‘Passengers’

                                         Artist - John L Gronbeck-Tedesco

“Passengers”

I met her in Thailand. An accident, the exactness of which escapes me. Could’ve been a lighter. Maybe some tobacco.

Not that it matters—the circumstances in which you meet someone, the how. The important part is the act of meeting itself. The exchange of human pleasantries. The learning and memories, the entropic tune, the breath of fresh air. The gathering of facts, the divulsion of personal details, and the subsequent formation of a friendship destined for impermanence. The acceptance of some new soul into your sphere, even if it be saddeningly temporary.

The meeting.

That’s where the substance really lies.

*

We sat side by side on the ferry, passing a spliff. Studying the darkling waters of the Gulf of Thailand; the moon no more than a glimmer, its fluorescence unable to fight through the oppressive nighttime clouds.

“Reminds me of a Van Gogh painting,” I remarked.

“Who?”

“Really?” I answered, all incredulity. “Starry Night, you know, the suicidal painter who severed his ear?”

Understanding dawned.

“Ah, you mean Van Gogh?”

“Is that how you pronounce it?”

“It is in the Netherlands.”

*

Her name was Lieke.

She was from the small town of Steenbergen in the south of the Netherlands; the third daughter in a family of farmers. Generations of cattle-rearing and cheesemaking, of shoveling shit and bottle-feeding runts, of tilling land and pulling weeds. Generations of dedicated laborers working what land they had.

And she was one of them.

There were a dozen chickens, the names of which I don’t recall. There were pigs too, but they didn’t have any names. She used to name them, she said; although, she stopped when she learned what death looked like, when she heard the blood-curdling scream of boar and sow alike. But now, older and hardened, the slaughter had become as routine and mundane as brushing one’s teeth. She even joked that Canadian bacon was just as likely Dutch. There was a flock of sheep raised primarily for wool, with grazing their secondary purpose. Rarely were they sold for butchering or killed to feed themselves—for even though she had reconciled one animal’s death, neither her nor the remainder of her family could stomach the notion of slaughtering something so young; and, in this nuanced manner, they abstained from the consumption and commoditization of lamb. Other than a few horses, a herding dog and some cattle, the rest of the land was dedicated to botanical life: wheat, tomatoes, feed crops.

She extolled the place, speaking with fondness and pride, and but for one neighboring family, there was nothing but genuine affection expressed.

Yet, the subjects were not proportionately discussed, and indeed this neighboring family occupied as much of the conversation as her family and the farm they tended to. I listened and learned. Of the children she said very little, other than that there were four of them, two sons and two daughters. The mother’s name was Ilse, and she was a strict disciplinarian and, perhaps paradoxically, a spineless zealot.

Other than that, I gathered nothing.

She was too busy talking about the father.

His name was Willem, and his beliefs were as antiquated as an abacus, as outdated as a mimeograph machine. A man as irascible as he was ignorant. A truculent man who loved repeating himself, loudly and long-windedly. He supported Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom, and like them desired a Dutch world devoid of Islam and its practitioners. A xenophobe who arbitrarily assigned blame to the Turks and other immigrants. A fundamentalist, he happily sermonized on the sacrilege of homosexuality. Black Pete was a staple of his Christmas décor, he considered the atrocities in Indonesia ancient history. In general, he believed that the only people of color worth allowing were the ones on national sports teams. He was a proponent of gender norms. He was an altogether distasteful and unpalatable man. A stubborn, prickly vestige of a past best left unrevived.

And yet, he was a man whose ideological principles, although once ostracized, were not dead—they were far from the fringes, and they were spreading like an infection. A moral pandemic where twisted thinking was contagious. Where hate had been normalized. Where it was winning politics. Where it was ubiquitous.

Because of people like him.

*

I understood the anger, the disgust, the shame. I understood the need to release those emotions.

But her reaction was different.

The length at which she spoke of Willem, the subtle seething, the almost unnoticeable agitation, it all suggested something deeper. Something personal.

A family feud beyond repair, perhaps. Or an individual wrong. An interpersonal conflict maybe, between the two of them. She had been equivocal about the children, the mother. Were they somehow involved?

*

Waves lapped at the ferry as we gently waded the waters. Cigarette smoke danced briefly around us before disappearing into the night’s fog.

The thirty minute trip from Koh Samui to Koh Phangan was coming to an end. Already passengers were collecting their luggage and lining up to disembark. We put our cigarettes out and joined the queue.

I felt unsatisfied. We had arrived at our destination, but the conversation hadn’t reached its proper conclusion.

We walked to the street. I was staying in Haad Rin, but she was going northwest to Haad Yao.

Before she went searching for the best priced tuktuk, I asked if she wanted a farewell joint. She shrugged her shoulders and we made our way down to the beach. We took our shoes off and stood in the sand, smoking.

“Why are you so mad at Willem?” I asked.

Lieke took a deep drag, debating.

Then she whispered:

“He took Mila away from me.”

“Who?”

“His daughter,” she said. “He exiled her to Belgium to stay with relatives. We were in love. And now that’s gone, because of him and his perverse beliefs. He ruined everything.”

She pushed the tears from her eyes.

“I loved her,” she wept. “We were in love. We still are.... I still am....”

THE END

Martin B. George is a world traveler and writer. He seeks to connect people through the art of story, or simply make them laugh. A proud member of the LGBTQIA community, his interests include painting, reading and exploring international cuisine. Find him at @the_wandering_nickel on Instagram to follow his adventures.

‘Jessica’ SHORT FICTION CONTEST RUNNER-UP

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Jessica

One of the first books I remember was 1000 Fun and Unbelievable Facts—an oversized affair whose letters lurched off its cover, primed to spill into my doughy palms. Jessica and I spent afternoons tracing the headings with sea-foam-soft fingers, sounding out the impossible four-syllable words. Moths lack stomachs, and thus mostly drink liquids like nectar. An African elephant only has four teeth. Goldfish may eat each other when under stress.

***​

Now, my mother and I bury Jessica on the riverbank. We should have done it on Sunday, right after we killed her, but it was 10 p.m. and neither of us trusted the dark. So instead, we covered her with a towel, left our clothes to soak in cold water and went to sleep.

My mother had first suggested floating her down the river bend for the fish to eat, but I thought that was disrespectful as fuck, and we were family. Jesus Christ. She was your child.

So now we haul her body into the mist-drenched morning and shovel the bank until we can roll her in.

When we killed her, my mother said that she had stopped being Jessica long ago, and it’s not murder if the victim isn’t technically “alive.” And I told her that morality shouldn’t skirt around technicalities.​

I drag Jessica by her clammy hands, legs streaking through the mud. Her mouth is frozen open in a gash, and I imagine her hunger accumulating against her tongue, exploding between her lips and leaving her behind. The back of my throat burns.

I lay her in the hole and pick up the shovel with my raw icicle fingers. Jessica stares up at me, eyes blank, blood a black crust on her shirt. We were always identical. The same widow’s peak and gently sloping nose, twin sets of braids brushing our backs. Jessica-and-Jennifer. We were the other’s reflection. When we were little, we dressed the same to confuse our mother. In the end, she stopped calling us by name and directed her words to whoever was in the room. You, help me wash the dishes. You, take your shoes off before entering the house.

I pour dirt over Jessica’s face, our face, first.

* * *

People online say it’s a rot from the inside, decaying you until you crave flesh to fill the emptiness left behind. I say it doesn’t matter anyway. This is what matters: Jessica’s body buckled into itself as she wasted away organs-first, emaciated throat swallowing her pulse, mouth opening and closing like a fish’s gills out of water. Jessica ate half our goldfish and spit their bones outside my bedroom door so I saw them when I woke. Jessica reached for my arm across the dinner table and tried to take a bite.

She was not the first like this. The disease originated in the countryside, spread to the city, and exploded from there. Children ate their parents. Parents ate their children. Businesses shut down, and people quarantined inside their homes, leaving only to steal from whatever stores had more stock than bloodstains on the floor.

