DECISION SHOPPING — YVANNA VIEN TICA

She’s struggling between cotton or silk. She hates linen. The customer service confuses itself with her demands. Rain pours out the window. I push the shopping cart. She’s struggling between hats and glasses, screwing a shirt on then off. I think of the traffic. An elderly couple asks me if she’s my granddaughter and I say yes. They chuckle as if I’m lying. I think of my daughter finalizing the divorce papers. They move away. She’s struggling to ask me something and I realize that she doesn’t know what kind of sleeves she wants on a dress. I think of my doctor, how he answered that any time would be a good time to tell the family. She’s given up on clothes and accessories. She tells me she wants to cry but doesn’t tell me why. I think of my doctor’s answer, how I disagree. I think of how the situation is classic dark humor, raw yet restrained. Three hours later, the cart stands empty in the parking lot. The moon appears through a gauze of pregnant clouds. On the drive home, I ask if she wants McDonald’s. She refuses. My daughter told me they’re both struggling to eat. I think of walking in those aisles gagging to the brim with clothes, my granddaughter's empty eyes as she scratched her thin-skinned palms. I realize I’m struggling to lie and tell her she’ll always have a choice. I think of telling her about what the doctor said, but my granddaughter starts crying and turns her face from me so I decide against it. She’s struggling to muffle her sniffles as we inch through traffic. I think of how she’s like my daughter in the way they mourn like ghosts: an unsettling force, afraid to be seen in daylight. Even when I drop her off with the promise that we’ll always go on shopping trips, the empty cart springs into our eyes before shuttling on a long, congested road.

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Yvanna Vien Tica is a Filipina writer who grew up in Manila and in a Chicagoland suburb. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in EX/POST Magazine, DIALOGIST, Hobart, and Shenandoah, among others. She edits for Polyphony Lit, reads for Muzzle Magazine, and tweets @yvannavien. In her spare time, she can be found enjoying nature and thanking God for another day.

POCKET SHARPS — JANNA MILLER

The blade is shiny and was your mother’s. You draw its steel across a found branch the same way she did, sitting at the edge of the flames, long curls of wood falling to your feet. The pile grows though no one says anything, and next morning you leave an outline of how you were sitting, just the wood chips and a woody shadow, all the disturbed ground twenty paces away. But camp is camp and other girls only want to sing in the dark and practice kissing the backs of their hands like squalling rabbits. The knife you put in the secret space behind your desk in case you need to use it to whittle a bird or confront a stranger. But you pull it out when the desk chair gives you splinters from rubbing your forearms and grinding your teeth because algebra doesn’t add up the way it should and once you skip your period. You gouge it good and deep, first one side and then the other until you break the arms off altogether and throw them in the woodpile behind the shed. There are snakes there, but you don’t mind. No one says anything about the chair, limbless as you push it around your room. Later, the desk comes with you but not the chair, and now you cut with a butter knife by pushing food around on your plate and chopsticks sometimes, but all it does is transfer calories from one place to another and maybe you don’t eat as much as you should. Dull pointy things are easy to grasp. Shirts fall off your shoulder and you wear a girl’s skirt to work, hunger pricking at your thin cheekbones and no one says anything. You check in the desk and your mother’s knife is still there, shiny as ever and you peel back the blade with a faint clicking sound of it falling into place and your hands fall into place too. You are sharp and pointy as well, the hair on your arms bristle and the heat never reaches your eyes but freezes there as hard as they need to be. The front door falls under the blade as dust settles into a wreath like the snake tattoo on your upper right arm and no one says anything, no one ever says anything, but you know your mother would, if she were here.

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Librarian, mother, and minor trickster, Janna Miller spends her time annoying lobsters, sharpening the edges of paper, and refusing to take out the trash. She has coerced published works in places like Andromeda Spaceways, F(r)ction, Meow Meow Pow Pow, and Daily Science Fiction. Nominated for Best Small Fictions. Generally, if the toaster blows up, it is not her fault.

