Issue 140 May 2025 Flash Fiction Online May 2025

Table of Contents

Editorial: Grandmas All the Way Down

by Rebecca Halsey

May 2025

I suspect my grandmother has moved into her next form. I can hear the spirits of my Dad and others that have passed, but I think Grandma is larking about as a toddler at this point. Maybe even riding a bike without training wheels, it’s been that long.

She was always a quiet spirit. Her strongest visit was right after she died, when my bedroom turned so suddenly chilly, it seemed like my gooseflesh was going to permanently raise scales along my arms. She toned it down quite a bit after that.

But now? I feel her in memory, but it’s not the insistence of a fresh message. It’s not the invisible hand on your back.

Can an ancestor quit their job as a guide or counselor? Could you (I mean, me— I mean, one of my cousins probably) do something so egregiously stupid that they say, I’m so done, I’m going back as a baby.

Or do we just age out of the system?

I suspect my youngest daughter is “of” Grandma. Maybe not Grandma herself, but from that lineage of spirit. This feels right in a way that is not scientifically provable. But so much about being a mother is biologically miraculous; why not embrace the inherently witchy parts of it?

I like the idea of mothering a spirit that has mothered prior. I like that we are all the roles to all the people, and they are all the roles to us.

I am a parent because you are a child. I am a child because you are a parent.

FFO’s May 2025 issue explores this ouroboros. The birth, death, rebirth of it all. The parenting of each other—whether good or bad. The shepherding of each other from the unknown realms of the before to the unknown realms of after.

We start with a mother that can’t accept her child—in life or death—in the stunningly chilling science fiction story, “Robot, Changeling, Ghost” by Avra Margariti.

In Nicole Lynn’s story, “Entropy in a Fruit Bowl,” the power of resurrection changes and resuscitates a friendship over and over until it’s unrecognizable.

In time for Mother’s Day in the U.S., we have a fast-paced escape on the back of a mama spider in Brandon Case’s “Eight Legs of the Mother Hunted.”

This is followed by a literary piece on how a woman’s role as a mother can obscure her identity in “To Be a Woman Is to Be Without a Name,” by Chidera Solomon Anikpe.

Sam W. Pisciotta flips the script on a seance in “Transubstantiation.” And LeeAnn Perry describes a teenage slumber party around a Ouija Board from the point of view of a ghost in “Yes, No, Goodbye.”

Finally, we close this issue the way we began—with a child in need. In “Sour Milk,” by Phoenix Mendoza, what lurks in the barn is a mother all right, just perhaps not the one we might want.

Thank you for reading! Sharing these stories with friends and families is as easy as sharing a link to our website. While subscribers get the ebook at the beginning of the month, each story has their own release day on our website. Follow along and share your favorites!

* * *

Ⓒ Rebecca Halsey

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Robot, Changeling, Ghost

by Avra Margariti

May 2025

Content Warning: Implied abuse of a child with special needs


Content Warning

Shivering, she pours her child a bowl of sugar-frosted cereal. The soured milk is two weeks expired. The body of her child has been buried in the local cemetery a week longer than that.

Three weeks of rotting under tightly packed soil while a robot sleeps in her child’s old bed. The dead’s soul roams untethered still—so said the instruction manual. And this robot she has mail-ordered to her empty house—this emptier husk she calls by her child’s name and feeds with her child’s favorite breakfast—is a homing beam. A decoy to entice and tether the wandering soul.

Behind her, the stairs creak like a maggot-infested coffin; a small, clumsy body ambles into the kitchen. She closes her eyes, as if to trap the illusion of normalcy behind spasming lids. The chair groans under the weight of silicon and steel. Spoonfuls of soggy cereal slosh down an artificial esophagus. According to the manual, the food gets stored inside a sealable balloon. Yet the sugar is unable to fill the hungry hollow carved out in waiting for the runaway soul.

“Good morning,” she says, and swallows her erosive bile. “Eat up, you’ll need your strength.”

* * *

She thought you a changeling even before the wooden casket cradled your corpse; before the robotic chassis was delivered to her door inside a factory crate like another coffin.

The crate was labeled ‘grief dummy’, its contents bearing perfect resemblance to me, her dead spawn. She had to put your new parts together with her own hands.

Before, she looked at the old-you and saw a child not of flesh and bone and need, but of metal. These silicon and metal-alloy components, the tear-drenched gears? What makes you think she knows to build you—build me—back the right way? 

* * *

Wincing, she looks at the little robot playing quietly in the living room, and she thinks: this is not my child. A fake ghost to summon the real one, yes. But it goes deeper than that. When the robot picks up a mecha toy, she wonders: what if her child doesn’t pilot this mechanical husk? Recharging the robot’s batteries is expensive, but a body powered by the animus costs next to nothing to maintain.

She needs to calculate the expenses, recheck her bank account, ignore the mounting house bills. “Quiet!” she barks into the silent living room. 

