Tripping

July 2024 | fiction

The blond man in front of her is too tall. European of course, Dutch perhaps. It’s claimed the Dutch are the tallest people in the world. She’ll find out if it’s true soon enough. Amsterdam is their next stop. Kyoko stands on her toes. She can’t even get a glimpse of the woman with history’s most mysterious smile, only the right upper edge of the gold-varnished, renaissance-inspired frame. How she’d love to see a friendly face, even if it’s just a painted one.

***

She planned the ten-day Euro trip with her daughters right after the divorce. A chance to forget, at least momentarily, to “make new memories together”, which was what the travel brochure said, “while admiring artworks with a lasting impact”. Now, she’s standing here alone. She’d already booked three tickets and didn’t want them all to go to waste. Her teenagers preferred shopping on the Champs-Élysées, without her. She just wants her daughters to be happy again. It already means the world to see the girls getting along. That hasn’t always been the case, but a common enemy unites.

She’s the guilty one, the instigator. She’s not even sure why she did it. She simply didn’t have a choice but to leave their father. If she has to describe the reason, the feeling when growing out of her favourite dress at the age of thirteen comes closest, the blue one with ruffles. She still loved it, but it didn’t fit anymore.

***

She had expected the Louvre to be busy, but not like this. Crowds are a strange phenomenon. Each has its own distinct character: some fierce and loud, others dumb and dangerous. Though obstructing her vision, this one seems kind, rocking her softly from left to right, holding her tight, making it impossible to fall over.

Josje Weusten

Josje Weusten, PhD (she/her), is a writer of (auto)fiction and a senior lecturer in literature and creative writing at Maastricht University. She is a Faber Academy London alumna. Josje aims to write fiction that stays true to Oscar Wilde’s words: “A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.” Her shorts have appeared in Litbreak Magazine and Flash Fiction Magazine. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions 2023. Her first novel, Fake Fish, a near-future story on the devastating impact of fake news, will be released on November 14, 2024, with Sparsile Books (Glasgow, UK).

How We Die in the Midwest

July 2024 | fiction

Claudia was done. She told her husband of twenty years, her three boys, and pet hedgehog Igloo that she was going to take a nap. The dishes stayed dirty in the sink, and the meat loaf and potatoes she cooked for dinner cooled on the supper table. She was tired and she was done. So, she marched up the creaky stairs, passed the shoes tossed at the bottom, shirts and sweatshirts hanging on the railing, water guns, and muscle-bound figurines. She kicked some dirty laundry strewn across the bedroom floor and plopped face down on the snagged comforter.

When her youngest son came to wake her, he nuzzled her cheek with his snotty nose. But, she didn’t move. Didn’t even lift an eyelid. She kept her eyes shut, face down.

Hours later, when her husband finally came upstairs, she stayed on top of the blankets. Her youngest boy sat on her back, turning her into a horse, using the strings from her sweatshirt as the reins.

“Claudy, wake up,” her husband mumbled. “Claudy?”

He touched her shoulder—the first real touch in months—and gave her a shake.

“Hey, wake up already,” he said. “Matty has to go to bed.”

He sighed.

“Your son needs to go to bed,” he shook her again. “Come on.”

His voice grew sharper, less patient.  Claudia didn’t budge.  Yes, she heard him.  Yes, she was awake.  She was just done and did not, could not open her eyes.

This continued into the next day—no, she did not wake up to take “her boys” to school or pack their lunches or vacuum or make her husband’s breakfast or pull his clean clothes out of the dryer and give him a requisite kiss on his way out the door. She kept her eyes shut and listened to the chaos around her, content not to move.

She did not open up eyes when the ambulance came and EMTs checked her vitals.

“There’s nothing wrong with her,” they proclaimed, ripping the blood pressure cuff from her arm.

Still, she was rushed to the hospital to have specialists stick needles in her. She didn’t flinch or flutter. Nurses crept into her hospital room at night, with one especially weary nurse whispering, “You stay asleep, girl. I don’t blame you one bit.”

So, she did, dozing in and out of the world around her. She grew used to seeing the inside of her eyelids and not having to see anything or acknowledge anybody.

Not even after she was sent back home. Not even years later when her boys grew and graduated, married and moved away. Not even after her husband stopped asking her to wake up.

Not even at the visitation they held for her and awkward eulogies from a childhood friend and distant cousin.

Only after they lowered her into the ground did she feel an urge to sit up, but she was used to the darkness and craved that silence, so she ignored the pain and slept on.

S.E.White

S.E. White teaches English and Honors classes at Purdue University Northwest. She has her BFA from Bowling Green State University, MA from Iowa State University, and MFA from Purdue University. She has published with The Smoking Poet, Ginosko, Toasted Cheese, Prick of the Spindle, Niche, 100 Word Story, and others. Her novella A Murder of Crows is available in paperback and Kindle versions. Her work can also be found in the Best Ohio Short Stories collection. She owns two of the best dogs around–Oscar Woolf and Daphne du Furrier.

Midair Collision

July 2024 | fiction

That day at the airport on the way to my hometown best friend’s funeral, when you couldn’t keep the newsfeed of the fiery midair collision out of your phone, even as you waited to board.

I tried to choose my seat wisely, but it was 5 a.m., and I hadn’t been home in twelve years, that suburban Ohio life not focusing: I had remade myself into an Angeleno who hung out not at the local dive bar with high school friends, but at a coffee shop in Los Feliz, an exhibition at the Getty. I slumped into a window seat when a woman and her teenage son eyed me.

I sank deeper into my seat and put on headphones, but she had me.

“Good morning!” She smelled clean and crisp, like hotel soap.

My polite nod only encouraged her. “Too bad, isn’t it? About the pilot.” She pointed to her phone’s image of the two jets colliding in midair. In the next frame, a young aviator smiled at the camera, a helmet under his arm. “So young. So handsome.”

She leaned in, whispering, “He had a bad feeling. He didn’t want to go.”

I knew the images: here he was, alive, about to climb into his cockpit. Still alive as he began his final descent with contrails blooming flames. The news stories began with the planes engulfed – images out of order. That upset me yesterday as I packed.

“Where are you headed?”

“Home,” I said, but it tripped on my tongue. We’d tried to keep up through the years, but texts and calls were no match for the pull of hometown husbands and the needs of small children.

“Where is that?”

But I backtracked. “He didn’t want to go? The pilot?”

“No, he told his wife something felt wrong. He tried to stop it.”

A week before she died, I had a strange cosmic nudge to call my friend, a sense to check in after so much radio silence.

I didn’t call. When I heard that she was gone, I couldn’t let myself grieve, as if it was my fault. I’d known, just like the pilot.

The lady patted my hand. Soon she was snoring.

It would be a long time before we landed. I closed my eyes, but I kept seeing the pilot, and he was smiling at me, waving one last time as he took off into the perfect blue of morning.

Sharon Lee Snow

A Pushcart nominee, Sharon Lee Snow earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of South Florida. Her short stories, creative nonfiction, and poetry have been published in Jelly Bucket, South 85, Gulf Stream, and other journals. Connect with her on Twitter and Instagram @sharonleesnow and her website www.sharonleesnow.com