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Issue 04

A new issue is here! The Truffle family continues to grow, and for the first time we welcome back past contributors.

On the menu this issue, stories of places and people who are no longer there or those who have never been; characters who struggle, flee, look around for love and meaning; tales others tell about us, how much we care, and what we are scared they might find out.

To be enjoyed as a series of light meals or an indulgent feast paired with the drink of your choice!

Editor
Tina J. Bowman
@tinajbowman

Contributors

Life After by Frances Gapper
My New-Holland TS-115 by MK Sturdevant
Laughing, Laughing, Fall Apart by Richard Leise
Aberdeen, August, 1981 by J. Edward Kruft
Christ Let Me Borrow His Car by Christopher P. Mooney
A Nice Sit Down and a Bit of What You Fancy by Lucy Goldring
The Rumour Is by Gemma Elliott
Komatsu’s Lion by Taylor Alexandra Duffy
Sat-Nav Cupid by David Cook
Free Sunglasses by Paul Ruta
Weeping Willow by Rob DelVecchio
Drawing a Line Under the Dog by John Holland
Life, Unboxed by Helen Gordon
The Piggy That Divides By Itself by Josh Sippie

Design by Nadia Castro @nadiacastro.uk

 Truffle is an independent literary magazine.
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Life After / Frances Gapper


Have you seen this, Mum asks me, pointing to a yellow stain on my hen-patterned tea towel. Probably turmeric, I say, it doesn’t matter. I try to grab the towel, but she won’t let go. The oven timer beeps, through the glass I see my cheese soufflé’s overbalancing. Mum, give me the towel! Flustered but obstinate, Mum tells me to use the oven glove she gave me. It’s stiff and slippery, more liability than culinary aid, so I’m forced to bring my skirt into play, hobbling from oven to work surface. Why the cordon bleu anyway, Mum’s not impressed, she’d prefer a salad.

The tea towel dominates our lunchtime conversation, Mum ignoring my attempts to change the subject. If the stain won’t wash out, she says, I could put in a new bit of material. Really Mum, I say, it’s not worth the bother, I’ll throw it away and buy a new one. Mum: I’m ashamed to call you my daughter!

She kidnaps the tea towel, stuffing it in her bag. I know I’ll get it back invisibly mended, washed and crisply ironed. The sight of my rejuvenated kitchen item will oddly please and comfort me. As she’s leaving I babble platitudes. She turns at the front door, her eyes hold mine. Letting me know she knows what I intended to keep from her a bit longer. Till I’m showing, or preferably for decades. Waggling her finger at me she says, don’t throw it away.

So I travel across the city. I go by public transport despite the CCTV cameras, because I’m not guilty of original sin, or any modern crime. First I stow the baby with Laura-next-doora. Her skin is freckle-pale: oh thank god, she says, I was afraid you’d forgotten. We all three bare our gums. I squeeze the baby to make her cry – instead she giggles – and exchange her for a teabag. I love you, I love you, I hear Laura say, not talking to me, as the door closes.

He’s in the conservatory, Mum says. I carry through a cup of boiling water tempered only by milk. Dad’s putting together the world in two globes. Once it’s finished he’ll break it up and donate it to the Air Ambulance. His dark-encircled eyes no longer need make-up, his Mohican’s dwindled to a patch on his bald head. He drinks and says no one makes a cuppa like you, doll. I leave before the taste gets too strong for his heart and chuck the bag down a drain to pollute the sewers.

Having pandered I now ponder, do superheroes like weak tea? The truth is, Dad’s not a hero. He’s not even my father.

Collecting the baby from her raven-haired minder requires an amount of trickery. When I open my arms she transfers without sob or quibble, but next instant she’s back in Laura’s. Laughing as if it’s a game she yo-yos between us, until I magic up a pomegranate-flavoured rusk, which she gnaws. Laura valiantly processes but her mind snags at acceptance, she bargains for two more minutes. OK then. Leaving them together on the floor – Laura couldn’t be more encircling if she was an octopus – I wander into her small but amazingly clean kitchen. I note the bottle steriliser and a leaflet pinned to the cork noticeboard: Considering Adoption? Marching back into the lounge, I wave the leaflet at them. No, I say.

The baby’s just started to crawl so we’re off, desperately mini-breaking. This motorway service station’s been on our to-visit list: its café windows overlook a small lake upon which artificial ducks paddle, remote-controlled by the young bartender. Feeling like I’ve moved to America, I lean on the bar and order a mint julep. According to TripAdvisor the mint juleps are to die for, but heedless of sinister terminology I down it, having first removed the little green umbrella. I can’t taste any alcohol, I complain. You’re Mummy Bunny, the hostile mixologist replies. He twiddles the umbrella, thereby activating a tiny microphone, which connects to the announcement system, so even people in the toilets hear Mummy Bunny, where’s Baby Bunny? I glance round and see her heels disappearing into the Wendy House or Play Portal. ‘5 Children Lost’ warns a Notice to Parents. The 5 clicks to 6. I pursue her through pink and yellow doors into a witch’s kitchen, which smells deliciously of roast poultry. Oh here you are, the witch quacks. She’s been good as gooseberry sauce, haven’t you duckie. Excuse me, I say, and remove my baby from the chopping board.

I take baby for what the sternly summoning letter calls her annual check-up. This’ll be her first medical rendezvous, I’m surprised she even has an NHS number. Dr Lockyer’s new to the practice, his theoretical speciality is levitation, which he says relieves pressure on joints, extends human lifetimes – viz astronauts returning from space years younger – and could drastically cut prescription of antidepressants, thereby preventing contamination of the water supply and boosting sperm count. He tosses baby ceilingwards and she hovers for half a second before he catches her. Very good, he says, nothing wrong there. Any concerns? 

I decide to ventilate a worry: I think we may have the same biological father, does that matter? Where another doc might exclaim whoa, this one looks interested. How are we defining biological? Hanging from a tree, I say. Upside down, I mean he was. Right, says Doctor Lockyer, a difficult sexual position. How did you…? His glance, that’s all it took. He impregnated me with… embarrassed I substitute ‘a bat of his eyelids’ (which reminds me the dream also featured a couple of bats) for eyes like fathomless dark pools. I was seeing another guy at the time, but. 

OK. Dr Lockyer gazes at a pen balanced on his flat palm. And your mother, same dream? I think so, I say. Although we’ve never talked about it.

Hmm.

Anytime, Laura says. She holds one ankle, I hold the other. Baby loves to swing upside down, fun in bloom. Her father’s daughter, I say. You think, says Laura, but it’s a wise child. Most passers-by look disapproving, not the silver-brooched (a tiny pair of scissors) old lady who picks a thread off my coat shoulder. I like her, I say, she’s broadminded. Is she, replies Laura, once when I forgot to turn off my landing light she accused me of growing cannabis. Laura shrieks and I feel uneasy, cannabis/Anubis. To ward him off I recite Marys: Mary Beaton, Mary Seaton, Mary Carmichael. And me. But who’s me? Each time I shut my eyes, wolves pour down. They gather in the car park, swinging their keys. When you drink too much and dance too wildly, it’s a signal for them to attack and tear into you. If she ever finds out I’ll tell her it’s OK.

The house was on a main road to the city centre. I don’t know who owned it, perhaps they’d died. A shadowy place, utilities cut off, haunted by me and my co-ghosts, its dimness a relief after my fluorescent-lighted workdays. 

My room’s previous occupier had left an overflowing ashtray on the outside sill, never emptied by me. Occasionally I heard the flutter of a pigeon jabbing at it. A spindly conifer grew in the lightless well that separated us from next door. One hanger hung in the mouldy cupboard; I piled my things on the carpet, where moth larvae burrowed into them.

