Amma’s Kitchen

by Rati Mehrotra

I can always tell what dish my customers will order. Knowing what the dead crave is my gift. Or my curse. It’s hard to know which.

This girl, for instance. Brown, like me, but pale, as if the color’s been leeched out of her skin. Dark, staring eyes, weeds tangled in her drowned hair, and an ugly purple frog squatting on her shoulder. She doesn’t remember her name or the man who killed her, but she remembers the taste of her mother’s fish pakoras.

She drifts in, dripping water over my nice linoleum floor. I suppress a sigh. Cleaning’s the worst part of my job. At least it’s not blood and guts today.

“Sorry,” she says, glancing down.

“Don’t worry about it.” I wave her to a barstool. I have tables and chairs for groups, even a couple of red vinyl booths, but my customers are usually a solitary lot. Sometimes a family will come in, all four or five of whom have died in the same accident. I’ll usher them to a booth, doing my best to ignore their ghastly wounds, and give them what they need. (Continue Reading…)

The Mountain and the Vulture

by Nick Douglas

“High in the North in a land called Svithjod there is a mountain. It is a hundred miles long and a hundred miles high and once every thousand years a little bird comes to this mountain to sharpen its beak. When the mountain has thus been worn away a single day of eternity will have passed.”

― Hendrik Willem Van Loon, The Story of Mankind

At the edge of the world stands a mountain, a mile high and a mile wide, black against the white sky, like one was carved out of the other. Wind whistles against the knife point of the stone. There is nothing for the wind to blow. Nothing grows here. There is no snow or rain. The mountain is alone.

And then in the distance, in the white sky, is a dot. The dot grows into a line. The line grows into a shape. It’s the shape of a vulture in flight. Wings out ramrod, feathers like rays of the sun. Below the wings, the body, in the same dappled gold. Below the body, the head, red and fuzzy and bobbing. The vulture is sailing toward the mountain, and now it is close, and now it is circling. (Continue Reading…)

The Sound of Children Screaming

by Rachael K. Jones

THE GUN

You know the one about the Gun. The Gun goes where it wants to. On Thursday morning just after recess, the Gun will walk through the front doors of Thurman Elementary, and it won’t sign in at the front office or wear a visitor’s badge.

The Gun does most of its damage in the first five minutes. The Gun doesn’t care about lockdown drills, and it will not wait for the SWAT team to arrive. The Gun can chew through a door, a desk, a cinderblock wall, and kids don’t wear those bulletproof backpacks during reading time.

Everyone has a right to a gun. Nothing can take that away from you. What you lack is a right to the lives of your children.

The Gun likes a game of hide-and-seek. The Gun will rove the grounds until someone stops it. The Gun has been here many times before.

The Gun is not working alone. (Continue Reading…)

Good Fortune for a Beloved Child

By Alexia Tolas

There ain’t no body for Thomas funeral, so we bury an empty coffin.

Not empty, Daddy did tell me as we followed the undertaker to the cherry-woods and mahoganies. The coffins they pretty up with ivory velvet and pillows and other shit the dead ain’t gonna care about ‘cause they dead. We don’t even know if Thomas really —

Quintia . . .

But I hear him at night. Singing.

Please!

When the tide goes out.

Enough! (Continue Reading…)

Flight

by Charlie Sorrenson

Now

They are coming out of the woods when Mateo grabs one of Maggie’s wings and tugs, hard. This has long been his way of getting her attention and she has always let him do it, wanting to be a good mother, reminding herself that this is a phase, that he is only five years old, that little boys who do bad things are not destined to become bad men.

But now she wheels on him, the force of her movement yanking her wing from his grasp. “No!” she says, and he blinks and reels back. Two women are walking ahead of them with their children. At the sound of her voice, their heads flick back to watch. “You’re a big boy now,” Maggie says, her voice rising. “You can’t touch them anymore.” Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the women murmur to each other. Turning their smooth, wingless backs to her, they seize their children’s hands and hurry away. Maggie doesn’t care. Tears pool in Mateo’s eyes but she ignores them, stalking up the big, sweeping lawn toward the place where everyone parked.

Further up the slope, the man who is not Trace walks quickly, gripping his daughter’s hand. On her arm is a bruise the size and shape of Mateo’s fist. As Maggie watches, the girl tugs her hand out of her father’s and takes off, her empty Easter basket bobbing in her grip. Her father calls out but she keeps running and Maggie urges her on, her heart pounding on the girl’s behalf, as her head says: faster, and her heart says: it will never be fast enough, and all the places where the Brothers took her apart pulse with remembered pain. (Continue Reading…)

All the Better to Taste You

by Marisca Pichette

This morning I swallowed the Wolf.

I started with oatmeal — sweetened bitter by fresh maple syrup, sticky all the way down. On top I poured mead inherited from drunken bees bumbling through the windows I always leave open — wide, gaping, hungry.

I finished with the Wolf. He’s quite small now; time and peace have removed his claws, decades of sweetness have rotted out his teeth. An infestation of fleas conjured by my stepsister forced him to shave completely. His final years were pale, bald, shivering as I carried him from room to room.

At the end, all that remained to feed his once-formidable muscles were nightmares. First mine, then his — rousing him gasping at midnight. I brought him cocoa, warm milk with a dash of honey.

At the end, I slept soundly, snuggled in a bed that learned to fit me. I stopped having nightmares years before I swallowed the Wolf whole. (Continue Reading…)

This Wooden Heart

by Eleanna Castroianni

It starts with a seed in your grandfather’s beard.

Before you were born, when you and your brother were still seeds tucked deep inside your parents’ bodies, your grandfather dreamed for a while: of grainy bark, of sun-kissed leaves, of sweet purple fruit and of milky poison sap.

Your grandpa: you knew him for a while. He had the eyes of someone claimed by something bigger; the eyes of someone who has known secrets that take root deep below.

He had the eyes of your brother.

Your brother: you knew him for a while. His fire burned too bright. And everyone who shines brightly is sent to exile. To this day, your mother thinks her son — your only brother — is imprisoned on a faraway island.

She doesn’t know that your brother dreams of grainy bark and sun-kissed leaves. She doesn’t know that what started with a seed in her father’s beard has grown wiry roots and curly tendrils around this family’s hearts.

She can feel the thorns. She can hear the faint beating. She will clutch at her chest with every long breath. But she doesn’t know.

It starts like this. (Continue Reading…)