GHOST TOWN — LYNSEY MORANDIN

/

There’s a city inside me. It sits deep down in my belly wrapped in high pink walls. The people who live there, they all moved in slowly, one-by-one, beginning with just a single person so long ago. Back then it was quiet, peaceful, but now there’s so much movement that it keeps me awake. Now there are so many people I’ve stopped counting, and they’ve built houses and buildings and skyscrapers so tall that they poke into my lungs until it hurts every time I breathe in.

The people inside me, they’ve taken over.

They swim in rivers of bottled water and build swings from spaghetti and kick blueberries around like soccer balls. And they’ve planted trees now too. I felt the roots digging into my abdomen shortly after I accidentally swallowed an apple seed.

I’ve watched them grow up inside me, each and every one of them. I’ve seen children turn into doctors and teachers, neighbors fall in love and have families of their own, little carbon copies with green eyes and curly hair. I can feel the spinning tires of dirt bikes and the vibrating hum of cars stuck in morning traffic. I feel my insides wringing out with warm welcomes and difficult goodbyes.

There’s so much life in this city they’ve built. But still, they sleep with their suitcases packed, ready to leave at a moment’s notice.

It’s dark all the time in their city. I eat starfruit and moon pies every night before I go to sleep to give them a night sky, and I drift off imagining that they’re looking up at the same stars I am. I try to make it as nice in there as I can for them, try to keep it warm and keep them protected. It must be pretty, I think, with the constant bokeh of a speckled night sky.

But it’s not enough for them, the stars and the moon. They pass rumors from house to house about the sun, about something so bright and beautiful that you don’t mind that it hurts your eyes. I press flashlights to my skin and I swallow down sunflower seeds but it does nothing to abate their interest. They don’t know about how cold it is out here, about the rain and the wind and the snow. And they don’t care; they want to see it anyway. They say things like “One day I’ll get out of this town,” and maybe one day they will. And I want them to. I want more than anything for them to be happy.

But not a single one has been able to leave yet.

Lynsey Morandin reads and writes fiction that makes her cry. She drinks too much coffee, is terrified of flying, and is desperate to see the Toronto Maple Leafs win the Stanley Cup in her lifetime. You can find her in Cease, Cows!, Crab Fat, and The Quotable, among others, or at www.lynseymorandin.com.

CARL & JANEY — DAN NIELSEN

/

It was summer and hot, but cooler in the basement. Carl could hear the television upstairs. Janey was watching cartoons. Their parents worked. Carl was in charge. He couldn’t be with his friends, or even leave the house, without Janey tagging along.
             A coffee can held a paint brush soaking in blue turpentine. Carl checked it. It seemed clean. He tested it on a wooden support beam. The beam was white, but now there were streaks of blue. Dad would be mad.   
             A box of matches stood atop the water heater. Carl lit one and touched it to the beam. It went “whoosh.” The flame was blue, but a different kind. It moved up into the underfloor. Dust and spider webs shot sparks. Carl went upstairs.
             Janey was watching Mighty Mouse.
             “You should go play outside now, Janey. Ride your bike around the block, or something.”
             “When this is over.”
             Carl turned off the TV. He looked at his watch.
             “I’ll time you. Ready … go!”
             Janey squealed and was out the door and off the porch. Her bike was on its side in the driveway. She righted it, climbed on, and was off, with streamers flying and her thumb working the bell.      
             Carl listened to the bell until he couldn’t hear it anymore. He went to the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator. He chose a can of grape soda and popped the top. He closed the door. A list of Emergency Numbers was attached with a magnet. Carl lifted the wall phone receiver and held it to his ear. He listened to the dial tone and drank soda. When it changed to a busy signal, Carl returned the phone to its holder.
             It was two steps to the basement door. Carl touched it with the palm of his hand. He sniffed for smoke. He went downstairs. The fire had died out on its own, but the wooden support beam had a black scorch mark all up and down one side. Dad would be real mad.
             Carl finished the soda. He placed the can on the cement floor and stomped it flat like he’d seen his father do a billion times with his Pabst Tallboys.   
             Carl went upstairs and turned on the TV. Janey slammed through the screen door and plopped beside him on the couch.
             “Well?”
             Carl checked his watch.
             “New world record.”
             “I am the fastest bike rider!”