This was my mother’s job now— leaving three times a week to trawl the abandoned shopping centers, running her fingers down the empty shelves, tiles echoing below her feet. Two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have let her go alone. Before Jessica shriveled into a shell. Before I wrestled her down as our mother slit her throat with a kitchen knife, blood seeping tar-thick out of the wound— long-stagnant in its veins. This was because in April, after a trip to Costco, I had found our mother hiding a pack of ham in a floorboard under her bed. I shoved her aside and shook her shoulders until they drained bloodless in my fists, yelling that you can’t just hoard all the food, goddammit. What about me? What about us? Just stay home next time. I’ll split the portions. My God.

From then, until Jessica got sick, she and I made grocery runs. We had one bike, so each trip we traded pedaling and sitting on the back, knees cramped, bony arms around the other’s waist. Whoever was on the back brought the backpack for carrying food. In the earlier weeks, it bulged with soup cans and crushed bags of chips, zippers straining over the Double Stuffed Oreos Jessica loved. By June, it hung around our shoulders like a husk of skin.

On one of our last trips, we lingered in the Walmart aisle, bag on the floor, a single can of sardines in Jessica’s hands. She turned it back and forth, reading the label: WILD CAUGHT & SUSTAINABLE; 170 calories per serving; 1 serving per container. Two weeks expired, but we were long past caring.

Jessica weighed the can in her palm. “Mom never liked fish.”

“No, she didn’t.”

Jessica ran her fingernail along the can’s tab. “Eighty-five calories if we split it evenly. Eleven grams of protein each.”

 I kicked the bag down the aisle.

 The can peeled open, fish and brine permeating salt-thick through the air.

​* * *

“I think murder does something to you.” I say this to my mother as we wait inside the laundromat, our bloodied clothes spinning themselves pure. She stands against the wall, arms crossed. The blue-green fluorescents highlight the wrinkles in her face, and she looks like someone else, older and paler and thinner, her cheekbones stark against skin.

“I already told you. ‘S not murder.”

The washing machine—somehow still in service—clatters.

“You know what I mean.”

She walks to it and peers inside. 

​“I feel like she’s still watching us. Like I’ll turn a corner and she’ll be there, blood all the way down her chest.”

My mother checks the digital clock on the wall, the display frozen at 2:33 p.m. “Guess that’s guilt.”

“Do you think she still recognized us?”

My mother doesn’t look away from the clock.

* * *

Growing up, our mother left Jessica and me at home while she rushed to whatever job she was trying to keep. We had no television, and we weren’t allowed to go outside, so we spent the long afternoons roaming around the house.​

Our favorite game was hide and seek, even though the cramped apartment had few places to crawl into— few holes to fill. Still, we took turns being “It,” facing a corner and counting up to ten. Back then, danger had a countdown. A warning. Jessica always hid behind the curtains in our mother’s bedroom, but I made a show of searching each corner, turning over pans in the kitchen, cushions in the living room. The goal was never finding each other. We only delighted in the search— the rambling turns, the promise of something at the end. After picking through each corner, I’d wander into our mother’s room to see Jessica, silhouetted against white, shadow languid on the floor. I never mentioned how the light revealed her body, crouched against the wall. But she was always too vulnerable.

Once, I tried to surprise her, sneaking to the window and grabbing her through the curtain. My fists clenched around her neck as cloth closed around her head. Her mouth gasped wet against white. Her limbs pummeled blindly. I flinched back, and she tumbled out of the curtain, coughing into the floor. She pushed me in the chest.​

 “Sorry!” I shielded myself with my arms. “It was an accident! Promise I didn’t mean to.”

 She cuffed my shoulder, and I stumbled to the side, feet tangling in the rug.

 “You can get me back, okay? Okay?”

 Jessica, smiling now, shoved me into the curtain. I thudded against the wall, breath punching out from my lungs. I turned my head, and there was the ring of Jessica’s spit, translucent in the sun.

* * *

Noon beats down on us in a blast of dry heat, and I sit in front of our fish tank, watching the lone goldfish drift. Most of the ones left by Jessica had died when we ran out of fish food, and I dumped their limp bodies in the yard. Buried them like a trove of gold coins, earth swallowing the price of her decay.

The radiator wheezes in tepid gusts, and the television buzzes with static. None of the channels broadcast anymore, and even the static is spotty at best, but I like the white noise when it works. A constant background thrum. Something to focus on other than starving.

My mother leans against the wall, dangling a cigarette out the open window.

I fan the air in front of me. “That shit is gonna kill you.”

She lifts the cigarette to her lips and inhales deeply. “Better than being eaten alive.” The cherry glows like a drop of blood on skin.

I stand and fold my arms behind my back. “Did you know goldfish can cannibalize each other? When water temperatures rise too high, or when there isn’t enough food?” Maybe I should have left the fish corpses. The survivors might have lasted.​

My mother exhales out the window, and smoke curls around her upper lip like a ghost of breath. “Brutal.”

The television static fizzes out.

* * *

In the evening, I lie in the bathtub and wrap my arms around my chest. Our stock of stolen ramen ran out two days ago, and the hunger gnaws at me, corroding my ribs. I hold my breath and slide deeper into the tub. The water closes around me like a womb. I pretend I am Jessica, rotting in that riverbed, pulse gone long before my death.

I remember our mother telling us a story like that decades ago— fairies who’d snatch infants and swap them for a changeling, a copy not quite right. She had said this as she washed our hair in this bathtub, drawing pictures in the shampoo sliding down our spines.

 “You would’ve known if we were taken, right?” Jessica asked, eyes wide.​

 Our mother smiled. “You wouldn’t have been taken in the first place. I sat in that nursery and watched you every night. ”

 She’d never answered the question.

 Soap stings my eyes, but I watch my hands distort in the water. What if I caught the disease? If Jessica’s deterioration mirrored itself in me, our bodies hurtling to the same end? My mother would kill me. I know this, true enough to type in block letters and tuck between passages about elephants and moths. She might have to call a neighbor to help, but she would.

* * *

As my mother bathes, I kneel in front of the goldfish again. It bobs up and down, barely visible in the dark—a smudge of orange against blue. I press my fingers against the glass, and it swims up to me, mouth gaping into space. I open in response.

Madeline Rosales has recently won a Gold Key for the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and has publications of poetry and prose with the Academy of the Heart and Mind, The Odyssey Youth Magazine, The WEIGHT Journal, and others. She works as a Senior Editor for Polyphony Lit, and as the Chief Editor for The Cardinal Review. 

‘Intergenerational’ SHORT FICTION CONTEST RUNNER-UP

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Intergenerational

It was around 2pm when we arrived, the roadworks puncturing the main road like great gouged wounds and sending us down the winding country lanes instead. “Lunchtime,” she’d said, which generally meant 12.30-1.00pm. We braced ourselves for the silence – no confrontation, never words – and almost in preparation, neither of us spoke during the final few minutes of the drive.

“I can still see your lipstick,” said Mum, glancing sidelong at me as we turned up the long driveway and the house came slowly, solemnly, into sight. “There’s wipes in the glove compartment.”

Women shouldn’t wear makeup. It’s ungodly.

Amy had bought me that lipstick. “Lover’s Kiss”, the shade was called. I, naïve and grateful, gave her my copy of Little Women in exchange, and she had to spell it out for me two weeks later as we settled on the stained sofa in her halls’ common room: “I like you, you idiot. Like like you.”

I wiped it wordlessly, the pale pink somehow more violent than blood as it smeared across the material, the scent of chemical cheapness filling the car.

“Better?”

“Better.”

God-fearing men don’t like women who wear makeup.

What about if women don’t wear it for men? What about other women?

When I was eight, I’d wandered into Mum’s bedroom and rummaged through her makeup bag.

Everyone else’s mothers wore it in abundance – the school gates were a safari of colour, birds of paradise laughing and fluffing and preening. My mum looked like a sepia photograph out of time. Even her makeup bag, when I found it at the bottom of her dressing table one afternoon (having crept stealthily, and with an enormous sense of my own narrative importance, into her bedroom) was greying.

