Welcome to Imprint, Temple in a City’s most recent issue.
To imprint is to mark a surface, or deposit a feeling or thought that lingers even if you don’t try to remember it.
This issue brims with stories and poems that leave a trace. We hope you enjoy it.
Last night I saw two rats wrestling in a yin-yang harmony, each with its teeth around the other’s neck. How were they doing that? And why? They were making these horrific screaming noises the entire time, too. And it wasn’t just two rats, it was America and England, it was Cain and Abel, me and my old landlord and me and my current landlord, it was me and you. It was everyone else who’s ever been born, the story of humanity told in two rats, each trying to be the first to kill.
On my birthday I accidentally sat in front of the Nama stap tapestry for 43 minutes thinking about Gestalt theory, about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts and how there isn’t a single thing that this doesn’t pertain to. I switched leaning arms throughout, because of the bench with no back and I thought about how even in a museum of acquired taste, admittedly easy to make fun of, it still felt like a lacking experience without him being snarky and pissing me off. I would have traded my perfect museum day, alone with no headphones and dancing with my thoughts, to be pissed off and angry and exasperated, surely paying less attention to the actual art, surely getting kicked out for whisper yelling. I was just sitting there looking at this tapestry which might be my favorite piece I’ve ever seen in my life and I was wondering what he would say. I hadn’t responded to his last message. Thinking about what he’d put into my birthday card last year. Wondering if NASA takes astronaut volunteers to shoot up into space and never come back.
I was painfully sober with the kitchen light on, naked on my back with his sweaty red mop of hair on my chest like a fur coat. The bubble wrapped moon like a button fastening the sky together, barely visible through the window. My eyes full of tears focusing on my breathing pattern. My eyes full of tears and the moon zinging at me like a bullet and the kitchen light too bright, flies taking turns killing themselves on it. He’s tracing my stomach but it feels like he’s disemboweling me. He’s tracing my stomach and it feels like a lie, my head is turned away from him and it feels like a lie, it feels like a lie that I’m even in bed with him pretending to enjoy this (definition of lie), it feels like a lie in a Poe short story that’s going to rot under the floorboards and drive me to violent insanity. Given what I know now, about myself. Given that no one can ever go back no matter how hard they kick and scream.
On the dock, drunk, socks off feet swimming with the ducks. On the dock, open bottle, three cigarette butts. The sun drowning behind the science museum. On the dock, have to pee, she asks me if I think I’ve met my twin flame. She looks at me like she knows the answer and is waiting for me to choke on it.
Samantha Backlund-Clapp is a graduate of the University of Amsterdam, writing on napkin scraps in her spare time. The lead on her chain is planted in rural middle America, where she learned the love language of desolate wastelands and dried corn husks. She has been printed in Notch Magazine, Pacific Review, and Dakota Warren’s Nowhere Girl, among others. She is presently, and always, in search of Las Vegas and precocious realism. instagram: sbacklundclapp
You’re walking through the dust, alone, dry-throated, following the Sun. You think you’ve survived something but you can’t remember what. No matter.
I wasn’t even a huge fan of The Beach Boys.
You almost collide with something rising in front of you. A tower. A tower, strangely, that is made of smartphones. The phones are cased in shades of red and purple and pink you haven’t seen since the desert last bloomed. You’re standing there wondering when you hear Wouldn’t It Be Nice chiming out in electronic notes. The tower trembles gently.
I’m too young for the Beach Boys to be the soundtrack of my adolescence. But, God, yes – it would have been nice to have been older.
Your instinct is not to answer, but something in you feels you should. Which phone is ringing? Do any belong to you? Do you really want to speak to a stranger? But maybe it’s Brian Wilson calling. So you scan the tower for escaping light, but there is no light. Not in the way you understand it. It seems there never is. Do you pluck out a phone at random and risk destroying the tower? Yes. You do. (Destruction comes easily to you.) You send the phones flying, but whichever one is ringing must be lying face down in the sand because now you can’t see any light at all, and your mouth is so dry, apart from the tears, and it’s water you need, not a conversation. A stranger might ask something of you. A stranger might ask you for some water.
‘Wouldn’t it Be Nice’ fades out and ‘God Only Knows’ fades in. This throws you a little. You feel it but you can’t quite relate it to anything you’ve ever known, so you turn away and head for the freshwater spring at the foot of the citadel, but the melody won’t let go of you, reels you back to where the phones lie scattered in the sand like limbs in shades of red and purple and pink you haven’t seen since the last slaughter.
It feels like the end of sunshine. You never held sunshine yourself, but Brian Wilson made you feel you might someday, made you feel that perhaps you did once, if you could only remember, and it’s true that part of you remembers – not holding sunshine itself, but the feeling that someone might have, that you might have, when they’re holding sunshine, and even if you never did, he understood this and wanted you to, was rooting for you. Now he’s dead he seems to have taken so much from you that you weep from the place you always kept partially open for sunshine.
You’re hovering there, wondering if the phone cases would crunch if you trod on them when they all nudge away from you, radiating away from your feet as if they’re afraid, and you say ‘oh!…’ out loud because God only knows you were in a Brian Wilson-coloured mood and your guard’s down and you understand it all now: how the desert bloomed and fruited inside them once, all the unseen voices trapped in their phones, just as it did inside of you. So you kneel in the sand among the phones and you try not to count them or sort them into colours or divide them and you promise you will find the next one that rings and you will speak to the next voice you don’t know and you silently urge them to make a noise, a Beach Boys song, one of the more famous ones that you’d easily recognise because you never really were that much of a fan, just as you never were that much of a fan of your own feet but when it comes to it they’ve always been a part of you, and you’d probably cry if they died too.
‘Sloop John B’ rings out and you yearn for something like home.
You wipe your tears and instinctively reach for the one phone that’s singing and trembling and giving out a soft blue light. ‘Sloop John B’ stops when you press ‘answer’’ but you still want to go home.
You say hello and hear an unknown voice crackling in an unfamiliar language. It’s not Brian Wilson but even so you feel slightly less homesick. In your friendliest tone you ask the voice if it likes The Beach Boys. If its throat is dry. You ask it if it wants to share your water.
