The swamp was the best place to watch wading birds, and wading birds were the only birds I watched. Sully didn’t like the swamp, but he drove us there anyway. He was going to propose. Otherwise, he wouldn’t waste the trip to some place only I liked. Sully was quieter than normal, but I chalked it up to nerves. Proposing was a big deal. He didn’t have to worry. Even though he hated swamps I’d say yes. Marriage was about compromise. We followed faded signs to a boardwalk connecting two mudflats. I looked for the soft glow of alligator eyes between gaps in the planks. Sully walked with his hands in his pocket, protecting the ring from falling into the water. Cattails and spider lilies crept up and twisted around the splintering wood. Glass glass beer bottles glistened in the shallow water. I wanted to fish them out, but Sully stopped me. “Marci,” Sully said. “If you fall in the water, you’re on your own.” The water would give me a bacterial infection if it touched my skin, he said. “If you fall in the water, I’ll jump in after you,” I said. Sully needed me. He didn’t know how to swim. Sully didn’t say anything because he saw a dead bird. It was a great egret. Its body was washed up on the mudflat but its head floated on the water. Turtles surfaced and the bird’s neck swayed in the ripples. Maggots were feasting on its flesh underneath a thinning layer of feathers. Sunlight caught on the water and the remains of the bird morphed into a passing cloud, and I couldn’t tell them apart. “Are you okay?” Sully asked. “I’m okay.” The bile in my stomach burned the back of my throat. The air was stale and sweat dripped down my forehead. Sully knelt and untied his shoe. He could have picked a better spot. I didn’t want to think of a rotting carcass every time I held the diamond to the sky, but it was nice of him to try and cheer me up. Sully wouldn’t look me in the eye. “I met someone else,” he said. There were other great egrets off in the distance, but cicadas drowned out their low crocks. “I did too,” I said. It was a lie. I only wanted him. The wind blew and the stench from the decomposing carcass drifted up and wrapped itself around Sully. I took small breaths through my mouth, but I tasted the rotten flesh on my tongue. I gagged. Sully walked to the end of the boardwalk and crushed tall blades of cordgrass underneath his feet. If he stayed in the same place too long, the soles of his shoes would leave an imprint. I stood next to him, and sank into the ground, the algae-laden water pooling around the outsoles of my shoes. I shoved Sully and he broke the surface of the water, distorting the reflections of cypress and tupelo trees.
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The size of the moon startles me as I step onto my porch. It is large and high in the sky. I forgot today is the full moon. Good luck. New intentions. My shadow is extra-long across the sidewalk in front of me when I start my walk. I talk to myself like I do, in the quiet of the morning. Is that Jupiter glowing to the right side of the moon? Is there a right side of the moon? Or is it just my right side? Does the moon have sides? I give the tiny glowing light to the right of the moon a wave and whisper: hi Jupiter, even knowing, despite knowing, it could very well not be Jupiter; I could be waving at a satellite. They say not to look at your phone right when you wake up, but I do anyway, each day before my walk. Your tumor is back. It took your mom three full paragraphs before she said the words again. I want to re-read the message. Scour it. I take a deep breath, blow it into my hands, warm them up, then shake them out a couple times and keep walking. The phone shifts in my pocket, tapping against my hip with each step. I can feel it there, pressing against me, light and heavy at the same time. The shadows of the trees are short and sideways in the extra moonlight. Distorted, they look wrong, but I can see the proper shape of the leaves at the edge of the shadows if I squint just right. Trying to find their shape in the dark feels like a game, like comfort. I count how many leaves I can find as I go past each tree. Five, then three, then four, then seven. I stop counting at seven. Lucky number seven. The coyotes ruffle around to my left. Or maybe it’s some javelinas. I’m not worried. We leave each other alone. I like to think it’s because they know me by now. They are readying for breakfast or sleep. I never know which. I like to wonder about that, about their lives. I give them a little wave, too. Past the coyotes or javelinas, at the end of the long curving corner of the gravel path, I have a perfect view of the full moon. I think: orb, and smile a