MONSOON — SARP SOZDINLER

Mama in the lake, singing. Knee-deep, she’s floating her newborn along the moonlit surface of the water, her head crowned with twigs and bird bones. The baby looks as confused and genderless in her hands as those oysters the pastor carves open by her side for the ceremony. He pours saltwater on the baby’s forehead from the tip of an empty shell, baptizes her amid bawls. The train of Mama’s wedding gown disturbs a butterfly nest on her way out, the ship of my half-sister’s body sailing beside her. Three generations of monarchs get trapped within the layers of her tulle in the same way three generations of women got married on this land and have never left. The frames and furniture inside the house have grown old with them, with me, those bones of a family ingrained into each wall and have since become a part of the concrete. All her life, my sister, too, will probably try and wash this blood off her, off her now-milky skin, feasted on by mosquitoes and healed with motherly prayers. As Mama and her boyfriend hold hands in the canopy of a weeping willow to say their vows, gypsy moths start buzzing in the mason jars lined along the makeshift altar to mark the beginning of something I cannot place. Watching them smile and negotiate their words, my heart becomes an infinite sponge, growing bigger as I soak it with all the rain and fire.

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Sarp Sozdinler is a Turkish writer based in Philadelphia and Amsterdam. Their writing has been featured or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Masters Review, The Normal School, Hobart, Maudlin House, Passages North, The Offing, and elsewhere. Some of their pieces have been anthologized and received a mention at literary events, including the Waasnode Short Fiction Prize judged by Jonathan Escoffery.

HUNAN HOMES — ELIOT LI

Content Warning: Suicide 

Hunan Homes, where my father devours platefuls of braised pork belly, with its layers of glistening fat, despite his cardiologist’s order to take it easy on the grease, and where Grandma produces green wax packs of baseball cards from her purse and gives them to me and my cousin while my aunt stares blankly at the giant bloated codfish floating upside down in the fish tank, the waiter trying to scoop it out with his net.
           Hunan Homes, my family’s favorite Chinese restaurant in Silicon Valley, though our region wasn’t called that forty years ago before the tech companies came and bulldozed the area’s last remaining peach and cherry orchards.
           Hunan Homes, where my hand is on my grandmother’s back as she puts her walker against the wall and takes her seat, just a few months after we buried my father and my aunt's cold body was found in the garage next to an empty bottle of valium while my cousin moved to Boston because it’s the big city that’s farthest away from here. My grandmother adjusts her black wig before taking a sip of winter melon soup, says it's like a gift from God that I'm taking care of her.
           Hunan Homes, where I order takeout after visiting Grandma at Pilgrim Haven Convalescent Hospital, where she cried and told me how lonesome she is and asks how could I abandon her there. The takeout is for my Taiwanese American fiancé, as they’re the only restaurant around that serves her favorite spicy stewed pork intestines with curdled blood, which isn't on the English version of their menu. I drive it back to our studio apartment in San Francisco, and when she kisses me I taste hot peppers and iron.
           Hunan Homes, where we celebrate your fifth birthday, though Momma yells at you because it’s a privilege to eat such authentic Chinese food here but you’re just rolling white rice around between your fingers into a smooshed little ball and leaving the heaping mounds of House Special Seafood Chow Mein on your plate untouched.
           Hunan Homes, now a neighborhood ice cream shop, where you’re wrapped around my knee licking chocolate soft serve off the tips of your fingers.

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Eliot Li lives in California. His work appears or is forthcoming in CRAFT, SmokeLong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, Trampset, Necessary Fiction, The Pinch, and elsewhere. He's on twitter @EliotLi2.

2022 AWARD NOMINATIONS

THRILLED to announce our nominations for some upcoming awards. Some of these pieces aren’t ouet yet—but will be soon, so stay tuned! In the meantime, HELP US CELEBRATE THESE INCREDIBLE FOLKS!

