GUEST OF A GUEST OF A GUEST — CHRISTINE KWON

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I was happy to hear from her, especially like that—desperate, lonely. Zahid wasn’t supposed to come for another two weeks and I was getting bored, even with the water and the fog and the abundance of berries. I invited her up. Holly came and everything looked different. 
           ‘Housesitting?’ she cried, ‘You couldn’t pay for a view like this.’ It all seemed suddenly glamorous. Instinctively, Holly sniffed out the right stores; she hired a boat; she found a lobster shack where people like her were picking at their fries.
           Waitresses lingered, salespeople smiled.
           That’s what Holly is like.
           Somehow, she made the time go so quickly that Zahid arrived before I had a chance to kick her out. I had not planned on them meeting. Looking tanned, Amira and Ismail got out of the car. Zahid waved to me and smiled as he walked up the hill to his house. Then he waved again and I turned and saw that Holly had emerged, dressed in a bright blue dress that matched the curtains, a dress I had never seen before.
           It was as if she had fashioned it during the night.
           “You’ve brought a friend, how wonderful,” Zahid beamed, and his children filed past us into the house. While I busied myself finding the appropriate linens and towels, like I was mistress of the house, Zahid and Holly remained outside, talking with the children.
           I heard their voices mingling.
           With the kids and Zahid safely installed in their own rooms, Holly and I had to sleep together on that final night. I turned my back to her and began to silently weep. I knew she was awake because I felt her stiffen.
           “Just go,” I whispered. “Just go.” Then a million different grievances poured from my mouth; real vitriol; I scared myself, the kind of things I said. “You steal everything from me,” I said between sobs. Holly didn’t turn or make a sound. I said these things to the abyss. In the morning, my eyes were swollen shut, and I studied myself in the bright morning mirror, listening to Holly laughing in the kitchen.

Christine Kwon lives in New Orleans, née Budapest, née Trieste, née Borrego Springs, née Los Angeles, née Iowa City, née New York City, née Fort Lee, née Flushing, Queens. Find more of her work on christinekwonwrites.com or follow her on insta @theschooloflonging.

THAT OTHER FAMILY — MORGAN HARLOW

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She had thought of that family often, the dissolution complete even as she was daydreaming happily of its continued existence now she was grown up and starting her own family, or perhaps because of this, she could recreate the life of that family, the family she had taken to heart, the family she had wanted as her own had it only been possible and so she would find a small bungalow as they had lived in, and a German shepherd like theirs, a hedge of currant bushes on the property line, and she’d encourage her partner to fly a plane and join the volunteer fire department as that family’s father had, then she would make brownies from a mix, smoke cigarettes all day, watch soap operas in a terry cloth bathrobe, her hair styled in curls using bobby pins, hang laundry on the clothesline, shake orange juice instead of stirring, the only thing missing the sour green apple tree next door and oh, yes, the children, but it would be a while before she awoke to this as from twilight to dawn, from being comfortable not knowing to the searing truth, beginning with the changing colors of sunset and the dreamy late night fragrance of honeysuckle outside the window, the memory of daytime, taking turns touching their tongues to the honey tip of nectar, and indoors the always closed door, the girl sullen and sitting in the den all day, why, she had never understood, the tears in the mother’s eyes and her smile, indignant, and how suddenly the family moved away, she never really knew them after all, that once in a lifetime perfect family.

Morgan Harlow's work appears or is forthcoming in Blackbox Manifold, Miramichi Flash, New World Writing, The Moth, Washington Square Review, BULL, and other journals. She teaches writing in Madison, Wisconsin and is the author of a full-length poetry collection, Midwest Ritual Burning.

AT THE ONLY FRIENDLY’S OPEN WHEN THE WORLD ENDS — K.B. CARLE

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The fries arrive soggy but crimped. The smell of grease lingers in the red leather seats that suction to exposed skin. The waitresses wear red shirts with exaggerated triangle collars. Say Welcome to Friendly’s with signature smiles, cover the big F for Friendly’s on the back wall with their final paychecks, play hopscotch on brown tiled floors. Balance black trays on their shoulders, carrying the Mushroom Cheese-Mania Burger, the Sriracha Burger, a serving of Buffalo Mac & Cheese.

