April 6, 2026
Mikki Aronoff
Fiction
At Sea’s Edge
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“Maybe the blood of a steak’ll do the trick?” Samuel shrugs to the day nurse, even though Polly’s vegetarian, even though he knows a cut of cow couldn’t cure what ails her. Over and over he tries to halt the gold of his wife flaking to powder. Samuel can plump up Polly’s pillows, wipe cinder specks from her eyes. He can draw open the bedroom curtains, point to feathery sunsets, to sand drifting in shifting patterns around their tiny cottage at sea’s edge. But try as he might, he can’t stop hope from withering or keep Polly from tripping down towards the water as it nibbles, greedy, at the shore.
Decades ago, Polly heard Samuel busking outside her café, swaying as he plucked his dulcimer, strummed a zither, clacked castanets. She invited him in. “You’re a regular one-man band,” she grinned, plunking his coffee and breakfast down on the counter as she regarded the tangle of red hair curling out from his plaid flannel shirt. “Great flapjacks,” he said, licking his lips, blinking against her eyes’ bright shine. They married within the month. Decades, they flourished nourishing each other’s spirits and keeping busy townspeople filled with good food and song. Now, the surprise of Polly’s mysterious condition, her rapid downward spiral.
The day nurse bustles to the garden, plucks an apple for Polly, buffs it to a shine with her sleeve. She cuts it in half, slices it into smiles. Samuel’s smile turn upside down as he shuffles over to the door, spots fresh faint footprints in the sand. He runs outside and coils around his wife’s broomstick body as waves lift, ravenous and wild, to wrench Polly from the clench of his embrace. From the village center, a chorus of wails wafts towards their cottage, hollow sounds of stomachs empty and rumbling, ears bereft of music.
Mikki Aronoff lives in New Mexico, where she writes tiny stories and advocates for animals. She has stories in Best Microfiction 2024/2025andBest Small Fictions 2024 and in Best Small Fictions 2025. More at https://www.facebook.com/mikki.aronoff/.
Patricia Q. Bidar
Fiction
If I Know Santa
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he’s laughing his ass off right now. He’d be the first to call BS on all this religious stuff—no offense, Pastor Chad. Santa was all about laughter. About good times. About working hard, but also playing hard when the work was done. Anyone who partied with him in that anything goes week between Christmas and New Years knows as much. The sugar cookies alone, my god.
On a serious note, Santa touched my life in ways I don’t often talk about. He treated me like his own son. So you can call me a boot kisser and a follower, unlike those not here today. Who pulled a Johnny Paycheck after He ended work-from-home.
You didn’t see His chubby face overlooking the chilly workshop after that. Just a few of us men still working at that point. Lights off to save money. Heat, too. No one got written up, although production was way down. I felt for Him. I started bringing in leftovers for the two of us. Borscht. Goulash. His favorites. An extravagance for me. He so easily could have fed us all, like he used to.
The day Santa went, He and I had been eating our lunch in his office, talking about girls and watching a couple of pigeons that had somehow gotten in. They purred and hummed in the rafters. A pretty sound. A pretty bird, if you forget everything you know about them. I said as much and Santa guffawed, thinking I was making a crack about our exes.
I had my own father, once upon a time. A plaza, a gazebo in downtown Los Angeles. We were eating crumbly pink pan dulce from a white paper bag. I tried to pet every pigeon that approached. He held me to him. His golden cross shined softly through his undershirt. My daddy said, there were bound to be adult situations coming up. And to remember the spirits of my ancestors were within me and if I listened, I would hear them and never be alone. Then he said he’d see me around Christmas. Like a sucker, I believed it.
Patricia Quintana Bidar is a western writer from the Port of Los Angeles area. Her collection of short works, Pardon Me for Moonwalking (Unsolicited Press), is available now from the publisher or wherever you buy great books. Visit patriciaqbidar.com
Christine H. Chen
Fiction
Grocery List
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1. Bread. Not sweet pao, oozing with lotus paste once bitten open from a restaurant in Hong Kong at dim-sum.
2. Milk. Whole milk, low-fat milk or skim milk? Not the powdered milk you mixed with boiled hot water for breakfast in Madagascar.
3. Chicken, camouflaged in white plastic like a ghostly hill. Not running wild, pecking at worms, being chased by a bored child like you. Ginger, scallion, sesame oil marinated and steamed, not grilled.
4. Fish fillet. Not the tilapia Ah Ma had to chop the head off first and brushed its skin from tail to gills with a fish scaler. No stubborn scales stuck on the sink you had to scrape off.
5. Yukon Gold potatoes for roasting. Not purple and sweet Ube mashed with coconut milk for dessert as Ah Poh prepared in Guangzhou.
6. Avocado for spreading on a slice of toast. Not pureed with condensed milk, eaten with a spoon as an afternoon snack you fed Ah Ba who could no longer mash his food.
7. Mandarin. A fruit. Not your mother tongue. A language you should have learned if you were “real” Chinese, said your colleagues in an American company.
8. Bananas. Yellow on the outside, white on the inside, was what Ah Ma always says, pointing a finger at you.
Cooking Lesson
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Ah Ma orders me to watch her sauté pork on a pan so I can learn how to be a good wife who can prepare food for a future husband, none of that store-bought food, or even worse, Chinese take-out that is Chinese turned gwei-lo food from mediocre restaurants, meat with too thick sugary sauces, too salty bad for the heart, and what would make a man happy is a filled up belly with home-cooked meals, and pay attention because of the way she prepares cha-siu, it’s always with some twist of her own she says, and I say, yes I’m watching at how she shows me the fattier cut she’d bought at the grocery store, pork butt the tastiest, look at how her hands pours sugar without a single crystal scattering away from the bowl, Chinese five spice powder, and my mind wanders to a magical island where a single whirl of a wand would bring up an entire meal ready while she mixes the pieces of meat with salt, pepper, rice wine, soy sauce and black pepper, how she holds the pair of chopsticks and stirs, stirs, and slather the meat she’d sliced in big chunks, keep the fat in, her fingers pink-black from just the right amount of sauce, how carefully she wipes her hands with a recycled paper towel she’d dried on the dish rack saying that I should be more frugal, and I stifle a yawn because there she goes again, giving me another one of her lectures and I’m laughing in my mind as I imagine Ah Ma transformed into a talking Hello Kitty but I’m still keeping my eyes wide open pretending to watch Ah Ma drop one spoonful of vegetable oil on the pan, heat medium, hear the oil bubbling, and just wait for a few more minutes then drop the chunks of meat in, listen to the sizzling and popping, cover the pan, let it cook a bit longer before picking each piece with the chopsticks, turn them up, and she whirls around to say are you paying attention, you need to pay more attention and stop being careless even when I haven’t moved from her side, and then she asks me to take the chunks out, and what do you know, I pick up a morsel with her chopsticks and it slips and falls on the floor, spattering amber oil on Ah Ma’s white socks.
