Decomposing at Bathhouse, FiDi by Grace Dilger

On By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment

Link to PDF: Decomposing at Bathhouse, FiDi by Grace Dilger

GRACE DILGER is a poet and educator. Her work has been featured in Peach Fuzz Magazine, The Brooklyn Quarterly, The Southampton Review, Grody Mag, The Elevation Review, Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors Vol. 9, Slug Mag, The Racket Journal, Yes Poetry, High Shelf Press, Defunct Magazine, The McNeese Review, Barzakh, Nonbinary Review, and The Bangalore Review. She received her MFA from Stony Brook University and teaches at Monroe University.

Spirals by Natalie Wallington

On By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

I am nine when I see the lights in the sky. I crow to Mom from the back seat that there’s a triangle over the field, moving away from us. She says she needs to keep her eyes on the road, but that I can draw it for her when we get home. I take some artistic liberties. What I saw as three soft, even lights I draw as a formation of floating spirals. I tell Mom that the aliens live inside each one like snails. I tell her their bright bodies are what make the rigid hulls glow.

I am thirteen when I see an alien’s ship behind glass at the natural history museum. The placard calls it an opalized ammonite; a curled fossil millions of years old and as big as a cinnamon roll, its pearly surface glinting back the whole cream-washed rainbow. I recognize it instantly, as if my drawing was some prophetic vision. I write my field trip essay about an ancient visitor from another world and get a D+ with the note “creative but false.” I start drawing the spiral on the back of my hand in crusty ballpoint pen, refreshing it whenever it fades, so when the aliens come back they’ll know right away who to trust.

I am seventeen when Mom finally sends me to therapy. The office has the color and smell of oatmeal. I invent a boyfriend who sometimes takes things too far in the back of his Jeep and feign angst over my belly fat. Mr. Dale eats it up. He doesn’t even ask about the spiral graffiti I’ve been caught leaving around town. I brag about my deception in the chatroom afterwards, where I’ve amassed a community of nearly two hundred fellow believers. They’ve seen the spiral ships too, hovering over pastures or appearing up close in dreams, glowing flesh moving inside translucent shells. Their descriptions color in the details of what I never saw.

I am twenty-one when I take a receptionist job at a medical imaging lab. I wear fingerless gloves to my interview so they won’t see the white scarring where countless metal nibs have etched the same spiral for almost a decade. I spend the workday on the paranormal message boards while the MRI revs in the next room like a jet engine. I map sightings of the aliens’ ships and misfile enough medical records that my boss checks the computer’s browser history. The day after I’m laid off, my online community reaches five thousand people. They comfort me when I share the news. I tell the truth: that I’m not upset. It just makes me want the ships to get here sooner.

I am twenty-five when my supporters pool the money to buy a condemned cottage in rural Oklahoma. The location was carefully chosen for its proximity to past sightings. The nearest neighbors are three miles away down a peanut-butter-colored dirt road. Mom begs me to reconsider, to get an apartment in the city where I can meet other people my age. I hug her and don’t answer — she doesn’t know about the others, a whole network around the world that looks to me as a visionary. She waves as I pull out of her driveway for the last time. A creek flows near my new house over a bed of muddy silt. I sit in it to cool off after mowing the first enormous spiral into the overgrown field.

I am twenty-nine when we begin making arrangements. There are several dozen of us scattered in trailers and tents around the property. The county won’t let us add rooms to the cottage until we fix the ones already there. We don’t plan to live here long enough for that. Every morning we gather in the field, tracing the spirals with our bodies. Every evening, we practice sinking into the creek. We light bonfires. We send letters that scare the few people who still love us. My drawing is framed behind glass above the crumbling mantlepiece. When I close my eyes underwater, I can see the spiral lights as clearly as if I actually had.

I am thirty-three when I awake from a dream surrounded by light, certain that the aliens have come for us after our years of sacrifice. But the headlamps are attached to men; the floodlights attached to their trucks lined at the gate. I’m dragged outside squinting. Around me I hear people running, hollering, trampling tents. Mom shows up to court and cries the whole time, like she really believes I would do what they’re claiming. My sweaty lawyer tries playing up the alien angle to get me deemed mentally unfit. A few defectors take the stand to say I’m dangerous. I feel sorry for them, having to go through life knowing nobody’s coming to save them.

