July 2024 | fiction
The blond man in front of her is too tall. European of course, Dutch perhaps. It’s claimed the Dutch are the tallest people in the world. She’ll find out if it’s true soon enough. Amsterdam is their next stop. Kyoko stands on her toes. She can’t even get a glimpse of the woman with history’s most mysterious smile, only the right upper edge of the gold-varnished, renaissance-inspired frame. How she’d love to see a friendly face, even if it’s just a painted one.
***
She planned the ten-day Euro trip with her daughters right after the divorce. A chance to forget, at least momentarily, to “make new memories together”, which was what the travel brochure said, “while admiring artworks with a lasting impact”. Now, she’s standing here alone. She’d already booked three tickets and didn’t want them all to go to waste. Her teenagers preferred shopping on the Champs-Élysées, without her. She just wants her daughters to be happy again. It already means the world to see the girls getting along. That hasn’t always been the case, but a common enemy unites.
She’s the guilty one, the instigator. She’s not even sure why she did it. She simply didn’t have a choice but to leave their father. If she has to describe the reason, the feeling when growing out of her favourite dress at the age of thirteen comes closest, the blue one with ruffles. She still loved it, but it didn’t fit anymore.
***
She had expected the Louvre to be busy, but not like this. Crowds are a strange phenomenon. Each has its own distinct character: some fierce and loud, others dumb and dangerous. Though obstructing her vision, this one seems kind, rocking her softly from left to right, holding her tight, making it impossible to fall over.
Josje Weusten
Josje Weusten, PhD (she/her), is a writer of (auto)fiction and a senior lecturer in literature and creative writing at Maastricht University. She is a Faber Academy London alumna. Josje aims to write fiction that stays true to Oscar Wilde’s words: “A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.” Her shorts have appeared in Litbreak Magazine and Flash Fiction Magazine. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions 2023. Her first novel, Fake Fish, a near-future story on the devastating impact of fake news, will be released on November 14, 2024, with Sparsile Books (Glasgow, UK).
July 2024 | fiction
Claudia was done. She told her husband of twenty years, her three boys, and pet hedgehog Igloo that she was going to take a nap. The dishes stayed dirty in the sink, and the meat loaf and potatoes she cooked for dinner cooled on the supper table. She was tired and she was done. So, she marched up the creaky stairs, passed the shoes tossed at the bottom, shirts and sweatshirts hanging on the railing, water guns, and muscle-bound figurines. She kicked some dirty laundry strewn across the bedroom floor and plopped face down on the snagged comforter.
When her youngest son came to wake her, he nuzzled her cheek with his snotty nose. But, she didn’t move. Didn’t even lift an eyelid. She kept her eyes shut, face down.
Hours later, when her husband finally came upstairs, she stayed on top of the blankets. Her youngest boy sat on her back, turning her into a horse, using the strings from her sweatshirt as the reins.
“Claudy, wake up,” her husband mumbled. “Claudy?”
He touched her shoulder—the first real touch in months—and gave her a shake.
“Hey, wake up already,” he said. “Matty has to go to bed.”
He sighed.
“Your son needs to go to bed,” he shook her again. “Come on.”
His voice grew sharper, less patient. Claudia didn’t budge. Yes, she heard him. Yes, she was awake. She was just done and did not, could not open her eyes.
This continued into the next day—no, she did not wake up to take “her boys” to school or pack their lunches or vacuum or make her husband’s breakfast or pull his clean clothes out of the dryer and give him a requisite kiss on his way out the door. She kept her eyes shut and listened to the chaos around her, content not to move.
She did not open up eyes when the ambulance came and EMTs checked her vitals.
“There’s nothing wrong with her,” they proclaimed, ripping the blood pressure cuff from her arm.
Still, she was rushed to the hospital to have specialists stick needles in her. She didn’t flinch or flutter. Nurses crept into her hospital room at night, with one especially weary nurse whispering, “You stay asleep, girl. I don’t blame you one bit.”
So, she did, dozing in and out of the world around her. She grew used to seeing the inside of her eyelids and not having to see anything or acknowledge anybody.
