LOVE SCREAM — MADELINE ANTHES

The night before our wedding, my wife told me she was descended from cicadas. We’d only known each other for six weeks. Our love was sudden the way evening turns to night—I blinked and then it was there.  

Why are you telling me this? I asked her.

It changes things.

Her brown eyes were so large and lovely. I took her hands in mine, her diamond ring sparkling like a lightning bug in the dim of my apartment.

It changes nothing.  

*

We had challenges.

Every summer her skin sloughed off in a thick sheet, a complete outline of her body as though it was the mold she was made from. She didn’t like to call it a shell; she called it an exoskeleton as if that were better. The first year I tried to make her laugh by sitting her old skin at the table like another person. I even put a cup of coffee and bagel in front of it as though it was sharing breakfast with us. She didn’t find it funny. After that, we carefully snapped the skin-body into chunks and threw it in the woods.

She was filled with electricity, always burning, always buzzing, always about to explode. She was restless—running for hours throughout the day, cycling into the evening. Her legs were spindly threads of muscle and bone.

I told you, she said one Sunday as we got ready for bed. She took out her blue contacts so her red eyes shone. The brown eyes had been contacts, too, it turned out. It changed things.

*

But it wasn’t the skin or the energy or even the endless talk of children that did us in.

It was her voice.  

Her voice was a rough melody—a hissing mixture of clanking chains and tinkling wind chimes. At parties, my friends would lean away from her when she spoke. They cringed as her voice grew louder and louder as the night wore on. By August, she echoed through our home and our neighbors called the police.

At first, I found her voice soothing. It was a rhythmic lullaby I could rely on, whispering to me, reassuring me. But soon I could barely think. My ears were ringing and I wasn’t able to speak around her. She drowned me out.

Finally, finally, I admitted it was too much. We were too different. I loved her, but it was done.

The night before she moved out, I returned home to find her sitting high up in the branch of a pine tree. She was clinging to the trunk and screaming at the top of her lungs.

I wanted to get her down, to hold her, to tell her we’d be fine if she could just stop.  But it was too late. I stood at the bottom of the tree and placed my hands along the bark’s ridges, feeling the trunk vibrate with her voice. I closed my eyes and screamed with her.

---

Madeline Anthes is the Assistant Editor of Lost Balloon. You can find her on Twitter at @maddieanthes, and find more of her work at madelineanthes.com

SAVIOR COMPLEX — ASHLEY WANG

It started with the minor things in life, symptoms steeped until lethal. Meaning my preschool teachers taught me well when they said to pray and reach for the bones embedded in the spines of our coloring books, to begin as a list of things to rescue:

we’re sitting in 2008 and mother says fireflies are stars trying to escape infernos. Once confronted with their own mortality, they fled, chose abandonment as a solution to the finish line. So I stand on the porch, correct this injustice. Launch a mission of grabbing onto wings, spilling mason jars and a minefield of paper cups over the fence. For months, constellations descend into our driveway, wake up on top of a kitchen island. I regurgitate Bible lessons, spit out a version of the Good Samaritan; cook up Turbo Rocket popsicles from the ice-cream truck, opening each summer day with resurrection. I chart lives by the week, feed the fireflies into believing. Always toward the same end: 

after graduating from guerilla prayers on curbsides and metal subway seats, the Sunday youth group flies to Chiang Rai. We write ourselves into a feel-good testimony, give too little and take too much. Cheap chocolate, fiction by the spoonful. Yes. Eve ate the seed of a fruit, grew it in her womb. And God sent Santa to save us all. Teach card games, as if losing a mother prevents a girl from counting to thirteen. As if knowing how to spot royalty will story a path out of an opium field. Once, before dinner, I explain how hunger humbles the soul, shortens the journey to salvation. Five minutes later, we devour pork, let oil coagulate with the sweat holding fast onto our chins. We slaughter a pig and watch its head fling open like a trapdoor. Witness a man hold the quivering flesh, unable to dictate its end, long enough for its skin to boil over with flies. Swallow a fly. Preach forgiveness and the right way to play tag: relentless, the way satellites chase after cars at midnight. We forget to consider the possibility of failed metaphors, that words sometimes struggle to cross the boundary between hunter and hunted. Forget translation—

fool them into stitching together lightning bolts, igniting back into the fires they ran from. A hundred charity cases marked as bruises on the countertop.