Best of the Net

“The Astronaut” by Lindy Biller
”Saltwater Dog” by Vivian Zhu

Best Small Fictions
“Oceans Under Threat Like Never Before” by Melissa Llanes Brownlee
“Tongue Twisters” by Victoria Buitron
“What Remains” by DW McKinney
”We Beasts” by Will McMillan
“Because There is a War On” by Zoë Meager

Best Microfiction (400 words or less)

”Tattoos” by Jamy Bond
“Kudzu” by December Cuccaro
“We Build Things, We Fall Apart” by Selena Langner
“Hunan Homes” by Eliot Li
“Occur” by Judith Osilé Ohikuare
“Adenium” by María Alejandra Barrios Vélez

Pushcart Prize

“Tongue Twisters” by Victoria Buitron
“Summer of ‘77” by Karen Crawford
“On How to Survive as a Barn Owl” by Olivia Kingery
“What Remains” by DW McKinney
“Because There is a War On” by Zoë Meager
”Saltwater Dog” by Vivian Zhu

BECAUSE THERE IS A WAR ON — ZOË MEAGER

When it snaps, Mother fusses about sewing new elastic into our knickers, and then, when the haberdasher runs out and her box of sundries yields no more, she devises complicated gestures of ribbon and string. 
           To keep ourselves from sin, we eat everything on our plates and never criticise the cook. She shimmies less the more our food, clear and earnest, wobbles, but all sorts of things can be food if you believe it.
           Our big sister is pale and peaky, Mother says, but she wears lipstick over the white cliffs of her lips and in her pocket are iron filings gathered from the factory floor. After dinner, we bully them with magnets into stars that burst across the table. 
           Bloodlust, our dog, howls home a joke and a lark. He’s been mettle detecting in the streets, tip-toeing broken glass, and pulling parts of pigs from deep in the butcher’s bin. We string our hall with tangles of gut in time for Christmas and rub the fat into our faces, calling it good as cold cream.
           Our big brother who wouldn’t fight sits on our mother’s nightstand, a slice of himself. He looks across at our Father’s side of the room with its thin window and understands the sunlight every morning as it’s shattered by the nets.
           Our little brothers aim their beds at the night sky and sit up shivering until they’ve rat-a-tat-tatted every star into an early grave. Then they roll themselves like pigs in a blanket, believing as they slumber that somehow it will all be mended.

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Zoë Meager is from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work has appeared abroad in publications including Granta, Lost Balloon, and Overland, and locally in Hue and Cry, Landfall, Mayhem, Turbine | Kapohau, and Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand and two volumes of Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy.

ADENIUM — MARÍA ALEJANDRA BARRIOS VÉLEZ

When my mom got married, she put a dessert flower in her hair, not caring that it was toxic. She got married and the day after the flower kept blooming, spreading through her tangled curls until it was a cascade of bright pink. When she was stressed she would shed the petals, and we would have to sweep the floors, tell the neighbors that we were sorry—but Mami was like that, a flower parade, a dandelion scattering pieces of her wherever she went. When she died, she didn’t want to be buried with her flowers, they were a burden, the reason for her divorce, of all her losses—she instructed me to pluck one, the first one from her wedding day that sat just above her ear, I ripped it out too distressed to be subtle, and on her last breath, the flower vanished to ashes, running through my fingers, turning into dust.

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María Alejandra Barrios Vélez is a writer born in Barranquilla, Colombia. She has an MA in Creative Writing from The University of Manchester and currently lives in Brooklyn. Her stories have been published in places such as Hobart Pulp, Reservoir Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, Jellyfish Review, Lost Balloon, Shenandoah Literary, Vol.1 Brooklyn, El Malpensante, Moon City, Fractured Lit, and SmokeLong Quarterly. She was the 2020 SmokeLong Flash Fiction Fellow and her work is forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2022. Her work has been supported by organizations such as Vermont Studio Center, Caldera Arts Center, and the New Orleans Writing Residency.

WHAT IS AND WHAT SHOULD NEVER BE — HARSIMRAN KAUR

Drive through dark alleys. Go skinny-dipping in the lakes. Catch a beetle. Call it pretty. Pick stones. Call them gold. Throw your towel onto your bed. Speak gibberish to your mom when she calls you downstairs for dinner. Get away from her. Get into a random yellow pickup truck of a stranger. Look at his daughter's portrait on the dashboard of his truck. Call her pretty. Call everyone’s daughter pretty. Call everyone. Throw your phone away on the road. Let the ground catch all your vibrations and turn them into something peaceful. Blurt out the lyrics to your favorite Led Zeppelin song. Read all the road signs when you're in the middle of nowhere. Don't let the truckman poke fun at your face caked in sadness, sunburnt on asphalt.. Hear him talk about oil and grease and bones. Assure him you know what page he's on. Be his book. 

Think. 

Maybe the truckman will kill you in this one. Maybe you’ll be lost in the ether. Maybe the darkness will follow your trail after the sky turns into a salmon. You’ll be in a forest. He will slow down the truck. Ask you to open the car door and run the fuck away from him. You’ll pick up your face, wrinkled with a grin. Turn into a vagabond, which is to say fear.