wobbly, little smile. I love that word, I whisper. I wonder about the message in my pocket. I take some time to launch some prayers, shoot them toward the moon. I make sure as many prayers go up as tears do, down my face. The squeak from the soles of my shoes is loud when I hit pavement again. I try my best to follow my extra-long moonlight shadow down the street. I am unable to catch it no matter how fast I walk, no matter how hard I try. Brandy Reinke is an author living in Phoenix, Arizona. She has published short-fiction pieces in: The Redrock Review, Esthetic Apostle, Tulane Review, Big Muddy Review, Microfiction Monday Magazine, Moonstone Arts, and the HCE Review. She was a finalist in Alternating Current Press’ 2024 Luminaire Poetry Award, awarded an Honorable Mention in short fiction in Glimmer Train’s final publication, as well as had a piece short-listed in the Fish Anthology. Her novel was short-listed as a finalist for Unleash Press’ Inaugural 2022 Book Prize. Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash It started, as it always does, with a small movement. We sat at the dining room table, our heads bowed for grace, when I noticed it. Just beside my chair the tattered fringe of my mother’s hand woven Persian carpet lifted ever so slightly and curled over on itself. I slid my foot closer to my body as we said Amen. Then she began to escalate. There were the blonde hairs that fell across my shoulders and lap while I read, the sound of sheer fabric sweeping the floor as I scurried across the hardwood to get a glass of water at night, the single wool socks that never make it back from laundry. I hid my mother’s lipsticks because I knew she was using them. I could smell her perfume lingering on everything, the eyeshadows, the cakey translucent powder. I prayed my mother wouldn't notice. At school, Marcie from Spanish warned me about Artie’s, the old firehouse-turned-antique store in town. Things come home with you when you go there. And I’m not talking about the items you buy, she said. Other things. But when I decided to skip 6th period and wander through the unsteady stacks of yellowing books and walnut desks, I found her on a shelf between A Curious Farmer’s Field Guide and Best Baseball Stats: 2001--the centerfold page falling open to reveal her photo, the white lace, the barn setting, her eyes at half mast, her sheer skirt dipping across her lap, Miss October 1976. She wasn’t on a sketchy website, or hidden behind a group of snickering high school faces; she was published in gloss across three pages, elegant, proud. And I couldn’t leave without her. But the haunting was getting worse. Small fires began to start in the basement, my father’s church shirts turned up shredded, boiling cups of tea tipped and fell into our laps. My mother had to stick a wooden spoon in the kitchen window frames so they wouldn’t slam shut while she cooked. On a night when Father Bard came for dinner he left the table to use the bathroom and after ten minutes tore down the hall and out the front door, his coat still swaying on the coat rack. That night, I knelt beside my bed and slid her from her hiding place between the pages of a biology textbook. Please stop, I begged, I’ll do anything. I don’t want anyone knowing you’re here. Just then, a draft moved through my bedroom, fluttering the captivating look in her eyes, and I understood. It all made sense. I knew why she was so agitated. The next morning I rummaged through the box way in the back of the closet and found one of my mother’s wool hats, my father’s scarf, a thick pair of socks that were lined with fuzz. I folded them neatly and tucked them under the bed, next to the stack of textbooks. There was silence for a while, and I laid awake each night, worried that she had left me. But I was wrong. The hauntings returned, but now, they were sweet. The trashcan nudged closer to the counter to catch a falling potato peel, our clothes already warm when we dressed in the winter, a soft hand on the shoulder when things got tough. I was relieved. Now, Miss October 1976 is there for me when I need her, perpetually smiling through deep red lipstick, her clothes slouching away from her body, her hair poofed with hot rollers, her thumb grazing her cheekbone. I admire her most nights. Take her out and gaze over her. I imagine her voice, her laugh. I’ll keep her forever. I’ll learn to be seductive in her specific way. She is everything. She was just cold. Kale Choo Hanson is a writer from Philadelphia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Peatsmoke Journal, Grande Dame Literary and Lunar Lit Magazine. She holds an MFA from Temple University and is working on her first novel.
