Girls like me cling to youth. Our hands claw at hyaluronic acid life preservers, as our sea-glass husbands tumble gently into middle-age. We hide our post-partum bodies behind Lexapro and filtered Instagram posts. It will be our turn again someday.
Girls like me can shred your self-esteem with a lingering look in the Costco line. We narrow our eyes at the grease stains on your stretch denim, then at your straining button fly. We conjure a tiny smirk at the corner of our plump lips — you suck in your stomach and pull at your oversized shirt.
Girls like me pick at our salads while our boyfriends tear at their rare sirloin like Vikings celebrating their latest plunder. No need to ask if we want dessert. We marry handsome men who proposition us with two-carat rings while they ogle the waitress’s ass. Your table of espresso martinis watches us with green-eyes and knowing glances.
Girls like me are toughened by mothers. Mothers who pinch rolls of skin tumbling over our ballet skirts and bra straps, clicking their tongues like scissors snipping at our loose threads. Girls like me twirl in new dresses before fathers who look through our glass bodies at Monday night touchdowns.
Girls like me are babies with wild ringlets and rosy cheeks. She’s so pretty. What an angel. A perfect doll. Passed from arms to arms, girls like me reach for bright lights and vibrant colours, finding beauty in everything.
Girls like me were prayed for. Girls like me were wanted. Girls like me were loved.
about the author:
Christy Hartman pens short fiction from her home between the ocean and mountains of Vancouver Island, Canada. She writes about picking out the morsels of magic in life’s quiet moments. Christy has been shortlisted for Bath and Bridport Flash Fiction prizes and is a two-time New York City Midnight winner. She has been published by Sky Island Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, Sunlight Press, and others.
Skate where the puck is going and you’ll be ready for the shot, said my father. I was more than ready for it, even though I was only six, and small for my age. My father cut the stick handle down to fit me. He did the same for my brothers, who were younger, though not much smaller, than me. On Saturday mornings we walked to the pond, the four of us, on the packed snow trail through the pine woods. We carried our sticks at our sides; my father called it the farmer’s carry. Our skates we laced together and wore over our shoulders. Duke came with us, his yellow fur standing out thick, his hot breath pluming past his ears. Sometimes we met our friends on the trail, and their fathers, and the bubbly feeling would well up in me, the feeling that everyone around me was happy. We lived outside Medfield, Massachusetts on lots recently carved from the woods and fields. The walk to the pond seemed long; I wonder how far it really was?
If frigid weather came before the snow, the pond’s surface shone clear and black as a dance floor. First ice, the fathers called it. They tried to maintain it as long as possible, shoveling after storms, sweeping away any stray leaves, or “melters”, which warmed the ice they fell on as they decomposed, forming treacherous little pockets. They always went first, the fathers—tossing their boots aside, lacing up their skates, rocketing off the bank like birds released from a cage. The first “clock” of the puck made Duke bark, his deep woof joining the fathers’ eager shouts. My fingers numbed before I could finish helping my youngest brother tie his skates. My father spun around us, lazy and graceful as a broad-winged hawk on a current. Shaky but eager, we rode sideways on our blades, our knees knocking together, our sticks nosing out, sniffing the ice for the puck. Look alive, boys, look alive! my father called, his words ringing out joyous on the winter air. He wanted us to skate with our sticks up, push our bottoms out, cross one leg over the other when we made our turns. He gave up on my brothers—they were too young—but he tried to teach me these things, and I practiced over and over in a corner of the pond where the little kids had their own net, my eyes yearning after my father even as he dug the ice with one toe and skimmed off to join the men’s game.
On the coldest days—which were not the darkest days but instead came in February, when the light was returning and the fathers kept us going until the moon rose and there was woodsmoke on the air—we could hear the pond’s ice groaning, and once we saw a slender fissure race across it, heard a shot and felt the pond shiver with agony. That day, my big toe froze white like a new potato. My youngest brother cried and collapsed in a heap on the bank, and my father sent him home on the moonlit trail with Duke for company.
Skate where the puck is, and you’ll miss your chance. Skate where it’s going, and all you have to do is take the shot. It was years before I knew Wayne Gretzky said it first. All wisdom, all grace, came from my father.
For him, the puck was going to Atlanta. He left us at the end of that winter, heading south to sign a lease with the girlfriend he’d met while traveling for work. My mother took to her bed and various relatives arrived to make sure we boys got fed and sent to school on time. By the time she recovered enough to take up the burden of single parenthood, we were moving away from that place of piney trails and woodland ponds, of old stone fences buried in leaves. I never saw the pond again after that last frigid day, when the ice fired its warning shot and my toe froze and Duke guided my brother home on the moonlit trail. Knowing how quickly wetlands are drained and filled in, I doubt it’s still there, and even if it were, I would not know how to find it again. I’m glad I didn’t know it was the last time, and that I remember the day just as it was, full of fiery breath and freezing wind and the drive to skate, skate, skate into the next realm.
Thirty years after my father abandoned us, I held my newborn son and looked deep into his eyes. I had one game plan for fatherhood: be different from my dad. When I felt my boy’s papery new fingers close around mine, a silent crack opened in my heart. I remembered the earliest days with my father on the pond—before I knew anything about skating or anything else—how he bent at the waist, held my gaze and let me grasp his two index fingers like levers, while he traveled slowly backwards, drawing me towards him across an alien surface. The molecules parted under the pressure of my blades and the sensation of gliding traveled up through my feet and legs, into my belly. I was moving towards my father, but I would never reach him; that was not the point. The point was to imagine myself in some future state, some place other than where I stood awkward and trembling, barely able to trust that the glazed surface would hold me up.
