Listen to the author reading this story:

Looks like Beirut in here.

The words zip like sniper fire through the years to hit their mark every time. It was our shorthand, you see, standing for a scene of utter destruction, usually a bedroom (how can you live like this? You can’t even see the floor), or a kitchen after a cooking attempt (you’ve used every pot and pan in the house!) and it became one of our dad’s habitual sayings.

Of course, none of us had ever seen or been to Beirut. Even then it wasn’t the sort of place one visited. It was piped into our living room TV for so many years that the horror subsided to familiarity through repetition, and eventually we came to recognise the characteristic piles of rubble and tumbling walls of the civil war bitten citadel.

I didn’t know, then, the colours of the sunset when it kissed goodnight to the high rises as they gazed out across the easternmost Mediterranean, which reserved a matchless blue only for Lebanon. I hadn’t yet found the joy of hiding from the early sun within the shaded, narrow streets of Hamra, shot through with the taste of bitter coffee and honeyed baklava. I hadn’t yet heard the blend of Muezzin and church bells calling all to prayer, arresting everything except the dawning impression of five thousand years of people and all their faiths and all their destinies landing up here in this place sentenced to rebuild itself in perpetuity.

I hadn’t yet swallowed the hot fear evoked by the look of bored malevolence in the eyes of the gangs roaming the plaza near the museum at noon, nor felt the weight of tiredness in the sigh heaved by the captain as he took my statement after I’d had my wallet lifted from my pocket on the bus. For the second time.

It wasn’t until our dad’s sayings were as dusty and well-used as my dig-bag that I found myself in Beirut as a post-doctorate joining the works to reopen the National Museum’s basement collection. My secondment put me directly in line to care for the thirty-one Phoenician sarcophagi, all from the Ford Collection, and all needing painstaking cleaning, cataloguing, and displaying. The cool of that basement became my home and, when we lost electricity, which was frequent, we would close the museum and decamp around the corner to the Director for Antiquities’ sandstone building or across to the park to swap food and histories.

Beirut taught me the fragility of beauty and the foolhardiness of taking anything for granted, even the ground beneath your feet. It also taught me the power of human resilience and the true meaning of endurance. These lessons I relearned every time an ERW – an explosive remnant of war, yes, it’s a term – hollowed out a street I’d trodden just the day before. I was always struck by the speed of the returning hustle after a blast.

Looks like Beirut in here.

The voice that spoke these words is gone forever and here we are in the small dark maisonette in Portsmouth which is the last place he called home. There’s a precise shade of dismay reserved for clearing a house of a parent’s belongings; it has a quality like dust or ash. The dismay is darker when the parent was a hoarder. Neither my brother’s mouth nor mine can shape the words, even though they are the perfect fit. They are stuck in our throats like blast-dust. Perhaps it is too soon. We have two days.

Afterwards, my brother flies to Beirut-Rafic Hariri with me to stay for a week or two on his way back to Thailand. It makes sense to us both in an as-the-crow-flies kind of way, but the truth is probably closer to this: once we part, all the rest of time will unfold into everything that comes after he died, and we’re not ready for that just yet.

We descend into the dusty blue and brown of mid-afternoon, and touch down on the simmering tarmac. The crosswind comes straight from a furnace, whipping our clothing and scorching our nostrils. The building we’re making for looks like water. We are silent amid the scream of jet engines idling. Inside the airport, the gloss of the wide boulevards and boutiques is obscured by crowds leaving and arriving in time for Eid al-Adha. There’s barely a square metre of white marble visible between the knots of people greeting, goodbying, gathering bags of gifts and gazing longingly at the departure boards. We drag our cases of grief and what treasures we excavated in Portsmouth through the faltering crowds, and come to a standstill amid the throng of bodies that will funnel us to the taxi rank. I wish he wouldn’t, but my brother leaves me to queue while he gets coffees.

As I try to spot his return through the crowd, an angry shout pursues two men sprinting from a storefront. We all watch the chase as it rounds the corner to meet a luggage train, which swerves to correct its trajectory away from the runners and the people they barge through. A hundred of us hold our breath as three of the carts topple in slow motion. Suitcases and bags crash and skitter across the polished floor. Something busts open, and a consternation of possessions blurts onto the floor.

The crowd is moving now and I am moving with it. I take a long glance back, anxious about my brother and the busted suitcase, worrying that the scooping of the luggage is too uncaring; that something precious will be missed. My eyes meet those that are most like mine now that our father is gone, and they follow my gaze to the tumble of suitcases and bags, people shouting.

Sheesh. Looks like Beirut in here, he says. My laughter is a bubble of ugly crying that bursts out in sound and snot, making him laugh at me. We cling to each other, helpless and speechless, borne along by the exiting horde. We draw stares from the people nearest us, making us cackle even more. We are grateful for the cover of sunglasses as we’re claimed by the aggression of the taxi rank and Beirut heat.

Ali McGuire writes fiction and poetry which have found publication most recently in Sparks, SWERVE, Sans. PRESS, and Frazzled Lit. She was a 2024 Novel Fair finalist and has received mentorship and funding through the IWC and Arts Council. She holds an MA in creative writing from DCU and calls County Wicklow home.

Listen to the author reading this piece:

When you first see her, you are 17—a junior in high school. You have college applications and the upcoming regional theatre competition on your mind. She is a Christmas present, and you can’t believe that years of begging brought you to this freezing, muddy moment of joy. You say over and over through tears, “She’s mine? She’s mine?” and your parents breathe a sigh of relief because after years of layoffs and careful spending, they finally feel secure enough to drop two thousand dollars on a pet.

For years you made lists of names that corresponded to breed and color. You watched the Kentucky Derby every May and combined the best parts of the rambling illogical names with those that sounded fierce. Song of the Sword and Lion Heart became Lion Song or Heart of the Sword. You filled notebooks with the possibilities. You ignored the stupid names like Bob and John that probably had some deeper, personal meaning to the owners but meant nothing to you—13 years old, tucked inside on a beautiful May day, cross legged on the couch, listening to the announcers list odds, sitting patiently through Pizza Hut and Taco Bell commercials, checking the time every ten minutes until the post parade.

Her name is Nickers. The woman says her daughter named her and is still pretty attached. The daughter is crying and sulking and begging her mom not to sell Nickers, that Nickers is her horse. You still remember this moment because it soured the experience, just a bit. You imagine someone selling your horse to a stranger.

Nickers is Black Beauty black. She has an eggplant of muddied white that runs from her forehead to her muzzle. Your books at home called this a blaze. You hate the name Nickers and vow to change it immediately.

Willow. Beauty. Stormy. Oreo. Nothing fits. You desert your lists. Her eyes are gentle and sweet. She has never been ridden and every time you make the hour-long drive to the pasture where she lives with the rest of her mud-spattered herd, she runs as far away from you as she can. You think of that girl saying, Nickers is my horse.

After some research and phone calls, you have Nickers moved to a stable near your house. She stops running away from you and you discover she prefers apples over carrots. She has a shitty habit of grinding her teeth. You take pictures with her and forget to change her name.

With each passing year, Nickers changes. When you graduate high school, the sleek black is gone. Instead, she is cloudy—an overcast sky portending storm. You break up with your high school boyfriend because he is going nowhere fast. You go to New York and experience enormity for the first time in your life.

After you finish your first year of college, Nickers is a charcoal painting with imperceptible smears of negative space. You have a new boyfriend who pressures you for sex. You drink beer and wonder why everyone pretends it doesn’t taste like bubbly urine. You immerse yourself in your writing. You forget to remember the little details.

By the time you graduate college and begin your career as a high school teacher, Nickers’ body is a galaxy of white stars on a slate sky. You don’t think to record her changes with pictures or journaling. You hardly have time to keep track of your own. The little details you forget to remember pile up like ungraded papers.

Last month you spent at least twenty minutes trying to pluck a stray gray hair from the top of your head.

Every time I see her, she looks like a different horse, your mom repeats. She has started to forget things. The little details.

Last week you found three more grays and realize you can’t spend an hour chasing them with the tweezers, so you leave them alone.

Today you climb the fence of the turnout and straddle it. Your boots used to be shiny black but they are coated with dust and held together with horse shit. Nickers is dusty white marble. Her blaze is gone. Her black fetlocks are the only evidence of her youth. She is sniffing the dirt, finding the perfect place to roll. She paws at the ground like a dog digging in its bed. She drops to her knees and her body collapses to the earth, sending clouds of dust into the air. She kicks her legs and grunts with pleasure at the sharp rocks that dig at the spots on her back her teeth can’t reach. You remind yourself to stay in this moment.

You wonder how you will recognize the passing of time when she’s all white. What comes after white?

Hana Jabr holds an MA in Literature from Weber State University. Her work has appeared in Juked, The Rumen, Thimble Lit Mag, and the print anthology Nightmares When I’m Cold. In October 2024, she was awarded second place in the Short Story Collection category of the Utah Original Writing Competition for her collection Breadcrumbs. A former educator, Hana is now a full-time writer based in Salt Lake City, where she is currently working on her debut novel.

Listen to Emily reading this poem:

therefore have I given you an astrolabe sufficient for our location, calibrated to the latitude of Oxford, upon which is the text of this little treatise – Geoffrey Chaucer to his son, Lewis, 1390s


Here at the bottom of Europe, closer to the equator,
the smartphone in my hand says the moon tonight 
is a crescent waning, forty per cent illumination.

Like an astrolabe of the middle ages, it can compress 
the cosmos, but with this feed of information 
I’ve no need to memorise constellations

or tell the time from the height of the sun;
the art of lunar navigation is an imperative
of the past. Yet, my need to feel the wheel of

the seasons in my bloodstream remains strong.
I marvel at Islamic astronomers, like Mariam 
who flattened the globe to fit in her palm,

condensed the celestial zodiac, made it 
graspable to man, the latitude and longitude
of fixed stars written in the margin of the rete.

Could I, like Chaucer, write a treatise for my son
on how my cell phone runs? Kundera wrote that
Goethe lived in the last epoch where we could

fully understand how all technology worked.
One thing I have learned: in the summer of 2061
Halley’s comet will blaze again at perihelion.

Emily Cullen is a Galway-based writer and the Meskell Poet in Residence at the University of Limerick, where she lectures on the MA in Creative Writing. She has published three poetry collections to date: Conditional Perfect (Doire Press, 2019), In Between Angels and Animals (Arlen House, 2013) and No Vague Utopia (Ainnir Publishing, 2003). Conditional Perfect was included in The Irish Times round-up of “the best new poetry of 2019”. Emily holds a PhD in English from the University of Galway. Twice nominated for the Pushcart prize, her poetry explores themes of history, social justice, ecology, music and the female experience.

Listen to the author reading this story:

I was born half a sea nymph. Rising from the water resplendent, lighthearted, beneficent, droplets clinging to my hair, tickling my nose, remembering the taste of salt. My mother was a Naiad. She named me pele for web, lepo for unraveled. When she held me up for my father to gaze upon, he shuddered and tried to have me drowned. Later, when I grew legs, I strolled the walls of Ithaca, wondering what lay beyond: Broken treasure ships. Sea monsters. Sirens who lured men to their deaths with sharp, strange voices. There be dragons. When I wed Odysseus, my mother cried and my father clenched his fist in triumph. At last, the dirty water baby has become a queen.

