Leech by Eben E. B. Bein

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Today, I read about a mother bleeding
mysteriously from her vagina
not quickly, but enough to stain,
something dark inside, and
when the gynecologist found it,
attached to the slick muscle
by its two suckers and tugged it free,
and it kept bleeding for hours, I thought
about how leeches, too, are mothers,

how I once spotted one, undulating
through the shallows
of a New Hampshire pond,
a stripe the color of leaf litter
down her rippling back, and at her side,
a wriggling cloud of S’s—a tiny school
of leechlets. When I reached out my net
they ducked beneath her awning
and disappeared.

Host dearest, what do little white boys take?

Back at the lab, I scraped her
from the bucket wall,
into a vial of ethanol. She writhed,
shrank in seconds
to a close parenthesis, stiff enough
to roll through the swirled preservative
onto her back, revealing
a small cluster of petals
clinging to her underside—
an umbilical flower
of dead children.

Eben E. B. Bein (he/they) is a biology-teacher-turned-climate-justice-educator at the nonprofit Our Climate. He was a 2022 Fellow for the Writing By Writers workshop and winner of the 2022 Writers Rising Up “Winter Variations” poetry contest. Their first chapbook Character Flaws is out with Fauxmoir Lit and they’ve published with the likes of Fugue Literary, New Ohio Review, and Columbia Review. They are currently completing their first full collection about parent-child estrangement, healing, and love. He lives on Pawtucket land (Cambridge, MA) with his husband and can be found online at ebenbein.com or @ebenbein.

Cancellations by Grace Marie Liu

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Most days, I wake up wishing I were something
like cold thunder. As in Zendaya, or the girl
in a pinafore dress who bakes rhubarb tarts in a cottage
made of cheese. I am instead trying to be punctual.
Zoom calls, grocery store appointments, downtown Zumba classes,
the studio slanted between the bank and a fruit market. This
is how I comfort my mother when she calls. Today, it’s five
across and the cause of this summer’s poor air quality
across U.S. cities, except I can’t stop talking
about the green bottle fly nailed to the windowpanes,
how I killed it with my right hand. Really, I should be sad
about bleach and glaciers, but I’m still mourning
my premature white hairs. The Zumba instructor emails
Saturday, apologizing because she can’t go outside, the fumes
disrupt her chakra. I call my mother, tell her it was smoke all along.

Grace Marie Liu is a Chinese-American poet from Michigan. She is a 2024 YoungArts National Winner with Distinction in Poetry, and an alumna of the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program and the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Minnesota Review, Peach Mag, Sundog Lit, and Vagabond City Lit, among others. She serves as an Editor-in-Chief of Polyphony Lit.

Object Lesson by Jules Fitz Gerald

On By okaydonkey7In flash fiction1 Comment

I stole the notebook.

Is this a sentence? I’m looking for hands. Take a stand here.

Yes? Do we all agree?

Anthony, I welcome you to remove your earbud and join us.

Even if your music is off, your extraction of that plastic snail consoles me as a gesture of respect.

Thank you. I stole the notebook. Why is this a sentence? Kylee?

Because it feels complete?

Yes, I just repeated Kylee’s answer in that radically ambivalent way I have of making you uncertain whether I’m validating or questioning it. Bear with me. I’m seeking to destabilize my position in the locus of power. If this feels hypocritical, that’s because it probably is.

What makes the sentence feel complete, Kylee?

There is a subject and verb, though I sense that’s the answer you believe I want rather than a conclusion you’ve reached for yourself. I can work with that. Is a subject and verb enough?

Anthony?

Just stretching. I see. Kaden?

Why did “I” steal the notebook? Thank you for taking this seriously.

No, really, assuming the notebook isn’t invented for the purpose of this lesson, why steal it?

I see your hand, Kylee, but I’d like to give Anthony a chance to answer this. Anthony?

Because.

Very clever. We both win.

Because I stole the notebook. Is that a sentence?

Let’s hear from someone new. I’d cold-call, but I haven’t learned most of your names yet.

You refuse me?

