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glassworks

a publication of Rowan University’s Master of Arts in Writing

flashglass2025

flashglass flash Volume XI 2025

MASTER OF ARTS IN WRITING ROWAN UNIVERSITY

All work in flashglass originally appeared as digital content at RowanGlassworks.org The staff of Glassworks magazine would like to thank Rowan University’s Master of Arts in Writing Program, and Rowan University’s Writing Arts Department. flashglass, a subset of Glassworks, accepts flash fiction, prose poems, & micro essays See submission guidelines: RowanGlassworks.org Glassworks maintains First North American Serial Rights for publication in our journal and First Electronic Rights for reproduction of works in Glassworks and/or Glassworks-affiliated materials. All other rights remain with the artist.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Katie Budris MANAGING EDITOR Cate Romano COVER ART “Water Needles” by Katie Hughbanks Glassworks Issue 28 COVER DESIGN & LAYOUT Katie Budris Glassworks is a publication of Rowan University’s Master of Arts in Writing Program Correspondence can be sent to: Glassworks c/o Katie Budris Rowan University 260 Victoria Glassboro, NJ 08028 E-mail: GlassworksMagazine@rowan.edu Copyright © 2025 Glassworks

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Dear Kelley, Kevin Brown

I didn’t believe Jamie would beat you up, find you with his fists after school even though I told him to, every day for a few weeks. I treated life like the Atari video games that were just becoming popular, something like Chopper Command, where we would hit reset every time we made a mistake all so we could make another and another and another. He told me about it on the bus ride home; we were proud of ourselves. If I saw the students I teach behaving that way, I would want to shake them until their self-satisfaction fell off their faces and rolled down the hallway, never to be seen again. I’ve passed middle age by now, so I wear self-righteousness on a too regular basis, as if I never made such mistakes myself. But what can I say for the self I was then? I was young and I was dumb and I wanted not to be on the bottom of the popularity pyramid for at least one moment, I wanted to know what it felt like to be aligned with Jamie and Alan and Joey who beat me up like it was their hobby, beat me up on a rotation like the universe had employed them to keep me in my place, and I thought that I could show that you were beneath us all—though that was already obvious to everyone, even me—and I was mean, though I didn’t know it then, and I wanted somebody else to suffer like I did, that feeling of wonder that came over me when I looked at other boys talking and playing with ease, without wondering what everybody was thinking about them all the time and when my parents sent me to your house to explain—as I had said over and over that I didn’t do it; I didn’t do it; I didn’t do it—your mother didn’t believe me because she knew me better than I knew myself, but you forgave me and I was almost in tears and I said I was sorry; I was sorry; I was so so sorry, and I never did anything like it again. But I know enough now to know I didn’t change—I’m still mean and I’m still dumb—but at least I rearranged what I worry about: popularity isn’t a priority; people’s opinions are as fickle as a boy who turned on his next door neighbor just to prove he could. And my ego has never recovered from the beating I gave it that night.

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Hireath Kevin Brown

hiraeth: n. - Welsh English; deep longing for a person or thing which is absent or lost It started with a dining room table and chairs, enough for a small dinner party where we would converse about the composition of novels or maybe music or film (not movies, but film or cinema). I even bought furniture for the front room of the house I was renting, a closed-in porch that pretended to be a sunroom, but was too hot when the sun was out, too cold when the winters of Indiana settled in. Nobody ever sat on the couch, and I never occupied the chair, save for in my imagination when we moved from the table to have dessert and discussions about politics or art or other Important Issues. Or maybe it began when I looked through catalogs: one from public radio with shirts emblazoned with Not now, Carmen, I’m Bizet or Books: The Original Hand-Held Device and ties modeled from Frank Lloyd Wright designs or one from Levenger filled with barrister bookcases with a B chiseled into the glass and fountain pens that cost more than the engagement ring I bought for my first wife, the one who would leave before I could ever afford one shelf, even without the engraving. I fell in love with skyscrapers and public transportation, so I traded in the mountains for a metropolis, of sorts. And now when I go home, or a place that looks like it—difficult to tell the difference—the one-fingered wave on the steering wheel that once welcomed me home has transformed into a finger flipped at a foreign entity with bumper stickers for the other side. Or maybe I’m the one who’s changed. In “Thinking as a Hobby,” William Golding writes, “It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.” To a boy from Carter County, Tennessee, who ended up in graduate school in the Humanities, it was impossible to know what a different life could look like, so I missed a world I never had, a world where books matter more than football scores, where philosophers filled my mind more than the family I left behind. I never knew what I had lost. I never knew what I had gained. I never knew which was which.

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Impersonating Stillness Kathleen McGookey

Travel into the future and you’ll see the hero is a mother. Ghosts tug her clothes and hands, and trail behind her, scuffing their shoes; they run so far ahead, they grow smaller and smaller until she can cover them with her thumb. She knows all their tricks. She pulls a tray from the oven and extinguishes the flames in the sink, her antique ring, cut red glass with a gilded back, weathering those changes. Each morning, she picks one good thing—a fur blanket, a warm cup of coffee with cream, a gray cat curled and sleeping in its basket—and holds it in her mind, like a jewel, all day. Sometimes she has to breathe and lead her mind back to it. Can she bear the heavy clouds hovering near the horizon, impersonating stillness, for yet another day? For years, she paints and paints, always a small blurry figure walking away.