Then Odysseus left to fight the Trojan War. You see what men do in the name of beauty. They creep into traps. They fill a horse with daggers. They spill their ruby blood in an unfamiliar land. Left behind, day after day, year after year, I sat on the balcony, gazing at ships laden with spices and silks, at the ravenous sharks beneath the gemstone blue Agaean, at the clever whales, at the naiads who whisper come back in the night, and the scorpion fish, hiding venom in their spines. She misses him so, said my courtesans. She is lonely, said the townspeople. She needs a new king, said my father, who gathered suitors like they were daisies and threw them in my lap for sport. One hundred and eight men, vying for my favor.

Each day I wove a funeral shroud. Each night I undid the stitches by the light of an uncertain moon. I will wed when I’ve finished, I told them, my legs crossed demurely, my cheek resting in my hand. My choices are thin as sand crabs, skittering into foam. Delay, delay. For 20 years, I delay until my fingers are callused as the pointy end of a conch shell, and I am still Queen. What is she really thinking? they wonder. When Odysseus finally returns, disguised in a beggar’s cloak, I see his crooked feet, hear his pretty lies, and know him immediately. Come to bed, he says, gazing at my stony face. In a moment, my love, I tell him and return to the balcony where if I listen very carefully I can hear the eels sing.

Beth Sherman has had more than 200 stories published in literary journals, including Flash Frog, Fictive Dream, Bending Genres and Smokelong Quarterly. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024 and Best Small Fictions 2025. She’s also a multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. She can be reached on social media @bsherm36.

Listen to the author reading this story:

On the last night you and I ever go out together, we drive to Ballyvaughan and wind up seeing the wrong singer. Driving home, John, who’s come with us, says he took this same road a few days earlier, after the funeral of a friend’s father. He avoided Corkscrew Hill that evening, didn’t fancy its looping limestone threads. The cold had got in on him at the graveyard.

‘Time to thaw,’ he says about the longer route. ‘Warm the marrow.’

Snatches of moonlight catch peaked waves before vanishing into the inky black of my wing mirror. I close my window against the fading salt air. Nobody speaks. You both seem content to let John’s funeral excursion lie. I can’t.

John and I go back and forth for a while, a reluctant and pressing exchange, until your hand moves to turn on the radio, but it stalls midair. Retreats. Your wrist is a pale strip without your brother’s watch. Your baby brother and those green eyes of his — gone.

‘What did you say he died of?’ I ask John, twisting round in my seat. ‘The father.’

Some inaudible answer comes, but I keep circling: a spaniel quartering ground, flushing birds into flight. You reach across, tap my leg, twice. Both times firm and unwelcome. A small correction that ends a thought, shuts an open mouth.

‘Chuir sé lámh ina bhás féin,’ John says.

The air shifts, like we’re climbing towards thinner oxygen.

‘He put his own hand…’ I say, half-translating for you.

The Burren’s limestone sheets pass in succession under soft, milky light. Bobbing and dozing, I sway in sleep until the turn and crunch of gravel. John’s house rises from the dark.

‘Great mistake of a night,’ John, says after the hugs and goodbyes, and our assurances that we’ve all enjoyed our wonderful mix-up.

‘God, you were fascinated with that man,’ you say, as we drive off, hitting the horn in final salute.

‘With John?’

‘No, with the dead man.’ You’re wearing that look you don when you’d rather say nothing, but tonight, you draw a breath and continue, a muscle ticking in your forearm. ‘You even asked if the coffin was open.’

I prop my chin on the heel of my hand and imagine the corpse-house both ways: lid open, lid closed. Lines of condoling hands would move slower with the lid open. Staring, curious. Complimenting the body, like I’d wanted to when Donal died.

A diviner from Couty Clare, Donal found water on our site, long before you and I ever met. The rods pulled me to the source, and I got to feel what he felt, that tug towards something invisible.

‘A curse,’ he said, ‘not a gift.’

His wake was one evening in late August. The first funeral since Dad’s, and I had yet to overcome the awkwardness. The glib, imperfect one-liners. Clammy hands squeezing rings tight. Soft rain pearling mourners’ heads before the shelter of funeral umbrellas.

Giant sycamores loomed over Donal’s hayshed. Its rust-red roof always wowed me, but that evening, it lurked like a corrugated witness. A flock of ravens swooped overhead, black shapes slicing the sky, as if in chosen ignorance. As if no one had ever hanged from the rafters below.

‘Jackdaws,’ someone said, as the birds drew evening into night.

‘Are they crows?’ said another.

Donal’s mare stood watching the crowd, from a paddock next to the shed, her fresh foal by her side. Had she seen him steal across the yard? Had he stopped to touch her, breathe her in? Quiet his hands before the knot.

‘Hard to know,’ came a voice from the line behind me.

‘God help him,’ said another, and a collective shiver passed between us.

Inside the house, we moved through his sitting-room-cum-temporary church. Donal’s hands, always fluttering and busy, now lay stiff and still. A desire to stare for an inappropriate time assailed me. To find some understanding in his face, proof that he was dead. I could find it if I just looked hard enough for his life.

His widow stood still, eyes shadowed by charcoal half-moons. Her blonde hair and Canadian accent struck bright against our East Galway bogland, where only three mornings earlier, her husband had decided to die. I filed past, looked at my friend, all swollen and waxy, and oddly made-up. When I reached to take her hand, my voice shook.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

A tear I’d tried to hold onto slipped onto our clasped fingers.

A pothole’s dip jerks me back to us. To our differences and their vastness. You’re still shaking your head, hissing air through your teeth, caught, I’m sure, on the image of the open casket.

I glance sideways. ‘You think I annoyed John?’

‘You kept steering the conversation there.’ You pause, thinking. ‘Clunkily, too.’

Clunkily? A new departure. Not the word but the dollop of judgement you’re dishing with it. I sit straighter. Our silence lasts a few kilometres this time. The mountain road folded tight by thick pines on either side, wraps the night around us, blocking any hint of moon.

The indicator blinks left towards Derrybrien. Twenty minutes to home.

‘Suppose I just wanted to know.’

‘Wildly interested, more like.’

You love using that word — wild — about me. About everything you spurn.

You: measurer of dishwasher plate-spacings, adjudicator of rules no one else remembers.

What would it take to loosen your grip? To engage. To face this truth together. So many unspoken secrets locked inside you, while I’m harbouring the misbelief you want to release. Need to. But I don’t want to think about you. Or us. The ending of us; one more death lying in wait, wings preparing to flap.

I opt instead, for distraction: if John is sixty-three and the friend likely similar, the dead man must’ve been ninetyish.

‘God, he was old. Must’ve been sickness. Didn’t want to suffer? Didn’t want—’

‘No, he wasn’t,’ you cut across. ‘The man — who we don’t even know — was fit and healthy up until…’ You inhale sharply, as you do. ‘Until, you know.’ So many words you can’t say. Refuse to say.

‘Oh, come on! Surely this interests you?’

You don’t answer.

I watch your profile, that look when you’re concentrating. Fixed on something other than me. And still, I find you briefly beautiful. I reach over, trace my finger along your stubble, follow jawline to earlobe. Hold it between finger and thumb. Faint pattering pulse.

‘There’s an acupuncture point here. For relaxation. So they say.’

You smile. ‘They always have a lot to say.’

A fox crosses the road. We stop. It stops. Stares back through the beams.

‘Has to be a hard life, little Foxy,’ I say. ‘Hope our chooks are safe, dreaming their chicken dreams.’

‘Finding worms in clay,’ you say, quick as silver. Your fingers brush the gearstick. Then mine. And I love you fiercely in this second. No — seconds.

Bun ós cionn, the fox disappears, tail last into the ditch.

‘We could talk about him. If you like. Your brother?’

The suggestion corrals us into our tiny tin box. You open your window, sit your elbow on the frame like it’s midday, then lean on the accelerator.

You say nothing after that. Shift in your seat, the road holding your gaze. But your jaw works, as if grinding words to powder.

Easier to read grief in others. Donal said that was my curse — that thing in me that follows the scent of death like a hound. Trailing behind the living like smoke. Not everyone senses it. But I’ve always felt it curling up the nape of my neck, settling in rooms long after the body’s gone. Maybe that’s what I’m sniffing for in John’s story, how the left-behind sound once the coffin is closed.

You downshift for the crossroads, tip the indicator a beat too soon. Tyres skimming the ditch; you take the turns faster near home. Not like John, with his careful detours.

The last time I saw Donal was in the waning dusk, as he walked the distance from his car to the cottage.

‘Why not pull up to the house?’ I’d asked.

‘People look,’ he said. ‘The mart’s a hard enough place.’ His hands were vibrating by his sides. ‘This. This is private work.’

I didn’t press him. But a current stronger than the groundwater beneath flowed between us. I never told anyone about his visits. We talked of his work — interlocutor between the land and the living, seeker of ancestral goodwill — and of how hard it was. How secret. How fiercely shameful.

The sign for Moyglass flashes. ‘Seven minutes to home,’ I say.

You laugh, slipping into the incredulous tone you use when you’re unimpressed with my theories. But this time, it’s you who circles back to the dead father.

‘You asked John if his friend had cried.’

Well done me, but I tuck that deftly inside.

‘And?’

‘He didn’t want to answer. But he gave in,’ you say. A vein throbs in your temple, a fault line in self-control. ‘To your interrogation.’

‘Well, did he?’

‘No.’ Then before I can ask: ‘Nor did he look like he’d cried earlier. Jesus. The detail.’

You wince at something beyond my reach.

I go back to West Clare, picture the coffin hoisted on shoulders. The Atlantic hurling wind at their backs.

‘Stiff breeze.’

Collars banded against the sky. Faces white-cold. Men linking arms with women in lipstick and heels. Funeral shoes and coats drifting towards the empty socket of waiting earth.

In this — my dream of it — John’s friend throws clay in after the coffin.

‘Bye,’ he says. Just the one word. Exhaustion ashen on his face. Not grief. No one cries.

The wind rises. People scatter.

I collect these details the way others collect stamps: grief, ritual, the trappings of the end.

I think of my dress hanging in the wardrobe. ‘I love that dress,’ I say, as we turn into our boreen. ‘Saving it up for my mother’s funeral.’

Though really, it was always your mother’s I had in mind. I smile at you in the dashboard light, but you don’t answer. I know with certainty that we won’t make it that long. I know that when your mother dies, you’ll go alone.

We pass our gate — five minutes, not the usual seven. I’m catapulted back to another gate. A different threshold. Back to that Friday when Donal came to divine the site. His rods in my hands.

‘Go with them, the energy’ll guide you,’ he’d said. ‘No mistakes.’

Lost to the magnetic pull, I barely heard my neighbour calling my name across the field.

‘Your father.’ She was crying, crossing the gate, arms waving, her tissues flaring white in the four o’clock sun.

‘Go,’ Donal said. ‘You might make it.’

I didn’t. My predictable lateness, Dad’s reliable promptness. By seven, he was dead. Always dying to be early, never satisfied with on time. ‘Hurry up, or I’ll go without you,’ he’d shout.

And he did.

I want to tell you about that day, how it all happened, how Donal told me he’d sensed it that morning. But you’ve already stepped out, heading for the coop, shining your phone. All safe.

