Category Archives: Prose

Oz Hardwick

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Hustings in the Age of Uncertainty

A man in a blue suit speaks in a whisper but carries a megaphone, tunes his preparatory breaths to the pitch of air raid sirens, and coughs up fragments of glass animals. His voice is a crack in the polar ice, through which sabre-toothed tigers, dire wolves, and other apex predators crawl, shaking crystals from their shaggy manes and blinking blood-lusty eyes. It’s a predictable avalanche that leaves peaks denuded of snow, with frostbitten corpses staring at the sky, toilet tissue wreathes, and flies. The man in the blue suit pays his own audience in luxury flights, flattery, and fast-tracked passage through loopholes paved with false intentions, his wheezing laugh lingering long after the last plant is plucked and the last polar bear blasted through its hot skull. When the bombs come, or when the Sun catches in bare branches and refuses to set, the man in the blue suit needles tears from the corners of his eyes as he photoshops his hands out of pictures of star-struck girls; and when he waves from low-slung cars and ornate balconies, he’s just a stand-in for himself, or a shop dummy with a blue suit slapped on in cut-price paint. Meanwhile, mammoths and mastodons march two by two, waving fire that turns mountains into cracked glass, while a disembodied voice gags in the throat of a dropped megaphone, summoning the two-faced faithful to free lunches, free holidays, melting ice creams, and blue suits for each new wailing infant.

Bargain

Contrary to counterindications, we are not flying. We are not fleeing the scenes of crimes in which we may or may not have been complicit. It’s complicated, but we were not created – in God’s image? A dog’s image? A cat, perhaps. Me? How? – to comprehend, any more than to combust from the fire in our bellies. Believe it or not, we are falling, in love like teenage sweethearts, and into the machinery like nameless sweatshop drones. We’re like kids in a sweetshop: not children but goats, sorted from the sheep by Disgusted of Godalming, Surrey, with his fringe on top. Stop. Why-oh-why-oh-why must we distrust the scores and indentations spread out as plain as the noses on our faces? Two wings don’t make a plane. We walk with backs bent through a stately pile falling down. The relationship of verb to subject remains. Ambiguous.

Interpretive Malacology: The Arecibo Division

We monitor the snails with cameras and trackers, then chart their movements with coloured pens on sturdy paper. The technology’s changed, but it’s much the same as it was in our parents’ day and, for all we know, their parents’ day, and on and on, until the Gods of your choice and their analogues and avatars first created snails. To the casual observer, they’re just scaling the fence for the finest leafy greens, then retracing their trails to sleep through the day beneath rusting bins and barrows. But if you look at the charts – here, and here, and particularly here – you can see the patterns and their relation to language, the script of slime on weathered creosote. We send out scouts in the cool of morning to scour chewed stalks for our new Rosetta stone. See how the lines caress the edge of meaning. We know in our bones that this is important, but we don’t quite yet know why.

The Assassin’s Last Bow

Reviews are in and they’re not looking good. Three stars at best, and one of those is O-type, hot and massive, its hydrogen burning out as it swallows itself into a black hole. Another is a washed-up lush in a downtown bar, repeating the same tired tales of the road to anyone who’ll listen. No one will listen. The last one’s more ambivalent, pinned to a five-year-old’s jacket, a tangible signifier of law and order in a clapboard frontier town. He looks at his tears in the mirror, as if they belong to someone else, as if they’re the binary stars he can only dream of. The reviews, he reflects, are disappointing to say the least, peppered with typos and tired tales. Maybe he should jack it in? The old man in the mirror weighs a gun in his innocent palm and aims it at the stars.

Oz Hardwick is a York-based poet, who has published “maybe fifteen?” full collections and chapbooks, most recently Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2024). Oz has held residencies in the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, and has performed internationally at major festivals and in tiny coffee shops. In 2022, he was awarded the ARC Poetry Prize for “a lifetime devotion and service to the cause of prose poetry.”

Marie de Quatrebarbes

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from The Vitals

(translated from the French by Aiden Farrell)

September 1

Signs without referent: fauna-fiction. Fugacities rendered post-war. A sign is a party she watches from death. Can it be, one of these terrestrial days, that which produces the hurried disappearance of a connection? For, to exist, magic is uncertain. Put on a drama of the abst. incompletion of a certain img. To exist, can it alone provoke uncert. fate?