Delicatessen
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Treading through Chinatown on Grant street in Boston one early Sunday morning after a snowstorm, shards of cold wind cutting through my puffer coat, I stopped when my boots crunched like tires hitting gravel. Grains of salt glittered from the pale sunrays, the air sifted between charred meat, soy sauce and scallion marinade, steam escaping the slam of a restaurant door wheeled in memories from long ago. Fish balls bobbing in a pot of chili pepper and sesame oil in Poh-Poh’s kitchen in Guangzhou. Fish scales sparkled in bursts as her hand brushed a tilapia with a knife, freshly ground ginger tickled my nose, the round fisheyes she dropped on my bowl, my uncles sucking on fishbones, flashing hungry glances at the half-empty platter, Ah Ma’s biting look, shaking her head. The coveted fisheyes for her only granddaughter, their sleepy stares. I slurped vitreous flesh, rolled the eyeballs like a game of beads on my tongue, careful not to bite, their taste, silky metal, lingered.
Contributor Note
I never intentionally write about food, but it keeps appearing in my stories, and I suppose because food has such an omnipresence in our lives that we take it for granted just as we breathe and don’t pay attention to the air we inhale unless it calls to our attention because of a stench or a fragrance.
As a first-generation immigrant, I am always drawn to the different cuisines between cultures and how food is prepared, consumed, sold. When I arrived in San Francisco from Madagascar for my Undergraduate studies, I met up with some newly made American friends and went to Chinatown with them for lunch. I still remember one of them exclaiming “How am I supposed to eat this?” when the waiter lay down a dish of half boiled chicken with bones. He seemed horrified, which to me was funny and shocking, because I could never have imagined eating a piece of chicken without bones! That anecdote and observations of the groceries displayed at Safeway stores inspired the piece “Grocery List.”
“Delicatessen” was derived from the notion of “weird” food that certain cultures prize while others balked at. Fisheyes is one of those prized delicacies.
As much as I love eating, I wasn’t always interested in learning how to cook until adulthood when I realize the importance of eating healthy. It felt like a boring chore whenever my mother wanted me to watch her cook and listen to her lectures about how to be a good child or a good wife. Those moments were captured in the second micro piece “Cooking Lesson.”
Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction has appeared in The Forge, SmokeLong Quarterly, Time & Space Magazine, New World Writing Quarterly, and have been anthologized in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, Bath Flash Fiction, Fractured Lit Anthology 3 among others. She is a recipient of the 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship. Find her stories at www.christinehchen.com or her sporadic presence on Bluesky @CSquareH.bsky.social
Francine Witte
Fiction
Not an apple
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Gluck says it’s an apple and I say no. I say no even though it’s clearly an apple. Red and round and I’m dying to take a bite.
Gluck is a fuck, I tell myself in my head. Good one, I think.
I do realize the consequence of arguing with Gluck. He’s bigger than me. More human than me. I swear I could/should make the effort to explain what I mean.
What’s not an apple about this? Gluck is blabbing on and on the way Gluck is known to do.
Okay, I mean he’s more human because he cares so damn much about things. Not like me. He really cares that this is an apple in a way that I really don’t.
Another human thing about Gluck is how easy he cries. Like when he’s losing an argument. His eyes go all squinty and red.
He’s only acting, I tell myself and ignore how the tiniest tear is forming in his eyes.
Go on, he is shaking the apple under my nose, take a bite.
You don’t have to cry, I tell him. And then his lip starts to quiver. Yeah, Gluck, I think, that’s a fuck move.
I take a bite out of the apple out of spite. A spite bite. Another good one, I tell myself. I chew and chew and swallow. Nope, I finally say. This is nothing like an apple.
Gluck is now a smother of salt and glop and I’m supposed to this is all genuine human stuff. I finish the apple. I toss it on the ground. I take one last look at Gluck and say it’s still not anything like an apple, but whatever it was tasted good and I’m leaving the core on the floor.
Another good one, I think and walk away.
Francine Witte is a flash fiction writer and poet, and the author of the flash collection RADIO WATER. Her newest poetry book, Some Distant Pin of Light, has just been published by Cervena Barva Press. Her work has been widely published, and she is a recent recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York City. Please visit her website francinewitte.com. She can be found on social media @francinewitte.
Elena Zhang
Fiction
Xiang
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My darling, when you were eight years old, you asked me what 香 meant. I said fragrant, but I could tell you were dissatisfied with my answer. Now, I finally know how to explain. It means the steam emanating from a split-open bun revealing pork, bright red like rubies. It means our toes touching when you crawled into bed with me one night to chase away both of our nightmares. It means sunshine in winter. It means stewed eggplant stuck between your teeth, means star anise perfuming your throat. It means braised fish making my mouth water when I married your father. It means the heaviness of cheesecake on my tongue when he left. It means the incense smoke that curls around my framed face like ghost hair, the gentle perfume of a peeled orange my grandson leaves on my gravestone, the sticky juice that dribbles down his chin when you allow him to eat it on my behalf. Close your eyes now. I know you understand. Say it with me: hao xiang!
Contributor Note
To me, “xiang” means more than fragrance or smell, something not easily translated, something more akin to the joy of savoring a home-cooked dish, which is what I tried to capture in this piece.
Elena Zhang is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. Her work can be found in HAD, The Citron Review, and Flash Frog, among other publications. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, and was selected for Best Microfiction 2024 and 2025.
Earl Briones
Creative Nonfiction
Memory of Rice
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At first light, the farmer bends low over the paddy, his back a slow arc mirroring the curve of the horizon. Mist clings to the waterlogged field, wrapping the seedlings in a veil as delicate as breath. His feet sink into the cool mud with every step, toes curling instinctively for balance, as though grasping the earth itself. The sharp scent of wet soil rises around him, mingling with the promise of sun-warmed water.
He works in rhythm, hands planting each green stalk with care, whispering prayers not to the sky, but to the soil. Trusting the land to hold the weight of his labour, to carry forward the quiet hope for harvest. Each movement is part of an ancient choreography passed down without words.
Before rice fills a belly, it fills the hands. It fills the earth. It fills the sky with prayers for rain.
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In my kitchen, the click of the rice cooker is the sound of continuity.
I pour grains into a metal bowl and run cold tap water over them, watching as the liquid clouds into milk-white opacity. My fingers stir through the rice instinctively, a motion learned not through direct teaching, but through years of quiet mimicry. The same motion, I imagine, that moves through countless kitchens and fields, across generations and geography.
The rice speaks in textures: smooth grains slipping between my fingers, the shock of water in springtime Canada, the faint rasp as starch lifts away. I tip the cloudy water down the drain and begin again. Second wash. Maybe a third. The farmer, I think, would not waste water this way — but here, the gesture feels more ceremonial than practical. More about remembrance than necessity.