‘I do love you,’ I say, that extra word escaping before I can grab hold of it.

‘I know.’

I start after you. ‘I had this friend—’

‘Who?’ you call back, walking ahead.

‘Nothing,’ I say to your back. ‘You know, it’s not the dress I wore to your brother’s…’

Your steel-capped heel drags hard on the path. You stop. And you do not turn around.

A glint of frost sparkles in the porch light. Cold seeps into my bones, with it the dawning that we’ve already ended but only one of us will say the words.

You turn the key, disappear like the fox, click the door shut.

I linger outside. Picture Donal’s mare —

her brown eyes taking in the last of him,

listening as the life left him.

Edelle Dwyer is a writer from Galway. Her first novel was shortlisted for the Oxford/42 New Writing Prize. Hard to Know, previously shortlisted in the Wells Festival of Literature, makes its publication debut here.

Megan

I chewed bricks, stacked fish fingers
in the year the dust jacket
tells me you were born. 

Did you crack open the front door’s egg
at seventeen, the unmembraned light
a terrible welling?

Did your hair fall lankly in your face,
eyeliner wobbling
along the waterline?

The greatest cities already called to you
as I conjugated spots,
picked verbs until they bled. 

They prised you out and placed you
In a smoke filled room where
being small and new 

could make your other gifts
seem preternatural, 
the mic popping,

exploding candy of your mind,
though crucially your body
paid the price.

And now your essays tell 
how broken you were: 
our sad girl blogs condensed

into one congested voice 
on Radio 4, or in conversation
with your peers who spoke to the cities

and also heard the cities speaking back,
their broken shells deep under soil
in suburbs that said nothing in the first place, 

where we eat passwords,
forget a hearty breakfast,
greenly making something out of nothing. 

Shower of Bastards

Someone told me birdsong
was about either sex or territory:

into the soft parts of the day calling
wanna fuck wanna fuck wanna fuck

or maybe fuck off fuck off fuck off
as if in the wee small hours 

I haven’t swung around a lamppost
saying worse to the pearling sky.

One minute you’re there,
next you’re in the spa shower on a deal

hoping not to catch your likeness in a surface.
Thunder rolls and the light alternates

in crayon colours. You control the climate, 
salt spray overhead, a storm’s dread heart

cut out and thrown to the tiles at your feet,
a slight slipperiness over a grate

then gone. More birds now. 
Is this a shampoo advert,

forest, blue waterfall,
orchid perched improbably in the hair

stingless fish darting, the best self
in the mind’s kind eye (a brusque

deep cough outside, slap of flipflop
on the tired tile)

or how it was always meant to be?
Real scattered light, sigh of leaves

you are singing your heart out now
fuck off fuck off fuck off

Rebecca O’Hagan is a writer and artist from Edinburgh. Her work has appeared in Poetry Scotland, Wrong Directions, The Basilisk Tree, and elsewhere. She is the author of zines Spa Pool, The Best Supermarket in Edinburgh, and Cherry Print.

Listen to the author reading this piece:

Self-Portraits

Did you know that silver is embedded in rock as a complex pattern of tendrils? The swirls in the water around the “self-portrait” photo of the Syrian goddess Atargatis by the artist Martine Gutierrez could be these tendrils. Coated in a lustrous silver substance, Gutierrez is lying in shallow water, on a dark surface.

Art

In “Anti-Icon: Apokalypsis,” Gutierrez, a nonbinary transwoman, uses her body as the canvas. They ask: Who should we consider a feminine icon? Along with Atargatis, Gutierrez, an American with Mayan heritage, shows sixteen other life-sized, nude, unsmiling, self-portrait photos of legends, taken in an empty swimming pool. The so-called women wear handmade materials. We see Cleopatra with a black garbage bag wig and a wire hanger armband. We see Godiva on a wooden sawhorse with long tinsel hair. What provocation. I am ready for it.

Suicide

As a bullied teenager in the 70’s, I was attached to Patti Smith’s grim song “Birdland”. A boy wants the black ship of death to join him with his dead father. I imagined a kid alone in a barren stoney landscape. Flakes of grey ash swirling. Also, I imagined wolves.

Darkness

At the time, I thought a dark song, like Patti Smith’s, represented a harsh and lonely rebellion: black boots, silver and onyx rings, heavy metal bands screaming about night marches in wars that never happened. I marched into a shadowy cavern in my mind.

Womanhood

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are a shadow. My grandmother loved her life as the wife of a RCMP officer. In my grandmother’s shrine room (the den downstairs) she had formal photos of RCMP members standing at attention in their red serge jackets. The troop of coworkers were photographed at banquets. My grandmother wore floor length gowns. I have no gowns.

While upstairs my grandmother’s living room was immaculate (only good for my girly ballet shows), she spent a lot of time down in the den. She coughed and smoked her Belvedere’s with their box so often opened that I could see the tinfoil wrap winking at me. The glass ashtrays filled up with her filters smudged by red lipstick.

Her domain was also the downstairs bathroom with its cheap fibreglass shower stall and well-lit mirrors. She had her own rigid standard of femininity and took hours dressing in matching outfits and doing her make up. My grandmother never looked me in the eye. Sometimes she seemed fake. It must have been the strain of performing womanhood. Her hair was a signature bouffant moulded into shape with a veneer of silver hair spray. Even with the relentless smoking and clouds of hairspray, she did not light herself on fire.

Secrets

We tolerate family lore. Did my grandmother speak Arabic as claimed? She grew up in an Arabic speaking home in Canada. Let my dead grandmother have that claim. Maybe. Should the old timey RCMP be venerated? Probably not.

We have family lore that my great great grandfather was a Syrian Orthodox priest. A priest who was married and had children? Or was he considered an apostate? His priesthood seems like a myth.

This is a fact: the Orthodox church keeps polishing up the weary idea that being queer is a sin and that queers must struggle to abstain from temptation. It is not lore but a fact that there has been no protection against discrimination of queer people in Syria. Syria is complicated and I do not know it. I won’t go there to explore my roots.

Perfectionism

When I was a teenager, I had to polish my mother’s quickly tarnishing sterling silverware, nestled in a wooden box with red velveteen placeholders. She treasured this box of silverware, which had pride of place in the dining room. I used Silvo and the soft cloth for spoons, knives, forks, teaspoons, even a sugar spoon with a scalloped edge. I smudged my own work.

Trauma

Silver is malleable, pleasing, beautiful, and the best reflector. However, my childhood silver fillings of the 1960’s and 1970’s ruined my teeth by expanding and cracking the teeth apart. Although silver is an excellent conductor of electricity, I received no messages.

Up the narrow gray concrete stairs I go, for new crowns, the steel brace forcing my mouth open, the hum of the grinding, and the whoosh of suction. Someone looming over me, and I feel out of control. I taste metal.

The tears will fall into my silver hair while I lie in the dentist’s chair. It is documented that I will cry and so I shall. The nurse will hand me a tissue. Is this my body?

Autonomy

These procedures remind me of late-night caesarean sections, mysterious equipment and looming figures that alienated me from myself and the birth of my children. Dental procedures even remind me of sexual violence, though those memories are down the old mine shaft, just black and white images, with no bodily memory. Still, I taste metal. I want a medal for all the autonomy that I have lost. Will I ever heal? I want to be strong—like titanium. Steel. I am only an old tin roof that blew off the shed. Nobody cares.

Violence

This is no secret. When I was a young adult, my mother told me that her dentist drugged and sexually assaulted her after convincing my trusting mother that he should fix her teeth on a Sunday evening in his office.

My mother may have performed femininity well with her skirts and jewelry. But it is no secret that she reported that silver-tongued ------. My mother is someone for me to venerate.

Depletion

My parents took me as a teenager to the mountain top Mexican mining town of Taxco, 1,700 meters up, the ornate Baroque cathedral at the high point. We walked the steep, irregular streets of dark cobblestones, past homes with red tile roofs and vines of pink bougainvillea growing over archways. The people of Taxco have mined silver since pre-Hispanic times. The silver mines are now exhausted.

Power

You can find silver down underground shafts and in caverns. Take it to the surface and crush it into powder. Add water to make a slurry and then add cyanide to the slurry to poison it. If the silver is mixed with lead, add zinc to the molten silver. Lead sinks but zinc floats. Silver floats. So, silver is revealed. Make a solar panel. Seize power and bring in the light.

Transparency

In Taxco, my mother bought me a sterling silver pendant. Embedded inside is the Aquarius symbol of two waves—the water bearer. Also embedded is the pink enamel silhouette of that woman pouring out her jug of water. I still have this tarnished pendant. The enamel is transparent. Through the woman, I see my own hand.

Icon

After something bad happened to me in Mexico as a teenager and my parents were away, I stayed in the rooming house of an adult friend from Spanish school. She went on day trip to Taxco while I slept in her bed. She showed me some dangling silver earrings that she bought although I was sick and could have imagined it. Later, still a teenager, I visited her in San Jose, California. She had a pottery wheel in her house. And plants. And cats. And an old truck. And a hippie husband. What was this place! She took me to the San Jose Observatory where I saw stars above. This friend? What an icon.

Legend

What does it mean to be an icon? A symbolic representation of ideology? Of legend? Of femininity? In the artist Gutierrez’s self portrait, the biblical Judith brazenly wields a wire hanger knife. She is barely clothed in damp raggedy tissues. She holds a plastic mannequin’s head like her vanquished foe: the general she killed to save Jerusalem. This is a story. I have no portrait of my legendary mother vanquishing her foes. But she did, also. This is not a story. What an icon.

Idolatry

Should I idolize the goddess Atargatis? I could adopt Atargatis as my talisman, with her moon power to aid me. Or Atargatis is my tempter. I can be an apostate.

What does it mean to be an icon? In the artist’s self portrait of Atargatis, this celestial being is elegant and indestructible. The water is dazzling. Her skin is gleaming sterling silver. Some believed that Atargatis, with her moon power, granted fertility. But the moon is only a mirror of the sun.

Poison

The moon is made of rocks and regolith. Perhaps a hidden silver vein. Not all silver is found as a beautiful filigree on rocks either. Sometimes silver just looks like white splotches and patches and dots on a cave wall.

Long ago, alchemists invented silver nitrate as an antiseptic. But they called it “Lunar Caustic” because they associated silver with the moon. Lunar Caustic is poisonous to bacteria. We should talk about other poisons: anti-queer words from old caves. There is no precious silver in those caves. Everything is depleted. Coat a mirror with silver. Take a long hard look at ourselves.

Proliferation

The silver swirls of the water around the artist in the self portrait of Atargatis remind me of the tendrils of silver in rock. But they could also be the tendrils and filaments of a map of the Mycelium talking in their fungal network. Fungi have 23,000 genders. Ah, to know that is healing. Let the peppered moon lichen thrive.

Gender

In all of Gutierrez’s photos, Atargatis is my favourite. It reminds me that I have stood nude under a full moon in a forest, when all the cedar tree needles had sharp sylvan edges, and every rock gleamed like mercury. The breeze blew over my body.

If an artist has clarity of vision and is unapologetically provocative about gender, and I see that gorgeous art, I am changed. My heart empties of its tarnished feminine medals and girl grey shrapnel. I have more moral lucidity and gender fluidity. I have the strength to vanquish my foes. Defeat tin gods. Somehow. Sometime.

