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My mind, memories, and soul came into being—like waking up, only somehow, I was already awake. My dim cabin aboard the Samsa was more dilapidated than I remembered: rust and barnacles plastered every wall and fitting, the sink black, the mattress on which I lay threadbare. Aghast, I sought light, retrieving a matchbox from my front pocket and striking, yet the cardboard crumpled as if sodden, the match flicking from my fingers and floating away. I clambered for the window. Blueish light filtered in. There was no glass in the pane, no wind in the air. No air at all. Abroad lay a wasteland of sand, ruinous ship-waste, and ocean. The seafloor greeted me with visceral indifference.  I assumed myself to be dreaming. Thirty or so metres above, the waves churned like a mosaic ceiling, and I knew such detail alien to all except divers and spear-fishermen. It could never be imagined so vividly. This was real.  The previous evening had been wonderful and ordinary: I took whiskey and flirted with a young French woman in the dining room. A pianist played a fine tune, the girl touched my arm; I retired cradling a bottle, knowing my Australian ventures would be profitable. Now, that bottle floated along the ceiling, an inch of whiskey remaining, sealed away and out of reach.  I marched for the door. It would not budge; something had fallen against it, or maybe the pressure kept it in place—I was not a learned person. I tore off the curtain, seeing only blackness beyond. "Hello? Is anyone out there?"  Light swam through the darkness, illuminating stray particles floating in the corridor. A rainbow of cyan and magenta. "Hello?" a voice answered, accompanied by colours. "Yes! Hello there! What ever is happening?" "Well, we’re inside a sunken ship. Nothing particularly is happening," the voice said, each syllable accompanied by prismatic light. I faltered.  "What of the crew?"  "Crew?" "Of the Samsa , of course. Are they alive?"  "No," it said mirthfully, "they’re quite dead, given that we’re on the seafloor." "Well, that is the crux of my question, my friend: how is it possible that we are living— speaking as we are—whilst stranded without air?" "Oh," the voice of cyan bid, "you ate something, didn’t you?"  "I ate nought but peanuts and drank only whiskey."  The colours ceased. Fear flooded my lungs—to what did I speak? I stepped away from the door, striding for the window, refusing to swim, as if it’d rob me of my humanity. A school of silvery fish glided by. I stuck my head out, but couldn’t squeeze my shoulders through the porthole. My cabin was a cage. Something knew I was in there. ‘Hello?’ I tried again. A dark, mighty shape took form in the distance, fin sweeping back and forth. I slunk inside and sat on the bed. My bed. I pulled the duvet close and opened my copy of Treasure Island . The same copy I drew in as a boy, the one Mother bought for me, and Father read to me. The pages released bubbles. Ink floated free.  A sound echoed from the door, meagre magenta light creeping in. "Are you in this one?" "Go away."  "Your window’s broken—just swim out."  "I’m too big for it."  "Come here," it bid. I closed my book carefully, as if it could ever be saved, and came as bid. In the door’s window drew an eye, wide and unblinking, filling the entire view. The gaze of limbo. "I want to return," I said, hoping Death would heed me if I was one step ahead. "I’m dying, aren’t I? I drank too much. This is a warning. Well, I hear you, mighty God. I want to return home." "I’m really sorry," it said wordlessly, the lights somehow communicating in place of a tongue, "but you’re dead. Well, no— you’re alive, but..." The great pupil affixed to the mirror above my sink. I did not wish to see.  "Did anyone make it out? The nice French girl?"  "I don’t know. The lifeboats are missing, so, maybe." I laughed; pink light shone through my eyes. "If I wasn’t drunk..."  "Please, look in the mirror."  "I do not wish to see, Reaper."  "I am not Death, and you are alive. You’re just not living the life you think you are." I discarded it with a flicking wrist, sneering, laboriously dragging myself where it heeded. I wiped away the barnacles and beheld myself.  Upon a well-dressed skeleton latched me, a tentacled monstrosity. My beak was buried in his skull. Ichor trailed by my lidless eyes, dispersing by my mantle and fins. I tried screaming. A sucker pulled open the jaw, puppeteering shock. I stepped back, abhorred—my tentacles pulled the legs up and down, mimicking walking like a child playing with a doll. "What?" I cried through light, my mantle shifting iridescent blue, flashing wondrously.  "That’s what we look like," the one at the door said. "Well, I’m not attached to a skeleton, not anymore. I had my fill a few hours ago—I didn’t think there were any good bits left. Disconcerting, isn’t it? I saw all sorts of memories, but you’ve done more than see, you’ve become , haven’t you?" "This isn’t real. This is a nightmare. I want my mother and father."  "Unfortunately, I doubt they’d recognise you, or care much. After all, you merely ate their son’s brain."  I hid the skull’s empty eye sockets beneath its picked-clean fingers, not quite realising my eyes weren’t there. "I am their son. How could I not be, knowing all I do? Knowing my first kiss was with another boy under the bridge by West Side? Knowing all those stories I told myself I’d one day write? Knowing my secret plan to name my firstborn after my father? How could I be anything else but me ? No, please, God, save me. Let me live."  The squid at the door floated without input. I became aware of the taste of his brain, sweet and metallic. His skull released a final puff of brown-red as we decoupled. The corpse floated to the floor, his skeletal hand landing in the direction of Treasure Island . I darted from the window. Josephine G Cambridge is a biologist from the United Kingdom who abates the horrors of STEM with scary little stories. When she isn’t spacing out in a laboratory or recommending people read Shirley Jackson, she enjoys history and all things fantastical.

