Issue 4

The path is difficult—fraught with slippery spots and broken boards. It was not always this way. Still, the journey is worth the effort. We exchange news, goods, gifts, and help in times of trouble. But years of passage without repair have a price. I begin to make the trip less often. A misstep now can be deadly. With erosion, the distance seems wider. Little holds the pathway fast. The boards are rotted; the space underneath is dark and foreboding.

When the smoke clears, I wipe my charred hands on the fresh green grass. I will not miss the bridge.

I’m sorry, dear, but I had to leave. I packed a tiny pink suitcase and went back to my magic place. I went to live under the branches, inside that hollowed out bush in the front yard of the house I grew up in. I don’t know who owns the house now. No, they don’t approve of me living there. I pretend not to speak their language. I pretend I am a child. They keep having me removed. I go back. That’s the land where I cut my teeth. You can’t own the dirt. It still smells of my childhood.

I sat on my bed and stared at the brightly painted, Polynesian music box. My grandmother had bought it on one of her cruise expeditions.

I cranked its tiny knob and threw open the lacquered lid. A tinny version of “Lovely Hula Hands” wafted into the air. It was a romantic song for a beautiful maiden. No words, however. I decided to devise my own: “Lovely Hula Hands, dressed in rubber bands, la la.”

My mother snarled, “Turn that off. It’s gauche.” I wasn’t sure if she meant the box or me. Or my grandmother. Probably all three of us.

Goosebumps shiver me as my niece recounts her family’s first night in their new home. They’d been sitting in their family room while, outside, rain and dark descended. Her daughter, five-year-old Elyse, ran shrieking from the kitchen. “A pink lady is outside! At the window!”

Elyse’s dad hurried to the kitchen. “Nobody’s there!” he announced. My niece escorted teary-eyed Elyse back to the kitchen. “There she is!” Elyse shrieked. She pointed at the window. Pointing back at her, dressed in the same pink nightgown Elyse wore, stood Elyse’s reflection.

My next horror story, I decide, but with a different ending.

A plaque beside the path we’d strayed from memorialized the meadow as a Civil War battlefield. A spring storm blew through the wildflowers like a ghostly vendetta.

“There’s no meaning but what you make it,” she said, tattooed arms folded over her sundress.

“But something’s guiding me...my dreams...”

“Your intuition, nothing more.”

The sky darkened. Rain.

“Let’s go get high.”

That night, on my rented sofa, paralyzed between waking and sleeping, I saw a spectral girl in a tattered, 19th century dress crawl from the shadows. I screamed awake.

A warning—or just a dream?

Queen Catherine grips the intercepted letter. Mere minutes before in the hands of her lustful husband. Snatches of syntax rise from the page.

The pain of absence… Stricken with the dart of love… Your servant…

What woman is this to reduce a King to a slave?

The letter falls from Catherine’s fingers to the floor. She tramples it as she walks to the mirror.

A matronly figure from multiple miscarriages. A deep furrowed brow. The accumulative impact of the dereliction of duty. A redundant ruler.

Let this hidden jewel prove her value now. Catherine smiles. I’m ready to be alone.

“Nice twist on a classic.” I gestured at the huge orb crackling with blue veins of electricity. In its storm, an eyeball glared without eyelids. “How do you get it looking so pissed off?” My shoptalk was unappreciated. Henchmen—two for muscle, one to scowl—henched me spreadeagled across the globe. The angry eye bored into my back. Voltage prickled my skin. “Well, shit. Now I can’t stop your nefarious plan. If you have one, besides buying the world’s supply of leather pants.” That got him monologuing, while I blocked the eyeball’s view; the team could do their job now.

Outside, an unrelenting sun hurls daylight at the communal farmstead. Parched garden soil cracks and crumbles. Inside the main house, windows darkened by layers of aluminum foil, a single candle illuminates a circle of sweating faces. Those gathered toast the day with cups of tepid recycled water.

Outside, feeble crops wilt and wither. Inside, families celebrate a young life with slices of date cake. They cool themselves with paper fans and sing Happy Birthday.

It is uncomfortably hot everywhere, even indoors. Yet warmth of a different kind also fills this house. And, for just one moment, it's very comfortable indeed.

I knew it was over the moment he jumped down into the dirt with nothing but boots on. The way he dashed up the ramp with ease, his manhood flopping all around, and raised his arms in victory as the monster truck hit the ramp at full throttle. Standing there in all his naked glory, the monster truck flying twenty feet overhead, the crowd going nuts, I knew our love would be so full of white-hot passion that it would burn out in a single night and I didn’t care.

