OCEANS UNDER THREAT LIKE NEVER BEFORE — MELISSA LLANES BROWNLEE

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Tita reads the headline from today’s paper. We wonder about what that means for us. It’s hard enough just surviving here, our parents working all the time, our family living in a house they built subsidized by Hawaiian Home Lands, the land ours for only ninety-nine years. Nothing ours. Not really. Tita thinks it will mean all those golf courses will have to go and probably all of the hotels, too. There would still be beaches, they just wouldn’t have any sand. Not that sand matters to us. Most beaches on our island are lava rock anyway. We imagine swimming down Ali’i Drive, jumping off the big banyan trees into the waves. Maybe the whales won’t come or they will come earlier or later, who knows. Maybe daddy and the uncles won’t be able to go fishing anymore, with no harbors to keep their boats. We imagine fishing from the top of Moku’aikaua Church, the steeple, the tallest point in town, casting our bamboo poles into the new coral reef growing on its rock-sided walls. We imagine tidepools forming in parking lots of abandoned hotels, wana finding purchase in the cracked asphalt, their black spines undulating in their new homes, sea cucumbers nestled along the yellow lines of the parking stalls, their colors camouflaged. We imagine our house on the mountain, finally a beach house, the ocean waves rolling in to welcome us home.

Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer, living in Japan, has work published or forthcoming in Booth, Pleiades, The Citron Review, Waxwing, Milk Candy Review, Necessary Fiction, NFFR, trampset, jmww, Superstition Review, Splonk, Lost Balloon, Smokelong Quarterly, Best Small Fictions 2021, and Best Microfiction 2022. Read Hard Skin, her short story collection, from Juventud Press. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at www.melissallanesbrownlee.com.

CRYOSEISM — ERIN CALABRIA

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High up between dark shoulders of stone, the glacier’s ghost shimmers and glints. Now and then, its phantom ice hisses, cracks, recarving old moulins and crevasses, foliations once chilled into slow-motion cascades.

To get there, the Gallaghers ford ten mountain streams—or the ghosts of those streams, anyway, their rental car splashing into swirls of spectral gray. In the backseat, Janie and her brother Billy forget to roll up their windows, and droplets of no-longer-water spatter in. But there is no damp, just a brief, cooling whisper that soothes their sunburned knees.

The trailhead starts in open pasture, sheep nosing grass and yellow hawkbit. Mr. and Mrs. Gallagher lead the way into bristle-thick forest, looping around switchbacks, panting up stairs dug into raw dirt. There are places where rock overhangs the trail, places with signs not to linger in case the mountain decides to swallow them whole. Janie glimpses a wren or two—not ghosts, not yet, she thinks—though the birds flit too fast among the beeches for her to tell.

The glacier’s ghost, when they reach it, wavers like a mirage. Translucent veins of ice jag and buckle over treeless moraine, glowing with eerie blue light. Mr. Gallagher gathers them all for a picture, then sweeps panoramas on his phone. Mrs. Gallagher kneels, real water shining on her cheeks as she arranges an offering of small stone cairns. Janie follows Billy to the terminus, both of them shivering as they pass through the wraith-like pillars of the glacier’s no-longer-toes. Inside, it reminds them of the swimming pool that closed when they were small—so much clear, cold blue, so much brightness cast in rippled nets. Billy listens to the echo of ice melting in the sun, a burst and fizz, trapped air bubbles sparkling like soda pop. Janie traces her hands along the once-glacier’s rings, its striated memory of dust, pollen, volcanic ash, thawed away now into earth.

Later, back in the motel, Mrs. Gallagher takes a long, scorching shower. Mr. Gallagher uploads his photos, though of course no ghost is captured there, only mountain rock. Billy glances over Janie’s shoulder as she thumbs through a field guide, looking for the wrens. Together, they read about the two surviving species, then another, extinct now for over a century, first seen by Europeans when an island lighthouse keeper’s cat came home with one clenched between its teeth. They read about how, for days, the cat laid bird after bird at the lighthouse keeper’s feet, until those wrens were gone.

In the dark, on the brink of sleep, the Gallaghers feel the weight of their bodies. How solid and alive they are—how not-ghosts. And yet from time to time, their blood will sough like alpine streams with no more meltwater to feed them. Their breath will flutter like wings no longer scooping air. And in the pulse of their loudest heartbeats, they will hear shard after shard of glacier ice calving down mountains, away to sea.

Erin Calabria grew up on the edge of a field in rural Western Massachusetts and currently lives in Magdeburg, Germany. She is a co-founding editor at Empty House Press, which publishes writing about home, place, and memory. You can read more of her work in Little Fiction, Milk Candy Review, Longleaf Review, Pithead Chapel, and other places.