cough in your throat, snake in the woodpile, outside, the poets remember too loudly— quiet, please, time is passing. every morning cracks us open like a boxer’s teeth, every day we sit in the shade & think god, somebody has got to do something about all these weeds. this is the order of the earth; first land & then the concept of land. next the rain sells our secrets back to us. next we are strangers in this town we love. next the house, after much deliberation, burns down. next we are strangers everywhere else as well. we huddle close to whisper we swallow the pulse of the stars we  divide our love like robbery cash we  swallow the pills at sunrise we take turns at the wheel we record everything we swallow the absence until it is gone & forgive all we can bear. everything has a place. i am afraid ours might be  clutching our knees to our chest on the curb  outside the hospital. i am afraid every poem  might become a curse, like ivy strangling our memory with romance. i am afraid when  i remember but also when i’m asleep.  every night we embark on the journey of  persephone—a total eclipse of the limbic system.  no but really, this is the order  of the earth;  first a boy gets cut out  in the shape of a sky, next  a boy learns why no other  boy is in the shape of a sky, next  i carry my heartburn with  me down the street like a glass bird next  a morning cracks the window  of the house & we slip into it  next a seizure performs the labor  our bodies are too frail for next  we become at last familiar  to all things, just long enough  that it becomes our job to  pull up all the goddamn weeds Tyler King is a nonbinary poet in Columbus, Ohio. They are formerly the editor of the online literary magazine Flail House Press , and their work has appeared in Ghost City Press, mutiny! magazine, The Louisville Review of Books , and other places.

It was time to venture out again. He didn’t particularly enjoy these journeys, but at least they were a reason to escape the monotony that was his home life and the misery that came alongside it. The world outside had grown wild and strange, like a painting where the colours had bled off the canvas, pooling into something unrecognisable. He stood for a moment in the doorway, listening to the wind scrape against the dull steel, waiting for the time to feel right. But it never did. He reached for his woollen hat and pulled it over his head, savouring the momentary warmth that it brought. He only had two left; he needed to be more careful with them if he was going to survive the long winter ahead. They were fragile things in a world that consumed everything. He picked up his supply bag, strapped on his mask, and began the lengthy process of unlocking the bolted steel door. Each bolt released with a deep, metallic groan, a sound that echoed through the hollow halls of his home. Eventually, the door swung open with a reluctant creak, unleashing the sharp bite of the outside frost. A few moments later he made his way down the concrete steps and out into the wilderness. The cold slapped him across the face. It wasn’t the kind of cold you prepared for; it was a living, writhing thing that wrapped itself around you, slipping into your joints like a virus. He shivered and braced himself for what was about to come. Which voice would speak to him today, he wondered. The sky overhead was a faded bruise, greys and purples piercing through the many clouds. The streets beneath his feet, cracked and broken, acted as rivers of dirt winding through skeletal buildings. The snow, once white, had taken on the hues of decay, stained yellow and brown from the rot beneath. As he moved, he felt the wind whisper in his ears. He waited for one of the familiar auras to fill his head. He hoped that it would be The Storyteller, regaling him with tales of a long forgotten era, of a time when hope and joy still existed in the world. The trivial matters on which people used to be so focused amused him slightly. So much strife was caused by such small, meaningless happenings. He wished that the world could be like that once again. Those stories were the last shred of beauty, the last pieces of a planet that had once made sense. Or perhaps he would be joined by The Old Friends. He always enjoyed reminiscing about the past, about the before time, and the escapades that they used to get up to. The thought of their voices filled him with a warmth that contrasted the bitter air. The laughter, the adventures they’d once shared, all now just wisps of memory, but still, they were something. Reminders of the former joys in life helped him to keep going. The plans to reconnect with each other and