Issue 25
Fever Dreams
Odilon Redon, The Eye like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity, 1882
Submissions are open from September 30–October 27. Submit Online
Issue 25 Fever Dreams
2
Rendezvous
Lora Berg
3
4
Dream Therapy
Beret Olsen
5
The House on the Cliff
Nancy Schumann
7
The Outcast
Chanice Cruz
8
Messiahs, Chapter One
Marc Anthony Richardson
9
Dead Dreams
Sandeep Kumar Mishra
12
Rise
Tiffany Lindfield
13
Darling, Don’t Change
Epiphany Ferrell
14
Flesh of My Flesh
Russell Nichols
15
Within
Marshall J. Moore
16
Remain Calm
JD Kloosterman
17
Flashpoint
Merethe Walther
18
Persephone, Episode Two
Dyan McBride & Daniel Smith-Rowsey
19
Halo has a sepia embrace
Roseline Mgbodichinma
20
Untitled Sculptures
Soroush Payandeh
21
The Taxidermist
Sylke Lesinski
22
A Grim Conversation
Matt Mueller
23
24
Lucid Nightmare
Kristin Fouquet
25
Down Time
Derek Des Anges
26
Dinner
Elise Kelly
From the Editors
Tri-an Cao, Dana DeFranco, SuzyJane Edwards, Sarah Garcia, Anita Levin, Clovelle Manglicmot

Motivated by the political climate, pandemic, the acquisition of Mills College, and continued abuses of power worldwide, our editors wanted this issue to capture such feelings of uneasiness and disorientation. We ultimately decided on our theme of Fever Dreams to call attention to the ongoing sense of surrealism, absurdism, and lack of control that has been palpable everywhere. Through exploration of this theme, we sought works of prose, poetry and art that reflected the unsettling atmosphere looming over us. We also wanted to highlight hope among this darkness, so we desired pieces where connectivity, humor, and imagination shine inside these liminal spaces.

To our great surprise and delight, we received over 600 submissions — one of the largest responses ever to 580 Split. In selecting a mere fraction among these many wonderful works, we chose both written and visual pieces from around the world that interpreted the fever dreams theme in their own unique ways, exploring hauntings, horror, time travel, transformation, imprisonment, isolation, exile, love, grief, and (of course) dreams. Within this issue, you will find a wide range of contributions including seven poems, fourteen short stories, an excerpt from a novel, an episode from a screenplay, and four sets of original artwork featuring sculptures, oil paintings, digital illustrations, and photography. We hope that these poignant, provocative, and thoughtful pieces capture your imagination, resonate with your heart, and inspire you to create in these uncertain, troubling times. 

To honor the history and previous contributions to 580 Split, we would like to acknowledge and thank all of those whose continued work helped shape this issue. This issue wouldn’t have been possible without the valuable, dedicated work of our editorial team — Tri-an Cao, SuzyJane Edwards, Anita Levin, and Clovelle Manglicmot — and our faculty advisor David Buuck. Thank you to Stephanie Young, Christina Fisher, and Joshua Zuniga for your valuable guidance as we navigated all the various complications of constructing an issue for a literary journal. Much love and appreciation to Shiraz Gallab, our designer for this issue, for putting up with all our many technical questions. We also want to acknowledge our previous editors, Kari Treese and Lila Goehring, who met with us to advise us through this process. Special shout-out to Birdie, David’s dog, who collaborated with us on many a late night. 

Of course, we want to acknowledge the brilliant twenty-seven contributors who made this issue possible. Thank you for entrusting us with your work as every creative endeavor contains precious pieces of the artist within. And finally, thank you, dear reader, for diving into the wild ride that is Fever Dreams. May you navigate this spell-binding maze and emerge renewed on the other side. 

Appreciatively, 

Dana DeFranco & Sarah Garcia 

Cover image: Odilon Redon, The Eye like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity, plate one from To Edgar Poe (1882)
Rendezvous
Lora Berg
Lora Berg

Bio

Lora Berg has published poems in Colorado Review, The Carolina Quarterly, etc. as well as a collaborative book with Mr. Canute Caliste (1914-2005).  Lora worked as Poet-in-Residence at the Saint Albans School, and holds an MFA from Johns Hopkins. Berg once served as Cultural Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Paris.  Lora is a proud mom and grandma.

Work
Rendezvous
Issue 25: Fever Dreams
Scavenging, 2 a.m.
in the junkyard
B movie 
at dream’s edge

where words are 
scarce, doubled down 
workers of 
the wee hours,

and actions blurred
slow motion 
rancid beauties
discarded and piled

in the psychic Thrift -
I should visit 
more often, maybe 
find a steal

as I turn
my stealthy love
to find you,
also here.

Bio

Lora Berg has published poems in Colorado Review, The Carolina Quarterly, etc. as well as a collaborative book with Mr. Canute Caliste (1914-2005).  Lora worked as Poet-in-Residence at the Saint Albans School, and holds an MFA from Johns Hopkins. Berg once served as Cultural Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Paris.  Lora is a proud mom and grandma.

Meet Death Out There
Ryan James
Ryan James

Bio

Ryan James is a writer from the Greater Boston area. He enjoys stories that focus on people and their moments, which is something he tries to capture in his own work. Sometimes that means venturing into the weird. Ryan is currently studying for his MA in English at Bridgewater State University. This is his writing debut.

Work
Meet Death Out There
Issue 25: Fever Dreams

           It looked just like those old spaghetti westerns. Coarse sand stretching forever in every direction, the landscape dotted in rough brown shrubs. A cactus here or there. Mountains loomed way off in the distance, never seeming to get any closer. His bike roared between his legs as rider and metal steed chewed up mileage. 

           The sun, well into its descent for the day, continued its hellfire assault on Brady’s right side. Through all his layers he felt like he was boiling, but the constant wind rushing around him helped stave off the worst of the heat. Brady could feel the leather of his jacket creak every time he adjusted himself. Jacket, chaps, gloves, all leather all beyond hot. He was covered head to toe, even had a bandana over the bottom half of his face. Just like an outlaw. He was completely protected from the sun and potential road rash from any unwanted visit to the concrete, though he wondered if he might fry like an egg if he touched the road.

           A couple hours beforehand he had topped off at some crooked gas station in the middle of Navajo land. It was already getting late at that point. The few locals there told him to find a place to stay for the night instead of riding through. They warned him about all kinds of things; cartel activity, evil spirits, and something they refused to even mention by name. Brady was not a superstitious man, but all that talk on top of riding on his own for hours on end was starting to grind on him. He brushed it off at first. Now that the sun was making a steady crawl toward the horizon, he felt his chest tightening.

           “You can meet Death out there at night,” one of the Navajos had said.

           Denver to Phoenix sounded like an exciting trip when Ollie first proposed the idea. A half day’s drive down to meet some of the guys from college for a charity ride, and then staying the weekend getting into trouble. A real good time. Then Ollie got into a bad argument with Charlotte on the day they were supposed to leave. Charlotte went to her parents’ house and Ollie bailed on the trip to go talk things out with her. Brady didn’t blame him, but he had waited for Ollie and ended up leaving much later than he had hoped. Now to make it to the ride on time he was going to have to travel through the night in the middle of nowhere on his own.

           Brady was pulled out of his head by the sputtering of his bike’s engine.

           “Oh hell,” Brady said.

           The exhaust let out a couple quick defiant roars before the motorcycle gave in to its death throes. Man and machine rolled to a stop on the side of the road. A trail of fluid led up to where they stopped, some now pooling on the pavement before hissing away in the ravenous heat. Brady tried restarting the engine. All he got were sputtering mechanical coughs. Kicking his kickstand down he began to inspect his bike. It had overheated.

           “Goddamn you, Brady,” he said. “Check your coolant before you take a road trip.”

           He pulled the bandana down to his neck in frustration, getting an unfiltered taste of the dry air. Now that he was still with no wind he felt the full brunt of the setting sun. Sweat on his upper lip made his moustache damp. He wiped his mouth and spent the next several minutes seeing if there was anything he could rig on his bike to get him at least a few miles farther. Nothing.

           He threw his gloves on his seat and took a half empty water bottle from one of his saddle bags. For a time, he sat there holding a sip of water in his mouth.

           “Damn it!”

           Water sprayed out as Brady yelled and kicked at the sand.

           “Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Damn-”

           Breathing hard, he squatted in defeat. He was stranded until someone else came along. If someone else came along. The only thing he saw down the road in either direction was endless desert. Brady found himself having to decide if he should just start walking, but he had no clue where the next anything was. The last bit of civilization he passed was a long ways back. He took off his helmet to let his head breathe, running his hand through his hair a couple times to shake it loose of the shape it had adopted from being pressed down for so long. Then he plunked down against his bike with a deflating breath. At least the bike offered shade while he still needed it.

           Sand scraped under his boots as he drew his knees up to rest his arms on top of them, water bottle dangling loose in his fingertips. He could still feel the vibrations of his ride running through his hands. A slow sip of water was refreshing on his parched tongue. He swished it around in his mouth for a few moments before calmly swallowing. His hands fell steady and he settled into the stillness of the desert.

           With some kind of tarp he could have constructed a makeshift tent; fastened it to the handlebars then secured it to the ground some way, probably with a couple big rocks or bury the end of it in the sand. Did he have anything like that with him? No, it was just clothes and toiletries in the saddlebags. Maybe the shirts could all be tied together. Or what a waste of energy that would be. Brady had gotten a tent once for his birthday. He had been going on and on about hiking that year, wanting to take it up in earnest; hours were spent reading up on proper equipment and the best places to go. He bought hiking shoes and one of those big backpacks. Then someone got him the tent. Mia, his girlfriend at the time.

           Brady had everything he needed, he knew a good mountain for beginner hikers, he was set to go. But he never did. Work got in the way a few times. Other times he just didn’t feel up to it. People planned to go then bailed. He broke up with Mia. More work. Charity rides. Where was the tent even stored in the house?

           Brady took a sharp sip from his water bottle, frustrated with himself for a multitude of reasons. Drops fell from his moustache to the ground, evaporating in an instant. Looking off into the distance across the road, he watched the day’s remaining heat rise up as his emotions settled. The whole horizon was warped behind the hot waves coming off the earth, like gazing through running water. Brush, sand, and boulder dancing across the desert. Still life come to life. Or actual life?

           A group of wavy shapes glided through the heat. They were too far away to discern, but Brady knew they were horses. He wasn’t sure if wild horses even lived in the desert or not, but he just knew those shapes were horses. Another absentminded mouthful of water as he watched, enraptured. They did not get closer or further away. The herd kept an even blurry pace as it went straight across the horizon.

           Just like those old spaghetti westerns. A black stallion leading the herd, lathered and shining in the falling sun. Hooves kicking up a great dust cloud. Brady could feel the leather of his gloves creak as he gripped the reins. He had a bandana pulled over the bottom half of his face, keeping the dirt and grit from his mouth. His mustang thundered between his legs as man and steed chewed up the distance to the wild herd. Brady had eyes for that stallion. The mustang drew closer, passing the slower horses straggling behind. He grabbed his lasso from where it hung strapped to his saddle. One hand on the reins, he waited for the gap to close. The others had broken off. It was just Brady and the stallion now. His quarry was tiring in the day’s final heat, but so was Brady’s mustang. He took a deep breath, exhaling slow. Brady swung his lasso overhead and let out a whoop as the rope caught the stallion around its neck. The wild horse was ready for a fight. Brady leapt from his saddle toward the bucking stallion, keeping the rope taut as the horse kicked and reared. Again, Brady waited for the right moment. He closed in then and swung himself up onto the stallion’s back. The horse threw everything it had left in an effort to toss Brady from its back. Brady held on, clutching the rope with a white knuckled grip, shifting his weight to counteract every move the stallion made. In the red light of the desert sun they fought, dust swirling up in a miniature sandstorm. Just when Brady was sure he could hold on no longer, the stallion quelled its wrath. Its heavy panting fell flat in the desert air. Brady could feel the hammering of its heart. And the hammering of his own. Sweat dripped down his face. He slid down from the now broken horse to lead it over to his mustang. He tied the stallion’s rope to his saddle and pulled a canteen from a saddlebag. Then he squatted for a moment to catch his breath. He pulled his bandana down to his neck, getting an unfiltered taste of the dry air. Eyes closed, he tipped the canteen back. Half a mouthful of warm water came streaming out.

           Brady opened his eyes. That was it for the water. The now empty bottle crinkled in his grasp. He swore to himself. Should have been better about saving it. At least the sun was just about gone. A dark blue had taken over the sky; the sun’s final orange light was making a retreat. He glanced back out over the horizon. Those shapes and their dusty wake had disappeared.

           As night settled in, the land became still. Brady was surprised at how fast the rising heat dissipated without the sun. The moon took over, painting the desert in her pale glow. Stars spattered the sky beyond. More than Brady had seen in a long time. Maybe if he had actually taken up hiking this kind of sight would be a more regular occurrence in his life. He was thankful for the clear night. Brady could only imagine how dark it might be if clouds were blocking the light from above. The stars had such a cold glow about them. A cold glow that the desert seemed to absorb. Once again Brady was protected by his leathers. This time from the dark chill that took over the arid land. 

           Even with the desert around him bathed in starlight, Brady could not stop thinking about what the Navajos had said to him. Unspeakable things and evil spirits. Meeting Death. Every shift of the sand in the breeze was dragging footsteps. Calls of creatures Brady did not know echoing throughout the night. Were there owls in the desert?  Or was it the voices of the spirits calling out to one another? Maybe that was how they communicated. Navajo spirits took on animal shapes, right? Brady shook his head. He did not know anything about the Navajo spiritual beliefs. All he was doing was freaking himself out.

           He looked back up at the stars in an effort to crawl out of his head. He tried spotting out the few constellations he knew. The Little Dipper. That was an easy one. Its tip was the North Star. All he had to do was find the brightest star. They all looked pretty bright. Maybe that one was it. A star with a particular glint to it grabbed Brady’s attention. It could not have been what he was looking for. There was a second star a short distance from it with an equally particular shine. Brady scanned the sky once more, but found himself looking at those two stars again. They shined so bright. Even through the dark cloud that had coalesced before them. No, they were in the cloud. Like a face in a smoking hood. Two shimmering eyes piercing through Brady’s mind. His soul felt compressed. Their ominous gleam tugged at his body with hands of dust. Sand scraped beneath his boots as he was pulled closer to their light. He tried to move away, but his strength was gone, taken into them like the rest of him being dragged into the pointed glare. Everything else was darkness. Beneath starry eyes a seam opened like a gaping nebula mouth that released an echoing screech.

           Tires cried out a squeal that went screaming out across the desert. Brady was standing in the road with his arms raised against the glare of headlights in a helpless attempt to escape.

           “Whoa there!” called the truck driver.

           An older man in a cowboy hat stepped out of the blue pickup. Brady blinked in the light of the high beams. He could taste sweat on his lips. The truck had come to a halt several feet in front of him. Looking back towards the sky he saw countless stars winking down at him.

           “That was a bit close, mister,” the driver said. “Can’t blame you, though. If I got caught out here, I’d be flagging down the first person I saw. Good thing you stepped out. Might have missed you otherwise.”

           “R-right,” Brady said. “Uh, yeah. Thanks.”

           “Name’s Sam.”

           “Brady.”

           “Pleasure to meet you. Have a breakdown?”

           “Bike overheated. Got stranded out here for a while.”

           “Well, I got some planks in the back of the truck. Let’s say we roll your bike up there and I can drive you to the next town. I’ll drop you off at the garage.”

           “I’d appreciate it. Thanks, man.”

           “Of course.”

           Sam and Brady opened the bed of the truck. Using some lumber Sam had stowed in the bed they managed to fashion a makeshift ramp to roll Brady’s bike up. The bike was heavy, but they got it onto the truck and lashed it down with winch straps. Brady climbed into the passenger seat while Sam got them started down the road again. It smelled like cigarettes. They had the windows rolled down. Brady was thankful to feel the wind rushing by again.

           “Were you stuck for long?” Sam asked.

           “A few hours at least,” Brady said.

           “Good thing I found you. Wouldn’t want to be stranded there through the night. You know, the Navajo around here say you can run into all kinds of things in the desert.”

           “I had heard that. Spirits and the like.”

           “Mhm. They say you can meet Death out here.”

           “Yeah.”


Bio

Ryan James is a writer from the Greater Boston area. He enjoys stories that focus on people and their moments, which is something he tries to capture in his own work. Sometimes that means venturing into the weird. Ryan is currently studying for his MA in English at Bridgewater State University. This is his writing debut.

Dream Therapy
Beret Olsen
Beret Olsen

Bio

Beret Olsen is a writer, editor, and artist, as well as the photo editor for 100 Word Story. Her essays, reviews, and short fictions have been published in journals including the Smokelong Quarterly, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, the Laurel Review (upcoming), the Masters Review, and First Class Lit.

Work
Dream Therapy
Issue 25: Fever Dreams

          “Explain dreams,” I hear myself saying.

          Dr. Wyatt shifts in his chair, making the rich brown leather sigh and creak against its sleek frame.

           I study him for a moment before turning my gaze to his painfully tasteful office: the modern light fixture, lush rug, warm gray walls. Everything looks as always, yet something seems off. 

          “There are many theories,” Dr. Wyatt says, twisting a signet ring with well-manicured fingers. “Some scientists believe that dreams are random images from memory; that we knit these into narratives when we wake.”

          As he speaks, I reach a hand toward the side table and watch it pass through the smooth glass top. Ah. I am dreaming now. I float the books off his shelves, arranging and rearranging them into a levitating phalanx.

          Dr. Wyatt clears his throat to continue. “If that were the case, recounting a dream would be a futile attempt to assign sense where none exists.”

          “Is that what you think?” I ask, letting the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders hover above his head, a little cloud of judgment and distress.

          “No,” he says, rubbing a neatly trimmed sideburn. “I think dreams are much more complicated.”

          I send his books through an open window. We watch them dip and bob in shifting patterns against the sky.

          “Why did you do that?” he asks, nodding toward the disappearing trail of books.

          “Written words are awful words,” I say. “Unspoken words are dead, unheard, unloved.”

          Dr. Wyatt leans forward. “You’re full of unspoken words,” he says. “Why not let them be heard?”

          I think about this. What’s the harm? This is only a dream, after all.

          “Something’s happened to me since I started seeing you,” I say. “I’m having nightmares.”

          He looks amused. “Is this one?”

          “Is it?”

          “It’s not mine,” he says, shrugging.


          The next time I see him, I run a hand over the tissue box beside me, the table, the armrest. All solid. I must be awake.

          “I’d like to talk about my dreams,” I say, uncomfortably aware of the cliché.

          He gestures for me to continue, and I catch sight of his ruby signet ring.

          “I rarely remember much about them,” I say. “But last night you showed up.”

          “Did I?” He leans forward. “Was it a dream or a nightmare?”

          “Nightmare? I’m not—” But I stop, feeling a pang of déjà vu. “Did we talk about this?”

          “Did we?” He thumbs through his notepad, though he doesn’t appear to be looking at it.

          “My dreams have been different lately: more vivid, upsetting.”

          “That’s normal,” he says, laying the notepad aside and setting his gold pen precisely in the middle of it. “Beginning a therapeutic journey brings all sorts of thoughts and feelings to the surface. No surprise there. But tell me about this dream.” 

          Is he smirking? “Well,” I say. “I wonder, though—”

          “I’d love to know more about this particular dream.” 

          His eyes are dark searching pools, bottomless. He is too eager, I think, no longer feeling the urge to confide. “I just wake up agitated; that’s all. Like I said, I don’t remember details.”

          “You should bring a camera,” he says.

          He sounds serious, so I give him a look.

          “Never mind,” he chuckles. “I’ll bring mine.” 


           Later, as I wait in line at the deli, Dr. Wyatt appears in the doorway, hands in pockets. His crisp white shirt glows in the late afternoon light. Without thinking, I touch the meat counter, feel its stainless top cold and firm beneath my fingers. This is really happening. But when I look again, he’s not there. I shake my head to clear it.


           Dr. Wyatt is sitting next to me on my living room couch. I glance around, looking for clues, stopping at the mirror over the mantle. In it, I am a wolf, a feather, a field of grass. 

          “Thank goodness,” I say aloud. “This is a dream.” 

          “A nice one,” he says, looking around. “About what I expected.”

          “What does that mean?” I ask.

          “Whatever you want it to,” he says. “It’s your dream.”

           Mentally, I dismantle the light fixture, splitting it into eight arms of color, an octopus of light. The arms bunch and breathe, grappling for space, so I roll back the ceiling and let them swim over the treetops.

           “Lovely. You should take a picture,” he says. He sinks into my couch cushions and crosses light blue linen-sleeved arms. “Then we can dissect this moment in therapy.”

          “I don’t sleep with a camera,” I say. “Weren’t you going to bring yours?”

          “Right you are,” he says. And he reaches under my couch; pulls one out.


           It is rush hour. I’m standing on the train, gripping the pole, swaying now and then with the turns. Dr. Wyatt is ten yards and dozens of people away, staring, staring. Smiling a little. Does he see me? Am I dreaming? I twist a little, bumping my suited neighbor, who offers a chilly look in response. I feel the weight of my book bag, the jab of someone’s elbow, wonder, Why is he here?


           I’m in the kitchen, watching the clouds through the little window over the sink. I don’t remember coming in here. Am I here for a cup of tea?

          Then I see him. He is aiming the Polaroid at me.

          “Listen,” I say. “This is getting a little uncomfortable.”

          “What is?”

          “I see you everywhere I go.”

           “Why do you think that is?” he asks, resting the camera against his chest for a moment. It moves up and down with his slow breaths, and I become aware that there is not much air between us. Not enough. 

           Shaken, I reach a hand to steady myself on the sink, but there is nothing to grab. My hand swings through air and rests against my thigh. Thank God. I’m only dreaming.

          Dr. Wyatt presses the shutter-release button, making the camera whir and spit a black square. 

          We watch me develop.


          I am in his office, unsure of how I got here.

          “Are you still dreaming about me?” Dr. Wyatt asks.

          I clutch at the arms of the chair, so grateful for their solid reassurance. Grateful to find myself in the world outside my mind.

          “No,” I say, without meeting his eyes.


          When I wake, the first thing I see is Dr. Wyatt sitting in the dim light of my bedroom window.

          Parched and panicked, I reach for my water glass, but my hand only grasps the air. This isn’t real.

          “Were you watching me sleep?” I ask.

