A FLUTTERING OF WINGS — CATHY ULRICH

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The girl in the apartment next to yours has married a bird. She shows you the wedding photos over tea. The tea is lukewarm, and much too sweet. You smile at the photos anyway — the neighbor girl in an ivory dress with a stain that she tries to hide under her hands, a bird perched on her shoulder. You don’t know much about birds. It could be any kind of bird at all.
             You look beautiful, you say.
             It was a secondhand dress, says the neighbor girl, shuffling through the photos. Do you think that’s unlucky?
             You shrug.
             It had to be white. I saved myself for him.
             She smiles in a nostalgic way as she stirs her tea.
             I mean, there were boys, she says. You know.
             You nod.
             I could have, but I wanted to wait for the right one. She taps the stack of photos with her fingernails. I did. I think I did.
             All the windows in her apartment are opened. She has removed the screens. Papers are held down by salt and pepper shakers, the television remote, empty mugs. The neighbor girl seems to only drink from mugs. You wonder if her husband drinks from them too. You imagine him perched on the edge of one, bird toes curling round the lip, dipping his beak into the liquid. A breeze stirs the papers, and one piece flaps up and down, like a bird’s wing. Outside, there is a cooing of pigeons.
             The neighbor girl tips her head in an avian way. She says: He’ll be home soon.
             Do you always leave the windows open? you ask, and sip your lukewarm tea.
             He has to be free to come and go as he pleases, she says. It wouldn’t work otherwise.
             You say: I had a boyfriend like that once.
             She says: If you love something, let it go.
             You nod.
             Look, she says, and pulls your hand to her belly. You see?
             Under your hand, there is a stirring within her, something that could be a fluttering of wings, a scratching of talons.
             She says: It’s a miracle, isn’t it? Don’t you think it’s a miracle?
             I do, you say. I do.

Cathy Ulrich doesn't think a secondhand wedding dress would be unlucky at all. Her work has been published in a variety of journals, including Booth, Lunch Ticket and Superstition Review.

FLAMES — SPENCER CHOU

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She sees smoke rising up from the end of the street. It’s coming from the side where she lives. It could be her house, but she’s not close enough yet to tell. Trees are blocking most of the view.

As she approaches, the smell takes her back to her tenth summer when the older kids would start a fire out behind the garages. Some would run and jump over it, a few would try to impress others by feigning a stumble and landing in a roll. Once, a boy ran home to fetch one of his dad’s deodorants and they all stepped back and watched as he threw it onto the pile, shielding their faces as it exploded, cheering once the danger had gone.

Sometimes, another boy would go to the shop on the corner and steal bacon for everyone to pierce onto sticks and grill over the heat. She still likes her bacon done that way: charred and tough. Mum always smelled the smoke on her when she got back home, making her strip in the kitchen before throwing her clothes into the washing machine.

A fire engine screams past from behind her now and pulls up outside the burning house, closely followed by a second. She stops walking before she gets too close. She’s not sure if she wants to know.

Firemen jump out and get to work. Neighbours are stood around, trying to see what’s going on. Folded arms, shaking heads, a morbid curiosity disguised as pity.

She reaches into her handbag and takes out a cigarette. When she was fourteen, her mum found a packet of them under her bed during a weekly clean. She was forced to smoke the remaining twelve after school, one after the other. Mum nodded with satisfaction through the coughs and tears. The only thing she learned was to find a better hiding place.

After her marriage was over, she ended up living next door to mum. In their small town it was the only place available at short notice. Neither of them is crazy about it. Sometimes they don’t talk for months.

She turns and walks back the way she came, flicking ash onto the ground. The damage is already done, she thinks. Knowing can wait until later.

Spencer Chou is a writer and editor from Nottingham, England. He runs the literary magazine and publisher The Nottingham Review. His writing is published or forthcoming in The Molotov Cocktail, LossLit, Paper and Ink, Spelk, Lost Balloon, and elsewhere. In 2016 he was shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award. You can follow him on Twitter @spencerchou