Body

I know that vengeance is not mine. I have no weapons: not my Syrian roots, not silver feminizing jewelry I would never wear, not gowns, not silverware, not real vengeance. Nothing belongs to me but my own body. I have vitiligo: white splotches and dots of skin that lost its colour. They are silver embedded in rock— or stars. I live in my free body. I am not an icon, but I am enough to go on.

Deirdre Maultsaid (she/her) has been published in Canthius, CV2, Filling Station, Grain, Impossible Archetype, Marrow, Prairie Fire, the Puritan, Riddle Fence, untethered, White Wall Review and others. Deirdre Maultsaid is a queer writer gratefully living in Canada on unceded traditional Coast Salish Lands. More information at @deirdmault.bsky.social.

Listen to the author reading this story:

“Let’s pretend we’re sisters,” Sophie says. Sisters are closer than cousins, share secrets, swap clothes. She stares at me in my new bunny rabbit pyjamas and, for a second, I think she’s going to make me strip them off, even though her two years older body would stretch the bunnies out of shape. I cross my arms over my chest. She must see my thoughts because she laughs and says “As if I’d wear those babyish things.” Suddenly, I don’t love my new pyjamas anymore.

“Let’s share our darkest secrets,” Sophie says. She has lots. The sweets she steals from the Pick and Mix in Woolworths, filling her pockets with pink and white mice, fizzy cola bottles and cherry lips when nobody’s looking. The time she locked the neighbour’s cat in the garden shed and left it there for days, mewing and scratching at the door. The rude words she wrote on the board at school, letting a boy she hated take the blame.

“Your turn,” she says, and I shrug. My only secrets are the ones she makes me keep, the pinch marks on my arms that keep me cardiganed on hot days, the bruises on my shins, the pocket money that mysteriously disappears whenever she comes to play.

“Let’s pretend I’ve kidnapped you,” Sophie says. She ties my hands behind my back with the stripy scarf Gran knitted her, binds my feet with sparkly tights and sticks the brown tape you use on packages over my mouth. She must have planned this earlier, must have sneaked downstairs and sneaked it from the sideboard drawer.

“Don’t be stupid, it’s just a game,” she says, sneering at my nearly-tears. She sits cutting out the paper dolls on the back page of Bunty for ten minutes before untying me.

All night she spreadeagles on the bed we share, stealing my space.

In the morning, I pretend to be dead. Eyes closed, but not screwed up tight, I let my mouth hang open and my head fall to one side. Sophie lifts up my arm and, when she lets go, it thuds, deadweight. I start to enjoy myself. She pokes me with a pencil. I stay dead. She tickles the soles of my feet. I stay dead. She puts her hands in my armpits and pulls me into a sitting position. I loll my head back. Still dead.

Still dead when she says “Time to stop pretending,” Still dead when she screams “Stop it, you’re scaring me,” So dead that I almost start to believe it myself.

I stay dead as she whimpers like a trapped kitten, as I hear the slip slapping of her slippered feet on the stairs, taking the bad tidings to Auntie Margaret and Uncle Ken.

I am sitting up and smiling when they burst into the room.

“Don’t be stupid, it’s just a game,” I say. We’re cousins, Sophie and me, but close as sisters, sharing everything. Cut, it turns out, from exactly the same cloth.

Alison Wassell is a writer of flash and micro fiction from Merseyside UK. Her work has been published by Fictive Dream, SoFloPoJo, Does It Have Pockets, The Bridport Prize, Trash Cat Lit, Frazzled Lit, The Dissapointed Housewife, NFFD and elsewhere. She has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net.

Listen to Evelyn reading this poem:

i crave the smell of your old car
i’d lasso neptune’s fourteen moons for you
i don’t sleep at night
thinking of words for everything that you are
my insomnia is purple
and dances stars around me
in shape of your wild hair
eleven full moons since i fell in love 
and eleven moons breathless-
it’s the way you look at me 

Evelyn Vozar is a college student at Baldwin Wallace majoring in early childhood education. When she isn’t teaching or crafting, she enjoys writing in candlelight and incense smoke. She loves Halloween and anything odd, and wants a bearded dragon more than anything.

Listen to the author reading this story:

The filly was born perfect. Almost impossible to believe – all those months, your favorite mare growing wide, your one chance, one arrogant dare since all those dreams as a boy, and here you’d done it: made money enough to pay to breed your horse. Bred the perfect foal. Those impossible legs, all tangled, and yet she was up and walking, just as they said, in only an hour. Gleaming copper coat. Muscled. That sculpted head. That one perfect star on her forehead.

It was an expensive hobby, the horse. Bad as golf or boats or hunting, the hours away from your marriage. An hour each way, out into the country. You: your window down, smelling the passing grains, even the sour dairy muck. Outside. Outside, and out in the country. Stalls rented at the farm with a white wooden barn shaped the way barns were once all shaped. A collie that ran snapping at you as you got out of your car. Smell leather. Grass. Sawdust shavings. Sweat. Molasses of the fistful of grain you’d dig from the barrel in the feed room and hold out to that impossibly chiseled muzzle. The filly. The filly you’d brought into being. Gleaming chestnut like a lightbulb against her mother’s dark flank, and that perfect white star on her forehead.

Your wife had been in hospital, you told the filly, her lips velvet and careless in your palm. Fibroids, something. Some thing causing her pain, needing surgery, costing money, her pain, needing recovery. The filly stood as you haltered her, as you taught her to cross tie. Let you brush her coat, her mother scolding nearby. She’ll be alright, you said. Repeating, in fact, what your wife had told you: It doesn’t change a thing. This is just one of those things. You run the course. You recover.

You were reluctant, telling your wife: there was something wrong with the filly’s legs. Nothing you’d noticed those first months. Didn’t show up that first year, hours you spent at the rail of the paddock, watching her zoomies, watching her kick. Watching the filly race her mother, now lean and in demand – the breeder wanting to buy her, to breed her on, as good as this filly had come out. All those hours you spent, away from your marriage, nothing to do but stand and watch. Watch your perfect filly run on grass. And those were the words your wife had used, your wife now healing, almost free of the pain. There’s something about running on grass, she said. Let the thing run its course.

And so you had. The mare sold on to the breeder. The filly – now full grown but too young to saddle. Your largest investment, was she not? The time. The money put into her. Money it cost every month: board, feed, veterinarian – and that, you were aware, even if your wife was not, was an increasing expense. X-rays. Bone sample. Medications. Splints. It was that the cannon bone did not sit properly into the knee, so as the filly carried her weight, over time, here and there, she went lame. Turn her out on grass, your wife suggested. Yes, the vet agreed. Leave her to run. Something to be said for simply letting her run on grass. Give her time to grow. Things run their course.

Your filly. Impossibly gleaming chestnut flame, blazing out across the thick of that green pasture. One year. Two. She trotted to you across the field. Stood for the leather halter to fit over her ears, the carrots, the brush at the crosstie. Old enough to ride but still. The pain in her legs.

Your wife is angry with you. This many years in. Children near grown. There’d been a woman in HR you barely knew, one you used your nicest voice with because she handled insurance. Expense reports. Pay checks. Time off. Because she had been the one to start the collection to help with your wife’s medical bills. She’d also offered to blow you. Let’s call it what it was. But that’s all it was. You’d laughed awkwardly. Said, Really? as if she’d caught you off guard. As if you’d go out with your expense check in hand, maybe a candy from the dish, but that would be all you’d take with you. You’d gone home to your wife – who was back to herself now. Healed, thank god, because it had just been one of those things, had run its course.

Only. You may have turned the woman down, but she mailed a letter to your wife all the same. Sad cow, she’d called her. We laugh about you, so pathetic holding on, but he is mine. Your wife left the letter out for you. On the counter. With the opened vet bill. She’d found a box of condoms in your dresser, set those out, too. And you stare at her, trying to think how to say you’d bought them – before the fibroids, before the pain, before the surgery – because you’d been too afraid to have sex and get her pregnant again. The children. The all of it, being SO MUCH.

But how do all these truths sound like lies?

You get behind the wheel because it’s time to drive out to the barn. The flash of copper on grass, that perfect filly. The one perfect thing you’d gotten far enough in life, far enough past childish dreams, to make happen. The mare. The barn. The stud fee. The safe gestation. The added feed, larger stall, supervision, veterinarian. The grass. The grass.

That long drive out between the last of family farms. No more of that, is there? Families all together on a farm?

Your wife calls you, voice choked with sobs. Believing. Believing the crazed font of the typed, unsigned letter from the HR woman whose burgundy hair made you think of Halloween costumes, who was no one you’d have chosen. Not something you’d have planned. Nothing you’d have dreamed of, planned and worked into being. No star in your life. Not like her.

Not now, you say. The vet is waiting, you say. When I’m home, you say. Need the silence of the car, windows up. Drive out to the barn. Flash of copper, flash of star, as if there were maybe still a chance.

But it’s time. Done running.

Half up the driveway, you could see it there already, in a perfect blade of evening sun cutting past that perfect barn. Golden glow lighting the metal arm of the crane, tread of the digger. International Harvester resting, having dug the perfect hole. Far back beyond the thickest grass, beyond where she ran. That one thing you’d made, so impossibly bright against the green, copper glint of boyhood hope. Park beside the veterinarian’s van. Imperfect bones that would always be nothing but pain. Flawed legs couldn’t be outgrown. Collie biting your ankles. Vet’s grip on your shoulder. When you’re ready, walk her in.

Elissa Field has been responsible for sorting thousands of family photos which unearthed memories of many of the horses from when there were still farms in the family. She writes literary noir, in short and long fiction. Her work has earned numerous fellowships and awards, with stories appearing in SmokeLong Quarterly, CRAFT, Peatsmoke, Fractured Lit, Monkeybicycle, Conjunctions, BULL, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. She has novel and story collections underway. Far from farm country, she now lives in an historic house under an ancient mango tree with her sons, cats, and collie. Find writing and social media links at elissalaurenfield.com.

Listen to the author reading this story:

Junwei will be caned later today. We saw him this morning stomping away from us. In a sweltering third-floor classroom muggy with afternoon heat, we huddle together, hearts thumping, mouths glistening, his name burning our tongues. Ceiling fans whirl but sweat pools under our arms, trickles down our backs, between our legs.

They say he smoked in the boys’ toilet, he played truant, he hit Mr Phee, well and good, for groping him. Yeah right, we say. Everyone knows Junwei collects virgin girls. He’s seventeen, eighteen, got held back for failing his O-Level. But he gets them fresh because he handsome what, looks like Nicholas Tse. In a different life, he’d model Calvin Klein jeans while we simmer and stew in our stuffy classroom.

They say he knocked up a girl, the nerd in the front row, the vegetarian no one wants to eat with, the weirdo with the skirt smothering her knees, waistband hoisted to her chest. He sauntered up to her, smirking, the hem of his shirt grazing his groin, a slice of chest exposed. No one else would let him put his lanjiao in their cheebye bareback.

Now broiling, now salivating, our body odour fills the air, but we keep dishing. They say she bled so much she stained his mattress, and he was so turned on he didn’t pull out. He threatened to tell her parents, dragged her by the hair to the abortion clinic, painted her body black and blue, like his laopei had done to him.