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Lineage

Kathleen McGookey Who told you that your mother used to balance upside down on one hand on a stepladder in the backyard? Did she learn at circus camp or teach herself? Do any pictures survive? How about when she spun plates on a broom handle or juggled eggs? Who taught her to sail? Did she call her sailboat The Rebel or did that name come with the boat? Who watched her bring that boat screaming into shore, then jump in the lake to swing it around? Is one observer still alive with that memory intact, but forgotten until now? You had climbed the crabapple to watch honeybees rummage in the petals. Did your mother’s mother give her a McCall’s cookbook with a yellow cover, and write inside that being a good cook is one of the finest attributes of a good wife and mother? Did she read that and think twice? What choice did anyone have? Why do you, even now, know exactly where to find that book? When your mother was happy, did she walk on her hands up one flight of stairs, or was that her granddaughter, the one she never met, who arrived years after she died? Did only one girl perform this feat, or could they both?

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Dear Dr. Lorenzo Margo McCall

Dear Dr. Lorenzo, (former) Dean of the School of Lifelong Learning, I want you to know I did it with tenderness, that when the order came down, I considered your impressive legacy and tireless commitment to the School before allowing my finger to hover over the Delete key. I could have highlighted your entire name and title and disappeared you with one keystroke. But I was gentle, killing off the letters one by one, and even having a moment of reflection before hitting Save. I want you to know you’re not the first person I’ve erased. In my years working in both academia and the private sector, I’ve removed many people. Some have gone on to bigger and better, been promoted or transferred or taken on a new role in a different department, happily blossoming to life on a different website. But when the deletion means you’re just gone—in the event of suicide, fatal car accident, or, as with you, being unceremoniously canned—it’s always sad. You’re there one minute—2x3 color headshot, full name, and official title—and gone the next. For a day or two, you’ll still come up in search results, but anyone clicking the link will find the space you occupied empty. And then after the spiders’ next crawl, even those phantom results will disappear. Maybe someone will have cached the page on the Wayback Machine, but few people even know about that dusty museum hiding in the far reaches of the Internet. I want you to know that I wonder how you’re feeling. What you’re thinking as you stare out the window of your huge house bought with public funds, at that expansive green lawn kept trimmed by underpaid gardeners. Letting it all sink in, I imagine. Nonexistence takes some getting used to. When the President called a hasty meeting at 3 o’clock on a Friday, the younger staff went into a frenzy. But experienced with this sort of thing, I was already digging out my executioner’s hood. All-Staff meetings on Friday afternoons only mean one thing. You weren’t even allowed to gather your belongings before the Associate Vice President of Human Resources marched you off campus and held out her hand for your keys. You must have really crossed the line to have not been given the option to retire and spend more time with your family. I will not dignify the rumors by asking which of them are true.

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I want you to know I waited until Monday morning. After your decade of service to the School, a two-day grace period seemed only fair. I wanted you to be reassured of your existence a little longer by the ten-yearold headshot you insisted I use in place of the more recent one where your hair is gray and your eyes look tired. But maybe you’re not the type to visit a website for proof of your existence. You probably have oldschool ways of validation: some crumbling monument of yellowed paper at home in your desk drawer. A commendation from the mayor with the city seal, or the governor’s invitation to join an ad-hoc committee. A wife who can hide the alarm in her eyes and tell you it will be okay. For people like you, it will always be okay. Whether you’re on the website or not, we know who you were. You may not have seen us, but we saw you. We’ll miss you rushing through the hallways in your Armani suits trailed by the exotic scent of sandalwood. Smiling and nodding at your constituents like you were the Pope or a Mafia Don. Whatever you plan to do next, please don’t worry about us. I want you to know we’ll continue to do our jobs—so well we’ll never be noticed. And when your replacement is named, we’ll serve at their pleasure just as we served at yours. Carrying out our tasks. Performing our duties. Doing the things us invisible people do.

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This is an Emergency Exit Nailah Jonquil

“You can’t go through there,” Jason shouts across the rooftop pool. The girl, who’d been blissfully unaware of the rule she was breaking, quickly removes her hands from the door, revealing the words “Emergency Exit. Alarm Will Sound.” The door snaps shut with a metallic click. “Oh, I am so sorry! I thought this was the way back inside.” Jason nods his head, flashing her his charming grin. “Other set of doors, sweetie. That one’s the emergency staircase.” She blushes and nods back shyly before maneuvering around the pool. I lift my glass to my lips. “There wasn’t an alarm.” Jason turns his head towards me but doesn’t take his eyes off the girl. “What?” “The alarm. It didn’t go off.” He finally blinks out of his flirtatious stupor and glares at me. “Anika, what the hell are you talking about?” I take another sip, this one burning down my throat. “Nothing.” “Yeah, you’re always doing that. Talking about nothing.” I look away from him. My vision blurs, and the dozen or so people in the pool become nothing more than colorful blobs. Girls’ giggles sound shrill in my ears, men’s voices too deep and grating. I notice another couple, like us, is standing by the railing. The man leans in close to the woman. She smiles like she means it. “You want a beer?” Jason asks.

