Author Archives: fragmentedvoices

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‘Dreaming of Snow’ by William Thompson

All day the snow falls, dropping down in great white flakes that gather themselves into clinging crystalline shapes that vanish as they kiss the ground. The air is alive and thick with falling snow. He sits and watches the gathering whiteness. The snow falls and falls. It obliterates the green of pines and the brown of branches. He watches: the whiteness of the air; the whiteness of the ground. The whiteness of the whale? — summer days, reading Melville, far from now. The drift of snow at the edge of the yard is the breeching back of a white leviathan — exploding into the frozen air to swim this sea of snow.

Once, he opens the front door. The air smells clean and cold, the snow whispering as it jostles its way down, filling the air with clogging coldness. The light is already fading, but the brightness of the snow persists. He closes the door. He watches the rising level of whiteness. Soon he will drown, drown in snow and cold. It will rise to the level of the window, then it will bury the house — sooner or later, he will be entombed in snow. So he waits, watching  snowflakes clinging to the glass, forming patterns and frozen faces that peer in and take no account of the heat that for now still runs throbbing through his veins in a rhythmic pulse of denial.

Meet the Author

William Thompson’s essays and stories have appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Zone 3, COG Magazine, and Firewords. His essay “My cowboy cousin” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2020, and won an honorable mention in the 2021 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest. He is totally blind and teaches children’s literature for MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada. He considers coffee a food group, and he loves to walk and read, usually at the same time. 

‘Marriage Bed’ by Fiona McCulloch

This body no longer excites you
Who knows it keenly after so long
Navigating it all for your pleasure
Its trodden routes now too familiar
Overly predictable just rote rigmarole
Left stale broke in our marriage bed
Back-to-back where minds adrift
Bleakly inch ever closer to its edge

This mind no longer entices you,
Once daring now just tiresome.
Having drawn deeply from its well,
Wings tested long to soar freely
Into a boundless future reinvented
Spy an elixir of untasted encounters
Highs of novel escapades half hinted

This alliance no longer secures you
Spurred up suddenly by a flighty itch.
Online offers emotional connections
Thrills of clandestine communications
Draws you further into a maze of new,
Renders you lost to meanings past. 
Imprint of a phantom spouse swiped
Loaded persona bloated on this husk

Meet the Poet

With poems in Northwords Issue 3, Fiona McCulloch recently has poems in MIR Online, Lumpen: A Journal for Poor and Working-Class Writers, and Dreich.

‘The Dig’ by Jeanne Althouse

A Creative Essay

“See this piece of clay,” Mrs. Aarden said to the children on the Monday of Kindergarten art class, holding up a fist-sized mound of oily brown modeling clay. “Hiding inside is a dinosaur waiting to come out. You don’t even know what kind of dinosaur it is, but the clay knows.”

“Or it’s a snake,” said Indira, who had rolled her clay into three long curvy slices on the art table. She picked up one piece and waved it in the air, pretending to frighten Jake, who had pushed other boys away to sit next to her.

“Or a dragon,” said Jake, who wanted to show he was better at ideas than Indira.

“Or nothing,” said Lamar, who was angry because Jake took the seat next to Indira, and he did not see himself as ever good at art projects, and he was afraid to fail, and be embarrassed in front of others.

This is exactly how I feel every time I face a blank page. I think I’ll never be able to discover another story. But I kept these thoughts to myself. This was Mrs. Aarden’s class, and my job was volunteer aid.

Mrs. Aarden nodded, agreeing with the children. “When you start to excavate, uncover, chip away at it, mold it, sculpt it,” she said, her eyes dreamy, unfocused, as if she had turned inward, remembering her own dinosaurs, “you have some idea, but you never know what you will find, because it goes its own way, it meanders here or there, unexpectedly, or a piece falls off revealing a wing instead of a tail, or the top half refuses to be a mermaid, or the way it warmed in your hand determined from the beginning it was never going to be a stegosaurus, it was going to be an angel.”

My subconscious is like that piece of clay, a fist-sized mound in my gut, waiting to be exposed, wanting out, wanting excavation, but holding its secrets.  I become a child, looking at it, facing its complexities. And how I feel on that day, at that moment, might prevent the dig, like a sudden storm interferes with the uncovering of the ancient treasures at the archaeological site.

There’s a perfect example. That metaphor—it meandered, from molding clay to searching for dinosaur bones in the ground. First it was an art project, now it’s a dig. I try to stay open to inconsistencies, synergies, connections. I go on with the digging.

 Morning is the best time for me to excavate. Every morning my body re-sets, after it sleeps and heals, like the sun, every morning, rises. With the colors of pink, red, flame orange, and with her clouds dipping their edges into the palette of blue-green sky- paint, the blinding bright sliver of round light slides up from the horizon behind the shape of trees. As the sun star holds me in her “great hands of light,” I hear the poet Mary Oliver singing.

On waking I am the new person I have become. I turn to the empty page, looking inside me, waiting for it to reveal.

Warning. Like staring directly at the sun hurts the eyes, it can hurt to look directly at the subconscious. Or another way of saying it, if I’m not slightly uncomfortable about it, or embarrassed to show the neighbors, or find myself not being honest, not telling the whole story, or not saying what I really got out of it, or what I really stole, or harmed, or meant to harm, or not saying who I loved and why, or not facing that I too once slapped my child, if I’m not being brutally honest, well, it’s bound to be a morning of a bowl-gray sky, with no sunrise, with no variety, ultimately, blank. Eyes down. Pen still.

The dig finds no artifacts at the expected location.