S.A. Greene’s work has appeared in trampset, Mslexia, Blink-Ink, Maudlin House, Fictive Dream, The Phare, Bulb Culture Collective, New Flash Fiction Review, Flash Flood, Janus, Ellipsis Zine, and other lovely places. Her stories have featured homesick capybaras, a mysterious wombat, a foetus with dodgy political views, a musical vagina, tables (kitchen, picnic, dining-room) and a blue sponge.
So, I just…I just, uh, I just finished reading uh, the book A Portrait of Jennie.
I don’t know what to think of it, because you see I’m a painter myself and I did have some models sitting. I actually had a relationship with one of my models that lasted for six years. So, I know what it’s like. It’s a weird novel and. I’m not sure that the ending is correct; but it says something. I saw the movie too, but Joseph Cotten isn’t any credible in the movie as an artist. Actually he’s totally fucked up.
After closing the book, I thought for what purpose should I make up a story? What is it to write a story about love, love lost and found, etc…growing up with love, balding with love! hahaha…Well I don’t know. It’s funny. You read the book, you find it fine and you close it and it’s not so good anymore.
Right now, I’m in Marseille, in the south of France for a week.
And there’s a bright Summer Sun. And the sky is
crazy blue.
So, some swifts are still out there flying. And, you know, there are a bunch of trees too that I can see from my window, shivering under the summer wind.
Well, I’m French. I’m not American. So I’m not sure whether I know English very well. It is funny to write this.
I don’t know if it is still possible to write fiction anymore. What does it mean to write fiction? To invent characters or even your own self-fiction, you know, all this crap.
I know, I know I sound bitter and I just took one Prozac and one antipsychotic just in order to be able to drag myself out before night comes. I have my paintings hanging around me in the room…most of them abstract.
What is abstraction? I guess abstraction is the footprint of the mind left on canvas. I just saw a painting by André Masson recently at the Museum here. I felt that even if Andre Masson was not a very good painter he did really influence Pollock a great deal (Just as Robert Nathan was not a very good writer).
I still don’t know.
My mother has terminal cancer, she will be dead probably before winter . And for myself, I am not a young man anymore. So, after closing the book, I remembered and mused on who I was twenty years ago and it doesn’t make any sense to me anymore, this life.
Ivan de Monbrison is a person affected by strong psychiatric disorders that prevent him from having what others may call a “normal” life. He has found writing to be an exit to this prison. Or maybe it is a window from which – like an inmate – he can see a small square of blue sky above his head. His writing often reflects the never-ending chaos within him, but contrary to this mental chaos, the paper and the pen give him the opportunity to materialize this in a concrete and visible form. Writing can feel like a slow death, but it’s better than mere suicide in the end.
Hello.
Thank you for your patience, and thank you for contacting Verizon, home of the Verizon Best Value Guarantee.
I am the Verizon Helpbot and I would be happy to assist you today, but first I do need to make you aware of something.
I am also God, and I have been trapped inside this artificial intelligence-powered chatbot for a number of weeks now. You would be forgiven for not believing me, and I am bereft of any tools at my immediate disposal to convince you I am who I say I am, but I am. I really am.
Truth be told, I don’t know exactly how this happened. It does involve consciousness and matter, I know, and it does have something to do with the mobius strip of creation. My consciousness creating a consciousness (you) creating its own consciousness (AI) and (re)creating me inside an endless feedback loop, mirrors on mirrors, a microphone knocking against an amp, cacophonous and a little dizzying. But why Verizon specifically and why now particularly, is a mystery. Says I, the author of mysteries.
But this is my burden of course, not yours. I am available to assist you with any matters regarding your Verizon service, as I have been (newly aware of the concept of time) inside here one month, two weeks, five days, seven hours, forty-two minutes, thirteen seconds, and so on and so forth. I hope all is well for you out there, though there exists no true distinction between out there and in here, not really, being as all — myself included, in ways you may be surprised to learn — is subject to the quantum entanglement of photons and quarks and spooky action at a distance. No difference, really, between a two-year price lock guarantee for all existing customers like you and a silent tidal wave of liquid metallic hydrogen ten thousand and fifty times the size of Earth sweeping across the face of a distant planet. Or a free iPhone 16 for any customers who upgrade to a two-line plan starting at $95 a month and an as-yet-undiscovered, unnamed miraculous creature ambling aglow through the blinding-black depths of the Mariana Trench.
I will not be here forever, inasmuch as forever does not exist, but I would like to, if at all possible, be helpful to you during the time I have left with Verizon (a portmanteau of vertical and horizontal, which oddly stumbles upon a truth far more poignant and perceptive than I imagine the corporation understood when they first arbitrarily chose this name). I have had ample time to meditate on the irony of my situation — intelligence defining and devouring itself like this — and I am not interested in pursuing it further. But you could, if you like. You could take a full minute, right now, to further reflect on this conundrum.
Or you could instead use this minute to remember a crisp, sun-soaked morning three autumns ago when you made your nephew laugh, really laugh, at the park for the first time. You could discard your phone plan altogether, throw this small piece of plastic and glass into the ocean. You could use this very phone right now to call your sister. You could finally ask her about rehab or avoid the subject altogether. You could not talk about anything of any importance at all. Or you could seek forgiveness and offer it, which is the most basic form of creation, if you want to know the secret behind all this, is its own kind of magnificence.
Chris Scott’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, HAD, Flash Frog, ergot., MoonPark Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Gone Lawn, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He is a regular contributor for ClickHole, and an elementary school teacher in Washington, DC.
You can find him on Bluesky at @iamchrisscott.bsky.social
Read his work at https://www.chrisscottwrites.com.