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“No.” “What, so you’re only gonna have water?” I swirl the liquid in my glass. “I don’t like beer.” He knows this. “Well, you could at least try something else.” “I told you I didn’t want to come here.” I start to walk away. “Oh right, Anika, because everything’s about you, huh? You can’t do a single—” Jason grips my arm tight and pulls me back to him as one of his friends approaches us. He leans in close, lips grazing my ear. “Act right for once. Can you do that?” he says through gritted teeth. I do not hear anything Jason or the friend say. I do not look at Jason’s blindingly white smile, pay no mind to the fingers tightening around my bicep. Whenever a fingernail digs into my skin, I know to smile, know to laugh, know to nod. I am here but I am not. I am looking past the friend’s head, at how beautiful the sky looks at this time of day. The sun is low and dyes the clouds pink, purple, orange. Orange is my favorite color. I am wearing green, Jason’s favorite. “Anika,” Jason snaps, and I come back. The friend smiles apologetically. “I was just asking if you’re enjoying the party.” I smile. I will have a bruise on my arm when I get home tonight. “Of course.” “‘Of course?’” Jason hisses when the friend has walked away. “Not even an idiot would’ve believed that.” I lean back against the railing. The metal is cool against the skin of my back. I look over my shoulder at a bird perched on the railing further down from us. “Are you even listening to me?” The bird dives for the street below. “Do you ever wish—”

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“Wish what? Wish my girlfriend wasn’t such a buzzkill?” He laughs, loud, but he makes it sound so genuine. He throws his head back, smiling so wide, anyone would think I’d just told him the funniest joke. “Yeah, all the time, Anika. All the damn time.” I close my eyes. The sun is warm on my face. “Jason, I want to leave.” “Of course you do. You always want to leave. And what if you did? If you just got up and left my best friend’s party? How would that look?” I hardly notice the rest of what he says. All I can hear is What if you did? What if you did? A gong clanging in my head. Jason leans against the railing beside me. He jerks his chin out at a girl in the water, the same one who’d opened the wrong door. She smiles and waves to him. He grins back, and he says to me, “I give you everything, Anika. I do everything for you. What more could you want?” The metal no longer feels cold against my back. I lean into it, looking up into the sky. The clouds are all orange, all orange, all mine. There are no sirens, no alarms going off in my head, when I make the decision: I am going to leave him. “Anika!” he screams when I am already falling.

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Duets

D. Dina Friedman When my grandmother’s hands hurt too much to play the piano, she lost her will to live. She began to forget. In the middle of duets, her hands dropped off the keyboard. Notes transformed themselves to dots, melodies to monotone. We kept turning the pages to try something else. We never made it to the end. She forgot the way downstairs to the pool, and whether she’d washed the strawberries. She forgot where the cabinets were, and the refrigerator, the names of the cards when we tried to play gin rummy. The air in her apartment grew dank. She wouldn’t open the door to the balcony. The ocean humidity might hurt the Steinway. My daughter now sits at the piano, yelling at fingers that will not hit the right notes—her eyes, my eyes, daggers as we struggle through duets. She will not wait for the right time to come in, and sometimes, neither will I. She yells at the piano, at me, at her hands, strawberry red and raw from winter. My daughter complains that the keys on our piano buzz, stick, reverberate. I tell her to tune it out, the way I tuned out my grandmother’s hands, her pained fingers falling into the wrong places. When my daughter was little, she used to sit on my grandmother’s lap, her chubby hands slapping at the Steinway. My grandmother would follow her as she toddled around the edge of the pool in a dark green dress that barely covered the edge of her diaper, the two of them sporting the same opened-mouth smile. “I always wanted a girl,” she said. It took my grandmother over a year to die, several months to forget her words—one note, one phrase at a time until all was silent. No notes. No words. Only once after weeks of empty measures did she utter a lilt of syllables, my daughter’s name. Clear and in tune, I could see them again, the day they disappeared into the bedroom like sisters and came back in silver party hats. My grandmother yelled, “March,” and somewhere on the Steinway, I found some chords, a march rhythm, 1-2-3-4 all the way to the balcony, where beyond the pool, the ocean was so perfectly blue, she even agreed to open the door. Just a crack. Just for a moment.

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The Story of the Rabbit Children D. Dina Friedman

after the illustration by Sybille Von Olders (Germany) before 1916 I. This rabbit has too many children. Even if this may be the common case with rabbits, the picture is far too rosy. The ten rabbit children look like they’re on the brink of prancing. They’re on two feet, not four, and holding each other’s hands. Again, a rosy choice. Did this mother rabbit have the choice to bear all these children? II. In Germany, where this picture originated, abortion is technically illegal, but unpunished during the first twelve weeks–as long as you’re not too explicit. The picture is dated before 1916, but what happened in the 1930s—or in the 1940s, especially to children who didn’t have pure Aryan blood? Was there an urge to abort? A surge to abort? How many women pranced happily pregnant in ghettos until the soldiers came to take them away? III. What does a baby think when it draws its first cry in a refugee camp in Rwanda? In a war zone in Ukraine? Or Gaza? When does that moment of pure innocence and infinite possibility first start to cloud over, like the feeling of the real world pricking hard at your edges after you’ve just come back from vacation? So much better to be in a painting like these happy rabbits prancing in paradise, which, on vacation, you try to capture with the snap of a camera as you tell yourself, this matters: this moment, where you can be as happy as the rabbit children.

