we came out of the ocean. coming out of the ocean began with your attempts to get on land. you’d developed lungs. they were badly formed. no one had even thought to try to get on land before you. you said it was easier for you on shore. it felt better. i worried about you. come down from there. i called from the sea bed. i’m ovulating. we had a child who inherited both your lungs and my gills. i worried my gills made her lungs even weaker. you died above us not long after she came out of me. it was too bright. your scales and your eyes had nothing on your lungs and your lungs were barely there to begin with. your lungs were small half-formed pockets that were continually ripping and sloshing with salt water. you’d cough up the salt water on the beach. you’d tell me about how the sand got wet where you coughed. you leaked our home out of your lungs. you said the shore wasn’t so different from what we had down below. everything was just heavier up there. the sand. your body. our child is already swimming and your bones are where the light is. she asks about you. i tell her i remember very little. i tell her she will have to remember better. her brain is bigger than the both of ours. but she has your cough. i worry about her lungs. i put my ear to her chest and hope. our books say nothing about what to do with these new bodies. i have read them all. our child is already kicking. i can’t believe it. she launches her body above the break of the ocean. into the air above us. then she crashes back down into the dark weightlessness. back to where we live together. we’re a small family compared to the others. i beg our girl to please stay near the sea bed but she says it’s easier for her up there. in the air. i tell her not to go on shore. i worry. she says she’ll try not to go on shore but it’s just so easy. it’s so easy for her up there. away from me. she’s growing. she doesn’t need her mother to tell her anything anymore. she doesn’t need my gills. i weave seaweed in my hair to make myself look younger. our child is growing faster than the others. i write the books i wish i could read to her. our child is grown. she is tan. one day she is late for dinner and i call her and ask her if she’s alright and she tells me she’s seen your skeleton on a nearby beach. how long have i known she asks. i tell her i didn’t want her to learn this way and she tells me she thinks she’s going to stay on the beach above me from now on. it’s just easier for everyone this way. by everyone she means her and her new child. my grandchild’s lungs are so wide they can’t help but float at the surface of our world. i would cry but I have not evolved tear ducts yet. i give a lecture to the others about paradigm shifts. the others say the world is flat. i tell them i’ve seen feet.

Amanda Claire Buckley is a writer who was once a waitress who was once a philosophy student who was once a musical director for a sketch comedy troupe. Her work has been featured in X-R-A-Y, The Same, and Story Club Magazine. She’s currently an MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College and is a contributing editor for the literary journal Pigeon Pages. She can be found on Twitter @aclairebuckley and online at http://www.amandaclairebuckley.com

After the tsunami, in the port town some mermaids comb their hair in bathtubs, others swim at the bottom of tequila glasses, drivers see them reflected in their rear view mirrors, housewives find them when they open cans of sardines, the radio interrupts cumbia and lets the enigma of their songs be heard, children find them while playing hide and seek, the parish priest assures that a swarm of them goes to church and seduces angels on rainy nights.

After the tsunami, the port town remained under water, and the mermaids are terrified that this human memory still lingers under the sea.

* * *

Luego del tsunami, en el pueblo del puerto hay sirenas peinándose en las bañeras, otras nadan en el fondo de los vasos de tequila, los conductores las ven reflejadas en los espejos retrovisores, las amas de casa las encuentran al abrir una lata de sardinas, en la radio la cumbia se interrumpe y se escucha el enigma de sus cantos, los niños las descubren jugando escondidillas, el párroco asegura que en las noches de lluvia un ejército de ellas va a la iglesia y seduce a los ángeles.

Luego del tsunami, el pueblo del puerto quedó sumergido, y a las sirenas les aterra que aún persista aquel recuerdo humano bajo el mar.

Born in Morelia, Michoacán in 1980, Édgar Omar Avilés has authored several books, including the story collections Cabalgata en duermevela (2011) and No respiramos: Inflamos fantasmas (2014), as well as the novels Guiichi (2008) and Efecto vudú (2018). His short stories have appeared in various journals and anthologies, including The Airgonaut, New Flash Fiction Review, and Queen Mob’s Teahouse.