September 2

We don’t trick her. And if she falls, we entrust her to the bees. Head forward, horns, bust. An elegance pageant. Figure of speech: circumstances. Everything is free here. Subtlety comes from the word. A fiction advances: the afternoon, the children…fiction to which we can only respond with a nod when a vague idea, a very vague idea, vaporous even, comes to snatch it away. She turns. Her head, always, in the direction of the wind.

September 3

What is eaten: the vitals. The face as such, the end of the year. Empty swamps, their water brackish, irreducibly yellow. When I say “we” (apples)—the little lame duck, the one we put in the child’s pocket—I mean “he” saves himself (it isn’t him). A sort of ecstasy, delusion of ownership—the reflection on an eye grows in the magnifying glass—loss of the image. Code: passing from green to landscape. Variant: she’s that old boy with the blue mouth.

September 4

Flat mouth (option to withdraw). Heard with mouth: porous. In the implementation of wind: window—its soaked nod. Focal: reclusion-adoration. The frozen function of a use.

September 5

This void: my skin illustrated it. We believe we are born, they say, from swarms of bodies, abstract nudities held in compromised steadiness. They call it: dreams. And we caress them. Our hands reach for their eyes. It’s how we treat things (they are not things). The rupture is often cold, this one, the same scream.

September 6

Yesterday a cloud descended on the city. My window turned the world into a thin surface and I wondered: where are the beds? I’m covered in an onion’s outermost skin. My mouth in situ: narrative acceleration. We find time in the same place we left it—in the pots of crayfish. Inside, tonight, the library burned down and the books were devoured by flames. Say again: are mourners ever singular?

This excerpt from award-winning French poet Marie de Quatrebarbes’ The Vitals, forthcoming with World Poetry Books in 2025, is an elegiac long poem in the form of a fragmentary journal that tracks the loss of a loved one.
Marie de Quatrebarbes has published several books of poetry including Les vivres (P.O.L.) and Vanités (Éric Pesty Éditeur), as well as a novel inspired by the life of Aby Walburg, Aby (P.O.L.). She edited an anthology dedicated to contemporary poetry by young French women: Madame tout le monde (Le Corridor bleu).

Aiden Farrell is a poet, translator, and editor. His translation of The Vitals by Marie de Quatrebarbes will be published by World Poetry Books in 2025. He has published two chapbooks—lilac lilac (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs) and organismalgorithm (Fence). Aiden is the managing editor of Futurepoem. Born in France, Aiden lives in Brooklyn.

Jeffrey Hecker

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New York Avenue

Oafs built The Unemployment Insurance Office inside Gateway Head Start Early Education Center. Jobless adults enter, see children frolic. Recess horn blows. The jobless ask are we in the right place. Children say no. The jobless ask are we in the wrong place. Parents say probably. Teachers say yes.

Indiana Avenue

I have a dream local celebrity James Avery (Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) broadcasts on WPGG-AM to report Turning Point Day Center for the Homeless is six blocks from The Pool & Spa at Bally’s. Avery then makes DJ transmit signal of complete human surrender to estuary birds.

Atlantic Avenue

In 2007, Mayor Bob Levy signed into law 7 ordinances, then Bob simply left City Hall in a Dodge Durango, and nobody knew where Bob was 13 nights. Many, like Truman Capote’s partner Jack Dunphy’s surf instructor, believe Bob disrobed to ascend reborn in a dust devil of artificial sand.

Ventnor Avenue

Once an experimental village flourished where in place of strangers introducing themselves by name or occupation or hey or yo they chose to confess their worst personal tragedy. An empathy hierarchy developed scaled at first painstaking as cantilevered stairs, eventually even like a multipurpose ladder.

Pacific Avenue

Tired of taffy, your daddy told you to give back to the street everybody should start at St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church, end at Altman Playground cookout. He enjoyed Linda Ronstadt in hardware stores. He liked Vietnam Vets who roamed a lumber section hours and never bought a single beam.

Pennsylvania Avenue

My landlady drives tweens ‘tween home and school. Peers must bus. My landlady is a manager of a nightclub. My landlady, nightclub manager, watches the breaking news of today tomorrow. My landlady is a nightclub manager. My landlady wakes at 1:00 p.m. My landlady hates the sun.