The robot doesn’t flinch, focused entirely on the toys. Just like before, when her child rarely spoke to her. Never looked her in the eye.

Another dreaded thought: how will she know when the husk has been inhabited? When her child has roosted inside the dummy summoning, displacing the placeholder persona?

How can a mother ever know?

She calls the factory, shouting at the recorded voice into the phone, “I want my money back. What is wrong with him? Why won’t he listen to me?”

Anger-limp, she lies on the couch strewn with unpaid bills and old takeout menus.

When the little robot worriedly hovers above her, her hand shoots out to slap the simulacrum of comfort on the cheek. Her palm’s torn open by the sharp metal under the façade of skin.

* * *

She thought me a changeling. Ask me and I’ll tell you how she looked at me and saw a trick of the light, an alien thing she had to hurt until it became real again.

Her flesh-and-bone child, she once thought, had been stolen by fairies. So it was the fairies’ fault when the blemished body they’d left behind malfunctioned. She replaced it with a robotic decoy, hoping to lure the real child back. But is this decoy, too, another changeling, she wonders? Another falsehood she is forced to foster under her roof?

Are we robots? Ghosts? Changelings?

Are we one, or many? Most importantly: are we hers?

Ask me, little robot, and I’ll tell you all about the price of her love.

* * *

Gasping, she awakens on the couch to see the child haloed in the glow of a nearby lamp.

“Mommy,” the child speaks. Sitting hurt but obedient by her feet.

When she hugs the robotic chassis to her chest in a rush of relief, she feels not the residual coolness of a short electrical charge, but a heat suffusing the clangy, cumbersome body. A lingering warmth that can only originate from the soul within.

The child has been, at last, embodied. The robot is now occupied, possessed, that much is certain.

But by whom? she can’t help thinking as she hugs the child tight. The child that will not meet her gaze when she cups a silicon-clad cheek. She sniffs the synthetic hair and thinks she catches the familiar whiff of a forest, pine and soil and lingering rot.

Perhaps the same forest that stole her sweet child from her, not too long after birth. 

And now, she calculates, the way she did the bills earlier. Counts the robotic breaths for a sum of humanity. Like the bills before, the breaths do not add up. The machine is warm, but the steel underneath is her own flesh no longer. A strange reverb; a double echo. The uncanny syncopation of a fairy child.

What are the odds of the wrong ghost inhabiting this grief-husk she paid for so dearly? This decoy to absolve her of all guilt?

The little robot did not come with a return address, nor refund instructions. Still, she knows where her late husband kept all his tools: the wrench, pliers, and hammers to make metal yield under pressure.

She hugs the imposter close, and counts.

* * *

She thought us a changeling.

She still does.

She hugs us close—this body shared between robot and ghost—and we count the memories, too. They sway, intersect, superimpose—

The lid of the factory crate, like the coffin where we slept before our summoning.

Like the pillow that once crept over our nose, our breath smothered by motherly hands.

* * *

Ⓒ Avra Margariti

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Entropy in a Fruit Bowl

by Nicole Lynn

May 2025

At eleven, my friend Mel resurrected an apple. The tree divided our field, so it was appropriate that I was present when he trespassed through the boundary of life and death. The apple clung to its branch all winter. It held through the frost, but the chill turned it shriveled, black, and greasy. When he picked it, he whispered words so low the wind stole his voice before I could hear. The grass turned jaundice; the apple turned a crisp, cadmium red.

“Here, Jason.” He tossed me the apple. “Eat it.”

I’m not sure if it was a gift or a test, but I would’ve bitten into it either way. I maintained eye contact as I sunk my teeth into the flesh, but I spat it out with a startled laugh. It tasted like rot and vinegar, with brown, dehydrated flesh.

“It’s poisoned,” I coughed.

“I’ll get better,” he said.

Even if the apple wasn’t edible, there’s talent in dark magic, a dangerous talent that could get you in trouble. My dad told me necromancy was illegal and immoral, but Mel didn’t have a dad to tell him that. Not anymore. That’s why he was reviving apples.

He let me keep the apple, a gift that time, I’m sure. I studied it with graphite, crosshatching the decay beneath its skin.

* * *

By thirteen, Mel got comfortable with reviving plants, while I grew comfortable with mixing paint. I would sit in the tall grass while he paced, smiling this wild, grit-toothed grin, on the verge of breaking the barriers of his understanding.

“It’s not just magic,” he said. “It’s more than speaking words with the right intentions. There’s science to it.”

He learned that for every plant he revived, another plant had to die. The fruit that he gave life would remain spoiled. The plants that he regrew wouldn’t sprout flowers.

“And the lives of plants can’t be traded for animals,” he said.

“How do you know that?”

He turned to the woods and said nothing else.

He gave me the discarded plants to study, and I’d sit in my room for hours to make them as immortal as paper. My art seemed unimportant compared to magic, but I’d smile and fool myself into believing that he picked the flowers for me.