I am thirty-seven when the letter arrives. The woman wants to interview me for a documentary. She says the county is even letting her film on the land they seized. In the visiting room I show her my ink. Spirals on the backs of both hands, done stick-and-poke by a kid in the next cell block. She wants to hear about my follower who died in the creek. I tell the truth: that he was tired of waiting. The woman asks me if I’m tired of waiting. For the first time in years, I think of the triangle over the field — three soft lights that could have been anything. And I tell her I’ll wait as long as it takes. I tell her I know what I saw.

Natalie Wallington is a writer living in Memphis, Tennessee. Her flash fiction has previously appeared in Wigleaf, Ellipsis and 101 Words. She is a co-founder of the Kansas-Missouri Writers’ Collective and was a finalist for the 2025 Mythic Picnic Postcard Prize.

There was a meaning by Amelia Averis

On By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment
There is a boy who speaks in rain at arrivals.
He has time in this world
where the rockpooled minnow
flashes silver seconds.
We follow the funeral and I try to say
‘I am sorry I am not afraid of you’ but I cannot lie,
or forgive the recurrent ghost;
I cannot learn his lesson.
In this dream there is guilt but not enough of it.
I will not die on this hill
but I am freezing beautiful
to an accidental death.
With the moon hanging over the park as the sea, I kissed it
and cried twice
to make it real.

AMELIA AVERIS  is a writer and journalist from Jersey, Channel Islands. She was highly commended by judges of the Passionfruit Review “Here and Now” contest, and also appears in Heimat, Tiger Moth Review, Palette Poetry, and Prosetrics. The organs of her poems can be found in her decade of journals, where she explores themes of longing, loss, beauty, and memory. Her chapbook as the ink birds split the sunset with Alien Buddha Press is on Amazon. You can find more Amelia at https://ameliaaveris.journoportfolio.com.

You Be the Flotsam, I’ll Be the Jetsam by Melissa Rudick

On By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

I called off from my job as an IT Support Specialist at the local college Tuesday, and whether as punishment or absolution, was eaten by a whale. If you want to be technical about it, I wasn’t eaten so much as I was in its mouth. The esophagus of a humpback whale is too small to swallow a basketball, let alone an adult human male with a little extra around his midsection. I found that out later, when I saw a marine biologist talking about the incident on TV. 

My buddy Frank, who brought me kayaking that day, thanked me after. He said this was going to blow up his channel. Then he dropped me off at the hospital because of my “creepy smile and dead eyes.” The docs said I was in shock and gave me a full check-up. Seemed like everybody who worked there wanted to poke and prod at me and ask me questions. When they asked me what it was like inside the whale, I forced a laugh, said, “Dark and smelly!” 

To tell the truth of it was impossible. Hell, I didn’t even understand the truth of it myself. 

Mary picked me up at the hospital later. That one eyebrow of hers already raised, as if this was something I had done just to annoy her.

“You ok then?” she asked.

“Yeah, let’s go home,” I said. I reached out for her, but she was already halfway to the parking lot. 

In the car, she was quiet. I watched her chew the inside of her cheek. She turned on the radio and they were talking about me. She turned it off. 

“I don’t see what business you had being anywhere near a whale,” she said. 

“Frank said kayaking would help us relax some is all,” I said. I couldn’t explain it to her. The sameness of my days. She’d tell me that’s what life is for everyone. Why would you think you deserved more than the rest of us, she’d ask. 

“Frank is unemployed and a moron, you shouldn’t listen to him about anything,” she scoffed. “Case in point! I’m sure your boss will be glad to know you were too sick to work yet felt good enough to be swallowed by a whale.” 

“I wasn’t swallowed, Mary. I was just in its mouth for a little bit,” I said. “Frank sent me a video, let me show you.”

“In case you were wondering, I’d already had a massively shitty day, so thank you for all of this.” She pulled into our driveway and got out. “Anyways, it’s all over the internet. I’ve already seen it.” 

Mary’s put up with a lot over the last fifteen years. I get stuck in my head and forget things. I forget her. The only thing I brought to the relationship was being able to make her laugh. 

 “Then you saw how that whale spat me out like I was a band-aid in a pot roast! Like I was some factory worker’s finger in a can of pop! Like I was a pubic hair hidden underneath a burger bun!”