Fine, Kylee, go ahead.

No, because of the because, yes. Because is a subordinating conjunction. Does anyone understand what it means to be made subordinate?

Anyone besides Kylee?

Do you realize you’re experiencing it now?

Yes, Anthony?

It is. It’s always this hot in here because it’s one of the outer circles of hell. No, seriously, if there were windows, I’d open them. That’s why I bought these fans.

Consider this: It is. Is that a sentence?

It is! Excellent.

No, we cannot prop that exterior door.

You are not the first to inform me this classroom is the hottest in the school. Perhaps you could have some compassion. You get to leave when the bell rings. I have to stay.

Quick, bonus challenge! What’s the shortest sentence in English? Kylee?

Nope. Kaden?

I’m? That’s essentially what Kylee said.

Yes, it’s two letters.

Anthony, please close the door and return to your seat. Remember that shooting in Texas? Yes, Texas is far away, but if there’s a shooter here, we want the door to be— I see your point, but we’ll just have to hope the shooter isn’t in the classroom.

No? Oh, you mean as a sentence. No.

You want a hint?

Think.

That’s your hint.

I’ll tell you at the end of class if you haven’t figured it out. Back to the lesson: I stole the notebook. Is the notebook necessary?

Kaden, I see you nodding.

Because you can’t steal something that isn’t there.

Interesting, but not what I wanted you to say. Let’s try another approach.

Must you see this notebook to believe it exists, or can I tell you it’s the size of an old-fashioned postcard, that its softbound covers bear a full-color bounty of heirloom vegetables: rosettes of lettuce and bouquets of chard, the veins of each cabbage leaf articulated with aching precision—Anthony, have I even begun to make you care?

Each vegetal specimen is labeled in a font from the last line of a sadist’s eye chart, suggesting the world from which this notebook was stolen is a third the size of our own. A model, perhaps. From “whom” was it stolen? “Who” stole it? How do I know “who” is “who” and “who” is “whom” apart from the fact that “I” stole it?

Simple. It’s a matter of subjects and objects. Who does the action to whom.

Kaden, I feel like I’ve lost you.

Kylee, while I appreciate that you’re either taking notes or working on the bonus challenge, I fear you, too, might be missing my point.

Look. I need your eyes. Here’s a notebook covered with vegetables divorced from any evidence of the dirt that produced them. They resemble eggplant emojis scrawled with Sharpie, but still.

Whose notebook is this?

Yes, Anthony. I stole your notebook to teach you the grammar of agency.

Now, write in your notebooks for the next seven minutes: Tell me what you’ve learned from this object lesson. Specifically, consider the implied “you” in that sentence. Can you imagine yourself as a subject, even when you aren’t on the page?

Anthony, why aren’t you writing?

Sorry, here’s your notebook. Kaden, do you need help?

Go ahead and write those thoughts down. Don’t mind me looking over your shoulder.

Intriguing observation, Kylee, but try to go deeper.

Anthony, why are you putting away your notebook? Please speak up. Wait, I said that door needs to stay—

Well then.

Can anyone put what just happened into a sentence? Kylee?

Hold on, Kylee—why are there so many shuffling papers and slamming books? There’s no reason to pack up.

The bell hasn’t rung! I haven’t given anyone permission to leave! Kaden, come back!

Don’t think I can’t write you all referrals!

Well, Kylee, it’s down to you and me. Believe it or not, I’m on your side. You remind me of me.

Oh. You’re only here for the solution to the bonus challenge?

Everyone else figured it out.

Go.

Jules Fitz Gerald (she/her) grew up on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and now lives in Oregon. She earned an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and recently attended the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and Tin House Summer Workshop. Past honors include selection for a Fulbright U.S. Student Grant in Creative Writing and a Lighthouse Works fellowship. Her prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, Fourth Genre, Raleigh Review, Tampa Review, and North Dakota Quarterly. She taught high school English for six years.