Jeffrey Hecker is author of Rumble Seat (San Francisco Bay Press, 2011) & chapbooks Hornbook (Horse Less Press, 2012), Instructions for the Orgy (Sunnyoutside Press, 2013) & Ark Aft (The Magnificent Field, 2020). Recent work appears in South Dakota Review and Bennington Review. A fourth-generation Hawaiian-American, he teaches at The Muse Writers Center & reads for Quarterly West. @jeffrey_hecker

Jeff Friedman

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How to Talk

Give up on drawing breath from your chest. Give up on bringing it up through your throat into your mouth. Give up on your tongue touching your teeth or the draw gate of your glottis opening and closing. It’s not about the lips either. The lips are for kissing if you can find someone to kiss. Forget about the sound of your voice speaking, how it rises and falls like birds flying against a strong wind. Forget about the soft voice you sometimes use to make an impression. The noise from others drowns it out. Imagine pronouncing a single phoneme, then another and now you have a word and more words. Imagine the words drumming into sentences. Let your mind raise its voice and shout sentence after sentence so those around you nod in agreement or smile their acceptance. And even if no one can actually hear you—now you’re talking.

Done Time

Done talking nonsense. Done with brittle tongues and bad brewers, with broods of chickens scratching the dirt. Done with the darkness at the center of darkness—it may be another kind of light. Done with drone mosquitoes buzzing at the windows—and the drones that unload exploding packages. Done with the birds delivering diseases, the doctors painting masterpieces—their floating deathbeds. Done with the wisdom of oracles whose disembodied heads bob up and down in the roiling river, singing their cliches like prophecies. Done waiting for justice to knock Humpty Dumpty off his wall, for his shell to be shattered—the yolk smashed. Done believing that there is a period at the end of a war.

What Her Hand Says

Her hand opens and closes: yes when she opens it, no when she closes it until the loose bulb of her fist bangs against air and collapses. When her hands fold together, she is saying “thank you.” When you touch your heart for her and lean over the bedrails, she touches your heart. The nurse dampens her lips with a sponge stick. Even the tiniest hint of food or water would choke her paralyzed throat. When you hold up the laminated alphabet, she struggles to tap the letters and you guess the wrong words again and again until she is almost smiling. She grips your hand and falls asleep in your silence.

Homeland

“You should visit Hungary,” my sister said. “It’s our homeland.” “How can it be my homeland?” I asked. “I’ve never been there.” “Everyone there has dad’s brown eyes and his rock of a chin.” Everyone looks like him and like us.” I peered into my sister’s face and saw my father’s face and then my own. I remembered how my father combed Wildroot into his black curly hair, huffing so forcefully he fogged up the bathroom mirror, how he whipped the comb away, flinging oily drops on the tile floor, how at dinner he inhaled the hot breath of Hungarian stew as though it were the air rising from the earth of his homeland. A country of our people, I thought, everyone looking like everyone else, everyone looking like us—every face a mirror of every face. “Scary, I said. “I’m not going.”

Jeff Friedman’s tenth collection, Ashes in Paradise, was recently published by Madhat Press. Friedman’s poems and prose pieces have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, New England Review, Poetry International, Cast-Iron Aeroplanes That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poetry, Flash Fiction Funny, Flash Nonfiction Funny, Fiction International, Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, The New Republic, and Best Microfiction 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship and numerous other awards and prizes. His newest book is Broken Signals from Bamboo Dart Press.

Howard Good

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Spooky Music

I feel the tingling in my chest that usually signals the onset of a panic attack, but instead, your nakedness spills like a crackle of lightning across the sheets, and I’m suddenly aware of the difference that makes and how without it social constructs would collapse and there would be shocking new twists to ancient myths, lifeguards drowning in kiddie pools, churches embracing sin and heresy, and the patron saint of shopping mall Santas, accompanied by spooky background music, sucking at Christ’s wounds, and first thing in the morning, too.

The Clock Strikes Thirteen

Fleeing for their lives, families brave oceans in paper boats, only to be turned back on reaching their destination. Caw-caw-caw, white crows cry, but less as frantic warning and more as bitter recrimination or desolate testimony. The living and the dead, the real and the imagined, the seen and the hidden, merge in a mirey mix at the behest of the home audience. Smoke from distant wildfires blots out the sky. None of those responsible will be held liable. The ancient Babylonian spirit that murders babies in the womb clings to the souls of mothers and speaks through their mouths.

