Category: Fiction (Page 5 of 5)

Call Me Mary

25 May 2022 / Editor

Fiction by Ali Mckenzie-Murdoch

My feet prickle and the orange fish in the water dart and glint, flocking to gorge on my dead skin, crisscrossing tracer bullets in the illuminated tank. The nibbling tickles like the bubbles in the glass of cava in my right hand. I lean back into the petrol blue cushion and stroke the white piping covering the seams. There’s a lighter band of skin around my ring finger. I slide my hand under my thigh where I can’t see it and look into the fish tank below my chair. Red frangipani flowers float on the surface of the water, fleshy lips parted in a sigh.

I wandered into the Aqua Bliss Fish Spa after walking from my hotel to Passeig de Gracia. I never do this kind of thing and I thought all those years of pounding the beat had made me tough, but police issue footwear is more comfortable than sandals.

An assistant helps me lift my legs out of the water and leaves me to relax in a dark leather club chair after drying me off. This is the ‘Extravagance Treatment’ highlight, a thirty-minute foot massage washed down with a second glass of cava. After the fish pedicure, I can’t eat another tapas of anchovies, but I’m always game for a foot rub and some bubbly. My eyes close, the swish and splash of water and bubbles lull me, a whisper of pear drops wafts past, warm hands cup my feet.

Hola. Soy Maria, says a voice, an English twang to the vowels.

Forgive me if I don’t open my eyes, I mumble to the girl sitting at my feet. She anoints them with oil, pressing her fingers deep into the soles, pulling and spreading my bones, pinching and kneading my sore muscles. Argh, I let out a moan, half-human, half pussycat. This is the most relaxed I’ve been since the divorce. A week in Barcelona seems a good way to start spending my share of the settlement.

There’s a smell in the oil I can’t quite place. It carries me to gilded altars, the chill of a darkened pew, a priest swinging a thurible suspended from chains. The swirling smoke of incense rises in the air. Is it myrrh or frankincense? I’ll have to ask the girl. When I open my eyes, all I see is the crown of her head. Her thick strawberry blond hair cascades over her shoulders, hiding her face but I make out a snub nose sprinkled with freckles. There’s something familiar about her complexion, her accent, and then I remember.

The thick locks of hair, more reddish in the daylight of the spa, appeared dull blonde under the strip lights in the police station. As if she hears the click of my memories falling into place, she looks up and recognises me too. After she witnessed the man murdered, we had to help her reinvent herself elsewhere, but not before she told the world what she had seen. Unlike the men who scattered and ran, who lost faith, who betrayed him, she stayed and spoke up. I remember throwing a rough woollen blanket over her head before we ran from the squad car and snuck her through a side door of the courthouse. An armoured vehicle as big as a snowplough thundered past, flanked by a full police escort, sirens blaring. Our decoy worked. Then we wrenched her from her life and erased all the traces.

So this is where she ended up, but I know better than to say a word. Her eyes are the colour of the Aqua Bliss Fish Spa. As we stare at each other, they fill with tears.

I want to ask her about her new life, how she can make friends without a past she can share, her life in danger if anyone identifies her. Her eyes quiver and a silver droplet falls on my foot. I want to reassure her she’s safe, but the threads knotted in this tapestry of lies keep me quiet. Bowing her head, she wipes away the tears from my feet with her hair.

Ali Mckenzie-Murdoch is a UK dancer who lives in Zürich, Switzerland with her husband and son. Her work has been published in El Pais. In between running her dance studio and writing, she enjoys lifting heavy weights and wild swimming.

Perfect Teeth

11 May 2022 / Editor

Fiction by David Patten

Elliot is far from a novice. He’s battled marlin in Florida, landed bluefin tuna off Prince Edward Island, fly fished for days in the Louisiana Marshes. Now he has come to Peru, on the hunt for species unique to the iconic Amazon waterway: peacock bass, redtail catfish, arapaima, piranha.

Six in the morning, mist rising from the surface, the chatter of tropical birds and primates from the dense rainforest flanking their small boat. It’s long and narrow like a canoe, Elliot perched at the bow clothed in khaki, boasting zippers and Velcro and hidden pockets only an angler would wear. At the stern, hand on tiller, Santiago guides the craft through the still waters, as the old man has done for decades.

