RED BEAN PRESS September 2020 | Issue 4
- THE WILD CARD ISSUE -
TABLE OF CONTENTS 0.04
Four of Spades By Comet
0.06
The Heart Does Not Lie By Asena
0.09
disused, decaffeinated, disappointed By Megan
0.10
Rely on the Lighthouse Keeper By Jessa
0.17
exhibition By Sasha
0.18
Rain in Wuxi By Jes
0.21
elegy for the spoiled milk on the counter By Leela
0.22
this broken body is not yours to hold By Cherri
0.23
the rat king By Alona
IN THIS ISSUE
Editor's Note Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Red Bean Press. For our fourth issue, we diverged from our typical theme format, opting instead to showcase a broader spectrum of writing without thematic limits. Therefore, this month’s theme was labeled “wild card,” which gave our writers the freedom to write about whatever came to mind and provided us with a range of vastly different pieces. The Red Bean Press is now four months old; that’s one third of a year! We would like to extend yet another thank you to our readers and writers, both old and new. We wouldn’t have come this far without any of your continuous support. We are continuously improving and expanding to fulfill our goal of providing writers with a platform to spread their works. In the coming months, we will release our exclusive Q&A and will work towards expanding our outreach with the newsletter. It was a joy to put this issue together, and even more so to work with everyone who submitted. We hope that you enjoy the pieces of our September issue and we hope to see you all back for something a little more… eerie next month! Once again, thank you. Sincerely, Red Bean Press Editorial Board Tris, Editor-in-Chief Reni, Assistant Managing Editor Lia, Content Managing Editor Rochelle, Layout Managing Editor Noor, Outreach Coordinator & Newsletter Editor
Four of Spades BY COMET
COMETWORKS
pick, she instructs, cherry-almond nails fanning out the deck there are so many; scarlet backs lashed with gold wire and tight-lipped spirals snaking around the corners, one holds the answer to my everything i only have to pick which this one, i tell myself, but hesitate what if i’m wrong? no, i second guess, this one but it’s not it doesn’t feel right none of it feels right your future, she reminds me, will be revealed, simply choose a card simply, as if anything was so fortunate to be simple this one. she smiles, sweet and deceiving, let us see what the stars have in store for you— oh? she blurts, straying from the tense formalities we have tethered ourselves to is it Death, perhaps? has the Hanged Man finally come to claim my breath? four of spades i almost don’t believe her almost. but then she twists her fingers, the card following, and i come face to face with my future my heart claws up my throat, eager and starved of truth, what happened to the tarot? this is the tarot, she assures, the cards do not lie that hungry curiosity takes hold of my tongue, spades are for gambles, not fortunes fortunes are for fools, without any hesitation she plucks the Fool from the spread, and it appears it is not you that has been tricked i smile, sweet and deceiving, with an eager heart in my throat so it does
THE HEART DOES NOT LIE BY ASENA
ASTRALIS-ELYSIAN
Content warnings: mentions of drugs, funerals, mentions of death, will control a continuation of my August submission, DREAMSCAPE, THE HEART DOES NOT LIE now tells the rest of the story: Before and After.
BEFORE. She is drawn to a side alley, and when she peers in, she spots the unmistakable sight that is Dreamscape, laid out in its tiny vials on a small foldable table. She tries to walk away, but she has already forgotten what she wanted to do. For lack of a better option, she goes closer. The seller is cloaked, and she cannot see who it is. But it doesn’t matter, because the only thing that she wants to look at is the drug. “Come to buy?” the seller rasps. “Come to look,” she corrects. Buying would mean chaining herself to the drug forever, and she cannot afford that. Not when she has a sister, not when her sister is so close to achieving success. Not now, not ever. “No one comes to look,” the seller says. “You come to buy, or you don’t come at all. ”“I will leave, then,” she says, but she finds that she cannot turn to go. “You have come,” the seller leans in close. “The heart does not lie. You want to buy. You will buy.”