She flipped me the bird, which for Mary is darn close to a declaration of love, and maybe forgiveness too. 

Inside the house, I sat on the couch. “My life flashed before my eyes, you know.”

“What’d you see?” Mary asked.

“Not much,” I said. “Not much at all.”

“Sounds about right,” sighed Mary, sliding a frozen pizza into the oven. 

*

I sat on the toilet watching the clip again and again while Mary slept in our bedroom. There’s me on the water in my red kayak, paddling lazily. A bait ball explodes underneath me, silver fish launch into the air, then rain down on me. A half second later there’s a giant emerging from the ocean, mouth open wide. You can see me rise into the air, the kayak shooting up and away, now empty, and the whale returning below the water. Not even a second later I appear on the surface. 

That I was gone for less than a second didn’t make sense. All I can think is that time works different for a whale, that it operates on its own scale and when I dropped in, it all slowed down for me too. The seconds turned to minutes turned to hours turned to days and there I was submerged in that wet, black cave, the waves and their echo roaring in my ears. I was a speck. I was a nothing. Tiny and absurd is what I was. Am. 

I found a playlist of whale song, stuffed my headphones in my ears, and crawled into bed next to Mary. I pulled her tight the way she likes. She squeezed me back. The whales called to each other. Lonely, it seemed.  I imagined myself sloshing around in that black womb. I closed my eyes to make it darker.

*

Mary called it my Jonah Day. She hummed “Under the Sea” while she washed the dishes. She asked if I wanted to role-play as merfolk. Then, when she saw the teasing hurt me, she got mad again and asked why she never got to have fun. 

“What do you mean, fun?” I asked. 

“I mean, I used to be a person that did things. Like kayaking or jumping off a cliff into water. With you, sometimes. Remember?” 

I had made so many wrong assumptions about what Mary wanted from life and me. I forgot that side of her and we both lost out. 

 “So, neither of us are happy,” I said. 

“But you’re different now.” 

I tried to explain how I’d concluded that man held an outsized view of himself. How we loomed too large on this earth, in no way proportionate to the value we brought. I rambled about wars and climate change and mass extinction events. I told her that whatever fork on the evolutionary road led to us climbing up on land was a mistake.

“We’ve certainly made a mess of things up here.” She nodded her head, thinking. “And you want to go back?”

“Will you come with me?”

We busted into Frank’s garage, left a note that said, “Gone Fishing.” We tied the kayaks to the top of our car. It was night and no one saw us back up to the boat ramp. The ocean calm, we paddled side by side. Mary looked up at the stars. I told her I read online that you could take a scoop of this water, and it would contain more life than stars in the sky. 

Mary cupped the water in her hands, brought it close to her face. “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” she said.

We pulled our oars through the black water. We let ourselves be swallowed up by the enormity of the night sky above us and the sea and all the life it contained below us. We looked everywhere but back. 

We were specks, we were nothings, we were tiny and absurd, together.

Melissa Rudick is a writer living in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. Her work is forthcoming in Vestal Review and The Blood Orange Review. She is currently at work on her first novel. You’ll most likely find her wherever there’s milkweed, looking for monarch eggs.

onwards and without delay by Alexandra Nwigwe

On By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment
Well, I was late because I took the scenic route
to work, as in I missed my stop, too busy looking

up how to stop a fight, how to walk up to a monument
and scale him to size, how to be the kind of body that moves

like the girl on the bus who stepped in between a baby and a
man with a blowtorch. Either way, there is always a body

in front of the blowtorch. On the pucker-skinned road to Umueze,
you are the only one crying, my mother says

after a lurch pushes me out my skin, one inch closer
to the rifle in the front seat, jumping as well, maw ready

to swallow the ceiling. The soldier looks back while I make
my sobs silent in the middle and my mother smiles

through my tears. Much later, she tells me she was also scared,
that she has gotten more scared with age.

This does not bode well for me.

I imagine learning to eat a punch is akin to riding a bike,
lessons harkening back to middle school when I practiced falling,

challenged boys to races during recess, turned
myself upside down in a fast from any form of grounding.