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IV. Before they get to the water, the rabbits must pass through a grove of trees whose trunks are so close together they look like prison bars. Beyond the trees is an open field, where the ground changes to a brighter green with yellow hues, brightened at the top by sky. Though the air takes up more than half the canvas, our eyes are drawn groundward to the happy rabbits, whose mother never had a choice whether or not to have them. Two of the rabbits have human faces. In the story, these are children the rabbit mother rescued and made rabbit suits to keep them warm. The children are in the lead, as if the artist is saying that humans, like Aryans, will always be superior. But nevertheless, let’s give the artist the benefit of the doubt. She wants things to be pretty. She wants the rabbits to be happy. She is letting the rabbits pass through the pressed together trees out toward the water, its wide expanse of promise.

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Navy Blue Dickies Jennifer Anne Gordon

I have oil stains on my frayed hem. On Fridays I smell sour, metallic. On Saturdays I smell like Tide detergent. On Sundays my fabric grows stiff. On good days, after vegetable picking and an early lunch, I smell like sunshine and air when I am hung outside. The family is at Clam King, and the little girl eats grilled cheese. I hate it because I am not there, I am not being worn, I am the workday armor. I am not needed at Clam King. I am outside a house, hanging in the sun, dancing in the wind as if I were not strong at all, as if I were beautiful. I am not made for sunshine; I am not made for dancing. I am armor, and I feel forgotten. I see the man when he comes home. Beige pants. Pleated and embarrassing. He pretends he does not need armor; he pretends that he can wear loafers and laugh over lunch. He will wear me again soon, but I don’t recognize him without me. I see questioning postures and a laugh that doesn’t meet his eyes. Those days of beige pant performances were like a school play where everyone forgets their lines. The little girl cries. The mommy gets drunk on bloody marys and the man is not wearing the right costume. During summer they take day trips. I go to the beach, I am navy blue, and hot in the sun, unable to soak in the saltwater. I am a bog, I am a shield, I am armor. The little girl looks at me funny, so dark against his pale skin. He takes off his shirt but slouches his shoulders. Tucks himself in and under an umbrella. I did not get removed. Not here. The little girl hates me, she doesn’t understand why I am not a pair of Bermuda shorts, with bright florals that scream and laugh in the waves. Sea mist and boardwalks. She does not know why I am not a swimsuit. Saltwater and chafed thighs. The little girl crawls on the sand, puts her head under the green nylon chair, she stares at my navy blue the way it punches out of the spaces in the fabric. Both a blindfold and a bullet. She hates me.

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She hates me because she has never seen her father’s knees. She hates me because she has heard the words shrapnel, she has heard the words scars, but she doesn’t know what that means, she doesn’t know what I protect. She doesn’t know I am armor with oil-stained hems, I fight an invisible battle, an invisible war. I cover legs that didn’t walk for months, I cover legs with wounds that never quite heal, wounds that are wrapped tight, wounds that smell like almonds, and swamp water. She is a little girl; I am armor.

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Fault Line Jillian McKelvey

She flattened her back against the wall, arms planted and slightly askew, fingers splayed, head pressed in profile like a cartoon character, or maybe more like an FBI agent about to leap around the corner, gun cocked. The remains of a potted plant lay recklessly across the floor and up the wall where earth and leaf lingered. Just moments before the upheaval, the pot had sat steady on the corner of a counter and the plant reached its limbs towards artificial light. She was mad, my mother. She said she was going to strangle herself with her purse, drown herself in the pool, throw herself under a bus.After hurling the potted plant, she went for Agnes and grabbed her around the neck until frantic caregivers pried her away. It’s the disease, Connie said, when she called. Don’t worry, she said, it’s the disease, she said. We all love your mother, and I loved her for saying that, but my hands flew to my face, and my insides tumbled and spilled across the floor. ~ Connie, the assisted living director, told me I was their poster girl. I brought sunshine in the door and laughter to the fourth floor. She told me I didn’t fuss around playing nursemaid. I visited. I danced. I sang. I read books. I dressed up and hula-hooped. I wasn’t afraid to come and have fun. But I was afraid. I was afraid every time I visited my mother. I was afraid of my mother’s dementia, afraid of her pain, afraid of not knowing what to do, of not doing enough, of not being able to delight her the way I had always been able to do. I was afraid of saying goodbye. She hated goodbye. “I won’t be here when you get back,” my mother said to me. And she shouted my name down the elevator shaft and I could hear her from the ground floor. On the fourth floor, the dementia floor, the knives, the scissors, and the hammer were locked behind glass in green felt pockets. But you can’t lock up someone’s hands, or stop them from kicking, or throwing a glass, or heaving a potted plant. ~ She was sad, my mother. A caregiver had encouraged me to leave while my mother read, Paddle to the Sea, with Ester, another kind caregiver. “Your mother is distracted,” she said. This might be a good time for you

