'When Your Parents Take You to a Faith Healer' by Tom Walsh

After a seven-hour drive, I stretch in front of a whitewashed shotgun shack of a church on a lakeshore in northern Maine.

Lorelei Slacker stands in the doorway. I’m on guard—her severe look triggers a strong dislike.  

She’s a faith healer, a prayer hermit who gave up earthly possessions to do God’s work, to tap into the divine healing stream and cure blasphemous disease or, in my case, deformity.

Inside, the church is bare but for some pews and a lectern. Purple swim goggles hang from a nail by the door, the only splash of color.

“They’re for baptisms,” says Lorelei, who’s watching every step my 15-year-old body takes.

My parents believe she can “cure” my webbed feet, a curiosity that doesn’t bother me, but which they believe is an omen of the apocalypse they alternately fear and desire. It’s not just a little extra skin between two toes; it’s full-on webbing, like I’m part puffin. My best friends have my back, say “it’s cool,” and will slap down anyone who teases me.

My folks are timid; my growing independence frightens them. I’m no longer scared by their punishments, or their talk of eternal damnation for my choices, for the pronouns I insist on.

Indulging them occasionally makes my life easier, but the Church of God’s Healing Power proves more than I can bear. For 18 hours on Sunday, Lorelei, my parents, and assorted parishioners pray, speak in tongues, faint, and lay hands on me.

Before dawn on Monday, I swipe the purple baptism goggles, slip into the lake’s cleansing waters. I aim for lights on the far shore, strong in the faith that my God-given feet will propel me to a future of my own making.

'Detached' by Anika Carpenter

The man opposite me has been eyeing my chest since we left Euston Station. I don’t want to think about my breasts right now; I’m reading a novel. A Biologist and I, by proxy, are exploring a fish market in Norway. A halibut ‘shiny as freshly polished brogues’ is urging the Biologist to join him for dinner. She’s declining, citing deadlines. But, the Halibut’s smile is salty, and the crunch of ice as other fish are picked from trays and parcelled in paper reminds her that life is easily half lived.

Unbroken observation of my chest infects the story’s dialogue. The Halibut flounders, ‘You should be ashamed of the way you’re pressing your pretty hands against the glass of the refrigerator, trying to seduce me with your in-depth knowledge of oceanography.’

I shake my breasts loose and hand them to the man sitting opposite me. But, a few lines back into my book, there is sighing, and when I look up, there is also squeezing. I scoop up my breasts and bundle them into the overhead luggage rack. The man sitting opposite me departs at York.

By Newcastle, the Halibut and the Biologist have dived off of Skorpo Island, swayed with kelp, joined a choir of clams. By Edinburgh, they’ve decided against birthing mermaids.

Online, the train company’s lost property portal instructs me to enter the colour, size and distinct identifying features of the object/s I’ve lost. Five results pop up. None of the breasts on show are mine. Maybe mine are still in the luggage rack? Perhaps a cleaner tossed them into a rubbish cart where they’re filthy and cold, pressed up against sleazy headlines.

News comes via a mountainous postcard   ̶  ‘We’re touring Tromsø! Bounding around Bergen! Resting beneath the Northern Lights, celebrating the redirection of charged particles.’

'Tiny Town' by Will Musgrove

To make all the town’s problems small, the mayor shrank it down to the size of a poppy seed. Soon the mayor mistook the town as a garnish and ate it atop a Caesar salad, trapping the microscopic denizens inside his apathetic body. Realizing what he’d done, the mayor swallowed cyanide to secretly poison his constituents. The press would eat me alive, he thought. The mayor died a few days later, but his people survived. They went looking for a new home, navigating the mayor’s decaying veins and muscle fibers to settle in his earlobes, where they trumpet day and night, “We are still here. We are still here.”

Debut Flash: 'Sailing Off' by Alexandra Packer

Carl sailed off the Clifton Suspension Bridge in June 1970, two weeks before the salvaged steamship SS Great Britain finally came home down the Avon.

The jump guards must have already been fixed on the walkways by then because Carl got the whole film crew up the Leigh tower with him, using his neat bullshit story:

“Let's test the shot for when she passes,” he said while we grumbled about lashing winds and heavy kit. He even wrote his piece to camera, said he’d practice it up there.

I should be angry he made us watch but really, there wasn’t much to see. He was a dot before any of us could scream, smaller than the swallows swooping up above. Then gone. All that extra height, and for what?

