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The kids in my kindergarten class would already be on the second page of their assignments while I was still remembering the letters to my name, Gobind Lambodhar Banerjee, which contained half the stinking alphabet. In third grade, I insisted people call me Gollum.

Overnight, from a freak, I became the cool kid. It was a bit strange at first. The scrawny brown boy in a class full of white kids being called Gollum seemed a bit offensive. But it gave me an identity, made me stand out. I walked around calling girls “my precious”  and they didn’t even mind. They giggled and locked hands with me. Gollum had struck gold.

My mother she still called me Gobind. She stressed each letter and ended the D emphatically. Sometimes she’d add an “O” and call me Gobindo. The “O” would trail on the air like the lingering scent of a skunk.

One day my friend Sara called and asked to speak to Gollum. Confused, Ma explained to Sara what my real name meant; ”Gobind or Govind like the the God Krishna. The blue one, you see.” I cringed. Did she really say that? I felt flushed, more red than blue. Sara laughed when I took the phone. She teased, “Gollum, are you a God?” I didn’t eat the lunch Ma sent to school for days. She made fish curry, samosas, even Mishti Doi one day. Staying away from Mishti Doi, that creamy, milky, sweet concoction, was hard. But I did. Food was a powerful tool, and I used it against her by rejecting what she made.

After I began middle school, she stopped packing my lunch three days a week. Instead, she slipped a few dollars into my hands and said, “Go have fun! Eat what you want.” It was liberating. I got ready by myself in the mornings while she made her tea, pounding the ginger and cardamom patiently. She would stand by the door, steaming cup in hand, stealing glances of me while I put on my shoes. In the evenings, two days a week, she drove me to piano lessons. She made me go, no matter how many jarring, off-key notes I played.

When I turned sixteen, I could drive myself to classes and back in our old red Corolla. I managed my own schedule—friends, library, school. I was on top. Though I’d given up piano by then, I excelled at debate and swimming. I would have no problem in getting into the college of my choice.

I didn’t see Ma much on weekday evenings then. She said she’d joined the gym. But when I studied at night, her light in the bedroom stayed on. When I came out to go to the bathroom and get ready for bed, she’d walk into the kitchen for a glass of water and to ask if I needed anything. Once, when I came back late at night from my swim meet in another city, I saw her peep down from the window. I groaned and braced myself for the questions, but when I walked in, I didn’t see her anywhere. Just a plate on the table with my dinner. It was then I realized I wouldn’t have minded her sitting across from me, asking how my day was.

A few weeks after that lonely night came my graduation. The phone rang while Mother got ready upstairs. My old friend Sara called to see if I was ready. I was supposed to ride with her. I apologized, and said things had changed, and that I’d see her at school. I bounded up the stairs and found Ma. She looked beautiful in pink tussar Sari.

“I’m ready to go if you are,” I said. As she looked at me surprised, I asked, “Can I drive?” She hugged me and patted me on the back. Before we left, she lit a lamp in front of the deities and  dragged me to the kitchen. She pulled out a little pot stored in a corner of the refrigerator and handed me freshly made Mishti Doi, which I promptly ate. The sweetness stayed in my mouth the entire two miles to the school. She held my hand while on the road for a brief moment and then mumbled “sorry” before breaking into a sheepish smile. That smile passed away too fast.

The auditorium was full by the time we arrived, so I ran to join my friends. Ma found her seat. Dozens of parents sat proud and beaming, ready to cheer their children. From the stage, Ma’s pink Sari stood out in the crowd.

The roster set on the podium, and the announcer Mr. Ross was about to start. I ran to him. He nodded, scratching and rewriting on his paper. When it was my turn to do the walk, my friends looked around surprised when they didn’t hear the familiar Gollum. Mr. Ross instead, very adeptly pronounced the words Gobind Lambodhar Banerjee. I heard Ma clapping loud from her row. I could see her tearing up as she mouthed the words, “my Gobind.” I grinned, waved her a kiss, and murmured “my precious.”

Sandhya Acharya grew up in Mumbai, India and now lives in the Bay Area. She worked as a financial professional and loves to dance, run, and be Mom to her young sons. Her articles have been featured on NPR (KQED), and in India Currents and IMC connect. She blogs at www.sandhyaacharya.com.

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Nicholas Cook lives in Dallas, TX, along with his dog. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Jellyfish Review, (b)OINK, 100 Word Story, A Quiet Courage, New Flash Fiction Review, Camroc Press Review, and elsewhere. His story The Peculiar Trajectory of Space Objects won second place in the Feb 2017 Bath Flash Fiction Award. Find him at @thisdogisdog.

