Tag: micro cnf

Healing Tobacco  |  Amanda Callais

The swing set shines in the South Louisiana sun. Silver. Blue. Mine. It beckons me out of the air-conditioned house into the backyard’s sticky heat. Hand over small hand, I grip the ladder’s warm rails. Not too loose. Not too tight. Just right. I am almost at the top when I feel the sting.  

Pain sears through my hand. Burning. Throbbing. Swelling. My shrill 5-year-old scream pierces the silent summer day, sending Papaw and Mom running. 

The sweet smell of tobacco that is Papaw fills my nostrils as he lifts me screaming from the ladder, setting me down on the bottom of the slide. He kneels beside me.  Eye-level, he lifts my swelling pink hand in his dark calloused one. 

“Wasps,” he mutters. 

I shrink.

“Tobacco,” he tells Mom. 

Reaching into the front pocket of his blue work shirt, he pulls out a clump of loose leaves usually reserved for his pipe. Hand tucked into my lap, I wail louder, gulping hot air. If it bothers him, he doesn’t let on. He just puts the tobacco in his mouth, wetting it with his spit until the leaves transform into a thick paste he spreads over the sting. Tobacco. Spit. Spread. Repeat, until my hand is a brown lump of spit-soaked tobacco. 

My sobs slow as numbness sets in. Clear-eyed, I stare into his work-hardened face. Small beads of sweat dot his olive brow. A large drop slides down his temple. Thinning black and gray hair curls in front, a perfect Q right at the center. His eyes light up his dark skin. 

I breathe in. 

Though he lives next door, I have known him only from afar. Tall. Strong. Stern. Today, I see him for the first time. Up close. I am no longer scared. I am in awe.

About the Author:

Murmuration | Lisa Cooper Ellison

The starlings explode from a nearby tree then dance overhead in a synchronized tangle of chatter and wings. Later that day, I tell my mentor and share a new word: murmuration. It’s his second week of chemo treatment for a second cancer. He’s paying attention to nature and its signs, which makes me pay attention too. We find hope in snapped twigs, grazing deer, and a sunrise refracting off a crystal vase. Past losses have taught us that life is like those birds pirouetting across the sky—art in motion that flies off too soon. 

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Dungeons and Dragons is | Ryan Stiehl

calling an upside-down Sonic cup the demon lord Zuggtmoy.

an act of quiet rebellion in the fantasy section of a North Texas Public Library.

a gateway into pulp fiction and bad acting and not caring about either.

a way to begin writing fiction in earnest in high school.

a way of saying hello.

collectively hallucinating that loose change and checker pieces were goblins and heroes around Eva’s dad’s game table when she used to live there.

not worth my family’s distrust, though they’ve gotten better now.

a sanctuary from the intense Texas summer heat outside.

my first experience using they/them to talk to my friend’s barbarian.

finding out my entire first party was gay and/or trans over the course of three years. Well, everyone but me.

where an evil wizard orchestrates his own demise in Castle Ravenloft.

the subject of fierce debate in the Southern Baptist community even today.

finding a clever answer to the 1,500 pound problem of an oncoming, raging stone giant against all odds.

eating Domino’s pepperoni pizza while Sam rolls damage for sneak attack. Needless to say, I have plenty of time to finish my pizza.

being called “culturally gay” for the first time. I still puzzle over what the hell that even means.

slowly realizing I’m the odd one out in my party.

long nights staring at a blank Google document that’s supposed to be ready for tomorrow night’s session.

making Saturday night a sort of holy day.

wishing I were writing for Dungeons and Dragons while I lose my faith in a First Baptist Church.

commemorating Grant’s fallen paladin with an ever-vigilant constellation.

helping a former friend escape their homophobic parents and helping them hide in Washington.

practice calling my friend of eighteen years Ophelia now.

creating the same stories that I’ll treasure dearly for years to come.

realizing that my friends would rather play Thirsty Sword Lesbians or Monster of the Week now.

a way of knowing the glory days are long past

a way of saying, “I’m still glad to have known you all back then.”

About the Author:

Ryan Stiehl is an aspiring creative writer currently living in North Texas. When he is not playing TTRPGs with friends, spending time with his wife and husky-malamute, or working a “real job,” he is fast asleep and would like to remain so, thank you very much.