I remember thinking, stupidly: “Why not wait? Didn't you want to see her come home?"

Back then, it felt like it should have mattered. They spent weeks diving for the scuttled dame in perilous storms. They pulled her across the sea all the way from the Falklands. Thousands came to witness her procession towards glorious resurrection.

Thousands, but not Carl. They looked for him for weeks, too. He was still down there when the hulking black wreck got dragged down the river. Still down there now.

I go to see her sometimes now that she’s been restored, all gleaming and polished stillness. I think: what good was it fixing her up if she’s just going to sit in a dry dock?

I had a dream a while back: they found Carl’s corpse and sailed it down the Avon on Brunel's old ship. We waved and cheered from the banks, welcoming him back like Christ.

'Lovers' by Vincent Anioke

I am 42 the first time I whisper those words—I love a man—hopped up on bitter bourbon, shivering eyes closed, dingy neon bar—I love a man.

I am 8 the first time I see a man naked. Friday night. Beer-sipping Papa watches NTA News with a steep forward lean, like he’s trying to disappear into the screen. Mama unshells groundnuts into a bowl on her lap, the cracks slow and tender like each nut is living, breathing, hurting.

“Tufiakwa,” Mama says, her voice crimson with sudden disgust. My gaze shifts from a carpeted battlefield of plastic velociraptors to her burning eyes to the television. A police officer with a wrinkled, important face is speaking. Behind him, two men stand bare. Their taut skins reveal the shape of bones. Bloody welts clump along their chests and shivering legs. Their blurred palms are clasped in front of their genitals. Bowed heads disguise their eyes. Lovers. Caught. Dirty Act. Mob. Mpape Motel–the officer’s words framed by grinning yellow teeth. Papa starts: wonders never cease, this is what happens when the West, all their sick shit everywhere, even at Silverbird cinema now, FedEx-wrapped Gomorrah. Mama’s shells crack faster, splintering, missile-thudding into the bowl. Strange new lines carve her face. Something has hardened in my stomach, so I close my eyes, breathing in deep to recall the scent of Friday nights: draught beer, leaking sofa foam, salt from the rising ocean of groundnuts. The smell lingers, but it no longer drifts down my throat, no longer expands in my stomach.

Later, after Papa turns off the TV, but before he ruffles my hair goodnight, he kisses Mama full on the lips. I watch how she unveils a smile’s shadow, how she grabs his waist, how she disappears into him.

'The Museum of Sheep' by Anne Summerfield

‘When I was a boy,’ my grandfather says, ‘sheep still lived high on the fells and on mountain sides. You’d see their white fleeces in the distance like puffs of fallen cloud.’
 
The wall screens display different breeds of sheep with names like ancient places. There’s a table where you can touch tufts of grubby wool and sniff them if you dare. The butchery room has red warnings but I sneak inside. Model legs of lamb look like limbs hacked from a tiny child. Grandfather finds me weeping. When I wipe my eyes, my hands smell alien, animal. 

'when love was all we knew' by Amanda Huggins

Driven ashore by a storm, the trawler lads take shelter in our cottage, dropping oilskins by the door, crowding the Aga as I pour mugs of tea.

‘Never thought I’d see you back here,’ he says. ‘London, wasn’t it? The bright city lights?’

I remember his kiss behind the science block, something malty-sweet on his breath, the heat of his skin through my school blouse.

‘Yes, London.’

I thought the city would be mine forever with her grit and spit and swagger, all art and song and high kicks, lunches at French Frank’s, drinking half-chilled wine, falling asleep on the Northern line. But she was mine for only a moment; a headlong train racing by.

And I recall her as a different city too; the school trip we took that hazy day in June, splashing through fountains in Trafalgar Square. I lost my footing and he grabbed my wrist, whispered something I barely heard, each muffled word bringing a blush to my cheek.

‘It’s good to see you again,’ he says, shaking the seawater from his hair, a single salt-drop brushing my lips like a kiss. ‘Was the pull of the sea too strong?’

I remember the herring shed behind the Anchor, his hot breath on the nape of my neck, him fumbling with the button on my jeans. And I remember the girl who snagged him fast with her unborn child, recall caring much more than I expected.

‘Something like that,’ I say, as my husband catches my eye across the room.

‘Call on me when you’re passing,’ he whispers.

And I remember, long before London, before the disappointments and the missed chances and the settling for something less, there was a time when love was all we knew.