JUST LIKE MUMMY — SANTINO PRINZI

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When I grow up I’m gonna be just like Mummy. Mummy told me I was gonna have a little brother soon and then her belly got bigger and bigger. Daddy had to help her lots; she was too tired to play with me sometimes. I would walk around with a football or a pillow underneath my t-shirt and pretend to have a large belly just like Mummy. She’d smile and laugh and rub her belly and sometimes she’d make me put my hand on it too and I could feel my baby brother inside. He would kick – he wanted to come out and play, Mummy told me.
             After baby Ben was born Mummy and Daddy bought me a baby doll and a pram so I can push my dolly around like Mummy does. I love Ben and I love my doll which is called Ben too. I fasten him in his pram so he is safe and doesn’t fall out. When Mummy is feeding Ben a bottle of milk I feed my baby doll too. The baby doll makes noises and its eyes open and close when I tilt it. I copy Mummy and rest the baby over my chest and gently rub its back. Baby Ben has fallen asleep and Mummy puts him in his cot, pulls a blankie over him, and watches him sleep; she sometimes smiles and her eyes are always shiny. I’ve looked in the mirror lots of times to see if I can make my eyes go shiny too.
             Tonight Ben is crying so Mummy picks him up from his cot and rocks him in her arms. I do the same. I make the same hush-hush sound Mummy makes and I bounce lightly on the balls of my feet. His crying is getting louder; I make crying sounds too because my baby isn’t real and can’t cry any louder. Ben won’t stop crying and Mummy’s face is red and she starts crying too. I want to be just like Mummy so I pretend to cry. I mimic Mummy’s panting. Mummy yells get to bed. I go away with dolly and I hide behind the door because I need to see what Mummy does to make Ben cry if I’m gonna grow up to be like Mummy. I imagine another me which I mime shouting at so I can be just like Mummy.
             Through the crack in the door I watch Mummy lay Ben on the sofa, so I rest my baby on the floor. His little arms and legs are thrashing up and down. Mummy is still crying as she grabs Ben’s blue blankie, folds it into a rectangle, and holds it over his face. She presses it down hard as if she is trying to touch the floor through the sofa. She’s sobbing lots. Ben is getting quieter and quieter.
             I run and find my blankie so I can be just like Mummy and make my baby sleep too.

Santino Prinzi is currently an English Literature with Creative Writing student at Bath Spa University, and was awarded the 2014/15 Bath Spa University Flash Fiction Prize. His flash fiction and prose poetry has been published, or is forthcoming, in various places including Litro Online, Flash Frontier, the 2014 and 2015 National Flash Fiction Day (UK) anthologies, Unbroken Literary Journal, and has been selected for The Best of Vine Leaves Journal 2015.  His website is https://tinoprinzi.wordpress.com and his Twitter is @tinoprinzi.

SICK GIRLS — LAUREN BECKER

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For Kelly Davio

The doctor said not to, so I went ahead and gave up. Because when the doctor looked concerned about the diagnosis, contrary to education and training in keeping a straight face when dealing with both the ridiculous and the death sentence, I knew I had permission. So I went ahead and gave up.
             Giving up is like flying. You are untethered to ordinary tasks: don’t open mail, don’t go to the dentist, don’t clean your apartment, don’t learn new things, don’t eat healthy. I decided to eat a lot. I had always wanted more and giving up created opportunity. Five months later, I emerge, living, from a haze of sugar and fat. I am 21 pounds heavier than my already heavy prior frame. Five months later, I don’t recognize myself; I didn’t think it would, but it matters.
             I try everything. Weight Watchers, juice fasts, cooking healthy foods, starvation, but I always end up eating whole pies and plate size cookies and deep, overfilled bowls of pasta in creamy sauce. I go to Overeaters Anonymous. I realize I am not special. Relief and disappointment battle at first, but relief wins out when I meet the other sick girls.
             Sick Girl #1 has breast cancer. She thought that cancer treatments would leave her thin and gaunt, but her stoic doctors give her steroids, which make her hungry, which makes her eat cake and whole pizzas until she is puffy with bloat. She is fat, and she is pissed, because—Jesus—insult to injury. Cancer is supposed to at least make you thin. She cannot die looking like this. She cannot live like this, either. She finds me at OA.
             We both find Sick Girl #2. Unspoken, each of us likes Sick Girl #2 better. She is sick because she was fat, and she has gotten even fatter. She has lost one foot and the other is ready to go and a foot is not enough weight loss to make a difference.
             We meet outside of OA, usually at Sick Girl #2’s place, because she has more trouble getting around. She has a wheelchair and hand controls in her car, but she is uninterested in adjusting to her circumstances. She is not brave. None of us is brave or inspiring. We are sick girls with resentments and fried chicken and French fries and pans of brownies and bricks of cheese. We are too fat to be poster girls. We are too hungry to stop.
             Sick Girl #1 gets sicker. She is off steroids and on chemo and radiation and, even when she eats, she vomits. She does not come to Sick Girl #2’s apartment much anymore because the smell of our food nauseates her. And she misses it. The ritual of engorgement. She misses being fat. I miss liking her.
             Sick Girl #1 dies. Just like she wanted, she is thin. We mourn Sick Girl #1. The fat one. In memorial, we expand to fill the empty space. 

