She left the ring on the table

October 2022 | fiction

She left the ring on the table, watching the liquid pool. Wood meant five years. He’d used that excuse to buy it – a typical couple’s gift, where only one party wants it, but can’t justify buying it for themselves.

It was a thin, modern thing, sliced so fine it looked flayed. One set of legs was longer than the other, so it tilted slightly; not enough to send cutlery flying, but she couldn’t eat an orange without it rolling away. He said it was bold, artistic. She missed the old table.

Five years. He’d imported it illegally. Redwoods aren’t meant to be cut down. This one was a hundred years old, practically a child in sequoia years. She wondered where it had come from. Was there a hole in the ground now, a lacuna amongst the trees, or was there a stump left behind, its rings dating when it died?

‘They symbolise eternity,’ he’d said, polishing the varnished top. He promised he’d sand down the corners, but she still had a blue-black bruise on her thigh from walking into it over and over again.

He’d thrown out the pine table that their friends had grouped together to buy. She hadn’t wanted to put anything exorbitant on their registry and she liked the soft grain, easily pitted and dented through use. What’s more, it lived in the kitchen, where a table ought to be. The kitchen was the heart of the house, a place for kettles and chatter, singing along to the radio and consulting the diary. Dining rooms are a place for performing. The kitchen felt empty now.

She stared out of the French windows, coffee on the table, an orange under her palm. He would wince if he caught her not using a coaster, but he wasn’t here now. She watched the overflow tumble down the mug’s side. She’d taken the coaster he gave her and ripped it in half to rebalance the legs, on an even keel at last.

Five years. She peeled her orange, watching oil jettison from the broken skin, a fine mist descending. It smelled of their honeymoon in Crete. She rolled the coffee and citrus round her tongue, relishing the sweet-bitter contrast. She smiled when she saw the circle; round peg, square hole, a new ring to join the hundred making up that too-soon-slayed sequoia. She picked up the mug, the skin and the suitcase, but she left the ring on the table.

Eleanor Kowol

Eleanor Kowol lives and works in Oxford, England. As a philosophy graduate, she likes to play with ethical and metaphysical quandaries in her work, along with silly puns and flights of fancy. She publishes100-word stories once a week to her Instagram and Twitter, @KowolEleanor.

Forecast

July 2022 | Best of Net nominee, fiction

Kevin’s father stares out the window at the clouds rolling in instead of the photo album Kevin brings today, cracking it open next to his bed, thinking it would help. Plastic pages unstick from each other as he turns the frozen moments, but no one is watching. The nurse says tomorrow might be better, that he’s not having a good day. Yesterday was worse. Day-to-day is hard to predict at this point. Strangely, month-to-month is easier. The coming years, if he gets them, all but certain.

Not that any day now is anywhere near good. The forgetting is getting worse. Good days, Kevin knows, are just quieter, pass faster. Bad days feel endless, are full of outbursts and fits—tantrums from a grown man stuck in a present he no longer feels welcome in. It’s not his fault. Kevin knows this. It’s not anyone’s fault. Kevin thinks to himself It is what it is and hates it less than when others say it, though he can’t recall if anyone has said it about his father. It’s after visiting hours now, and he needs to come back another time. He isn’t sure what the hours are, when he can, or if he wants to just yet.

A mist begins to fall as he walks to the car. He stops, remembers the forgotten album on the check-in desk left on his way out, looks back and sighs—the nurse already holding it up, blurred through the wet window next to the revolving door. She’s waving. If time froze, it would look like saying hello or goodbye, though it’s really neither—the same with these visits.

Back home across the couch, bathed in the TV’s bright-then-dim splashes he isn’t watching, Kevin calls his dog’s name. The dog lifts her head in the dull glow, meets his eyes, waits to see what happens next. But Kevin has nothing more to say, is tired, is out of words and ideas. He can’t remember when she last went out and it worries him. He can’t remember how many things he’s forgotten recently. It’s a cold and steady rain outside anyway, and he doesn’t know if he wants to walk her just yet. He hopes it’ll blow over or clear up soon.

In the silence that lingers, the dog lays her head back down between her paws, lets out a sigh. For now, something left in Kevin’s life remembers its own name. On the TV, the weather forecast drones. It predicts the rain will freeze to ice overnight and into the morning. A green, blue, and purple shape slides over the state line getting closer as it grows across the screen—a widening bruise blotting out what’s waiting below. It is, he knows, what it is.

Kevin sighs too and tries, for a moment, to forget what tonight or what tomorrow—or what any future—might bring.

Aaron Sandberg

Aaron Sandberg will remember memento mori later. He’s appeared or is forthcoming in Asimov’s, No Contact, I-70 Review, Alien Magazine, The Shore, Plainsongs, West Trade Review, The Offing, Sporklet, Right Hand Pointing, Halfway Down the Stairs, and elsewhere. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, you can see him—and his writing posts—on Instagram @aarondsandberg

If I Didn’t Have My Thousand Acres

July 2022 | poetry

The old man tells me, “If I didn’t have my thousand acres,

I would die.” He doesn’t realize he is in the hospital

emergency waiting room. “If I didn’t have my wife,

I would die.” He looks at me sincerely, clearly unaware

of the situation at hand, his hand trembling

on the arm of his wheelchair. “She’s at home

making supper for the hired help, you know,

when they come back from driving cows to pasture.”

But he hasn’t had cattle for over thirty years,

and his acreage now only exists framed in pictures

in his small room at the nursing home where his wife

also was full of life before she died five years ago.

I know because the man’s caretaker told me

when she wheeled him in to wait, just in case

he needed to say goodbye to his daughter

rushed in by ambulance an hour before.

Aware the woman’s heart attack was massive,

I casually ask if he has any children. He hesitates,

tries to remember, then settles, “No, I don’t think so,

but if I did and anything happened to them, I would die.”

Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb

Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb is the author of the chapbook, Shapes That Stay (Kelsay Books, 2021). Her poetry has appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, Weber: The Contemporary West, About Place Journal, High Desert Journal, Clockhouse, AJN: The American Journal of Nursing, Terrain.org, and many other journals. She holds an interdisciplinary MA and has served in various capacities as an educator, a researcher, and an editor.

Jim Ross

July 2022 | visual art

By The Old Mill 2

 

Jim Ross

Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. With graduate degree from Howard University, in seven years he’s published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid, and plays in over 175 journals and anthologies on five continents. Photo publications include Bombay Gin, Burningword, Camas, Columbia Journal, Feral, Stonecoast and Typehouse. Photo essays include Barren, Kestrel, New World Writing and Sweet. Jim and his wife—parents of two health professionals and grandparents of five little ones—split their time between city and mountains.

It’s Possible

July 2022 | poetry

I believe that if you rub the forehead

of a captured crow clockwise

in small circles, it will gift you

with the knack of comprehension

teach you to understand the cawing

conversations of its cousins, those

who’ve roosted darkly in the maples,

and now are waking up the day.

I heard the congregation, all

the crows’ brash chattering above

the morning mist rising from the river

still lavender with hope.

I am dubious, although I’d like to trust

that this bright river rattling through the gorge

will come soon to a shallow peace, flash

its stony gifts, glinting catch-eyes for the crows.

Beth Spencer

Beth Spencer currently lives near Minneapolis, MN, loves travel, and is a notable example of the persistence of hope over experience. She has been messing about with poetry since fifth grade when she won a “Why I Like to Read Good Books” contest by submitting her essay in poem form.