The Notes Left Behind on Grandfather’s Desk by Michelangelo Franchini

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Giovanni: son

Marco: grandson curly hair

Giacomo: grandson glasses

Mum: dead

Dad: dead

Olga: wife? Gentle 

In his poem Montale describes the scorching Ligurian landscape as a metaphor for the desolation of life

Wife: where?

White pills are not candies are not don’t give the children don’t eat

Dante’s journey may be a dream but the passages in the text where he says that are too obscure and the scholars are

Paratore: mentor dead

Virgilio: Paratore’s grandson glasses tall

Si quicquam mutis gratum acceptumue sepulcris accidere a nostro Calue dolore potest quo desiderio ueteres renouamus amores 1

Read Cicero

Wife: vacation? Dead

 

1 If the silent grave can receive any pleasure or sweetness at all from our grief Calvus the grief and regret with which we make our old loves live again

Michelangelo Franchini is an Italian author and screenwriter. His short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in many Italian and English literary zines, such as Carmilla, Pastrengo Rivista, Tuffi Rivista, Isit Magazine, Neuro Logical, the big windows review, Maudlin House, and Sublunary Review.

A Poem in Which I Avoid My Guilt by Mike Bagwell

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I have no authority to say anything.
I clap my hands and a cat runs out of the room.
This is magic. It is expensive,
but well within your means.

The first rule to having mass
is not to have mass at some point.
You have no choice in the matter
especially if you are reading this.

Applicable sorcery: t-shirts,
Mickey Mouse, Ikea.

I conjure objects from nothing.
This water stain in the ceiling,
for instance, this Monstera plant—
both still growing. It feels good
to admit as much.

Beehives nestle in the attic rafters
and hum golden vowels
which I wrap in paper packets
and promptly swallow.
I’ll never die.

I clapped. I could not stop my hands
from clapping. There were cats
everywhere. You can purchase this
through the normal channels.

 

Mike Bagwell is a writer and software engineer based in Philly. He received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, trampset, Halfway Down the Stairs, HAD, BULL, Bodega, Whiskey Island, and others. Some editors have kindly nominated him for a Pushcart. He is the author of the chapbook A Collision of Soul in Midair (forthcoming from Bottlecap Press). He was the founding editor and designer of El Aleph Press and his work can be found at mikebagwell.me.

Rod by Whitney Collins

On By okaydonkey7In flash fiction1 Comment

It was during their slow dancing that Rod saw the jaguar. He and Billie were twirling in the trailer to Kenny Rogers when Rod reached out and flipped the lights off for romance. That was when the kitchen went from bright to dark, and the outside went from black to blue, and out past the picture window he saw Priscilla the Peruvian jaguar crouching under the honeysuckle.

Rod grabbed Billie by the shoulders and stopped their waltz: “Don’t you leave,” he whispered. “You understand me?” Then he went and got his firearm from an old Ritz cracker tin under the loveseat and walked toward the front door. When he opened it, the hot night hit him in the face like his stepfather once had.

*  * * 

Last summer, when Priscilla had escaped the zoo, Rod had gone out and bought the handgun. The idea of killing a jaguar and becoming the city hero had lifted his depressed ass right off the sagging trailer couch and smack into the Cabella’s showroom, where he put the Ruger Super Redhawk Alaskan on his nearly maxed-out Discover card. 

In the truck, he held the gun’s barrel to his nose; it smelled like what he thought a real man would smell like. Like metal and blood, which honestly, smelled the same. Rod knew: out past his windshield, the whole town was falling apart. Playgrounds and parks were closed. Local police were outfitted with tranquilizer guns. There was so much collective tension, the wind seemed to sing like a musical saw. For a brief while, Mount Cherry residents had tolerated the ransacked chicken coops, a Jack Russell here, a feral cat there. But the baby was the back-breaking straw.

Three weeks after Priscilla had outsmarted her mesh enclosure, an infant boy was snatched from a backyard quilt while his mother went inside for the cordless phone. Authorities found jaguar tracks in the mud near the driveway, the boy’s discarded diaper near a stream, one perfect little forearm under a Norway spruce two doors down. After that, townspeople no longer hoped to see Priscilla caged and rehabilitated. They hoped to see her spotted corpse laid out over the hood of the sheriff’s cruiser. They wanted someone to shoot her right between her lemony eyes, and that someone, Rod decided, was going to be him.