* * *

At fourteen, he revived his first animal. I found my mother’s finch at the bottom of its cage, back pressed against the newspaper classifieds, spurs frozen in the air. I cupped its body in my hands and ran next door to Mel.

He shrugged and said, “I could use the practice.”

He found a live deer mouse in his pantry’s trap. I clenched my eyes shut, but I still heard the rattle of the mouse’s last breath.

After that, the bird stopped singing and preening – it only faced the wall and shivered. My father took it to the veterinarian to take it out of its misery. Before bed, he told me the story of Cain and Abel.

“God rejected Cain’s offering because he gave Him resurrected fruit. Entropy is God’s will, Jason.”

I was too cowardly to tell Mel we sinned, but I painted the bird’s remains as if it could atone for us.

* * *

At fifteen, Mel stood at my door, bloodied hands trembling. I followed him deep into the woods, where no one could find his sacrifice. He bludgeoned the stray tomcat that our families kept fed and warm in the winter.

“I killed it,” he said. “But I was going to bring it back to life, I swear.”

“I believe you.”

I buried it. Even though my chest panged with grief, my stomach knotted in disgust, Mel needed me. Sweat soaked and wind chilled, we sat next to the modest grave. Mel once healed the cat’s infected eye with tea bags. I wondered how it could mean so little to him and if I was just as worthless—

But his head hit my shoulder.

“I don’t know what I did wrong,” he cried.

Now I know he wasn’t crying for the cat – it was because he failed.

* * *

Seventeen. I tried not to notice the missing animal posters on the powerlines or how bloodshot Mel’s eyes became. He was getting impatient with his skills, so we spent days in his attic trying to contact his dad with a spirit board. Ghosts don’t like to be disturbed: they answered with sleepy ‘yesses,’ and ‘noes,’ and labored ambiguity.

“Where’s my dad?”

T-H-E… S-O-I-L.

“Can I speak to him?”

Goodbye.

He threw the planchette against the wall. I flinched and blinked away tears. I’d grown fearful of his fists, but I reminded myself I crumpled sketches that didn’t fit my vision. Instead of breaking pencils, he broke lips and capillaries.

I struck days from my calendar, counting down to graduation. I never told Mel that I was accepted into art school. The guilt of keeping the secret weighed heavy but never as severe as my mounting dread of his wrath.

At eighteen, I left.

* * *

I’m twenty-five now. I drive a harvester by day and paint bowls of fruit by night. They’re hard sells because the apples are rotten, and I paint dead finches and cat skulls in the foreground. I loved Mel, but distance granted me clarity: he thought of me as an assistant, nothing more.

He called the other day, came over for coffee, and he said he liked my paintings.

“Then buy one,” I said.

He laughed, ignoring the bite in my voice, and leaned close to share one last secret.

“I can bring him back now,” he whispered. “I can do it, Jason, but I need your help.”

I looked at my paintings, my bowls of entropy, and swallowed.

“No. I’m sorry.”

He left me in a room full of my decaying fruit. I thought about running after him, but our friendship was dead. If nothing else, I’ve learned to let the dead rest.

* * *

Ⓒ Nicole Lynn

Originally published in The Arcanist, October 6, 2022. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

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Eight Legs of the Mother Hunted

by Brandon Case

May 2025

Eight legs, fleeing. Eight babies cling to my back.

Over my black exoskeleton, my children scuttle on sticky feet, pitter-patt-pitt, trying to hide from you.

Your torches shine violent orange in my eight eyes.

You drove us from my cave with your foul smoke and shouts.

But I’m fast.

I charge through the dark forest, trampling shrubs and shaking pines with the thomp-thump-thom of my legs. Needles fall like sharp rain. We’ll be okay. I just need to reach the seaside cliffs where I grew up.

On horseback, you chase, whooping your lust for the silver shine of web. The spider threads that weave your clothes, your ropes, your silk pavilions. To deepest forest, you hunt my babies, yearning to confine them, milk them, pull endless thread from their tender bodies. You’ll enslave my children until they wither and lose the will to live.

I will not let that happen.

Your crossbows thump and whine, cutting the air.

I’m too armored, too grown. Your weapons glance harmless off my sides.

Yet with a small thud, you pierce deeper than my heart.

A wooden shaft sprouts from my daughter’s forehead.

She’d peered over my back, curious. Dead, her body tumbles to the pine carpet.

You cannot have her.

To save her from molestation by your hands seeking her silk inside, I devour my daughter’s corpse. In my maw her carapace cracks, crunches. It’s more than I can bear. Hollow agony. Emptiness into which I further consume, chewing off my own leg. The one that carried her to my mouth.

The taste of my flesh, my pain, washes down her memory. Enough so I can stumble forth, missing one middle leg. Fleeing for the seven babies that remain.

* * *

Four legs, running. Four babies cling to my back.

Thrice more your weapons found my children.