Gosh

While seagulls swirl in the bright summer sky like silver foil confetti, I’m trapped under a boat dock. The water is up to my neck and rising. My dead cousin Rhonda miraculously appears. She looks down at me through the gaps between the wood planks. By now I’m struggling to keep my mouth out of the water, which reeks of gasoline and motor oil. “Why would you do this to us?” she scolds. I can hear people walking around above as if nothing terrible is happening. The worst atrocities aren’t on the news. I’m beginning finally to understand something about it.

Criminal History

The children in mandatory attendance have faces like wilted flowers. Poor humanity, always preparing for something that won’t ever happen or that already has. Investigators assigned to the case plant false evidence, intimidate witnesses, solicit bribes. Then one night the chalk outline of the body is mysteriously erased from the sidewalk. It doesn’t change the fact that every street is a crime scene, every person both a suspect and a victim. No one is perfectly innocent. My own heart rattles with bottled-up rage. Just before pronouncing sentence, the judge wipes his blubbery lips on the sleeve of his black robe.

Post-Op

I start hearing loud clanging and wake up in the hospital, where a face floating in and out of focus is saying, “You’re lucky to be alive.” “Oh?” I reply. I’m not there even though I am. Chimpanzees living in captivity will angrily throw their turds at their keepers. I just lie half-dazed under a thin blanket barely big enough to cover me. Beyond the curtain surrounding my bed, I can hear the visiting dead conferring. The ceiling when I glance up is swarming with their gray shadows. Yes, I fuzzily think to myself, I’m all but through. I can’t remember the life I had, only the one I should have.

Howie Good’s newest poetry collection, Frowny Face, a mix of his prose poems and collages, is now available from Redhawk Publications He co-edits the online journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.

Heikki Huotari

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Feedback

Reality is flowing and reality is ebbing on an oblique mile-wide boundary of
misinformation. As it’s spring I’ll be as antithetical an umbra as an umbra ever
was, i.e., I’m not just throwing shade, i.e., my flights of fancy seek to serve. I’m
reaping all of my rewards at once. To make of nothing a production, data mine
and damn the data to eternal bliss. The bliss kicks in, the worms crawl out, from
virtuosity ten thousand hours of winding down, the ice to slide on as by accident
then by injunction. No one sees it for more than three minutes; is the tour de
France in fact of all of France? I hereby sing the feedback loop into existence.

The Shibboleth Of Theseus

One if via virtue, two if via vice. If Muzak be the comfort food of idle preference,
play or not see if I care. If sunk cost is to white noise as white noise is to el
corazón, i.e., an interesting impediment, the menace meets the mailbox so the
menace is unmade, and information enters the misinformation bubble. On the
interactive star chart, hover over any planet and you’ll know that planet’s name.
Three hundred thousand of us jointly own the three-by-three outdoor enclosure
but choose not to use it because we have everything we need.

Remote Sensing

Be honest. Which contains the other, the idea or the thing? Which guarantees the
other a soft landing? Jealously I guard my wave state. Once per postulate to
sudden-change the wave state waits. The ends of tentacles but touch. Get used to
being a pariah. They may worship you but they won’t let you in the house. I do
not run with scissors, scissors run with me. The butterfly’s surprise is nullified by
whispering or surreptitious signing or the butterfly reads lips. The butterfly and I,
we always pay the asking price so we don’t have to bargain. Are you
extrasensory-perceiving what I’m extrasensory-perceiving? To be fair it is my
pirouette.

Linear Accelerator 2

As I was blind but now I’m innocent and I need kill nor eat no goat so this
scenario is going to a cinema far far away. This quicksand packs, as once, no
punch. The ship of Theseus is in the chop shop, less than the sum of its parts. The
faith of my great great great grandfather is clam-shell packaged, i.e., what I see is
what I get. The frequency of epilepsy is the perfect crime of crows. The ABD will
see you now, course work completed. Expectation is updated daily. What one
knows with 90% certainty is 95% cliché. Adverbially modifying an inaction, I’ll
be independent of what chickens have on offer when truncated cones of
styrofoam in chain-link spell out messages of maybe love and maybe loss.
Attenuated logarithmically, I’ll notice nothing strange. As latitude to wiggle room
so longitude to sudden change.