This act is grounding. In a kitchen far from the tropics, surrounded by electric heat and humming appliances, I’m still tethered to something old. Something deeper than recipe or routine.
❦
Rice has always been more than food.
In the beginning, it travelled by hand, across rivers and oceans, across borders both visible and invisible. Domesticated thousands of years ago, it became a constant companion in migration—carried not as luxury, but as survival. Carried in baskets, in sacks slung over shoulders, in the folds of stories whispered at campfires. Every seed a small act of preservation.
In the Philippines, rice is life. Pananim ng buhay. Crop of life.
It has shaped our rituals, our myths, our calendars. Rice planted in the wet season predicts fortunes for the dry. In some regions, a bowl of rice is placed at the altar to invite abundance; in others, grains are tucked into the corners of new homes, a quiet offering to prosperity.
Even in mourning, rice appears—sticky and plain at wakes, scattered in memory on the ground, sometimes offered to spirits or birds. Its presence marks every threshold: birth, union, death, return.
But rice is also resistance. During colonial rule, it fed communities in secret. During storms and displacement, it filled empty stomachs with hope disguised as sustenance. In times of scarcity, we stretched it with salt, with broth, with whatever could be found — not as a sign of defeat, but as an act of stubborn resilience.
Rice is not merely what we eat. It is how we endure.
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The farmer's day is long. As the sun climbs overhead, sweat beads along his brow and drips from his chin, watering the soil in its own small offering. He straightens occasionally to ease the ache in his spine, eyes scanning the horizon where fields ripple like green silk under the breeze.
He does not ask for praise. He is not featured in documentaries or news headlines. His work is quiet and persistent, like the growth he coaxes from the land.
I think of him often, this unnamed figure who works beyond the pages of history books, beyond the reach of glossy food magazines. Without his labour, without the thousands of farmers like him, there would be no family feasts, no simple weekday dinners, no quiet bowls of comfort at the end of a hard day.
He is part of my memory, even if I’ve never met him. He is folded into the fabric of every meal. His silence hums underneath the sound of a spoon scraping the bottom of a bowl.
In my kitchen, as I press the button on the rice cooker and listen to its familiar hiss and hum, I honour him. Though we are separated by distance, by time, by circumstance, the thread between us holds fast. It is woven from water and grain, from mud and memory.
❦
Rice carries memory not in words, but in weight.
In the heft of the sack on the farmer’s back. In the measured cup in my kitchen. In the warm heft of a bowl cradled between palms.
It carries the weight of stories I’m still trying to uncover. The ones that didn’t make it across oceans. The ones interrupted by colonization, migration, or silence. I don’t know the exact fields my family once worked, or the names of all the hands that harvested before me—but I know this: they are with me. In every rinse. Every scoop. Every serving.
Every grain contains a history too vast for a single story, yet small enough to slip between my fingers unnoticed. I try to pay attention. I try to remember that this food is not simple, though it may seem so. It is complicated, layered, ancient.
It is the beginning of our meals, and perhaps, the beginning of our memory.
When I eat rice, I eat history—and I am fed.
Contributor Note
For me, food is both subject and language. It is how I remember, how I interpret, and how I tell stories. Every dish I write about carries more than flavour—it holds the hands that prepared it, the land that grew it, and the history that shaped it. In my work, food is never just backdrop; it is a craft element that drives the narrative forward.
Like dialogue, a recipe reveals relationships—between people, between cultures, between past and present. A bowl of rice might speak to survival, migration, and comfort all at once. The scent of vinegar simmering in adobo can open a chapter about resilience. A single bite becomes a thesis statement, a sensory anchor that keeps the reader in the moment.
I approach food on the page the way I approach it in the kitchen: with attention to detail, curiosity, and respect. In writing, as in cooking, I layer texture and balance contrast—letting a sharp, briny note cut through something rich, or placing a quiet, reflective scene after an intense, crowded one.
By writing about food, I am also writing about people. Each flavour profile maps to a lived experience; each cooking method tells of adaptation or preservation. Food makes the intangible tangible. It allows readers to not only see and hear a story, but to taste it, smell it, and feel its heat rising from the stove.
In this way, food becomes my most fluent form of storytelling—an edible archive of memory, identity, and craft.
Earl Briones is a Filipino-Canadian chef and writer whose work explores food, culture, and memory. His essays weave culinary history with personal narrative, reflecting on identity and heritage through the lens of the kitchen. Follow @chefebriones on Instagram and Facebook.
Susan Delgado
Creative Nonfiction
Black Beans
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My mother never cooked black beans. Every day while growing up a large pot of pinto beans stood cooking on our stove. The smell of her pinto beans traveled throughout my parents’ bedroom, the living room and gracefully filtered up the stairs underneath our closed bedroom doors. Fresh round dough balls sitting in her large Pyrex bowl waiting for her to make tortillas and scrambled eggs for breakfast before school. My mother’s pinto beans when uncooked were tan color with reddish splashes. Then they turned to a beautiful pink color as she cooked them to perfection like she always did. The meaning of pinto beans means painted. One could say my mother painted with cooking every morning with the sunrise.
And yet, my mother never shared with me how to cook pinto beans, make tortillas, make her hot cheese salsa for eggs, how to make enchiladas, cook a pot roast, steam vegetables, bake a cake, or bake cookies. Our relationship was like the ocean’s tides. Constantly ebbing and flowing never settling into a rhythm of loving and sharing like mothers and daughters do.
Then a boundary was crossed. A trust violated. One that could not be forgiven. My relationship with my parents had been simmering like a pot of water waiting to boil over. Like a storm gathering strength and blowing through wreaking havoc with anything in its’ path. And then it passes like my relationship with my parents. I gathered my two daughters and my beloved and walked away from my family forever. But what I could not walk away from was the smell of fresh pinto beans and flour tortillas being cooked and filling my parent’s house with such lovely aromas. No, these memories were seared in my brain. I would have to find my own path to learning how to cook.
I gathered together cook books and cooking shows schedules with Julia Child, Martha Stewart, Ina Garten, and Rachel Ray. The shelves of our book case began to grow with cookbooks like The Joy of Cooking, Better Homes and Garden Cookbook, Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook, The Silver Palate Good Times, I was willing and excited to learn how to make food other than mac and cheese, pizza, spaghetti, and soups. These chefs became my friends even though in real life we would never meet. It was a challenge to follow any recipe with measuring spoons and cups and I innately have never fully followed a recipe. Because, like my mother I cook, touching, feeling, tasting, smelling, and I use the palms of my hands to measure. Adding
or eliminating ingredients balancing the acidic with sweetness.
Cooking is and always will be part of my love language. A language that I would never share with my mother but one I have taught my daughters. And like my mother’s pinto beans I choose to cook black beans instead of the pink pintos. The black beans turn a deep purple when cooked and their aroma is different than the pintos. As different as my mother and I.