Flames that intense weren’t meant to last long.

nothing rises from a witch's pit, because the curse she put on it as she screamed in rage and pain scares away the children and the adults and the plants.

Nothing rises from a witch's pit, which is still warm days, weeks, months later. We seek out its warmth and don’t mind the screams on the wind. We shelter from the cold as the village shivers.

Nothing rises from a witch's pit but memory, and she is there with us as we remember, and huddle, and mutter her words, we outcast girls, we future witches, and we wait for spring.

Thick, furry neck and gravel voice. Half bear, half ape. Riz. What kind of name’s that?

After he caught you gawking you scared yourself out of sleep every night. Told yourself never! Not if you were down to your last egg. Not with that animal. Imagine his kids! Beast-babies!

Then, a tap on your door — there’s Riz asking with his eyes, and yours saying come in. That gravel voice became butter. You fainted and he scooped you up like you were some princess.

Love’s proof was soon fattening your waistline.

Your sweet daughter was born half teddy-bear, half angel.

Sonny takes a drag of his cigarette, sighs his eyes shut, attempts a butt cheek shimmy. Right. Left. Knees quiet. Dammit. He wrote that he loves King Charles Spaniels. True. Loves dancing. Half true.

David, responding, assumes Sonny can dance.

And while inside the sanctuary of his study, Sonny does dance. In a feely kind of way. The way he feels when the glow of light through his closed blinds holds him. Understands him. Sees him. He bends, he reaches, he cries, he Betty Boops.

Sonny invites David over at two in the afternoon. He chooses his blackberry velvet slacks.

The hearse had come to a stop in front of the cemetery's office. We all got out and could see my mother's coffin inside. The funeral director approached from the office as if trotting onto a ball field. He opened the trunk and, without being asked, opened the lid of the coffin. There she lay as before, hands neatly folded in the lap of her light blue suit. The director looked at us expectantly, as if a man behind a deli counter awaiting our approval of the meats he'd just sliced. I nodded. Transaction complete, he proudly closed the lid.

My bobber, a piece of cheap white-red plastic, bobs up and down a few feet from the boat dock. I saw one at the tackle store that was shaped like a duck, but Dad said no.

“Sing to the fishies,” Other Grandma tells me. I did that last year, and she thought it was so funny that she hasn’t let it go.

“Here, fishy fishy fishy,” I call. Nothing happens. Maybe that’s better. If I catch one, she might make me touch it.

My grandma smells like beer, and the sun has pinched my cheeks too aggressively today.

Giulia placed the rose between the sleeping couple, the poison shimmering green in the dark.

She cursed, fingertip stinging from the hole hidden in her glove.

With each breath, the thieves drew closer to death.

As now did she.

Kneeling beside the bassinet, Giulia ran a blackening finger above the baby’s cheek. “I wanted more for us,” she whispered. “But soon, your father will come. You’ll be home again.”

Giulia pulled back, sweat beading on her brow as the poison spread.

With one last look at her daughter, Giulia stumbled through the window and into the starless night.

"What've you done with our life?" my child-self asks, perturbed. "Why aren't we an archaeologist? Why aren't we winning awards for that book we wrote at sixteen? Why aren't we standing around Stonehenge or on the moon? What've you done with my life?"

I cradle my half-drunk coffee, observe the stuffed animal litter, open doors left wide in their frivolous play, the sound of my husband's voice tease-chatting with them. Someone laughs. The dog barks. I glance at the over-edited novel before me, awaiting a meaning though I'm pleased with the setting.

"Oh," I say, "I'm still working on it."

I went to the bar alone. I wasn’t planning on socializing, but I saw a friend.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“Good.” I laughed: “What was with the armful of shooters at the store last night?”

“Oh, helps me stay good,” he replied. “If I get a bottle, I drink the whole thing.”

“I see.”

“It was bad for a while, but I’m doing good now. I used to wake up on my day off, slam a bottle, and pass out.”

“Glad you’re doing better,” I said.

He died weeks later. Mixed alcohol and pills. It was an open casket.

Two cities, one full of smoke and machines, the other green and full of life. Both cities serve the same purpose: to anchor existence. People in the smoky city live through innovation, bending nature to their will. The residents of the green city live minimalistic lives in tune with nature, with little luxury and a healthy environment. The boy in the smoky city looks through a telescope at the crisp green city and longs for the fresh air. A girl from the green city sees the twinkling lights under the smoky city's smog and wishes she could read at night.