Bonus audio of Mary Ellen reading from her story:
about the author:
Mary Ellen Gabriel is a writer living in Madison, Wisconsin. Her articles and essays have been published in Madison Magazine and Isthmus, along with other regional and national publications. After moving frequently as a child, she is now firmly rooted in the upper Midwest, where she has explored every square inch of her neighborhood lake in her kayak and on her ice skates.
“Mr. Ross is silent.” He had been like that since he came into hospice care; Helen claimed he didn’t even chew or cough. I thought she was being mean. Still, that was the only care instruction on his sheet: “Mr. Ross is silent,” and I hadn’t visited his room yet. Those four words repeated in my head as I approached his door with his dinner: sweaty, bland meat, bleached mashed potatoes, and a pre-opened pudding cup rumbling on a cart with a dozen siblings.
I knocked softly and waited for an answer. (I am not sure why; he was silent—he wouldn’t have said a word.)
“Hurry, Helen! I don’t have all day.” I froze, but Mr. Ross came to the door to thaw me.
“Oh, you’re not Helen,” he apologized with a slightly bowed head. “Still! Come be quick, please.” He opened the door wide enough for the whole cart, but I only took the tray with his name.
The room was stark white. The only reprieve was a TV, which the patient had left off, and two cheap photography prints: one was of a beach that no one who entered that room ever got to see in person, and the other was of a forest infested with lumberjacks. His bed was tidy, and the rolling tray beside it held his keys, wallet, and wintergreen mints. Only dust had touched these items in the three weeks the patient had been here.
“You can keep that,” he pointed at the tray, “I don’t have time for that. Thank you.” He waved his hands, casting the tray away with a spell, and turned towards the visitor’s chair where an ancient leather case yawned.
“You need to eat, Mr. Ross,” I insisted as he fiddled with the items in his case: four pairs of pants, the same number of shirts and briefs, a bag of toiletries, a knife from ‘Nam, and a photo album. “No, no. I have a train to catch. And for that price, there better be a meal.”
I decided to investigate, so I could update his care comments: “They don’t allow knives on public transport.”
He shrugged and put a Walkman in the case. “Maybe… it’s all new to me, so I’ll take anything I might need.” He locked the case, then turned with a saggy smile and nudged his glasses up.
“Where’s the train going?” Was this an old memory shoving its way to the surface?
Another shrug. “I’m not sure. It’s going west, that I know. But I hope spring is nice there; if not, I’ll come back here in March whether they like it or not.” He paused. “I never liked trains.”
“Where’s here?” I asked, ready for another mental note. He gave me an are-you-stupid look and pointed down. When I looked up from where he pointed, he was wiping his cheeks and apologized. “The train has me stressed.”
Mr. Ross turned away and began carefully verifying every photo in the album he kept in the suitcase. On the cover was an old woman with a gap in her teeth. “Who’s that?” I asked.
“That’s my Suzy, my sunflower. She’s out West. I’m going to meet her there.” As he flipped through, I caught glimpses of trees, flowers, and birds: not a single human except Suzy the sunflower.
“Why those pictures? Why no family or friends?”
“They’re all out west now; I suppose I fell behind. I’ll see them with my eyes, so I don’t need photos anymore. But I don’t know if they have trees out that way. Or if they’re green and dance in the spring breeze? Or if they are full of life? Do the birds nest in them, and the critters call their bark their home? I’m bringing the photos just in case they’re different, so I can remember what a lively tree is like.”
I was still trying to assemble every detail for my notes later when he looked at my tray. “You’re very good at talking; you’ve got me distracted. My train will be leaving at any time, and my family is expecting me. Please leave the meal if you must, and I will go.” He zipped his case
and hung his glasses on his collar. I was hesitant. I didn’t need another escaped patient. But he waved at the tray again, and I decided to go along with it.
As I turned, he took up his case and entered his bed, shoes and all. He called out to my back, “Close the door too, it’ll be here any time.” I agreed. I put the tray down, pulled the door’s whistling hinges shut, and the wheels of my cart trollied on to the next patient.
about the author:
Christopher R.A. Adams is a non-binary writer based in Nebraska. They hold a BA in English and Professional Writing, and their nonfiction has been nominated for the Dean Joseph H. Cash Award for Excellence in Writing. This is their first published piece.
The kettle clicks off at exactly 6:48. The whistle is broken, so you have to listen for the silence, that sudden hush of effort ending. You get up, pour water over coffee grounds, stare out the window. The buses are already groaning down the hill. In the balcony below, Mrs. Wahida is brushing her son’s hair, her mouth moving in a slow recitation. Maybe a prayer. Maybe just a to-do list. You can’t tell.
You check your phone. Notifications. A few headlines.
Thousands Flee Amid Escalating Violence.
Confirmed Death Toll Surpasses 10,000.
The thumbnail for the second one is a pile of limbs blurred into dust. You scroll past it, heart squeezing, then quickly forgetting. You open the weather app instead. Rain today. Heavy by noon.
You imagine sending a text to Amal, remembering how she had a way of turning headlines into human voices. She once translated a poem scrawled in charcoal on a refugee tent. She would call your silence by its true name.
But you don’t text her. You haven’t in months. Not since the last argument. You said, “It’s not like we can do anything,” and she said, “That’s what they count on.”