Not even after she was sent back home. Not even years later when her boys grew and graduated, married and moved away. Not even after her husband stopped asking her to wake up.
Not even at the visitation they held for her and awkward eulogies from a childhood friend and distant cousin.
Only after they lowered her into the ground did she feel an urge to sit up, but she was used to the darkness and craved that silence, so she ignored the pain and slept on.
S.E.White
S.E. White teaches English and Honors classes at Purdue University Northwest. She has her BFA from Bowling Green State University, MA from Iowa State University, and MFA from Purdue University. She has published with The Smoking Poet, Ginosko, Toasted Cheese, Prick of the Spindle, Niche, 100 Word Story, and others. Her novella A Murder of Crows is available in paperback and Kindle versions. Her work can also be found in the Best Ohio Short Stories collection. She owns two of the best dogs around–Oscar Woolf and Daphne du Furrier.
July 2024 | fiction
That day at the airport on the way to my hometown best friend’s funeral, when you couldn’t keep the newsfeed of the fiery midair collision out of your phone, even as you waited to board.
I tried to choose my seat wisely, but it was 5 a.m., and I hadn’t been home in twelve years, that suburban Ohio life not focusing: I had remade myself into an Angeleno who hung out not at the local dive bar with high school friends, but at a coffee shop in Los Feliz, an exhibition at the Getty. I slumped into a window seat when a woman and her teenage son eyed me.
I sank deeper into my seat and put on headphones, but she had me.
“Good morning!” She smelled clean and crisp, like hotel soap.
My polite nod only encouraged her. “Too bad, isn’t it? About the pilot.” She pointed to her phone’s image of the two jets colliding in midair. In the next frame, a young aviator smiled at the camera, a helmet under his arm. “So young. So handsome.”
She leaned in, whispering, “He had a bad feeling. He didn’t want to go.”
I knew the images: here he was, alive, about to climb into his cockpit. Still alive as he began his final descent with contrails blooming flames. The news stories began with the planes engulfed – images out of order. That upset me yesterday as I packed.
“Where are you headed?”
“Home,” I said, but it tripped on my tongue. We’d tried to keep up through the years, but texts and calls were no match for the pull of hometown husbands and the needs of small children.
“Where is that?”
But I backtracked. “He didn’t want to go? The pilot?”
“No, he told his wife something felt wrong. He tried to stop it.”
A week before she died, I had a strange cosmic nudge to call my friend, a sense to check in after so much radio silence.
I didn’t call. When I heard that she was gone, I couldn’t let myself grieve, as if it was my fault. I’d known, just like the pilot.
The lady patted my hand. Soon she was snoring.
It would be a long time before we landed. I closed my eyes, but I kept seeing the pilot, and he was smiling at me, waving one last time as he took off into the perfect blue of morning.
Sharon Lee Snow
A Pushcart nominee, Sharon Lee Snow earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of South Florida. Her short stories, creative nonfiction, and poetry have been published in Jelly Bucket, South 85, Gulf Stream, and other journals. Connect with her on Twitter and Instagram @sharonleesnow and her website www.sharonleesnow.com
July 2024 | fiction
- We sit on the banks of the river on the last day of summer. The drought has left only a trickle down the center of the dry river bed, so there is no sound of water to distract us from the words hanging between us. Nothing will be final until one of us walks away.
- We arrive at a pool party hosted by your coworker. After starving myself to fit into a bikini, I need only three watery cocktails to trip and fall into the pool. You leave, embarrassed, and your boss has to drive me home.
- We stand near the confluence of two rivers in the middle of the country as we roadtrip from one coast to the other. Silence for miles, followed by sharp words stabbing each other until we’re hollowed out. The next day we’re overly polite, as if we just met.
- We keep returning to each other, a bit out of love, but mostly out of fear. We’re more miserable apart than we are together, we tell ourselves, holding space until someone better comes along.
- We end for good standing next to the ocean. Giving up like a bloody boxer who can’t take another round. The tears you try to hide taste like the sea as I kiss you goodbye.
Jen McConnell
Jen McConnell has published prose and poetry in more than forty literary magazines, and her work has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. Her current work can be found in Does it Have Pockets?, Bridge Eight, and the tiny journal. Her first story collection, “Welcome, Anybody,” was published in 2012. Learn more at jenmcconnell.com.