Wave Collapse

Plato’s chair collapses to hilarious effect and dogs evolving pave the way to outer
space. Where curvature is certain, in earth’s umbra we may take no rest. They also
serve who don’t exist. Depending on which axis my head rotates I might answer
yes or no. Astronomy and personality go separate ways. The village willing but
the boy who cried wolf weak, I’m quite requited thank you. Prison A and Prison B
may swap their convicts. I’ll escape acceleration and acceleration’s rate of change.
We’re looking at a grand piano and a spiral staircase and the skeptics need be on
guard always, the believers need believe but once.

Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. Since retiring from academia/mathematics he has published poems in numerous journals and in five poetry collections. His manuscript, To Justify The Butterfly, won second prize, and publication, in the 2022 James Tate Chapbook Competition. His Erdős number is two.

Grace Smith

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Sadder and Deeper

I dropped off a lover at the sad train station. He got us coffee and I waited in the little street wishing it was full of morning people and would be full of night people but there were just two men by a doorway talking about war.

In the translation seminar people asked how to find a text. Translators told the stories of how they’d found their texts. I found a big white dog in the street. She was cheerful. We knocked on all the doors until somebody knew her house. When they opened the door, they said, Magic, I didn’t even know you were gone–

Outside the grocery store a woman recognized a man in the street. You work at the shelter, she said, you’re funny as shit. It was sunny. I want to be related.

On the bus a girl said to a boy, If my pussy stinks so bad then why is your friend in it all day long? A man yelled about language. A tiny lap-sized girl looked. The yelling man said, This man has a daughter! Later I tried to joke about it in the lawyer bar with the math teacher by titling it A Feminist Issue on Bus 28. I thought I might love the math teacher but I have whatever that sexuality is called where you fall in love from coming until you don’t. When the girl and her friends got down off the bus, she reminded us through dirty springtime windows, We are kids.

At a clinic the man waiting across from me said with a sheepish grandma-flirting smile, You don’t want what I’ve got. Maybe I do though, I think I was thinking. In my mind the chair beside him’s empty, but I know he was talking to someone he knew.

The city was taking people’s houses if they hadn’t gutted them by the date after the flood. One day the homeowner was with us volunteers, touching everyone with his bright attitude. Under the drywall we found plaster, old plaster on old wood laithes, and none of it looked moldy. The house had been in his family for generations. He said, this is beautiful. This must be hundreds of years old, even older than I ever knew, historic. Your beautiful house, we agreed, your beautiful laithes. In my mind I said, your beautiful eyes. They were gold like fall and trying. On the porch he kept trying. I’ll never see the street he saw. There were people there, he said. There were people. There.

She Says She’s Sure My Soul Mate’s Out There

I’m so happy. It’s Saturday night.
Drank a 5PM can in the shower.

By the lamp I’m back at it. Planning summer, new
lives. I turn off the radio coming from France.

In the glass museum I was wrong about the
blue arrival of winter nights. Factories

didn’t interpret these kitchen window skies, but
I left without a souvenir cup to compare. I’m 38.

It’s February. Is this attitude or feeling?
My mother, alive, picks up the phone.

Astrology for Small Potatoes

Some people have a rain cloud above their heads.
And that is why, french fry, their thoughts are frizzy.
The water goes down and floats back up.

Some people have a light bulb dinging just above,
rattling when it’s used up. They stop. They start.

Some people have a spotlight shining down upon
them, tater. That’s why they must keep dancing.
They must keep dancing.

Some people have a forest hovering above the
tops of them. Dirty roots drop worms on them,
and furry worm gobblers. These people are lost
underground, reformed hunters, never going back.

Some people have a bright pail of blood balanced on
the air above them, always about to topple. That is
why they laugh so easily.

Some people have a handsome hawk above them,
but they don’t see the shiny killer because they are hooked
over their phones, reporting me to my boss instead of listening.

How about you, potato? What’s just above your head?

Flying

Our parents are not our real parents. I used to have a
lovebird. Crossed the Bay Bridge to get her.

I’m on a creek bridge in snow with orange gatorade and
an aging spit swan talons boy wet and clawing in my chest.

I wake up again in bird song. I can’t honestly stand it
when indigo morning grays and the day is everyone’s.

Everyone who might mom talks genetic screenings at the cookout.
Why I like past lives. My dog’s tongue is purple and the croci.