Mapping the area by its convenience stores, I’d walk a long way for a Star Bar. But then unwisely I accepted a birthday invitation. After that I found a flat to rent and bought myself a nice tea towel.

Frances Gapper’s tiny story She’s Gone was published by Wigleaf and is included in Best Microfiction 2021. Her flashes and micros have appeared in e.g., 100 Word Story, Six Sentences, Dribble Drabble Review, FlashBack Fiction, the Ilanot Review, the Citron Review, New Flash Fiction Review and Splonk. She lives in the UK’s Black Country with her partner Bear. Twitter @biddablesheep

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My New-Holland TS-115 / MK Sturdevant

One night in Kilbrittain, a cloud was everything there was in the world. It marched up the long hill that separated the kitchen from the sea. It expanded until everything was inside it. 

In the kitchen within that cloud, old Philomena tapped her ash in a brown plastic tray. Her sons got the board game ‘Risk’ off the shelf. They set up the game of world conquest as words of battle were laid bare— hard words, after-dinner words. I’ll split the farm with Finbarr two parts even, was said to the third brother. Ye wouldn’t. Doesn’t matter anyway, I’m going to beat you, and when I do, you’ll swear off the Baile Áthe Cliath lass and I’ll ask her out. I will not. Will. Not a hope. Alright, then the losers will have to run a marathon. We feckin won’t. You’ll have to root for Kerry then, next match. Ah Brian, ah Brian, they all said, at the words that had finally gone too far. 

It was agreed that the winner would acquire Gerry’s new tractor. Gerry was a neighbor down the road and was not in on the discussion, but the decision was firm. 

The cloud and the leading man expanded themselves even further over the hour, taking whole territories and bargaining for nothing, merciless, even Philomena imposed her smoke from within the kitchen within the cloud. In the dense fog, no one noticed my stealthy advance on Europe.  

At some point, a disagreement between the two younger brothers nearly ruined the ambience, but the squabble was handily beaten back by the mother as if her boys were not in their 30s. A delicate goblet of sherry was placed before her. 

In the settling mood, Philomena asked me about American games. I made a case for Scrabble. Ugh, she said, all those English words, the tidy squares of it, no. 

I won. A pair of big bovine nostrils came to see, having made it up the hill through the cloud, right up to the glass of the sliding door. Ah go on eedjit, someone said to the great beast. 

Sheets of rain whipped the house in rhythmic waves that night. In the morning, one silver blade of sun cut all the way down. It was so bright I squinted. I went to the kitchen. 

Gerry was there with a mug in his hand, frowning. 

Typical.

Hm?

Come over here and just start taking men’s tractors. Tsk. 

My tractor has a dual gearbox and a push-out hitch. I have never seen it, and I’ll never drive it. Things didn’t work out with the brother I was dating. I may never go back there. But at least I can say that my New Holland still roves over the green slopes, still rumbles over the hay. A bird, I think, now rests on the black edge of the muffler. It calls out, then returns to the shore.

MK Sturdevant's writing can be found in Orion, Newfound, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, The Great Lakes Review, The Nashville Review, The Fourth River, About Place Journal, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Montana Prize in Fiction 2019 and a Pushcart nominee in 2020. She lives in the Midwest. Twitter @mksturdevant

 

Laughing, Laughing, Fall Apart / Richard Leise

Propped upright in bed, and buried beneath a mound of bright white blankets, my mom can’t move. Her bad hand positioned atop a stack of pillows, her bug-eyes bug-zapper blue, she looks asleep, but impossible to wake, as if the Ifex and the Adriamycin have taken what was needed from those cells the drugs had otherwise destroyed and repurposed them to regenerate that collagen and fiber necessary to erase wrinkles and restore, to her face, a queer sort of agency. It’s absurd. It’s impossible. How the hushed crush of so much meaninglessness has, like dust, settled here, upon this silent and sepulchral space.          

“Knock, knock—”    

Pulling aside the privacy curtain and stepping into the room, the Eucharistic minister raps an imaginary door. Dressed like a doctor, on one white lapel her gold tag broadcasts: Volunteer. On the other, her huge, golden crucifix screams: God plays a fundamental role in informing my life decisions!  

Technically, my mom isn’t paralyzed. Literally, pain moves in slow, concentric circles, from her left shoulder to her left hand. As though her blood were bruised. As if her blood were sprained.  

Her pain.  

On a scale from one through ten, if pain were a smiley face, was her face crimson, eyes x’s of agony, mouth mashed, tears—or sweat—bursting off the page?  

How can this pain be the worst pain of her life if this pain (the worst pain she’s ever experienced in her life) is a different version of the same pain she had yesterday?  

On her backside there’s a bedsore the size of a softball.  

How do you describe ache?  

How can you explain the misery of knowing that you, so long as you’re alive, are limited to your understanding of hurt, and all that you understand is that you’re alive?

You don’t.  

“Oh, Junie!” the minister whispers. “I didn’t see Richie. Is this a bad time?”

Feet crossed at the ankles, hands folded on his stomach, and his loafers on the floor, my dad wears a hooded sweatshirt. I stand in a corner. I can’t remember the last time I saw Dad in socks. They came to Sloan for a consult. They hadn’t planned on staying. Head splayed, his mouth open and bright with silver fillings, gray stubble is just now growing. He nicked himself, shaving – that spot on his neck he pulls taut with two fingers. The wound bright as wet blood. When the television cuts to commercial, or jumps from scene to scene, Dad changes colors.    

I process the silence. Unsure what the minister wants, I tell her it’s cool, that she can stay.  

“You must be Peter,” she says. She speaks slowly, draws a pyx from her purse. “Are you going to join your parents in Eucharist and in prayer?”  

My father. A man who, unmoving, except to grip the armrest, or to make a mutter of some unspoken fear. Eyelids fluttering, I can’t remember if this means he is, or isn’t, dreaming.  

“I’ll do the prayer part?”  

“Well,” she smiles. “Prayer’s certainly an instrument that makes beautiful music. And while it may not change God, it certainly changes those of us who do pray.” There’s a pocket stitched inside her jacket. She frees an index card, says, “Your mother appreciates this.”     

I eye Mom. Who knows?    

“I’d like to read from St. Anne,” the Eucharistic minister raises her index card, the pyx blue and bright, reflecting televised light. “St. Anne is glorious among the Saints, not only because she’s Mary’s mother, but because she gave Mary to God. The number of cures wrought through the inter—”  

She has a nice voice.  She reads absent embellishment, but with rehearsed refinement, so the words, strange as they are, possess a strong cadence, a particular intercession. I relax. I imagine us in scene. A cartoon. Mom, in bed, rigid as a cross. Dad, awake now, hunched, arms resting on his thighs, head lowered. The Eucharistic minister, dressed like a pharmacist, holds the host. And me, mouth open, speaking. Black and white, a series of simple slashes, there’s also, as means to add dimension, a window. Beneath it all, the caption: Actually, I’ll have to pass. I’m a vegetarian.  

“June,” the minister says, waking my dad. “The Body of Christ.”  

She reaches forward. She rotates the host. She considers June’s open mouth. She manipulates the wafer. It’s obvious that Jesus isn’t going to fit. I expect her to back off. She doesn’t. “June,” she says. “Would you like me to break off a little piece?”    

Mom stares.  

“That’s fine,” the minister smiles. She breaks free a tiny triangle. She places it on Mom’s tongue. “It’s just the same exact Jesus, no matter the size He comes in, now isn’t it.”        

The minister turns. And then it’s one of those things. My father, half-asleep, tongue lolled like an idiot, tired of waiting for his turn, closes his mouth.  

“The body of Christ,” the minister reaches out. The bread, hard as slate, and snapped, now, to a point, cuts open Dad’s lip. Stung, he raises a hand, smacking the host, which falls to the floor. The Eucharistic minister drops to her knees.     

