HOLY JESUS, THERE'S A NUN IN IKEA — SARA HILLS

At first I think she’s a mannequin perched on an Ektorp sofa; some hipster’s idea of a humorous gag in the showroom. But then she moves. Her dark veil swishes like the flash of a crow’s wing as she turns to caress a shaggy silver pillow.
           Matty’s waiting in the car, and I’m supposed to be quick—in and out—to pick up a replacement picture frame after our wedding portrait crashed off the wall. But I can’t take my eyes off this nun.
           She stands, smooths out her tunic and strides past me, past the paper measuring strips and doll-sized pencils, past the cage of yellow shopping bags, and heads straight for the display of throws. She strokes each one, knit in vibrant golds and grays, and presses them against her cheek like one would a kitten.
           She sees me staring and smiles. I turn away and pretend to examine an armchair, one of those wide ones big enough for two, the kind Matty says are wholly impractical. He’d have found the frame and made it to self-checkout by now, but I like to linger. Imagine what if. Stand in each decorator room and pretend to be living some alternate version of my life—a young twenty-something with a new apartment; a scientist who collects jazz records; single and on a first date, wondering if I’m brave enough to smoke a little weed if he asks, if he’ll tip me over the edge of the armchair or if he’ll go slow.
           I should hurry, get in and out like Matty said. But the nun’s on the move, and I snake after her; I can’t help myself. Her tunic swings with each graceful step, as if with every movement she gives more of herself to God. And she’s beautiful, even with her hair hidden under the wimple—such a sad, salty word—she’s ageless. I bet she’s shopping for refugee families or abused women; people in need.
           The nun doesn’t dip through the sneaky short-cuts, not like Matty does when he comes with me. Straight to the end, so they can’t sucker you into buying more crap you don’t need, he says. But how do you know if you need it or not if you don’t even lay eyes on it? For example, the picture frame shelf? If we had one of those, our wedding portrait wouldn’t have crashed off the wall. Maybe stemmed glassware would make us more refined and floral sheets would encourage something to grow.
           The nun stops at a decorator bedroom, sits on the edge of the bed and bounces twice. She lays herself down atop of the covers. The bottom of her black shoes are worn thin. How tired she must be, taking such careful steps, acceding to God’s wants and whims. Serving only Him and not herself.
           I know I should hurry, that Matty is waiting, but the beds are so inviting and so soft.

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Sara Hills writes from Warwickshire, UK. Her short fiction has been featured in several anthologies and journals, including Barren Magazine, Reflex Fiction, TSS, and Flash Flood Journal. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Award and the Bridport Prize, longlisted for the Fish Flash Fiction Prize, and in 2020, she won the UK National Flash Fiction Day micro competition. She tweets from @sarahillswrites.

COCKATOO'S FLIGHT — MICHELLE XU

In my dreams, he finds me on the thrice-waxed floor of our old high school gym. Clumps of shadows are clapping for some spectacle in center court, a wrestling match, a theater scene, a tango of purple cockatoos perhaps, but I am leaning against the bleachers’ plastic wrinkles and scanning for a familiar face. Then he strides into view, sixteen again in cargo shorts stuffed with cinnamon gum, knocks his shoulder against mine and whispers:

“I’m sorry.”

Sometimes he takes my hand first. Sometimes he kisses my cheek farewell. Sometimes we rush into the center of the crowd and each grab a cockatoo’s tail, bursting through the ceiling of tessellated fluorescence, upwards like the birth of two stars in the night.

But either way, I stop wondering what came first: him loving me or him wanting to leave his girlfriend. (Instead I leave him, trampolining off the clouds into thinner and thinner air.) I stop fearing the corroding mists of rumors after every date. (Instead I twirl free like a cockatoo, purple invisible against ink sky.) And I stop dreaming of him inside this dream, no longer confused by how a cinnamon kiss, shared, could mark only one target.

(Instead, the sky up here is clear. I soar.)

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Michelle Xu is a physicist by day and writer by night. Her work has appeared in Riggwelter Press, and she runs a compost heap of a writing blog at colorcompendium.wordpress.com. 

AFTER SEX, WE FIND A PRAYING MANTIS IN OUR BED — CORTNEY PHILLIPS MERIWETHER

The first time we slept together in the new apartment, it had been five weeks since you last touched me. But they say moving is one of the most stressful things a marriage can go through, and back then we would have agreed—our lower backs aching, the shrieking rip of packing tape still ringing in our ears—so who could blame us for not feeling up to it.

Afterwards, I got up to go to the bathroom, like I always do, and you turned onto your back to reach for your phone, like you always do, and the moment felt instantly severed—during and after, then and now—and I wondered, like I always do, if you noticed it too.