“I don’t have money,” she says desperately. And it’s true, because her pockets are suddenly empty. The seller is holding her wallet in their hand. “Now you don’t have money,” the seller corrects. They push a vial towards her. “Take it.” She takes it. The seller empties the wallet, leaving behind her identification card and another photo, and returns it to her. As expected, all her loose change, all the dollar bills she painstakingly saved — gone. “Enjoy,” the seller says. This time, she turns and leaves with no difficulty. ### Her sister is disappointed, and she wishes that her sister was angry instead. Disappointment meant giving up, and she didn’t want her sister to give up on her. Not now, not ever. She leaves the vial of Dreamscape on the small table. They ignore it for the better part of a week, magic humming through the tiny space. And every day, she is drawn to it, like a moth to light. Until one day, her footsteps stop by the table against her will. Her hand picks up the vial, ignoring her panicked mind trying to let go of it. Her mouth no matter how hard she tries to force it to close. And with her horrified sister watching the struggle, she swallows the first drop of Dreamscape against her will Time stops, then starts again. The vial thuds on the table, sending a tiny crack through the glass. Her eyes are wide, and she starts to say something when she sways and falls to the floor. Her sister picks her up and carries her to the sofa, covering her with a blanket.. That was the first time she took Dreamscape, and it definitely wouldn’t be her last. AFTER. [ SISTER ] The funeral wasn’t really a funeral. It was more of “give body to other people”, “watch other people say prayers”, “put body in coffin”, “lower coffin in ground”. The heart does not lie. She is mourning, has been for the past three days, yet relieved. No more worrying over paying the bills. No more shitty wards that don’t even keep bugs out.
“Doesn’t make it hurt any less, though. She sighs and goes home to pack everything. Her new job means she gets to live in another apartment provided by the office. Her new job means money won’t be a problem, at least not in the near future. Her new job was only possible because she could finally say she had no family instead of “sister taking Dreamscape”. Her life had been tilted, was still tilting. It would not go back to normal for a long time, if ever. But she was still surviving. She tucks the last empty vial of Dreamscape in her bag, a reminder of who she’d lost. Stepping on the bus with her bags, she does not look back at the old apartment block; no, she looks ahead. Ahead to her new life, one that promised a bright future.
disused, decaffeinated, disappointed BY MEGAN
MEGANSWRITINGJOURNEY
Your stereo plays that song you always pick I forgot the name and I can’t ask you now because you’re my watered down Dr. Pepper fountain soda flat and half drunk thrown into the garbage disused, decaffeinated, disappointing I won’t ask for a refill.
Rely on the Lighthouse Keeper BY JESSA CRANBOGGLES
So once upon a time, the icebergs melted and the sea levels rose and people died and people lived and now there’s a lighthouse standing half-submerged a half mile or so off the shoreline. Charlotte dreams about the lighthouse every night. Not so unusual, since she thinks about it every day. Every morning she runs the length of the docks where the fishermen call her Lottie. Her legs are long and lean and her sandals go thwap thwap thwap against the saturated wood two planks at a time. She cuts her hands climbing the tide-battered cliffside and eats clams with every meal for want of pearls. Boiled, steamed, fried. She’s trying to turn salt into diamonds between her chipped teeth and so far? Not much luck. After her morning run, she works the floor of her uncle’s dive shop, pandering to wannabe treasure hunters. “All kinds of hidden beauties in the sunken cities, ripe for the picking,” he tells them. “Whatever hasn’t already been picked dry years ago, or eaten by fish. Treasure hunting is a sucker’s game,” he tells her. He’s not really her uncle, except in the ways that count. They sell thermo-control, pressure-control wetsuits that only sometimes tear at inopportune moments and gadgets to evade sensors in the places where such activity isn’t strictly legal. Mostly their customers come back with satchels full of scrap, green with age and algae-- worthless except to be melted down for raw material. Her uncle drops a few coins into their open palms, subtracting a generous finder’s fee for the equipment, and sends them on their grumbling way. They’ll be back though, because it’s a bad gamble but it’s one they don’t know how to live without, and one big win is all they need to change their lives for good. Suckers though they may be, Charlotte can’t help but feel for them. Something about the way they cycle through fervent hope and resignation in tight circles like a dog chasing its tail, she’d be blind not to see the resemblance. Every kid in this town has the exact same haunted look in their eyes, tailed by the loss of something that died long before they were born. For dinner Charlotte boils rice in a thin salinous bone broth until it becomes pale, barely palatable mush that her uncle can press comfortably into the space of his missing teeth. She eats two boiled clams and her own porridge, marginally thicker and with some actual meat in it to make it more resemblant of a meal. They don’t speak very much as they eat, outside of the same old discussions about Charlotte’s education or the future of the shop which resolve without conclusion and will be forgotten by the next time it comes up. Neither one is much for conversation. Afterwards the girl pours a bath as cold as she can stand and sits and scrubs and fills her lungs. Hold, hold. She can keep in her breath for over two full minutes on a good day, but it’s not good enough. She