Wind moves the purple croci. I wrote about Baisat hearing her
song. Her whole face changed, her whole body, she went fast

to somewhere good. I can’t write about songs. I was seven
when I won the dove in the lottery. I was twenty-one tortured

by thoughts of fourteen. I was the one girl in motorcycle class.
The old men, the young men. They cheered when I passed.

Grace Smith is a writer and teacher. Her poetry has been published in Muzzle Magazine and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol.

Kylie Hough

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Prognosis Uncertain

This monotony rampant in the suburbs. The constant hum of electric drills and the wringing out of Op Shop cocktail dresses. It isn’t the way I imagined I would go. I light a Red Head and watch it fizzle to black. With my butcher’s knife, I slice and dice my way to the dog park. Someone swing high ahead of me and look back smiling on the upturn. Bring your philosophy and your poetry books. I am an unrealised nobody moulded from midnight. I have the potential of a hand grenade and the attention span of a clown fish. By day I scrub toilets. Boats power past, a tabby meows at a magpie. At night I talk with moving shadows. Who’s there? Oh, it’s you. I act like silence, breathless. To be heard is so close to being loved, it is almost impossible to tell the difference. This is not akin to some field trip to the zoo. No, this is warfare. This is sculpting a tin man with gloved hands. My liver poisoning someone else’s blood. Trevally in a tidal wave. I am two hotels away and freedom looks like walking fully clothed into salted black water. The tunnel of light after the feeding frenzy. A shark shaped shadow slips through the lip of a wave and I dash from the seashore. Surely someone will notice I’m playing at opposites. Somebody maybe wants to dance with me in the dunes.

Diary of a Dead Poet

The kale tastes like cardboard smells and I’m telling you, I’m trying. You stand under a deluge of cold water ripping into you like road spikes because it’s good for your immune system. Or something I can’t put my finger on that jabs like an uppercut to the jaw. I pick Aloe Vera from the garden and smear it on my skin under a pre-midday sun. You spoon magnesium into a plastic glass and watch me swallow until there’s nothing left. But the baby girl, initiated into this patriarchal prison. I don’t tell you about my dream. The one I have where your nervous system shuts down in the middle of the night and despite outside attempts to bring you back to life, you can only watch from your position on the ceiling of Accident and Emergency. Get on with it, you say, and I run around the neighbourhood in circles until I’m stopped by a man who asks me to Cocktails and Dreams. Because it’s a club, Love, and you know you want to. You’re looking down on your fitting body in horror now, two-one-shock, limbs flying, me—smiling. I’m someplace else and I’m telling you, I’m trying. But when you’re already dead, there isn’t much you don’t have to smile about.

No Place Like Home

I have this idea for a story. In it, there are two people. There is you, with your broad chest and your muscled arms. There is me, with my perky breasts and my dimpled smile. It’s a story of high school sweethearts and Disney endings. There is this castle made from yellow bricks set amongst rolling meadows of daisy and clover outside a township that glimmers green and gold. Surrounding the stronghold is a mote filled with angry alligators looking to chomp men who hurt women, children and other domesticated animals. I live in the top chamber on the thirty-fifth floor at the end of a spiral staircase you climb with the force and passion of a steed half your age. There is a white mare I feed oats to in the stable. It necks with a black stallion. The same one you ride into the sunset, me on my white horse galloping beside you. Side by side we journey, toward everything bright lights, white-picket-fences, kinky sex, two-and-a-half-kids, safe jobs, a fixed mortgage, Prozac, bullshit and banter at TGI Fridays, tantrums and track marks, rehab, unemployment, cutbacks, setbacks, climate change, Smirnoff, despair, sex trafficking, glacial melting, and grass-filled-billies smoked Saturday nights which morph into Monday mornings. And it’s lovely. And it’s wonderful. And it’s all we hoped for. Except it’s not. But we don’t mustn’t can’t. Instead, the story ends. Back it up. Reel it in. Edit. On a Sunday morning in Spring, light streams in on a gentle breeze trailing through curtained windows. Blueberry pancakes and freshly squeezed orange juice are served in the super king by adoring, impeccably-behaved, A-grade children with white teeth and sparkling eyes. A kiss, a hug, a dozen lies swallowed.

