Lost Balloon

Chicken Fingers with French fries $6.00
+ Substitute sweet potato fries +$1.00
+ Consume one-handed while playing Call of Duty. Your girlfriend will sit at the table, eating a salad. You won’t know if she’s talking to you, so you gesture to your headset without moving to take it off +$0.50

Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich with carrot sticks $5.00
+ Add apple slices +$1.00
+ Forget to ask her if she wants one too. She will steal one of your carrot sticks, and each crunch will sound like an accusation +$1.50

Chicken Quesadilla with corn chips and mild salsa $5.50                                                       

+Add guacamole +$2.00
+ Order this on a wet Saturday night. She’ll go out with her friends that really despise you, not the ones who just casually hate you. She will come home, drunk and gloomy, and eat your chips hovering over the garbage can +$1.00

Hamburger with French fries $7.00
+ Add cheese +$0.50
+ Request this from a waiter at her cousin’s wedding, since you don’t eat fish or the chicken. Watch her eyes fill with tears as the best man toasts to the bride and groom’s future children +$5.00

Noodles (Spaghetti or Penne) with Butter and Cheese $5.00
+ Leave butter and/or cheese on the side +$0.50
+ Let her be the one who leaves. That way, on paper, at least, you aren’t the bad guy. You’ll tape together a cardboard box for her to pack up her things, and she’ll say it’s the nicest thing you’ve done for her in years. You’re the best woman I’ve ever been with, you’ll tell her, and she will respond, flatly, What does that mean? That question will make you feel so tired. You’re tired! Men are allowed to be tired! Maybe with the next woman, you’ll think, you won’t have to translate everything. She’ll just get it—get you. After all, your mother always told you that when you find the girl, it’ll be easy. She still says that, though lately she says it gazing at you like your glasses are crooked. You don’t wear glasses. Your now-ex will pack up the box and shut the door quietly behind her without a word. She has always been like this, you think: classy, no drama. Or maybe you’re already idealizing her now that she’s gone. You’ll wonder if you’ve made a mistake, and the regret will taste like you’ve bitten your tongue while chewing: the sharp shock of it, your mouth hot and mean now, flooded with salt and metal. You will never let yourself have that thought again *no charge

---

Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and the author of the forthcoming book, Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar America. Her fiction has been published in Pithead Chapel, Rejection Letters, and the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. She lives in Maryland.

Remember that today is picture day for the twins, but they have soccer so their hair should be in braids, pretty enough for photos but sporty enough that their coach doesn’t make another pointed comment. Pack the twins an extra packet of Halloween Oreos as apology for yesterday’s forgotten ice cream money. Try not to remember the fight with Liam last week about continually catering to their every whim, or the email from the twins’ teacher about healthy lunch choices that skirted the edge of body shaming. Don’t look in the mirror. Pour a mug of coffee, remembering the days when coffee wasn’t necessary, when the potential energy of the day was enough to swing the pendulum.

Go upstairs to wake Zack again, even though Liam insists he should rely on his new alarm clock and if he misses the bus, let him suffer the consequences. Hush the twins on the way, because they are buzzing around the dining room table throwing ping-pong balls at each other instead of using them as intended on the table in the basement. Remember that under that table waits a dead mouse, half-eviscerated by the elderly cat, Rufous. Miss the time spent playing with Rufous when he was a kitten, the delight of his orange paws batting at string, the house so hushed his scampering claws on tile were the only morning sound. Remember that Liam, upon discovering the mouse in situ a full week after its demise, described the neglected corpse as a sad commentary on the state of the union. Wince.

Remember the way he buried the twin’s guinea pig last year during a blizzard, his red knit hat bobbling in the howling wind, providing Fluffernut with unabridged, respectful last rites.
Knock six times and wait until Zack grunts but upon opening the door he shrieks like, well, like a teenaged boy whose mom just walked in on him wanking. Slam the door shut on the cliché. Whisper sorry towards the bedroom where Liam groans, trying to sleep off the fog of his twice-weekly night shift at the rehab center. Appreciate that Liam is the rarest kind of decent man, that being with him is the ficklest kind of luck. Realize how long it’s been since he groaned in a way that wasn’t leave me the fuck alone but its opposite.

