They like to say they met at Bow Market. Theirs sounded like a sapphic romance: reaching for the same porcelain ring dish on a Small Business Saturday. One of them, to put their wedding band in, the other, to house their grandmother’s signet. The real story is more cliché: bartender at female-owned wine bar comps customer a few glasses of red on a Wednesday night and misses their shift the next day. In the end, they end up buying the ring holder from Bow after all, not for wedding bands, but instead, for discarded safety pins from running bibs. Scattered, silver, and winking.

“What clinched it for you?” they ask while walking the whippet or drinking Chardonnay distilled in steel.

“That you liked baroque rock.”

“That you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.”

“That you told me to come home.”

They slide past bitter things like divorce papers and the other dog that ended up with the ex. That is until one of them calls the whippet Rufus or worse, the other Emma. It’s in times like those that the what ifs come out and the do you still think about her and the silent but terrible is this the next passing thing?

What they both really want to know, even though they’re too afraid to ask: what is it that keeps you here? Perhaps their answers might have been the same: baroque rock, growing up, home. They continue to let that be their truth until, on the bartender’s professional Instagram, they see a comment at 3 a.m. from amylikescats that stops them cold:

Love your hair like that all scattered, silver, and winking.

The next morning, the customer-of-the-pair takes a cup of gunmetal earl grey and sits and stares at the ring holder until all those silver needles swim together. They sweep it up and dump it into the trash and realize for the first time since they got together, they can finally see the dish and it’s not like they remember. There’s an uneven crack, hairline fracture, along the blue tinted lip. Not broken yet but maybe, if they smashed it against the floor, they could piece it back together in kintsugi.

Now that they think about it, that old Japanese art was something they always wanted to learn, that— they believe without evidence— was kept from them by the whippet or the Chardonnay. They pick it up, feel the lack of its weight in their hand when the bartender-of-the-pair arrives. 

They stare at one another like two cowboys dueling at high noon, hands on pistols and slowly, slowly, the one with the ring holder bends down on one knee and offers it to the other.

“Can we start again for real this time?” They ask, and the bartender brushes her silver hair over her shoulder and meets her on the floor and closes her hand over the ring holder and their foreheads touch and they sit there, waiting, perhaps, for one of them to rise.

I moved south for college and began working part time at a nonprofit dedicated to forest preservation. My department was responsible for converting the field reports into numerical data. Aisha was one of the field workers. Her reports were thorough and well written, often containing poignant notes about the forest creatures. I was always sad to distill her narratives. She’d write: On four separate occasions, the camera observed a gnome hand-feeding acorns to a family of squirrels. The mother squirrel filled her cheeks with the nuts and brought them back to a hole in her tree. Two shining pairs of eyes peered out to watch her ascent and descent.

I’d write: Daily sightings: One gnome; three squirrels.

When I invited Aisha over for dinner one Friday night, I was surprised when she accepted. I made us spanakopita with parsley I’d grown in my flower boxes. She returned home with enough leftovers for lunch the following day. We began having dinner every week, sometimes twice a week.

One Saturday, Aisha texted asking to have dinner. When I picked her up (she didn’t have a car), I noticed she was vibrating in the seat next to me. Her thin frame blurred at the edges.

“Aisha,” I said.

“No, no, I’m fine,” she said quickly. “It’s silly, really. Just a man. A guy.”

I kept my face forward. Aisha seemed too, well, young to be seeing anyone. “From work? How long’s it been going on?”

“A month.” She scratched the back of her right hand over and over with her thumb. “He’s not from work.”

I said nothing; I’ve always had the ability to call forth weighty silences. Once, arguing with a lover, she asked me how I kept my quietude so well hidden yet readily available, like a tightly folded blanket.

“I don’t like to tell people things until they’re serious,” she said. She was looking out the window, still scratching.

“Ok, well, where’d you meet?”

She hesitated. “In the woods.”

The tires thu-thunked over a crater in the asphalt. I asked, “How?”

Aisha proceeded to tell me she’d been in the woods last month to quantify an as-yet unidentified dropping, when she heard a sound like a woodpecker. But the pitch was too tinny, isolated. She followed the sound and found a naked man, standing in a hole in the ground. Rather than run away or call for help (as I surely would have), she asked what he was doing.

“I’m trying this out,” he answered. He had brown skin and black eyes with hardly any sclera exposed.

“Trying what out?” She asked, but he didn’t answer. He continued to stand upright in the hole, holding his back impossibly straight. He made no move to leave or say anything more.

