December 30, 2024
Michael Czyzniejewski
FICTION
Now
❦
Kylah texts: Now. I throw on my running gear and tell my wife, Patty, I’m going for a jog. Kylah lives three blocks away. We’ll have an hour. This happens two or three days a week. It’s a good thing, this thing.
I enter Kylah’s through the gate in the alley. Her yard is overrun by trees, weeds, vines, no one seeing me come or go. The back door is always unlocked. I call for Kylah from her kitchen. She yells for me from the front room. I undress on my way to her. Kylah is waiting, nude, spread wide on the coffee table. Every time, it’s something different. I wonder if the table will hold.
We are in the throes when I hear what sounds like a small train moving through Kylah’s house. I look to the side hallway as the sound gets louder. An old woman in a nightgown with a walker trudges past the doorway. I jump off Kylah and point.
“There’s an old woman in your house.”
“Yep,” Kylah says, unmoving.
The sound starts up again, wheels grinding against hardwood, unoiled metal squeaking. The woman crosses the threshold again, going the opposite direction. A door shuts.
“That’s Mom-in-Law,” Kylah says. “She lives here now. She’s mostly deaf and going blind. Shouldn’t affect things here at all.”
I stare at Kylah.
“Don’t leave me hanging,” she says, beckoning. “Time’s a wasting.”
❦
Two days later I’m back at Kylah’s. She summons me to the bathroom. She’s in the shower stall, nude. I stay clothed. The bathroom sits between the kitchen and back bedroom, the bedroom where her mother-in-law resides.
“You can hear her coming a mile away,” Kylah says.
“You, too,” I counter.
Kylah laughs. “That’s the spirit.”
Kylah turns on the shower. I like this: Cover. The water is noisy. It explains nudity. The door locks. I start to think this could work. I undress and join Kylah.
As Kylah lathers me, I hear the doorknob twist. Knocking follows, the pounding. The mother-in-law yells, asks if anyone’s in the bathroom. More doorknob, more knocking.
“Stay here,” Kylah says.
Like I wouldn’t.
I watch from the gap in the curtain. Kylah dries her face, wraps herself in the towel. She opens the door. I expect a quick dispatch. Instead, that small walker train rolls across the tile floor: Kylah has let her mother-in-law into the bathroom.
“Take your time, Irene,” Kylah yells. She shuts the door.
I squeeze the curtains tight, freeze. I work to not picture what’s happening five feet from me.
Irene takes an eternity. Kylah reenters after Irene lumbers out. The curtains part to Kylah smiling like a goofy devil.
“I want you to know I had no choice: one bathroom. But I enjoyed it all the same.”
Leaving, in protest, is the only honorable option. Kylah rejoins me in the shower, is immediately all about me, more amorous than I can remember.
Who would I be punishing if I left, I wonder.
❦
Two days later: another Now. I plan to end things with Kylah, and for three blocks, I practice my speech. I picture Kylah in the back bedroom, next to her mother-in-law: Kylah wanting me, right there, swearing up and down that it’s going to be all right, that Irene won’t notice.
When I enter her house, Kylah is sitting at her kitchen table, dressed.
“You’re breaking it off,” I say, certain she’s beating me to it.
“Irene’s dead,” she says.
I feel terrible that I’ve sighed, audibly, in relief.
I sit next to Kylah, put my hand on hers. “Tell me how it happened. How’s Les taking it? I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Kylah looks up. “Les doesn’t know. I just found her. She’s in her room, frozen, eyes open, staring at the door.”
I squeeze Kylah’s fingers. “Why am I here?”
Kylah rests her head on my shoulder. I maintain my hold on her hand. Kylah kisses my cheek, moves to my neck. She begins unbuttoning.
“Seriously?” I ask
“Don’t ruin this,” she says.
Kylah’s kiss on my mouth stops what I have to say. I get out, “We have to call someone.”
“I called you,” she says.
I see the table has already been cleared.
❦
It takes Patty a week to notice I’ve stopped jogging.
“You’ve been smelling better,” she says.