At the only Friendly’s open when the world ends, no one talks about the fires. How the sky is always red, how their lungs burn and everything tastes like lead dipped in Tabasco. Nobody talks about how the children can’t stop coughing. How the women blister. How the men are gone. How someone—or everyone—thinks there’s still time to try again to save the world or—maybe—time to save themselves.

At the only Friendly’s open when the world ends a woman reenacts her first date with a crash test dummy, pretending he is the man she should have married. She orders the Clown Sundae. He orders one Monster Sundae with extra horns made of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups split in two. Their waitress smiles that signature smile, asks will that be all? The woman nods, offers to pay the waitress in cash, says could you hurry? We’ve got somewhere to be. The waitress nods but leaves the money so the woman takes it instead. She folds one bill into a paper crane, the other into a heart.

At the only Friendly’s open when the world ends, a woman kisses a dummy, pretending he is the man she should have married while reenacting her first date. She tastes peanut butter and vanilla on his tongue, sits back and whispers, delicious.

K.B. Carle lives and writes outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her flash has been published in a variety of places including Good River Review, HAD, Waxwing, Bending Genres, No Contact, and elsewhere. K.B.’s stories have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, and her story “Soba” was included in the 2020 Best of the Net anthology. Her story “A Lethal Woman” will be included in the 2022 Best Small Fictions anthology. She can be found online at kbcarle.com or on Twitter @kbcarle.

BED BUGS — NICOLE TSUNO

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I wake up, arms fat with red bumps. You tell me I should clean up, that there may be bed bugs. I like the way your voice rings in my head all day, settling like a stain. My therapist says I’m attracted to competence, and somewhere along the way, competence got twisted to mean men. 
           Her supporting evidence: I met you at an independent coffee shop, your legs crossed at the ankles. I asked about the beans and you leaned over and said you mean berries. Berries? Seeds of cherries, if we’re getting technical, you replied, because you were. You waited for me to laugh, so I did. I didn’t have the language to tell you that it was the woman sitting next to you that pulled me into the coffee shop and out of myself. Wine lipstick, hair cropped exactly an inch below her shoulders, how she sipped her coffee as if her life depended on it. Not when my face was already between your hands.
           I clean the entire apartment and wake up the next day with more bites. How could something I didn’t even feel leave so many marks on me? The answer, like with many things, makes more sense than the question: bed bug saliva acts as an anesthetic, making the feeding process almost painless. Bed bugs are considerate like that. They don’t care if you’ve cleaned the baseboards or how many days in a row you’ve ordered takeout: they only want blood, warmth.
           I plan to tell you these bed bug facts, but when your voice stretches toward me from the door, my words lose their shape. Your lips find my hairline. And it doesn’t matter, not really: on my arms, the bites have already begun to rust.

Nicole Tsuno is itchy. She is chronically ill and will be an MFA fiction candidate at Johns Hopkins this fall. Some of her favorite things include dogs that look like their humans and available & accessible bathrooms.

TONGUE TWISTERS — VICTORIA BUITRON

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In order to join, people have to morph their tongues. Most pick the easiest: a piercing. No beatings or dares, just paying for pain. They live with Jiggly Puff, a glow-in-the-dark moon, or even a tiny Pepsi Crystal can piercing on their taste flesh. Maybe, eventually, a keloid. Simon gets a tattoo of his initials in the middle of his tongue: SOS. I ask him if he ever felt the peeling of his old skin, his mouth once a chrysalis. Sydney cheats because her tongue is too special, and she can’t risk losing the ability to do her cherry-stem knot trick. “Fine,” Kai says, “Do fifty knots in five minutes and you can join.” And she does. Kai jokes that if you want to leave, then you also leave a piece of your tongue in a jar like giardiniera carrots. 