Aisha left the woods and consulted her notes. A centuries-old live oak tree supposedly lived in the hole the man stood in. She’d heard legend of this on internet forums. Trees turning into people for a brief period.

Like Rumspringa for the Amish, treefreak444 had said.

The man was still there the next day. “Come on,” she said. “Don’t waste this opportunity.”

The man hesitated and then stepped out of the hole. The spines of dead leaves snapped under his feet. Aisha told him to follow, and he did.

She took him, first, to an ice cream parlor, where they shared a chocolate sundae with vanilla ice cream and two cherries. She shyly showed him how she could tie a cherry stem in a knot with her tongue. Then they electric scootered to a soft-drink museum, where they tasted different syrup samples and watched metal machines crush cans into perfect, gleaming cylinders. Last she took him to a reimagined rendition of Waiting for Godot, where, in the end, Godot arrives. The reviews were mixed.

At the end of the day, she did not take him back to the forest. She took him to her apartment. She did not say explicitly, but I believe they were intimate.

He lived with her for a month, rarely saying a word, before informing her he’d be leaving for the woods that night.

“Just like that?” she’d asked, shocked.

“Yes,” he said.

She drove him back to the woods and followed him to his hole. He told her to turn around and she did. She heard that tinny, non-resonant sound again and when she turned back, a live oak tree stood, strong and dusty, in his place.

We sat at my kitchen counter. Aisha had stopped shaking. In fact, a thin sheen of calm had descended upon her.

“He told me,” she stopped to swallow, “that I could join him, if I wanted to.”

“Join him?” My face felt separate from the rest of me. “What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure,” she paused. We both knew what she would say next. “But I think I want to.”

I said nothing to deter her. I stirred the milk, parmesan, and garlic until it frothed into alfredo sauce. We ate our pasta from wide white bowls, traded the cheese grater back and forth. At the end of our meal, I rested the tips of my fingers on Aisha’s knee.

“If you don’t go,” I said, keeping my gaze above her hairline. “You’re an idiot.”

That night, when I dropped her off, she came around to the driver’s side and hugged me. I knew I would not see her again, nor would I read another of her lively reports.

But I was wrong. Four days after our final dinner, I received a report she’d written. It was dated a few weeks back, after the tree man would’ve been living with her for several days. Her words were confused, nearly unreadable. I will always remember how that report ended: the world’s wooden forever believes in our salvation. I copied this sentence down on a paper napkin leftover from my lunch (I’d eaten dry salad and hadn’t made a mess) and threw away the report. There’d been nothing easily convertible to numbers.

The boat skids and bounces across the sea in darkness, and Yasser has never been so frightened, for so long, before. In Syria, he cowered as bombs fell from the sky, heard the whistle of bullets just inches from his ear, was splashed by the blood of people he loved. But that all happened with horrifying speed. This night has felt endless, and though Yasser can swim a little, he’s never been on a boat or at sea, and knows he’s no match for these tireless waves. This small, rickety fishing boat feels flimsy as a toy in a bathtub, splashed around by a violent and invisible giant child. He thinks he may die tonight, that this quarter-century is all he’s been allotted—but he’d feel proud to die this way, fighting for a future. Better to die a hare in bounding flight than cower in a warren waiting for death.

Eleni wakes at 5 a.m. as she has every day for six months. As her feet touch cool tiles, her back protests. She defies the pain, forcing herself to stand up. She has found defiance a surprisingly effective strategy for dealing with old age. It has limits, of course. She can’t do much about death (which she senses sometimes, snuffling on her trail) but she can make it a difficult pursuit and she won’t be easy to swallow. She intends to stick in death’s throat: make it choke.

Dawn’s embers glow on the horizon and hope flares inside Yasser’s heart. He knows life isn’t a scary movie, and that death is no nocturnal creature waiting in the darkness: he’s eaten breakfast inside shaking walls as bombs struck and seen bodies steam in the street under midday sun. Yet an illogical, instinctive part of him insists the light is safer. He looks at his fellow refugees—two dozen, shaking with cold, fear or both—and some of their faces reflect his hope back at him.

The night dissolves above Eleni’s head as she packs her bicycle’s basket with water and biscuits. There were two weeks last summer when the boats came almost daily, and the whole island jittered with whispers of a new smuggling route targeting tiny Gavdos. But the boats are less frequent now, since the coastguards got wise and intercepted them at sea, arresting the smugglers and taking the refugees to larger, better-resourced islands. Eleni has read grim reports on the camps in those places, but time’s taught her what she can and cannot change. The boats may be fewer now, but Eleni goes to the shore every dawn, in case she is needed.

