Fiction – Page 3 – Writers Resist

A Woman of Good Manners

By Nikki Blakely

It is a universal truth that a man of good fortune must be in want of a wife, and Jayne set her sights on Edward, despite his reputation for being of a most disagreeable character.

On their first date, they went to Possum Pond.

Jayne had always been told the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach. She smiled coyly at Edward as she opened the picnic basket and placed the food onto a red checkered tablecloth laid out under the shade of a large elm tree—ham and Swiss sandwiches with the crusts cut off, red potato salad with tiny cornichons and tart-sweet lemonade, freshly squeezed.

Edward ate heartily, while Jayne merely picked at her food, as was befitting a woman of good manners. Afterward, she slipped off her stockings, pulled her dress to her thighs and waded into the pond, beckoning Edward with the crook of her finger to follow, and follow he did.

He came up behind her, grabbed her tightly by the neck, then pushed her face into the muddy murk of the shallow water and held it there until her body stopped thrashing.

The next afternoon, it surprised Edward to see Jayne strolling up the cobbled stone pathway to his house, looking no worse for wear, though he thought he noticed a slight smudge of dirt around the cuff of her sleeve.

“Darling, it’s a beautiful day for a picnic,” she said, exactly as she had the day before, and indeed it was.

True, Jayne was not an overtly handsome woman, her countenance left Edward wanting, but her cooking skills were a credit to her housekeeping. And, well, it was lunchtime and he was hungry. Edward pulled his hat and coat from the rack, and once more they set off to Possum Pond.

Today she brought crispy fried chicken, golden buttermilk biscuits, and ice cold beer, and, for dessert, cinnamon-apple hand-pies. Jayne only nibbled—she was a lady after all—while Edward ate his fill. Afterward, Edward picked up one of Jayne’s stockings that she had taken off, twisted it tightly around her neck, and pulled sharply. Her hands clawed at her throat, her eyes bulged, and her body thrashed until finally falling limp.

The next day, Jayne was again on Edward’s doorstep, with only a slight reddening around her neck.

“Darling, it’s a beautiful day for a picnic,” she said, and off they went.

She’d made a salad with fresh greens, crisp bacon and soft-boiled eggs. Edward washed it all down with Southern sweet tea, then finished the meal with vanilla macaroons. Afterward, he pulled out a knife he’d hidden in his sock, and stabbed Jayne in the neck, watching the blood first spurt, then trickle, the red stain spreading like spilled wine across the checked tablecloth.

When Jayne once again appeared on his doorstep the following day, Edward noticed a crimson spot on her collar, and thought her smile waned slightly, but other than that, she remained nonplussed. They locked arms and set off for Possum Pond.

As usual, they sat down under the cool shade of the elm, and Jayne removed the food from the picnic basket: beef tongue pie, pickled beets, butterscotch pudding and sarsaparilla soda. After they had eaten, they lay down, and spent the afternoon picking animal shapes from the clouds until Edward at last leaned over and kissed Jayne on the lips. Then he placed his coat over her face and pressed down firmly until her arms stopped flailing about and she was completely still.

“Darling, it’s a—” Edward was already waiting at the door, coat and hat in hand.

From the picnic basket, Jayne pulled cold roast mutton, deviled eggs, sweet mulled cider, and a raspberry tart. When Edward finished eating, he picked up a thick heavy log and smashed it over her head, once, twice, three times for good measure, until her body collapsed and crumpled to the ground in a heap.

When Jayne again showed up the next day, picnic basket in hand, it had been five days since their first date. She looked a little bedraggled, with the smudge of dirt on her cuff, a reddening around her neck and a drop of blood on her collar. Her bun hung askew to the left, and she walked with a slight limp.

Edward considered Jayne. She was not a great beauty, nor an accomplished woman. By her own confession, she did not possess any knowledge of the pianoforte, was not skilled in the art of conversation, and almost always lost at whist. Her prospects were most certainly limited. But her figure was slight and pleasing, she ate like a bird, and, try as he might, she would not die. What she lacked in physical attributes she made up for in tenacity. If he couldn’t kill her, he’d marry her instead. He decided to propose that day, directly after lunch.

That day, as Jayne had done every day before, she shook out the checkered tablecloth and spread it out under the shade of the elm. She slipped off her stockings, and Edward, impatient to see what new delights the picnic basket held, took haste to open it before Jayne had the opportunity, His countenance revealed his surprise at finding it empty, and he looked to Jayne for explanation.

“It is a universal truth that a woman of bad fortune might be in want of a good meal rather than a good husband, and there is a much faster way to a man’s heart.”

With one hand, Jayne grabbed Edward by the throat and plunged the other deep into his chest. She pulled out his heart, still beating, and bit into it like an apple, the blood dribbling down her chin. Then she picked up a napkin and dabbed daintily at the corners of her mouth. She was a woman of good manners, after all.

Nikki Blakely lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, with her partner and a precocious gray tabby named Tedz. She enjoys writing fiction of all shapes, sizes, and genres, crafting stories that evoke smiles, tears, laughter, the occasional eye roll, and sometimes even a scream. Her work has been published in Sundial Magazine, Bright Flash Fiction and Luna Station Quarterly, and others. You can find her on Twitter at @nblakely99

Photo credit: “Picnic Basket” by Paul via a Creative Commons license.

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Sunny Is Going Through a Depressive Episode

By Livvy Krakower

“The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” – Nathan Rabin

When Sunny was eight years old her mother fell down the stairs. That doesn’t seem important now as you sit across from Sunny and run your fingers up her thigh. You can feel the goosebumps on her skin and you read them like braille. I want you, they tell you.

You see her outline before you see her eyes. You kiss her neck before you kiss her lips. You grab her hips before you grab her hand. Saturday nights always feel that same in the city. Outside the club, Sunny holds your hand as she explains to her friends that she is going to go home with you and that it is gonna be ok. You trick your brain to believe that her words are spontaneous as you watch a guy throw up in a corner. You hope that he will look up and see you with her. Sunny tugs your hand and pulls you back to her.

Let’s go, she says to you. Her words are soft and she smells of coconut rum. As you walk away you think that this girl is gonna change your life.

Sunny’s lips taste like blood. When you ask her why she tells you that she is addicted to biting her lips to the point where they split open and explode like a volcano. You play the floor is lava with your tongue. Her blood is hot and sour. You kiss her for an hour until she tells you that she is very tired and wants to smoke a cigarette. You walk outside with her. Sunny lives in the middle of nothing. Actually, she lives in Brooklyn, but when you are with Sunny it feels like you guys are nowhere at all. You watch her draw the cigarette from her mouth, and you see how the tip of it is stained with her blood. You look at her and she grabs your shirt, pulls you in and puts her open lips against yours. When she lets go, you exhale and you see gray smoke dance from your mouth—transported from her to you.

Sunny reads a book about the potato famine. It is a Tuesday morning when you kiss her. She tastes like lukewarm coffee mixed with vodka.

It was terrible, she tells you.

The famine? you ask her.

Yes of course, what else would I be talking about?

You are disappointed.

Sunny lies down on the table. Her yellow spring dress is hiked up. Her knees are up in the air and open. She looks like a skinny rotisserie chicken, the one no one buys from Costco. The speculum must be cold because Sunny squirms as the doctor puts it in. You stand by her side and hold her hand. The sweat from her fingers makes her grasp around you weaken. As you look at her, her face all red and squished like a rotten tomato, you can’t help but find her unattractive.

You will begin to feel some cramping, the doctor says to her. She responds with a gasp and a small ow. Her hand releases from yours. When she looks at you, you feel like a fish stuck in an aquarium staring at a human and wondering how this could be. She begins to cry. You have never seen Sunny cry. You always imagined that when she cried her green eyes would become even more vibrant, similar to how the taste of lollipops becomes crisper after you run them under cold water. But instead, her eyes remind you of dying grass. She asks the doctor if it is in yet.

Not yet, he says and mumbles something about her having a very small cervix and that it is very difficult to get the IUD in. She looks at you and another ow escapes her mouth before she passes out from the pain. She must hate you.

I want to scream. I want to scream. I want to scream. Sunny keeps saying to the air as she paces around the room.

Scream already, you yell at her. She is giving you an awful headache, she is constantly giving you an awful headache.

I want to scream. I want to scream. You look at her wandering around. She is reminiscent of a ditzy bird that keeps flying into the same glass door.

Just scream!

I want to scream. I want to scream.

Scream!

I want to scream. I want to scream.

Just scream already you bitch!

Sunny looks at you and slaps you hard in the face.

I don’t understand you, you say to her. She walks out of the apartment and you wait for her yell, but instead you hear absolutely nothing. You punch the closest window to you and glass cuts your hand. Sunny comes back in. You watch as she takes a pill out of her pocket and swallows it. She holds your hand and runs it under warm water until the blood is gone. After she sucks your fingers dry, she pulls off your shirt.

How many men have you been with? you ask Sunny. She lies down in your bed. She is very tired today she tells you—something to do with her increasing her dose of Prozac, something to do with her hormones, you are not really sure. All you want to be sure of is how many men she has slept with.

How many women have you been with? she asks you, you expected this.

Four, you tell her, and it is the truth. Number one was Gwen, who lived next to you in your freshman dorm. Number two was Eden, who you met at a bar. Number three was Fiona, who you met online. Number four was Jackie from work. Eden. Fiona. Jackie. Gwen. They were great, but they weren’t Sunny. Sunny was different from all the other girls.

Sunny closes her eyes, trying to avoid your question with sleep. You rub her arm softly to wake her up.

So tell me, how many? you ask again.

Twelve, Sunny says, not even bothering to open her eyes.

Twelve? you fail to contain your voice.

Why is that a problem?

No, you stumble, it isn’t a problem at all

You think I’m a whore, Sunny says to you and nuzzles closer to your chest.

No I don’t, you say unsure why you would even bother lying.

You used to count your steps and hate your father and jack off with the lights on and take Lexapro and read vintage pulp fiction and long to be a famous screen writer. You sit in the shower and tilt your head up. Hold your breath. It takes 40 seconds for an adult man to drown. 39, 38, 37. . . just before you hit twenty seconds—you breath—the gasp leaving your mouth like a deflating balloon flying in the air. You haven’t written since you were in college, but the night after you meet Sunny you open your laptop and begin typing for the first time again.

As Sunny speaks you hear nothing. In your mind you imagine her traveling the world. You see her going out dancing, her knees bouncing against each other. You see her reading in a park on her stomach, her bare feet in the air. SUN – NEE. You let the syllables rest light then heavy on your tongue. SUN – NEE.

Between kisses, she tells you that when she grows up she wants to be a mother and have two kids—a boy and a girl—the boy will play basketball and the girl will do art classes—for their birthday’s she will have them bring in brownies not cupcakes for their elementary school class to share—she hopes that they will have her green eyes, but not her mind.

You take her bra off ,and her words fade from your mind as you kiss her breasts—leave marks on her neck.

You can feel the vibration of Sunny’s leg shaking through the floor of the coffee shop. She drinks her coffee black. You find this poetic. Whenever she parts her lips, you believe she is about to break up with you, but instead she just takes another sip of her drink. She is constantly praying that the caffeine will work. The barista here knows Sunny’s name. She comes here every morning with you or without you. Sunny says that this coffee shop is the only thing consistent in her life. The barista is an old, round man and something about him makes you think of warm beer, microwaves, and minor league baseball teams.

I hope he is a kind man, Sunny once said about him, but the truth is he’s probably just nice to me because he wants to sleep with me.

Sunny’s leg is shaking even faster, the rapid bouncing of it transcending into you. Vibrating, bubbling, up and down and up again —a hurricane that only you two can feel—you are about to implode—spontaneous combustion.

You know I love you, you say to Sunny, not as a question nor a statement, but as something else.

You take her hand, the shaking has not stopped. She looks at you. Sometimes you wonder if Sunny is even human.

And you know I love you too, she responds in the same way. Whatever is between a period and a question mark is how you both speak to each other.

She finishes up her drink then stands up and walks over to the barista. She touches his wrinkled hand lightly as she hands him her cup. He refills it with no extra charge.

You watch Sunny in the morning. It is early in the winter and the outline of her naked body reminds you of fog. She gulps as she swallows Prozac and Valium and another pill that you do not know the name of.

Sunny?

She looks at you, she is so small.

You motion for her to come lie next to you on the bed and she does.

What is it?

You look at her. There really is so much that you want to know. You open your mouth to say something but she kisses you before you can speak. She pulls down the elastic of your boxers and you realize that she does not want you to talk—she doesn’t want you to talk at all.

Livvy Krakower is currently an undergraduate student at UMass Amherst. She has previously been published in Blue Marble Review, Roadrunner Review, Jabberwocky Journal, and more. She has pieces forthcoming in The Washington Square Review and Wrongdoing Magazine. You can find more of Livvy’s writing on Instagram @littlepenguinswrite.

Photo credit: Ion George via a Creative Commons license.

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Joelle Cantrell’s Fanfiction

By Holly A. Stovall

Until the paper that Joelle Cantrell wrote made it to the top of my stack of To Kill a Mockingbird essays to grade for sophomore English at Jackson High, I had been eating clean and feeling good. I was slouching deep into the couch, a pint of Clean Cream sugar-free-non-fat frozen balanced on a dictionary by my side. Only a few more papers were left in the stack, and then I would be free to hide away upstairs to write fanfiction. I loved to teach Mockingbird, but then I read Joelle’s first sentence, and an unease creeped up around my skin, like hives.

I’ll show you what Joelle turned in, and you’ll see why I’m unnerved, but if you love Mockingbird like I do, if you voted it the best freakin’ novel ever written, like the readers in all those fancy national polls, then don’t get too involved.

So Close to Her Momma in Heaven

By Joelle Cantrell

Last week, Bob Ewell held a pillow on his daughter’s face until she passed out. Sometimes he puts his hands around her neck, but means only to injure her, so he doesn’t squeeze as hard as he could, and he doesn’t leave bruises in front, where people would see, not that anyone would care. Sometimes, Mayella has to leave the house to run an errand in town, and folks might hate Bob even more if they saw bruises on his grown daughter’s neck, but their hate for him doesn’t transfer to protection for her. She doubts he’ll go to jail if she dies, because he didn’t even get arrested after he knocked Mayella’s momma’s head hard against the stove. He doesn’t know Mayella was watching that night. The sheriff came to investigate, Bob said it was an accident, and there was no murder charge. Weren’t ever any drama. Weren’t ever any trial.

Today, when Bob orders Mayella to chop up a chiffarobe, she doesn’t tell him she’s too tired. If she does, he’ll hit her. But it’s like the life is spilling out of her because last night all kinds of blood had been letting down, more than the monthly, more pain, bigger clumps. She would have loved her own baby to nurse, but it’s just as well it miscarried, as she can barely take care of the kids Daddy had with Momma.

Over a year ago, the little ones started begging Mayella to take them for ice cream, so she saved up, and then, finally, when she had enough for each child, she made them wash and put their shoes on and they were about ready to leave, when Daddy ordered Mayella to do some chore. He’d done this a handful of times, and the kids were disappointed when Mayella told them “not today” after all.