Alary Things | Hilary Fair

Millie fills her chair. Fills the room with her voice. Arms crossed over plump chest over pink robe, she asks if I want to see something amazing.  

I do not.  

I want to continue staring into my iPhone at a cheeky-bottomed swimsuit I will not buy because I cannot afford it and because my ass is soft and pocky from sitting through too many COVID-years inside. 

It is Monday and my mood is drab as the gray-beige paint in here, the misting rain outside. I’m immune to the peppy, highlighter-pink of my gown. Unmoved by the stickers stuck to the mirrors promising: You are beautiful.  

Millie leans in anyway, holding out her own iPhone. Despite myself, I look. On it, a picture her daughter took of a lone cirrus cloud, its wispy, fleeting body immortalized against a blue Kitsilano sky. 

Here in Ontario, spring has been endlessly damp after the darkest winter recorded in seventy-three years. Here in this mammography lab, Millie and I sit in our robes, waiting for techs with gentle hands to lift and tuck and squeeze and photograph our tissues. 

“An angel wing,” I say, lingering on the image.  

Millie sits back, satisfied. 

An older woman once taught me to look for hearts. I find them easily now—in tree burls and beach stones and, once, a clump of cat litter.  

A tech appears, beckoning to me, and I leave Millie behind. She’s still in her chair, still has arms crossed over plump chest over pink robe.  

Neither of us knows, yet, what our scans will reveal. Or that the sun will peek through today. Or that in the coming weeks I will think of Millie when I notice the alary quality of other things: the arc of a rain-soaked cedar frond pasted to a shingled roof; the curve of a dried milkweed pod backlit by sun and lake and sky; a photograph from an animal sanctuary, showing a cluster of kittens, their tiny bodies feathering out from a shared food bowl, creating a patchy-but-perfect wing.

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Oceans | M.R. Lehman Wiens

The child is crying, his wails cascade down the stairs and flood our home with grief. It’s the sixth time this evening, and our Netflix queue is stuck on a frozen screen. Are you still watching?

She does not look at me, focused on her laptop, as she should be, the physician caring for her patients. She has birthed, nursed, worked her body and mind down to the bare fibers of her existence. She is done.

She coughs once, a soft, delicate sound that tells me what I already know. It’s my turn, has been my turn, and there will be no discussion of the issue. I shouldn’t have to be reminded. I go upstairs and pick our son out of the crib. I sing to him, rock him, and he quiets but does not sleep. Large blue eyes fill the nursery, her eyes, reminding me that love is an ocean, one with tides that ebb and flow, but that never completely disappear.

He and I lie down together, me curled around him inside the crib, as much of a womb as I can be. 

He and I sleep.

When she comes upstairs, I hear the creaking of the old floorboards before I feel the touch of her hand on my shoulder. Carefully, slowly, I climb from around our son and follow her back to our bed.

There, we hold each other, our breaths matching, caught in the ebb and flow together. 

About the Author:

Tucked In | Mubanga Kalimamukwento

My son watches Bambi for the first time today. An hour and ten minutes of decadent silence – no banging toys, no merry-go-rounds of questions and requests. I welcome this quiet for the gift that it is: rare solitude for my mind.

After, his afternoon continues as always – Legos, Pokémon, Beyblade, a loud, imaginary world that turns the house upside down, until supper.

Then, as I bend over to tuck him in at bedtime, he says, “Mom, I have a question.”

I smile. “Oh?” Usually, his questions just spill out, no preamble or room to answer before the next one comes, for as long as he can stave off my inevitable Goodnight. I tap his nose with my finger. “And what’s that question?”

“Will you die?”

He is eight. So far, our big talk has been about why daily showers are important, even when he doesn’t get any mulch in his socks. I was expecting the birds and the bees before the life-and-death conversation. My heart cracks right open as I tell him, “One day, yes, I will die.” 

The silence returns, the one from Bambi, no longer a gift, as my mind tries to squirrel away from his inquisitiveness. His eyes, which were once my mother’s eyes, dark and wide, seem to take a long screenshot of my face, memorizing the routes of the lines on my skin as the understanding sinks into him. The silence blooms – a minute stretched to the verge of breaking until he asks, “When?”

