SICK GIRLS — LAUREN BECKER

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For Kelly Davio

The doctor said not to, so I went ahead and gave up. Because when the doctor looked concerned about the diagnosis, contrary to education and training in keeping a straight face when dealing with both the ridiculous and the death sentence, I knew I had permission. So I went ahead and gave up.
             Giving up is like flying. You are untethered to ordinary tasks: don’t open mail, don’t go to the dentist, don’t clean your apartment, don’t learn new things, don’t eat healthy. I decided to eat a lot. I had always wanted more and giving up created opportunity. Five months later, I emerge, living, from a haze of sugar and fat. I am 21 pounds heavier than my already heavy prior frame. Five months later, I don’t recognize myself; I didn’t think it would, but it matters.
             I try everything. Weight Watchers, juice fasts, cooking healthy foods, starvation, but I always end up eating whole pies and plate size cookies and deep, overfilled bowls of pasta in creamy sauce. I go to Overeaters Anonymous. I realize I am not special. Relief and disappointment battle at first, but relief wins out when I meet the other sick girls.
             Sick Girl #1 has breast cancer. She thought that cancer treatments would leave her thin and gaunt, but her stoic doctors give her steroids, which make her hungry, which makes her eat cake and whole pizzas until she is puffy with bloat. She is fat, and she is pissed, because—Jesus—insult to injury. Cancer is supposed to at least make you thin. She cannot die looking like this. She cannot live like this, either. She finds me at OA.
             We both find Sick Girl #2. Unspoken, each of us likes Sick Girl #2 better. She is sick because she was fat, and she has gotten even fatter. She has lost one foot and the other is ready to go and a foot is not enough weight loss to make a difference.
             We meet outside of OA, usually at Sick Girl #2’s place, because she has more trouble getting around. She has a wheelchair and hand controls in her car, but she is uninterested in adjusting to her circumstances. She is not brave. None of us is brave or inspiring. We are sick girls with resentments and fried chicken and French fries and pans of brownies and bricks of cheese. We are too fat to be poster girls. We are too hungry to stop.
             Sick Girl #1 gets sicker. She is off steroids and on chemo and radiation and, even when she eats, she vomits. She does not come to Sick Girl #2’s apartment much anymore because the smell of our food nauseates her. And she misses it. The ritual of engorgement. She misses being fat. I miss liking her.
             Sick Girl #1 dies. Just like she wanted, she is thin. We mourn Sick Girl #1. The fat one. In memorial, we expand to fill the empty space. 

Lauren Becker is editor of Corium Magazine. Her work has appeared in Wigleaf, The Rumpus, Whiskeypaper, Tin House (online), and The Best Small Fictions of 2015. Her collection of short fiction, If I Would Leave Myself Behind, was published by Curbside Splendor in 2014.

OUT TO SEA — VICTOR VEKTOR

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Imagine a boat. Did you do it? Good job. Now imagine that boat being lifted by a wave the size of two houses. The wave crushes your boat, sending you into blackness. You taste salt. Open your eyes, dummy. The houses you pictured, picture them again. Good job. You’re in one now. The salt is gone. You smell dinner. Fish, no, steak. Filet mignon. Good job.
             A woman with long blonde hair places the steak and mashed potatoes on an oak plank table and invites you to sit down.
             No time! No way!
             The woman starts floating in the living room. Water spurts out her eyes, now her mouth. Her hair turns green. Her stomach turns brown. You lunge at her, sinking your teeth into her medium rare tummy. She screams. Her scream sounds like your voice. Blood runs down your mouth, your face, your neck. Tastes like salt.
             Next time try talking to her. Open your eyes, dummy. A wave the size of the Empire State Building is coming.

Victor lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His writing has appeared all over his closet on loose sheets of paper.

I'M THE STEAK — ANNA GRAGERT

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Me. Standing on pavement peppered with plastic. Alone. Waiting. Surrounded by man-manipulated metal. 

Unsure of the direction. No compass rose. Eyes wide. Standing before a construction site. Work in progress. 