          “You’re still asleep,” he says, a smile playing at his lips.

          I try to levitate him, but he seems rooted to the chair. How can I get him out of here?

          “Why would you want me to leave?” he asks.

          “What do you mean?” I say, trying to feign confusion.

          “I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “We’re both in your head.”

          “Why can’t I get rid of you, then?”

          He laughs, twists his ring. “You tell me.”

           My mouth waters, throat tightens, and I fight the urge to vomit, to cry. Act normal, I tell myself, then remember he is in my head. What I manage to say aloud is, “No way. You’re the doctor.”

          He is walking toward my bed, but I can’t make myself roll away. My limbs will not obey.

           “Since you brought me here,” he says, “I might as well make myself useful. I’ll stand watch for nightmares—keep them at bay. You go back to sleep.”

          “I am asleep,” I say.

          “Touché. Lie still then,” he says, as if I have a choice. One strong, hot hand is resting on the white duvet, the other smooths my hair.

          “Dr. Wyatt,” I say. “Why are you here? What are you doing?”

          “Not a thing,” he says, pulling out the camera. “You’re dreaming, remember? This is only a dream.”

          Wake up, I am telling myself. Wake up, wake up. But my eyelids are sealed crypts.


          Though the duvet weighs on my limbs—a feathered corpse—I am pleased to discover that I can move beneath it. I reach a hand up to press hard against the headboard, which presses back. I’m awake. Even better: I’m alone.

          I breathe deep and offer a little prayer of thanks; grab my water glass; take a sip.

          But as I turn my head, something catches my eye on the pillow beside me: a photograph. A polaroid. I reach for it, hoping my hand will pass right through it. 

          It doesn’t. Instead, I feel its crisp white edges. Within the frame, I see myself asleep, my hair a halo on the pillow. A hand in my hair.

          His hand, his ruby signet ring a winking eye at the edge of the frame.

          Written at the bottom in awful, unloved words: “I am here.”


Bio

Beret Olsen is a writer, editor, and artist, as well as the photo editor for 100 Word Story. Her essays, reviews, and short fictions have been published in journals including the Smokelong Quarterly, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, the Laurel Review (upcoming), the Masters Review, and First Class Lit.

The House on the Cliff
Nancy Schumann
Nancy Schumann

Bio

Nancy Schumann is a German writer, based in London, UK. She writes in English and German. Nancy’s particular interest is female vampires. Her monograph Take A Bite traces vampiresses from Lilith to Twilight. Poems have been published in collections like Gothic II. Short stories include The Hostel published by Hic Dragones. Visit Nancy online at www.bookswithbite.in or Twitter @TweetsWithBite.

         It never used to scare me. The drop at the side of the house has always been there. The house hasn’t moved. It hasn’t changed. The cliff has always been as steep as this, always right outside the house. And yet, looking out of the window is like looking into the abyss now. At some point, it stopped being a view that’s exciting and unusual because nobody else lives in a house right on top of a cliff. I don’t see the valley below now. I see an emptiness that’s staring back at me. The nothing has become a thing and that thing scares me. I don’t know when it started. I don’t know what caused it. 

         The house has been on top of the cliff for as long as anybody can remember. Nobody knows who built it, only that it was a long time ago. There must have been records at some point but there was a fire in 1887 that destroyed the town archives. That fire we know all about. All the records since are carefully guarded and by now digitised, backed up and accessible for anybody who cares to investigate the history of the place. The house is older than that. The unknown builder and first owner of this house can’t have had any family alive in this area even at the time of the fire because nobody ever re-recorded the story of the house on the cliff. It’s a mystery why anybody thought to build a house this close to the edge. The walls of the house merge into the rock of the cliff seamlessly as if the house had grown out of it. The structure is sound. That has been established and checked again and again. They wouldn’t have let people live in the house otherwise. 

         My grandparents bought it when they got married. My mother was born here. I wasn’t. I was born in a sterile hospital but all my life I’ve lived in the house on the cliff. I’m its only resident now. My grandparents are long dead and my mother lives in a care home. It just got too much for her fragile body. She’d only live on the ground floor of the house because of the steps and never leave the house because of the rugged, narrow path along the cliff. It’s better at the home for her now. She can go out and meet friends. I visit, of course. I haven’t told her that the abyss in front of the house has started to scare me. I haven’t told anybody. They’d think I’m scared of living alone in the house but that’s not it. The house doesn’t scare me. The house is safe. There is something outside the house in the deep valley the cliff overlooks. It’s not the trees I can look down on. It’s not the rocks beneath the house. I know all the sounds of the wildlife, of the wind, of the night. That isn’t what scares me. 

         In fact, the wildlife is scared, too. I can tell by the seagulls that swarm around the house like birds of prey. They don’t do this, normally. Seagulls don’t swarm and they’ve never come this close to the house. In the blood-red sky they look like an attacking horde but they are not the danger. It’s as if the house has become a homing beacon. They must feel, like I do, the house is the safe thing here now. They keep coming back and I never know if they’re trying to warn me or scare me when they do. Their cries mix with the howling of the wind, as it lashes the walls of the house, trying to get in, trying to break the safety of my house. 

         I try to ignore the bird cries, like screams, that surround me. I try to calm myself. To breathe steadily. I tell myself not to panic. Breathe in. Breathe out. And again. Nothing’s there. Nothing can harm you. You are safe inside the house you’ve always known. There is nothing to be scared of. My eyes scan my surroundings. Familiar, as they’ve always been. I know the door is locked and secure. I know the windows are closed. I know the quickest escape route if I ever need it. I know each room and the heaviest object in it. The one I could use as a weapon if ever I had to defend myself in my home. I know all of this. I am prepared for any emergency that could happen to me here. And yet, I know that something is not as it’s always been. 

         Something moves, just about detectable out of the corner of my eye. I don’t want to look. I blink. The shadow remains where I know it cannot be. The large window behind me faces the cliff. It faces nothing else. Birds can fly by but they don’t linger mid-flight. Maybe the wind carries something light away. But the wind is even quicker than any of the birds. There can be nothing there that wouldn’t come and go in a moment. The shadow remains. I turn. My heart stops. I try to tell myself to breathe. I try to blink. I scream. 

         The shadow doesn’t move. It stands in the middle of the window. It can’t be standing. It cannot anything. There is nothing but the wind and a sheer drop outside that window. And the shadowy figure of a cloaked man that cannot be. My heart is racing. How ever much I blink the figure does not go away. I notice details of the cloak, which looks like it’s made of feathers. A bird-man hovers outside my window. If he is a bird he must be a bird of prey. Nothing about this figure looks harmless. Now that I’ve looked I cannot turn away again. I wonder vaguely if the shadow is nothing but my fear personified. A combination of the bird cries and the shapeless fear I’ve struggled with. The shadow smiles at me. It’s not a friendly smile. It is pure menace. I want to back away, fly away like a wild bird that won’t sit still for anybody to look at it. Yet, I know the window is between us. I’m inside my house. I am safe here. I am, am I not? 

         The shadow figure’s smile widens. Can he read my thoughts? What does the shadow know that I don’t? Then I feel it. I want to go outside. The house is safe, I know. I am scared of something out there that I am hiding from in here. But while every fibre of my body fights to hide away I cannot silence the urge to go outside. I tell myself not to move. I tell myself that looking at the shadow is better than whatever waits outside. One heartbeat, two heartbeats. My feet move without my mind being aware of it. Step by step I back away from the window, staring at the shadow. The door behind me is open. It leads me out of the room straight into the corridor that leads outside. My eyes are fixed on the shadow until I’m at the door to the house. I wonder what looking away will do and, as I turn, open the door. 

         I face the path that leads from the house off the cliff. For a moment, all looks normal. Then my eyes notice a spot of colour that shouldn’t be there, just on the paving stones outside the house. I look closer. The stones are covered in prints of hands and feet. Small hands and feet. They are blood-red and blue. These were not here before. The stones were clean and normal and unnoticeable the last time I walked this path. There are no children in the vicinity. If any had come to the house to cover the pavement in handprints I’d have heard them. I could have seen them if I’d looked out in this direction. But there are footprints too. Footprints that lead nowhere. All the prints are in just one small area. There is nothing, no other prints, no paint spots, anywhere else. I look around and don’t know what to do next. I hear a sniggering laugh that I attribute to the shadow. It falls on the prints of hands and feet in front of me. I can’t look away. I can’t look up. Somewhere at the back of my head a voice shouts that it’s only a shadow, only some kids playing. Nothing to be afraid of. 

         I take another step closer looking at the handprints in the shadow. The laughter changes. This isn’t the shadow. This isn’t just one voice. It’s several small voices laughing. The shadow engulfs me and the ground opens up. Where a moment ago I saw colourful handprints I now see and feel small hands all around me, dragging me into the pavement. It goes dark as if the earth that just opened up has closed over my head. The hands are still there, grabbing me from all sides. I hear small voices laugh, small feet patter in the distance. I struggle to breathe. It never was the house, I think, it’s the cliff. The cliff is pulling me in. After years of being a solid base for somebody’s home it’s drawing breath, a living thing. Why me? I wonder. A hollow voice I cannot see replies: ‘The tribute is due.’ 

         I try to look around myself but it remains dark. The hands stop grabbing me. Somehow that makes me more scared. With the silence, the faceless dread I felt in the house returns. The cliff has always been alive. All this time that we lived and felt safe here, it was waiting for a time when it would be due a tribute. How can I be a tribute? The hollow voice returns: ‘You are the youngest.’ The small prints of hands and feet pop into my head then. Oh dear, goodness, no, there were children. They were the tributes before me. I hear laughter. Malicious laughter. And there’s enough light for the shadow to be visible. It smiles as it did when I saw it in front of my window. Without moving its lips it says: ‘You may as well know that you’re only the eleventh. Probably the oldest young one we’ve had.’ All these children. They must have been so frightened. Didn’t they have anybody to protect them? I mean I am alone but children would have parents. ‘Nobody really missed them. There used to be more young ones.’ The voice says. So it did read my thoughts earlier. What are we all tributes for? Now the laugh is so loud the rock around me vibrates. ‘The house.’ Those words are the last thing I hear before the rock closes in on me. 


         The house on the cliff is much larger than it looked at first sight. It seems to have grown right out of the cliff. Yet it’s not a cave. It’s a large, modern house, with many interestingly shaped rooms. Some look like something designed many years ago. As if the rooms were transported here intact from another building in a long-ago era. There is even that one room that looks as if it was just added. As if it didn’t previously belong to the house.


Bio

Nancy Schumann is a German writer, based in London, UK. She writes in English and German. Nancy’s particular interest is female vampires. Her monograph Take A Bite traces vampiresses from Lilith to Twilight. Poems have been published in collections like Gothic II. Short stories include The Hostel published by Hic Dragones. Visit Nancy online at www.bookswithbite.in or Twitter @TweetsWithBite.

I Gave It My All, Afterlife, Forever Haunted, X
Zuzanna Kwiecień
Zuzanna Kwiecień

Bio

Zuzanna is an illustrator and designer. She aims to capture the visual narrative of the subject and combine it with a distinct atmosphere. As an artist, she values time and effort put into the construction of a high-quality work of art.


Bio

Zuzanna is an illustrator and designer. She aims to capture the visual narrative of the subject and combine it with a distinct atmosphere. As an artist, she values time and effort put into the construction of a high-quality work of art.

The Outcast
Chanice Cruz
Chanice Cruz

Bio

Chanice Cruz is originally from Brooklyn, New York and has lived much of her life in Richmond Virginia where she became involved with Slam Richmond. She currently co-hosts a Latinx bookish podcast called The Poet and the Reader. Her poems have been published in several literary journals. She received a bachelors in English from Queens College.

 

Work
The Outcast
Issue 25: Fever Dreams

Somewhere on a slate grey surface, there is a mermaid,

alone, in her room, wiping moon dust from her cheeks.

Sighing into her reflection, which always seems to be

dirty.  

 

Her brown hand touches the cool glass. She hates

her face and the dusty moon. She is reminded to be

proud of the surface of her tribe, which is not really

a planet she spits back into a dusty mirror, neither 

a star, a spinning oasis, the second brightest in the 

sky, which will always be second best to the sun. 

 

She yearns to swim in the black sky, like her ancestors.

The better warriors. She hates that she will never 

be a warrior. Only second best to the warriors that have

fought for her before.

 

She sighs again, flips the chair but it floats in the air. She 

glides out her window, wraps her arms around her tail,

the Earth reflecting in her neon blue eyes, and wonders what

it would feel like to really drown.


Bio

Chanice Cruz is originally from Brooklyn, New York and has lived much of her life in Richmond Virginia where she became involved with Slam Richmond. She currently co-hosts a Latinx bookish podcast called The Poet and the Reader. Her poems have been published in several literary journals. She received a bachelors in English from Queens College.

 

Messiahs, Chapter One
Marc Anthony Richardson
Marc Anthony Richardson

Bio

Marc Anthony Richardson is author of Year of the Rat, winner of an American Book Award, and is a recipient of a Creative Capital Award, a PEN America grant, a Sachs Program grant, a Hurston/Wright fellowship, and a Vermont Studio Center residency. He teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania. Find him at www.marcanthonyrichardson.com.