You asked me to come, and I did, even though I knew it was wrong. In that city of beaten red clay and ramparts, you took my hand and led me through medieval keyhole arches and thin, ribbonlike passages meant to confuse the enemy and disperse the jinn. Some doors led to cool, leafy fountain courtyards. Other doors led to riads rotting from neglect. We were in the medina on the other side of the world, far away from anyone and anything familiar; we could do whatever we wished. We skipped through the souks admiring the beauty of the ordinary – this ancient stone, these odours of cinnamon, clove and rose. Brass lanterns and swords. Bins of talismans. We spied on men in long saffron robes smoking hookahs in their cafes. Young teenage boys cried out – Hey! Who are you? Where you go? I take you. – and we walked past them laughing, as if you already knew the way. You had finished your lectures, and the days unfurled before us now like a fresh piece of paper. Do you know where you’re going? – I asked, hearing the oddest thrill of excitement in my voice, looking vaguely round and letting myself be drawn further in. A bright-eyed boy sold the sweetest orange juice in the square and a suited man named Azeem had shone shoes beneath the clock tower for all his life. The barber, the cobbler, the tooth puller – each shop was nothing more than a wobbly chair. Children behind every shop counter cheated you of change but you didn’t care. You chuckled at the mule with a carburetor tied to its back and the crooked man who called out Balak! Balak! as they passed. From the tiny bakery, you chose a slice of the thousand-layer cake and ate it in three bites. In the mosque, you pointed out the calligraphy that was engraved on the ceiling and walls, the calligraphy that was almost everywhere in the city, you said. For these people had always believed that writing was sacred. Writing was their word of God. Outside, the smiling guard who’d been watching us mistook us for married, asking if this was the honeymoon. But no, I wanted to say, covering my hair again. There’s a wife who knows nothing of this. We are in the realm of the Forbidden. A man stepped out of a doorway and invited us into his carpet shop, away from the heat, and rug after rug was spread out before our feet as three cups of mint tea were poured. When we emerged, it was from a door on a different side and the scene had changed completely. A girl sat weaving in a dark room beneath a single bulb. A blind boy stood singing. ~ I woke from the dream (of what?), the call to prayer echoing through the sky. Come back, you said, pulling me in again and slipping a hand between my legs. ~ Every night at dusk, the main square filled with musicians and storytellers. An old man, remarkably tall and thin, held up various props – a giant ostrich egg and feather plume and sword – as he told tales of choices and danger and fate. A wide-eyed woman with a ruby on her forehead felt it her duty to translate to me. You have the eyes to see you are caught in one story, and the heart to know you could change it to another. We ate sheep brains at the stall of a boy who pointed the way to his brother’s rooftop bar, promising it had the best view of anywhere. Dozens of people just like us were there. You gave me a tiny pill and my heart quickened in beat with the drums. It was our last night and I spun round and round, the sounds echoing loudly within me because perhaps it was true that I was hollow at the core. In the morning, I’d leave, and you’d switch cities, and your wife and children would join you. I glanced up and saw you watching me from the other side without any expression at all. I am alone, I thought, leaning into the sparkly air. Sometime later, I went back down to search for the toilet. There, through the tiniest window, I looked into the yellow room across the alley where someone, sitting before a mirror, was drawing a picture of herself.