---

Ashley Wang lives in Lawrenceville, NJ. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins, Sine Theta Magazine, Up The Staircase Quarterly, Polyphony Lit, Plum Recruit Mag, Freezeray Poetry, and elsewhere. She tweets occasionally @AshWang20.

ONE HELL OF A MEMORY — CHRIS HAVEN

Once there was a person who remembered everything in every moment of her life, the good and the bad, and that meant that she never forgot a birthday or anniversary or the weather on a particular day. She would get booked on talk shows so people could marvel at how she had mastered time. Her brain was like a computer before computers existed and people were reminded of the miracle of being human.
           She was charming on the shows and talked fast and she never forgot a slight. She could call up anything negative anyone had ever said about someone else, or her, and she often did. She couldn’t help it. She remembered every time she said an unkind word or had a petty reaction to someone else’s success, or a petty reaction to someone else’s petty reaction to her own success. Sometimes she would report these on the shows, without the names of course, but that hardly mattered.
           As the memories piled up she wondered if anyone on balance was a good person. She couldn’t control the frequency of each memory, and the bad memories seemed to come up more often and outweigh the good ones. Repetition became reality. This gift which had brought her so much notoriety developed into a hell—that was her word for it—until she decided one morning to focus on the tree outside her door.
           She chronicled the exact moment she noticed the first bloom in spring and the first change of color in the fall. She made that tree the anchor of every day. She focused on turns and changes, not states of being. She never learned the tree’s genus or species—a good memory does not mean one knows all. If she would have found out the name of the tree, it never would have left her, and she wanted to preserve space in her mind.
           So she focused on the greens and browns and yellows and reds, and when she began to see everything as a moment turning to change, she explained to the audiences of the talk shows that our calendars are constructed all wrong. In fact, they’re useless! No day should be separated because: when the one becomes many, it becomes impossible for the many to become one.
           These audiences applauded and smiled politely. Still, they asked her what day of the week their birthdays were, what the weather was on the day their goldfish died, and how many days they’ve been alive because she had become theirs to use. They didn’t care about the unclassified tree outside her yard. They wanted her to keep telling them the dates of their lives, the weather that carried them. She would never forget how they wanted to keep being born again and again, numbered into existence, any existence, in whatever mind, and copied throughout however many lives they might be able to rustle their way through before that last drift through unencumbered air, toward their resting spot among the many.

---

Chris Haven’s prose appears or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Jellyfish Review, No Contact, Cincinnati Review miCRo, and Kenyon Review. One of his stories is listed in Best American Short Stories 2020, and his debut collection of short stories, Nesting Habits of Flightless Birds, was published by Tailwinds Press in 2020. Bone Seeker, a collection of poems, was published by NYQ Books in March 2021. He teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.

THE ASTRONAUT — LINDY BILLER

My 6-year-old wants to go to Mars. He dreams of floating around like a dust bunny in zero gravity, looking down at the gumball-sized earth through a small, reinforced porthole. His heart, when I press my ear to his chest at night, whispers the same word over and over: away, away, away. I make him a cardboard box spaceship and take him to the empty lot across the street, releasing him to the December breeze. Once it would’ve been snowing here. It used to snow all the time. Downy pillows of white. When I was little, I rolled around in it, rolled it into round-bellied men with stone eyes and stick arms, men who melted into glittering skeletons before collapsing. My son has never seen snow. He wears cotton pajamas with moons and stars and rocket ships on them. He says that when he becomes an astronaut, he’ll name his shuttle after me: Laeli, my real name, even though he just calls me Mama. He rides his bike to the library and checks out books about the space program, the Big Bang theory, the entropy of stars. He launches his bottle rocket in the dirt field behind the school, speckled with broken glass and abandoned shoes and other kids’ bottle rockets. My son is small for his age, and he says this will give him a better chance of survival. He will require fewer calories, less oxygen. He is 13 before I realize how serious this is. He takes the entrance exams for the city’s junior aerospace program, an Earth-to-Mars pipeline for gifted children, and he aces everything. I shut myself in the bathroom and cry into a washcloth for twenty minutes. I go into debt to pay for his classes, his virtual books. By age 16 he has started practical training: the flight simulator, hydroponic farming, field trips to 30,000 feet—his empty stomach heaving while the pilot flies a parabolic maneuver to simulate microgravity, my son’s freefall cocooned within the curved walls of the fuselage. I begin grinding my teeth at night, molars worn down to hard seeds. I buy him a telescope and help him set it up on the roof of our building. I sit out with my son on clear nights, looking through the eyepiece, the long tube, the high-powered lens. My son shows me the twinkle of dead light. The pockmarked face of the moon. He adjusts the angle and shows me where he'll be after he’s gone: a luminous orange circle, smudged in places, like an old penny. I touch the hollow of my stomach and think he has always been this way: kicking, somersaulting, wide awake even at night. I’m so proud of you, I tell my son, several times a week, and he smiles, glows a little, and I imagine the words trailing after him like the tail of a comet, small pieces of me burning as he arcs upward through the atmosphere, away, away, away.

