Nesting

January 2025 | fiction

There is something very large building a nest in the parkway by the house I grew up in. The house where my father still lives. He takes walks in this parkway. It makes me nervous. I guess I first noticed it after my mother died. It looked like a large pile of brush in the clearing. Maybe from a storm or from the efforts to rid the area of an invasive species like buckthorn or thistles or the contents of my mother’s hospice supplies. But it was in a perfect circle.

The circle, the size of a small house, was furrowed in the middle, like something was lying there at night, and I wondered what could be so big. I thought of a bird the size of a hatchback car, and when I thought of the car, it was the car my father drove when I was four. A black Volkswagen Rabbit. I remember driving behind him in my mother’s car, in the passenger seat, and seeing the muffler drag on the pavement, making small orange sparks. My mother saying he would explode, and sometimes he did.

New things started to appear in the tree limbs of the nest. I saw my father’s pocket knives that fell between the couch cushions over time. Once, I saw a chair, and I had seen that chair before. It was in my parents’ living room when I was small. My father once threw its matching ottoman across the room. There were ash marks from my parents’ cigarettes on the seat of it, and a perfect circle burn. I would bring my father pepsis while he smoked and read to me. Scary stories or even just my name written on an envelope, so I would know it.

Once, during a fight, my father slammed an unopened pepsi can against the counter so hard it burst. My mother, in silence, cleaned it, while my father apologized, circling her. Now, the chair looked just the same, still stained with ash, and it was covered in leaves and empty pepsi cans and little, yellowed, sharp crescents, my mother’s fingernails that she tore off with her teeth.

My mother’s clothes weaved their way throughout the nest. My father has been asking me for years to look through her closet–her drawers for anything I might want. But there is nothing I want. I’m afraid to open the door. I’m afraid of what could be hiding in there, now. It would be dark. She wore black because she believed in black, but there were embellishments. Gold buttons. Large plastic jewels glued to the sweaters in purple and gold and silver. What is the bird that collects shiny things? What color is it? I’m very nervous.

The nest is getting bigger. My father has been doing work–making it more and more like home. The oriental rug that is soaked through with dog pee and baking soda lines the bottom. There are eggs, now, a bluish-green with spots of brown. I know that color. My father’s eyes are that color. He is stopping to rest more and more on his walks. And I want to tell him no. Do not stop here.

I can see something else in there. Something is moving. It’s crawling. It looks like it’s made out of the trimmings from my father’s beard he collected with his white electric razor. They would spill all over the sink in my parents’ bathroom and my mother would peck at him about it. The shedding. Brown at first, but as the thing moves, it goes gray, then white, then patchy and I can see the skin. It is not smooth. It is papery and thin and folds over itself like an envelope. I imagine it would be soft, but I won’t touch it because you are not supposed to touch the babies, or their mother will not come back. Your smell will get on them and she will know it. And this is what makes me nervous. I do not want their mother to know my smell. Though, I suspect, she does already.

Mary Thorson

Mary Thorson lives and writes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her MFA from Pacific University in Oregon. Her stories have appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Reckon Review, Cotton Xenomorph, Milwaukee Noir, Worcester Review, Rock and a Hard Place, Tough, among others. Her short story, “Book of Ruth,” was included in Best American Mystery & Suspense, ’24, edited by Steph Cha and S.A. Cosby. Her work has been nominated for Best American Short Stories, A Derringer, and a Pushcart Prize. She hangs out with her two feisty daughters, the best husband, and a dog named Pam when she isn’t teaching high school English, reading, or writing ghost stories. Lori Galvin represents her at Aevitas Creative Management. Thorson is currently working on a novel.

Dinner parties

January 2025 | fiction

She lived to host dinner parties. It was a need, a compulsion, to fulfill it she would look for the most absurd reasons. Like the time she bought a purse and messaged our group: Guess what it’s dinner party time. I just bought a purse. Or when she had a fight with her parents over not hurrying to marry a nice boy and having his babies before her biological clock froze. Then there was one where her blind date stood her up. Soon, the reason to hold dinner parties gained as much popularity as the dinner party itself. Her friends couldn’t fault her since her hostessing skills were flawless. She was an extraordinary cook with a knack for chopping her feelings and emotions into itty-bitty pieces and adding them to her dishes. She preferred the food to tell us stories and hold all the intimate conversations while she  laughed, twirled her hair, and talked about anything and everything except what she felt

Like when the guy she thought was the one broke up with her, she held a dinner party and made her version of Cassata, a three-layered ice cream on a sponge cake, and served it with a sprinkling of pistachios. With every spoon we took of this dainty ice cream, we tasted her thoughts of that guy, her love, her heartbreak forming a bitter-sweet taste in our mouths, stirring our own uncomfortable memories of having loved and lost. We looked at her, imploring her to talk, to tell us what she felt but she kept pushing the Cassata in front of us. That night, we left feeling betrayed by love, and with a deep unsettling fear of layered ice cream cakes.