My black beans are cooked with garlic, onions, sea salt, olive oil and lots of water in a big pot. I frequently cook a pot of black beans and freeze the extra beans for dinners at another time. One could say black beans are a staple in our house. When I make my refried black beans,
I use extra virgin olive oil instead of lard. However, there is no better refried beans like the ones my mother use to cook with lard. Her refried beans were always served with her homemade enchiladas and burritos. Even as I write these memories I can smell the chili red sauce cooking on the stove. I have mastered making my own recipe for enchiladas. It’s a comfort dinner I serve for my family and for those friends who enjoy Mexican food along with homemade tamales.
I wonder to myself if my black beans measure up to my mother’s pinto beans. It’s a question that lingers in my mind and one that will never receive an answer to.
I do know that I will not ever master how she use to make her flour tortillas. So round, cakey, cooked perfectly each time she tossed one onto the hot black Comal. They tasted best for me hot with a dab of butter smeared all over the tortilla as I savored every bite. My mother and I never knew one another for the last decades of her life. And even though my daughters never knew their grandparents I hope someday they understand that I left my family for them and their safety. I will always remember the aroma of my mother’s pinto beans and I will continue to cook black beans just like my daughters do now.
Contributor Note
Cooking is like my writing or making jewelry. They are part of my love language.
I am always thinking about how to cook foods in different ways. I use my palms frequently, for measuring, my tongue for taste, and my nose to smell aromas. If a recipe has to many steps or ingredients I will begin to substitute or eliminate them. Making a recipe to me is like writing. One is always revising and searching for better words for a story, essay, poem, or book. In cooking I am always trying to balance acid and sweet, textures and taste.
When I put a pot of black beans to cook it requires me to slow down, be patient. I walk back and forth to my office next to our kitchen. I attempt to create a piece of jewelry or write a messy draft. I check my beans frequently making sure there is enough water and chicken stock in the pot. I buy my beans, lentils, chickpeas, hot sauce, from Rancho Gordo. They are the best.
I am not a chef like those who create delectable meals. But I am curious about mixing ingredients and seeing the results, just like I do with seeking out words to convey a story. And I am curious at this moment as I write these words how my mother and I might have cooked a meal. Sharing our intimate thoughts, tasting the sweet and the bitter, of a relationship never birthed.
Like a recipe not fully developed.
Susan Delgado is a San Diego writer and a native Californian. Her writing has most recently appeared in Paris, Great Cities, Volume 1. You can find her work in RUBY, The Kelp Journal, The Sunlight Press, San Diego Decameron, Journal Publications, and other anthologies. She has been nominated for Best of The Net for her story, “A Mother, Daughter and Tamales.”
Naz Knudsen
Creative Nonfiction
Stir Simmer Taste Trust
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Dice, mince, cut, slice.
This is how we begin.
He circles the pan, nudging the oil to coat the surface over the heat. On another burner, he fries the dried herbs—now plump and bright.
Children chase each other through the house, bumping into me, then him. I inhale. He exhales.
I focus on the rhythm of the knife, keeping the tip anchored to the board—a place to stay connected, to fall back on. I learned that from him.
I dice the onions. He cuts the meat—each piece about the size of a two band-angosht, one of the first Farsi words he learned years ago when we first met.
This is how we prep.
We sat at a small table near a terracotta wall. Behind him, a large painting evoked the feminine figures of Persian miniature art. The turquoise folds of her dress echoed the blue in his eyes.
The smoky trace of lamb kabob was the overture to the plates the server carried. Next came the steam rising from long-grained rice, heaped high and crowned with golden saffron rice. Earthy, umami scents lingered in the air between us—long after the plates had passed us by.
It was his first time at a Persian restaurant. I was an international graduate student. He had just started a job in Arizona. We had met a few weeks earlier. When I said I was from Iran, he responded, “So you speak Farsi.” A simple fact that drew a lasting smile.
Stir, wait, watch, breathe.
This is how we remember.
I watch him in my peripheral vision, patiently moving the herbs around, coaxing the fenugreek’s aroma to the surface, checking the second pot; the oil begins to bubble.
I add the diced onions to the pot. Stir, and wait.
He leaves the evenly sliced meat next to the stove for me to add to the sautéed onions, to sear the edges before adding the water, and letting it simmer—before letting it sit.
“How long have you been frying the herbs?”
“About ten minutes. Do you think it’s ready?”
I sniff the air.
“Not yet. Maybe five more minutes.”
The aroma of translucent onions joins the kitchen’s cacophony. Together, this orchestrated harmony—punctuated by a child’s occasional complaint or scream—has become my organized chaos, where we get to feel closer, where I get to feel at home, here, and relive memories of home far away, with him.
So, we do what we can to stay connected—to each other, and to home—through cutting the meat to the right size. Sizzling it to the right temperature. Seasoning it with the earthy spices of my childhood.
This is how we live.
In that restaurant, we sipped on tea served in glass teacups and studied the menu. The ceiling fan’s blades shimmered on the red liquid, caught in the golden rim.
Arizona heat bounced off the faces of patrons when I argued for chicken kabob—a gentle introduction to Persian food. He looked through the stews, an array of traditional dishes with distinct flavors.
I watched a young man in the kitchen tending skewers. Farsi exchanges between the owner and staff overlapped with the hum of the lunchtime crowd. A sudden aroma of charcoal-blackened lamb, fresh off the grill, filled the air.
He insisted on the dish made of mixed dark greens stewed with beef and balanced with dried lime, served over rice. I loved the dish but felt that it was too Iranian too soon. He didn’t back off. I gave in.
If we were going to work, it couldn’t always be my way.
The first years of our relationship were full of ups and downs. That honeymoon phase people talk about—we didn’t have it. We argued a lot.
Simmer, soften, deepen, become.
This is how we grow.
That dish he ordered—the one I was so worried about—turned out to be his favorite. And we began to cook.
The first time I made it, halfway through, it tasted bitter. Nothing like my mom’s. What did I do wrong?
Then I remembered—I hadn’t added the dried lime. It lacked the acidity to balance the chemistry.
Now, I know. Now, I wait for the meat to become fork-tender to add salt. Then I wait some more before adding the magic ingredient: dried limes.
With a fork, I poke their crinkled skin—just a couple of tiny holes, enough to allow in moisture, to soften the hard shell as they float in the pot of mixed green, beef, and red kidney beans.
That first time, the initial bitterness frightened me. Still, I resisted the urge to toss the whole thing.
An hour later, when I lift the lid, it smells like something familiar. Something comforting, like my mom’s home-cooked meals on the stove of my childhood home, the hum of Tehran’s traffic at dusk, a backdrop to her ever-quiet-presence as I did homework at our red kitchen table.