But, someone says, wasn’t it weird, what happened with Mr Phee? We recall the morning: Junwei skulking in two hours late, his shirt rumpled, his hair sticking out in all directions. How Mr Phee stopped barking at us to run faster, you fatsos. The way the bad boy flinched when our teacher gripped his shoulder. And how Junwei wrenched away, shouted cheebye, don’t touch me and stomped off.

We scoff. Please lah. Everyone knows Junwei’s a bad boy. That’s why he’ll be caned. No need to make up stories.

Originally from Singapore, Ya Lan Chang lives in Cambridge, United Kingdom with her husband and son. Her work has been shortlisted for the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, and has been published in The Disappointed Housewife, SoFloPoJo, Northern Gravy, Litro Magazine, among others. She works as a law lecturer and is a writer at heart.

She can be found on Bluesky: @yalanchang.bsky.social.

Listen to the author reading this piece:

I wasted my healthy reproductive years in unhealthy relationships, forgetting that my ovaries weren’t as young as people said I looked. I wasted so much time that people use the past tense in conversation with me now. ‘You would have been a great mother.’

When I visited my sister, Edel, in hospital after she gave birth to her first child, I saw women smoking cigarettes outside the front door, their dressing gowns strained across heavily pregnant bellies. Why them and not me? The jealousy is often visceral. The grief of my invisible loss was forever on my mind but never came out of my mouth. Just another thing buried in my internal graveyard. ‘I thought you’d be the first to give us a grandchild,’ said my father when one of my sister’s became pregnant at sixteen. ‘Donna will give us the girl,’ said my mother when their fourth grandchild was yet another boy. I joked that Edel might get there before me even though she was sixteen years my junior. The joke turned out to be a prophecy.

It felt like my baby was having a baby because I had been like a mother to Edel for twenty-nine years. A classic example of the eldest daughter being stricter than the actual parents. My mother was forty-five when Edel was born. One year younger than I am now. She often said, ‘You have to move with the times Donna,’ when I tried to stop her being so lenient with Edel. She was trying to be hip and cool like all the younger mothers. ‘Highlights in her already blonde hair, leg waxing and a spray tan. Are you mad? She’s twelve. It’s a confirmation not a bloody wedding.’ She didn’t listen to me then or when she allowed her to get a tattoo at sixteen. ‘She thinks she’s your mother,’ she’d say to Edel while rolling her eyes. She could roll them all she wanted, but the fact of the matter is that I’m the one Edel ran to for comfort when she witnessed her boyfriend collapse and die. ‘Are you sure you’re not my mother?’ she asked. I joked that I would have done a better job, but half meant it. Our parents did their best but we grew up in a home where love wasn’t easily expressed and we didn’t talk about our feelings. I yearned for the simple things; Good morning; Good night; Good luck in your exams; How was your day?

I denied how painful being childless was until Edel’s pregnancy announcement. A simple text message to the family group. I could understand that she wanted to get the news out of the way in one go, but couldn’t comprehend why was I being told at the same time and in the same way as everyone else. She should have known the news would hit me differently. I replied with one word as I allowed the overwhelming sense of sadness to consume me. ‘Congratulations.’ I had to dust myself off in time for the gender reveal party. I was her oldest sister, and the eldest daughter, and everyone was used to seeing me calm and in control. I put on my game face.

It was late afternoon and the sun was shining. Family and a few friends gathered around the pastel-coloured decorations. A large white balloon swayed in the gentle breeze, revealing the blue and pink words ‘He? or She?’ Laughter and chatter filled the air. I channelled my emotions into the tasks at hand, smiling as I handed out the pink and blue iced cupcakes. When the time came to pop the balloon, I stood alone at the side of the crowd. ‘Three, two, one.’ The balloon popped and a burst of pink confetti showered down like tiny cherry blossom petals. Cheers erupted. Edel’s boyfriend hugged her and tears of happiness flowed down her glowing cheeks.

I won’t be the first to give them a granddaughter.

I no longer have time to give them any grandchild.

I was next to hug Edel. I kept my voice as steady as I could as I congratulated her, but my eyes were going to betray me so I kept it brief.

Amidst the commotion, I slipped away to find a moment to myself upstairs. My vision blurred as tears threatened to spill so I took deep breaths, exhaled slowly, and kept my head tilted back, gazing at the ceiling. I heard footsteps on the stairs, blinked rapidly, and pretended to organise the gift bags before Edel came into the room. I handed her my gift. In addition to several neutral clothes and trinkets, I bought a blush pink rabbit with floppy ears and long dangly legs. I apologised for how I reacted to her pregnancy announcement and was attempting to explain myself when she took my hands and held them in hers before asking me to be the godmother. The wave of emotion I had been trying to hold back enveloped me. My hands left hers and rose to shield my face. My shoulders shook as uncontrollable sobs began. She hugged me and we stood in an embrace until I managed to nod my response.

I was in my forties and just out of a relationship that I had thought was going to last. When it ended, I knew that my chance was gone. My cut-off point had passed. I had to accept life on terms that weren’t my own and act like business as usual. I hear words like barren, spinster, and career woman. People constantly presume it’s a choice rather than circumstance. I watch movies and see childless women depicted as witches, evil stepmothers, or crazy cat ladies. I’ve become invisible to a HR department apparently focussed on diversity, equity, and inclusion. I hear the same things over and over.

‘Just adopt.’

‘If you really wanted children, you should’ve tried harder.’

‘You’re lucky.’

‘Want one of mine?’

‘Just have one on your own.’

It’s hard enough to hear these things from strangers or casual acquaintances, but when they come from your friends, they hit harder. I’ve heard sane friends say insane things. ‘Just trap someone.’ While these comments never help, imagine hearing them when you just broke up with your boyfriend and you know it was your last-chance-to-have-a-baby-relationship. Staring face to face with a future without my own children, I can’t help but blame myself. I think of the child I never had. The daughter for whom I would have been everything I needed when I was a little girl. I’m still grieving and learning to accept my new path.

Donna Leamy is a PhD scientist currently working in the biopharmaceutical sector. After winning a placement on The Walls of Limerick mentoring program, she took a career break to pursue an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. She graduated with first class honours in January 2025. Her work has featured in a special edition of Silver Apples magazine, and poetry anthologies Washing Windows IV and V.

Listen to the author reading this story:

If Heather falls, someone should be awake.
Her legs click on the kitchen tile — metal under skin.
She doesn’t talk about it.
The flame of her lighter wavers against the window.

The son hums into the phone light.
Hollow-boned, awake when he shouldn’t be.
Coffee smell from the room next door.

doboy227: need Runescape gold
doboy227: anyone selling

Monitor light stripes the wall.
Outside, a deer in frost, perfectly still.
The air holds its breath.

doboy227: you can make 10k an hour flipping mats — yule logs, rune bars, giant bones.
People buy time. Sell it back.
He works before school and after midnight, flipping mats, chasing margins.
The game hums like a night shift — quiet, endless, costing nothing but time.
The Runescape bank window open — rows of items, neat and useless.

The sister drives him home after work.
The heat’s broken again.
She keeps the window cracked anyway, drifting between the lane markers.
Their mother working a graveyard shift.

Heather’s door stays closed now.
The lights under it go on and off at hours that don’t belong.
When it’s on, he listens.

gabby428: omg amor remember when doboy brought that rose at the dance
amorvincitomnia: omg stop
ratboy39: lmao
doboy227: it wasn’t like that
amorvincitomnia: typing…
amorvincitomnia: nm

The house hums — fridge, computer, heater.
Each machine taking its turn to breathe.
But underneath, a window slides open down the hall.
The cold air moves.
The floor chills the bottom of his feet.
He smells it before he sees it — smoke, sweet and wrong.

doboy227: hello? anyone awake
He watches the cursor blink, then deletes the line.
Down the hall, her lighter clicks, sputters.
His jaw tightens. The cursor blinks.

Kitchen light still on.
Dog shifting in sleep.
Somewhere, a door that never fully shuts.
He waits for the screen to glow again.
Outside, the first bird starts.
A sound too small to mean anything —
a branch cracking in the cold.

Doboy looks back at the screen.
Morning coming.
In the next room, a sound — small —
nothing.

Kellan Jansen writes from the American Southwest.

Find him @MarryMeMachine on X.

Listen to the author reading this story:

“Wait, I don’t understand,” Megan chews on her pink straw. “So, that guy assaulted you? That’s what you’re saying?”

“What? No.”

We’re in the bar above the Clermont Lounge and the smell of her daiquiri’s making me sick, like the Bath & Bodyworks roll-on glitter I used to lick off my wrist when I was 9 or my mom forcing sunscreen onto my face.

“But, that’s what you said. You let him kiss you even though you didn’t want to. And then he stuck his hand up your shorts.”

“Well, yeah, but it wasn’t like — that’s not the point of the story,” I say.

“Oh, okay.”

The velvet-clad room gives me a fizzy, candy-coated feeling. Like Dorothy in the poppy field, except they’re playing that song I listened to every day in the summer of 2003. Megan looks a little too chic in her 501s and white T-shirt. Then again, that’s why I hang out with her — because she’s tall and single-black-coffee skinny. Sitting next to her, I feel like we should be gossiping on a morning show in Chanel suits.

I’ve actually never been raped. But I don’t like to tell people that. It sounds too braggy and untrue. I’ve just been lucky.

But then Megan is saying, “So what’s the point of the story?”

“That I took some loser who didn’t even know who Stanley Kubrick was to see A Clockwork Orange and he got up and walked out in the middle of it — after he was on fucking Facebook the entire first act.”

“You said he invited himself.”

Well, yeah, Teddy was always inviting himself places, like the time he walked me back to my dorm after lunch. “You’re not going to invite me in? I want to see what your room looks like,” he’d said. So I stood in the kitchen of my apartment-style dorm, front door in sight, as he did a turn around my tiny bedroom.

“He said the movie was weird,” I launch into the story again. “I mean, not really. Violent, yes. A little avant-garde, maybe. But it isn’t like Begotten weird. It isn’t Gummo or Eraserhead or Jacob’s Ladder or Salò or Slaughtered Vomit Dolls or August Underground. It isn’t even The-Human-fucking-Centipede.”

The novel’s way weirder, the author literally invented a new language for it. In high school, I printed out a key from Wikipedia so I could translate. I did that at 16 but a grown man can’t watch a Kubrick film without looking at Facebook?

“And then, he asked if I wanted to leave too. ‘Do you want to go?’ You mean, do I want to get up and leave this movie that I’d been planning on coming to all week? The film Roger Ebert called, ‘an ideological mess, a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading as an Orwellian warning’? Malcolm McDowell almost lost an eye for that film. Did I want to leave — was he serious?”

“But then after he left and didn’t come back, he still waited for you outside the theater. You went back to his dorm.”

“And he got us lost on the way.”

“Why’d you go if you hated him so much?”

I shrugged. “To spare his feelings? Because I hadn’t come up with an excuse to leave yet, and I didn’t know how to say no at the time.”

“Or he didn’t know how to hear it.”

“He just kept smiling like he hadn’t walked out on me in the movie. No matter what I said or did, all I got in return was that smile that felt like a scream.”

“It’s always the nice guys.”