needs more practice. Outside her bedroom window the lighthouse beacon blinks in and out of sight as it turns, winking at her where she sits wide awake in bed. She dips into sleep only long enough to get what she needs, and it comes to her in a pool of golden light and promises. Her and those suckers at the shop, they’re just the same, except where they cast about blindly in the ruins she’ll never lose sight. In the other room she can hear her uncle groaning as he works the heel of his hand against his bad leg, trying to exorcise a memory. For people who live seaside ghosts are as common a problem as bedbugs or radiation poisoning. Everyone has a story, from so-and-so’s brother’s neighbor’s cousin who had a grandfather who died in the first tidal wave that took Long Island and so on and so forth. In most of the stories though, or at least the good ones, it’s women they see. Ghost women bobbing in the surf and dressed only in moonlight. Always naked. Sailors are so predictable. So the story goes: “The widow of a navy marine. She went half mad when the call came in and fully mad by the time the war was over. When the waves went up she refused to retreat to higher ground, still waiting for her husband to come home. They say she waits to this day.” So the story goes: “She loved to dance on the beach even though she knew it was forbidden. A healthy young woman in her prime, but died suddenly of a vicious pneumonia. At her autopsy they found a tiny ocean in her lungs, coral reefs growing all up the sides and freckled with starfish. Real coral, can you imagine?” So the story goes: “Their daughters were possessed by a longing for the world that was. When at last it was more than they could take, they met under a red moon one night and threw themselves from the cliffs in despair.” So it goes. In another month Charlotte can hold her breath for almost three minutes. Soon it’ll be four. The rising bubbles tickle her cheeks as she breathes out. Clams every day, still no pearls. Her hair is growing long now and on rainy days it slaps her back and shoulders as she runs. A season of fishermen return to the docks while another sets sail and they don’t recognize her there anymore. She’s not Lottie to them but “that girl”. They make jokes to mask their unease. They say she runs like she has the devil on her heels. She knows though, she knows the devil doesn’t chase. He waits. He waits for her to get slow, to take her eyes off the horizon. She’s seen it happen. As she gets older it’ll get harder to dream except for of her next spot of luck, a good business quarter or a diver with a rare bounty, and her treasure will slip away from her. The devil is a man o' war, the devil is the scar that streaks diagonal down an old man's calf as he tells tales of days when sharks swam the seas in great
numbers, the devil is a lazy trawling net caught in a propeller. If she waits, someday she won’t wonder who lights the abandoned lighthouse at night. Someday she might not notice it at all. Just another part of the scenery like craggy cliffs and sunken skylines and the gates. “The devil is a tall iron gate,” she mutters, disinfecting her scraped palms. “That’s a new one,” her uncle says. “And I’m pretty sure those gates aren’t made of iron. Would rust, wouldn’t it?” “Iron sounds more,” She casts about for the right word. “Epic.” He laughs and his laugh is the only thing still completely dry in this shop. Then he says, “You could be a real writer if you put in the time. Didja give anymore thought to going back to school?” And the conversation is over. The devil is the slow broadening of her hips. Three minutes and forty-six seconds until she can’t take the burn anymore, but instead of resurfacing she sucks in an involuntary lungful and comes up retching. More clams come up, and a yellow starfish smaller than her pinky nail. There’s a medicine woman in a shop a few doors down who claims a paste made from dry-earth roots will expand the chest and bellows. It can’t be any worse than pinching crawlies from the bait-box. What she really needs though is a remedy no one’s given her yet. She needs a cure for time. Another few months and she can run from one end of the docks to the other in sixty-six identical strides. Before she so much as hits the docks her legs are shooting out to the bow and stem of her like a dancer. Meanwhile her uncle can barely walk anymore. She isn’t ready to go. The fog is so constant, so oppressive now that the lighthouse shines not just at night but throughout the day. From sat upon the cliffs she times her blinks in rhythm with the beacon and looks out on the waves, for ghosts, or just for a sign. For five minutes this time she quiets the hurting part, the signal that burns bright and angry, and focuses on the chill of the water engulfing her. In a year not quite to the day, while preparing dinner, she cracks open a particularly stubborn shell to find a lumpy pearl bigger than her goddamn knuckle. She leaves the pearl at her uncle’s bedside while he’s sleeping, paralleling nicely the way her mother left her once upon his doorstep, though she can’t know this. In the morning the dockworkers see a girl-- a young woman they used to call Lottie, sprinting along the boardwalk so fast that she seems not to touch the ground. It's another gray day, misty and magical,