Santiago maneuvers them into a horseshoe pool off the main river. It’s sheltered by overhanging branches that shed pods into the water. It’s a feasting ground. Elliot baits his line and stands astride the bench for balance.

The first two times the bait is gone, either slyly taken or slipped off. Elliot packs it tighter around the double hook and casts again. This time the line goes taught, the carbon fiber rod doubling in on itself, threatening to snap. Elliot reels and pulls, reels and pulls. Mantenlo tenso, says Santiago. Keep it taut.

The fish is strong, angry. A fighter. It breaches in a commotion. Breathing hard, Elliot brings it toward the boat. Es piranha, says Santiago reaching for the landing net. But Elliot raises the rod too soon, the frenzied ball of muscle arcing at him. Instinctively he holds out a hand, Santiago’s ten cuidado, be careful, a fraction late. With the violent precision of a steel blade, the piranha removes Elliot’s index finger at the mid joint.

Elliot’s mind can’t process what he’s seeing, stalling the shock and pain. The piranha thrashes in the boat, gasping. The disturbance has caught the attention of an alligator on the far bank. Santiago watches it slide into the water. Mantener la sangre en el bote, he tells Elliot, wrapping his hand in a small towel. Keep the blood in the boat.

David Patten is an educator living in Colorado. He enjoys reading and creating short fiction. He is looking to expand his audience.

The Package

4 May 2022 / Editor

Microfiction by Kenneth M. Kapp

Bob was a joker with a permanent smile. If asked, he’d answer: “Told myself a joke and it’s a corker.”

Now a widower he lived in a small Milwaukee bungalow. A sign on his mailbox pointed to a milkcrate below: Please leave all packages here. Old and still smiling, he made his final arrangements.

His time was up. His cremains were delivered to his home and left in the milkcrate. A curious neighbor checked and discovered the package he had preaddressed. A cloud enclosed the return address: If unclaimed return to SENDER (a large arrow pointed up).

Kenneth M. Kapp was a Professor of Mathematics, a ceramicist, a welder, an IBMer, and yoga teacher. He lives with his wife and beagle in Wisconsin, writing late at night in his man-cave. He enjoys chamber music and mysteries. He’s a homebrewer and runs whitewater rivers. Visit www.kmkbooks.com.

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But It Deepens

28 March 2022 / Editor

Fiction by Jeff Burt

Snowflakes swirled under two streetlights at the park like shooting stars against the night sky. A young woman lay prone on the cement walk. I first thought she was making angels in the snow, but with more inspection seemed more on the path to becoming an angel. She did not move. The bellows of her chest had stopped.

I felt for a pulse on her iridescent wrist, flesh a translucent paper exposing thin, visible veins from arms gone gaunt. I touched her berry-colored lips to close them, the unlit indigo of her iris like an old bruise, a plum after the sun has caressed and not yet ripened, of a lily when the color vanishes and the petals fall, the pale purple of candles of the church lit for repentance, the amethyst of meditation, the lilacs pressed in books to mark a place of interest lost in the shuffle of reading, dried lavender, as if Death had kissed her but was interrupted before all color had been taken.

Her rayon dress ran through my fingers, like mercury freed from containment and spilling on the pavement unable to be contained by the merest boundary, without bond, lake water slipping through my hands no matter how hard I tightened my fists, and I remembered my mother’s hands covered in cornstarch when I was a child, her laughter at watching the water beads form in her hands as she tried to wash them, the starch remaining in the crevices of her palms like snowflakes she said, that do not melt in the darkness underneath trees.

I called for help. Snow fell and kept on falling. I wanted the snow to fall like rain, anonymous, consistent, but each time I looked out saw chaos, swirls without pattern, each flake individually propelled. I covered the woman with my jacket.

She survived.

That night my father called. Cancer had taken my mother.

Though I am separated by years from that night, I still see the silhouettes brought by that snowfall, the variations of brilliant white, dirty white, and gray, and the stunning blackness of the park’s backdrop. I still see every variation of flake falling under the lamps, the wide, the slim, the lace-like, the cotton-like, the confetti, the crystal, the furred, the angular, and the oblique.