The first time a man made me feel threatened, I was 12. He was a 40-something friend of my mom’s who tried to introduce himself to me in the kitchen. But I was being a brat and said “okay” or something equally sullen. The thing I remember — other than what he said (Please don’t ignore me, in a way that implied the Please did not make it optional) or the look in his eyes as they shifted over my body or that he made me shake his hand like we were both adults — was the smile on his face. Like checking out a middle schooler was the most genial thing in the world. I didn’t have a lock on my bedroom door at the time, so I had to shove a cheap Limited Too chair under the handle.

“Once we got to his room, he started changing because we were gonna go to the bars — but then he just wouldn’t put on a shirt. He stood there talking to me without a shirt on, flexing his muscles.”

That was when I realized he thought I was gonna fuck him that day he invited himself up to my dorm. Even though I hadn’t even wanted him there.

“He still thought I liked him. God, I was so embarrassed to be with him, in that room, right at that moment.”

“And then he kissed you.”

People begin to get the late-night munchies and we’re enveloped in the smell of fried oil and hot butter and Fernet. I watch Megan pick at the red nail polish she chose because the name made her laugh. Communists in the Summer House.

“If the everyday relationship between men and women is this constant push-and-pull where we have to throw up boundaries just to see if they’ll cross them — ”

“Someone on Twitter called it ‘Schrödinger’s Rapist,’ I think.”

“— then some men you meet and just immediately know: That guy’s a fucking creep.”

Like this guy I’d see at parties sometimes in my early 20s. Charlie would always try to hit on me. I entertained it once because I was in a good mood and he asked mid-conversation if I wanted to “go over there?” When I turned to look, he was pointing to a pitch-black area of the driveway with an overgrown one-car garage. Did I want to go to the rape corner with him? No, I didn’t.

One night my friend Annabelle said, “I’m going to fuck Charlie tonight,” before a party at his house. The next day, she told me that after they had sex, she threw up in his bed and he slept on the couch while one of her girlfriends took care of her. She’d been completely blackout when I’d left the party in an Uber. But I’d tried to put her in a car. But she did say she wanted to fuck him.

But my friends were always telling me stories like this. A rogue’s gallery of sex crimes. Like Claire, who was drunk and “all of a sudden” realized she was having sex with some guy she met at a show. Or Sarah, who had a threesome with a friend and their Spanish teacher. She told me how he’d fucked her in her roller skates. Betty Ann, who had sex with her boyfriend because he wouldn’t stop asking and she was afraid to keep saying no.

The first time a boy actually touched me I had just turned 18, not even a year before I took Teddy to A Clockwork Orange. It was a guy I’d had a crush on in high school, though he was a freshman in college at that point. We ended up making out on the floor of a dark room. He asked if I wanted to have sex. Tired, heartbroken over a different boy and little more sober than before, I sighed and “No” slipped out. Even then, some reflex in the back of my mind kicked over. What if he gets mad?

He said okay like it was the most natural thing in the world and rolled off me. I slept with my head on his shoulder. I didn’t see him again until years later at a mini reunion between mutual high school friends. We immediately fell back into our flirty banter but nothing happened that night either — though that time, I would have said yes.

Megan grabs the bartender’s attention. “Another one please, love.”

“Yeah, but the movie thing bothered me a lot more,” I tell her.

“So you’re saying the only thing worse than being a predator is being boring?” Megan asks.

“I’m saying there was nothing interesting about him from start to finish.”

The playlist changes over to the song I was almost named after. We’re interrupted by a man so drunk I’m surprised he can even see us. It must be something like instinct that makes him bother us.

I let him slur his words at us for far too long before I say, “I think you should go home, honey.”

Anger rears in his sloppy demeanor. “Oh yeah, sweetheart? Why’s that?”

I don’t know why, but I go with the honest answer. “Because we’re asking you to.”

He stares at me with his glassy, half-closed eyes and sags under the weight of all oppressed men. Then he stumbles off, yet another victim of female cruelty.

Lauren Loudermilk is a writer and editor based in Atlanta. Her work has appeared in Paste, Travel & Leisure, swim press, and more, and she holds an MFA in fiction from The New School. You can read more of her work at Suburban Gothic on Substack.

Listen to the author reading this piece:

Author note: I wrote this piece three and a half years ago, right after my cousin was murdered. I thought of it again today because the second of my cousin’s murderers was finally found guilty of multiple charges, including murder.

My cousin was murdered last month. Least I think he was my cousin. He was my aunt’s grandson, so I figure cousin, right? Except my aunt is my half-aunt cause she had a different father from my birthmother, so was he my half-cousin or some distant, tenuous relation? Doesn’t matter, not really. I never met him and now, I never will.

There are pictures. Being fourteen, he was mostly on Snapchat but being middle-aged, I see the ones on Facebook. In them, he’s smiling. Carefree. Like his whole life’s ahead of him, not behind. And he’s looking forward to living that life. His family may not have much; he may live in a small town on the edge of a big desert but the open sky is full of star shine and he’s full of dreams.

Fourteen. Fourteen. Who gets murdered at fourteen? Plenty, it seems.

America. Where these days you’ve a God-given right to not only carry a gun but shoot it. If guns are legal, why isn’t murder? Cause what else do you need a gun for other than killing?

Didn’t used to be like that. Sure, when I lived in San Francisco—the Mission, near the gangland of Valentia Street Gardens— I’d hear gunfire on a regular basis, but it was like throbbing bass leaking from thick warehouse walls of an illegal rave. Close, but distant. I worked in the Financial District and on Sundays, sat behind the counter of a quiet corner shop owned by Ramses, a Palestinian who kept the liquor shelves stocked but not so much the freezer. Sometimes in quiet moments as I watched old shows on the older TV, I wondered if I’d ever be robbed but didn’t worry about it much.

I left over twenty years ago now. Moved to Belfast where war was called “The Troubles” like Northern Ireland was some delinquent teenager. There were guns and this pervasive—not fear, so much—but heightened awareness of potential threat. No open carry, guns were hidden same as bombs. I had to check my wheel well before I started the car. Look for wires, things that shouldn’t be there. Left my baby in the car seat by my front door, out of the way, just in case my car blew up when I started it.

It was a stressful way to live, and I couldn’t imagine spending your whole life like that, so we moved before our eldest was even walking. Down south, someplace where only farmers had guns, mostly to scare off crows but sometimes, rarely, to murder relatives over land. If you’ve seen The Field, you get the gist.

I have two sons. They’re older now but when my youngest was fourteen he was always sneaking out of the house at night. I’d lock all the doors, hide the keys; he’d crawl out a window. Locking all the windows kept him in for a bit but I’d get comfortable; sleep sound knowing he was tucked safe in his bed. Leave the key out. Not on purpose, just forgot. And he’d always know. Always find it. Like a homing pigeon except one who always flew away.

I don’t know where he used to go. With friends mostly. Down by the canal where the Guards wouldn’t see them. Smoke whatever they smoked. Shoot the shit.

Not each other.

My cousin snuck out of his house in the middle of the night too. Fourteen. Typical, right? Maybe he met some girl under the school bleachers; played COD in a friend’s basement; sat with friends on benches in a fast food parking lot and listened to highway flyby. Smoked a bit. Shot the shit.

Shot each other.

My cousin drove to the desert with a sixteen-year-old Arizona runaway and a local eighteen-year-old to shoot guns. Maybe he thought the older boys were his friends, maybe he wanted them to be as he took aim and shot at the stars, cause everyone knows if you wish on a falling star, your wish will come true. I’m guessing that never, not for one minute, did he think he’d become one himself.

At some point the older boys grew bored, angry, high, who knows, who cares, does it matter? Decided they wanted my cousin’s gun.

Shot him for it.

Stabbed him too. Maybe to shut him up. Maybe for good measure. Just to make sure. Maybe he didn’t die straight away. Maybe he cried for his mother. Cried for mercy. Cried for the future he’d never have.

Prayed.

When his mom went to wake him for school the next morning, she found him gone. They searched for two days. I saw the callouts, the posts on Facebook, the MISSING notices, the increasingly desperate pleas for any information. No one expects a young kid in a small town to go missing, even when it happens all the time, it never happens here.

To us.

The cops discovered a Snapchat video of him shooting into the night, city blazing on the horizon and were able to pushpin him on a map. Found him in the desert where his body had been dumped. Where he lay dead or dying under sun and stars.

A day before my cousin’s murder I was lying on the floor of my sitting room exercising in some vain attempt to ward off the ravages of middle-age when a framed picture fell off the wall in the hallway. I was alone in the house and there was no reason for it to have fallen—the nail was still in the wall, the hook on the picture. I talked to another writer friend about it. How I’d had terrible déjà vu the day before, now this. She told me any time she’s had a picture fall for no reason, someone’s died. Not someone close, but someone she’d know. Who’s the picture of, she asked me.

No one, I said, just some desert plant.

It’s been 25 years or more since I’ve been in New Mexico. There is no place like it on earth. The desert. The sky that strings all the heavens together, cloud fluff like drifting hot air balloons, the desolate magic not as if all the Gods slept there but were buried. I remember watching Breaking Bad a few years back and thinking, that’s not the New Mexico I know. Maybe not, but maybe that’s what it is, and my memories are pure imaginings like when people think of Ireland and think of green hills and fairies, not bombs.

No one’s prepared for a fourteen-year-old’s murder so there’s a GoFundMe page for funeral expenses. On the page, there’s a picture of my cousin, Ashton. He’s smiling. The family resemblance is there. Not in the smile, cause mostly I don’t. But around the eyes. Eyes looking slightly up and off to the distance. Eyes full of stars in a desert of darkness.

Rest in Peace, Ashton Remondini. Taken too soon, Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Barbara Byar is a working-class American writer living in Ireland for over 25 years. Her critically acclaimed, collection of stories: Some Days Are Better Than Ours (Reflex Press) was short-listed for the Saboteur Awards. Her short fiction has been published and prize-listed widely. She was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Irish Short Story of the Year in 2023 and longlisted in 2021. A recipient of an Irish Arts Council Literature Bursary and an Agility Award, she is editor of MOTEL from Cowboy Jamboree Press. Her debut novel, In the Desert will be published 3-3-2026 by Cowboy Jamboree Press.

Her writing can be found at barbarabyar.wordpress.com

Listen to Kate reading this poem:

What I won’t tell you 
is that I nailed my foot to the floorboard.

I found a hammer under the sink.
The nail was the focus of my whole body

as I considered the position —
in between the tendons 

and the gentle sloping structure 
of the upper muscles, 

and I hammered slowly,
for precision. 

And there, I understood, for once,
the ways in which the mind can wander —

for I could hear my soul above me 
making the noises of fans and flight

as it looked down my windpipe,
overturning hymns in the sky

as I worked alone at night,
tethering myself to the earth.

Kate Vanhinsbergh is a Pushcart-nominated poet from Manchester, UK. She has poems published or forthcoming in Iamb, Black Bough, Ink Sweat & Tears, Anomaly, We Hyperfocus, After… and others. She holds a Masters in Creative Writing from Keele University, and can be found on Instagram @kate.vanhinsbergh or X @katevanbergh

Listen to the author reading this story:

Long after he’d made his mark on the world, my father told me the story of how he got his start in the shoe business. It was in the mid-1930s, and he had just graduated from the high school of a small Missouri town west of St. Louis. Jobs for young men were scarce then—the Great Depression was ravaging families and economies—but through the influence of his father, who was a well-known women’s shoe stylist, Dad managed to get a job cutting patterns on the assembly line of a St. Louis shoe factory.

