Angela Townsend

Conchas

I know a man whose name means “seashell.” Not even Dickens could have done better. Neither Mr. Bumble nor Mr. Pumblechook was more aptly named than Chuck Concha.

If you tell Chuck this, he will snicker and deflect. He will gather his licorice curls at his chin like a babushka woman’s scarf. “I am the whorl of the world.” He will trace a nautilus in the air. “I am iridescent. I am incandescent.”

Chuck has heard seashell gags all his life, or at least since seventh grade Spanish. He knew what his name meant. One flash card let everyone else in on the secret. Only seventh graders have fingers spindly enough to reach into a seashell and pull out an insult. 

It is harder to offend Chuck than to compliment him. This is good news, since Chuck is the only unneutered male under sixty at the cat sanctuary. Cat Haven attracts the insoluble and unadoptable. It also shelters cats. 

Among three hundred volunteers ranging in age from twelve to ninety, there are ten men. Honors students, chemists, and a woman whose nametag reads “MeeMaw” dominate the discourse. They name cats Ganache and Penuche, and they name men “Laundry Al” and “Other Lyle.” The men respond to their names. 

Chuck came decades too young, with a surname that means “seashell.” A cat in a diaper greeted him at the entrance, and MeeMaw deposited a mewling despot into his arms before asking his purpose. Chuck put in an adoption application for a cat with no eyes and signed up for dryer duty.

Cat Haven reassigned him to tour duty. That was ten years ago. Chuck tells Girl Scout troops and day trippers that Cat Haven is the Hotel California. The cats get adopted, but the human beans never leave. Chuck waits for someone to ask why he says, “human beans.” He tells them we are all small, and we are all here together. The Scouts understand. Their mothers ask if they can bring him home. They don’t have anything like Chuck in their collections.

Cat Haven is hospitable to Presbyterians, Wiccans, and poets who pray to their deceased pets before they write a word. “Unadoptable” is the only heresy. Chuck gets asked why he has not been adopted. He answers with spontaneous acts of head-banging, boarding his escape hatch of hair. At the right angle, Chuck looks like he should be delivering pineapple pizzas or auditioning for a remake of Point Break. So, Chuck keeps moving. He has no flat surfaces where you can put yourself down. He has no sharp edges where a cat or a seventh-grader could get hurt. 

If you get lost in Cat Haven, you need to keep walking. The sanctuary is a circle, and the last solarium opens into the first. I find Chuck at the end of his shift, at the end of the floor plan. He lies prone in the blind cat room. Vigorous prophets swarm him, tails in the air, unashamed of empty sockets. Some have had their eyelids sewn shut like stuffed animals on the discount rack. Some appear all-seeing, their irises black as grapes on the far shore of glaucoma. This is Chuck’s favorite room. 

Blind cats map new territory within days, if not hours. They use the litter box and learn the way your profile shifts the air. People like to adopt blind cats, so Chuck’s heart is broken open most of the time. They are his hermit crabs, moving on to larger territory. He is a shelter within a shelter. 

I tell Chuck. You can say anything to Chuck. I tell him to his face that he is a seashell. I am Cat Haven’s maple idiot, a hairball of verbs. I interrupt my own invisible illnesses by telling people they are peridots and revelations. I do not have the strength to mop the lobby, but I am good at looking donors in the eyes. I have been the fundraiser for seventeen years. I am unadoptable, so I will be here until they sprinkle me in the memorial garden.

Chuck scolds me for talking like that. He says the world is the seashell. We are here to pick up cats, and towels hot from the dryer, and conversations with the UPS man, and squash them against our ears until we hear our names. That is what human beans are here for. I tell him he is incriminating himself, because only a seashell would say such things. 

I find a box tied with string on my desk, full of pastries called “Conchas.” They are covered in chocolate and small as cat treats.

---

Angela Townsend graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. She is a Best of the Net nominee and the 2024 winner of West Trade Review’s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Paris Lit Up, Pleiades, SmokeLong, and Terrain, among others.

Robert Roman

JAGGERBUSH’S CONFESSION

I walked into the principal’s office again. Jaggerbush was sitting across from Sister Kelly Pork Belly. Her pop-bottle glasses were foggy because she was already overheated.

Jaggerbush was in fifth grade, one grade behind me, and the nuns at Saint Augie’s were still batting zero against him in the confession game. 

“Sit! Your brother was just about to confess his sins.”

I busted out laughing. Her face shriveled up like a Shrinky Dink you left in the oven too long.

“You find this funny? Maybe you can tell me who’s responsible for the pornography in the boys’ lavatory.”