I pour a bit of the stew into a small bowl and blow on it. The texture is almost right, coming together in time. It tastes good, but after almost twenty years of making our favorite dish, I know it will be even better in a few more hours.
I let the stew sit on the back burner, on steady low heat, transforming into something far from its original ingredients. Something old and something new.
Soon our house will smell like the past I carry and the present that we share. It will smell like home.
This is how we love.
Nazanin Knudsen is an Iranian-American writer and producer. Her work has appeared in literary journals and earned nominations for the Best Microfiction Anthology series and the Pushcart Prize. She writes memoir and essays and produces documentaries and advocacy work grounded in trust, collaborative storytelling, and accountability. She teaches film editing and nonfiction storytelling at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
John Lugo-Trebble
Creative Nonfiction
Tabula Rasa: Scenes of the Departed
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A group of friends preparing food for the evening. Cutting the vegetables: cucumber, leaves, red onions. Pieces thrown into a large wooden bowl. They are making a salad. In the background some electro band is singing in French; loud enough to hear, low enough for them to laugh and joke. Is it Air? Nouvelle Vague? It doesn't matter. Sips from wine glasses. More chopping. The sizzle of a frying pan I can't see. Transfixed; I lose myself in this Parisian scene from across the courtyard.
Years later, Brigitte would tell me how in Paris, there is always a scene being set. Darling, its what we French do. It could be food, the running of a bath, the lovers stealing a kiss on the street or just a solitary person sat reading with a carefully lit cigarette in their right hand. Mise-en-scene. It is second nature to the city's inhabitants.
Across the courtyard. A large bowl with chopped leaves, tomatoes and cucumber, dressed in a light vinaigrette. Bread broken into smaller pieces piled into another large bowl. Cheeses and meats bought fresh from the bustling street market on the street below. Fresh flowers, a chilled bottle of Rose, sparkling water. All laid out on the large wooden table in the grand dining room. A summer Saturday evening bustling below the open windows. Another scene, ready for its close up.
Is it the love of creating memories that binds us or the food set out before us? Why can't it be both? Does it matter if we are sitting around a large table in someone's home, a cosy restaurant, or lingering in a kitchen. Why is the kitchen the gravitational pull of the house? Chatting whilst picking at bowls of tomatoes, bits of cheese, crispy bacon, jam filled donuts or hot cups of coffee and tea. Manoeuvring around like a carefully rehearsed ballet to a Jona Lewie song. Scenes cemented in our psyche.
As a child, my mother would cook for days in advance of family parties and birthdays. I don't remember the gifts but I remember the atmosphere. The process of chopping, slicing, marinating, boiling, frying and roasting are sounds that take me back to simpler pauses in life. I can still smell the various dishes of pernil, lechon, pasteles, mofongo, arroz con gandules. Standing room only, disposable plates, tropical flavoured sodas in Styrofoam cups. Homemade rum in small shot glasses for the adults. Another scene.
A summer BBQ, far from the streets of Paris but a scene set nonetheless on a hot Cornish day. Brigitte on a chair, bare feet propped up. Her smile lighting up the garden; the faint scent of lavender nearby. Under the oversized parasol small plates of tomato and red onion salad with a balsamic drizzle, sun dried tomatoes, pesto and mozzarella in olive oil, rolled serrano ham filled with soft cheese, potato salad made with crème fraîche, a Virgin Bloody Mary for her; regular ones for us. Tasters on offer before the main event of burgers, hot dogs and sausages. Our cats are lounging in the sun.
A Sunday roast on a rainy day. Sat around our old wooden table. Large oval plates full of beef, turkey, garlic and rosemary roast potatoes, mustard honey parsnips, leeks and cheese, cauliflower cheese with a dash of cayenne pepper and large Yorkshire puddings with collected pools of gravy ready to pour out like a broken damn once cut into. Our fine cutlery and crystal wine glasses laid out because a special occasion is always when a chosen family come together. The scene set for the perfect afternoon.
I can still hear the larger-than-life voice of Wacker giving me food tips. Always use a wine you would drink yourself mate; as we decanted an Australian shiraz into a pitcher. Anything can be a decanter mate. A splash of white wine in a tomato-based sauce brings out the flavour more mate. Stopping by on his way to work to pick up fresh oregano that I grew in our greenhouse. Herbs that would go into the meals he would prepare that evening. From ground to plate in less than 2 miles. Connecting his customers to the land around them. Extras in a scene they were unaware of.
Fausto's Almacén in Kreuzberg in the early days. A storefront both at home in Berlin and Buenos Aires. Only one Biedermeier inspired table in the centre that he would expand as more customers arrived. The scene unfolds as Spanish, German and English encircle the plates of empanadas, garlic infused chimichurri, Milanesa and glasses of Malbec and Mojitos. The faint sound of tango music in the background. Is that Carlos Gardel? Strangers brought together. A moment of unity and memory in a once divided city. End scene.
Contributor Note
I’m no stranger to grief. I lost my dad when I was 9, my mother at 21 and my sister at 22. From a young age, it felt like a monster looking at me through a closet door left slightly ajar. When I left home at 17, the monster transformed into a cloud that followed close behind as I travelled the world. Now that I am approaching 50, it feels like that cloud has caught up with me. This is the sad reality of ageing; the older we get, the more people we lose. In the last year, I lost 3 wonderful friends in very different circumstances. As I processed that grief, I realised how much of my own memories of them were centred around food. Not parties so much but intimate spaces where conversations flowed like wine and dishes were shared in a space where time slowed down. Where those preserved moments twinkled like lit candelabras on white linen table cloths. When I think of the dishes in Tabula Rasa, I am transported back to those moments. The moments that outlive material possessions. The memories that no bank can repossess. I am reminded that grief is the price you pay for love but one that I would pay each time because what is life without love? It isn’t a fear of death that I have, but a fear of not living. I am grateful for the family and friends and I have, and have had. I am grateful for the life I have lived. These scenes are inspired by glimpses into that life.
John Lugo-Trebble is a Bronx born Puerto Rican queer writer based in England. His work has been published on both sides of the Atlantic. He is the author of The Everywhere Series which includes Lu’s Outing and The Deadbeat Club. He also helps produce a zine alongside dif, a Bristol/ Salford based queer collective of artists and writers promoting non mainstream misfit art and writing. Since 2022, he has been a full-time carer, looking after his husband, David. They are the proud parents of 3 beautiful cats. You can find more information about him at www.johnlugotrebble.com
Tirza Garcia Olivares
Creative Nonfiction
C. Isla Tazmania 2094, Mexico
❦
The lime green house with the popcorn walls is no longer what it used to be. The strawberry guava tree is gone, and the golden trumpet flowers that crowned the house were swept by the thunderstorms. At least, the terracotta bricks in the front yard remain.
