Protocol for Sonar by Ellen Wiese

On By steve cIn flash fiction1 Comment

⦆

The sound goes out from my dark little room at the end of a long metal pier, collides with something, and returns.

Protocol: note all targets. The sonar display doesn’t give details, submarine or creature both just blurring dots. But I know that’s her, on the scan at last.

I can hear the stories in the ultrasonic echoes, the specifics that the machine can’t detect. I was slow to learn to keep it to myself. Aboard the Suffrance, I said too much, became a standing joke.

Now the closing shape’s a beacon, lit by spinline. Bright as the line passes and fading through the next rotation. Flaring another tick closer. Moving towards my dark little room, chasing the source of the sound she can hear.

In the log, I write: unknown target, though I know what it is.

⦆

One of the stokers on the Suffrance had something wrong inside the chambers of his chest. When I told him so, he said I could keep that to myself. But he took a shine to me. Rankled like a bear at the other boys’ derision.

Radio crackles. Downcoast checking in. Bored, congested with a cold.

Ears, this is Downcoast. How’s the view?

Can’t complain. Over.

Got a name on the monster they pulled up. Over.

They hauled the young one in at the downcoast station just yesterday, tangled in a trawler’s net. Whether or not it was dead when they caught it, it was lost to the world an hour later.

What is it? Over.

Architeuthis, he says. Big old squid.

I’ve heard the young one and its mother: long heads, too many limbs for me to count, eyes that scatter sound. But the sonar carries more than shapes. Today, the whole resounding space of the sea is raw with grief.

Huge, he says like this is news. Six meters long.

Under the floor, the pier’s bearings groan like men. Where the beams meet the platform, the metal is red with rust. It comes away on my fingers, sticks under my nails, leaves smears on the lid of the coffee machine.

⦆

I first saw the mother and the little one as smudges on the sonar screen. Listened as they feasted through a school of fish. The little one was slow to learn.

Once, when they wandered close, I paused the spinline and pinged them a hello. The baby darted forward, echo full of curiosity. The mother set her body in the sonar’s path. Mantle wide, she rushed the little one away. Broad like the stoker, squaring his shoulders at the others’ mockery.

On the scan, she flares bright again as the line continues its rotation. I calculate her distance and her speed and note it on the clipboard.

○

Hey, Ears, Downcoast calls again. Boys’re saying they’re gonna pay to stuff it. Sell it to a museum or something. The monster. You wanna buy in? Over.

Under my tight fingers, the pages of the log crumple, nearly tear. The rust under my nails leaves red lines across the neatly labeled rows.

I’ll pass. Over.

Your loss, he says. Dull as rocks otherwise. Anything down there?

Her outline etched by the reflected sound. The billows of her long limbs, her vast intent. Two kilometers and closing.

Protocol: call in unknown objects. The whole point of dark little rooms at the end of long metal piers. Safety and security and the national interest.

All clear, I say. Out.      

⦅

After a dive off Peterhead, the Suffrance surfaced in a bank of fog. Nobody knew yet that we’d drifted. Only blurs on the sonar screen. But I could hear the edges through them, some dead volcanic peak.

I told the control crew we would break our hull along the ridge. The navigator took my collar in his hand. Not going to change course because a sparker thinks he’s better than the scan.

The bow took water and we sealed it off too slow. Saltwater hit the batteries and turned to chlorine gas. By the time a merchant steamer reached us, 46 hands were lost. No one could tell me what happened to the stoker, if it was sea or gas that put him on the roster of the dead.

⦅

The radio again, static before his voice crawls through. Always wondered, he says. Did you believe it? Your magic hearing thing.

Don’t clog the channel. Over.

Boys down here say you’re really crazy.

Jeers in the crew mess. The stoker standing, head scraping the ceiling, asking if anybody wanted to say that one more time.

I put my thumb on the switch that stops the sonar’s spin. She’s closing now, her jets in the display’s revolving beam.

⦅

Protocol: maintain and observe the rotation of the scan. Whether gas burned through the fluid in his lungs or breakers trapped him in the hull, I never found out how the stoker died. As the mother nears, the only sound she makes is the rush of water through her body like blood in the valves of the heart. She won’t find her baby’s body here, but I know where it is.