I opened the zipper with my clumsy child hands, sticky with the sugared contents of a juice box, and silently monologued my adventure like I was the precocious heroine of some kid-friendly American movie, all dimples and Girl Scout cookies. I had eczema and hayfever and a burgeoning case of lactose intolerance; Mickey Mouse club I was not.

Similarly disappointing were the contents of the bag. It didn’t contain much at all – moisturisers and Tampax, mainly – and certainly held no glimmering, colourful secrets, nothing to suggest she secretly glammed up in front of the mirror when I was asleep. I was disappointed; I not only had a drab mum, but she didn’t even mind being drab.

Peeved and disheartened, I rummaged dispiritedly through a layer of old tissues and flicked an empty Nivea tube aside, and at the crinkly off-white bottom of the bag, found a photograph facing up at me. Big Eighties hair and double denim, and the unmistakeable stain of scarlet across smiling mouths – this couldn’t be Mummy, I thought, and I took it down to her, clasped in my clammy little hands.

“That’s not for you,” she said, and snatched it from me. She thrust a damp flannel at my face and scrubbed with a frenzied vigour at the citrus stickiness around my own lips as if it would somehow wipe the war paint from hers. I tasted sour milk and mouldy cotton fibres for hours afterwards.

We never spoke of the faded lipstick kiss on the back of the Polaroid.

We crunched up the driveway in unison, a show of military precision and political unity, Mum and me, me and Mum, the way it had always been, two gawky women with our grey eyes and straight brown hair, wrapped in our muted autumnal-hued jackets even as spring sighed and flickered and coquettishly unfurled all around us. The immaculate windows with their fresh flowers and the flurry of twittering activity at the bird table in the back garden all spoke of a cosy little house where any little girl would be lucky to have her childhood.

The door opened.

“Hello,” said Grandma, and we hugged. She was frail but steely – the grey eyes seemed to pass down the maternal line, and it felt like looking back – and forward – at myself every time we met, an Unheimlich in a pleated skirt. “How are you?”

I’m happier than I’ve ever been, Grandma. I met this girl at uni – Amy, she’s called – and we get on so well, it’s like I’ve been looking for her my whole life. She’s got green eyes, Grandma, like Grandad had, and she’s from Cornwall, like Great-Grandma, and she laughs like Mum does with that laugh that sounds like a crackle, a lovely little fireside crackle in winter.

“I’m fine, how are you?”

“Yes, fine, thank you. Hazel?”

“Yes, I’m fine too.”

Round one of conversation exhausted, she took our jackets and hung them on the hallway hooks with painful care and attention – like it mattered, like any of it mattered – and the three of us moved as one, wordlessly, to the kitchen.

The table was laid; gingham tablecloth that had seen better days but retained a quiet, pitiful pride in its shabby cleanliness. She was a woman of precision, and the salad, retrieved from her ancient fridge-freezer in time for a prompt 12.30 lunch, was wilting in much the same way as my silent resolve.

She poured tea that had cooled into cups that didn’t match the saucers. I thanked her and took a sip, and wished for sugars, sweeteners, even a splash of honey would have helped. Anything.

“Can I use your bathroom, Grandma?”

It always sounded so silly when I said it aloud – what are you, three? – but she wasn’t the sort of woman whose bathroom you just used without asking. She quavered a little before she answered, a kind of quiet wheeze escaping thin lips.

“The flush is broken in the family bathroom,” she said. There hadn’t been family there for years. The three spare bedrooms gathered dust, and I bit my tongue every time I thought of the refugees or homeless people she could have housed, if only she practiced the kind of religion she preached. “You will have to use mine, just off my bedroom.”

I’d never been in there before. The wallpaper, baby pink but yellowing at the edges, guided me on a geometric journey up the stairs and through her perfectly neat bedroom, the king size bed with its ruffle-edged satiny eiderdown a magnificent relic of days gone by. The side on which she slept looked no different to the side where Grandad had slumbered until ten years ago, the fabric unrumpled and the pillows artificially plumped. It was as if heterosexuality – sexuality of any sort – had never lived here.

The bathroom was pink too, pink and white like the marshmallow filling of the wafer biscuits at my childhood birthday parties, pink like the dresses of the Barbies she begrudgingly bought me – I conducted weddings between them in secret long before it was legal. I sat on the toilet with my skirt hitched up and pissed out a whole car journey’s worth of Fruit Shoot.

She had a dressing table just by the door to her ensuite, and as I left, closing the door behind me, I accidentally knocked a talcum powder pot onto the floor, sending it rolling beneath the chair.

Retrieving it, my sleeve caught on the handle of the lowest drawer, and it slid open with surprising ease. I looked in, of course I did – and she looked back.

There she was, my past and future self, my mother once removed, grey eyed and grey skinned in the monochrome of the Fifties. The high-waisted checked skirt suited her – I imagined it even had some colour – and the smile on her face as she hung adoringly on the arm of a bespectacled girl with ringlets had a strange sheen to it – an almost painted, glossy quality.

What about women who wear makeup for other women? What about women who wear it for themselves?

It was cold to the touch, and I flipped it over, half hoping for the perfect synchronicity of a faded lipstick kiss adorning the back of the image. There was nothing, just Grandma’s initials and those of a G.H alongside them. I wondered what had happened to G.H, who she was, what she’d said to Grandma to make that smile shine so bright.

Had they painted each other’s faces, swapped lipsticks in secret, laughed like crackling fires at private jokes the world could never steal?

Perhaps not. I always was a sucker for a sentimental story.

I replaced it and closed the drawer, then the door behind me, retreating down those rickety, faded old stairs. They were still in the kitchen, stilted meteorological small talk just about audible from the staircase. I reached into my pocket and pulled out Lover’s Kiss, applying it blindly without a mirror. I didn’t need a mirror. I didn’t need to see my reflection when two of them sat waiting for me, cowed and colourless, behind that wooden door.

“Hi Grandma,” I said, taking my seat at the gingham-draped table. “I want to tell you about my friend Amy.”

Chloe de Lullington (she/her) is an author and screenwriter based in Manchester, UK. Her debut novel, Cacoethes, a queer satirical sugar baby comedy, will be published with Northodox Press in June 2025, and she has had short fiction and poetry published in The Word's Faire, Bullshit Lit, Powders Press, and For Page & Screen Magazine. A lifelong outsider looking curiously in, she is drawn to the offbeat and eccentric, and the minutiae of peoples' lives that might mean everything - or could mean absolutely nothing at all.

‘Feathers and Bones’ & ‘Erosion’

Artist- John L Gronbeck-Tedesco

Feathers and Bones

I lied to a priest 

at the age of eight.

My sins would be forgiven

if I was sorry.

There are only three things

bodies need to survive—

forgiveness isn’t one.

I was a bride for the first time

at the age of nine.

I walked down the aisle toward 

a wrinkled, balding man.

He presented my husband—

a thin, tasteless wafer I was  

told became His body. 

I took back my original sin

at the age of fourteen.

I stained every spec of white

with the blood dripping

from the gaping holes

where I ripped apart my wings

and scattered the ground with

feathers and bones.

Erosion 

Raindrops falling down a windowpane

You leave me

S-l-o-w-l-y.

Your laugh, a

chuckle

giggle

chortle

snicker

I can’t remember.

Were those earthen locks softer than the blanket I clutch?

A smile that lit up a room—an exaggeration?

I rip through the pages,

Entreating one photo after another

“Please remind me.”

Still those raindrops fall off the edge

to oblivion

Another piece of you 

fades 

away.

Sierra Tufts is a writer living in Pennsylvania who received her MFA from Arcadia University. Her flash fiction has been published in 805 Lit + Art. She has also published poetry in two anthologies—Hey There, Delilah! by Wingless Dreamer and New Voices – Spring 2024 by Moonstone Arts Center.

‘Bunhill Field’, ‘Dinosaur Footprints’, & ‘Only the Forest Remembers’

Artist- John L Gronbeck-Tedesco

Bunhill Field

Early spring in Islington, 

hyacinths poking through, 

daffodils in bloom, 

even the magnolia trees 

exploding. 