So finally, now, they ask again, and Mayella is fixing to take them, the thought of it cheering her up, but her daddy tells her to chop up the chiffarobe for firewood, so she just sighs and gives the kids the nickels she’d been saving and tells them not to lick down the ice cream too fast or they’ll get a headache, and to come straight home afterwards. There’s an extra nickel, the one for Mayella’s cone, and she keeps it.

The children leave and she’s inside swinging this hatchet into the middle of the chiffarobe, trying to splinter it, but it’s tough, hard wood. The hatchet gets stuck, and she lets it hang there while she catches her breath and rests her arms. She needs a nap, but her daddy will kill her if she don’t get that thing out the door before he gets back. He means to kill her dead. If not today, then tomorrow or next week. She needs to gather her strength, so she goes to sit on the front steps a moment, and that’s when Tom Robinson comes by and tips his hat.

She calls to him, asking if he’d please loosen up the chiffarobe into small enough parts that she can carry them outside.

“My daddy kill me if it ain’t done when he get back,” she says.

Everybody knows her daddy’s mean as a junkyard bitch.

Tom Robinson nods and turns to the house. Mayella goes in first and holds the door open for him to follow. She says, “Just chop it up small enough so it fits through the door. Then be on your way. I got a nickel for you.”

“I won’t take your nickel, mam,” Tom Robinson says.

She tells him he might as well take it, seeing she has no use for it now that the kids have gone on for ice cream without her. He says to save it for next time, and her eyes water, like she’s going to cry, because not since her momma died has anyone been kind. She knows she’s not supposed to like no colored man, but his voice is warm, like sunlight in winter.

Tom Robinson turns to the chiffarobe with the hatchet still stuck in it. Mayella gets a good look at his arms, how the one hangs there and the other pulls the hatchet out of the chiffarobe, like picking wildflowers in a field. He swings the hatchet with his good arm, and the wood gives way. He circles around the chiffarobe, moving his arm, high and low, and she watches chunks of wood splinter and fall.

She doesn’t know when her daddy’s coming back, and it wouldn’t do for Tom Robinson to be there when he does, so she says, “Thank you, I can take it from here.” She’s not sure that she’ll be able to finish on her own, but she’ll do her damnedest.

She stretches her hand towards him to take the hatchet, and then it just happens. She rests her forehead on his chest. “Just let me rest my head here a moment, Tom Robinson. Just for a moment,” she says, and he lets her. She closes her eyes and cries. Tears come when you don’t expect it and can’t explain it. “My daddy, my daddy does things to me,” she says.

Suddenly, Tom Robinson bolts out the door and leaves her standing, staggering. When she looks up, her daddy’s fist meets her face, knocking her to the floor. Then he gets on top of her and squeezes her neck, front and back. While he’s squeezing, she feels so close to her momma in heaven. She sees her momma’s face in a light. Her momma is the light. She passes out and when she wakes up, Daddy’s poking her with his thing, saying, “God damn bloody bitch.”

She hasn’t escaped this life yet, and it’s just as well because she promised her mamma she’d take care of the kids and the gardenias. Her daddy gets up and disappears out the door and Mayella lies there, trying to muster a drop of strength. When he comes back, the sheriff’s with him.

“See them damn bruises all over her neck and face. That’s what that colored boy did to her,” except Bob Ewell uses the vulgar term for colored people. Mayella’s momma told her the n-word was wrong, because Jesus says to treat your neighbor as yourself.

Weeks pass, then months. Mayella gains some strength back. Bob hasn’t beat her since that day. There’s going to be a trial at the fancy courthouse. Her daddy tells her she’s going to speak to a judge in front of an audience, and all she has to say is that Tom Robinson took advantage of her. He uses the word “rape,” and she figures that it means it’s when a colored man puts his thing in you. If her daddy does it, it’s just him being a daddy, and not a crime.

Her daddy takes her to town to meet with a man in a suit, Mr. Gilmer.

“Mayella, we’ve got to rehearse. Atticus is rehearsing with Tom Robinson, and you will practice with me. Now, pretend I’m the judge, and that’s Tom Robinson in that chair.” Mr. Gilmer points to an empty chair.

Mayella nods.

“Point to the man who hit your face, strangled your neck, and raped you,” Mr. Gilmer says.

Mayella slowly raises her hand towards the empty chair.

Bob Ewell stands and stomps his foot. “Ain’t nobody believe her! Mayella, you got to show’em. You been wronged, violated. You got to get upset.”

They rehearse until Mr. Gilmer and Bob Ewell are satisfied.

The day of the trial, Mayella finally steps inside the courthouse, with its towering ceiling, polished wood, and white paint. It has a balcony upstairs, like an opera house. Folks are dressed up, like they’re there for a show. Scout Finch, Harper Lee’s little narrator, paints Mayella as entirely uncultured and illiterate, but Mayella knows more than she lets on, and she’s read about opera houses.

The courthouse is packed, colored people upstairs and the white ones below. The white ones want to hear the lie her daddy is making her tell. The white folks, she thinks, ain’t never wanted to help her or her momma, even though she’s white like them, but she’s dirt poor, living at the edge of the trash dump and next door to the colored folks. She’s invisible to the people in town, with their sidewalks and porch swings, their living rooms with couches, their kitchens with tables. But they know how mean her daddy is. They know her momma’s death was never explained, and if they didn’t care that her momma died, they won’t care if she does.

Still, she don’t like to say anything against Tom Robinson, but if she doesn’t do what her daddy says, he’ll kill her. And he means to kill her dead.

They’re calling her over to a chair by the wooden box that contains the judge. Mayella’s daddy is staring her down with his most onery face, like a rabid dog. It makes her freeze.

• • •

Scout wasn’t there to witness the event in Bob Ewell’s house, but she was at the courthouse and can tell it from here.

Scout sees the court paint Mayella as an oversexed hussy. Today we call it victim blaming. Well, I’m sorry, but f*ck Harper Lee, because it’s not that simple.

Court’s a place for the men and their laws and punishments. It doesn’t have anything to do with getting to the truth of the danger Mayella’s in, only with the story folks want to hear and tell.

The essay assignment asks for evidence, but what’s the point of evidence if the wrong man’s on trial?

P.S. Dear Mrs. Raulston, I know you take off points for postscripts because “they take the reader out of the narrative,” so let me just say that this is the narrative. Look up. Did you know that more than three women and girls a day die from domestic violence? That’s every day, year after year. A fourth of all girls sustain gender-based violence before age 19, and more than a third of women during their lifetimes. The World Economic Forum calls gendered violence a pandemic. Also, like, 97 percent of the people who report rape are telling the truth, but you make us read about the one who lies. Do you want us to believe the girls who report are lying? We’re not supposed to believe Mayella or any victim? Is that why the principal didn’t take Kayla seriously when she reported to him that she was sexually assaulted in the band room? Are you teaching male superiority?

“No,” I said, though there was nobody nearby to hear me. The word “no,” irritating and itchy, vibrated in my throat. I’d told the class not to turn in fanfiction. I started to write “Re-do” at the top of Joelle’s paper but got only as far as “R” before scratching it out. Something about Lee’s novel now nagged at me, as if I couldn’t keep reading it as I had before. A murky sense of betrayal was sinking down from my throat and into my gut, hot and awful. I needed to sooth it away, but the melted Clean Cream was bitter.

I slid Joelle’s paper under the others, padded into the kitchen, and dug around the back of the freezer until I found a pint of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream. Just one spoonful would be enough, but it soothed me so much that I wrapped my mouth around another and another. The cold sweet cream dissolved my momentary doubts about Mockingbird. I leaned on the counter, giving in, until only a puddle was left in the carton, which I then tossed in the trash.

I fished Joelle’s story out of the bottom of the pile and wrote “A” at the top, not for her, but for me, as in “A” for ancient history, meaning I didn’t have to think about it anymore, and I wouldn’t have to try to teach teenagers about domestic violence in literature. This way, Joelle wouldn’t protest her grade or complain to her mom, who would complain to me and then to the principal. The mom would write an Op Ed for the newspaper. There might be a culture war. Instead of all that craziness, I planned to go on teaching Mockingbird as I always had, not calling attention to the crimes against Mayella. It will be as if I’d never read Joelle Cantrell’s fanfiction.

Holly A. Stovall (she, her), a new editor at Writers Resist, is writing a thesis for her MFA in Creative Writing at Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies. She has an MA in Women’s History and a PhD in Spanish Literature. For over a decade, she taught Women’s Studies at Western Illinois University, where she earned tenure, but her career as a feminist academic ended when a neoliberal governor starved WIU of funding. Despite being one of the most diverse and economically successful departments in the university, the Department of Women’s Studies was closed, and her position eliminated.

Since leaving academia, Holly has gone on to publish fiction and creative nonfiction in LitBreak Magazine, Writers Resist, and the Mid/South Anthology. For her MFA thesis, she’s writing a memoir about the grief of her layoff and the space she finally gave herself to fully grieve her losses. She lives in Macomb, Il, with her husband, son, and standard poodle, but visits Chicago regularly. Visit her website at HollyAWrites.com.

Photo credit: Jimmy Emerson, DVM, via a Creative Commons, license.

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Sticky Singles

By Jennifer A. Swallow

After several dozen first dates over beer and mozzarella sticks—none of which had led to a second—I decided to change the format. I planned to meet a guy in the park for a midmorning stroll. No pressure. Just a walk and a chat. I told him we could meet at the fountain, and I’d be wearing a felt cowboy hat and Stockman boots. He responded that that was hot and he was looking forward to meeting in person.

When Byron strolled up, he looked just like his Tinder photos—floppy blonde hair and ears that stuck out cute far, not dorky far. Okay, maybe dorky far. He was slightly overweight but in a cute way, like a teddy bear. He was wearing a red t-shirt and blue jeans, like he said he would.

He circled the fountain—looking around—and his eyes skimmed over me. He stopped about twenty feet away and examined the crowd more carefully. I remained still, waiting for him to recognize me. I was dressed for work, so I didn’t exactly look like my profile photo, but when I washed the paint away I would. All my profile photos were taken in the last few months. I couldn’t stand meeting guys in person and realizing all their photos were five years old. It was immediately obvious, and their mumbled protests about not having any recent ones were a huge turnoff.

Byron’s eyes swept the space around me again, not seeming to register my presence, but then they flickered back and looked squarely into mine. I struggled to not blink. He stared. I stared back. Recognition loosened his squinted eyes, his scrunched forehead, his tightened mouth. When he took a step forward and asked “Kate?” I finally broke character.

“Yup, it’s me!” I stepped forward and held out my right hand, forgetting it was covered in gold body paint until he raised an eyebrow at it.

“Sorry. Job hazard.” I turned around and grabbed my saddle bag from the ground. It was also covered in gold paint on the outside and contained about forty dollars in ones and fives. “Theft is another hazard. Gotta be careful.”

“This is your job? Your artist job?” He scanned my outfit from top to bottom. In addition to the promised cowboy hat and boots, I wore a plaid shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps, a denim skirt held up by a leather belt with a large brass buckle, and gauntlet style gloves with leather fringe. Every inch of clothing and even my blonde, braided hair was coated with gold paint.

“Yes, well, no. I mean, I also sketch. Images of the Wild West—bison, Indians, wild horses, things like that.” I smiled. “But this living statue act brings in the easy money. You’d be surprised how many people are impressed by the simple ability to be still for a really long time. Of course, there are the shitheads who—”

“Yeah, okay, um, this—” he outlined my whole body with his hand flat, palm open toward me, “is not what I expected.” His tone was flat, and he put extra emphasis on not.

I paused and then said, “I thought it would be fun.” I twirled the end of the rope that was slung over my shoulder and grinned. I’d been certain meeting like this would make me intriguing, or memorable at the very least. Better than my standard too-tight jeans and low-cut blouse first date attire.

“What’s fun about this? I get to walk around the park with a cartoon?” He lowered his eyebrows.

I dropped the flirtatiousness from my tone. “I’m not a cartoon. I’m a living statue.”

“Which one of my friends put you up to this?”

“Put me up to what?”

“This! Pretend to be interested in me and then put on this crap and make a joke out of it.” His voice had gone up an octave and he gestured wildly with both hands at my whole body.

A woman stopped and watched us, and a family hurried their small children around the other side of the fountain.

I lowered my voice and spoke gently. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but if you don’t want to have this date, please leave.”

“You bitch.” He shook his head at me. He pursed his lips to the size of a raspberry. Those ears, which were absolutely not cute now, glowed bright red.

“I don’t know what your problem is or what you think is happening, but we’re done here and you should go.”

He snorted, folded his arms across his chest, and jutted out his chin.

I stepped back a few paces and set my saddlebag down with the strap looped under my right heel. I hooked one thumb under my rope and the other in my waistband. Finally, I exhaled my abdomen into a position where I could take shallow breaths with almost no movement through my core and I relaxed my jaw and eyelids into a position that was easy to hold. Byron was barely visible in my periphery. But he was audible.

“Fucking cunt.”

And then I felt the spit.

Inside, I shuddered. Outside, I didn’t even blink. I remained immobile, just like I’d trained myself to when morally deficient parents encouraged their children to kick me to see if I’d flinch. My face was hot, but I didn’t think anyone could tell beneath the gold.

Byron left. I couldn’t see where he went without turning my head, which I didn’t want to do since a crowd had gathered. I was in character again, ready to earn sticky singles from cotton candy eating tourists from Nebraska or Missouri. But maybe out of appreciation for my composure, or out of pity, they’d put something extra in my saddlebag.

Jennifer A Swallow is known more for writing about cybersecurity than imaginary lives, but that doesn’t stop her from filling notebook after notebook with ideas. Her creative work has appeared in The Courtship of Winds and Adelaide Literary Magazine. She lives the life of a digital nomad and finds inspiration everywhere she goes. When inspiration is lacking, she runs up mountains until it comes back.

Photo credit: Pete Ashton via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

LipStick It Couture Du Jour

Because Extraordinary Times Require Extraordinary Adornment

By Tracy Rose Stamper

Welcome to RevlOff’s Lip Couture Counter, where science blends with art, topped off with attitude, to bring you colors to carry you through dizzying days.

Our makeup counter’s mission is to challenge the slippery slope into post-truth society. By offering an honest line of honest products, we aim to create an oasis in this world gone off its axis. Like you, we wouldn’t have made it this far without attitude, an ingredient as important as science and art. Sometimes, attitude shows up as color play therapy. Other times, admittedly, we’re throwing shade. Because today’s many shades of fustercluck require many shades of lip armor.

With science under attack, we begin with highlighting our Scintillating Lip Science Line. Our distinct shades—Moderna Woman, Pfizer Fly, J&J Vim&Vigor Violet, and Fully Vixenated—are recognizable, helping take the guesswork out of navigating this partially vaccinated world. Thirty-nine percent of proceeds from this line go towards public health education.

Our Levity Line is curated for comic relief: Frosted Snowflake, Commie Bastard Berry, Cashmere Coastal Elite Crème, Scintillating Socialist, Luscious Lefty Lavendar Lustre, Flaming Liberal Lilac, Bleeding Heart Burgundy, and Radical Rosé. You will be called all the above. May as well dress it up!