NO MORE PESCATARIANISM — JENNIFER TODHUNTER

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I started eating white bread again after my husband died of cancer. Every morning I made a bacon sandwich in the microwave and ate it alongside a cup of instant coffee, lightened with powdered milk and sweetened with aspartame. Then I flipped through the endless stack of legal documents, tax forms, and family letters while trying to choke it down. Our golden retriever, Lily, stared at me unflinching with her shiny black eyes because Dave had always fed her at the table. He’d also walked her every morning along the breakwater, but I couldn’t find the motivation to do that, so I sat on the front steps and threw the same red ball for her over and over and over again.
             She always came back.
             I tossed our coconut oil in the compost and started frying everything in vegetable oil. You name it, I fried it. The taste was different. Sort of like burning. Thick and rancid.
             I began frequenting the tanning beds down on 16th. You could smell the flowery lotion and crispy skin across the street. There was a vending machine in the lobby filled with chia pudding, kale chips, and coconut water, but I always stopped next door at the convenience store and picked up a can of soda before checking in.
             “I’m so happy you took some time for yourself,” one friend said, admiring my tan. “It’s really important when you lose a loved one.”
             After a month or two, I was able to walk Lily further than the front yard. I took her to the park with the thick power lines, the ones that people measured with EMF meters and told their kids to stay away from. There were bunny rabbits everywhere, brown ones with fluffy white tails, and white ones with milky red eyes. Lily chased them with her tongue sticking out, just in case one fell into her mouth. Occasionally, she was lucky, and she’d run over, elated, and drop the gift at my feet, looking at me like she’d just presented Dave reincarnate. I’d leave the bunny behind though, burying it in the thick underbrush, because I was on a strict red meat only diet. No more pescatarianism now that Dave was gone. And certainly no bunnies.
             Letters came from my doctor, reminding me to book a pap test, schedule a physical, consider a mammogram. I ignored them. Wrote “Return to Sender” on the envelope and left them out for the postman who continued to deliver a barrage of condolence cards and small meaningless gifts.
             I took up smoking and drinking. Dave and I hadn’t been much into either, maybe a glass of red wine with supper or a bit of champagne to celebrate a good friend’s birthdays. Some mornings, staring at my bacon sandwich and instant coffee, it truly felt like I was going to die, my head thick with sadness and my throat scratchy and sore.
             Here I come, I’d think while I chewed. Here I come.

Jennifer is a number nerd, backyard beekeeper, and writer based in Canada. Her stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Flash Fiction Online, (b)OINK, and elsewhere. Find her at www.foxbane.ca or @JenTod_.

THE JAR & ITS CONTENTS — DAN TREMAGLIO

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Two in the morning we parked behind the Trader Joe’s and got poised to suss out some heavy shit.  Lenny’s left hand was turning purple as he held it taut over the top of the Ball jar and I killed the lights and ignition and unbuckled my seat belt and sat back and watched him.  So did Michelle whose head poked over the center console.  “It’s almost got like a Guinness read,” she said of the jar and its contents, the electric wisps of light cascading upwards across a depthless black.  I asked Lenny how the hell his hand felt but he did not respond.  He didn’t move either, just held the jar out at arm’s length unblinkingly.  I watched him for a while to be sure of this and no, he did not blink, not once.  With the dashboard and stereo lights out, whatever it was he held in there with his naked palm was casting pale ripply flashes across his face and the rest of my grandma’s van’s interior.  “What the fuck is called for here?” Michelle asked, running a finger along the rim of my ear.  I could not say.  Her breath smelled like vanilla.  Part of me recognized how convenient a lid would be in this situation but for reasons I could not articulate.  I could not think where we might have misplaced it or whether there’d even been one to begin with.  By now Lenny’s hand had turned black and begun to sprout long translucent hairs the size and shape of icicles and I wheeled around to make some meaningful eye contact with Michelle.  Her mascara was running in twin trails down her cheeks and dripping from her jawline.  She was crying, which was okay, because she was always crying.  This constant crying of hers was her most redeeming quality and the reason we were all so into her.   She reminded us we could always feel worse.   I watched her tell her tongue-ring compulsively across the insides of her teeth and finally said fuck it and elbowed Lenny real hard in the side of the head.  The jar tumbled from his grasp and its contents went surging out all over the place like an escaped birthday balloon full of déjà vu and slobber.  An instant before Michelle started laughing and pulling at my hair, I remembered where it was I’d left the lid.        

Dan Tremaglio teaches creative writing and literature at Bellevue College where he is assistant editor for Belletrist Magazine.  Recent work is in Cease Cows, Jellyfish Review, Tammy, and Skewed Lit.

THE AVERAGE MAN IS NOT HARD TO MYSTIFY — CHLOE N. CLARK

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Afterwards, we stared at each other for far too long. No one knew what to say. We left the hospital and, later, you and I curled into bed as if we thought we could escape in sleep. You reached out to pull me closer and I moved my body further away. But neither of us knew what the other was doing. If I had known you were reaching, if you had known I thought I was giving you space.

Here is a fact I told you on our very first date, because this was the sort of knowledge I had: the Davenport Brothers perfected the art of the spirit cabinet, of speaking with the dead on stage. I wanted to apologize for what it was that I thought of as small talk. But you asked me to explain, to tell you more.

We both sleep as if we are new at it. I sigh and shift and try to keep my eyes pressed closed. You flip onto one side and then the other, back and forth so routinely that it is almost enough to make me sleep.

After the first time we had sex, after the first time I learned the entire shape of your body, the jut of your hip bones and the birthmark at the small of your back, I told you a fact that I always found sad: Howard Thurston was known, in his time,  as the greatest magician of all, but now he’s misremembered. I said, see, I even have to say his whole name because, otherwise, you wouldn’t know he was. You laughed and said, I still don’t know who he is. I said, he was a master of levitation, of making woman float.