and when they tell this story to their mothers’ good friends’ nephews she will be naked with skin made of gold and ambergris. She dances the length of the boardwalk and down to the wire fence surrounding the bivalvarium and without breaking stride she begins to climb. Right up and over, planting herself in the sand with a muddy thunk, one foot sailing in front of the other over rocks and ridges and into the chaste waters where fishermen and treasure seekers alike are forbidden. The oysters buried in the earth are singing, chattering their shells like castanets. The coastguard siren sings its angry song too. With no time to spend languishing on the beach, she wades on and begins to swim. The current doesn’t welcome her, but she wouldn’t expect anything less. The state tried to make her go to a nice inland school once and it felt a little like this. The resistance isn’t anything personal, it’s just how it is. “Go back where you belong, land-walker,” it says. “There’s nothing here for you but heartache.” But stroke by stroke she insists herself upon it. Somewhere someone is screaming from the shore. Whether in excitement or recrimination, Charlotte can’t hear any of them now. Hand over hand, out of the surf and then in again. As she approaches her destination, squinting against the salt in her eyes, she breaches a final time and then nosedives to the bottom. Five minutes. The tide and the air trapped in her ballooned lungs try to buoy her back to the surface so she activates the weighted bracelets filched from the shop. They’re tricky little trinkets, only used by the more experienced or reckless divers. Once they’re cracked a chemical reaction within the donut-shaped shell makes them heavy as anchors, giving the wearer an extra bit of depth but also limiting their movement. Charlotte had her reservations about them, and still does, but right now they get her just where she needs to be. At the base of the sunken lighthouse there’s a crack. An ordinary crack, worked open naturally by the years and the pressure. It’s down deep though and the point of entry is small. An adult burdened with lots of heavy diving equipment couldn’t fit. She squeezes in, scraped raw on all sides, struggling to release the clasps on the weights when they get her stuck in the gap. She’s all through but her ankle now. Two minutes of air left by her rough estimation and she still needs to make it back to the surface. Panic will eat up her air faster. She knows this, she knows. She grabs one of the bracelets and hammers it against the stone until she breaks free. A small burst of blood halos her ankle as she races for the faint light above her, winking at her in a rhythm she knows so well. There is movement in the ocean around her. Big flat-bodied fish? Monstrous mutant eels perhaps? Or ghosts. So the story goes.
She swims up and breaks through and her ears are ringing. Only now does she let herself feel the cold and the ache in her lungs and the throbbing of her muscles, and she wails like a newborn, her cries echoing to the heavens. She’s survived, and the surviving is an agony unlike anything she’s ever known, ever could have anticipated. The collision of the dream and the reality is less breaking a fever and more hurtling through a pane of glass. “Well that was dramatic,” say the ghosts. They do indeed look like women, although they have clothes fashioned from layers of seaweed and rubbery fish skins so thick Charlotte can’t tell where it ends and they begin. Their bodies are thin but only in the way flounders are. They twist and writhe like a child’s lost ribbon floating in the tide. One sniffs and touches her wounded ankle curiously as she floats, and she doesn’t feel much like a ghost at all. She feels as plain to her as fish porridge. So the ghosts who are not ghosts swim her over to a ledge, where the water laps upon the stair. Their ribbon tails shimmy back and forth in hypnotic rhythm and when the pale light shines upon them they glisten like jelly. Charlotte doesn’t know it but sailors didn’t always just tell stories about ghosts. It’s just that tall tales lose some of their zest once they come true. “Since you’re here I guess you’ll be staying,” says one gilly girl, not cruelly but not kindly either. “You might as well get comfy.” Another, smaller than the first with a bob of inky hair matted to her cheeks, tugs shyly at the hem of her top. “Did you bring anything fun with you? Oh, do you have any movies? We found a VCR the other day in the old houses.” “It won’t work.” “You don’t know that. I want to watch movies again. I miss having new stories.” “Do you know my brother? He’s a bivalve farmer back on the cape. Unless he isn’t anymore. It has been a while since I saw him.” “Is the president still a prick? I promised myself I wouldn’t be coming back until there was someone with half a brain in office. Oh hey remind me, what year is it now?” “I have a blockbuster card in my purse! You can use it if you bring back some movies.” Two of the girls begin to drum up a chant of, “Moo-vies! Moo-vies!” Charlotte just sits and stares. A different one swims up to her, shooing away the clinging creatures who poke and prod and inspect her person. Her features are long and angular, more mature to Charlotte’s reckoning, not knowing how meaningless the term is here. Like describing the maturity of a fossil or an insect petrified in amber.