Run.

The forest will be green. Your favorite color as a child was green. The forest will be silent. Your favorite sound as a child was silence. There. A tree house. Inside. Home. Warm. Doors locked. Fingers untouched, estranged in fear. When he'll be outside knocking on the door with an axe in his hand, you’ll hear voices circling your head. You’ll murmur Led Zeppelin for one last time until the door unlocks itself as a memory, placed neatly on the palm of your hand. An axe. Truckman. Silence. Trees.

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Harsimran Kaur is a seventeen-year-old writer from Punjab, India. Her writing appears in Jellyfish Review, BULL, Parenthesis, Big Windows Review, KNACK, Milk Candy Review and elsewhere. She speaks four languages and loves clementines. Find her at harsimranwrites.com.

TATTOOS — JAMY BOND

We didn’t tell anyone. Not our parents, not our friends, and Jethro cared only about the cash in our pockets, not that we were 14.

We lived in a Florida port town where heat was like a second skin, a bear suit you had to wear. In August, the humidity could mess with your head, make you think you were drowning.

Our moms drank Tab and did Jazzercise and worried that we might be gay. They didn’t want our lives to be difficult. They had no idea that on weekend nights we slipped from our bedroom windows and walked to the Club Detroit on 2nd street where we drank rum and Cokes and danced to Psychedelic Furs songs. Sometimes, we French-kissed the sailors on shore leave. Most of them had wives; they just wanted our tongues for a few minutes. It never got scary or real.

And then one night your Dad cornered me in the backyard while you were inside playing Frogger. We used to laugh at him, how he’d come home from a 10-mile run and crack open a beer, sweat streaming down his face. He was like a cartoon character. A Dad who did dumb Dad things.

Suddenly your Mom had a boyfriend named David and you were moving to the other coast and it felt like our lives were ending, our hearts exploding, the adult world closing in.

We picked two Siamese cats and Jethro fired up his ink gun. It sounded like a chainsaw. I wanted orange eyes; you wanted green. It would be our little secret, forever hidden beneath the rim of our pants.  

I went first.
Does it hurt? you asked.
It feels like a bee sting, I said, wincing. Sun blisters. 

And I remembered your Dad watching us from the kitchen window while we sunbathed on green jelly chairs, our bikini tops untied to avoid tan lines, baby oil to soak up the rays.

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Jamy Bond’s stories and essays have appeared in a variety of publications, including Pithead Chapel, JMWW, The Forge Literary, Barren Magazine, Wigleaf, The Rumpus and The Sun Magazine. She earned her MFA from George Mason University where she co-founded So To Speak Journal. Her work has been listed on Wigleaf’s Top 50 2022 longlist and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. Find her at www.jamybond.com or on Twitter: @bond_jamy

OCCUR — JUDITH OSILÉ OHIKUARE

When did she even occur to you?

Five years ago, at my old roommate’s wedding while making Cincinnati chili. I performed a chiffonade on the corner of my thumb where nail met bed and dripped into the side salad before I could help it. She brought Band-Aids and damp paper towels so the cotton wouldn’t stick. She squeezed to get the blood out; a sharpness rang in my hand and my head—which is where love and pain both occur.

When did you last see her?

Monday night after burning cheap incense a man sold to me at a discount. He liked the tangles and whorls of my hair, he said, and threw in a jug of coconut oil that told me the temperature was above 76 degrees. I had wine too soon before sleeping. A smoky something wrapped me in gauze. Her mouth occurred to me: the thought, then the pressure. I spent Tuesday and last night trying to remember, ash gathering in the ceramic tray on my nightstand.

What’s her name?

I try not to tell people who don’t already know. Gossip is wild and the world is small.

What is her issue? 

The last time I assumed, she disappeared for months—hair changed, new number, apartment listed and let. I had to forget her, hard, so that she would come back. That kind of privacy had never occurred to me.

How did you know you were in love?

It felt as much like what I thought it should as it possibly could.

Do you miss her?

The thought had occurred.

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Judith Osilé Ohikuare is currently the Operations & Development Director at NY Writers Coalition, a nonprofit organization in Brooklyn that provides creative writing workshops for historically underserved and marginalized groups in New York City. In the past, she freelanced for various publications, including Condé Nast Traveler and Essence; worked on staff at Refinery29, Cosmopolitan, and Inc. magazines; and served as an editorial fellow at The Atlantic.