Author: Shyla Shehan

Elvidarium | Kay Sexton

I’d never spoken to Ronita before we covered synesthesia in English class. To start with her name was weird, and she was weird. She always had chewed off nail varnish and how is that possible? There has to be a day when it’s perfect, surely?

I knew, from the moment Miss Perkins defined synaesthesia, which one of us was going to claim to have it. Magdalena Pike. Magdalena with the too-long fringe that she constantly brushed out of her eyes, the too-prominent Adam’s apple that was bound to raise questions in later life, the fluttery laugh with a hand pressed to her chest (the hand that wasn’t brushing hair out of her eyes). Magdalena would go on to become a hypnotherapist, to recover memories of past lives and end up suing an employer for discrimination because they wouldn’t let her bring in a six-foot pyramid to heal her clients’ endocrine systems.

Magdalena’s instantaneous acquisition of the ability to hear numbers and smell days of the week caused me to eye-roll inadvertently enough to catch Ronita’s attention, so when we paired up to write a piece, she tapped her pen on my desk. “You and me,” she said. 

We wrote about the colors of emotions. Not the obvious red for anger stuff. Taupe was depression, peach was the hour before school ended on a Friday, and jade was the color of a walk with your pet dog early in the morning before the newspapers were delivered. It was okay. It was adequate. It was more fun than anything I’d ever done in English class before. That was how we began, giggling through our creative writing, asking Magdalena snarky questions about tasting numbers as we ran downstairs to our next class, skipping afternoon school without discussion, without guilt. 

We played on swings like little kids, smoked cigarettes like grown-ups, talked like teenagers who’d never had a best friend before, which neither of us had. We became inseparable. But not for long. Three weeks after we first talked, on the peach hour of Friday, we were sprawled in the long grass behind the playing field, sharing a roll-up, when Ronita said, “You know when you wake up in the morning and turn over in bed and remember it’s Saturday and you don’t have to get up?”

I nodded. 

“You know the color you see behind your closed eyelids at that moment?”

I nodded.

“That color…” she inhaled deeply. “That color is elvidarium.”

I remembered that conversation when I heard the news on Monday morning. Heard that she’d taken pills she’d filched from her grandmother’s house – the house her parents thought she was staying at because they were away for the weekend. Her grandmother thought she was at a friend’s house. 

I knew I was that friend. 

I knew she’d woken that Saturday morning, rolled over in bed, said elvidarium to herself and known it was never going to get any better. 

I understood.

About the Author:

Kay Sexton has been a finalist for several writing awards including the Sunday Times Short Story Award, the Willesden Herald Fiction Contest and winner of both the Fort William Festival Contest and the Wollongong Literary Festival Short Story Contest. In addition she has had two non-fiction books and one novel published. 

Madonna and Child with Butter Cow | Zachary Kocanda

with a line from Wikipedia

When I say “Hillshire,” you say, “Farms,” then pull me in closer with your hooves. Spoon me like forgotten low-fat yogurt in the back of the refrigerator and kiss me goodbye before you leave for work. The most sensitive part of a cow is its udders, and the most sensitive part of you is me. But don’t worry. I’m fine. Take your time in the fields. I fear for the tipped cow, but you reassure me—: A healthy cow lying on her side is not immobilized; she can rise whenever she chooses. I follow the goings-on of the state fair, forlorn I can’t join you. The sculpted butter cow is the belle of the ball, like every year. I preferred last year’s design, but I’ll still protect her with my life. I take a twelve-hour shift and monitor the webcam to make sure she’s safe. The exhibit closes soon. I wait for you. A mother and child, alone, behold the spinning cow behind its bulletproof glass. It must be baby’s first state fair—so tiny, a pink bow in her hair, black and white polka dot onesie, little calf. The mother whispers to the infant: “You too are more than toast fodder, baby.” The child fusses. I see them stir before the sculpture has completed its rotation, and I white-knuckle my computer mouse. Hold it, I will to them, You must see this beauty from all sides.

About the Author:

Girls Over The Edge | Susan M. Breall

The thrill of blue, the smell of cold water hitting warm concrete, the chatter of girls by the edge of the pool. It was a white-hot day, a day without current or motion. She sat, awkward and apart from the other girls.  She wanted to be like them, so she dangled her feet on their side of the pool. She rubbed at her sunburned legs as she listened to their laughter and pretended to understand it. She knew she was not like them, with their bronzed bodies and colorful swimwear.  She was a sun-bleached outdated magazine cover, a pair of discarded eyeglasses cast aside on a shelf. 

As she looked up at the wide expanse of sky a boy her same age approached. He had her coloring, her same beyond-white skin tone, her same pale blue eyes, red hair, and freckled cheeks. He gave her a warm familiar smile, then walked over to the beautiful chattering girls and pushed them, one by one, over the edge of the pool. She continued to look up at the wide wonderful sky during the screaming and flailing of limbs. One girl could not swim.

He was more than a brother. He fought every nasty boy who threw banana slugs at her legs. He knocked a boy unconscious who forced her to eat garden snails. But the beautiful drowning girl meant no harm, so when she stopped looking up at the sky and looked down at the pool’s edge where her brother stood, she screamed for a lifeguard who then came running from the back alley behind the changing rooms where he was making out with his girlfriend. The lifeguard pulled the beautiful drowning girl out of the deep water that was about to devour her. She thought how fortunate for the beautiful girl that she happened to be right there at the edge of the pool. 

About the Author:

By day Susan M. Breall handles cases involving abused, abandoned, and neglected children. By night she writes short stories. She is the 2022 winner of the Gateway Review flash fiction contest. Her stories appear in numerous anthologies including The Raw Art Review, Kairos Literary Magazine, Running Wild Press, The Write Launch, Impermanent Facts, Paragon Press’ Martian Chronicles, and Dreamers Writing.