---

Lindy Biller grew up in Metro Detroit and now lives in Wisconsin with her family. Her fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming at Pithead Chapel, Flash Frog, X-R-A-Y, and Chestnut Review. 

WAKE UP CALL — CHAUNA CRAIG

Near the top of the burnt-orange carpeted stairs leading into the kitchen’s warmth, I turn to look where the wolf stands perfectly still at the bottom, legs poised to pounce, red tongue lolling, cartoon canine smile, patient as death because suddenly I can’t speak or move, limbs drained of life energy, my jackrabbit heart pumping blood that can’t circulate and pools in my feet, weighs me down. I know: my parents can’t help me, my alarm clock will never sound. 

*

At twenty-five, a graduate student, I taught my first fiction writing class, two students near my own age. One is now a famous feminist theorist with best-selling books. The other shot her husband dead. Conclusion in both cases: self-defense.

*

In one recurring dream, I know where the body is buried, a woman my own age. I try desperately to throw all the male detectives off. I simper, I smile, I appear to be helpful as I lead them in other directions. Why don’t I want her found? I think I’ve killed her, but I’m not sure. Why am I not sure? What if she’s still alive?

*

San Francisco in January, salt water taffy on the pier, seals barking below. Cindy in a buttery brown leather jacket, blonde hair dancing in the wind. We huddle close, I unwrap a pink taffy, my grandmother’s favorite, and pop it in my mouth. We’ve spent nearly a week here, two friends on a trip: books at City Lights, the Castro’s swelling energy, an Italian restaurant with mouthwatering Bolognese sauce, the rocking trolley where I fell asleep against the warmth of her body. Finally, on our last day, Cindy turns to me, her conjuring hands weaving the salty mist in the air between us, and asks, “Is there something going on here?” My heart beats harder, my tongue wraps the taffy and holds on.

*

Another recurring dream. A plastic retainer in my mouth, molded plastic and wire like the one I wore in junior high, makes it impossible for me to speak. I push it away with my tongue. I spit it out. Another grows in its place. This continues until I’m fully awake.

*

Camping at Palouse Falls with friends and strangers, I was nineteen, just months away from dropping out of college. I sneaked away alone to perch at the edge of the gorge, that rocky open throat roaring and pulsing with water. Imagining how it might feel to lean too far, to fall and fall. Mist laced my brow, curled the fine hairs around my face. I wanted to remain in that feeling, stay there as darkness descended, but someone called my name.

---

Chauna Craig writes fiction and nonfiction and edits creative nonfiction for Atticus Review. She loves piña coladas and getting caught in the rain, but her favorite escape starts with surprise bouquets of tiny proses. Find her at www.chaunacraig.com.

DRINKING GAME RULES — SAGE TYRTLE

Drink Baileys from your parents' liquor cabinet when Nicole sleeps over. Drink when your parents are having date night. Drink when you're kissing in a pickup behind the Texaco. Drink when your dad moves out. Drink when you move out. Drink three shots of cherry vodka when your aunt gets you a job interview. Drink when you're bored. Drink a Mojito when your coworker says, again, "Oh my god, she did not." Drink when the wedding's over. Drink when you're anxious. Drink when you want to hear the glass filling, the foam hissing. Drink when the White Sox win. Drink when the baby is having her bottle. Drink when you have a fight. Drink when you're having date night. Drink white wine at Book Club, points subtracted if you mention The Hate U Give or Angie Thomas at any point. Drink when you've had another, another, another fight. Drink when you're alone. Drink when you're at a party. Drink when it's 2:45 AM and you're lying on the couch, bonus points if you finish the bottle within an hour. Drink when the house is empty. Drink when the sun rises. Drink when you're sober.