“I don’t know anything about any graffiti,” I said.

“Pornography! Not graffiti. Pay attention!”

She started her breathing exercises. When she lost her temper, it sounded like she was having a baby.

“You know what I’m referring to. The lurid images of that brawny, green woman. Her taut flesh is barely concealed by tattered rags.”

“The Savage She-Hulk?” I said.

Jaggerbush glue-sticked pictures of She-Hulk inside every missile and hymnal in church last month. Nobody complained until now.

“It’s not her fault she’s green,” Jaggerbush said.

“Regardless of her race, scantily clad women with bulging, rippling muscles are simply,” she took some deep breaths, “Inappropriate. This is your final opportunity. Tell me what you know.”

“She’s cousins with the Incredible Hulk,” I said.

“Fine,” she said, “From this day forward, no comic books on school property. Congratulations.”

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Jaggerbush leaned closer to the fish tank. His beak touched the glass.

“Are you threatening me?”

“Not me. It’s the She-Hulk Fan Club I’d watch out for if I was you.”

“They make Franco’s Italian Army look like sissies,” I said.

“Who’s Italian what?” she said.

“Franco Harris. Running back. Pittsburgh Steelers.”

“The one who committed the Immaculate Conception?” Jaggerbush said.

Sister Kelly sucked wind like she had a case of the croup, “Franco Harris is not God.” 

“Tell that to our dad,” Jaggerbush said.

“He meant the Immaculate Reception, Sister.”

“I know what he meant!”

Jaggerbush was the only kid in Pittsburgh who wasn’t a Steelers fan. He wasn’t a Virgin Mother fan either, so got confused when it came to miracles.

 He shoved his hands in his Toughskins pockets and faced Sister Kelly.

“I’d leave She-Hulk out of it. Especially with Christmas coming.”

“Or what? Santa Claus will incur the wrath of this imaginary She-Hulk cult?”

“That’s silly,” he said, “They’ll go after Jesus.”

She screeched about blasphemy and devil spawn and roasting in Hell, but she was hard to understand because of her asthma attack. Then she kicked us out of her office and went into labor.

The next day in school everybody had to say an extra prayer to Saint Anthony because the Baby Jesus disappeared from the school Nativity Scene. 

---

Robert Roman grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, where he sold newspapers to cars from a concrete island. He worked as a mail carrier, busboy, bartender, and laborer while earning a degree in English Literature from the University of Pittsburgh. He taught GED preparation at a juvenile detention facility, elementary school in the Baltimore City public schools, and English to high school seniors in Howard County, MD. He studied writing at Johns Hopkins and UCLA. He now lives in L.A., where he writes fiction and America’s favorite hangman puzzles.

James Hartman

Trip

When my wife told me she was pregnant, she kept jerking her head like she was trying to deny it.  She didn’t give me a chance to speak.  She hurled herself out of the house yanking her suitcase behind her and kicked the front door shut.  I was already uncomfortable about this trip, so I don’t know what the hell I’m feeling now.  

Laura sits huddled far away from me, clenched against the car door with her shoulders bent inward, but she has no problem launching herself alive whenever her brother addresses her.  She thrusts herself forward and torques her hands as if wishing she could hand-deliver him her words.  I’m always surprised by this behavior and yet I shouldn’t be.  She spends hours talking to her brother on the phone after work, sitting in her car in the driveway with her elbow angled out the window as if on a joyride.  When she finally comes in she goes straight to making dinner, and if I’m stressed, or anxious, or simply want to feel the close warmth of my wife after the long cold chaos of a courtroom trial, she says she needs to finish making dinner.  On the couch she slaps on the television and we watch Family Feud as we chew our lasagna.  After that she says she’s too tired to do anything physical, and then cleans up the kitchen, walks the dogs, does yoga, and talks again to her brother outside in the driveway, running her palm across the hood of her Dodge Charger, the slightest tease of a smile to her lips.

Reflecting on all this still makes me feel foolish.  Laura says I have a nasty, unfair habit of overanalyzing and sometimes I think she isn’t wrong.  Family is important, I know that.  Their father had left them early, likely for another woman but no one knew for certain, and their mother had apparently been abusive, so all they had really was each other.  My mother’s been gone not one year, and I still feel trapped up in a whirlwind, lurched and whirled and throttled, never able it seems to find a clear view or firm grip of anything.

Up front my sister-in-law turns in her seat, her eyes following something out the window.  “God,” she says.  “I could go for some Dunkin’ Donuts right now.”