Sebas is the riskiest one of all, and he gets a forked tongue like a rattlesnake. After the middle scar heals, he alternates moving each side up and down like a true serpent, scaring the kids on his street into nightmares. He says the pain is worth it to see people’s eye shock. At first, I don’t know if risking my tongue is worth joining the group, since they mostly sit around at the Paper Cut Bar and play darts, but when Manny drives without a license and lands in jail, they all show up and pool money together to bail him out. 

On the day of my initiation, I say: “Something happened in the last few days, and I can no longer taste.” At Pete’s Beer and Wings there’s a challenge to eat a dozen Afterlife Wings. If you down all of them in less than two minutes, Pete doesn’t charge you. Instead, you get $50 on the house. Only two people have done it—one passed out for a few minutes, spoke to his dead father who told him to get a colonoscopy. Turns out those death wings saved his life. 

I start and the gang begins to chant, “Tita’s tongue! Tita’s tongue!” I feel the texture of meat and the gunk but nothing more, transcending logic. I eat, pull the meat off the skin and hold back tears that are more automatic than pain prone, and I’m so glad I wore my good mascara today. My throat and neck feel warm, then hot—a cut on my index finger stings—and while my stomach doesn’t taste, it screams out in gurgles. The chants make sure no one hears, and hopefully the heat doesn’t bleed a hole through my esophagus. Before I swallow the last piece, my body is warm as if I’ve eaten a scorpion. I’m up in the air, on shoulders, strangers whistling, human hooting muting the music, their smiles as if I’ve just turned tap water into amber beer for their tongues to savor and maybe tomorrow my senses will return and I’ll finally learn what fire tastes like.

Victoria Buitron is an award-winning writer who hails from Ecuador and resides in Connecticut. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Normal School, the 2021 Connecticut Literary Anthology, The Acentos Review, and other literary magazines. Her debut memoir-in-essays, A Body Across Two Hemispheres, is the 2021 Fairfield Book Prize winner.

A SINGLE MEMORY, REMEMBERED DIFFERENTLY — SUMITRA SINGAM

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Papa is in his wheelchair at the old picnic table.  The lawn is overgrown, but we can just make out the beach past the yellowing lalang. The place is dusty, mildewed; like anything left for more than a week in the tropics. The kampung house creaks and groans its annoyance at us for the years of neglect. We’d come every school holiday, shrieking down to the Straits of Malacca, or finding hidey-holes under the elevated house on stilts.

“For Papa’s eightieth, can’t you make an effort?” Sujatha had said. So here we are - father, two daughters, emotional baggage and all.

Papa’s wrinkled arm is flaccid around my neck, a dead weight. It used to be as wide as my thigh.

“Remember, Papa?” Sujatha points at the tall coconut trees flanking the path down to the water. 

There was a villager from the kampung who would climb it for us, using his shawl as his only equipment. “Jaga bawah!” he’d bellow as he cut down young coconuts for us. He’d shimmy down and slice them open with a deft flick of his parang, pearly white flesh and crystal liquid glinting in the sunlight. We’d down them in seconds, never thinking to offer him a drink.

A querulous lilt to his voice, Papa says, “There used to be a neem tree, what have you done with it?”

Neither of us answers. The breeze stirs the soupy air listlessly.

Suddenly Papa barks a laugh -staccato, sharp. “Remember that party we had here, Meena? You got drunk on my Green Label! You thought I didn’t know?”

The weather has turned. Ominous storm clouds creak and rumble, shadows lengthen, the trees susurrate. My skin pimples. I hadn’t wanted to come.

I close my eyes tight against the flashes of hairy hands, ice tinkling in a glass, heavy limbs, woozy head.

I unwind Papa’s arm from around my neck and place it back in his lap. “You must be tired.”

“Who’s tired? You are, you old grandmother! Even at the party, Uncle Prasad wanted to dance with you and you made such a fuss!”

A flash of falling, limbs tangled, pushing everyone’s hands off me.