You sip your coffee. It is bitter. You put more sugar in it than you used to.
In the city, life thrums. A construction site is tearing into the earth across from your office. The jackhammer pounds like a memory you’d rather not have. Men in yellow helmets pass around thermoses, laughing. A truck backs up, beeping like a child imitating distress.
Your colleague, Martin, arrives with a story about his dog. Something about diarrhea and a missing chew toy. You nod, you laugh. He never asks about the news, and you never volunteer it.
There was a time, you recall, when people would say “Never Again” with the kind of sincerity that builds churches. Now it’s just again.
You once made the mistake of bringing it up during lunch. The room fell into that particular kind of silence. A silence that protects itself. One woman said, gently, “I think it’s important to take care of our mental health too.” And you nodded. Of course. Of course. Compassion has limits. Everything has limits.
You go to the supermarket after work. You stand in front of the tomatoes. You remember a story you read about a man who was shot while trying to save his sister, who was pregnant. He had a name. You forget it now. You reach for the plumpest tomato.
In line, a little girl behind you is crying. Her mother hushes her in Spanish. The man in front of you wears a shirt that says “Stay Kind.” He’s buying wine and birthday candles.
The woman at the till smiles and says, “Have a good evening.” You say, “You too.” You do not ask where she’s from, although her accent reminds you of a region you saw on the map this morning, painted in red.
At night, you do not watch the videos. But you read the comments underneath.
Where is the humanity?
Why is the world silent?
We cannot look away.
And yet, you do. You look away. You take off your socks. You stretch your back. You brush your teeth. You click the lamp off. The room is dark and still. Somewhere across the world, someone is screaming. But your windows are double-glazed. And the city hums on.
You dream of oceans. Always oceans. Not the peaceful kind, but the vast, cruel kind that carry bodies too far from names. You wake up drenched, heart galloping like hooves over mud. You whisper into the dark, “I didn’t mean to forget.”
But forgetting is not a decision. It is a symptom. Of distance. Of safety. Of privilege. Of being able to choose whether to remember.
You’re torn between the life you have built and the life that is burning elsewhere. The ache of belonging and betrayal sitting in the same room, drinking the same tea.
The next morning, the kettle clicks off at 6:48. You pour your coffee. You scroll your phone.
Survivors Describe Horror.
You pause. You read. The article names the village, names the bodies, names the silence that followed. Your chest tightens. You think of Amal. You type, I read the article. You send it. Small, maybe. But a beginning. A crack in the wall of forgetting.
Outside, it starts to rain. Not the kind that cleanses. Just the kind that falls, and falls, and falls.
about the author:
Wasima Khan is a Pakistani-Dutch writer, poet, and jurist from The Hague, the Netherlands. She won the 2025 Willow Springs Surrealist Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in About Place Journal, Fourteen Hills, Sky Island Journal, Santa Fe Literary Review, Third Wednesday, and elsewhere.
For the near-decade since she crossed over with baby Maryna in her belly, Vira has been wiping up after grubby college students and waiting to rest. She tells herself they are just kids, but she can’t help cursing them when she finds shit-smeared toilets and banisters dotted with hardened gum. The anonymity of the night shift is reassuring (even if she never stops watching for the watchers), but it’s also a drain on her body, knowing all the while it should be asleep. She leans on the mop as if it is a third leg, studies her feet while summitting the marble staircases, and cleans as she dreams standing up. Sometimes she wonders whether running was a mistake. If she can believe an aunt who never left, things have improved, but this is the only home Maryna has ever known.
Most people at the university merely see backdrop as they pass Vira, but one night a med student actually looks at her. He’s studying in a classroom glowing blue from his computer screen when she wheels in her Metro Deluxe Cleaning Cart and uses her shoulder to switch on the overhead lights. Even though she turns away from him, she can feel his eyes idling as she sponges the chalkboard clean and lets herself fantasize. Maryna has grown independent, the president just signed a new order, Vira has lasted this long in the undocumented dark—even has her own apartment now. Maybe this med student can be hers too.
The next night, he’s there again, this time right by the board, so she has to squeeze by him to clean it, and as she does, she looses a giggle that doesn’t sound like hers.
Older than his classmates and far less privileged, Drew is lonely too. She is more his peer than they are.
He won’t take her back to his place. He has three roommates, he says. Vira doesn’t invite him to hers: Maryna. According to the movies, broom closets have a reputation, and the one Vira uses has a cot. Some nights, Drew brings rotisserie chicken that they eat with their fingers and wash down with white wine from a jug. The wine burns her nose, and she doesn’t care that the chicken-grease on his fingers stains her uniform—until the next day when she has to take an unscheduled bus ride to the laundromat. But she smiles as she counts out the quarters, smelling the chicken in her hair.
Then Drew proposes. He’s moving to the other side of the country for his internship and wants her to go with him. Vira isn’t sure of her own feelings or whether he loves her for her and not for the comfort she brings, but the promise of citizenship is enough. She tries convincing herself that acceptance comes with love, but she well knows how rarely that jackpot is won. They start planning their future, and Drew stops bringing condoms to the broom closet.
Then he graduates and is gone.
Her calls to his phone aren’t answered by his voice, “We’re sorry, the number you have reached…” but she hangs up and dials again, every day. For nine months.