In the rearview Brad’s eyes shift toward Laura and Laura, of course, jumps forward, her eyes sparkling with urgent yearning.  “Krispy Kreme,” Brad says, and his right eye shuts, pauses, then opens.

Laura touches her fingers to the bend of her neck.  I stare at her caressing her skin.  She glances at me and stops.  The vents are pumping chilled air and yet I feel scorched.

“That’s me,” my wife giggles suddenly, like a softly purred hum. 

My blood moves like slush, taking things within me forever to collaborate.  My jaw is working, and then my mouth is moving, and then I realize I am asking, “What do you mean, that’s you?”

“She used to eat so many Krispy Kreme donuts,” Brad says quickly, “that I called her that.”  His eyes gleam bright sapphire green in the rearview.  “Krispy…Kreme.”  

He says the second word through a small nudge of air that might as well be a moan.  

Or is all this overanalyzing, too?  Have I overanalyzed so many times that I forget how to properly analyze without compromising something?  

My wife keeps giggling as two fingers pull her hair out past her nose.  When they draw to the ends of her hair, instead of dropping her hand, she keeps it there, letting golden threads of hair float and wave between her fingers.  

My wife is imagining something very firm and clear in her mind and that is not overanalyzing.

Jill swivels around and shoots her eyes into mine, a very particular frown screwing up her face, and I immediately point my eyes out my window, trying to shove back down what her frown is excavating from my memory.  I want to tell her it has no relevance, it means nothing, that Saturday evening when Jill and I went to the Piggy Wiggly for beer and I forgot my wallet, and opening the front door I saw in the kitchen Brad and Laura leap away from each other, their faces a shade of red I told myself was normal from bending over and examining the rotisserie chicken in the oven.  It was insignificant, how still and rigid and tensed they kept their eyes fixated on the wall, as if nothing, nothing at all, could be detected if they simply did not move.

“Yum, yum, yum,” Brad says, and smacks his huge, disgusting lips.

This must be the magic trick, this must be what had to be accomplished before anything else could proceed, because now his eyes unstick from their spot in the rearview and center back on the road, his fingers dancing along the steering wheel as if in sync to his own exuberant heartbeat.             

Jill glares at her husband, his dancing fingers, and then she makes a face I have to turn my head from.

The road goes on.  That’s the thing about this goddamn road.  It goes on and on and on, the trees on either side proliferating with the growing dark of night, closing us in.  Disney World might as well be spiraling away into oblivion.  Disney World, where I met Laura at a lemonade stand and I thought from the way she was acting was buying lemonade for her boyfriend that stood next to her but who was actually her brother.  Disney World, where Brad suggested we celebrate Christmas vacation.  Disney World, where the magic happens.  

I need to ask Brad where exactly we are, but I don’t want to overanalyze his answer.  I can’t even remember how long we’ve been on this road.  I guess I’ve never realized until now how terrifying it is to imagine how much longer we have to go.

---

James Hartman’s fiction appears in Blue Fifth Review, December, Raleigh Review, Gris-Gris, and New World Writing, among others both online and in print.  His story, “A Junior Whopper, Please, With Cheese,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions, and his story, “The Range of Acceptability,” was an Honorable Mention in New Millennium’s 50th Annual Flash Fiction Award. He lives in York, Pennsylvania.

j. Snodgrass

Potential Spam

 “Hello?”

 “Hey Mom, it's Pam.”

 “Oh, Pam!”

 “What's so funny?”

 “Well caller ID said 'Potential Spam' from Buffalo!  And then it was you, calling from your tin-can car!”

 “How—  What makes you think—”

 “A mother knows.  You're hands-free, right?  Or else you hang up this instant.”

 “Yes, mother.  Not that I'm—  Ergh!  Stupid traffic jam in a stupid blizzard!  And if I'm not at the apartment in nine minutes the electrician's gonna show up, put a tag on the door-knob and I won't have heat till Monday!”

 “Well, not to say 'I told you so,' but—”

 “Good.  Right, let's skip that part.”

 “It's eighty-seven by the pool here in Miami.”

“Let's skip that part too.”

“So.  How do I add this new number to contacts?  Can I do it while you're on, or will it hang up the call?  I never did—”

“We'll do that next time, I can't—  I've spent all day crunching logistics.  The apartment, DMV, new number, wifi, about thirty new login-passwords to learn for work—”

“Well you could have kept your old number.  People do move these days, area-codes aren't what they once—”

“No.  I mean yeah, but—  I'm happier with it.  The whole U-Haul trip, Hector kept calling, and I just couldn't—  No matter how many times I swiped to dismiss— I just can't listen to another one of his lectures.”

