'Climate Change' by Jay Kelly

In the forest at Tibradden, where we spent all our time that rare, real summer of 1995, we dreamed your dream of escape. If you don’t leave the place you grow up, everything becomes a monument, you said on the bus out one day. Imagine seeing the same stuff every day, all your life. That didn’t sound like a bad thing to me then. I thought nothing of the leaden outpost from which we’d sprung, only of you, and this abundant acreage in which, undisturbed, we improvised verdant bedrooms, studies, attics and gardens. Now you live in Bangkok. You live in colour; in greens, mainly, I suspect. I have stayed behind. I have chosen monuments.

I come here only in September, when the leaves themselves become sunshine, even on grey days, to grey lives. Now a “wooded area”, our forest has shrunk. We never carved our names on the oaks or beech. To do so would have seemed cruel, for we felt them as alive as our own bodies. Like parent and newborn, we didn’t know where they ended and we began. We branded our bodies against their bare bark.  Each tree, a third party to our union, a gentle conspirator, both host and guest.  

Like all things overly known, I have contempt for this town, particularly in summer. Its sewer scented streets on weekend mornings, dappled with hopeful travellers from more optimistic places, framing gentle fictions in their camera lenses. But then, another September, and with it, a quietness.  

I take to the wood and the earth itself, with every radiant, death-defying fallen leaf, yields forth all it retains of you. You could have been my perpetual harvest, but I could not leave. Though in September, your light in each remaining leaf, I gather you still.

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First published in the Fish Anthology (2016).

'How to Change the Oil on the Car' by Kim Steutermann Rogers

We were taught to jack it up. We were taught to crawl underneath and unplug and drain the oil into a metal pan. To replace the old filter with a new one. To put the drain plug back in—don’t forget to put the drain plug back in—and fill the engine with oil, 5w30 for extreme Chicago winters. We were taught how to check the oil level and check for leaks. While Dad watched TV in the back room with the car keys in his pocket, Mom taught us this would make independent women out of us.

'The Devil You Know' by Audrey Burges

I am a considerate villain, and you let me in because I only use the finest pomades on my long mustache, which I twirl with practiced elegance and tapered fingers tipped with the smoothest of fingernails. You unbar the door because I only take my spiraled lollipops from the sweetest of infants, and I use words like “dastardly” and “ruffians” in sentences punctuated by laughter that trills in a melodious arc. I am not a rogue, simpering in silence while sinking calloused hands into a pocketbook. You open your wallet and your arms and yourself to me because my polished shoes and brass buttons and white pinstripes shine like the sun. I cast no shadow. I am transparent as a shopkeeper’s window. My business card is thick like rich cream and embossed with the words “up to no good.” You pin it to your refrigerator with a “MAMA NEEDS COFFEE” magnet beneath a child’s crude drawing of a cat. I poisoned the cat, and I know that you know it, because I wear my heart on my sleeve—it’s this silver cufflink, just here, as shiny as everything else about me. My car is the one on the curb outside, the one with the hood ornament shaped like an angel and a trunk full of puppies and kittens I stole from the Baby Animal Emporium. I know you have your choice of malefactors in this world, and though my reputation as a scoundrel no doubt precedes me, I do not take my invitations for granted. The field is thick with ne’er-do-wells who will wrong you without style or grace, but I do not lurk in dark corners or send ill-grammared messages through the veins of some anonymous computer. You welcome me for tea. I stir mine with a dagger.

'Defect' by Shareen K. Murayama

For the Asian-American who did not Become Doctors

From time to time, my mother calls and asks how I am doing. It’s May, closing of grades, another year, and the same. The mountain doves ebody their bird-brains, planting nests in frangible locations. It rains patches of hay that I don’t fish from the lawn and gutters. My mother updates me with her updates from our family — the ones that don’t speak of me (ill or well) because no one flocks to me in an emergency. Her silence imitates them. I look over my valley, a quiet community of those not recognized within or without. In recent years, whole family units have defected here, the Land of Pish, denuded of old wives’ tales. At customs, suitcases are screened for antiquated hooks and sinkers, while hope chests are recycled for the mountain doves. Everyone feels so much lighter and pink. My mother calls from time to time, from some other distant land, and asks how I am doing, and tells me your shoes have always held more water than mine. Sometimes we don’t talk. We allow the birds to sing, before and after nesting, to anyone and no one.