Walking three blocks 

to Bunhill Field 

through London sun 

and crowded sidewalks. 

Bunhill Field, 

eternal home of Daniel Defoe, 

John Bunyan. 

The grounds where Isaac Watts 

forever sings “Joy to the World.” 

And behind the hedgerow, 

William Blake watches his city 

rise around him. 

Romantic prophet, 

forging the reign of Urizen 

who watches and waits. 

Urizen watches and builds 

the walls of his 

chartered metropolis. 

Urizen builds walls 

and hammers mighty chains 

to keep his people in check. 

And there lies William Blake, 

visionary with crown of light 

and trees full of angels. 

South in Peckham Rye, 

those angelic trees 

glowed and pulsed, 

sending letters of love 

and rebellion to the dungeons 

of the Tower of London. 

Wordsworth called him a madman, 

and mad he was, but those visions, 

from the heart of Islington, 

awaken the grand city 

and guide us toward tomorrow’s 

fantastical sleep.

Dinosaur Footprints

Aqua-marine spray paint 

on weathered ply-wood: 

“DINOSAUR FOOTPRINTS, NEXT LEFT.” 

Not knowing what to expect, 

we signaled, pulled into the gravel lot, 

and stepped out to the blast furnace

of June in northern Arizona.

Under an awning, 

folding tables filled 

with turquoise rings, 

necklaces, bracelets, all for sale. 

Local mothers keeping 

food on the table 

and love in their hearts: 

“You guys want a tour?” 

a young woman asked. 

There was a crumpled five 

in my pocket, 

I handed it to her, and we set out 

across hardened Jurassic mud. 

“Here, dilophosaurus, 

they probably didn’t actually spit venom

like in the movie, 

and there, our state dinosaur, sonorasaurus. 

You can tell its giant gate 

by measuring one print to the next.” 

As we walked back in time, 

200 million years to when 

that shallow sea covered the Moenkopi flats, 

as we stepped back in time to witness 

the pinnacle of 19th Century

Navajo freedom, 

we sipped our bottled water 

and munched week-old trail mix

from out our shiny new REI backpack. 

“And here,” she said, 

spilling water at our feet 

to highlight the indentations, 

“you’re standing in the print of a T. Rex.” 

70 million years of wind, rain, erosion, 

and there we stood. 

We thanked her, wished her luck, 

and headed out. 

We had to make Kayenta 

for those 1:00 PM fry bread tacos 

and our lunch date at

JoD’s laundromat. 

Only the Forest Remembers

Only the forest remembers 

and us. 

The sturdy, low boughs 

held us in our youth 

as we climbed. 

The upper twigs swayed 

and bent in the wind. 

From the tops, 

through leaves and clouds, 

the sailboats shined 

on silver waters. 

Waters running from 

Chicago to Alpena, 

Detroit to Montreal. 

The waters follow that highway 

of sorrow and forgetfulness, 

Mackinac to Mobile, 

Timbuktu to Shangri-La. 

Only the forest remembers 

the broken shale. 

Knee deep shards 

lined the gulch 

carved by ancient ice and snow. 

When the glaciers receded 

and the Pleiades fell 

to sandy shoreline solitude, 

when sumac burned crimson, 

vermillion, jasper before 

November’s gale, 

before Friday nights at Curtis Field, 

water and wind worked their magic 

and the Devonian hexagons 

bleached in the drought 

of August.

Only the forest remembers 

and those warm midnight stars. 

We found Sagittarius 

in the eastern sky 

and The Dipper’s double glow. 

Ptolemy knew the archer 

was thirsty. 

Ptolemy knew when 

the hunt was lost. 

And with that J. C. Penny telescope, 

we knew the lunar mountains. 

Shadows cast ‘cross craters 

and ‘cross benighted minds 

of childhood’s fancy. 

With astral projection, 

we never looked back. 

Only the forest remembers 

those long days 

spent as mountain men, trappers, 

and Allied soldiers 

slinking across enemy lines 

to blow ammo dumps 

and liberate France. 

Each broken branch a Winchester 

or an M1 Garand. 

Each of us, Lee Marvin or John Wayne. 

“Say your prayers, 

you Nazi bastards!” 

we called wading through trout lilies 

and barberry thorns. 

“We have you in 

our sights!”

Only the forest remembers 

and us. 

Those long, lazy afternoons 

biking through the trees. 

Catching air off exposed roots, 

we soared like harriers. 

Rounding embankments 

with no hands. 

“Look ma!” we called to no avail. 

Parents weren’t watching. 

Our summers remained 

unsupervised, remained free. 

They’d call us for dinner;

we’d run home for tacos 

or hamburgs and hotdids 

before returning to the woods 

to live out grandiose lives 

until bedtime called 

us home again.

Andre F. Peltier (he/him) is a Pushcart and two time Best of the Net nominated poet and a Lecturer III at Eastern Michigan University where he teaches literature and writing. He lives in Ypsilanti, MI, with his wife and children. His poetry has recently appeared in various publications both online and in print. His poetry collections Poplandia and Ambassador Bridge are available from Alien Buddha. He has another collection forthcoming in 2024: Petoskey Stones from Finishing Line Press.

‘The Artist’ SHORT FICTION CONTEST RUNNER-UP

PHOTOGRAPHER - Tobi Brun

The Artist

It was a warm day at the market. The sunlight came down through the tall oak trees and lay slotted across the stalls. The man picked at his fingernails with a paring knife, humming to himself. He shared smiles with patrons walking by and glancing at his wares, coming and going.

He got up from behind the table and reorganized the wooden staffs leaning there, turning their showier sides toward the walkway. He paced back a few feet and stood looking at them, his hands on his hips. They looked good. People were walking up and down the path and he would move out of their way while judging the stall’s presentation.

It was a busy day, the townsfolk chatting with vendors and inspecting melons, soaps, and candles. Children ran by with honey sticks in their hands and the park smelled of sweet earth and wax. He placed a few of the staffs in different positions and inspected them from the pathway again. Satisfied, he walked back over to sit down in his chair.

He pulled the knife out of his pocket and went back about his business, watching the skin and dirt fall to the ground in little flecks. His nails were clean quickly and he stuck his legs out and crossed them over each other, tipping his broad hat a little lower on his face. He dozed in the humid morning, the conversations around him middling into a sweet hum.

“Whatcha got here?”

He jumped at the voice and pushed the hat up his head, standing and dusting his pants.

“Howdy howdy, sorry about that there, this warm weather just puts me right to sleep.”

“Oh I don’t blame ya none. Ya make these?”

“Yessir you bet. My ol grandpa taught me when I was a youngin. Been whittlin since.”

The visitor picked up a staff. “Ya mind?”

“Go right ahead. Stern stuff.”

The visitor hefted the walking stick up and inspected it from its rubber tip at the bottom all the way to the top. It was smooth and lacquered but honored the wood’s natural from.

“I’m Carl.”

“Hess.” The visitor inspected the knots and put it on the ground, his arm out in front of him.

“That one’s lookin too tall for ya. Here, try this one.” He counted down the sticks from the side of the table till he found the one he wanted and grasped it by its handle. “That’s it.”

The visitor took the stick and placed the other one back.

“Oh, yeah. That feels right. Sturdy, too.” He put his whole weight against it, the staff bowing slightly. He inspected it thoroughly and then placed it back. “Thank ya, much obliged. I’m gonna head on over to the square. You comin?”

“What’s goin on?”

“What’s goin on? You ain’t heard?”

“Nope. I just sit here and whittle away.” It was then that he noticed most of the market was empty. The booths were closed up and only a few people rushed on down the path. The dull roar of conversation in the distance met his ears.

“They done locked a fella up in a rock.”

“They did what now?”

“They locked this fella up in a big ol rock and kept em in the museum. He’s been in there a week and ain’t been out yet. They’re bringin it to the square. They’re fixin to open it up and get him out.”

“Today?”

“Lord, right now.”

“Shoot. I got to see that.”

“I’ll see you there.”