Four years ago, I fell into traffic, flew even, and the brief gulp
of air I stole was not enough to recall any of the life I’d lived,

what I’d learnt. The pain did not set in until the mirror gifted me
with a busted lip and a torn up chin. I fended off my vanity by

holding hands with the dark.                           No, I kid. I walked
around with a swollen jaw to the tune of tire squeals.

ALEXANDRA NWIGWE is an engineer and writer based in San Francisco. She finds solace in making art with her hands and capturing her memories, whether through poetry or photography. Her photography has appeared in Lucky Jefferson, and her poetry has won MIT’s Isabelle Courtivron Award and has appeared in MIT’s Rune.

Door in the Woods by Chris Scott

On By steve cIn flash fiction4 Comments

Sarah is hiking up ahead of me, so she’s the first to see it. She goes around the bend, says “Hey now,” and stops in her tracks. Then I see it, too. Right there in the middle of the trail is a single door, like it’s been waiting for us. The door doesn’t belong here, obviously, with no structure around it except for a simple wooden frame holding it in place. “Weird,” I say, because what else can you say? 

We circle it once. Studying Sarah’s face, I can see her wheels turning, some private communion between herself and the door that I’m not privy to. Maybe it’s some kind of art installation? The remaining relic of an old, demolished cabin? The thing about the door though: It doesn’t look like it’s been here very long. Like it hasn’t weathered the elements really at all, like it was just constructed specifically for an audience with us.

Sarah steps right up to it, tries the knob, cracks the door open a bit. And because Sarah is Sarah, she says, “I mean, we have to, right?”

The door makes me uncomfortable but I don’t know how to say this in a way that doesn’t make me seem silly. “Do we? Doesn’t really seem like it belongs here.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Sarah says, the kind of offhand dismissal to which I’ve grown accustomed lately. “Okay then, you walk around it and I’ll go through.”

“Are you sure?” We came to the woods to keep a struggling thing going. Six months of couples therapy and my eyes are constantly peeled for any wrong decision that could strain or sever our increasingly tenuous connection, that could make a trial separation less hypothetical, in the future.

“Count of three,” Sarah says, “You go around it, and I’ll go through. One…”  Her hand still on the knob, the door partly open. “Two…” I run my fingers along the frame. “Three.” I go around just as Sarah walks through, and I’m overcome with the sudden certainty that she’ll vanish, the door transporting her to the moon or Siberia. But before my fear can get away from me, she’s already through. Just a door after all.

“Alright well… shall we?” I say, continuing on the trail, eager to put the door behind us. Sarah catches up with me.

“How do you feel?” I hand her the canteen.

“I feel great,” Sarah says. “How do you feel?” Also great. We round another bend, and I look back. The door is still there, closed again. Then I’m trying to remember, did Sarah shut the door after she walked through? But she must have.

In the car on the drive home, Sarah is taking off her hiking boots in the passenger seat when she says, “I can’t believe you did that.”

“Did what?”

Sarah turns up the radio even though we’re having a conversation. Strange habit. “Walked through that creepy ass door in the middle of the woods.”

I would normally assume Sarah was being ironic, making a joke. But. Seven years together, three of them married. I can tell she’s dead serious. “What are you talking about?”

“Umm…” Sarah curls her lips. “The weird door? On the trail?”

“Yeah, I remember the door. You walked through it, I walked around. I was too chicken. Are you messing with me right now?” I turn the radio off.

“Wait, no. What? That’s completely backwards. You walked through, I went around. Are you messing with me?” Sarah pleads, her voice rising. I turn back and forth from her to the road, trying to figure this out.

“What are we talking about, Sarah?” The door in the woods was maybe an hour ago. How could she be remembering it completely wrong? But her face says: She’s asking herself the same thing about me.

I don’t understand how this is happening. We volley back and forth like this for another ten, fifteen minutes, our accounts of what happened mirroring each other’s almost perfectly, but somehow inverted and wrong. We cycle through the conflict resolution methods Dr. Owens taught us. Patiently going over the details as we clearly remember them, over and over. Then one of us will say “reset” and we’ll take a deep breath and start over, but we always end in opposite places, unable to find our way back together. Sarah says I’m not listening to her, but I am. 