The smugglers shout and though Yasser doesn’t understand their Maghrebi dialect well, he sees the way their fellow Libyans start squinting North and knows someone must have sighted shore. Yasser can’t see it, but he can sense it. Greece. Europe. He’s waited so long to get here, travelled so far. In Damascus, he’d saved money by helping people with computers, cycling around neighborhoodas that had avoided bombing for long enough to have functioning Internet. Computers connected the world, and he hoped his IT skills might help him find a better, kinder place in it. Before he started on this journey, he’d been warned of its dangers, but he knew that staying in Damascus could be just as perilous, his hatred of the regime known. In a life full of dangers, you sometimes have to choose by the one your heart kicks hardest against.

Eleni cycles through the village in smudgy dawn light. She knows leaving this early won’t fool the villagers or silence those who call her eccentric. It won’t deter Mr. Patrakis, who warns her, and anyone else in earshot, that soft hearts like hers will ruin the island, will ruin Greece. Eleni leaves early because she knows morning is when most refugee boats arrive. She remembers her father, too, a fisherman lost at dawn in the same sea when she was small. Nobody waited for him on the shore. She’s carried that memory throughout her life: a sad, heavy, useless thing. Only in these last months has she found a use for it.

The smugglers are shouting again, causing tumult among the passengers. A Libyan woman translates for Yasser in urgent, simplified Arabic. A coastguard boat approaches from afar and the smugglers are turning back to avoid arrest. Yasser’s heart wails. It will take a year to save enough for this passage again and he’s so close. As the boat spins and water churns, he thinks he sees a blur of land. Before he can think, he heaves himself out of the boat and tumbles into the frothing waves.

As Eleni cycles along the Tripiti cliffs—where tourists pose for photographs at Europe’s southernmost tip—she thinks she sees something out at sea. She stops and stares out at the waves, but there’s nothing. Perhaps it was a trick of light, or a whale spouting. She wishes she had binoculars, then reminds herself they wouldn’t really help. Not even defiance could help her swim so far at her age, not to anyone so far out that she can’t see them with her own eyes.

Yasser is shivering and tiring despite clinging to an inflatable tossed by one of the other refugees as the boat raced away. He sees the island only in brief snatched moments before another wave crashes against his face, blinding him. His whole world contains just three things now: sea, Yasser, shore. He must live. He kicks, kicks, kicks.

Eleni sits under the cliffs in her usual spot, sheltered from the sun and its dazzling glare. Her heart jumps when she spies a disturbance out in the waves—a clumsy thrashing that can only be a person lost at sea. She sets down her flask of tea, walks to the shore, and wades out to meet a young man who is not her father, but could be someone’s one day.

SleepoverWhen I sleep with men, I will remember the sleepovers. Lying curled in the crook of that masculine tang, Old Spice and old socks, I will remember Bath & Body Works—Warm Brown Sugar, and the way the scent, sprayed, clung particulate to the peach fuzz on your neck.It’s Friday. We flip to that same, two-page…

A Community Feature with Lamp Lifeboat LadderLamp Lifeboat Ladder is a global refugee resettlement program that supports survivors of torture, sexual violence, and trauma who have been forced to flee their homeland. They provide protection and holistic accompaniment to survivors, and work with them to identify and address their needs—this may be medical care, safe housing, access to education, or therapeutic support. Lamp Lifeboat…

Flash Fiction winner of the Spring 2023 F(r)iction Literary Contest.

With Real Dog long-dead, your vlog is thriving. We both know they only came to hear about the murder.

You play coy, It’s hard to talk about.

It’s not. Watch me: You heard noises at night—a running tap? an intruder?—and reached below your bed to find comfort in Real Dog’s tongue lapping at your palm.

In videos, your currant-colored wall read as honest, somber. The nights I spent there, it was eggshell. Red must’ve been cheaper than the countless coats of white it would’ve taken to cover up the punchline scrawled in Real Dog’s blood: Humans Can Lick Too.

You won’t dole out gruesome details until views dwindle—an aging musician withholding his one-hit wonder. You tell them about waking up to your dog’s life puddled on the hardwood. A one-two punch: the world-stop of losing such an obedient love, then, horror. That wet sandpaper tickle against your hand didn’t belong to Man’s Best Friend, only Man.

Sniffles. Pretend camera-shy eyes. It wasn’t who I thought it was.