“Well I did warn you, getting involved with a professor—”

“What ever happened to 'not-to-say-I-told-you-so?'”

“You got me.  I accidentally told you I-told-you-so.”

“Alright.  Moving on.”

“You could have just picked up and said—”

“Forget it, nothing I said would—  He'd have just—  'Oh by all means, try it – see how you like dying alone in the bone-crushing cold, follow your dream.'”

“Well leaving Asheville was—”

“Hang on a sec, this might be the electrician.  Hello?”

“Lisa it's Matt, we need to talk - I'm not sayin' I'm innocent in this, but you've gotta think for once and I mean seriously, about the future—”

“This isn't Lisa.”

“You're gonna-— Oh.  Wrong number.”

“Mom, are you still there?”

“I was saying the move was a good idea, but you went in the wrong direction!  You could be in Florida!”

“No.  Florida smells, Mom, I've told you before, I can't stand it.”

“Buffalo smells too!  They just don't know it 'cause they're, half-the-year, totally congested!”

“Damnit, move!”

“What, you mean me?  There?  Really?”

“Ergh!  No, sorry, just—  I can see the off-ramp from here but it's just— Just—”

“Congested.”

“Very funny.”

“And the men here!  In their tight little speedos.”

“There are men here too.”

“I've been on three first dates this week.”

“I don't—  Some other time, okay?”

“I'm just saying.”

“Thanks, but I'm not—  Two years living with Hector, his constant—  Constant pontification, 'you've gotta be realistic,' 'that deadline's too tight, and so is that dress,' 'you'll never fit into that parking spot.'  And you know what's crazy?  Two years and never once could I just say 'back off jackass, I can do it!'  I can do it!”

“Yeah, I know the feeling.  Every time I pour a beer-can on your father's grave.”

“Even breaking up, I couldn't—  Just cleared out my stuff, I didn't even leave the note!  Ergh!  It's still in my purse!  'Cause I just couldn't stand to think of, you know, the professor pulling out his little red pen and marking all the wrongly placed apostrophes!  Smug corduroy smirk—'”

“Pam slow down, I can hear you driving recklessly.”

“I'm fine.  Fine.  Anyway I don't want any first dates right now, I've just gotta make my own way, you know?  Before I think about—”

“I'm not trying to rush you.  So tell me more about this electrician - did he have a tan-line on his ring-finger?”

“Ha-ha.”

“You know what your problem is?  You're missing something - one of these jalapeňo margaritas!  Here with me by the pool!  Instead of lurching through a tundra, then you'd loosen up and laugh with me!”

“I'll visit, I promise—  Oh, just a sec, 'other line again.  Hello?”

“Listen, Lisa, this is my last quarter - I'm at the Brick Bar, pick me up and we'll talk through this – reasonable, like adults, I think you'll—”

“Nope.  Still not Lisa.”          

“See you're— What the— Shit!”

“Mom?  Hello?”

“I'm here.  Electrician?”

“No, just this guy.  A real dirtbag drunk, keeps mis-dialing, trying to reach Lisa.”

“...Or?  Maybe he's got the right number.”

“Well I don't want to talk to him.”

“Yeah.  But you just got that number.”

“You think this was Lisa's number.”

“Could be.  So tell me about the new job that was worth moving to the frozen northlands for.”

“It's still claims adjustment but with twelve thousand more take-home, medical and dental, sick and personal days, plus I get my own desk by a window.”

“With a breathtaking blizzard vista.”

“It would have been another four years in Asheville, to get this—”

“Yeah, 'cause nobody wants to live in Buffalo!”

“And with my experience I'm on management track!  Hector said it'd take me a decade—  Oh!  And I could have my own office next year!”

“So?  Next time Hector calls?  Tell him—”

“No, I don't—  And he can't anyway.  And I can't 'cause then he'll have my new number.”

“Well I'm proud of you.”

“Ergh.  Stupid call again, just gonna—”

“NO.”

“...'No' what?”

“No, answer it.  And tell him.”

“It's not—  It's this rando with the wrong number.”

“He's got Lisa's number.  So?  Tell him what Lisa would say.”

“...  Thanks, Mom.  I'll call you back in a minute.”

“Oh, I'm looking forward to it.”

---

j. Snodgrass was born in 1979 and lives in Buffalo, NY.  (j-snodgrass.com)

Meredith Wadley

Cabbageheads

Sea and sky form an unbroken gray. Not the calming bottle-green sea and azure blue skies Janie had envisioned. Glistening blobs the size of plastic grocery bags wash ashore. Litter the wet sands. They resemble something a child might have spat out.