I thumb the switch, a narrow slice of ocean stranded in its range. Direct it south, a degree offshore, where the downcoast station and the body of her little one sit just beyond the sonar’s beam.

For a moment the scan is empty. But then a blur on the display. The echoes contort behind her as she follows the signal’s course, her intention sharp and set.

At the sonar’s farthest reach, she slows. In the sound I see her drift a moment upright. Her eye turns towards my sound, smooth and round and shining black. As though she can hear me in the echoes too, I lift my hand.

Ellen Wiese is a Chicago-based writer. Ellen’s previous publications include Portable Gray, AGNI, Wigleaf, and Lost Balloon, and her writing has appeared on the 2022 Bristol Short Story Prize shortlist, the 2022 Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize Long-Longlist, and Glimmer Train’s 2018 Very Short Fiction Top 25. She graduated from the MA Prose Fiction program at the University of East Anglia.

The Office of Nobody There by Jeffrey-Michael Kane

On By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment

There is an office where they keep sounds no one was present to hear, the tree falling, the glass crazing, a man in 1943 saying the name of a woman he would not see again, into a telephone that had already gone quiet on the other end, metal cord dangling frayed.

The clerks are very organized, everything is filed by frequency, then by grief, then by the peculiar sub-category they call almost—sounds that arrived one room too late, or one year, or one translation, nothing is named, the radio in the office tuned between stations, songs burning white in static.

I applied for a position there once, they said the work required a certain tolerance for unresolved vibration, I said I understood completely, they said most people say that, they said come back when you can hear the difference between an echo and an answer.

I am still standing outside the building, the brick hums at a frequency I recognize but cannot name, this is, I believe, the interview, this not naming.

J.M.C. KANE is the author of Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss About Neurodivergent Talent and How to See It (CollectiveInk UK). Disabled, he writes from this learned experience as an ASD-1. His prose work has been published in more than two dozen literary journals & magazines. Kane was a finalist for the 2025 Welkin Prize for Fiction and received the Reader’s Choice Award, was shortlisted for the 2025 Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction, was a finalist in the 32nd Annual Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest (2025), was longlisted for the 2026 Bath Flash Fiction Contest (UK), and has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Kane admires compression and exhibits a willingness to trust his reader. He lives in New Orleans with his dogs, family, and a house filled with art.

Three Stories by Brendan Todt

On By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

Sarah met an old acquaintance

Sarah met an old acquaintance who confessed there was something wrong with her, that her taste buds registered cilantro as soap, that she had noticed this only now, somehow, in her thirties, when she had eaten it for the first time entirely by itself, with two fingers, out of curiosity, out of a tiny glass dish among other garnishes, at a party of respected peers. Sarah asked her if her taste buds might change or change back but the friend admitted it was something elemental, genetic, final. Sarah thought about how strange it was that her eyeballs remained spherical and eyeballs. Her father had once called a stray dog licking at his ankles at a gas station a stinking miserable cunt of an animal and then asked Sarah not to tell her mother. The friend cried. Her boyfriend had confessed to her to loving Tex-Mex far more than authentic Mexican cuisine, which he had tried only once, and not been impressed by. The friend admitted she loved the boy—she kept calling him boy, boy—and insisted that the sex was fine, yes, perfectly fine, that she appreciated it, even, the break it afforded her, the opportunity for leave and release, just lying there, understanding there were some things she could have and others, finally, she could not.

Sarah receives by mail a letter

Sarah receives a letter, written by hand, from her nephew who has also drawn a picture of Sarah as the sun. Giant and yellow and happy and rare. Sarah’s sister has children whom she often sends photos of, who fold themselves like letters, sitting cross-legged on the floor or hanging in some abominable shape from the playhouse out back. Sarah has held these very same children like letters in her lap. 

The children like to share secrets, but only if they are written or drawn, and therefore able to be found out, and only therefore worthy of being kept secret in the first place. The children fold up these pictures and notes and sometimes stuff them into Sarah’s travel bags or the drawers of Sarah’s own house when they visit. Sometimes they stuff them in her pockets. Once, the nephew, who had seen his mother do this with her money, stuffed his note discreetly inside Sarah’s bra. The mother had a talk with him because that is the mother’s place. 

