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by Lisa Wartenberg Vélez The children waited, running the diamond or standing stoic at the perimeter or dangling off monkey bars in the playset that bled in. Some wore excitement in their eyes, or perched like little placid Buddhas on the grass. Some plucked grass or worms from the soil. Inés and Salomé clutched each other, their faces creased paper, eyes drawn outside the lines. The Great Sacrifice had arrived at this time every year since the Big Collapse and the children were glad. Even the hard ones. The dream-hearted ones, tender as lambs, nearly adrift in Heaven. Even the parents, who watched from the benches of the soccer field, soppy eyes behind sunglasses, alive in their shame. Watching was required. It was the only way to be set free now from looming ruin. Divinity would trail them, Mrs. Flores told her little dears, render them holy in sacrifice. When the shots began it was the frolicking ones flattened first. Then the ones pushing limbs full-speed into the wind. They saved the criss-crossed ones for last. When banks scanned tags at the end, along wrists or ankles or whichever parts most intact, cell phones pinged like techno music: debt cleared. Wails could only be masked to a point. But only the Muscle, as those children still alive were called, the ones hailed heroes and not saints, the ones with gunpowder and blood down their shirts, understood the true value of their lives. Lisa Wartenberg Vélez is a Colombian-born writer of fiction who also grew up in Florida. She is an MFA candidate (’23) in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, where she is an Inprint Jesse H. and Mary Gibbs Jones Fellow and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Scholar. She also has degrees in theatre and has served as Assistant Fiction Editor at Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Her work appears in Nimrod International Journal and has received support from Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, Tin House Writers Workshop, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She is the recipient of the 2022 Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Contributor Award in Fiction and the 2021 Francine Ringold Award for New Writers. She was a Finalist for both the Master's Review Anthology XI and 2022 Passages North Waasnode Fiction Prize, and a current nominee for the 2023 PEN / Robert J Dau Prize.

with a line from Frannie Lindsay by Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer You too might, in the holiest hour of your life, reach for me. Who’s to say when that will be? It could be your deathbed, with your family gathered around you, a wife with stringy brown hair and a dog that chews your slippers. Or it could be tomorrow, while you fuck your latest woman, kiss her leg as you hoist it over your shoulder. There are angles to consider: anything looks holy if you put the right hat on it, give it the right garb. Or maybe, the holiest hour was in that first night, already past wishing. I was no animal, but someone simply naked in bed with you, face slackened with sleep, vein of drool connecting cheek to pillow. The day had not broken open like an egg or an unkept promise. Dawn made its lazy overtures, but stood outside the door. In the dark and hushed room where once you touched me, you pulled on your clothes, and did not look back to see if I was awake. This is not a story about love. It is, however, about someone you left behind. And I make a good saint, or at least something holy: I make no complaints. I make no sound at all. Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer is the author of the full-length collection Bad Animal (Riot in Your Throat, 2023) and the chapbook Small Geometries (Ethel, 2023.) The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, their work has been published or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, The Adroit Journal, Crazyhorse, Poet Lore, Beloit Poetry Journal, and others. They attend Syracuse University’s MFA program.