Three more bodies, lovingly tucked into my stomach. Three more legs consumed.

Stupid, this self-destruction. I stagger inelegant over fallen trees, chonk-chunk-chon. On my back, my babies legs flail sharp, tick-tek-tik, barely holding on.

I’ve sabotaged their survival. I’ve slowed myself, half my legs consumed.

Sometimes loss compels destruction.

After laying my egg sac, I’m dying. No second chance. These children are all I am. Their tiny legs carry my hope—the hope of my species, nearly extinct. Each death gouges our future. Each my fault. My failure to protect. Horror too huge, horror demanding my body reflect the damage to my soul.

Ungainly, I lumber through sharp moonlight and shadow. Pines thinning, air thickening. Sea mist cools my wounds. Potent, this salt-and-seaweed scent of hope.

I won’t maim myself further. Whatever happens, I won’t succumb to the selfish desires of pain. Young lives are too important.

The limestone cliff is just ahead. A sharp precipice, breaking the land but hiding the sea—fusing rock to sky, a dark horizon that’s close enough to touch.

Behind is whooping and violent orange light.

Ahead more torches flash, cutting off my escape.

A trap. An ambush.

Nets drop from the trees, tripping me. I throw out my forelegs. They explode like pine trunks in frozen winter. I fall hard, rolling. A pair of babies scuttle off my back, finding safety on my stomach. But two of my sons are crushed. White ichor fountains from their abdomens—pre-silk they’ll never get to spin.

Wearing a cloak of crimson-dyed spider silk, your leader shouts, “Capture the young spiders first! If the mother resists, hack her apart.”

You cannot have my babies.

To defend, I attack. I swing my shattered legs. Too broken, they rip from my body and roll like black logs, thumping, sweeping your horses off their feet. You fall, screaming, and your torches die against the mist-damp ground.

With mandibles sharp, I chew your ropes, freeing me from the net. With only two legs, I cannot run. But I could reach out. Crush you moaning men. I could end your lives, as you’d end mine.

No. Never good has vengeance bought. And if my kind is to die by your hand, I shall not stain the world with further violence.

The seaside cliff, the safety of my childhood, is almost within reach.

First, I must protect my dead sons. Their eight legs fold inward like wilted flowers. Into my swollen belly, I consume, suffering the pain without distraction, without mutilation. My final two babies need all that remains of me.

Torches and shouts from behind, those of you who drove me from my burrow. A mob too many to fight.

We must escape.

Already, those who laid in ambush reach for fallen crossbows and swords.

We have little time.

My final defense is silk. I hate giving you this treasure, but web I spray—binding you to horses, to trees, to yourselves—silver threads in moonlight.

Towards safety, I crawl.

* * *

Two legs, scraping. Two babies cling to my back.

Across broken shale, I shove slowly forward, skrom-skrum-skom. My remaining babies make no sound, frozen atop my head.

Hooves pound behind. The one I spared, crimson-cloaked, cries, “Split the mother open and harvest the pre-silk she swallowed!”

A cold sea breeze rises beneath me as my head dangles over the cliff.

Finally.

On silk threads, my son and daughter lower themselves over the rocky outcropping, instinct guiding them into darkness.

Thank goodness. Sheltered, they’ll survive decades, devouring gulls at night—carrying our species into the future.

Of me, one final effort is required.

You cannot have my body. You cannot have the corpses of my babies, borne within me once more.

I plant my hind feet. The last two of eight, they won’t support my weight without breaking.

Nevertheless, I leap, rising over the horizon.

To those hunting, I hope I appear as one of their mothers, bipedal, stomach swollen like I’m pregnant.

My legs rupture. But I’m over the cliff, falling.

Falling through moonlight that smells of salt, seaweed, and hope. Falling into the ocean’s dark embrace—into the refuge of forever, our eternity beyond pain.

* * *

Ⓒ Brandon Case

Comments

  1. Danny says:
    May 9, 2025 at 5:00 pm
    Wow!! Incredible read!
  2. James Miller says:
    May 24, 2025 at 8:28 pm
    Nicely done.

Leave a Reply

To Be a Woman Is to Be Without a Name

by Chidera Solomon Anikpe

May 2025

i.

For most of her fifty-three years of life on Earth, she was called Mama Jide by everyone except for her son. He–the ‘Jide’ from which her identity was coined–called her Mummy.

And so, when she died and it came time to make posters announcing her death, and write obituaries to go in newspapers, the first question everyone asked was, “What was Mama Jide’s name sef?”

 

ii.

Years before Jide, before Illoabuchi–the man who would later marry her on a quaint Tuesday at the Registry in Nsukka, father her only child a year later, then abandon her weeks after her first breast caved to cancer–Mama Jide was called Miss Nkechi Elegant Face.

The name was as deserving as any title that had ever been given. Her face was the oval of an egg, with brows arched so high, they might as well have been arrows. A nose so pointed, it seemed almost drawn on. And lips that sang such beautiful melodies during Sunday service, they drove men and women and rowdy children to tears. But mostly the men.