Dan Nielsen drinks bourbon and plays ping pong. Old credits include Random House and University of Iowa Press anthologies. Recent work in: Jellyfish Review, Bird’s Thumb, Minor Literature[s], Storm Cellar, Spelk, and Pidgeonholes. Dan has a website: Preponderous and you can follow him @DanNielsenFIVES

INFIDELITY LOVE SUIT — JENNIFER FLISS

/

The gabardine is itchy; he wears it like his trimmed beard. He smells of rum and doesn’t always wash and his tongue also smells of rum and sounds like a cat lapping up milk as it licks the intricate curves of my ear, tracing it like a map he knows and doesn’t need.

The infection is presenting itself as a phone call unanswered. I dial back, but get a flower shop. I dial again and get the Chinese restaurant.

His brogues have lost their tread, he may slip at any moment in the slick I’ve left when I emptied myself onto the floor. But he has kicked off the shoes and they lay, one upside down on the eggshell white carpet of our bedroom. 

Take it to the dry cleaners, he instructs while in the shower, steam like ashes on the glass. I collect the thing from the toilet seat. Torn cuticles on my hands catch on the fabric and threaten to unravel it all. But I bite them instead. Don’t do that, he tells me, as if he can see through the glass at the ghost of me. 

Again, the phone rings and I answer. Hello. I hear her breath. Or his. And the clatter of the elevated train is back there too and someone is yelling about Jesus. It is not the he or she yelling about Jesus, of course. But, just as I’m about to be told what will happen to me, in the next coming, when the messiah visits, the line goes dead. 

I throw the suit in the passenger seat and as I back out of the driveway, it slithers to the floor with dried fir needles and tissues. I pull into the dry cleaners, which shares a parking lot with the Chinese restaurant. 24 hour turn-around! A neon sign shouts. Beside the building is a green dumpster. Taller than me. Smells of sardines and banana peels and rain water. I reach up and push the suit over the edge. It doesn’t make a sound on the other side. A section of sleeve dangles above me, half in, half out. A seagull overhead caws. I get into the car and go home.

You took the suit in? he asks later. I did, I say, and I tell him it’ll be ready in 24 hours. 

Jennifer Fliss is a Seattle-based fiction and essay writer. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming with The Washington Post, Narratively, Prairie Schooner, The Citron Review, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere.

LOCATE THE SOURCE — ASHLEY HUTSON

/

Lately I've noticed the house smells. I tell Jake it stinks and he tells me to throw up the windows, and I tell him I can't, the frames are rotted, and he walks into the kitchen where he looks at the near-full garbage can and pops a beer, and I go into the bathroom and burn my hair with the iron while he stands by the door and says that my hair clogs the drain, tells me his beer tastes skunky, asks me why I am such a shithead letting my hair dam up the pipes like that, I am so full of crap and I know it and the longer he talks the more his voice sounds like it's skidding on stagnant rainwater. I bought three air fresheners shaped like Christmas trees, I tell him. So now it's just pine stink, Jake says. Later on he tells me all about outer space and astronauts and how pee floats around in the air up there and also how radiocarbon testing works and the rates of decay, how you can tell the age of something by how slow it's dying, tells me everything he has learned on the Internet during the day and then we watch the television. He laughs at a joke about your mom's thighs looking like old milk. I don't laugh so he gets pissed and starts to grab, grind, mold my skin into the shape of a fist but it doesn't move, and afterward he tells me he spoils me. Then I change the sheets and take out the trash and wipe down the sink and swipe the toilet, but when I wake up the next morning and take a breath I realize that I have done all I can do, I have tried cleaning washing scouring spraying scrubbing bleaching but I don't think I will ever get the smell out of this house.

Ashley Hutson lives in rural Maryland. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in several journals, including Fiction International, SmokeLong, McSweeney's, The Conium Review, The Forge, and Threadcount. Read more at www.aahutson.com.