Our LipStick It line’s Pop Off Pink, Ragin’ Red, and Apoplectic Purple coordinate well with feeling feisty. Piehole Plum works wonders when venturing places where you’ll wish to tell folks to shut it. Warm, inviting Pumpkin Smasher Spice is popular on Wednesdays when we smash the patriarchy. Another smashing shade is Vagalante Lavender. (We’ve been asked if that’s a typo. No, it’s not.) Our newest addition, Pro-Roe, is a bold blood red. Enough said.

Lip Armor Liquid Courage Collection comes to the rescue with extra oomph! Impressive science merges a lip stain offering 8-hour staying power with a satiny liquid look. These blends have you covered across the board, from situations where it’s best to just walk away, to those times when you’ll have to say something to maintain any semblance of self-respect. Talk for 8 hours straight ‘til you’re blue in the face, with lips remaining radiant, although we don’t recommend wasting breath trying to change minds committed to closure. Red&White&True, Pink Patriot, and Coral Compass encourage standing for what is real and right. Think insurrectionist thugs eager to decapitate politicians, thus threatening our democracy’s very survival. Consider this collection your armor against gaslighting claims that what you saw didn’t happen.

Lip Armor Liquid Courage Collection mainstays are Crimson Courage and Seeing Red. These trying days require courage. Liberty Lover Lapis invites speaking the truth, because asserting individual liberties can sometimes adversely affect the collective, and empathy always matters. True Blue is for those of us who have earnestly spent six plus years trying to understand hearts of loved ones living in an entirely different world, despite residing mere miles away. Googling “cognitive dissonance” is your clue that this one’s for you. Striking shades draw foci to lips, away from puffy eyes. We’ve all had moments of dissolving into tears, leaving us looking as weary as we feel.

On Second Thought All-Out Orange is our collaboration with the common sense gun safety movement. With a nod to the Second Amendment and law-abiding citizens’ rights to own guns, this also represents the rights of our children to simply survive an America riddled with epidemic gun violence. Deep orange emboldens the user to take on stale assertions that “the government’s coming to take away your guns.”

Our Glow-Getter Glam Line celebrates bright spots with shimmering finishes. We have Yes We Candied Plum, Georgia Peach, Blunami, and V(I)P Pearlescent, in honor of our first POC and woman VP. We wish to expand this line in years to come.

Our True Colors Collection reflects the revealing of folks’ true colors. Spiraling up each tube are the words: “We’re only going to get browner and queerer and witchier and louder and stronger and prouder (author unknown).” Top-selling Browner is a rich maroon that beautifully celebrates the browning skin tone of our country’s trajectory. Black Sheep comes with a gift enclosure that reads: “For the black sheep of families dangerously close to falling off the edge of their flat earth if they lean the tiniest bit further right.” Pussy Hat Pink is quite popular. Pride gloss features rainbow sparkles. #RubySlipperRed represents the dreams of a compassionate homeland that lives up to its ideals of democracy, equity, and unity for all.

Finally, for the end of those days that last for months, we have our Lip Therapy Line. Designed as therapeutic balms to soothe and restore lips overnight, many customers reach for these around the clock. One of our regulars dubs our therapeutics as the “Homebody Cluster,” since it feels less lonely given today’s isolating climate.

Whether staying home or venturing out into these most curious times, RevlOff has you covered. Though this concludes our makeup bar tour, it is just the beginning of the important work we will do, alongside customers like you, doing right by the world.

To thank you for being part of a bright future, our complimentary gift is a tube of bRight Side of History. Apply liberally.”

Tracy Rose Stamper dances with words. Her recently acquired middle name is the most significant word she has written lately during these days asking us to rise. She lives in a home on a hill in St. Louis with two beloved humans, two rescue beagle boys, and two whimsical wind sculptures. She is a contributing author of Anna Linder’s ‘The Book of Emotions,’ and has had work appear in New Feathers Anthology, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality & the Arts, Dime Show Review, Drunk Monkeys, and borrowed solace, among others. You can find her dancing with words at Facebook.

Photo credit: he who would be lost via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

A Simple Act

By Erin Edwards

It is a simple act to stand in the middle of the road. Simple, but effective. A car either has to stop and wait or run you down—and it just wouldn’t do for a hearse carrying the body of a former government official to accelerate towards a woman in the middle of the street.

Making a scene wasn’t something I’d planned. I hadn’t even been paying attention when they’d announced the route for Eric Marshall’s funeral procession on the news. Events simply collided, leaving me the perfect moment. The universe implored me to do something.

The route intersected my walk to work. Barriers prohibiting pedestrian access to the road lined the pavement, except at the crossing. There, two police officers simply held up a rope, keeping us all back. We were expected to stand in silence. Once the cars passed, they’d let us through, they assured us. But Eric Marshall had never let us rest for one moment once he stepped into office. What right did he have to a peaceful forever?

I didn’t want to wait until the cars had passed.

I looked around at the people bowing their heads, waiting respectfully for the procession to drive by. But Eric Marshall had done nothing to earn my respect.

The police officer guarding the crossing looked the other way, and there was my chance. I ducked under the rope and bolted for the middle of the road.

The procession was forced to stop. The car of a prominent government official, even a dead one, hitting a woman in front of dozens of cameras was unthinkable. The funeral was being streamed to the nation, but it wasn’t Eric Marshall’s show anymore. I looked around and saw the policemen frantically discussing my presence. Tackling a woman to the ground on live television wasn’t an option either, but I knew it would only be a few moments before they had the cameras turned off so they could haul me away. I needed to make it more difficult for them, so I sat down and laid back, tucking my arms underneath me to make myself harder to grab.

The tarmac was warm, cooking in the sun. I rested my head, feeling the uneven surface through my hair, and ignored the commotion around me. No one raised their voice—this was a funeral, after all—but there was plenty of debate. It would probably only be minutes before I was dragged away.

If I’d planned it better, I would have worn a long red cloak and a white bonnet, just so my stance on Eric Marshall’s politics was clear. He had stood in the way of so many women and their health, their right to choose. He’d convinced everyone that criminalising abortion had saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of children, but no one thought to mention the women who died as a result of the bill. Some were lost to backstreet abortions. Some took concoctions the internet promised them would end a pregnancy but wound up ending their lives. And some women just couldn’t take it.

I had heard stories of women placed under house arrest, under twenty-four-hour suicide watch, because they were deemed a risk to the foetuses they carried. Eric Marshall would turn us all into handmaids, if he had the chance. It was only right that someone stand between him and eternal rest.

The sky was cloudless and far-reaching above my head. I wondered how long it would be before I got to see it again—I knew I’d be heading to a police station rather than work when they moved me. I was contemplating whether they’d give me a chance to contact my flatmate and explain my absence at home, when I heard a yell.

“Another one!”

Before I had time to register where the shout had come from, someone skidded across the ground and stopped beside me.

“Sorry,” they said with a giggle. “I didn’t think that through.”

I turned to see another woman. She was far closer than I’d normally be comfortable with, but I appreciated the show of solidarity. From my limited vantage point, she was dressed for work, in a pencil skirt and floaty shirt with billowing sleeves. I wondered if she’d shredded them during her shaky landing. Despite any damage she might have done to her clothes or herself, she was grinning.

“Hi.” I laughed, a little manic. “You know they’ll arrest us for this?”

“Yeah, I figured. But if there’s two of us, it’s harder for them,” the woman said, shrugging. “I’m Daphne.”

“Allyson,” I introduced myself. “Thank you.”

We were at rather an awkward angle to shake hands, but instead Daphne threaded her arm through mine and linked us together. If they tried to drag one of us away, they’d have to take us both.

I didn’t ask Daphne why she hated Eric Marshall. She could have just hated the way he had knocked over the first domino—there was already talk of having women of childbearing age assigned to a guardian, whether that be a family member or partner, to ensure she “acted responsibly.” It was only getting worse. There was always the chance her hatred was personal. She could have lost a friend, a family member or a loved one. It wasn’t the kind of thing you asked someone when you’d just met and you were lying on the burning tarmac in the middle of the road in front of a funeral procession.

They must have shut off the cameras, because a police officer came to stand over us. The sun shone behind his head, backlighting him so all of his features were sunk in shadow.

“All right, ladies, you’ve had your fun. Show some respect, get moving,” he ordered, waving his hands like he could waft us away like a bad smell.

“This is a protest,” Daphne said, her voice stronger than mine would have been.

“This is a funeral,” the officer replied.

“You see a funeral; we see a celebration of the loss of our human rights,” Daphne shot back.

She tightened her grip around my arm. Despite the sun, I stared right up at the officer’s face, jaw clenched. Leaving quietly wasn’t an option.

The officer huffed and walked away. The debate on how best to pitch us out of the road was growing loud. I could hear shouting and radios, as they called for backup and argued over strategy. They didn’t want to make martyrs of us, but every second we were left there was another moment that Eric Marshall was rotting in his coffin.

I turned to look at the hearse, only feet from me. The black paint was glossy enough that I could see my face in it. There was me, there was Daphne, and there was what seemed like miles of empty road. If I had planned any of this, I would have brought handcuffs to lock myself to the grill. We likely had mere moments before we were picked up and tossed into the back of a police car.

“It was nice to meet you, Daphne, I said. “Thanks for doing something stupid with me.”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s over,” she said.

I could hear a grin in her voice and when I turned to see what she could possibly be smiling about, I found her looking the other way. At the crossing where I’d originally snuck through, there was a whole group of women. There had to be twenty or thirty of them, all pushing forward against a row of police. The officers had abandoned the rope they’d been holding up and were trying to create a wall of riot shields.

Our anger had been building for so long. Layer upon layer of it, another spark added to the fire each time we felt the restraints of Eric Marshall’s policies: the men-only bars and restaurants we were banned from for our own safety, the TV adverts begging us to take care of our health to ensure thriving offspring, the poster campaign that screamed “A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE HOME!” It was enough to drive anyone to rage. They say that a woman can display superhuman strength to save a child, but no one ever realised that she could do it to save herself, too. She just had to be pushed far enough.

I watched, sideways and half-blocked by Daphne, as the group of women burst through the line of police. Once one had breached the blockade, they all piled through the gap before it could be closed again. Shouts of victory and glee rang out as they ran towards us. Suddenly the empty road was a sea of bodies, clustering together and grabbing on to each other so no one was left vulnerable.

Information was shared through the crowd as quickly as people could speak the words. The official broadcast had been shut down, but social media livestreams had almost immediately started up in its place, shared by onlookers from nearby buildings. The world was watching.

Any lack of a plan on my behalf was immediately rectified by the women around me. They shared the number of a protest support line, reminders to go limp if someone tried to lift you, orders not to give personal information even if arrested. No one had any doubt that we would all be taken into custody, that Eric Marshall’s funeral procession would eventually continue, and he would be laid to rest. But first, we would make our stand.

Erin Edwards is a dedicated Londoner and compulsive writer, most often found in an archive or at the theatre. She is committed to providing the world with more queer content and is currently working on far too many different projects to do just that. You can find her Twitter at @EEdwardsWrites.

Photograph by Victoria Pickering via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist:

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

The Failed Real Estate Caper

By Sue Katz

The first thing Miriam noticed when the taxi dropped her off at Ruby’s house was the For Sale sign on the lawn. She took a magic marker out of her handbag and wrote “NOT” in capital letters, but it turned out too faint to be easily seen. “It’s the thought that counts,” she muttered with no small measure of anger.

Ruby had fallen and broken her elbow. That can happen. But Ruby’s son Lionel was trying to take advantage of the situation by insisting that Ruby move into assisted living while he sold her house out from under her. Despite his charm, Lionel seemed determined to crush Ruby at every turn. Her wealth was entirely tied up in her home—he called her “house poor”—and he couldn’t wait to get his hands on it.

Miriam let herself in by the front door, which Ruby had unlocked for her earlier. She found Ruby slumped in a living room chair. Ruby gestured with her head towards the bedroom, and Miriam went directly there. She found Lionel packing a suitcase. On the floor were a trunk and two large cardboard boxes. Clearly he had been hard at work. He looked up and, when he saw her, he bestowed the kind of flirtatious smile handsome men use to smooth their way through life, but it didn’t work on Miriam.

“Ruby doesn’t want to sell. She doesn’t want to move. And I’m wondering why you are forcing the matter, Lionel.”

“I think I know what’s best for my mother,” he answered without changing that smile.

“I think Ruby knows what’s best for Ruby,” Miriam said.

“With all due respect, this is a family matter.”

“With all due respect,” Miriam said, “it all depends on how you define family. Ruby and I have been close for over 65 years—a couple decades longer than you’ve known her.”

“As far as we’re concerned, you’re a nice lady, a good pal to my mother, and you’ve got zero to say about this situation. If you want to bring some soup around or send a card, feel free. As for this house, I’m going to sell it, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” He returned to stuffing Ruby’s things into the suitcase.

Ruby had quietly come to stand behind Miriam for this exchange. “Sorry, Lionel. It’s not your house to sell,” she said.

“You can’t take care of yourself with that dodgy arm, Mum, let alone this whole house. And you can’t really afford to bring in full-time help on your Social Security. I’d hate to have to force you through the courts.”

“The courts?” Miriam cried.

“Yes, if she’s making irrational decisions and putting herself in danger, there are things a son can do about that.”

The two women looked at each other. They made every effort to look somber, but they couldn’t control themselves. Miriam giggled while Ruby laughed out loud.

“What’s going on?” Lionel asked.

Ruby calmed herself enough to say, “I believe a wife trumps a son, dear.”

Lionel looked concerned. “Mum, you’re not making sense.”

“Tell him, Miriam.”

“Your mother and I got married a few months ago. We worried what you or the authorities might try to do to us someday. We’re old women each living alone, solitary, low hanging fruit, as they say. We figured we’re like an old couple who have been together a very long time anyway, so we decided to make it official.”

“Didn’t you notice my ring, honey?” Ruby waved her wrinkled hand in Lionel’s direction.

“Or mine?” Miriam said, showing off her identical gold band.

“And don’t worry,” Ruby said. “Miriam will be living here for as long as I need her. We’ll be just fine.”

She looked at Miriam. “Could you possibly take down that nasty sign in my yard?”

“Yes, and I’ll call the agent to cancel, as well. Shall I say I’m a member of your family?”

“Sure. Tell them you’re my spouse.”

The two women giggled and left the doorway of the bedroom, chatting happily. “Put everything back nicely, will you Lionel?” Ruby said over her shoulder.

His fading smile curled with anger, robbing him of his beauty, but his scowl formed too late for the women to notice.

Sue Katz’s business card identifies her as a “Wordsmith and Rebel.” Her journalism and fiction have been published in anthologies, magazines, and online on the three continents where she has lived, worked, and roused rabble. Her writing has appeared in such publications as Gertrude Press, Writers Resist, Brilliant Flash Fiction, and the Boston Globe newspaper. Her fiction books, often focusing on the lives of elders, include A Raisin in My Cleavage: short and shorter stories, Lillian’s Last Affair and other stories, and Lillian in Love. Katz’s first play was produced by the prestigious The Theater Offensive in honor of Stonewall 50.