---

Sage Tyrtle's stories have been featured on NPR, CBC and PBS. She is a Moth GrandSLAM winner. In her basement a team of brilliant scientists work night and day, figuring out how to bring Louise Fitzhugh back to life. Twitter: @sagetyrtle

REFLECTING POOL — YONG-YU HUANG

In mid-July we watched the gleaming surface of the lake swallow a menagerie of color, unnatural in its cadences of light: the lovebirds that a man dropped from his rowboat and then the golden dog that dove in after them. It didn’t make a splash, dropped like a comma in the water. The night before, I had let my favorite denim jacket sink, the one with my initials cross-stitched in tangerine thread across the front pocket; around me, everyone else was tossing things into the water. Loose mother-of-pearl buttons, greening pennies, the crumpled red skin of an empty Coke. Afterwards, we sat on the dock and sucked on neon popsicles, the colors swirling on the surface of the mossy water.

That year, the camp guide told us that the lake was meromictic—layers upon layers clinging to each other but never mixing. They lost a camper sometime in the hairpin bend of summer too, and for weeks, her bright yellow swimsuit was plastered across every front page. When we sat around the campfire to pray for her return, the lake flooded up to our shins and left a permanent ring of red around our ankles. Someone mentioned ringworm and lifebuoys; I stopped wearing socks after that. Still, I wanted to stay out there with them all summer, lounging in the gritty sand and letting water seep into my mouth. But we drove back down the mountain roads, past the copse of trees lined with golden streamers from the night before, past the turtle sanctuary with its odd silences and empty green pools, past the gas station and the sitcoms playing on the TV by the slushy machine, and I said goodbye somewhere in between that.

When they dredged her out of the water in the winter, we were already long gone. The body had floated all the way up to the top layer, and someone had spotted a pack of deer fleeing south, away from the foggy ice and the half-open eyes underneath. I read about it in the paper—the limp mass sprawled across the front page—and then I called the others. We ordered wicker baskets of miniature lotions to cover the last of the sunburns from lying belly-down on the dock, our elbows rubbed raw on the wooden slats. They came in strange, exotic scents like Buttered Tartar, Cream of Cinnamon, Mango Incense. We rubbed them into our skin anyway; it was always better to start water-proofing early.

The next year we met at the same lake, skin gleaming and still curious to see what the lake had to offer. It was a morbid fascination, but we agreed—water that didn’t take on the appearance of anything else was something to be explored. I thought of the dog and the lovebirds and the fistfuls of hair we had lost the year before, endless shades of peacock blue. Come on now, it’s getting late, someone called out, but we had already turned away, our faces damp and eager in the silty heat.

---

Yong-Yu Huang is a Taiwanese student living in Malaysia. Her work is forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, Passages North, and Counterclock Journal, among others, and has been recognized by Princeton University, The Kenyon Review, and Columbia College Chicago. She is the winner of the 2021 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize and the prose winner for the 2021 Counterclock Awards. In her free time, she enjoys listening to Studio Ghibli soundtracks and sitting by bonfires on the beach.

HEIRLOOM FROM RIVER ROUGE, MICHIGAN — BROOKE RANDEL

A bell dings. A woman hands over her husband’s shirt, torn at the shoulder, and another woman, a woman with the same first name as my middle name, takes it and says come back Thursday. She smooths the shirt, aligning its seam under the eye of her Singer sewing machine, model 31-15. Her grandson sleeps on a wooden table in the back. She watches the Singer’s needle bob up and down as it does its steady, invisible work. No one will know what happened to the shirt, what traumas it’s seen. She doesn’t pick up her head, doesn’t slow down, doesn’t wonder why her grandson isn’t in school. She sews a straight line, closes the wound. Decades later, when the auto plants close down and the town empties out, her body will too and her grandson, grown and graduated, on his own since sixteen, will move across the country, setting the sewing machine in a corner of his house where it will go untouched for years, a dusty memory, a different time, until, at age five, I try to sew my finger and scream.

---

Brooke Randel is a writer and copywriter in Chicago. Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in Gigantic Sequins, Hypertext Magazine, Jewish Fiction, Pidgeonholes, and elsewhere. She is currently writing a memoir about her grandma, literacy and the legacy of the Holocaust. Find more of her work at brookerandel.com.