WE BEASTS — WILL McMILLAN

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“Everything in nature’s out to get you,” said our father, flapping a hand toward the explosion of wilderness. “Everything. Hold still long enough, and the birds will drop from the sky to devour you. Insects will lay eggs in your skin. Every beast that crawls on the ground will tear into you.”

He spat on the dirt road where he stood with his boys. The road that split through the woods like a dagger. The road where our camper, our home now that we were without one, was dumped. We watched his spit sink into the soil. “The earth, too. It’ll swallow you up. The trees, the flowers, they’ll break you down into nothing. You’re not little boys to the wilderness. You’re just raw material.”

Every day he repeated this discourse, aware of our habit to forget and to wander. Ten steps, maybe twenty from the road, that’s as far as my brother and I’d wager we’d get. We’d glare at the trees, imagining their dripping branches as arms, their grimy roots as tentacles ripping our puny bodies in two. To the road, we’d return.

Until the day twenty steps became thirty, then a thousand. Our tendency to wander magnified by a rooftop of perfect blue sky, by winds bleeding the scent of wildflowers. Two thousand, three thousand steps. Until the road disappeared. We turned, but there was nothing but trees and earth, nothing but the unrecognizable wilderness. Four thousand steps, five…? Realization shook us like thunder. We were lost.

The forest was warm-washed in crashing sunlight, trunks and needles glowing chocolate and lime. Suddenly, our father’s words came to us and we would not consider ourselves as prey. “If everything in the wild’s out to get us,” we’d said, “then let’s become wild.”

Quickly, we cast off our shoes, our socks, strapping them around our necks. We ran, kicking our toes through the earth, flinging dirt and leaves through the air, screaming up at the sky. We feasted on clover, ripped it raw from the ground, gnashing our teeth like beasts because beasts we’d become. Shouting and whooping to the birds, to the trees, running harder and deeper, getting more and more lost, jagged earth gouging wounds through our feet. But so what? The wounds of living inside a dumped camper gouged even deeper.

But the road that stabbed its way through the woods also cut them up into fragments. Abruptly, the wilderness ended, spitting us back onto the dead, dusty street. “Everything in nature’s out to get you,” our father had warned us. Except it was the road, not the wilderness, that seemed to be stalking us, refusing to let us stay lost, to let us stay beasts.

We slowly pulled on our socks and shoes while the trees cast deep, frigid shadows over us. Our feet stung walking back to the road. Ten steps, then twenty. Back toward a camper, toward a life waiting to slowly break us down into nothing.

Will McMillan is a queer writer born and raised in the untamed wild of the Pacific Northwest, where he still lives today. His essays have been featured in The Sun, Hobart, Hippocampus, JMWW, and Pidgeonholes, among many others. His first essay collection, When You're a Boy, is forthcoming from Alternating Current Press.

BRINE FLIES AND BEACHGOERS — SHANNA YETMAN

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Antelope Island
Utah
August 2021 

“Pray for rain,” the governor pleads during his latest press conference. This is a ridiculous notion and we won’t listen.  Instead, we’ll go to the beach to see the Great Salt Lake. This is our ridiculous notion. We put on our swimsuits, pack up our flip-flops, and soon we are on that seven-mile causeway that leads us into Antelope Island.  The boats are dry-docked and peppered in between them are huge salt chunks. A blue heron flies overhead. 
           We smell sulfur. We breathe in dust laced with arsenic and mercury. 
           You make sense of this drought by talking about surface areas and lake depths. These are numbers I can’t get my head around. It’s not hard to see what you’re saying. The lake is shrinking. 
           You say, it's usually 1700 square miles and now it's 950. 
           I say, look outside. The shores are vast and the lake is quiet except for the water lapping and evaporating.  We drive further onto the island in search of those famously imported bison. Nothing. The sun sears us, even through the windshield. We park near a sign with a beach umbrella.  This is Bridger Bay near Buffalo Point. 
           I slather on sunscreen. It’s apocalyptic out there and I don’t want to burn. 
           We walk. We take our shoes off by a puzzle of rocks meant to be a maze and solve through this. We trudge across the sand. A doll head with pink hair and one glass eye stares at us. I get the sinking feeling we should all be underwater. You tell me about that mass extinction that ended with all those sea monsters choking on air.  You know, you say to me, the one where all the shallow seas dried up? It was too hot then, too.  
           We avoid the dried-out buffalo chips and make it to the water’s edge. Here, we are greeted by waves of sorts. There’s a long black blanket snaking along the shoreline, moving—no, matching—our every step. It’s funny. I move and you move and hundreds of brine flies shuffle across the sand. They bite us, herding us to match their movements. 
           They lead us in a dance. 
           Foot forward, the sand is clear. Foot back, the sand is covered by their bodies. We step again and again and soon we are stomping our feet rhythmically on the ground, our arms and torsos forward, then up, and forward again. The flies buzz to the drumbeat of water hitting the shore.  
           The wind whips up and I punch it once, twice, left, right. We rock our bodies and move in circles guided by the insects. 
           We chant.
           A ya yea ya. 
            A yea ya ya. 
            There’s a brush of lightning in the distance. The electricity puts our hair on edge.
           We twirl deliciously together.
           Next comes the thunder. 
           A dark cloud appears over the lake. 
           We dance until the sky lets loose and luscious rain thrums on our heads.