Lauren Becker is editor of Corium Magazine. Her work has appeared in Wigleaf, The Rumpus, Whiskeypaper, Tin House (online), and The Best Small Fictions of 2015. Her collection of short fiction, If I Would Leave Myself Behind, was published by Curbside Splendor in 2014.

OUT TO SEA — VICTOR VEKTOR

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Imagine a boat. Did you do it? Good job. Now imagine that boat being lifted by a wave the size of two houses. The wave crushes your boat, sending you into blackness. You taste salt. Open your eyes, dummy. The houses you pictured, picture them again. Good job. You’re in one now. The salt is gone. You smell dinner. Fish, no, steak. Filet mignon. Good job.
             A woman with long blonde hair places the steak and mashed potatoes on an oak plank table and invites you to sit down.
             No time! No way!
             The woman starts floating in the living room. Water spurts out her eyes, now her mouth. Her hair turns green. Her stomach turns brown. You lunge at her, sinking your teeth into her medium rare tummy. She screams. Her scream sounds like your voice. Blood runs down your mouth, your face, your neck. Tastes like salt.
             Next time try talking to her. Open your eyes, dummy. A wave the size of the Empire State Building is coming.

Victor lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His writing has appeared all over his closet on loose sheets of paper.

I'M THE STEAK — ANNA GRAGERT

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Me. Standing on pavement peppered with plastic. Alone. Waiting. Surrounded by man-manipulated metal. 

Unsure of the direction. No compass rose. Eyes wide. Standing before a construction site. Work in progress. 

Lovers brush by. Hands held. Lips pursed. A man strides past. Briefcase: shined. Shoes: shined. Forehead: shiny. The wind whips around buildings. It beats me. 

A herd of men appear. Talking loud. One man pauses. His right finger in his left nostril. 

He looks at my shoes. Sees through them. Pays attention to the dry patch on my heel. My freshly cut toenails. Knows I cannot run fast. Works his way up my legs. Notes the one spot I forgot to shave. Back of right knee. Keeps going. 

There are stretch marks on my hips. My belly button is cavernous. My stomach bloats. Beneath three layers, there’s a scar on my chest. My neck curves. My jaw juts. My hair hangs. Makes his way to my eyes. Waits.

I want to look. Stare at his psyche. Condemn his perversion. Rip that finger from his nose and point it at his third eye. I’m desperate to show him the color of my soul. 

Instead, I freeze. Stare straight ahead. There’s a steakhouse there. I’m the steak. 

He keeps going. Though he knows my body as I do. They hang right. He is gone. 

Others pass. They see something. But they don’t see me. 

Work in progress. 

When Anna Gragert isn’t trying to create a groundbreaking third-person bio for herself, she’s writing for publications like My Modern Met and HelloGiggles, catering to her little black cat, reading fiction for Cactus Heart Press, or wondering if/when she should become a shaman. Check out Anna's portfolio or follow her on Twitter to keep up with her adventures in all things human/creative.