I ask Sarah what it will take to put this behind us. She shrugs, says I could remember walking through. That I could remember it how she remembers it. That would be a start. I don’t know what to say to this. I don’t know how to remember something that didn’t happen. Eventually we run out of energy, just sitting in our respective silences on either side of the car. It feels so ridiculous, all of it. The door. Who went through it, who went around it. But the problem is not the fight, it’s the door. I look over at Sarah a few times but she doesn’t look back at me. She’s somewhere else now.

Later that night I’m back at the trailhead, Sarah at home asleep in our bed. Illuminated in my flashlight, everything looks different than it did earlier, otherworldly, backwards in the dark. But I know the door should be just up ahead, maybe twenty minutes jogging. Assuming it’s still there, and that’s why I’m rushing through the woods now, why I had to do this tonight. This feeling that the door will disappear if I don’t reach it in time. Thinking all the while how absurd this is, but I don’t know what else to do.

Then a wave of relief when I finally see it, waiting for me, pale wood against the moonlight, appearing even more out of place than it was earlier. But right where we left it, still. I pause briefly before the door, thinking this through, but there’s nothing to think through, not really. I take the doorknob into my hand and turn. It’s locked. I try again, harder. Locked. I walk around to the other side, just as locked.

I slam on the door with both palms, the smack echoing through the woods, spooking the animals, species I can’t identify. Then both fists pounding now, not budging, not even a little bit, but I have to get through somehow. I can’t accept otherwise, and I can’t lose Sarah to this. So I’ll be here as long as it takes. Until daybreak, until some other hikers come along who can help me, until I am able to walk through this door finally, and go home to Sarah and say: I went through just how you told it. My world is still your world and I still have a place in it, I swear. How will I ever belong anywhere else?

Chris Scott’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Flash Frog, ergot., MoonPark Review, New Flash Fiction Review, scaffold, Gone Lawn, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. His fiction was selected for Best Small Fictions 2025, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He is a regular contributor for ClickHole, and an elementary school teacher in Washington, DC. You can read his writing at https://www.chrisscottwrites.com.

Hot-Desking by Maxwell Minckler

On By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment
Happy Monday, Gary! Gary is one of the interns stuck
to the giant strip of sticky tape hanging over the snacks.
Morning full-timer! he buzzes furiously with his one free arm,
revolving away like a sad piñata, Let me know where you need me!
Always a pleasure, Gary, but I’m hot-desking today,
which means I can take any open desk, anywhere.
This desk is bolted to a treadmill, and I get to catch
all of these falling motivational weights while I work.
This desk hangs half out of a top-story window,
to keep an eye on the competition.
This desk is in a vat of coffee — a soggy one, but productive.
This desk is a ping-pong ball with something alive inside it.
This desk is in a lion’s mouth.
This desk is made of something called wood, I think.
How to choose! There’s so much opportunity here!
Then I see it. Tucked in a corner, practically sizzling.
A desk designed to perfectly match my father’s,
smoldering with unfinished novels and seventy-five years
of undiagnosed magical thinking. They’ve even baked
his stay-at-home shame into the chair just right,
nicotine-yellow and padded with burnt job applications.
Here’s his electric typewriter with the E, V, O, and L keys missing.
The Mennin-green aftershave lighting puts the iron wool
of his beard right over my shoulder again,
half an inch above my next keystroke.
Such attention to detail! Management sure knows
how to show they care, to prove we’re part of the family.
Gary is weeping quietly again as the workday
comes to an end, and his feet begin to crisp and smoke.
So beautiful, he mutters to himself,
such beautiful, beautiful hot desks.

MAXWELL MINCKLER’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlanta Review, Ambit, Krax, Okay Donkey, The Interpreter’s House, Obsessed with Pipework, and others. He holds an MFA from Durham University UK, was honored to win Lafayette College’s MacKnight Black Poetry Prize, and placed second in the New Writers UK poetry contest.  Originally from Hawaii, Max lives, writes, and works on tech-ish things around England.

13.1 Septillion Pounds by Emily Rinkema

On By steve cIn flash fiction1 Comment

To help her sleep, we give the baby a basketball, a full-size regulation ball that my husband, CT, puts in her crib one night. He writes her name on it with a black Sharpie, bold letters like they would appear on a jersey.

“Ten months is a little young,” I say.

“Never too early for our little athlete,” he says. CT played college ball for a season until he blew out his knee. The first thing he said when he held her was that she was the longest baby he’d ever seen. She came home from the hospital in a UCONN onesie.