After Cabella’s, Rod went back to his and Billie’s trailer. It hung on the side of a wooded incline, like an Appalachian barnacle. Rod perched himself on the wood deck and held the gun out in front of him and squinted out at all the places Priscilla could be until the trees were a smear of chartreuse. Rod was fully aware that had never known himself. Sometimes he looked into the bathroom mirror and jumped, startled. The face he looked at was his own, but he never recognized himself. 

But on that first day with the gun, on the porch, looking out into the forest, Rod felt like he was close to self discovery. He held the empty gun out at the trees and aimed. Bam! He killed a deer for dinner. Bam! He killed Priscilla for Mount Cherry. Bam! He killed his stepfather for himself. Bam! He killed himself for his stepfather.

*  *  *

Billie turned off Kenny Rogers while Rod let the door close behind him with a hush. Rod stood motionless on the concrete blocks he’d stacked for stairs and listened. He wondered: how could he climb down from the porch without spooking the cat, how could he cock the hammer without the cat’s big ears twitching all around, how could he hit the cat between its big yellow eyes before the cat could hit him first. Rod moved slow and quiet. He peered around the corner of the trailer as mild as a breeze. He squinted in the dark toward the shadow under the honeysuckle. He wondered how much Priscilla weighed. He wondered if it would be a struggle to lift her, to drape her over his back. He hoped not. He hoped he could make it look easy. He wanted to lay that cat over his shoulders and walk straight into the trailer and have Billie say, “My word, Rod. What have you done gone and brought me?” so he could say: “Myself, Billie. I brought you me.”

Whitney Collins is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Pushcart Special Mention, a Best American Short Stories Distinguished Story, and winner of the 2020 American Short(er) Fiction Prize and the 2021 ProForma Contest. Her stories have appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2022, Fractured Literary Anthology 3, Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Tales of Horror, as well as AGNI, American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, and The Idaho Review, among others. Whitney’s previous story collection, BIG BAD, won the Mary McCarthy Prize, a Gold Medal IPPY, and a Bronze Medal INDIES. Her second collection, RICKY & OTHER LOVE STORIES, is forthcoming June 2024

The Man with the Third Ear by Ann Weil

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The man with the third ear lives on Canal Street and is used to curious stares, children pointing, and the occasional rude remark. He isn’t bothered in the least. He understands the blessings of a third ear, and his is a highly skilled worker. His third ear hears only truth. Growing up, he heard the truth of his mother’s love in that ear as she sent him off to school with a reminder—kindness above all else. He heard the bark of his best friend, Dog, who waited on the front lawn for his return. He heard his father’s late-night apology to his mother—another missed dinner—and he knew his dad was truly sorry. As the boy grew into a man, he still heard truth in his third ear, only less of it. He heard nothing in that ear when he watched the news, or when he traded fishing tales with his pals. He heard nothing from his wife, and while that saddened him, it made the divorce easier. She left him for a two-eared bartender. Now, the man with the third ear takes long walks in the jack pine forest and knows to stop and listen when he hears a Kirtland’s Warbler sing. A rare bird is worth waiting for.

Ann Weil is the author of Lifecycle of a Beautiful Woman (Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2023). Her work has been nominated for a Best of the Net and appears in Pedestal Magazine, New World Writing, Crab Creek Review, 3Elements Review, and elsewhere. A former special education teacher and professor, Ann writes at her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and on a deck boat off a sand bar in Key West, Florida. She is part fish, but won’t tell you which part. Visit www.annweilpoetry.com to read more of her work.

Two Stories by Hedgie Choi

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Volunteering

At the nursing home, the soft and brittle were flipped twice a day to keep their skin from melding to the bedsheets. As I passed one of the cots, a papery hand grabbed mine and pressed something sticky into it. It’s candy, the old woman said. I opened my hand to look. Some were oozing from their wrappers, some had teeth marks. Some were whole and new. They were from a brand that had gone out of business in my childhood. It’s dementia, a passing nurse explained. No, it’s candy, the old woman said. No, the nurse said, carrying a bucket of human waste out of the room, it’s dementia.