Return downstairs and discover that Rufous has vomited a trail of fur, grass, and mouse entrails on the carpet. Attempt to hush one twin, who has stepped in it and is screaming like, well, like a kid with mouse brains on her favorite polka-dot socks. Reassure her that the only pair of clean socks left in the house, the despised striped socks, won’t be visible in the school photo. Discover the other twin hiding under the dining table, crying through a darkening shiner. Realize that the twins were throwing not the ping-pong ball, but a clumsy terra-cotta sheep Zack made ages ago in kindergarten, which explains both the black eye and the shards of clay on the floor. Realize that there is no time to hide in the bathroom and cry, because the bus is due in five minutes.

Cry anyway right there in the dining room, holding sharp splinters of lost sheep, until the twins descend in a miasma of child-tears and strawberry shampoo. Hug them and say consoling things and kiss the tops of their heads and somehow get all the lunches into backpacks and the arms into jackets and hats onto heads and they’re out the door. Watch Zack thunder down the stairs, swooping through the kitchen to grab a granola bar and although he won’t make eye contact, he yells goodbye as he runs, one Converse untied, to climb into his buddy’s F-150. Listen to the truck squeal away from the curb and stop behind the twin’s bus, idling at the red light.

Feel the quiet in the house and think about Liam. Glance at a honeymoon photo on the wall, see everything that will be lost and gained by that faded couple, which parts of them will tumble into entirely new beings, which parts of them will vanish. Consider ditching work, slipping between the blue flannel sheets, lying warm and still. Wonder if he’d blink open his hazel eyes and see all the incarnations he has loved.

---

Sarah Starr Murphy is a writer and teacher in rural Connecticut. Her writing has appeared in Qu (forthcoming), The Baltimore Review, Pithead Chapel, and other wonderful places. She’s a senior editor for The Forge Literary Magazine and eternally at work on a novel.

I imagine my cat and I living in Buffalo which, I admit, is a pretty lackluster daydream, but in the one philosophy course I took we learned about Epicurus who said we should limit our desires so we only want simple, attainable things, and that way we’ll always be happy. The professor told us Epicurus was an ass who was basically encouraging us to short circuit life, and to fear what Aristotle called “excellence.” I thought Epicurus was smart. I’ve always hated Disney movies and questions like what’s on your bucket list or where do you see yourself in five years, so I wrote my essay on him and the professor gave me a C-.

I call my sister to tell her about Buffalo and she laughs. The name is stupid, she says, the ‘u’ caught in the back of the throat and then the double-fs stuttering out like a fart (her simile, not mine). Somehow I find this argument compelling and for the next few nights I stay up drinking decaf coffee switching the lights in my apartment on and off, wondering what it means to name a place something like ‘Buffalo,’ or a person something like ‘Eugene,’ and do names actually affect the way people think of themselves, or do you become numb to it after a while, like that scene in Spirited Away where the mean witch-lady raises the Japanese characters from the page and squishes them in her hands. I realize that places can’t ever become numb to their names, even when history tries to rewrite them the name remains, like with ‘Constantinople’ or ‘Turtle Island,’ and certainly anyone would have a hard time replacing something like ‘Buffalo,’ so I decide it’s okay to live there and log back into Trulia to find a one bedroom apartment that allows pets.

The semester after my philosophy class I was funneled into a Milton seminar, where the dean of Renaissance studies spent a full two hours on the part of Paradise Lost where Adam names all the animals. The dean explained how language, and specifically naming, likens Adam to God in that it creates something ex nihilo, and this scene is second only to the one where Adam and Eve bang, because sex is the ultimate generative act. I was happy he said that because personally I find sex pretty God-like and any academic who tries to tell me that naming something is better than fucking has a lot of explaining to do. But then a cute girl raised her hand and said that naming was the most primitive and nefarious power structure at play, and she referenced Harry Potter and Ladybird as two contemporary works which acknowledge this structure and seek to overturn it, and I wrote that down in my notebook, resolving to finally read those damn wizarding books because they’d made their way into the university, which means they must be important in some big, epistemological way. After the lecture I told the girl she was smart and mentioned that I never named my cat, I hated the responsibility of it and kept putting it off until a few years went by and finally he was just ‘the cat.’ She said that was nice but reminded me that the very taxonomy of animals was part of the problem, so really calling him ‘the cat’ didn’t help, and I nodded as if I had already thought of this, which I hadn’t, and then decided she was probably too smart for me to ask out. Last week I saw her at a coffee shop by campus but didn’t say hello because my cat and I are moving to Buffalo, so what’s the point?