“Here,” I say, looking at Mom, who was, she couldn’t be …. 

“Try this,” I grab a piece of paper, kneel beside the minister. I brush the bread on to the paper. “Kind of like scooping a spider? I have little kids. They drop stuff all the time. Stickers. Those little, like, eyeballs?”  

June hasn’t laughed in so long she doesn’t know what’s happening. She isn’t coughing so much as having trouble breathing. There’s too much fluid in her lungs. The tumor is too big. But Peter! June can’t remember the last time she heard him laugh. Oh, how he was so much like his father. And June wanted to laugh. To let Peter know. But the pain was incredible. And the pain was different, too. More like a blow. June raised a hand, she—      

“Richard,” the Eucharistic minister said. “Richard. Isn’t June making the inter—  Richard. Isn’t that the universal sign for choking? Is she? Richard. Richard? I think June’s choking?  

June can’t stop laughing. Vision splinters into bright prisms. White lights signaling nothing. So she listens. Eyes fixed on the face of some color, her look is like a gentle touch, as wet as water. So much of her wanted to hear Peter’s voice. So much of her wanted to hear him speak. But the sound of your son’s laughter—    

“Mom?” I say, trying not to laugh. “Hey, Mom? What’s wrong? You’re not choking, are you?”   

Dad is broken beyond repair. His idea of living has been reduced to hearing Mom say “Yes” in this corner of this building in this city where these sorts of rooms erase everything, reduce everyone inside them to their solitary purposes for being (which, of course, is to find comfortable, or agreeable, ways of dying). He’s not a terrible person, but he’s no longer working, properly. Like a televangelist, he tells promising lies.    

June closes her eyes. Even if she could see, watching any of this would sully the experience, would separate the mental from the mental communion, would render this—all of this—nothing more than communion. She lowers her hand. It’d be nice to relax, but of course she can’t. She’s rigid. Her body taut as rigor mortis. Her expression an approximation of agony.  

Still, she laughs. And laughing delivers waves of pain which arrive as an estimate of ecstasy. And white light illuminates the insides of her eyelids. 

Someone—June can’t remember who—told her that people, when dreaming, and wake up terrified, think it was the monster that scared them. But, June now knows, it’s not the monsters that frighten. What really scares us are our dreams.      

The Eucharistic minister grabs my arm. Orderlies wheel Mom from the room. Maybe, as the Eucharistic minister suggests, her voice wavering as if caught between wrung hands, she’s going to be fine. It’d be nice to think so. It’d be nice to believe in something other than the bags, the cannula that had fallen free from her face, this room, this space, all of which affirms a certain maximalist collective in which the assault on my mom’s dignity becomes the graver injury. I step across the room. I rest my forehead against the window.      

It’s a wonder we do anything. How, in the face of everything, we make first one decision, and then another, until our lives, like involuntary actions, are lived for us.  

And it’s sad, considering how much we see, how little we know. 

Richard recently accepted The Perry Morgan Fellowship in Creative Writing and the David Scott Sutelan Memorial Scholarship from Old Dominion University. While completing a MFA, he has a novel out on submission, and is finishing a collection of short stories. His work may be found in numerous publications, and was recently awarded Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions nominations. Twitter @coy_harlingen

 

Aberdeen, August, 1981 / J. Edward Kruft

I recognize him at once, from my older sister’s collection, coming through the gate in white tails and a straw hat and tennis shoes and, of course, enormous glasses that take up half of his chubby face. 

“Hello, Elton,” I say.

“Will,” he nods, and I beam, for I have only just recently decided I am no longer Billy. Nobody takes this seriously, least of which my St. Mary’s classmates from since kindergarten. 

He lay down under the clothesline and I follow.

“Christ,” he says, “it’s hot as fuck.”

“Africa hot,” I say. 

He laughs harder than expected.

“Will,” he is serious now. “I want to ask you a question and I want you to really, really think about your answer. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Are you…happy?”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t thought long enough. Go on.”

I lay staring into the cloudless sky; a drop of sweat rolls into my eye and stings. I know my answer is going to remain the same, even though, it occurs to me, I don’t know why I will say yes, but only that I feel I must. Still, I give him the consideration he asks for. 

When I answer again, he sighs. “Well then, good on you.”

I take his hand and we lay silent for a time.

“My father says you’re homosexual.”

“Does he? Is that the word he uses? Homo-sexual?”

“No.”

“Yes, well, I suppose he’s right. A three-dollar bill, as they say.”

“Why?”

“Many reasons. Although, I suspect among them, is that sex is brutal, and I cannot imagine brutalizing a woman.” 

“Yeah,” is all I can muster. “Elton,” I say after a time, “are you happy?”

“Miserable, actually.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault. I’m afraid I’ve brought it on myself. Have you heard my latest? Utterly DREADFUL. Hardly remember making it. It’s a bloody disco tribute. All sorts of pigeons cooing in the background. Can you imagine such dreck?” 

As he speaks, I go further inside. Am I happy? What does that mean, even? How would my mother answer the question? She would answer as I had: rotely. I am not-quite twelve. Is it even allowed to not be happy when you’re not-quite twelve?

“Christ, it’s hot as fuck,” he repeats. 

My free hand brushes some buttercups and I pick one and roll onto my side and hold it under his chin. “You like butter,” I say, shifting the buttercup to the underside of my own chin.

“Oh, you are an odd one, aren’t you?”

“Tell me. Do I like butter?”

“How should I know?”

“Is it yellow? If my chin’s yellow, then it means I like butter. Look!”

Elton sits up and pulls down his enormous glasses to look over the top of them and then lies back down. “Yes. You like butter.”

I giggle and wriggle.  “Fooled you! I really don’t like butter.”

“Impossible. Everyone likes butter. Don’t be a liar now. Good God, is it really supposed to be this hot?”

“It’s 105 degrees,” I say and explain that that is unheard of on this side of Washington state, the side that is wet and gray and hovers almost exclusively around 59 degrees. Seventy if the sun is out, which is August.  “I asked my mom if the world is ending; if the nuclear plant in Satsop has exploded or something else terrible.”

“And?”

“She told me to go outside and get some vitamin D.”

“Ah, well, my mum’s a bit of a twat, too.”

“Before you got here, I thought I was going to faint. I’m glad we laid down.”

Elton turns his head and smiles, showing me his gap. “Me, too.”

A moment passes: “Do you know what my father says about me? He says it enough that I have it memorized. He says: if you were a flower, no one would be a bit surprised.

Up on his elbow now, his face close to mine: “You know what, Will? Take what your father says as a great big motherfucking compliment.” He smiles again and I am sorry for my braces, sorry that I’ll have no chance of having such a beautiful gap in my teeth. “Tell me. What kind of flower will you be, then?”

I think, my eyes squinted from the brightness. “A sunflower,” I declare. 

On his back again: “Good. Let’s sing.” 

Elton: 

I don’t want to talk

Will: 

About things we’ve gone through

Elton and Will:

 Though it’s hurting me, now it’s history….

“Billy!”

Billy:

The winner takes it all….!

As I hold the final note I see my mother, hovering above me like some bird of prey, the blue kerchief covering her hair, a layer of sweat on her forehead.

“I said come inside! Your father will be home soon. I don’t want him coming home to you serenading yourself under the clothesline. Billy! Do you hear me?”

I can’t help myself. I am still smiling. I can’t seem to stop, even as I turn my head to look at my hand, still clutching the withering buttercup, my smile won’t go away.

“Your mum thinks you’re daft,” he whispers. 

“Yeah,” I say.