On good mornings, the best mornings, the words land on the page running. Sounds leap off their consonants in song.  Vowels kiss each other with expectation, like first lovers. Fresh images release their emotional juice slowly, like each sweet ripe red Cara Cara in the breakfast juicer releases its complex flavors of raspberry, cherry, rose.  The story comes alive so strongly, I can smell the flavor of it coming off the page.

But, alas, it’s half-baked. Or half-dug. Or not even half.

On thinking about it, all day, as I go about my business, filing out the tax form, or calling the plumber, or walking in the park, I realize I only have the first layer. These people on the page, they need names. My main character—is she a Mary, or Jasmine, or Rosa, or Leah, or Dolores, or LaDonna? Her name speaks of her ethnicity, her religion, her features, her hair, her eyes, her breasts, even the pink bottoms of her black feet, if her white lover likes to caress them.

What about her work? Is she trapped in a meaningless job answering phones on a complaint line? Does she deliver for the post office? Does she research coral reefs? What about her history?  Is she an immigrant? Was her great-great grandmother a slave? Is she adopted? What does she carry when she leaves the house; does she have a huge bag full of makeup, Kleenex, hand sanitizer, lip gloss, aspirin, a flashlight, a quirky old fondu pot she found at the antique store? Or does she leave with only her house key and phone tucked into her yoga pant pocket? Does she suffer micro-aggressions against women in silence or does she speak up every time? What is it about her that cries out to be told?

This is the day-work. It’s gathering the tools, the shovel, a trowel, the rake, a delicate brush. It’s looking for the soft ground, or the odd mound, the thing that won’t let go, that begs to be discovered, to be let out, to be explained. The day work is also reading, reading for joy, and reading like a writer, to learn craft. On this day I read “Hamnet” by Maggie O’Farrell. Her voice stays with me. She writes about the unexpected death of a beloved son. “Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.”

When ready to sleep, I turn my mind once again to the dig, to the story, to the characters, to the Muse. I ask her to help me access the mystery. Then I close my eyes, hearing borne away from you like thistledown, and I let go.

Dream. 

In the dream a scent comes to me. The scent of White Linen, my mother’s perfume. She’s been dead for ten years, but I see her face clearly. I visit her last home, the retirement room with her four-poster bed, a family heirloom, in the corner. She wears her blue velvet opera dress ready to go out. She reaches out for me to hold her hand, as she walks to the door, to steady her, but, oddly, I refuse. I remember the feeling of her warm hand in mine, her middle finger bent from Dupuytren’s syndrome. In the dream I refuse to take her hand and she falls.

They say dreams come in service of health. I recognize a warning from the feeling of shame I have on waking. I have unfinished business with my mother.

I read on the internet: “When digging or excavating in your yard, a potential hazard may exist because your utilities may have underground equipment installed relatively close to the surface.”

There should be a warning. “When digging or excavating in your subconscious, you may discover conflict, pain, suffering, a moment of shame that undoes you for days.”

In the morning, I write. I find my way into the story through the scent. White Linen. As I dig deeper, I uncover the moment, the moment of conflict on which the story turns. The character, Spenser (“dispenser of provisions”), has unfinished business with her mother, Faith (“fully anticipating it to happen”).

Shoveling. Digging into the dark hole. Every day, another layer.

I begin to see pieces of the treasure: the themes, what their story is about, where it wants to go. The treasure is visible, but it is full of dirt, grime, or hard clay from years in the soil. It begs for cleaning, for a power-wash with humility, gratitude, awe.

What happens next? Does Faith die? Is she snatched away from Spenser in the blink of an eye, like Hamnet was borne away from his parents? I am consumed with finding out, in the zone, oblivious to the tax form, forgetting lunch, breathing inside the story.

More shoveling. Returning to work. Showing up. Persevering. Another layer. Excitement builds.

The next day, more is revealed. Faith does die, leaving Spenser broken, full of regrets, unable to forgive herself. I feel tears coming as I write the words, words that seem to come from somewhere else. The sadness overwhelms me. This guilt will haunt Spenser for years. I search for the words that will deliver this daughter’s need for peace in that important last sentence. I write what I think is the end.

But it is not the end. 

My drafts, of which there are many, need a huge amount of editing. The story will evolve through this work, the deepening knowledge and respect for each character, the reading aloud of every word, the considering of active verbs, of varied sentence structure, of order of paragraphs, punctuation.

That evening, while listening to a favorite recording of Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma, I cook my mother’s Chili. The aroma of her Chili wraps around me, holding me in my mother’s warm embrace. I hear her voice reminding me not to forget to add a dash of sugar, her secret ingredient.

 In the morning, I look at the story again. I find another small treasure, lurking there at the bottom of the whole (interesting that word choice: “hole” or “whole”); it’s ready to be dusted off with the delicate brush. As she cooks dinner, Spenser hears her mother’s voice, reminding her to add the pinch of brown sugar.

In Mrs. Aarden’s art class, on the next day, she asked the children to find a seat next to someone new, someone they did not sit next to yesterday. She suggested that Lamar sit next to Indira, making them a good example of what she meant. She said that moving to a different place, looking at things from a different angle, doing something unexpected, something new, perhaps slightly scary, can help them uncover their dinosaur and let him out.

Lamar sits next to Indira; he wears a big smile.

When the story is the best I can write, I give it to my writing group, or to a writer-friend, to someone who did not sit next to it for ages, to someone who can look at it from a different perspective, to someone I trust who can tell me if I found my dinosaur—or a dragon, or a snake—or an angel in a blue velvet opera dress with my mother’s eyes.

Note to Readers

“The Dig” is an essay on creativity which tells how one writer digs into her subconscious mind to access the muse.