The next time I call home I’ve put a deposit down on a tiny place that has exactly three windows but borders a rich neighborhood where I can waitress and pay rent through tips. My sister answers but I ask for my mom because I don’t want to tell someone who will laugh that I’m moving 487 miles north to a city whose football team has never won the Superbowl. (I’ve been doing research on my new home. OJ Simpson played for the Buffalo Bills, and they went to the Superbowl four times but never won. F. Scott Fitzgerald also grew up in Buffalo, but moved away when he could, which I found both demoralizing and ironic.) I don’t even end up telling my mom I’m going to move. Instead I ask her how she chose our names and if she was nervous about it, or if it came naturally to her.

A bit of both, she says. Yours was easy because I had horrible morning sickness all through your pregnancy and sage was the only spice I could stand to smell. So we called you Sage.

I try not to think about this, the fact that my name was chosen purely for its non-nauseating implications, and what that might mean for my general sense of self-worth. I tell my mom I love her and three weeks later my cat and I are I-90 North, my car packed with all my belongings and still half empty. As we enter the city’s limits, a sign reads Welcome to Buffalo: An All-American City, and I imagine Epicurus sitting next to me, saying, you’ve done it, you’ve hacked life to its core, and now you can sit back and watch without fear, and I smile and bask in this glory, this tiny victory no one will ever know about. The feeling only disappears when I pull up to my new apartment and I realize I am here, in Buffalo, stranded in a place lined with streets and people whose names I do not know.

---

Sheila Mulrooney has an MA in English Literature from the University
of Toronto. Her work has appeared in a number of journals including the
White Wall Review (forthcoming), The Wayfarer, Rejection Letters, and
others. She lives and works in New York State.

7:17 a.m.
You stiffen when his hand slides up your thigh. He tries it the way you prefer: gentle at first, like an accident, but his clammy fingertips give him away. “I think I hear crying,” you say, and slip out of bed.

9:52 a.m.
There have been two arguments already—about what, neither of you remembers, probably something to do with your job or his parents or the thermostat—in hushed tones, just in case infants can be traumatized. You want the twins to see what real marriage looks like, all adoring gazes and suggestive gestures. Lingering glances as you cross paths in the kitchen. Someone touching someone always. Or, surely, at least some laughter?

1:40 p.m.
One puckering mouth is affixed to each nipple and a tiny fist tangles in your hair. “My body doesn’t belong to me anymore,” you say again—words he’s heard for months—and you wonder if he notices the way despair sometimes sucks air from your vowels. But he has always claimed you are the one who controls the atmosphere, the one who says yes or no, and now he often acts as though you are the puppet master of everyone’s bodies: your children’s growth. Your collective degree of emptiness.

2:24 p.m.
When his father calls, you don’t push back your chair and leave the room this time because today the terrible news is slicing up his face. Shifting it completely, puzzling all its features into an arrangement even he won’t recognize tomorrow. You come up behind him with your arms, your hands, you press your face into his neck and say I’m sorry.

5:33 p.m.
At dinner, all you can hear are the forks. You sip from your wine glass and he swallows his meat whole. He reaches for you across the table. There is no hesitation: just your fingers curling around his, squeezing. You clear the plates and drop three forehead kisses in succession. Them, and then him.

10:09 p.m.
No matter what is happening anywhere else in the world, no matter what is happening anywhere else in your head, the babies always need to eat and they always need to play and they always need to bathe. He helps you rinse the bubbles from their skin so no one has to be alone. After they are bundled into their cribs, you unzip him from the chest and peel away the layers until you can crawl inside, maybe not because you are still in love, but because you have forgotten where else to go.

---

Melissa Bowers is a writer from the Midwest. Her fiction was selected for the 2021 WigleafTop 50 and she is the recent winner of the SmokeLong Quarterly Grand Micro Contest. Read more of her work at www.melissabowers.com.

Only a few nights before I lose you, I decide that I like you best around 5AM, bundled up on the first train of the morning. On the cusp of sobriety after the night’s gig, I stop trying to measure how much of your head on my shoulder is drunkenness, how much is comfort, how much is care. The dawn’s syrupy tendrils trail over the tracks of the Keio Line as we run up the stairs, over the bridge, down again. Your guitar bounces on your back. We crash into the fence of the fire station and curl our fingers around the diamond mesh.