Toshiya Kamei holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Arkansas. His translations include Liliana Blum’s The Curse of Eve and Other Stories (2008), Naoko Awa’s The Fox’s Window and Other Stories (2010), Espido Freire’s Irlanda (2011), and Selfa Chew’s Silent Herons (2012). Other translations have appeared in The Global Game (2008), Sudden Fiction Latino (2010), and My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (2010).

I had to send them away. They were children not born of me; they came rushing out between some other woman’s legs, one right after the other, and I was told she lost so much of her liquid that, as soon as they squealed in the air, she had dried up, all broken apart, and pieces of her blew away with the gust of their father’s grief. I had not known her, being so young myself when she died, barely out of my first bleeding, that when I was invited to her funeral, as the whole village was, I looked at the fractured remains of her bones with the curious pity one has for a dead animal. I expressed the appropriate grief to the father, my eyes cast down and my lips trembling, but he must have seen something genuine in me, though there was none at all, and he asked my father if I would be a suitable replacement. My father hand hesitated to grant the blessing, but when a bag of coins found their way into his fingers, my father’s hand was firm.

It was not so bad, at first. The children would not suckle from my breasts, but I warmed milk from the goat and dripped it into their mouths until their skin stretched over their expanding bones. They grew fast: the boy, Hansel, with his greedy appetite, and the girl, Gretel, long and thin like a branch, but whose arms knocked the china from the table if she did not get her way. They loved me, I suppose, as much as their father did, though when they saw my belly begin to expand they huddled together and whispered. When the rain forgot to fall on our small garden and the ground cracked, our lone goat’s milk refused to be coaxed, and the four of us knew what would happen: a fifth would devastate us. Two of us would have to go. We would all starve if we remained together. I have not been taught numbers as men are, but even I know that three is less than five.

My grandmother once told me that once you go into the forest, you come back a changeling. Or you don’t come back at all.

Gretel was awake the night I decided. Our small house had only one room for sleeping, and so all of us dreamed together. I climbed above their father and massaged his neck and behind his ear, as he likes. I pressed his hands to my belly and rejoiced at what we had created.  In his ear I whispered that I would not die with its birth, for I was made of stronger things than dust.

It was difficult, after we finished, to fall asleep, for that daughter who was mine but not mine stared at me all night, the moon reflecting off her dark eyes.

They cried, of course, the boy more than the girl – his emotions reflected his appetite, and he could keep neither in check. Their father cried as well when he held the door open, but I held my hand on my belly – my only bargaining chip – and he gave them a little bread and told them they were old enough to make their own way, though they were young, too young.

At night, I asked them to forgive me, though they were already gone.

*  * *

I bore him my daughter and I did not die. She suckles from my breast and squirms and laughs with all the happiness of a small thing. I see myself in her, that bit of myself that did not have to choose. With so few mouths to beg, the goat returned to its milk. We are saved.

Their father weeps for them, though quietly, as he knows it upsets me and my daughter. I don’t voice what flows in my veins: I do not want them to come back, not my long-armed daughter nor my voracious son. If they come back, it is I who will pay the price for saving us, I who will pay the price for desiring my own daughter over them, I who will pay the price for making the difficult decision, though it was their father who held the door. After a few months, I suspect that they have died out there, and while I feel the ache of loss, I am also relieved that I will not suffer their retribution, even though they would be within their right.

* * *

One night, a little time before the birth of the new year, as I sit on the little landing with my daughter wrapped up against my breast, showing her snow for the first time, I see two figures make their way towards the house. Rather, I smell them first, the sickly stench of rotten sugar clings to them like a death. The boy is so big he makes the earth shake with each step, and the girl, tall and thin as she always was, had a red glint in her eye, and her teeth, when I they are near enough to see, are filed to uneven spikes.