Afterwards, I found my way back to you with the flashlight on my phone—the beam catching dust in the air—and then I saw it, perched lightly on the bare mattress where the fitted sheet pulled loose, overlooking you while you overlooked it.

Afterwards, once you’d gently corralled him into a Tupperware container and deposited him safely outside, I asked you what it meant—luck, maybe?—and you told me no, that was ladybugs and it probably didn’t mean anything, and then I said something about don’t the females eat the males after sex..? and you said well not always and reached for your phone again to Google symbolism, telling me soothing words: patience, peacefulness, grace.

Afterwards, we’ll both know it wasn’t that night—the timing just won’t add up, off by weeks, even—but we’ll tell the story like a fact, cleaving to the narrative of our family beginning under the watchful blessing of this uninvited party, because how could something like that not be a sign, after all, and how could we not fully delight in new life created alongside a divine messenger? Exactly, we'll say. Exactly. 

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Cortney Phillips Meriwether received her MFA in Creative Writing from NC State in 2012 and has been working as a writer and editor ever since. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, Monkeybicycle, and Minola Review, and she is a reader for Fractured Lit. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her husband and son. 

GRAFFITO — ANDREW ADAIR

Across the country the words went round and round in the heads of the children, their minds burning rubber trying to understand what it meant to remove an organ, why someone would want to, and who would want the organs of a little girl, you mean like me, a thing impossible to hear from your child and made worse once it becomes clear no organs were even removed and all this after days of fighting the hydra of news both real and fake sprouting up from all sides at newsstands, in the grocery store, overheard on the bus, everywhere, until it was no use, it had to be addressed: what had happened, how it had happened, the impossible question of why and most importantly, if nothing else could be made clear, that this would never, ever happen to their little babies because they would never let it happen, and that yes, the world can be a scary and dangerous place but you have a whole bunch of people who love you very much and who will never stop making sure you're safe, and all this said knowing full well that that little girl had damn well near the same bunch of people who loved her very much and that the only difference between her mother and every other parent on earth was the thinly stretched, light years-long arm of chance, its bony finger set in motion by the big bang itself.

So what to do now but be paranoid, to drive the teachers nuts about their after-school policies and their plans b and c and don't fuck with us, what happens if none of those work, don't make this harder than it already—and a burst of tears which scared even them, to see themselves this way when nothing had even happened to them, except that wasn't fair to say, something had: their barely tolerable image of this already violent world was hacked to pieces by an unassuming middle-aged woman, a "friend" who took no more than four seconds to convince that seven-year-old girl to walk away from that school with her and to, my god, hold her hand as if she were her mother and to slip through the streets calmly, quietly, in plain view of a slew of cameras, police, neighbors, shop owners, and worst of all, the teachers from the school who knew the girl so well and knew her mother hadn't arrived yet because she couldn't have, not from where she worked, and the poor mother with her mental health issues so predictably ignored by all and for her, hell is gone, a children's fairy tale paled against a reality where a man tells her that not her daughter but a bag filled with her daughter has been found at a construction site, and where is the mayor on this or no, actually, where's the president, oh there he is, he's upset; he says this is not the way, this heinous defacing of a federal building.

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Andrew Adair is a writer/translator from Indiana living in Mexico City by way of New York. He is Editor-at-Large, Mexico at Asymptote Journal and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Latin American Literature Today, Waxwing, BrooklynRail, and The Hopper. In 2020, Random House Mondadori will publish an anthology of the poetry of Guadalupe 'Pita' Amor, co-edited by Adair. He is currently translating the work of José Gorostiza, Maricela Guerrero, Guadalupe Amor and Rosario Castellanos. He is also a founding member of the translators' collective, Falsos Amigos.