July 2024 | fiction
Grandpa would say go outside I can’t hear myself think and if the air was clear and bright the mother between us said run, let your lungs gobble that good air, get your Vitamin D, and sometimes the air was thick with low-lying fog by the river, and the mother was shrouded, warning of slippery rocks, stray dogs, of Mr. Bob—who couldn’t live near a school—and sometimes the air was searing and the mother shimmered, drew us to the shade, silent while we bickered—having long understood that we did it for sport—and sometimes the air was sharp as icicles and the mother between us said put your scarf over your nose and mouth and sometimes the air held something sulfurous from downriver factories or—worse—that funk from the rendering plant and she said go inside, go drink some water, go help your Grandpa for a change you know he does his best, he’s just doing his best.
Michelle Morouse
Michelle Morouse’s work has appeared recently in Vestal Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Gemini, Midwest Review, Prose Online, Bending Genres, Best Microfiction, The MacGuffin, and Unbroken. She is a Detroit area pediatrician and a Pushcart nominee.
July 2024 | fiction
In the far away, newer, and still shifting western frontiers, there once was a watchman uniformed in olive green who looked over a border, an imaginary one some argued, since a natural delineation this border was not, but instead had been drawn by humans through migration, invasion, occupation, relocation, warfare, purchases, and treaties; now this line manifested itself as a rusty and porous chain-link fence adorned on top with tetanus inducing garland. This watchman, in a grand and big-wheeled gasoline-fueled and color-coordinated-to-his-uniform motor vehicle, would give chase at daring speeds to reach and capture people who, according to this artificial line, were not supposed to be on his side of it. Parallel to it, a massive and glorified irrigation canal that brought verdant promises to a once arid desert served as a secondary boundary this watchman conveniently patrolled from, since the people he would follow with night vision binoculars had grown immune to barbed wire but not to the dangers of deep running water. These people didn’t know it, but they were invisibly watched by another whom they feared as equally as the watchman, a ghostly woman in a dress known to appear waterside at night crying for her drowned children. One night lit with a full moon, while the torrid waters of this wide canal sparkled like stars, the watchman gave chase to a car he believed was loaded with the unwanted; chasing over a bridge across this immense canal, this ghostly woman and secret guardian of the others, made an appearance on the passenger’s seat of this watchman’s speeding grand motor vehicle; elegantly dressed in a white spectral dress, she appeared seated not uttering a word, not looking at him either, just sitting there perfectly postured looking straight ahead, not acknowledging his existence by gesture or word, but simply by being there. The scare made the watchman swerve out of control and roll over, and down the grand green and white Ford Bronco went into the All-American Canal; the words BORDER PATROL emblazoned across it slowly faded as it sank. He died trapped, drowning under the waters of this massive canal that humans use to provide and divide so much, but not before believing, if even for one instant, in the ghostly woman dressed in white.
Omar Bárcena
Omar Bárcena, born and raised straddling the line dividing Alta from Baja California in the border city of Mexicali, Baja California, raised between his hometown and Calexico, his childhood and adolescence were divided between two countries and two languages whose border he crossed: often daily. At 18, he left the currently delineated USA/México border to attend university in San Luis Obispo, California, where he obtained an architecture degree. Omar has lived in Mexicali, Calexico, San Luis Obispo, San Francisco, Paris, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Borrego Springs, but the border splitting has never left him. His poetry has appeared in the Hawai’i Review issue 89 – La Trayectoria del Latinx, by the University of Hawai’i in Manoa and in The Very Edge Poems, by Flying Ketchup Press, of which he became a Pushcart Prize nominee in 2020, and his first collection of poetry, Poemas desde el otro lado, which deals `with being on the opposite side of things, was published in 2021 by Valparaíso Ediciones of Granada, Spain. He has since obtained a certificate in Creative Writing from UCLA Extension, become a finalist for the 2024 Harbor Review Chapbook Editor’s Prize, and is pursuing a bilingual MFA in creative writing from Mount Saint Mary’s University of Los Angeles.
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