J. Edward Kruft has had work appear in online and print journals that include Barren and Crack the Spine. He is EIC at trampset. and he is terrible at tennis. He lives with his husband, Mike, and their adopted Siberian Husky, Sasha, in NYC and Sullivan County, NY. His fiction can be found on his Web site: www.jedwardkruft.com and he can be followed on twitter: @jedwardkruft

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Christ Let Me Borrow His Car / Christopher P. Mooney

Urged on by the bulls’ sirens somewhere behind me, I ignore red lights and blaring horns to race across another junction. Nodding Jesus on the dash responds to the rising needle numbers by rocking back and forth with speed-freak intensity on feet that seem to have healed well from all those nails.

Too fast for the next corner, a hard left, I give the brake a gentle push. The tyres squeal their disapproval and Nodding Jesus, his back to me, is thrown forward. That puts me on a long straight, where the empty rear-view suggests I might have got away. I relax, my right on the wheel and my left gripping the pistol on the passenger seat.

Then, memories of Ann’s face. Her voice. ‘I’m sorry, Richard,’ she said. ‘Please. Don’t.’

The guy I’d found her with just stood there, mute and motionless; one hand over his cock and the other balled into an anticipatory fist he didn’t know what to do with. 

The unmistakable whir of helicopter blades jolts me back to the present. An industrial flashlight illuminates the interior of my black V8 Ford, dwarfing the amber glow of the Camel hanging from my lips.

My eyes settle on the tarmac in the near distance, lined with two ranks of the real deal who are pissed off and armed to the teeth.

Again, the brake.

Nodding Jesus is stood upright; motionless, defiant.

Fuck you, Ann. FUCK YOU!

The first bullet buries itself in the bonnet just as the gas pedal feels the floor. The second takes Nodding Jesus’ thorny head clean off.

Not long now, I say aloud. 

And it isn’t.

Christopher P. Mooney was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1978. At various times in his life he has been a paperboy, a supermarket cashier, a shelf stacker, a barman, a cinema usher, a carpet-fitter's labourer, a foreign-language assistant and a teacher. He currently lives and writes in someone else's small flat near London. His debut collection of short stories, Whisky for Breakfast, is available now from wherever you get your books. Twitter: @ChrisPatMooney Website:christopherpmooney.com

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A Nice Sit Down and a Bit of What You Fancy / Lucy Goldring

Terry was stewing again. He didn’t notice until he pulled on his sock with such force that his toe burst out of the top. For crying out loud, he yelped, to no one, as the last of his good Argyles went sailing over the bin. Sue, with her nippy fingers, would have darned them of course. She would have had something to say about his armadillo toenails too. 

Again the inane website blurb barged into mind. Apparently, the rationale of the new initiative was to combat loneliness – as if it were a marauding army. But Terry wasn’t lonely. He didn’t feel alone among the trees and the birdsong. He felt connected: both to the natural world and to his many-roomed house of memories. The park bench overlooking the lake was his port of solitude. Peaceful reminiscence at quarter past ten was as much part of the routine as Countdown with a decaf and two biscuits (whichever ones he fancied, now it was permitted to have multiple packets on the go).

Welcome to The Friendly Bench! If you sit here it means you’re happy to chat ☺ 

The sign’s lurid orange font still polluted his thoughts despite a week’s passing. It was the same as the one used on the website. No doubt this was what people meant by ‘consistent branding’. Terry would much rather his council tax went on sorting out potholes than paying millennials to come up with snazzy graphics and patronising slogans. 

Following the surprise appearance of the orange sign – not a sticker that would peel and decay but a screwed in plastic sign – Terry had conducted a thorough appraisal of all the unfriendly benches. After a long career in supply chain management Terry ‘the fixer’ Chapman was nothing if not adaptable. Brushing his teeth in the haphazard fashion he now favoured, Terry imagined scribbling a little review of each bench for grateful colleagues: ‘too much traffic noise’; ‘uninspiring view of main road’; ‘on a dreadful slant’; ‘facing path favoured by maniac cyclists’; and ‘covered in birds’ mess – fresh and old’. It wasn’t a matter of compromise; the alternative benches were just not workable. 

But The Friendly Bench was not workable either. Since Sue died, Terry had liked to control when and where he socialised. For months he’d been quite useless of course but now he found his mood improved with the day. Afternoons were brighter, and he often had a potter round town or caught up with a friend, but mornings were sad and grey, no matter the weather.

Terry ignored the pain in his hip as he bent to tie his shoe, ignored the prickle of irritation as he recalled his daughter’s suggestion of elastic laces (everyone was bursting with advice since he’d become a widower). Closing his front door with unnecessary force, he struck out for the park to commit his first act of public vandalism.

Terry found his bench occupied by a large heap of black clothes, an outcome he had not considered and one that left him paralysed with indecision. The young woman inside the clothes, dimly aware of a pair of dithering navy corduroys, pushed herself up to sitting. She grabbed about for her belongings – a suede coat, three bags and, absurdly, a bedside lamp missing its shade – and made a precarious pile on her lap. Terry wished her good morning and seated himself at a polite distance.

This brief engagement with reality had not sat well with the girl. Out of the corner of his eye, Terry noticed her rolling side-to-side, wafting notes of strong white cider and stale tobacco smoke towards him. She seemed to be scrutinising the skyline, perhaps trying to return it to horizontal, as if she were a human spirit level. Terry was on the point of asking if she was okay when the girl finally rebalanced. Then, with a series of light and graceful movements, she opened a small sequined bag and constructed what Sue would refer to as ‘a funny cigarette’.

‘Sorry,’ she slurred, her awareness of Terry blinking on and off like a faulty light. ‘You don’t mind d’yer?’ 

Did Terry mind? His brain offered no reply. When the words ‘each to their own’ fell from his mouth he assumed that must be his opinion. The girl produced a brass Zippo and sparked up the joint. 

Terry saw her looking down at his hand. ‘Oh’ he managed, his surprise part real, part affected. He tucked the navy screwdriver in his pocket and smiled in a way he hoped would communicate only good intent. 

‘D’yer wanna puff?’ Her hands were scrubbed clean, nails filed short just like Sue’s.

‘Oh. Erm… thank you. I’m not sure I – ’ 

‘You wanna chat though, yer?’ 

The sun was breaking free of the clouds. He had no plans till ten past two.

Lucy Goldring is a Northerner hiding in Bristol. She has been shortlisted by the National Flash Fiction Day (NFFD), Flash 500 and Retreat West and won Lunate Fiction’s monthly flash competition in 2020. Lucy was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2020 by both NFFD and 100 Word Story. Tweets @livingallover

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The Rumour Is / Gemma Elliott

There had been a rumour going around school all day. The rumour was that Ms Salter from History smells bad because she never washes her bra. She just wears the same one over and over every single day. Emmy McLeod had never worn a bra, being twelve, and so could neither confirm nor deny that one should wash one's bra regularly. 

Emmy mentioned the bra situation to her older sister over dinner, and Jenny said that she had been told the same rumour about another teacher last year. It was one of those myths, she said, that gets recycled. Jenny thought that Ms Salter smells bad because she cycles to school every day. That did seem more likely now that Emmy thought about it.

All of the bra talk had made Emmy consider whether she needed one. She stood in front of her mirror after a shower and attempted to push what she had of breasts together, trying to create some cleavage. There wasn’t much to work with. She'd come back to it later. You can't force these things.

The rumour mill at this particular school was ever-churning, and on one particular day the next week, Emmy became the subject. To outsiders, the system may seem unnecessarily harsh, but everyone takes their turn, never knowing when theirs will come up. The subject is never repeated, but the rumours occasionally are. It's fairer than normal bullying, more of a lottery than targeted harassment, and few students bother to complain.