Sarah remembers folding very tightly the notes she passed in class. She remembers folding the large bills her own aunt gave her when she visited when she was a child. She remembers the same aunt teaching her how to cross and how to not cross her legs—and pushing her out into the sun when she had been too long inside reading a book. She remembers being scolded, many times, by a professor who told her she must never fold the poems she submitted to class. Henceforth she never did fold the poems because henceforth she never did permit herself to submit.

Sarah runs through the neighborhood knocking loudly

Sarah runs through the neighborhood knocking loudly, not exactly shouting, not exactly waiting for each neighbor to come to the door before moving on to the next, hollering back behind her as the doors open, Look up there, look up there!

Above the cul-de-sac swoop eleven bald eagles, all white-headed and grown. She’s a little out of breath now as she settles in for another good look herself. She hands off a spare pair of binoculars to a child and his father beside her. Can you believe it, she says, with the kind of enthusiasm she usually reserves only for the classroom when a student has come upon—typically stumbled upon, by accident—something very nearly magnificent.

I don’t need it, no, I don’t need it, says the boy as he pushes the binoculars back into his father’s hands. I can see them now, on my own. I can see them, I can see them! Out come sister and mother next. Will you hold me, the boy asks Sarah, and she does. He is only a little bit closer to the eagles now, but together they are much closer to something else.

On a few other porches stand a few other neighbors. Some have their own binoculars. One a giant telephoto lens. White heads and white tails, shouts the boy. I never knew they had both! I’ve seen them in the zoo, says the sister. You can put me down now.

The group breaks off into compartments, still visible, but heading in their own directions. Maybe families. Maybe soon-to-be mating partners. Are there even more awaiting them at the river? What’s a group of bald eagles called, again? She used to know.

The harder the eagles are to see, the closer the neighbors gather in the street. They pass among them the binoculars. Even the boy wants them now. I will never forget you, he says, and as Sarah hands him back off to his father, she is quite content to imagine he is no longer talking only to the eagles.

Brendan Todt lives and writes in Sioux City, Iowa. He has been working on a series of short prose that follows a character named Sarah. Other Sarah pieces have appeared in Necessary Fiction, Moon City Review, The MacGuffin, Complete Sentence, and elsewhere. “Sarah draws little moustaches” was a finalist in the Smokelong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction. A book-length manuscript of these stories has been recognized in the Cider Press Review Book Award (Finalist) and Word Works: Washington Prize (Semifinalist).

In the Other World, They’ll Receive Mitzvahs by Daniel Lurie

On By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment
I’ll commission a dollhouse door
just below my collarbone, with a toothpick
for a handle. Inside, there’s a brand-new
laundry line, where I pin their worn clothes:
the mother’s denim, the daughter’s opal shirt
with mustard stains and daisies, the father’s ratty
briefs. I set the dinner table in my palm.
It only takes a moment. I could close my fingers
to protect them from blue jays. I could close
my fist to end it all. The father crawls into my ear
so I can hear him better. From the lobe, he dangles
a pickax fashioned from the melted-down gun
metal and bullet casings he used to keep
in the basement safes. I want to wield it
to shatter the links clamped around the mother
and daughter’s wrists. They’d dance on my index
finger, rubbing at their irritated skin. Here
is where the real work would start. More doors
needed, coaxed from the raised flesh of my kneecaps.
One opening into grocery store aisles full of other lives,
without price tags. The other holding a dark
room a man’s voice has never touched.