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to slip away.” “But I didn’t say goodbye. And she might come looking for me.” “It might be easier this way. She won’t remember you were here.” But she did. I slipped out while Ester read, “The Canadian wilderness was white with snow.” I backed out of the room and ran to the exit and pressed the secret code and snuck down the back stairs like a thief and left my mother paddling to the sea with Ester. But, I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t say, I love you, Mummy, and she didn’t say, I love you, back. Just before Christmas, my mother woke in the middle of the night, and in bare feet and a yellow smocked nightgown, she traipsed after Helen, a new fourth floor resident. My mother followed Helen down a dimly lit hall and tapped her on the back. “Where are you going?” my mother said. Tap Tap Tap. But Helen, her long grey hair pulled back in a ponytail, didn’t turn or speak. My mother tapped Helen again and again and Helen swung around and shoved my mother with both hands and my mother tumbled to the floor, her right leg crumpled beneath her. Fractured. At three in the morning, I found my broken mother in a hospital cubicle, shivering without a sheet. She waved her left arm in the air, clutched her right leg with her right hand and cried, “Hello. Hello. Somebody!” “Oh, Mum, I’m here. I’m right here.” ~ I woke up beside my mother on St Patrick’s Day, her favourite day, and I finger painted her chapped lips with a drop of white wine and fastened a shamrock pendant around her neck. She died at noon. When the coroner arrived, she insisted on an autopsy. “Oh, please don’t do that,” I said. “Please. She’s been through enough.” But the coroner said they needed to know the cause of death. They needed to know if it was Helen’s fault. “It’s no one’s fault,” I said. “It’s the disease.”

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My Sister and I Wander Through an Empty Make-Believe Land Beth Konkoski

Flooded twenty years ago, abandoned, now the castle slumps like a collapsed birthday cake, the jungle boat run aground, Peter Pumpkin Eater’s cracked concrete shell filled with dry vines, leaves rattling, too much like snakes. We trespass. She points her phone, snapping while I throw empty beer bottles of my 12 pack behind me, hear them bounce on gravel. “Dad’s here,” she says. “Somewhere.” A waste of a Saturday to hunt his belligerent ghost. And why here? Sure, we visited twice the year we lived with him. Surprise afternoons of freedom from Wilson Elementary, we headed through the mountains with a canteen of coffee, ham sandwiches coated in mustard, wrapped in aluminum foil. My sister hated mustard but forgets this to glorify our adventures. “ Remember, the stagecoach picture? In a frame on his desk forever?” It was the 70’s, people couldn’t scroll memories or pass them back and forth like insults as they can now. It took effort to have a photo developed, printed, framed. I was not smiling in this picture, having just been stung by a bee as I climbed into the velvety cabin of the stagecoach. My arm throbbing and tears near the surface, I thrust myself out the window because missing the picture, crying over a bee sting might ruin the whole day, might get me walked to the car, Dad’s fingers tight around my arm, my feet barely touching the ground, his rage over my betrayal strong, like the smell of dirty laundry, strong like his hand reaching for his belt to signal some rule we were breaking. With four beers left, I find a bench under an oak tree, and lean my head back. The bark a maze of deep rivulets and shadows, uneven as I drink and rest, drink and close my eyes, drink and let the memories fade as much as they will. She talks to herself, searching and snapping, hoping, although I suspect she might not really believe herself. Point the camera here, I could tell her. Find your ghost here in my blood, my throat, my birthright to be who he was, the set of my lips, too often the slump of my shoulders when I look in the mirror at all the broken promises.

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“Come on,” my sister insists, kicking my foot to get me up. I open one eye, roll my latest empty down the length of the bench and watch it skitter across the grass. There is almost a buzz going, the quiet tingle I can trace up and down my body until it lets me rest, like I’m a shirt slowly ironed free of wrinkles. “You’re so much like him,” she says, no longer pleading. “I know.” This moldy truth is not comfortable. I pat the space beside me, feel the bench take her weight, only a slight shift but then she’s leaning against me, solid, real, our bodies almost the same size now. I reach in the box, hand her a beer, and wait.

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Things We Feed Each Other Neah Ziana Mendoza

My mother spat me out when realized she couldn’t digest me. Pushed until all traces of fermented beauty and soured anger had been expelled. I think a part of her was relieved when I stubbornly screwed my mouth and refused to suckle on the very body that I came from. I t started small, as all things do. She would feed me jaundiced milk formula in pink bottles. Pulpy pea and pureed black beans. Sips of stories of birds with human faces that brought death to crying babies. Soggy bread and milk-soaked crackers. Cloying nightly prayers to the people in the paintings on our altar. Raspberries mashed to look like emboluses and slimy banana disks. Warnings of disembodied hands, hungry for fat infant ankles. This was before my baby teeth had burst like rice grains from the banks of my gums. S he later began feeding me pasta, soft like animal entrails smothered in red sauce and small helpings of self-doubt about my scabby legs. Fish with spines like lice-combs and eyes that popped like gummy candies. Legends about moon-faced ladies with animal feet who called men like my father into the forests. Bowls of bone broth frothing with wilting greens, cooked with languishing love and gossip about the kind of women we shouldn’t be. Whatever she fed me, she measured. I survived like this until I gorged on what I wanted. By the time I turned fifteen, my pallet had expanded to soft, tongue-like seafood boiled in blighting spice leaves and nibbles of straight romance novels stolen from my mother’s shelves. I sucked dribbling white chocolate from my fingers and chicken bones after ripping the pink meat off. Slurped drinkable yogurts, picked at pomegranate seeds, gnawed on toughened jerky. Sometimes my mother still served me berations candied in sweeter, back-handed compliments about the acne scars that peppered my cheeks and dough that molded over my frame. fter I left home, I acquired the taste of waxy lipstick from the lips of one-night stands and the briny A wetness from between their legs. The salt of sweat mixed with perfume that I lapped from collarbones and the metallicness of ringed fingers. I could now have my fill.