"Ignore them, they’re just excited,” she says. There is something moving behind her dark eyes, flitting about like a school of minnows, yet her expression is peaceful. Charlotte, finding her voice, asks, “Are you the guardians of the treasure?” She cocks her head. “Treasure?” “Yes, the-- the treasure!” she struggles to explain. “I dream about it every night. Treasure from the old world, a golden light, guarded by the lighthouse keeper…” “You’re in shock, dear. You look pale. When’s the last time you ate?” “Who’s in charge here?” “No one is. We’re a self-governing body of--” ”Who lights the lighthouse?” she demands, ignoring the fish-woman’s protests. She braces her hands on the slick stone wall and pulls herself up. “Someone must light the lighthouse, but none of you have legs. None of you can climb the stairs. So who lights the lighthouse?” Oh, silly girl,” the not-ghosts not-fish not-women fawn. “You do.” So much love in their eyes. So much love living behind them, wriggling in the shiny shells of their bodies like happy mollusks. Charlotte’s legs feel weak. The elder mermaid touches the back of her knee gently, comfortingly. When, she wondered, had anyone last touched the back of her knee, of all places. She nods up towards the stairs which spiral skywards in the shape of a conch’s crown. “Would you like to see? “So once upon a time, a girl chased a dream to the edge of her world and in consequence fell off of it. Not the worst outcome. Not for Charlotte, who was just one girl against a great big ocean of trouble after all. And still the sea levels rise, and still the lighthouse lantern turns around and around, reliably guiding home ships full of sailors who tell all sorts of old stories and know well enough not to try and see them through to their ends. END
exhibition BY SASHA
LASBRUMAS
CONTENT WARNING: religion
i. the wings flutter helplessly beneath the thick glass. people come up, ignore the large DO NOT TOUCH sign, place their fingertips above it, as if leaving a testament that they were there. ii. like the DO NOT TOUCH sign, another sign sits nearby, an exhibit label. “‘Angel’ wings, found December 25, 1985, just off the shore of –––.” the last word is scratched out. iii. no one thinks about why the wings were abandoned. they only want to touch, to see them. holy, a miracle, they call them. iv. a silent stranger with haunted eyes watches people approach the case. they turn away at the sight of their greedy hands, reaching, reaching, always reaching. their shoulders ache just a little.
RAIN IN WUXI BY JES JANAISVU
i. the thunder comes one second before the suffocating wet there's always noise outside your window. the raindrops dance the way they only do in summer; your drums drifted in muffled & tender. i say: i can't sleep (because of the rain) (because of your stupid night light) (because you are here)
ii. would you mind if i cry on your favourite orange shirt? rain in wuxi shattered me into pieces and told me to sing about it i swear i did my best i'm sorry my best is still off-key
iii. i promise you, you're born t to live among stars don't you see how the world lights up for you? the stage is trembling i am singing to you do you know? in all the brightest & cruelest places i will still look to you do you know?
iv. i suppose there's a summer in every heart romantic & hazy & impossible to go back to this august slipped by in the wettest grass & heaviest skies & someone playing the piano at midnight this building is too hot and not loud enough smells like the eleven eggs you hid under the cupboard burns like mosquito bites in places you can’t find this is a place where someone will ask you if you're lonely and you won't get mad; not that much, anyway everyone is lonely here everyone tried to run away but somehow, there is still something gentle about wuxi.