The snowflakes perpetuate like a background that never gets refreshed, snowflakes not feathery like eiderdown which sways back and forth like a pendulum lowering itself to earth, but drifting, white blossoms floating on the dark swells of quiet waterways, white funeral mums among black cloth, white petals of roses against the dress of dark evening, white hair of my mother with cancer drained of pigment, white doilies she treasured as gifts, the white of waves high capped and falling, white of waterfalls in spring, eidolons of snowflakes lingering in memory, eidolons that haunt me.

All images now resolve into one collage and crowd my consciousness. They become a single form flying at me on a conveyor of wind until I cannot perceive, not blinded, but that visible shape has been coalesced into a picture book fanned repeatedly with frames I cannot distinguish, surviving, dying, all one.

People tell me this will pass. But it deepens.

The mind filters and selects things we do not wish to come forward, and most often, the years have eroded memories, and they no longer hold us. Snow melts.

For me, it has never stopped snowing.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife. He has worked in electronics, healthcare, and mental health. He has contributed to Gold Man Review, Per Contra, and Consequence Magazine.

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Sawdust

22 March 2022 / Editor

Fiction by Terri Mullholland

The wooden owl her dad carved and painted for her when she was a child still sits on the fence. The once bright colours now so faded that from a distance, and without her glasses, it looks as if it might fly away at any moment.

Her dad was always making something from wood, things for around the house, coasters, a spice rack, a chess set. He even made her a Noah’s ark, complete with two of every imaginable animal. Every weekend, he’d be there in the shed, whittling away, carving, shaping, chiselling, sanding, bringing each piece of wood to life.

The door would be ajar, and she’d creep in, sit on the floor and watch him.

He was a quiet man, never one to chat or whistle or hum while he worked, and not one for small talk. But during those hours in the workroom, watching his hands craft and sculpt, she felt close to her dad. He spoke to her through those silences they inhabited together.

She’d sit at his feet and play with the wood shavings that lined the floor, beautiful paper-thin coils of wood. If she found a perfect spiral that seemed to go on forever, she’d put it in her pocket, take it up to her room to wonder at alone. She’d carry pieces in the pocket of her school cardigan, a talisman against the bullies.

Her fingers would worry the coil away to nothing. Then she’d have to go back to the shed for a new piece.

He stopped making things from wood long ago. When his hands became stiff and clumsy, when he had too many accidents, and her mother said enough.

Two young men came to dismantle the shed; his tools were packed up and sold. She was glad he never lived to see it all go.

She wishes she could still go back for one last perfect spiral, one last lucky charm.

Now, years later, every pocket is full only of sawdust.

Terri Mullholland (she/her) is a writer and researcher living in London, UK. Her flash fiction has appeared in Litro, Flash Fiction Magazine, Every Day Fiction, Toasted Cheese, Full House, Severine, Tether’s End, The Liminal Review, and Analogies & Allegories Literary Magazine. When she is not writing she can be found curled up with a good book and a cat.

Photo by Christophe Van der waals on Unsplash

Hashtag Icarus

16 March 2022 / Editor

Fiction by Stephanie Buesinger

Bronwyn set out to conquer the world by the ripe old age of twenty-five. Our boarding school crowd knew we had advantages few others possessed. Still, among us, Bronwyn sparkled most brightly. When I heard she set out to visit every country on Earth, I recognized it was within her grasp. Each destination earned a spot in her Instagram grid or a full story, if it was an especially picturesque sight. Bronwyn’s followers could receive real-time updates from her social media channels; they would seldom go a few minutes without a live feed. Rumor had it that Bronwyn was in talks with an up-and-coming Hollywood director who promised to turn her around-the-world voyage into a feature film, one that would premiere at Sundance, Toronto, even Tribeca.

We met at boarding school- me, the Nick to her Gatsby. I was ever the observer, aspiring to a literary life, while Bronwyn became the famous author, the narrator to her own fairy tale. Bronwyn scored visas to the most challenging locales with ease. She performed a downward dog in ballet flats atop the Great Wall of China, and sported designer sunglasses at Machu Picchu. It helped that Daddy was a celebrated hedge fund titan and her mother a former model-turned-reality star. Like a character from a Fitzgerald novel, Bronwyn led a charmed existence. Well, she did until now.