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When I visit my mother now, I feed her a daughter she can stomach. One she won’t regurgitate into my lap and tell me to clean up. Spoonfuls of a daughter that doesn’t fuck girls, that won’t get stuck between the gaps of her twisted teeth. I add salt when she tells me that I am not enough, that I could have been more. I add sugar when she says I need a man in my life to fix me, to satiate the hunger all women have. I bite my tongue until it bleeds and my mouth begins to rust. I think perhaps I could leave her here, to waste away and let the ulcer in her stomach eat her from the inside out.

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What the Pines Remember Zainab Khamis

They told me not to go alone. The locals at the diner leaned in when I asked about the trail. Old woods, they said. Best left quiet. But I am not a believer in ghost stories, and my grief needed silence. My sister had loved hiking—she died in a hospital bed, sterile and still. I wanted to give her something better. I brought her ashes in a tin and took the path marked by stone and moss. The forest greeted me with stillness, and for a while, that was enough. My boots softened into the dirt, birds muttered in the canopy, and I whispered my sister’s name as I scattered ashes beneath a red pine that looked a thousand years old. Then I turned to leave. And the path was gone. Not overgrown. Gone. The stones I would step over—vanished. The way I came curled behind me like a fern folding into itself. The sun was dipping fast, and the trees had shifted. Taller now. Closer. I did not panic. I had a compass. I had done this before. But the compass spun. The needle twitched like it was afraid to choose. My phone flickered dead in my hand. When I started walking, the forest seemed to inhale. Every step deeper felt like sinking. The birds no longer muttered, and the pines stopped rustling. There was a sound behind me, soft as fur, quick as breath, but when I turned, nothing moved. That night, I made camp without fire. I dreamed of my sister. Only her skin was bark, and her eyes were hollow knots, and said, I am still here, you know. I never left.

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When I woke, pine needles were on my pillow that had not been there before. On the second day, I tried to mark my trail. I carved notches into trunks, broke small branches, and laid out stones. But the forest closed them behind me. Trees stood whole again when I looked back. My trail was being swallowed. The sound returned that night—closer. I stayed awake, listening to my breath and the sound of something else breathing. By the third day, my mind was cracking. I could not tell if the whispers were wind or voices. I saw faces in the bark. I heard my name in the crunch of leaves. Leila, they said: my sister’s voice. Leila, stay. When I ran, the forest ran with me. Trees blurred. The light filtered strangely, like through stained glass. I tripped. Cut my knee. When I stood, I was back at the red pine. The ashes were gone. In their place was a hollow in the earth, pulsing gently—like a heartbeat. I understood then. The forest remembered her. It had taken her. It was offering me the same mercy. I knelt. The earth was warm. I do not remember lying down, only the softness of moss and the weight of pine needles falling like snow. I felt bark bloom along my skin, roots threading through my veins. I felt her beside me in soil, in sap, in song. We are quiet now, but we are not gone. We listen when you enter. We bend the trees. We hide your path. And if your grief hums like ours once did, we might call you closer. We are what the pines remember.

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I Try to Explain to My Husband What it’s Like Linda Downing Miller

in that small waiting room, each occupant half-enrobed in a somehow sinister mauve. We’ve entered curtained-off sectors and removed our tops and bras and covered ourselves in one-size-fits-alls, with their gaping necklines and tiny ties that cannot shield us. We’ve inserted our displaced clothing into our chosen lockers. Will we remember our locker numbers? We may not remember our numbers unless they’re helpfully written on the worn pieces of wood attached to our locker keys. We grip that wood more tightly than we might realize as we take our chairs, three here, four there, edging the room. We don’t think to check whether our locker numbers are written on the wood or not. Our eyes gravitate to a television in the corner, where a cooking show offers light-hearted chatter. We need that lightness because waiting in this room does not simply feed impatience. It feeds terror and prayer and a pitching of the mind, from attempted optimism to malignant imagery and all that might ensue: a biopsy proving what they’ve caught; months and months upended; slashing, burning, poisoning, weakness, visible illness; then the slow crawl back to normalcy, or as close as we can get, if we’re able to crawl at all. As they arrive or return after their names have been called, some women say hello to the others in the room. A newcomer sits with brittle poise; another, with heavy resignation. Some who’ve been here longer may know who’s yet to get any pictures and who’s waiting to hear about the results of their pictures and who’s been called back for more pictures—“the doctor just wants a few more pictures”—and who has returned from a nearby room in which ultrasounds are performed and discussions held, the one doctor on duty periodically approaching and leaving in her clicking heels. They’re the only clicking heels in the place, at least on the morning I’m talking about, so those heels in the hallway sound like doom being visited upon one of the women who had needed extra pictures. We could free our tops and bras. Try our keys in every lock. But we’d still be at risk, however we’re shaped, in whatever position we wait. So, we cede ourselves to this life-saving/-shattering process. The clicking of heels. The meting out of doom. Perhaps I shouldn’t say doom because I’ve faced and survived a breast cancer diagnosis. So far? Entering with two double As and emerging with one and three-quarters or so, without chemo. Yes, I was luckier than most. But it didn’t feel like luck at the time. And it doesn’t feel like luck now when I’m called back for more pictures—technically, “better pictures.” A very experienced mammographer has taken up my case because the