And the time her cat died, she had made Rogan Josh.  That dinner party, with candles lighting up the room instead of electricity, as we mopped up the soft naan bread with velvety Rogan Josh sauce wrapped around meat pieces tender as a child’s kiss, we digested her sadness. We could see her dicing onion crying, pretending her tears were onion tears and nothing else. Her heart was raw, her eyes swollen, and she smiled and chatted while shadows danced on her face. By then we stopped asking her to talk while we wrestled with a million conversations within us.

Happiness also occasionally found a seat at her dinner parties like when she passed her driving test after four attempts, and she made bitter gourd curry that tasted like a mother’s hug. We remembered when our mothers stroked our hair and cheeks and rocked us with milky breaths to sleep. With every dinner party we partook in, we felt, we were swallowing a part of her soul, her memory, her being; our souls blending into hers. When, at long last, we realized we needed these dinner parties more than she needed them.

Roopa Menon

Roopa lives in Dubai, U.A.E. but was raised in Kochi, India where swatting mosquitoes at dusk is considered a life skill, to be honed and perfected. Some of her short stories have been published in Corium magazine, Nunum, Bright Flash Literary Review, Tiny Molecules, Crow & Cross Keys, and elsewhere, and have been nominated for Best of the Net and Best of Microfiction. Her debut middle-grade fiction, Chandu and the Super Set of Parents, has been published by Fitzroy Books. She tweets erratically @RoopaMenon1

Local Boys

January 2025 | fiction

In brown and grey demob suits, stoked up well with Woodbines, the three of them, from the same regiment, were thrown up cheek-by-hip on the platform: Tim, Spence, the younger David. They were packed into a wooden-slat-seat train and Spence, a chunky pugilist of a man, the veteran of bar room scraps, now weathering twenty-six, knew, like the other two, that hostilities were over, that the lights were out at last on the theatres of war.

The theatre was part of home for lanky Tim. For five, six years pre-war, he’d done amdram. He had the wavy hair, indeed the coaxing smile of a film star, so in the local Little Theatre, he could charm the ladies, court the audiences, bask in the warm reviews. But for six years nearly (Tim was thirty-two in a fortnight’s time), he had found, in conflict and in barrack room, you got to see the truth of fellow men, naked and in the raw. He was thinking rather differently now, of men and audiences and acting and affection. Post-war things would be difficult for him and only finally, decades on, would he reach a personal peace.

Spencer had married back in ’41, and yes, he was looking forward to going back to Lily. There was the physical part, of course, the regularity, and in the years that followed he would settle, despite the criss-cross and the alleyways of love, for what was more or less OK. He’d think of her, always, as ‘the Missus’, just as he’d think of ‘the boy’ and ‘the girl’. And decades on, when the cancer struck, he would cope and care for Lily with a dour devotion.

David was bound to think, on that journey home, of the breathless Rachel, the schoolgirl daughter of his mother’s friend. She’d been there at their house, on each of his leaves, and he knew full well she loved him blatantly. Everything in him, of manhood, pride and celebration, yearned for her. Yet somehow now, post-war, aged twenty-two, she not quite seventeen, he would keep feeling the gulf between all he’d seen, the nauseous blood, the gristle exposed, and the world of the child. So they would circle each other for several tremulous months, before in time they panicked and married others.

Each married a shit. Only after many, many years, after the bitterness, the blows, the pettiness, were they free, their every emotion rising with a rush.

In 1995, the celebrations marked the end of the war, and the following golden peace.  None of the boys attended. Spencer said, ‘I’m just glad I came back and I think of the boys who didn’t’. He stayed in playing rummy with Lily (recovered years ago but frail). Tim and his partner Sebastian drank their Merlot in their favourite London wine bar. David and Rachel went in a rural morning for their walk in the Teifi marshes, saw the radiance of the kingfisher, felt the wetlands’ wealth and depth.