Shanna Yetman is an environmental writer and Latina living in Chicago. Her fiction has most recently appeared online in MoonPark Review and the Daily Drunk.  Her micro "Climate Migrants" was longlisted and appeared in Reflex Fiction's Winter 2020 competition. Her story, The Miracle Is to Walk this Earth, was the winner of the New Millennium Writings 39th Competition for flash fiction. Shanna is a 2014 recipient of Chicago's Individual Artist Grant Program sponsored by DCASE (Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events).  She has studied under Rebecca Makkai, Maud Casey, Howard Norman, and Claire Vaye Watkins.

BIRDING AT THE END OF THE WORLD — MELISSA FITZPATRICK

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It’s the end of the world so she goes looking for birds, just like she always does when she needs to convince herself that it’s not really the end, that all is not lost. Like the time she packed up her car and drove out of L.A., past the long-commute housing developments, past grinning lawyers on billboards, past mile after mile of factory farms, cows crowded on dusty lots, farmworkers hunched over rows of lettuce. Drove north to the brink of dusk where she finally stood, awestruck, at the edge of a field as flock after silhouetted flock of sandhill cranes glided through the blazing sky, calling to each other with their comical rattling cries, floating to the ground like ballerinas as the light slipped from golden to rose to lavender. She hadn’t known such abundance still existed in the world, thought it had gone the way of the passenger pigeons whose migrations they say once darkened the skies for hours at a time. When the darkness settled, there were hundreds of cranes gathered at the nighttime roost. Something unclenched and she took her first full breath in a very long time.
           And so now that California is burning again and so much of the news fills her with dread, all she can think to do is grab the dog’s leash and head for the park. It’s too goddamned hot, and the smoke from distant fires has turned the afternoon light a peculiar and unsettling orange. But the white-crowned sparrows have arrived, right on time, and they are feasting on toyon berries after their long migration. And she tries to take the long view, tells herself a story about resilience, about the rhythms of nature, thinks to herself it’s not for nothing they say hope is the thing with feathers, even though she knows it is slipping away. But still, she cannot help it, how she comforts herself this way, how her heart lifts at a flash of wing, a nest, a migrant bird come back again, and she wonders how much longer this will last.

Melissa Fitzpatrick lives and writes in the Los Angeles area.

KUDZU — DECEMBER CUCCARO

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We learn to eat the kudzu after it traps us. We crack windows to let vines crawl in, to sustain ourselves and sometimes see sunlight behind the smothering veil. We learn to fry leaves into chips, steep roots into tea, boil flowers into jelly. In the dark and silence we sit on our couch and snap the tender ends off the tendrils snaking over our laps; we eat those raw. My wife leans into my shoulder and whispers that she can’t remember who she was before. I stroke her cheek, soft as the fuzz on a seed pod.

December Cuccaro is a South Floridian living in the high desert of Reno with her spouse, cat, and two goblinesque chihuahuas. In 2021, she received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Reno, and attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop.

OUR FIRST-EVER THEME ISSUE: THE ENVIRONMENT 🌱🌎

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For the first time ever—and to celebrate Earth Day on April 22, 2022—CHEAP POP will be curating a SPECIAL THEMED ISSUE in 2022: THE ENVIRONMENT.

This will be a shorter submissions period than usual, so check out the details below and get your environmentally-themed short fiction ready to go:

  • All pieces (500 words or less) must be environmentally-themed in some way (climate change, deforestation, or maybe the awe and mystery of nature, etc.)

  • Submissions will be open February 1 - 15, 2022

  • Pieces will be published in April 2022—to align with Earth Day 2022—so we’re looking for 8 pieces in total

  • This special issue will not impact our full June 2022 submissions call

Again, we’re looking for pieces that celebrate the environment, that rally behind it, that feature it as the crux of your work. Fiction, creative nonfiction, something in between—we can’t wait to read your work. 🤍