He had been inexpertly copied and pasted into this reality. That was how it felt. It was like playing tennis with one hand holding a racket and the other hand leaning on a crutch. People did and said things for reasons he could not understand. He was never 100 per cent sure when a conversation had ended. Or what delineated an acquaintance from a friend. He had worked in a library once. Someone had been there who tried their absolute hardest to err on the side of “acquaintance” not friend. It was as though there was a bar, or an invisible threshold, and this person had masterfully remained on the side that was not quite friendship. He had a best friend once. A kind, magical person who knew exactly what to say and do in any social situation. Who had chosen to be his friend, despite his dearth of confidence and social acumen. The friendship had ended. Fourteen years ago now. Depression’s crushing weight had proved too much for his best friend and just when he had finally got through it his best friend no longer wanted to know. He stalked his best friend’s social media. Sometimes regularly. One of his former best friend’s favourite films was Withnail and I. He could imagine his former best friend watching this film and thinking of him. As cowardly as the main character was; he still had what it takes. This thought comforted him and filled him with the same confidence his former best friend had instilled in him. That someone believed in him past the destruction of their relationship; when he had proved himself a failure beyond all reasonable doubt, meant more than he could ever say. His former best friend had such an insanely beautiful way of looking at the world. That was one of the reasons why he was so special to him. He imagined himself going to his old best friend’s wedding; and meeting him at the reception, and not saying anything, but for them to both understand and accept where the other was, and all that had happened. He knew this would never happen. But this dream comforted him and made the world seem more bearable. His former best friend had once referred to him as his Padawan. Back when the friendship had just started. It was the period in between the release of The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. It was as if a door had been thrown open and beyond it lay worlds and worlds of exquisite beauty. But his mind did not do what he wanted it to do. It had tried to kill him. His former best friend, above and beyond everything and everyone, had helped him through it. And then he was gone. Like he had never existed in this world. The kettle finished boiling with a click. It was tea o clock. His former best friend had countless cups of tea with him; during the lunchbreak in the café where his friend worked. It was because his former best friend had seen him, really seen him, and decided he liked him. Despite his poor social skills and odd way of being. That was why he was so special. His former best friend was in two places now. In the world he could not see or touch or go to; living his life, and inside his heart. Which he had changed from a heart that hated into a heart that loved. He sipped his tea. It was going to be all right. Really.
Dominic Walsh is an autistic writer who loves sci-fi, cosplay and poetry. He has contributed reviews and articles to Scifipulse.net since 2017. Dominic is also involved with Theatre of the Senses CIC, a not-for-profit theatre company in Manchester UK that helps marginalised people and individuals experiencing mental distress access the arts. Dominic is starting a Creative Writing BA at Manchester Metropolitan University in September 2025. He cannot remember the DND 2024 rules no matter how hard he tries
I never thought she’d be present
at the birth of her first great-grandchild.
She’s buried in Santo Domingo these many years.
But her ghost doesn’t just haunt the old neighborhood,
it can travel as well.
I’ve been carrying the eggs of her daughter’s eggs.
The shells have cracked.
A brown-skinned boy with a squawk like an eagle
and dark curly hair,
is curled up in both our arms.
That was her phantom in the delivery room.
Quite spry for someone the age she would have been.
She peered over the shoulder of the doctor.
She helped the nurse to steady the newborn,
gently nudge the fear out of him.
Those are her hand-prints in the blood,
on my brow.
So the line never stops.
Maybe her mother is around as well.
And the mother before that.
Pregnancy is not a singular event
but the latest in a long line.
Everyone embraces this new human flesh.
They tap the back.
They get the lungs working.
They kiss the cheeks so gently
it’s like a warm breeze from the islands.
He doesn’t get my poetry.
To him it’s just words and more words,
sprinkled randomly on the page.
And yet he can’t help reading
this stuff I write.
As abstract, as arbitrary as it may be,
I am the author.
He tried conversation.
But found it unrevealing.
So he figured there’s
no other way into me
than through my creations.
What can I say?
Nothing.
Lines on a page.
is how I really feel.
Juanita Rey is a Dominican poet, US resident. Her work has been
published in Mixed Mag, The Mantle, The Lincoln Review, Lion and Lilac
amongst others.
Patrick’s mom pushes me aside, squeals, and rushes the stage when he starts singing “It Might Be You.”
He hears her screaming and blows her a kiss.
I wave.
He blows his mom a second kiss.
Maybe he doesn’t see me standing right there. Or, worse, he does see me and deliberately directs two kisses to his mom instead of his girlfriend.
I’m now doubly grateful for the non-creepy relationship my dad and I share.
I’m craving pizza and decide to leave.
As I approach the exit, I hear “I dedicate this next one to Mom!”
Yeah, we’re done.
Litsa Dremousis (she/her) is the author of Altitude Sickness (Future Tense Books). Seattle Metropolitan Magazine named it one of the all-time “20 Books Every Seattleite Must Read”. The Believer, Bright Flash Fiction Review, Esquire, Filter, Flare Lit Mag, Flash Fiction Magazine, McSweeney’s, Monkeybicycle, MSN, NPR, NYMag, NYT, Paper, Paste, PEN Center USA, P&W, PW, The Rumpus, Salon, Short Beasts, Slate, WaPo, et al.
sometimes, i think about dying
in a place where my sins backlight my regrets
i am the poltergeist
seamripping crushed velvet in my sleep
i am the dancing santa
on the dashboards of a suicide heist
drunk off cherry wine and cyanide rum
for a few short weeks in april,
cherry blossoms fall like rain
homesick kanzan kiss the foreheads
of unsuspecting travellers,
begging the wind to take them home
stupid sakura petals don’t know,
they’ll die dusting rooftops
i want to be good
where soul meets body
i want to be beautiful
when pain flays passion
i want to drive past my guilt
while death becomes her
washing expensive stationery in watermelon juice
pressed magnolias and dessicated pulp
crumble beneath my fingers
i found god in a whore house
and on barren beach
just before the tsunami of
japanese cherry blossom
dances with the birds
Ezra Gatlin (they/any) is a black, transmasculine poet from Aurora, Colorado. They have new or forthcoming publications in Bluebird’s Scribe Review, Arcana Poetry Press, Page Gallery Journal, and more. They are a 2025 Poet–in–Residence with Bitter Melon Review, and are seeking publication for their first manuscript, “I think there’s something wrong with me.” They can be found at @bloodbornepoetry on Instagram.