The man hurried down the path with the others. Carl bounded to the front of the table and collected the walking sticks in a big bundle in his arms, shuffling to the back of his stall. He lowered them on to the ground in front of a storage chest and they clattered against each other. Finding the key in his pocket, he unlocked the rusted padlock and opened the chest, placing his merchandise inside. Then he locked the chest and put the key back into his pocket, leaving the stall. He strode down the pathway.

When he was out of the park he walked down 22nd until Jefferson street and then took a right. He could see the large crowd gathered there around the obelisk. Their roar filled the plaza and rebounded off the marbled buildings. He stopped and looked at them, confined by the tall stone pillars on one side and brick storefronts on the other. A man was selling hot dogs on one end and an ice cream truck was parked at the other. Music box Joplin cut through the din and children pulled at their parents. He sauntered up and stood at the back of the crowd, now able to see it. In front of the obelisk was a gray boulder. It was mottled with whites and blacks. The crowd encircled it.

“What’s goin on?” Carl asked.

The man beside him turned to look at him briefly then brought his eyes back to the rock. “They’re gon let him out.”

“He been in there seven days?”

“Yes sir,” a man on the other side of him said.

Carl grunted and pumped up his ankles to get a better look. It was very sunny and the rock reflected some of the rays. He put his hands on his forehead to shade his eyes and then brought his heels back down.

“You think he’s alive?”

“Oh lord, I sure hope so,” a woman in front of him said in return, her large hat now blocking some of his view.

Another woman standing next to her nodded and said: “He better be. I just don’t know what I’d do if I saw a dead man.”

“Aw, honey, ain’t nothin to be afraid of. I seen plenty,” one of the men said. “Mister Wilson, have you forgotten that I’m a lady?”

“My apologies ma’am, didn’t mean nothin by it.”

“That’s alright, sugar. One of my girlfriends said he lived in a bottle.”

“He did what?”

“Mhm, you heard that right. A whole month. Lived in a little bottle out by the beach.”

“You’re tellin me he lived all alone inside a bottle by the beach?” Carl asked her. She turned her big hat around now, showing her face.

“Wouldn’t never lie.”

“Takes all kinds I suppose.”

The men and women all nodded in agreement about that and fixed their gaze back upon the rock. The obelisk’s shadow grew shorter and then was gone. The men scratched themselves and shifted the weight on their feet and the women fanned themselves with their hats and their hands. Carl’s stomach rumbled.

“When’re they openin him up?”

“Beats me, but I ain’t missin it.”

Carl looked out over the crowd again. The boulder still sat there. There were people

behind him now.

“I’ll be back,” he said to those around him, and edged his way out of the crowd. He walked over to the museum underneath the big pillared building and went through the doors. It was cool and dark and he waited a moment for his eyes to adjust. He walked down the hall, following the signs, to the bathroom. It was empty and he urinated and walked back out of the building into the light again. The crowd was growing. He went over to the hot dog stand.

“Howdy.”

“Howdy, what can I get ya?” “Guessin I’ll take one of those dogs.” “Two dollars.”

Carl handed him the two bills and the man took his tongs and grabbed a hot dog from inside and placed it on a bun in some wax paper. He handed it to Carl.

“Thank ya.”

“Help yourself,” he said, pointing with his head to the ketchup and mustard. Carl squirted a line of each down the hot dog and stood eating it in the shade of the hot dog stand’s umbrella.

“You gettin good business today?”

“Best in a long time.”

“I could use some myself.”

Carl stood out of the way while another patron came up to the stand and the man helped him.

“You gonna go over there and see this?”

“You know it.”

“You don’t think you’ll miss it over here?”

“Aw, I’ll hear y’all start roarin over there and come over and see.”

“Fair enough, fair enough.” Carl finished the hot dog and licked his fingers, cleaning them with a napkin, and threw the refuse into the trash can next to the stand. “Thanks again.”

“Ain’t nothin but my pleasure.” The man smiled at him with his big yellow teeth.

Carl left and walked back to the crowd, shoving himself back into where he was before. The shadow of the obelisk had come down on the other side now, short and stubby.

“When they openin it?” he asked.

“Dunno.”

“Aw hell.” He looked at his watch and then put his wrist back down and continued to wait, staring forward at the heads in front of him.

“What’s he doin it for?”

“Dunno.”

“Hell.”

“He’s an artist,” a voice to his side said. “An artist?”

“It’s all I heard.” The man shrugged and kept peering over the others to steal looks at the boulder.

“Gotdamn but it’s hot.”

“Oh, please don’t say that now,” one of the women said. “He just must be so gosh darn hot in there.”

“Suppose that’s why they kept him down there in that museum till it was time. Next to all them ol grey coats.”

“You think he’s okay?”

“Hell if I know.”

The woman fanned herself again, beads of sweat dripping down her temples. “Why don’t we go head and get these folks back to the market and the shade while

they wait?” Carl asked.

“He could come on out any minute now. We ain’t missin it.”

It was then that the doors to the museum opened up and four men dressed in black walked out. One of them carried a canvas duffel bag. A few people turned to look and after several nudges and murmurs the crowd then watched them as they walked down into the square. The people parted and the four men walked through them toward the boulder. They sat the duffel in front of the rock and opened it up. One man took out a thick hammer and the others began pulling out railway ties. They held them in place while the man with the hammer struck them all into the rock. The pegs ran in a line that went up from the bottom of the boulder and around the top and back to the bottom again. Once they were all in place, the man with the hammer began to swing. He swung over and over, driving each railway tie deeper. The other men stood on each side of the boulder, arms crossed and facing the crowd, glasses shading their eyes. The clank of the hammer filled the square, echoing off the angled marble all around.

The boulder cracked.

The man with the hammer set it down and motioned to the other three. They began to pry the boulder open, the crevice growing bigger.

“My lord,” one of the women said.

One of the men stuck his head into the crack and spoke something. He nodded and the men continued to heave and then he reached his torso inside, pulling him out. He turned around and faced the crowd, holding him.

He was ashen and limp and clothed only in his drawers. His smell spread across the square and his eyes opened in slits. He turned his head slowly, looking at them all there staring back at him. The man holding him leaned down to his mouth and then nodded again and they began to walk through the people. His legs and arms dangled down and he shielded his eyes from the sun light in the man’s chest.

Once they had walked out of the square, his carrier let him down and he swayed on his feet, holding tight to the other man’s frame.

“Hold up, tell that man to wait!” Carl shouted. “I got just the thing.” He turned around and shoved his way through the crowd, running back to the market.

GRANTLAND KILGORE currently lives in Alexandria, VA, USA with his wife and dog. An alumnus of Clemson University, he grew up in South Carolina, spending many summers in the Western North Carolina mountains. His work has appeared in storySouth and and Half and One. He hopes to someday publish a short story collection centered on the American South. Outside of reading and writing, his passions lie in camping, hiking, running, and writing music.

‘Little Satellites’

‘Little Satellites’

THE WINNER OF THE GARDEN-VARIETY GRIMOIRE ANTHOLOGY CONTEST

I

This is years ago, but a boy who can’t even grow a beard yet is on a plane at night. He’s up against the window, tomato juice on his tongue, gazing at a landscape of lights below and convincing himself he’s looking at the night sky. He writes in a Moleskine notebook on a flimsy food tray. A notebook she bought him as a present. On the left page, the words I HATE HER are repeated from top to bottom in red ink. I HATE HER I HATE HER I HATE HER. He looks at the fake stars on the ground.

 Los Angeles is a terrible place. Especially nowadays, with the wildfires and the rising sea levels and the social media influencers. But even back then it was awful. The way the temperature is always perfect. The way it never rains. The way tanned men shout in apartment courtyards at night. The way it shatters every illusion, reveals you to yourself. That’s where he’s leaving from, where she is, where she’ll stay. Los Angeles is a stick of dynamite up the ass. A line of cocaine off a park bench. A girl with a rose behind her ear telling you, without regret, that she’s blown the entire starting lineup for the Dodgers. Forget that place, it’s so beautiful. You’re better off going East.