Down on the pitch, twelve rows of men move up and down in synchronized pushups while their captain chants numbers. We count along, quiet and giggling at first, then mimicking their imperial booms. Our laughter spills through snorts, a soprano counterpoint to their drumming.

We try to find a bench but collapse on the concrete next to hydrangea bushes that will bloom when the rains come. Your voice slides into a hum as you rest the guitar between your crossed legs. Bum bum bums buzzing on your lips. You wanted to be a jazz musician, but you ended up with a wispy voice and open chords and a girlfriend whose father used to play keys for Mott the Hoople. I have never been able to give you what you want, but I can at least clap along in uncommon time.

The audible sweat from the firemen makes me thirsty. At first, I assume you will fall silent as soon as I leave you alone, but your fingers keep picking at the strings, rummaging for voiceless melodies. I find the nearest vending machine and let the little plasticky 100-yen coins roll into the slot. Some twelve feet away, you look homeless on the concrete. I drink and drink again, my insides arid where they were sticky only a few hours ago.

A lone dog walker becomes your first audience member just as the sky shifts to indigo. She stares, debating whether to shush you. Alcohol bubbles inside me once more and I want to start a fight with this bomber vest and her Pomeranian, but then the dog bites its own collar and yanks the lady forward, wagging its tail in triumph, and she lets herself be led away, sighing into such blissful fatigue that I relax my arm and let the tea spill out of the bottle without even noticing. Your head bobbles along to a rhythm of its own.

A few weeks after I have lost you, I walk to work early one morning with my scarf draped over my head to keep my hair dry, and I find the firemen again. This time, none so symmetrical. Assorted lumps of oversized overalls twirl translucent umbrellas, limbs lollygagging, coffee cans and tea bottles spread all around the fence. I cannot tell if they are laughing, but the wires send electric memories up my arms all the way to the dimples in my cheeks. I indulge a fantasy that you might come back to play for the Kanagawa base, but you would never make such sacrifices for me.

The bell rings and the captain strikes his tuba-timbred opening chord. All humanity runs out of the firemen like liquid. Their boyishness stiffens into mechanical jumping jacks, uniforms tightening in the rain.
Over their chanting, I start humming. Discipline is not enough to recall the melody just as you played it, but the beat tastes the same.

 

---

 

Annina Claesson is a geographically confused writer and researcher currently based in Paris, France. Her short fiction has recently appeared in New Reader Magazine and won awards at the Charroux Litfest.

The part of the story where we decide to believe in the protagonist. The part where she falls out of the boat. The part where she barely makes a splash. The part where we can’t distinguish her cries from laughter, where she photographs moths and storm clouds, insists we guess which is which. Thumbing that fat stack of pictures animates them, showing us how she bobs in the sky over Cleveland. Her smile, a sign of trouble, wins us over.

She takes us to a few parties where her engine clears its throat. This is the part where we learn a belt can mess with timing. The part where she censors thoughts that make her mother look bad, fears anything spotted on an x-ray, shows barely enough faith to see snow as temporary. When she’s clumsy, her father calls her Gertrude. That’s back in a time when carpets creeps halfway up walls in some houses. A time with too much eyeliner and Mercury in retrograde. A time with blind trust in strange dogs. It’s the part with open curtains. Putting on a show for the whole neighborhood, Gert?

We grow protective. When she goes home with the one who applauds her lily padding washer lids at the laundromat, we want her to love him, but she sneaks out as soon as he’s asleep. This is the part where she prepares to leave the riverbank. The part where she moves up into the hills, hot on the trail of a spell to unscorch the earth. The part where grief gets in her way. But since we also wear our pain like big toes poking out of socks, we keep reading. When it comes to hell or high water, none of us wants to be alone.

---

Carolee is a writer and artist living in Upstate New York, where – after a local, annual poetry competition – she has fun saying she has been the “almost” poet laureate of Smitty’s Tavern. She has an MFA in poetry and works full-time as a writer in social media marketing.

 If someone asked you what you’re sad about, you couldn’t tell them, not exactly. All you know is it is like a battery. It fuels you to run, get things done, till one day, you stop, left only with the toxic residue.