Now Vira has a new baby and no Drew and no citizenship. Milk spills and wets her uniform through the night while she cleans shit, scrapes gum, and curses the students. She pumps and bottles it in the broom closet so Maryna can feed it to Tristan while Vira is at work, but the milk only trickles when she’s at home with him during the day. He sucks at nothing then wails and wails with an exhausting hunger. Vira knows how he feels.
about the author:
If we’re talking about my personal idea of the good life, it would be sitting on the beach, surrounded by friends and family, getting to hear their joys and chatter while my face is buried in a good book.
A native Floridian and dual US and Canadian citizen, Sarah Schiff earned her PhD in American literature from Emory University but is a fugitive from higher education. She now writes fiction and teaches high school English in Atlanta. Her short stories have appeared in Pembroke Magazine, Valparaiso Fiction Review, The Saturday Evening Post, and Cleaver, among others. She’s been twice nominated for a Pushcart prize, by J Journal andJMWW, was a finalist for the TulipTree Review’s Wild Women Story Contest, and was a 2024 Jack Hazard Fellow. Wouldn’t you know it: She’s currently at work on a novel. More at https://sarah-schiff.com/
The protesters in the park are shouting about peace. I think you’d find it amusing, if you were here—you’d turn to me, rolling your eyes with a judgmental snort. Peace, you’d say, and let me fill in the rest—they don’t even know what it means. I’d smile and shake my head knowingly. If you were feeling brave, you might let your palm graze my thigh.
Peace. It’s what I’m hoping to find here, today.
In the crowd of shouting teenagers, I spot a small girl in a bright purple coat, no more than four years old, tugging at the straw-plastic hair of a naked doll. A redhead, like you. Who would bring a child to an anti-war protest in late winter? No one around her looks old enough to be her parents.
We met at an anti-war rally three years ago. I lost my balance, and you helped me back to my feet. You told me you’d evaded the draft because of your asthma, while my lottery number was keeping me safe for the moment. We left together, and you took me to your tiny walkup below 14th Street, and we listened to Joni Mitchell’s “The Pirate of Penance” over and over—every time the song ended, you’d move the needle back—until I worked up the nerve to kiss you. By “Cactus Tree,” I was in love.
I spin the cold metal band you gave me around my finger. It’s not as tight as it used to be—I’ve had so little appetite since my discharge from the hospital—but I remember the moment you opened your palm to first reveal it to me.
It’s not real, not to them. But… we know. Chip, would you marry me?
The February chill seeps into my bones, and I tug my jacket tighter around me as I sit on our favorite bench in Washington Square. If I was a woman, you would have brought me back to Central Park, where we met, and sunk to a knee—so traditional!—instead of sliding this ring onto my finger as we stood at the stove, waiting for the coffee percolator.
Peace.
I thought the rings would give us cover. We’d sit in bed and make up stories about our fake wives. Pamela was your high school sweetheart, but you caught her in bed with the TV antenna installer. Janice was in the same secretarial pool as my sister, at a marketing firm uptown.
Snowflakes drift around my head, aimless. The abandoned newspaper by my side reads: California Supreme Court Voids Death Penalty. We planned to visit San Francisco this September.
I stand and jam my hands into my pockets—the ring catches on the lip of the fabric. It’s never done that before, in the year I’ve been wearing it. On my way out of the park, on my way through the crowd, I’ll walk past the spot where it happened.
Peace.
I’ve been asking myself: why us? We did everything we were supposed to. No holding hands, no displays of affection. We lowered our voices so no one would suspect anything unusual about us. You talked about Nixon’s upcoming trip to China. I was concerned about a hole in my boot. Then the boys appeared, four of them, teenagers in ratty coats, hovering in front of us like ragged shadows. One waved a butterfly knife in our faces, demanding money. The others hung back, paradoxically more scared of us than we were of them. We did as they asked, though we only had eleven dollars between us, and no valuables. Except—
“Please not the rings,” you said. In your fear you must have forgotten to keep your register low, and your affect came out. I heard it. I saw on their faces that they heard it. One of the shadow-boys stepped forward, wearing an expression of pure disgust. I knew what would happen, my worst nightmare rising up to greet me, and stepped forward to protect you.
I remember being surprised at how little it hurt when he stabbed me in the stomach. It felt like being punched, but I’d taken harder blows. After that, the memories swirl together like colored oils, and only flashes remain. The sound of the boys retreating, their shoes crunching against the light snow. The reek of urine as I realized I’d lost control of my bladder. Your eyes. Your beautiful, forest-colored eyes, reflecting the moon and nothing else.
It’s too much, the onslaught of memory. I stagger to the nearest bench and settle onto its rotted wood, biting back emotion. I thought I was strong enough to return here, where hippies dance on the spot our blood colored the snow, leaching onto the pavement like it was never ours. I close my eyes.
I try to summon your voice, its soft lilt, so I can beg you for guidance, but you remain silent.
Something taps my leg.
I open my eyes and find the little girl in the purple coat standing before me. She holds her doll to her chest, pudgy fingers gripping the toy by its legs, and her other hand restlessly twirls her hair.
“Are you okay, mister?” She stares up at me with the greenest eyes I have ever seen.
I shake my head.
She nods, considering this.
I scan the crowd for her parents, but I see no other redheads, only her and the absence of you. Maybe they aren’t here. Maybe her father is off in the jungle somewhere, wondering about her.
She pushes the doll in my direction, an offering.
Peace.
“No, she’s yours.” I shake my head again. “But thank you.”
The little girl clambers onto the bench beside me, struggling to hoist herself up. Once settled, she puts her tiny hand on my leg. “I’ll keep you company ‘til you’re better.”