by Alexander Fredman The small car starts. The overpass reaches over the sea. The sea waits daintily for the sun to break. When the sun breaks, the sea will begin to move. It will ripple and quake and its surface will soon be slashed through with pleasure crafts. Sara stares at the blacktop ahead of her. It is not so dark here. It never is. In the distance condo towers pose, rimmed with balconies. Earlier, Sara stood on one of those balconies, where she looked to the beach and to the sea beyond the beach, and both were black, but they were different sorts of black. Sara lost eyes in that border between the two. There are not many cars out, but there are a few, and those few drive either very slow or very fast. An Italian convertible glimmers by, rises with the bend of the bridge. She likes this about this city—that the rich people buy cars like that. They are not yet burdened by fun. If Sara were rich, she thinks, she would get such a car. Her friends would think it ridiculous. Sara is, presently, drunk. She is drunk and she is aware of it, and she drives slow, and hopes her slowness is not so noticeable. It is good that the sun rises in the east. Sara does not want to think about what this drive would be like if the sun rose behind her. She is glad to head towards the lagging glow of light. She is sad, too. Sara is sad because she feels like the dark, because she understands that the dark isn’t nothing. It’s something, and it’s something other than herself. When she reaches land, she turns to the right. She drives first to the tip of the island, and then she veers onto the road that runs along the beach, and she drives north. Many people are out, and drunk. The bars lining the left side of this road are still open, still radiating revelers between them. The people mill around—some of them look angry, others upset. Sara recognizes the sense of seeing a photo of yourself that you didn’t know was taken. They are so—and the term comes to her from some unknown place—kitted out. Their clothing shines, and they sulk. There are a few who are still stuck in the thrill of the night—jumping, joining hands, singing out. She watches them, thinking they are under some spell, knowing that in time the spell will be broken. Sara parks in a spot and walks to the beach. She feels some slight relief. She sits just before the waterline. Here she will sober up. She cups her hands and scoops those cups with sand, and she lets the sand fall through her fingers. This is something she has seen in movies. She has even done this before, in a movie. The movie wasn’t much. It was really a student film but for the fact that the director had graduated. He had some funding from an uncle. The uncle had given him an amount of money that would have been enormous had it not been used for a movie. Sara was paid a rate that when sliced hourly was illegal. If she remembers it, she remembers it fondly. Sara’s lips are ruby-hued and that is new. Also her skirt is new, and her top. Both were purchased the prior day. They are not even really the sort of thing she likes. If you had told her she would spend such a sum on clothing, she would hope it was from a French brand that made heartily draping things in shades of mud and fallen leaves. Not this, from a store that was all mirrors. Her skirt is shiny and tight. Her shirt is loose and has strange appliques of fruit studded across it. This she removes, because it will be ruined by the sea. She leaves the skirt on, though it too will be ruined. She doesn’t care if the skirt is ruined. That is what she has decided, though it’s not quite true. Sara is standing in water to her knees. Sara knows that nudity is not freedom. It is simply nudity, and it makes her afraid. Concern enters her from someplace foreign. She looks back, to see her pile of belongings caringly stacked where she left them. It is so late that it is early. There is no point in sleeping now. She will, she thinks, take a nap after lunch. She is sure she can last until lunch. There will be twelve people there and four were at the party Sara came from. The others were at different parties, some of which she was invited to, many she was not. She has learned that there is a hierarchy of parties. It is the sort of thing she doesn’t care about, except that she has learned it, and so now she has to care about it, at least a little. She smiles in this story. She smiles because the people at lunch will be hungover, and she will be, too, and that makes her feel part of a club. Sara is twenty-eight. It is two-thousand and nineteen. Sara lives normally in a small apartment in a quiet neighborhood about thirty minutes by train from the gallery where she works in the largest city in the country. She is here, in this smaller and hotter city, for one week, for an art fair that draws visitors from everywhere. Really now it’s a dozen fairs. The name of the largest serves as shorthand for the occasion. Earlier, Sara attended a party thrown by a man she used to love. On arrival she learned that he did not invite her, not exactly. Rather an employee of his comprised a list, and included on that list was the staff of the gallery that employs her. This was all basically fine, and Sara understood his surprise. But please understand that this is what led Sara to the balcony, to her gazing over. Gazing over, she was aware suddenly and bodily that this scene had been repeated innumerable times. On seeing Sara, the man dropped his drink. This is not hyperbole. The crystal tumbler fell to the floor. It fell slowly, and he held his hand above it, open, as if to say, How did this happen? Sara hugged him tight, as a way to prove something. The water is warmer than the air. Sara is by now up to her neck and floating. She realizes in the small and profound way of a child that this is more or less the spot she was looking towards from the balcony. Possibly someone—and by someone she means the man—is presently looking down at her. She scans the array of balconies to the top of the tower where he stays. That is how he said it. This is where I stay when I’m in town Sara did not know whether to understand that to mean it was his place, or it was his friend’s, or it was the sum of some other opaque arrangement. The place had furniture built from steel and plastic. This furniture was, she was led to believe, alarmingly expensive. On a chair approximating a chair a toddler would draw, she sat and willed her mind to empty itself. She watched the people. Most of them she knew, or knew of. She had the suspicion no one noticed her in the chair. Now she thinks she can see the unit where the party was. She can, unless there is another unit with a large disco ball. The disco ball is pink and spinning still and Sara wonders if the party is still continuing, or if it was abandoned, if everyone disappeared and left the music and the lights to linger on alone. Probably that’s what happened, she decides. Everyone went to visit some other party, one better and bigger, at a vast house on the bay, or at a nightclub. The man would have been a little bummed to lose that attention, she imagines, but he would have gone along. She sifts through her mind for an emotion to feel, but she can only picture his face, coiled and pulled to a smile. After an obligatory hour at the party, Sara left to drive through the city like a specter in the rental car. She drove in jagged lines across the map on her phone. She stopped for Cuban coffee, and at a bar in a neighborhood that hardly had a name. Then she drove to a party she hadn’t planned to attend, and found that it was empty, was less a party than a sort of atrophied exhibit of the night. The host was a collector—significant, people say—and the pieces, like pieces in a museum, were now set among empties and ashtrays. As she poured the remains of a bottle of gin into a glass she noticed a small sculpture in tin. The tin is a girl and that girl has sapphires for eyes. Sara sold this to him, a year prior. Now it sat on a shelf among bottles of liquor. Sara scanned the bare room. She heard only murmurs from above, saw only what was waiting to be cleared. Down a hallway, through the house made of concrete and glass. She fixed her gaze on the art and the empties. Then out, and she strode to find her car margined on the sod before the house. She felt a little bit alive as she held the girl in her lap. This thing, hers! As Sara floats, the sun is yellow and halved across the polished surface of the sea. It is silent here. Sara looks for a while at the sky. Sara looks for a while at the moon. Sara does not look again at the condo tower, and at the balcony, where, she imagines, a man is leaning weightlessly against the railing. The man is smoking. The man flicks the cigarette down, and it flits in filaments of wind, and it lands on the beach. It lands in the water, in the black. But it isn’t black anymore. Alexander Fredman is a writer originally from Miami, Florida. He is currently pursuing a Fiction MFA at The City College of New York.