School children walk through the Art Institute, two by two, holding hands. They are quiet. They are clearly under strict instructions, filing in behind their teacher, but still I think maybe.

***

“The Vitruvian Man” is superimposed upon himself and stretched within a circle, within a square. I lean closer. He is bare, anatomically perfect—he could breathe. In 1490, there must have been a real flesh man flayed with ink by da Vinci down to muscle, sinew, vein.

***

I sit on the front steps, eating sushi from the gallery cafeteria. He walks up the steps towards me. His security pass swings on a lanyard. His glasses catch the light and they flash, making his eyes invisible, then visible again. He leans down and kisses my cheek and smells of his last cigarette.

“What are you doing here?” he says, and it is kind.

“The da Vinci exhibition.”

He sits beside me, twenty centimeters away.

“You should come after hours,” he says. “I can show you around without the crowds.”

The sushi rice is sticky. I push my tongue across my teeth. I smile.

***

I have pushed my tongue along his neck, across his knuckles, down the ladder of his ribs. He was underneath my hands so that it was not his skin I felt, but his blood that hummed, hot.

***

His voice is low, so low, crawling around the pit of my stomach. It takes its time, scraping over and over, finding its old place.

“Are you okay?” he says.

I nod. “Sure.”

He smiles, but I see it: she was always a dreamer.

How to tell him that I am listening intently? Not to his words, but his voice, the texture of it, the timbre, the base, the way it moves through me, the way it stays.

A group walks past us up the stairs and I slide five centimeters closer to him.

***

Almost two years ago now, he took off his shirt for me for the first time. The afternoon light got in around the edges of my bedroom blind and his skin ran with goosebumps. His clavicle was a wishbone, stretched across him. I wanted to break it in two. I did. I wanted him to push me to the edge. Sometimes he said, “Are you sure?” He pressed the words into my skin. Nothing hurt then.

***

I pay attention. The things I could tell him: clavicle derives from the Latin “clavicula” meaning “little key,” because the bone rotates like a key when the arms are raised. The clavicle is the bone most often broken in the human body.

***

We danced in a club and the music beat and vibrated through me. It soared. He leaned against me, his skin burning. He kissed me, pushing a pill from his mouth into mine. I swallowed. He smiled.

“Let’s go home,” I said.

He bent closer. “Home? Why?”

The crowd pressed against us, strangers, every single one of them. They slid against us. I could not breathe. He closed his eyes and tipped his head back away from mine. The chemicals hit my veins and they ran and ran.

***

“Studies of the Fetus in the Womb,” dated 1510-1512/13. Leonardo da Vinci drew a foetus with its knees raised, its head bowed and pressed against its hands and knees, hiding its face. The umbilical cord sweeps across its body. The womb is cleaved open, like two halves of a shell.

***

The children leave the gallery and run down the stairs, a tumble of legs, arms, small bodies, oversized backpacks. They laugh and shout. They push their faces to the sun and they grow, their cells dividing, multiplying, unfurling.

***

He was illuminated by the moon, its cold wash of lilac-blue light. Shadow lines of the window fell on him as he looked into the night.

“What’s out there?” I said.

He turned to me. “Nothing important.”

I believed him.

***

In bed, he slept and I drew my finger along his clavicle, first one way and then the other, finding the halfway point, finding the ends.

***

The gallery asked him to help curate an exhibition of Impressionist works at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. He planned to travel through Europe afterwards.

“For how long?” I said.

“I don’t know. There are so many things I want to see. Cities I want to visit again.”

All I heard was I, I, I while he listed galleries, cities, icons.

***

A drawing of da Vinci’s compares man and animal: “Studies of legs of man and the leg of a horse,” dated 1506.

***

Another drawing shows a man inside a woman: “Coition of a hemisected man and woman,” dated 1492. She is far less detailed than him. She fades into nothingness.

***

He sent postcards. One was from the Galleria Nazionale di Parma in Italy, da Vinci’s “Head of a Woman,” dated 1500, painted in oil on wood. On the back he had written—she looks like you.

I studied that postcard. “What the fuck?”

Her hair was tangled, her gaze downward, fixed on nothing it seemed. I threw her away.

***

“I should get back to work,” he says. “It was good to see you.”

He puts his arm around my shoulders and he is hot all down my side. I see his clavicle beneath the collar of his shirt. Little key. Old friend.

“Have you seen the drawings of the human heart by da Vinci?” I say.

“Of course. Why?”

In 1513, da Vinci must have reached inside a human body and pulled out the heart, or somebody did it for him.