BROADER AND STRONGER — LAURA BESLEY

Twice you’ve had the dream, the one where you’re having sex with that dad from the school playground, you know the one who’s slightly broader and slightly stronger than the other dads and when he smiles at you—oh god, when he smiles at you!—you notice his teeth are slightly whiter and slightly straighter and you go home and try to make the kids eat the fruit you’ve chopped before they have a biscuit, then, like most days, you give up and they eat the biscuits and you eat the fruit and in between bites of apples and pears, you prepare a Bolognese sauce from scratch because you can smuggle in extra vegetables to make up for the lack of fruit and all the while you’re thinking about his broader stronger frame pressed against you, his lips against the back of your neck, and somehow you remember to ask about your son’s spelling test and your daughter’s art project and your husband’s meeting with the Big Client and you don’t even mind that no one asks you how your day was, about the fundraiser you’re organising for the local hospice where your mum is dying or that the physiotherapist you’ve been waiting months to see told you the nerve damage might be permanent and you don’t know who was more embarrassed when you burst into tears, and after dinner, when you’re clearing the table and washing up, you think of him again, and when you’re in the bath touching yourself, you imagine they’re his hands and you’re careful not to make any noise because for once you want everyone to forget about you and you don’t want anyone to shout “Mum, where are you?” or “Mum, what are you doing?” or “Kiera, where’s my squash racket?” and when you go to sleep, you dream about him again, but this time you dream that he’s stroking your face and telling you he loves you and now in the school playground you can’t look him in the eye because sex is one thing, but love; love is something else entirely.  

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Laura Besley is the author of micro fiction collection, 100neHundred (Arachne Press, 2021), and flash fiction collection, The Almost Mothers (Dahlia Books, 2020). She has been listed by TSS Publishing as one of the top 50 British and Irish Flash Fiction writers. Her work has been nominated for Best Micro Fiction and her story, To Cut a Long Story Short, will appear in the Best Small Fiction anthology in 2021. Having lived in the Netherlands, Germany and Hong Kong, she now lives in land-locked central England and misses the sea. She tweets @laurabesley

IN WHICH THE FUTURE SPEAKS DIRECTLY TO ISLA — KELLE SCHILLACI CLARKE

No one in her first-grade class believes her when it’s her turn to share. They’re too busy wiggling their teeth, shoving Legos in their mouths, talking about their stupid dogs. The teacher asks what day/month/year it is, where they are on the Mood Meter—red, green, blue, or yellow—and they respond like trained bears. When asked, Isla says she is a mix of green, blue, and red, but not yellow. Never yellow.
           She is green because of all the kids in the world, the Future chose her to visit the night before, balancing their celestial body on the edge of her bed frame, trapping Isla tight. They said Isla was “smart beyond her years,” used the word “brilliant,” and this made her feel important. They conjured beige holograms between their fingers, weaving prophecies that looked like old-time movie projections, swirling in dust. “Why is everything so brown?” Isla asked, and they sighed heavily, bringing their hands together on their ample lap. “This isn’t about that,” they said.
           She is blue because of the things she will miss: snow, bananas, hot chocolate, the monarch butterflies she saw last spring at the Science Center. On their way out of the exhibit, she and her mom had stood perfectly still in a chamber between two doorways, being dusted by employees for “hitch-hikers.” The lady found a bright blue one clinging to Isla’s hair and gently lifted it out, saying, “You can’t sneak away like that.” Isla kept the ones she’d tucked beneath her ruffled skirt.   
           She is red because no one will listen to her—not about the butterflies, the Maldives, or the maple syrup. Her little body fills with rage very quickly, like a tea kettle with only a small amount of water inside, how swift she is to steam and boil. She feels it bubble in her belly and she can sometimes stop it there, before it takes over, but it’s getting harder.
           “Why so angry, Isla?” asks her teacher. “How can we get you back to green? Class, do you have any ideas?”
           But Isla doesn’t want to borrow Marisel’s stuffy, doesn’t want to be friends with Lamar, who pulls her hair and asks why she always wears boys’ clothes, wishes Buster, who reeks of tuna and leaves gummy wrappers beneath his desk, would back off. She knows what happens next. She knows where they all end up, she’s seen it before her very own eyes. It’s this dull space in between that’s making her head explode.
           She coughs, her throat filling again with thick phlegm, and she asks to see the nurse. Hall pass in hand, Isla approaches the office doors, but at the last moment pivots and walks toward the exit instead, pulled by the force of sunlight streaming through the school’s front windows, flooding the entrance in a bright glow. She walks through the glass doors and straight into the heat of it, finally feeling the wash of yellow overcome her small but brilliant body.

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Kelle Schillaci Clarke is a Seattle-based writer whose stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Los Angeles Review, LEON Literary Review, Gone Lawn, Superstition Review, and other literary journals. She holds an MFA from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and was recently named the 2021-2022 Pen Parentis Writing Fellow. She can be found on Twitter @kelle224 and at her website: www.kelleclarkecreative.com.