by Tiffany Troy *This poem was written in response to our vintage series illustration prompts. You can see all prompts here. At the height of my suffering there appeared a squirrel at my feet nibbling away, their luscious tail brushing against my knee socks as I hold tight to my chest the white lilies and a leaf sharp as blade and feel intently, the swell of my nipples, that yellow muck of bacteria, the crust of my skin crispy, my garment tied with rope girding an equator of red. They call me Little Maria and forget I have become a woman underneath the Fragonard rococo, the pinch of my black Sunday church shoes cracking open my toe nails, the melanin of my hair paled to an oak brown with slivers of white bound tightly by a mahogany bonnet I ate pills to not self immolate. I am steroid-induced hunger as the unwelcome sun sets on my skin. I hate it as I hate God, as I hate life for giving me hope, hope which rises on a warm afternoon when the leaves are gilded gold-rimmed before they fall, swinging in the wind. Soon the Catholic school children will roam giddy for chocolate gelts for Halloween but before the sun sets this late afternoon, before I put away the itching under my nails to bid farewell to the parishioners, in this square that is mine, I am touched by the handsome squirrel bent over one nut as if it’s the only thing in the world. Oh gosh, what pure joy! What a one-up for this wayward New York transplant who has learned to curse in corporate professional against the stone walls setting the parameters of my faith as above me the frowning sunflowers burdened by the weight of their golden mane cannot help but peak up and beam. Tiffany Troy is a critic, translator, and poet. Her reviews and interviews are published or forthcoming in Adroit Journal, The Cortland Review, The Los Angeles Review, EcoTheo Review, Heavy Feather Review, and Tupelo Quarterly, where she serves as an associate editor.

by Saski When desire follows you to the pool, you realize she is serious. So you start dancing and notice the deep purple flux flowing down your plexus Streaming its way all the length, its wild creatures covered in ink. You’ve dipped your toes head first so far it’s burning. She lays down on the sticky floor of the club, loosing glitterfeathers I love you factual, whispers as you follow her lead and lick the pearls a sickeningly sweet noise your lips or was it hers it’s been a decade since we’ve met it’s been a whole dj set how much did it take you to find me. Swimming in this room so long our toeskins rippled & as we dance she pushes away the clingy duddi-dudes I hope you’re not dancing for them. Weave me closer when you giggle, this is a love poem to your ginger breath -- when your pearls shine I bump into them I cannot stand I cannot stand they’re greypinkwhite their lust my lust. Once, I was told to abolish the hierarchy between our love stories We must not diminish the summertimes. Saski A.L.S Erikson Weisbrod (they-them) is a French poet, translator and researcher-performer. In 2021, they received a George Lurcy fellowship as well as a writers scholarship to study poetry and literary translation at Columbia University, where they work as the art and translation editor of the Columbia Journal. Currently an Irene Kronhill Pletka YIVO Research Fellow, they are gathering material for their next performance, "Vu iz Bessie?", on the life of erased Yiddish performer Bessie Maud. You can see more of their work on this website forever in construction: https://saskisaski.hotglue.me/ and follow them on Instagram @saskirikson.