The rumour about Emmy was that she touched herself. That was all that was said. Emmy McLeod touches herself. Yes, Emmy thought, I do. And what's wrong with that? Emmy spent all day recalling the many times that she had touched herself. Here she goes right now, brushing lunchbox sandwich crumbs off her still worryingly flat chest. In class that morning she had scratched an itch on her left leg. Last night before bed she had clasped her hands together – ironically – to pray that her rumour day wouldn't come up any time soon.

Emmy couldn't work out what was funny about the contents of her rumour, for she saw her hands and her person as irretrievably combined, one always in contact with the other, but her fellow pupils found it extremely funny. It was, however, bad form to react against your rumour and so she stayed quiet. 

Emmy didn't have many close friends, but she considered Hannah a longstanding pal. Hannah could be consulted, without fear of repercussions. In whispers during gym class, both girls lagging behind the pack of cross country runners, Emmy asked Hannah to explain. Hannah blushed instantly, her already high colouring from the exercise deepening further, and shook her head in silence. Emmy realised her rumour must be unspeakably horrendous. Hannah had been the daily rumour subject before, when everyone had said that she secretly practised witchcraft. Emmy still wondered occasionally if that was true.

At home, Jenny wasn't a great deal of help either. She sniggered and told Emmy to ask mum if she was that worried. She wasn't. But she was worried. That night, after showering off her cross country running sweat, Emmy was very careful to only allow her towel, not her hands, to touch her body. She skipped her cleavage check and decided that praying might be too risky as well.

The next morning the subject of the rumour was someone that Emmy had never met from an older year group. She felt a fleeting rumble of sympathy and moved on.

Gemma Elliott lives in Glasgow, Scotland, and works in local government. She has recently published short fiction in Neon, Crow & Cross Keys, and The Common Breath. Gemma can be found on Twitter @drgemmaelliott

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Komatsu’s Lion / Taylor Alexandra Duffy

We were sitting on the floor when it happened, and after I had dialed the three digits, I ran into the yard, still wearing my newspaper hat, to appeal to the neighbor democracy. Five minutes prior you were resting the papers on a dictionary, and as we spoke I watched your hands and thought of how you’d fold the bills into little rabbits and leave them to graze on the table when we left. You laughed and the Roosevelt elk shook and danced across the hardbound cover and you grabbed it gently before it jumped. But with the call came those weeks we spent, and so in the fluorescent light you folded, elephants to keep you company, not a crane in the room. I slept in the chair beside and would wake carrying an entire zoo, a bright menagerie you asked me to hide throughout the ward, and sat eager to hear of where and how. I watched as the rabbits grew lopsided and velveteen, burrowing amid the flowers around you. I thought constantly of what you had told me, and when your hands smoothed out the thick grey paper I realized it was worse to know. I prayed for a misstep, a restart, but your precision wrought lines I would have deemed impossible if I hadn’t known it was named. It stood between us, and watched as we traded accomplishment for despair, and I blamed it for the loss.

Taylor Alexandra Duffy lives in New York and works in research & development. She specializes in pending patents and penning short short stories. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y, Passages North, and elsewhere. She was longlisted for the 2021 SmokeLong Quarterly Grand Micro. Website: www.tayloraduffy.com Twitter: @tayloraduffy


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Sat-Nav Cupid / David Cook

‘In 20 yards,’ said the sat-nav smoothly, ‘the woman of your dreams will be on the left.’

Alvin blinked. What had the sat-nav just said? It can’t have said what he thought it had. He must have imagined it. Loneliness can do terrible things.

‘You have arrived at your destination,’ said the voice.

Yes, just hearing things. That’s okay. Well, not okay, but better than having a sentient sat-nav. He stopped the engine.

‘The woman of your dreams is on the left,’ said the voice.

Oh. 

I have two choices, thought Alvin. I can accept that I’ve gone crackers, or I can look out of the window and see who’s on the left.

He turned. He was at the bus stop outside the butcher. Waiting there was Glenda Turner, the doctor’s receptionist. All big of hair, overly made-up and smoker of 50 fags a day – how she was employed by a doctor was beyond Alvin – Glenda was someone he certainly liked, but had never thought of as the woman of his dreams. Especially as he was sure she knew about his ‘little problem’, as he called it.

So, he concluded. I’m going mad, then. He wound down the window anyway.

‘Hi, Alvin, love,’ smiled Glenda. ‘How you doing?’

As she said this, she stuffed a wrestling magazine into her handbag.

Wait a second. Wrestling magazine? Alvin loved wrestling. And he didn’t know anyone else who did. Well, not until now.

Something clicked in his head. He looked at Glenda again. Looking again, actually, the hair was quite glamorous. And the make-up... enthusiastic. And the smoking wouldn’t be a problem if he didn’t breathe in too much. And if she knew about his little problem, well, isn’t it best to have these things in the open to begin with? 

‘Glenda...’ he said.

‘Yes, love?’ she smiled. An attractive smile, Alvin noted.

‘Do you need a lift?’

Their eyes met. If there’d been a soundtrack to this moment, it would have been an unlistenable crescendo of harps and trombones. As it was, all they had was a bus driver pulling up behind Alvin and shouting ‘move your bloody car, you twat!’

As Glenda opened the passenger door, Alvin could have sworn the little light on the sat-nav flickered just once, as if it were winking.

***

Months later, Alvin and Glenda were well and truly an item. When not working, they spent their time at each other’s flats, rewatching old Wrestlemanias and Royal Rumbles (they both agreed the British Bulldog had been robbed in 1995), or at the pub, where Glenda regaled everyone with details of her clients’ medical issues.

‘You’ve never told them about my... little problem, have you?’ Alvin asked.

‘Which one is that, big boy?

‘You know.’

‘Oh, that. No, never. You’ve nothing to worry about, don’t fret.’

So he didn’t.

Glenda once asked why Alvin had stopped to give her a lift. Unwilling to tell her exactly what happened, he’d said he’d been trying to find the parcel sorting office and his sat-nav had sent him to the wrong place. He didn’t think she’d believe the truth. He barely did himself. He still wondered if he hadn’t gone mad for a few seconds back there.

But he had, privately, nicknamed the sat-nav ‘Cupid’.

***

Six months later, Glenda moved into Alvin’s flat. And six months after that was when the problems began. Little things at first – Alvin leaving his underpants on the floor, Glenda leaving her fag ends in the sink – sparked little rows. These soon escalated into full-throated slanging matches. The worst of them all came the night he’d got them lost in the woods overnight. Having announced that their hotel was ‘just over there to the left’, it had turned out, the next day, to be a considerable distance to the right. He’d always had a terrible sense of direction. Glenda didn’t speak to him for a week after that.

All this meant that Alvin’s little problem had started to become much bigger. None of his bottles of medicated shampoo, normally so reliable, seemed to work anymore. Maybe it was the stress.

‘Alvin, look, I hate to be blunt, but please wear white,’ Glenda said once, before they went for an Italian to try to get over their latest row. ‘You look like someone’s been grating parmesan over your shoulders. The waiters might try and scrape it onto your spag bol.’

Excessive dandruff was no fun.

***

Then, one day, Alvin woke up and Glenda had gone. Her make-up drawers were empty and her clothes had vanished. A solitary wrestling magazine lay on the floor of the cupboard, abandoned. He’d seen this coming. He’d expected to feel relieved when it finally did. Instead, he felt crushed.

After a few days of just staring at the telly blankly, he decided to feed his misery further and went for a drive around all his and Glenda’s favourite places - like the greyhound track, the pub, and the cemetery where they’d done it behind the tombstone of a long-deceased local magistrate. Then he drove to where they’d first met. He remembered the sat-nav’s voice. Cupid? Seemed a stupid bloody name now.