Somehow—the details are missing from memory—my father met with a bigwig in the St. Louis shoe business. When the man learned my father’s surname, he asked whether he was related to Alvaro Careaga, the shoe stylist. “He’s my father,” Dad told him. The man then asked my father if he also designed shoes. “Sure I do,” he replied.

“Well,” he told me, years later, “of course I’d never drawn a shoe in my life.”

But on the basis of my father’s bold fib, and, no doubt, my father’s self-confidence, the man offered him a position with his company. And that is how my father got his start as a designer of women’s shoes.

In this regard, I am my father’s son. I too lied my way into the vocation of journalism, a vocation that opened doors to a long career in public relations and marketing.

My journey began during my junior year of high school. That fall I enrolled in a class called Journalism I. I was not a diligent student; my grades were mediocre at best, and often below average. I held my own in the required freshman and sophomore English courses, sliding by with Bs or B-minuses. But if I were to stay on the college prep track, which seemed to be the best way out of the world of factory and service jobs, I needed to take an elective English course my junior year. The choices were yearbook, Speech and Debate, English Literature, and the one I thought would be the easiest, Journalism I.

Another factor that came into play was the teacher, Mrs. H. She had taught freshman English, and despite my lackluster performance in her class, I thought she seemed fond of me, the way some people are fond of stray dogs. So I thought I’d have a good chance of making a passing grade in Mrs. H’s journalism class without having to put forth much effort.

Soon after the fall semester of my junior year began, Mrs. H. assigned us to something she called “beats.” It was a term, I later learned, from the journalism business that signified what areas reporters might cover at a daily newspaper: the police beat, the school beat, the city government beat, and so on. Mrs. H. assigned us to write one news story a month from our respective beats, and stories that were good enough, she said, would make it into our school newspaper, the Spartan Scroll.

When I learned that my assigned beat was geography class, my heart sank.

I’d taken geography my sophomore year and did not do well in it. That was what I later came to call my experimental year—the year I discovered pot and made a few connections, friends of friends, who could feed my burgeoning interest in smoking the stuff. If geography were limited to parts of the world that produced the best grades of marijuana—Columbia, Mexico, Jamaica, Panama, Thailand—then I probably would have aced the class. But Weed 101 was not a part of the curricula, and the geography teacher, a stern veteran of the classroom named .. K., held high expectations for her students. I was a classic underachiever, more interested in rock music and the stoner comedy of Cheech and Chong than in memorizing the names of rivers and world capitals, so our worldviews did not mesh. I thought she was there to make my life miserable, and she thought she was there to teach me something. Somehow, through the haze of that sophomore year, I managed to get through her class with a low C.

Furthermore, when Mrs. H. assigned me the geography beat, I could not understand how a subject like geography offered anything worth writing about for the school newspaper. Our school had no geography club, and except for whatever was going on in Lebanon it was a relatively peaceful time in the world. There were no upheavals or government coups in the news, and so the names of cities and countries remained unchanged. Leningrad was Leningrad, and as far as anyone knew it would never again be called St. Petersburg. And it was obvious to me, just by looking at old Mrs. K., that the woman hadn’t done anything innovative in her 30 years of teaching geography. So what was there to report?

September flew by. The time came to turn in our first beat stories, and I was empty-handed. When Mrs. H. asked me about my assignment, I told her I was still working on it and would turn it in late. She frowned and nodded grimly. Her eyes told me she knew I had not even talked to Mrs. K. since getting the assignment and had no intentions of it.

I was fully prepared to accept my fate and flunk Journalism I. But a few days later, a minor miracle occurred when Mrs. H. assigned us to write a review of some kind. She said it could be a review of a book, a work of music, a movie, a play—the choice was ours. She gave us a week to accomplish the assignment.

Now this, I thought, was something I could do. When I wasn’t getting high with my stoner friends, I spent most evenings in my room, pretending to study while swaying to KISS, Thin Lizzie, Ted Nugent, Black Sabbath, Styx, or the Steve Miller Band. One thing I knew, I thought, was rock and roll. I figured I could easily throw together some paragraphs about one of the albums in my collection and be done with it.

The idea unfolded slowly in my head. All that week I meditated on the notion of writing an album review. But which album?

It dawned on me one evening as I listened to the new Lynyrd Skynyrd album, a recording of live performances called One More from the Road. It was a two-record set, a double album that folded in half, like a book, and that made it a great surface for winnowing seeds from my latest pot purchase. On this occasion I found another practical use for the album. Reading the liner notes on the inside cover, I noticed on the right-hand section a block of reverse type and inset to the photograph of Ronnie Van Zandt and the band performing beneath the spectacular blue-green glow of stage lights. The reverse type was a brief history of Lynyrd Skynyrd, written by a writer for Rolling Stone magazine, some guy named Cameron Crowe. The write-up told how the band got its start by playing in honky-tonks throughout the south and summarized the group’s slow but steady ascent to stardom.

I don’t recall exactly how this rock journalist expressed his thoughts into words on the inside of that album cover, but I do remember thinking that whatever he had written was perfect. His words were the perfect solution to my Journalism I problem.

Brazenly I lifted large portions of the write-up and scrawled them almost verbatim in my spiral-bound notebook as the record blared. Before the final thunderous guitar chords of “Free Bird” had ended, I had completed my assignment.

Mrs. H. was delighted with my work and with the progress I’d made, seemingly overnight. She returned my paper with a blue A written on it and asked me if I would mind letting her publish this review in the next edition of the Spartan Scroll. She also asked if I would write a monthly record review for the paper. She explained that the review would replace my regular monthly article from the geography beat. I would now have the record beat.

What could I say? Any fate was better than the geography beat. I readily accepted Mrs. H’s offer.

The plagiarized review was my first published article, my first byline. When I held that pulpy tabloid student newspaper in my hand and saw my name in print, the effect was intoxicating. Never before had I had such recognition.

But soon the initial high wore off, and I began to worry. I realized that what I had done may have been pragmatic in the short term, but was also unethical and fraudulent, and that I could be in serious trouble if anyone were to discover my theft and narc on me. The possibility of suspension from school entered my mind and took root there.

I needn’t have worried, though. Most of the writers on the Spartan Scroll staff were blind scribblers, sufficiently ignorant of rock and roll to know anything about Lynyrd Skynyrd, a magazine called Rolling Stone, or some obscure writer named Cameron Crowe. Except for one guy who was a huge fan of Bruce Springsteen and Born to Run, everyone else probably listened to Donna Summer or the Bee Gees or whatever was on top 40 AM radio. If anyone knew of my cheating, I never heard about it.

So I got away with my lie and got my own monthly column in the Spartan Scroll. I also got instant recognition, and a reputation handed to me that I now had to work to keep.

I started buying Rolling Stone from a local drug store every week to learn how real rock critics wrote. I turned first to the review section and read each article over and over. I read mostly to learn, although I did lift a few lines here and there when I thought it would inconspicuously serve my purpose.

I wrote these reviews in longhand and turned them into Mrs. H., who grimaced at my grammatical flaws but saw to it that they were corrected before the stories were typeset. The articles were nothing great, and I noticed that Mrs. H.’s enthusiasm for my work seemed to wane with each passing month. But in the process of writing on a deadline, I felt myself learning to appreciate the work that real journalism entailed. I even began to rewrite some of my later columns before turning them in. Mrs. H must have noticed some improvement because near the end of that year she asked me if I’d like to continue writing the reviews during my senior year, as a regular member of the Spartan Scroll staff.

As a senior, I began to gain a reputation as the school authority on rock-and-roll music. I even sold a local record store a year’s worth of full-page ads in the school paper and worked out a deal with the owner that provided me with a free album of my choosing each month to review, in exchange for a promotional line at the bottom of each article.

So I continued my record reviews but also wrote other stories, including a feature about the geography teacher Mrs. K.’s husband, a beloved auto body repair instructor in the vocational school who had announced his retirement.

By the start of my final semester, I decided I might like to study journalism in college. I applied for a few scholarships but didn’t get any, didn’t have the grades or much of a record of extracurricular involvement. I got a part-time job at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken, saved money (I even reduced the all-important budget for weed), and took two years of classes at our town’s junior college. I joined the newspaper staff there my first year and covered a range of topics—basketball games, student committee meetings, faculty council, whatever. I started to enjoy journalism. At the end of that freshmen year of junior college, I was named the newspaper’s editor-in-chief and received a nice scholarship that went along with the title.

In the meantime, I read other writers beyond Rolling Stone’s rock critics and began to dabble in fiction and poetry. I tried on writers’ voices as though they were clothes: Hemingway’s spare prose one day, Twain’s caustic wit the next, London’s straightforward descriptions on occasion. I found writing that fit and writing that didn’t. I learned from the good and the bad, and through it all, without my realizing it, a voice began to emerge.

From the voice of the plagiarist, other voices came forth. I learned to recognize those that weren’t me, and to shed them, the way a sprout sheds the protective covering of a seed and becomes its own thing.

Andrew Careaga is a writer from Rolla, Missouri. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in The Argyle, Club Plum, Flash Fiction Magazine, MoonLit Getaway, Roi Faineant, Spillwords, Syncopation Literary Magazine and elsewhere. You can find him on X/Twitter and Instagram at @andrewcareaga, on BlueSky at @andrewcareaga.bsky.social, and on his website andrewcareaga.com.

Listen to Chisom reading this poem:

before i turned 25
i  would not see a sow thistle and call it a dandelion
ignore a hundred flowers telling me not to waste a wish
instead i would sit with a scarf around my neck  and pretend to be a beauty queen
or the mother of a baby made out of my favorite cardigan
but now i am the woman who knows that life can be anything
and there is still pleasure to be found in cheap wine
that a wish is never wasted
and stretchmarks cannot ruin a life
that even when the flowers mouth their disapproval
they recognize me to be just like them
edible and wild and occasionally mistaken for something else 

Chisom Nwaezuoke is a Cardiac Physiotherapist living in the UK, and documenting her thoughts sporadically on substack. Her poems have appeared in Snowflake, Mosspuppy, and Funicular Magazines, while her essays have been published in Lolwe, and Libre Literature. She enjoys music, movement, and books.

The contact lens slid off Effie’s fingertip and disappeared. “Oh, not today, today of all days!” She let out a grunt at the farce of life.

It was always hit-or-miss if the lens would land on target, especially with a trembly hand. But she’d discovered that if she knelt she could steady her forearm against the table edge. It amused her, every time, the picture of herself “at prayer”. It lifted the scene out of the pathetic and into the enlivening absurd. Pity there was no one to share the joke with. No one now.

She’d been at prayer when a wisp of hair got in the way. She was a woman of wisps. A small part of her life had been used to whisk wisps away. They were fewer now, but wispier and even more wayward. They found their way into her tea or the polystyrene cup of soup delivered once a day. And now here was another, come to hinder and put her plan on pause. Destiny derailed – by a hair. The farce of it!

Angel-hair, spiderweb, filament – strands would stray, persuaded by the slightest waft of air. They trailed as if in a watery element. Silvio had called her a jellyfish: “La mia bella medusa” – my beautiful medusa. She’d read recently about Turritopsis dohrnii, a jellyfish that can live forever. Immortality – would one want that? Would she want that? Perhaps she might – if she had her work, and Silvio, no pills, and no pain. But not as a jellyfish, not on life support. Never.