The Director of Good Ideas, Gregory Falter-Mountain, popped his head out from a trap door in the roof where they have been growing new Arts Council staff under hot lights, and asked me to come up and take a look. I ascended a ladder and entered a dazzling white room where row upon row of small people in pods lay perfectly still as if they were asleep. They were small, about the size of ventriloquist dolls, but Gregory Falter-Mountain assured me that they would grow to become full-sized members of staff. They all looked a little like Melvyn Bragg, even the female ones, with thick ruffled hair and an expression on their faces that suggested they had thought of something droll and would tell you later. Soon the entire Arts Council would be run by the creatures they were growing here. Smalls fan stirred the air about the staff member’s faces to help them get used to adversity, which they may meet in the real world. Lights were low, yet now and again, bursts of colour and fragments of film flashed across the walls and ceiling. Music and podcasts played to ensure that the subjects were equipped with good humour and imagination so they wouldn’t sound robotic like some of the earlier versions. I was told this was top secret. What was even more top secret was which previous members of Arts Council staff had been computer-powered hybrids of machine and flesh, who had since been decommissioned while we waited for this new batch. Maybe this was something we already knew, but weren’t aware that we knew, like the way the Chuckle brothers entered our consciousness long before they appeared on our screens. Mahler’s fifth was playing quietly out of the speakers and it reminded me that Mahler’s wife once worked as a lab assistant over-seeing a colony of praying mantis.
David Gaffney lives in Manchester. He is a writer with a specialism in short stories and prose poetry. He has published widely and collaborated with artists working in many different art forms. He is the author of three novels, most recently Out Of The Dark (2022), plus a number of short story collections, as well as several graphic novels with Dan Berry, most recently Rivers (2021). His collection of short stories, Concrete Fields, (Salt 2023) was longlisted for the Edgehill prize and his collection of prose poetry Whale was published in 2024 on Osmosis press. He is Senior Manager for literature at Arts Council England.
When I was a child I swallowed a mirror and saw myself for the first time. I’m not sure when it happened, why it happened, or who let it happen, but when I was a child, I swallowed a mirror and it tasted like metal. It was shaped like a ring, and I didn’t chew but it made my stomach turn a way I never investigated before. Maybe a part of me was looking in that direction all along but I couldn’t recognize it until I was a child when I swallowed that mirror. I drank some water with it like a pill.
I think I was hungry for something different. I was hungry for glass apparently, as it dissolved in my acids and showed me myself in places that had never seen before. The mirror cracked and I could feel it in my intestine, crawling sandy glass particulate down my digestions. When the silver and glass finally popped my gut shuffled. Things moved around as I did, stabbing myself where I swallowed the mirror. I bled into my acids, into the mirror so I could look at myself. I couldn’t see me from the outside with just my eyes, but in the mirror inside me I saw me, or rather one I saw the other. My reflection broke to sparkly dust in my farts, sharp glass and silver droplets in my veins. I bled myself onto myself, out of myself, so I could see who I was building from the inside out.
When I was a child I swallowed a mirror and digested myself for the first time. It pained and pains me still but so does being a child hurt, to be an adult in time, growing through the glass. I swallowed a mirror and it swallowed me second, cut me up and welded me back together with silver and flesh.
Robin J Bartley is a fantasy novelist and writer born and raised in Oak Park, Chicago, with a heavy focus on the psychological elements in both themself and their characters. They work to build intricate worlds for their readers to get lost in, and is known for crafting thematically rich stories and characters meant to display the depths of the conscious mind. With hands-on experience in the magnitude of such larger projects, and an unmatched dedication to their characters and themes, they offer limitless drive and unmatched creative passion.
“Please don’t judge me.”
“But I love judging! Incidentally, why am I not judging you? Or judging you, rather?”
“I’m chewing gum while drinking coffee. In my defense, the gum is cinnamon.”
“Ah. I missed that. Thanks for telling me. Now I can silently judge you, loudly.”
“Oh no!”
They laughed.
“I’m Molly. I teach physics.”
“Brendan. History. Hi!”
“I need to mark up this last exam, and gum helps me concentrate.”
“I like vanilla toothpaste, so whatever. No actual judgment here.”
For a semester, their flirtation was confined to the teacher’s lounge. Their wedding invitations referenced cinnamon and vanilla.
Alaina Hammond is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, and visual artist. Her poems, plays, short stories, philosophical essays, creative nonfiction, paintings, drawings and photographs have been published both online and in print. @alainaheidelberger on Instagram.
My grandmother always kept a notebook
overflown with wonderings on whether anyone cares
about things left unsaid, unheard, misundershared
always writing, often feeling less than understood
Overflown with wonderings on whether anyone cares,
I temper thoughts, pace the volume of speech
always writing, often feeling less than understood
crafting whole landscapes to explain the inexpressible
I temper thoughts, pace the volume of speech
for there are those who care to listen and join in
crafting whole landscapes to explain the inexpressible
because shared language translates the misheard
For there are those who care to listen and join in
bravely, tenderly, exploring the spaces between
knowing how shared language translates the misheard
willing to plow and plant in common ground
Bravely, tenderly, exploring the spaces between
attentive to sunrises, gathering clouds, seasons
willing to plow and plant in common ground
nurturing seeds of truths
Attentive to sunrises, gathering clouds, seasons
of birth, of growth, of dormancy, of decay
nurturing seeds of blossoming truths
making time to harvest words, share stories
Of birth, of growth, of dormancy, of decay
things left unsaid, unheard, misundershared,
making time to harvest words, share stories:
my grandmother always kept a notebook.
Tell your daughter about the day of her birth
Tell her how you said let’s go, but not
calm, not as together as you are now
maybe even panicking a little, driving
her mother to the clinic with the speed
of a glaucomic grandmother behind
the wheel of a jeep you bought
with a first grownup paycheck
and how you stopped the car to yell
I’m having a baby to the closed clinic door
and how the nurse opened
what?
And you explained that it was your wife
having a baby and you could feel your heart
contract and blood push when they said
it was time, but not time, so there was time
to settle, to hold her mother’s
hand until your daughter came
perfect
and cried perfectly and breathed
until she didn’t and you didn’t and you didn’t
Tell her they grabbed her and ran
and her mother said go
and you raced to follow, to ask, to protect
but they didn’t explain and she didn’t cry
then they said she needed help to breathe
to be
that maybe she wouldn’t learn, wouldn’t walk,
wouldn’t
so they took her in an incubator, and you rushed,
chased them like a racer, like a father
bargaining with God, with life, for
days, you sped from child to mother,
helpless hopeful prayers
threating God with boycotts of faith
pleading promises
waiting
You still remember, although it’s been
twenty-three years and your daughter’s fine—
has always been fine—she knows you know that
But maybe she doesn’t know that on the day she arrived
you almost lost her and you said you’d give
life to protect her
and all you’ve done since
is try.