Photo by Luke Brugger on Unsplash Behind the glass, corn cob bedding pillows the dead finch. Hilly plops into the faux velvet wingback chair, notices the dusty purple dawn filtering through the gauzy drapes. She must be the one who found the little birdy first, like she’d found Edgar unresponsive in the backyard, his joggers and flannel button-up sopping from the streaming garden hose he still clutched. Hilly remembers thinking Edgar’s face was milky and mottled. She can’t imagine that curdled face now. But she can picture Grampa’s waxy, gaunt cheeks and the brown ribbing on the lumpy easy chair where he still reclined, muscles stiffened into place, and the odd tilt to her voice when she phoned her mother with the news. Maryam enters the aviary, carting her supplies to feed the finches, clear their filth from the plastic vines, the ropes and perches, twine spherical roosts. Maryam had taught Hilly the little dead one is a zebra finch. Stripes and polka dots both, browns and greys. Maryam coos at the exotic little lifeless thing in soft public mourning. She advises Hilly to return to her room while Maryam cleans today. Hilly doesn’t. Maryam leaves to fetch an aide, returns alone, and says she’ll take you, Mrs. Moreland, just for today. Stout Maryam hoists Hilly to her walker and caresses Hilly’s hunched shoulder while they plod down the beige hallway, a beaten flat and dingy streak down the carpet’s middle. Don’t be sad about the finch, Mrs. Moreland. He lived a good life. There, sit in the big chair, Mrs. Moreland. Are you okay? Do you need water? Okay. Have a good day, Mrs. Moreland. Hilly looks out her window. Past the tidily manicured boxwoods, sparrows peck at the asphalt parking lot. Hilly watches. Jenny Severyn lives in Ohio with her husband. She holds a BA in English from Loyola University Chicago and an MLIS from Simmons University. Her work has appeared in Litbreak, Eunoia Review, and Apricity Press.
Photo by Andy Holmes on Unsplash The trees are bare enough to see the squirrels’ nests. Frederick scratches his gray mustache and squints his weathered eyes, wondering how a creature could rest on such a fragile bed, at such great heights, amidst winds that could carry away a thin branch. During the spring and summer months, Frederick had spent every morning taking care of his beloved Mariana’s gravesite. He’d bring a pair of scissors in his back pocket, get down on his hands and knees, and make sure there wasn’t a single blade of grass out of place. A fresh set of daisies, strategically placed in a vase next to the headstone, would add a hint of delicate sun to the roughness of the stormcloud-colored granite. With winter on the way, Frederick knows it’s going to be a lot harder to keep Mariana’s headstone clear. The snow doesn’t care about the names it covers, and wool gloves just aren’t enough to warm hands that have been cracked for forty years. The daisies will shrivel up quicker, if they don’t disappear first. Frederick stands in front of Mariana’s headstone. He envisions himself lying peacefully in the plot next to her. When Frederick and Mariana got married, they’d always hoped that they wouldn’t ever be without each other for long. But when each minute feels like an empty lifetime, a day feels like another death. On the way home, Frederick’s walking stick taps against the sidewalk like a ticking clock. His walking stick has seen better days, but so has anything that has traversed the grounds of time. His back seems to hunch more with each step, his frown burrows deeper, and every breath becomes a bigger job when the cold air enters his lungs. The new neighbors whisper to each other from their porch, and Frederick turns away. It’s hard to face the world when you’re mourning your own. As Frederick approaches the walkway of his deteriorating Victorian house, he looks up and witnesses a squirrel falling from the birch tree in his front yard. The squirrel lands on the firm soil, pauses for a moment, frozen, then springs up and darts across the street as if nothing happened. Frederick steps into his home which doesn’t feel like home anymore. He hangs up his scarf, caresses the sleeve of Mariana’s old coat, and sighs. After making his way up the creaking staircase to his bedroom, Frederick lies down in his bed and stares at the ceiling. A gust of wind rattles the shaky windows. The height of his loneliness makes him feel dizzy. He contemplates whether he’ll ever be able to get back up again or not. He closes his eyes and wishes he could be like the squirrels.