THE MAN WHO DIDN'T KNOW HOW HE FELT — TREVOR SHIKAZE

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"I love you," she said.
             "Hold on," he said, "let me check my pulse rate."
             He put his fingers to his neck.
             "What are you doing?" she said.
             "Just one minute," he said. "I need a mirror."
             "Why do you need a mirror?"
             "I need to observe the extent of my pupil dilation."
             He left her alone on the promenade and went to look for a mirror. He headed for the mall. He thought he might use a mirror in a washroom, or maybe a mirror in a changeroom so that he could have some privacy. His phone buzzed.
             "I don't understand," she said. "I love you."
             "That's really nice to hear," he said. "I probably love you too."
             "Then why did you walk away?"
             "I told you. To check my pupil dilation."
             "I want you," she said. "I need you right now. Meet me at my place."
                He looked at the palm of his free hand. He thought he saw sweat glistening there. "Do you know how to measure skin conductance?" he said.
             "I don't know what that is," she said.
             He squinted one eye and held his arm up to the setting sun, which backlit the hairs and revealed their angle of inclination.
             "Hello?" she said. "Are you still there?"
             "I'm still here," he said. "I'm just checking my pilomotor reflex."
             "Do you care about me at all?" she said.
             He stopped in his tracks. How would you measure such a thing? He turned and headed for the university, where they had an MRI machine. Maybe his cerebral blood flow would shed some light on the matter. But he knew analysis would take time.
             "Could you call back in six to eight weeks?" he said.
             "You know what?" she said. "Forget I said anything. We're through."
             She hung up.
             And his heart broke.

Trevor Shikaze's writing has appeared in American Chordata, Axolotl, Wyvern Lit, and elsewhere. Find him online at www.trevorshikaze.com.

YOUR WAITER IS AN ACTOR — SARAH HENRY

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Your parents take you to the same restaurant every year on your birthday and tell you what a good baby you were. You never cried or fussed in public. You were so great, they wanted another one. The waiter takes your orders with a faint look of relief. He’s got a soap opera name: Devon. This is a fairly decent place. Devon would never inquire about a patron’s accent. There is no Help Wanted sign in front. No french fries on the menu. Devon is dark and sleek as all get out. His nails are buffed. This morning in Shakespeare lab, he practiced falling at the feet of a king. Your parents took you to parties where there were fur coats draped across the beds. They smelled like your mother’s cologne. At twenty you found out who you were and who you weren’t. The waiter brings three salads on a tray and delivers each as if it’s an act of greatness. He remains in character. The tips here are good and the work is steady, but he still has to live in New York.

Sarah Henry lives in the Pittsburgh area, where her poems have appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Loyalhanna Review. More of her work is forthcoming in the new Pittsburgh Poetry Review. Farther afield, her publications include The Hollins Critic and three current anthologies. Humor is very important to her.

A FAMILY IN THE LAST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY — JEFF ESTERHOLM

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I.

She was a newlywed five weeks, red-haired, skin a vivid pink though she’d just settled into the clawfoot tub’s hot, soapy water. The closed-up bathroom filled with steam, beyond the tub the toilet and sink were floating apparitions of white porcelain, the medicine cabinet mirror was glazed with condensation. Her pale green robe hung from a hook on the door that shook when either of them walked down the hall and now, Claire smiled, pressing her eyes against her knees, with Ed coming on the run.

The door swung open and there he was, on the edge of striking a Charles Atlas pose. But, no. His shoulders fell in on his chest, one hand dropped in front of him. Five weeks now, still timid. With his free hand he shut the door and then climbed into the tub with her. He trembled as he lowered himself in. “Hot.”

Claire laughed and leaned toward him, breasts pressed against her legs, and said, “You can take off your underwear now, don’t you think?”

These are my parents, Claire and Ed Strom. She at nineteen and he at twenty-one. I see other couples at that age and they don’t seem ready to be parents, but Claire and Ed, Claire in 1951, she looks ready. And here I come.

II.

In 1951, there were 79,074 miscarriages in the United States. I was one of them.