Lovers brush by. Hands held. Lips pursed. A man strides past. Briefcase: shined. Shoes: shined. Forehead: shiny. The wind whips around buildings. It beats me. 

A herd of men appear. Talking loud. One man pauses. His right finger in his left nostril. 

He looks at my shoes. Sees through them. Pays attention to the dry patch on my heel. My freshly cut toenails. Knows I cannot run fast. Works his way up my legs. Notes the one spot I forgot to shave. Back of right knee. Keeps going. 

There are stretch marks on my hips. My belly button is cavernous. My stomach bloats. Beneath three layers, there’s a scar on my chest. My neck curves. My jaw juts. My hair hangs. Makes his way to my eyes. Waits.

I want to look. Stare at his psyche. Condemn his perversion. Rip that finger from his nose and point it at his third eye. I’m desperate to show him the color of my soul. 

Instead, I freeze. Stare straight ahead. There’s a steakhouse there. I’m the steak. 

He keeps going. Though he knows my body as I do. They hang right. He is gone. 

Others pass. They see something. But they don’t see me. 

Work in progress. 

When Anna Gragert isn’t trying to create a groundbreaking third-person bio for herself, she’s writing for publications like My Modern Met and HelloGiggles, catering to her little black cat, reading fiction for Cactus Heart Press, or wondering if/when she should become a shaman. Check out Anna's portfolio or follow her on Twitter to keep up with her adventures in all things human/creative.

THE MAN WHO DIDN'T KNOW HOW HE FELT — TREVOR SHIKAZE

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"I love you," she said.
             "Hold on," he said, "let me check my pulse rate."
             He put his fingers to his neck.
             "What are you doing?" she said.
             "Just one minute," he said. "I need a mirror."
             "Why do you need a mirror?"
             "I need to observe the extent of my pupil dilation."
             He left her alone on the promenade and went to look for a mirror. He headed for the mall. He thought he might use a mirror in a washroom, or maybe a mirror in a changeroom so that he could have some privacy. His phone buzzed.
             "I don't understand," she said. "I love you."
             "That's really nice to hear," he said. "I probably love you too."
             "Then why did you walk away?"
             "I told you. To check my pupil dilation."
             "I want you," she said. "I need you right now. Meet me at my place."
                He looked at the palm of his free hand. He thought he saw sweat glistening there. "Do you know how to measure skin conductance?" he said.
             "I don't know what that is," she said.
             He squinted one eye and held his arm up to the setting sun, which backlit the hairs and revealed their angle of inclination.
             "Hello?" she said. "Are you still there?"
             "I'm still here," he said. "I'm just checking my pilomotor reflex."
             "Do you care about me at all?" she said.
             He stopped in his tracks. How would you measure such a thing? He turned and headed for the university, where they had an MRI machine. Maybe his cerebral blood flow would shed some light on the matter. But he knew analysis would take time.
             "Could you call back in six to eight weeks?" he said.
             "You know what?" she said. "Forget I said anything. We're through."
             She hung up.
             And his heart broke.

Trevor Shikaze's writing has appeared in American Chordata, Axolotl, Wyvern Lit, and elsewhere. Find him online at www.trevorshikaze.com.

YOUR WAITER IS AN ACTOR — SARAH HENRY

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Your parents take you to the same restaurant every year on your birthday and tell you what a good baby you were. You never cried or fussed in public. You were so great, they wanted another one. The waiter takes your orders with a faint look of relief. He’s got a soap opera name: Devon. This is a fairly decent place. Devon would never inquire about a patron’s accent. There is no Help Wanted sign in front. No french fries on the menu. Devon is dark and sleek as all get out. His nails are buffed. This morning in Shakespeare lab, he practiced falling at the feet of a king. Your parents took you to parties where there were fur coats draped across the beds. They smelled like your mother’s cologne. At twenty you found out who you were and who you weren’t. The waiter brings three salads on a tray and delivers each as if it’s an act of greatness. He remains in character. The tips here are good and the work is steady, but he still has to live in New York.