I know it’s a coincidence that she resembles you. But in the moment, I imagine you’ve sent her somehow, the visitation I prayed for. I know it isn’t real. You’re gone. Forever.
“I’d like that,” I say.
about the author:
Charlie Rogers (he/him) is a gay writer, former photographer and aspiring hermit who lives in New York City, writing the same story over and over, ignoring birds and their portents. He is originally from Beacon, NY, and studied literature at Cornell University for some reason. His work has appeared in BULL, Uncharted, and Ellery Queen. Website: charlierogerswrites.com
While Making Out the Lineup for Tomorrow’s 12U Softball Championship Game | Jim Parisi
1. TABITHA, whose mother sent, at the start of the season, a spreadsheet documenting her myriad allergies (line fifty-seven: lukewarm tap water?). Despite the ever-present risk of anaphylactic shock, Tabitha is an on-base machine who sets up the power hitters who don’t need to be encased in a plastic bubble when the team enjoys its post-game snack.
2. AGNES, your best all-around player. She lives at the end of your block with her two moms. You spent numerous nights this past winter in their living room, drinking too many Modelos and failing in your efforts not to burden Holly and Audrey with your tales of woe.
3. MARTHA, who hasn’t made an out since early April, always bats third. Her father set in motion the chain of events that has reduced you to sitting in bed unable to sleep, in an empty house, as the clock approaches three in the morning.
4. MADELINE, erstwhile resident in this three-bedroom Cape Cod, which never seemed cavernous until her mother pulled up stakes in January. You wanted to work out a rotating co-parenting arrangement that would keep Maddie in the house full-time. Becca told you that wouldn’t fly because she and Maddie were moving in with Steve and his three kids. You protested that she had started seeing Steve a mere three months earlier, after your separation became official. You lost that argument and got custody every other weekend, plus practices and games. This year has been difficult, but the big test will come when the offseason starts around six tomorrow night.
5. ROSE, who speaks only when spoken to and sits alone at the far end of the bench. Her mother insists Rose can’t wait to get in the car to head to the field. You recognize echoes of your own mother in Mona’s rictus and the ropy muscle bulging in her neck as she stands along the outfield fence; the yearning for her quiet, sensitive kid to fit in; the living and dying with every at-bat and every chance in the field. You try to visit Rose’s end of the bench every couple of innings; on a good day you can induce a hesitant smile at a corny dad joke. But Rose springs to life on the basepaths, stealing with abandon and always taking the extra base.
6. CASSANDRA, sister of Martha and younger daughter of the instrument of your professional demise, Bill Trager, whose first initiative upon becoming mayor two years ago was to adopt the supermarket model of self-checkout for municipal services, starting with your domain, the public library. Trager’s budget not only replaced clerks with self-service kiosks, it also eliminated funding for your head librarian position. You wonder if your decision to start a twelve-year-old at shortstop ahead of Cassie, who at ten was new to the team, convinced him to seek revenge. Trager sits in the first row of the stands to yell encouragement to his daughters. You hate yourself for lamenting that he is not a more toxic presence in their lives.
7. GISELE or GETRUDE, twins you haven’t seen since they sprayed line drives all over the field at the first practice. You assumed they had quit the team, but on Friday morning, their father texted to say the girls would be arriving at four on the dot, coming directly from ballet class. You fear going into the championship with two outfielders who haven’t picked up a softball in three months. But their surprise appearance is your only hope of averting an embarrassing forfeit.
8. GERTRUDE or GISELE, not that it matters.
9. MABEL, your daughter’s new roommate, whose pinpoint control and natural movement will determine your team’s fate. The girls have had a rapport since the first day of 10U practice, when Maddie raised her hand to strap on the catcher’s gear and Mabel strode from behind the gaggle of teammates to say, “I’ve got pitcher, Coach.” Your throat catches every time you hear parents call the duo “the sister battery.” You tried to make Steve the villain after Rebecca broke the news last fall that their casual dating had turned serious. But things between you and Becca had been on the skids for years. You prefer to remember the Steve who used to smuggle illicit beers under his jacket for impromptu Friday happy hours in your library office. And you can’t blame your former friend for being in love with the woman you fell for, hard, when she trusted your spindly arms to catch her in a team-building exercise at freshman orientation. If you could rekindle those happy hours, you’d ask Steve if he ever finds himself marveling at Becca’s ability to command every room she enters, always knowing the right thing to say to gather a crowd around her; if he’s found the spot on her lower back, an inch to the left of her spine, that sends a shiver through her entire body if you touch it with just the right amount of pressure; if she scrunches up her nose when she laughs at his jokes, the way she used to for yours, before all the laughter stopped.
[OUT: BEATRICE, MURIEL, and ESTHER, triplets on a pilgrimage to Disney. You beg parents not to schedule vacations until after the playoffs end, but every year, one family bolts town as soon as school is out. The girls don’t control their own schedules, which is the only reason you feel guilty for hoping a smallpox outbreak shuts down EPCOT.]
You close your laptop. The printer comes to life down the hall. You press your back against the headboard and finger the ridged border of a red checker, a one-month sobriety chip you awarded yourself yesterday afternoon. You know that no matter what happens in the game, you won’t wake up the following morning beside a lineup of beer cans on the nightstand.