Kylie Hough writes on Yugambeh land. She was a finalist in the Gertrude Stein Award in Fiction 2018 and long listed in Room Magazine’s 2021 Creative Nonfiction Contest. Kylie received a 2021 CA/ASA Award Mentorship, was a finalist in the 2022 Page Turner Awards, and shortlisted in the 2022 Woollahra Digital Literary Award. Her stories, essays and poems are published in literary journals OyeDrum, Litro Magazine, Posit, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and others.

Sean Ennis

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Vouchsafe

This dog was abused, I think, and that gave it a shitty personality. That’s the correct cause and effect, right? Otherwise, the story of the dog is much sadder and I’m just trying to cheer up Grace. Her long sadness had broken, and she appeared, bath bomb-radiant and pink, excited to attend a movie? I cannot stress the deep dejection she had previously felt—don’t say wet blanket—and moods are a type of muscle, stronger with use. I’m not an expert! But I told Gabe to go pick some flowers while Grace and I talked about the type of story we’d like to see told. Because we had never planted any flowers, Gabe came back with some handsome weeds, and no one fussed about the difference if there was one. It was a new day, but fragile!

There are, of course, multiple frameworks available to choose from. I am not sitting. I’m trying to pet the dog even though he doesn’t like it. I feel that if I can just keep the dog from barking, the situation will resolve. Otherwise, all is lost and we’re back to the beginning, the bottom.

“This one sounds fun,” Grace said, and I went with it.

“Grace!” I said.

“What?” she said.

I was so happy I felt like buying presents, but then again that thought occurred to me that I am the cause of all of Grace’s misery. I’m becoming more non-profit. Last night was not my best meal. What movie?

Gabe interceded. “Pizza,” he said.

Eighteen months later, we came home from the movies and the dog is still growling. It’s a hustle keeping Grace—up. Which is to say, keeping up with Grace. It’s the movies where she regained pleasure, and so we’ve seen everything we can in English. Even so, there is that horror that it might return, that darker Grace, and contagious. We have this pass that lets us walk right in and the carpet is, of course, red. They know our order. I’ve read the disease is life-long and I still plan to find out, though these tip-toes on the sticky floor, my own swirling anxieties and obsessions and occasional tics. And poor Gabe watching the whole time, seemingly happy if fed, growing like a weed. He approaches the window of onset. We must be invited into his room.

To think, Grace recently championed the installation of a “Slow Children At Play” sign on our street when just last year she used that funny word about herself, lugubrious. Worse than that. I had been imagining the family breaking up like a band, sadly working on our solo projects because of creative differences. Now, she’s thinking civically because the cars were coming by so fast. She’s even thinking romantically: a matching bra and panty set. She still removes my hand but the progress is undeniable. As for my own mental health, I’m cruising.

Sean Ennis is the author of Cunning, Baffling, Powerful (Thirty West) and Chase Us: Stories (Little A). More of his work can be found at seanennis.net. He lives in Mississippi.

Erika Eckart

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Sight

She needed a break from seeing it: the one daughter’s drinking, the one daughter breaking her hand on the other daughter’s face, the vodka-filled water bottles, the strategically placed puke buckets, the grandbaby turning his sleeping mother over on her side like he had been taught, etc., etc. So she squirreled away a few dollars to stay at a cheap hotel. She felt guilty about leaving them, but also if she didn’t remove herself she would do something dangerous. She couldn’t see it anymore, couldn’t see her baby she made with her body asleep in the snow. Well, technically she didn’t see that, the police just described it to her, but you get my drift. She was watching her creation destroy herself and there was nothing she could do, (believe me she tried all the things) but watch because she didn’t have the heart to do what the books said and put her baby out on the street. What she really wanted out of the hotel was the hot tub, to close her eyes in, to shut down completely in. And she did ease her body into the almost painful water, and it did feel so good the temporary reprieve, the halo of steam obscuring her sight, but lurking in the water was a single-celled organism which squirmed into her eye. It was a desperate grasp at relief, both her plunge and the parasite’s. It curled itself under the doorway that was her eyelid, embedded itself in the fleshy tissue, and started feasting. She came home with one eye shut. Disoriented. Nothing was better. The one daughter was unconscious in a grocery store bathroom. And the doctors couldn’t figure her eye out. At first they thought it was a trauma, then a bacterial infection until an eye specialist determined that, no, that’s a living thing in your cornea, preparing for its departure to your central nervous system. It was painful, an anvil in her skull, but the closed eye wasn’t empty. Instead, it offered a different vision. In it, she saw her daughter sober, happy, apple-cheeked, riding a fucking horse, lisa-frank style, walking down an aisle, white dress, a trail of babies, so clean. In the other open, still-operational eye, the daughter is running up a hill mostly naked, it is cold out, she is warning the neighbors about hallucinated phantoms. The mother wanted to close both eyes, to give up, and if the medicine didn’t work she’d die with her happy baby emblazoned on the backs of her eyelids. And this is how she figures the light works, the one you walk toward, the glowing embrace that protects us from knowing it’s the end, the calming fiction that gives mothers permission to let go, to pretend it’s all going to be okay, they can fend for themselves now, no need to be there to turn them on their side so they don’t aspirate.