Photograph by Alan Levine via a Creative Commons license.

**A note from Writers Resist:**

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Search Terms

By Holly Stovall

I opened the search bar, typed in “middle-aged women support Black Lives Matter” and narrowed the results to “images.” Google spit out a white couple, on the stairway in front of their mansion, pointing guns at protesters marching by. It’s not what I was looking for, but Google taunted me—Aren’t you curious? I clicked on the link.

What?! So now I’m standing under a pixelated oak tree holding a sign that says, “Abolish the Police,” while across the lawn, a man and a woman are aiming guns at me. The man with a gun is shorter than the woman with a gun, but his weapon is bigger. Their faces are pink, like pigs. Everything is lit—back lit, front lit, inner lit, and I’m in a multidimensional screen. I turn my sign over to show daisies on tall stems.

The woman is looking at me, but tilting her head towards him. “Who the fuck is this?” she says, and then, to me, “How did you get in here with us?”

Her pistol is polished. Her top is a navy French boating chemise with a sequin appliqué on the breast pocket. It overwhelms the pixel compactor and spews out blinding rays of fluorescence.

“Didn’t your daddy teach you not to point guns at people?” I say. “Aim it at the sky.”

I scan the perimeter of my vision for the “leave” option, but find none.

The woman explains that this isn’t Zoom; there’s no exit option. Her name is Kelly, and she doesn’t know how she and her husband, Brody, got swooshed in. They had been in opposite wings of the mansion. Kelly wants to know what I was doing when the search engine sucked me in, so I say I was just browsing the internet, clicking on random stuff.

She lowers the gun and asks me about my search terms. Hers were “middle-aged women righteously threaten protesters with gun.” I don’t say what I’m thinking. First, that the adverb, righteously, is unnecessary. Also, that she’s the only middle-aged woman who rose to the top of Google results for waving guns at people practicing the right to free speech. Last, she embarrasses me.

I ask her if she has any theories about why Google generated me for her, but before she answers, Brody informs us that Google is an algorithm.

“Are you familiar with mansplaining?” I say, and then regret it because he’s wielding a fat automatic attached to a black strap slung across his hot pink Polo shirt. Even though we’re just pixels, the threat feels real, and I’m afraid. I don’t know the rules in here, but it seems I shouldn’t have pissed him off.

Kelly thanks Brody for his Google wisdom. “Hun,” she says, “go on up the steps. You should be above the rest of us.” He falls for that.

Kelly asks me if I was caught on video threatening nice suburbanites with BLM signs and causing Google to throw me out onto the first page of her search.

I explain to her that no, I live in a small town, west of the city, where we just stand on the edge of the park, next to the highway, and hold up protest signs for the delivery cars and hog carriers to see. There’re no mansion dwellers there who would aim guns at us.

I don’t tell her that I wrote an op-ed for the local paper, criticizing police for Kayla Montgomery’s death. Kayla was a blond woman who worked at the gas station and called me “dear,” even though I’m old enough to be her mom. A sheriff’s deputy pulled her over for what he claimed was “impudent driving” and shot her five times. She was unarmed. My column went viral on social media and generated pushback. That must be how I got on Google’s radar.

Brody descends to butt in again. “Did you hear me? Google results are generated by an algorithm. It’s just about how many hits a site gets. That’s all.”

His hot pink polo shirt contrasts nicely with the gunmetal of his weapon. His belt, though, is brown. Christ. He could have bothered to match his belt with his weapon. I tell him to Google “mansplain,” but I do it in a sweet voice, so I have an out if he gets angry.

“I’ll knock the lights out of you,” he says. He holds up his fists and lets the gun fall across his belly like a guitar. The pixels simulate smoke shooting out of his ears.

Kelly turns to him. “It’s a compliment, hon. Mansplain is what men do as an act of generosity towards women because our brains are small.” Brody turns and climbs back up the stairs.

Kelly wants to escape. She tells me that, before she got sucked in, she had a client who sent her an email saying she was trapped in a pixel compactor, and could Kelly please get her out and sue the search engine. The client claimed that when two people are Googling at the same time and their search terms intersect, the engine can get tangled, generate energy, and suck you in like a black hole.

I point out that she and I were each searching for middle-aged women who were involved in the protests.

“And we must have hit return at the exact same time,” Kelly says.

I ask her what made her enter “middle-aged women” in the search bar.

“I wanted to see women who look like me,” she says.

“Me too, women who look—” And before I finish my sentence, I’m swooshed back to the safe side of my laptop.

Later, Kelly phones me in this world, where things are soft, shadowed, cold and hot. I ask her what happened to Brody. He’s still in there, and she calls his current home the “mancompactor.” She claims he loves it because he can watch Fox News through the sight of his gun.

Holly A. Stovall has published short fiction, personal essays, literary histories, literary criticism, and scholarly research. Her creative writing appears in Writers Resist, Litbreak Magazine, and is forthcoming in Belle Point Press’s Mid/South Anthology. She holds a PhD in Spanish literature, an MA in Women’s History, and is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Northwestern University. She lives in rural Illinois with her spouse, teenage son, and standard poodle.

**A note from Writers Resist:**

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

The Wizard of Roz

By Marleen S. Barr

“I thought the Donald would evaporate in a poof of orange smoke, ending a supremely screwed-up period of history. But the loudest mouth is not shutting up. And Republicans continue to listen, clinging to the idea that the dinosaur is the future.”

– Maureen Dowd, New York Times, May 9, 2021

Professor Sondra Lear, suffering from pandemic induced claustrophobia, stepped out on her Manhattan apartment roof in the early evening to get fresh air. She looked up and noticed an unidentified flying object careening toward her. Upon closer inspection, she realized that she was viewing a flying, chartreuse 1960s Lincoln Continental complete with silver edged tail fins and whitewall tires. The Lincoln landed on her roof. The door opened. A bleach-blonde bouffanted woman in her forties, wearing an A-line, pink-and-purple paisley knee-length dress, a three-strand beaded necklace, and white tennis shoes, emerged from the flying car. Although a feminist science fiction scholar and used to extraterrestrials, Sondra was baffled as to why this particular alien was a dead ringer for her dead mother.

“Why are you appearing as a replica of my mother coming to visit me at my 1960s summer camp?” Sondra asked as she tried to remain calm. “Who and what are you?”

“I am Rozie6812, an emissary from the planet Roz. We are controlled by the big giant head, an omniscient, omnipresent computer named Roslyn. We call Roslyn the Great and Powerful Wizard of Roz. As a card carrying Rozie, I have to follow the computer’s orders—and she ordered me to find you. She admires your academic interest in science fiction written by women.”

“My mother’s name was Roslyn.”

“All of the billions of Roz inhabitants are versions of your mother. We are interested in accomplishing two things. First, we want to know if you are married. Despite our ability to find out everything, we want the answer to come directly from you.”

Sondra felt dizzy.

“Steady yourself. Just answer the question.”

“Yes,” said Sondra as a sky-blue rotary phone materialized and floated in front of the Rozie.

“Excuse me while I call home,” said Rozie6812 as she picked up the receiver. “Hello. Roslyn. Sondra said yes. She is married.” The Rozie then turned to Sondra and said, “Everyone on Roz is deliriously happy and giving you a standing ovation. Now, turning to my second directive, I have come to put an end to President Trump. No one who spends her professional life writing about feminist superheroes should be subjected to his misogyny.”

“You’re too late. Biden is the president. Trump is tweetless in Mar-a-Lago.”

“Too bad. Since I cannot accomplish my second objective, Roslyn will order me to return,” said Rozie6812 as she opened the Lincoln’s driver-side door.

“Wait. Stop. Trump is not nullified. He’s perpetuating the Big Lie that he won the election, proclaiming that he will be re-ensconced in the White House, and threatening to run for president in 2024. Someone smarter and, I shudder at the thought, worse than Trump could succeed Biden. Help!”

“Roz is a very bureaucratic planet. But I’ll see what I can do. Let me apprise Roslyn of the situation.” Rozie6812 spoke into the telephone.

“I am afraid to ask, but what did Roslyn say?”

“She says that because you are married. she will make an exception even though I arrived too late to carry out the original Trump removal mission. But, according to Roz regulations, changed mission objectives impose additional requirements. Roslyn will not allow me to assist you unless you bring me Donald Trump’s broom. Her decision stands. Resistance is futile.”

“In order to save America from the Big Lie, an eventual Trump second term, or an even worse political fate, I have no choice but to comply. I’m off to Trump Tower on a quest to bring back Trump’s broom.”

“Good decision. I’ll drive around the Milky Way while I wait for you. When you have Trump’s broom in hand, return to your roof, and I will tell Roslyn that your mission has been accomplished.

Sondra put on her face mask and walked up Fifth Avenue to Trump Tower. She sat against the wall near the entrance, dejected and trying to discern what to do. A piece of straw fell on the floor nearby. As a lifetime New Yorker who grew up with myriad anti-litter bug campaigns, Sondra picked up the offending material and placed it on the seat beside her. Something that resembled a lime-green sea horse appeared and hovered above the straw.

“Thank you for rescuing my nesting component,” said the flying entity.

“You’re welcome. I am sort of afraid to ask, because I already did this today, but who and what are you?”

“I’m a dragon.”

“Aren’t you a little small for a dragon?”

“Size doesn’t matter. Just as a hummingbird is as much an avian as a Great Blue Heron and a chihuahua is as much a canine as a Great Dane, I am a bona fide dragon. I was in the middle of building my nest in one of the atrium trees when this straw fell out of my claw. Thank you for retrieving it.”

“The atrium is devoid of trees.”

“It was supposed to contain several 40-foot trees. But Trump chopped them down because he didn’t like them. His disrespect for nature made me mad. I restored all the trees and ensconced them within an invisibility cloak. Believe me, although you can’t see them, the trees are here.”

“I believe you,” said Sondra in the middle of having a brainstorm. “Could I possibly have some more of your straw nesting material?”

“I am happy to share, but why do you need it?”

“It could help keep Trump from having the ability to destroy swaths of the American natural landscape.” The dragon flew away and quickly returned with a bunch of straw.

“Thank you,” Sondra said. “I have one more request. Please bring me an atrium tree branch and make it visible.” The branch appeared next to the straw pile. “It was nice to meet you. I wish you well with your nest building and I hope you successfully raise your offspring amid the invisible trees.”

Sondra gathered up the straw and used the original piece to tie the bunch around the branch. Because the broom was made from materials garnered from within Trump Tower, she was certain that Trump, by default, owned the broom. She was ecstatic.

Sondra returned to her building’s roof and said to Roz6812, “Here’s Trump’s broom.”

“If it looks like a broom, and it sweeps like a broom, and you say it is Trump’s broom, thus it is,” proclaimed Roz6812. The rotary phone reappeared. “Let me clear this with Roslyn.” She spoke into the phone. “Good news. Roslyn says because you have fulfilled the quest, I am cleared to nullify Trump. As I speak, the Mar-a-Lago resort is being turned into a roach motel. Trump is permanently checked in and he can never check out. A cheeseburger and a can of soda will appear whenever he gets hungry.”

“Great job!” Sondra said as Rozie6812 flew off.

Sondra returned to her apartment and found a baby lime-green mini dragon flying loop-the-loops above her sofa.

Marleen S. Barr is known for her pioneering work in feminist science fiction and teaches English at the City University of New York. She has won the Science Fiction Research Association Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction criticism. Barr is the author of Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory, Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond, Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction, and Genre Fission: A New Discourse Practice for Cultural Studies. Barr has edited many anthologies and co-edited the science fiction issue of PMLA. She is the author of the novels Oy Pioneer! and Oy Feminist Planets: A Fake Memoir. Her When Trump Changed: The Feminist Science Fiction Justice League Quashes the Orange Outrage Pussy Grabber is the first single authored Trump short story collection.

Photo credit: William Warby via a Creative Commons license.

Five short stories by Amirah Al Wassif

Running away

My mouth is full of mice. I can’t talk or protest. I was born in the darkest spot of the world. My people hate the sun. They put the weight of the world on my tiny shoulders. When I was young, I was a great talker, but when I became 12 years old, they ordered me to shut my mouth up. My country is made of dust and sins. They don’t believe in girls’ voices. They say that when girls talk, the evil spirits spread.

I have to admit that I am not sure that my mouth is full of mice, but when my tribe circled around me like bees, they pointed to my mouth, shouting loudly: “Hide your ugly mice! Don’t speak! Don’t protest.”

Their anger showed me that I have to flush and run away for hiding. Instead of doing that. I made a hole in the wall and disappeared forever.

Hunger and satiety

At the same time when I was wondering, did my friend like my latest photo on the Instagram, a child died from hunger somewhere in the world.

We all bite our nails through watching the breaking news. We all recognize the fake ones. We all cry in front of war children posters. We all laugh at our mirrors.

My mother stands on a mountain of pillows for feeding my little brother. I am big enough to feed myself.

We have many delicious dishes. We are proud of our full plates. After finishing my own, I run in a hurry to bring another one, not because I feel hungry, but because we have a plenty of food. So it is a shame not to bring another one.

We never experienced hunger before. The first time we heard of it was when our neighbor’s daughter died. At her funeral, people said that she died because of hunger. Even when we all knew that, nobody cared.

Just a dream

Last night, I closed my eyes and I saw my mother and me sitting together in front of a brown oven, baking delicious bread in a clearing where some birds pecked our necks and backs.

My mother’s cheeks were colorful like a clown. I looked at her in a proud way. She was still beautiful, just like a young girl.

She had a dimple. A special one. One of those dimples that kiss the heart of the sun. You feel its warmth naturally, without trying so hard.

The dust that covered my mother’s eyelashes smelled of the ancient streets.

In the dream, there were grown mint leaves between my fingers. My mother grabbed one of them, trying her best to cut it off. I screamed. There was a lot of pain around my fingers.

We are farmers. We used to fill our pockets with laughs and stones, stumbling to the river to throw them. Our dearest friend, the river welcomes our greetings, competing with us to make the funniest jokes in the world. We are country people, so we and the river understand each other very well.

I have a music box within my chest. All my lifetime, I felt that I am the richest girl in the globe. We don’t have money, but we feel so wealthy. Our fortune is a mix of singing and giving. We sing for our folk. We used to give them. We used to plant for them, for us, for the whole world.

My mother kissed my right cheek in the dream. You are a winner, babe, she told me. You plant your land; don’t wait for the men to plant it for you.

I don’t have a father. My mother’s forever tale says that there is a toxic man, tricked her, married her and made her a pregnant child who suffered a lot because of this.

I don’t blame you for this, babe, my mother said to me. You are my blessed girl, I need you in my world, and we all here need your bravery.

The distant birds play hide and seek with my wishes. I pray for our land, I pray for getting stronger, I pray for the girls, for the poor mothers. I don’t pray for the abusive husbands.

Within my dream, the grace underneath my little feet, I am sinking in the arms of the universe, sipping the happiness water.

My mother’s milk isn’t enough now, I am trailing the buds with my fingers.

The sky breathes in and out through my hair.

I met you too, in my dream. You were smiling at me from your far land. I called you: “Lewis, don’t forget me, my love, don’t.”