 The cheek of the boy who can’t grow a beard is cold against the window. He tries to sleep, but the humming of the plane is too loud and his left leg won't stop twitching. He jolts upright, starts ripping pages out of his notebook. One-by-one, then in huge fistfuls. He’s snarling, crying, destroying Los Angeles in his mind, the whole damn city at once, copulating like a porn star or a stripper, like he hates it more than anything in the world. Balls of paper pile at his feet. A pretty red-haired stewardess walks by, adjusts her jacket and keeps walking.

 The plane won’t be in flight much longer. The man who can’t grow a beard is whimpering now, like a puppy trapped in a well. He thinks he’s sad, being so young and all, but his sadness is merely happiness masquerading as sadness. Right now he wants to purge the quote unquote sadness from his body like spoiled chicken when instead he should be holding it close to his heart and letting it burn like hot metal. One day he’ll search for living sadness like this, believing it must be somewhere. He'll search like mad out in the brightly lit world, but it’ll be gone forever. Up in the air, like a plane between stars.

 The man with a white beard at the end of the row is growing concerned. This smooth-faced boy is something else, he thinks, sipping scotch. This boy is trying for something. He’s just not quite there yet. Listen to those pathetic noises he’s making. With his too-tight jeans and that mustard stain on his jacket. White Beard recognizes the boy's sadness, knows there’s life beyond what he’s currently feeling. He thinks: boy, there are things you want to be, things you think you are. Right now you’re butting up against the edges. A universe trying to expand, but realizing it can only contract. Realizing this harshly.

White Beard thinks about his wife at home. Pouring a glass of Pino and crying, probably. He thinks of his two kids now out of the house. Philadelphia and Toronto. Real estate agent and school teacher. A universe in contraction. A star burning out. Little satellites thrown here and there, producing the illusion of stability. Of permanence. Little satellites that revolve for a while then crash.

 White Beard sips then leans toward the boy.

 “Don’t you just love flying?” he asks.

 The boy rubs his eyes and shifts his feet, scattering the paper balls.

 "I don't love anything."

 "That's what you think."

 “It's what I know."

 White Beard gestures towards the balls with his glass.

 "What have you written there?"

 "Crap. That's why they're balls now."

 “I’m sure it’s not all crap. You shouldn't throw them away."

 "Excuse me. Who are you?"

 "I have some of my best ideas on planes. The feeling of being suspended between places.” He sips. “Don't say it's crap."

 "Sure."

 The boy looks away, snuggles up against the window. In the darkness below there's a small explosion, a brief burst of light, like a supernova dying.

 "I'm never going back to Los Angeles," the boy mutters.

 "You don't have to."

 "I think I'll move to New York."

 "New York is Los Angeles with snow. The streets aren't clean. And all those skyscrapers."

 "I think it's more my style."

 "Oh, you don't know your style. Not yet at least."

 "Excuse me?"

 "Maybe it’d be good for you, though."

 "How do you mean?"

 "Like winter's good for a tree. A time to lie dormant. To take stock, then flourish. At least New York's far from Los Angeles.”

 "Drink some more scotch, why don't ya?"

 "I will."

 White Beard sips. The scotch stings his throat. He swirls the glass, thinking.

 "Let me see what you've written."

 "What?"

 "On the floor there. The crap balls. Hand me one."

 "It's not good."

 "Doesn't have to be."

 "Why do you care?"

"It's not about caring. It's about recognition."

"Whatever.” The boy tosses a ball to the man. “Knock yourself out."

White Beard uncrumples the paper, pulls a pair of spectacles from his pocket.

What he reads isn’t half bad. It’s about the last time this boy and his Los Angeles girl made love. The boy had placed candles around her platform bed, really trying to make it special. Yet as soon as they started kissing, he knocked one of the candles onto the bed. Flame and ash. Ruined the girl’s $300 pillowcase.

"That was very palatable crap,” White Beard says, flattening out the paper and handing it back to the boy.

"You're funny."

"I'm serious. Keep writing."

"That's what I intend to do. But thanks anyway."

White Beard removes his glasses and places them in his shirt pocket.

"This girl,” he says. “Was she Los Angeles?"

“How do you mean?”

“I mean had she become Los Angeles?”

"Yeah, maybe. In some ways,” the boy says, not quite comprehending. “The city sunk its teeth into her."

"People can be places."

"People become places."

"I like that better."

The boy was feeling less tense by the second. This strange, half-drunk man was relaxing him, against all odds.

"You know, the first time I flew, I had to knock myself out with Percocet, I was so nervous,” White Beard says.

"About?"

"Breathing stale air. Crashing into a cliff. Dying. Now look at me."

 “I'm looking." The boy tries to smile. "This is only my second time on a plane."

"And you're not scared?"

"If I think about it too much. But usually I can stop thinking."

"The best thing to do, in most situations."

Those were the last words White Beard and the boy spoke to each other. The energy between them dissipated after White Beard finished his scotch. The boy fell asleep. White Beard looked out the window, thinking about his lonely drunken wife, his adult children, his youth. The plane landed and they went their separate ways without acknowledging they'd ever come together.

The boy carries a bowling ball in his stomach as he walks alone through the empty airport at night. That bowling ball is the girl. That bowling ball is that sprawling city out West with dirty streets and porn stars skulking every alleyway.

II

That was back then, years ago, I’m telling you, before the wildfires got bad, before TikTok, before the virus, before Ukraine, before whatever we’re in today. The boy can grow a beard now, and he has a thick brown one, like a bird’s nest. Let’s call him Brown Beard. He has two small satellites of his own. They revolve around him constantly, ketchup stains on their shirt necks, arms outstretched as if to say please.

The man sees these satellites in the kitchen, watches them dance around a woman with bags under her eyes, a smiling tired woman, a hardened woman the man has known since she was soft. She’s the woman who came after the bowling ball, after Los Angeles. A Wisconsinite who loves Cracker Barrel. A gentle woman with an autoimmune disorder. She’s never even been to the West Coast. The man has become both a satellite and a universe for this woman, revolving and expanding, in that order. They live together in a small Appalachian town. It's pleasant.

“I’m going now,” Brown Beard says to those satellites in the kitchen. He lifts a light duffle bag off the floor. The satellites run toward him with stained mouths and bright eyes. They embrace his thighs like vines. “Daddy, don’t go!” shouts one with long blonde hair and a missing tooth. “We’ll miss you, daddy!” shouts the other with brown hair and a bruise on his cheek. In a burst of clarity, the man realizes what all of his struggles have been for. Every mistake leading to this beautiful moment, like walking through briars to get to the sea. The happiness he feels when his children embrace him can’t touch the sadness of his past, that overwrought-but-living sadness of his youth.

Even as he thinks this, though, he knows it isn't true. The new happiness and the old sadness are two different things. He’s two different things. The world itself is two different things. The glow of life he felt back then could only have been felt back then. Now that it's gone, it’s gone. The pleasure of a corn-fed woman and stained-mouthed satellites could exist only now. He’s thankful for that. The two have no business mixing, anyway.

He kisses his wife, tells her he loves her. Tells her he’ll be back in a couple of days, that he doesn’t want to stay in Los Angeles any longer than necessary. He means that, maybe more than anything he’s said in his life.

III

The man is skinned alive with anxiousness waiting for his flight. He’s wearing a mask because of his wife's disorder, but not many others are. There are more people here than he’s seen in one place in a long time. They’re bolting this way and that at astonishing rates, moving like they should’ve been somewhere 20 minutes ago. Wrinkly men in gray suits. European girls in gray sweatpants. Fat women trailed by crusty-nosed youngins. They move as animals, as a single indecipherable blur. The stench of living human bodies hangs in the air like hot mayonnaise. A TV in the waiting area, just above the man’s head, reads CIVILIANS TAKE UP ARMS IN UKRAINE.

The man has been in airports before, obviously. But it’s been years. This is no airport he recognizes. The signifiers are the same, but something bedrock has shifted. The man cannot determine whether the change has occurred within himself or out in the world. Or both. Or neither.