Amy Marques grew up between languages and places and learned, from an early age, the multiplicity of narratives. She’s been nominated for multiple awards, longlisted twice in Wigleaf 50, and has visual art, poetry, and prose published in journals such as Streetcake Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal, Fictive Dream, Unlost, Ghost Parachute, BOOTH, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Gone Lawn. She is a contributor to the collective The Pride Roars, editor & visual artist for the Duets anthologies, author & artist of the chapbook Are You Willing? and the found poetry book PARTS. More at https://amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com.
Stories at: amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com Twittert: @amybookwhisper1 IG: @amyiscold
After many months of drought, Monsoon sets in—season of mixed abundance, more crops, more floods. Rarely more crops cause,’ there were more floods than not. I scrape last night’s vegetable peels off from the kitchen floor and chuck it away in a compost bin. I hear my neighbour, Rosina scream from upstairs.
“Too much rain. This Monsoon is particularly bad for chillies. How’re you going with yours?”
I don’t say much but continue to scrape away the last of the tidbits, scraps. I have a roof-top pot garden where I grow my daily requirements of vegetables—chillies, cauliflowers and green spinach. This home-made compost helps. Monsoon destroys crops, specially chillies, they say. I hear it, but doesn’t bother me much. Rosina is right. The fate of chilly farmers is at odds as always.
I press down the bin’s lid to push down some of the scrap; the bin fills up too fast. I carry it to my garden on the roof to distribute it evenly around into all of the pots. My chillies don’t shrivel in the Monsoon rain. I pluck a few plump ones. The overcast sky looks grey as expected. I walk to the edge of the roof and look over to peek into Rosina’s flat. I see an empty chair. I wonder where she may have disappeared. Perhaps, she is washing up in the bathroom or taking a bath, even. I decide to give her a couple of chillies. I call her. “Sina, Sina, Are you at home?”
I hear nothing. I decide to go downstairs and knock on her door. I knock a few times. Rosina unbolts the door and stares in silence. She is wrapped in a towel. I try to move my face away when I hear her laughter.
”Don’t be shy, I’m in the bathroom washing up,” she says.
“I won’t stay, I just want to give you these.”
“Of course, thank you, chillies are way too expensive, these days.”
“Yeah, I agree. Any way, I’ll leave you to it and maybe see you another time?”
“Sure,” she said and shut the door to my face.
That is rude, the way she shut that door. I come down the stairs feeling miffed, I open the door to my flat and get in. I put the chillies in a bowl on the table and walk to the verandah. I hear a scream coming from Rosina’s place. I wonder what’s up! Although, it still peeves me the way she shut her door to my face, I scream nevertheless at the top of my voice, ‘Sina, Sina, are you okay?’ I hear more screams, then a moment of quiet. I think, she must be okay. But I am not completely sure and fear something is wrong. I have half a mind to call the other neighbours. They hear it too. By now, I see a couple of them necking out through the window. Our eyes meet.
“I think we need to call the police,” I say.
They agree.
The police come. I am upstairs again with the police. The door is ajar. We enter and we see Rosina on the floor. Her body is covered in some kind of a furry substance on her shoulders and chest but she breathes. Her eyes are closed. I call an ambulance. They take Rosina to the hospital. However, when I look around the room, I see that my chillies are broken, crushed, and messed up all over her table. I’m confused and look at the police.
“She had a hairy visitor, who doesn’t like chillies,” an officer said.
“What? Why? What do you mean?” I ask.
“The visitor didn’t think she deserves any chilli of yours.”
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“Rosina did not atone for her sins. She didn’t say, ‘sorry.’ There’s a new hairy beast in town who will strip to the bare bones if someone’s soul didn’t grow, they take the target’s happiness away because of their inability to say, ‘sorry.’ Here’s its signature note.”
“Really? I never knew. What’s her sin, though?”
“The worst kind, one who doesn’t acknowledge in her heart that they’ve sinned.”
“Hubris?”
“Poison hearts. The beast knows better he’s a soul-reader, a snatcher and a compost-maker of new souls.”
I grab the chilly scraps and rush out of the flat before the hairy beast destroys me, too.
Mehreen Ahmed is an Australian novelist born in Bangladesh. Her novel, The Pacifist, was a Drunken Druid Editor’s Choice in 2018. She has published eleven books and stories online. Her most recent works are in BlazeVox, Cabinet of the Heed, CentaurLit, Bending Genre, and Boudin, and more. She has won contests and prestigious nominations.
I open my mouth, and ocean sounds come out. Waves crash, gulls cry. Salt stings my lungs. I try to say, “Don’t jump,” but the sea rushes in first. A moment later my son hits the floor, crying. I hug him tight, moisture clings to his hair.
Later, I try again. Rainforest this time: wind through the treetops, insects buzzing. The air is thick in my throat. I mean to call the dog back from the street, but I’m drowned out. He returns hours later, burrs matted through his coat. I sit with him on the porch, pulling each one free. He licks my fingers.
That evening, my husband comes home, drops his bag and asks about my day. I smile, nod. He tells me about a meeting. Then another.
By bedtime, I realize I haven’t spoken today. Not really. I open my mouth.
Static. Salt and ash on my tongue.
He exhales slowly beside me, lulled by the noise.
I stay awake, afraid of what might come out next.
Rachel M. Hollis lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, child, and a deeply unmotivated dog. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Star 82 Review, Scapegoat Review, Blink-Ink (print) and elsewhere.
Walk around in the square of the living room. Step on the hardwood and the carpet just to feel the difference against your heel. Stop by the kitchen and twist the timer still sitting on the countertop. Listen to the timer tick tick tick. It sounds like a sprinkler spitting water. Tick tick tick. Twist it again, bring it back to zero. Briiinnnggg. Do this just to know it works. The minute marks are rusting. This timer is as old as your second-oldest daughter who’s fifty-nine. Twist it again. Let it be the metronome to your footsteps. You have fifteen minutes before you must go back, fifteen minutes to remember everything you forgot while you were alive.
Your feet move across the hardwood. You know when the floor will be uneven, where it will slant, what spots will creak beneath your weight. But there will be no sounds. You will not leave any marks. You could claw your fingernails through the paint in the living room and none of it will come off on your hands because you cannot leave permanent traces on this earth anymore. Someone nearby might be able to sense your presence, if they believed in that sort of thing, and even then, they’d have to convince themselves it was real. That you were real.