They are almost upon me, and I hold my sweet baby daughter to my breast as I stand tall to receive them, these children that I have sacrificed to save my own, these children who are mine and not mine, these children who now sniff at my arms and neck, looking for the place to bite.

A. A. Balaskovits is the author of Magic for Unlucky Girls (SFWP). Her writing can be found in Indiana Review, The Southeast Review, The Missouri Review, Apex Magazine, and many others. She is the Co-Editor in Chief of Cartridge Lit. On twitter @aabalaskovits.

First, the bodies.

3 on the first day. When your head was still bleeding and the smoke was still curling black across the white. When you had checked all the pulses. When you didn’t know what to do and so you started doing what you thought you should and then you didn’t know if you should even be doing that.

9 on the second day when you were determined and something gave you strength, maybe it was your husband moaning or maybe it was your daughter crying or maybe it was the stranger praying to a god you’d never heard of.

16 on the third day when the efforts of the second day had carved a tunnel of ice into the snow and you could almost fling the bodies down the track you had made and award yourself three points or a gold medal or whatever they give Olympic-standard curlers.

4 on the fifth day because on the fourth day you couldn’t face it, on the fourth day you shut down and it was like giving birth, when they warned you that the high of the endorphins from labor would crash (not that word, not that word) drift away and leave you broken and sobbing and numb. There were four on the fifth day, but they came in many pieces.

2 Legs. Two legs that used to wrap around your waist – your neck even – in younger, more adventurous times. Two legs that walked out of the church by your side, that stood next to you in your eight-hour labor, that paced the hospital corridor for hours after while they fixed you up. Two legs. Crushed.

64 tray meals. It’s not enough, it’s not enough, it’s not enough.

2 movies you have seen about this very scenario. First the one with the terrible ending and the two Hollywood stars who inexplicably fucked their way out of trouble. They had a dog. Of course, they had a dog. If you found a dog now you would eat it. And you would hum The Littlest Hobo theme song while you did. Then the other movie. The one with the soccer team. The one with the thin goatee guy, who used to date Winona Ryder pre- Johnny Depp, pre-shoplifting. Wait. Is that right? Or did you just want them to be a couple because of the on-screen chemistry? Because, right now, figuring this out seems like the most important thing. Because you’re trying to fill your brain, to replace the memories of the book of the film because you’re remembering the detail about what they did, so much detail that you wished you’d never read it, details about how they cut the flesh and how they made bowls from skulls, and utensils from bones.

6 bodies mauled. They look like the exhibition you went to, the one everyone raved about because dead, peeled bodies were something that they were never going to see. You waited four months for the tickets and then you left within minutes. The bodies made you sick. You didn’t want to know what was inside of you.

6 bodies mauled = 1 moment of hope. That something else is alive out here.

822 pawprints you counted before you began to lose sight of the plane and turned back.

5 times you felt like something was watching you.

1 time you shouted, “Come at me, bitches!” then ran away from your own echo.

9 days.

10 days.

11 days.

1 decision to make.

26 months. Your mother nags you, says “she’s two,” but you count her in months because she is closer to a baby that way, closer to you.

1 vision. You wrap her up, as warm as you can, using everything you have found. You strap her to your back with torn seatbelts, singing songs the whole time. She whispers back, raw red cheeks trying to smile at Mummy’s voice. You kiss goodbye to her father, say a prayer with the stranger. You can see the headlines already. You can see the picture of your husband in his wheelchair, your baby with missing toes, you – gaunt, but glowing, your chest puffed out and your loose teeth smiling. The stranger won’t be there – he doesn’t fit the headline. You’ll probably get free trips to Disneyland and an appearance on Ellen. And all this will seem worth it. You fix the newspaper picture in your mind, project it out onto the blankness before you. Then you set off into the snow.

Gaynor Jones is an award-winning short fiction writer based in Manchester, U.K. Her website is http://www.jonzeywriter.com.