relive these times provided him with a shred of hope and positivity, even if he knew that they would never come to fruition. Instead it was the musical whispers of The Bard that filled his head. The verses of joy and sorrow, of love and loss were always a welcome guest on his travels. The music, vibrant and raw, rose up, filling the desolate streets around him with renewed life. As the familiar melodies lifted his spirits he strode on with fervour towards his destination, his feet crunching against the snow like a dance. For a moment he almost felt alive. The buildings around him loomed high and jagged, the remnants of what once had been humanity’s triumphs were now twisted into monuments of defeat. Vines, dark and brittle, crawled up their walls, fighting for space among the many cracks. The streets were mostly empty nowadays, although he did occasionally see another survivor on his journeys. He had learned long ago not to interact with them. On the surface, they appeared to be no different to him, just another hollow-eyed husk drifting through this ruin like a ghost. However, they were not the same. When approached, they spoke in strange tongues that he could not comprehend, and when he failed to respond, they often became frustrated, even aggressive. It wasn’t his fault that the world had split them apart. It was much safer to give them a wide berth and keep to himself. He could sense their eyes glaring at him, judging him for the lack of interaction, but he kept his head down and avoided any conflict. He moved through the wreckage with careful steps, the icy ground crunching beneath his boots. He could see the luminous green glow of the supply cache against the horizon, blinking like an alien beacon, casting an eerie light across the snow. He was nearing the end of his journey. Just as he began to believe that he would complete his task without incident, the reassuring ballad of The Bard came to an abrupt halt. He had known that it was inevitable, but he couldn’t help but hope that it would not come to pass. He stopped in his tracks, his breath hanging in the air like a cloud of smoke as he waited for the next voice to speak to him. He prayed that he would hear the voice of The Sister, sharing her tales of life in a far-off land, where the air was warm and where the seas still glittered blue. A world that, despite all of its differences, was eerily similar to the one where he found himself isolated. But alas, this was not the voice that greeted him. The voice of The Mother spoke. Her voice was sharp, slicing through his thoughts before he could even brace himself. It stung, each word an accusation, each sentence another cut of the blade. He knew how to deal with the situation. As she rambled on he gave the expected one-word answers, agreeing or showing support where necessary, never saying too much. He was careful with his words, but a mistake was inevitable. He wasn’t sure what he had done wrong, he thought that his answers had all been acceptable, but evidently they were not. The tirade began, loud and unrelenting, louder than even the howling wind that clawed at his skin and froze his breath. He tried not to listen, but the viciousness of the berating pierced his defences. The world around him blurred, the colours of the sky and snow bleeding together, spinning into a cacophony of greys and whites. What had been a pleasant journey was now becoming a nightmare. He gritted his teeth, clenched his hands into balled fists inside his gloves, and bore the brunt of the attack. He wasn’t sure how long the whole ordeal lasted, but it was with relief that he welcomed the silence that surrounded him once the voice of The Mother departed. His head throbbed, but the world slowly came back into focus. He was so close to his destination. He took a moment to regain his composure, then continued towards the green beacon that marked his goal. As he stumbled into the bastion of hope, he took in his surroundings. The piles of rations were of no interest to him. He pushed past the others who had been attracted by the sanctuary, hardly noticing their presence. His eyes scanned the room until he found what he had been looking for. Overwhelmed with relief, he fell to his knees. He had found it, the golden prize. He lifted the crate of liquid ambrosia in his hands, his fingers trembling as they closed around the neck of one of the bottles. This would be enough to dull the misery and emptiness for another week. D. J. Bates is a new writer who is a proud part of the queer community. They have no previously published works and welcome the opportunity to take their first steps into the world of writing.