Read by the author:
Jim’s story was selected as the 2025 Honeybee Flash Fiction Prize winner by Tom Paine. Tom had this to say about the work…
Kurt Vonnegut didn’t do book reviews, as he said nothing was easier than sticking a warm knife through the butter of a book. He knew how hard it is to write, and frankly, how noble to try to capture the topside beauty of life while capturing “deeper things” in the nets of words we call sentences. As a fiction professor in an MFA, I try to water the garden, to promote growth. Which it to say: hooray for these finalists. Each shows deep pixelated attention to life, and attention is love. Let me say up front readers have biases, and mine own is toward a writer sharing the strange and grievous experience of living the fleshy life. I want full 3-D communion with the people in fiction others call characters. When writing is artful and attentive to the minute building blocks of a life others call random details, I feel less lonely, and even soul-vitalized. Which is a long-winded way of saying the story that locked me into a shared experience of life was “While Making Out the Lineup for Tomorrow’s 12U Softball Championship Game.”
What an absurd and impossible conceit for a story! A coach pondering the players in a young girl’s softball game the following day. But woven into a coach’s list of pondering, each player comes to life in a grocery list of offhand but life-giving details. But within those thumbnails, the coach unveils a snapped love, alcoholism, and their own splattered but hopeful heart. Art’s secret is that the closer you zoom in on the details of anything, even a random coach’s player list (!), the more it glows with the bickering mitochondrion of a life. So yes, this writer has made something gorgeous out of a coach’s hidden melancholia; shown us the gods in the quotidian. Even a coach’s notes otherwise heading for the trash on the floor of the car.
about the author:
What comes to mind when I think about the good life is vacations with my family: sitting on the nearly deserted beach late in the afternoon, the sun setting behind us, the sound of the waves crashing, the sense of peacefulness. I think I’ll need to make a concerted effort to conjure that image to counteract the sense of dread that pervades my thoughts whenever I think about the state of the world.
Jim Parisi lives in Occupied Washington, D.C., with his long-suffering wife, Beth, and Dolce, a spicy mix of boxer, pit bull, and Australian cattle dog. (Their two kids, Aidan and Nora, have flown the coop.) Much of his free time is spent coaching Little League softball. His writing has appeared in FlashFlood Journal, The Bluebird Word, Five Minutes, Wandering Lights, Club Plum, and ihavethatonvinyl.com.
Mom lets you choose the perfect spot – close but not too close to the water, equidistant from the people to either side, far from annoying kids who might steal your sand toys. You walk right out of your flip flops, leaving them behind you like footprints, plop down in the cool sand, and plunge your fingers in. The drive from the valley felt like it took forever. Mom was crying again. Then she suddenly wiped her face and said in a wobbly voice, We girls just need a day at the beach. You felt her watching you in the rearview mirror, silently begging you to smile, to say something cheerful back to her. Your eyes refused to meet hers. And then she started sighing a lot, which, these days, means she’s going to start crying again. You just stared out the window and watched the green freeway signs fly past.
But now, the sand is soft beneath your thighs and you can feel the crashing of the waves like thunder in your chest, and the wind is wild, whipping in your hair. You fill your lungs with the briny air and look to the horizon. All of this feels like it could almost wash the rest away.
You want to get right to it – run straight into the waves, do cartwheels at the water’s foamy edge, bury yourself in the sand – but Mom says Sunblock first. Standing side by side, both looking out over the water, you pass the bottle back and forth, smearing the lotion over chests and limbs and cheeks. It smells like coconut, and the scent is deeply familiar but also faintly repulsive, cloying.
Honey, can you get my back?
You ignore her. She lowers herself to sit on a towel so that you can reach, and she lowers the straps of her swimsuit over her shoulders. You instinctively look for someone, anyone else, who can do this. But, of course, there is no one. You scan the beach and imagine that every other mom has a husband who does this part, and then they trade places, and the moms do it for the husbands. They both like it because it’s sort of sexy and that’s what grown-ups do. But not your mom. What she told you was: Dad left us. But you know that has to be a lie. He left YOU, you want to scream at her, but she already cries so much all the time, you don’t say anything. You hate how splotchy her face gets when she cries.
You kneel behind her, hold the bottle aloft, and squeeze a big blob directly onto her wide back, sprinkled with moles and freckles. You spread the lotion with the pads of your fingers only, wishing it would sink in faster. That blob was a bit much. Peering down at her hunched form, you think of a Thanksgiving turkey – soft and pink and vulnerable before it goes into the oven. You smear the lotion as quickly as you can, wanting to be done.
When she does your back, she rubs the lotion in her palms first, so it’s warm when she spreads it up your neck, over your shoulders, down the neat stack of vertebrae. Okay, okay, you say, though you know she’s not done yet, and you scamper to the water on colt legs. One day I’ll run away too, you don’t dare say.
Later that evening, back at home in the valley, she undresses in the little bathroom with the light that hums like a beehive. You glance up to see your mother’s back striped with pale streaks – your four fingers. One shoulder glows an angry red, scarlet blotches bloom at her armpits and along the edges of her swimsuit, and you feel guilty, for a moment. That must hurt, you think. But neither of you says it aloud.
That night, you wake in the middle of the night, chest slick with sweat, heart jackrabbiting in your throat. In your dream you were falling, falling. You go to her then, silently, and her room is cool, and into her bed you climb, nestling behind her. Through the thin T-shirt you feel the heat of her skin on your cheek. She smells like the ocean, and your eyes drift shut.
about the author:
Alison is a mother, an attorney, and a lover of all things fiction, living in Santa Cruz, California. Her writing has appeared in Stanford Magazine, Cleaver, Seaside Gothic, Bluebird Word, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review, Short Beasts, and The 2023 Swan Song Anthology. She is working on her first novel.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen myself on a MISSING poster. One version of myself, anyway, a face that never really belonged to me. The chalk-white skin, shock-red beard, deep green eyes—they were always borrowed. My new face, with its porcelain-perfect features, still feels foreign to me, just like this new black hair rippling to my shoulders.