When I check on her before I go to bed, she’s still awake with one tiny hand on the ball. She’s never been a good sleeper, but the last month has been significantly worse. She just stares at the slowly spinning mobile of the galaxy above her head, sometimes reaches for it with her fists. I kiss her on the forehead and whisper that the basketball is like the earth. A little poet is never too young for simile. 

In the morning, CT makes us coffee while I go get the baby. She’s asleep. The basketball is on the floor under the crib and the Sharpie is clutched in her hand. I turn on the light.

The walls are covered with math. Math formulas and numbers and equations and graphs and angles and shapes and arrows that direct us from next to the crib to above the changing table to the closet door to behind the rocker and under the window and then back to the crib. 

“Oh, fuck,” says CT, handing me a mug of coffee.

“Language,” I whisper.

“But,” he says, looking around.

“Yeah, fuck,” I say.

CT calls a mathematician while I try to feed the baby, but she wants nothing to do with the Cheerios or blueberries I put in front of her. She just bangs her spoon on the table. She’s got dark circles under her eyes and it’s like looking in a mirror. I can’t remember the last time I’ve slept through the night.

“We did this,” I say to CT, who is now Googling “baby math.” 

“Did what?” He asks.

“Stressed her out,” I say.

“Maybe it’s just math,” he says, putting some pumpkin puree down in front of the baby. “Maybe it’s nothing.” 

I spoon out some puree and bring it towards her, but she just clamps her mouth shut and grabs the spoon. I call my mom and ask if she can come over for a bit.

My mother agrees to take the baby to the park while we meet with the mathematicians. The park’s only a few blocks away, but with all the gear, I suggest she takes the car. On her way out the door, baby on one hip, car seat hooked over her elbow, she raises her eyebrows at me and says, “I told you she was gifted.” She kisses the baby on the top of her head and coos, “Gramma’s little genius.”

Two mathematicians arrive a few minutes later. They are younger than I expected. One is wearing a sweater vest. They both have glasses and are carrying briefcases. The men stand in the middle of the nursery and turn slowly from wall to wall to wall. The taller of the two men takes off his glasses and cleans them. He puts them back on. He opens his briefcase, takes out a notebook, and writes something down. He closes his notebook.

“Well?” asks CT, sitting down in the rocker. 

“Wow,” says the shorter man. “Amazing, really,” he says, taking a deep breath. He points at the wall under the crib. “She starts by calculating the weight of the earth,” he says.

“She’s a baby,” says CT.

“That’s pretty simple math, actually,” the mathematician says, “She just needs the weight of any sphere,” he points at the basketball, “and then she can plug it into Newton’s formula for universal gravitational attraction.” 

The taller man interrupts. “It gets much more sophisticated over here,” he says, pointing to the left of the closet. He bounces a bit on his toes.  “It looks like she’s using semi-parametric predictive modeling to determine existential risk.” He leans towards the wall and squints. He wipes his hands on his pants. He looks at the shorter man and shakes his head. 

 “Wait,” the shorter man says, “Is that strategy optimization for carbon reduction at the bottom of the door?” 

I stare at him, waiting for something I understand, a word, a phrase, a gesture. CT puts his head in his hands. “I have no idea what’s happening,” he says.

“I think she’s looking for a solution,” the tall man says, and when we don’t respond, he says, as if we’re children, “To climate change.”

“But,” I say, and I don’t know what comes after that. I don’t even know what to ask. I think of everything we’ve ever said in front of her, thinking she couldn’t understand. We watch the news during playtime. We listen to NPR in the car. We fight about solar panels and electric cars and how much meat to eat. When I was pregnant, we even fought about whether it was responsible to bring a baby into this world. Did she hear all that? Did she feel it?

CT stands up. “This is fucking ridiculous,” he says. He’s the one who suggested Meatless Mondays. He’s the one who wants a Prius. He’s the one who thought we should skip flying to see his parents this year so we could afford panels on our roof. 

“Wait,” the shorter man says, and looks at his partner for confirmation. He points to the right of the door. “There. Is she using partial differential equations to see if…” and then he stops, squatting in front of the wall nearest the crib. He shakes his head. The taller man keeps putting his hands in his pockets and taking them out again. “It looks like she gave up.” He’s tapping the wall where our baby scribbled with the Sharpie, age appropriate markings that in another world could have been made with crayon or finger paint. “She gave up,” he repeats. 

