OXEYE DAISY — JENNIFER LANG

You confront him, hands on hips, say, So, did you enjoy that? and he asks what and you say, Your 80th birthday party, a little belated? But he doesn’t realize it’s belated, having lost track of time, no longer able to recall the day he was born. All the guests—your sorority sisters, his fraternity brothers, your friends from Lawyers’ Wives, his from high school across the Bay Bridge—gone, leaving only the two of you in the reception room still awash in UC Berkeley colors with blue-and-gold mini basketballs and plastic cheerleading pom-poms you placed on every table, and me: your second child, only daughter, grown woman with still unanswered why-questions. He tells you it was nice and you say, Good! your voice implying more along the lines of Good because I planned it by myself! or Good because it’s my turn next year and someone better do the same for me! when he leans in, toward you, while I lurk in the doorway, putting presents in bags, observing as you lean in, toward him, hearing his I love you and a loud smack, followed by your I love you, too, making me wince. I get your fifty-nine years of marriage cemented by two children, nine grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and adventures on every continent but can’t get beyond all the other buts. But his quarter-century betrayal. But your rash decision to stay together. But his diagnosis. Last but of all: your ensuing rage, ending in I-can’t-deal-with-him-anymore-so-I’m-moving-out at age seventy-eight. Honestly, you behave like a sixth-grade girl, plucking flower petals on a daily basis, altering the words I love him-I love him not as I stand, a witness, wondering how to solve the pronoun problem: who is really losing whose mind here—him, you, or me.

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American born, French by marriage, Israeli by choice, Jennifer Lang writes mostly about her divided self. Her essays have appeared in Under the Sun, Ascent, Hippocampus, Full Grown People and on Brevity’s One-Minute Memoir podcast. Honors include Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays nominations and finalist in 2017 Crab Orchard Review's Literary Nonfiction Contest. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Raanana, where she founded Israel Writers Studio and serves as Assistant Editor at Brevity. Find her at http://israelwriterstudio.com/ and follow her @JenLangWrites.

BEEPERS — EMILY COSTA

The old man sells Dad beepers in a dark store that smells like we’re inside a cigarette. Other guys sit on folding chairs and watch. The old man sounds like he needs to clear out his lungs, like he needs to cough for a whole year to get it all out. He has a voice like a baby rattle. He has glasses halfway between regular and sun. They’re brown-yellow, but you can see his eyes. I don’t want to see his eyes, especially when he’s talking to me. He’s like the old man at the candy wholesaler. I don’t want to talk to them, these old men, but they always talk to me. Dad says she’s just shy, but they keep on me. At the wholesaler, I usually run off because it’s big enough to run off in. I run until no one is around and then I slide my hands over the big smooth bags of Frooties, the boxes of Sour Punch Straws. But the beeper store is small and there’s nowhere to go. I stay and watch them argue about price.
             Dad sells the beepers he buys from the old man. He sells them in a glass case in the front of the video store. Beepers are just one extra Dad is trying out. He sells incense, pogs, video games. He is thinking of selling ice cream, of buying the empty spot next door.
             Dad has a beeper. It’s just black. If I had a beeper, I’d get see-through blue or pink or purple. I don’t need one, though. I don’t go anywhere like Dad does. Dad goes everywhere. Sometimes I’m with him, sometimes he takes me and my sisters, but then Mom comes to pick us up at the video store. We give her a hard time about leaving. Dad lets us take candy. Later, we eat it in front of the TV without him.
             But we have a black cordless phone. We have an answering machine with a robot man’s voice and we check messages as soon as we get home. When we need Dad to call us, we dial his number, then our home number, and wait.
             When we want to say I love you, we press 1-4-3 and wait.
             When it’s an emergency, we press 9-1-1 and wait.
             We wait, we wait.

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Emily Costa teaches freshmen at Southern Connecticut State University, where she received her MFA. Her writing can be found in Hobart, Barrelhouse, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Memoir Mixtapes, and elsewhere. You can follow her on twitter @emilylauracosta.

A LESSON IN LOVE, TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN — SIONNAIN BUCKLEY

Daddy came home from work with a special wrapped package. Me and Millie and Meg were jumping all over the place just to see, and it was better than we could’ve dreamed because he opened it up and it was two baby bunnies, little ones so small we could scoop them one in each hand.
             “Can we name them can we name them?” we shouted at him, nuzzling our noses into the bunnies’ ears. Mama came into the doorway when she heard our screaming, wiping her hands on a dishrag and looking at Daddy.
             “They have names already,” he told us. “The black one is Hass and the white one is Feff.”
             We took up these names straight away, while Mama pulled Daddy into the kitchen and whipped him in the back with the dishrag. “Hassy!” we cooed. “Feffy!” We passed the fluffy creatures between our six small hands.
             They were instantly our new favorite things, two extra twitchy-nosed sisters all of a sudden. We carried them in our pockets until they couldn’t fit anymore, we cuddled them on our shoulders, watched as they grew as big as little pillows, and softer. We loved them and loved them, learned gentleness from their small paws, and trust from the rise and fall of their sleeping chests against ours.
             And one night, when Daddy told us we were having a special Sunday dinner, he called it a word that sounded almost like our two best friends, and it smelled so good, and we ate it with relish, licked our bowls clean, licked our thirty fingers till they sparkled, and learned then about sacrifice, and about loving someone so much you want to put them inside you.