HOW TO GET A MESSAGE BEHIND ENEMY LINES — K.S. LOKENSGARD

Tattoo the small, dangerous words to a man’s shaved scalp. When the hair has grown back, send the man ahead with a knife and a small pack of food. Show him the hidden routes through the mountains when spring has come. Trace the lines on the map with your fingers and then burn it.
            Write the secrets on a piece of your mother’s stationery, using a cipher that makes the message look like a different message, banal and weather-related. Press your lips to the flowers scrawled around the border of the page and sign it with a fake name. Send this one through the normal post.
            Take hostages from a skirmish at the border. Look carefully at the one with close-bitten fingernails and then turn her by blackmail, with threats about her own secrets. Watch her wring her hands in panic and then agree. Send her home with instructions: Have her eavesdrop behind the curtain. Have her bring a tray of drinks around the party, listening for the person you told her about. Have her pass on the message in the dim light of a back hallway, fraught seconds passing while her heart pounds.
            When the terrain sounds familiar in the reports coming back, ignore it with a shake of your head. Chalk it up to coincidence. Remember the thing that caused the war: the midnight betrayal, the sick dropping-off in your chest when you found out, the wound that remains tender even now. When your friends say things like, you’re better off now and you’ve just got to move on, keep the secrets of your wartime campaign to yourself. Not everyone has the stomach for war.
           And when you realize that across the frontline of the enemy, where smoke rises in clouds and dogs bark into air already full—when you realize what that place is, take a moment. When you come to understand that it’s just a different part of yourself, bloodied beyond recognition, that you drew the line with your own hand—that this whole country is just your body, and you have been sneaking word to your own traitor heart, give yourself a minute. Give yourself a minute. Smooth your skirt. Tuck your hair behind your ears. Listen to the boy’s bumbling apology as it falls from his lips.
          Then, call your spies back. Realize that you can speak to yourself without casualties. That you can love someone who hurt you; that you can leave him behind. Look out over the valleys, the fields, the sparrows darting from the trees. Leave notes in the branches with soft things written on them. Watch new growth sprout up in the places that you burned. 

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K.S. Lokensgard is a writer and lawyer from Washington, D.C. 

BAD FISH, BLACK SHEEP — SARA SIDDIQUI CHANSARKAR

Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning, sings Suzie, the lead choir singer and my friend. She stands two steps ahead of me and other chorus girls on the assembly stage. Her voice is as beautiful as her face, which has a glow these days. Her dark-brown hair tied in a braid, with a black ribbon at the end, shimmers in the morning sun. 
           Other girls are lined on the assembly ground, waiting, patiently, for the hymn to end. They stand quiet—hands to the side, creased pinafores touching their knees—under the thick-browed gaze of our tall principal, Sister Rosaline, who is standing on the stage to our right. There’s no escaping morning or evening prayers at our boarding school.
           Sing hosanna, to the king of kings, we sing the chorus after Suzie recites her lines. Suzie is unsteady on her feet. Her upper body swings left to right, her braid touches one hip, then the other, before her knees buckle. I catch her as she falls backward. Other girls shout, run toward the stage. Sister Rosaline grabs the microphone and orders everyone to the classrooms.
           Suzie is unconscious and heavy as I and another girl carry her to the nurse’s room. Her cheeks are flushed, her forehead beaded with sweat. The plump nurse checks Suzie’s pulse; worry lines appear on her forehead. She makes a cross sign on her bosom and mutters a prayer. The buzzer for the first-period sounds. I hurry to my 11th-grade math class.
           I don’t see Suzie for the rest of the day. After school, I go to the dorm to check on her. She is nowhere: her bed is stripped, her closet empty, her wall bare except for old cello-tape stubs. Her black hair ribbon, still tied to her chair, flies towards me in the ceiling fan’s breeze.
           I rush to the warden’s office and ask about Suzie. Bad fish, black sheep, Sister Lawrence, the warden, tsks. Suzie has been sent home, she says and adjusts her habit. No one must talk about her.
           On Sunday, there is no confession because Father Andrew isn’t there—he’s gone. No one must talk about him, I am told. Suzie, once, told me Father Andrew wore a woodsy cologne. How do you know, I’d asked. Give me love in my heart, I pray, she hummed, running her fingers over her braid.
           I go to Suzie’s room, untie the black ribbon from her chair, open the window and let it fly. It rises up, then floats parallel to the ground for a while, before sinking.

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Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar is an Indian American. She was born in a middle-class family in India and will forever be indebted to her parents for educating her beyond their means. She is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee; her work has been published online in Fictive Dream, Spelk Fiction, PidgeonHoles, MoonPark Review among other places, and also in print anthologies. Her work can be read at Puny Fingers and she can be reached on twitter @PunyFingers.