Claire took the crowded city bus to her doctor’s office, a small, cold clinic in Superior’s south end. Dr. Jordan was an older man with raw sausage link fingers who, when the nineteen-year-old was up on the examining table with her feet in the stirrups, looked like he would have been more at ease in a machine shop on the lakefront, working at a metal grinder, sparks shooting off the wheel like the Fourth of July. But Dr. Jordan was a good technician. Claire told him about the spotting, its increase. The doctor examined her, apologizing for the chill of the speculum.

After the dilation and curettage, after she was dressed, they sat facing each other and he held her hands, a damp Kleenex crumpled and clutched there, in his larger hands, and he assured her that there would be other babies for her and Ed. But I would not be one of them.

III.

This was their world without me.

The summer sun at 4:43 P.M. cuts across the lawn of the three-bedroom ranch. A family reunion in a backyard, the taste of Claire’s macaroni and beef hot dish eaten from paper plates at a picnic table. Ed’s collection of utility sheds abutting the graveled alley, inside old grass clippings, the ghost smell of gasoline for the lawn mower, rust-edged snow shovels, plastic ones with cracked blades. Sons Michael, a lippy child and a stranger moldering with addictions, and Andy, the absentminded one who came across AIDS in Minneapolis.

They were a part of the neighborhood for fifty years.

Now, it was as though they were never there.

Jeff Esterholm's fiction has appeared in Akashic Books’ Mondays Are Murder flash fiction series, Midwestern Gothic, Flash Fiction Italia, Yellow Mama, and The J.J. Outré Review, among others. Upcoming in the new year, he will have a story in Crime Factory and another in Yellow Mama.

OOLOGY — ELODIE OLSON-COONS

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—This Piece was an Honorable Mention in the 2015 Micro-Fiction Contest—

It would be a waste.

A man asked to have his teeth shattered so he could retrieve one. He held it in his mouth while climbing down a tree, like a lightbulb.

The mouth is a spoon for starling meringues. Eggs rot if left unblown.

We have threads loose at the hems from blackthorn, bark scrapes on the inner knee. Willow baskets filled with rags. Backpacks soaked with rain that smells like cedar.

You do not crack them into glass bowls. There is a special drill, very small. We used to pinprick but that was unreliable. Albumen and yolk come burbling out in wet slurps. Sometimes, in a moment of terrible luck, the whole yellow can squid its way out; spherical, unbroken.

Sometimes the shells are thin as foil, gnawed by rats or pesticides: they cave in stickily to webbing, like mosaics.

Oology. Like moons, craters, calico. Spectrum: cream-of-jade to gasoline and indigo. Delicious.

Some collected them late, pierced them, left maggots to eat the not-quite-birds. Wet feathers almost-oiled, translucent beaks almost-fluted. It isn’t right.

You whisk very delicately, some yolks the size of fingernails, some thick and marbled. You chop sugar, squeeze fists of herbs, into the whites hiding thread-thin veins.

We keep them in our cabinets like stolen geodes, lining vanilla ice-cream tubs with cotton wool under our beds. Numbered and named on slips of yellowing paper. Opened, they give off an acrid smell, like steel.

Kingfishers spat fish in our faces. White-tailed sea eagles dove for our eyes. Flashlights nearly caught us, dashing over hilltops. Sirens.

Home, we ate them in pastry, handful, glass.

We go to jail four or fifty-one times. From condor to avocet nest. We deserve it; in our buttery aprons, with our wet hands and hair.

Delicious. Celery straws with baked Manx shearwater, spiced in a clay dish. Soft-cooked golden eagle with warm toast fingers. Four whiskey warbler sours, on ice. Vanilla osprey custard; Earl Grey butter cookie crumble. Redshank omelette with bacon. We eat them together.

If we fell from trees, we too would shatter, soaking from our skulls like split milk, and none to gather us with typewritten labels.

When we were young we loved the tin-wrapped ones, the taste of sugar-paint. Lined up all the different colours. 

Elodie Olson-Coons is a ghostwriter and translator currently based in Switzerland. Her short fiction and poetry has appeared in [PANK], Paper Darts, Lighthouse, and The Literateur. She tweets @elllode.