DANIEL LURIE is a Jewish, rural writer from eastern Montana. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Idaho. Daniel is co-editor of Outskirts Literary Journal and a Poetry Reader for Chestnut Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in swamp pink, Poetry Northwest, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, and others. He recently won the 2026 Mississippi Review Prize, was awarded the Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellowship from UW-Madison, and will serve as a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford in 2026-2028. Find him at danielluriepoetry.com

Feed by Debbie Urbanski

On By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

Bird cam: a pair of hatchlings squat inside the twiggy nest while the mother hawk perches on top of a metal rail, fanning her tail feathers beside the spring green
(scroll)

Somebody’s trip to Bali
(scroll)

A turtle begins to cross the road with intention then somebody picks the turtle up and carries the turtle across the road then this person stands at the guardrail, holding the turtle in both hands before they reach out over the water
(scroll)

So what is the tipping point when what might be adorable in singular becomes worrisome or even menacing when it arrives in multitudes? Essentially when does a group become a swarm
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Nobody is using the word monsters, that would be ridiculous
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A woman beside a turtle positions her fingertips on the turtle’s shell
(scroll)

Take a deep breath
(scroll)

A map of the country. Arrows point westward and northward. Red circles = services are down (unconfirmed). Yellow circles = barricades are up (unconfirmed). Orange circles = sightings (unconfirmed). Orange triangles = levitation (unconfirmed). Orange squares = destroyed (unconfirmed) 
(scroll)

The perfect everyday work bag. Four colors. Shop
(scroll)

14 years ago, a sitcom in Syracuse premiered
(scroll) 

Recommended reading: War of the Worlds, Ways of Seeing, Frankenstein, Regarding the Pain of Others, Annals of the Former World, The Voyage of the Beagle, Black Hole Survival
(scroll)

How do we turn dialogue
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What a difficult thing for which to provide commentary, as we are not appearing to have the same experiences during such “effluences.” In the present footage, for instance, I see a plume of green extending from the horizon line like a cloud but a cloud that scrapes across the ground so slowly and with such great intent, though once that green solidifies, then — well in the comments, tell me
(scroll)

A turtle beside a woman positions its fingertips on the woman’s shell
(scroll)

The question, really — is a broken reality fixable? Or does a break lead to a new and different reality or realities, in which case
(scroll) 

Monkeys in trees, monkeys on the ground, monkeys on the curving boardwalk, monkeys piled onto the stone statue of a god, monkeys nursing their pups, monkeys balancing on a man’s shoulder, monkeys lifting and lowering
(scroll) 

Vapor, elbows, the sidewalk, the sky
(scroll) 

I don’t know, I looked outside and it wasn’t fucking there. The tree. All the trees. They weren’t there. They were just gone. They were fucking gone
(scroll) 

A public service announcement about the importance of identifying and protecting the monarch
(scroll)

Can the absence of something prove its existence?
(scroll) 

As a working historian, I’d like to now place the current events into an epistemological context. We may want to believe that a shared reality has been a constant throughout both modern and ancient history, but that’s merely a story we tell ourselves. There are numerous examples in our past when a multitude of groups observed an event or events in real time yet came to radically different interpretations. Take any civil war or revolution or reformation or sub-reformation. The difference here: what’s happening now isn’t interpretation   
(scroll)

A sunflower sea star unfurls
(scroll) 

Ice bubbles in Pennsylvania
(scroll)

Your Wednesday Wellness tip
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Yet was it a violent force to begin with? Or did we transform what it was into a violence because of how we met the force when it arrived?
(scroll)

The secret to stress-free travel
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It was right here. You can see where the roots were, right? Those holes over there? It used to go up, I don’t know, 40 or 50 feet
(scroll) 

Snow falling locally and leisurely, wide white flakes
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Yesterday, I woke up
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State emergency services advises individuals in affected areas to:
* shelter inside
* wear a face mask or respirator
* secure the premises
* reduce exterior visibility 
(scroll)

It has become difficult to write dystopias, fantasy, or any form of literature without sounding naive
(scroll)

How would you like to receive a letter
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Revealing teeth
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Shelter inside, mask up, windows closed, blinds closed, don’t
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A woman walks out of the frame
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It would be useful to know what is happening
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Stay inside, mask up, windows
(scroll)  

Stay
(scroll) 

Break
(scroll)  

What
(scroll)  

There
(scroll)  

Red
(scroll)  

What
(scroll)  

Hand
(scroll)  

(low battery warning)

They’re trying to help us. What if we became
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Bird cam: empty nest, rain 
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I feel like a sense of narrative has been destroyed among other
(scroll)

Don’t believe what you
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Fractured house, roof on the ground, the aluminum siding rendered
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The rain isn’t rain (low battery warning)
(scroll) 