Jessica parked her Tesla in the drive. Planning to meet Mike at Luigi’s for drinks after a quick shower and change, she didn’t bother to open the garage. It had been a long but rewarding day. Two major clients had responded to their annual email reminders with automatic renewals. She had expected a flurry of competitive bids and questions on both.  The renewals were big enough to earn a smile—a wide smile — from her usually glum supervisor. Even at just two percent, her commission would put her into bonus territory, She grabbed her laptop, shoulder bag, and Fiji bottle and marched up the walk to the front door. Extending her hand to punch the four-digit code, her fingertips touched solid wood. The keypad was gone. She ran her fingers up and down the red lacquered door in disbelief. There was only the brass circle of an old Yale lock. Glancing left, she noticed the house numbers 1495 were in black and white ceramic tiles, items she’d replaced with designer gold numerals a dozen years ago. She tapped the spot where the pad should be. This was crazy.  The door opened, and a thirty-ish woman in Capri pants and bouffant hair appeared. “May I help you?” “You live here?” Jessica asked. “Yes. You from Avon?  I know we’re getting a new girl.” A telephone rang loudly in the kitchen. “Jus a sec. I gotta grab this. Probably my husband.” The blonde trotted down the hall to the kitchen, picked up a yellow wall phone, and returned with its bulky receiver followed by a curling yellow cord. “Yes, yes. The TV repair guy fixed it today. And hey, swing by the dry cleaner's.  It’s my good dresses, but there’s a coupon in the glove compartment.  Shouldn’t be more than two dollars.  OK, the Avon girl is here, gotta run.” She smiled at Jessica, “Sorry, you know how men are. So, are you taking over for Janet?” “Look, I don’t understand. You live here?” “Sure. Second family on the block. Wilsons on the corner were first. Bought the model house.  Her kids raise hell with their skateboards, but they’re good people.” Her kids?  “Sybil Wilson?” Jessica asked. “Oh, you know her?” “Yes,” Jessica nodded slowly. Sybil Wilson was eighty-six with middle-aged twins. Skateboards? “Are you OK? You want to come in?” Jessica followed the woman into the Swedish modern living room with orange mobiles and pastel wallpaper. “Are you OK?” the woman asked again. Jessica looked around the room and into the green and yellow Formica kitchen. Where was her furniture? The bay window she had installed last summer? The hardwood floors? What’s with the wall to wall carpet? In the corner a TV in a massive wooden cabinet was showing black and white Soupy Sales. “Look, I’m Jessica Van, and this is my house. I bought it over ten years ago. Who are you and how did you move in?” “Ten years ago? Honey, this house was brand-new in ’62 when we bought it. Do you have the right street? These subdivisions look a lot alike.” “1495 Grandview.” “Right, but honey, this our house. We’re the Callaghans. We live here. Look.” She picked up a handbag from the hall table and fished through her wallet. “Look at this.” She handed Jessica a cardboard New Jersey driver’s license.  “That’s me. Helen Callaghan. This is our address. 1495 Grandview. Look at the date.  License was issued almost three years ago.  August ’65.” Jessica dug in her purse. “Well, look I just got an email about my property tax. I have it on my phone.” “Your phone? You have a telephone in your purse?” “It’s gone. I had it just now when I pulled up.” Helen Callaghan looked over Jessica’s shoulder. “That your car, the blue Falcon?” “I have a Tesla.” “Tessy? Honey, looks like a Ford Falcon to me.” Jessica looked at the sixty-year-old compact sedan in the driveway and nearly dropped her shoulder bag. Across the street a woman who looked like she could be Sybil’s granddaughter was yelling at two boys on skateboards. “Are you OK? You seem in shock. Like you might pass out,” Helen warned. “You’re white.  Maybe you should sit down. My husband’s on his way. He’s a doctor. Let me call the clinic and see if he’s left. I think you need to see someone or get some help, OK? Lemme call and get you a glass of water. You seem lost.”   When Helen returned from the kitchen Jessica Van was gone. As soon as Ted Callaghan came in from the garage, Helen filled him in. “It was so strange. She didn’t seem drunk. She wasn’t acting crazy, but she insisted this was her house and she knew Sybil. But when I asked her about her car, she freaked. I went to call you. And then she was gone.” “You got a good look at her, right? Can you give the police a detailed description? Sounds like a mental case. And she’s driving a blue Falcon?” “She was gone. I looked, and the car was gone, but I didn’t see her drive off.” “Well, she could be a missing person. Let’s call it in. But she was otherwise rational and not violent?” “No. Just like she was in shock. But she said weird things like having a telephone in her purse.” Callaghan picked up the receiver and dialed the police. “Psychosis, no doubt. Or some breakdown. Someone could be looking for her.” Jessica nodded. “It could be anything these days.” Ted noticed the Zap comic his nephew had left on the counter and shook his head. “Everyone is going psycho now.” He dialed the police, gesturing toward the TV showing bearded students burning draft cards. “Sometimes I think the whole world’s on LSD.” Mark Connelly is an English instructor at Milwaukee Area Technical College. His fiction has appeared in Bristol Noir,  Indiana Review, Milwaukee Magazine, Cream City Review, The Ledge, The Great American Literary Magazine, Home Planet News, Change Seven, Light and Dark, 34th Parallel, Mobius Blvd, and  Digital Papercut . In 2005 Texas Review Press published his novella Fifteen Minutes , which received the Clay Reynolds Prize.