“Sing in me, muse, and through me tell the story…”

Homer, The Odyssey

Meet the Author

Stories by Jeanne Althouse have appeared in numerous literary journals including Gravel, The Examined Life, Birdland Journal, Penman Review, Inkwell and The Plentitudes Journal.  Her story, “Goran Holds his Breath” was nominated by Shenandoah for the Pushcart Prize. A collection of her flash fiction, “Boys in the Bank,” was published by Red Bird Chapbooks. She writes each morning, watching the sun rise, hoping to capture the light in words.

‘The Stone Men of Newcastle’ by Daniel Hinds

‘A certain faultless, matchless, deathless line,
Curving consummate.’ 

Arthur O’Shaughnessy, The Line of Beauty

I cast a stone into a pool;
These lines are the ripples that curve

The lines of beauty that draw the shape 
Of dead and lingering men.

The mundane and unmoving ghosts
Of a commuter’s careless glance.

Every man a new stone block
In our old castle, holding in his last death grip

His own exceptionalism.

Our daily walk’s bulwark to stem the slow
Erosion of the past’s last bastions.

Unruined Ozymandiases, buried in tides of flesh,
Not sand – the remorseful gods of a living city.

Stone blocks blocked from worship by buses
And bypassers and self-centred screenglow;

The rainstorm of crowds and modernity.
With every watery libation you grow less. 

Is this the afterlife you would have chosen?
Yourselves, your own Purgatorial mountains. 

You are the stone and unexploded shells
Of some vast dark ocean.

I see you. From your stone eyes see me,
And one day I too will wear the mask of clay.

Clay was our first flesh; let us return to it.

Meet the Poet

Daniel Hinds lives in Newcastle. He won the Poetry Society’s Timothy Corsellis Young Critics Prize. His poetry was commended in the National Centre for Writing’s UEA New Forms Award and has been published, or is forthcoming, in The London Magazine, The New European, Wild Court, Stand, Southword, Poetry Salzburg Review, Blackbox Manifold, The Honest Ulsterman, Perverse, Finished Creatures, and elsewhere. He was commissioned by New Creatives, a talent development scheme supported by Arts Council England and BBC Arts and delivered by Tyneside Cinema, to produce an audio piece based on his poetic sequence The Stone Men of Newcastle. Twitter: @DanielGHinds  

Mum (A Phenomenal Woman) by Nikola Veselá

I want to thank you for your brightest smile 
that showed me
how you sacrificed your dreams
so that I can pursue mine.
I want to apologize for calling you pretty
before calling you brave or smart
because your mind
is the most beautiful piece of art.

A Note from the Editor

I often use creative writing in my English Language classes to improve my students’ understanding and feel for the language. Needless to say, they always rise to the challenge, but every now and again, you encounter a rare talent that leaves you speechless. Nikola Veselá is such a talent. She wrote this poem last year when she was only 14.

We had planned to share this piece to wish women around the world Happy International Women’s Day and Happy Mother’s Day. Now, just a country away, Ukraine is being torn apart by war. Women and girls are being impacted. Teenagers the same age as Nikola. Women the same age as you, as your sister, mother, niece, daughter…

If you can, it would be wonderful if you could donate to the United Nations Population Fund, which is particularly focused on helping endangered women and girls in Ukraine. You can find out more (and donate!) here.

Meet the Poet

Nikola Veselá is a student at Pražské humanitní gymnázium in Prague. She is an avid reader, and her specialist subject is Jane Austen.

‘Passing’ by Nick Young

Marla folded the last of the towels and slipped them inside a large plastic shopping bag she kept for her trips to the laundromat.  She was happy to be leaving.  The building, squat, gray cinderblock, was poorly lit, with constant noise from the machines and the smell of accumulated lint and fabric softener.  Inside her car, Marla sat with her eyes closed for a moment, relishing the quiet.  She really did hate the place.  She looked up at the sign with half its neon winking on and off.  The Suds-a-teria.  What kind of stupid name was that, anyway?  

On her way home, Marla stopped at  the Dollar Bonanza for a couple of frozen beef pot pies and a two-liter bottle of cola.  She bought the store brand.  It was thirty cents cheaper than Coke or Pepsi.  And there was a deal on the pot pies — buy one, second one for half price.  

“And a pack of Tareytons,” Marla told the cashier. “Toss in a book of matches, too.”

“Don’t give them out anymore,” the bored teenager with pink hair and lime green nail polish replied.

“No more matches?”

“Management says it’s too expensive.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Marla said disgustedly,  gathering her change and groceries.  

“Sorry for the inconvenience,” mumbled the girl.

“It’s hard to believe they’re that damned cheap,” Marla fumed,  getting back into her car and switching on the radio.  As she pulled out of the parking lot onto North Auburn Avenue, a song by Blondie started playing, so she turned it up began to sing along:

“The tide is high but I’m holdin’ on.”

Yeah, by my fingernails.

At thirty-seven, Marla Sloan’s life had shrunk in on itself, curling and contracting until its lines demarcated very little beyond the city limits of Emmitsburg, Illinois, population 1,100.  Divorced for two years, she had an on again-off again boyfriend,  a job at a local plant stamping out parts for small engines, and she had her mother.  It wasn’t disappointment that she felt.  Her dreams had never really exceeded her grasp.  Rather, it was resignation, no different than many of her girlfriends.

In the driveway of the tiny two-bedroom frame house she shared with her mother, Marla took her groceries and bag of laundry, slid out of the car and nudged the door closed with her hip.  A light rain had just begun falling, so she hurried up the front porch steps and into the house.