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minimal tissue that can be pressed between those planes of hard plastic requires an expert hand, guiding my position at the machine and positioning me within it. I spare my husband the turning knob, the ratcheting pressure on flesh, the suffocation of held breath…. He’s already wincing, and I haven’t even gotten to the worst of it yet. The worst of it, I explain, is the waiting after the second set of pictures. The heels on the floor tiles. The woman who returns after a stint in the nearby room and hopes things go well for us, all of us in the waiting room right then. Things have not gone well for her, she confesses—she cannot help but tell us—but somehow, she manages to wish the best for us. He’d asked me how things went. Could any of us have simply said, “okay”? I’m still not sure what exactly happened in that room after the woman spoke. Did someone muster a word of comfort? Did time go silent for everyone, or only me? I have a blurry image of our wounded comrade disappearing with her coat and purse. Then nothing: until I’m released with a paper bearing an “x” in the “benign appearing” box. Perhaps my desperate relief could be seen in the shiver of my key, the clutching of my things, the haste with which I abandoned our uniform. I had no words for anyone else just then. I wanted every second left for myself.

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I Hear a Steady Beeping and This Room is Getting Colder David Colodney

Sons, the grandfather who didn’t live long enough to meet you asks me in Winston 100 smoke-rings whisper what you’re like. He’s sitting in his powder blue recliner - the one where he watches the News at 10 & then The Benny Hill Show before the orange smolder of his cigarette butt fades to a flicker in the black plastic ashtray that rests on a folding table by his left arm. His smoke circles like an oasis & disappears & he falls asleep doing this routine each night of the week. I struggle for adjectives & adverbs to describe you guys as I blink through tears & IVs hearing my dad, gone 30-plus years, question me in a fog of words & discordant machines emitting metronome noises over the air conditioner’s hum. My old man’s only son describing his sons to a ghost in a blue post office button down short sleeve work shirt, thick bifocals in tortoise shell frames & all I want to tell him is how I’ve been & what I’ve done & that I’m ok. But we’ll catch up soon, Dad. Knowing we’ll grab a bagel & instant coffee somewhere soothes me as the nurses recycle in symphonic movements, adjusting my drips, checking off charts at the foot of my bed. I may be crying. This room may be raining. What’s left of my eyes dances between you three, my sons now guardians, as you look to the nurses & then back to me & the monitors & back at me & my eyes flutter like shutters in summer storms, my lips like a vacant orbit, a vapor whisper. Dad.

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Still Life for God #24: After Midnight Mass or Elegy for the End of the World M.J. Young

Mouth dry from the Eucharist and out of step with myself from the hour I’m walking down the middle of the road, golden lane markers my guideline home. Things have changed and things will change but now I’m alone, organ music echoing in my head. I feel more at peace, meaning closer to You, under this cloud-thick sky than sitting in a pew. It’s something about being alone in grand spaces—empty churches, museums after hours, the world at early morning—as if this smalling sort of solitude demands Your attention. It’s Christmas, and I’m afraid we’re on a precipice. I don’t know what to do but continue down the lane marker. Last time, I stopped praying and waited, as if I could reintroduce myself to You once I got better. As if I had to get better. Every fourth step I take there’s a reflector. I don’t know when I started counting but I’m on twenty-three. I think I want to ask You something, but being out of practice makes praying hard. I stop and lower myself to the ground, the street rough under me, cold. To my left is a house with a cross in its yard, ten feet tall and wrapped in twinkle lights. I’m tired. My question is about suffering and how much we’re meant to give up. And why. It’s hard to imagine what the world is going to look like in four years. It’s hard even thinking past this coming stretch of Ordinary Time to Lent—what will I give up then? Will that be the start? I haven’t gotten off the road. I think I’m waiting for Your answer. Or maybe for twin headlights to send me home.Dad.

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A Catalogue of Light M.J. Young

The dull red of a stranger’s alarm clock the faded green of the segmented digits on his wrist when I lift his arm off me and climb out of his bed the slit of white under the bathroom door the flood when his roommate opens it and sees me in my boxers and sighs the gray of the morning when I shut the door behind me and flick the switch and twist the blinds to an unfamiliar view and realize I don’t know where the hell I am the shock of pool-blue when I open the toilet lid and the sudden dark when I close it the dancing dots when I stare for too long into the mirror trying to gauge if my eyes look bloodshot-tired or bloodshot-hungover the stars that blind me as the world tips under my bare feet the pool-blue again as I throw up and its afterimage when I flush the glare of the hall light which wasn’t on earlier the lightening of his room from the rising sun I use to help me tug on my shirt and step into everything else the amber of my phone screen still thinking it’s last night as I check Google Maps to see if walking home is an option and of course it’s not the gold glint off his anklet as I wonder if I should wake him up the blinding light of the hallway again and the exposed bulbs of the dining room chandelier one of his roommates is sitting under and God everything’s just so painfully bright there’s the tiny rainbows the crystal doorknob throws that doesn’t open under my touch until the roommate from the bathroom unlocks it for me so I can escape into the dim caged fluorescents of his building’s stairwell that smells like gasoline as I walk down to the street to be greeted by the cool white LED headlights and vermillion taillights the now-blue glow of my phone weak in the daylight as I track the Uber I ordered the sun as it sits above me as I half-wish I stayed in his bed and waited for the light to rouse him and asked his name.