If not for the vulgarity of it, and the lack of lyricism that it carried, she would have also been called Miss Nkechi Elegant Breasts, because on her chest sat two voluptuous balls of divine beauty that heaved when she walked and drew the neckline of her shirts taut.

She was divine.

And years before Jide, before Illoabuchi, before the cancer seized hold of her other breast and reduced it to a flat chest, she loved a man. His name was Majesty. And he was anything but.

 

iii.

“Hello Papa.” His voice is tentative on the phone, almost reclusive.

“Hello?” A pause, and then, “Jide? Is that you?” Contrary to Jide’s voice, Illoabuchi sounds excited, almost excitable.

Jide knows that the man has a new wife and two new children. That he still works at the mill in Okija even though he makes great effort not to pass through their neighborhood in Nsukka. That the man has grown rather paunchy in recent years, his hair has grayed at the edges, and his stomach has rounded to a ball. Jide knows all these things because he religiously stalks his father’s Facebook page with a burner account. He knows this because he sometimes treks to the mill by two in the afternoon, hoping to see his father walking towards the buka in the corner of the street for his lunch break. He does these things because once, when he was seventeen or eighteen, he intentionally walked right past his father on the streets of Nsukka and realized, with dread knotting in his stomach, that the man no longer recognized him.

“Mama is dead,” he says, voice lined with an alien hardness. “Three days now,” he adds in case the man does not know.

He is momentarily stunned to hear his father say, “I heard. I am so sorry for your loss.”

A moment of silence passes. And another follows behind it. All he can hear is the boisterous noise of children playing football across the street and the steady exhale of his father’s breath over the phone.

It takes him more effort than he expects to speak again.

“Uncle Livinus wants to sponsor Mama’s poster and obituaries for free, but we don’t know her real name.” There is shame in his voice when he speaks these words.

There is shame because he knows that he has never asked his mother for her name. It had never occurred to him to ask. On the forms that he filled for school, it was his mother’s first name backed by his father’s surname that sat in the slot for ‘Guardian’ or ‘Next of Kin.’

“Oh.” His father says, a new awkwardness creeping into his tone. “Her name was Nkechi Beatrice Izege.”

“Is.” He responds sharply.

“Eh? What?” His father asks, confused.

“Her name is Nkechi Beatrice Izege.”

He does not stay on the call long enough to hear his father say a quiet, “Ndo, sorry.”

 

iv.

Majesty, with his bushy afro and his knobby knees and his slight stutter, was a kind boy. He talked often about America, and Nkechi liked that he had big dreams even though she wondered how he could fit such magnanimous desires in a body as wiry as his own.

She liked him because he made her feel as delicate as a flower and as sturdy as the earth on which it was planted. She adopted his dreams as her own and soon, she too began to dream of a life in America. A life spent with him drinking real coffee–”not that Nescafé nonsense they sell over here and call coffee”–and taking long walks in the snow, surrounded by White men who said, “Howdy sir,” and tipped their caps in greeting like in the movies.

She dreamed these things because he dreamed these things, and she was content with the dreaming.

Until he secretly left for America in the July of ‘98 and did not leave a postal address for her to reach him by.

 

v.

On the day of her burial, Jide repeats the words, “My mother, Nkechi Beatrice Izege, was a great woman,” in his room over and over again until he is completely sure that it sounds organic.

But when he walks to the podium at St. Piran’s Catholic Church, Nsukka, and catches a glimpse of his gray-haired father in the congregation, accompanied by his fair-skinned young wife and their twelve-year-old, runt-like twins, his brain revolts against him. As does his tongue.

He says, “Mummy was a great woman…” instead.

 

vi.

On the altar where her body lies in a closed casket, fifty-three years of Nkechi Beatrice Izege’s life is summarised into a five-minute speech that neither includes any of her dreams, her hopes, her aspirations, nor her name.

* * *

Ⓒ Chidera Solomon Anikpe

Comments

  1. Julie says:
    May 16, 2025 at 12:10 pm
    Wonderful, deeply moving story.
  2. Folakemi says:
    May 16, 2025 at 12:23 pm
    I really enjoyed reading this. Sounds like you had fun writing it.
  3. Tantris says:
    May 19, 2025 at 2:01 pm
    Yes.
  4. Malina Douglas says:
    May 19, 2025 at 10:42 pm
    Great characterization in this piece. I get a real sense of who Nkechi was through brief flashes of her life.
    The last line hits hard.
  5. Chisom says:
    May 21, 2025 at 3:00 pm
    A breathtaking piece
  6. Miracle says:
    May 21, 2025 at 4:08 pm
    Dayum! This is beautiful.
  7. Chosen says:
    June 2, 2025 at 3:38 pm
    ”not that Nescafé nonsense they sell over here and call coffee”
    This phrase was most striking and it’s uncaring straightforwardness had made me laugh
    It remains my best part in this piece…
    In general, the story is awesome and well told

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Transubstantiation

by Sam W. Pisciotta

May 2025

I wake to you quietly singing to our daughter, an invocation from mother to child. You fold her to your breast and urge her to drink. Like the moon reflecting sunlight, she is given form by your love. Her translucent skin reveals organs struggling to become real, to move from the phantasmic to the biological. Lungs gently pulling. Bowels gently pushing. Her heart is not so much a beat as the quiet hum of the universe.