Work
Messiahs, Chapter One
Issue 25: Fever Dreams
Year of the Rat (Excerpt)
Issue 20: Anthologia
Once    a     man     becomes    a    wife    they    are    a    new
creature    and     should      be    addressed   as     such,    he 
says      to     her,      whispers,      for     women    listen     for
whispering  men,   for  their  fathers  with  the  force  of  a
folktale   in   the   black   of  their   beds   at   night   in   the 
cabins  of  north  country—a  northeasterly  tryst  for this 
woman  of  Asian  and  this  man  of African  antecedents, 
both  birthed in  this  modern American state,  one of the 
five  that  has  embraced  the  proxy   initiative—whispers 
with  those  coywolves crying  outside  now  in  the  snow, 
after  conjuring  the  couple of men  on  the row  with him 
who  had  just  severed  their  scrota:  anathemas  for  the 
death house.  No, she does  not  know  why he’s  thinking 
about  this, she thinks. Yes, she knows why  he’s thinking 
about    this,   she   thinks:    the    quail   eggs    at   supper, 
the white plate,  the spilled wine upon them—and the as- 
tonishing  effect of  red  on  white—and  then the way the 
scrota lay there outside the feed slots of the men’s single
white cells  at dawn: not like  shaven little  skin sacs, with 
their  testes  attached  to  their  tunicae,  but  like  bloody 
little  newborn   rats—but  before this  the screaming  the 
adrenaline  and  the quiet  stench  of  iron in  the  air  with 
this fortitude it took  to stay  standing,  just long  enough 
to  sever  and   to   shove  yourself  through   a   slot  (their 
spermatic   cords   sawed   through   by   blades  extracted 
from daily safety razors? by miscellaneous bits of metal? 
by   pork  chop  bones   or   the  plastic  handles  of  tooth- 
brushes  ground  down  on   the  concrete  for  cutlery?)— 
for he saw  all four rectangled  two  at  a time in  each  sac 
all  bloody  and   burgundy  in   his   hand  mirror  after  his 
forearm shot  through  the  feed  slot  of  his  single  white 
cell  at  dawn—the vertical bars  in  the square  above  the 
slot  being   too   close  together   to   squeeze   a  forearm 
through,   akin   to   a   cashier’s  window,   with   the  more 
spaced-apart    bars   around    the   window   sheeted   with 
white  metal  mesh  (as  it was with  all the cells and is still: 
white   blood   cells)—his   acrylic  shaving   mirror  angled 
downwardly  and  just  right  to  reflect  the  reversed  and 
inverted   images   onto  his  retinae  to  be righted  by the 
brain,  for  first  the  mirror was facing the northeast then 
the  southwest  and  then  the  northeast again  with  each 
time  needing to  be  handled  by  the  opposite  hand,  for 
they  were  on  either side  of him  these  men  and  he was 
between    them—testis   (witness),    yet   testis  unus,   testis 
nullus   (for  you  would  need another  to  corroborate this 
sight  in  your head,  for  the testimony of one is to be dis- 
regarded    unless   corroborated   by    the    testimony   of 
another,  for there’s no  video surveillance in  this  ancient
execution unit,   no  way to  catch  the  guards  doing what 
they’re   ordered   to   do,   only  the   other   hand   mirrors 
looking   out   on    the  row  with   you)—so   then   Fucking 
Christ!  Fucking Christ! one of  the  guards cries,  above a 
plash  of footgear,  for this guard  still cries  in  his head as 
they   must’ve    lain   there    these   two   crimsoning   men 
inside the leucocytes of  their separate cells, a  malady  to 
society  to  either  side  of  him, one  white  and  one  black 
and   both   outrageously   stark  naked,   passed  out  from 
the shock or from  the bloodlack,  prostrate  or  faceup  on 
the  concrete,  coolness  against the  red  warmth  rippling 
out  and   with  their  cocks  now  monstrously  clitoral. But 
as  he   is saying  again  to her that once  a man becomes  a 
wife  they  are  a  new creature  and   should  be  addressed 
as  such  she  is  already  in   the  kitchen  in   her  mind  and 
then later  in  her body  because  she  can’t stand  to  be  in 
bed    with    him    anymore,    because   there’s   this  shitty 
kitchen   in    my    belly,   she   thinks,   the    wine   and   the 
excuse  for   giving    him   my  bed    and   I   must   need   to 
organize  this  shit,  she  thinks,  fueled   by  the  burgundy 
while  cutting  on  the  lights, with  hope  and   with  scrub- 
bing  and  holding  my  boy  up  high by  the  waist  to  wipe 
his  lil’  Buddha!   I  need  to   dunk   my  hands  in   water.   I 
need   to   fill  this  fucking   kitchen  up  with  scalding  hot 
water—this  sink!  I need  to  go  outside  and stoop  in  the 
snow  and   plunge  them  in   hold  them  in  and  then  rush 
them   into   this   sink—oh  God!   the   hum  in   my  hands: 
the  burn.  So  there is  a scalding  after she  rushes  in  and 
she  is   calm   and   thinking   of   that  sea  again:  I  need  to 
think  of  the   sea  every  now  and  again,   she   once  wrote  to
him,   for   I   am   forgetting  him.   I  am  not   normal.   I  need to 
feel   the   warm   warm   seawater  like   bathwater,   for   I   never 
want   to   forget   how   warm   the  seawater   was,   like  bathwa- 
ter,  she  wrote,   to  lead up  to  her,  to  explain   her—for  it 
had  been  over  a  year  and  a  half  then  since  she’d  seen 
any  ocean or  her at  all, her mother,  and now  over  three 
years    have    passed—nor    forget   the   clownfishes    I    saw 
swimming   inside  of   it  deep   sea  diving,   those   small  orange 
bodies with  their  bold  white  vertical  bars  accented  by   black, 
how    those    protandrous    tropical   harlequins    can   engender 
both  genders   and   live  symbiotically   among   the  death  sting 
of  the sea  anemones,   how  the  biggest  fish  the  queen  clown- 
fish the  only female  fish  in  a  school of  male  fish  stresses  the 
next  biggest  fish,  the  male  mate,  and   stresses  the  male  and 
stresses  the male  to keep  the  mat male, who  then  stresses the 
remaining   males,  for  though   being  born  males  the  decrease 
of  cortisol   will  turn  the  males  into   females,   but   when  she 
dies—she   is    bound    to    die—the    male   mate   will   become 
larger  and   rise   to   the   rank   of   the   female   alpha  stressor, 
whereas the  next  biggest   will  become  larger  and   rise  to the 
rank of  the  new  male  mate.   But  by  and   by  as  this  cycle 
began afresh  in  this  supermax,  he  wrote  back,   respond- 
ing   to    her   missive,    redolent    of    her   vaginal   scent 
smeared  across  it,  his spent semen smeared  across  his, 
the hierarchy  is reversed:  it  is the least of   the  males  who are 
turning    female    in    their     standard    prison    attire,   orange 
accented   by    bars   painted   white    while    living   among   the 
sting  of    the   death   house   for  years ....   The   administration
and   the  warden  and  the  guards  have  all stretched  out  those 
men  those   lovers  so  supremely   those   lovers  who  will  never
touch    each    other    from    separate  cells   that    I,    who   was 
centered   between   them   like  a    muscular   pump,  could   feel 
them   both   thrumming   their   deoxygenated   desires  through 
a  heart  that  just  had  to  oxygenate and  deliver  them  respec- 
tively   and   readily   and    aided   and   abetted   them   unknow- 
ingly:   the    dawn    of   that   double   self-castration   when  the 
light  is  coming  through   the  windows   and  stretching   knife- 
like  down  the  corridor  to  our   row  to   my  door  is   when  we 
do it,   he wrote back,  he  must’ve  wrote  back,  the  black  lover 
to  the  white,   or  at  least  as  I   imagine  him,  because  neither 
of  them   had  a  watch  nor  wanted  one  and   he  would’ve  ro- 
manticized   the   moment    as   only   a   madman   would   do.   I 
aided   that  note   those   notes—for   there   are   no   clocks   no 
cameras   no   way   to  catch   the   guards   doing   what   they’re 
ordered  to  do, as  guards are  wont to  do,  to  keep the  quiet in 
here—I aided  those  notes,  as  did  the  man  before  me  for  as 
you  know,  as   you  know,  I   have   been   on   this  row  now  for 
over   a  year,   but they,   the  black  lover  and   the  white,   have 
both  been  here  for  over  a  decade  and  the  dead  man  before 
me  in  this  cell  only   did  it  for  something  from  the  commis- 
sary,   aided their  correspondence for  a pack   of  gum   a  candy 
bar  a  couple  of  cigarettes,   which  could  be   passed  along  as 
well.   I   did  it   for  free.  Though   I   could’ve   been   caught—I 
should’ve    been    caught—and    consigned    to   administrative 
segregation,   thus   losing    my   daily   hour    outside   inside   a 
kennel  among   other  things  and  my   good  standing  too,   for 
returning  to   solitary  requires  less  justification  than  when  a 
man   first   entered  it,   that  space  with  no   sound  no  soul  no 
sunlight,    only    the   dimmed   lights   of   an   eerie   florescent 
twilight  as   you  lose   some   eyesight  and  your   perception  of
depth,    the   phenomenology   of   an    alien   world   where   the 
nimbuses  of  a  lover’s   nipples  hover  above   you and   the  shit 
beside   you  and   the  silence  is  often  broken   by  cockroaches 
and  mice  scuttling  around  like  the  sound of  the shells  being 
peeled  away  from  your  hard-boiled  eggs,   where  every  little 
detail  is  constantly  eating  you  alive:  the  smell  of  the  after- 
shave  of  a  trial  witness,  the  bags  under  a  mother’s eyes, the 
smirk  of   an  arresting  officer,  the  smell   of   bacon,   a  corner 
you   could’ve   turned   and   the   bedbugs   a   breath   being  the 
dinner   bell:   the   carbon   dioxide   exhaled   in   sleep   and  the 
waking   up   to    their   Lilliputian   shits   smeared    across   the 
sheets,   each   having   swiped   a   blood   payment:   everlasting 
vigilantes  that  can  fit  into   a  crack  the  slimness  of  a  credit 
card—yes,    he    wrote    this,    the    man,    but    not    for 
the woman, for fear of the officials,  for with a few sheets 
already  written,    for   this   reason,    he   had   ended   the 
missive  after   writing  while  living  among  the  sting  of  the 
death house  for years  and just  signed off  with his  disgust, 
disgusted  at  what  wasn’t  inveighed  against  and  never 
would be, yet throughout that night,  on separate sheets, 
he continued to write and  reread and rewrite,  as writers 
are  wont  to do,  words  he would  destroy  soon  after  he 
was  finished   with   them  before  falling  asleep,  only  to 
rewrite  them again  the next  night  and  on  later  nights, 
destroying   them   every   day  (though   the   writing  was 
still a  terrible  risk,  for  his cell could’ve  been  tossed  at 
anytime),  but he had needed  to  write them  so  he wrote 
and   destroyed    and   rewrote   them   after   memorizing 
what  he  would  have  to  always  undo,   as  prison  writers 
are  wont  to  do,  kept  writing  from  memory  the  admin-
istration  and  the  warden  and  the  guards  have   all  stretched 
out  those  men  and  so  on and  so  on  and  over  and  over 
these words that  would never  be sent,  only torn up and 
flushed  away   again    and   again—and   so,   yes,   I   helped 
them.  I helped  them  with  those  notes.  I  did   it  for myself.  I 
did  it for this solitude this  schism  of  the heart  and  the  week 
before  they   did   it,   during   any    one   of    our   note-passing 
moments,   they  were  always  less   than  fifteen  minutes  away 
from   being   caught   and   kept   whole   men   these   men,   the 
black   lover  and   the  white,   who  will   now   be   removed   to 
separate   supermaxes   once    their   bodies    stabilize,   having 
gone   through   their   hemorrhagic   shocks,   with   that   black 
brain suffering the  bloodlack the most,  yes,  less   than  fifteen 
minutes   away    from    being   caught   and    kept   whole    men 
these   half   men    who   didn’t   want   to   become   whole   men 
again  but   wives  to  each  other,   who   would’ve  severed  their 
sexes  entirely  had  they  not  fainted—or  at  least  that’s  what 
the  meme   is,   I  hear,   on   that  whole  superhighway  to  half- 
truths,  the  gospel  of  the  new world  wide web,  the  gossip  of 
that   guard   perhaps,   the   one   who   first   found  them   and 
shouted They cut off their  balls! They  cut off their  balls! The 
nigger  and  the  redneck!   (why  are  the  men  who  are  in  love 
with  men   always   and  only  news  when  they  are  deviant  or 
aberrant?)—some   think  they’re   just  trying  to   get   off   the 
row   by  feigning  insanity,   but  only  the  incomprehension  of 
the  nature  of  your  crime  in  connection to  your  punishment 
can   do  this—which,   for  a   psychiatrist,  can  be   damn  near 
impossible   to   prove.   I  think   they   just  want   to  be   whole 
again.  For  they  believe  they  were.  Yet  when  the  white  was 
fitted   for   a   suit  the   linchpin  was   pulled:   a  guard   would
sashay   down   this    row   every   fifteen    minutes    for   every 
fifteen minutes  is  the  standard, the  watch  before the  death- 
watch  cell   (the  holding  cell   of  the  off-site  facility  serving 
signed   warrants   where  the   white  was   to  be   transported), 
but  I   still  passed   along   those   notes  between   those  times 
sometimes, those  watches (and  maybe  even  once  a packaged 
hoard  of   painkillers  to  prepare  the  other  for   the pain—or 
maybe  that  razor blade  for  the  white?   God  knows  how  he 
got it),  passed along those  notes  for the  last  week  they were 
to   be  together,  for  no  one  can  talk  along  the  row  and   an 
echo   can   carry  you   away   on   a   gurney   if   you   want  (the 
sounds  of   the   standard   televisions   and   radios   inside  the 
cells—for  those  who can  afford  them and  are  in fairly  good 
standing—are   suppressed  by  near-defunct   headphones),  so 
there  are   only  footfalls   and  flushes  and  farts   and  snores 
and  coughs  and  sloshes and  trickles  and  drips,  and  after  a 
guard would  pass  by and  his  footsteps  had  faded  away  one 
of  the lovers  would  stick his  acrylic  shaving mirror  through 
the  feed  slot  to  scan  up  along  the   row—for  our  arms  are 
not  only  blocked   by   bars  but   by  white  metal   mesh—and 
once  the  coast  was clear  he would  take  up  a  long  piece  of 
yarn   wrapped   around   a   weighted   note  and   would   wind 
the other end  around a  forefinger  and whisper for  me,  then 
reach  out   to   swing   the  weight   over  to   my   slot  where  I 
would  snatch  it and  swing  it to  the  other  lover, after  whis- 
pering  for him,  and  then  vice versa  later  (a  pack  of  gum  a 
candy bar  a  couple  of  cigarettes:  all  had  passed  along  this 
way,   possibly  even  permitted  by the  guards,   the  lax  ones), 
but  it   has  been  a   week  out   and—though  I’ve  been  asked 
about  it—I  have  yet  to  be  connected to  it,  nor  do I  believe
I  ever  will  be,   for  that  guard   is   gone,   the  one  who  first 
found  them,   a   lax  one   who  had   handed  out   to  everyone 
other   than   the   white   lover   that   day   those   daily   safety 
razors   to   be  collected   later—because   maybe   a   few  days 
before  this  the white  had distracted  the  guard,  and was  not 
just  cursing  him   without  a  care,  from  checking  and  seeing 
that  that  daily  safety razor,   the one  the black  was  handing 
back  to  him,  was  missing   its  razor  blade?   Maybe  he—not 
me—had   helped  them   with   those   notes?   For   money,  for 
money  from  a relative  of  theirs?  Or maybe  it  was  a trustee, 
an  inmate  in   the   warden’s  favor,   who  mopped   the   floors 
delivered  the   food  retrieved  the  trays,  for  now   one’s  been 
replaced  by  another.  And  of  course  they  could’ve  communi- 
cated  in  codes   through  the  ventilation  vents  in   the  rear— 
though  not  so  effectively—during  the  day  when  the  guards 
would   converse   crassly   or   after   they’d   yell   up   Mail   up! 
Chow   up!   Shower   up!    For   a   rower—for   we   are   always 
undertaking   this    awful    rowing    toward    God—is    always 
alone in  the  dayroom or  in  a  stall  of  the  communal  kennel 
outside  for   his  one  hour  a  day,  six   days   a  week.   He  eats 
alone.  He   sleeps  alone.  He   fades  away.  But  not  before  he 
would whisper.  So  I  aided  them,  as  did  the  man  before  me, 
with  the  bosom  of  a  Jehovah!  Jehovah!  as  I  am  called  and 
always  called  by  the guards  here  as jeer,  Jehovah!  Jehovah! 
one  can  call   along  the  corridor,   outside   this  row,   and  an 
echo  can carry  for  a  year—an  echo  can  carry for  a  year. 
Yet  now,  standing  over  this cabin  kitchen  sink,  drunk 
and  cold  and  only hearing  the  cries  of  the  coywolves 
outside,   the  woman  only   knows  about  the  basics  of 
this  obliterated part  of the  letter,  this  ghostlike  coda,
from  what  the  man  wrote  to  her;  she  will  never  read 
any  of its  lines unless  they  are  written  once  again  by 
him,  from memory,  only to be destroyed once more,  by 
her,  burned  inside  her  furnace—as all  his missives  had 
to   be—so  she  could   remain  in  the  now  and  only  the 
now   and  never be  undone—for  she may  need  to  deca- 
thect    from    him:    the    phone   call   today    made    her 
remember.  The   phone  call.  It   is  late   December  now, 
and  the   promise   she  may   soon  have  to   keep   would 
require  a  neutrality and  surely,  she  thought  with  fore- 
thought,  back in  late  June, when  her lover was  soon  to 
be  released,  letters  from  a  once-condemned man  to  a 
now-condemned   woman  could   be   more  dangerous  in 
the forest once he’s released and reads them after I leave 
him   and—what  if  his   mind  escapes,   again?   The  coy- 
wolves  have  been  crying  ever  since  she  left  the  bed— 
those  wendigos in  the  snow—and  once they  get full  on 
the  howling  you   cannot  tell  one  from  another  or  how 
many  they   really  are.  She  remembers  him  mentioning 
the  madmen,  but never  until now  his  link  to them,  and 
the  perfect  penmanship  of  his  hand  and  his  body  now 
lying  on her  bed as  she  stands before  the  sink,   feeling 
that her  hands have been slightly seared  by this scalding 
water,  as  his   conscience  is  momentarily  cleared  as   he 
sleeps   like  a   feather  unburdened   by  flight,  the  slight 
snore   and—will   he   be   sleeping   with  you  tonight,   or 
below,  that face of  the cause célèbre?  If he were  a killer, 
she  thinks,   asleep,   he   would   be  innocent.  All   killers 
are.  There is no  discernible difference  between  killing a  child 
and    killing    a   sleeping   man—for   what   is   a   man   other
than   a  child   who   has  not   yet  woken  up?   Yet  he  has, 
hasn’t  he?  Yet some  thought and  still think,  she  thinks, 
he   was   a  fool   for  taking   the  initiative,   not  just  for  a 
claimed  killer,  but   for  a  person  with   so  little  promise. 
Yet  since  this  person  is—no, no,  must  not  think  of  him 
and  his  tonight,   but  of  me  and  mine.  Though  mine  has 
never  thought  of  me.   Yet  will  he  be  sleeping  with  you 
tonight?   Do   you  even  want  him   to   and—what   is  this 
taste  in   my   mouth?  She   spits   into   the   kitchen   sink, 
and   then  looks  above  it  into  the  black  window  mirror: 
another  December  snowstorm   will  be   rearing  its  head 
tonight—the    forecast    called    for   it;    soon   the   white 
winds   will   be   roaring   over   the   timber   of  this   crazy, 
aging  cabin,   for  since   the   man   arrived   here   in   mid- 
November—free   for    five   months    now—he    has   been 
working   on   several  essays  for   the   debut  book,   down 
below  in  her   cabin  that’s  not  truly   a  cabin,   for  it  has 
the  depth  of  a  house  and  the  animus  of  a  furnace  and 
it  sleeps   and   speaks   like  a   crucible   sometimes;   it  is 
lodged  in  a  slope like  an  axe, a  lonely  two-level  liminal 
house  halved   crosswise   by   the  incline   to  dominate   a 
skeletal  snowy  valley  of  larches  and  birches  and  ashes, 
of   various  evergreens—a   bottomless   abyss   right   now 
at  night,    the   vale  of   the   forest—with   doors   opening 
out  back  below  on  the   bottom  floor  and   above   in  the 
front.    The   woman   has   been   sleeping   with   the    man 
most  of   the   time,   sometimes   in   her   bed   and   some- 
times  in  his,   for  these   lovers  have  separate   rooms  on 
separate  floors  and  still  appear  to   be  beginning  a  new 
life  sequestered  together  in   this  crystalline  forest;  she
in   her   late   thirties   and   he   in   his   early   forties,  with 
many  solitary   years  between  them;   she   having   begun 
hers even  before  moving  here  over three  years  ago  and 
he   before   the   two  years  and   three  months   and  three 
days   inside:   she   in   a   lifeless   wedlock   and   he   with   a 
writer’s   want—and   should   they  be   unneurotic   for   the 
eighty-eight   more  days  here,  a  Mercurian  year,  the  ice 
may  begin  to  thaw,   much  too  early  these  years,  and  it 
would  be the  first  day  of  spring. The  first  day  of  spring. 
A  ladybug  alights on the  faucet. The wine  is  waning. The 
phone  call  is  fresh:   that   early   morning   message,   that 
voice  the  woman  hadn’t  heard  in  over  three  years,  that 
voice  from  the  old  country  in  this  country  now  seeking 
the  other  old  country  within  her—for  though  the woman 
was neither born nor raised  in  it, the old  country, she  has 
been  and  is  still  being  steered  by  it, the  ways  of  it:  the 
voice spoke  for  the  way of  it. So  that  standing  over  this 
sink, the  kitchen lights  so  bright, she  is  still  looking  out 
of    the    black    window    mirror    at    the    would-be-seen 
snow-covered  evergreens  encroaching  on  the  would-be- 
seen    snow-covered    quarter-mile    drive   of   dirt,   those 
would-be-seen    boughs   and   branches   reaching   toward 
it,   as  it  in  turn  reaches  toward  the  route:   after  finaliz- 
ing   her  divorce,   she   had   fled  to   the  forest   with   only 
minimal   stays  in   the  university   town  for  the   winters— 
this being  her  first  winter  in  the  forest  with  her  lover— 
leaving  her  neighbor  to   tend  to  the  cabin’s  upkeep  and 
to  clear   the  drive  with   his  snowplow;   while  during  the 
other  seasons  she  would  take  in   boarders   most   of  the 
time,    Bhikkhunis,   sisters    between   sojourns.   But   now
that  aftertaste  again.   Salty.   So  she  swipes  the  ladybug 
from the faucet,  draws a glass of water,  drinks it, and then 
looking   again   into   the   black   window   mirror   becomes 
afraid and  thinks that there’s something  dark about them, 
that  there’s  something grotesque  about  them:  mirrors— 
as  if they are really  one-way  mirrors concealing  insidious 
instruments;   if  only  they  could  be  portals  between  two 
possibilities,   gateways  to  a  reversed  world  where  there 
aren’t  any  religious  sects  of morality  creeping  into  your 
personality,   where  there  aren’t   any  proxy  initiatives  to 
mutely pressure you, where the bereaved aren’t the capital 
killers and the capital killers  aren’t  the  bereaved:  Ah, she 
thinks,  a chiasmus to be considered  inside a court.  So she 
cuts  off the  lights and  in the dark  can see the  play of  the 
humpbacked   gibbous   moon   on   the  snow   and   says  to 
herself—Oh!    An    epiphany   on    a   tombstone,  perhaps, 
an   epitaph?—and   then   all   at     once  she  is  tasting  the 
amniotic   salinity   of   the  ocean  in  her  mouth, drowning 
again,   like    before   like    always   before   and   she    must 
think  of  something   anything   else    to    oust   this    ocean 
from  her mouth, this  tiny  body  in  her  brain,   for  the   af- 
tertaste of  his  semen  returns  it, this  goddamn  ocean  in 
my  mouth, and  then  thinks  of  why she  hasn’t  sucked   a 
cock  in years  until  now and  doesn’t  miss  it  and  then  of 
her  anus  opening  up   like  a  mouth  before  he  stuffed  it 
into   my   mouth  then   stuffed  my   shit   into   my   mouth 
and   so   she  walks  right  back   into  her  room  and  plops 
down   beside   him    and   says    You   can’t    come   in    me 
anymore,  as   he  starts  and  sits  up  in   her  bed, rubbing
his  eyes,   the  lamp  the   only  thing.   What?   What?   the
man  says,  afraid—and  yet  is  angered  now:  he   thought 
he  was  still  on  the  row. No  longer is  the  woman  naked 
as  he  is,  for  after rolling  out of  bed with  the  excuse  of 
needing   to   do   something   in    the   kitchen,    she    had 
gathered   up  her   thermals  and   slippers  from   the   rug 
and just  left, not even  bothering  to  dress. What?  What? 
But the  woman  is  silent now, sitting  on  the  side  of  her 
bed,   looking   ahead,   and   in   the   lamplight,   with   her 
back  straight   and   her   breasts   scarcely    defined,   her 
frame  lean  and  truculent, her  eyelids  pulled  narrow  at 
the  corners  by  crow’s-feet, the  bones of  her  pyramidal 
cheeks,   the   square   jaw   and   the   jet-black   buzz    cut 
peppered  with   salt—like  a   Buddhist   nun’s—she   looks 
quite  handsome. She  is  focused  now,  yet  unclear. Love, 
the  man says, hanging  his  head  without  saying  another 
syllable,  just  lumbering  up  to  lighten  the  bed,   leaving 
a   warm  depression,   and  standing   nakedly  over   her— 
his   ebon   skin,   his   greying  crown   of   kinks,   his   long 
curly  eyelashes  and  that  single  eyebrow  curled  into   a 
horn,   his  tall  frame  and  thin  girdle  of   fat  making  his 
midriff  fatherly,  his  sex  now  hanging  like  a  lynching— 
before  dropping  to   a  knee.   Let  me  see,   he  says. The 
past  is  two  doors  down.   And  so  she  blurts  out You’re 
too  vile  you’re  too  much!  I’m  not  you  I’m  not  normal! 
I    should’ve    never    destroyed    them,    those   faces—I 
forgot  his  face!  How  could  I  forget  his  face?  It  was  a 
face  only  a  mother  must  forget,    only   a  mother  must 
forego.   I  only  see  my  father’s  now.   The  dark-skinned 
face  of her  lover is before  her,  his  body  below  her,  her 
shadow   developed  into   the   third   dimension   and   she
thinks:   Why  am  I  so   solaced  by   the  darkest  of  men? 
For  she   is   only   now   hearing   what   he  said:    Let  me 
see—and  it  is  uncanny,  for  another had  said  the  same 
thing to  her over  three  years  ago, a  blue-black  man  in 
a  morgue. The  man  is  sitting on his heels as  he lays  his 
head  in the  woman’s lap. Let  me  see, he  says, and  then 
her  palm  is  on  the  back  of  his  neck,   pressing  quietly, 
her thermal  leggings and  her heat  is in  his face,  feeling 
the   pressure  at  his   base—and   she  can  break it  if  she 
wants.  If she  wants. But  her  hips rise a  bit  after he lifts 
his  head  away. A  mother’s  grief, she  sighs, opening her 
thighs,  becomes the  door she walks through  for the rest 
of  her life—opens  them, for  he  has  slid off her leggings 
and   slippers  and  is lowering  his  head  again,  her   palm 
pressing  his  nape again—she  can shut  it,  she says, eyes 
shut,  but there will always be the temptation to  touch  it, 
to   open   it—and  then  she  snaps  his  neck like  a  tooth- 
pick. The  dream  she  had  many  years  before  and forgot 
about   until   now  and  she  smiles  and  thinks about  how 
good it  is to be no longer lost  and lulled and is  relieved  by 
this   already-dreamt   marker,  as  if  there  were  no  lapse 
between  them,   the  then  and  the   now,  as  though   this 
route  is  the  right  route  thus  far  for  the  moment,   and 
then  she forgets it  again and  is lying again  on  her  back, 
lifting her thermal undershirt  to  bare   her  small breasts, 
and  then wetting  her fingertips with  her spittle:  beyond 
the   junction   of     her    motherly    thighs    a    blue-black 
basement  is   flooding  and   brimming   and   a  bucket   of 
water and  a bucket of  water and a  bucket of water  out  a 
window  would   never  be   enough:   a   great  voidance   is
needed,  by way of a path of least resistance; so her knees 
spire  above  his  head  for  her feet  to perch  on his shoul- 
ders,   her  feed  slot  to  his  mouth  to  receive  the  excess 
water,  and  soon  she  imagines  a  small skeleton  flushing 
out  with   the  rush  and   onto  the   coral  reef  of   his  oral 
cavity   and    begins   to   weep  and   moan  as   his   tongue 
muscles  and  circles  the   crease  between  the  glans   and 
the  hooded  cloak,   cinching  the  inner  cape,   tightening 
her sluice laterally, hugging it,  this organ of taste turning 
intromittent   organ,    her   pelvis   grinding   away   at   the 
precipice of her bed and  his long,  coarse beard,   her eyes 
shut,  rapt: a  yellow  eagle  swoops  down from  a  sun  and 
seizes  her, snatches her  up  from the  river and  back  into 
the  blurring  orb,  so  that  then:  oblivion. Her  feet  alight 
on the  rug, so  he  lies  down  beside  them. Both,  she  and 
he,  are  still. She  lying  halfway  on   her  bed, her  thermal 
undershirt half-raised,   her breasts and sex showing,  and 
he  lying naked  on  the  rug,  a  three-dimensional  shadow 
and  so  I  had,  she  says,  as  though  she’s  been  speaking, 
what   I   believe   to   be   the  second   visitation   from   my 
father:  in  the light  he looked  fantastic and  wore a  great 
suit,  he  was  very  energetic  and   joyful  and  kept  saying 
and  saying  let’s  go  for a ride  let’s go for  a ride, let’s ride 
the  wild  horses,  and  I  remember  I remember  saying  to 
him  that everything is so  rapid-fire  with  him, as  if  to  say 
he  was being  pushy and  overbearing and I wanted  to  be 
left  alone, then  he  sat  down in  a  chair  like a child,  with 
a  sad  tranquility  to  him,  so  I  leaned  over  and  held  his 
face  in  both  hands  and  said,  very  tenderly:   My  God— 
you  are  so  full  of  life—I  forgot  you  are  dead . . . .


From Messiahs, Chapter One, pages 1-16
Copyright © 2021 by Marc Anthony Richardson
The University of Alabama Press
Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

Bio

Marc Anthony Richardson is author of Year of the Rat, winner of an American Book Award, and is a recipient of a Creative Capital Award, a PEN America grant, a Sachs Program grant, a Hurston/Wright fellowship, and a Vermont Studio Center residency. He teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania. Find him at www.marcanthonyrichardson.com.

Dead Dreams
Sandeep Kumar Mishra
Sandeep Kumar Mishra

Bio

Sandeep Kumar Mishra is a bestselling author of “One Heart- Many Breaks-2020”, an outsider artist, a poet and a lecturer. He is a guest poetry editor at Indian Poetry Review. He has received “Readers Favourite Silver Award-21”, “Indian Achievers Award-21”,IPR Annual Poetry Award-2020 and Literary Titan Book Award-2020.He was shortlisted for “2021 International Book Awards”, “Indies Today Book of the Year Award 2020” and “Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize 2021” and “Oprelle Rise up Poetry Prize 2021”.He was also “The Story Mirror Author of the Year” nominee-2019. Find him at https://www.sandeepkumarmishra.com.