“Not for a very long time,” I promise, planting too many wet kisses on his cheeks. 

Prone to ticklishness, usually, my son would laugh. Instead, he shifts from me, this new wisdom already tugging him out of childhood, making him a little less my baby. “But your mom, she died when you were little, like Bambi’s mom?” 

I spot a quiet terror in his expression, the math he must be computing. I was ten when mine died, and he will be ten in two years. I have told him as many stories as my mind has been able to restore, rebuilding my mother the way he does the Lego castles whenever they fall apart – how he has the gravel in her voice, the exact cadence of her laughter, her sneaky sense of humor.

A quiver sits in my throat, waiting to mutate into tears over a glass of wine later. I nod, frantically hoping his next question will be something I can answer – How many deer are there in the world? Can I go to the park tomorrow? How are animations made? I cup the duvet around his shoulders and lift it to his chin. I fix his mohawk, which doesn’t need any fixing, anything to avoid the question building in his eyes. 

Instead, he asks, “Who tucked you in, then?” 

About the Author:

Pet Cemetery | Benjamin Davis

Growing up, we had a lizard, ferret, parrot, rat, six dogs, eleven hamsters, and a holocaust fish who died with such startling frequency, that it was as though we’d bought each without bothering to check the expiration dates. Fish went in the toilet. Our mother dragged us by our names to the bathroom where we’d find her with a little green net in her hand. Inside there was always Rebecca, Ariel, Sarah, Anastasia, or whatever other fish had died. She’d cry, as she did when any pet died, then plop it into the toilet. “Everyone say bye, fishie!” She’d say. We would, and as the toilet gulped them down, she’d hum a little tune that I’m pretty sure was the national anthem. Then the hamsters. “Rodents,” our mother called them. Her only rule was that we could only have one at a time. So I doubt she was thrilled when we bought “Mama” who birth to six wiggly tablets that all would’ve grown to plague our home if Mama hadn’t eaten four of them, choking on the last, leaving us with reproducing siblings and a lesson on how nature surely doesn’t believe in God. Years passed. Hamster after hamster. It wasn’t our fault—not really; heart attacks, tumors, cold snaps, electrocutions, and embolisms. They always died in winter when the ground was too hard to bury them in. So our mother placed them in the four-by-six, three-foot-deep basement freezer in leftover shoeboxes beside the freeze-pops, chicken pot pies, and TV dinners, accumulating over years of forgotten springs. By my teenage years, a full two rows of shoeboxes lined the left-hand side of the freezer. When friends came over we’d go hunting for freeze-pops, and they’d ask, “What’s in the shoeboxes?” I’d say, “Hamsters, mostly.” And they’d laugh. Like it was a joke—which I always thought odd. What did they think, that we froze our shoes? If pressed, I’d open a box to show them a fur-matted, frozen stiff, rodent-popsicle. Hamsters don’t die gracefully. As my friends lost grandparents, I wondered how many hamsters equaled a grandparent. I’d see them grieve and think, well, I was a little sad when Anastasia died, was I ten percent of grandparent-sad? If we had ten hamsters die, would I have grown as much from my grief as they from theirs? Twelve? I made a mental note to count the shoeboxes, but I never did. Years later, I came home to find that my brother’s hamster had died on a beautiful summer day. Our mother reverently carried it outside. Our father dug a hole. My brother wept until all of his tears were used up. Until the hole was filled. Then they turned and went inside as if that were the end of it.

About the Author:

[Redacted] | Joanna Acevedo

In the weeks before Michael’s death, I quit smoking. Not because of anything, but just because I can, because these moments of rudeness and grace that we are dealt are sometimes more than we can handle. After he is dead, B— will smoke a cigarette, outside, with my cocaine dealer. They will talk about [redacted]. I worry they will talk about what it is like to fuck me, but the subject never comes up. 

In the cult classic movie, Fight Club (1999), based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, a commanding Brad Pitt tells us:“The sixth rule of Fight Club is the fights go on as long as they have to.” The fights, as the movie shows us, are quicksilver speedy—men grapple with each other, arms and legs akimbo, their fingers finding eye sockets and armpits, their toes hugging the polished concrete or hardwood. It’s not often that one thinks about their capacity for violence. 