無錫
note: wuxi — , a city in china where i walked through summer to autumn with your hand in mine
elegy for the spoiled milk carton on the counter BY LEELA
BOYSAINTS
look, i know i promised for a week that i’d drink it, or throw it out, or put it away--at the very least--but i forgot anyways. i mean, there isn’t anything i can do about it now but say sorry, i guess. & i am, believe me, but does it matter all that much? we can get in the car & go for a drive down to the 7/11 on the corner of elm & third. i’ll buy you three big gulps if you promise to forgive me for the milk & the groceries & the laundry & whatever else it was i didn’t remember to do this morning. see, you have this habit of biting the hand that feeds you & i could never say no to anyone because my palm was perfectly built for everyone else’s fingers & i thought that just because the shoe fit i had to wear it. we painted the kitchen brighter a thousand times over but the color always washed you out, made you retreat into yourself at the dining table. lemon yellow was the worst, i think. then pastel blue & baby pink followed by the puke green i gave up on halfway through. you wanted a love like a sail unfurling over an open sea but instead you got lorraine, my density has brought me to you, you got never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run you down & desert you & yet you left me cornflower-blue and half-dead from heatstroke in the middle of a highway going nowhere. lost your glasses somewhere along the way & got into a staring contest with the sun as you worried at the edges of your shirt & said did you check? check again. are you sure? are you sure? look, i know that recently we’ve had our differences & recently we’ve had our difficulties but i want you to forgive me & i don’t want to talk about it & i don’t want to have to say i’m sorry. the spoiled milk on the kitchen counter & the inside-out drawers & all the mirrors we broke, you & i together, this time. i promised not to forget but i did, of course i did. i’m sorry, i’m so sorry. i know it doesn’t do anything but i am, really! i know mama would’ve shaken her head and said, baby, such a thing can’t last & i wouldn’t have believed her but i think she’s right on this one, i think. i think maybe there’s a breaking point, i think maybe we’ve crossed the line i drew in the sand, i think this looks like the ending credits, the bloody carcass, the exit music. such a thing can’t last. can it?
THIS BROKEN BODY IS NOT YOURS TO HOLD BY CHERRI
BY HALCIONIC
Content Warnings: slight body horror, death, self-destruction
the honeysuckle burn of a purpled weapon sears away at the burning edge of a cliff-side coffin with a hole and you’re still digging with that broken shovel; there’s a brand carved into your heart and it’s one you’ve never seen outside of nightmares when you wake up clawing at your throat with the wonder, wonder, where am i, is this my grave, have i finally dug so deep i can’t escape? you want to destroy yourself. it’s a guilty pleasure tearing away at your skin until you’re nothing more than a skeleton laid bare in front of the jury waiting for a guilty verdict; but it never comes it’s not selfish to want a softer beginning, you deserve one more than anyone, you really do. burn, burn, baby, burn. you haven’t been alone since you were a child and you’re craving more than the blood under your nails will allow; where are the matches and the pitchforks? why are you not burning at the stake? where is the hatred that has bubbled under your veins, seeping seeping seeping into the air like a poisoned curse following you everywhere you go. you are the sum of your experiences and all they have created is a monster drunk on its own humanity, drunk on the notion that it does not ascribe to the same poison you have created. hazard, hazard, the sirens call, hazard, hazard, you don’t belong here anymore. i’m gonna fight everyone until i burn so hot that all this broken glass turns into something worthwhile you’re mismatched and misguided; a collection of everything you were supposed to be and everything that comes out of the rotting grin you gave to your mother when she asked what happened to you, blood dripping from the canines you oh so adore. you are the one you despise. you are the dragon of the castle. you are the sharp edge of a dagger’s betrayal. you’ll find that polished glass to be worth it, I promise you the burning sun snaps its jaws at the shadows clinging underneath your eyes; the curtains open for the first time in years and you’re surprised to say you missed the purple blue of the sunrise as the world plunges on, constant and constant and constant, waiting for a new day to rise, waiting and waiting until the perfect moment until the coffin opens for the open casket funeral you’d never have; you are the sum of your experiences. you will burn away the horizon. and the sun will do the rest.
the rat king BY ALONA SERPENTARII
Content Warnings: musophobia, implication of death
i am ten years old when i first meet the rat king. he’s as short as you think, with a thousand, thousand tales and crown of holiday tinsel and old foil, chewed to shreds and smelling of old breakfast. a pinprick grin from up upon his penny throne, his once-magnificent fur gone green from molding years one the cusp of final rust. he crushes himself under door frames in winter to steal sugar cubes. a few flush encyclopedias to the chipping paint keeps him out for the night, yet i worry if it just makes him smarter. i saw him while i was in the bathroom. perhaps he’d misunderstood when my father joked porcelain throne. he chews through the leaden pipes and i wonder if he knows the taste of roman wine. if he shivers beneath the footsteps of giants. does he think himself clever when he steals in the nighttime? rat king, rat king, grant me solace. will you know the halls, the halls of my home and other homes unwelcome. i see your royal visage in the woven rosettes of the carpets, in the portraits on my walls, under wisteria lamps, heavy with glass fruit. i’ve prepared a feast for you under the oven and wait for the now-comforting stench of rot. christmas dinners, tinsel crowns, and sugar for the pies.
credits We'd like to thank all our authors for contributing their pieces to the zine. All written work is owned by the writer credited within the piece. Images are sourced from royalty free stock photo websites such as Unsplash and Pexel. Thank you once again for reading!