Work
Dead Dreams
Issue 25: Fever Dreams

In his dreams, Rajan searches for the ghosts. He hunts for them, tracing their footsteps in the dirt. He is back in his hometown— he knows these roads. The moonlight shivers on his skin. The crooked streets rattle around him. His heart burns in his chest. Baba, Mama. Where are you?

He runs, following the path laid out for him. The streets smell like smoke. Everything is hazy and deserted, shuttered up and locked away. He knows his neighbors behind each door, but no one steps out to help him. They’re too scared. Rajan is terrified, too, but he keeps running. 

Please, if I could just see you one more time. I didn’t know it would be the last time. I would have said so much more. Baba, Mama.

When he looks up, the ghosts are further away than before. They blur in the distance, like a poorly developed photo, but he can still sense the sadness etched upon their faces. Their feet twist backward from their bodies. Bhuta. Spirits. He should have known better— he’s been following their trail the wrong way the entire time. He won’t ever catch up now. 

Grief sweeps over Rajan like a monsoon. He drops to his knees. The ground begins to crumble. A dark pit opens underneath him— a grave, cloying and sticky with the scent of death. The spirits watch from a distance, cold in the low moonlight. Rajan falls. 

He wakes up with a jolt. It’s still dark outside. Warm air filters in from the cracked window by his cot. The only sound in his cell is his own unsteady breath, and what sounds like the rustle of paper. He looks at his journals, but they lie still across the room, untouched. 

He looks out the window. Two beady black eyes stare back at him, then rise in the dark, unfurling into an undulating brown body. The snake’s tail lashes out and strikes the window. Rajan jumps back, heart hammering in his chest. The snake hisses, but it sounds more like a shriek of mocking laughter.

He doesn’t sleep for the rest of the night. 


Dawn spills like pale pink soup over the horizon, bringing with it a searing heat that refuses to break. The prisoners queue up to receive sloppy rations of oatmeal ladled into their bowls. The cafeteria smells like vinegar and bleach. 

Rajan sits down at a table and pulls out one of his journals. He’s made it a point to write every day he’s been imprisoned— it’s the only thing keeping him sane. A flip of the journal’s pages shows his journey: first raw confusion, then legal jargon for later lookup, finally feverish thoughts of revenge as he realizes what has happened. After, a dull acceptance of his fate, then a sudden jolt back to confusion as the pandemic hit and the world spun upside down. 

He still feels all those things like an ache in the pit of his chest, a heartburn he can’t get rid of. Rajan used to take pride in his sensitive emotions— it made him a better poet, after all, and his poetry landed him a teaching position at a prestigious university. Now, though, he wishes he could turn off his mind. There’s too much to feel. It’s overwhelming. 

“Hey.” One of the other prisoners— a skull-inked man aptly nicknamed Bones— nudges Rajan’s side. “Stop writing, professor. What’s the point? None of us are ever getting out of here.”

Rajan does not spare him a glance and continues writing. “The words are the point.” If he doesn’t write, then the words haunt him in the dark, and he doesn’t sleep. 

Bones grunts. “That’s deep, man. I bet if I was that deep, my wife wouldn’t’ve left me.”

This is a ritual the prisoners go through daily, sitting around the table and wishing things had gone differently— a storytelling, of sorts. 

Rajan has heard it all by now. If I hadn’t met her… if he hadn’t pissed me off so much… if the cops hadn’t been nearby that day… Rajan has never played their game. There’s no point in wondering about the past. He isn’t even sure about enough details about his case to wish differently. 

All Rajan knows is this: one minute, he was an esteemed professor travelling internationally to attend a literary seminar. The next, airport security found a bag of white powder in his carry-on, and there was a global pandemic. The world was having a collective panic attack, and his pleas of innocence were lost in the cries of a million others. 

Rajan’s mouth goes dry just thinking about the horrors of that day. He takes a sip of milk, but it’s curdled, and stings going down his throat. He hacks up a cough. 

Bones leans back. “Hey, get away from me, man. Is that contagious?”

“The sour milk? I hope not.” Rajan understands Bones’ anxiety. The fear of the plague is almost a second pandemic in and of itself. He sets the cup on the corner of his tray, as if it must be quarantined from the rest.

“Ugh.” Bones makes a face. “Why is everything here so rotten?”

“It’s a metaphor,” Rajan tells him dryly, and they both laugh. 


Mid-morning, he gets a migraine, which makes him scream and kick his cot in frustration. He’s been plagued by headaches his whole life, but they got viciously worse when he came to Australia eight months ago: something about the climate, he suspects. He’s learned that there’s nothing to do but wait them out. 

Rajan curls up in a corner of the room, hands wrapped around his knees. White spots dance in his vision. It feels like a hammer is raining blows down on the back of his skull. When things got this bad, his wife used to soothe him with a cool compress, but now she’s a continent away. He passes out with her name on his tongue. 

In his hazy, pain-filled sleep, he sees a snake. He can tell by the markings that it’s the same one from the previous night. Mottled spots of green blot the snake’s body like mold. No, not mold— it reminds Rajan of the diagrams of the Covid-19 virus he and the other prisoners were shown at the beginning of the pandemic. 

The snake hisses at him. Rajan is distantly aware that this is a dream, so he does not flinch. The desert blurs around him. The prison at his back. He’s outside. He’s free, if he can just get past the snake in his path. 

Rajan picks up a stick from the ground, intending to shoo the snake away. Before he can, the snake shrieks and flails, tail lashing on the ground. Rajan jumps back. The snake hurls itself towards him. He raises the stick and clubs it over the head. Its scales brush his wrist. He feels a pinch of pain. He pulls away, hits it again. It keens, wild and pained. Adrenaline floods Rajan’s veins. He strikes the snake for a third time. It lies still.

Breathing hard, Rajan looks down at his wrist. Two pin-point pricks of fangbite are embedded in his skin. Poison seeps slowly through his veins. Dizziness overwhelms him, and he collapses. 

He wakes up smothered in sheets from head to toe, like a funeral shroud. 


The rest of the week flits by like a ghost in the mist. Time blurs, and Rajan struggles to find things to record in his journal. It’s just another day after day after day— what is there to write about when everyone is trapped, when nothing changes? He knows vaguely that this is momentous, that the world has never seen a pandemic of this magnitude, but he’s so isolated in the prison he can’t even conceptualize how the outside world is changed. 

He is starting to forget the details of his family’s faces. He draws awkward, crooked pictures of them in his journal. Does his father wear two rings or one? Does his mother have a mole under her right eye or left? It strikes Rajan with a deep, tolling sadness that he will never again be able to look at them and remember. 

With nothing else to do, Rajan starts recording his dreams. The doctor prescribed him sleeping pills to help with the migraines and insomnia— and they do help, but they make him dizzy, thick-limbed, unable to differentiate wake and sleep. In this half-twilight, he writes:

October 18, 2020. The ghosts came to visit me again. This time, it was my children. They danced around me in a circle, chanting, “Baba’s dead! Baba’s dead!” 

I tried to tell them that I wasn’t dead, that I was just away temporarily, but they couldn’t hear or see me. I tried to embrace them, ruffle their hair, but I couldn’t touch them. It was as if I was invisible or a ghost. Am I becoming a ghost? My feet are straight, and bhuta are restless, transient things. I am not ever-moving. I am stuck. I hate being so stuck. 

October 19, 2020. Last night, I saw the snake— the same snake I always do. I killed the snake. But the snake returns. It bites itself— a perfect, pure, ouroboros. It behaves like it also wants to die. I don’t know how to feel about this. The snake returns. The snake returns. 

The rest of the entry trails off into unintelligibility, marked by a spot of sleepy drool at the edge of the page. 


“What’s up, dude?” Bones prods Rajan’s shoulder. They’re in the exercise yard, Rajan crouching to pick up a dumbbell bar, Bones watching to make sure he doesn’t injure himself. “You look even more depressed than usual, which is saying something.”

Rajan focuses his efforts on squatting, then lifting the bar over his head. His muscles burn, but it feels good to sweat. “Nothing. I’m fine.”

“Really?” Bones arches an eyebrow. “You look like you’re about to pass out.”

“I am not—” A burst of light-headedness flows through Rajan. He sways unsteadily on his feet and sets the dumbbell down with a thunk. “I am not going to pass out,” he says, panting. 

“Seriously, professor, you’re worrying me.” Bones offers him a water bottle, which Rajan gratefully accepts. “Is it the nightmares? Are they getting worse?”

Rajan blinks. Water drips down his chin. “How did you know?”

“You cry in your sleep.” At Rajan’s expression, Bones rushes to reassure him. “We all get the bad dreams, dude. We’ve all been through something heavy. If anyone judges you for it, I’ll beat them up.”

“Thanks,” Rajan says, flattered by the offer. He wipes sweat off his forehead. “I think… I might be cursed. I don’t know.” He gestures to his chest. “All my emotions are like water, filling me up, drowning me. There’s only so much grief a person can take.”

Bones sits next to him. “What do you see in the dreams? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“A snake,” Rajan says, holding up his hands. “About this big. We fight. I kill it. The snake returns.”

Bones scratches his head. “The same dream? Every night?”

Rajan shrugs. “Pretty much.”

“Cool,” says Bones. “In my dreams, my wife always yells at me all the time.” Rajan laughs humorlessly. “If you’re having the same dream every night, a spirit is haunting you. You need to do something to appease it.”

“Like what?”

“Well, leave bowls of honey and milk outside for the fairies to eat, but you can’t do that here. Maybe just do something different to help it out? Hmm.” Bones taps his hand against the barbell. “Saying that aloud, it all sounds pretty nutty.”

Rajan gestures to the prison yard, to the barbed-wire walls and the world at large, where panic and a pandemic consume them all.

“If you ask me. Anything’s worth a try.”

“Or ask your doctor to double your prescription.”

“No, thanks. If I take any more sleeping pills, I might never wake up again.” The thought had been appealing, at times, but Rajan can’t go through with that. He has to find his way back to India, to his wife and to his children, to his parent’s ghosts and graves. He has to believe that, someday, this will end. Giving up means he will end. 


Rajan takes no sleeping pills that night. He lies on his cot, arms folded over his chest, and watches the moonlight seep like spoiled milk through the window. Some part of him thinks the snake might come to find him while he is awake, but the desert outside his window remains bleak and empty. In the end, he has to go to it, instead. 

He closes his eyes. His breathing is soft and steady. He slips into sleep and dreams.

Here he is again. The jail behind him, the snake in front of him. Imprisonment or death. Are those his only options? Is he supposed to give up and let the snake poison him? Rajan refuses to believe it is so.

The snake bares its fangs, which curve like crescent moons in the light. Rajan picks up the stick. The wood is familiar in his hands, grooved from his grip. 

“Back off,” he tells the snake. It hisses at him. “I mean it.”

The snake lunges for him. Rajan dodges away, swiping the stick out to protect his bare feet. 

“What do you want from me? Just leave me alone!”

The snake writhes and coils. Its tail thumps in the dirt again. Rajan hits it with the stick. It howls. 

This is his dilemma, the problem he’s figured out over many nights of mystic battle: he can wound the snake, but whenever he closes in for the killing blow, it finds a way to bite him. Slaughtering it only results in both of them dying. 

Do something different. Break the cycle. Bones’ voice whispers in the back of Rajan’s head. 

Rajan backs away. The snake follows. Blood drips from its abdomen. 

“Stop,” Rajan says. “I don’t want to hurt you.” The snake ignores him. It seems compelled to attack. Its black eyes fix on the weapon in his hand.

So Rajan sets the stick down.

His heart is pounding in his chest. He raises his hands above his head. “See?” he says, mouth dry. “I mean it.”

The snake rises up, twists its head to consider him. Its eyes reflect the white-chip light of the stars above. 

“Go,” Rajan says. “You’re released. You don’t have to die to be free.”

The snake places its body back on the flat ground, as if it is bowing to him. Then it slithers off into the desert, leaving soft plumes of dust in its wake. Rajan drops his hands, breathing heavily. He takes a step forward into the night. Nothing stops him. For once, there are no ghosts, no migraines, no spirit-snakes waiting to strike. He is free. 


The next morning, a guard comes to visit his cell, rapping loudly on the bars. 

“Hey. Wake up.”

Rajan hasn’t slept. This time, it wasn’t insomnia, but indecision: he is burdened by his choice to let the snake go free. What has he set loose? The nightmare has so warped his life that he can’t help but imagine it will impact the waking world, too. For all his metaphors, for all his knowledge of spirits and curses and dreamscapes, he doesn’t know what he’s done.

“Get going,” the guard snaps. “You’re leaving.”

Rajan blinks. Sits up. “Leaving?”

“In three hours.”

He almost doesn’t want to ask. It’s too much to hope for. “Where— where am I going?”

“I dunno. Back to wherever you came from, I guess,” the guard sneers, but Rajan barely registers the jab. He’s going to get out. 

He glances down at the page in his journal, where he has written the first scrawling lines of a poem: today I did not kill the snake / I set it free / it will return to the wild / I will wait for its mercy / and it will return to me. 

He asks, though he already suspects the answer: “Why?”

“Prison’s full— we need more space than usual because of the pandemic. You’re a minor offender. Your sentence was shortened. Congratulations.” The guard tosses a piece of paper at him, presumably some sort of official court document. “Pack your stuff.”

Three hours later, he’s out the door. 

Two guards accompany him on either side, nightsticks swinging. A car idles a few yards away. Rajan breathes in the sweet desert air. The heat doesn’t bother him, and his migraine has faded. Clouds of dust bloom like flowers. The world is still. Even the tumbleweed has stopped its travels to watch him. It would make a good setting for a poem, Rajan thinks. 

As he takes his first steps as a free man, a snakeskin snaps beneath his shoe.


Bio

Sandeep Kumar Mishra is a bestselling author of “One Heart- Many Breaks-2020”, an outsider artist, a poet and a lecturer. He is a guest poetry editor at Indian Poetry Review. He has received “Readers Favourite Silver Award-21”, “Indian Achievers Award-21”,IPR Annual Poetry Award-2020 and Literary Titan Book Award-2020.He was shortlisted for “2021 International Book Awards”, “Indies Today Book of the Year Award 2020” and “Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize 2021” and “Oprelle Rise up Poetry Prize 2021”.He was also “The Story Mirror Author of the Year” nominee-2019. Find him at https://www.sandeepkumarmishra.com.

Consacré à l’art, Oltre il domani – Beyond Tomorrow, Verso la luce
Delta N.A.
Delta N.A.

Bio

Paired in art and life, Delta N.A. work simultaneously revealing deep meanings and speaking directly to the heart. In an ethereal space, shapes and figures dance in a world between dream and reality, telling timeless stories of a free and introspective existence. Present in many private and public collections, they exhibited in  Europe, USA and Asia. Find them at www.dnartists.com.


Bio

Paired in art and life, Delta N.A. work simultaneously revealing deep meanings and speaking directly to the heart. In an ethereal space, shapes and figures dance in a world between dream and reality, telling timeless stories of a free and introspective existence. Present in many private and public collections, they exhibited in  Europe, USA and Asia. Find them at www.dnartists.com.

Any Moonwalker Can Tell You
Joel Peckham
Joel Peckham

Bio

Joel Peckham has published seven books of poetry and nonfiction, most recently Bone Music and Body Memory. Individual poems and essays have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, The Sugar House Review, Cave Wall, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Sun, and many others. With Robert Vivian, he is also co-editor of  Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in American Poetry and Prose, recently released by New Rivers Press.

Work
Any Moonwalker Can Tell You
Issue 25: Fever Dreams

while circling                    the dark side, out of contact with command, Apollo
10 started picking up  a signal—whirring, whistling                strange sounds in
a strange place.     A strange land. Strangers, desperate just to see the earth
reappear                                on a horizon, silent, bristling with messages, how
many signs have been shaped to our need for touch                         fingertip to
fingertip with a reaching hand? O, to be                   grabbed around the wrist,
pulled up and out.            Even if there is no way                to process it, there is
always               oscillation, vibration, everywhere a shaking. Deep inside the
body, inside  the module there is  a pulse/impulse. There is
anticipation—everything on                      the verge and                         waiting for
someone or something                to shape it.  You can travel in silence, planet
to moon and back, or like forgotten cosmonauts                  ride    the    comet
screaming all the way into the vacuum. We believe to be heard is to be
seen is to                                  connect—charged particles interacting as a wave,
then scattering again. And we know how dangerous             that can be—this
urge to see  an absence and reach                                into it—to begin to hear in
nothing                  everything,                mistake each echo in the emptiness for
a sign                            calling us out into oceans, caves, alleyways                we’ve
convinced ourselves are tugging                at our coat-sleeve. And the music?
Scientists                                       would claim it was only interference: two radio
signals inhabiting the same sonic space.                  Symphonies           have
been created                      out of less.

Bio

Joel Peckham has published seven books of poetry and nonfiction, most recently Bone Music and Body Memory. Individual poems and essays have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, The Sugar House Review, Cave Wall, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Sun, and many others. With Robert Vivian, he is also co-editor of  Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in American Poetry and Prose, recently released by New Rivers Press.

Rise
Tiffany Lindfield
Tiffany Lindfield

Bio

Tiffany Lindfield is a social worker by day, trade, and heart advocating for climate justice, gender equality, and animal welfare. By night, she is a prolific reader of anything decent and a writer.

Work
Rise
Issue 25: Fever Dreams

           She sat in a hot yoga class, and it was hot. The yoga instructor was a man, in his 20’s, with thick brown hair. While she wore baggy pants and shirts, he summoned his flock of yogis in spandex yellow shorts. They flowed in grace to those shorts—to his whim, a dance of sweat, estrogen, and testosterone. 

           She marveled, envied the flexible hamstrings that bent round glutes, bodies separate but intertwined, muscular, toned, and beautiful. She felt like a factory farmed sheep on the plains of the Serengeti. Like the acrobatic prowess, and grace of the lioness, the young bodies about her elongated into power poses, while she could barely reach—or even see her toes. 

           The boy at the front, acting like he had lived long enough to be a guru, boomed in a confident voice, ‘The hummingbird’s heartbeat is 1,000 beats per minute when the sun rises, and drops to 40 beats when the sun sets! Your sun has risen! RISE into Warrior!’

           She placed her palm on her chest. She couldn’t even feel her heartbeat. 

           Class ended. She stared at the bodies laughing, languishing in the parking lot, drinking filtered water from colored steel cups with messages on them:

‘Save the Dolphins’

‘Unvaccinated Lives Matter’

‘Love You.’

           She lit a cigarette and drove off. This was her last cigarette. It was always her last one. 

           That night she sat in the cafe by her small house, forcing herself to eat, though not enjoy, a quinoa bowl. She had snapped an image of the meal before eating, and texted it to her friend with the caption: 

           ‘Day 4 of my wellness do-over!’ 

           Her friend replied: ‘Girl Go!’ 

           She checked Facebook, stalking a woman she had recently met at a book club. The woman smiled from picture after picture, accomplishment after accomplishment, yogi pose after yogi pose, and a man beamed unconditional love by her side. This made her feel lonely, and she left the cafe, walking back home with her forehead weighing over her eyes. 

           She laid in bed, reading. The book was enveloping but she had barely waded in, and her eyes closed. The book laid on her chest, and her chest rose and fell with shallow, sleeping breaths. 

           Her heart was beating.

           She had a large fish tank dedicated to a betta fish, and the bubbles rising and falling from the filter kept her sleeping. There had been two bettas, but a fight ensued, and so only one, named Jelly, made the tank’s night rounds. 

           A cat laid at the end of her bed. His name was Sammy, and he was older than dirt. He could barely see, and really had no more reason to sleep, no point in rebuilding decrepit bones, and so he wearily bobbed his head around the bedroom, until his neck hurt, and then he stretched out, as if to sleep but he just stared at the tank, his eyes fixating on the purple dot moving inside, not knowing if it were a bird, or a flower bulb, or another odd hallucination. 

           When she awoke the next day, she was shivering, shivering so hard, she could barely open her eyes. Her eyes! Something about them felt off, so she went to touch them with her hand, but realized she did not have hands. A feathered wing graced her beady eye. She went to speak, but only a tiny chirp came out. 

           She moved the feather over her long beak. She looked around, realizing that she had tiny feet, and her claws were gripped around the young branch of a large tree. The sun was rising, and something made her want to wiggle, and as she did, wiggling this way, and that, her wings began to flap up and soon her weightless body was off the branch and soaring in the air. She wanted to laugh, thinking what a dream…. but she could only chirp. The air was warm, and soft around her like a baby blanket. 

           Her eyes were enchanted by a sea of flowers below her. Two colors seemed to almost burn her eyes in delight, and she could see the wavelengths of these colors in ways she had never before. Thousands of shimmering yellows and oranges. Though she could not recall, something told her which flowers were abundant, and she immediately dove into a bloom, slurping the nectar, the sweetness of a thousand brownies sloshing in her tiny belly. 

           She then caught three gnats mid-air, enjoying her new athletic body, and then settled on a branch. This all felt normal, yet not. It was as if she had been a hummingbird all along. Maybe that’s why the human body felt so clumsy, she wondered, knowing instinctively to preen her feathers while resting in the tree. 

           And this was her day. She suckled from the flower patches below, their petals transcendent in color, rested on the limbs of trees, bushes, and vines. She stretched her wings, and feet, chased off intruders, and ate flying bugs that were small enough to eat. She was so busy that she didn’t have time to remember her old life. 

           She had to eat every fifteen minutes making every second more precarious than the one before. Death was always only moments away. She had to use her beak to stab other birds that tried to take her patch, and she—being a male hummingbird—also had to make time to put on dancing shows for females that ended in rejections half the time. Either way, something about swiveling her hips, tossing colors in the face of another felt freeing. 

           At night, she had to settle her miniature body in a safe place and force herself into a stupor. If someone were to see her in the middle of the night, her colors glistening under the light of the moon, and eat her as a morsel, she would be too comatose to know. It was only when the sun began to rise, and her eyes blinked, and her nerves tingled with new blood rushing, that she knew she had lived through the night. Lived to fight another day in the arena of predator and prey, of bodies begging for grace.