I would refuse my grandma’s barbacoa dish every time. I would give anything to have a plate of it now. She’s gone. I’d like to sit at the teens and kids’ table with my cousins, nieces, and nephews. We used to be around twenty kids, now we’re closer to forty. We’ve grown. We’ve turned into parents or aunts or uncles. And we’ve moved around to other states and different countries.
I would walk to the Church with my mom. We’d get coconuts with chili powder and lime from the friendly street vendors after Mass. At night, we’d go to the small fair and get on the cheap rides with questionable safety measures. I’d win candy and bubbles at the marble games while the fireworks exploded around me. I’d buy roasted corn with more chili powder and lime. I’d eat my cup of roasted corn once we were back home watching A Christmas Carol or Malcolm in the Middle while my mom worked on my curls to get them pretty for later.
I liked the times when we were all single. My cousin Lalo studied abroad in Germany. He came back that Christmas and told me about the food. No flavor. He missed our grandma’s barbacoa. He took another spoonful, savoring the lime juice, the pepper sauce, and the chicken. He talked about how in German the letter “V” is pronounced weird. I laughed, and he laughed with me. Ale, his sister, read a book. I peered behind her shoulder. She said it was rude to do that. Oli, their younger brother, pinched my arm while no one was looking. There was no point in accusing him. He’d do it again.
I listened to my aunt Laura talking about Jesus’ birth as I sat on her lap. She asked if I was excited to place baby Jesus on the nativity at midnight. I was. The youngest kids would place baby Jesus in the nativity at midnight every year because we exuded innocence. Cameras would flash everywhere. Then, we’d go to bed. Baby Jesus would bring the presents before we woke up.
I would wake up my mom, my grandma, and my aunts. I’d run to the living room and witness Baby Jesus’ kindness. He brought the toys I asked for and clothes for Candy, my stuffed bunny. Once I was surrounded by wrapping paper and the doorbell rang and the rest of our crew rushed in, we would all share what we’d gotten. Kari, Chris, Rodo, Lalo, Ale, Oli, Sammy, Kaz, Kassi, Sam, Regis, Santi, Juan Daniel, Ariana, Leo, David, Nataly, Meli, Dario, and me. Emi, Alex, and Diego would share via phone call. The oldest got clothes, phones, and skateboards. The youngest got toys. We’d share and play, no greed, no envy. Just games and fragrant smells and tasty dishes cooked with love.
I would listen to my uncle Juan singing while playing his guitar. He sang a song for me about a girl with honey-colored eyes. There was this one song that always made my grandma cry. Then, he sang "Piano Man." After that, the soda would run out, and my mom would let me go buy more from the tiny store down the block, but only if Lalo and Juan Daniel went with me and held my hand all the time. I’d like to be surrounded by cousins and drown in our laughter again. I’d like to hear the jokes and marvel at the magic tricks of five uncles and four aunts, either in person or through the phone, once again. I’d even enjoy the gossip of the in-laws. I’d like to stuff myself with spicy steak tacos, Fanta, grapes, hot cocoa with cinnamon, and sweet vanilla conchas straight out of the oven again.
I would pick strawberry guavas with my cousins when it was still light outside. Grandma fancied the reddest ones, so we looked for those. Spot, gently squish, if it’s too hard leave it, if it’s too soft throw it out. The softest ones had yellow worms inside of them. Not good. I collected twenty-five. Oli thirty-seven. Sam got fifty. Everyone else was in between. It didn’t matter how many we’d collected. All that mattered was getting the strawberry guavas washed up and our grandma pleased.
I would hug my grandma even though she’d push me away almost immediately. She didn’t like hugs, but she liked gently caressing our arms with her thumb. The strict woman’s love language. It was enough. She’d give money to her favorite. She gave small gifts to the others. She hugged the boys more since she wasn’t too fond of girls. Simply, old ways meeting new ways.
I would go out at one point. I would peek through the fence to see if the cute boy who lived two houses down was playing with his German Shepherd. He was. He would catch me looking at times and kindly smile. I’d run away. I met him later and nicknamed him “Digo.” We became great friends and so did our mothers.
I would give anything to go back to the lime green popcorn house and pick strawberry guavas and golden trumpet flowers with my cousins. I’d give anything for one more Christmas surrounded by family and culture. But now, we’ve become writers, architects, engineers, psychologists, spouses, parents… A new generation is blossoming as our knees begin to crack.
Some are here. Others are there. We never knew what we had until we lost it. The number 2094 will always be there, but what made that house a home is gone forever. C. Isla Tazmania 2094, Mexico is just a house now. And we are her echoes.
Contributor Note
In this CNF piece, I used food as a craft element that would cue not only the narrator into vivid memories of her childhood, but also transport the reader into this world. Additionally, each dish is symbolic of a value or belief. For example, the barbacoa dish represents family unity, the coconuts with chili powder and lime and roasted corn symbolize aspects of parenthood, such as patience, discipline, and emotional warmth. Other sweet foods such as hot cocoa, soda, and vanilla conchas represent the innocence of childhood. Finally, the strawberry guavas represent the bittersweetness of tradition. Therefore, food does not only emerge here as a memory cue, but also an element that establishes a connection between the reader and the narrator to increase relatability.
Tirza Garcia Olivares (she/her/ella) is an emerging Mexican-American writer studying Creative Writing and Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her work has previously appeared in Prosetrics Magazine, and more will soon be published in Viscera Literary Magazine. When not writing, she enjoys reading, doing yoga, and spending time with friends. Find her on Instagram: @tirza.olivares.1534
Sayantani Roy
Creative Nonfiction
A cobblestone yard, Bengal afternoons, and a handful of trees.
❦
Eat the fruit. What do you care which tree it came from?
So goes the old proverb, but today I want to summon the fruit-bearing trees of my childhood. Trees that bore difficult fruits, as the writer Kate Lebo would say perhaps. But I am no inventor or keeper of family recipes. I don’t have any scientific nuggets to present. All I have are memories of a cobblestone courtyard, some lazy Bengal afternoons, and an ancestral home, razed and gone.
I am a scrawny nine-year-old and my cousin a strapping girl of thirteen. Peeking from within its foliage we have this tease of a custard apple. When I think about this fruit with its very English name, all I can think of is its sweet white pulp and large black seeds. Aata in Bengali. It’s been decades since I tasted one. I don’t remember how we took apart the bumpy, hard skin to get to the flesh, but my cousin must have found a way just as easily as she found one to devise a makeshift pole to pluck it off neatly. Strange, I can’t remember anymore what an Aata tree looks like, yet, among the first rhymes we read in the Bengali alphabet book, the tree makes its place:
Aata gacchhey tota pakhi! A parakeet in the Aata tree!
Another difficult fruit in that garden was a variety of citrus. The tree bore the sourest fruit possible. We gave up on it after tasting it once—it was not even worth making chutney with. But I remember admiring its beautiful foliage—a shiny, dark green with rounded edges. We called it the “Biliti Komlalebu” tree. Komlalebu as in orange, and Biliti as in ‘from England,’ but in this context perhaps it just meant foreign. Till date I have wondered about the provenance of both tree and its name. What foreign shores had it come from? Or were we othering it because of its strange taste?