Fight Club was successful, and continues to be successful, because it shows us what we could be—dual sides of the coin, both the unnamed narrator and the sexy, confident Brad-Pitt-as-Tyler-Durden. We could be reckless, rebellious, if we only stepped out of our comfort zone. All of us, in our ways, have this capability. We’re just not reaching for it. The possibility is there, and this possibility is enough for most people. 

In late March, I offer B— two of my extracted wisdom teeth; a peace offering. Michael has been dead three months. I know what my capability is—I have glanced sideways at the knife block as our voices rise, but I will never act on these urges. I do not know how to handle my grief. I read his obituary again, and it streaks through me like lightning, fresh as paint. 

Fight Club offers us a way out through violence—but it’s a fantasy, and in the movie, unlike the novel, it’s also a love story. Violence will not save us, and neither will love. What will save us is [redacted]. Our only way out is through.

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My Life as a Frog | Tina Kimbrell

I spent my days in a pond with the frogs. I stood with the tiniest tadpoles and the tadpoles caught in the in-between, their little legs sprouting from their bulbous teardrop bodies. My body loomed among them—a foreign pulse. I stepped around the edges, watched the grown bodies dart away in waves and bellyflop back into the water. I sat alone in the tall grass nearby, legs chigger-bitten and scabbed, and watched the cattails wag with the weight of red-winged blackbirds. Their nests were buried somewhere deep in the weeds. They would leave and return again and again.

At night, my mother worked at a factory, deboning whole chicken after whole chicken with her gloved hands. My father drank beer after beer after selling couch after couch all day. At 11:00 each night he left to pick up my mother from the factory parking lot. I was in bed but not asleep, sprawled on top of humid sheets. When I saw the headlights glide away and across my bedroom walls, I walked out onto the back deck in the dark and listened to the constant chirp of tree frogs, the low trill of bullfrogs. My eyes adjusted just enough to see the outlines of trees among the glowing confetti of lightning bugs, the yo-yo bounce of bats overhead. But the frogs remained invisible and loud. Their throats throbbed a woven chorus, blanketing the night with me inside it.

I would sit and wait. I would cling to the wood and watch for the familiar headlights turning back again onto the gravel.

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Clothes Rack | Niles Reddick

The Sears store was cold compared to the hundred degrees temperature and humidity outside in inland Florida where the coastal breezes cease, and Mom was lured there after receiving the sales circular in the mail. I had eaten my gummy bears and fidgeted with the clothes on the rack.

“Leave the clothes alone,” she said. “Play with your cars.”

 “Are you almost finished?”

“No,” she said, pulling a hanger with a dress from the metal retail rack, holding the dress on the hanger just below her chin, looking at it in the floor-length mirror on the wall, putting it back on the rack, and scraping groups of hangers with dresses to the next one she liked.

“I’m ready for the Happy Meal,” I tugged on her clam diggers.

“If you don’t stop your ants in the pants, you’ll eat fried liver for lunch.” She shooed me away like the gnats we fanned when outside. 

I crawled on all fours to the center of the rack, imagined it a teepee, sat with my legs crossed, my spine lined with the stainless-steel totem pole, and watched my mom move clockwise around the rack, her clogs stepping like the slow dances on Lawrence Welk. I rolled my cars, parked them in a lot, whispered invitations to imaginary drivers about a race, and then sped the cars and drivers until they crashed.

What I didn’t know was that my mom didn’t know where I had gone, called my name, and ran to the cashier’s counter.  Salesclerks fanned out, and the manager made an announcement over the intercom.  Something brought me back from the race, and I saw clogs, reached through the dresses, and pulled on Mom’s pants. The lady screamed, and one of the clerks came, pushed the clothes on the rack, and saw me.

“Come out of there, boy.”

Mom ran over when she heard the commotion. “You about gave me a heart attack.” She yanked me by the arm, and I dropped my Porsche.

She turned to the lady shopping. “I’m sorry he scared you.”

“It’s alright,” she said, fanning herself.

“I can’t take you nowhere.”

“What about my Happy Meal?”

“Ain’t nothing happy about the meal you’ll get when I get you home.” 

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