I know the man taping up the poster. I watch him, studying his movements with a mourning so deep I feel it run down my spine, through my shins, and deep, deep down into the soil below.
Diego.
I have nobody to blame but myself.
There are rules. From the moment I could understand human speech, my mother drilled them into me—they’re not like you, and if you forget this, they’ll kill you.Or worse. Until I met Diego, I’d never been tempted to break any rule. I’ve cycled through nine bodies now, a new one every fourth year, and never once allowed myself to attach to a human. That’s the first rule.
The second is not to hang around after a change—too risky. I try to migrate at least a hundred miles for every new identity.
I shouldn’t still be in this city, let alone in Diego’s favorite park. I convinced myself I was stopping here to savor one last autumn afternoon—the new colors unleashed by the change of seasons— before heading south. A lie, of course. As soon as I saw Diego, the truth revealed itself.
I’m breaking Mother’s rules yet again, for one more moment in his long shadow. His face is leonine handsome, and that loose shirt hides a taut, elongated body… but I know better than most how meaningless surface details are. It’s what lives behind those cheekbones that drew me to him.
We met three summers ago, on the other side of this park. I’d lived decades avoiding humans, lurking in the undergrowth at the edges of their lives, but I found everything about them fascinating. I’d spent forty-five minutes imagining the life of the stranger who’d left behind a quarter-filled coffee cup on my park bench. But then Diego appeared, his face etched with consternation, as he taped a different poster to a tree. I waited until he was gone and approached it, studying the inscrutable expression of a tortoiseshell cat named Ralphie. Black on one side of her face, mottled brown on the other.
“Oh, sorry.” I was startled by his lilting voice behind me. “I wasn’t sneaking up on you. But I saw you looking and wondered if you’d seen her?”
I shook my head, profoundly wordless.
“She’s my neighbor’s,” he continued. “I’m just helping out…. We’re worried sick about her.”
That was the moment. I couldn’t fathom being so concerned about someone else’s house pet—it was as if he was speaking to me in a foreign tongue. A language of kindness, an empathy so all-embracing I later believed it might even be expansive enough to include the real me.
“I’m Patrick,” I said, wishing I’d chosen a better name for myself. Mother’s rules hissed at me—never volunteer information—but for the first time, I let myself ignore them.
Here and now, I’ve been staring, and Diego’s noticed. He strides towards me with such purpose that a sudden breathlessness overtakes me—does he somehow recognize me? I should be alarmed at the prospect of discovery, but I’m not. So many nights in our bed I lay still and sleepless, desperate to tell him the truth, or some version of it. I crafted whole monologues in my head, reworking my explanations, but never worked up the courage to say a word of them. The thought of disappointing him frightened me more than the knowledge I’d have to leave.
“Excuse me, Miss.” That last word stamps out hope like a boot on embers. Yet his voice is a forgotten song, a drumbeat calling me to a home that no longer exists.
He peels the top poster off his stack and hands it to me. “Have you seen this man?”
I still haven’t acclimated to this new body. Usually, the transition is easier—my biggest worry is the invention of a new life for myself. But it’s been twelve years since I’ve shifted into a female form, and I’d forgotten how much smaller I’d be. Diego towers over me now. My fingers brush his as I take the flyer—his touch electrifies me, same as it ever did.
I study my old face as if trying to remember where I might have seen it before, then look up into Diego’s eyes. A thousand volts surge, but now—for the first time—only in one direction. “I’m sorry, I don’t think so. What happened to him?”
The moment I hear my strange, soft voice ask the question, I know it’s a mistake.
“He’s my boyfriend.” Diego takes the seat next to mine. There are only inches between our arms now. They might as well be a universe. “He’s been missing for three days. He didn’t take any of his stuff, so I’m worried. This isn’t like him.”
When I was eight years old, Mother vanished. I was already assuming adult forms—changers mature faster than humans—and we were posing as brother and sister in Miami. One afternoon she took me to a parade and ditched me in the crowd. She’d warned me it would happen, but not when. I searched for her, of course, hours spent wandering through hordes of drunk revelers, hope leaking away like water from a basin. She was gone. That was that. Sometimes I wonder if she ever tries to check up on me, but she’d have no way of finding me again, and I wouldn’t recognize her even if she did.
I never—not once—thought about how that day might have felt for her. Diego and I once watched a nature documentary about a tigress who had abandoned her almost full-grown cub. Tigers are solitary creatures, just as my kind are meant to be. I ached to tell Diego the truth then, but I couldn’t think how to explain myself—Mother never taught me.
“That’s terrible.” That’s all I can think to say now. “I hope he turns up.”
The lie feels cruel. For a fleeting second there, I thought perhaps I could reach Diego again through this new body, but now I understand the stark impossibility. He used to look at me with hunger. Now it’s a kind of indifference—he has no interest in this new form. That was too much to ask.
Finally, I understand why we have these rules. It’s not just to evade detection, as I always believed. I wish it were.
It’s to avoid this.
I fold the poster in half, the crease running across my old mouth. “I’m Lyss, by the way.” Why am I telling him this? Am I still nursing some kind of hope?