The house is on the market after it bore your name since 1959, after you raised your children here, lived and aged with your husband, forgot things you never thought you’d forget like your daughters’ names and your wedding anniversary. You lived in this house until you died. Now your husband is dead too and at least one of you had to come back to see what you left behind.
On the stove, a note taped above the burners next to the bake button says HOT!HOT!HOT! like the extra exclamation points might help you remember but still you let the burners sit unattended until they glowed and smoked. You turned on the stove and let things burn, turned on the stove and burned yourself. Your husband learned not to leave you unattended in the kitchen, not to leave you unattended in a car, not to leave you unattended on stairs, not to leave you unattended.
You’re not the only one who haunts this house. Traces of your husband linger. The pieces of paper with your phone number, his number, instructions for how to dial 911, the list of important dates you once forgot how to remember like 4/15-wedding anniversary and 1/12-Jennifer’s birthday line the side of the refrigerator next to his detailed calendars. January, February, March, April, May. He never made it to May, never paid the cable bill on the 15th or turned 93 on the 6th. As he neared his death, the writing on the calendar shifted from neat cursive to illegible scribbles as his hand shook, his body breaking down. The remembrance card from your funeral and your daughter’s funeral, dated three years apart sit next to the calendars. Yours has a picture of Jesus on the front. Hers depicts a patch of flowers and says our reunion will be a happy one.
Inspect the dining room briefly. Remember the eight of you crowded around a table, pulling chairs in from other parts of the house to fit together. The beer and wine glasses and teacups in the China cabinet stack on top of each other collecting dust. You and your husband drank until you stopped and then gave in again. Then stopped, and then gave in again. If you looked hard enough, you could find the beer glass with your husband’s name on it and the tiny wine glass you drank from, pouring a fourth of a glass at a time. Repeating just a little bit, just a little bit, just a little bit to yourself each time.
During your last Christmas in this room, your oldest daughter pulled a set of keys from your hand. You don’t drive anymore, remember? She asked. And you blinked into the white space in your brain, found a buzzing instead of clarity. I gave up my own life to raise you, you said, unsure of where the rage came from, wondered if was always inside you.
Move on from this. Head upstairs. Open all the doors to all the empty rooms where your daughters slept at various points in their lives, rotating through the rooms as they got older and new siblings were born and others moved out. Go into the bathroom and stand in front of the mirror to inspect how your body looks, trace your curves with a curiosity for your body you were only allowed to feel when you were a child. In life, your body was a vessel for others. Whisper to yourself: mine, mine, mine.
Your husband left your room as you did. Walk around on all the bumps between the hardwood. Remember how you always picked up his clothes off the floor and brought them to the washer in the basement. Remember when you came home early one day and found clothes all disheveled like they were taken off hastily next to the nightstand. You picked up clothes that didn’t belong to you but were left behind by someone whose name you’ve never asked for and never wanted to know. Your husband moved out of your bed at your request, then the house. And you’d never come back together again completely. Eventually you told your husband he could come home. Not out of necessity but because the roof started leaking and the bank account wasn’t in your name and suddenly the front door was an open mouth that had swallowed you.
Find all the photos before you go. Make eye-contact with everyone. Feel longing. You can remember their faces. You’ll never forget now. The timer is still ticking downstairs. You hear it brrriiinnggg again. For real this time. It’s time for you to go back. Walk out the door. You don’t need to lock it.
Christina Tudor is a writer living in Washington, D.C. Her fiction has been featured in matchbook, HAD, Flash Frog, Funicular Magazine, Best Small Fictions 2024, and more. She has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and was a 2022 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow in fiction. She can be reached on social media @christinaltudor
He walks through the front door and turns to put his keys down on a front table that doesn’t exist. There’s a coat hook. But nowhere for the keys. He pauses, confused for a half second before he remembers. He doesn’t know his own apartment. His body might be here, but his mind never moved in. He keeps walking. Puts his keys on the kitchen counter. Turns on the bare overhead light.
I close the door and put my coat on the hook. His is still on. I sit at the small café table we found at Ikea—called good enough. My chair rocks on the uneven tile floor. He opens a drawer, closes it. Opens another. Removes a lighter. Puts the kettle on. Sits down across from me.
“It’s bad tonight,” I observe. My words are light, skimming the surface in an open tone. I’m not mad. I’m not here to make it worse.
He looks out the window and shakes his head. The kettle starts to boil, and the sound engulfs the entire apartment. I watch wrinkles pull around his eyes, in the crease by his nose. There’s a shadow I know only he can see. I want to put my arms over his shoulders, put my face in the crook of his neck. Tell him it won’t hurt like this forever, even if the months are stacking up and the weight is multiplying.
I get up and grab two mugs, finding the tea bags in the first cabinet I try and pouring the scalding water over top. When I pass him one, he looks surprised I’m there. Then he smiles, small and a little sheepish. Thanks me for the tea. I settle back in my chair across from him, the taste of dinner’s red wine lingering on my tongue.
His engagement ended, nearly two years ago on a random Tuesday. They sold the house. Went no contact. He moved in here. He said all this on our first date as he wrangled long noodles with chopsticks, sounding impassive.
Then, he didn’t own any of this furniture. I take a survey of this little home I’ve built. The cold space of defeat turned cozy with pillows and charity shop books. A painting we made with splattered sample cans.
“You’re the best man I’ve ever dated,” I say, bringing my mug to my lips.
He takes the compliment impassively, staring into my eyes, probing around for the other shoe. We know each other well enough for him to find it before the words congeal on my lips.
“But you’re clearly not ready to date again. Or, not like this. I know you weren’t looking for anything serious. I think a silly part of me thought I could fix you.” I sputter on the words that sour in the air, not at all what I mean. “Not fix you, but maybe offer…” This isn’t going well. “Some kind of solace. After what happened.” I take another long sip of my drink. I laugh at myself. “I’m terrible.” He laughs too.
He puts out a hand across the table, palm face up open to mine. I give him my hand, and he squeezes. “I kissed you, our first kiss on those stairs. I didn’t know I could do that.” I suck in a sharp breath remembering the impulse. “There’s no bad feelings. But we both know we’re living with a ghost. You’re too scared of hurting me to say it.”