You looked at me in your gentle way. Your eyes smelled of honey. I see a paradise lies inside them. “Don’t try to close them so much, my love.” I said to you, and you ran away behind the red sun’s reflection.

I understand how the sun was so jealous. I know that nature belongs to you.

I plant beans, tomatoes and flowers. You plant me like a poem inside your heart. How close we were in my dream! How far we are in the reality!

I still remember how many tears jammed in your eye, when I sighed and cried, telling you that I and my mother should leave this land. You still remember, don’t you? How I sobbed, how the sadness made a lake of salt in my heart.

That moment was the harshest moment in my lifetime, the words jumped in craziness from my mouth’s edge. You ate yourself in worry and pain.

In my dream, my mother advised me to stop crying. She told me that nobody deserves my tears. I pretended that I agreed with her, but in truth, I didn’t, because you deserve, my love, you aren’t them, you aren’t a toxic man like my father and like all those men who forced us to leave the land, who poisoned our plants, who stole our right to be women farmers.

In my dream, I shrugged. I felt like I lost my voice forever, but then, I woke up, half asleep, trying to hide my waterfall of tears.

I open my eyes wide: I am heading now to my mother’s graveyard, next to yours, where I am planning to plant a cactus, my love.

My dead husband’s secret

My dead husband plays hide and seek with me. I catch him every now and then playing guitar in front of our daughter’s framed photo. He also loves to act like a clown before our baby budgie birds. He believes they notice him.

I don’t say a word about that to my relatives. They won’t believe me. To be honest they will say that I am a crazy old woman who is looking desperately for a new man. I am not. I love my dead husband, and really, I see him wandering in our apartment all the time.

Every time I see him, I try my best to hurry, to follow him. I want to catch him. I am longing to kiss his cheeks. I dream of throwing myself into his arms.

But I can’t. As a disabled old woman who is sitting in her wheelchair, I can’t help it.

There is no one here to watch me. There is no one here to look after me. Only my dead husband shadow, dancing up there on the walls with the shadow of our dead daughter.

Injustice

I was born and raised in a box.

My body is a metaphor. I lost my voice when Adam planted a knife in my throat.

“Give up, Eve,” Adam said.

I pointed out to the Apple tree. I hopped from one corner to another inside the box. I was dying to shout. I wanted to announce my revolution. I was in trouble. A big one.

My voice is gone. I have no power, no words.

Adam was touching the apple curiously, tracing it with his fingers. The smile on his face. The sin on his hand.

He kept watching me from his place: I was moving in back and forth. He treated me like a monkey in a cage.

The last time I called Adam was a billion years ago, when he asked me what was the thing I see in my dreams that makes me feel good, although I’m imprisoned?

At that moment, I let him see the picture in my head. A magnificent photo of the apple tree, guiding me to the river of happiness.

When he saw the photo in my head, he sighed and smiled.

After a while, he sang and ran away to find the tree, and yes, Adam found it and owned it, before punishing me and cutting my tongue.

Amirah Al Wassif’s poems have appeared in several print and online publications including South Florida Poetry, Birmingham Arts Journal, Hawaii Review, The Meniscus, Chiron Review, The Hunger, Writers Resist, Right Now, and others. Amirah also has a poetry collection, For Those Who Don’t Know Chocolate (Poetic Justice Books & Arts, 2019), and a children’s book, The Cocoa Boy and Other Stories, published in February 2020.

Photo credit: Andrew Malone via a Creative Commons license.

The Woman in Elmina

By Nicole Tanquary

There is a coastal village called Elmina. An abandoned slave castle sits at the village’s highest point. The castle walls stand in stark white stone that burns in the sun, the paint achingly fresh—the castle is now a museum, and it has money to keep itself restored, more than can be said for the village spread out at its feet.

In Elmina lives an old woman. She dresses in traditional kente cloth her son bought for her long ago. On clear days she sits beneath a palm tree in the shadow of the castle, on a stretch of green lawn leading to the castle’s entrance, where the tourists tend to wander. A bowl carved from a coconut shell sits in front of her. She does not beg but rests with her eyes closed and her back against the palm tree. If you come up to her and speak, she will open her eyes and you will see cataracts, filmy as ocean clouds. Once, her son fed her, but he was a fisherman, and sometimes fishermen drown.

If you come up to her, she may nod to acknowledge you or she may not. If she does not, set some money, cedis or pesues, in her bowl. The clinking of the coins will bring her awake.

If you take out a bottle of palm wine and hand it to her, saying, “Madame, will you drink with me?” the numb will drain from her face and leave behind a thoughtfulness. She will take the bottle and uncork it with expert hands, pouring some onto the ground for the ancestors to drink. She will take a sip of it herself and then offer you the same. If you drink it, it will be tangy, not quite sweet but with a good, settling warmth in your belly.

She will make another offering to the ancestors, and the thirsty earth will drink it away. And then she will tell you a story.

“The castle guides … they tell lies.” A tiny headshake, the movement swaying in time with the palm leaves above. “They are Ashanti, the ones who sold the Ewe to the white men. The Ashanti are ashamed, they try to change history. But we remember. We listen.” She will look towards the castle, its white walls reflecting in her eyes. When she speaks again her voice will fall to a monotone.

“The white governors, they empty the women’s dungeon into the courtyard and pick through them, take who they want. Guides say that if the women have governors’ child, they be looked after.” The old woman will spit onto the ground. “Lies. If a governor pick you, you be washed up, sent to private room, and afterwards go back to dungeons—no treated special. If you a favorite, it not matter that you carry child. You still his slave. Always a slave.”

Her eyes will go wet, and she will take another long drink of palm wine to steady herself. You may want to ask her how she could know these things when they happened so long ago, but if you wish to hear the rest of the story—if you wish to see what it will call forth—do not interrupt.

“The Ewe people brought down from the north, they be scared, so scared. Never see white men before. Never see ocean. They not know how to swim. If they sick, they thrown off ship into water, and they not know how to swim.”

Then, in a quieter voice, one with a tremble to it, she will say, “You feel them if you go in castle—all the ghosts. I hear them come through the walls, chains still on they ankles, in one big line … no one see them. I not see them,” she will admit, “but oh, oh I do hear them.” The palm wine will shiver in its bottle as her hands tremble. “The worst be in the water. That is why I never go there,” she will say, nodding at the ocean. “That is why my son should never have gone there. So much anger.” Her voice might drop to a whisper, “It drag down.”

The palm wine might sour in your mouth. Keep drinking. Even as you see echoes of the ghosts over her shoulders, their sun-bleached bones picked clean of flesh, the slack jaws saying nothing but the eye sockets boring into you, boring deep. Keep drinking. The woman will finish her story.

“Even when they no die … it is the same to us who stay. The Ewe who left on white men’s ships never came home. You,” and she might nod to you now, her eyes squinting to try to make out your face, “You, trying to find your history here, you the child of ghosts.”

Then she will start to smile, blearily. You will decide to leave her the bottle of palm wine because you think she will need it. Even when she does not tell you that she has dreams, terrible dreams of dead mothers and fathers and daughters and sons rotting together in the water … well, even if the ghosts have mostly left now with the end of the story, you can still see faint skeletal fingermarks, dug into the skin on her shoulders.

Before you leave the woman, stop long enough to pour your own offering of palm wine into the earth. Libations must be made to keep the ancestors at peace.

Especially the ones in the water.

Nicole Tanquary lives and works in upstate New York, although she will soon move to Pittsburgh, PA, to pursue a PhD degree in Rhetoric. She has over thirty speculative fiction short stories available from a variety of publications, some of the most recent being Crone Girls Press, Mithila Review, and The Society of Misfits Stories. When not writing or working, she likes to eat, sleep, follow mysterious trails into unknown woods, and play with her three adorable pet rats.

Photo credit: Stephen Johnson via Creative Commons license.

After the Splat

By Kate LaDew

In 1867, the first instance of a hero saving their sweetheart from an oncoming train after a dastardly villain tied them to the tracks debuted in the last scene of a New York stage play.

The hero’s sweetheart calls for help, while the hero, locked inside the train station, watches from a barred window, searching for a way out. The villain disappears, off to be dastardly somewhere else, and the whistle of a locomotive sounds, the sweetheart’s cries grow frantic.

The door shudders from a blow on the other side. The hinges creak, the wood splinters and the door swings open, lock dangling, as the hero appears, out of breath, axe in hand.

The sweetheart calls again, beginning to sob, as the hero rushes forward, tearing at the ropes crisscrossed over the tracks, and pulls the sweetheart to safety a split second before the train barrels past.

The woman drops the axe, the man shrugs off the remnants of the rope and they embrace, each declaring undying love. The sweetheart marvels that his hero is capable of such bravery, yet not allowed the right to vote.

In 1867, the first instance of a hero saving their sweetheart from an oncoming train after a dastardly villain tied them to the tracks features the woman as hero, the man as sweetheart.

A scene from Augustin Daly’s 1867 play, Under the Gaslight

Every moment since that night, men have waited while women, with incredible patience, undo the cruel, illogical and sometimes just plain stupid acts of other men. The good, waiting men all the while wondering why the world is so unfair and “Oh! if only something could be done, by somebody, somewhere, about it all.” But it can’t be them, The Good Men, because someone has tied them to a train track, and don’t you hear the whistle? and won’t somebody think about them? down here all alone with all the other Good Men, waiting for somebody, somewhere to do something about it all? Never mind how they got here, and never mind that the ropes aren’t secure because the knots have been tied by The Bad Men, who only know how to tie women’s wrists.

Those Brave Strong Women who really deserve more, more pay and medical rights and safety and equal access and equality in general and all those things they blabber on about. Someday maybe, somebody, but right now, let’s deal with the train situation.

All The Good Men who have daughters and wives and sisters and mothers and really get it, truly, no really, feminism and such, and hey, where are you going? don’t you hear?—can’t you see?—I would do something, I swear, it’s just, these ropes, you know and I mean, I don’t agree with all the bad men, and I’m only laughing to fit in, and I don’t really believe—and if it were up to me—and I would never—and the light in that tunnel’s pretty bright, and the tracks are really rumbling, aren’t they? and is it just me or is it getting hotter, and that whistle’s pretty close, and I think that might be the tr—

After the splat, the woman sitting in the train station she built from scratch, feet on the desk she designed herself, pauses in the middle of a sentence in the paragraph of a chapter of a book she wrote. Looking up at the blue cloudless sky, past the glass skylight she can open whenever she wants, the woman asks all the other women in the room, feet up on their own desks, reading their own self-authored books, Hey, did you hear something?

Kate LaDew is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a BA in Studio Art. She resides in Graham, North Carolina, with her cats Charlie Chaplin and Janis Joplin.

Boris Badenov image: Fair use.

Train scene from Daly’s Under the Gaslight (1868).

He Comes at Night

By J.M. Lasley

Editor’s warning: assault, self-harm, mental illness

He comes at night, when no one is watching.

The soles of his white shoes squeak on the shiny white floors, reflecting white lights above, humming and buzzing through night and day. The keys jingle-jangle and the door swings open, screaming.

He smells of sweat and the cigarettes he told his wife he quit smoking. Sometimes, like the first time, his breath stings my nose and my tongue: liquid fire from a flask he’s not supposed to sip from. He doesn’t care, he tells me, chattering as his fingers fumble with his belt. She’s a dumb bitch anyway and she’ll never know. Those idiots who run this place, they’ll never know, no one will know, and it will just keep happening.

The smoking, the drinking, and me.

I’m safe in the daytime, hidden amongst the bodies in the community room. I fold and fold bright squares of paper transformed into birds and butterflies, things I only see in pictures now that I’m here. I fold a lion to bite his legs and a tiger to roar him away, a bear to stand between us, with paws as big as my face.

They say we’re here because we’re mad. This is sometimes so. Sometimes I’m so mad I can feel it choking me, drowning me, my head lifting as I gasp for breath and the angry water spills up and out of me. That’s when they strap me, drag me kicking and screaming to the white room, to the bed, and I will have even less to fight him with between the straps and the pills. They taste like chalk and take the madness away. For a while. So I try not to get mad.

I try new things all the time. When it started, I tried kicking and screaming. But no one watches so no one came and the kicking and screaming only made his eyes sparkle and his breathing, fast.

No one asks about the bruises or the shadows. I can see them in the reflection of the window of my door. Not real glass. Real glass can shatter and cut and end, but this glass just bounces and breaks your knuckles when you hit it. I can only see myself dimly. But I can see the bruises and the shadows. Does he have magic? Is that how no one else can see? When the faces in the blue outfits do see them, eyes squinching behind their glasses, nose wrinkling, they mumble mutter, “She’s taken to hurting herself, poor thing.” More chalk and straps, more helpless nights.

No glass, no knives, no knitting, nothing poking, prodding, nails trimmed daily, nothing nowhere. Until the Big One broke the chair. Ferret, the tall skinny twitchy one, he had been swiping a pill or two from the Big One for days. Ferret is a Blue Shirt, not a White Shirt or a Body, but he takes the pills sometimes: the chalk we don’t want anyway, the chalk that sometimes the others need. He took too much for too many days and the Big One woke, a sleeping giant gone mad, real mad, breaking the chair over a White Shirt sending splinters skitter-scattering over the floor. Behind my chair, hands over my head, I felt one touch my foot. I lost my shoes again, which means a pinch from Nurse, but that’s how I felt it. Long, jagged, beautiful wood. Snatching it up, I tucked it under my bra band.

The giant has been taken down: a pebble to the brow or a needle to the arm, I wasn’t sure. They pat us down one by one, pulling bits of the chair or other contraband out of hair and pockets, waist bands. When they try to reach for my bra band I crouch and scream, as if I am scared, as if they are hurting me. They are not hurting me and I am not afraid, but they forget where they were searching. Others were not so clever, they did not hide their pieces before the White Shirts thought to check.

When I am put back in my room and the coast is clear I hide my treasure beneath my mattress, tucked in the coiling.

•

For a while I tried the not fighting. I lay and stared at the wall when he came, counting the squeaks of the bed frame, seeing faces in the cracks on the painted wall. The first time he cursed and left. Other times he tried to hurt me, tried to slap me back into madness, so that he could crush me into the pillow again. The faces on the wall smiled at me, and I smiled back.

Then a new body came to the playroom, the Community Room. Her face was young; behind her flat bangs she had wide eyes, round ears, a gap between her teeth. She was older than she looked, she would tell them when the old Nurses called her honey, baby, and the Whites called her sugar-pie. The soul in her eyes was older, that was plain as daylight through gridded windows. Her arms were decorated with the scars of her suffering, a tally for every sorrow. She folded birds with me, kindness in her gentle hands and the small smile she gave me when I clapped.

He would do her instead, he told me. He’d see if she’d give him what he was looking for. So, I fought again. Better me, who was filled with madness, than she who had only sorrow.

The girl is gone. She left yesterday, squeezing me tight and whispering sweet words of remembrance I know she has already forgotten outside these iron and stone walls. I hope she forgets me. I am glad she is gone. It is time to try again.