The moon casts her milky drape  over stoney gardens—shadowed with crosses stretching the grass. My blistered tongue whispers,  entreats you to visit realms of night where I reside, gloaming and dull under oceans of auburn oak leaves. On a cradle of gentle night air your dead voice reaches me, navigating  through mazes of concrete and ash, undiminished and vital—Godlike. My bouquet weeps its small petals into your gaping maw, phantomic, while the stars cry their icy laments and I lift the veil of my liveliness to join you in your divinity, beyond. Spencer Keene is a writer of poetry and short fiction from Vancouver, British Columbia. He is a member of the Vancouver chapter of the Horror Writers Association. His work has been published in SAD Magazine and will appear in Iron Faerie Publishing’s forthcoming Hallowed anthology.

When my father was teaching me how to ride a bike, he also taught me about sin. We lived in Vienna, just having arrived from Minnesota. My parents were missionaries, hoping to move to Budapest, but that was tricky because Hungary was still behind the Iron Curtain. This was 1980. In those first days my father was mostly gone, taking care of paperwork at the American embassy. My mother brought us to the local grocery store so she could buy ingredients to make us cookies. She misunderstood the label and bought salt instead of sugar. My sister and I ate a few mouthfuls of the cookies anyway. The bike my father purchased for me was a secondhand Gräf & Stift Austrian brand, sturdy with chipped green paint. I was still at the stage where I needed my father to run beside me with his hand on my back. My father came from a family of Swedish immigrants. His parents moved to Minnesota from Sweden in the early 20th century. He inherited a somewhat reserved emotional nature from his father, who looked for ways to turn daily tasks into teachable moments. Hence the bike purchase and the bike lessons. My father had something on his mind that day. After a few rounds of practice, he sat down on a park bench with me and said, “It’s hard to balance, isn’t it?” I nodded. “What makes it easier?” he asked. I smiled. “When you hold me up.” This time he  nodded. “It’s sort of like what God does for us,” he said. “He uses his hand to help keep us from sinning.” “What is sinning?” I asked. He paused, choosing his words carefully. “That’s when you do something that isn’t right. Like lying. Or drinking.” He let me think about it for a moment. “Do you think you could live your whole life without sinning?” I considered it. We made a few more bike runs. “Well, what do you think?” he said. “Yes, I think I probably could.” He paused. “Are you sure?” “What would happen if I sinned?”  “You would be separated from God forever.” “You mean hell?”  He nodded. We went home for supper. The small apartment my parents were renting had only a kitchen and a bedroom. Before bed my mother read to me and my younger sister from the Little House on the Prairie  series about a little girl named Laura. In the story Laura’s family had just moved from Minnesota to Kansas, so I felt like I could understand her. In the book Laura’s ma said, “The Lord helps them that help themselves.” My mother paused her reading and said to us, “That’s not correct. No one can do anything themselves. Ma is wrong.” This frightened me. My family moved to Hungary two weeks later. We traveled there by train. We sat in a train compartment with one bench facing in the direction the train was traveling and the other bench facing backward. Because my sister and I were sitting on the bench facing backward, my father later said that she and I were the first missionaries in our family to enter Hungary because our bodies entered the country first. My father rented us an apartment in one of the working-class districts of Budapest. The building was fifteen stories high, constructed from stacked sections of pre-fabricated cement, every apartment identical. It had distance heating, which was very inefficient. Hot water was piped in from massive factories on the outskirts of the city through pipes hung with torn sheets of asbestos insulation. The pipes occasionally sprung leaks, and where this happened were gathered clumped piles of asbestos that my sister and I would mold into makeshift snowballs…filling the air with poison as we played. My parents started language lessons shortly after we moved from Vienna. The apartment had a tiny, black-and-white television, and my father would switch on the news every evening at 6. My parents sat, staring at the small screen, hungry for any word they could recognize. One day they both recognized the word “no” at the same moment. They laughed and hugged each other. My own language skills began to develop after the first few months. I remember occasionally I would simply know  what the neighborhood kids had just said to me. This realization did not feel like a success, merely a dawning of recognition. One day when the two kids from the neighboring building were preparing for a bike ride with their father, I approached them confidently with my bike and asked if I could go with them. Their father did not allow it. I went home and told my father about what had happened. He seemed more interested in how I had asked them—what sentence I had used—rather than in understanding why I was sad being left at home. When I told him the sentence he pointed out the grammar mistake I made. Initially my father attempted to maintain a business start-up visa which allowed our family to stay in the country for up to a year at a time before taking a trip back to Western Europe to renew the visa. He rented a small, one-room apartment a few