Sarah Henry lives in the Pittsburgh area, where her poems have appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Loyalhanna Review. More of her work is forthcoming in the new Pittsburgh Poetry Review. Farther afield, her publications include The Hollins Critic and three current anthologies. Humor is very important to her.

A FAMILY IN THE LAST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY — JEFF ESTERHOLM

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I.

She was a newlywed five weeks, red-haired, skin a vivid pink though she’d just settled into the clawfoot tub’s hot, soapy water. The closed-up bathroom filled with steam, beyond the tub the toilet and sink were floating apparitions of white porcelain, the medicine cabinet mirror was glazed with condensation. Her pale green robe hung from a hook on the door that shook when either of them walked down the hall and now, Claire smiled, pressing her eyes against her knees, with Ed coming on the run.

The door swung open and there he was, on the edge of striking a Charles Atlas pose. But, no. His shoulders fell in on his chest, one hand dropped in front of him. Five weeks now, still timid. With his free hand he shut the door and then climbed into the tub with her. He trembled as he lowered himself in. “Hot.”

Claire laughed and leaned toward him, breasts pressed against her legs, and said, “You can take off your underwear now, don’t you think?”

These are my parents, Claire and Ed Strom. She at nineteen and he at twenty-one. I see other couples at that age and they don’t seem ready to be parents, but Claire and Ed, Claire in 1951, she looks ready. And here I come.

II.

In 1951, there were 79,074 miscarriages in the United States. I was one of them.

Claire took the crowded city bus to her doctor’s office, a small, cold clinic in Superior’s south end. Dr. Jordan was an older man with raw sausage link fingers who, when the nineteen-year-old was up on the examining table with her feet in the stirrups, looked like he would have been more at ease in a machine shop on the lakefront, working at a metal grinder, sparks shooting off the wheel like the Fourth of July. But Dr. Jordan was a good technician. Claire told him about the spotting, its increase. The doctor examined her, apologizing for the chill of the speculum.

After the dilation and curettage, after she was dressed, they sat facing each other and he held her hands, a damp Kleenex crumpled and clutched there, in his larger hands, and he assured her that there would be other babies for her and Ed. But I would not be one of them.

III.

This was their world without me.

The summer sun at 4:43 P.M. cuts across the lawn of the three-bedroom ranch. A family reunion in a backyard, the taste of Claire’s macaroni and beef hot dish eaten from paper plates at a picnic table. Ed’s collection of utility sheds abutting the graveled alley, inside old grass clippings, the ghost smell of gasoline for the lawn mower, rust-edged snow shovels, plastic ones with cracked blades. Sons Michael, a lippy child and a stranger moldering with addictions, and Andy, the absentminded one who came across AIDS in Minneapolis.

They were a part of the neighborhood for fifty years.

Now, it was as though they were never there.

Jeff Esterholm's fiction has appeared in Akashic Books’ Mondays Are Murder flash fiction series, Midwestern Gothic, Flash Fiction Italia, Yellow Mama, and The J.J. Outré Review, among others. Upcoming in the new year, he will have a story in Crime Factory and another in Yellow Mama.

OOLOGY — ELODIE OLSON-COONS

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—This Piece was an Honorable Mention in the 2015 Micro-Fiction Contest—

It would be a waste.

A man asked to have his teeth shattered so he could retrieve one. He held it in his mouth while climbing down a tree, like a lightbulb.

The mouth is a spoon for starling meringues. Eggs rot if left unblown.

We have threads loose at the hems from blackthorn, bark scrapes on the inner knee. Willow baskets filled with rags. Backpacks soaked with rain that smells like cedar.

You do not crack them into glass bowls. There is a special drill, very small. We used to pinprick but that was unreliable. Albumen and yolk come burbling out in wet slurps. Sometimes, in a moment of terrible luck, the whole yellow can squid its way out; spherical, unbroken.

Sometimes the shells are thin as foil, gnawed by rats or pesticides: they cave in stickily to webbing, like mosaics.