           If the other bird was bigger, she would lose territory, and this happened. Finding a new patch of flowers was no easy feat, even with magnificent eyesight. And to eat again meant that she would have to injure or chase off another bird. Food was scarce, and every patch was claimed, and reclaimed hourly as battles recycled, shuffling and reshuffling fate. 

           She would finally reach nectar, usually at the last second, near death, heaving. The rush was exhilarating but traumatic. She began to look forward to the chilly nights when the stars burst in the sky like dynamite. No more searching, wandering, killing, or maiming others for sucrose. She could turn her body off and sleep. 

           No, it wasn’t all bad. Dancing and gliding in the air with a body as lightweight as feathers was rapturous. Sliding this way, and that, watching the sun change her colors, and the warmth of the breeze petting her body like a glove was heavenly. The taste of the flowers, the petals on her face, the buzzing of other bodies, it was all something to take pleasure in, but it all came with a price. Every fifteen minutes, she had to eat, every second was a second chasing death. 

           Her life went on like this for many months, and then a chilly wind came, and she knew, carried to her brain by a firing in her bones, that she needed to move, and so her—their—great migration began. She had no words to describe where she was going or why, only that she needed to go towards the light. 

           She knew she needed to gorge before the big flight. This meant eating all day, taking brief pauses to sit, and preen. She barely preened, and the extra weight grew hard on her tiny frame, but she knew that if she did not pad her body in fat, she wouldn’t make it across the water.

 

Water? 

 

           And it happened. She launched, with others, over the vastness of the ocean. No stopping, no restful stupors. She flew until the bones in her wings felt like they were set aflame, until her eyes burned with wind, and though she tried to keep up, she couldn’t. She just couldn’t, and like she had seen with others before her, she let go. Completely, letting her small body fall from the air, and into the ocean. She landed like a leaf on the water, letting the waves carry her a brief while. She closed her eyes. 

           This was it, she thought and then the sun was rising. It was beautiful on the horizon; the glow of radiation cracking diamonds on the water renewed her spirit. She leaped from the water, and back into the air. She could no longer see the other birds. She hovered low, admiring dolphin pods playing in the distance. 

           She would fly like this for several more hours, until the pain subsided, and her entire body went numb, and finally, finally she reached the shore. Patches of flowers in bloom accosted her vision, piercing her brain. The idea of satiation lured yet made her belly flip with acid. She landed, in indescribable relief on the lip of a Holly Hop. Its blooms were five different reds, all glittering for her tongue down their throats. She bent her neck and slurped the nectar until she couldn’t drink anymore. The acid in her stomach did flip, but she was alive, and would live at least another fifteen minutes.

           Sleeping that first night back on land was like finding an oasis of water after miles of walking in the Sahara. She stretched her tiny feet out and snuggled her beak inside a feathered hand, turning the light inside her body off. She felt mercy as her heart crawled from 656 beats a minute to 34. She closed her eyes, very content with the sunset, the coma nearing. 

           When she awoke, she awoke in her old bed, back in her human body, with legs too big, and lacking the energy to move them, not because she had forced herself into a stupor but because she could sit all day, if she wanted, and still survive. 

           Why move?

 

           She looked at the cat, who bobbed his head. She looked at Jelly swimming along. She stretched, this time arms and hands. She no longer had wings. 

           She went to yoga class. It was only forty-five minutes, and everyone in the class was young, and of course, they could still bend…but did they really rise? She had crossed the ocean with feathers the weight of rose petals and a heart the size of a mosquito’s foot. 

           She went outside, but there were no flowers. Only concrete, and the sun sat dully in a gray sky. She ate at the cafe that served vegan food, and it tasted too salty. She went home and heated water on the stove. She poured sugar in the water, and then drank it. She later sat outside to the moon setting and tried to shiver her heart rate to flatline, but it beat heartily. 

           She put her hand to her heart, and felt it roar.

           She got in her car and drove to the department store. It was dark, and the wildflowers she would have eaten from as a hummingbird were closed for the night, but here, the shelves were packed with whatever she—as a human—could dream to eat. She went to the garden section of the store and stared at the petals of Lantanas and Petunias. She peered inside them. They had not been made love to. Their petals were laid out, in silk and show, for no one looking. They sat in plastic pots under a fake sun. This made her eyes tear up.

           “Can I help you?” someone asked her, and she turned around. 

           “Help?” she asked. 

           “Yes, Ma’am, do you need help?”

           She squinted at the man. “No.”

           She roamed the aisles. Water hoses, planters, plastic pools, bug killer, bird feeders, and there—hummingbird feeders! She stacked a cart with every feeder on the shelf and bags of sugar. She went home and boiled sugar solution to fill the feeders. 

           In the morning, she placed several in her own yard, front and back, her neighbor’s yard, who was too old to notice or care, and then she went to parks, libraries, and even to the local bank, convincing the manager to let her set feeders there, too. 

           In the mornings, she would watch the birds feed, and after work, she would change feeders, driving and hanging fresh containers of nectar. 

           She planted flowers in her own yard and everywhere she could. She cut her hours at work to plant and tend more flowers, and to tend the feeders. She worked, and worked, forgetting to cover her body in long shirts. No, it was hot, and she peeled the layers off, letting them catch in the wind.

           She worked and worked and forgot to count calories or measure vegetables in cups. No, she was hungry and just ate what her fist pulled from the ground. It was a relief to not have to eat multiple times a day. 

           She did this until—years later—her heart stopped. The hummingbirds saw her fall in the middle of the yard, the sanctuary she had built for them, and they carried her back over the vastness of the ocean and back to the tropical island for respite, and higher and higher they carried her, planting her in the heavens, turning her into a constellation, a constellation shaped like the bell of a flower. 

 

           She had served them, and they would remember her. 


Bio

Tiffany Lindfield is a social worker by day, trade, and heart advocating for climate justice, gender equality, and animal welfare. By night, she is a prolific reader of anything decent and a writer.

Darling, Don’t Change
Epiphany Ferrell
Epiphany Ferrell

Bio

Epiphany Ferrell lives in a berm home named Underhill across from a corner of the Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois. Her stories appear in Best Microfiction 2020 and 2021, Best Small Fictions 2021, New Flash Fiction Review, Ghost Parachute, Pulp Literature, and other places. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee, and won the 2020 Prime Number Magazine Flash Fiction Prize. Find her at epiphanyferrell.com.

           It was a good gig. Reading to a comatose pilot, a young man with milk skin and dark chocolate hair. Beau. He’d slammed a Cessna Skycatcher into the ground. He was a skin-sack of broken bones. He’d been in a coma six weeks. But he was breathing on his own. His mother was sure he’d come back. He just needs a voice, a real voice, to guide him, she said. So she paid Bianca to read to him all night. She herself took the day shift.  She’d known this would happen, she’d tell the nurses. She’d tried her best to keep him away from airports. His godfather was the one who taught him to fly.

           At first, Bianca didn’t look at him. It was creepy, reading to a living corpse, the reading lamp and monitors throwing shadows across his eyelids, his stiff arms. 

           Bianca sat near the head of the bed. A nurse shaved Beau’s face every morning. By the time Bianca sat near him at night, rough stubble accented his strong chin. That’s a sign of health, the night nurse told her. He may come out of this. 

           By week 10, Bianca sometimes held the book open in her lap and, instead of reading, told Beau about her day. She studied his face, admiring its structure, the way, even in repose, he seemed capable of action. He was the perfect boyfriend. Handsome. A provider of fresh flowers. A good listener. 

           He had the longest eyelashes. His lips were dry, cracking. She found the little pot of lip balm his mother left behind, and she smoothed some on his lips with a gentle finger, feeling his life in the warmth. She wondered if he felt her, if he knew her touch from his mother’s, if her murmuring voice comforted him, if she were a beacon for him as he drifted in dream. She rested her hand on top of his, lacing her fingers through his, pictured walking with him hand-in-hand down a cobbled street with cafés and antique shops. He would always appreciate each moment, notice every nuance of their time together, she knew, after losing weeks of life.

           In week 13, she told him she loved him. She said it casually, on her way out the door. In week 14, she whispered it in his ear. She declared her love with long poems written in paroxysms of ecstasy. She touched his face, rubbing the back of her hand against its rough grain, smoothed his lips, ran a light fingertip over his eyebrow. 

           Week 18, he opened his eyes, the nurse told her. Or anyway, his mother said he had. As soon as he was out of the coma, she’d have him convalesce at home. In Georgia. His fiancée was back from Europe, the nurse said. She had a phobia about hospitals. But when Beau was home, in Georgia, the fiancée would be there. How dare she, Bianca said. Right, the nurse said, Where has she been all this time? The Riviera? 

           There was a new photo among the flowers. An unsmiling beauty in tennis whites. Bianca put the picture facedown while she read to Beau. 

           You can find anything online. You can find out anything you need to know. 

           In week 21, Beau twitched a finger. Only his mother had seen it, the night nurse said, but it was enough. She was making plans to take her still-as-death son home. 

           In week 22, Bianca kissed Beau’s stiff hand, his dry lips. Beau’s eyes flew open, as blue as a newborn kitten’s. “I love you.” Bianca’s face was close to his, filling his vision. She’d found the tiniest needle. The hole in the IV tube would go undetected. Beau moved his mouth. “My perfect Beau,” Bianca said, stroking his hair. “Go back to sleep.” Beau’s eyes rolled wildly under lids that slid slowly to slits. Then, he was still.


Bio

Epiphany Ferrell lives in a berm home named Underhill across from a corner of the Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois. Her stories appear in Best Microfiction 2020 and 2021, Best Small Fictions 2021, New Flash Fiction Review, Ghost Parachute, Pulp Literature, and other places. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee, and won the 2020 Prime Number Magazine Flash Fiction Prize. Find her at epiphanyferrell.com.

Flesh of My Flesh
Russell Nichols
Russell Nichols

Bio

Russell Nichols is a speculative fiction writer and endangered journalist. Raised in Richmond, California, he got rid of all his stuff in 2011 to live out of a backpack with his wife, vagabonding around the world ever since. 

Work
Flesh of My Flesh
Issue 25: Fever Dreams
And the naked couple held hands while staring into the one-way mirror 
 answering in unison We do and a white light swashed the circular 
 room and a buzzing sound grew louder louder still around them 
the glowing walls pulsating and they didn't feel any pain
and wouldn't feel any pain but the thought that they might 
feel the slightest sliver of pain from this procedure
made them press wet palms together tighter as 
hairs on their bare bodies raised synapses went ablaze 
and sinews snapped skin cells mingled and molecules
all over kept vibrating faster faster still and
neither of them could feel their fingers anymore 
as they melted into singularity first hands
then arms then shoulders then hips then ribs
every part of them fusing till there was nothing
left to fuse at which point the white light
switched off and the buzzing faded down
so the voice behind the mirror could be
heard declaring By the power vested
in me I pronounce this union official
and the state thanks you for your
commitment to helping solve
the problem of over-
population and with
that the naked couple
exited the wedding
chamber as 
1

Bio

Russell Nichols is a speculative fiction writer and endangered journalist. Raised in Richmond, California, he got rid of all his stuff in 2011 to live out of a backpack with his wife, vagabonding around the world ever since. 

Within
Marshall J. Moore
Marshall J. Moore

Bio

Marshall J. Moore is a writer and martial artist. Born and raised on the tiny Pacific island of Kwajalein, he has once a thousand dollars’ worth of teapots to Jackie Chan and on one occasion was tracked down by a bounty hunter for owing $300 in late fees to the Los Angeles Public Library.

Work
Within
Issue 25: Fever Dreams

          There is something inside of me, and it is trying to get out.

          Understand I am not speaking metaphorically. I am not talking about some soulful longing for self-expression, or the yearning for romantic understanding, or spiritual contentment. I mean exactly what I said: there is something inside of me, living under my skin and beneath my eyelids. I can feel it, at all times, like an itch that cannot be scratched.


          It has taken my hand, you see.


          Not just the hand, but my entire arm, from fingertip to elbow. I could feel it dwelling just below the skin: something tingling and alive, like a swarm of black bees had colonized my flesh. The sensation had been building for weeks; unpleasant but not painful.

          I could feel it watching me from behind my own eyes. I do not believe it can think as we do, but I know it observes the world through my five senses. Perhaps I am like a periscope, through which the nameless thing views the alien surface from its hiding place inside my body. If that were the only purpose I had for it, perhaps I could make my peace with the thing and find some way to live in uneasy symbiosis.

          It watched with my eyes as I took a knife from the kitchen and laid it on the table beside my arm. It retreated fractionally from my gums as I poured a fifth of vodka down the throat I share with it, numbing my pain and steeling my nerves.

          It was almost painless, at first. The knife was sharp and my grip steady.  The first incision was as neat and clean as if I were dissecting a frog.

          There. A few minutes of pain, and it was done. I had cut a rough rectangle out of my left forearm from wrist to elbow. There was blood, of course, all over my arms and hands, but not as much as there should have been. 

          I drained the last of the vodka and tried to pry loose the rectangle of skin I had carved out of my arm. That was the difficult part. Even numbed as I was, the pain was nearly unbearable, and I cried out. Tears leaked from eyes that were not solely mine.

          I carved away at my arm, cutting the rectangle of flesh into little triangles, then slowly lifting each piece out with the knife tip. Each piece resisted me, and when at last I had flung the last bloody shred of my flesh aside I saw why.

          Beneath my skin, not deep, lay something…I have no name for it. Not for what it was, or how it felt. It was something not wholly unlike a beetle’s carapace: chitinous and shiny, oily black where there should have been only pink and red muscle and sinew.

          I looked closer and saw thousands of tiny waving cilia, little hairlike protrusions that shifted with the strange rhythmic undulations of an anemone. As I leaned in they reached out for me, and I saw the tattered bits of meat still clinging to them. These, then, were the reason I had had such difficulty in tearing off the flesh that concealed them.

          Perhaps if I could get the blade’s tip beneath the carapace I could try to pry the chitinous thing off. I dug around until I felt the carapace’s edge. But try as I might, no matter the force I exerted or the blood that leaked from my lacerated arm, the carapace would not budge. The harder I pried the more stubbornly it clung to the muscle beneath. The cilia, it seemed were below as they were above.

          The tip of the knife bit off, burying itself in my arm. In desperation I seized a butcher’s knife, a heavy cleaver. If I could not carve the thing from my arm, I could at least remove the offending limb.

          I raised the cleaver high.

          Sharp and sudden pain seized my chest, a hand squeezing mercilessly on my heart. The cleaver clattered to the floor as I collapsed against the table, my vision blurring and my breath growing short as the thing inside my chest steadily crushed my heart, like a python. I could imagine it there, nestled in my ribcage, its chitinous black tendrils wrapped proprietarily around my beating heart.

          Slowly my breath returned and the iron grip subsided. Only after I had regained my strength did I attempt, for the last time, to touch the knife once more.

          The thing stopped my heart. 


          My blood pooled and coagulated in my veins, my lungs ceased to draw breath. Strange visions appeared in my sight and I could not hear.

          I was dying.

          It kept its death grip long enough to serve as punishment and reminder. Then, one beat at a time, the thing allowed my heart to work again.

          I have not defied it since.


          I do not know where the thing that lives inside my body dwells. I do not know whether it is nomadic, roaming through my veins and wandering across my muscles, or if it has a settled abode. I know it has wrapped itself around my heart, inextricable and unmoving, and that it has spread.

          Sometimes I wish I had been able to complete the operation I began with my arm. I imagine myself lying dead atop a table, limbs spread wide, my hands and feet pinned neatly through with metal spikes like a parodic amalgam of Christ and the Vitruvian Man. 

          The examiners would slice me open, see the spread of the growth beneath my skin. Instead of muscle and sinew smooth black chitin and waving cilia line my limbs, adhering to the skeleton beneath. I can see it clearly in my mind’s eye, wrapped against and fused to the bones of my ribs and spine in an embrace tighter than any lover’s. What I will look like –what I will be– when it has taken my skull and the soft, delicate gray matter beneath, I shudder to think.

          For it is no longer merely within me. The changes the thing has wrought upon me, its unwilling host, are becoming harder to hide. 

          This morning I pulled one of my teeth from my own head. It came out easily, as though it had been rotten.

          Beneath it was a black, chitinous fang.


Bio

Marshall J. Moore is a writer and martial artist. Born and raised on the tiny Pacific island of Kwajalein, he has once a thousand dollars’ worth of teapots to Jackie Chan and on one occasion was tracked down by a bounty hunter for owing $300 in late fees to the Los Angeles Public Library.

Remain Calm
JD Kloosterman
JD Kloosterman

Bio

JD Kloosterman is a teacher and urban fantasy author from Michigan who recently published The Hospitaller Oath, the second book in The Solomon Code series. JD has also written a number of other short stories, including “Lost in Translation” in Cast of Wonders and “Final Inspection” in Daily Science Fiction online. Find him at the-solomon-code.com.

Work
Remain Calm
Issue 25: Fever Dreams

          If you smell blood in your living area, do not panic. There has been much disinformation regarding “Blood Moss” online, but its treatment is simple. First, locate the source of the smell—most likely a small red discoloration on the ceiling. Some witnesses have compared the distinctive shape to that of a skull. Prepare a disinfectant of 70% bleach and 30% water, and wash the spot with an old rag. Do not wash it more than twice—repeated washings may cause damage to your ceiling/hands and will have no impact on the growth. When complete, dispose of the rag, preferably by burning in a well-ventilated outdoor space.

          If the red stain should begin to spread, do not panic. Reach out to your local health and safety authority so they can take appropriate action. If the stain has formed any clear symbols or specific rune-like inscriptions, be sure to mention this in your report. Do NOT take pictures of the runes and post them online. Do not draw sketches of the runes. Do not look at the runes for extended periods of time. Remain in your home and avoid contact with others.

          If blood should start leaking from your ceiling, do NOT panic. There is a chance that this is merely a hallucinatory reaction. If possible, verify with a second party that the blood is real. If it is not, take two aspirin and lie down. If it is, notify the relevant safety authority, then prepare containers and place them under the spots where blood is dripping down. Wear gloves and a mask, if any are available. Do not touch the blood. Do not drink the blood. Do not dispose of the blood through the public drain system. Do not use the blood to anoint yourself as part of any strange rituals that you see in your dreams. Spend as little time in the room as you can, but do not leave your home.

          If you begin to see bloody faces on the walls, ceiling, or floor of your room, DO NOT PANIC. While disconcerting, these faces cannot hurt you. They may take the form of dead parents, children or former rivals who perished under mysterious circumstances, but there is no conclusive evidence that they share any of the knowledge or enmities of the beings they imitate. If the faces speak to you, do not respond. Instead, ignore them, perhaps by putting on music or doing light exercise. Do NOT leave the house. Do NOT ask other parties if they can also see the faces. Do NOT, under any circumstances, relay any information to the faces regarding your fears, doubts, or national security responsibilities.

          If you become oppressed by splitting headaches, accompanied by momentary visions of a devastated apocalyptic hellscape, STOP PANICKING. These headaches/hallucinations are signs of mental distress and will only worsen with increased stress levels. Lie down, place a cool handkerchief on your forehead, and wear a blindfold. This will not stop the visions, but it will make you less likely to trip and injure yourself while you are subjected to them. If there are others in the house, consider also the use of a gag, which will not stop the voices, but will keep your own screams from disturbing your community.  

          If, in your visions, you recognize the dead bodies of loved ones, DO. NOT. PANIC. It is merely a hallucination. If you recognize any landmarks or public figures, call your local health and safety officer and relay information regarding the place, arrangement, and nature of what you saw. Recall as many specific details as you can, especially any clues as to the date and causes of what you saw. Keep your message focused on such details and not on overpowering sensations of horror or on vague impressions of vast shadowy figures looming in the smoky red haze.  

          If a voice in these visions has told you to deliver a “message” of some sort, DO NOT DELIVER IT. Tell NO ONE of this message. You may indicate to the health professional that you were given such a message; however, if so, wait until the end of the call, as they are obligated to hang up if such a message is mentioned. We already know the message.

          If you begin to see a great grinning visage like a blackened skull with skin sloughing off it with too many eyes and too many teeth, burning with a flame of an undefinable color, following you around in both your visions and in your home life, smiling, always smiling, do not panic.  

          At that point, it won’t help you anyway.


Bio

JD Kloosterman is a teacher and urban fantasy author from Michigan who recently published The Hospitaller Oath, the second book in The Solomon Code series. JD has also written a number of other short stories, including “Lost in Translation” in Cast of Wonders and “Final Inspection” in Daily Science Fiction online. Find him at the-solomon-code.com.

Flashpoint
Merethe Walther
Merethe Walther

Bio

Merethe Walther is a professional editor, author, and short story writer whose work spans genres and has won awards with Readers’ Favorite and Writers of the Future. When not writing—or explaining how to pronounce her name correctly—you can find her playing video games and board games, reading, and spending time with her husband and cat in Atlanta. Find her at https://merethewalther.com/.

          The truck vibrated beneath Donovan’s feet, its gentle rumble reminiscent of the distant bass of loud music. The soft bump and sway along the magnetic rails was gentle—near enough to lull him to sleep—so he wiggled upright between the men on either side, clutching the assault rifle tighter to his chest. Like him, each soldier wore a white camo uniform; held black guns in sweaty grasps, apprehension ridged in the lines around their eyes.

         Not Donovan, though. Not him.

         He’d been waiting for this day the entirety of his life. He had no memory of the viral contamination that took his parents as a boy; nor of the concussive explosions and the blaze that started after, when the rebels burned everything else. His very earliest memory was of the soldier appearing like a ghost out of the mist, a stained white uniform trailing smoke as he dropped to his knees. Donovan was barely alive, backed to the edge of the cliff by the charred scent of bodies and burning trees. Once the soldier stopped weeping, he’d picked Donovan up, covered him with a fire-retardant blanket, and brought him out. 

         The doctors said he’d been the sole survivor. It was a miracle he’d made it at all.

         He’d never seen his rescuer again, but the very idea of soldier had taken root in Donovan’s consciousness and refused to leave. That single moment—the undeniable urge it sparked within him—had guided the man he’d become, sure as a blacksmith beating steel from the forge. 

         And now, here he was, ready to play his part: fighting rebels in the Containment Zone with his fellow soldiers—men who would kill and die beside him.

         The rebels wouldn’t stand a chance.

         Lights dotted the truck’s interior, flickering on and off as the slow sequence of electricity coursed by with each soft bounce of the mag-lev rails underneath. Donovan tightened the grip on his gun. 