When you water the lilies, they die. You don’t tell anyone your mother died a while ago, and no one asks you. You feed your cat, only to never see her again. You bake a cake, following the recipe to the last teaspoon, but it collapses at the center. You have a date, but he stands you up. Trains leave before time, without you. The bus driver does not wait even when he sees you in his mirror, running full tilt, your bag and scarf and hair flying. Your sadness grows, and in a strange way it makes you feel good. This is what you deserve, you tell yourself, you deserve to be alone with your collapsed cake.

Some of your mother’s books sit beside your bed. The ones she’s written, flanked by others she gifted you that you never opened. You pick one up at random, open a page, but the words dance and you shut the book to prevent the text flying off. You check yourself out in the mirror, but you reel back from the woman staring at you. Your short red dress and your swimsuit will never fit you again. Grief has bloated you up. A washed-up, orphaned divorcee.

You’re young. Barely fifty, even. You can’t give up yet. Your mother was seventy-nine. She used to paint her nails red, walked on the treadmill, got her hair done each Saturday. You stare at her photo on the back jacket of her book, smiling, her long red hair gathered on one shoulder, blush on her cheeks, every inch the writer of romance novels.

You pick up a book at random from her library of self-help tomes, and in its blurb you find the words she used to toss at you over the phone: you manifest your destiny.

Make decisions, she used to say. So you sign up at the gym. Take baking classes. You spot a red car you like while on the way to the furniture store. Secondhand, but who cares. You buy it right away, but you need driving lessons. At therapy, you talk about your dead mother, your cheating ex-husband, the absent father. You wonder about taking up the clarinet, set up an account on a dating site. You will manifest your destiny, dammit.

Months later you’re staring at the ceiling, a snoring man beside you, his arm heavy over your bare breasts. It was very good, you told him before he mumbled off to sleep. You still don’t fit into your red dress, but you’re on your way to it. A ginger tabby sleeps at your hearth. Your car hasn’t broken down in weeks, and this man beside you chowed down your red velvet cake. You haven’t thought about your mother in months. None of that battery residue shit. You’ve reinvented your life.

Beside you, the snoring grows louder, the hand on your chest heavier. You’re lying inside of a coffin, lined with white silk like your mother’s. You’re wearing your red dress, with a red jacket on top to hide your cleavage. You’re buried in bouquets of white lilies, the air heavy with their oily fragrance. You’re alone. Your red hair is tied up in a bun, your eyes are closed, your hands crossed over your heart, with red-painted nails.

---

Damyanti is an Indian author currently based in Singapore. Her short fiction has been published at Smokelong, Ambit, Litro, and Puerto del Sol, among others. Her work appears in various anthologies, and she serves as one of the editors of The Forge literary magazine. Her debut literary crime novel, You Beneath Your Skin, was published by Simon & Schuster India, and optioned for screen by Endemol Shine.

If you ask someone who works there, someone who knows the machines, they’ll say the steam turbines sound like a storm on the ocean. If you ask any of the sixth graders who take the field trip through the power plant each February, they’ll say it sounds like the static when the cable goes out, only louder. Like the cable is going to be out forever. But none of these kids have been to the ocean. This is a town that people sneak out of or escape. They don’t take vacations.

After the turbine room, the kids are shown an illustration detailing how the electricity, once created, is sent to the power stations, and from the power stations it shoots out in every direction over deteriorating powerlines. The lines split at every street, then again for each side of the street. And every time they split they get weaker.

They split one more time to terminate at their destination.

At our house, the line terminates outside of Hanson’s room.

Hanson isn’t here now. He’s at one of his appointments talking about why he gets so upset. The doctor says he’s too young to understand his own disappointment and anger. They are developing a coping strategy for him. Jenn and I have strategies of our own. They fail us but we won’t let them go. We would rather blame each other. We stand in Hanson’s room talking about what to do next.

I look at the line draping over our front yard. If I were outside, I could jump up and grab it. I imagine a lightning strike. Sparks shooting out of the outlets. I imagine finding the words to explain that love doesn’t matter anymore. The lights would get bright and then go dark. Every bulb would need to be replaced.

I open my mouth and what comes out sounds like a storm on the ocean. At one time that would have been enough. Hanson is in fifth grade. We can still figure this out.

---

Nathan Willis lives in Ohio. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of journals including Passages North, Outlook Springs, Cotton Xenomorph, and Jellyfish Review. He can be found online at nathan-willis.com and on Twitter @Nathan1280.