“Cabbageheads,” Janie’s mother says. Gayla’s gray hair flips in the wind.

Screaming gulls ride the wind like white skiffs. Others gulls at the beached blobs. Some blobs, Janie notices, smaller, shimmer iridescent purple. “Cabbageheads?” Janie says, shifting her baby from one hip to the other. Unaccustomed to wind, Preat gulps. He’s an early walker, but too unsteady to manage loose sand.

“Jellyfish,” Paul says.

“Some Portuguese man-o-wars, too,” Gayla says. “Be careful with the kids. They have tentacles you can’t even see. Venomous all the same.”

Three-year-old Ann cries, “Hair! Hair, Mommy!” and presses her hands to her head. The child hates wind-tangled hair. Janie passes the baby to her mother and gives her daughter two quick braids.

Unaccustomed to holding weight, especially squirmy weight, Gayla hands back the baby. “Healthy boy,” she says. She could have handed Preat to Paul.

“I wanna see the ’abbages,” Ann says.

Paul scoops her up before she bolts and sets her on his shoulders. “Down,” Ann cries, and Paul clasps her ankles. She’d only get stung by man-o-wars.

“Driving six hours for this,” Gayla says. “I did wonder why y’all wanted to be here during a jellyfish bloom.”

Jellyfish bloom? “Mom,” Janie says, “you could’ve said something.”

“Thought you knew.”

She’d grumbled about Galveston Island not being so charming, but Janie had heard the usual bitching, not a warning.

Paul suggests walking, keeping to the dunes.

After a few yards, Gayla’s winded. “Y’all go ahead,” she puffs. “I’ll get us settled in the house.”

They all trudge back. Janie wants to make sure her mother doesn’t grab the biggest bed for herself. Before the kids, Gayla might’ve paid for an outing. She still acts like she does, grabbing the nicest room or the one with its own bath. “Well, I cut the check,” she’ll say, and if Janie says, “Actually, Mom, Paul did,” Gayla will pout for days.

The rental’s one of three look-alikes on stilts. Stairs up to a wide deck. Janie puts away the groceries and scouts the cabinets for white vinegar or tenderizer, should anyone touch a venomous tentacle. Nada.

Paul offers to go to the store. “Should I take the kids along?” he says.

When Janie suggests he take Mom, he chuckles.

Ann and Peart have found the rental’s stash of beach toys. Peart hugs a pink plastic pickup the size of his torso.

“Here,” Janie says, “let’s put on your sandals.

“Stay close to the house,” she adds as Ann clatters down the stairs, braids flipping and a red bucket swinging in her plump little hand. She runs straight to a half-buried driftwood log that’s as smooth and silvered as the horizon. The wind lashes tufts of dune grasses growing alongside it.

Janie sits on the top step. Peart’s content to push the pink truck back and forth on the deck, the plastic wheels rattling over the wooden planks. The baby’s vroomvrooms punctuate an enchanting lullaby of crying gulls and distant waves. What else besides jellyfish do the waves carry? What might lurk beneath the water’s surface?

Gayla stays inside. Perhaps she’s napping. Long car rides, small children, and the palpable mother-daughter tension—however baseless yet ubiquitous—drains Gayla. When Janie rented this place, she invited her mother along only because she knew Gayla would decline. Now, here they were.

A woman appears upon the deck next door, the wind nearly flattening her afro. She holds a glass of wine and says in a calm drawl, “A rattlesnake was sunning itself on that same log yesterday.”

Janie stands immediately. “Ann, sweetie,” she calls, “come on inside.”

“I’m pwaying.” She rubs her palms free of sand on the log.

Janie might see a burrow among the tufts of dune grasses. “Now,” she says firmly.

Ann pours a bucket of sand, Christ Almighty, right into that burrow.

“Ann!”

The child drops the bucket, the handle clattering. “Mommy! Don’t be like Granma!”

Janie snatches up Peart, presses his head to her chest, and rushes pell-mell down the stairs. His fingers dig into her fleshy underarms, and he drops the pink truck. It tumbles down the stairs, and she almost trips on it. Preat begins to howl.

Like a mama cat, Janie’s on the scruff of Ann’s neck, grabbing her T-shirt to pull her away from the log. She nearly drops Peart.

Like a kitten, Ann goes limp, and Janie glances up at the neighbor. The woman’s leaning on the rail. Mild expression, red lipstick, matching nails. Empty wine glass. Similar age—early thirties. Here for a weekend tryst? A quick escape from a messy life? Or has the woman kept her life tidy? Childless.