by Mandira Pattnaik Planktons never age. I do. So I walk my planktons around my abandoned home. As I enter, I remove the lock like a diaphanous layer upon my acquired inhibitions, leave it outside the door, delicately harbor the moment when the hardened faces of stone walls and carved mahogany furniture look me in the eyes, the eagerness of years, the loony pool of surrenders, the wordless crusting over of lips. Feel the urge to hug everything: like a working mother returning to children, sister of seafarer brothers, or shoreline of countless moon tides. Examine the carpet of unmistakable sogginess. Dad’s hard-earned plaque blanketed in dust. Leave them to stride across the bones of the door creaking for love. Into the living quarters with framed portrait of beloved Nana-Nani, frozen in their tired look, shawl-draped and reluctantly hanging there, the woeful dead plant in the corner, how it smells of craft and embroidery, paints, half-done baking, rounded up with moist rotting trash that left its odor as hated apparitions; fall for the wonders of well-lived bedrooms, with family albums, the lingering smell of lotions molded in velvety jewelry boxes; I take a scoop and hold it to my face, inhaling the air; twine the blue ribbons of mysterious curling as moments lost forever; pause for minutes that clone into hours, then days and years; then slide on, and outside through that imaginary ramp which makes your marooned planktons somersault to agelessness. Forgive the guilt of forever-moving-on. Mandira Pattnaik's (she/ her) work has appeared in Prime Number Magazine, The Fourth River, Watershed Review, West Trade Review, Variant Lit, Amsterdam Quarterly and DASH, among about 200 other places. More about her can be found at mandirapattnaik.com

by MC Barnes actually, i’ve been crying. just a little when you leave or when my mom calls or when my mom hangs up or when you tell me you just don’t feel that way or when i try and see myself or when i really think about how a clock works or when i watch buffy the vampire slayer or when i think about how we used to play dolls or when i’m alone or when i’m with you. i think i’m emotionally maturing or maybe i’ve just been wearing the same pair of contacts for two months. either way – there’s no winner. no balloons pouring down and no birthday cake. i could sing to myself. i have to get a new pair of contacts i have to get out of my bed i have to charge my phone i have to learn my optometrists phone number i have to learn how to call people on the phone i have to call i have to find my prescription i have to order the contacts please, thank you very much, have a nice day i have to open my front door i have to lock my front door i have to learn how to walk down my stairs without running i have to walk in a straight line i have to pick them up i have to focus focus focus enough to pop them into my waiting i need to realize the contacts were not the wet i need to stop blaming what’s not the issue i need to become okay with the hitch that premeditates the wet i might need to be cast into a wholly new figurine i need to envision a figurine with waterproof eyes. or i could just lie and let pool. bathing suits not required. go for a swim. MaryCharlotte “MC” Barnes is a New York based student who got tired of people shortening her name, so she did it herself. She spends her time sharing her unpopular music opinions on her radio show and sometimes writing. You can find her on Twitter @mc_barnes_