He’s nervous after boarding, too. Antsy. Can’t stop thinking about everything that must go right for the plane to reach its destination. What if the pilot didn’t get a good night’s sleep? What if whoever did the pre-trip inspection missed something important? Stale air gets caught in his throat like cottage cheese. He pulls a bottle of pills from his carry-on bag and pops a couple on his tongue, washes them down with water. He reclines as far back as he can in coach and dries his palms on his jeans.

Seated next to him are two blonde girls in their 20s. Sweatpants and no make-up. They speak of going to Hollywood for the first time, watching surfers on Santa Monica Beach, floating on the honey cream air of Los Angeles. They shoot him concerned, seemingly disgusted glances, as if to say hasn’t this guy ever been on a plane before?

I have, he’d like to say. But things are different now. One day they’ll be different for you, too.

A rush of contentment fills every cell of the man’s body. The pills, like opium, are kicking in. The interior of the plane becomes a cloud and the man is finally somewhere he’s been before. Somewhere he can trust. He checks Facebook one last time before the metal cage he’s seated in is launched above the clouds. Into a kind of orbit.

The profile picture is of her, on Santa Monica beach, gazing at the ocean like it holds some unknowable truth. She seems younger than her 37 years. Not much different from how the man remembers her looking back then. He can’t wrap his mind around her death, can’t comprehend how someone he’d once been so close with could be wiped from existence just like that, without reason.

The comments on her page are flowers on a gravestone:

I’m begging you God please tell me I’m dreaming!

Trying to sleep every night is no good when you can’t sleep…Hope I drift off soon and you come visit me in my dreams.

I catch myself texting you. I miss you more than words can explain.

My hurt is burning right now.

The man thinks: who does this page refer to? Other pages point to someone in the world. People who wake up and go to the grocery store and love and hate and fight and fuck. But this page is an amputation. Only half-alive. If that. 

The man wants to write something to her, but can’t think of anything to improve upon the collective grief. So he turns off his phone. He can feel the tears coming on, hot and wet, but won’t let them flow.

He tries to remember their final interaction. Snippets of memory return like dreams. The two of them on a hilly trail outside Santa Monica. The air warm (of course), the sky clear (of course) and her in a floral sundress, an orchid tucked behind her ear, walking with hands clasped behind her back, looking at everything – the dirt, the birds, the sea – except for him.

“So what you’re saying,” the boy had said. “Is this is the end.”

“Yeah,” she’d said. “I think it has to be.”

The man wakes up covered in sweat. He doesn’t know where he is or how he got there. He’s almost certain he made a little hollow noise as he was waking up. The drug hangs heavy on his brain and body.

“Are you OK?” one of the blonde girls asks, in a nicer tone than expected.

“Yeah,” he says sluggishly. “I’m fine. Thanks for asking.”

“You were, like, moaning a lot in your sleep. The whole plane was worried.”

“Well it’s good to know so many people care about me,” the man says, using his shirt sleeve to wipe away moisture on his upper lip. “This your first time going to Los Angeles?”

“Yes,” the girl says. Her eyes are candles on an empty beach. “Oh my goodness, we’re, like, so excited. We’re thinking about moving here. I heard it’s sunny and 75, like, every day.”

The man smiles. He cannot believe how young they are. How old he is. How the universe has flipped overnight. Before he had a chance to pin it all down, to understand. He thinks of things he could say to them, like be careful, don’t let the city suck you dry, move anywhere but here. Yada yada.

At one point in his life, many years ago, he could’ve fallen in love with these girls. Lit up at the sight of them. Pontificated on the machinations of the universe with them. Talked of planets orbiting stars in distant galaxies, all that drug-and-lust-fueled young adulthood crap. The boy he once was, that oracle and idiot, is still inside him. But it’d take too much effort to unearth that version of himself now, like pulling a corpse from the rubble of an earthquake. So the man lets his old self die, screaming under mangled metal and glass, a pale hand reaching toward the sun.

“The weather’s great there,” he tells the girls. “Just enjoy it. Try to enjoy it.”

IV

The man does not go to the funeral. He intended to. That was the whole point of the trip. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. The service was being held at her favorite bar – Roxy’s, a block off Santa Monica Beach, where she worked for a decade – and the man had gotten as far as the big red front door. Her picture is posted out front. That’s what stops him. It’s the girl he used to know, the girl with a flower behind her ear and a lavender darkness in her soul. How awful it’d be to see her cold lifeless body. A body once so full of fire now devoid of a soul. Drained and decaying. He places a hand on the picture, tries to feel its realness, tries to remember what she felt like. The salty air makes his beard hard and sticky.

He remembers being on this street many times before, in the pre-Tik Tok pre-COVID past. Sometimes walking with an arm around her waist, a show of protection from the city’s gnashing teeth. Usually the two of them were stoned, smoking a joint on the sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon, sun beaming like a happy friend. They’d stroll past bums and coffee shops and graffiti, high on the simple stupid thought of being alive in California.

Other times he’d stumbled down this street well past midnight, piss drunk, searching for a cab to take him far away from her, the slut, the insidious manipulative slut who cared for no one but herself, for nothing but her own narrow-minded philosophy of the universe. Drugs, sex, free love. Stupid hippie bullshit. Her own life and death. She talked a lot about death.

Now walking this street, he sees himself as those girls on the plane must’ve seen him. As a man sliding toward the grave. With each step on the hot pavement, he tries to snatch the glow he once knew from the tops of buildings. From the salty air. From the dirty sidewalk. But he’s grasping for something no longer available to him. Those girls, they could grasp it. For now, at least. Hold it. Swallow it into their wet warm guts. But for him, it’s all gone flat.

Yet the flatness, in its way, feels true. Right. Real. Maybe the flatness was what he should’ve been going after all along.

V

Now Brown Beard is on a bench on the Santa Monica pier, mask strapped tightly to his face, looking at the ferris wheel, the roller coaster, all that colorful crap. He didn’t intend to stop writing all those years ago, yet he gave it up as soon as he’d returned from L.A. He let the delusionary vision of himself as some sort of Hunter Thompson or Charles Bukowski die. If I can’t write and live like them, wide open and straight from the gut, I should just quit. That’s how he felt back then. This assessment was dead wrong, of course. One doesn't have to be self-destructive to be a great writer. And not everyone has to be a great writer besides. There’s plenty of room for good writers, even middling-to-decent ones, so long as writing does what it’s supposed to do, which is make a body feel whole, important, unique. A satellite separate from other satellites. On its own orbit, even if that orbit is insignificantly different from the rest.

He thinks of White Beard. It’s something he does when he's in a certain state of mind. It’s funny, he thinks, how this man has stuck with him for so long, while the image of so many other strangers have faded into non-memory. He recalls one specific part of their conversation as they’d sat on the plane that night, White Beard swirling his scotch. People are places, or something like that. He felt this was true. We absorb what we see, feel, hear, taste and smell, and through osmosis, turn into those things. Sometimes partially, other times fully. That’s why he’d fled Los Angeles. The beauty and the grime and the heat and the vapidity were seeping into his pores, turning him into someone he didn’t recognize. Eating away at his insides.

It killed her, didn’t it? At 37, to boot. But this is a silly thought. She died of an aortic dissection. A freak genetic thing. Just like her father did, at 42. Cities don’t kill people. Not like that, at least.

He’d avoided coming back to Los Angeles because he’d known this place when he was bursting at the seams with life. He was afraid to look at it through aging eyes that could destroy any remaining illusions.  But now, sitting on the pier, watching the river of existence pass by, in the form of young girls in yellow sundresses and bulky tanned dudes with balloon muscles and frumpy women in short shorts, he’s surprised to see everything glimmering. Not in the way it once did, heady and surrealistic, but in the way flecks of glass embedded in a sidewalk reflect sunlight.  He’d been worried that something fundamental about him had changed for the worse. But sitting here, in the hot sun, he realizes he no longer needs to feel that deep, life-affirming sadness. It, indeed, could’ve only existed in his past. Should’ve only existed in his past. He no longer needs to expand at the rate he once did.