“‘Bout time, where have ya been?” called a shrill voice from across the living room.

“And a very good evening to you, too, Lois.”

“You’re late.”  Lois Sloan, at the age of sixty-six, was the picture of a woman who had stopped caring years before and let herself go.  She was obese, her legs swollen and barely useful.  Her face was round and severe, framed by stringy yellowed-gray hair.  Her rheumy blue eyes, too small for her face, were puffy with fat.  She was reclining on the sofa, the TV blasting at top volume.  The coffee table next to the couch was cluttered with an array of prescription bottles, inhalers and a half-filled ashtray.

“I had to finish the clothes and stop at the store.”

“You bring me my cigarettes?”

“Yes, Lois.”

“And what about pot pies?”

“Yes, Lois,” her voice rising above the din.  “I got your pot pies.  If you’ll give me two seconds, I’ll put them in the oven.”

“Good, because I am star-ving,” Lois replied, taking the fresh pack of cigarettes from her daughter.  Marla eyed the blaring television with annoyance, picked up the remote and turned it down.

“Any reason you’ve got to have this up so loud half the county can hear it? Your hearing aids are on the table again.  Why aren’t they in your ears?”

“I don’t like them,” Lois said peevishly. “They feel like little bugs crawling around in there.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”.

“Just take care of them pot pies.”  Marla rolled her eyes and walked away.

An hour later, she had her mother’s dinner ready, both of the pot pies and a large glass of cola on a wooden tray that she placed on her mother’s lap.  

“You forgot the Worcestershire sauce,” Lois complained, stubbing out a cigarette.

“Alright, sorry,” Marla said, restrieving a bottle from the refrigerator.  Dousing the pies was one of the peculiarities of her mother’s eating habits.  So after vigorously shaking out a puddle of the sauce, Lois took up her fork  and went to work.  She noticed that her daughter had changed into fresh clothes, let her hair down and added makeup.

“You ain’t having supper with me?” she asked between bites.

“Not tonight.  Jerry and I are going to grab a drink.”

“Thought you two were done.”  Marla sighed.

“No.  Just another lull in the action.”

“Well, I hope you won’t be late.  I may need help with an enema later.”

“I’ll be counting the minutes.”

Marla Sloan was an attractive woman.  The years had  not erased the best features of her angular face and smooth olive skin.  She prided herself on still being able to squeeze into size four jeans.  And her long chestnut hair had yet to show any grey.  Since the breakup of her marriage, she had dated sporadically, settling into what passed for a relationship with Jerry Dyer, who lived just outside Emmitsburg and delivered for FedEx.  He was forty, a good-looking man just beginning to sport the first signs of middle age.  The two had met on a blind date set up by one of Marla’s friends from the parts plant.  

They shared divorce in common, and for the most part they got along well.  They weren’t partiers,  preferring carry-out pizza and watching old movies to the bar scene.  The sex wasn’t always great, but it was good enough.  Jerry wanted a deeper commitment, but Marla wasn’t able to go there, and not because her heart wouldn’t let her.

“I can tell she was giving you a hard time again, wasn’t she?” he said as he and Marla nursed beers at Town’s Pub.

“No different today than any other, really, except I was tired.  A long week, you know?”

“Tell me about it.  Brownie was busting my chops over a couple of late deliveries.  Came pretty near to telling him to go fuck himself.”  They drank in silence for a long moment before Jerry began with some hesitancy.  “I’ve never asked, and you’ve never said how your mom ended like she has.”

“You mean being such a bitch?” Marla said with a smirk.  “Well, I guess it’s an old story, really.  She grew up here in Emmitsburg.  Not much to say about her early years  — she was an only child.  Decent parents, though I have no real memory of either one of them.  When she got a little older, in junior high I guess, she started singing in the chorus and that got her started dreaming.  Big dreams,  moving to Chicago and becoming a singer with a big band.  From what people who were around then say, she had real talent, a good voice and good looks to match.  But she never got the chance to leave .  When she was a senior, she started seeing this older guy, and no sooner had she graduated than she got pregnant with my brother.   So the big city and stardom went out the window.  She got a job in the old air compressor factory when it was here, and she settled with her husband.  Two years after John was born I came along.  A year  after that, the old man took off for parts unknown, and Lois was really stuck.  She had two raise two kids by herself — she never remarried — and life just ground her down.  A few years ago her health problems really started getting bad.  And so here we are.  A happy tale, isn’t it?”

“But why does she have to beat up on you?  I mean, you’re the one taking care of her.”

“Which means I’m the one who’s around.  Who else is she going to take it out on?”  

“What about your brother?”

“John?” Marla replied derisively. “He could care less.  Hasn’t spoken to her in years.  When she had her heart attack a year-and-a-half ago, I  called him.  He lives in Louisiana.  Works on an oil rig out in the Gulf.  Anyway, he asked why I was bothering him and told me he didn’t want to know any more about her.   Ever..

“Jesus, his own mother.”

“Well, yeah, his own mother, but she wasn’t much of one when he was a kid.  He was older.  He was the one she blamed for destroying her dreams, so he was in the bullseye, you know?”  Jerry reached across the table and took Marla’s hands in his, gently rubbing her knuckles.

“Look,” he said gently, “you could really use a break.  Why don’t we get something to eat and go back to my place, watch a movie?”  He winked at her. “Maybe you could stay late, and we could fool around.”  She smiled, but it quickly faded.