“Diego.” He stands up again, but then he turns to me and some life sparks back into his dark, tired eyes. “Wait. Have we met before?”
He does recognize me. Somehow. But as understanding and forgiving as I know he is, he could never understand this. And I can’t confess that our three perfect years together were all a lie.
I’ve been a walking lie since the day I was born.
What’s one more?
“I don’t think so.” This untruth shouldn’t be any different but it is, my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth.
Diego stands and nods a sad-smiled goodbye to me before bustling off. I sigh. He’s as awkward as ever.
A breeze picks up and rains leaves around me, a riot of reds and yellows. I reach forward to catch one. A glossy chartreuse, shed from the ginkgo one bench over. They won’t have those trees where I’m going. The leaf appears so vibrantly alive, but that’s an illusion. It’s already dead.
I stand. Diego and his shadow are walking back home, and after watching him a few more seconds, I turn in the opposite direction and force my legs to move. The bus leaves soon.
Read by one of the authors, Charlie Rogers:
about the authors:
Charlie Rogers is a writer living in New York City. His stories have been Pushcart-nominated and featured in several publications including Bull, Permafrost, and Uncharted, as well as the anthologies Weird Weird West, Hope, and Alchemy.
Jaime Gill is a British-born writer living in Cambodia. He is a Pushcart-nominee and his stories have won a Bridport prize and been published in Trampset, Blue Earth, Orca, New Flash Fiction Review and others.
Charlie and Jaime are Trans-Pacific friends and collaborators, with shared interests in queer lives, writing, cinema, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. More at www.charlierogerswrites.com and www.jaimegill.com.
Taco Bell Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire | Susan L. Lin
Welcome to the Taco Bell Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire. Thank you for taking time out of your busy day to bare your heart and soul to a group of data analysts on the Internet. We appreciate your honest feedback.
Store Number/Location:
Date of Visit (MM/DD/YYYY):
Section I: True or False
Please respond to each of the following statements as truthfully as you can.
1. This was my first visit to any Taco Bell restaurant.
2. This was my first visit to this particular Taco Bell location.
3. Arriving at this restaurant was like finding an oasis in the middle of a hot desert.
4. Arriving at this restaurant was like finding powdered cinnamon in the middle of a hot dessert.
5. My food looked/sounded/felt/smelled/tasted like my childhood stuffed into a paper sack.
6. I was provided with sufficient napkins to soak up my nostalgic/bittersweet tears.
7. I was very satisfied with my overall dining experience.
8. I am likely to return to this location again.
Section II: Multiple Choice Fill-in-the-Blank
Please choose the word clusters that best complete the following sentences.
9. If I were holding a Taco Bell _____ right now, I would no longer feel _____ or _____.
A. Mexican Pizza; hungry; Italian
B. MTN DEW® Baja Blast® Freeze; my fingers; my thumbs
C. cash register; hopeless; short-changed
D. employee; horny; alone
E. all of the above
10. _____ is the reason Taco Bell _____ my _____ every day and/or night.
A. The color purple; catches; eye
B. Fast, cheap food; finds its way into; stomach
C. A fond childhood memory; permeates; thoughts
D. An unpleasant childhood memory; haunts; nightmares
E. all of the above
Section III: Short Essays
Please select two prompts from the list below and respond appropriately with well-developed thesis statements and supporting arguments.
11. If you were given the opportunity to create your perfect custom Taco Bell Chalupa, what would the secret ingredient be? Why?
12. If you were given the opportunity to design your dream Taco Bell hotel, what would the guest keys look/feel/sound like? Why?
13. If Taco Bell discontinued your favorite menu item tomorrow, would we trigger the apocalypse? Why or why not?
14. If Taco Bell brought back everyone’s favorite discontinued menu item tomorrow, would we finally achieve world peace? Why or why not?
Section IV: The “Are You a Robot?” Math Section
To confirm your humanity, calculate the solution to this simple algebra problem. Please show your work.
15. In the distant future, you’re exiting the last Taco Bell on Earth with a greasy paper sack full of delicious warm food. You are, however, in a foul mood because the restaurant was experiencing an alarming shortage of salsa verde packets. “How exactly is one expected to live más when all our basic condiments have been stripped away?” you wail, shaking your fist at the heavens. That’s when you notice a hot air balloon rising vertically into the sky at a steady velocity of 1.5 ft/sec from a launch pad roughly 30 feet away. Whoever is picnicking inside the basket waves an elusive red bottle above their head. “Fire sauce!” they yell. “Want to feel the flames?” You peer inside your bag. The Crunchwrap Supreme® at the top could indeed use a little kick. “Toss it my way!” you reply, but the stranger ignores your command. Instead, 22 seconds after the start of their aeronautical journey, they simply allow the hot sauce to fall from their open hands. How fast must you now run to catch the bottle before it shatters on the pavement?
Thank you for completing the Taco Bell Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire. We will never sell your personal information to third parties. If you choose to share your email address below, you will be entered to win a lifetime supply of reheated Doritos® Locos Tacos and the one-million- dollar equivalent of our Taco Bell x Dogecoin ‘90s throwback Chihuahua Pog® cryptocurrency.
About the author:
Susan L. Lin is a Taiwanese American storyteller who hails from southeast Texas and holds an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. Her novella GOODBYE TO THE OCEAN won the 2022 Etchings Press novella prize, and her literary/visual art has appeared in nearly a hundred publications. She loves to dance. Find more at https://susanllin.com.