Your love for her transcends hydrogen stars and tidal rhythms; it pushes aside the laws of entropy, reaching around incubators and doctors’ pronouncements. When you brought her home, you asked me to believe—but it’s only by moonlight that I think I can see her. I wonder if I can coax her into the daylight, bring her into my solid world where gravity holds us together and mitosis divides us. My love requires empirical data.

On Friday night, we attend a séance. You want to ask our daughter if she’s getting enough milk, if the love tethering her to us is sufficiently strong. I drop you at the door of an old brownstone on 15th and Cheshire, then park the car across the street near the trees that line the park. It’s November cold, but I stand outside in the chilled air. I’m afraid to go in, afraid of what our daughter might say once given words, afraid she’ll wonder what I’m even doing there, a doubter wondering Golgotha

You peek through the drapes of the bay window, and I know I can’t put this off any longer. Crushing my cigarette underfoot, I climb the steps and go inside the house. You ask what took me so long, but I don’t tell you of my secret fear that our daughter won’t recognize me as her parent. After all, I don’t have a tether that will reach from this world to the next, nor the milk to make her real. I only have the silent hope that one day I will reach into the shadows and find her reaching back.

A young boy ushers us into the parlor and offers us cans of Coke; he points to a mixing bowl filled with Cheetos. You decline, but I take some of the Cheetos. I’m trying to get the orange shit off my fingers when Madame Rita enters and proclaims herself a conduit to all things otherworldly. She seats us at a table and then summons the spirits; she calls for a connection to the other side. A tambourine and trumpet hover in the shadows to shake and squawk. Soon there are raps on the table—one for yes and two for no. Madam Rita pulls out every magic trick for this evening’s journey to the spirit world.

But not everything here is fakery. In the seat beside me, you sit sobbing and caressing our daughter, and for the first time I see her, really see her. She rests in your arms, looking up as your tears roll onto her lips. She stops fussing at the taste of you.

And there it is, the only true connection made this evening, the bond between mother and child. With the taste of love still on her tongue, our daughter utters her first word. Mama. It’s barely audible over the trumpet’s call. Mama, she says, and the word rises to quiver within the air above us.

You must hear it too because you start to levitate from your chair.

Madam Rita stops jabbering and pulling on her strings. The tambourine and trumpet crash to the floor. For a long moment, Rita and I watch in silent awe as you lift toward the ceiling. Right then I know: our daughter will never join us in the light. All along, I’ve been mistaken. She’s not becoming more solid; I’ve just been slowly vanishing.

I stand and gently pull you back to the floor. When we leave, you float several inches above the ground, holding our daughter tightly in your arms. We cross the street, and I open the car door for you. You don’t get in though. Instead, you drift over the curb, glide across the grass, and disappear into a thicket of elms.

The streetlight above the car surges brighter, electricity popping. It feels safe to stand within that cone of light, and I’m tempted to stay there until morning. But at the edge of that light, the shadows in the park grow deeper. I see it now—the space in between, that space where you find her every night. Elm trees growing side by side hold a vacancy between them like a darkened doorway.

You call for me to join you, and I step from the light and into the shadow. It’s there I find you above a park bench, slowly rising from the earth. Her head lay on your shoulder while you hum a lullaby. You beckon for me to follow.

Love only requires my leap of faith.

Our daughter looks down at me and her eyes are filled with stars. Dada, she says, and the word flutters down to sit of my tongue. I lift from the ground to levitate beside you.

In this world you’ve created for us, the dreamlike world of twilight, we remain motionless, breath held in anticipation, fingers grasping but never closing, but also never surrendering to release. We can live here together, the three of us, in this space made real by our faith in each other.

* * *

Ⓒ Sam W. Pisciotta

Comments

  1. Greg Rohloff says:
    May 30, 2025 at 3:36 pm
    I was drawn into the story through the tension of what the father will do. Will he join the mother and infant, or will he remain in his world of empirical data. I like how the story starts out with an image of what I would expect to see — a father awakening to see his wife nursing their infant daughter. This introduction meets the standard of presenting something that I can relate to. But the clues that the child’s organs are struggling to pull her into this father’s world draws me to accept that the child is in a spiritual realm, that she will not be a part of the empirical world by changing from spiritual entity to an earthbound infant. The father is the one who undergoes the changes that the title points to.
  2. Scott T Evans says:
    June 14, 2025 at 1:10 pm
    Atmospheric, poetic yearning.