Gayla appears, her white hair whipping around her drawn face. “What in the world are you doing to my grandbabies?” she calls. “Traumatizing them?”

Janie closes her eyes for a second. The neighbor woman steps from sight. And above Gayla, gulls hover as if the wind holds them in place. Are the birds at war with the elements or exploiting them? One swoops past Gayla head, awfully close.

A white rental car pulls up, parking under the house’s stilts—the rental car. It’s Paul, empty-handed.

---

Meredith Wadley is an American-Swiss living and working in a medieval micro town on the Rhine River. Her writing has been anthologized and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Read her latest work in Keeping It Under Wraps: Bodies Uncensored anthology, The Disappointed Housewife, Mediterranean Poetry, Subnivean, The Woolf, and forthcoming in Across the Margin and The Vincent Brothers Review. Her monthly musings about life and writing plus her publication links appear on her website, www.meredithwadley.com. Twitter: @meredithwadley. Instagram: @meredithkaisi.

Don Malkemes

No Tangle Dual Leash, Comfortable Shock

For three years, my wife ached to rescue a dog. I would list the logics. And when those failed, I’d look behind the bookcases and couch cushions; searching for the verdant, fenced-in yard we must’ve misplaced. No, c’mon: a dog deserves better than this apartment. Don’t you agree, I’d argue, that it would be cruel to get one? 

So we got two. 

The first came during the bite of winter; handed to us in the parking lot of a suburban animal hospital. The tape from the parvo drip still stuck to her leg. The other came from the wilds of Louisiana, carted north through the midsummer humidities. They grew beyond our expectations. And they grew to the same weight, but in different ways.

Parvo grew slender and tall, a regal lady of the dawn, a guess of black lab and whatever-hound that left her legs and ears a little too long. No one really knew which breeds for certain, and only the creeps seemed to care, so a mutt. Her mind was on fire, which was most evident when she hit the street; her nose hovered millimeters from the ground and remained in position as the urgency pulled her from block to block. She wouldn’t stop until she got to the bottom of all this mess, or needed to shit. In that way, she would’ve made a great gumshoe.

Kingfish bulked up, a boxer with a broken jaw, a guess of catahoula leopard and palmed karambit that left her with perma-puppy eyes and a tensed, dense frame. No one really knew which breeds for certain, and only the creeps seemed to care, so a mutt. She had escaped from an unreported rural war, and though she had reached sanctuary, she remained vigilant and quick to attack. Every dog a threat, every human a hero; there was always another fight around the corner. Shit, she had to protect what’s hers. In that way, she would’ve made a great grunt.

They said -no more than thirty-thirty-five; and again -no more than twenty-five-thirty. We held those estimates as vows. By the ninth month, both were seventy-seventy-five. What do you do with one-forty-one-fifty? We weren’t athletes. We had our limits.

The big problem was O-U-T-S-I-D-E. Inside, they could sit, stay, shake, settle, even return to the crate. But no amount of training, professional or otherwise, could quash the Pull. We had proved proficient in Squirrel, Carcass, and Vomit. I was also certified in Stray Cat and Racoon. But no mortal could master the rabbits, the hippity-hoppity cacodemons whose darts and dalliances summoned an inalienable bloodlust from each dog’s core. If a rabbit should appear, it was imperative to set one’s footing before the whipcrack traveled from leash to bone. Properly braced, i.e. feet perpendicular to the taut parallel lines, one could cantilever one’s bodyweight to neutralize the forward momentum. And as tendons begged to snap from their sticking places, one could wait for the moment to pass. 

During a notably manic excursion where I resigned to follow their lead, we found ourselves at Foster, a main vein of morning rush-hour traffic. Cars frequently added fifteen-twenty to the speed limit. Just let one of ‘em inch out, I thought, maybe if the other heard the screech of brakes, saw the impact and the insides scattered on the street, that one, that surviving one, would get in line. But then, there’d only be one. One who always watched, always followed, always needed something from you. The liberties we took while they reeled and tumbled from den to bedroom, the freedoms we had as they established dominance over a doormat; those would be as dead as that one dumb dog (hypothetically). No, we had to have two.

On a gamble fueled by desperation and ben-gay, we ordered the No Tangle Dual Dog Leash. The construct was simple enough, a leash that led to two other leashes, all fastened together at a squeaking swivel. With tactical ruche, the terminating leashes clipped to the harnesses of Parvo and Kingfish. 

