October 2022 | fiction
While her husband drove, Margaret kept her eyes closed, trying to identify each roll to the right, each jostle to the left along West Road. She had guessed the first curve was the bend around the Tudor house. The one being gutted behind a green privacy fence. “Privacy? Everyone knows what they’re doing,” she had laughed. Moments later a sharp bank had shunted her frail frame into the padded door panel, and she thought they might be at the place with the goats. Her uncertainty, though, had surprised her.
Six long years had passed since they had moved to the hills and found themselves quickly labeled “the kids from the flatlands” after the septic tank overflowed and raccoons tore through the chicken wire. Nearly every day since they had navigated this route, eyes alert to “all” potential threats. Margaret chuckled again, then promptly regretted the expended energy. In the momentary quiet she sensed her husband was staring so that the familiar pang of guilt struck. Six long summers ago she had asked him to trust her as they tracked the petite flags and glossy plastic signs along snaky one lane roads to the Open House. Six long autumns ago they had moved into their “forever” home. She tried to find it funny.
Soon enough, her contrition morphed into something warm as they descended a long, gentle slope. She knew they had reached the huge empty lot where the wild mustard grows. Where tall stalks burst out of compressed cracked earth with spectacular speed, growing taller than her in spots, revealing a radiant splendor seemingly overnight: intense yellow flowers arranged in delicate x’s atop sturdy hairy stems, their billowy ballet summoning dainty white butterflies. Margaret’s mother said that in the parable mustard represents faith. Well, here they chop it all down by May. In early spring, weed abatement notices start arriving. “Dried mustard plants? Highly combustible! Be safe and clear it out!” She chuckled for the last time. “Nothing that invasive is gone forever,” she thought. “After a fire destroys this place, the mustard will be the first thing to come back.” In her life before treatment, Margaret had jogged through the field each night, had stood rigid to hear what swaying sounds like, had heard the crunching beneath her shoes. She understood that well before the trucks and chainsaws rumble up to pull life out by the roots, wild mustard plants have already dropped much of their seed. She opened her drained eyes onto her husband. Oh, how she wished now that they had done the same.
Elizabeth Allison
Elizabeth Allison spent many joyful years in alternative and high school education before leaving the classroom to spend more time with her children and on her own writing. Her work has since appeared on sites such as The Huffington Post and Intrepid Times.
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.
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
July 2022 | fiction
- Digital butterfly
His hands are rough, like sex, and when he touches me it is delirium and fever and ecstasy, but he is only reading my palms. Butterfly, he says, digital butterfly and traces his fingers along the fate line. Social media influencer, I remind myself, that’s who you are. It makes sense. He has long hair, black, melanin, falling against his shoulders as he dances his pointer finger and then his middle towards the heart line. Yes, there is rage and loss and obsession. Yes, there is desire. Jacaranda, he says and I understand. The petals would fall on Los Angeles sidewalks.
Yes, I remember.
He traces further, white t-shirt, black silk. He feels like cool sands at midnight, like quiet beaches with prescient waves. His fingertips move along my palm and I wonder if I’ve ever been known and then he stops, looks up, his eyes grey but also charcoal. You like wine? He asks. Don’t you know? I think, but he pours a glass and it is dry and friendly.
I drink and my skin grows warm and buzzes. From his couch I can see into the kitchen and there are hand towels printed with small black butterflies.
- Dancer
Don’t you wanna hold me down? Touch me? I ask.
He’s sitting on the bed, Motel 6. I’m standing in front of him, florescent pink lace and long legs. Glitter on my eyes. I put my hands in his hair, hair the color of the dark pavement in the parking lot when it rains, the darkest. I run my hands through that black silk, run them down white t-shirt, chest, abdomen, thighs.
No, he says, I only want to touch your hands. His eyes empty beaches late at night, early into the morning before the sun rises.
I place my hands over his face, cradle him, and his lips run along my palms as I bring them down in front of him to hold. He takes the right and then the left. This is the heart line, he says. This is the fate line. On his arm beneath his shoulder is a tattoo of the yin-yang symbol, thick black. The color green, he says and I think of the heels I wore last night, plastic against metal. Philosophy major, and I think UCLA. Dancer, and that is now, how I make my money, how I got here, this motel room. He moves his thumbs along every line.
Beneath his skin I feel electricity like a gentle hum, wings, beating.
Elle Reed
Elle Reed is a writer from California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bombfire, Bullshit Lit, Misery Tourism, White Wall Review, Metonym, and others. She is currently finishing her first novel, about the desert, longing, and friendship.
July 2022 | fiction
It was very late. Mildred Sowers listened to the cold February wind. It blew up Snake Hollow hard against the house and rattled the windows. She sat in an easy chair by the woodstove and watched the flames as they flickered and danced around the lonely little room. Faces of the people she had loved stared down from the walls in framed black and white photographs. She was old, ninety-one and she had trouble sleeping. Often she would sit up most of the night just waiting on Clarence.