The day I learned you once lived in the jungle, I was in your knee-wall attic, looking for envelopes of negatives your wife had asked me to find. “It should say BABY’S FIRST CHRISTMAS,” she hollered from the den, as if such a request would prove easy, should prove easy. As I sorted through towers of cardboard storage boxes, most neither dated nor labeled, I wondered when the last time was that she was up here. Or you. “I don’t see a box with that year, Aunt Audrey.” Though I didn’t hear her respond, I kept opening boxes, rifling through contents for negatives. I found Christmas tree lights. Christmas ornaments. A tree-topper. An envelope. Full of photos. No negatives. Then you. A picture of you. A much younger you. Sand in your hair. Sunscreen on your face. A tricolored beach ball in hand. Your wife next to you. My mother on the other side. A rippling, clear-blue ocean as background. What fun you must’ve had without me. Before me. I felt something stuck to the back of the photo. I turned the picture over, revealing another. You again. An even younger you, though. In olive green. A necklaced ball chain on what must’ve held your dog tags visible. US ARMY above your left patch pocket. Other young men beside you. Also uniformed. Also smile-less. Jungle as background. As green as your camos. Patterned like them, too. As I studied the photo, something else in the box caught my eye: on what looked like a small, framed diploma, George Washington’s profile gleamed—gold in color, enclosed in a heart-shaped medal; ribboned with purple; above printed text: TO PRIVATE FIRST CLASS MACKENZIE H. AMBROSE, UNITED STATES ARMY FOR WOUNDS RECEIVED IN ACTION. Below the citation, wrapped in yellowed newspaper, was your Purple Heart, mounted in a presentation case. As I gently pulled back the crumpled newsprint, fingered grainy images of B-52s, anti-aircraft guns, and aerial maps, I read the front-page headline: CHRISTMAS BOMBING: NIXON ORDERS OPERATION LINEBACKER. Now I could see the whole picture. Now things started to make sense: your laconic responses, your gruff demeanor, your hearing loss, your refusal to dine at Vietnamese-American restaurants. With your Purple Heart in my hands, I grew somewhat resentful at your wife and my mother. Why hadn’t they told me? Didn’t they trust me? Yes, I was still a freshman, as much the activist against Bush’s War as those against Johnson’s and Nixon’s. But I wouldn’t have said anything. I wouldn’t have asked you about what you saw, heard, or smelled. I knew better. So enwrapped in my own thoughts was I that I did not hear your wife calling me from below. Only when I felt the vibrations of your heavy footsteps on the stairs did I scramble, quickly but carefully putting back your pictures, citation, and medal, closing the lid to the box and shoving it behind the others. As you opened the door to the attic, I tried not to glance at your secrets, now boxed together again, letting on that I was snooping. “Have you found the negatives yet?” you asked, standing inside the doorway. I frowned and shook my head. Not the ones that you mean, uncle.
Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash Heavy folds of Sherpa blanket sag down her arm, cold air rushing into the pocket of warmth. Watching the ripples of her breath gently crash through ginger and lemon tea, she hopes the draping makes her look like Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle. Maybe Sandra Bullock in Practical Magic. It doesn’t. No kind wind pushing hair back. No full moon to gaze at. Snow hits the window, at least. But no drifting flakes. Just a frenzied swarm of tiny shards. The caretaker commented on the luck yesterday. That burying someone during the warm before the storm was easier than cutting deep into frozen ground. Maybe he didn’t think the young woman running her pale hand against glossy dark casket again--wishing the surface wasn’t so smooth, wanting a splinter or rough patch but feeling nothing but slippery varnish--could hear him. Fair enough. Most would be preoccupied after screaming, yelling sharp words that cut jagged lines in the throat. Words not spoken ten years ago, but left to molder, infecting the mouth. The heart. Finally spewed out over the corpse of a mother. Hoping the venom might pierce the armor of the pressed suit of a father. Hands and fingers aching for something to break against, yearning to feel something other than polished walnut. Settling for mangling a business card offered with soft words, words that would probably work on another woman, other children that weren’t left with rot in their bodies. But the slick card felt too smooth against trembling hands, too much like the coffin. She pulls the torn fragments from her pocket now, the blanket gaping further, her chest more vulnerable to cold. Tea and honey having soothed, the empty cup is set down slowly enough to not sound against a desk. The puzzle of a torn phone number is carefully solved with fingertips skimming the surname she abandoned. She remembers a gift given over a decade ago. Carefully chosen green and blue stripes, the favorite colors of father and daughter matching against each other. The same pattern seen on an old faded tie yesterday. A tie too old and cheap to match well with a fancy suit. But worn anyway. One hand gathers lumpy blanket closed around a shivering chest. The other hand carefully consults a torn number and raises a phone. Two rings, and then an answer.
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