In Some Ways I Have Changed

As a mature and gifted child, I did not often play with my sister, because she was five years younger than me and thus unwaveringly stupider and worse. But when we got a catalogue in the mail—Sears, the local grocery store, American Girl Dolls, any catalogue—I made an exception. I would play with my sister for hours at a game we invented, a game that brought us together, a special game we loved. The game would go like this: we’d hover over the catalogue, each holding a marker. On the count of three, I’d flip open a page and we’d scan the glossy spread for the best thing, the one item we wanted most, and circle it with our markers as quickly as possible. This meant we “got” the item. Each item could only be circled once—we could not, for instance, co-own the Truly Me Western Horse and Saddle Set. Twice, I attacked my sister because she was quicker to circle the thing we both wanted. The things she took from me, or, more accurately, the pictures of things she circled that I wanted to circle, for which I attacked her physically, were a 2002 Toyota Camry and Premium Shredded Turkey Breast.

Hedgie Choi received her MFA in Poetry from The Michener Center for Writers and her MFA in Fiction from The Writing Seminars. Her fiction and poetry can be found in Noon, American Short Fiction, Poetry Magazine, The Hopkins Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere.

A House on Two Legs by Kendra Marie Pintor

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How long will I be cleaning that house out of my ears? Picking it’s floorboards from between my teeth with the prong of a hammer, plucking my father’s collection of crushed Miller Lite cans like gunk wedged between my toes, wiping away the hardened chunks like the husk of my mother’s heart from the inner corners of my eyes. How long will it take to fully disentangle myself from that place? Is it insane for me to shop online for “ear swabs made of steel,” or “nail picks that shoot fire,” in an effort to eviscerate that house from my body? I don’t know what else to do. Every time I argue with my husband, the house comes out. I spit up lamp cords strung with crystal ornaments, Thermoses full of warm wine, My Little Pony’s with glittery manes, chlorine and barbeque smoke, ammunition covered in backyard soil, a first communion dress that smells like a dusty attic, photographs where we’re all smiling but no one is happy. It’s like scrubbing at hardened grease with a soft sponge. It’s like trying to clean whites without bleach. It’s like trying to keep hair from slipping down the drain, to keep it from knotting into a wad that will clog and cause the water to overflow, spill out onto the floor, wetting my husband’s feet, and always right as he’s leaving for work. No matter how hard I try, I keep finding that house, and all its memories, burrowed and hibernating in my belly button like a brown bear in a cave, stuffed up my nasal passageways making it hard to breathe, under my fingernails, under my skin, which I pick and scratch whenever I need to distract myself. And that house, it is heavy. And it is hard work. And it is a load I would like very much to put down. And I am the load. And I am the house, on two legs. I carry it with me everywhere I go, and while I try so hard to keep it all to myself some of it falls out and god my husband, my friends, even strangers off the street, they ask, “do you need some help with that?” And they reach down and pick up the belt, the quarters my sister and I used to hold against the wall with our noses, kneeling on the hardwood floor, the orange pill bottles that filled every drawer, the VHS tape of Toy Story recorded over with porn, cradling it in their hands as if it is a precious piece of me, and it’s the way they all look at me that makes me want so badly, so, so badly, to drop the whole thing. To leave that house condemned wherever I am, and watch as wrecking crews raze it to the ground.

Kendra Marie Pintor (she/her) is a rising author of speculative horror from Southern California, with work appearing in Lunch Ticket, Fast Flesh Literary Journal, CRAFT Literary, FOLIO LIT, and LEVITATE Magazine. Her story “The Sluagh” has been nominated for Best American Science Fiction/Fantasy and was selected by Alternating Current Press for the 2023 Best Small Fictions Anthology. Kendra is a graduate of the University of La Verne’s creative writing program and the 2022 UMass Amherst Juniper Summer Writing Institute.