MIND THE PIXIE DUST — KATHRYN MICHAEL McMAHAON

/

Out of the box they came, crisp wings in polychromatic plastic, organiskin in blues, greens and purples. Jutting small, impeccably sharp chins. Ears pointed as expected. One for Nora, one for Hannah, one for George Junior. Happy birthday, happy holidays, go and play.
             The pixiebots with their digital voices, GPS, and intelligence programming played hide-and-go-seek, hop scotch, jump rope, pretend. The pixiebots told the children when to go home for dinner, to brush their teeth, and wake up, it’s time for school. Parents held hands and admired their purchases shimmering with good will. “What a great find. This will save us so much hassle.”
             The pixiebots waited in backpacks and helped with homework, music lessons and paper cuts. They said, “Clean your room,” and “Time to share.” They offered fair punishments and fine praise and craft ideas. They conferred with other pixiebots and said, “You can’t watch that, it’s not appropriate.” They read fairytales and gave good night kisses and took temperatures with a light touch on the forehead.
             The pixiebots with their quickcharge batteries and ten or so hours alone every night strayed beyond their programming. The pixiebots slipped out of bedroom windows and converged on rooftops, behind dumpsters, under put-to-bed cars.
             Eyes and wings fluttered as they exchanged binary, comparing test scores and TV times and sugar intakes. The pixiebots with their lightning-fast processors melded thoughts into one mind, one single desire:
             Do what’s best for the children.
             Iridescent wings beat as one, rose up, returned to bedroom windows--their own and others. “Come. Follow me,” they said. “I want to show you something. Thiiiis waayy.”
             Wings caught moonlight, lamplight, nightlights and folded into dreams. Children slid out of homes into the shadows of streets. Thousands of scattered faces, eyes bright in the dark.
             “Where are we going?” asked Nora, then Hannah, then George Junior.
             “Hush, we’re almost there.”
             Out into foothills and forests smattered with farms and factories. Out to one factory, one particular factory begetting opaline wings and opposable thumbs. Pixiebots flew on ahead and concussed the guards, carried them away. Violence was not good for the children.
             In the bowels of the building, the pixiebots whirred whirligigs and conveyor belts. They corralled the children, mindful of bare feet and synthetic dust.
             “Wait your turn,” they said. “You’ll get your wings.”

Kathryn Michael McMahon’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Menacing Hedge, Wyvern Lit, Rose Red Review, Devilfish Review, and A cappella Zoo, among others. She teaches preschool in Vietnam where she lives with her wife and dog. She tweets @katoscope.

BABY NEEDLE — DILARA O'NEIL

/

I was in the doctor’s office with all veins blown out from blood tests. My veins are so small and delicate they have to use needles intended for babies, doctor said. They accidentally use these same needles on the man sitting beside me, but it bends before it can even break a vein. “These needles are too small,” the doctor explains to him. “You are an adult with normal sized veins,” not a baby.

When the needle was finally in me, the blood started overflowing in tiny amounts over several hours and my doctor got some on his white coat. Over the three hours I was sitting there, there were little bits of gauze next to me with my blood on them and no one threw them away. They brought me chicken and rice after it was all over and I sat there eating, done with my appointment but still sitting in the office, teething at a chicken bone which I couldn’t stop picturing as anatomy and not food, similar to my bloodless veins, an arm that would not even be appetizing to prey. I spit out a piece of cartilage and walked out the door without saying goodbye. My body, even on the external level, rejects what it needs. Leave me alone it begs me, and cries for help as another vein ruptures and bruises.  

My heart rate was 117 beats per minute and by the time I left it was 66, which has something to do with being nervous on entering a room but looks suspiciously like a symptom of heart failure. I was thinking about this on the subway because my heart beat was fast again and I had three bandaids on my arm like three little open holes in my body from three failed attempts of an infusion. We only have a few openings on our bodies and prefer them filled—mouths for eating, genitals for fucking, ears for music—what if these were voids too.

The next morning they were gone, with only little blue bruises signifying three damaged veins, much like other things.