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First published in The Red Tree Review, August 2020.

'Our Lady of Perpetual Help' by Jan Elman Stout

1. He asked for her left ring finger. A small ask in the grand scheme, really. She’d still have the right. And did she really need it? I’m left-handed, she said, pleased she’d spoken up. But wouldn’t she appreciate the challenge? Had he underestimated her? 
   
   
2. As long as he had her finger, he might as well take her whole hand. If she loved him she’d give it to him. If she loved him with all her heart she’d give it to him and be pleased she had. But I need it. He shook his head; she was overreacting.
   
   
3. He wanted her right arm. He needed it. How much of it do you require? After all he’d done for her. So ungrateful. Now when she gave it to him it would no longer feel like a gift.
   
   
4. His uncontrolled diabetes led to kidney failure and he had to be put on dialysis. If she gave him a kidney they could spend more time together. I’d like to think about it. Really? It’s not as if she can’t live without one. Why, he’d give her one of his if the tables were turned.
   
   
5. And still his diabetes was out of control. He developed floaters and blurred vision before losing his sight. He knew she’d give him an eye. If I give you an eye that’ll be the end of it. He pouted. He closed his rheumy eyes. He turned over and faced the wall. She  was always so dramatic.
   
   
6. His body continued failing. His enlarged heart worked as hard as it could but couldn’t keep up. He had trouble breathing and was fatigued. He peed constantly. His legs, ankles, and feet swelled as big as balloons. He needed her heart; he wasn’t asking for the world.

'A Pondering of Velocity When you’re too Scared to Move' by Tommy Dean

My son stands at the end of the driveway, the tip of his rubber soles balancing in the shadow between roadway and cracked cement. Safety an invisible line I think, I demand, I can control by saying, “Be careful”, but the wind, the universe, the controlling variables of our lives, don’t give a fuck, so I count the steps in my mind, brace myself to sprint, holding back my body, because this is independence, this imaginary tether I’ve created, a facsimile of trust, when why would I ever let him go? The road is too scary, a version of a video game, where we don’t respawn, we don’t rematerialized to make the same mistakes again, where we learn the algorithm of nature, of drivers distracted by another algorithm of beeps and chimes, alerts of someone asking for money, wanting attention, that dammit this driver can’t afford to give in this tensed second of my son’s life, of my life, a patterned doomsday of coiled muscled emotion that borders on mania, released in the fragile prayer, of being careful. A haunting from the living, those ten feet that one day I’ll never bridge, or jump, or stumble through, or climb, or plow ahead, hands on my knees, a gap yawning.

'Reckless' by Kim Murdock

They stand alongside the canal, hand in hand, the mother's low heels pressed against the curb of the asphalt roadway, the boy's knees poking out above wellington boots like two pale eggs caught in first light. The mother wears a moss green wool coat with an oval brooch of painted flowers and grips a thin black clutch in her other hand. The coat is too heavy for this time of year, but it brings comfort.

Behind them, the canal lies dark and still. So still in fact that this east/west ribbon could be mistaken for a rain-slicked roadway. Behind that, a tangle of scrub presses against a concrete wall that cuts the horizon. They are on their way to the kindergarten, or maybe the grocery store. She is unsure.

Behind the concrete wall lies a factory, a perfect study in greys and nubs of manufactured texture. Steel structures crawl skyward while inverted funnels yawn indistinct powders that weave through the fog. All but the loudest emergency sounds are trapped and reduced to a low hum. Sometimes she catches the workers changing shifts. They call out to her Elise! Elise!, and she waves and waves and waves back.

Behind the factory lies the sea, where black depths and crested swells push like an open hand on the small of the back to another coast, jagged and wild, heath scraping her ankles, swaths of pine, her name the wind and flowers shoved recklessly into pockets. Where a laugh caught in the throat rises to the clouds.