blocks from the British embassy, a requirement for anyone with a business visa. He called it “the office.” He spent a few hours there every week to maintain the cover that he was trying to set up business venture opportunities. Whenever he met anyone official who asked why we were in Hungary, he told them that he was in the import/export business, preparing to ship farm equipment from Minnesota to Hungary. During some of those office visits he would bring me with him and we would watch Hungarian football matches on TV while we drank Coca-Cola from small glass bottles and ate Hungarian milk chocolate (five cents a bar). I couldn’t understand the rules of football yet, but I pretended I did. Being invited to the office with him made me feel important. I attended Hungarian school from Grade 1 through 6. The school days when I felt the most like a foreigner were on Hungarian national holidays. These were vacation days, but there was always a school celebration held on the day before vacation. Our class filed into the communal gymnasium with the other grades and sat on ankle-high wooden benches. Our teacher told us to sit still, no rocking. This was hard to do.  The school principal led us in singing through a variety of Soviet-era national songs, designed to encourage Communist solidarity. We all sang together in unison, but I stood out from the crowd in one important way. All of the students wore an official uniform for the Little Drummer Society. I only wore a white shirt with blue jeans. Every Hungarian student was automatically enrolled, from the age of 6, into the Little Drummer Society. This was a Hungarian student’s first step on the road to Communist party membership. The Little Drummers would be followed by the Path Breakers, the league for the older students which began in the 7th grade. The Path Breakers eventually graduated into Communist party membership once school led into a career. The Little Drummer uniform was a white shirt with a blue kerchief. There was a whistle attached to an embroidered rope which hung from a shoulder epaulet. The whistle was stored in the pocket of the white shirt. There was also a belt with a buckle featuring a drum beneath a red communist star with the Hungarian word “ Előre !” (Forward!) written below.  I wanted a Little Drummer uniform, but my parents forbade it. One day, in an attempt to reason with my father, I explained that if I was going to someday be able to share the Gospel with these students I would need to fit into their ranks. By now I understood how much my father’s mind operated around spreading the teachings of Christ, and I felt that if I appealed to this side of his thinking that I might prevail upon him to relent and allow me the uniform.  “If I am dressed like them, they will see me as a comrade.” My reasoning seemed sound to me. “Comrades are friends, and friends are able to talk openly about their beliefs.” My father considered it, and my spirits rose when he didn’t immediately say no. He spoke with my teacher one day after school and came home with a pamphlet that explained the purpose of the Little Drummer Society. Later that afternoon he sat me down by the kitchen table. He said, “The Little Drummers follow six steps. Should you wear this uniform you must agree to these six steps.”  “What are they?” My heart was beating faster with excitement. The uniform seemed within reach. He read through the first five steps. “The Little Drummer is a faithful child of his country. The Little Drummer loves and respects his parents, teachers. The Little Drummer diligently studies and helps his partners. The Little Drummer always says the truth. The Little Drummer is clean, ordered, and punctual.” My father paused. I leaned forward. This seemed easy. How could there be any problem in agreeing to this? “I can do all those things,” I said. My father stared at me. Then he said, “The sixth step is: The Little Drummer lives in such a way as to be worthy to wear the red kerchief of the Path Breaker.” He looked up at me. “You know what Path Breakers believe, don’t you?” I nodded. Even though I didn’t know what Communism was, I knew the conversation was over. It was during 2nd grade that my grandfather died back home in Minnesota. He had been dealing with heart murmurs and my parents wanted to make a phone call back to America to check on him. Most Hungarian households did not have telephones in 1980. The government wait-list to receive a phone was 10 years long. Pay phones were plentiful, but if my parents wished to make or receive an international phone call they could only do so from a government office in downtown Budapest.  The phone center had bright yellow molded plastic chairs. My parents huddled together behind a wall of glass in the small telephone cubicle. My mother suddenly began to cry. My sister and I, desperate to calm her, asked her what was wrong. She told us he had died. We told my mother again and again, “But, we’ll surely see him again in Heaven.” My mother said, “That will be such a long time from now.” I later asked my mother why my father had not cried that night when he heard the news. She assured me that later in the evening, when we were in bed, that he had also cried. I tried to picture it, but I couldn’t. After my grandfather’s death, my father talked about him more than he had in the past. When my father was a young boy he used to see his father drink shots of moonshine behind the barn with his uncles and cousins. My father watched him throw back the liquor into his mouth and exhale a hard burst of air when the alcohol hit his throat. Whenever my grandfather caught my dad watching them he said, “Now, when you get older, you’re not going to do this.” My father nodded, knowing that was what was expected, but he snuck up afterwards and stuck his tongue into the shot glass to taste the drops at the bottom of it. It was shortly after this that my grandfather had a conversion experience and began to go to church. He also stopped drinking.  