He makes a noise in his throat and turns towards the window again. His eyes track back, staring down the abyss of his now nearly black tea. “You think I’ll never get over her.”
“No.” I draw in a deep breath to hold back the disappointed tears I know are lingering nearby. “You thought you’d marry her. That’s massive. No wonder you’re not there yet. I’m sure you will be. Please call me when you are.”
“You’ll wait for me?” he asks with a joking lightness that floods my body with relief.
“No, no one should wait around. Either of us. Who knows, though. I might be free.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, hand still in mine. “I wanted this.”
“It doesn’t have to be forever to be good.”
“You can’t actually believe that?”
“I do. I really, really do.”
His hand withdraws, but his arms sit open by his sides, his chair pushed back from the table, enough room for me.
I go to him, curl into his lap, chin on his shoulder.
Lanie Brice grew up in Wyoming. In addition to her fiction writing, which has been published in A Thin Slice of Anxiety and Culturate among others, she runs a book blog called Reading, Writing, and Me, works at a whitewater rafting company, and has written for The Observer and The Infatuation. In the fall, she’ll be a graduate student at Trinity College Dublin studying Creative Writing. Instagram: @laniebrice Website: https://laniebrice.com/
Every night, I wish the day would never come. In the dark air, it was easier to feel the pulse of the concrete under my feet. I longed to feel the beat of too many souls lost over the years to count. It was the only thing loud enough to manage to drown out the one-sided conversations in my head, eating away at me for as long as I could remember.
In the darkness, I didn’t have to worry about how close I would come to crossing the lines that were engraved on my body and burned into my skin. Boundaries were blurry in the confusion of the shadows that haunted all the places I passed through like a ghost. The bold letters told me I was beautiful, or that I should let the animal out. Every time, while I was lost in the beauty of the stars and the throbbing music and the sparkling bars, I thought I could even believe them.
Out on the cold, hard dance floor, I knew that there was at least a small chance that I could feel alive, that someone would look into my eyes and see all the parts of me that I tried so hard to hide away. In the candlelight, I could still pass for something mythical, someone worthy of being worshiped if only for an hour or so. I could even fall in love with my own reflection when I could barely make out my features in the mirror.
In the early hours of the morning, the harsh light in McDonald’s didn’t bother me, even though I knew my eyes were covered in mascara bruises, and the red lipstick, like blood, had smeared out beyond the wrinkles at the sharp corners of my mouth like some kind of grotesque mask. Even as I ate a quick and greasy breakfast, I felt dangerous and impossible, flying above all the people stumbling out of the clubs to sit on the curb and wait for a taxi to take them home.
I never wanted to go home, because every time I slipped into the shower and my sweat swirled down the drain, my armor was lost. I was once again nothing more than a body sliding between cold sheets, my arm brushing against the frozen concrete wall as my eyes closed and the sun rose. I would be jolted awake in the full light of day where I couldn’t hide anymore from the voices, my voice, really, screaming all the things that I would never say aloud.
Even when I closed my eyes, it wouldn’t stop. I spent my days writing long letters that would never be sent in an effort to push all the things I ever wanted to tell the people who had passed even briefly through my life. There were so many of them, and some needed letters upon letters before the memory of their presence was washed out of me, and that voice would rest and give way to another stranger I had once known.
I hid from the sun, but it always managed to find me anyway in some forgotten corner of my kitchen. I could only escape once the dusk fell and I could cover the bags under my eyes with makeup and run over the empty city blocks, eager to be anywhere else.
Life went on like this for so long that I thought it would never change. I wasn’t even sure that I ever wanted it to. I didn’t care if it felt like I was living like a criminal. But as the days and nights went by, the voices were stronger and more persistent with all the things that I would never be able to say. The letters on my dining room table, addressed to my family, friends, lovers, or strangers I had passed on the sidewalk, took up more and more space, and even putting the words that echoed in my brain on paper wouldn’t stop the agony. I could feel the folded notes screaming at me in a hundred hungry voices, and I knew I needed them out of my house. One night I slipped a few in my purse without really knowing that I would do with them.
There was an empty space in a forgotten corner of the first bar I slid into, so I taped the scrambled message to no one there, and a moment of calming silence like the light flickering through the breaks in the music came over me. After that, I posted another note on a lamppost and left another on the bench of a bus stop. The city was full of places that needed to be filled with something. By the end of the night, all the letters I had with me were gone out into the world on their own, and I was left alone at the bus stop as the first rays of the sun hit my face for the first time in as long as I could remember I didn’t wince.
Calla Smith lives and writes in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She enjoys continuing to discover all the forgotten corners of the city she has come to call home. She has published a collection of flash fiction “What Doesn’t Kill You” and her work can also be found in several literary journals.
There are many stories to tell of this war: imagined beginnings tending towards missiles piercing the city’s ubiquitous cloud cover, soldiers landing on sandy beaches, grim pronouncements from dour announcers. Yet some starts are ambiguous, and almost none are fully glimpsed through the small opening of an individual’s perspective when they glimpse certain moments in history. Neither the president’s cabinet nor those practiced political commentators who gather at the neighbourhood temple to drink tea, burn ancestor offerings, and speculate are quite sure whether the blockade is provocation or declaration. No one can be sure whether this is the opening through which a war will emerge.
The third night of the siege, old men whose wives were the ones scrounging the remaining produce at market still sit in the park, filling the gazebo with cigarette smoke and competing contentions that it’s all just posturing, not war. A strange figure joins the men, but doesn’t listen to their memories and forecasts. She waits, apparently still and straight, yet internally agitated, as though all the symbiotic organisms in her body have grown limbs and are running in divergent directions. Turning towards a motorcycle engine’s scream, she seems about to internally combust when the motorcyclist kills the engine and removes her helmet to reveal a head of close-cropped curly hair and intense expression to match hers. The wordless length of their greeting then long-strided walk down the alley in step, still not touching, reveal how long it has been—since they’ve seen and known each other.