by Matt Rowan Instead of being cautious, Joey Turnstable made a suit of bubble wrap to wear whenever he’d bike around town. Which was weird but not too weird. Then he started wearing it all the time. That was when it started to get too weird for most people. For the longest time, Joey had been trying to protect himself in every conceivable way. He’d been broken—heart broken and physically broken—and was rebuilding himself from the ground up. He settled on a bubble wrap suit as the quickest, surest and least painful means of obtaining this form of security. Joey would rather not remember the way he was broken, that his dad got the whole family wound up thinking about living in caveman times. Joey’s dad explained how if you were alive then, you were just happy about having food. “You couldn’t care a whit about eating junk. It didn’t exist! No Cheetos, no Coca-Colas, no McDonald’s. People in the time of the caves simply didn’t know about snack foods. As a cave person, you’d be standing there by a tree, spear in hand, crunching on an apple like it was the best food there ever was or ever could be,” Joey’s dad explained. Joey’s dad was especially partial to salty corn chips, and said the salty chips had ruined, ruined his chance at foraging in nature, on account of the highly salty carbohydrates he found he now craved. His dad tried standing near their tree in the front yard , eating an apple, holding his version of a spear, a pocket knife tied to an old broom handle, but he knew it wasn’t going to get him in touch with his cave-dwelling ancestors. After that, Joey’s dad tried to get everyone in the family eating healthy and organic. He’d started a small garden in their backyard. He served a lot of home-canned vegetables, some of which had turned, and everyone got botulism, and not everyone survived. Joey was the only one who survived, really. Unless you counted their mastiff, Spark. Spark died that winter, of old age. Joey’s body was ravaged by the disease, but that was, to him, the least of his pains. The weight of Joey’s grief hounded him, haunted him. When anyone tried to talk to him about it, he just receded further inside of himself. He was of the mind that if he wore his bubble wrap suit nothing could ever harm him. It was a pretty reckless idea but he had glommed onto it and was not going to be de-glommed so easily. At the convenience store, where Joey purchased a package of vanilla Zingers from time to time, he cried. He wasn’t sure why he was compelled to let everything out in the convenience store—probably the abundance of snack foods reminded him of his dad and therefore of his personal tragedy—but whatever the cause, his emotions would become untethered and he’d begin torrentially sobbing. He seemed to think his bubble wrap suit protected others from his crying, as he imagined it protected him from all things, not unlike how the bullet-resistant plexiglass barrier was meant to shield the cashier from bullets. He seemed to believe the bubble wrap would somehow absorb the sounds of his tears, unaware of the gentle “tap, tap” of the tears hitting plastic. He cried until he was done, or until the cashier politely but gruffly urged him to leave. The cashier was the same man every time. Where once they’d been on friendly terms, the cashier now avoided speaking directly to Joey. It was exactly this aloofness that allowed Joey to imagine himself invisible to others. In reality, of course, everyone was now extremely worried about Joey and sometimes a little scared of him. They didn’t know what to do about it, so they did nothing. The suit itself was jarring, as was his other, more reckless behavior. It made him unapproachable, they all told themselves, as they tried to move on with their lives. They had responsibilities. Joey had to figure out how to take care of himself. Joey, for his part, now walked wherever he wanted without regard, imagining he would always be spared physical injury and pretending that there existed no abstract injury inside him, as well. *** Joey—as an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of his newfound carelessness—was hit by a semi truck. He almost died at the scene of the accident. Quick thinking by the trucker, who had stepped out of his vehicle to help, prevented Joey’s immediate death, however. Friends and family visited him at the hospital. They had been very close to taking him off of life support when he miraculously regained consciousness. Like so many miracles, it didn’t last. He declared he wanted to be buried in his bubble wrap suit, then expired shortly thereafter. All who had known and loved him wanted to satisfy his dying request (it would help to expunge some of their guilt for doing little else while he was alive, too, though no one wanted to admit to that part). His suit had been destroyed in the accident, so they found him the finest bubble wrap in all the land, and they wrapped him tightly in it. The wake was a somber affair in large part. At least at first. At some point, a child reached into his coffin and popped one of the bubbles of his bubble wrap suit, unable to ignore the temptation. Then another child did. A crowd of people swarmed Joey’s casket, eagerly popping his wrap. Shnp, Shnp, Shmp, and so on. There were practically no more bubbles left to pop, certainly not enough left to provide any cushion. Suddenly, Joey’s spirit floated down and glowed among them. “Yes!” Joey shouted. “You care! You really care! You have all passed the test, and, therefore, I am finally free!” All anyone who witnessed this uncanniness could think was, what test? Then there was one final pop, by a stunned relative who had done so reflexively. “Even freer!” Joey again shouted, as his ectoplasmic tears rained down upon those in the viewing room. Everyone stood with their mouths open wide, bodies covered in a highly viscous, paranormal goo. They were all too stunned to continue mourning, at first. But slowly they began to laugh, which Joey thought was weird but not too weird. Then they all ignored him and began writhing around on the floor in the pooled goo that had dripped from him. That was when it was too weird for Joey. He escaped into a light. Matt Rowan lives in Los Angeles. He edits Untoward and is author of the collections, Big Venerable, Why God Why, and How the Moon Works (Cobalt Press, 2021). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue, TRNSFR, HAD and Necessary Fiction, among others.