•

The door has been closed behind me, the lock clicking into place, the light inside taken away so that I am left under a thin blanket and darkness in my bed. When the calling and the footfalls stop, when the chatterings and cryings and crowings of the Bodies stop, I slip out of my bed and crawl under it. Between the coils, my wood waits. Grabbing it, I set to work.

For several nights I do this, between the time the light leaves and he comes. Sawing, sawing, pulling. I dispose of my work in pieces, so they will not know. I stuff the remnants in my bra, then into the trash when no one is looking. They think I’m mad, but I am more than mad.

The night comes. It is time to try. The light leaves, the lock clicks, the darkness settles. Before the sounds disappear, I lift up my mattress, slide onto the frame and then settle the mattress back down on top of me, hidden in the hole I have made. And I wait. My heart is loud in my ears, louder than I have ever heard it. Eventually it comes. The squeaking white shoes on the white floor. The jingle-jangle. The scream of the door. And then a new sound. He is surprised. I cannot put my hand over my mouth so I bite my lips between my teeth so that he cannot hear my glee. Now he thinks I am magic.

I hear his footsteps leave, squeaking down the hall and I hear his call to those who are not watching. He has triggered the alarm. I push the mattress up, slide out and then back on top of the mattress as it settles, covering myself with the blanket.

Many footsteps pad down the hallway, and people rush into the room. I blink open my eyes, pretending I was sleeping deeply, sitting up and rubbing my eyes. I look up at them—the White Shirts, the Blue Shirt and the Nurse.

They ask me questions, throwing words at me in anger. My eyes are wide at them, and I pull back, lifting my blanket up. Where did you go, they ask, how did you get out? I shake my head again and again. They begin to question him, begin to think maybe he is the mad one.

“Why was he in my room?”

It is the first time I have spoken to them in some time. Usually I sing—nonsense songs they call them but I know better. To me they are pink and yellow, blue and grey, and life lives within the sound in my ears. “Why did he come here?” I cock my head and wrinkle my nose. “Smells bad.”

I see their noses twitching, opening and closing as they take in the sour and the sting. Their eyes meet to trade secrets, and I sense when I become a Body again. Now he is the target. They pull him away, nothing wrong here, but they have some questions. I see the Blue Shirt pat his chest, feel the hidden flask in that chest pocket, see the sweat start to drip down his face. I giggle in glee when the door is closed because I am more than mad. I am clever like the fox that escaped the hound.

The next night, I hide again in my clever fox hole, and listen, telling my heart to not beat so loudly so I can hear if there are squeaking shoes. But nothing squeaks and the keys don’t jangle and the door doesn’t scream; I know that I am free. So, I come out, lie down on my lumpy bed and smile and smile as the stars dance me to sleep from beyond the bars.

Days pass and I don’t see him. I dance in the community room to the old music because I have slept, my bruises are fading, and there is less pain. But then, when I have not been mad enough for chalk for days and days so that I know the pills are not making me see the things that are not there that look there, he comes back. He does not look at me as he watches the bodies, but I know that in not looking he is staring directly at me. And I know that he will come again.

Each night I wait. I know he enjoys that I am waiting. In the morning he looks at me once, to see more and more shadows sleeping under my eyes and he smiles. And I wait. I know it is a matter of time before he comes. But I pretend to sleep every night. The squeaking goes up and down the hall and pauses—but there is no jingle-jangle. Not yet. He cannot come because they are watching.

Finally, I begin sleeping through the nights. Perhaps he will not come—perhaps they have learned their lesson and there are watchers now. The sparkle grows in his eyes as I tremble in my corner and I know that I am wrong. One day, as he passes me, his fingers prod me sharply in the back. I jump up and scream and soon there are White Shirts all around me and I know the chalk and straps are coming. I calm down but they make me take it anyway. I pretend to, but I hold the chalk behind my back tooth—they cannot see and they do not check too good. I know he will come tonight thinking they have taken the madness out of me and I will not be clever enough to hide.

He is only sort of right.

The white soled shoes squeak down the white floored hall, under humming white lights. Sweat drips down my back, my spine, like a slide. The keys jingle jangle. The door opens, screaming. He chatters at me while fumbling with his belt.

“Thought you had me good, didn’t you, little bitch. Well, if you thought I was rough before—”

I stop his chattering. I swing my arm down—the wood clenched in my fist, its ragged point like a spear—and then it is in his neck. When I pull it out, the wood is wet now, soaking it in, turning red instead of brown and his eyes are surprised, and this surprise is even better than before because I can see it. When he falls, his eyes still wide and his life pumping out of the hole I have made, I let him. White becomes pink and then red—the clothes, the floor, my hands.

I smile.

He came at night, when no one was watching.

J.M. Lasley believes that the greatest form of resistance is kindness and empathy. She lives in small town Georgia for now, where she keeps her dog company and lives a thousand lives through stories. Her short story “Wish Perfect” will be published in 2020.

Photo by Andy Li on Unsplash.

The Right Hat

By Luke Walters

The little girl’s teal hat is what caught my eye. She and a woman were hugging the bottom of a gravel drainage ditch, hidden from sight—except to me, perched high in my rig.

I’d just passed dozens more like them sitting cross-legged along the highway next to green-striped border patrol trucks. Their hike across the desert from the Mexican border at an end.

Having headed the back way to Phoenix to avoid the zoomers and the Department of Public Safety, I’d left Tucson early to pick up a trailer of fresh chilis at a farm west of Casa Grande. With the sun rising behind me and miles of highway in front of me, I’d been sleep-driving 75-mph down I-8, a four-lane, flat-straight black-ribbon of asphalt cut through the rough Sonoran Desert. After skating on and off the white edge line for maybe twenty miles, I decided I wanted to live for another day, turned off, and wrestled my 18-wheeler into the parking lot of the rest stop—nothing more than paved-over desert with a half-dozen picnic tables. That’s when I spotted them.

Now, parked lengthwise in the empty lot, I scooted on over to the passenger’s side, pushed past my stack of crossword puzzle books, opened the door, and let my legs dangle out. A can of Monster in one hand and an unfiltered Camel in the other, I relaxed, taking in the monotone landscape. My old favorites, Waylon and Dolly, brought back too many memories and the regrets that came with them, so I listened now to Mozart.

The woman and the girl raised their heads to stare at me. I paid them no mind. After a quick jolt of caffeine and a hit of nicotine, I planned to be back on the road. The pair of fence jumpers weren’t any of my concern.

At least that’s what I thought, until the green-striped SUV of the border patrol passed through the lot.

After scanning the desert behind the picnic tables, the driver, a woman in an olive green uniform, stopped next to me and opened her window. She had the same burnt-brown skin and coal-black hair as the pair in the drainage ditch.

“Howdy, officer,” I said, shutting off the music. “Beautiful morning for catching beaners, ain’t it?”

Not answering, she gave me her cop smile while studying me. Too much Burger King and too many bottles of Bud showed on my face and my ass. Pretty, I wasn’t.

“Sir, is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

I blew out a smoke ring. “Yeah, there is.”

She watched me, tapping her steering wheel, as I crushed out my butt on the heel of my boot.

I raised my eyes to her.

The woman pulled the little girl close.

“Well, what is it?” the officer asked.

Taking off my Make America Great Again ball cap, I held it out, turning it for her to see. “Just got this. Looks nice, don’t it? Some big-smiling guy who wanted me to vote was passing them out at the garage. I liked my old John Deere better, but it was grungy—all sweat stained and greasy.”

Squaring my new red cap on my head, I said, “Not sure what it is, but somehow, there’s something about this one that just doesn’t feel right.”

The agent waited for me to say more. When I said nothing, she asked, “Is that all?”

“Yeah, that’s all.”

“Okay, sir,” she said, rolling her eyes like she’d been talking to someone simple, and she zipped out onto the highway.

I glanced toward the ditch. The little girl and woman smiled at me. Those were the first genuine smiles I’d gotten in ages. They lasted with me all the way to Phoenix, where I dropped them off.

Ed Radwanski, aka Luke Walters, resides in Arizona. His flash fiction has appeared in Yellow Mama, Mash Stories, Post Card Shorts, and in Envision – Future Fiction, an anthology by Kathy Steinemann, published on Amazon.

Photo by Ryan Riggins on Unsplash.

An Implausibility of Wildebeests

By Elizabeth Edelglass

“A pride of lions. A pod of whales. A wisdom of wombats.”

Henry is rattling off something he learned from the zoo—not the zoo zoo, the online zoo, somewhere, Seattle? Omaha?—Isabel forgot which one today. If it’s Tuesday, there are pandas; if it’s Thursday, dolphins. Pandas are bears, Henry likes to remind her, but koalas are not.

“A shiver of sharks.” Animal collectives, someone’s been teaching him today. With flocks and herds soaring and thundering across the screen that Isabel can see from the corner of her eye. Once, it was Elmo teaching baby animals—one TV show, one hour a day. But Henry’s eight now, not two. And now he gets prizes for screen time, if he wears his mask, practicing for school. If he goes to school—three weeks until Labor Day. “A prickle of porcupines.”

“You made that up!” Isabel has been dicing potatoes, tossing with olive oil and paprika. Maybe some garlic powder? While simultaneously watching a Zoom meeting about CDC data collection, except only listening to the Zoom meeting, through one earbud, leaving the other ear free for Henry.

“An impossibility of wildebeests.”

“Are you sure?” Mrs. Farber, Henry’s second grade teacher, would’ve known.

Henry makes his exasperated face at Isabel, his fake exasperated face, because he is rarely really exasperated.

“Let’s look that up.” Isabel washes her hands, not for twenty seconds, just so her fingers won’t be oily when she picks up her phone, but Henry beats her to it, already Googling.

“An im-pulse-ability of wildebeests?” Henry thinks about that. “Guess they’re impulsive. Like Caleb.” Caleb sometimes pushes Henry on the playground (used to push him), but they are (used to be?) best friends.

Isabel looks over his shoulder, sounds it out for him. “Implausibility,” she says. “Well that’s a good word, for now.”

“Huh?”

“From the word implausible. Impossible. Unthinkable.”

“Weird,” Henry says, staring closely at the screen through his thick glasses. He has to sit in the front row at school, to see the board. Which is good, because he’s near the teacher, but would be bad this year, because he’d be near the teacher. “What’s a wildebeest?”

You’d think Isabel would know, but her sciences are genetics and disease vectors, not zoology. “Didn’t we read about them in that book? About the wild things?”

“That’s implausible.” Henry flashes his wild and crazy grin that showcases the gaps and new teeth growing willy-nilly. He’s supposed to start the orthodontist this year. And Hebrew school. Maybe trumpet.

•

When she hears the rumble of the garage door, Isabel knows Ben is home, stripping in the garage, dumping his scrubs in the washer, heading straight to the shower. He used to wear khakis to work, a necktie. Isabel lets Henry watch one episode of You Live in What?—the one about living in an ice cream factory, his favorite because of the cows.

“Twenty-one new cases,” Ben says through the shower curtain. Isabel sits on the toilet, in the hot bathroom mist, their only chance to talk without Henry hearing. “Four deaths.”

His numbers never align with the ones she’s working on. He thinks in digits; she thinks in millions.

“Deaths down, admissions up,” he says, as if she wouldn’t remember from yesterday.

“Three plans,” she changes the subject. “The email came today. Regular, hybrid, or remote. Five days to decide.” He’ll know what she’s talking about. They try not to say the word school out loud, even when they’re pretty sure Henry isn’t listening. Can they ever be absolutely sure? “Tuesday,” she adds, in case Ben’s too tired to do the math.

“I can’t,” he says, pulling aside the curtain, standing slumped and dripping, not reaching for his towel. “I just can’t.”

•

“Did you know,” Henry says, “that turtles breathe through their butts?” He lies on his side, facing the wall, but Isabel can feel his entire body quaking with laughter under the covers. He’s been wearing these same dinosaur pajamas for two days, maybe three, literally, days—she gave up on forcing pants and underwear back in April.

“You’ve told me,” Isabel says.

“And alligators will fall asleep if you turn them upside down.” If he can learn that online, couldn’t he learn the multiplication tables online, too, come September? Although do third-graders even learn multiplication tables anymore? Number sense over rote memorization—Isabel is familiar with the theories.

“But how would you turn an alligator upside down?” she says, the nightly Henry-and-Isabel comedy show.

“How far is six feet?” He’s rolled over now, to look at her.

“Your bed,” she says. “Your desk plus your bookcase.” They’ve measured and remeasured. “The couch,” she says.

“But not the loveseat,” he says.

“Not the loveseat.”

“I love you.”

“Love you, too.” They hug, hard and long, until she has to pry his arms from around her neck. “Sleep tight.”

What does that even mean? Don’t let the bedbugs bite, her mother used to say, back when that was just something mothers said, when mothers dusted and vacuumed, and kids felt safe.

•

“A barber today,” Ben says, lying on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling, Isabel can tell, his eyes reflecting a glint from the hall light they keep on for Henry, for when he comes to stand by Isabel’s side of the bed at three a.m., which he didn’t used to do. “And a teacher.”

Isabel tenses, thinking of Mrs. Farber, or Miss Penny from first grade.

“High school,” Ben says, moving his hand to her thigh. Isabel lets her shoulders unclench, until she remembers crowded hallways, lockers.

Ben wears glasses, like Henry—he can’t cry at work, not with a mask and glasses. He ordered some anti-fog ski-goggle spray that he read about in a medical journal, of all places. But it’s on back-order. They have a standing bet which will arrive first, his goggle spray or the toilet paper Isabel ordered while she and Henry were on Amazon searching for a Lego SpaceX capsule, the day of the NASA live-stream, but only finding a space shuttle, or an Apollo V capsule that cost three hundred dollars. They ended up ordering a book about how to build fifty Lego animals, then watching a video of a Belgian zoo that displayed Lego models of endangered species. A pre-pandemic zoo, with people wandering about, maskless, mouths agape.

“Do you know how to tell an African elephant from an Asian elephant?” Henry had asked.

“How?”

“An African elephant’s ears are shaped like Africa.” Henry was wearing his screen-time mask that day, fogging his glasses. Isabel smoothed it over his nose, tucked it under. She didn’t have to Purell (which was available for $159 on Amazon).

“And a vet,” Ben continues his list.

“A veterinarian?” She sometimes takes Henry to see the dogs at Dr. Klein’s clinic. Sometimes used to take.

“No, a veteran. Survived two tours in Iraq. Lost a leg, but made it through. Until now.” So this is the death list. She prefers the admissions list—the list with hope—but it’s usually too long and amorphous, bodies to be worked on, not yet people. Ben rolls her over, hugs her from behind. They’re not usually spooners, but Ben has outlawed face-to-face kissing. Not outlawed, suspended. “What will you do on Tuesday?”

“There’ll be another email. With a link to vote. I mean to choose. Something called a survey monkey, I have no idea why.”

“So how will you vote?”

It’s not as if Isabel hasn’t been thinking about it all summer. Reading, studying, analyzing, calculating and recalculating, even lurking in a local moms’ Facebook group, devouring the debate.

“You mean how will we vote?”

“Ninety-seven thousand kids tested positive in the last two weeks of July,” Ben says. “American Academy of Pediatrics.”

“Still, kids are just seven percent.” She read the same study. “And mostly asymptomatic.”