My father used this story when he taught young Hungarian men certain spiritual lessons. He ended the story by saying, “I never felt tempted to drink after my father stopped drinking.” We went back to Minnesota for my grandfather’s funeral. We stayed with my grandmother in the big empty farm house. She asked my parents how the Hungarian mission was going. My father gestured to me and said, “He can speak Hungarian now.” We lived in Hungary until I was sixteen. When we returned to Minnesota, we moved into the same small town where my parents grew up, and I graduated from the same high school they did. As time passed, the memories of Hungary misted together and the favorable ones stood out most.  After we were married, my wife and I moved to Hungary ourselves to teach. Our two sons attended Hungarian pre-school. One of my proudest memories was seeing my sons begin to speak the language. I taught both boys how to ride bikes and used the same hand-on-the-back method that my father used. I wish I could tell you I chose to raise my sons in a completely different way, but if I said that I’d be lying. And lying is a sin. Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary. He has a debut novella ( Words on the Page ) out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection ( To Accept the Things I Cannot Change: Writing My Way Out of Addiction ) out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many, many, many films. Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete

I live in the house my grandfather built when he was young and strong, and filled with love and dreams. Where I lay me down to sleep was once my mother’s room. She tells me how her father would sit on the edge of her bed and kiss her goodnight on her forehead when she was small like me. Every night, I listen to my grandfather walking the floors beyond my room, dragging his leg with a cane in a  thump-step-scratch  rhythm against  the aged wood boards that creak under his weight. No one else hears him in those late hours pacing the hall and around his room with a  thump-step-scratch  and asking for his deceased wife. My mother doesn’t believe my complaints despite the bruises painted under my tired eyes. She tells me that a man who’s been dead and buried for years higher in number than my age can’t possibly be keeping me from sleeping with a thump-step-scratch pulse . I may never have met my grandfather, but I have become familiar with the  thump-step-scratch  tune of his specter. Tinamarie Cox   lives in an Arizona town with her husband, two children, and rescue felines. Her written and visual work has appeared in many online and print publications under various genres. She has two poetry chapbooks with Bottlecap Press: Self-Destruction in Small Doses  (2023), and A Collection of Morning Hours  (2024). Her full-length debut, Through a Sea Laced with Midnight Hues, releases in February 2025 with Nymeria Publishing. You can explore more of her work at tinamariethinkstoomuch.weebly.com and follow her on Instagram @tinamariethinkstoomuch.

We come to it After a walk Through a field Late afternoon Shadows closing in Sunlight already golden. Old tree, Its beard scraggly Flowing with time The memory of souls Drifting over the land Having left life and bodies Graced with hair, all colors, Caressed, remembered, loved But unwilling to leave Entirely for the other place So strands grab the old limbs To hold on, to stay behind In the blood red sun Shadows crisscrossing Fields, days, other shadows, Even our thoughts as we pass Beneath the tree and on And on. Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Texas. His monologue show, Twelve from Texas,  was performed recently in NYC by Equity Library Theatre. His poetry collection, Maybe Birds Would Carry It Away , is published by Kelsay Books. Gallery: https://christopherwoods.zenfolio.com/f861509283

there is more than one way to look at it.  outside the wood gift shop there is the desert, the gray hill  but the scrub shivers like hatching. there is more than just one life. you get off work and your pockets ring your magnet rocks, your change and the girls all wave so nice to you and the blue sky spills out big. but when you walk out in the sagebrush the camel crickets still crowd around you like the sea.  brown thumbs of their bodies long grass of their legs  there is more than one way to look.  the desert shows you things sometimes. yourself in other things. you crouch down til you see it in their black magnet eyes.  their leader beckons you with his sweet finger his back leg and in his change ringing voice he makes his speeches about hatching.  the others know it by then. they split open their brown shells.  their new legs crawl them forward. their new mouthparts take hold. it’s not a bad thing, says their leader. but he says that every time. he splits your shell with his long back leg and there is more than one side: there is the sweet dark of your first life and there is blue milk  gray breast  sun.  i’m not ready, you say.  the laughter rings. it changes  they grip the open skin of you. their leader shakes his head.  he says, there is no ready.  and all at once they jump. Maya is a writer and educator from Michigan. Her work lately focuses on growing up — how the worlds we live in as young people are full of strange delusions and equally strange truths.