Oology. Like moons, craters, calico. Spectrum: cream-of-jade to gasoline and indigo. Delicious.

Some collected them late, pierced them, left maggots to eat the not-quite-birds. Wet feathers almost-oiled, translucent beaks almost-fluted. It isn’t right.

You whisk very delicately, some yolks the size of fingernails, some thick and marbled. You chop sugar, squeeze fists of herbs, into the whites hiding thread-thin veins.

We keep them in our cabinets like stolen geodes, lining vanilla ice-cream tubs with cotton wool under our beds. Numbered and named on slips of yellowing paper. Opened, they give off an acrid smell, like steel.

Kingfishers spat fish in our faces. White-tailed sea eagles dove for our eyes. Flashlights nearly caught us, dashing over hilltops. Sirens.

Home, we ate them in pastry, handful, glass.

We go to jail four or fifty-one times. From condor to avocet nest. We deserve it; in our buttery aprons, with our wet hands and hair.

Delicious. Celery straws with baked Manx shearwater, spiced in a clay dish. Soft-cooked golden eagle with warm toast fingers. Four whiskey warbler sours, on ice. Vanilla osprey custard; Earl Grey butter cookie crumble. Redshank omelette with bacon. We eat them together.

If we fell from trees, we too would shatter, soaking from our skulls like split milk, and none to gather us with typewritten labels.

When we were young we loved the tin-wrapped ones, the taste of sugar-paint. Lined up all the different colours. 

Elodie Olson-Coons is a ghostwriter and translator currently based in Switzerland. Her short fiction and poetry has appeared in [PANK], Paper Darts, Lighthouse, and The Literateur. She tweets @elllode.

THE BEFORE — AMANDA CHIADO

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—This Piece was an Honorable Mention in the 2015 Micro-Fiction Contest—

She let the wind of the waves negotiate her body, her dress, a tsunami in the water- wind. My father tried everything to make the boat-house a home. It didn’t even look like a boat. It was a two-story Victorian painted Friday-night-red. He gave it little windowpanes, planter boxes of petunias hung at their bases. The ever-ideal picket fence wrapped around the house like a jagged embrace. He even bought her a dog when we docked in Greece. We named him Catfish. 

She stood there still as a tree, anything with roots, as if she might simply slip from the last stair into the weight, away from the salty red window panes, away from the dishes clanking their lullabies, away from the chair rocking only a tattered bear with no eyes.

“This isn’t just seasickness,” my mother said. Whenever she said this, I would bring her tea with honey and I would brush her wavy, golden hair. She wanted a stillness that an ocean cannot possibly possess. My brother and I were some fishing line between my mother and father, the tug and tautness of battle.

The dreams aren’t as soothing as you might think when you sleep at sea. Instead of the tender shift of weight from side to side in a mother’s arms, it was a slosh of weight, a slap and slush, and too much great depth to live upon. To fall asleep I would pretend I was on a park swing, pumping my legs into the endless sky, like before. 

My mother was baking her famous cherry pie again. We all have dreams we can’t let go of.

We were cheering my father on, his swordfish whipping heavy, like a bad memory. “This is the one,” my brother shouted. He said that about everything, which was both disappointing and full of hope. The animal thrashed its deadly face, trying like hell to get back to the before. We admired its boundless muscle, its silvery beauty and my stomach tightened. I was part of its end and wouldn’t look away as its bright flesh dulled.

The dog barked. No one noticed my mother’s apron ruffling in the wind as she descended the perfect staircase my father had hammered together one Saturday morning, and further still, her supremely quiet slipping down into the sea, from light to darkness, a jelly fish fluttering toward another bloom.

Amanda Chiado is an MFA graduate of California College of the Arts. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and is forthcoming or appears in Best New Poets, Witness, Cimarron Review, Fence, Eleven Eleven and others. She currently works as the Program Coordinator for the San Benito County Arts Council and she is also an active California Poet in the Schools. Visit her at www.amandachiado.com