Brown Beard misses the girl. The girl he once knew, before she changed and died. He’s a lifelong agnostic, but inexplicably finds himself praying for her soul, which is now either soaring across the universe or nowhere at all. He bids her memory adieu. Thanks her for the good times. Apologizes for his misgivings. Forgives her sins.

I never moved to New York, he thinks, the sun drying the sweat on his skin. He starts down that path, considering how life might’ve unfolded differently if, upon leaving Los Angeles, he split for the Big Apple. Shacked up in some grimy apartment in a dirty neighborhood, started living destitute and strung out, like a character from Rent without the romanticism. Maybe he would’ve had more experiences. Maybe he wouldn’t have stopped writing. Maybe some deeper labyrinth would’ve been carved into his soul. Maybe he would’ve been happier, sadder, both.

None of that matters in the end, because what he did do after Los Angeles was move to sleepy Appalachia. The antithesis of New York. That’s where he met his wife, in a coffee shop. She’d had her nursing books splayed across a table. A student at the time, fresh out of a short disaster of a relationship. She’d looked up at him as he was walking toward the counter, dressed in a dumb pea coat and an even dumber paperboy hat that at the time he thought was super cool. He’d noticed her freckles, she his soft almond eyes. She smiled and said “you new around here?”

He said he was. That he wasn’t quite sure where he was going next. He asked if maybe she could help him figure that out.

The Wisconsinite with the autoimmune disorder smiled.

VI

Here’s something: out there on the edge of the universe, there is no Los Angeles. No New York City. Only expansion and contraction, a balance between the two, a dull humming like a plane engine, and many little satellites inside, condemned to continuous movement, like dark waves lapping at the Santa Monica pier. See them breaking and receding, breaking and receding. Know they’re pulled by something greater than themselves. Know everything will always be beyond their control.

A white mist ascends from the man’s body and hangs above the pier. Become this apparition. Float above this man, sitting down there amongst the masses, watching the ferris wheel spin ‘round to no end. See the top of his head, the thinning hair in the back. Float higher. See the slab of wood jutting into the Pacific like a stake in a vampire heart. Microscopic creatures moving along it like amoeba, bouncing off one another, coming together, separating. 

Further up still you see the bumpy landscape inland, smooth hills off the water, pushing up on the dirt like something’s underneath, trying to escape.

Higher still, the gaping metallic shine of Los Angeles. Planes floating motionless in the crosswinds. The desert. The wildfires. 

Keep rising and you’ll hold everything within your view. Know the following things are there, though you won’t be able to discern them:

Wisconsinite mother and two satellites revolving in a yard, happy.

Many grandmothers and grandfathers dying on ventilators in hospitals.

Ukrainian amoebas fleeing, crying, cursing, watching their dollhouse homes being bombed into oblivion.

Blonde ant and other blonde ant on a beach in skimpy bathing suits, taking pictures of themselves, searching for the right angle, never truly finding it.

Know that here and there, Los Angeles and New York and Appalachia, are only acts of creativity. No different than an airplane or a tank.  Know that everything is happening at the exact same time, in the exact same place.

This is it. All we’ve got. The world, as it is, right now. Time like a river. Time like an acid.

No matter how high you rise, no matter how close you inch to the edge of the universe, you’ll never be able to see those who’ve already risen. White Beard. Los Angeles girl. Your former selves. All of these people are somewhere else now. All of them living only in the confined infinity of your mind. This makes them as real as anything else. As real as you believe them to be.

VII

There's a commotion at the end of the pier. Two men are reeling something out of the water. A crowd is gathering. Brown Beard stands up and joins the group of people. Something heavy thumps repetitively on the wood. The man finds a gap and steps forward. Sees a massive creature lying on the pier. Everyone in the crowd is clapping, but the man is horrified and transfixed, gazing into the eyes of this slick sea monster, this dying creature with gills that gasp for water. The thing flops once, twice, then falls limp on the wet wood.

One man works to remove the hook. The other lifts his arms overhead and shouts, as if there's something obvious to celebrate. As if some great victory has been won and he's sending joy skyward, toward anyone or anything that will listen.

The fish lies motionless.

The ferris wheel spins.

Nothing has changed.

Everything has.

Michael Schoeffel is a writer, firefighter, husband and father based in the Shenandoah Valley. His work has appeared in numerous outlets, including a collection published by Propertius Press titled "Draw Down the Moon. His story "Now Walt" was a finalist in the 2022 Hemingway Shorts Contest.

‘Shell Shock’, ‘Riot Police’, & ‘Just One More’

Photographer- Perseverance Fey

Shell Shock
I always thought that was a funny term
That should only apply to soldiers with beach-related trauma,
Or maybe to little Sally,
Who got so goddamn tired of selling seashells by the seashore
That she quit and got her MFA,
Only to be haunted in every poem
By those sharp pink edges.

I never thought shell shock would apply to you and me,
Sitting across from each other at the dinner table.
You dive over to tease me
(Like you always did)
And I bury my face in my hands
(I never did this)
And you look at me for a moment
As the smile falls off your face.

Three nights in a row,
I dreamt that I spoke with you.
Three times we made up in the dead of night
And three times I woke up just to find you
Absent from my side;
Your forgiveness rolled in and out like the tide,
So please understand
If I’m hesitant to receive it now.

I do believe that Sally can recover,
That one day she can give her demons a burial at sea
And go to sleep without her tongue
Tied in knots.
I believe that soldiers can reacclimate
To eating lobster rolls,
To seeing mayonnaise instead of mortars,
And I believe that you and I can sit together again.
Just not tonight.

Riot Police
These policemen maintain their composure better than anyone I’ve met in my entire life.
These men are meaty scarecrows,
Brows high and eyes straight forward,
Staring at...
What, exactly?
What’s behind us?
I wonder if it’s any scarier than what’s in front of us.
I tell one a dad joke
And challenge another to rock paper scissors
(He respectfully declines with charged silence)
While a girl twenty feet away screams in a man’s face
That he ought to be ashamed of himself.
Both men react exactly the same way:
Silence.
My friend the nude model once told me he did complicated math in his head
When he didn’t want to acknowledge the fact that people
Were staring at his genitals.
I wonder what kind of calculus these officers are doing.
Maybe it’s chemistry–
The face masks certainly look like it.
It seems unfair to scream at meaty scarecrows,
Because I bet ten years ago half of them would have been screaming alongside us.
When you’re an adult, you’ve got responsibilities,
And some days it’s your turn to wear the clown suit.
When this cop gets home tonight,
I bet his wife will be up waiting for him.
She’ll have been worrying herself sick,
And they’ll sit down in the dining room
And he’ll put his head on the table.
He’ll tell her you call a cow without legs
Ground beef.

Just One More
Outside of Beta Gamma fraternity, you and I run into three Europeans
And they offer us a cigarette.
At this point I am drunk enough that the night
Moves in stop-motion,
But when it’s lit
Even I can tell that I feel nothing.
Maybe we lit it from the wrong end,
Like my dad in grad school;
Maybe we’re not doing it right.
Nope, we smell like shit–
It’s working.
Every time I do this it comes up empty,
Tasting for all the world like putrid orange peels,
But every time I see that speckled little stick
I gotta try it.
I’m like an underage kid at the bar,
A virgin on Tinder–
I haven’t won yet but this time I’m feeling lucky.
The cigarette’s halfway gone and I tap the ash onto my tights
Which miraculously do not burst into flame,
But I can tell from your scowl that you’re not enjoying this either.
We could stamp it out now under our heels
But I like the way it’s held,
Falling away from me then pulled back
Like a girl who I don’t really love
But can’t let go.
I’ve heard that cigarettes are great after sex.
I’ll let you know once I find out
What either one is meant to feel like.
The cigarette’s gone out, by the way;
I’m holding an ashen stub of tobacco
And the Europeans have wandered off to Chi Delt
And still, neither one of us feels any sort of
Head buzz.
Shit.
I bet you the next one would have done it.

Scott Sorensen is currently pursuing an English degree at Dartmouth College. He hopes to become an English teacher and be famous on the way.