At the far end of the cobblestone courtyard stood the bel tree, the Bengal quince or the stone apple. True to its name, it has a stony exterior that grandma broke open with her nora—the cylindrical grinder that came with the grindstone. In lieu of a mixer grinder she used the stone sheel nora to grind spices. Her skilled hands to turned the soft bel pulp into bel sherbet, a thick concoction of even consistency that had a cooling effect on the body. She did this until the day she left her home to live with one of her sons. My cousin and her family moved in some years later. My aunt, her mother, made bel sherbet much the same way that grandma did throughout all the years that the tree bore fruit. In life, the two women were distant, but this image of making bel sherbet for the household weaves a gossamer thread of tenderness through my memories and dispels all worldliness.
When the smoke from the unoon could no longer fight the cold heavy air and ran parallel to the ground, we knew it was time to summon the man who would shimmy up the date palm tree to collect its sweet sap. On the first visit he would make incisions beneath the fronds and tie an earthen vessel there. He angled a makeshift conduit to channel the sap right into the pot. We drank the raw juice in the mornings, but mostly grandma collected it to make gur. She heated it for hours on a low flame until it thickened into molasses. Upon cooling, it solidified into patali gur, which sweetened our milk. She made perfect balls of mowa by rolling the molasses with puffed rice, a delicacy probably deemed unsophisticated by today’s children growing up with urban sensibilities.
There were other fruit too, but the mango season was transient, and we could never be present at harvest time. All summer we worried about the possibility of our grandparents getting injured by a pebble or a piece of brick that the neighborhood children brought down the fruit with. As for the guava tree, my memories are less about the fruit and more about my cousins climbing the limbs with its peeling bark.
It's been several years now that the house is gone. I long for dreams that take me back to that cobblestone courtyard of fruit-bearing trees. I want to taste each full-bodied fruit because when was the last time I even saw an aata or a bel? But I also want to take a good look at the trees. Their sturdy trunks, their lithe limbs. Look closely to see how they hold onto the soil. How they rise upward to hold the sky.
Contributor Note
Sayantani Roy works out of the Seattle area. She has place work in Alan Squire Publishing, Emerge Literary Journal, Grist, TIMBER, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. She was a 2024 fiction mentee in the AWP Writer-to-Writer mentorship program and was placed as a semifinalist in the 2025 Adroit Journal Anthony Veasna So Scholars in Fiction. Say hello on Instagram @sayan_tani_r.
Kathryn Silver-Hajo
Creative Nonfiction
Cinnamon and Sandalwood
❦
The way we held each other the night before I watched your plane taper to a speck against the clouds. You, returning to your homeland at last.
The way my heart jumped when a blue airmail letter arrived with your blocky print on the front. When the touchtone phone rang, and I knew it was you.
The way I pressed my face to the jean jacket you left behind, lost in the denim and sandalwood hug of it, reminding me of long nights talking. Trying to figure out where we were headed.
The way I finally followed you to make a new home together. The 747 nearly skidding off the runway on the stopover in Brussels in an epic snowstorm where the ticket agent said my best bet was to try to get the Étoile du Nord train to Amsterdam, fly on to Beirut from there.
The way I dragged my wheel-less bags through the snow to the station but the trains were canceled and I had to drag them back again, sleep on chairs in the airport until flights could resume.
The way the airplane food tasted like loneliness, made me long for the meal we’d made together the night before you left. The lentils and rice smothered in crispy onions smelled of cinnamon. Tasted like home.
The way you laughed and waved like a wild man from behind the Arrivals gate and when we pressed our lips together, there was a whisper of cinnamon, a thrill of sandalwood, and I knew we’d never let go of each other again.
Contributor Note
“Cinnamon and Sandalwood” is a story about the early days of my relationship with my future husband, who is Lebanese. For several years I lived in the Middle East and maintain a robust connection with friends and family there to this day. In the Middle East, not only is food love, it is life itself. Nearly every social interaction involves food, coffee, sweets, or all of the above. This aligned with my own experience as a child growing up in a family that was very food oriented. My grandmother and mother both enjoyed cooking, baking, and sharing the fruits of their labors. My parents took us kids out for Chinese food and Smorgasbords for special occasions. I’ve integrated many of the dishes from my childhood into my own repertoire and since then have tried my hand at the cuisines of nearly every country I’ve visited. In Lebanon, I learned to prepare a large array of both simple and sumptuous dishes that are now solidly incorporated into our mealtimes. Food is in my heart and soul, my body and psyche and it finds its way through my fingertips and onto the page frequently. In “Cinnamon and Sandalwood” the wistfulness and longing of the narrator is partly expressed through a meal made together before a long, but necessary separation and contrasted with the airplane food that “tasted like loneliness.” Food is love. Food is life. Food is longing and remembering.
Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s work appears in Atticus Review, Centaur Lit, CRAFT, Emerge Literary, Fictive Dream, Ghost Parachute, Gone Lawn, McNeese Review, Milk Candy Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, Ruby Literary, Switch, The Phare, and other lovely journals. Her stories were selected for the 2023, 2024, and 2025 Wigleaf Top 50Longlists and nominated for Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Food Writing. Kathryn’s award-winning books include YA novel, Roots of The Banyan Tree and flash collections Spinning: Love, Family, and Other Strange Entanglements (forthcoming) and Wolfsong.
Find Kathryn online at kathrynsilverhajo.com;
facebook.com/kathryn.silverhajo;
twitter.com/KSilverHajo @kathrynsilverhajo.bsky.social;instagram.com/kathrynsilverhajo
Elisabeth Meyer Gonzalez
Hybrid Prose
Gloria Rubino Knows Who Took the Money from the Cigar Box
❦
She knows what drove Uncle Manny to set Aunt Frances’s collection of miniature flocked horses on fire. She knows that Cousin Linda had her first orgasm in the chapel at Our Lady of Lourdes Camp with counselor-in-training Candy McCafferty. She knows who came to Aunt Frida’s door the night she had her second heart attack and choked on an artichoke leaf. She knows that Millie Prinzi buried her miscarried baby on the same beach in Palermo where she had lost her virginity in 1981. And she knows that Aunt Mary keeps Uncle Louie’s glass eye in her nightstand drawer.
Gloria stirs secrets into hot cups of coffee with heavy cream and sugar at the worn kitchen table. She lights a votive candle with a wooden match and pushes aside a rhinestone-studded cigarette case and Lady Liberty ashtray to make room for the food. She sets out a plate of frosted fig cookies or a tray of peperoni and sharp provolone, then pulls a pan of roasted nuts out of the oven and fans the steam with her hand. The breath of fragrant figs and nuts arouses memory. Rich flavors awaken tongues. Stories unfurl like peeling away the leathery outer shells and paper-soft skins of warm chestnuts. Gloria leans inward or nods or pats hands. By nightfall, when the kitchen hums with whispers and laughter, she pulls a pan of eggplant out of the oven, the mozzarella melted like psychedelic moons, and stirs a pound of macaroni stars into the kettle of salted water that hisses on the gas stove.