EMMAJANE W. — REGINA CAGGIANO

In school there was a girl who shared her first name, and so it was fated from birth for her to fall into the world with a last initial W. following her every invocation. They coexisted in equilibrium, the two Emmajanes, regarding each other at first with a slight repugnance and jealous terror, later revealed to be the kinds of emotions tried on only briefly by children, like jackets passed over by a mother at the store, sandals roped away in the waves. The repellent drag between the two girls dissolved as soon as they grew old enough to twine their fingers around their own wholeness, awakened one after the other to the way she could kick a ball and watch it blow up dust onto the other’s ankles without dirtying her own. From then on they entered a benign state of non-reflection: the two Emmajanes looked entirely different from one another anyway, one with brown eyes and one with black, one with lips always chapped, one with eczema on the insides of her elbow, one with a cloud of fuzz between the brows, one suspected of emotional fragility who cried perhaps too often, one that let the recess bugs crawl into her ears, etc.

This would eventually come to an end in Miss H.’s fifth-grade class, where the two girls each with the same two names ceased to be. This was due to the fact that when Emmajane C.’s furnace exploded in the basement, it left a hole like a rocket tunnel through the roof. The school collected donations and Emmajane W. brought sheets and pillowcases to the house on Glass St. to exchange with the ones burned, and her mother brought a very funereal casserole to the family while the kitchen was being repaired. But after the collapse of just a few days, the C.’s of Emmajane C. would move away without notice—the house would be left empty and soon condemned by the state, and Emmajane’s gift of new bedding would be left behind in the linen closet, and her mother’s casserole in the freezer whole, until the electric bill went unpaid and the little cold box no longer hummed with life and in the following years would be razed by a bulldozer, and little by little the letter W. fell from the suffix of Emmajane’s name, for  there was no need, and it was rather more like losing a limb than growing one back, and it was like a vague sunlight, one that is really a relative parting of the clouds, and it was very much the same as the day in first grade music class when they held hands once, fingers rolling over one another and she imagined many small smooth stones in an ocean, and the feeling left her goosebumped all over, and she would always remember, and tread very carefully around radiators and ovens for the rest of her life.

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Regina Caggiano is a student on the East Coast getting her undergrad degree in creative writing. Her work has been previously published in Beyond Words Magazine and the Ember Chasm Review. You can find her on twitter at @reginacaggiano where she loves to connect with other writers and small presses!

SWAMP THING RUMINATES ON A LINE FROM THOMAS MERTON — JACK B. BEDELL

Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire. The first time I heard this, I was holed up in the palmettos behind Our Lady of Blind River waiting for the sun to drop so I could move on. There was a woman inside the chapel chanting Merton, and it all seemed to square with the world to the left and right of me. Because I was sitting in the shade hungry, it sounded like standard nutritional advice, actually. Clean fuel in, clean energy out, you know. You are what you eat kind of stuff. I mean, the poule d’eau diving for fish in the water behind me tasted like fish, the choupique nosing silt tasted like mud, so it made sense then. Looking at my own reflection on the bayou now, though, I’m starting to realize Merton was herding us more toward the Zen of desire with all that stuff. My whole grown life, I’ve been alone in a lab chasing God, trying to make something out of nothing like He did. I never wanted to BE God. That was never my goal. I wanted to be as God is to this world, a provider, someone who could turn stone into bread or desert into paradise so we could all share in it. And look at me now. There is nothing in this whole swamp more consubstantial than I am—all dirt and vine and anger and guilt. Infinitely so, in the image of my desire.

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Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in Barren, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Okay Donkey, EcoTheo, The Hopper, HAD, and other journals. His latest collection is Color All Maps New (Mercer University Press, 2021). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.