“She’s a fucking baby,” CT says, and his voice cracks. “A fucking baby.”

“I just want her to be happy,” I say.  “I just want her to write poetry,” I say. CT pulls me into a hug. “Or play basketball,” I say into his neck.

“She can be a poet-athlete,” he says, and we both start to cry.

I check on the baby before I go to bed. Her room still smells of fresh paint, a new color CT picked up at the hardware store after the mathematicians left this morning. Butter yellow to match the stuffed duck he bought on his way home. While the baby napped this afternoon, I took down the universe mobile and replaced it with the one his sister bought us for the baby shower–green giraffes and purple hippos–and CT painted over the math. We’d thought about keeping it, but decided it was all just too heavy for a baby.

“It’s a clean slate,” he’d said when he finished.

The baby is awake and content. She moves her hands in front of her face as if she’s in awe of them, as if she’s still working out whose they are. It’s the way she used to look at me. 

“It’s a blank page,” I whisper to her now, and kiss her on the forehead. And before I leave, I tuck a Sharpie into the corner of her crib, just in case.

Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has recently appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y Lit, Variant Lit, and Flash Frog, and she has stories in the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Bath Flash, and Oxford Flash anthologies. She won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can read her work on her website (https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site) or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema).

Pete the Cat: All Grown Up & Alone In His Car by Emily Dressler

On By okaydonkey7In poetry1 Comment
with help from my daughter


At the library,
we walk past Pete the Cat
and you say it’s weird and sad
how you grow up with these books
but they don’t keep growing with you.
Like, Pete the Cat doesn’t go to 5th grade
and lose a preschool best friend,
find humiliation from a teacher,
have ALICE drills
(but you did those in kindergarten too, I
want to remind you, but don’t
because Pete the Cat never does that shit),
strategize about how to take his pads
into the bathroom.

Like, Pete the Cat Gets Braces? I ask.
You smile and say, Pete the Cat Kisses a Girl with Braces.
That’s good, I nod.
We walk past a book titled
My Parents Forgot How to be Friends.
Pete the Cat Has Two Houses Now
you say, pointing.
I laugh. Poor Pete.
We’re going to put him through a lot:

Pete the Cat Learns to Lie
Pete the Cat Becomes Lactose Intolerant–
That comes later, I say,
when he cares more.
For now, he is carefree:

Pete the Cat Finds Joy,
in which he learns how to love
being alone, and eats vegetarian
crunchwrap supremes in his car. He’s
happy, he really is. He doesn’t tell
anyone about the parking lot meals
even though they feel like the most
real part of him.

EMILY DRESSLER lives and works in Northeast Ohio. She works as a proofreader for a global ad agency. Her flash fiction has recently appeared in Villain Era Lit.

All the Friends I Could Have Made are Having Fun Without Me by Mackenzie McGee

On By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

Alexis throws a big party and everyone’s invited. She lives a half-hour drive from her childhood home, the one with the big bay window and the basement where we had sleepovers every other weekend for most of high school. 

I imagine she’s done well for herself. Her new townhome is in the affluent suburb that kids in our marginally less affluent suburb used to mock. Her Instagram is all pictures of her rescue corgi. Her Facebook is all tagged photos of her at friends’ weddings and thirtieth birthdays, but she’s not thinking about any of them right now. Tonight, she’s fifteen again, and she’s worried I won’t show.

It’s a cool summer evening in Minnesota. From the street I can see the glow of the string lights crisscrossing her treeless backyard. Citronella wafts through the air. I imagine there are two coolers on the concrete patio. The one on the right is stocked with beer and sparkling water. The one on the left is full of Monster Energy Drinks, the Zero Ultra flavor we were obsessed with in tenth grade. Alexis used to buy them two-for-three on her way to our 7 a.m. social studies class. She’s wearing a bracelet made from the can tabs we saved.

Teo’s the first guest to arrive. He pedals down the sidewalk on his childhood mountain bike. I crouch in my car when he passes by. Alexis notices the Jersey in his accent. She asks him, as she will ask everyone, how he knows me. 