Trees holding rope
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It appears this world got tired of pretending
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Enormous tracks
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A turtle (low battery warning) being
(scroll)

I have started writing on
(power down)

Debbie Urbanski is the author of the novel After World (Simon & Schuster, 2023), the collection Portalmania (Simon & Schuster, 2025), and a lot of essays and short stories. She lives and hikes in Central New York. Find her online at debbieurbanski.com

Upon Hearing a Lecture at a Halifax Burial Site by Kallie Blakelock

On By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment
Janet’s husband stands bowlegged, thin
grave-digger and former smoker, his hands
shake when he holds her

purse. He and I prowl
along the edges of the graveyard
while Janet goes on and listens.
At home in Toronto

he cremates bodies,
tells families that they can’t watch
him work, even when curiosity begs,
because only he, only Kevin, can handle the lifting
and shutting, only he can handle

lighting the furnace, lighting the fire that shivers
bones back to dirt. Yes, only Kevin knows

what happens when faces disappear real slow.
              He says he just has to think of them as logs.
And aren’t you glad it’s not you? Aren’t you lucky

that he does that
and that you can kind of ride
behind the car on a skateboard
with a rope and a helmet.

KALLIE BLAKELOCK is a former high school teacher who recently relocated from Charm City to Tampa. She is a poet who explores things like sorrow, bodies of water, and her own mind. Though she’s far from the salty Eastern Shore of Maryland where she was raised, Kallie loves the sunshine and community she has encountered during her time as an MFA student in poetry at the University of South Florida. She lives with her obese cats, Mowgli and Mona. This is her first publication.

We Took Turns Trying to Start the Truck With Our Minds by Jeffrey Hermann

On By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

I closed my eyes and held my fingers to my temples. Nothing. Just the quiet field. The two of us sitting in the truck cab, the summer sun still hot in the evening. She said anyone could do it but no one was like her. I’d known that right away.

I’d lost the keys somewhere in the field. I searched all over, running my hands through the tall grass. It’s not that important, she said to me, but I kept looking anyway, down by the river where we’d lain on a blanket, scanning the shallow water where a thousand stones resembled a thousand shiny keys. I imagined having to walk home, having to listen to the yelling. Really, don’t worry, she said. We can try something. Her voice was kind of cheery and I looked up at her. Kind of a game, she added.

When it was her turn she put her hand on the dashboard and closed her eyes. Almost like she was praying. She whispered to the truck. Or to something else, something really big or really small, somewhere inside. Watching her I imagined both possibilities, both futures: dead silence and the weight of the regular world rushing back into the car, or something extraordinary.

Within the dashboard something clicked. The engine gave a small chug, then turned and rumbled. I said something dumb like, whoa, or holy shit, and she smiled. We both laughed and I kissed her while she was laughing, our teeth hitting. I asked what else she could do and she said anything with an electric heart. I just looked at her, my mind a flood of questions I couldn’t articulate and something like joy. I must have stared too long, because her smile faded into an uncertain smirk. She turned to look out the window.

I’d been driving around aimlessly when I saw her that afternoon. The neighborhood a little shabbier than the other shabby neighborhoods. The house a little smaller than the other small houses. She was sitting on her front porch with a dog that looked really old. I stopped and she came over to the truck. We exchanged stilted hellos and then she asked where I was going. I said it was a nice day for a long drive. I knew she didn’t have a car; I’d seen her getting on and off the bus. She opened the door and got inside.

Now we sat together in a machine she’d just brought back to life. I put the truck in drive and we moved out of the field and onto the dirt road, then onto the paved two-lane, all the way to the gas station. We didn’t talk. I turned the radio on and after a minute she fiddled with the stations until she found something. She’d been here maybe six months. Assessed, categorized, and rejected by this place—the kind of place that works hard to make one kind of person and nothing else—in a matter of days. I’d watch people who couldn’t seem to blend in, couldn’t choke off their impulses to say or do something out of the ordinary, and feel pity. By the river, lying on the blanket together, she asked me what I was most afraid of and I said nothing. Fucking liar.