Papa cackles like a machine gun, crescendoing into a breathless cough. His smoke-addled lungs are giving out.

A sudden rush of wind stirs my hair and my veins are electric. I feel like running down to the water and swimming away.

The silence stretches, long as the distance we’ve placed between our hearts.

“I saw Puja the other day,” Sujatha says. “Prasad’s daughter.”

I stand, shielding my eyes with my hand. There’s a ship on the horizon.

“Her parents divorced. She’s cut contact with her father.”

“Oh?” Papa frowns.

“He was not a good man, Papa.” Sujatha says.

It’s probably an oil tanker, spreading its poison through the waters of our childhood.

“Come on, let’s go inside. It’s going to rain,” Sujatha says. I gather myself back together, and walk with them, the waves shooing us off.

Sumitra Singam writes in Naarm/Melbourne. She traveled there through many other spaces, real, metaphorical and transitional; and likes to write about those experiences pretending that it is all fiction. She works in mental health when she inhabits the real world and realises there are bills to pay.

HARPER WOODS — ELIJAH SPARKMAN

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A Jolly Rancher flies through the sky and nails Cheesy Chaz in the face. He jump-stumbles off the float trailer and busts his knee on the Beaconsfield cement. It raspberries up: four times the size of a real-life raspberry. Major folds a pom-pom for his true love. Hot ashes simmer in a pot, the ghost of a hot dog. Children throw sand at the heads of their best friends. Maybe if Paul drives over his baseball mitt enough times, smoking weed won’t be so necessary. Marcel, at the Taco Bell, asks G. Hoey if he’s going to order two cheesy gordita crunches. G. Hoey says, How did you know? Marcel says, Y’all better stop cheating on your fucking math homework. I’m going to call your principal. Be kind to your friends. There is a game on the counter. Drop a quarter through a slot. Land it on the highest, transparent, plastic orange ledge. Work it down to another. Work it down to the yellow. White flight. Everyone moves to St. Clair Shores where you can’t even be a band in your own garage. Where the people call the police. Bar chords wrestle with the lawnmowers. Empty bags of hot Cheetos crinkle in the sheets. Order a free glass of water, fill it with Baja Blast. Lean in so you can feel its true color: be touched by carbonation.

Elijah Sparkman holds an MFA in Fiction writing from Northern Michigan University. He enjoys writing about Detroit Techno music, murals, the Great Lakes, grocery stores, sadness, and birthday cakes. He is currently at work on a novel entitled The Earth Ball.

THAT ONE TIME YOU LOVED A MERMAID — LAILA AMADO

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That one time you loved a mermaid, the sea followed you everywhere.

It leaned on your windows, clouds pressing against the glass; murmured about sunken treasures between the lines of late-night radio broadcasts.

It roared in the road noise of a faraway highway, sloshed in the glasses of gin and tonic passed around in your favorite dive bar.

It dripped down the shower curtain, rolled to rest at your feet in a scattering of pearls and salt, greeted you in the night with the forlorn calls of lost tankers when you lay sleepless by her side. In the darkness of the room, her curls on your pillow twisted and twined like ribbons of kelp.

A sudden whiff of seaweed from the teacup told you she was on her way from the airport.

A gust of cold wind in a closed room—all ice and brine—told you she was angry with you.

All staircases spiraled like ammonite fossils.

One time, when you were lying together on the roof of your apartment building and the stars above looked like specks of sun glittering on the surface of the waves, you reached for her hand. 

“The sea is a graveyard,” she said. “No one to talk to but the shadows of long-gone whales.”

She didn’t love you back, of course.

Every now and then, you go for a walk along the beach, steps tracing the soft curve of the coastline, and the sea recedes from your feet, forever shrugging away.

Laila Amado writes in her second language, lives in her fourth country, and cooks decent paella. Her stories have been published or are forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2022, Rejection Letters, Milk Candy Review, Café Irreal, No Contact, and other publications. In her free time, she can be found staring at the Mediterranean Sea. Occasionally, the sea stares back. Follow her on Twitter at @onbonbon7