         This is it. This is what I’ve been waiting for. 

         “Heads up assholes,” called one of the shift captains from the cabin upfront. “Boots down in five.”

         “Turn ‘em and burn ‘em,” said the man beside him.

         “Rebel shits,” agreed another.

         No one could pinpoint the time or how a small group of saboteurs had grown to become a military force rivaling the government’s own. There’d been talk of rogue scientists playing with time-warping tech, but that was all smoke and mirrors as far as Donovan was concerned.

         “Third attack this week,” whispered the man next to him.

         “Fuckin’ murderers,” Donovan confirmed. “They ought to know better by now.”

         But the rebels never learned; and now it was his chance. His moment. After all, what were a few malcontents? Against the soldiers trained inside the city, they’d never survive. They had to know that.

         The others were nervous, but not Donovan. 

         The truck whined to a halt and the acrid scent of chemical fires seeped through the cabin. Donovan knew the lab-concocted flames would have destroyed the town already, despite its citizens’ best efforts. Regular water was practically useless against the hungry tongues of science-grown fires. Gallons and gallons of extinguishing fluid—drying chemicals, pressurized water, and CO2—were required to put it out. 

         Once the conflagration started, the townsfolk didn’t stand a chance. 

         Outside the truck, men shouted. Someone knocked hard on the door twice: the signal to get out. Donovan stood, but for a moment, time slowed; his heart rhythm drummed in time with the knocks, echoing out into infinity. He blinked too-heavy eyes, his world off-kilter as though he’d lost the ability to regulate his equilibrium. Something was wrong. Something was… different.

         The thump of electric bullets rocked the side of the vehicle and slammed Donovan back to the present with a quick shake of his head. The first lieutenant smiled; a grim look nearly extinguished by the glint of fear in his eyes.

         “Looks like it’s time,” he said. He raised the latch and shoved the door open, a bravado-fueled scream pouring from his throat.

         Black smoke and soot poured in; the fire containment crews were already hard at work. Soldiers shot energy rounds at rebels wearing chemical flamethrowers. One saboteur tried to dodge a blast, but the bullet hit the tank of his flamethrower instead. He expanded like a super nova, body parts splintering off into the air like a doll on a firecracker. The area around him exploded into an inferno of hellfire, and one of the rebels beside him went up in flames. That one’s screams turned to choking gurgles as fire ate its way into his helmet. And when he slumped to his knees, skull ablaze like a fiery demon, Donovan lowered his goggles, took aim at another rebel, and fired, dizziness forgotten. 

         This is what I was born for, he thought. This is what I was meant to do.


         The last of the chemical flames burned out, and all that remained was thick smoke and the stench of burning flesh. Donovan didn’t know how many men he’d killed; he didn’t know how many civilians they’d saved, if any. But it was over. Now all there was left to do was count the dead that weren’t ash.

         He felt… disappointed. Perhaps he’d put too much expectation into his first fighting experience? He tried to shake the odd sensation as he walked along the blackened remains, but the place felt haunted to him—all forgotten memories and unfinished business. Like it had been interrupted in the middle of a sentence and was never allowed to finish the thought.

         It might have been beautiful, once. But now the entire town was a smoking hole, marred by death and crowded by shadows and ghosts. The lieutenant instructed them to search through the rubble for survivors, but Donovan knew it was only to collect the dead. They wouldn’t save anyone that hadn’t already been found. 

         Dutifully, exhausted soldiers trudged through the burned remains of what had once been homes, the still-hot, blackened wall supports like skeletal fingers begging the heavens for relief. Donovan looked up and lifted his goggles, wiping away the sweat dripping inside and stinging his eyes. The worst of the smoke had been carried off by the wind into the still-smoldering woods south of the houses.

         He swept a nearby structure at a glance and turned to leave, but the world tilted with him. Donovan lost his footing and stumbled as the same sense of disjointed dizziness he’d experienced in the truck slapped him like a physical force. The side of his boot caught a singed teddy bear, bizarrely undestroyed, only one paw and half of its leg scorched. It skittered through the ash and settled in a mound of simmering embers. Beneath the remaining pile of its charred stuffing lay a photograph, curled at the edges from heat, but otherwise undamaged. Donovan knelt, tilting his head to keep his balance, the pounding of his pulse in his throat so fierce it was like a second heartbeat. 

         “Would ya look at that,” he said to no one in particular, lifting the photo from the soot. A family of three—a young boy with his parents—stared back at Donovan, smiling through the soot and grime without a care in the world. 

         A twinge of recognition fluttered into his mind as he glanced at the photo—some strange phantom of memory refusing to lay dormant. He couldn’t put a finger on it, but something about this niggled into his consciousness; a sense of vertigo made him stagger like a drunk once more, knee landing hard in the hot ash underfoot. He swore under his breath, shoved back to his feet, and checked the medpanel on his wrist. Elevated pulse, but otherwise no signs of illness or injury. Donovan shoved the worry aside, convincing himself it was too much smoke inhalation, even as his hand curled protectively around the photo. The world swayed; his body ached. It was just like that day, the fire—Donovan sucked in a shuddering breath. The heat was intense, but the fires were out. 

         It shouldn’t still be this hot, so why…?

         Confusion gave way to irritation, and then to anger. An unknown need grew within Donovan until it threatened to burst. He grit his teeth to keep from shouting, What is this?! at the remnants of the happy family in the photograph. Why should they matter? They were strangers to him— 

         Weren’t they?

         A jolt like electric shock heaved him from his anxious stupor.

         “No,” Donovan whispered. 

         He turned and ran to the woods. Why? and How? replacing the What? driving him to the edge. He passed his lieutenant; didn’t stop. The woods smoked, just like he knew they would. Just like he’d somehow anticipated it would look coming from the other direction. Was it memory, or pure speculation? He didn’t know. Men called after him; he didn’t respond. 

         “This is impossible,” he choked out, throat parched from smoke.

         And without warning, Donovan was afraid. 

         He broke into a run, searing hot tree roots grabbing at every step. His feet sank deep into the ash, leaving a trail of prints through desiccated brush. What if I’m too late? He didn’t want to contemplate the idea. The thought propelled him forward with renewed vigor. He could just barely make out what appeared to be a clearing within fifty or so feet. He ran for it headlong, heat and smoke boring into his eyes and lungs. Ten feet, now five. He dove for the light and broke through the trees.   

         It was like looking at a mirror from the other side. He was simultaneously there and not there, all at once. Was he the real person? Or just the reflection? Not knowing sent a chill through him, and he shuddered as his sense of self came back into focus, two halves rejoining as one whole. 

         The sunlight made his vision waver, drawing tears out of soot-stung eyes as he sank to his knees. The cliff’s edge was twenty feet from him; the boy wouldn’t have lasted much longer. The fire had singed him, left him marred in areas. He hunched one shoulder down, favoring the torched limb. Donovan could still remember the burns on his own shoulder when the soldier found him; the spot ached and throbbed just as he recalled, as though the wound was only minutes old instead of years. 

         The boy was all limbs like a newborn foal; spindly, with huge, haunted eyes like saucers of milk. Donovan didn’t know when he started crying, but tears dripped through the soot on his cheeks, pattering dirty water down to his boots. The boy watched, silently making the memory Donovan knew would be his first.  

         He stood and picked the child up, draping a fire-retardant blanket around his shoulders, careful to mind the worst of the burns.

         This was what he’d been born to do; he’d been so sure of it before they’d arrived.

         He hefted the boy and started back into the forest, heading into an uncertain future through the haze of smoke and burning trees. Donovan knew what lay on the other side for the child, but the sudden vulnerability of his own future shook him to the core.

         This is what I was meant to do, he reminded himself, casting a look at the boy. 

         …But for the first time, he began to wonder why.


Bio

Merethe Walther is a professional editor, author, and short story writer whose work spans genres and has won awards with Readers’ Favorite and Writers of the Future. When not writing—or explaining how to pronounce her name correctly—you can find her playing video games and board games, reading, and spending time with her husband and cat in Atlanta. Find her at https://merethewalther.com/.

Persephone, Episode Two
Dyan McBride & Daniel Smith-Rowsey
Dyan McBride & Daniel Smith-Rowsey

Bio

Dyan McBride is a Bay Area based performer, director and theatre instructor.  She is a member of SAG/AFTRA, AEA and is represented by Boom Models and Talent. MFA-UC Davis.

Daniel Smith-Rowsey is a Bay Area-based independent, award-winning filmmaker, PhD, instructor at Napa Valley College, and writer of books published by Bloomsbury and Palgrave MacMillan.

Work
Persephone, Episode Two
Issue 25: Fever Dreams

EPISODE TWO 

Fade in from white. 

Crazy short burst of music a la Scooby Doo or Wayne’s World. 

TITLE CARD: SUNDAY, JUNE 14, 1992
THE PROMINENT CLOCK with hands shows that it is 11:50. A NEW PERSON APPEARS OUT OF NOWHERE. 

This is PERSEPHONE, 52, whom the amulet has brought to Seph’s apartment. She is dressed in a rock and roll t-shirt, a blazer, tight black jeans/leggings, and boots. She looks a little like Chrissie Hynde. She is an upscale version of Seph. 

SEPH

Whoa, what is this?  What’s going on?                    

PERSEPHONE

Whoa, what is this?  What’s going on?

SEPH

Uhhh, I don’t quite understand. Are you
one of my friend’s moms?

PERSEPHONE

This is a really vivid dream. This place looks…
EXACTLY like my 90s apartment! Okay,
WAKE UP!

SEPH

Did you have one of the brownies? A lot
of people were tripping off of those.

PERSEPHONE

God, this is perfect. Look at all my old stuff.
These posters, my jewelry box, my bong.

She goes to the record collection and thumbs through it. 

SEPH

Uh, that is definitely my bong. Its name
is Simon.

Persephone registers this, but is distracted by vinyl. She goes to the record collection and thumbs through it.

PERSEPHONE

Wow. My signed copy of Transformer. I
wish I had this, but I lost it in that fire in
2007. This is why dreams rock.

SEPH

(pointing to herself)

Dude, not a dream. Totally real.

PERSEPHONE

(Picking up a bottle of wine and a
cheap party horn, which she blows)

I guess my subconscious decided I needed
a party to celebrate my new
contract! (calling)
Janae!  PJ!  Jake!
Resister dream party!

SEPH

Wait, that’s MY band.

PERSEPHONE

This is a trip. Why would my subconscious have
brought me me as a 20-year-old?

SEPH

Dude, your subconscious didn’t bring me
anywhere!

Seph looks down at her amulet. 

SEPH

Maybe I brought you here?!

PERSEPHONE

You look so much like me, omigod. SELFIE!

SEPH

You know, I really don’t like it when people call
me Sephie.

PERSEPHONE

No, let’s take a selfie. Dream selfie!

Persephone gets out her iPhone and maneuvers Seph into position and takes way too many pix in a row-duck lips, devil horns sign, the works. 

SEPH

I am NOT in your dream! (beat) How do I…
wait a minute…what proves you’re not in
a dream? Falling? No. Oh, wait.

Seph sees her squirt gun and grabs it and shoots Persephone in the face. 

PERSEPHONE

What are you doing?!

SEPH

Wake up, sleepyhead.

PERSEPHONE

Stop shooting my face!

SEPH

Admit this isn’t a dream!

PERSEPHONE

This is.. (beat) Is that vodka?

SEPH

Well, yeah. Stoli.

PERSEPHONE

Well, now my face is soaking, you dork.
(beat) Wait, my face is soaking. If…this
isn’t a dream, then what the shitnanigans
is happening?

SEPH

(almost to herself)

That’s my word.

PERSEPHONE

Ok, wow, then this is one hell of a party.
Janae and PJ really went the extra mile on
the whole I hate being old this is your life
midlife crisis let’s be young again thing.

SEPH

Wait, are you saying Janae and PJ are
having a midlife crisis?

Persephone gets out her iPhone and uses it to take pictures of everything. Seph STARES at the iPhone this time. 

PERSEPHONE

Let’s ask them. (shouting) Janae, PJ, you
got me, come on out now! Omigod, I gotta
film this and put it on Instagram. Hashtag
raidedmyninetiesstorage

Persephone makes a five-second video. Seph watches over her shoulder. Persephone tries to post it to social media. She waves her camera around. 

SEPH

Where you’re from, can you, uh, instantly
go from one place to
another?

PERSEPHONE

Like in an Uber??

SEPH

What’s an Uber?

PERSEPHONE

Why can’t I post this? I don’t have any bars.
Ugh.

SEPH

Is that…do you live in the future?

PERSEPHONE

I try to live in the present. (a cymbal crash)
Badum Bum.

SEPH

I think I’m welcoming you to the past. You
just said you lost something in two-thousand-seven?
Right now it’s nineteen-ninety-two.

PERSEPHONE

Wow, I really respect your commitment
to this bit. I’m impressed they found an
actress that looks so much like me.

SEPH

Dude, look out the window. It’s the early
nineties!

Persephone looks out the window, sees only old cars, and laughs. 

PERSEPHONE

Look at all those Volkswagens!

Seph watches Persephone look out the window, and catches a glimpse of A VERY DISTINCTIVE TATTOO on the back of Persephone’s neck. Seph gasps.

PERSEPHONE

What?

SEPH

What’s your name?

PERSEPHONE

Persephone. Queen of the underworld.
It’s a weird name, people can’t really
pronounce it most of the…

SEPH

(instantly)

Persephone. Also goddess of the garden.

PERSEPHONE

Hey, that’s what I always say!

SEPH

Okay, don’t freak out. I wanna show
you something.

Seph shows her tattoo on the back of her neck, the same exact one. Persephone touches the tattoo. It’s real. She looks at Seph. Seph looks at her. A realization that time travel is real. 

They both exhale, slowly sit on the couch, cross legs, take out a smoke, put cigarette in mouth. All gestures are done simultaneously and are exactly the same. 

PERSEPHONE PUTS A COOL LIGHTER ON THE COFFEE TABLE. 

SEPH

I’m 22 now, so you’re from, what, forty
years from now?

PERSEPHONE

I’m 52!  I’m not in a retirement facility.

SEPH

So were you just in, uh, let’s see, carry the
one, uh, twenty-twenty-two?

PERSEPHONE

Yes, where I was taking a disco nap before
going to see Ryan Adams!

SEPH

Bryan Adams? He sucks. Who have we
become?!

PERSEPHONE

Ryan… nevermind. Oh my god, am I stuck
in nineteen ninety-two?

SEPH

Wait a minute, wait a minute. If you’re me,
why don’t you
remember getting this amulet?
(shows her amulet)

PERSEPHONE

Wait, I’ve seen that amulet once before
in my life. Omigod, is this my graduation
night?

SEPH

Yes, hence our awesome cake.

PERSEPHONE

Was our Aunt Ariadne just here?

SEPH

YES!

PERSEPHONE

Wait, so…did you choose the money?

SEPH

No, duh, I chose this rad amulet!

PERSEPHONE

Oh, my, God.

SEPH

What are you talking about?  Why are
you being so weird?

PERSEPHONE

I took the money. I didn’t take the amulet.

SEPH

(standing up)

So, wait a minute. You’re me, but in a
parallel universe?

PERSEPHONE

(beat; Persephone paces)

After you chose the amulet, what were
Aunt Ariadne’s instructions? What did
she say? What did
you say? Did you wish
anything?

SEPH

No, I just put the amulet on..

PERSEPHONE

Knowing her, this is probably happening
for a reason.

SEPH

Maybe I’m supposed to give you a message
of some kind.

PERSEPHONE

Or maybe I’m supposed to tell you something.

SEPH

What’s our life like in the future?

PERSEPHONE

(beat) We’re fine.

SEPH

We’re fine? That’s it? This amulet sucks!
Are we married?
Kids?  Do we have a job?

PERSEPHONE

Listen, every time-travel movie we’ve
ever seen suggests that if I tell you too
much, it will change the time-space
continuum and alter who we become.

SEPH

Maybe that’s the point?

PERSEPHONE

(mildly offended)

Rude.

SEPH

Sorry, but…are we still in music?

PERSEPHONE

Of course we are.

SEPH

Well, are we rich?

PERSEPHONE

We’re comfortable. In fact, my life is
pretty cool and I’d like to go back to it.

SEPH

(slightly hurt)

But, uh, now that you have this once in
a lifetime chance, don’t you have anything
you want to say to your former self?

PERSEPHONE

(thinks)

Yes. Yes, I do.

SEPH

What?!?

PERSEPHONE

Floss more often.

SEPH

Lame. Anything else?

PERSEPHONE

Uhhh, don’t stress over Y2K. It’s not a
thing.

SEPH

Why Two What?

PERSEPHONE

Oh! Ok, this is for reals. You’re gonna
meet this dude named Gary. You’re gonna
think he’s the one but he’s an a-hole times
a bazillion.

SEPH

See how this works?  I could show you
around my life and with your wisdom the
two of us would make it better than either
of us can do alone.

PERSEPHONE

You mean I could make your life better.

SEPH

I have an idea. Why don’t you tell me, right
now, the best song
we ever wrote?  And then
I’ll
write it early and make us some money?

PERSEPHONE

Is that really gonna matter if I’m stuck
here forever?

SEPH

Persephone, the reason that you took
that five thousand bucks is here, now, we
are broke! Can you just give me a money-
making hint or something?

PERSEPHONE

(beat)

Ok, screw the time-space continuum. Can
you borrow a thousand bucks from anyone?
What about that preppy guy we dated? Isn’t
he still in love with us?

SEPH

Brett? He was just at the party. But a
thousand bucks isn’t gonna change my life.

PERSEPHONE

But could you borrow it?

SEPH

Yeah, I could totally borrow money from
Brett. He’s crazy about us.

PERSEPHONE

He wants to bask in our coolness. Ok. Listen
up. Apple stock.

SEPH

(laugh)

In my timeline, Persephone, Apple is way
obsolete. Steve Wozniak only did one cool
thing. The US Festival.

PERSEPHONE

(holds up her iPhone)

Uh, no. He did more. Just trust me. Buy
Apple stock.

SEPH

Maybe I should sell the amulet instead?

PERSEPHONE

I wouldn’t. It’s remarkably beautiful. And
it’s probably filled with witchy powers like
that taboo thing from the Brady Bunch
Hawaiian episode.

Persephone walks up and fingers the amulet, although it remains on a chain around Seph’s neck. 

SEPH

Hey, careful with that.

PERSEPHONE

God, Frankie says relax. Can I try wearing
the amulet? Maybe I can make it reopen the
time portal.

Seph is obviously reluctant, but finally nods, allowing her older self to touch it.

Persephone touches it, and a wormhole begins to open that they both see. 

A vague whitening glow starts all over the room. Slight Scooby Doo music. 

The room gets whiter, seeming to indicate that Persephone was right. 

SEPH

What did you just do??

PERSEPHONE

I didn’t do anything, I just touched it.

SEPH

I just had a thought. What if we’re gonna
trade places? You live here in the nineties
and I get transported to the twenty-twenties?

PERSEPHONE

Oh, wow. You mean I’m gonna be in my
fifties in the nineties and
you’re gonna be
in your twenties
in the twenty twenties?

SEPH

I was told there’d be no math.

PERSEPHONE

All right, something’s happening. (The
room is getting whiter, perhaps Persephone
is glowing too.) Seph, I think I gotta step
into that light. (She moves toward it.)

SEPH

I wish you could stay. I don’t even know
anything about you! Us! Me.

PERSEPHONE

I can’t even believe this happened. I’ve
missed you.

Persephone starts to disappear. 

SEPH

Persephone wait!  Wait!  Did you ever talk
to Aunt Ariadne?!!  How
does this thing work?

Rack focus shot: Seph looks at Persephone’s lighter sitting on the table. 

Persephone disappears. Fade to white. Credits roll.


Bio

Dyan McBride is a Bay Area based performer, director and theatre instructor.  She is a member of SAG/AFTRA, AEA and is represented by Boom Models and Talent. MFA-UC Davis.

Daniel Smith-Rowsey is a Bay Area-based independent, award-winning filmmaker, PhD, instructor at Napa Valley College, and writer of books published by Bloomsbury and Palgrave MacMillan.

Halo has a sepia embrace
Roseline Mgbodichinma
Roseline Mgbodichinma

Bio

Roseline Mgbodichinma is a Nigerian writer, poet and blogger who is passionate about documenting women’s stories. Her work has been published on Illino Media, Isele, Native Skin, Down River Road, Amplify, jfa Human Rights Magazine, Blue Marble Review, Indianapolis Review, The Hellebore and elsewhere. You can reach her on her blog at www.mgbodichi.com where she writes about art, issues, and lifestyle.

& waking is a battle of fogs 
My eyes closing to light 
And opening to blur 
Moving my legs is similar to paddling in the middle of a wave, 
When I sleep, my body does not go to rest. 
It becomes a trance & negotiates my return, 
in the gut of my belly is a sac 
That purges itself on my arrival to the unknown 
They say spirits tickle fullness from skin 
& There is no sunlight here 
So halo has become my warmth

Its sepia embrace is the reason 
I come back with my heartbeat intact 

On the other side, 
there are dreams, layered voices & bones, 
But I do not belong there, 
every inch 
of my skin is tearing for a return. But 
When I sleep I cannot resist the temptation 
To cross over

Bio

Roseline Mgbodichinma is a Nigerian writer, poet and blogger who is passionate about documenting women’s stories. Her work has been published on Illino Media, Isele, Native Skin, Down River Road, Amplify, jfa Human Rights Magazine, Blue Marble Review, Indianapolis Review, The Hellebore and elsewhere. You can reach her on her blog at www.mgbodichi.com where she writes about art, issues, and lifestyle.

Untitled Sculptures
Soroush Payandeh
Soroush Payandeh

Bio

Soroush Payandeh is an accomplished Los Angeles-based artist and public art restorer. Born in Isfahan, Iran, Soroush has produced internationally recognized artwork for the past 25 years. Payandeh has worked on over 30 public art projects throughout the world, including sculpture, paintings and murals. He was honored by the United Nations in 2015 as the Humanitarian Artist of the year, where he exhibited four portrait paintings of Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa.

 

 

Work
Untitled Sculptures
Issue 25: Fever Dreams

Bio

Soroush Payandeh is an accomplished Los Angeles-based artist and public art restorer. Born in Isfahan, Iran, Soroush has produced internationally recognized artwork for the past 25 years. Payandeh has worked on over 30 public art projects throughout the world, including sculpture, paintings and murals. He was honored by the United Nations in 2015 as the Humanitarian Artist of the year, where he exhibited four portrait paintings of Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa.