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Sionnain Buckley is a writer and visual artist based in Boston. Her work has appeared or is slated to appear in Winter Tangerine, Wigleaf, Jellyfish Review, Strange Horizons, and others. Her flash fiction has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions, and she is a 2019 Rhinebeck Resident with The Seventh Wave. She also serves as a prose editor for 3Elements Review.

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR — KELSEY IPSEN

Melanie cut Caitlyn’s hair outside in the wind and all the separate bits of it flew into the bushes, into the trees, into the neighbour boy’s garden. We had cackled like sticks underfoot watching the brassy strands, the trash of her, tear across her backyard like Caitlyn was a hurricane, a choking wind, a force to be reckoned with. I saw the neighbour boy with braided bits of it in his pockets on Monday. He took them out, fingered them, while we learnt about integral calculus and copied figures into tiny squares.

We all wanted to be like Caitlyn. Caitlyn who tore from place to place and commanded the attention of strangers, easily, just by moving her body. We watched her and noted the way she did not hide her skin, the way she laughed louder than anyone; these the wild ways in which she did not apologise. She scoffed at the tools we used to make ourselves presentable so we stopped brushing our hair, refused to even when the knots started clumping our heads together. We stopped shaving and let the spikes of us claw through our tights, all sharp-tipped and spire-like. The edges of us blurred as we pooled together our lunch money, our tampons, our clothes. Our ideas rolled over and over our tongues. We talked our thoughts into being so many times we could not remember who they first came from, we talked the thoughts into being so old they felt new again. The whole time we pretended to ignore, but did not ignore, the neighbour boy who stalked around our edges with his hands in his pockets. His hands in Caitlyn’s dead hair.

When Caitlyn leapt over the garden wall we linked hands and listened to the neighbour boy howl. 

Under Caitlyn’s belly grew a part neighbour boy, part hurricane. She told us it would be a girl, bigger than all of us because it came from us. We bent our heads forward to hear it gathering strength. It sounded like rustling leaves, it sounded like eolian tones. It was calm before we told everyone. 

We felt each others’ stomachs, small and hard in comparison to Caitlyn’s. We could hear the wind whipping under her skin now. We chose her dresses, big and ballooning. The neighbour boy’s parents sent him to the army and slathered new concrete over the parts of the wall that were crumbling down. They wanted Caitlyn to disappear but she would not, not when we were there stood like a circle of salt. We paraded in the streets with bare feet, bare faces. We wild women. Let everyone see us. When the hurricane was born we opened all the windows in Caitlyn’s house and let her wind-cries carry out into the night.

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Kelsey Ipsen is a New Zealand born writer who lives in France with her husband and half-wild cat. Her writing can be found or is forthcoming in PANK, Molotov Cocktail, Gone Lawn, Apt and elsewhere. You can find her online at www.cargocollective.com/kelseyipsen

THE INTERSTATE — DINA L. RELLES

It was just over the Pennsylvania state line—where the road widens and silos rise up on either side and the welcome sign says Pursue Your Happiness—that the rains came, first soft, then in sheets, so we slowed, flicked on our blinkers, but soon you couldn’t see a thing, it was anyone’s guess where the lanes were, the other cars, the horizon. Some stalled right there in the middle of the highway, but I made it to the shoulder with a car in front of me and another behind and we huddled like that with bumpers almost touching while the worst of it passed and (I shit you not) Michael Stipe sang “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” over the radio. I texted short messages to my husband, tapped a tweet about how we don’t see enough kissing on street corners, then looked back at the four serene faces of my children, spit sliding down their cheeks, temples sweat-damp, returning from a visit to my grandmother whose second husband died earlier that day (not the first one she really loved, who died years ago) and oh, how hard it is just to remain, yet here we are all of us trying. Then that sky changed from blue-black to rust so I clicked the turn signal and slipped slowly onto the interstate as we made our way a few more miles to exits, then back roads, past the private pond and bike path, the decaying barns in deep red, each of our cars disappearing one by one into the fog of familiar places until alone, on that final stretch, my shirt felt soaked, skin-stuck, as if the rains had reached me, and I thought how in our little time here, at least we can be stranded strangers seeing each other home.

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Dina L. Relles’ work has been/will be in The Atlantic, matchbook, Monkeybicycle, Passages North, DIAGRAM, and Wigleaf, among others. She is the Nonfiction Editor at Pidgeonholes and Assistant Prose Poetry Editor at Pithead Chapel. More at dinarelles.com or @DinaLRelles.