“I’d like to, Jerry, I really would, but I can’t tonight.”  She looked away for a moment.  “She may need my help later.  I don’t have to go into the gory details, but she’s got something going on with her digestive system.  ‘Nuff said.”  Now it was Jerry’s turn to seek out a deep corner of the bar with his eyes.  “I know it frustrates you,” Marla went on softly, squeezing his hands.  “I get that, but I’m all she’s got now.  I can’t turn my back no matter how much bitchiness she throws at me.  So let’s get some supper, and I’ll take a rain check on the rest.”

By the time Marla returned home it was a little after nine and the light rain had moved on.  As she reached the door, her annoyance returned immediately at the sound of the television going full blast.

“What did I say about the TV, Lois?” Marla shouted as she stepped inside.  Her mother, sitting in the same spot as when she left, said nothing, did not move.  Marla sensed something wasn’t right and quickly crossed to the sofa.  She seized the remote and shut the TV off.  “Lois?  Are you okay?”  But Marla knew her mother was in  trouble. She wasn’t moving, her eyes were glassy and the right side of her face drooped.   Marla called  9-1-1.

The EMT”s confirmed her suspicion:  Lois had had a stroke.  At the town’s hospital, the emergency room doctor ran a battery of tests then ordered a special medical helicopter flight to the nearest trauma center in Springfield.  It was an hour’s drive, so as soon as the chopper left, so did Marla.  By the time she arrived,  the ER team had evaluated Lois and moved her into the intensive care unit.  The news was not good.

“Your mother has had a massive stroke,” the examining neurologist told Marla.  “The next few hours are critical.  By morning, we should have a clearer picture of where this is going.”  

There was nothing to do but wait, so Marla  took the most comfortable chair she could find in the visitor’s lounge, curled up and dozed through the long night.

In the morning, nothing had changed.  The doctor treating Lois wasn’t due for another hour, enough time for Marla to get caffeine from the hospital cafeteria and try to clear her head.  She returned to the ICU lounge, sat and sipped her coffee.

This is it.  She is going to die.  She’s not coming out of this.  How am I supposed to feel?  Overwhelmed with grief?  Regret?  Guilt?

She did not have to struggle with the answers; they were clear, and she felt no shame.  

When the neurologist arrived, his evaluation was what Marla had been expecting:  there was no brainwave activity, no hope for recovery.  There was only one thing left to do.  Marla had power of attorney, so she instructed that her mother be removed from life support, and within an hour it was over.

Lois’ body was transported back to Emmitsburg, and Marla made the arrangements at Wannamaker’s Funeral Home.   Her mother would be cremated on Tuesday, with a brief service at the funeral home on Wednesday.

Marla went back to work at the start of the week.  She didn’t tell any of her co-workers Lois had died.  She asked her boss for Wednesday off and rquested that he keep the reason to himself.    Jerry was very sympathetic and did his best to be supportive.  He told Marla he would take the day of the funeral off.  She told him it wasn’t necessary.  She didn’t bother to call her brother.

Wednesday morning was bright and cloudless, pleasantly warm for early May.  Marla was at Wannamaker’s promptly at ten o’clock.  She was the only one who came.  There was no minister; neither Lois nor Marla had any religious inclinations.  So, with Lois’ ashes in a plain cedar box with a single lily in a cut-glass vase on a table by his side, Fred Wannamaker read a few words from a three-by-five csrd designed to soothe those who grieved, had there been any in the room. 

Within a few minutes it was done.  Marla thanked Fred, who seemed abashed by the bland pieties he had uttered.  He smiled wanly as he handed the urn to Marla and told her how much he appreciated being entrusted with the care of her mother’s remains..  She knew he was just trying to be nice so she refrained from reminding him that because his was the only funeral home in town, there was nowhere else to go.

So that was that.  Lois had been given a proper sendoff,  such as it was.  She had made no provision for her death — no cemetery plot, no headstone.  It wasn’t a subject she would even discuss, though Marla had tried a time of two..

Back home, Marla carried the urn  inside the house.  She glanced around, noting how quiet it was in the absence of the blaring television and how the smell of stale cigarettes and the sickly sweet-sour odor of her ailing, overweight mother had begun to dissipate.   She drew a deep breath, walked down the hallway to what had been  Lois’ bedroom.  There was a small closet.  She opened it, lifted the urn onto an overhead shelf, shut the door and walked out.

Meet the Author

Nick Young is a retired award-winning CBS News Correspondent.  His writing has appeared in the San Antonio Review, Samjoko Magazine, Short Story Town, Danse Macabre Magazine, Pigeon Review, CafeLit Magazine, the Green Silk Journal, Typeslash Review, The Potato Soup Journal, 50-Word Stories, Sein und Werden, Of Rust and Glass, Little Death Lit, Flyover Magazine,, Sandpiper, Fiery Scribe Review, The Chamber  Magazine and Vols. I and II of the Writer Shed Stories anthologies.

‘Living Ink’ by Sarah James

I come round from my faint less than half-way
through the moment being marked into my skin.
The tattooist yawns and passes me a glass of water;
my younger sister squeezes my hand and steadies me
with her calmness, as she did during my long labour.

Bicycle falls scar my knees but that c-section
was my first scalpel and stitching. My sister’s braced
me through the worst cuts, even a forked lifeline
on my palm from a red wine bottle that smashed
on Gran’s stone floor when I was still a toddler.

Although I’m older, she’s lived far more than me,
is armed with a small collection of inked charms.
The tattooist revs up his machine again, scrapes pain into
(and out of?) my left shoulder bared to the sharp
100-watt light and hot room, tightening around us.

I’ve asked for a tawny owl on a moonlit branch
fleshed with green leaves – wisdom, flight and hope
that hasn’t rotted or broken away from the tree.
Wings that haven’t lost their wide span
or feathered grace, but can, in a single heartbeat,

reach across the ocean now between us.