You call me by a stranger’s name.

What happened to his spots? You.

Got 'em lasered off. Your father.

A photograph of you and me together. Your gap-toothed grin like sloughed scales. My face, a stranger set in familiar skin.

How much longer before this borrowed name is inflicted upon another, passed down like a hereditary disease?

Humans speak of our memory as transient. Dissolving like the air I swallow and eructate. How can something no larger than your smile carry the heft of consciousness?

My memories are all I have. They bloom like the algae that fogs the water.

What to take? What to leave? Twelve long years stuffed into trash bags.

I'd snuck into the woods: when it was dark, when it wasn't; when he was home, when he wasn't.

I hid black garbage bags crammed with can't-leave-behind possessions and two toddlers' necessities.

Within days, when he left for an evening with the guys, we left, too.

I buckled my kids into a friend's car, and she and I hunted for the bags behind ghostly trees, beneath the man in the moon's critical eyes.

At the women's shelter, the front lights shone so brightly I felt at home.

One foot in front of the other. Slow and steady. Easy breathing. Long flat roads with gentle hills. Up slope, flat land, down slope, flat land. No need to change. The ground behind is like the ground ahead. No evolution is needed. Use the same rhythm. Step, step, step, step. The same stride: no heel strike, no forefoot first strike, always midfoot-ing it, and the miles pass. You can bequeath that stride to your children and your grandchildren. And they can hand it along to theirs. Up slope, flat land, down slope. It is the same road. Until it isn't.

We're all drinking latte talking about how we were never validated as children. Well, we're talking at each other because we were never validated as children and so we don't have listening skills and it's the era of telling everyone that you're actually not ok but not the era of receiving. So, while I am talking at Cartia about how I was never validated as a child and she's talking at me about how she was never validated as a child, no one tells me that I in fact have a milk moustache from my latte on my upper lip.

Do not ask me to brew you a love spell. Love spells are not consent. You wouldn’t walk into a bar and dump roofies into someone’s beer. If you would, I’m definitely not giving you a spell to control their deepest emotions.

Instead, try a spell to make your hair thicker or your teeth whiter. To be clear, these things won’t make people love you. But maybe they’ll make you feel more confident. Maybe they’ll make you less insecure. Because the only thing less attractive than insecurity is putting roofies in people’s beer.

A little, white house with big bay windows sits at the edge of the woods, between the veils of what can and cannot be seen. Blueprints exist. Deeds of ownership can be traced. Still, none in town recall ever having met any who dwelt there.

No access drive to be found, one must hike the critter path leading from the unused mailbox. Along the way, always, one loses sight of the house. Reach where it should be; the house is no longer there. Only the woods, untouched, shall greet you. Walk a bit more. Turn around. Now it's behind you.

Remember how you used to joke "this dead language isn't so dead!" as we watched Jeopardy and answered etymology questions? Well, apparently, some memorial masons don't know Latin. Or perhaps Mom got distracted filling out the form? (I assume there must have been a form.) I don't know how it happened. But...there's a typo on your tombstone.

Just tell Mom? Easy for you to say. You're already dead.

Yes, yes. I wish someone had taken five minutes to proofread your epitaph too.

Sorry, Dad, this mistake is set in stone. But if it's any consolation, so is the love.

Siblings grow apart. It’s normal. Right?

I moved to the City, he stayed in New Jersey. I was in school for ten years, he fixes toilets. I never married, he spawned three kids.

“The youngest's recital was last week,” he reminds me at Christmas, disappointed I missed it.

I pretend I forgot. Later, I mention the article I recently published in a no-name journal.

He’s genuinely thrilled, wrapping me in a big bear hug. I struggle to return it.

On the drive home I ask myself:

Is this really who you want to be for the rest of your life?

Sitting in my car, which is nearly paid off, in the parking lot of the Rite Aid on Christmas Night, around 11 PM. The lot is empty except for me and one other vehicle, reindeer antlers on its hood, probably belonging to the clerk I see inside. Everything around the Rite Aid—a nail salon and pizza place in the strip mall, the adjacent neighborhood—everything as far as I can see is dark except for the lights inside the store and the slowly blinking garland strung along the roof of the shopping center. There is one hour left of Christmas.