SUNDAY MORNING AND THE WORLD IS BEHIND YOU — DAKOTA CANON

You sit quietly on the sofa when the Dunbars arrive, all high-pitched so-good-to-see-yous and awkward embraces, apologies because they meant to bring champagne but the Mrs. grabbed a red by accident, and you know for pretty-damn-sure this won’t end well, but there’s nothing your ten-year-old powerlessness can do about it. Your mother’s wearing her yellow dress, the one with white flowers she used to wear to the lake on those searingly cloudless days when her skin shone like unbreakable glass and you had to squint just to find the tuna salad in the picnic spread. It’s like she thinks that dress can turn back the days, make them sunny again, even though Donnie’s been gone two years now.
           At the breakfast table, you wrap a foot around what used to be his chair, with its own place setting, even its own wineglass, though Donnie wasn’t twenty-one yet when he died. You consider scooting over because Mr. Dunbar keeps eyeing the empty chair, the full wineglass, and scowling, which your mother notices, too. But sitting in Donnie’s seat could be its own catastrophe, so instead you ask Mr. Dunbar to pass the chicken.
           “Put some meat on those bones, eh, boy? Maybe you’ll make the team someday, too?”
           Everyone freezes except Mr. Dunbar because that’s how Donnie died: a pileup, his head bent under his chest, six guys projectile-missile jumping onto his spine with their two-hundred-eighty pound cannonball selves, and all you can think about is Mrs. Dunbar’s perfume, so sickly sweet like rotting fruit—it’s suffocating you. Mr. Dunbar’s laughing, elbowing your father and thrusting the dead chicken right into Donnie’s wineglass. Glass shatters. Wine splatters. The stain spreads all over your mother’s sunny dress, blood-red darkening the spot where her heart must have been.
           You’re on your feet as she scrubs over the sink, sobbing. You reach out tentatively with your best caresses—her arm, her back. You want to fling yourself untethered around her, be her baby again and have her be your mom, but she stamps a foot, tosses the rag in the sink and turns to you, teeth gritted. “You’re not helping anything!”
           You step away, stung, squinting through your own tears because you used to make her happy. And you’re sure you could again. If only that dark spot were gone. If only she’d hold you one more time.

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Dakota Canon’s work can be found in Witness, Smokelong Quarterly, Hobart, Moon City Review, Fiction Southeast, Literary Orphans, The MacGuffin, Citron Review, Gone Lawn, Bending Genres, North Dakota Quarterly, on Wigleaf’s 2020 longlist and elsewhere. Her novel, The Unmaking of Eden, won the 2019 Caledonia Novel Award and the 2018 Hastings Litfest Crime Novel Contest, placed second in the 2019 First Novel Prize, reached the finals of the 2019 James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and was long-listed in the 2019 BPA First Novel Award and the 2018 Yeovil Literary Prize, among other prizes. She’s received mention in the Manchester Fiction Prize and the Writer’s Digest Annual Short Story Contest and has served on staff for Cease, Cows.

THE MOUTH — MATT LEIBEL

Things came out of the mouth that were not supposed to come out of the mouth: words the mouth was not supposed to know; words the mouth knew but knew it was not supposed to say out loud; interjections that, once released into the universe (defined here as the world beyond the mouth, beyond all mouths, the air we had not yet breathed), could not be taken back; little bits of spittle the viscosity of raw rubber; tiny bird-like whistles the mouth shaped into tiny birds and tiny whistles. The mouth, after mouthing some of these things, was washed out with soap to teach it a lesson about what to mouth and what not to mouth. The mouth wondered why something so clean as soap had to taste so dirty. The mouth would have an aversion to Lava brand soap bars that would last a lifetime. The mouth was 6 years old, precisely the age of the small person it was attached to, though it had been recognizably a mouth for somewhat longer than that. The mouth wished it could be washed out with candy, or with ice cream, or with bubble gum. The mouth formed questions it rolled up into bite-sized pieces: Where does God live? How did the world get 7 billion people? Are mussels called mussels because they have big muscles? are all things the mouth wanted to know. The mouth wondered if there were mouths in space, secret mouths deep in the universe, and what comes into and out of these mouths. The mouth wondered what was the first mouth ever, was it the mouth of the distant ball of gas that gave birth to the Sun in our Galaxy and other sunlike stars in other galaxies? Was it the mouth of God? And if no one ever had a mouth before God how would God even know what to do with a mouth, who could God even ask because She’d have to know how to move Her mouth to move Her mouth? Our own mouths lacked the ability to form satisfactory answers to the mouth’s questions. The mouth was sometimes admonished for talking too much out of turn in school. The mouth was placed in time out. The mouth was good at apologizing, and redeemed itself. The mouth, a fast learner, would someday talk itself into dates and jobs, and bargains on cars. The mouth would comfort the sad at funerals, speak up against the cruel. The mouth would go through an experimental lipstick phase. The world would be better off for the mouth having mouthed off. But for now the mouth was still exploring the limits of being a mouth. We never quite knew what it would say or do, and that was part of the primordial delight that would leave us gaping at the mouth, our own jaws stretched wider than they’d imagined themselves capable of, ready to inhale the unspoken world, poised to take in all that we could swallow.

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Matt Leibel’s short fiction has been published in Electric Literature, Portland Review, Carolina Quarterly, DIAGRAM and X-R-A-Y, and is forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2020.