In the eyes of strangers, she came across as unfocused. First impression: ditzy air-head. Even fellow academics surrendered to the aura of fine chaos around her head. Mind and hair were a mismatch. Well, the strands might be vague, but she knew herself to be clear-sighted. Clear-sighted, and also large of jaw, a tad hefty, too pink – “plain” had been the usual euphemism. But she was a person of little vanity; the mind was the thing, that and the real and present world. Still – let’s not pretend – vanity it was to wear contacts instead of glasses. The only compliment she’d ever got as people cast about for a favourable feature was, “You have lovely eyes”. Just her eyes. Intending to be kind, her father would say, “Looks don’t matter, Effie” – but she wished he’d lied and called her his “pretty dove” or said, “You look good in that dress”. A lie would have been lovely now and then.… But, there’d been Silvio, sweetest man on earth, Silvio who could finesse the sweetest lie. Oh yes.

She found the lens at last, by touch: slimy-sleek. Falling like a fish scale, it had slipped right back into its own little eye-sized plastic pond. She scooped it out and got it in. Left eye. Right eye. All done. The terrible twins. She glanced at the time.

She made a mug of tea to settle herself after the flurry – kettle – mug – teabag – horrid powdered milk – each step supervised by Commandant Pain. She coddled a spoon of powder across to the mug. The tip caught the rim and powder cascaded down her dress. She gaped at the mess. Can’t be helped. Press on.

She watched the tea get milky as she stirred. Powdered milk – Silvio’s Italian eyes would have rolled, imploring the heavens. “Madonna santa!”

Trailing faint white footprints, she carried the mug back to her bed and sat cradling it.

Powdered milk meant scalding tea. She took little sips with a small, quiet pause between each – little sips like tiny kisses: ciao ciao, kiss it better, buonanotte – baby kisses, un bacetto, one at a time – ti amo, arrivederci, grazie di tutto… A ceremony of kisses.

During the week, she’d shelved books and tackled the medicine drawer – bottles, blister packs, package inserts in Big Pharma’s nasty teeny font. Not much to tidy in a one-room flat. Only one room, but it was hers. She still had independence; she still had autonomy. When she moved in, it had been alarming to part with her belongings, but she’d found she didn’t disappear. She plucked a dry leaf from the plant on her bedside table, turned the pot towards the light, and tipped in the water from her tumbler. Pacing herself, she went and rinsed the glass, filled it, then filled another. She made her shaky way back and set the glasses side by side. Smoothing the bed cover, she tried to get a handle on the pain. It would be worse in a week, or tomorrow – it wasn’t as predictable as Meals on Wheels. There were biscuit crumbs on the mat – she could feel them with her toes. Have to pass on that – low on coupons.

The dull drone from the city was company of a kind, a shapeless hum punctuated by car alarms, hooters, sirens, skidding tyres – the bird calls of the street. And she listened for birds themselves, perched on the sill or out of sight on a ledge. They comforted her with little doses of distraction, joy even, pulling her into the present: life now. A string of four notes or the dip and bob of a tail … It was absurd how such moments gave hope.

The view was a rectangle of sky. But if she stood near the sill and looked down, she could see concrete rooftops, lift-shaft housings, cables, gutters, ducts. She made a point each day of getting up to look out at a certain time when the low, late, yellow-orange sun, raking across it all, crisped wires, posts and planes, and made them sing against blue shadow. Even ugly things had their time of beauty.

She had a pee, rehung her towel, and felt she was of no use to anyone. A wave of weariness came and went. Catching her face in the mirror, she paused… the strangeness of the thing, the fact of it, the falseness of the image, its truth. A plain face, but one of a kind. Hers. Her?

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red…

Coral lips would have been nice – and all the rest. Happily, the face was not as comprehensively detailed as the one that the monstrous magnifying mirror flung back at her when she put her lenses in. That was going eye to eye with a Cyclops.

Coral lips… Ah, well, regrets were part of life. Hettie, yes, that was a regret, Hettie, three floors down in Cultural History, Hettie with her coffee mug and crosswords – “Six across: ‘accountant with a harelip’ “ – presenting her with a pumpkin, home-grown; Hettie on her Honda, her laugh like a car starting up; formidable, funny, delicate, loyal – Hettie, who had loved her too deeply. And she had shied away from it, she who looked at things straight. She had hung back because she’d felt ugly and unlovable and only half-believed it, and never let the love in, not really. She never acknowledged it: that was the crime. That was the regret. Years, those years of love. And then it stopped. Hettie stopped, without argument, explanation or accusation. It was like a yellow flower that had dulled overnight and turned its face away. There had been occasions, moments, chances, when she could have spoken, named the thing, its beauty, its impossibility.

She had tried to make amends.

“Hettie?”

A silence confirmed that a single word, the vibration of a voice, was all it took to connect them across time. It was like a book falling open at the page where you’d left it.

“I’m phoning to say thank you.”

“For what?”

“For loving me.”

A new silence, the size of a sky, extended itself. She listened to Hettie’s breathing – eloquent, close, unsettled – and waited, a shamed penitent.

“Thank you. I appreciate that. It’s something.”

“I should have–”

“Shhh…”

They gave it over to silence, in deep communion, then said goodbye.

Whenever Hettie had looked at Silvio, her volatile face recast itself into glacial repose. He referred to her as The Clam. He also called her The Hiker, Cat Person, and Hecate. But he was always kind to her. That was Silvio. A buzzer bleeped: her 10 a.m. meds – she ignored it. It’s a form of love, kindness, isn’t it.

The couple next door were trading insults. It made her sad to hear their voices through the wall. Vera and Donoghue. She had heard the names shouted and screamed. They used a name as a club, to bludgeon and bruise, provoke and subdue. There was no respect, no honouring of a name. Still, it must be hard living on top of each other in one room. Neither Vera nor Donoghue greeted her if they saw her putting out the rubbish. To them she was a blur. It was as if they didn’t know her name. She gave her hair a perfunctory, pointless comb-through. The scrap was more strident than usual and she closed the bathroom door as she left.

It was eleven already. She’d factored in delays, but she’d got lost in the past and now time was short. The last thing she wanted was Meals on Wheels barging in. Madonna santa! Good thing there was no chance of Vera popping in for a cosy chat or to borrow a cup of powdered milk. She managed a spirited chortle-cough. Without bending down, she wedged her feet into her loafers.

She sat on the edge of the bed with everything in full view and focus. Her heart was beating – of course it would – but essentially she felt a serene conviction. She’d come to her decision over time. It was not impulsive. Pulling open the drawer of the bedside table, she retrieved the three envelopes she’d taped to the underside. One envelope was thin, addressed with a name. The other two bulged with tablets. She set them in a row next to the two glasses of water.

She picked up the photograph by her bed – another face, a face behind glass, the image overfamiliar and fixed, one moment in time tasked with conveying an entirety. Yet he was there, and her fingers touched his cheek. Softly, in a clear voice, as she – as Silvio – had done many a time, she recited Sonnet 130.

          My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; 

          Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; 

          If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; 

          If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. 

          ...

          I grant I never saw a goddess go; 

          My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground: 

          And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare 

          As any she belied with false compare. 

The old words. One last time.

She placed the photo back in its usual place. Without haste, she spread a towel on her lap, tore open an envelope, and gathered a fistful of tablets. A thud, close by, broke through and she jumped. Tablets scattered. Her eyes darted to the window. On the sill lay a small bird, its body at a tilt, one leg stuck out, one wing fanned. A gleaming eye. She gasped. For several seconds she could think of nothing but the little creature: it might be in pain, alive; it could be helped. How could she carry on with that happening. The farce of life! She rose and, stepping on tablets, made her way to the sill. She brought her face to the glass. The poor thing – how could she reach it?. Distress rose. A pounding on the door and Vera yelling, “Effie! Effie! I need your help!”

Michael Pettit is an artist from Cape Town – a painter – with works in the SA National Gallery and other major public collections. He also writes. A Pushcart Prize nominee, his stories and poems have been published in The Barcelona Review, Meniscus, Thin Skin, and other journals. They have been shortlisted, placed, or won competitions including those of Wells, Hastings, Parracombe, MTP, WestWord, Bournemouth, Hammond House (Editor’s International Choice award), and the 2025 Plaza Short Story Prize judged by Booker Prize winner, Damon Galgut.

Listen to the author reading this story:

This party blows. I fold my arms into an elephant’s trunk. I trample through the apartment, bumping people’s drinks, answering each, “Watch it, buddy,” with a full-lipped trumpet. She sees me. Puts down the Franzia. I know her ivory skin. We touch trunks (twine wrists) and know our feelings through animal magnetism. That’s our signal. ‘The elephant.’ The signal to leave. Only for mid-size events. Talking makes me nauseous. We go together.

Big events get ‘big cats’ and at the wedding she hunts me through the taiga forest of groomsmen and stepmoms. I know because each of her steps are deliberate. She avoids stepping on cousins or branches. Her eyes are snow leopard blue, dress like pelt white. She’s trailcam beautiful. I am the only creature who understands that predator in the rented VFW1 hall and her needs, her signal. She wants to leave.

For one-on-one situations you need subtle signals. She doesn’t like the nurse. Or what’s said. She sticks out her tongue, retracts it, at the nurse, at the doctor, at the receptionist, at the bald woman next to me in the waiting room—‘the frog,’ I know—and I carry her home. Our bodies flatten onto the kitchen tile. We rest under an Arizona full moon. We crawl, alone in company. And croak. She stares unmoving beneath kitchen window glass and, as we live through the sleeplessness, I wonder why the Harvard Museum of Natural History can preserve beetles, dinosaurs, safari fodder, birds of every color, glass flowers brittle as life is long, but not frogs. Taxidermy doesn’t prevent extinction but at least it’d keep her frozen in some stance I would understand, some wordless silhouette that gives meaning through symbol. I stick out my tongue. Retract it. She croaks.

Funerals are big events again but I mumble through each conversation with a kitten’s uncertainty. I imagine every photo of us repainted by Susan Herbert. People expect me to cry but I just put my paws atop the coffin, wedding band biscuiting. Nobody knows the signal. The embalming stench, I can no longer pretend is Kamchatka breath. I stare at the hearse driver’s windshield like I’ve found a camera in the wild. The reflection shows I am no longer the king of the jungle. Without a signal, I don’t know what I am.

I am critically endangered to myself and others. I guzzle another Tom Collins. It’s been long enough for the elephant to begin forgetting everything he desperately wants to remember. The TouchTunes plays Adrian Gurvitz’s “The Way I Feel”. I trumpet mourning. Last of my kind. But I refuse to be exhibited, to be stitched and positioned next to an animal that isn’t her, in a stance easily translated. Shirtless, I frenzied charge across the dancefloor. I may be acknowledged but I will never be understood. And for the final time my trunk reaches from the singles night tar pit trap and I sink.

Marco Visciolaccio is an author in Asheville, North Carolina. He edits Flash Fiction for French Broads Lit, a publication focused on celebrating authors in Southern Appalachia. He yearns for the unsolicited email.

Website: visciolaccio.com