I’m less than sympathetic; you weren’t who I thought you were.

The ring light behind the camera casts a frosted halo across your cheeks. You’re suddenly solicitous, hawking a candle with a pithy label: “Candles are fire you can keep as a pet.”

What brings you comfort? you chirp, For me, it’s one of these.

What brings me comfort? When the night is blue-black, I conjure memories of running my tongue along your body’s every valley, the hopeful cave of your neck. It stilled me.

But you were already looking for reasons to leave. I’d ask, What’s wrong?, and the way you looked at me made me want to put my clothes back on. How humiliating to have believed you could love me in high-definition.

Now I only see you in your shining rectangle. I zoom in, reducing your face to a desert of blinking squares. I interrogate every pixel. Can I hold this line of ones and zeros responsible? Can I blame this string of code?

You sometimes mention Ghost Dog, a combination of air and hope, phantom tongue licking your fingertips. The heart isn’t there, you admit.

I fall asleep to your gilt voice lapping at my dreams. You’d hate it, the way I marionette you in my mind, but you don’t own You any more than you own Ghost Dog.

I wonder if you have a ghost of me, and if you do, what she does.

I can’t relax into new lovers now. At every soft scrape of new teeth against my collarbone, I stop. Is this real? A steady drip, drip, drip of doubt. I turn on lights, double-check. Am I allowed to love this?

When they’re gone, the light of my computer screen paints my face blue. I watch your lips crinkle at an imaginary audience. I press my thumb against your face until the colors pool.

Nights like this, I am glad that when you reach out in the dark, you have no one.

They’d found her body in an empty field. A piece of her denim on a barbed wire fence. Her white handbag under a tree in the Cherokee National Forest, its kisslock loosely pecked. Days earlier, she’d begged me for ten dollars. I knew it’d go to the man who usually stood across the street watching us, but I cashed it out of my register and handed her the money. She looked ragged and tired, like she’d been running through the woods all night. Her arms were covered in scratches. I imagined her in danger and she suddenly became “Jessica.” When I first met her, she said that would be her horror movie name: Jessica. She said she might not make it all the way to the end of the movie—axe-beaten and swollen, blood on the brain—but she would at least be one of the final characters to die. You would definitely die in the first scene, she said. I didn’t want to believe her, but I feared she was right. She leaned across the bagging area while she talked, and my coworkers left their registers to come listen. There was no one in the store that time of day anyway.

You’re wrong about me, I said, and I tried to talk my movie character’s station up. I’d seen enough horror movies to know that the good girls made it through. The girls who had sex, the girls who smoked pot or got drunk in the basement, the girls whose boobs you saw while they changed clothes in front of a mirror—those girls were the first to die. I’ll be okay, I said.

Jessica did not agree. You’re too nice, she said. My coworkers, on the other hand, were tougher, and she thought some of them might survive but most would only make it about half-way through the movie. They were farm girls, girls from hollers. Girls whose fathers taught them how to throw a punch without telegraphing.

We were all impressed by Jessica. The loose men’s pants, the tiny tank top, all the rings she wore. The blue bandana around her neck. The homemade tattoo behind her ear. At first, we wondered if she was a thru-hiker. Middleton was a secret oasis on the Tennessee section of the Appalachian Trail, and MidMart was the only grocery store in town. We saw a lot of hikers, but Jessica didn’t carry a backpack, only a small white purse that she wore across her body. And she stayed around longer than any thru-hiker I’d met.

Over the next few weeks, Jessica began coming in early, just after the morning meeting when all the managers had headed back to their offices, to chat. We talked about horror movies, about the Poltergeist and Exorcist curses, the people who died or almost died, and about Jason Voorhees’s mother. One day I asked her about her own mother. Jessica didn’t look old enough to be on her own. She married her boyfriend, she said, and kicked me out.

We noticed Jessica wore the same two outfits over and over and every day that same blue bandana, so we all started donating to what we called the “Jessica Cause.” We gave her our old clothes and our books. We gave her lipstick and tampons, and a little of our money every payday.

But then she stopped coming around. We waited. We watched for her brown ponytail, her spaghetti straps through the sliding glass door. The man from across the street was gone. When the officers came in for Cokes just before they started their shifts, we always asked them about Jessica. That was the only name we had for her. They knew who we were talking about, but they never had news. We didn’t know for sure, but we got the feeling they weren’t really looking. But we didn’t stop. We kept watching for her blue bandana, her soft gait down the aisles. I’d stand behind my register, feeling transparent to the shoppers and my coworker, and twist the heart pendant on the necklace my mother had given me for Christmas. I’d twist it until I felt my fingertip purpling.