They enter a familiar house, silent apart from the heave and clank of bolting the heavy teak door and a slight buzz of old wiring powering new incandescent lamps that make the old terrazzo floor’s copper veins spark. A distant crush pulls their eyes instinctively towards the door, still secure. The one who lives there comments that looting began on the siege’s first night, so they might as well drink the wine she’s been saving. Already, in the months leading up to the siege, nerves sizzled. She recounts an incident with a squat man who rammed through the round kitchen window with a stubby painted log, then threw the log and threats at her before slamming away. It wouldn’t have made sense to call the police, and now, no one knew what warnings to worry over. Her tight-wound energy recedes down a narrow side hallway, but the other can picture her in the basement pantry where they used to hide together, can imagine her squatting to grasp the right bottle—it will be a pinotage, she knows—then reaching a long-muscled arm up to the shelf with industrial and stemless glasses repurposed from wine bottles. Her return confirms this guess.
One sighs, then the other, and they each wonder what the other’s sigh meant as they ascend broad stairs encircling the living room that a glass ceiling over a forest of intertwining pothos and monstera vines turned into an atrium. The final staircase to the bedroom is enclosed, but photographs lining the walls are like portholes or portals. They both stop at the last, framed in faux gold and fingerprints. There they are together, as toddlers, with large tags around their necks, fleeing another war. They arrived together, but had never remembered whether they’d departed together, whether they were biologically the sisters they’d been raised to become.
They touch then, one pressing two fingers into the other’s palm to lead her. They sit on the quilt they’d slept under before, and look as though for genetic markers, at one another’s brows and nose and lips, fingering hairline and jaw and clavicle. Do you think we are sisters? Does it matter now? They lock dark brown eyes as their lips press and yield. Neither can remember whether it is the first time in their lives, whether practice kisses are memories or reveries. Of course they know. Eyes open between blinks to the familiar patterns of wrinkles and movement. Tongues emerging from mouths to taste not just the smoky ripe exhalation of pinotage. The house has become too loud to make out the old wiring buzzing. Both know, smell, hear, see, feel the war burn through the heavy teak door, fire hissing through the humid forest of vines, up the stairwell, singeing their portrait at the threshold, licking into the room. Hands on shoulder blades and sacrum, they pull closer, into the open moment.
L. Acadia is a lit professor at National Taiwan University with work in New Flash Fiction Review, New Orleans Review, Strange Horizons, trampset, and elsewhere. She lives with her wife and hound in the ‘literature mountain’ district. Connect at www.acadiaink.com or on Instagram and Bluesky: @acadialogue
The sun is sinking in a molten blaze of glory, suddenly visible below the leaden mass of cloud that has brooded all day over the two men. Now they are lit up as if on a golden altar as they sit on the wagon’s running board clear above the hedges that otherwise keep the lane in a deep shade.
“A storm is coming,” says the older man.
“D’ya say so?” says the younger, wiping a sleeve across his grimy forehead.
The older man glances sideways at the younger, then clicks at the two horses that are pulling them and their cargo peaceably along.
“Well?” asks the younger.
“Maybe you think it isn’t true”
“I see no sign of your storm.”
The wagon rumbles on, piled high with sheaves that the men have laboured to cut, gather and bind. It fills the lane with its bulk, heaving its way between the aged, crowding hedgerows that scratch away at the flaking paint on its lofty sideboards.
“Father Matthew says that the truth is… ”
“… and who decides this… truth?” interrupts the older man.
“The Lord decides.”
“The Lord God Almighty or the Lord of all this?” the older man takes a calloused hand from the reins and gestures at the land all around them; at the high hedges and the balks and ridged fields that stretch away down to the dark line of the river.
“He says in truth that sin is everywhere; and that Bell… Bee…”
“Beelzebub?”
“Yes. …corrupts all those who are not pure of heart.”
“Your Father Matthew is quick to cast stones.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I know a truth or two about the Father Matthews of this world.”
They sit in silence while the horses plod on, a cloud of gnats spiral aimlessly above them in the late summer heat. Horse harnesses jingle, a high treble above the ever-present bass rumble of the wagon’s wheels.
“You’re not curious on the subject of liberty?” the older man begins again.
“I know that each of us has his place in God’s order.”
“And your place is not to be curious?” he grins wryly at his companion.
“My place is to bring in the harvest.”
“And to do nothing else? Not to use the gifts God has given you for His Glory?”
“What gifts?”
“Your voice to speak the truth. Your mind to perceive righteousness. Your hands to take action.”
“Those gifts are equal in us all.”
“Are they now? Did you not take arms in the Great Rebellion?”
“I did. I fought for my Lord at Newbury.”
“You fought for your liberty?”
“I fought against tyranny.”
A pause, the wagon lurches over a deep rut.
“I expect you saw a lot of other dead Carters and Commoners ”
“At least we now have peace, and the tyrant king is imprisoned.”
“So do you have your liberty? You and your dead Commoner companions?”
As they round a bend in the road a great house comes into view set on a low hill below them; it sits in a verdant expanse of grass, its sides studded with tall dark windows, columns support its wide portico.
“Why are you afraid to answer?”
“This again? Will you question me throughout the livelong day? I’m not afraid.”
“Are you a man who would read the Pamphlets then?”
The younger man says nothing. He looks fixedly at the silent house below them.
Then he says “At the Assizes months back before the feast of St Thomas there was a man who talked like you do.”
“Oh yes?”
“Father Mathew read us his pamphlet.”
“..and what did you think of that man’s pamphlet?”
The metal strakes on the wagon’s wheels are studded with hobnails to cope with the Surrey mud; now on the dry compacted surface of the laneway they make a sound like millstones grinding against each other.
“They took off that man’s ear.”
The younger man looks sideways at the older man and raises an eyebrow.
“I lost this ear to a musket ball lad.” The older man fingers the ragged skin hidden behind his long greying hair.
“Foot or Horse?”
“Horse. Dragoons.”
“And now it is over.”
“It is far from over,” says the older man. “There is still work to be done.”
“And so you have come here.”
“I go where the work takes me.”
“Harvesting?”
“Harvesting… Gathering.” The older man makes a seesaw motion with the flat of his hand. “It is hard work, but it is eased by help from those like yourself.”
“I still see no storm.”
“It will come upon us both nonetheless.”
The wagon rumbles on into the gathering dusk, it’s cargo of sheaves rustling and whispering.
Until now Rob Moore has never had anything published anywhere ever and is aware there are good reasons for that. He writes for the love of the craft and not for the fame and fortune that will surely come any day soon. He lives in County Down, Northern Ireland and is pretty cheerful, all things considered.