Things became easier, in a way. Eighty-ninety percent of the time, walks began in a Y-formation: one huffed the parkway grass as the other pawed a neighbor’s lawn. That Y would predictably transmute to a T, one pulling against the other, no ground gained or lost. In that T, with stasis achieved, my end went slack. There was enough time to reply to an email, scroll a neglected Slack channel, read a one-pager: important stuff. 

Of course, it was never just Y or T. After the piss puddled and the shit was inspected and bagged, lines would often cyclone-swirl as the two wrestled their way up a parallel street. And when a line inevitably snared a leg or neck, panic would overwhelm play; growls dropped in pitch, raised in volume; and killing teeth were bared. While it mitigated the Pull, the Dual Leash added to the Fight.

Maybe it was the proximity. Unlike the separate lines, the Dual Leash removed the last illusion of autonomy. As one moved, so must the other. Even during the languid plodding of hottest summer, the squeaking swivel would chirp above their heads -- a small, persistent reminder of their shared subjugation. 

I’d let the skirmishes last a few seconds longer than I should’ve. Kingfish always won. The home was calmer when Parvo was a touch afraid. To have one cowering in a crate, the other muzzled; it let me get more work done. But when things got bloody, like the couch thing and the duvet thing, a new regime was put in place. Tangles were quickly corrected, playtime ended at the slightest hint of unrest. The freedom to sniff and meander was replaced by father’s loving fist. While it mitigated the Fight, the new protocol added to the Pull.

Such was our burden, maintaining the balance between Fight and Pull. Choosing between the two was wholly a matter of convenience, dictated by the circumstances of the day. In retrospect, in the mind of a dog, it was all arbitrary. But it was manageable. Then winter came. 

Winter was a mischievous prick, protean in its temperatures. Saturday snow, Sunday melt, Monday freeze, Tuesday snow, etc. until the alleys and sidewalks were piebald paths of concrete and ice. If a pattern could be discerned, it was quickly obscured by driven snow. As such, the slightest tug could send me to the ground. And if a dog’s body was clipped or pinned by my flailing frame, the blame was shifted to the other, and another attack began. It was a herculean task, to keep control when you’re on your knees. Out of self-preservation, I favored the Pull.

In the first week of February, they pulled me back to Foster. I didn’t notice where we were. I had been busying my thoughts with bones most likely to break: collar bone, clavicle; forearm, radius; ass, coccyx; ankle, what’s the ankle? Man, what the fuck is the ankle bone? Think! The woolgathering of future injuries ended when I felt a slide under boot. I panicked to stay upright and keep the dogs in check. But there was no Y in front of me. No T.

They stood as two set columns, an immutable equal sign. A frozen focus locked both to the sidewalk’s edge. From head to tail, nothing moved but their hackles. And on the other side, through the street’s dot-dash rush, a rabbit. It sat on a patch of snow that hid a sheet of ice: unaware of the day’s significance or its possibilities, unaware of doom’s reach, unaware how quickly insides can go outside.

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Don Malkemes lives in Chicago.

Nicole Cifani Lehmann-Haupt

BIG QUESTIONS

You have been asking yourself the big questions lately. For example: How should a woman be?

Let’s say your best friend, Lorraine, wants to go to a pool party in the valley. You are living with your husband in a condo near the ocean at the time, having finished your second round of IVF and the suffocating feeling that your body is not your own. Let’s say you couldn’t understand how it had come to that, like a celebrity shaving her head and tap-dancing her way into rehab.

Let’s say you ask the universe, the gods, the trees, the wind, the rain, the fog, the waves crashing into coves, the wise crows, cliffs, and satellites how you should be. That is, your hope is to live a simple life full of meaning. You don’t want anything to change, except to be as iconic as you can be but without changing yourself so drastically that you are no longer you. Everyone would know that despite being childless, you were still serious about life, like a purple jelly donut, for example—that is, without needing to fill a space that isn’t meant to be whole.

Neither of you knew the pool party is meant for kids. Lorraine is wearing a low-cut swimsuit that draws attention from the dads. Let’s say you count thirty kids in the pool. Their shrieks pierce the air like hungry baby falcons, and all the splashing turns the water white. The water feels questionably warm on your toes, so you decide not to swim.

You and Lorraine are polishing off kid-sized fruit popsicles. You lick the sweet and sticky neon juice from the crevices of your fingers. Let’s say you ask Lorraine what she thinks about motherhood and she shrugs. “Meh,” she says. But how does a woman exist in this world without a child? You tell her that you won’t be any good at this stuff.

“What stuff?” she asks. She is looking at you, shielding her eyes from the sun.