Then one day the officers said they’d found her. They told us she’d bled out. Later, one of the girls had to explain to me, Bleeding out means you bleed until you die.

We talked about Jessica all that day, but then much less in the days that followed.

All summer, I picked up shifts no one wanted and followed my parents around the house. Helped my mother repaint the living room. Chopped vegetables with my father for the stews he made. I dreaded being alone. I wanted anything other than to remain alone and unseen, hidden away in my bedroom. What had caused her to bleed out? There had to be an instrument somewhere that fit her wounds precisely. And the person who used it was still out there.

That fall, I would be going away to college, and I knew what sometimes happened to college girls—how quickly walking across campus at night could turn into its own kind of horror movie. I thought about Jessica’s prediction for me, my fingers rubbed raw from twisting my locket. I couldn’t stop seeing Jessica dying in that field alone at night. I could feel the blue of the stars above and the thin night air. I could see Jessica agape in the pale summer grasses, the dirt soft under her nails, the blood pooling under her shirt.

I twisted the locket, cinching it tight around my fingertip until a numbness came, until my hand felt as invisible as Jessica was, long before she’d been killed.

It’s all in the smile. If they smile back, you got them hooked. They smile back, they’re already wondering what your tits look like under that dress, or whether you do anal.You’re thinking “not all men.” But the “nots” don’t matter, you’re not there for the nots. You’re there for the ones who smile back as…

Just outside of Chinatown, the stylist holds my hair in his hands and calls to his assistant. “Help me!”She runs over and sticks her fingers into the dye-free floppy strands.“It’s hard to hold!” he exclaims. “It’s so healthy!” she nods.“It is sooo healthy!” he returns.“We never see hair this healthy,” the assistant speaks into the now-falling tresses I see reflected in…

The following piece is the flash fiction winner of F(r)iction’s Fall 2022 literary contest

As it is the duty of every rational creature to attend to its offspring, and … it is necessary to be prepared to conquer nature’s brute instinct. The first thing you must attend to … is her exterior accomplishments…

-Loosely borrowed from Thoughts on the Education of Daughters with Reflections on Female Conduct, Mary Wollstonecraft, Grandma of Frankenstein’s Monster

Take your sweet brown girl. To the field. Grease her pate like she’s a fine filly. You’ve been telling her so. Let her laze in her favorite spots. Only greens she can eat until she’s almost sick. Wrap a braided choker round her throat and guide her now swollen body to the house.

Shield her eyes from the cool metal, the easy leads of flesh. Button her ears against the sounds of production. She’s meant for better things. Take her to her own little sweet space to rest. Nuzzle her nose. Pet her crown. Don’t look into her eyes.

Now comes the messy part.

Line her up with the others. She blends in except to you. You see the Cameroon-shaped birthmark above her gut and know it’s her. Guide her through the line. Shock her if you need to. It’s nothing compared to the gun. Look away when the bolt of lightning hits her skull.

Collect her. Hook her. You may see yourself in her brown eyes but don’t worry it’s just a reflection. She’s dead. Blood-let her for good measure. Keep the blood away from your shoes otherwise you’ll leave a trace. Cover your nose when her foulness slips out.

Start your work. Dissect her into sections.

Fuck the Chuck and round. They’re both for poor people.

Locate her tender parts. Be gentle here. It sells for your whole month pay, making it worth 1/12th your life.

Finish with the plate, flank and shank.

Take her parts to be weighed. Notice how her insides look like all the others but argue for more because she’s been fed. Wash her blood off.

Take the cast-offs of her you’ve been allowed to take home. Grill her. Notice how her ends now curl up into a tough bowl. Put her on a white plate. Ignore how bland she tastes. How she sticks between your teeth, tweeks your jaws. Swallow her whole if needed.

Shit her out re-born brown.

It was a hot, dry June and Paul was already discussing what we would do for New Year’s. 1948 seemed to sneak up on us from out of the hills. Paul wanted to travel down to Vienna. I’d never been, but he had. We had lingered in Italy after the war had finished with us, just letting…

When we made them, they were mere bundles of light and flesh. They couldn’t speak, we thought, because we didn’t make them for speaking. At first they had no faces, because we didn’t make them so they could look upon ours. We made them so we could reap from them what we needed—a heart, a liver, a pound of flesh….