Meet the Poet

Sarah James is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer. Winner of the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine 2020 and CP Aware Award Prize for Poetry 2021, her collection Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic is forthcoming in 2022. Website: http://www.sarah-james.co.uk. She also runs V. Press, publishing poetry and flash fiction.

‘Stella’ by Daniel Schulz

I don’t like being served. Had you asked me that evening, if I wanted a cup of tea, I would have shuddered. Yet, here I was, paying up front for service. Coming toward me, she pulled my shorts down and put them on the chair. Usually, women like her don’t do anything like this. Usually, they wait for you to get undressed and ask you what you would like to do. But she… she touched me with a tenderness that I seldom felt before and kissed my shoulders, exactly where it hurt. I closed my eyes as if inhabiting a dream, as I couldn’t bear the reality: she was kind to me. I didn’t ask her to be that. Nonetheless she just was… Of course, you’re going to say something else afterwards, when you meet your friends. That you fucked her hard for one long round. That, after all, is what is expected of you. But I am not at all interested in fulfilling expectations. That has never been my thing. When women look me in the eye they become afraid, because they can see the loneliness inside of me. She sees its, too. That’s how she earns her money.

She was from the Shengen Area, she told me later in the hour, from Romania to be exact, but had lived in Albania before she came to Germany. – “Men treat women differently there,” she explained, “They beat them wholeheartedly. I once lived next to a man who killed his wife with a kitchen knife. Believe me, if I had stayed there, I would have gone crazy. I was afraid for my life. I mean, you don’t want to know what I read in the papers today.”

In her former resident country, as it turns out, a mad man wanted to blow himself up in a train station because his wife had left him. He wanted to hurt as many people as possible, especially women. The paper was the equivalent to the Daily Sun or Der Express. She, obviously, was glad to live in Germany. My eyes wandered up to her beautiful lashes. Something was hurting deep inside. I believe it was my heart, if, indeed, a heart feels like that. A heart beats, right? Like a fist, right? Something inside me was breaking. One of my hands was clenching the sheets, while the other slowly stroked the handsome unshaved fuzz of her thighs, while she smoked. Emotions were surfacing. But I remained still, as if I wasn’t feeling anything. If I remained still my feelings would perhaps ignore me.

– “How do you manage working here?” I asked.

Stella shrugged, “I don’t know. I don’t think about it. I just switch off. If I thought about what I’m doing here,” she confessed, “I’d just as likely go crazy. But I’m not going to stay here forever. In four years or so, I’m out.” – Stella, it seems, was determined to make her fortune here, in Germany. She wouldn’t be working in this locale forever. As soon as she had enough money, she was going to start her own business. – “I’ve got a great idea and the brains to make it work,” she smiled. I could feel my lips stretch, feel myself smiling back to her. Deep inside my heart, I knew that I wished her all the best.

Outside the night had become cold and lonely. I could see my own breath in front of me like a path that I would eventually have to follow. You think you know yourself? You don’t. Looking out into the darkness, I could feel something else catching up to me. I could hear my heart beating in my chest like a fist. Somewhere in the back of my head my mother was screaming. Somewhere in the back of my head my father was beating the shit out of her. Hands clenched. BREATHE. Such is the matter of memories… Maybe Stella was right. Women are treated better in this country… Hear the sirens howling in the background: An Audi at the crossing in front of me is honking at the car in front of – him? An ambulance is rushing past. Asking his friend, a man standing at the traffic light says: “What is up with that guy? Is he stupid? Why is he honking? Can’t he see an ambulance is passing?” – “No, look,” the other guy answers, “It’s a woman.’”–

While the sirens passed, I thought about the irony that in 2019 it is still a crime equivalent to manslaughter for a driver to pass by a car accident and ignore it, while it had been made law for ship captains in the Mediterranean not to save refugees drowning in the ocean. They weren’t supposed to get through the Schengen Area, after all. 

Only recently, a friend had called out against mere deportation of immigrants. She was talking about Freiburg, where a group of men, mostly immigrants but also some Germans, had raped a woman. She commented that deporting the rapists, as some people demanded should be done, would not make them vanish from the earth. Deportation wasn’t the answer she said. What about the girls and women in those other countries? And where was the justice in sending these criminals away instead of prison? – I looked through the shit storm she was confronted with, the many rape threats sent to her Twitter account precisely because she was concerned with actual justice. – “You’re right,” one of the agitators wrote, before he got censored “We should assimilate rapists and serial killers from other countries into our own. We, at least, could help them resocialize… we could train them in our brothels, let them rape all the Bulgarian and Romanian girls there, train them to loose their inhibitions. You could even offer yourself up to them, do your country a service.” – No one was thinking about the fact that they might be talking to someone who had once been raped. No one cared about who they were hurting or how they were hurting her. And if they did, it was all the more gruesome.

I tried to close my eyes that night, but that didn’t work. Every time I closed them shut, images surfaced, as if unlocked from within the depth of the dark surrounding me. And I could hear my heart beating from the bottom of that very depth. I could hear it beating. Him beating her. My mother screaming. He was kicking her stomach, when she was down on the floor. I thought of my friend, about how I held her in my arms, after she told me she had been raped. And I thought about Stella, brilliant, genius Stella… It wasn’t until my fist hit the wall that I realized it wasn’t just my heart beating. It wasn’t until my fist hit the wall that I realized that it wasn’t my mother screaming from the depth of her heart but me from the depth of an abyss within me. Something was breaking out. I could hear my neighbors pounding against the walls, asking me to be quiet, asking me to go back to sleep, asking me to see reason. But the more my demons howled at me, the harder my fists clenched themselves tight. Maybe women in this country are treated better. But maybe, just maybe better isn’t good enough. Sanity, after all, is nothing but a status quo.