BRASS — MELISSA OSTROM

In the dim station, close to the tiled wall, among a press of harried people, near the clean passing chords of a saxophonist’s bebop, Ruben had stared. Not at the woman, technically. He’d been admiring her coat. His mother had worn one exactly like it: a navy all-weather Count Romi from Neiman Marcus, with brass buttons, a bit of a buckle on each side of the waist, and pintucks that formed neat rows down the front. (And wasn’t that how he remembered her—not at the end of her life but at the beginning of his? A knot of hair at her nape, the grip of her hand, and at the school door, the firm hug, his brow briefly branded with a button, and then her “Be good,” the swift release, and a cloud of lemons and lilies. Chanel No. 5 stayed longer than she did.) He was sorry. He’d only toed up the hem to check the color of the lining. (And yes—just right—a satin-like crushed violets.) Truly, Officer.

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Melissa Ostrom is the author of the YA novels The Beloved Wild (Feiwel & Friends, March 2018) and Unleaving (Feiwel & Friends, March 2019). Her stories have appeared in The Florida Review, Fourteen Hills, Juked, and Passages North, among other journals, and her flash “Ruinous Finality” was selected for The Best Small Fictions 2019. She teaches part-time at Genesee Community College and lives with her husband and children in Holley, New York.

POLES OF INACCESSIBILITY — F.E. CLARK

Pole of inaccessibility: the centre of the largest circle that can be drawn without touching land.

Olivia and Steve learnt to use a pair of compasses at primary school, to stab the needle-point of the instrument into the paper, swivel the pencil round. Her impatient fingers couldn’t make the ends of her circles meet. His circles were perfect with their invisible joins. Olivia ditched the compasses, made her own circles, organic and joined like frogspawn, she wrote her name with a circle over each letter i. Steve drove her crazy by making her i-circles into eyes or glasses, or owls with glasses, once a pair of breasts—then, later the planets began to appear. 

From Point Nemo, a pole of inaccessibility in the Pacific Ocean, the nearest land is approximately 1670 miles away; at times the closest humans are those in Space.

The launch was a carnival. Afterwards, Olivia looked up to the sky often, trying to imagine Steve floating out past the blue in the dark. It didn’t seem possible, and then it wasn’t. Steve fell—‘Mission Failure’. The craft falling, the flames and the launch replaying again and again on the television, on the radio, in the newspapers, while Steve was back to earth, and gone, into another vast uncharted place, a graveyard of spent space vehicles there in the depths where no-one ever went, just lying on the ocean floor. With continents of garbage floating above, thermal vents surging from below—a place of impossibility and darkness, of strange noises and beasts.

When the margins of land are not defined accurately the location of a pole of inaccessibility is also inaccurate.

It was not possible to recover the remains, it was not possible that there even were any remains, it was not possible for her to go there, wherever ‘there’ was. When Olivia was twenty-four, a year after Steve’s mission failed, she went on her own to a tattoo parlour and had a tiny space-ship inked under her left breast by a tattooist with a huge beard who smelt of cloves and touched her so tenderly it made her cry. He thought it was because his needle hurt her and kept apologising, but she told him, ‘It’s not possible’.

Nemo means no-one.

Olivia sat every day in the same chair at the window, holding her hand over her secret space-ship as she rocked back and fore. She insisted on seeing the stars every night. She wept on her ninety-eighth birthday because it was cloudy—the care-staff thought she didn’t like the cake they brought her. It would be a few years before they discovered her secret tattoo.

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F. E. Clark lives in Scotland. She writes, paints, and takes photographs—inspired by nature in all its forms. A Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions nominee, her poetry, flash-fiction, and short stories can be found in anthologies and literary magazines. More details can be found on her website, www.feclarkart.com, and she tweets intermittently at @feclarkart.

GROUP — CHELSEA VOULGARES

Ours is a twelve-step, and we have addictions of all kinds: sex and love, overeating, gambling, drugs. We take turns and hold it in our apartments because we do not like church basements. 

We sit on beige couches, or a purple futon, or in Cindy’s case, the floor. We hate folding chairs and styrofoam cups. We hate smoking (except for Shawny—that’s her particular compulsion, but she respectfully takes it outside.) There are no refreshments. No seven-layer dip. No Pinot Noir. There are, however, ten boxes of Kleenex, one for each of us, so that we can honk and mist and clear our throats while we confess. 

Deanna fucked her coworker in the bathroom of a Starbucks. Frida traded her mother’s ring for painkillers. I ate two gallons of rocky road covered in a half-inch layer of hardened chocolate Magic Shell. Some of us think we got this way because our dads didn’t love us, or because of that guy sophomore year who farted while we went down on him, or because our dopamine’s not right. Some of us have no idea why. Our addiction’s the thing we do that makes our brain go blank and pure and white. Our habit makes the committee in our head go silent for a full three seconds. Until the moment passes and we return to ourselves. 

For now we wait in this room together, the quiet sound of New Age flute in the background, and listen to each other in the space between our next mistakes.

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Chelsea Voulgares grew up in a Rust Belt town in Ohio, trapping lightning bugs, watching horror movies, and singing in the show choir. Now she lives in the Chicago suburbs, where she’s working on a collection of flash fiction and a novel. Her work has been published in journals such as Passages North, New World Writing, gravel, and Jellyfish Review. Her story “Hotbox” was longlisted in Wigleaf‘s Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions of 2019. She is the editor of the literary journal Lost Balloon.