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Yes, No, Goodbye

by LeeAnn Perry

May 2025

Content Warning: Suicidal ideation


Content Warning

The dead don’t like to wake.

The darkness was torn away and I had flesh again, had eight arms prickled with goosebumps and eight legs fidgeting and four heads filled with nervous chaos. I was annoyed, of course. Who likes to be summoned? But these girls were earnest, and unpretentious, and piercingly open, and they had said the words, and they were sitting in a circle in the house where I had died.

A fifth girl sat outside the light she held pointed toward the board, notebook on her lap, ready to transcribe. She was not in the circle, so her mind was blank to me, but I knew she was the one who lived in this room, my room. These were her blacklight posters blaring from the walls, her secret stashes of makeup and mall lingerie, her SSRIs displayed bedside with a kind of pride. Piled forgotten in the closet were last year’s boy band CDs, and strewn on the floor were this year’s nu-metal CDs, already scratched.

The questions were about boys. The first few always are. They wanted to know if they were desired, and of course they were. They should have asked whether the boys were worth a damn, and of course they weren’t, no one thirteen is. I don’t control the planchette. They do, and it points every time to yes.

One of them, I knew, would achieve her heart’s wayward desires. This Jordan will put his hand down Gina’s jeans in a movie she doesn’t want to watch, some horror comedy populated with a middle-aged man’s caricatures of teenage girls, and eventually she will stop pushing his hand away because she’s been led to confuse surrender and seduction. Eventually, she will forget how alone she felt while laughter filled the theater. Remember, she’s still young. She’ll survive worse.

Leni asked about Kevin from homeroom, but she should have asked about what was growing in her mother, the doctor that dismissed the symptoms. I would have told her about night falling in the hospital as she waited with her father and her brother, about the powdered smell of flowers and the slow drive to the too-green lawn. I could have told her that it wasn’t her duty to manage her father’s grief. But don’t worry, she’s the kind who emerges from these things stronger.

How could I warn them and how would they learn to listen?

I felt the planchette grow warm in my eight hands as they decided their own fates. Will I become a veterinarian? Yes. Will I get an A on the history test? Yes. Will I live in California someday? Yes. Will we be friends until we die? Yes, yes, yes.

The fifth girl watched, wrote, sounded out the puzzled letters, and asked nothing. Soon the ritual strayed into distraction and they decided to watch a movie. They talked about it for fifteen minutes, compromised on no one’s first pick, and fell asleep. My presence in them softened and detached one by one until I was myself again, wavering but intact, floating just above the purple-lit, nylon-cocooned bodies.

The dead don’t like to wake. We’ve had enough life. We feel pity for the stuck ones, the stubborn ones, lingering baffled and useless in a world they can’t taste. I know nothing here is for me, but as I wait to darken again into oblivion I move through the house where I had died.

I pass through the walls into the master bedroom. My parents were long gone, but now I recognize the weight of a mother and father’s worry as they turn in their own quiet bed, each thinking about the things they had or might have done wrong. In the closet is a gift for a birthday three months out, already wrapped. I drift downward into the living room. The spinet piano is still there but the photos have changed: a first Holy Communion and a Confirmation, two white dresses, a gap-toothed smile and a faked one.

Outside, the moon is almost full. The neighborhood has changed and I don’t want to see it: the resurfaced streets, the new types of cars, the parking lot in the church where I might now be smoking joints with my friends, had I grown up. The sleep is a cousin of bliss, but it dulls in comparison to the bright and desperate now.

The dead don’t like to wake. Because when the jealousy hits it burns through the narcosis, because I want more life, of course I want more life. Anyone who has ever tasted life does, no matter how bitter it may have seemed at the time.

I drift down to the basement, and I try to recall the self that was so upset, so impulsive, so fiercely determined to punish anyone I could hurt, but all I can remember is the physical pain, the flash of regret. I lie where I lay before and wait for sleep to take me.

Someone’s still awake.

She holds the planchette.

It’s the girl with the flashlight, the smart one. Not because she doesn’t believe in ghosts, but because she knows she won’t listen to them. Because she’s thirteen. Because she has secrets and shames no one else has ever had and she knows how this all works already.

In her mind is a question, a terribly familiar question, that I want to scream no to. But she doesn’t ask me, and I can’t tell. She watches herself move the planchette to yes and she can’t hear me tell her no, no, no.

* * *

Ⓒ LeeAnn Perry

Originally published in The Dawn Review, August 2023. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

Comments

  1. Victoria says:
    June 10, 2025 at 5:15 pm
    Gripping story.

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Sour Milk

by Phoenix Mendoza

May 2025

Content Warnings: Body horror; Child neglect; murder of women (mentioned, not depicted)


Content Warning

Jean-Marie couldn’t get inside the barn by daylight. It was swarmed with fat black carpenter bees that buzzed in an iridescent cloud, blocking the entrance. Daddy could do it with an old tennis racket in hand, use it to swat them away with dull, clumsy pings. She tried once but the patch over her eye meant her aim wasn’t so good, and she’d only swung too hard and fallen over, getting dead grass in her hair. So, she waited to visit the barn once the sun went down and the bees went to sleep.