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Contributors Kevin Brown (he/him) teaches high school English in Nashville, Tennessee. He has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. You can find out more about him and his work on social media sites at: @kevinbrownwrites or at: http://kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com David Colodney is a poet living in Boynton Beach, Florida. He is the author of Gen X Redux, forthcoming in 2026 from Main Street Rag Publishing, and the chapbook Mimeograph (Finishing Line Press, 2020). A three-time Pushcart nominee, his work has appeared in multiple journals. David currently serves as an associate editor of South Florida Poetry Journal and is an ardent supporter of Liverpool Football Club. D. Dina Friedman’s recent work includes a short-story collection, Immigrants (Creators Press), and a poetry chapbook, Here in Sanctuary—Whirling (Querencia Press). She is also the author of the chapbook Wolf in the Suitcase (Finishing Line Press) and two young adult novels: Escaping Into the Night (Simon & Schuster) and Playing Dad’s Song (Farrar Straus Giroux). Dina has published widely in literary journals and received six Pushcart Prize and two Best of the Net nominations. Visit her website or her blog on living a creative life in a creatively challenged universe at: https://ddinafriedman.substack.com Jennifer Anne Gordon (she/they) is an award-winning horror author (Kindle Award Best Horror Novel 2020, Lit Nastie Best Short Story 2023 and more), Podcast host (Vox Vomitis), and essayist with works in Lumina, Miniskirt, Wildscape, Horror Tree, Nerd Daily, and more. She is represented by Talcott Notch Literary and is a member of HWA and MWA. Find her online at: www.jenniferannegordon.com Nailah Jonquil is a second-year graduate student at Columbia University School of the Arts studying to receive her MFA in fiction writing. She received her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering/computer science and creative writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Originally from Detroit, MI, she was raised in Lithia Springs, GA and currently lives in NYC. Her goal is to write stories and novels that allow people to feel seen and understood.

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Zainab Khamis is a Bahraini writer whose work has appeared in the Inlandia Institute, Vermilion, and The Progenitor Art & Literary Journal. She won first place in Bahrain’s Young Authors Contest (2024) and was recognized by The New York Times “My List” contest. Her writing explores identity, memory, and belonging. Beth Konkoski is a writer and high school English teacher living in Virginia where she spends as much time as possible listening to the sounds of water over rocks and a pen across the page. Her work has been published in journals such as: Smokelong Quarterly, Bending Genres, and Split Lip Magazine. Her collection of short fiction, A Drawn & Papered Heart, won the 2023 Acacia Prize for fiction and was published in 2024 by Kallisto Gaia Press: https://www.kallistogaiapress.org/product/a-drawn-papered-heart/ Margo McCall’s short stories have appeared in Pacific Review, Hypertext, blank spaces, EVENT, and other journals. Her nonfiction has appeared in Herizons, Lifeboat, L.A. Times, and other publications. A former journalist and graduate of the M.A. in Creative Writing program at California State University Northridge, she divides her time between the Canadian prairies and Southern California. For more, visit: http://www.margomccall.com Kathleen McGookey’s most recent book is Paper Sky (Press 53). Her work has appeared in journals including Copper Nickel, December, Epoch, Field, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, On the Seawall, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and Willow Springs. It has also been featured on American Life in Poetry, Poetry Daily, SWWIM Every Day, and Verse Daily. She lives in Middleville, Michigan. Jillian McKelvey writes narrative nonfiction in Prince Edward Island (PEI), Canada. She is currently working on a memoir titled I’m Losing My Mountains. Her work has appeared in Memoir Magazine, Shift, River Teeth, Ravensperch and is forthcoming in Salamander. She can frequently be found bounding across the fields of PEI with her dog, Flying Freddy. Neah Ziana Mendoza is a Belizean writer. Born and raised in Orange Walk Town, she’s found her way back home after earning a BA in Creative Writing from Murray State University. She is a proud, weird, queer girl who writes stories for other weird, queer girls. You can find her work in Waxing & Waning and The Page Gallery Journal.

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Linda Downing Miller has led creative writing classes in Chicago for more than ten years. Her stories and essays have appeared in literary journals and other publications, including Chicago Quarterly Review, Water~Stone Review, The Florida Review, Booth, and the Brevity blog. She earned an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and lives in Oak Park, Illinois. M.J. Young is a writer and MFA student at Florida International University, where he is the poetry editor of Gulf Stream Magazine. His poetry can be found or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, The Penn Review, Vagabond City Lit, and elsewhere. In his free time he enjoys listening to Philip Glass and exploring bookstores. He can be found on Instagram: @mjyoungwrites

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