Robert Nisbet

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh writer whose work has been widely published in the USA. Burningword Literary Journal and three other magazines have nominated him for a Pushcart.

José Being Himself

January 2025 | fiction

When I entered the parking, there was a problem. A BMW SUV with a Connecticut license plate was parked right in the middle, blocking access to the specialty food store. I was angry. Why the fuck couldn’t that dumb bastard park in one of the nearby spaces, instead of in the middle of the lot?

I entered the fish store to get a sandwich. When I finished, I walked over to the specialty food store.

Perhaps someone had a problem. The temperature outside was below zero, so I thought — having cooled down while eating my fried chicken sandwich in the fish store. Perhaps some poor slob had a car issue and might need assistance — like a tow truck.

On entering the store I saw an aging, grey-haired man in a Brooks Brothers overcoat and tyrolean hat who was pawing the lettuce.

“Yeah, that’s my car; what of it,” he said, checking each head carefully as if he might find gold under one of them.

“Does your car have a problem?” I asked, noting not to buy lettuce.

“Not that I am aware of,” he replied, continuing to pick amongst the lettuces, probably to find the largest head.

“Well, it’s blocking the entrance to this store,” I told him, now getting a little annoyed.

“So what?” he said, finally choosing a head and putting it in his basket.

“Well, it’s inconsiderate,” I told him, following him as he walked over to the cashier.

“Says who?” he said.

“Listen, mister, you’re blocking the entrance to this store. Why don’t you move your car?” I asked, politely.

“I don’t give a shit, sonny, let me handle this first.”

“Who the fuck do you think you are, asshole?”

“Listen, sister,” the man said, “don’t play games with me.”

“Are you going to move your fuckin’ car? Why don’t you just move your fuckin’ car, asshole,” I said as politely as any Cuban could, gesticulating with my arms in his face — for emphasis.

“Listen bitch,” he said to me as he turned around, “why don’t you mind your business and let me mind mine.”

“Who’re you calling a bitch, fuckin’ asshole?”

“Bitch, go suck tit. Can’t you see I’m fuckin’ busy?” the asshole said.

I wasn’t going to let anyone — especially someone from the city — mess with me.

“Asshole, just because you come from the city you think you own the place; you’re our guest, so fuck off and move your fuckin’ car.” I had become so mad, and when a Cuban becomes mad his arms move so that the other person knows what he’s talking about.

“Bitch, as soon as I’m finished ….”

At this moment Jesse, the store manager, appeared from the back room.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Oh, José’s been talking to himself, —you know, just being himself,” Mariah told the store manager.

E.P. Lande

E.P. Lande was born in Montreal but has lived most of his life in the south of France and Vermont, where he now lives with his partner, writing and caring for more than 100 animals, many of which are rescues. Previously, he taught at l’Université d’Ottawa, where he served as Vice-Dean of his faculty, and he has owned and managed country inns and free-standing restaurants. Since submitting two years ago, his stories have been accepted by publications in countries on five continents. His story “Expecting” has been nominated for Best of the Net.

Suspended in air

January 2025 | fiction

At home, we are preparing to paint the living room walls pale yellow. Its summer. The heat is oppressive. There are cobwebs in every corner of the walls. The spiders have weaved their webby homes in our spacious one. They are in clusters, like spools of grey cotton thread dangling from the walls. I see the spiders suspended in the air, unfazed by the height, and drop to the floor. I am scared of heights. Of falling from the rooftops of restaurants we often visit. I am even terrified about diving from the diving pool in our club swimming pool. I am trying to understand why. I usually dream about falling and wake up screaming loudly. Why does it happen only to me? My husband thinks it’s irrational. My kids laugh at me. I am afraid for these eight-legged creatures. The mere thought of them falling and dying gives me shivers. Why can’t they build their homes in the shrubs or trees outside? The ferocious summer heat drives them indoors. Perhaps the pungent paint smell will drive them out. Seasons will change. In the meantime, I see the spiders continuing to spin, suspended in mid-air. The sight is scary as I watch them with bated breaths, their delicate movements adding to my unease.

Swetha Amit

Swetha is the author of two chapbooks, Cotton Candy from the Sky and Mango Pickle in Summer. An MFA graduate from the University of San Francisco, her works appear in Had, Flash Fiction Magazine, Oyez Review, etc. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.