This is not the worst thing she’s said to me.Kylah texts several times. Nows, ???s, an apology. An invite. The latter comes a couple of hours after Irene’s funeral.
❦
I get a dog and name it Les. I walk him, graduate to jogging, this time for real. It’s horrible and I’m bad at it. So’s Les.
One run, cutting down Kylah’s alley, another jogger approaches. I think we’re going to pass, share the jogger’s nod, but he doglegs through Kylah’s back gate. I wonder if he knows what he’s gotten himself into. What could be next.
Jogging becomes my obsession. I get better, then get good, look thin and strong. Patty does not comment on this actual jogging, the results. I want her to, I realize. I walk around the house without a shirt, bend over to pick things up in front of her. Into conversations, I drop in how much further I’ve gone, how much faster I’ve gotten. She doesn’t seem to hear.
I ask her if she wants to start up, jog with me, make it a thing we do together. She lets out a laugh and looks away.
Every day, I make a pass through Kylah’s alley, past the front of the house, too. Sometimes twice. I never see Kylah, or other men coming or going, again. I wonder if Kylah sees me, through a window or curtain, notices how I look, how I look now. If she’s impressed.
Or maybe she doesn’t recognize me. She wonders who that man is, always passing her house, always glancing her way, hoping to catch a glimpse of something, of anything.
Hospice
❦
My sister gets a call when I’m at her apartment. It’s Geoff, this guy she hung out with in high school. I remember Geoff—I had a crush on him. Everyone did. He and Millie were two years ahead. I don’t think he knew who I was.
Millie says Of course I remember you! sounding genuinely excited to hear from Geoff. He was in plays with Millie. They starred in Grease. They starred in Hello, Dolly! They were in Thoroughly Modern Millie but Millie didn’t play Millie, which she never got over.
I was always chorus. I dropped out when Millie graduated. I did AV club instead.
Millie’s enthusiasm shrivels into Oh, nos and Uh-huhs, followed by chains of silence. Millie eventually tells Geoff No, absolutely not. and I’m really sorry, Geoff, but still no. Millie hangs up and lets out a noise like she’s tasted something sour when she’d been expecting sweet.
“Was that Geoff?” I ask. I’m chopping onions and mincing garlic.
“Were you listening?”
“What’d he want?”
Geoff is dying—Millie initially looks pained, but her expression shifts as she details why
Geoff really called: He’s always loved her and wants to meet up before he gets too sick. Translation: Geoff wants to fuck Millie before his dick stops working. He’s staying at the Hilton by the expressway, in a deluxe suite. There is a Chili’s across the street and a Houlihan’s down a bit, if Millie wants to have dinner first—his treat.
“He’s waiting in the hotel bar,” she says. “Cocky fucker.”
Millie helps me chop, taking out the second board, another knife. We are making our mother’s chicken soup for the first time. We scrape ingredients in the five-gallon pot Mom left us both—we share because we can’t split a pot in two.
“I would have cried when I found out he died,” Millie says, crying now from the onions. “Now I can’t see me going go to the wake.”
The soup simmers and we watch TV. Millie gets a text from another old theater friend, Joanna. Geoff called her, too, the same proposition. They text back and forth until Joanna gets a text from Veronica, who just got off the phone with Geoff. By the time the soup is done, Millie and six others from her clique have heard the Geoff pitch. They trade timestamps—Millie was second in line, of the women they know about. Second bothers Millie.
We eat soup, raising our spoons to our dead mom—it’s been one month today. The soup tastes nothing like hers. I add heroic amounts of salt and it’s perfect. I eat a second bowl then Millie’s—she gives me the pot with the rest to take home. I set it on the floor of the passenger seat for the ride, anchoring my purse on the top, hoping none of it spills.