Below the house, Snake Run wound its icy way down the through the mountains to Big Furnace Creek passed the cemetery at Furnace Creek Baptist where all her people were, the people in the pictures on the wall. She’d lived there in the hollow all her life. Joanne and Betty Lou were born in the house, right upstairs over her head. They were getting old now too and had children and grandchildren of their own. That’s the way things go, she thought. They were all out in Tennessee and she hardly ever saw them.
There was only her sister Pauline to come visit and take her to church and to town on Sundays. Mildred Sowers looked forward to seeing her sister every week. Except for Sundays, and an occasional phone call, she might go for days on end and not speak to a living soul. Still, she always had Clarence to keep her company and she was used to being alone. Old people have to get used to being by themselves. It’s just a fact. The older you get the more you live inside your own head.
She reached over and stuck another stick of wood in the firebox. Then, she leaned back and closed her eyes. “Mildred, you really need to think about moving into town. That new nursing home is a wonderful place and everybody says the food is real good. You’d have friends there and folks to help you.” Pauline was always after her to move, but she wouldn’t know what to do without her little house, without her mountain looking down on her and the comfort and security of Snake Hollow. You can’t just up and change the ways of a lifetime. No, as long as she could put one foot in front of the other she was determined to stay where she was, where she belonged.
The clock on the mantel struck four. It was Clarence’s mother’s clock. It had told the correct time for seventy some years without ever winding down. In one way, the old timepiece reminded her of herself and her life. She wound it faithfully every week just the way that Clarence used to do. She could almost see him doing it. He wasn’t a tall man. He’d have to stand on his tiptoes to wind it. He was a good man though, honest and hard working. Everybody liked him. If anybody ever needed any help they knew they could depend on Clarence.
The spirits rode the wind on nights like this, all of the spirits of the mountains. Some folks would say that a soul never really leaves these old hollows. Mildred Sowers wasn’t sure she believed it, but it was a comforting thought in a way. After all, nobody knows exactly what Heaven will be like. Even at ninety-one, it was hard enough just to try and make sense of this life without worrying about the next. She didn’t know why she was permitted to live so long and why Clarence was taken away so young. He was only forty-nine. That’s not long enough to live. Still, they did have that precious time together. She imagined his spirit aloft in the mountains, moving through the dark forest, riding the wind.
If he was coming it was nearly time. It would soon be dawn…She listened for the sound of his boots coming up the front porch steps. You could always tell Clarence’s footsteps. He always walked heavy. Mildred Sowers listened expectantly, but all she heard was the wind and the crackling of the fire.
James William Gardner
Author of, “DEEP AUGUST: Short Stories from the American South,” James William Gardner writes extensively about the contemporary southland. The writer explores aspects of southern culture often overlooked: the downtrodden, the impoverished and those marginalized by society. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Gardner is a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University and lives in Roanoke, Virginia. His work has appeared in numerous publications including Deep South Magazine, Newfound Journal and The Virginia Literary Journal.
April 2022 | fiction
There was something comforting about handling a machine. The nature of the situation was almost always evident: understand the laws of thermodynamics, the dangers and uses of friction, the chemistry of combustion, and it was possible to handle any problems that might arise. The inexplicable could be explained, the right decision implicit in the conditions. Incorrect decisions were measurable. And if something went wrong, there would be a solution. Or at a least a clear reason for scrapping the heap.
When she couldn’t get back to sleep after Rob had left for work, Morgan sought out machines. She replaced the air filter on the furnace and cleaned the humidifier. She checked the transfer switch to the backup generator. She tossed a load of laundry into the washing machine and listened to its rhythmic churning for a few minutes, staring at Rob’s yellow shirt still hanging over the sink. She sniffed at it, but it hadn’t grown any more scent since Tuesday night. As usual, Rob had done a thorough job.
What had been on the shirt? And why did she care? Why was she so sure Rob was daring her to notice it? It could have been anything—a soil sample, some chemical from the lab. Coffee, which his doctor said he should avoid. Red wine (she’d counted the unopened bottles, though, hadn’t she?). Cigar ash? Lipstick, perfume?
She was straying too far from the world of machines. She pulled the shirt down from its hanger and tossed it in with the rest of the roiling laundry, where it was soon buried in suds. It made her feel better, but not good.
Cheryl Walsh
Cheryl Walsh earned her MFA in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her novel Unequal Temperament won the Buffalo Books Fiction Prize and is forthcoming in 2023 from Buffalo Books and the University Press of Kansas. She has been awarded writing residencies with the Djerassi Resident Artist Program and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and her work has appeared in Short Édition, the anthology Imagination & Place: Cartography, the audio magazine The Drum, and such literary magazines as Confrontation, Cicada, and The MacGuffin, among others. Follow her on Twitter @IrishRoad.