‘The woman of your dreams is on the left,’ it had told him. It hadn’t said anything like it since. He sighed, and glanced to the left.

Where had the bus stop gone?

He looked around. It was on the other side of the road. They hadn’t moved it, had they? No. Wait. He was wrong. The bus stop was on the right. Not the left. It had never been on the left.

Alvin’s eyes widened. He’d looked the wrong way. Glenda had never been the woman of his dreams. The woman of his dreams, whoever she was, had been on the other side of the road. Or she had been if the sat-nav had really spoken. If he hadn’t imagined the whole thing. He swore loudly, thumped his fists on the dashboard and slumped back into his seat, showering dandruff all over the upholstery.

He was too lost in his thoughts to notice, but the little light on the sat-nav flickered. Just once, as if it were winking.

David Cook's stories have been published in Spelk, Ellipsis Magazine, The National Flash Fiction Anthology and many more. He's a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. He lives in Bridgend, Wales, with his wife and daughter. Say hi on Twitter @davidcook100

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Free Sunglasses / Paul Ruta

Fiona’s wrapped in a red sarong, passed out face down on a hibiscus bedspread. Ice cubes make a bloody racket so I go behind the blackout curtain, inch open the sliding glass door – it screeches anyway, the bastard – and I squeeze onto the balcony with my drink.

Palm trees always look inviting on the website but if I’m honest the tropical shite gets old a bit fast. That’s all there is to see from here, three floors up: green trees, blue sky, yellow sun. A child’s painting. Or David Hockney’s.

Two more days of this and it’s back to Blighty. Back to a proper curry and chips. Back to the grindstone, too. So it goes. Until then, keep smiling for her indoors. She deserves this trip.

Below, across the courtyard, is a huge swimming pool. Olympic size, maybe, but on second thought, no. It’s a ridiculous turquoise colour. Manicured shrubs all round and a tidy row of deck chairs under white umbrellas. Some guy in Ray-Bans and loud trunks from the gift shop floats on an inflatable raft, though the raft looks none too pleased about it. Black chest hair matted with sweat. German is my guess.

The grounds go quiet this time of day. The Europeans avoid the worst of the early afternoon heat and humidity and sleep off the lunch buffet in air-conditioned rooms. I like it like this, no one around, but the air out here stinks of rotting flowers and damp earth. I half expect to see reptiles emerge from the bushes, looking for the yippy dogs some arseholes bring to these places.

Now what’s that noise? Crickets? Cicadas? Christ, they get loud.

The man lies perfectly still as the raft drifts in slow swirls. Heat’s too heavy for anything else in this landscape to move. My eyelids get heavy, too, and sweat starts trickling down the middle of my back.

I lean elbows on the hot railing and take a sip. I keep my drinks simple. G&T but with proper gin, not the rubbish they serve downstairs. And proper tonic – it’s nearly half the drink. I always pack good tonic along with the Hendrick’s. You can trust the local limes but you take a chance on the ice.

The pool is smooth as glass yet somehow the guy slides off the raft and into the water. Slips right in without a sound. He doesn’t wake up, he doesn’t struggle. 

I take another sip and squint into the sun. Christ it’s hot.

A minute later the body rises to the surface face down, arms outstretched, like in the movies. Sunset Boulevard.

Another minute goes by. Two lads arrive in matching polo shirts and khaki shorts, they could be brothers. They nudge the body to the edge with poles like they’ve done this before. Without a word they roll the dripping German onto a cot and disappear.

Ray-Bans have sunk to the bottom. Another tourist will find them later.

My ice has melted. I step back into the room. The sliding door screeches again. It’s cool and dark in here and I let Fiona sleep. No need to spoil her holiday.

Paul Ruta is a Canadian writer living in Hong Kong with his wife and a geriatric tabby called Zazu; his kids live on Zoom. Recent and upcoming work in Cheap Pop, Robot Butt, F(r)iction, Reflex Press, Ghost Parachute and Smithsonian Magazine. He reads for No Contact magazine. Twitter @paulruta

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Weeping Willow / Rob DelVecchio

My Momma used to bury her feelings in the backyard. Daddy told her to, and she obliged because it was easier, tidier than the alternative. Her armor had worn thin from the lashes of his whiskey-soaked tongue, and there was only so much mess she could sweep up in the aftermath. Only so many frames left to hang over the fist-shaped holes in our plaster walls. In the backyard, by herself, it was clean. The metal from the shovel squelched through sod beneath her foot. She discarded fresh dirt in a neat little pile next to her, a shallow pit left for her to empty everything she couldn’t tell him, everything he wouldn’t hear. She’d let the salt from her tears soak the black earth below, germinating her spilled thoughts from seed to sprout. 

My Daddy never tucked me in, not that I can remember. It was always Momma, pulling the sheets up to my chin, brushing back the wisps of my hair, leaning in for a gentle kiss. Sometimes she’d sit beside me and read a story in the dim light, her tired eyes creased at the corners like each page of the book. Other times we’d sit in the quiet. The faint buzz of white noise from the TV downstairs vibrating between us. On special nights she’d sing me a song, soft and sweet until my eyes went heavy:

My heart is sad, and I am lonely, 

for the only one I love.

When shall I see her, oh no never,

’ Til we meet in heaven above.

Oh, bury me beneath the willow.

Under the weeping willow tree.

So she will know where I am sleeping, 

And perhaps she’ll weep for me. 

I’d pretend to be asleep while she’d turn down the light and drift from my room like a shadow, only to hear their muffled voices below. A door slamming shut. Squelching sod. The metal clink of a shovel outside. 

At first, the holes were scattered, hard to notice. One alongside the back of the tattered shed where Daddy kept his tools. Another next to the creek that trickled between the trees at the edge of our property. With time, they multiplied, filled in craters dotting the lawn like freshly planted land mines. I would play games with them, hopscotching over them, until the yard was swallowed up and the patches of green became fewer and farther between. Daddy couldn’t stand the sight of it. He tried to plant new grass, raking and spreading seed over and over again. Nothing helped. Because he kept handing Momma the shovel. And Momma kept on burying things.

I watched the real estate agent in her cheap blush heels twist the stake of the for-sale-sign into the ground two weeks after Momma passed, the squelching sound too familiar. Daddy flashed her a smile and kept his eyes fixed on her as she walked past. Your Momma’s gone now, ain’t nothing else to do but move on. I never asked what happened. I already knew. She ran out of room in the backyard to bury what she kept inside. Grammy told me as much when I went to live with her instead. On the morning that I left, my Daddy turned his back before the door closed between us. 

Standing in front of it now, almost forty years since Momma died, the house is nothing like I remember. Someone added layers to the top of it, built a detached two-car garage where the shed used to be. Flowers line a brick paver walkway; their purplish hues accent the lush green of the immaculate lawn. Momma’s feelings are buried somewhere underneath it all. There is a wrought iron fence behind the house too, and between the posts, I can see a family - two parents, two children, a dog chasing their heels. I listen to them laugh a while, take in their smiling faces, and then trace the shadows floating beneath them towards the edge of the backyard.

A tree stands tall in front of where the creek used to run. Its gangling branches hang low, dancing in the breeze. The green and yellow leaves drip in strands towards the ground, a pile of them collecting underneath. A weeping willow tree. 

The willow hadn’t been there when I left, and it must have lived a whole life since. Its trunk is pockmarked and worn. Patches of its limbs are without cover. One piece of it had come down, the flesh of the tree still raw where it broke free. 

The branches sway at a quickened pace as the family makes their way inside. I keep still and pull my jacket closed to watch the strings of leaves flutter down through the golden light. My eyes water, and I can faintly see Momma there, resting on the willow’s roots. Her hair is fixed to her shoulders, clothes pressed neat and clean. She wears no makeup, never did, but her cheeks are rosy, and her lips curl into a smile. 