❦
I pass the Hilton on my way to the expressway. Curiosity grabs me and I veer into the lot. The bar has windows. I slow down and see several men inside but can’t make out their faces. A parking space opens and I pull in. I put on more makeup than usual and drop my hair out of its ponytail. I pop a mint. Inside I sit at the bar and order a drink. I scope the room, wondering which of the men could be Geoff. Nobody matches up. Geoff’s AWOL and I’m overglammed in my sweatpants and the ice-cold margarita is mixing funny in my stomach with Mom’s salty hot soup. I want to throw up. I look into the mirror behind the bar and also look like I want to throw up. I order another margarita, this one with sugar instead of salt.
“You changed your mind,” I hear a voice say from behind me. I look up to see Geoff in the mirror, approaching. He sits next to me and I keep looking toward the mirror, not facing him. I realize I look enough like Millie, what Millie could look like, eighteen years later—eighteen hard years.
“I felt bad,” I say, making my voice higher, like Millie’s, but not anything like Millie’s.
Geoff orders a beer and tries to twist himself in front of me. I don’t want him to realize it’s me, Cheryl, that I’m not Millie. He doesn’t know Cheryl. He didn’t call Cheryl.
Geoff goes on about the cancer ravaging him, spread to his brain, lungs, and nodes—he grabs at his hips when he says “nodes.” Geoff appears robust, beefy. He downs his beer and orders another. When Mom was dying, cancer in her brain, lungs, etc., she couldn’t sit up. She had to be overmedicated just to talk. She didn’t drink. She never tried to get laid.
Geoff puts my drinks on his tab and asks if I like fajitas. He says it’s my call, that he doesn’t have his appetite anymore. We can go upstairs now, or whenever I want. He says the bed is a king.
In the far end of the mirror, back by the door, I spot Millie. She is made up with more care than I am, wearing the slinky silver dress she wore the night her divorce went through. It still fits, nine years later.
Millie sits on the other side of Geoff, who sucks on his beer, going on about cancer. Millie doesn’t notice me—typical—and tries to get Geoff’s attention, arching her back, crossing and uncrossing her legs. She clears her throat several times. Before either can realize what’s happening, I slide off my stool and sneak toward the exit.
❦
The soup tips and spills as I cloverleaf onto the highway. Stock and cloves and parsley drench my carpeted floor mats. Millie and I never make the soup again but she takes the pot back a year later, for chili, something Mom never made. I hold onto the car as long as I can, the smell of soup soaked in, all mine.
Michael Czyzniejewski is the author of four collections of stories, most recently The Amnesiac in the Maze (Braddock Avenue Books, 2023). He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Moon City Press and Moon City Review, as well as Interviews Editor of SmokeLong Quarterly. He has received a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and two Pushcart Prizes.
Marie Gethins
Fiction
Legumes
❦
Helen makes the satay sauce with almond butter, whipping firm spoonfuls into smooth submission. ‘Because, you know, peanuts aren’t nuts. They’re legumes,’ she says. Helen’s sworn off legumes. ‘Riddled with carbs.’ When I don’t reply, she fires The Look across one shoulder. I’m thirty-five not four. My big sis is all about continuous improvement, but only for me.
Legumes grow in pods that can split into two halves.
I could legume you to the moon and back. Open my kitchen cupboard. Second one, bottom right. I’ve got them all: chickpeas, three types of lentils and don’t get me started on bean varieties. Edamame in the freezer. What if Ty calls me a laissez-faire vegetarian? Sometimes it’s a ‘lazy-affair vegetarian’. I only cheat at Helen’s anyway.
Most legumes flowers have five petals—some similar to a face.
She doles out chicken skewers, cucumber sticks, lime wedges, itsy-bitsy bowls of satay sauce, a frond of cilantro each. I follow her into the sunroom, sit and survey my oblong plate. On each skewer, chicken fingers curl like a fist. I nudge them to the plate edge and dip cucumber into sauce while she lists Ty’s shortcomings, tells me how much better off I am without him. ‘Total deadweight, Hon.’
Legumes have a symbiotic relationship with soil bacteria, converting atmospheric nitrogen into a form that can be utilized.