“Kids. I’m terrible with them,” you say, wiping juice from the corner of your mouth. “Sitting here, I feel nothing. I wonder if I’m just selling myself into the idea because there’s nothing to celebrate.”

“Really?” she says. Lorraine wrinkles her nose in the way she does when she’s about to challenge you. “But you’re doing great with in vitro, your clients, everything. Is this fear talking?” A red plastic ball bounces off her head. She smiles politely, then tosses it over the fence.

“Probably,” you say. You watch a hawk circle overhead. A crow is chasing it higher and higher into the atmosphere. “I just wonder if I’m going through the motions,” you add. “Since we’re not all destined for motherhood.”

“Eh,” she says, shrugging. “Probably not. But you’ll be great. There’s no need to overthink your experience. Besides, all kids are shits anyway.”

Let’s say right then a child with chubby cheeks and a blue, floppy hat tipsily toddles over, smiles at you, and promptly face-plants onto a piece of pool furniture. His face crumples like a mylar party balloon and he begins to wail.

Let’s say Lorraine frowns, stands, and straightens her dress as the mother appears, covered in enough sunblock to resemble a ghost. The mother apologizes profusely to everyone in sight, especially the child.

Let’s say your friend grabs your wrist and points to a solitary shaded spot on the other side of the pool. As you both walk away, you say that it is a pretty stupid thing to cry about—falling, that is—but you both admit that you do not know anything about children.

As you hustle away it also occurs to you that this is the great power of being a woman—that you can decide on how you should be.

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Nicole Cifani Lehmann-Haupt has been published in Active Muse Literary Journal, Mulberry Literary, and received a Pushcart Prize nomination. She earned a bachelor’s degree in information communication processes from The Ohio State University and a master’s degree in visual and media arts from Emerson College. Nicole has attended the San Francisco Writers Conference and the Iceland Writers Retreat. She teaches creative writing at The Writers Studio founded by Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Schultz. Nicole grew up in Ohio, has lived in Boston, Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, and Tokyo, and now calls San Francisco home.

Amy Cook

Zurich and Paris and Oklahoma

It’s basically bedtime, but I’m boarding a plane. Three of us (new Bat Mitzvahs, straddling the gulf between first kiss and first handjob) sit on the floor, next to the gate. Our parents, who triple checked that the crew knows we are unaccompanied, sit with our overstuffed luggage. As if any of us are imagining giving our hosts the slip and taking our chances in Europe.

When we board (coach), we take up the middle seats. I’ve traveled alone before, but never with friends, never at night, and never while on my period. Because my disability’s symptoms worsen with fatigue, the muscles in my neck are lax, begging for sleep. No one has taught me how to take a redeye, or convert my money; I have not mastered any of the skills of international travel. But I am about to float – to fly, perhaps – between continents.

The cabin lights dim. The dark separates us from the strangers, each other, and then the Earth. We lift off, and the plane tips from side to side, like how a toddler wobbles. My friends sleep, on either side. I fidget, and dig into my bag for the portable CD player and headphones.. What did I leave in here? Ah, the new Duran Duran. I press play, and we are in motion together as I try to unwind. In a few weeks, Alanis Morissette will release Jagged Little Pill, and my world will spin differently. For now, I listen to the entire album, trying to hear myself.

Halfway between New York and Zurich, I sleep poorly. There’s no chop up here, but the loneliness of being fourteen presents a gravitational pull that no plane can ignore. We will soon land unharmed, and be delivered into the custody of our friend and her parents, expats who have invited us for the spring holidays. I don’t ski with the others in Zurich – my eyesight has relegated me to round-trips on the chair lift, but I do, briefly, enjoy the tilt of ascent, the flight of falling. 

We arrive in Paris, by train, on the afternoon of April 19, 1995. In the station, commuters stare 

at the news on glowing screens. A federal building appears, hollowed out, and refilled with carnage. A fireman pauses, surveying the temper of death on a baby, still wearing her socks. We haven’t gotten to the Eiffel Tower yet, but I wish, desperately, to be flying home.

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Amy Cook is an MFA candidate at Pacific Lutheran University (Rainier Writing Workshop), and participated in the 2021 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop in Creative Nonfiction.  Her work has been featured in more than two dozen literary journals, magazines and anthologies, including Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, great weather for MEDIA, The Other Journal, and Apricity Press. She was a finalist for the 2023 ProForma competition (Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts), a finalist for the Disruptors Contest (TulipTree Publishing, 2021), a semi-finalist for the 2022 Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize, and received an Honorable Mention from the New Millennium Writing Awards (2022). She is a reader for the literary magazine CRAFT.