For a moment, I’m back in my childhood bed, sheets pulled up to my chin. The silhouette of Momma is black against the dim light of the room. It’s a special night, and she sings me the song again: 

My heart is sad, and I am lonely, 

for the only one I love.

When shall I see her, oh no never,

’ Til we meet in heaven above.

Oh, bury me beneath the willow.

Under the weeping willow tree.

So she will know where I am sleeping, 

And perhaps she’ll weep for me. 

Then like always, her shadow drifts from the room and out of sight. Muffled voices. A slammed door. The metal clink of a shovel outside. 

When my eyes refocus, Momma is gone. All that’s left standing is the weeping willow, shedding its seedlings in the backyard like tears, waiting for one to catch root. Hoping it will sprout new life, reborn from the dirt.

Rob DelVecchio is a short story fiction writer and product designer from Westchester, NY where he lives with his wife, daughter, and their Boston Terrier. His work has been previously published in Barren Magazine and he can be followed on Twitter @RobDelVector

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Drawing a Line Under the Dog / John Holland

My wife wants a dog. When we were married two, or maybe three, years ago - my second marriage; her third - there was no talk of a dog. 

Dogs love my wife. In the street she fusses over them, bending down to their level, talking her baby talk and kissing them on the mouth. With the same lips she might kiss me. They ignore me or just sniff my crotch then walk away. Nothing of interest here, they say. 

I’ve explained to her that a dog wouldn’t mix with my studio pottery collection. I don’t intend to glue together a beautiful Bernard Leach stoneware pot because a delinquent Labrador wants to play with a Korean-style iron-glazed urn. 

My wife and her family have always had dogs. Generations of her family and generations of dogs. Now even my sister, who dislikes my wife, says I should buy her a dog. She also says that my parents had a Jack Russell when I was a baby. 

‘They had to re-home it because it stole your socks and upset you. A month later it ran in the road and was killed. That was your fault,’ my sister says. ‘You were an evil baby.’

I decide to talk to my wife about how she feels but I choose the wrong time. She’s just on her way out to her rifle club.

‘You do understand how important my pottery collection is to me, don’t you, buttercup?’ I say.

‘No I don’t. I want a dog,’ she says, tucking her bullet-proof vest into her camouflage trousers. 

‘Enjoy your rifling,’ I shout wanly as she climbs into her jeep.

***

It’s 4 am and again I’m sitting at the kitchen table drinking amontillado from a Lucie Rie ovoid vessel, thinking about how I was an evil baby and how my wife wants a dog. I’m also thinking about our love life. We were mad for it before we married. Any place, any time. 8 am at the bottom of the garden behind the compost bins, our backsides in the soft black earth. 10 pm on the roof of the house, with a stabilising hand on the chimney pot, her handgun rattling down the roof tiles into the gutter. Now she laughs at what I have to offer. Maybe that’s why she wants a dog. She’s not getting the loving she needs. I move onto brandy - from a Shoji Hamada tea bowl.

Perhaps if I sell a small Bernard Leach piece I could buy her a dog. 

It’s not easy. These days there are no doggies in the window. The only things peering through glass in the local pet shop are Siberian hamsters, friendly rats and chameleons. And the chameleons are hard to spot.

I look at the website of a local breeder. She sells cockapoos. Sounds like a bird, looks like a dog. 

I can hear barking when I arrive at the imposing building in its rural setting. There are ‘Keep Out’ signs on the wire fencing. I hit the intercom at the metal gate and a woman shows me to a cage inside an outhouse where puppies frolic.

‘Do you have any that are pottery-trained?’ I ask.

She mishears. ‘Potty-trained?’

I explain.

‘They’ll be safe in the home with proper care,’ she says. 

The way these balls of fun are leaping around I doubt that.

She tells me about the food they eat, which is mainly dog food. All in, it’s going to be £1200.

‘Do you have any with just one ear, or maybe three legs, that are cheaper?’ I’m joking but I can tell she doesn’t like me. She knows I’ve been drinking.

I notice she’s holding a large stone in her hand. I decide it’s time to leave. 

***

Back at home, I pour myself another amontillado and stroke my Richard Batterham wood ash-glazed pitcher.

I know what I have to do. That night I slide over to my wife’s side of the bed and behave in what I believe is a loving manner, suggesting we start by removing our matching camouflage pyjamas she bought for Christmas. Despite a sudden cramp in my left calf, a trip to the toilet and the protracted removal from my mouth of an entangled hair, she welcomes me back. Things go well and only on two occasions does it cross my mind that these lips also kiss the wet mouths of local dogs. 

Half an hour later I’m her ‘sugar baby’ and God is back in his heaven.  

And the next day she’s so sweet. Not closing the door in my face. Not entreating me to ‘shut the fuck up singing’ during Songs of Praise. And not on a single occasion does she point her Glock G19 at me and mouth the word ‘Pow’.

At last I can draw a line under the dog. 

A week later I see a leather lead and collar hanging on the coat stand in the hall.

I’m hopeful. ‘Is that to enhance our loving, buttercup?’ I ask. 

‘Sure,’ she says. ‘We can use it for that too.’

John Holland is a short fiction author from Gloucestershire in the UK. He started writing stories at the age of 59 and, ten years on, has won first prize in a number of short story competitions and is now published widely online (including in Truffle Mag Issue 2) and in anthologies. John also runs the twice-yearly event Stroud Short Stories.
His website is www.johnhollandwrites.com He's on Twitter @JohnHol88897218

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Life, Unboxed / Helen Gordon

You’re not supposed to look forward to funerals, so I force myself to think of the box, sealed already and silent, and the woman whose vast and mutinous spirit must somehow fit inside it. 

Look forward to it all you bloody want. I couldn’t care less. 

Her voice, always rolling with subterranean mirth, is deeper still in death. There’s no bitterness in it though. She knows that this funeral is the sole scrawl on the blank expanse of my life and that any glimpse of the outside world is cause enough to smile. 

“It’s a good job the roads will be empty,” Lee says, grimacing as I adjust his driver’s seat to fit my inferior frame. “When, exactly was the last time you drove anywhere?”

I barely hear him over my pulse, which is racing now that the moment is finally here and I have to leave the muffled safety of my home. 

“Coat, wallet, mask, phone,” I recite, checking my handbag for the fifth time. “Coat, wallet, mask, phone,” running my fingers over the wheel. “Coat, wallet…”

“What’s the matter? Can’t you remember how to start it?” 

Lee’s going to watch me out of the driveway and the pressure of his stare is going to turn my legs so leaden that I’ll stall the engine twice. He’ll laugh at that, of course. And it won’t be until later, when his grin has faded and the familiar boundaries of my world have passed, that I’ll notice my knees are still shaking.  

I’ve not driven on a motorway for years. Lee hates to be driven, especially by me. His the pilot seat, the dashboard control, the mastery of the stereo; mine the shaky map, the blurry spaghetti contours, the plastic bag of snacks for quietening children in the back.  

You’re perfectly capable of driving a damn car, my grandmother’s voice says as I pull cautiously into the slow lane. She herself drove until she was eighty-six. Always in red leather driving gloves; always in third gear; swearing at cars that came too close with equal parts glee and derision.  

She was obnoxious, my grandmother. But obnoxious with a swagger. She wore her temper ironically, like a gaudy piece of costume jewellery, and though she loved to rant and curse, you could always hear the laughter rippling just beneath. It was bigger than the narrow contours of her life; bigger even than the ignominy of old age. And she kept it to the close, making nurses laugh into their bedpans or brush away brisk tears, depending on how the mood took her. 