“So he won’t lose a leg.”

“Did you know kids lose twenty percent of their year-long learning every summer? Not counting social skills.”

“An eight-year-old,” Ben says. “Today.” Number four.

•

Isabel awakens to a clap of thunder, the pounding of rain. And darkness. No nightlight. Power out. One more thing for Henry to be scared of.

She creeps downstairs, by the light of her phone and the flashes of lightning, in search of one of their old pre-Henry camping lanterns, for the hallway, for Henry. Then, back in bed, she turns off her phone, to save the battery, and reaches across Ben to retrieve his phone, to set the alarm for her seven a.m. Zoom, before everyone’s kids wake up, or at least before everyone’s kids finish their first TV shows. If Ben’s battery dies, well he’s always complaining how hard it is to reach his phone through his PPE. Maybe he’ll thank her for saving him from its incessant buzzing, calling him from room to room, bed to bed, human to human. Probably not.

Ben sleeps through it all. Like he used to sleep through Henry at midnight, two a.m., four a.m., exhausted from workdays that seemed endless and exhausting at the time. The sleep of the dead, they used to call it, laughing.

It feels like she’s only been back asleep for a minute when Henry appears at her side. Although he doesn’t actually appear, because the lantern battery must’ve died. But she can hear him, breathing, can feel his warm breath on her cheek.

She gathers him in on her side of the bed, for the nightly nightmare retelling. “I was in school,” he says, “and the kids kept getting too close.” Usually it’s dragons or outer space. “And Mrs. Brodie was the Wicked Witch.” Mrs. Brodie, the third-grade teacher, does have long, pointy fingernails. They’ve been watching too many movies, seemed-age-appropriate-at-the-time movies, filling time, working their way through Isabel’s childhood.

She lets Henry sleep next to her—too dark to make him walk back across the hall. She can’t tell if Ben is awake to disapprove, with no nightlight to glint off his eyes.

•

Henry is still talking about his dream over breakfast, cold cereal and milk that hasn’t yet gone warm—power still out. Power, pandemic, what third P could go wrong? Pandas? “Caleb kept moving his chair closer,” Henry says. “And I kept telling him to stop. And then I was running away, but there were kids everywhere, and I never got where I was going.”

“Draw it,” Isabel says, another study she’s read.

“I’ll write it,” he says.

So he sits, sturdy fingers tapping, never mind crumbs in the keyboard or an extra hour of screen time—maybe less, if the computer runs out of juice—with no mask—while Isabel tries to figure out how to make her phone a hotspot for her nine o’clock Zoom. The internet is out, too, and she’s already missed her seven o’clock, and she’s had to shake Ben awake, twice, and now he’s rummaging through her office, which is just a corner of kitchen counter, looking for his keys, grumbling about no coffee and a cold shower.

“You woke me late,” he says.

“I woke you on time.”

“But I have to stop for coffee.”

“A quarrel of sparrows,” Henry says, without looking up. “An ambush of tigers. A crash of rhinos. A murder of crows.”

Ben stops rummaging. Isabel pulls his keys from under her noon folder. “If the power never comes back,” she whispers in his ear at the door, “we won’t be able to fill out the survey monkey on Tuesday. Maybe we’ll never have to decide.”

“I know about school,” Henry says. “You don’t have to whisper.”

“Did you know,” Isabel whispers anyway (she likes the feel of her lips on Ben’s ear), “only baby possums hang by their tails? Grownup possums are too heavy, their tails would snap.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Ben whispers back. “We’ll make the right decision.”

“There is no right,” Isabel barely breathes the words. “Let’s just try not to be wrong.”

Elizabeth Edelglass is a fiction writer and book reviewer living in Connecticut. Her short fiction has recently appeared in Sixfold, Prime Numbers Magazine, and New Haven Review, and is forthcoming in CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly. Her work has also been published in four recent anthologies, including The Bridport Prize Anthology 2018. She has won the Reynolds Price Fiction Prize, The William Saroyan Centennial Prize, The Lilith short story contest, and the Lawrence Foundation Prize from Michigan Quarterly. “An Implausibility of Wildebeests” belongs to a category of fiction she calls “fiction I never thought I would write”—a series of stories in response to the unexpected nature of the world today.

Photo by Mohamed Nanabhai on Unsplash.

Nobody Likes Spock

By Sarah Colón

Spock scrolls through his Facebook feed in the early hours of the morning. He hasn’t been sleeping well, and the blue light from his phone shining upward reveals dark circles around his eyes.

Today, someone is posting a long description of the origins of the virus. “PROOF that it was created by Chinese Communist conspiracists who want to take down our government,” it says: “The virus has been present in a LAB previously to it ever getting out in the public. It originated in CHINA. A certain wealthy philanthropist stands to gain a lot of money by inventing a vaccine. FOLLOW THE MONEY, PEOPLE.”

Spock springs into action, posting helpful comments. “Perhaps you should look up the word proof in a suitable dictionary. Your use of the word in this context shows you have gravely misunderstood its meaning. Your post does not include sources or footnotes, but I can say with certainty that this particular virus was only ‘present in a lab’ in fecal samples of bat guano. The philanthropist you mention is actually projected to lose billions of dollars on vaccine research. Hope this helps.” He includes links to relevant scholarly articles.

His comment gets one like and five angry faces, followed by several comments calling him a communist, an elitist. He scratches his left ear. He’s not as vulnerable to this stuff as most people, but the human half of him still feels hurt. He writes a post on his own wall about fact checking.

One of his Facebook friends PMs him. “What was that post about?” she asks aggressively.

“Fact checking,” he replies.

“Yeah, but in response to what?” she asks.

He sees what she is driving at. She wants to know his political stance on the subject. “In response to statements that were not fact-checked,” he clarifies, helpfully.

She unfriends and blocks him.

Today, the leader of the country tweets he has the virus. Spock reads another post by a documentary maker that says it’s probably a lie; this particular leader lies all the time, so the most likely truth is that he is lying to gain traction in the upcoming election. Spock corrects him that this is the least likely of possible scenarios, considering the number of additional people—staffers, housekeepers, and medical professionals—who would have to be involved in the lie.

His comment is ignored, so he posts it on his own wall.

“Dude, whose side are you on?”

“Defending the liar, huh? WOW this is beneath even your low standards.”

“COMMUNIST FASCIST!!”

“Clearly I cannot be both a communist and a fascist,” Spock replies, “the two ideologies being in polar opposition.”

“Then what, exactly, is your position?” another lady comments.

Spock does a facepalm. He knows he is sometimes too slow to read the hidden messages and nonverbal cues in language and social situations, but he realizes he should have understood this sooner. People want to know which side he is on. He quickly composes a post to remedy this. He types it in all caps, as he has seen others do when they want to be especially assertive or clear.

“I AM ON THE SIDE OF THE FACTS.”

“Which facts?”

“All of them.”

“Okay, but what about when the facts contradict each other?”

“Your language is misleading. If two pieces of information contradict each other, at least one of them must be false. False information is, by definition, not fact. Therefore, it is impossible for two facts to contradict each other. In the scenario you suggest, there exists either one or zero facts. If there is one fact, I would be in agreement with the one fact, or, if there are zero facts, I would be in agreement with neither of them, instead taking the side of the omitted, but still extant, fact.”

“DUDE.”

“Way to avoid answering the question.”

“This guy is a coward.”

“WHICH CANDIDATE DO YOU SUPPORT?”

Several memes pop up next: a picture of a dog licking its own eyeball captioned “Durrrrrr,” a GIF of Charlie Chaplain goose-stepping in parody of Hitler, and another of a well-dressed black woman spitting the contents of a wine glass straight at the camera.

Spock is unsure what to make of these, but he has learned from a great deal of time spent with humans that, when involved in confusing social situations, mimicking the behavior of those around him is usually the answer. He posts a GIF of Ace Ventura wearing a pink leotard and tutu, running with a football.

“WTF?” someone asks.

“Is there some hidden meaning here? What are you trying to get at?”

Spock knows the answer to this one, having discussed it thoroughly with a coworker. “This image is a well-known reference to a popular movie from the 1990s about a pet detective who uses unorthodox research methods and has a particular competence with adjusting the muscles of his face. It is humorous because in the 90s this outfit was considered feminine, subverting the expectation of male/female costumes, accompanied by the comedic tactic of adjusting facial muscles into unnatural positions.”

Spock is pleased with himself. It took him years of research to understand humor and jokes, but now he feels he has a grasp on it. He even knows that there is a specific unnatural adjustment of facial muscles that is not included in the category of comedy that includes severely downturned mouth corners accompanied by flexion of the neck ligaments, strong tension between the eyebrows, and short, choking sounds. This particular expression is sometimes called an “ugly cry” and is not intended to be funny. The expected reaction to the ugly cry is to pat the person on the back and say there twice, followed by it’s not so bad. This is one situation where lying is acceptable, because humans with their neck ligaments tightly flexed are temporarily in a state of reduced intellectual capacity, so lying to them that it’s not bad helps relieve the neck tension and return them to their usual, albeit low, level of mental acuity.

He considers writing a post analyzing Ace Ventura’s facial arrangement in comparison to the ugly cry, but decides against it. Most humans have an uncanny ability to know what facial expressions signify without explanation or analysis.

Someone says he has Asperger’s. He thanks them, having met several autistic persons who have high levels of logic for a human, but adds that it’s unfair to compare him to even this best type of human, his abilities being so markedly different from theirs.

Someone calls him a troll. Someone else accuses him of making fun of autistic persons. He assures both of them that he lacks the cruel impulses to engage in either activity, cruelty being motivated entirely by emotion.

This inspires him to compose another long post about the baser emotions, like terror, rage, and hatred, and compare those responses with the logical, thereby drawing the conclusion that they are all the product of illogic. Terror, rage, and hatred, he posits, are the emotions of idiocy. This is not a condemnation, he explains. Humans, who evolved without discarding their lizard brains, are always going to be susceptible to this part of themselves when faced with something they don’t understand. The remedy, however, is to know that this is happening and then seek to learn more about it, thereby circumventing the emotional response and re-wiring it into the logical portion of their brains.

He has solved both stupidity and negative emotions in one fell swoop. Feeling as though he has just unlocked the secret, hidden meaning of human existence, the answer to all philosophical questions and difficulties, he sits back and waits for the likes to come pouring in.

Sarah Colón is a poet, fiction writer, and educator from the American West who spent her childhood in Montana as a second-generation member of a religious cult preparing for impending nuclear disaster. She currently teaches high school and lives with her partner and their blended family of six children in Largo, Florida. Previous publications include The Examined Life, Just Words Fallacy, Madness Muse Press and Flash Fiction, and work is forthcoming in The Account, Swamp Ape Review, and 32 Poems.

The Spectators

By D.A. Gray

We’d grown thin during the pandemic.

I don’t know when it began. Years ago, I think. When we began to look at neighbors with contempt, to walk head down into the house from the car, looking neither left nor right. Something broken in us and we would enter the house and lock all three locks behind us, and turn on Box—the friend who understood us.

We would post jokes about lost drivers on Robertson Road, the coworker who couldn’t seem to do anything right, Texans and their beer hands that kept them from reaching the turn signal, or the lady in her bunny slippers at the H-E-B.

It was funny then, right? We meant no harm.

Faces from our angle seemed forever stuck in a moment of worry, or maybe lostness.

When the pandemic hit we noticed more in the mirror—or less—the way we almost disappeared from the side was cause for slight alarm. We vowed to eat better, to exercise. Then we sat down with Box, who loved us as we were and flashed pictures of pets, of stories curated for us.

Anyway, there’s still this pandemic. But it’s been so long since you’ve taken in a game.

In the stands, we notice faces frozen, you might say with “pasted on smiles.” Or frowns. Or maybe screams. Who knows. Everyone is silent here.

We’ve forgotten how to enjoy a simple game.

But the game itself is good, right? Slow moving, sure. But we watch the strategy unfold. There are outfield shifts, signals from the sides, pitcher and catcher in their esoteric talk. We never noticed when we used to talk.

Now the action has us glued to our seats.

And the sky has become an orange haze.

Players run through the motions. The stop and start drama, the overthinking, the occasional sprint after a collision of hickory on cowhide. Someone yells “Yes” as the ball drops onto the green grass.

Here the orange sky gets brighter.

Back home, Box tuned to something more pleasant. I hope it’s just conspiracy talk.

My skin is feeling thin, papery, which has me a little unsettled. My chances of surviving a combustible world were not good before this development.

What was that? Another crack of the bat. Maybe. No one’s moving. Perhaps the crack of timber from a nearby hill.

We keep watching. No one’s speaking to each other anymore and the faces seem to carry a look of perpetual anxiety. I think of the time we could have spent talking but never did. We assumed those around us were nothing but cardboard cutouts of something we feared. Now I fear we’ve become that, while watching other things.

And outside this place an orange menace lumbers—I can’t ignore it anymore—slow and clumsy, but steady. Its fingers—it seems to be feeding—grabbing at everything, as if our silence were consent.

D.A. Gray is the author of Contested Terrain (2017). His poems have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, Writers Resist, Comstock Review, Still: The Journal and Wrath-Bearing Tree among others. He holds Master’s degrees from The Sewanee School of Letters and Texas A&M-Central Texas. Gray now teaches, writes, and lives in Central Texas.

Photo credit: Eric Drost via a Creative Commons license.

The Fire Still Burns

By Gary Priest

Fire makes us all believers.

There’s a unity in fear that allowed science and religion to merge into a rational hysteria that swept us all along on a wave of koala memes and apocalypse FOMO.

The eco-inspired crimewave started in the mid 2020s. This was not just shutting down airport runways or protest hashtags. This was something darker, primal and all persuasive.

My first assignment as a rookie eco-cop was crowd control at the murder of an oil company CEO. He was castrated and hung from a lamppost outside a petrol station on New Year’s Eve, 2028. Six months later, I found myself first on the scene of a luckless idiot who discarded a burger wrapper on a Soho street and was kicked to death by a passing group of vegan death metal kids.

Ten years after those first deaths, “ecoslaughter” was written into the rule of law. By the early 2040s, it was impossible to get a conviction on any death that could show a motive related to saving the planet.

The skies got a little bluer and the oceans were more saltwater than cellophane again.

We saved the world.

Twenty years came and went. I remained on the force.

On a dull evening patrol, I drove past a group of teens waited in an orderly line to get into the hippest of the town’s vice-free nightclubs. I could probably find some reason to take them in. The smallest violations were now offences. Sneaking an outlawed carbohydrate, wearing leather shoes without a permit, and, of course, loitering with intent to pollute, which could be twisted to cover anything anyone did and was great for keeping arrest numbers up.

Hoping there might be some meatier infractions inside the club, I parked my bright green smart car and with one flash of my badge at the door, strode inside the large hall. The whale song and bird tweets were a long way from the old days of EDM and rock ’n roll, but after the Bank Holiday Modular Music riots of ’44, the influencers decided that all human-made music was ecologically unsound.

I still remember the day they executed Keith Richards. The lethal injection didn’t work, so they beheaded him live on the nine o’clock news. The tattered illusion of humane deaths for musicians was put aside. They crucified Miley Cyrus, fed Alfie Boe to a pack of feral hogs and kept going until every last one of them was dead.