I wonder if we fall into sleep at the exact same time, if we dream the same dream. In mine, I am lying on a table and someone is preparing to saw me in half. He runs a finger across my abdomen and says, this won’t hurt anymore. And I sit up in bed, gasping at the same that you do. You reached across the cool spot between us in the bed and clasped your fingers with mine.

Later in our relationship, when I knew you were the person I never wanted to be without, I tell you this fact which I had been safeguarding, waiting to give you when you least expected it: Houdini felt immense guilt for leading the grieving to believe that the dead could talk from the beyond. You said, but wasn’t his whole thing illusion? And I said: his thing was escape. He was always escaping. Which is magic in its own way. And you said, so is staying in one place if you know how to do it.

Chloe N. Clark's work appears in Drunken Boat, Flash Fiction Online, Hobart, and more. She tweets about baking, basketball, and sci-fi, at @PintsNCupcakes.

NEST — CHANCE DIBBEN

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What was it building? He thought, lifting the shovel off the now dead squirrel. The nest by the toolshed was bowled, like a bird's, but had acorns, bits of glass, routed string, and pebbles placed on each cardinal direction. He knew it was the squirrel because, over the last few days while scrubbing the dishes of his lonely meals, he saw it bound back and forth through the window over his sink. Focused, like a mad scientist.
             He didn't know why he brought the shovel and was surprised he killed the bastard with one swift clunk. What could he do? He laughed.
Looking closer at the nest it became clear the squirrel possessed some sense of mathematics, proportion, architecture. This was no mere hobby-nest. Pulling apart the walls he found foil. Underneath the dirt floor, a metal plate. He looked up. In the tree branch directly above the nest, bottlecaps arranged like a flower, a dish.
He stepped back, fully creeped out.
             He approached again. The dead squirrel's tongue poked through its smashed face. Spooked, he pieced the nest back together, shoveled the creature, and went to his trashcan. What was it doing, he kept asking himself. Was the thing finished or was there more? Would the nest, had there been no human impediment, taken over the backyard, the house, and the whole neighborhood? Was it a squirrel star-gate? Was the squirrel trying to get back to his own timeline?
             I don't know. I want to tell him to forget about it and go to sleep. I'd like to think this squirrel made this structure as a warning, out of some hurried compulsion, that if it could just find the golden wire, the nest would blaze open and give it the ability to speak, so it could tell the man, someone wants to kill you and he's living your toolshed.
But what do I know—I'm just the fucking cat. 

Chance Dibben is a writer, photographer, and performer living in Lawrence, Kansas. His writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Split Lip, Blue Earth Review, Unbroken, Squawkback, as well as others.

WHAT BECAME OF MARIE TAGLIONI? — SIOBHAN WELCH

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Whose father pushed her until she rose up en pointe, the first living fairy, to pirouette atop toes bloodied like bordelaise the crazed fans later tasted when they pooled their rubles to buy la sylphide’s last worn slippers and cooked them into a paste that slid down their hungry throats.

Siobhan Welch lives in Austin, Texas. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Split Lip, Devil’s Lake, Hobart, Jellyfish Review and elsewhere.

MAYFLIES — MEGHAN PHILLIPS

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The mayflies hatch every summer from the banks of the Susquehanna and find their way through the air ducts and window screens of every home in the towns that bracket the river like frown lines. As much as they love the warm glow of porch lamps and ceiling fans, those lesser lights can’t compete with the blazing run of art deco lamps that span the Veterans Memorial Bridge—the fourth bridge to cross the Susquehanna between Columbia and Wrightsville. The only bridge to get shut down by a blizzard of mayflies swarming up from the river, little meal worms with lace-work wings that mate and lay eggs and die in the yolky light of those nostalgic lamps. Bodies falling inches deep on the roadway, powdery soft like too-cold snow. Tiny corpses that caused three motorcycles to skid out and forced the Wrightsville Fire Department to guard the entrance to the bridge, like Major Haller and Colonel Frick’s men did over 150 years ago as Rebel forces advanced after the capture of York. Fifteen thousand Yanks no match for 1,800 victorious Rebs drunk on victory and heavy artillery, the Union troops retreated across the bridge to Columbia, lighting fires as they went, until the whole thing was nothing but a charred outline, a pencil sketch of a bridge. Even though the Wrightsville Fire Department cadets stood at the mouth of that bridge like their great-great-great grandfathers did, the truth is, it was only closed for an hour until PennDOT could get there with a street sweeper and clear away the whole damn mess.

Meghan Phillips is the fiction editor for Third Point Press and an associate editor for SmokeLong Quarterly. You can find her in real life in libraries around Lancaster, PA, and on Twitter @mcarphil.