I’m almost an hour too early, so I pull into a nearby park that has nothing to recommend it except an enticing smell of bacon drifting from the burger van on the corner. 

I could eat a bacon sandwich, I think. But I don’t get out of the car. Lee’s the one with the pound coins in his pockets, and the ability to spend them. I’m the one that packs the thermos and waits to see what I’m offered.  

At the van, a lady in a bright yellow parka orders a hot chocolate piled high with cream and marshmallows. I watch her bury her lip in its peak, sending a cascade of tiny marshmallows spilling over her shoes.  

Go and get yourself one, Granny orders. But I don’t.  I just sit in the confines of my car until the clock has ticked away fifty minutes and I begin the engine again. 

The crematorium is a squat brick building with a utilitarian demeanour and a sparse group of black figures scattered about the entrance. There are tears in my throat as I make my way towards them, but they aren’t there for Granny. They’re swelling from the fear that I’ve bottled up all morning, released now in a sudden rush of relief. Because here are people that love me: Mum: “You look wonderful darling”, Dad: bouncing on his toes in resistance to the distance between us, Aunty Lou: blinking a watery smile across the top of her mask and twisting her arms round her chest as though this is comfort enough. 

“You planning on making a show of yourself?” Lee had said as I tucked a packet of tissues into my pocket.

“Well, it is a funeral.” 

“It’s not going to be an emotional affair though, is it? Not for you, anyway.” 

“I don’t know….” 

“It’s not as though you were close.” 

I pictured Granny, pressing her forehead to mine so that her pearls clacked against my chest and I could smell her signature scent of violets and cigarettes and hairspray.  

“How’s my favourite granddaughter?” she’d say, even though she had three blonder, skinner granddaughters in Hull. “Tell me: Are you beating the buggers, or letting the buggers beat you?”  

She’d cackle at the audacity of this, freely, so that I had no choice but to join her, and for a moment we’d both be colluding in beating the buggers together. 

“I think we were, in a way,” I said.  

“You never bothered to visit her.” 

Don’t even think about that. You never dare to go anywhere. 

But the guilt is packed in my pocket, right along with the tissues, and I curl my fist around it now as we file in behind the coffin.

She’s right. I never did go anywhere, even before isolation became a command rather than a choice. My world has always been so small that it could easily fit in that box. The school run. The shop. The kitchen. The lane. The passenger seat. The sidelines. 

It’s a nodding, acquiescent, silent sort of life of the kind that Granny never could have borne, and I’m ashamed of it, suddenly, faced with the one that is over. Guilty too, for keeping it, when this, far better one has been lost.  

I scrabble about in my pocket for something, anything, to hold. But Lee was right; the tissues are redundant. The mask has soaked up my sadness, and now I’m breathing through a thick layer of grief that’s partly there for Granny but mostly there for myself.  

***

It’s drizzling when all the words have been said and the curtain has been closed and we’ve filed out of the chapel to the sound of weak, classical strings that Granny would have hated. We stand in the grey glare of reality, blinking our emotions into submission and offering one another watery smiles in the absence of suitable words and hugs. 

“A lovely tribute” we say, although nobody really believes it, and then there’s nothing left to do but leave quickly, before the horror of not hugging can become a creeping ache in the bones.

  “Take care,” we say. “Stay safe.” And just like that, it’s over. My family are heading back to their desert island lives, and the day that I’ve been longing for so guilty has gone. 

You need a vodka martini, says Granny through the howl that echoes around the hollow inside of the car.   

“I need a new life.” I sob.  

Piffle. You need to start living the one that you’ve got.

 “It’s Lockdown!” I scream to the empty crematorium car park. “What exactly am I supposed to do?” 

It’s not about what you do. It’s all about how you do it. 

I think about my life, sealed now at the edges so that possibilities are as rare and unreachable as rainbows. When did I become so frightened of it? I wonder. When did I forget that you simply had to laugh to stop the buggers from winning? 

I can’t face the journey home, so instead, I drive back to the park, and sit watching the girl flip burgers that nobody wants to eat. The drizzle’s thinned to a mist that’s slowly settling on the windscreen and blocking the world from view. 

My handbag buzzes, and when I check my phone I find three missed messages from Lee. 

‘Have you left yet?’ ‘Will you be home for dinner?’ ‘What’s your ETA?’ 

I click it into the glove compartment, pick up my purse and climb out of the car. 

“Burger?” mumbles the girl. 

“No. Hot chocolate - with all the extras please.” 

I watch her pile on the marshmallows until they tumble down the sides. 

For a moment I think of carrying the drink back to the safe fug of the car. But there are trees beyond the goalposts and benches beyond them, and a pond, and an empty afternoon ahead of me with no one to please but myself. 

“I’m doing it,” I murmur as I stride across the grass, hot chocolate in hand. “I’m living.” 

But Granny’s voice is gone. And all I can hear is the birds.

Helen Gordon’s short fiction has been featured as Seren’s Short Story of the Month, shortlisted for the SmokeLong Quarterly Grand Micro Contest and longlisted for the Mogford Prize, the Bridport Prize and the Fish International Short Story Prize. She works as a Freelance Journalist in Shropshire, where she lives with her husband and two sons. Twitter: @byHelenGordon

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The Piggy That Divides By Itself / Josh Sippie

I have seven toes on each foot. Mom never told me I was a freak. I found out when we were in third grade math class and the teacher asked what any number divided by itself is.

Why, one of course, I said. Genius in a plastic chair, that’s me. I was right, obviously, but the teacher wasn’t satisfied with right. She wanted to know how I knew when she hadn’t explicitly told me the answer and I told her, with proper decorum:

Because this little piggy went to market.

This little piggy stayed home.

This little piggy had roast beef.

This little piggy had none.

This little piggy divided by itself,

Giving this little piggy one.

And this little piggy went wee—

Wait, the teacher says, arresting the piggy from his wee-wee home. How many toes have you got. I have seven toes, why, how many have you got. And she’s got five. They’ve all got five. All of my third grade friends sitting in a circle, wiggling their little piggies, some with roast beef some with none, but none dividing by themselves and getting one. 

I threw up in my pencil case, then I threw up in Marge’s pencil case. She sits next to me. She has an aversion to vomit. Get over it Marge, we all have an aversion to vomit, but turns out we don’t all have fourteen toes, so you tell me who has the right to be upset.

Apparently Marge, says the principal.

But how many toes have you got, I ask the principal. And he just bats his eyes and his expansive forehead shifts like those wrinkles are active fault lines.

Why, I’ve got ten of course, why, how many have you got. And I can’t even tell him because he wouldn’t understand and because maybe I’d throw up in his pencil box as well.

I bet Marge is still crying.

I ask the principal where to submit my resignation. Resignation from what, he says. From third grade, of course. I can’t stay. I’ve got to cut town. Fred no longer exists, call me Steven Seven Toes, the boy with feet that have advanced knowledge of mathematical concepts.

He just stares at me, so I ask again about tendering my resignation and he sends me to the nurse. She asks what’s wrong, Fred. And I say don’t call me that, It’s Steven now. Steven Seven Toes. So she says what’s wrong Steven Seven Toes and I say it’s in the name, woman. She’s heard the rumors about my vomit, apparently, but not the truth about my feet. If rumors spread this slowly, I might yet have a chance. The name is a joke, I tell her.

I’ve got ten toes, same as everyone else. The fact you’ve said that makes me doubt you, she says. How many toes have you actually got. And I’ve done myself in, just like that. 

Josh Sippie lives in New York City, where he is the Director of Publishing Guidance at Gotham Writers and an Associate Editor of Uncharted Mag. His work has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Hobart, Stone of Madness, Bear Creek Gazette and more. When not writing, he can be found wondering why he isn't writing. More at joshsippie.com or Twitter @sippenator101

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