Perhaps they too were lonely, Not among themselves so much As among their own kind. Loneliness was a hand reaching Through the darkness to touch, Be touched, Made certain once again. Their sky was populated Vastly, poignantly, Distant as all of space. They believed each star a house, A place to come to. Star clusters were villages, So much like their own. Whoever lived there, across heaven, Were much the same, Building houses close together From need, from want. They too must have known How time propels, arranges, Why all houses fill and empty, How all of them must eventually fall, Draping themselves in darkness as they go.* * Nayarit was (and is) home to several groups of indigenous peoples in Western Mexico. Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Texas. His monologue show, Twelve from Texas,  was performed recently in NYC by Equity Library Theatre. His poetry collection, Maybe Birds Would Carry It Away , is published by Kelsay Books. Gallery: https://christopherwoods.zenfolio.com/f861509283

Have you ever taught a lesson over symbolism to a room full of thirty-three teenagers while holding cupped handfuls of your own glistening red bones? I have, more than once. It’s one of the worst recurring nightmares I have: the one where all of my teeth fall out. Sickening suction squelches as the bones detach from their roots and cascade out of my mouth in stacks like blank, bloody dominos. It happens while I’m talking, while I’m teaching, while I’m eating. I’m embarrassed each time—how dare I be so openly vulnerable to onlookers?—so I keep forcing myself to do The Thing I Am Doing, trying to ignore that I am literally falling apart in front of my parents, friends, students, and strangers.  But it is not just  that my teeth fall out—sometimes they break apart in shards too, and I must be careful not to swallow them. Or, there is an after-birth of sorts where thin yet sharp layers of roots and rot slip out of the sockets like glass, making it even harder to keep forcing myself to do The Thing I Am Doing, yet somehow I prevail. Somehow, I always carry on. Sometimes the people around me do not notice. Sometimes they notice and offer only pitying looks. They never try to help, and I never ask for their help. Maybe that’s my fatal flaw.  I have done plenty of research on dream interpretations, flipping through glossaries and indexes for symbols to break down until I get to D: Dental  or T: Teeth . Most interpreters say that losing teeth in dreams is indicative of either impending death, or feeling a loss of control in life decisions.  Death. Loss. I’m all too familiar with both. Sometimes, I do not know which is worse: dying, or having no choice in the matter. Sometimes, I do not know which is worse: falling apart, or knowing people see me falling apart, yet they do nothing to help. Sometimes, I do not know which is worse: that they do not acknowledge my downfall, or that I do  acknowledge it, yet choose to give myself no pause; keep eating…keep teaching…keep disregarding. Keep bleeding and breaking all the same. Mahailey Oliver holds an MA in English and Advanced Pedagogy from Stephen F. Austin State University. Her work has recently appeared in Hearth & Coffin, ForgetMeNot Press , and Spark to Flame . Her soul is made happy with an autumn breeze and camping under starlight. To read more of her work, check out her website here:   sites.google.com/view/mahaileyoliver

such delightful isolation surrounding  as my mind opens up  like a gentle stab velvet car crash chewing on knives  and I’m speechless with red love me  sedate me  drain me  watch me drown leaving nothing behind except an empty chair the deep shadow  of a subterranean death wish and the subtle persistence of fog Marcel Feldmar   grew up in Canada, and then left.  He spent some time in an institution called The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, but ended up living in Los Angeles, where his words get caught in traffic. He has been working on some spoken word / music collaborations, which can be found under the name Blue Discordant Way on Bandcamp. Feldmar has contributed poetry to the Curious Nothing and Rabbit’s Foot Magazine , and his full-length novel, Awkward on the Rocks , is coming soon from Dead Sky Publishing.