***

In the gallery gift shop, “The Vitruvian Man” is everywhere. I buy a fridge magnet and I don’t know why. 

***

I walk back to the train and realize the actual man that da Vinci drew from in 1490 might not have been alive at all. In fact, he probably wasn’t.

Melissa Goode’s work has appeared in Best Australian Short Stories, SmokeLong Quarterly, New World Writing, Split Lip Magazine, WhiskeyPaper, Atticus Review, (b)OINK, and Jellyfish Review, among others. One of her short stories has been made into a film by the production company Jungle. She lives in Australia. You can find her here: www.melissagoode.com and @melgoodewriter.

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Clio Velentza lives in Athens, Greece. She’s a winner of Queen’s Ferry Press The Best Small Fictions 2016, and her work has appeared in several literary journals including (b)OINK, Corium, WhiskeyPaper, The Letters Page, Atticus Review, and Wigleaf.

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At first, it wasn’t about changing. It wasn’t about coping. It was about not drinking. Another hungover suicide attempt landed me in the psych ward, and I realized I couldn’t kick alcohol alone. So I went to meetings. I listened. I heard sober drunks say things like, “I try to do the next right thing. It’s nothing noble. It means making the bed. It means brushing my teeth. It means feeding the dog.” They told me to write gratitude lists. To forgive myself. To question my motives. To pray. They told me to get a sponsor. They told, and I did.

I found Charlotte.

Charlotte is old enough to be my mom. She has shoulder-length dreadlocks and straight, white teeth. She laughs a lot. She says “mmhmm,” with emphasis on the second syllable. She can pray like a preacher’s daughter and call your ex a motherfucker in the next breath. She’s heard my inventory of resentments, fears, debts, and sexual mistakes and hugged me afterwards.

In the beginning, her mantra was, “Honey, you’re okay.” I’d call her after fighting with my boyfriend and she’d say, “You’re okay.” I’d be pissed at my boss, ready to quit, and she’d say, “You’re okay.” I’d wake up anxious and she’d say, “You’re okay.” When that boyfriend left for good, I dialed her number and watched my face crumple in the mirror while I waited for her to say, “You’re okay.”

When depression left me gasping, fingers twitching toward knives, Charlotte would tell me to do my nails. I’d glare at her then—I want to die, and you’re giving me beauty tips?—but now, I get it.  A D.I.Y. manicure is like hitting “reset” on a camera. It pulls me out of my head, refocuses my lens. As usual, Charlotte was right.

So tonight, as my brain rages, telling me I’m hopeless, broken, not worth it, I won’t binge on whiskey or reach for a razor. Instead, I will paint my nails.

I will sit on the bathroom floor and choose a shade of blue from a dozen different colors, from black to pink to brown.

I will push my cuticles back and sever them with a tiny, U-shaped blade.

I will draw the brush across my left index fingernail first and feel the coolness of wet polish. I will paint three coats of color then a topcoat, just like Glamour says.

I will hold my hands in front of my lips and blow.

I will sit in stillness until they dry, careful and silent. For fifteen minutes, I’ll be okay, just like Charlotte said.

And when I stand up again, fingers tipped sapphire, ocean, stormy sky, I will be changed. Not brand-new, but better than broken.

Emma Faesi Hudelson teaches writing at Butler University in Indianapolis. She lives in a house by the woods with three dogs, two cats, and one husband. Her work has found homes in Booth, BUST, Linden Avenue, The Manifest-Station, and others.

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You made me cry on the school bus. Row two, window seat. I never truly knew what made the tears come fast and heavy. Maybe it was your awful motorcycle jacket, the one with the silly Mickey Mouse patched on the back, or maybe it was when you put your hand on my knee and squeezed. While I burned like gasoline, you made me promise to meet you beneath the bleachers that afternoon. I never did tell. What I did do was take lovers like you. Rest of my life. Lean, quiet men with gentle hands and sad, kind eyes. The snap of them made my heart break. Like yours broke, shot down in the rushing faraway jungle. Our last kiss, you held me like I was going out of  style. The homecoming crowd thundered above us. Popcorn, peanuts rained down through the slatted seats. I listened as you said we already had our home. We could be us anywhere. But young, we were young. Too young. And promises beneath bleachers never amount to anything. Only the weight of bodies atop empty beds. Stretching an arm out for a memory that won’t shut up.

Jules Archer likes to smell old books and drink red wine. Her work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, >kill author, Pank, The Butter, Foundling Review, and elsewhere. She writes to annoy you at julesjustwrite.com.