It wasn’t a real barn. No animals lived inside, there was no hay in the loft or grain in the silo. It was just for storage, somewhere for Daddy to put the bodies before he buried them. It was a good hiding place, guarded by the carpenter bees. They buzzed so loud no one would suspect there were flies inside, too. Jean-Marie went to visit the Ladies, carefully peeling the tarp away from their pretty faces so that they could talk to her in hushed whispers. Daddy tried to put them in holes before they got stinky, but sometimes he’d wait too long and their faces wouldn’t be so pretty anymore, coated in slime and maggots, or swollen and ruptured in places, the white shine of blood showing through vulture-ripped holes. But Jean-Marie didn’t mind. A rotten stinky Lady was better than no Lady at all, since she didn’t have a mommy, anymore.

Daddy snored in front of the TV, throw-up crusted down his bare, hairy chest. She let herself out of the screen door and hiked the dead-grass hill, ducking into the barn. And there, in the quiet darkness, she crouched in front of the newest Lady, who was in truth, not so new at all. “Hi,” she said, taking a barbie comb out of her pocket and sliding it lovingly  through a small segment of blood-crusted black hair.

“Hello Jean-Marie,” the lady said back in her whispery dead-thing voice. Her eyes were blank and clouded and soon would be eaten away by flies. The eyes always went first, the tastiest part of a Lady. There was still a kindness to the jellied bulge, though, like she didn’t blame Jean-Marie for what happened. Jean-Marie remembered thinking back to the moment she first saw her, pumping gas at the station in maternity leggings and a tee shirt. You like that one? Daddy had asked from behind the wheel of the truck. Yeah, Jean Marie said, because she had to choose someone, fast, or Daddy would choose for her.

He let her out then, and she wandered over to the Lady, crying. It was never very hard to cry. Jean-Marie felt like the tears were always welled up in her throat, ready to overflow. The Lady crouched down so she was on her level, smiled at her so sweetly, promising they’d find her Daddy. And they had.

Now she sat up, tarp around sharp, maggoty shoulders like a Queen’s cloak. “Did you have a good day at school?” she asked, black tongue moving in the pit of her mouth. She was a little lopsided now, half of her face slack and melted and bearing creases from the tarp, lips withered and pulled back over her teeth so it looked like she was smiling.

“I don’t go to school,” Jean-Marie explained, uncapping her glittery vanilla lip gloss and dabbing it on what was left of the lady’s lips. Her eyelids made papery moth sounds as they opened and closed, and something deep inside her squelched, sputtered gaseously.

“How do I look?” The lady asked, twisting her head to the side, tendons creaking, ropes of sinew in her neck showing through shreds of buggy skin.

Jean-Marie assessed, then peeled her eye patch off to get a better look. “Ok,” she said.

“Can you see through that eye?” the lady asked, pointing with her stiff, blackened finger.

“It’s actually better than the other one,” Jean-Marie admitted shyly. “They cover up the strong eye so the weak eye gets better.”

The Lady took the lip gloss from her, cupped Jean-Marie’s face in a beef-jerky palm as she applied it. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” the Lady said, a few flies buzzing out of her mouth. “You’re a very pretty little girl.” 

Jean-Marie blushed. No one ever thought she was pretty. Daddy called her plain, compared to her Mommy, who had been a beauty. Jean-Marie  didn’t remember what she looked like- there were pictures but they were all a cigar box under her Daddy’s bed, and he never let her look at him. The one time she snuck a glimpse after he’d passed out, she found they were stuck together with something like glue. The picture on top looked just like a Lady—dark hair, light eyes, big smile.

“Jean-Marie,” the Lady said after a moment. “Can I ask you for something special and secret?” 

She nodded, eyes wide as the Lady lifted her shirt and laboriously unhooked her nursing bra. The deflated balloons inside spilled out like two slabs of meat, bruised and cottage-cheesy, nipples pointing in different directions. “I had a little girl, before. Younger than you. I’m sure she misses me, but not as much as I miss her. And I just hope that one last time, I can feel—“

Jean Marie nodded solemnly, and did not need to be told twice. She was a girl without a mother, an empty hungry mouth. She dropped the lip gloss and the Barbie comb, crawled over on skinned knees to the Lady’s outstretched arms. Then she let herself be pulled to the slat, sunken frame. Nosed through the rot to the puckered bag, fixed her lips over dead flesh, and sucked until bits of skin rolled off on her tongue. She could almost taste the ghost of milk gone sour, and imagine the gush of it over her tongue. The Lady held her, and hummed like a buzzing bee.

* * *

Ⓒ Phoenix Mendoza

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