When we got to the Marathon I asked her what her favorite gas station meal was. She said a frozen Cherry Coke and Fritos. It was when I got inside and paid that I admitted to myself that my drive hadn’t been aimless. I knew where she lived. People had whispered about it. About her. When I came back out another car was just pulling away from the truck. I could hear the laughing, see the other girls’ hair whipping in the wind. Girls from here learn young not to cry. They learn to yell, to pull at each other. When I got back in the cab her face was calm. The sound of the car disappearing down the road. Sometimes I think about doing something terrible with it, she said. I don’t believe that, I said. Another lie. I could see it easily. Could imagine terrible things in vivid detail. She said she didn’t want to go home yet, then leaned back in her seat and took a long sip from the big red cup. No one was like her.

I drove us back down the two-lane, back down the dirt road to the field, parked the truck and idled there for a minute. Then I pushed the ignition, killing the engine. I’d have to make up a story about the key. But that was later. Outside was the sound of river water, a trilling of insects. Inside was the smell of heat and cherry sugar. She slid closer to me and then laid her head on my lap. She asked if that was OK and I said yes.

She closed her eyes and I watched her for a long time. I wondered if I could feel the pulse of something inside her, sense a hum of something kinetic. Instead I felt her get softer, her body’s weight relaxing into mine. I looked into the rearview mirror, catching my reflection, then back out at the field and the sky. Everything was so still—the truck, the evening, this girl. I was tired, too. And I wondered about quietness, stillness. I guess it had never occurred to me before. How sometimes things are resting out of exhaustion, and sometimes things are resting in preparation. That felt good. That felt strange for this place.

Jeffrey Hermann writes short fiction and prose poems in his spare time. One day when he retires he will write in his regular time. His work is out there if you look. His wife and two children and dog mean everything to him. He has two books forthcoming in 2027, from Unsolicited Press and Gnashing Teeth Publishing.

Telegrim by Madeline Blair

On By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment

Link to PDF: Telegrim by Madeline Blair

MADELINE BLAIR is a poet, editor, and award-winning filmmaker from Chicago, IL, with a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the founder/editor-in-chief of Sabr Tooth Tiger Magazine. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Blood+Honey, BULLSHIT LIT, Burial Magazine, Michigan City Review of Books, Luna Luna Magazine, Ekphrasis Magazine, and more. She was once quoted in The New York Times on her passion for clean air.