HERE, THERE, OR ANYWHERE ELSE — GENTA NISHKU

Despite the country’s diverse topography, regional buses always make pit stops at restaurants that look and feel the same. The same orange and white plastic chairs, an oval hole where one’s back would rest. The same white plastic tables, with the same white paper covers, adorned with a pattern of pink flowers on each edge. The same ceiling fan, moving slowly above the magazine stand, repurposed to hold salty and sweet snacks, wrapped in more shiny plastic. The same bathrooms without toilet paper or running water. The same wooden decorations, portraits of national heroes or paintings of a village alleyway, somewhere nondescript. The same embalmed eagles mounted on the walls, responsible for the bird’s fast disappearance from the region. Next to these, an instrument or two, never once played. The menus are the same, too. Same drinks: short or long espresso, long or short macchiato, Turkish coffee, lemon soda, tonic water, sparkling water, coke, cheap beer. Same food: rice pilaf, with or without gravy, bean stew, fillets of pork or chicken breasts, eggs scrambled with bell peppers, tomatoes and farmer’s cheese, green salad, greek salad, village salad, pickled cabbage. Even the waiters serving the wary commuters are the same: scrawny young boys, related to the owners of the restaurants, or the owners themselves, middle-aged men with protruding guts and gold chains, permanently tanned by years of harsh sun. The local clientele is almost always groups of men, gathered around empty glasses and plastic bottles, plates of bones, unnamed dissatisfaction and unhappiness. The passengers on the bus change up the scene at the restaurant when they arrive, every hour or so, but even they are predictable: old women traveling alone because of family or health problems, waiting to be picked up by a son or nephew at one of the stops, students traveling home or back to the city where they study, textbooks in tow, families with young children who misbehave and demand chips and soda, new couples holding hands, the solitary woman or two, staring at her phone. They disembark the buses and fill the empty tables and chairs, look to the view that unfolds in front of them at each of these stops: a meadow, or a lake, cows grazing, or a few ducks moving leisurely. The landscape is interrupted by the building that holds the restaurant, incongruous with its surroundings, the parking lot that extends too far, the gas station across the street, owned by one of two companies, excavators and gravel trucks a bit further in the distance, newly constructed hotels in the middle of nowhere, the skeletons of houses left unfinished, landscape without imagination but full of disappointment, everything the same, saying: long live democracy, long live freedom.

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Genta Nishku lives in New York and grew up in Tirana.

ON THE WAY TO CAMP — JOY GUO

Mama litters I-95 with sighs—at the clouds threatening rain, at me for making her drive six hours when she could be safe at home. A solar system of hives unravels on her neck. Everything a disaster. Long, dark tongues of tire treads licking the road. Yawning pothole. Joints and hinges pimpling the bridge, about to burst. The concrete under our wheels suddenly rips apart like bread. Our car plummets. Neither of us knows how to swim.
           We pull over, blinkers on in defeat. Everyone swivels to look. You can’t help it. Faces pressed against smudged glass stream past us. The sky leaches blue. Mama wads her knees into her chest and moans. We’re not that far, I say, pointing at the horizon. All those other families have made it to the other side in one piece, why can’t we?
           Tunnels are worse. At least a bridge gives you space to fall apart. Down there, in some massive belly, grey-damp walls pressing in, Mama trembles as hard as thunder, sobs through lips pressed like a paper cut. What’s to stop a flood from taking us all? I bite my sleeve, the inside of my cheek, the raw pink of my fingernails, to remind myself that I’m not underwater. Stay in the lane. No shoulder, no respite from the agony of inching forward, half-blind. We’re two hours late. Behind us, a relentless parade of headlights. I remember Snake, the only game on Mama’s flip phone, how we used to take turns playing, how I was really good, my coiled tail always avoiding the corners and blunt edges just in time. 
           At the rest stop, we don’t use the bathroom or buy hamburgers or look up the directions for the rest of the way. Instead, we eyeball the tires for errant nails. Mama unhinges the hood of our Camry, pokes around, says everything is okay in a voice full of frayed threads. She cheeks the third yellow pill of the day. Spidery fault lines around her eyes pucker. I pretend I don’t see her crying because that only makes me cry too. Instead, swallowing hard, I turn caustic. I complain that I’m missing orientation, everyone will stare at me, all the good bunk beds have probably been taken, I’ll be stuck with the one right next to the bathroom for four whole weeks, so thanks a lot. 
           Mama whispers sorry. 
           Somewhere in Maryland, I fall asleep. In my dream, I canoe, weave friendship bracelets, eat so many hot dogs I throw up during badminton. I have the best time ever. I don’t come home. 
           I dream I am not afraid of bridges or tunnels or of drowning, lungs aflame. The water puddling around my knees, up to my shoulders, slipping into the crevices of my ears, is warm. I’m nothing like her. I swim.  

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Joy Guo currently lives in Manhattan with her husband. She is a white collar and regulatory defense attorney. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Passages North, Okay Donkey, Pithead Chapel, Atticus Review, CRAFT, and SmokeLong Quarterly. You can find her on Twitter at gojiberryandtea or www.joyguowrites.com.