They crowned her the top “influencer” of the year, the girl everyone wanted to be. Meanwhile I toiled at a substitute teaching job in my midwestern hometown, trying to impress the merits of Faulkner and Nabokov upon snickering middle schoolers. Bronwyn seemed destined for social media. She had both the classic good looks for fingernail-sized selfies and the vanity to go with it, sharing photos of herself multiple times a day in skimpy ensembles. Yet for all Bronwyn revealed, she kept us guessing.

Who took that picture of Bronwyn bartering the four carat Asscher cut diamond solitaire given to her by her ex before he ran off with that magenta-haired hipster chick? We heard the new couple opened a microbrewery slash small-batch sausage factory in Williamsburg. Did Bronwyn just trade the ring at a makeshift stall in downtown Kathmandu for a Sherpa guide up Mount Everest? Indeed. And just how was she able to climb while transporting the Wi-Fi receiver, several vintage Penguins, a wheel-thrown artisanal coffee mug and a French press, not to mention the micro-roasted beans custom blended by a former Google executive in Portland?

We never considered Bronwyn to be sporty, but her sponsors outfitted her in high style. Elite outfitters jumped at the advertising bonanza Bronwyn’s twenty million followers represented. Even I could not resist the mesmerizing loveliness of her silhouette outfitted in the close-fitting black parka that retailed for two grand, her blowout still fresh after an application of dry shampoo. Her emerald eyes flashed like the light on Daisy’s pier, calling us to look. Funny, I didn’t remember her eyes being green.

When I spotted Bronwyn’s snapshot of the colorful Nepalese flags surrounding her flat lay photo of a traditional stew, homemade granola and matcha chai latte at 19,000 feet, I realized she was near her destination. At 26,000 feet at the South Col, the air was so thin, most climbers require oxygen tanks. Not Bronwyn. She had the lung capacity of an Olympian, a legacy of her grandfather who had skied for the 1964 Norwegian team at Innsbrook. She had that magic, if not the fortitude, that flip of the coin that determined who was blessed and who was condemned to a life of mediocrity.

As Bronwyn made her approach to the summit, she reached up for that most elusive selfie of all, the one atop this planet’s highest peak. As she shimmied off her elegant parka, as she held her iPhone aloft to attain that ideal angle of her cheekbones, cut like glass against the clear azure sky, as she fiddled with the smartphone to get a better connection, difficult at 29,000 feet, we reached with her. I thought of the ancient mountain, called Sagarmatha by the people of Nepal, and Chomolungma in Tibetan, and considered sacred by both cultures. I thought of how it would have looked to the first explorers, those who dared to face its perils—infinite crevasses, shifting ice, avalanches, frostbite, altitude sickness. I considered the slow dripping passage of the ages, continents colliding, mountain ranges rising, pushing aside all in their way. And as Bronwyn aimed her iPhone toward the golden heavens for the perfect backlighting, she fell.

And we streamed the Netflix series when it came out.

Stephanie Buesinger writes fiction and children’s literature and enjoys illustration and photography. Current projects include a middle grade novel and a picture book. Stephanie has degrees from Wellesley College and the University of Texas at Austin. She has worked in corporate finance and economic consulting. Stephanie is the Blog Editor at Literary Mama. She lives in Florida with her husband, teenagers, and rescue pets.

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Time-Tested Tenets

24 February 2022 / Editor

Fiction by Foster Trecost

The handwriting was so overly scrolled, some letters looked like caricatures. I never knew funerals could be by invitation, but there’d been a death and someone wanted me at the service. I returned the card to its casing and placed a call, asked the answerer if he’d received an invite. Continuing his role, he said he had, then we swapped roles and he asked if I was going. I unsheathed the invitation, read it again, and said, “I’m not entirely sure what I’ve been asked to attend, but I’ll be first in line to find out.”

The parlor filled with seasoned socialites alongside newly assigned A-Lister’s. I claimed neither title, but a shared curiosity landed us in the same place. That, and the open bar. Occasional guests deserved closer scrutiny, but only because they had yet to master the rules of invisibility, a skill that would allow attendance at such events to be recorded only in the register. Music oozed from hidden speakers, but I only noticed when it stopped. The lights dimmed to a point just past dusk and everyone stared at the stage, empty except for two podiums. And our hosts appeared, Justin and Claire, neither deceased.

Claire thanked us for coming, then said, “You’re expecting a funeral and that’s what you’ll get. But this one’s different. Nobody died.”

Relief. Confusion. And yes, disappointment. Just a bit, but some.