Ty hasn’t died. He’s changed jobs, moved to another city in another state. In a couple months, we’ll have enough saved to hire a container, so I can ship our big stuff, pack up my Fiat500 and join him. I’m a remote worker, you know, office anywhere. We both crave open space around us. Find a fixer-upper house, grow some veg, rescue a dog or two. I’ve told Helen. She twists things to her version. ‘You know what’s really going on here,’ she says. ‘He’s separating us. Total control freak.’
Ancient Romans used legumes for voting—white beans to agree, black beans to oppose.
When I bring my plate into Helen’s kitchen, I see she’s loaded up a box with cans. ‘For the dump,’ she says. I check the labels. They’re all in-date. I offer to take them to the Food Bank. She shrugs, then grabs my elbow as I head out. ‘We’re not finished discussing this stupid move thing.’ In the car, I pull out two cans of black beans to keep.
Same Same but Different
❦
He peeked through the café window and recognised himself in her. She had his black, black, black hair that shone blue under halogen lights. Slim and tall, she wound thick curls into a loose bun. In profile, she resembled the piñonero tree of his mountainous home. He went in.
When she approached to take his order, he spoke with expectation. Chile? She brought him a bowl of spicy beans in tomato sauce. He scooped the mixture onto bread and wondered about her lineage. Clearing his plate, she smiled. I like how you ate it. He gave her eight pound coins and they exchanged numbers.
Three days later, she agreed to a gin after work. He stood—a stance with attitude—holding a white-flower posy gathered from a nearby blackthorn bush. They took it slow. By the time they shared a bed, the bush had purpled with ripe fruit. Morning muesli became a serial occurrence.
She wondered if they complemented one another. He only praised her beauty. Most evenings they sat in separate but matching wingbacks. Their orderly life began to faze her. Was he another passing interest or something more? On the anniversary of the day they met, a ring-box sat in the centre of her dessert plate. He circled the table, waiting for her answer. She looked up, stared at the crack above their heads, wondered about sealing herself to him.
He tugged her out of the chair, ushered her to the living room. A book about his motherland lay open on the coffee table. We will build a beautiful home for lots of babies. He imagined small heads with black, black, black hair that shone blue in a certain light. She saw a multitude of little hands, grasping to pull her down, down, down. He spoke of peace, but she imagined herself in fragments.
It’s not the role for me.
Next morning, he listened to suitcase wheels spin across the bedroom, rattle down the hall. He listened to the click of their front-door open and close. He listened to the rhythmic gush of his heart—that still seemed to function—and the sound of its twin beats bouncing off bedroom walls.
Ba-boom,
Ba-boom.
Ba-boom,
Ba-boom.
Ba-boom,
Ba-boom…
Marie Gethins grew up in an Irish/Italian American kitchen with a mom who encouraged her culinary experiments throughout her childhood, achieving mixed success. Her short stories, essays and flash fiction appear in many nice places, have won some lovely prizes, and were selected for BIFFY50, Best Microfictions, and Best Small Fictions. She is the flash fiction editor for Banshee, a co-editor of Splonk and lives in Cork, Ireland.
Kim Magowan
Fiction
Cycle
❦
The daughter of an alcoholic/ married an alcoholic/ who then had me. Then who/ married an alcoholic/ the daughter of an alcoholic.
❦
Have you heard of an “Athena daughter”? It’s from a book I found on a bargain table at Barnes & Nobles, linking various models of being a woman generally and a daughter specifically to mythical archetypes. Some pop-Psychology book you’d disdain. I stood at Barnes & Nobles, in my ugly shoes, reading it. The “Athena daughter” is a daddy’s girl. Zeus swallowed Athena’s pregnant mother, his latest lover, because a prophecy forecast that if her unborn child was a son, he’d overthrow Zeus. But Athena continued to grow, inside Zeus’s head. She burst out of it, fully grown and fully armed. Since she was a girl, instead of posing a threat to Zeus, the daughter he’d intended to destroy became his right-hand girl and favorite child.