Contributor Note
If you’re lucky, you’ve sat at Gloria Rubino’s table. You’ve cracked nuts with her, stirred parmesan and butter into a bowl of macaroni stars, sipped rich coffee, and maybe smoked a cigarette or two after. The kitchen table is a magical site where food and love invoke characters into being and where flavor loosens inhibition as loved ones reveal their most intimate secrets. In this piece, as in my life, kitchen-table ethos and food rituals transform the ordinary into magical and nourishment into narrative.
Elisabeth Meyer Gonzalez’s work has appeared in RUBY, Gooseberry Pie Lit Magazine, The Best American Food and Travel Writing 2025, and Bending Genres.
Maureen Langloss
Hybrid Prose
The Cost of Dragons
❦
We argue at the market over whether this stuck-up fruit is worth ten dollars. Its scales: a lure. Its fuchsia: a dare. Lately I’ve been dreaming of quitting my job, of telling the Boss I want to give the world something more urgent and beautiful. Yet I want this ten-dollar dragon for my children, my magnificent, curious children, more than I care about the whole world so I shell out the money, I shell out and shell out until I am a shell, a shill, a shallow, a swallow, flying over this landscape of skyscraper and mobile home, every forbidding enticement in this grueling life calling to me. Caw caw. Over and over I succumb to dragons taking flight. At home, we slice body into communion wafers, place host on tongues. We stand on tiptoe and wait. We want the loud noise, the big bang, the fated flame. But our vibrant, vitamin-bearing firedrake ignites nothing. Its subtle glow disappoints like a love too far away to feel. I eat every soft bite though, and when the fruit’s blood is all that remains—a brilliant pink puddle cooling on my forgiving white plate—I photograph it. I lick the dish clean with my human tongue. Sometimes I return to its picture and cry—I am so moved by the color, by the memory of its gentle care.
I Never Made the Toast
❦
My mom sprinkled cinnamon and sugar on toast when I was sick like all good mothers of the 1970s, but my child turned eighteen and I still haven’t made him the toast. I didn’t teach him to drive at midnight in the school parking lot when he was thirteen, giggling, scanning the dark for cops. I didn’t teach him to drive at all. I didn’t bring home red hots from the vending machine so he could give them to the boy he liked, didn’t take him to Chicago to see his aunts in a beat-up Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, the way back all the way down so he could sleep the seven hundred miles. Fifteen kinds of candy and cold grapes in the cooler at his feet. I never tucked into a convoy so he could hear the truckers’ horns sound for him. I didn’t bring him to Mass. Oh god, fuck, I totally forgot about Mass. He never confessed or genuflected or tasted the host. I didn’t chain smoke Kools beside him on the couch, didn’t make him skip school for All My Children. We never did Jane Fonda together. There weren’t plastic baggies over his socks inside his sneakers when it snowed. I never sold encyclopedias or used cars to put him through school. I was never the only woman working a car lot that smelled of tar and Montgomery Donuts. I sprinkled glitter though. Oversized jugs of pink and royal blue and rainbow. It was all I had. We shook color across giant geographies of glue and playdough. Sometimes we added feathers too. Googly eyes. Buttons. Pipe cleaners. The glitter, it got everywhere. In the creases of our clothes. In the dog’s fur. The medicine cabinet. It’s still here with us. Sometimes I catch a speck of gold or silver on my cloth as I wipe dust from beside the posters of eyes he hung in his room—why so wide open, what is he looking for?—and wish I could put the speck back. But it’s hard to get a single molecule of glitter off the rag, return it to its original position in the space-time continuum. I touch the gold to my tongue instead, taste where it’s been, check for sweet. I ask before he hits the road, before my mom hits a different road, Is glitter enough? Are you going to be okay? Am I?
Anti-ode to the Egg
❦
I have no respect for eggs / I find them disgusting /
loathsome / reeking / of questionable character
texture design morality functionality / the way they
can be jiggly or hard / that people put the devil in
them / greasy lazy over too easy / I cannot abide their
mutable form / the serving plates dipped with egg-
shaped emptinesses / how they make me question
God / chickens / other objects and emotional states in
the universe / in myself / that are yellow and vibrant
/ gooey and trembling / possessing hard shells /
harboring loneliness / hiding unsettling snot-like
secrets // My mother slathered them in / damnations
of butter / purified them with salt / putrid orange
collected in the corners / of my father’s scowl / I fluff
them / again and again / a monotony of / burritos /
scrambles / foul-smelling suppers / for clean-
smelling children / watching me perch over stove /
hand clasped to beak / abhorring the violent crack /
petrified of rup-turing yoke / of stray shell / tooth-
break / salmonella / under-over cooking / feather /
flavor of chick bit and other trifling deaths / as if big
deaths weren’t already enough / already glued to
every aching moment / with egg-y slime.
Maureen Langloss is a lawyer-turned-writer living in New York City. She serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Split Lip Magazine, and her writing has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Best Small Fictions, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. Her work has been named a distinguished story in The Best American Short Stories, received the Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Find her online at maureenlangloss.com or on social media @maureenlangloss.
Nancy Stohlman
Hybrid Prose
Last Words
❦
We’re sitting in a booth at Gunther Toody’s:
mint green vinyl,
glossy checkered floors,
classic doo-wop,
hood of a cherry red ‘57 Chevy
suspended from the ceiling,
and beneath that,
the sharp smells of Windex
and industrial dishwashing detergent.
We’re sharing a plate of Elvis fries—melted cheese, smothered gravy, bacon bits—
almost like old times. Almost.
You’re overdressed,
crisp, baby blue shirt,
silver hair freshly cut (though you denied it).
The record on the jukebox finishes
I will sleepwalk no more…
In the silence between
songs there’s only coagulated gravy,
condensation dripping down glasses,
water rings left on napkins
my hand under the table
the one topic we’ve been avoiding.
I want to tell you something, I finally say, reaching—
knowing he’s already seen it,
the silver band.
Please don’t, he says. Not yet.
His blue eyes shake no.
I pull my hand back.
Let me remember you like this, he doesn’t say, but I hear it.
A new song on the jukebox: break it to me gently….
we hold our melting milkshakes with both hands
and brace ourselves
for all the tomorrows
now lining up
outside
the diner
door.
Nancy Stohlman is an award-winning author of six books including After the Rapture (2023), Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities (2018), The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories (2014), The Monster Opera (2013), Searching for Suzi: a flash novel (2009), and Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction (2020).
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