The other woman showed up at our house, braless, on Mother’s day. Her t-shirt looked like a wax-paper envelope with messages to my mother visibly enclosed. We’re younger, perkier, winning, they said. Babies haven’t suckled us. Your husband’s a different story. I was just a girl. Still, I understood.

I tried to slam the door in her face. My furious father let her inside anyway—just as he had the first time, every time, since they’d met at hiking club. My mother served charcuterie while the woman talked about how to shit in the woods. Creamy slices of dill Havarti. Camembert. Crackers on a wooden board. Salami. The woman squatted in the corner. I wondered if she would actually defecate near the philodendron I’d bought Mom as a gift. She was here to mark her territory, after all.

Now I nurse my newborn daughter while my husband frosts a cake meant for me, downstairs. Belly full, my baby fills her diaper, and the smell reminds me of that woman’s body odor, like stinky cheese and pheromones—pungent—even though the memory is stale. Not this Mother’s day. I close my eyes and watch this Mom club the unwelcome guest with the cheese board; there’s splintered wood, and a patch of skin opens like a present.

E.M. Hubscher is a writer and toxicologist from North Carolina. Her work has appeared in Eunoia Review, as well as several scientific journals and a textbook. You can find her online at http://emhubscherauthor.weebly.com or @emhubscher on Twitter.

Gerald crawls out.

He got the idea while stocking shelves at ShopMart. It closed to customers at midnight. From then till 4 a.m. the cleaners and stockers took over. After that the store was empty till 9:00. Not even a security guard prowled the premises so confident was management in the door sensors and glass break protectors.

One morning Gerald clocked out at 4:00 with everyone else, but couldn’t bear the thought of going home. So he quietly ducked into the men’s bathroom and waited for the night crew boss to go through her routine and lock up. Then he crept out into the store to the huge mountain of toilet paper packages. It reached nearly to the ceiling and sprawled across four aisles. Valuable real estate for sure, but it was practically a tourist attraction. Hell, it was a tourist attraction. People posed in front of it, came from out of town to see it, and put make-a-wish sticky notes on it. The staff even decorated it for holidays.

He carefully repositioned eight-packs to create a crawlway to the center of the mountain. Once inside, he removed and re-stacked packages to hollow out a living space. When he was finished, there was room for him to stand and more than enough for sleeping and moving about. It was good enough to live in. So he does.

He likes knowing there’s so much commotion outside, yet the super-absorbent walls muffle the noise of the busy store to a soft relaxing murmur. He passes the time sleeping, taking advantage of the store’s free WIFI to browse and listen to music on his phone, and reading by light of a lantern from Outdoor Life. A bucket gets him through the day.
During his 4-9 a.m. excursions, he takes care of hygiene, charges his phone, and pilfers supplies — usually chips, candy bars, peanut butter, and cola. He strolls through Magazines, his personal library. He’d take in a movie, but too many security cameras eye Electronics. Same for Jewelry. There’s a necklace his wife would have loved. Ex-wife. “I want more, Gerald. You just don’t have any ambition.”

Maybe she was right. He looks out as dawn creeps across the parking lot. Maybe he should strive for more. A magnificent mound of paper towels is taking shape over in aisles 42-46. It would make a real castle. Maybe then he could convince Doris to move back in with him. It’d take a lot of work to make it livable though, and he doesn’t care for that side of store, he thinks, as he posts another sticky wish and crawls back inside.

David Henson and his wife have lived in Belgium and Hong Kong over the years. They now reside in Peoria, Illinois with their dog, who loves to walk them in the woods. David’s work has appeared in two chapbooks, Literally Stories, 365 Tomorrows, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Dime Show Review, among others. Find him online at http://writings217.wordpress.com.

I never went to school. My mother hid me away. She’d refuse to let me play in the street with the other children. Some days I’d refuse to speak.

The black nights were my escape. We lived close to the river, and I’d sneak to the water’s edge, shivering as velvet mud wormed between my toes and sucked at my heels.

After my mother died, I made sure the whitecoats didn’t catch me. It was better to be a circus freak. The Feltz Brothers signed me up as Flipper Boy; set me next to Snake Tongue and the Bearded Lady. They were my new family. Each afternoon and evening the punters came to gawk at the sideshows. Brave men stood close with their beery breath. “Devil’s spawn,” they’d hiss, and cross themselves.

I was glad to join the Tumbling Billies, clowning in the ring. My limbs learned to flow round my feet. I can still hear the crowd’s roar.

My old bones release me into the dreaming dark, and I push through musty midnight curtains. Half-lit phantom faces loom from front-row seats. I launch myself onto my palms, cartwheeling first one way, then the other. The smell of old sawdust fills my head, the echoing voices of the Billies sing out around me, and my body whirls.