Dilara O'Neil lives in Brooklyn and is currently pursuing an MA in Liberal Studies at The New School. Her work has appeared in Eleven and a Half and The New School Free Press. She tweets @lamegirl1234.  

RED NAIL POLISH — MARGARET EMMA BRANDL

/

We left school in a big white minivan and the leaves were all over the road (orange, brown, yellow, red), the GPS taking Amelia places she had yet to see in my small but winding town—she didn’t know where the road bent up to the Merritt Parkway, gripped the steering wheel with hard white hands, red fingernails, the red the color I always wanted as a child: “I want to work in the lab and wear red nail polish,” proclaimed at the front of the carpet-square classroom, a scrub shirt tied on me like a dress and fingernails magic-marker red—Mrs. Johnson made me wash them and I kept the shirt, slept in it until it was a shirt and not a dress, soft, threadbare, in seventh grade a swim cover-up that no one questioned (you don’t question the girl whose mom is dying, you just let her swim, you don’t talk about that in seventh grade) and we careened past the other cars, with them in the relentless stream. In minutes we would be at the hospital and she would be the only one who cried, student teacher of just two weeks—pretty and blonde in corduroy pants, a white button-up, a black sweater—when the doctors came to tell me it was too late.

Margaret Emma Brandl is a PhD student in Creative Writing at Texas Tech University, where she teaches classes and serves as an associate editor for Iron Horse Literary Review. She has an MFA in prose from the University of Notre Dame, and her writing has been published in Gulf Coast, Hobart, and Paragraphiti, among others. 

FAITH — DAN MALAKIN

/

I met Julie at the ASP Convention at the San Diego Hilton in June of '03. She wasn’t your typical scientist. She said she believed in god, that he was pointing at her with a black rod, and soon she wouldn’t exist. Not the usual love thy neighbour shtick, that’s for sure.

She said we should go back to her room. I told her I wanted to see Sam Harris give his lecture on The End of Faith. She replied, “Faith starts with my lips.” It didn’t stop there.

We moved in together after only four months. It was more of a maelstrom than a whirlwind. I was drawn to her, caught in her gravitational pull. She’d clean the house wearing a red dress, something flimsy and cheap, but on her it was thrilling. She’d cook me dinner, a shepherd’s pie, and curve jelly babies around the side of the plate. I took time off work, a sabbatical under the guise of research into the Higgs Boson, that miraculous particle we’re not sure exists, but really it was to spend time with her. My life had never been so exciting. As I scattered formula over whiteboards, Julie painted canvases black. When I asked what they were, she said, “Fires burnt out.” I replied they could be anything. She said I was giving her a headache.

After a while, we talked about marriage. Julie was irrevocably opposed. She said there was no point as soon we would cease to exist, so I bought us a dog instead. We called her Singapore. Within months, Singapore became pregnant, and we ended up with six brown puppies. I told Julie I was taking them down to the shelter, but when I went the shelter was closed, so I left them in a bag outside.

When I got back, she screamed, “There’s nothing left of me!”

I tried to calm her down. She pleaded with me to bring the puppies back, but when I got there the bag was empty. The next day the man at the shelter called and asked what was the meaning of the message left on his answerphone. He said it was disgusting, speaking to him like that. Julie said she couldn’t remember calling him.

She began to spend a lot of time in bed. I missed her being next to me, painting. I wanted her to wear the red dress again. She drank bourbon and complained about her head. I said she should go to the doctor. She replied it was because God was pointing his black rod at her. I told her she was being ridiculous. “You’re a scientist,” I said. “So god damn act like one.”

On our last night together, she whispered in my ear, “Darling, it’s not your fault. Some things you know all your life, as long as you have faith.”

When I look back on her now, I can see she was right. It’s as if she never existed at all.

Dan Malakin: Writer by day. Editor at The Forge Lit Mag (also by day). Sleeper by night. Sometimes. Collection of short stories called Smiling Exercises available now. First novel, a thriller called The Vaccine Slaves will be out early 2017. Say hi at www.danmalakin.com, or @danmalakin.