Groups of pious youth swayed back and forth to the somnolent sounds of nature. These were the inheritors of the planet.

I hated them and I hated what the world we saved had become.

That was my secret.

Back in the early 21st century, there was a gestalt shift that left no room for doubt in anyone’s mind. They called it Twitter-logic. You never expressed doubts, you never backed down, and if there was a mob, you had better be part of it or you would find yourself its next target.

That shift pulled us back from the brink of global catastrophe. Who’d have thought all those armchair environmentalists would one day bring about the Plastic Purges of 2042, the Meatless Monday Massacres of ’55.

I played along, said all the right things and became the perfect symbol of the new age of woke warrior.

Don’t get me wrong, I was glad the planet had been saved, and I admit that the draconian means were probably the only option we had left by the end of the 2020s. But now that the planet was yet again an Eden, it seemed we had forgotten how to enjoy its bounty and grace.

I clocked up a few arrests in the club. Minor violations of recycling laws and dental hygiene directives. The Prius prison vans came and took the offenders away, and I went back to my patrol.

It was a quiet night and I was nearing the end of my shift when the call came in to investigate a code 411, “possible youthquake in progress.”

She sat alone on a wall by the burnt-out shell of a public library. Hardly a youthquake, but certainly a curfew violation to start with.

She wasn’t much older than fourteen. Her hair was a messy nest of blonde and pink. I could have taken her in for the hour and the highlights, but those abuses were the least of her transgressions.

Smoking a cigarette. In public! A goddamn roll-up! That was a twenty-year minimum sentence right there. At her feet, a small pile of cigarette butts, an empty bottle of bootleg vodka and what looked like the remains of a highly illegal kebab.

I got out of my car. She didn’t look up, just puffed out a plume of smoke and started singing.

Instinctively, I drew my gun. Still, she didn’t react.

The song came from way back in the 1980s. “Are you singing a Russ Ballard song” I asked.

She stubbed out her cigarette on the wall and tossed it to the ground.”‘The Fire Still Burns,” she said. She did not smile but assaulted me with eyes granite grey and defiant.

“How do you even know music? It was outlawed before you were born.”

Her laugh was flat and without warmth. “It’s all still out there in the dark cloud if you know where to look.”

Another violation.

“And is that how you want to die? Singing some forgotten power ballad from the eighties?”

She shrugged. “You remember it.”

“That’s not the point, you dumb fucking kid. I have to kill you now. You get that, right?”

After the first few years I no longer enjoy the killing, nor did I feel anything other than a grim certainty that to disobey an eco-statute would mean my death as well as the offender’s.

“I have to kill you”’ I repeated.

‘Of course, you do. Been waiting half an hour for one of you green-booted arseholes to come and end me.’

My grip tightened on the gun. There was no arrest protocol for this many violations.

“Why are you doing this”’ I asked.

The kid smiled for the first time. “Because extinction is the only rebellion I have left, green-boot.”

I shot her twice in the head and once in the chest. Her smile reddened as she toppled over the wall to the ground. I called the cleanup squad and went home.

For the first time in years, my heart soared. I was too old and too scared to rebel, but that kid hadn’t given it a second thought, and if there was one of her, there were probably more. One kid smoking cigarettes and singing outlawed songs might do little else but give hope to her embittered executioner, but a thousand of them could become a trending topic, a hashtag, a movement, and that was how the world changed these days. In her grey eyes I saw the rebirth of the natural revolt of youth. Our generation saved the world, and now maybe, just maybe, the next one could save us.

Later, in the surveillance dead-spot of three a.m. I started singing “The Fire Still Burns,” softly, in the cold solitude of the night.

Gary Priest writes short fiction and poetry. He has over thirty publications online and in print including Daily Science Fiction, The Eunoia Review, and Literary Orphans. He lives in the UK at the end of a dead-end road, which may explain everything.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.

Playing Possum

By Phebe Jewell

Mama won’t let us leave the house, and MJ is furious.

After dinner we form a line at the kitchen sink, Mama on one end, up to her elbows in dishwater, MJ in the middle, rinsing each bowl and plate. I wait at the other end of the line, ready with a towel.

I’ve always been Mama’s favorite. I sit in the middle of the classroom and only speak when I’m called on. During parent-teacher conferences my teachers have nothing to say about me. Mama smiles at my neat homework, tells my teachers “Jackie’s my Mini-Me.”

MJ’s teachers complain about her asking too many questions and arguing with their answers. Whenever Mama and me watch America’s Got Talent we snuggle. “You’re my baby girl,” she says, smoothing loose hair from my forehead. She has no idea what goes on in my head.

MJ turns the faucet off. “Why can’t we go?”

Mama stops scrubbing, lifts her hands out of the water.

“How many times do I have to tell you,” she says in her you’re-on-my-last-nerve voice. “Don’t let anyone know your business. It’s not safe. Don’t let anyone know what you think. Or feel.”

She turns to face MJ, and continues, prodding her chest with one finger. “When you speak out of turn at school, on the bus, wherever, you’re playing with fire.”

MJ steps back, a wet spot dotting her tee shirt where Mama’s sharp nail poked her.

“But people are getting killed,” MJ whispers, like she’s asking a question.

“If nobody knows you’re there, they can’t get you.” Mama turns back to the sink, plunging her arms into the water.

MJ turns the water back on, rinses the silverware. She passes a handful of forks and knives to me, and I pretend to inspect the blade of a butter knife, raising an eyebrow. Our signal.

I dry the last pan and set it on the counter.

Mama presses my hand in hers. “You know what I mean, don’t you, Jackie? This is not the time to make waves.”

I nod because that’s what Mama wants. She’s sure I’ll go upstairs, wash my face and brush my teeth, say my prayers before slipping into bed.

Later, when the house is dark and still, and MJ whispers, “It’s time,” I know Mama won’t be waiting to catch me sneaking out. She’d never dream I’d stand with MJ outside the police station, raising my fist.

Phebe Jewell’s recent flash appears or is forthcoming in XRAY, Literary Heist, Ellipsis Zine, Bad Pony, Crack the Spine, and The Citron Review. A teacher at Seattle Central College, she also volunteers for the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, a nonprofit providing college courses for women in prison. Read more of her work at PhebeJewellWrites.com.

Gurū Testimonial #1843

By Wendy Lee

“I hope you don’t make me regret finding you a job. Will is a good friend of mine,” Dad says.

“I’ll do the best I can,” I say.

“Are you still playing bass?”

“No, Mom threw it away.” Mom always said bass guitar was not ladylike. She didn’t like the thick, dark strings and the weight of it.

“Good. Your cover of ‘Stand by Me’ really sucked,” he says.

“It wasn’t my best work.”

“You really shouldn’t be thinking of anything but your job. Any pleasures or conceits you had before—gone. Don’t even try to relegate that to the five minutes you spend folding your towels. Understand?”

I nod.

“Are you sure? I don’t want to get any calls from Will about you. We go way back.”

I know that my father is right, but he is a hypocrite. He never folds any towels.

“You don’t need to worry. I’ll be the maven of estate planning. My modest sweater will shine as the noonday sun.”

“I’m glad to hear that. But for God’s sake, wear a jacket your first week. Will is an old-fashioned guy.”

I know I must seem sarcastic, but I really am grateful. I feel so lucky to have a job before I’ve even passed the bar exam. Will must have a lot of confidence in my dad.

• • •

What if I told you that you’re not the problem?

My eyes fill with tears, but not enough for Mom to notice.

“Skip the ad,” she growls.

“No!” I say.

It’s Roger Singh, the CEO of Gurū. He’s wearing a navy blazer and jeans and a sandalwood bead bracelet.

What if I told you that by reprogramming your subconscious and resonating with your ideal frequencies, you could say goodbye to loneliness, sexual repression, nostalgia, and lost productivity? In a recent study, Gurū was found to be more effective than medication at treating anxiety.

Mom yells at me in Korean, a language that I was taught to not understand. I pick up my laptop and carry it away, still watching.

Each day, we are surrounded by energy, from ourselves, from those around us, and our many handy devices. This can be a great thing, but it is also very confusing for our bodies. If you don’t have the right tools to ground yourself, you can easily get swept up in the chaos.

“That’s so true,” I say. “So many wavelengths, amplitudes.”

I started Gurū because I wanted to help people live up to their full potential. Gurū combines cutting-edge technology and exciting new breakthroughs in neuroscience to help you do just that.

It’s Jeanette from Tempe, Arizona. She has a golden retriever and works in an office.

Ever since I started using Gurū, I’ve been able to think so much clearer. For years, I thought, oh, I can’t afford to go back to school. I can’t pay off my house, I can’t do this, I can’t do that. But after a few weeks of wearing Gurū, working through the positive affirmations on the app, I ran the numbers again and realized I could do it. Now, I’m working part-time and studying to become a physical therapist. It’s always been my dream to help people achieve mobility, and now I’m right where I need to be.

“It’s always been my dream to help people too,” I say.

I look up the price of Gurū. It’s only $999.00. And it comes in three different colors.

• • •

“It’s always just one thing or another with you, isn’t it?”

Dad is super mad. My eyes fill, lungs ache and quake.

“I know I’ve been a failure. I know I have an unfortunate personality and an unremarkable GPA. I’m the blank sheet, the model minority misfire. But I can make all of that go away.”

“A shitty little pulsating headband is going to change the whole trajectory of your life?”

“The device only takes eight hours to sync.”

“Fucking millennials.”

“I’m Gen Z.”

“Makes no difference.”

“Just give me your credit card, and you’ll see. Tomorrow, I’ll be like the sun. Just the right amount of happy for ho hum.”

“Is she still bitching about Hulu?” asks Mom.

“It’s Gurū.”

“I think it’s a gimmick,” says Dad.

“You always spend your money on me just the way you like. But what if you’re wrong? Look, I told you I didn’t need golf lessons. I tried to tell you in a nice way that no one likes us because they think you’re just a couple nouveau riche assholes. And I was right! I didn’t need golf lessons.”

“She’s got a point there,” says Dad.

“If we get you this toy, will you be happy forever and try to look good with the new mid-century modern aesthetic around here?” asks Mom.

“Yes!”

“And make partner by twenty-six?” asks Dad.

“My very synapses shall echo with virtue and honor and praise,” I say.

“We should get her Hulu,” says Mom. “She is our daughter, after all.”.

• • •

I have read the Amazon reviews, and I believe I have a more sober (haha) view of things now. Gurū is not safe with certain medications. One reviewer reports that a glass of wine is fine, but you’ll hardly enjoy it because your brain chemistry will be so different. I already don’t like most things anymore, so maybe it’ll work out well for me.

One thing that makes me sad is the thought of Michael Stipe not visiting me in my dreams anymore. Maybe I’ll become so present and leaning in that I’ll never think of any of that ever again.

“I won’t let you be a humanoid-android. You can’t just stop being Jenny,” says Tyrell.

“Easy for you to say. Everybody loves Tyrell. No one loves Jenny. No one ever wants to play with Jenny.”

“I want to play with Jenny.”

I hold his hand, and he holds the shopping basket.

“So, it’s arriving tomorrow?” he asks.

“By eight a.m.”

“Shit.”

“You know, supermarkets make me anxious, but ethnic supermarkets, less so.”

“You’re cute when you’re cagey,” he says, meeting my gaze as we stroll through the rice aisle.

“Shut up and shop.”

“What’s this drink we’re looking for?”

“I’ll know it when I see it. It’s wanderlust in a plastic bottle.”

We linger at the refrigerated shelves.

“Here it is. The nectar of my fatherland,” I say.

He reads the label.

“Looks like some kind of persimmon juice.”

We take it to the car. I show Tyrell the super cool foreign packaging. The cap twists off in a slow, satisfying way. He takes a swig and makes a face.

“This isn’t right,” he says.

“You don’t like it?”

“This is no way to celebrate your last night as a real girl.”

“Well, that’s just it. That’s the point. I don’t know how it is that people handle these things. That’s where Gurū comes in.”

Tyrell sighs and gives me the Korean soft drink.

“I know you don’t understand. If I were you, I’d romanticize my disease too,” I say.

“You don’t have any disease.”

“How do you know? You don’t see what they see. I am the blank screen of fear. Behind the screen I’m dark, caving in, too yin. Upon me, they can project whatever they want.”

“They can go to hell.”

“It’s different with you, Tyrell. With you, I can eject. I don’t need to deflect.” How we did intersect.

I close my eyes to laugh, and when I open them, he’s not there anymore.

• • •

Today, I made a joke at work, and Will laughed. I said, “Well that’s another thing they don’t teach you in law school.” Gurū is really helping me discover my sense of humor in a healthy and work-safe way. I think my six-month review is going to bring to light a lot of things I can improve on. I am still only a human, after all.

I don’t think of Tyrell much anymore. We’re both very busy, and I know it’s better this way.

Sometimes, I like to walk outside, under a canopy of oak trees. I like the parable of the grape ivy. It just expands everywhere, takes in light and sucks up CO2. I suppose it does remind me of the album cover of Murmur, but I don’t have those dreams where I ask Michael Stipe questions anymore.

I do have to take Gurū off every few days to clean it. I also have to wash my hair without Gurū. They’re working on a water-proof model, but that won’t come out until Fall 2020.

“No one’s going to finance your bullshit, lingering over café au lait and Apple News like a bum.”

I know the voices aren’t real, and I try to breathe deeply. But they won’t stop.

“Did you ever have any childhood trauma related to carnivals?”

Michael Stipe looks at me like I’m a moron. I hear the water running and feel the cold of the tile running up my hands, but I can’t stand and can’t stop crying. Greg was rude to me today. Real abrasive when he said, “Maybe after lunch.” But I shouldn’t have bothered him because I knew he was preparing for the conference call. Dumb, inconsiderate bitch.

I want to scream. I want to scrape off all my zits. Withdraw my application from the California State Bar. I wish I could call Tyrell, but I deleted his number already.

I grab the little handle of the cabinet under my sink. There’s Clorox behind there. I can hardly see through the water and I know my face is folded up. I want to rip the nub off the cabinet. I want to rip myself apart, piece by piece.

Mom runs in.

“Come on. It’s not so bad. Stop crying, Jenny.” She has her arms around me. I have my arms around my dumbass ribs, squeezing my lungs out. She lets go and places the cool crown of plastic rationality on my head.

These incidents usually last about half an hour. We in the Gurū community affectionately call it “withdrawal.” It’s harmless, really. Some users report that they can significantly reduce the duration and intensity of these episodes by adjusting down “lucidity” under the Delta Dreams tab on the Gurū app. That’s not something that works for me personally, but I do take a little CBD oil before bathing.

I’m usually not one to review products, but I would totally do a testimonial for Gurū. I just want everyone to know that recovery is possible. I’ve been sober for two months now. I’m great at my job and my dad finally loves me. The pH of my urine is 7.3. My life is finally worthwhile, and it’s all thanks to Gurū.

Wendy Lee lives in San Diego, California. She is an attorney by trade, dabbles in beading, and is an aspiring curator of clichés.

Photo by Maximalfocus on Unsplash.