 

 

The Taxidermist
Sylke Lesinski
Sylke Lesinski

Bio

Sylke Lesinski is currently pursuing a Master’s in Creative Writing, her fiction focusing especially on the macabre and strange. When not writing, she’s flying in the back of a jet with the U.S. Air Force. Currently, she calls Oklahoma home, where she can be found walking the fields with her rescue dog, Hamlet.

Work
The Taxidermist
Issue 25: Fever Dreams

           Stephen L. Johnson was known as the greatest taxidermist in America. His career began when he was fourteen years old, and for seventy-two years, his reputation grew without sign of slowing. People from all corners of the country – and sometimes even across the globe – would make the effort to travel to the town of Seesaw, Oklahoma, on the outskirts of which Johnson’s Taxidermy stood, proud and tall against the flat horizon.

           Unfortunately, Stephen L. Johnson was dead. He had been mauled by a coyote a customer had brought in. Stephen had always been exceedingly careful when performing taxidermy on wild animals, and how exactly the reanimated coyote got the best of him, no one would ever know. The creature was found limping in the fields behind the shop, with only one glass eye fixed inside its reconstructed skull, and so it was generally assumed that the poor thing had come back to life sooner than intended, catching Stephen off guard. 

           Stephen joined his late wife in a quiet cemetery three miles north of his beloved taxidermy shop. Their gravestones stood side by side. The funeral had been a private affair, with a handful of close friends in attendance, as well as Stephen’s only son, thirty-three-year-old Thomas Johnson. 

           “We should really consider it,” Thomas’s wife, Lucy, said as the pair left the cemetery. It was a sweltering June day, and Lucy hung her arm out the car’s passenger window as they drove. “I’ve always wanted to move back to Oklahoma. And you’re a great taxidermist, Tommy, you always have been.”

           Tom’s hands flexed, gripping the wheel of the car as if it were a personal life raft. He did not take his dry eyes off the endless dirt road in front of him. He knew the road well. He had practically grown up on it, and now uninvited memories came clamoring back – memories of him climbing trees, shooting squirrels, smoking cigarettes in the fields, stealing his father’s truck and taking his high school girlfriend all the way to Norman to see a Sooners game.

           He remembered, vaguely, the face of his mother. 

           He also remembered the first time his father had let him solo a taxidermy project. The rabbit hadn’t come back quite right. It had hopped in erratic circles, velvet nose twitching in panic, glass eyes rolled back, before collapsing and fading back into death.

           Sometimes they don’t come back right, his father had said. You’ll get the hang of it.

           “I’m a terrible taxidermist,” Tom said. “We love Boston. All our friends are there. Besides, I like teaching.”

           “All your friends are there,” Lucy said. “And I’m sure there’s a school nearby that needs an English teacher. You could run the store part-time on the weekends.”

           “I can’t run the store, Lu!” Tom yelled, and he brought his fist down hard against the steering wheel. Lucy didn’t flinch at the outburst, but she fixed her husband with a cold stare. 

           The drive continued in silence. They entered the city limits of Seesaw. Out of the corner of his vision, Tom saw an older woman. She was walking with a golden retriever padding loyally at her heel. The dog cocked its head curiously at the passing car, its glass eyes catching in the midday sun. Tom recognized his father’s work. His dry eyes began to burn with tears.

           “I know you had issues with your dad,” Lucy said stiffly, “but he left you the shop, so we’ll have to do something with it.”


           Three months later, Tom sat behind the counter of Johnson’s Taxidermy, reading a paperback copy of King Lear. It was a bleak Sunday morning in September. The Oklahoma sky was a garish, angry yellow, summoned by the seasonal rains, and the light spilled in through the shop’s wide glass windows, tainting everything it reached with its hazy hue. 

           Since moving back to Seesaw, Tom had performed taxidermy on ten birds, five cats, three dogs, and one prize buck. The work was decent. No one was crossing the ocean to have Tom try his hand at immortalizing the beloved family pet, but he hadn’t received any complaints either. Still, there were times when an individual would walk in, ask for Stephen, and Tom’s heart would sink. He would grind his teeth into a strained smile and say oh, so sorry, Stephen’s actually dead, but maybe he could help them out instead. 

           Although Lucy had been thrilled with Tom’s agreement to relocate to Oklahoma, she had since refused to set a single pale foot inside the shop. This did not come as a surprise to Tom. Lucy had wanted a return to the quiet Midwest lifestyle, to sip whiskey in the backyard and watch fireflies dance on summer evenings. Not for animal carcasses smelling of formaldehyde and rot. Tom had scrubbed the bloodstains out of the shop’s workroom alone.

           Absorbed in King Lear as he was, Tom didn’t notice the chime of the front door, announcing the arrival of a patron. Business was slow, which was fine by him. He thought he might actually begin to enjoy the quiet weekends, reading by himself in his late father’s armchair. He thought it might be healing, in a way – that he might slowly replace all the memories of this place with new, peaceful ones. 

           “Tommy?” 

           Tom started and glanced up. A large, older man Tom did not recognize was standing in the doorway. He was wearing dirt-smeared camo, which was not unusual for this part of town, and a black ball cap that obscured his eyes.

           “Sorry,” Tom said, “I’m not sure I know you.”

           “Youse Tommy. Stephen’s boy,” the man said. He did not move from his post in the doorway.

           Tom placed the book flat on the counter in front of him and stood from the chair, squinting to get a better look at the man. Did he know him from his childhood? He was sure that he had never seen him before.

           “Yeah, that’s right. Were you a friend of his?”

           “A friend?” The man laughed. “Something of the like. Stephen did me a big favor three years back. I recognize ya from the photos, anyway. He yammered on about ya.”

           “Oh,” Tom said, somewhat sheepishly. He didn’t think his father had kept any photos of him, much less brought him up in conversation. “Well, it’s nice to meet you properly.”

           “Right then,” the man said. “Where’s Stephen at? I gotta talk with him.”

           Tom paused. Unease began to prickle at the back of his neck. 

           “I’m sorry, he actually passed away a few months back…”

           “What?” the man said. “Stephen’s dead?” 

           “Yes sir, sadly.”

           “You let him die?”

           Tom tilted his head, almost convinced he hadn’t heard him correctly. The unease began to grow, spreading from his neck down to his chest, where it expanded around his heart like water beginning to freeze.

           “I don’t think I know what you –”

           “Youse a taxidermist,” the man interrupted. “And you ain’t bring your old man back?”

           Now the growing ice in Tom’s chest seemed to shoot downwards, through his feet and into the wooden floor, anchoring him in place. His breath caught in his throat. His eyes widened, and he was still, perfectly still, like all those deer he’d seen stuck in the headlights of passing cars. Deer that had been struck, deer that had died, that had been brought to his father’s store and his father had sewn back together, replaced their tongues with clay, their teeth with ivory, and painstakingly glued individual eyelashes to adorn their new glass eyes until their flanks began to rise and fall on their own, until they were once again alive. 

           Alive. But not the same. 

           “That’s…” Tom heard himself say, distantly. “No. Of course not. That’s illegal.”

           In truth, it was far more than just illegal. Taxidermy on a human was punishable by death.

           Humans never came back right. 

           “Illegal?” The stranger repeated. “Maybe. Never stopped Stephen, though. Suppose you can’t help me, then.”

           And with that said, the man turned his back and left, the door chiming as it swung shut, and through the glass windows Tom watched in petrified stillness until the man’s silhouette was swallowed by the red-brown dust of the Oklahoma day. 

           Never stopped Stephen.

           Tom slowly sat back down. The shop was very quiet. He looked at the faded cover of King Lear, met eyes with the withered and gaunt illustration of the old king, and waited for his heartbeat to slow, for the ice coating his bones to thaw.

           When Tom returned home that night, he listened in silence as Lucy told him about her day. He washed the dishes in the kitchen sink, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, as Lucy poured herself glass after glass of wine and chatted on the phone with her sister. He laid in bed, examining the ceiling, as Lucy brushed her teeth and then climbed in next to him. Just as she made to turn off the nightstand lamp, Tom spoke.

           “Do you remember the story I told you about my mom?”

           Lucy turned in surprise. She pursed her lips.

           “What?”

           “The story. I must have told you at some point.”

           “Yes,” Lucy said slowly, “but you hated telling me that story. You never wanted to talk about it.”

           “Yeah,” Tom said quietly, still looking up. He could almost see constellations in the popcorn patterned ceiling. There was a rabbit. There was a golden retriever. “I was thinking about it today. While I was in the shop.”

           Lucy leaned over, gently brushing a loose lock of hair from Tom’s forehead. She told him often that she loved his curly dark hair, so unlike his father’s. He had gotten it from his mother. “Honey, are you all right?”

           “I was six. Or maybe five, I can’t really remember,” he said, ignoring the question. Tom continued his search of the ceiling. A bird. A cat.

           Lucy let her hand drop. She settled back against the headboard, listening in polite silence. 

           “She had been sick for a long time. Something wrong with her liver. Dad never let me see her. Then one night, she just appeared in my room. Dad was watching from the doorway. I had been sleeping, and I woke up, and she was just standing over me in the dark. She didn’t say anything. She leaned down, real slow like, and she sort of hugged me. I started crying. She looked like she wanted to cry, too, but it was like she couldn’t. Her eyes were all shiny and wide. And that’s it. That’s all I remember. I don’t even remember there being a funeral.”

           “Tommy,” Lucy said softly. “What made you think of this?”

           “Because I met someone today,” Tom said. “And they made me remember something I had forgotten. Something my dad said, right after this happened. He told me I couldn’t see mom anymore. I couldn’t see her again, because she wasn’t quite right.” 

           And there, in the ceiling, Tom thought he could almost see his mother’s face, with her dark waterfall hair and her glinting, glass eyes, staring silently down at him as he lay in bed. 

           Tom felt the weight of the realization squeeze against his ribs, forcing his heartbeat to quicken and his muscles to tighten. The true horror was that it wasn’t a realization at all, but rather a quiet and sinister confirmation of what he, in the anguish of his childhood, spending every day sewing the dead back together under his father’s gaze, had always known.


Bio

Sylke Lesinski is currently pursuing a Master’s in Creative Writing, her fiction focusing especially on the macabre and strange. When not writing, she’s flying in the back of a jet with the U.S. Air Force. Currently, she calls Oklahoma home, where she can be found walking the fields with her rescue dog, Hamlet.

A Grim Conversation
Matt Mueller
Matt Mueller

Bio

Matt Mueller is an Asian-American Los Angeles-based writer who wishes he could effectively layer outfits in the summer. He has a degree in Creative Writing and once sold a story to comic anthology “Strange Romance Vol. 3.” When he’s not writing fiction, he’s winning the love of his girlfriend’s dog and booking his next ticket (travel, concerts, etc. You get it).

Work
A Grim Conversation
Issue 25: Fever Dreams

          The house didn’t belong to Riley, but with its owner’s corpse crumpled in the basement with all the other bodies, who was going to make him leave? Nobody around to stop him from soaking in the wood-fired hot tub. Nobody to say he couldn’t roast dinner in the brick-laid fire pit. The beige adobe residence, once owned by the head of the Order, sat at the end of a dirt road on five acres of slightly sloping desert, far enough from neighbors to avoid inadvertent encounters yet accessible enough to see the assembly of town lights spark to life below. Two Heinekens in hand, Riley slipped past the gaping French doors onto the patio and joined his prisoner. 

          The woman, pallid and thin, drowned in a massive pitch-black blanket. She was sprawled over an Adirondack chair, bony fingers lazily tracing the rim of an empty bottle. She smiled when Riley popped the cap off one of the new ones and set it on her armrest. When she pointed east, toward the rugged rock formations that pressed harshly against the horizon, an uncharacteristic flash of curiosity colored her face. “What’s that out there?”

          “It’s a national park,” said Riley. “One of California’s best if you ask me. Folks come from all over to camp, rock climb, hike, birdwatch—you name it, they do it. But honestly, it’s only when the sun drops and your skin tastes cool desert air and you catch a glimpse of all the stars dusting the night sky that it becomes something truly special. Nothing better. Just, y’know, avoid the cholla.”

          “Cholla?”

          “God’s major flora fuckup. It’s this stupid cactus with little barbed spines that jump out at the lightest touch. Seriously. My wife brushed past a small one once, and she had three stems with dozens of needles glued to her skin like leeches. Our son couldn’t stop busting up. These little shits go deep and hurt like hell.”

          “Yeah, I’ll bet.” She sipped her beer. “So should we go?”

          “To the cholla?”

          “To the park.”

          Riley paused. He reconsidered his geniality. Remember what she is. “No.”

          “Why not?”

          “We’ve been over this. Until I get what I want, you’re stuck here. Plus, I’m still not sure you didn’t off all those folks in the basement.”

          “Oh, please. I don’t kill people. That’s something humans do.” 

           The pair continued drinking in silence. The last of the day’s sunlight filtered through the sharp, staggered leaves of the yucca palms scattered over the property. A dry breeze swept into them like surf over sand, wiping the sweat from the base of Riley’s neck. A housefly, swift and bold, dotted the sticky patches of his bare arms and legs for the better part of a minute. This harassment, in tandem with the heat, did few favors for his mood. Riley kicked off a shoe, and, with the precision of a falcon dive-bombing the unluckiest mouse in the world, splintered its body against the teak coffee table. Empty bottles toppled. 

           “You’re drawing this out,” said Riley. “And I’m tired of asking.”

           “I understand the stress you must be under. To come so close to what you perceive as the final stretch of your personal mission, only to be stonewalled like this, probably isn’t kind to your sanity. So let me make this clear—it’s not happening. Don’t make me repeat myself.”

           “You little—” His grip tensed around the glass bottle, knuckles whitening.

          “Scary.” 

          “Don’t patronize me.”

          “Hmm.” Pity cast itself on her face. “Do me a favor. Look at the fly you crushed.”

          “What?”

          “I want you to see something.”

          Riley studied the table. The fly, mangled with its guts strewn across the surface, twitched. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”

          “It’s moving, isn’t it?”

          “So? Things die. Nerves spasm. Who cares?”

          “Pay closer attention. Note its wings. The way its legs are moving. It seems deliberate, doesn’t it? Measured. There’s no random twitching or anything because, you see, this fly is trying to move. It’s failing of course, because you’ve ruined its body too much for it to function, but it’s in no way dead.”

          “You’re talking out of your ass. This little shit’s going to croak any second.”

          “Yes, by all the natural laws of life it should’ve died as soon as you struck it, but it hasn’t—and it never will. Not as long as I remain trapped here like this.”

          Riley set his bottle down slowly. Like a hound that lost sight of its quarry, the confidence with which he’d been barreling through this conversation flickered. He took a seat on the table, opposite the woman. “I suppose the fly’s not the only thing, is it?”

          “Of course not. Did you know that in normal circumstances around 150,000 people die every day, all around the world? Disease. Murder. Starvation. You know this. What do you think happens when the gift of Death is snatched away from those whose bodies are too broken to sustain life? Consider victims of natural disasters—when earthquakes sunder the ground, what happens to those whose bones are turned to dust by brick and concrete? What happens when I’m not there to save them? Think of people caught in house fires, unable to escape, so they do nothing but burn and choke and beg for a way out. Agony multiplies exponentially. The universe screams in pain, all because you won’t release the spell.”

          Riley sat back, studying the woman in front of him. “…never expected this.”

          “Excuse me?” 

          “Nothing. It’s just, ah, immortality was sort-of the raison d’être for those dead folks down below—the Order of the Undying Tomorrow. After decades of exhausting every other option, they decided their best shot was to cast a spell, capture Death, and use that imprisonment as leverage in exchange for eternal life. Only thing is, I doubt any of those zealots conceived of an endgame beyond what they imagined. Their goal was the only one that mattered, and anything contrary to that precise vision had no use to them. Don’t think they figured Death’s entrapment would mean immortality for all by default.” He snorted, then took another swig. “So now they rot beneath the desert—and their intended victim enjoys a drink under the Cali sun. Love a good bit of dramatic irony.”

          “You don’t seem affected by their deaths. Weren’t they your comrades?”

          “I sported the garb and attended the rallies, sure, but I was never one of them. No doctrines warped my purpose. No manifestos influenced my methods. They were nothing more than a means to my end.” 

          Riley had died once. Four minutes later, he coughed up teeth and blood and bile as a paramedic crouched over him at the side of the I-5. Weeks later, at the junkyard, he found the entire passenger side of his Civic crinkled like a soda can. Months later, people continued bringing him food and condolences in equal measure, but all he could think of was the booster seat he overpaid for, found stained in crimson beneath the eighteen-wheeler. 

          When one has diminished to such an extent, then encounters those who say they can detain Death for their own purposes, well, there’s not much of a choice at all.

          “I need you to understand that there are consequences to my being here.” She straightened, eyes drilling into Riley. “My duty, my very existence, is not subject to the whims of hysterical mortals. Even if you managed to persuade me, I literally cannot bring them back.”

          The sun dipped below the horizon, dimming the sky. Shadows stretched in broader and broader arcs across the arid landscape, heralding night to claim the hour. The patio’s motion sensor lights flickered on. Riley sipped his beer. In the deepening twilight and recession of his hope, the woman seemed to change. She was growing more into herself, he supposed. Hollow eyes. Sunken, pale cheeks. He admonished himself. Never forget what she is.

          “You’re no help,” the words caught in his throat. “Completely fucking useless.”

          “I suppose.”

          “So resurrection ain’t your wheelhouse. Okay, fine. Take me out. Let me die. That’ll bring me to them, right? I just, I just want to see them—hold them, kiss them—y’know?” His breathing shuddered. “Let me see my family.”

          “Is that what you think happens?”

          “Just—” Despair rippled through Riley, nearly as potent as the alcohol. “Just do it.”

          “Please,” said Death softly. “I don’t kill people.”

          “The basement?”

          “That wasn’t my doing.”

          “Bullshit.”

          She sighed with all the exasperation of a principal dealing with a problem child. “To call on me is to meddle with the fabric of reality. A single misstep with the incantation can result in…recoil. Humans can rarely endure such things.”

          “So me surviving was just dumb luck? Here I thought it meant, I don’t know, like my task was destined to succeed or something. These past couple days have been hell on the psyche, but I always felt like there was always something to look forward to. Now…”

          “All it means is that this wasn’t your time.”

          “My time.” Laughter slipped past Riley’s lips, quietly at first, before sputtering outward like a battered sprinkler. Calloused hands caught his face as he bent forward, slipping slowly down, from forehead to chin, stretching skin along the way. He lifted his left hand, wiggling his index and middle fingers in a focused display. At the second knuckle of each, they’d been bent in such a way that it seemed unnatural to even make a fist. “See this? Couple years back, I entered something called Megavalanche. It’s this downhill mountain bike race out in France, one of the most famous in the world. Breakneck speeds. Tight turns. Hundreds of riders around you. They say it’s less dangerous than it seems, and I guess it is, since a pair of broken fingers is all I suffered.”

          Then he stood. Gripping the hem of his shirt, Riley lifted to reveal a series of burn scars on his stomach. “Got these in Nicaragua. Volcano boarding. Perfect for people who think snowboarding ain’t warm—or dangerous—enough.”

          Next, his lips parted in a cold grin. He tapped the top row of his teeth. “This is a veneer. Earned it bombing down the side of a hill at 80 miles-an-hour on a street luge a few hours away from here, over in Long Beach.”

          Death held up a hand. “Why are you telling me all this?”

          “Sometime after the accident, I swallowed two dozen pills alongside whatever liquor I had lying around. Didn’t take. Didn’t have the nerve to try again. So I went ahead and sampled dozens of extreme sports in some kind of half-assed way to meet, well, you. Doesn’t make much sense, I know, but I figured they were a decent way to skirt close to death without actually admitting to myself what was going on.”

          “At the risk of sounding trite, I’d say you lived a lot of life trying to meet Death.”

          He sighed. His eyes were bloodshot. “I’m telling you all this because I need you to understand how important this is to me.”

          “I already know how much this means to you. My answer, however, hasn’t changed.”

          “What?” Riley’s heart throbbed like a bruised thumb. 

          “What did you think would happen? Did you think a deeper dive into your struggles and motivations in pursuit of this goal was the answer? As if a lack of sympathy was the only thing stopping me. Stop deluding yourself.”

          Riley cursed, leaping off the table. One hand cast aside the blanket wrapped around Death as the other quickly dragged her to her feet. His nostrils flared. Both hands gripped the tunic covering her skeletal frame before slamming her into the side of the house. Her face, gaunt and devoid of emotion save for the slightest drop of pity, didn’t even react to this burst of violence. 

          That pissed off Riley even more. “Know what? I think you’re lying. I think, if you really wanted to, you could bring them back and, I don’t know, you’re just holding back.” 

          “Why would I do that?”

          He shrugged. “Maybe as punishment for trapping you. Maybe you just like seeing people suffer.”

          “I know suffering. Everybody I come across, I meet at the peak of their pain. Never once have I enjoyed it.” She put her hands on his. Riley wondered if they were cold because of the beer or if her skin always felt like that. “Listen—I’m not going to pretend to understand how it feels to lose someone, for life to demand that I carry the weight of them with me until the end of my days. But I know how my actions affect those left alive. It’s bitter and unkind and painful. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair, but you have to move on anyway.”

          “Pretty words.” Riley eased his grip. He took a breath and looked out towards the swaying chaparral. “Don’t change much, though.”

          “What?”

          “Like I said, until I get what I want…you’re stuck here.” 

          “Riley—” 

          “Don’t bother. You’re just going to say you ‘can’t’ bring them back or you ‘can’t’ kill me, right? So many supposed rules.” Turning back, Riley took a trash bag from beside the table. He began to clean, tossing in empty bottles. There was no sense of grace here. Just a simmering tension and the sharp clatter of glass-on-glass cutting through the air like firecrackers. “Try harder. Or you’re going to be staring at this desert for a long time.”

          The briefest irritation blinked across her face. “Holding me here keeps scores of people from passing on. You talk of my familiarity with suffering, but I’ve never inflicted it. Not like this. Not on purpose. Nothing’s come close to the scale of torment you’re bringing to this world.” 

          “So kill me. If you feel so strongly about this, end my life. End this whole thing, for everyone’s sake.”

          “You know that’s not an option. The only one who has a choice here is you. As the final member of your Order, you have the power to set everything right. Say the words. Release me.”