He says we met Thanksgiving weekend twenty-five years ago, oh, maybe twenty-two. I was in town visiting my cousins. We were playing basketball in the driveway when he rode up and asked if we wanted to play Nintendo. I loved Nintendo and I hated my cousins, but they were older than me, and they hated Teo. They said he was weird, and when I asked why, they said I was weird too. I’d heard this before. I thought if I could make them like me then it wouldn’t be true.

Michaela comes in as Teo’s finishing his story. She carries her sharpie-covered JanSport on one shoulder, all cool and casual. She shrugs it off to dig for the mix CD she burned for the evening. 

Michaela and I—we shared a cabin at summer camp. We bonded over emo music and the art of tie-dye. We exchanged numbers. She called my house twice that August. I let the phone ring as I tried and failed to conjure a voice full of carefree enthusiasm, the self I could be away from myself. She couldn’t know that the real me was awkward and uncertain, that camp-me was a façade. This was years before I knew to call it fear, not fraud. Michaela left a couple of voicemails. She shrugs like, what are you gonna do?

Alexis nods. That is so like me.

The fashionably late arrive in clusters. Coworkers from my first full-time job sit on the kitchen counter sipping PBRs. Some of my sisters’ friends make friends with my brothers’ friends and share the wisdom I was too awkward to ask for: how to print in pretty bubble letters; how to tell when someone like-likes you, how to tell when someone likes you at all. 

The nice busboy from my short-lived waitressing career is using chunks of cheese to teach Alexis’ corgi to sit. He tells her about the time I got awful hives from the wool scarf I wore to work. He brought Benadryl, just in case. He asks if I RVSPed. Alexis lies and says I texted her to say I’m running late. She doesn’t want people to give up on me just yet.

The biochem TA offers charcuterie to the cute librarian who works the closing shift. The rec league volleyball team I quit after two practices arrives in two consecutive carpools. They dance ironically, and then, a few drinks in, it’s not ironic anymore.

And then they hear it: the drumline’s cadence, the drum major’s whistle. The crowd flows into the front yard to see my high school marching band chair-stepping up the street. Their teenage bodies carry the muscle memory of these instruments, and some of them are really, really good. Someone jumps on the upright piano and leads the living room in a singalong of “Don’t Stop Believing.” The party is in full swing. All that’s missing is me.

I’m still outside, sure I’m about to go home but not ready to admit it yet. I’ll wait in my car five more minutes, and then I’ll go in. I’ll walk through the front door and everyone will cheer, like I’m a fan favorite in a sitcom. There’ll be a big sheet cake decorated with loopy icing in the shape of my name. Everyone will want to know what I’ve been up to, how I’ve been. No one will be mad at me for not calling or texting them back.

I have a minute left when Alexis steps into the front yard, carrying a corner slice of cake on a paper plate. I watch over the steering wheel as she tiptoes between the instruments scattered on the grass. She finds a clear spot to sit cross-legged with the plate in her lap. She looks down the street, down the way I came, and waits for me.

We had every one of our sleepovers at her place, every other weekend for about three years. Then one day, we didn’t. A month went by, and then another. Growing up I often felt, sometimes I still feel, there had been a lesson in kindergarten about how to be a person in the world on a day that I, and only I, had missed. I had wanted to invite Alexis over and return the favor. For a long time, I didn’t know how.

Now everyone inside is getting to know each other and having a good time. Alexis should be inside having a good time. Someone should ask her how she knows me. She was kind enough to host, after all.

I shut the car door behind me. Alexis’ ponytail whips around at the sound. She waves me over and says she’s so glad I’m here, even if the part of the party that was for me is over. The cake has been cut; the end time on the invitation has come and gone. The music is louder than ever. Colored lights flash in the windows. That party, she says, has taken on a life of its own.

She doesn’t ask me to go inside. We sit in the grass and split the slice, taking turns taking bites. The can tab bracelet shushes softly on her wrist. It’s just how I remember it—two of the tabs face the wrong way, their silver underbellies exposed. We watch as guests slowly trickle home in new configurations of designated drivers and rideshares. For each one she says, look. They came here for you. Isn’t that nice? Everyone together, here tonight, and it’s all because of you.

Mackenzie McGee is a winner of the 2021 Pen/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her fiction can be found in Nat. Brut, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cease, Cows, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from the University of Arkansas, and she’s currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Kansas.