Alligator by Salena Casha

On By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

I say to him, it’s been a year, and he looks at me across the table with its fake spider plant and starts talking about how he’s found a simple way to make lemon trees grow in the shade, like he didn’t text me an hour ago after 371 days of no contact, asking me to drop everything and meet him at Roast, and of course I did because I know through a friend of a friend that his mom just died. And so, I skipped a weekly meeting with my department head and took a Blue Bike in the wrong shoes to witness him in mourning because it’s what I deserve, to see him low, lower than I was when he left me on read, and be given the choice of whether to help him stand again or leave him as he was, but I’d never imagine lemon trees so, of course, it throws me. There’s a bit of egg hanging on to a mole on his cheek, just out of reach of his tongue, and I don’t tell him to get it, and I don’t wipe it off myself, even though I’d be absolutely annihilated if I knew that someone I was once in awe of saw it and did nothing. This is not because I’m in awe of him anymore, but rather, because I’ve experienced that sort of epiphany firsthand: how all the seriousness and subject matter expertise in the world on second-wave feminism can be diminished by a bit of spinach or a sesame seed or, in this case, egg and so I let it diminish him. There’s a woman next to us who’s seen the egg though, I know she’s seen it, and a part of me worries this witness will say something, but we’re on the same page and she returns to her Anna Karenina. He keeps talking about how he spliced a lemon tree with a fern and thickened its skin with alligator genes, for a moment, I wish that I had the sort of palate that craved lemon slices beneath chicken skin so I could say he did all that work in his little white coat for me, that he loves a metaphor as a substitute for feeling, but I don’t like lemons and I’m annoyed that I’m here again, unpacking his symbolism for free and that I still have his number memorized even though I deleted it and couldn’t even text sorry who is this when his message first came through like I’d rehearsed but that was also because he actually used the word emergency. My tired fantasy of an ending I deserve, like all the others before it (sending a love letter to me in the mail or asking for forgiveness in an overlong voice note and begging for me back just so I could have a choice in it all), is not coming true. I will not get the chance to say, I’m sorry your mom died but you made sure I never met her, and so, yeah, we’re not getting back together, because the emergency he mentioned is not, in fact, about her or us or, maybe even, about him. The bit of egg wags on his face and he asks me, So, can you take them? And I say, Take what? And he’s like, the lemon trees, they don’t need much, just water once every two weeks, just until Fall. Did you bring your car? and I see sparks on Roast’s stained-wood walls and I can picture a forest of them, fragrant and oily, ready to be scraped raw, and my voice catches on something sharp in my chest because he thinks I’m still in the same place that he left me, that he thinks I’ve already said yes, that the part of his brain that plays God with vegetation saw nothing wrong with reaching out to someone who couldn’t keep a plant alive to save her life, a someone he discarded, with an open-ended babysitting opportunity. Even in our play-pretend world that was alive and well 380 days ago, I was never that person and all the imagination I wasted on him since he stopped talking to me vibrates through my nailbeds. Maybe I should take those useless plants and burn them in effigy for closure and inhale their fragrant crisping wood to cleanse me of him like good sage. I exhale hard enough for both him and the woman with her Russian literature to notice and lean away and I think about this man who, last August, would still not have called me first about his mom, and it’s then and there that I decide I need something to survive me, a sign of life after all of this that is also an ending I deserve, and so I say, carefully, slowly, I’ll think about it. But, you know, I’ll probably kill them and the second I say it, death is at the table and something around his eyebrows crumples and he leans forward, the egg on his cheek just in swiping distance and my stomach swells because yes, this is the way I did picture it at last, him reaching for me as I walk away, and as I press my hands down to stand up, to leave him here at last, he grabs my fingers in his clammy palm, and says, I‘ll solve for that next. I promise, I just need more time. 

Salena Casha’s work has appeared in over 180 publications in the last decade. Recent pieces can be found with HAD, F(r)iction, and The Forge. She survives New England winters on good beer and black coffee. Subscribe to her substack at salenacasha.substack.com

I Belong Hair by Shivani Mutneja

On By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment

Long arm hair is slowly longer arm hair is winding into prolonged arm hair is dreaming into sticky wet arm hair is only thinking of itself on the left arm soaped arm hair waiting to be rinsed so that it can go back to slightly tangled arm hair, having been forgotten beneath the woolens even by the judgmental eyes of mothers is the growing forestry of arm hair only imagining the future when a wax strip will uproot it into the dustbin or a razor will will it into the drain, till the longing of the arm hair makes it sentient into wanting to be seen by a stranger whose long stare may fabulate it into a savannah for cows to graze at.

Long pubic hair is longish pubic hair is longer pubic hair till the husband says, “I will trim those for you,” doesn’t say “I am tired of those on you,” because he knows better than long pubic hair is the longing to lick without indigestion, so he stands on the bedside while pubic hair wires gape, the scissor gently trims, long pubic hair trembling to the cold air is not a gripping story for the husband, razor takes away a bunch of narrative wires leaving deep inside the folds a long day of growing intimacy, tangled in the oblong gap between legs is the forest for one man to walk in till he can’t find himself.

Long armpit hair is crusted at the end with soap, what desirable lushness for the mousy parlour girl who wants to see it succumb to golden hot wax, to look at the black mat of it over the dirty cream of the strip is the hairy satisfaction she lives for, shows the strip to the bearer of the armpit expecting similar enthusiasm if not triumph, the stretched thin flesh of armpit, tenderness subdued to repeated pressure from palms, singed, betrayed that the once lush landscape is now naked folds, tongues might come for it, sweat will trickle down easy, beating close to the heart will be the resilient hair follicles till they sprout.

SHIVANI MUTNEJA is a writer from Delhi. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her poems and prose have appeared in Nether Quarterly, Jellyfish Review, Two Serious Ladies, and decomp Journal among others. She is also the Associate Fiction Editor at The Bombay Literary Magazine.