Prepper

She had been through lean times, (I mean when weren’t they?) but she means when there really wasn’t enough to fill the cavities in their bellies. She watched them fight over crackers, for dinner once prepared a box of Jiffy muffin mix with nothing but water and split the rubbery yield among 5, garbage picked the contents of a gas station dumpster after a fire made everything technically unsellable, wept when her children reported they did not eat their free school lunch. It is a mother’s job to feed her children, and when you can’t something breaks in you, your mind is a scramble/frenzy/war always hustling to turn nothing into calories, bulk, something to chew. So later, when the foreclosure notice came/the light bill was unpayable/ the children now grown with full bellies struggled to work/live, she protected them the only way she knew, gathering food from dollar stores and food pantries like a magpie on speed: cans of potted meat, boxes of tuna helper, obscure jarred frostings, all past their sell by date. Much of it was boxes of dust: dehydrated corn syrup, ground to sparkly flint, gelatin, stabilizers, MSG, flecks of green. When reconstituted with water it transforms to the equivalent of stacking all the furniture against the door. She fashioned her stores into fortress walls, flanks of soldiers, a watch tower, a moat, stocked all the cabinets, a storage room, an extra freezer, every pocket of space filled with insurance that it won’t come to that again. In the end, there was enough to eat, but everybody was hungry for something else: affection, work, revenge, alcohol, some of it surely grounded in that earlier time of want, but there is no feeding it now, the statute of limitations is long past. Afterwards, her cupboards remained full, but she couldn’t throw it out–it was a keepsake, a relic, an obsolete fortress made of highly-processed corn, long covered in moss, trees growing on the inside, admired, but useless, but still proof of how hard she tried to cushion them from want, how well she did her job, just look.

The pull of the water

My boy wants to watch the creek carry its burden–watch garbage gather in the current and be pulled against the rocks, watch the water travel in indirect swirls when it dances over the jagged bends. When that’s not enough, he throws leaf carcasses and wood chips and discarded bottle tops on one side of a bridge and then quickly runs to the other to watch them be pulled by the flow. Each time his act has the effect he hoped he hops up and down in place, overjoyed. He wants to be closer so we walk down the bank to admire the pull of the water up close. Suddenly, he pushes himself and his puffy coat into the metal fence, separating us from the water and tries to scale it. He needs to throw himself in, to be the thing dragged by the current and pulled under, to dance against the rocks. I anchor myself on the wet ground and hold him back; he wiggles. Everything is slick, the whole world a smooth, wet surface with no traction. It is impossible to create enough friction to keep upright, so I shift my weight and we fall back, away from the water, a panting, still-struggling pile. A stranger comes and asks What are you going to do when he’s too big for you? My boy writhes on the wet ground; I’m pinning him, begging, explaining, promising, praying the stranger will walk away. It feels unsustainable, the pull of the forces, a seam about to burst somewhere in my mind or my stomach or the space time continuum. I start scream-singing “this little light of mine,” scaring the stranger away and startling my boy out of his mania, and I remember hanging from the ceiling in the school cafeteria little paper mâché planets with signs explaining how long it will take their light to get to us, and how comforting it is to know someday it’s coming, either the light or the current to carry us away.

Erika Eckart is the author of the tyranny of heirlooms, a chapbook of interconnected prose poems (Sundress Publications, 2018). Her writing has appeared in Double Room, Agni, Quarter After Eight, Quick Fiction, Nano Fiction, Passages North, and elsewhere. She is a High School English teacher in Oak Park, IL where she lives with her husband and two children.