Dust rises. I am spun into light and air. You can see clear through me.

Ali McGrane lives in the UK and is an emerging writer of short fiction and poetry. She has studied literature and creative writing with the Open University and works in a university library. Her work has appeared in Fictive Dream and is forthcoming in Ink Sweat and Tears.

Papa said it wasn’t good to keep secrets so the morning after my nightmare I told him about it.

He told me not to worry. “It’s normal to dream about your Mama.”

I had woken up crying and my eyes felt crusty along the edges. I picked off the dust. “Do you dream about her?”

“Sometimes.” He turned back to the nook in the wall he called the kitchen and flipped the eggs. “Just means she’s on our minds is all.”

The lake water cast reflections that glittered along the ceiling in the morning sun and it made me remember my dream again. Mama used to call those Glimmer Fairies and we’d pretend to catch them in jars when I was little. She’d put the mason jars out on the front porch that overlooked the lake. At night, she’d say they’d gotten out. “You can’t keep them captured up for long. They always get out.”

Papa put my eggs on a paper plate and ate his right out of the pan. We’d been at the cabin for four weeks now and I was starting to think we may stay here forever.

“We’re just going to get away for a while,” Papa had said as he packed my duffel bag back home. “A change of scene would be good, right?”

I’d nodded and told him yes, and hugged him around the neck and waited for his arms to wrap around me. I let go when they didn’t.

I thought we’d go somewhere new. A vacation somewhere warm maybe. I thought maybe Papa and I could drive down to North Carolina or Florida, somewhere with a beach, and we could lay in the sun and both of us not talk for a while. I thought of us giggling over salami sandwiches (“more sand than wich” he’d say) and slathering on sunscreen.

I didn’t think we’d be going to Mama’s cabin in Michigan. It took us hours to drive there from our house in Ohio; Papa drove slow. I watched the sprawling green and yellow farmland roll past, one ocean of vegetation looking the same as the next.

It was the first time I’d gotten to make this drive in the front seat, but the view looked the same. Just less tinted.

It didn’t seem right, being here without her.  She’d grown up in the cabin, coming here with her own parents on weekends and holidays. Then she took us here, letting us shape her place into something that was ours. Now it was ours and not hers. We’d stolen it.

I wondered if people still owned places after they died. I’d gotten her costume jewelry, scarves, and a few antique pens she’d loved. They were packed in a box somewhere – Papa had put them away.

We ate so quiet I could hear a boat’s motor rev up across the lake. The dead-wake hours must have ended. I wanted to ask Papa to take me in the fishing boat. I wanted him to ask me to go on the boat. He’d been working on the engine in the motor for days, cursing and spitting over the gunwales, hands streaked with oil. Once our old boat was up and running I wanted him to take me through the canal. I wanted to go fishing in the lake that connected to ours; it was bigger and had larger fish, or so Mama used to say. But Papa hadn’t gotten the motor started yet, so I didn’t ask him.

During the day there wasn’t much for me to do. Papa worked on the boat and I fished off the dock for minnows using breadcrumbs and a large net. After I caught them, I threw them back. I didn’t need bait.

I shot bottle rockets at the ducks floating by until Papa told me to stop the racket and let them be. I tried talking to Papa and asking if he needed help but he told me go run off somewhere. Where would I run?

I didn’t want to be bored. I wanted to find something engrossing, something that filled me with such interest that I didn’t mind that his back was towards me as he leaned over the glossy black motor.

I was dipping my net back into the water when I heard Papa yelling and the engine spitting into life. His hands were pumping above his head, and he leaned back in a way that could only mean victory. He was still holding his wrench, and for a moment I worried he’d drop it on his head, but then he tossed it aside and clapped with a whoop. He turned around to face me. “I got it,” he said, a smile spilling across his face.

And just like that I felt a lightness grow within me.

I knew he’d take me on the boat tonight and we’d watch the stars come out of a dusky blue sky and make our own constellations. I knew he’d tell me stories about times they went camping and then he’d coast the boat towards the middle of the lake. I knew I’d fall asleep on the leather seats, lulled by the rocking and the smell of gas and lake water.

I knew I’d put my mason jar out on the front porch overnight and see if the glimmers stayed, just this once, until morning.

Madeline Anthes is the acquisitions editor for Hypertrophic Literary, and her work can
be found in WhiskeyPaper, Third Point Press, and more. Read more about her at madelineanthes.com or follow her on Twitter at @maddieanthes.