By Anthony Emerson It was after midnight and we drove the Golden Road into the blackness. I parked beneath the outstretched arms of an Eastern Pine And We stood on a bridge that swayed with the weight of us Katahdin was a faint purple shadow in the dark expanse that we could only see because we knew it was there. The Penobscot moved invisibly beneath our feet and my knees wobbled while I stared at the stars and waited for my eyes to adjust. I couldn’t see you in the night, but I felt your presence and our whispers cut through the humid air like dim streams of light. The sky was like any other Northern sky until it exploded in bursts of green rivers spilling across the stars. We searched the celestial wilderness for silent flashes of cosmic light— two specks of flesh suspended above running water, aching in the way you ache when something is too big to comprehend. My ears pulsed with the sound of your heartbeats and the entire universe felt like a darkened room that could barely fit us. I clenched the railing and tried to forget that we are floating through space And I thought about the moths with wings like brilliant flowers resting in the eaves hoping for a new moon. Anthony Emerson lives and writes at the edge of the North Maine Woods. His essays, short fiction, and poetry have been published in Appalachia Journal, Bangor Daily News, The Dewdrop,The Dillydoun Review, Northern New England Review, Tiny Seed Journal, Flora Fiction and Visitant. Outside of writing he enjoys hiking, the Grateful Dead, and kayaking with his grandmother. You can find out more about him here: https://anthonyemersonnaturewriter.squarespace.com/

by William Doreski Already the roadkill expression of autumn dangles above the supermarket at dusk. Pink flares in its gullet. Bruises ripple for a thousand miles. A month of summer remains, but the parked cars cringe with chill. We rarely shop late on Saturdays because the shelves need restocking and the clerks are eager to leave. Besides oozing colors, the dusk forms a washboard effect so rough it rattles our bones as we watch. Let’s get inside and stock up on bananas, oranges, apples, lettuce, spinach, arugula. We never buy meat here— the roasts too bloody, sausage writhing with shameful memories, hamburger still mooing with pain. We’re hoping no hurricane soils the forthcoming season. Trees bearing grudges want to crush us. The sky wants to solidify. We should be proud of the distance we’ve achieved, but somehow it sickens as well as flatters distinctions between spirit and self. We enter the market and wield a cart that groans with abuse. Later at home we’ll remember everything we didn’t purchase, but by then the dusk will relent and its wound will have closed in honor of our honest dismay. William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Dogs Don’t Care (2022). His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.

by Andrea Gerada On Thursdays I visit the haunted lake, where algae grow only in seasons of defeat—when I lost my cat Biscuit, for instance, or the day the storm cast us out from the rest of the world, leaving us in the candlelit dark. The path to the water is narrow, lit by the dim honey light of an almost-setting sun. Vetiver roots and violet horsewhips scrape my ankles pink. I bare them to the very few strangers I pass on the way; they whisper only of loneliness, obsession. I was neither, merely curious about a November meadow between the living and those who seem to come from a more preternatural age. When I arrived she had already emerged: bentonite hair curling artfully, her noble features in repose. Most importantly, the palm of her hand held a gift, which I carefully plucked. On Thursdays, the water descends to uncover its secret Atlantis: the statue of an elfin woman appears like an ornamental lighthouse, benign creature of the lake. The other week she offered me squelched bergamot, and the week before, patchouli leaves. Soaked. During my third visit, I made the mistake of inviting a friend, a skeptic with a puckish nose. The surest sign of irreverence. He called out to her as “pantomime mermaid,” apprehensive and fussy. She failed to make an appearance, and I had terrible visions that night which I could never recall. They only flashed in alarming silvers and Neptune blues. I woke with the sudden wisdom that perhaps even gods of the past become angry at being seen nude. I looked at my new gift. Today, it was bergamot once more. Before taking my leave, I nimbly peel the fruit and leave a bright yellow carpel in her outstretched palm. I want to be remembered for this, somehow. I want her to want my return. Andrea Gerada is an aspiring writer and creative living in the Philippines. She holds a BA in English Literature, and is particularly interested in works that explore food, nature, and light.

by E.M. Lark deep breaths taken in twofold, I am learning what it is like again to trust. our hearts are uneasy, our mouths dry, but surviving amidst its impossible replenish. this game of survival has never been one I’ve understood— individualist, eat-or-be-eaten gnawing at the flesh of camaraderie we lost sight of that hope long before we could sink our teeth into something more fresh. but we are trying, oh how we are trying – we are far more alive than we are dead, but I can still see what haunts us is in the room. are we sharing ghosts? exchanging phantoms hand-for-hand, in this market trade of troubles, your hand shakes like mine, and for the first time in forever, I don’t feel so alone. I am not afraid to tremble, not afraid to be soft – I hope you are not afraid in front of me. we endure too much fear, heartache, exsanguination, in this one fractured life wouldn’t it be nice to live and die a little slower, together? E.M. Lark (they/them) is a writer/reader & reviewer/casual hauntologist currently based in NYC (and also everywhere). Recent works can be found in Hearth & Coffin, corporeal, JAKE, Penumbra Online, The Lumiere Review, among others past and future. On most social medias as @thelarkcalls.