Meet the Author

Daniel Schulz is a U.S.-German author based in Cologne. He is best known for his short story collection Schrei (Formidabel 2016) and his work as curator of the Kathy Acker Reading Room at the University of Cologne. In 2019 he co-organized and curated an exhibition for the Goethe Institute in Seattle for which he edited the book Kathy Acker in Seattle (Misfit Lit 2020). He also worked as co-editor of Gender Forum‘s special edition Kathy Acker: Portrait of an Eye/I (2019). His works have appeared in the journals Der Federkiel, Luftruinen, Die Novelle, The Transnational, Electronic Book Review, Mirage #5, Gender Forum, Fragmented Voices, Divanova, Kunst-Kultur-Literatur Magazin, Versification, Salut L‘absurde, Café Irreal and Cacti Fur as well as the anthologies Tin Soldier (Sarturia 2020), Corona -Schnee (Salon29 2021), Jahrbuch der Poesie 2021 (AG Literatur 2021) and Home (Fragmented Voices 2021).  Instagram: @danielschulzpoet

‘New flat’ by Matt Nicholson

Unpack the colours, sounds, and sheets that make a home. 

Start with red, closest to fury. Let fingers swim in the blood that’s here, memories of every man, box-camera pics of skinned knees and body-ease. Lipsticks, clumped, made from the same powdered beetles that roam vacant minds, unused for months – more trouble than they’re worth. 

Blue is spilling from somewhere – there one minute, not there before – from bruises and poor circulation, from Granny’s calf and mascara – more trouble than they’re worth. 

Yellows are tickets on the sky, promising bargains, old men who can’t leave the Thunderbird alone in the mornings, who stumble into pews in sunlight through cold clouds of ammonia and old glass. 

Only one sound to find a place for, sob mixed with sigh. Wrap it in the best bedlinen, tie the sheets in knots.

Meet the Poet

Matt Nicholson is a poet and performer from Yorkshire’s East Riding, in the cultural glare from the City of Hull. He is widely published and commissioned, most recently By The Humber Mouth Festival, and has performed all over the UK. He writes poems that are sometimes dark and sinister, sometimes tender and moving, but always very honest.

‘A Lot on One Plate’ by Moira Garland

This afternoon the golden retriever lies on its side, all four legs jutting out from the sagging settee so that Bridget cannot sit down. She stands at her kitchen window, next to the three-day old pile of dirty plates, cups, pans, knives forks. The plate on the top of the stack on the drainer has what she calls deep-blue-swirly patterns on a creamy background, dotted with a few small patches of dried soil, and what might be the remains of a slater.

She looks out at the handkerchief-sized garden fronting her ground floor flat. Through her grey net curtain she peers at local children in small groups passing near her window laughing, shouting, or running. Years ago she’d see the milkman coming for his money on a Tuesday. Yesterday, like so many days, two PCSOs strolled along their heads turning this way and that, their yellow chests like pumped up balloons.

Who would throw away a perfectly good plate and hide it at the base of her privet hedge? And why?

Ryan’s dad is a chef. Well, he was a chef thinks Ryan, but he still likes to practise. 

“I was actually a pâtissier.” Ryan’s dad says, more often than Ryan would like even though Ryan doesn’t live with him. He lives with his mum about half an hour away on the bus. Ryan’s nan lives near her son, Ryan’s dad, and keeps an eye on both of them from her third floor flat which she doesn’t often leave on account of her bad hip. She has 1348 Friends on Facebook.

On this cold Saturday morning Ryan is visiting his dad. His dad is galvanised, showing Ryan how he makes chocolate eclairs. It is nearly dinnertime by the time they are made and ready for Ryan to take to his nan. They are her favourite cakes, keep her healthy. 

“Your nan has always been dainty, Ryan.” 

His dad says this every time Ryan visits. Fourteen year old Ryan now believes that ‘dainty’ meana a woman who fills her recliner and has legs like elephant trunks. This morning ‘dainty’ heralds Ryan’s dad piling chocolate eclairs on a blue and cream plate, wrapped in foil to go to his nan’s. Ryan is hungry so on the way he sits on a backless bench by the playground and eats three of the eclairs. Ryan feels a right prat carefully holding the plate and eclairs. As he passes one of the flats he ditches the plate, stuffs it down between the hedge and the disintegrating fence. A splinter lodges in his middle finger, which is uncomfortable. He easily holds the foil-wrapped package in one hand. Anyone who sees him might think it is drugs. He meets no one. He smells burgers cooking through an open window.

Homes under the Hammer has finished when there’s a knock, knock, knock on the opaque glass of Pauline’s door. Ryan’s on his way with eclairs explained the text so she heaves her weight up with the metal stick the hospital gave her last year while she waits for the operation. Tap, thump, thump to unlock the door. You have to be careful these days who you open the door to says the email from the bobbies. There’s enough light coming through to show the familiar shape of Ryan.

“Don’t take your jacket off, get down the chippy. My usual and whatever you want. She hands over her card. Thirty from the machine, love. And bring me the change.”

Ryan must have slipped out when Pauline dozed off. They’d polished off the fish, chips, peas and butties. With cream oozing out of the squashed eclairs Pauline thought Chris should have wrapped them more carefully, him being a chef and all. Still they tasted good. 