          “No,” said Riley. “I don’t think I will.”

          With more effort than she’d put into anything over these last couple days, Death reached out. Her hand nearly connected before it was swatted away. “Don’t run from this. Don’t let your grief traumatize others.”

          He faltered at the door. His head nearly turned. They almost locked eyes. “See you tomorrow,” said Riley. Then he left. 

          The patio—tidy, quiet, empty—stood still. A gust touched the ground, kicking up a veil of brown powder. From here, this house on the desert hill, nothing seemed amiss. Everything seemed peaceful. The world would keep turning, ignorant, at least for tonight, of the nightmare that had already enveloped it. 

          Death was still standing against the wall when the sensor’s lights went dark.


Bio

Matt Mueller is an Asian-American Los Angeles-based writer who wishes he could effectively layer outfits in the summer. He has a degree in Creative Writing and once sold a story to comic anthology “Strange Romance Vol. 3.” When he’s not writing fiction, he’s winning the love of his girlfriend’s dog and booking his next ticket (travel, concerts, etc. You get it).

Ushi no toki mairi
Betsy Aoki
Betsy Aoki

Bio

Elizabeth (Betsy) Aoki is a poet, short story writer and game producer. Her first poetry collection, Breakpoint, was a 2019 National Poetry Series Finalist and received the Patricia Bibby First Book Award. To find out more about Breakpoint, go to betsyaoki.com/breakpoint or follow her on Twitter at @baoki.

Work
Ushi no toki mairi
Issue 25: Fever Dreams
1. Ushi no toki mairi
I went to the sacred tree with a hammer
I went to the grove with a nail in my heart
white-faced and cold and ready 
and I pressed myself flat against the rough of the bark
and I pressed my feet flat against the wet of the ground
and at the Hour of the Ox I hammered
five-fingered grip for five inches of nail
counting to five on the stroke of each descent
counting to 10 for each heartbeat
deep in the breastbone of night, I raised my arm 
I hammered it down                     through the white flesh and splinters
I hammered that nail                                   through the blood and the screaming
I felt the spirits rise their mouths          rings of light in the darkness
      O O O O O

2. Divinations of direction
Wood xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx fire
Fire XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX soil
Native gold XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX water
Aquatic wood XXXXXX soil
Water xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx water 
Fire XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXx fire
Gold XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXx gold
Wood xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fire

3. Wara ningyō 
Constructing an enemy takes many pieces.
Perhaps a scrap of paper with their name, a fingernail, a lock
of hair they left in a comb, blood on cotton, a cut while shaving.

It requires you take a bit of them in. Where you would not touch 
before, here you will willingly carry their symbols
and spirit in your head, rent-free, preparing this curse.

It is like a recipe, you age the meat of them and season, 
while you prepare
an effigy that will be conduit to their punishment.
Then you prepare yourself – white thick face paint, 
white clothes, white sash around your waist. 
So much whiteness. So much not yourself during the day,
done so when you summon the otherworld 
they recognize that color
and come. Bring a blade because 
there can be no human witnesses.

4. Conduit
when at that hour of the ox, the slumbering,                 strong-shouldered bellowing sleeps
when at that hour of your crime and their crimes        come together in this wara ningyō 
and the barriers to the spirits are broken         they come and all the death in your head
becomes the life in their bodies              all the life in your head 
               becomes the death in their mouths
and the army you lead now      has taken over your body 
conducting       lightning through the effigy
burning straw stalks    hit the heart of the demon
which is you

Bio

Elizabeth (Betsy) Aoki is a poet, short story writer and game producer. Her first poetry collection, Breakpoint, was a 2019 National Poetry Series Finalist and received the Patricia Bibby First Book Award. To find out more about Breakpoint, go to betsyaoki.com/breakpoint or follow her on Twitter at @baoki.

Lucid Nightmare
Kristin Fouquet
Kristin Fouquet

Bio

Kristin Fouquet is a photographer and writer from lovely New Orleans. Her photography appears in online journals and magazines, on chapbook and book covers, album artwork, and occasionally in galleries. When not behind the camera, Kristin writes literary fiction and is the author of five books. Visit her website Le Salon: https://kristin.fouquet.cc.


Bio

Kristin Fouquet is a photographer and writer from lovely New Orleans. Her photography appears in online journals and magazines, on chapbook and book covers, album artwork, and occasionally in galleries. When not behind the camera, Kristin writes literary fiction and is the author of five books. Visit her website Le Salon: https://kristin.fouquet.cc.

Down Time
Derek Des Anges
Derek Des Anges

Bio

Derek Des Anges is an emerging cross-genre author living and working in London, with a strong interest in mycorrhizal networks, urban histories, antihumanism, and queering the self/other divide. His work also appears in Lemonspouting Journal, Missing Slate, and Vulture Bones Magazine, among others.

Work
Down Time
Issue 25: Fever Dreams

           Stifled by the senescence that is stored in every walking thing, you stop, and you drop, meaning to rest a second on the weary stumps that have worn your way to this spot. 

           Under cedar wood. Fatigue takes you. Takes you fast. Caresses your heart to a standstill. Fingers the breath from your lungs. Sucks the life from your veins. Stops you. 

           You sit suspended in bliss on the threshold of eternity. The smell of perfumed bark breeds the begins of black decay; around the roots a shroud is preparing itself for your body; a sheath.

           You breathe, once, twice, with lungs that can scarcely take the strain. You sigh. They shiver. Earth calls.  

           Your body slumps against the leaf mould. Dead grey fingers touch dead grey fingers. It parts your pores, softly at first, with respect for the recently-deceased, the still-living, the irreconcilable tangle of existence and destitution. At first, it is soft with you.

           With the change in moisture within your skin, it swells. The spores, gestating in their coating, begin to ripen. The thread-like white filaments unknot themselves in a wedding veil of exploration across the capillaries that soak with still-warm blood: all iron, all oxygen, rich as a dowry. Your body is a treasure house, your body is a feast, your body is a heaven.

           The venous tissue of your palms begins to dilate and throb with the passage of their tender tendrils through the soft parts of your flesh. You shudder; you ripple from the hand through the forearm in a kiss more intimate than you have ever known before.

           Along the cold exterior of your body, out in the world, the gentle carpet of dove grey steals over you, demure and silken, to conceal this union from the eyes of the birds, the judgement of the beetles. You twitch at the touch which passes not only over the hairs upon your arms, but through their bases and down, down into the flesh; there to meet with those passing within, along the naked highways of your inner self.

           At first you only sigh as the stroking of these minute inner tongues unbind the final clenched electricity of your muscles, releasing the last breath from your stubborn lungs and filling their wet cavities, their welcome moist cradles with the fruit of passion shared in ways your living brain would never have countenanced; but you are free now. Free of the confusion that controlled your limitations. Free of all the cramped confining conditions of love that marked it down to something mundane and simple, a combination of uncomplex gametes.

           Here in the irreducible complexity of your more profound desires, the spaces between bronchi branches bud with white webs and weave tapestries of total integration.

           Ephemeral anchors breech with slow and delicate inevitability the cooling sweat and glands of your back, discard the fibres of your unneeded clothing, stripping you naked piecemeal and with tenacity. They hold you to the incense bark, cradling you like a beloved child, and ruffle your hair as they murmur over the back of your head; butterfly kisses upon your cheeks, fluttering your eyelashes and drinking away the fallen tears of expiring life.

           When at last they come to touch your lips your mouth is already moist for their entry; the kindly fronds pull back your slumbering muscles to admit their outer kin—and in an embrace to which you are at once witness, host, and facilitator, they exchange the gifts you have given them in a timeless, unfathomable entwining that bears as much resemblance to the usual tedium of fucking as perfectly choreographed ballet does to a drunken uncle’s miserable shuffle.

           And all at once your teeth give way, your mouth is open wide, your tongue shaping a cup to hold the thick, fond, warm and spongy width of the fruiting body as it plunges past your jawbone and through the inner halls of your red interior, bumping your ridged palate, blocking the wet ring of your oesophagus, met by the entangling strands that shoot up from your lungs to conjoin these parts.

           Never before have you been party to a coming together that comes together the way this comes.

           Tiny electric thrills pass through your form; invisible outside but all-consuming within. You tense and release, shake and shudder, shiver and reform; the combined entry of the stranded body enters your throat as its questing, probing lower part finds the other end of this complex tube, and advances through sphincters pre-slackened by the passage of life’s worst tensions and lubricated by the almost imperceptible accelerated precipitation of decay.

           You decohere exquisitely.

           Moving outwards through your capillaries, climbing your cilia, expanding your passages and opening you like a flower, the tendrils seep through your cooling flesh. They pass through the barriers which kept you separate from the world, from others, from connection; the collection of ghost-light filaments drown out the separations of human life; they fill you as nothing has ever filled you. They grow, and grow closer and fonder, tangling like the fingers of lovers across the collapsed highways of gut, through permeable and impermeable walls, penetrating you in such acute and total infiltration that the definition between them and you is trivial, arrogant, impossible. 

           As they blow in, reaching their fullest extent as they reach the eager and earnest spores nestling in the deep folds of your silent brain, a gentle surge once again passes through you. You are as wet as the caves in which they first came to life; you are as warm as the earth on which you lie; you are as full of fruiting fungal ecstasy as any being, living or dead, can be. And with a last push, the bodies of their endless bulbous growths erupt in tumescent triumph, burst forth from your tired mind, part the last of the foolish frontiers of flesh, and ejaculate a cloud of ash-like seed into the watching air. They, and you, are spent. 

           And so, at last, you deliquesce.


Bio

Derek Des Anges is an emerging cross-genre author living and working in London, with a strong interest in mycorrhizal networks, urban histories, antihumanism, and queering the self/other divide. His work also appears in Lemonspouting Journal, Missing Slate, and Vulture Bones Magazine, among others.

Dinner
Elise Kelly
Elise Kelly

Bio

Elise Kelly (she/her) studies creative writing at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and is published by For Women Who Roar, Pomme Journal, Coffin Bell, and others. An avid fan of feminist and experimental literature, Elise tries her best to push the boundaries of “acceptable” writing for a young lady. Her interests include clowns, womxn, and magical realism.

Work
Dinner
Issue 25: Fever Dreams

Most people only feel naked in the dreamscape, but I’m that way all the time. I am wearing my sleep shirt and jeans but I can’t help but feel like everyone can see my vagina, my tits. Maybe it’s because I forgot to put on a bra.

 

The grocery store lines us up outside, single file. If you’re smart, you brought a reusable bag, but I didn’t. My hands are cupped, like they’re already scooping the rice I will serve Luka for dinner, like they’re already holding the eggplant, salt, pepper. I can’t cook all that well but I’ve never heard him complain.

 

To cut labor expenses supermarkets across the globe have implemented a new model in which produce is not separated by crates or booths but instead is piled into the middle of a warehouse, often reaching half a story high. This eliminates the countless hours which were traditionally dedicated to sorting, stocking, and cleaning. Customers now take it upon themselves to tackle the pile, grabbing what they can and paying at the weigh stations which precede any and all exits. This, of course, has led to serious contamination hazards and boycotts from religious customers who are adamant on certain foods not touching (ex: a Rabbi has condemned Trader Joe’s for allowing raw clams to smolder amongst the mangos, completely unrefrigerated). Independent outbreaks of food poisoning have emerged throughout the nations, but the stock market is stable as ever and several new enterprises (particularly within Big Pharma) are looking to adopt similar strategies.

 

I’m third in line so I can smell it now. People slip on banana peels like our childhood cartoons predicted. Customers behind me have begun to don their gloves, scrubs, hazmat suits, but I am so naked. So unbelievably naked, yet so harrowingly clothed.

 

When I reach the metal detectors I begin to hear my heartbeat. A bucket beside one of the guards brims with knives, pistols, tasers, even nunchucks and canes. There’s a rolling death toll that the highway billboards like to flash for those of us on our ways home. We look at the strawberries in our passenger seats then watch the numbers climb. You’re lucky you’re lucky you’re lucky.

 

“Clean.”

 

He opens the doors to a bloodbath. Weapons have been confiscated but the guards can’t cut our nails—there are scabs on my chest from last week’s trip. I have learned to never aim for the top where the food is fresh; that’s where it gets the dirtiest. The rich have started hiring runners to sneak in with razors and fight to the death, all for a few yet-to-be cracked eggs.

 

The store is busy today—I won’t be able to make it up higher than a few feet, and the minute difference in quality won’t be worth the scarring, the risk of infection. Luka needs my legs.

 

I run into the pile like a child at the beach, a wave of mold, pests, mush engulfing my thinning thighs. Making my way as inward as possible, I scoop what I can into my forearms, depositing the awful mix into a kangaroo pouch I shoddily shaped with my shirt, already soaked by rotten tomato juice. A man with some ravenous glint in his eye leaps through the produce, stalled into slow motion by this sea of rancid delicacy. He’s fixed on the splintered chicken bones pressing into my legs. I run.


In the kitchen, I listen to Luka watch TV. He likes the old ones, like How I Met Your Mother and That 70s Show. Every once in a while I hear him laugh. It’s never in line with the laugh tracks, never in line with the scheduled jokes—normally has to do with something stupid and dark.

 

I couldn’t find rice, and I don’t know if I should tell him. The pot is simmering on the stove; I sprinkle a pinch of salt, a pinch of pepper, a pinch of any spice I can find. Was that cinnamon or nutmeg? The labels have all worn away and my nose is clogged—allergies suck this time of year.

 

I couldn’t find rice, couldn’t find eggplants. I’m lucky Luka’s been glued to the screen. Another pinch of cinnamon, or nutmeg. Fried with a rotten tomato and a splash of canola oil. He’ll never notice. He never does anyway.

 

“Three until dinner is ready.”

 

Luka laughs. I don’t know if he heard me, but I take the spoon with holes in it anyway and scoop a portion onto his plate. A sprig of thyme on top from the herb garden in our backyard. “Honey, do you want red or white wine?” He laughs and laughs more, which means white.

 

I bring the plate to the couch and set it on his lap. Kiss on the cheek, “Here you go honey,” he lowers his gaze and smiles. “Rice. What a treat.” Then I lift his fork and I feed him. Sometimes he looks at me and sometimes he looks at the TV. Does he ever confuse Mila Kunis for his wife, or his reflection for Neil Patrick Harris? 

 

Eyes glossy, he swallows the mush. Maybe it’s the cinnamon, or maybe it’s the pepper, but something makes him frown. But my husband doesn’t complain. He never has. When I finish feeding him I go to bed. He always stays up late.


Luka died last night. Apparently he’s allergic to maggots.


Bio

Elise Kelly (she/her) studies creative writing at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and is published by For Women Who Roar, Pomme Journal, Coffin Bell, and others. An avid fan of feminist and experimental literature, Elise tries her best to push the boundaries of “acceptable” writing for a young lady. Her interests include clowns, womxn, and magical realism.

Portrait of Soliloquy in the Mouth of Grief
Joshua Effiong
Joshua Effiong

Bio

Joshua Effiong, Frontier VI, is a writer and digital artist from the Örö people of Nigeria. His works have appeared/forthcoming in The Kalahari Review, Rough Cut Press, Madrigal Press, Titled House, The Indianapolis Review, Chestnut Review, etc. Author of a poetry chapbook Autopsy of Things Left Unnamed (2020). 

& yet again mama caught me talking to myself. I cannot control
the way I slip into the space between yesterday and today. The
deafening void that wears the colour of the night. Daily, I begin
recounting the spirits of those who left unannounced. The air in
their lungs vaporizes into the clouds and their cadavers only feast
on form​al​de​hyde. Nobody had warned me aforehand that: a man
born of a woman is of few days and there are calculi of griefs. These days,
I avoid looking into the mirror because it has become a sanctuary
where the people I've lost congregate always to hum their favorite
hymns. My throat has become a playlist of eulogies. Tell me, what is
this figurine their departure has sculptured my dreams into? I have
learned the process of italicizing my words, saying it slowly, & backwards.
Perhaps, these forms of communication would grant me the audacity
to go fishing light. Last night, God visited me with the face of my
late grandpa. He told me to oil mama's counterfeit smile with antiseptic,
& like holding a jar to the rain, I should collect her tears and have it frozen.
Tomorrow, on my knees, I would hunt for joy in this same dream
while I present this body—a living sacrifice, wholly and acceptable
as a reasonable service.

Bio

Joshua Effiong, Frontier VI, is a writer and digital artist from the Örö people of Nigeria. His works have appeared/forthcoming in The Kalahari Review, Rough Cut Press, Madrigal Press, Titled House, The Indianapolis Review, Chestnut Review, etc. Author of a poetry chapbook Autopsy of Things Left Unnamed (2020). 

A Letter, Unfolding
H. Pueyo
H. Pueyo

Bio

H. Pueyo (@hachepueyo on Twitter) is an Argentine-Brazilian writer of literary and speculative fiction. Her work has appeared before in venues like Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, and her debut short story collection “A Study in Ugliness” will be published by Lethe Press in 2022. Find her online at hachepueyo.com.

Work
A Letter, Unfolding
Issue 25: Fever Dreams

          The cell unfolded every night like an envelope. First the flap unpeeled, its triangular outline opening and fluttering, then the throat widened, distorting the view, and finally the content revealed itself, an open mouth turned inside out, but instead of teeth and tongue and gum, another cell appeared in front of him. A cell within his cell. On his door was her wall. On his wall, her door. A prisoner sat on the floor he was sitting on, or maybe on another floor, on any floor.

          She was there.

          He looked at her.

          She looked at him.

          The image was gone.

          It started slowly, no more than a few blinks on the first day, no more than half a minute on the second. The invisible envelope broke into a grin, and the face he saw—her face, always her face—materialized, two black eyes, the soft curves of a nose, the bows of a mouth. He knew her name more than any other name. Its three letters had rolled many times on his tongue. He had called her, written her, moaned her. Once, before he was locked there. Once.

          It had to be some kind of mental mockery. Pain could do that to the human brain, he guessed, it could make his thoughts drip like sweat from his forehead, and whenever it happened, he thought of her, her, her. That was the reason he was seeing her in the first place, wasn’t it? You’ve got to ground yourself, one of the older prisoners had taught him. The man had been arrested by two different regimes, more than three times. He had to know what he was talking about. You’ve got to find something that reminds you of who you are, outside of this place.

          Seeing things already, and you’re only here for a few days, he scorned himself. He stopped for a moment. How many days was the real question. Sometimes, the guards mentioned a weekday, or left a newspaper on the table, but the walls had no windows, and he was starting to suspect they were lying about the dates. Lying to make him think more or less time had passed since he arrived to his cell.

          The woman in the other prison looked at him.

          How many days, he meant to ask. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth. He forgot the question. Her hair was shorter than it was when he last saw her. Her skin was sallow, the lines around her eyes darker. But it was her—only she didn’t know him yet.

          It was then that he decided it couldn’t be because of the pain. He touched the scar that went from the corner of his lips to his cheekbone, old and deep, whitened by time. He rubbed the cigarette burns on his knuckles. The nose that had been broken once, slightly crooked to a side. No, it wasn’t that; he could take a little pain. He heard of prisoners who had seen things. One of them came back singing a little carnival march. Not him. He knew how to escape himself. He knew how to molt skin and crawl out of it.

          No, it was her. It had to be her. She was the one melting his walls.

          Every night, or after they turned off the lights, the colors quivered. Corners crumbled, angles dissolved into lines. Her pretty little face, her bruised neck, her slumped shoulders, her body hidden under clothes twice her size. Tonight, her knee is exposed, the leg of her pants rolled up, dry blood cluttered around a laceration, a loose sock pooling around her ankle.

          She lifts her face to see him.

          It’s her, it’s her, even for a moment, even for a second, it’s her. By the two rings she has on her left index finger, he knows it’s a glimpse from her past, or an entirely new reality, one where they have never met. He touches his own hand, feeling her ring on his little finger. It was a pair her father gave her a year before he abandoned her, and in turn she gave him so he would have a token when they were apart, memento, wedding band and lucky charm, all at the same time.

          She observes him from the other side, and her hand drops to her exposed leg. Her nails dance on the skin, under the hematoma, and a finger disappears into the sock, pulling it down. The white sock slips off her foot, the only visible feminine piece she’s wearing, hidden under the cargo pants, a schoolgirl’s sock, knee high. The other is still on, and her heel and toes roll slowly on the floor until her leg is fully stretched.

          He knows that smile.

          Usually, she would be wearing his clothes. His plain white t-shirt, too big for her, his jeans, cuffed with pins, his bomber jacket, her favorite. Only the boots and the socks and the underwear were hers. Her rings are there. She’s not under his jacket, but drowning inside a battered boilersuit she must have stolen before her mission. Her hair is cropped as short as she had it one year before they met. And her eyes—he can tell by her eyes she doesn’t recognize him, she has no idea who he is.

          How are things going there, he signs silently, fingers moving from his chin upwards, then pointing the question. She looks at her own leg. I’ll survive, she signs back. You? He glances at himself, at the state he’s in, he hasn’t shaved since god knows when, he’s lost weight, he doesn’t feel hungry, but they forced him to eat a slice of bread. And a coffee, he remembers now, like it happened in another life, a plastic cup of black coffee when he spaced out. Don’t even think of dying before you speak.

          I’ll survive, he also signs back.

          She smiles.

          He smiles.

          The lines blur again, and he knows it will be the last glimpse he’ll have of her face for now. Good night, she signs, her hands form the words, but to him it feels like she’s blowing him a kiss. He can almost see it: the envelope, paper white, the folded letter they’ve been writing for weeks, and her lips pressed against the close, melting into honey wax. He remembers what that kiss feels like. The envelope disappears, and a guard unlocks his door. He knows what’s coming now, but still he looks at the place she had been seconds before, and he has to hide a smile.

          See you tomorrow night.


Bio

H. Pueyo (@hachepueyo on Twitter) is an Argentine-Brazilian writer of literary and speculative fiction. Her work has appeared before in venues like Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, and her debut short story collection “A Study in Ugliness” will be published by Lethe Press in 2022. Find her online at hachepueyo.com.

Issue 25
Spring 2022

Managing Prose Editor
Sarah Garcia
Managing Poetry Editor
Dana DeFranco
Faculty Advisor
David Buuck
Managing Faculty Advisor
Stephanie Young
Graphic Design
Shiraz Gallab
Prose Advisors
Tri-an Cao
SuzyJane Edwards
Anita Levin
Clovelle Manglicmot