“I’m here to pay final respects, not to Justin, but to the relationship I had with him.” She looked to her right.

True to his cue, Justin: “I’m here for the same reasons. Claire, the woman I hoped she’d be, but never became.”

“He was a good man.”

“She had a heart of gold.”

And that wrapped up the niceties. The volley of insults that ensued played out like a tennis match. Before long I could see Claire’s bottom lip began to quiver. Justin’s voice cracked like an adolescent. And I started piecing together what this was all about.

“He was condescending, he needed to feel smarter than everyone.”

“She didn’t like to read but wanted everyone to think she liked to read.”

And with this she left her post and crossed the stage. I imagine the acoustics made the slap sound worse than it was, but she struck him and I’m unsure who was more surprised, us or him. “I like to read,” she said. He raised a hand to cheek like he was checking for blood. Then she surprised us again by kissing him.

“But I’ve got more,” said Justin.

“So do I,” said Claire. She pointed to the rear of the room, to the bar in waiting. “The funeral is on hold, but drinks are on the house.”

A cluster of confused faces made their way to the bar. Everyone seemed to have a theory: public therapy, performance art, a happening. I had my own take. We saw two people who so desperately sought closure, they staged a funeral for their relationship, but they weren’t ready to bury it, not just yet. And we watched them begin again.

A man standing nearby asked my opinions on the proceedings, but he wouldn’t get them. Never respond to questions, a time-tested tenet of invisibility. I turned my back to him, faced the bar, and ordered an Old Fashioned.

Foster Trecost writes stories that are mostly made up. They tend to follow his attention span: sometimes short, sometimes very short. Recent work appears in Harpy Hybrid Review, Right Hand Pointing, and BigCityLit. He lives near New Orleans with his wife and dog.

Maybe Death Smells Like Onions

20 February 2022 / Editor

Fiction by Pamela McCarthy

Presentation is important. Set the table with good dishware, with the silver placed just so, with the napkins folded. Maybe light a candle or two.

Who am I talking to? I guess I’m talking to you, ghosts.

Make something that won’t tax your resources and that will be delicious. What I mean is, use what you have on hand. Cut things evenly, add salt—always add some salt—add the spices and flavorings you want. Maybe cook with a little of the wine you were going to drink in the hopes it would lead you to where everyone is, where you can at least visit with them for a while.

This is why it’s important to buy the ingredients before things go to shit. Before you can’t get to the Indian grocery store and can’t get your hands on asafoetida. Well, I got the asafoetida a while ago, it’s been in my cupboard. Its stench is legendary, like death according to one vlogger, so when I sniffed it, I was disappointed. It smelled like onions to me. It still does. Old onions, I suppose, but …onions.

Where was I?

Make something that can accommodate the remaining chicken in your freezer. Something that will tie the past and present together. Something you would proudly serve to your family or friends, if they were here to eat it.

We won’t think about that.

Pour yourself a glass of wine while the chicken roasts in the marinade you prepared. The power could go out any minute. Pour yourself another glass of wine when it goes out just after you take it out of the oven. Toast the grid. The grid is dead, long live the grid.

After raising your glass, remember why you’re doing this. Why am I doing this? Well, we all do things like this for a reason, I’m sure you have your own. Maybe it’s to remember eating with your loved ones.

Look at the photographs of your family, your friends, the ones who can’t be here because there’s no safe passage any longer, the ones who can be here because they are ghosts. Remember that you have to eat what you’ve prepared. You are on your third glass of wine, you lush! Haha, I am hammered. Alone. Drinking alone was never on my bucket list, and it wasn’t anything I did before all…all this.

The chicken is good with the asafoetida. Resolve to use more of it in your cooking, then realize that the grid is sputtering in its death throes like everything else. You’re in a condo, one that’s been awfully quiet. Did everyone die? Wouldn’t there be a smell? Would it smell like the asafoetida?

I know I’m drunk. Here I am, giving instructions and advice on cooking to ghosts. If you pay attention, you can see them from the corner of your eye in the shadows thrown by the candles you lit for ambiance, but which are now for light.

Pamela McCarthy spends her days working in healthcare fundraising and her nights writing short fiction. When she is not working or writing, she is buying seeds for her garden, creating more garden space because she bought so many seeds, or reading.