Lodged back in her chair Pauline remembers when she was fourteen already living in this same flat with her mam, her dad long gone. Her mam was dead pleased to get on this new estate, out of the old back-to-backs they’d pulled down. Pauline was looking forward to leaving school the next year. She’d get a job in the cosmetics factory where her mum worked. Pauline wasn’t sure she liked that they called it Soapy Joes, but you could get discounts on things like shampoo if you worked there. Pauline’s best friend Irene started there with her. ‘Course Irene went downhill fast last year. She misses her. She misses laughing at Mrs Brown’s Boys with her, misses holding on to Irene’s arm when they walked to the bus stop and had a cup of tea in the caff near the bus station.

Next to the railway station in the city centre stands the Royal Hotel. The website reads: 

This magnificent Art Deco hotel, built in 1932 and was inspired by the glamour and elegance of high society, rising from the ‘29 crash. It boasted  all en-suite rooms, and a magnificent ballroom where guests could dance the night away to the sound of live jazz bands. 

Its distinctive building is now also fabled for a cuisine catering for a diversity of tastes, open to both guests and visitors alike. 

Pascal believed that a new chef should shake things up a bit. The salamanders were looking decidedly shabby, the sinks were gathering gunge around the plugholes. And he informed the maitre d’ that the crockery and cutlery must have been around when the original hotel was built in the 1800s. They looked at the catalogues together Pascal insisting that ‘modern is what our customers expect for what they pay’. The maitre d’s neatly cut black, short back and sides nodded in agreement. He was a lot less experienced than Pascal.

It wasn’t Chris’s job to pack away all the old crockery but like the rest of the staff he took the opportunity on his short break to dive into the basement where the kitchen boy was sorting and packing and allowing them to take away a portion of the lovely blue and cream plates, bowls, cups and saucers of various sizes. They were mostly in perfect condition. Paperwork was altered. The auctioneers wouldn’t know the difference. 

That was a while before Chris started with his hands shaking. He had known chefs who shouted and cursed of course. But Pascal would put his face right next to yours, and he expected everything to be done ‘yesterday’. “The management’s bottom line,” said Pascal, “is profit. Why else would they be running a hotel?” The day the Black Forest gateau was returned by several irate diners – regulars, insurance company directors – was the last straw. 

On the odd occasion Chris tells his mum or his son a joke he calls it the last cherry. 

Chris calls his mate Leroy ‘a godsend’ from his working life. Leroy is now the boss at the Caribbean café nearer town. It’s because of Leroy that Chris has the money to bake a few times a month. 

“I’ll come to you every other Saturday,” says Leroy. 

They sit down at the glass-topped coffee table while Chris shows Leroy his accounts – his budget pencilled in on graph paper that Leroy buys him. After a beer or two they go off to the bookies. Leroy makes sure Chris doesn’t go beyond the one pound stake. Today Chris has won £27 odd which goes into the bottom draw of the wardrobe in his bedroom so that he won’t be tempted to splash out all at once.

It’s flippin’ freezing the following Friday. His trainers will have to do. He’s off to the specialist shop in town to buy fondant icing and pastry cream. You can’t get that at the one-stop. By the time he gets home late afternoon his feet are sopping wet and cold. He reckons he can put the electric fire on for half an hour, and stuffs his trainers with unwanted leaflets.

This Saturday’s schedule is for Ryan to come and Chris thinks Ryan might be a pâtissier one day. Then there’s Chris’s mum. He tries to look after her, thinks she’d appreciate a nice plate as well as the éclairs. He’ll get the plate back when he gets over to see her, next week. It depresses him to see her too often, with her hip.

Bridget has given up wondering why there’s a plate in her garden. She’d only gone to put the bin out. The grass was pale and flattened which is how she saw it there, hiding like some sort of criminal. She’d checked, there was no suspicious package full of drugs or cash hidden behind it.

The washing up waits while she turns on the telly and gives the dog a shove so that her own skinny frame can sit right up next to it. 

“Go on,” she urges, “you soft lump, you Molly-coddled.” Bridget has this habit of adding to names, not shortening them. The dog is named after her mum, god rest her soul. 

Too much gore on one film, too many gunfights on the other channel. She turns it off with the remote. There’s notifications on her mobile. She swipes up the lost cat ones, the adverts for support stockings. On Marketplace she scrolls through all the freebies but she has no use for baby clothes. Her friend Louise has lived in Australia for nine years. Louise has posted a picture of her new grandchild who’s speaking to her from the UK on Skype. Behind her is an orange vase.

Molly raises her head when Bridget gets up again, then goes back to sleep. Bridget heads for the kitchen, runs the plate under the tap, gives it a wipe with the sponge, polishes it dry with the tea towel. She lays the plate on a chair. It makes a pleasing backdrop of black leather. “Yes!” she says. Molly opens one eye but she knows the phone does not signal dog biscuits. The image taken by the camera phone, altered with the app, is well worth putting on Facebook. Public setting. My fabulous new plate. Smiley face. 

Meet the Author

Moira Garland is a prize-winning prose writer and poet whose fiction has been appearing online and in print since 2004 including Strix, Tyto Alba (Comma Press), The Forgotten and the Fantastical #3 (Mothers Milk Press), Cake magazine (Lancaster University), Electrifying Women, TSS, Stories for Homes, Paragraph Planet, and www.commuterlit.com . She took 2nd prize in the 2021 Weaver Words/Frodsham Literature Festival flash fiction competition, and was also a runner-up. Radio Leeds has also broadcast her stories. Her poetry appears in many anthologies and in The North journal. She lives in West Yorkshire. Twitter/Instagram: @moiragauthor