My mother adored her father, and though my grandfather could be cutting, that adoration was reciprocal. “How could you not realize Grandpa was an alcoholic?” I asked my mother. “Don’t you remember how he’d watch the clock, and as soon as it turned 5 p.m., he’d get out the Dewar’s White Label Scotch? Or how irritable he’d get, if we were in a restaurant and he couldn’t order a drink?” Mom shook her head. “It was the highball generation. You don’t understand,” she said.
❦
No surprise, that a girl who denied her father had a drinking problem would marry a man with a drinking problem. You, of all people, know how this happens. Perhaps when my parents met, it looked normal: the excessive drinking at frat parties, the blackouts. Certainly, my father never acknowledged he had a problem. To him, alcoholics drank out of brown paper bags and sprawled on sidewalks. “Didn’t you realize Dad drank too much?” I said to my mother, years after their divorce. She acknowledged that sometimes Dad wouldn’t remember a conversation they’d had the night before. When she told her father that once, he said, “Well, was Michael drinking?”
❦
Alcoholism runs in families, and I have it on both sides. In college I switched to pot, because I didn’t like the way drinking gave me permission to misbehave. But here’s what William James says: personality is “set” by the time you are five years old. Even if behaviors are painful and uncomfortable, we gravitate towards what we know, because the familiar is the groove, the water trickle that forms the canyon. The children of abusers often become abusers or marry them; a disproportionate number of children of alcoholics break the same way.
❦
It was your mother who drank, not your father. She drank to the point that everyone knew there were certain conversations not to have with Arlene after sunset, but also certain ones to introduce. Drunk, your mother was more belligerent, but also more passive—manageable, if you knew just how to manage her. Like when you wanted her permission to go on a debate team trip to Washington, D.C.. “Look, Mom, you signed the permission slip,” you showed her in the morning. She blinked, not wanting to admit she didn’t remember. You told me that story like it was funny. I was just falling in love with you then. It was that narcissistic stage of falling in love, when lovers are delighted, instead of alarmed, by all the things they have in common.
❦
You promise, you break your promise, you promise again. The cycle is so exhausting: “I want to quit drinking! There’s nothing I want more. Not even you,” you say. I picture your alcoholism as Zeus, me as Athena. Don’t you understand that it’s swallowed me up, too? Zeus got a splitting headache because inside his head, Athena was hammering her armor, her breastplate, her fantastic shield. I find your contraband bottles in the strangest places—in the shelf in the garage under the bicycle pump, inside the toilet tank. In Al-Anon, one woman, so pale it’s as if she’s been leeched of color, says she feels doomed to repetition. I’m sick and tired of you being sick and tired of being sick and tired. It’s the cereal box with an image of a child holding an identical cereal box: the same cereal box infinitely repeating, in reduced form. It could go on forever, these concentric rings
Contributor Note
My story “Cycle” is all about drinking–the impact drinking has on drinkers, but also the ones they are proximate to. I was going to say “bystanders,” but really, I mean people too close by to qualify as bystanders. Bystanders always have the option of stepping away. (Look up the “Bystander Effect”: the more bystanders there are, the less likely someone will intervene). This story is fiction, though I’ve been exposed in my life to my share of heavy drinkers, including people whose lives were shortened by drinking. It’s a story about denial. Being an alcoholic involves denial–denial that you have a drinking “problem,” and then, when that is at long last acknowledged, denial that the only way to combat the problem is to quit. (“I’ll quit tomorrow. I’ll cut back. I’ll quit January 1, the fresh start of a fresh year”). Being close to an alcoholic also involves denial (“They are not an alcoholic. They are an alcoholic, but they will quit”). The image in my mind, composing this story, was of concentric rings: cycles inside cycles, entrapping each other. When Dionysus first introduced the Greeks to wine in the myth, they were initially jubilant. Then they woke up hungover, convinced they were poisoned; a mob tried to kill him. I drink myself, in moderation. I think, a lot, about what it means to drink “moderately.” I think about this wine in my glass as a contained kind of poison.
Kim Magowan is the author of the short story collection Don’t Take This the Wrong Way, co-authored with Michelle Ross, forthcoming from EastOver Press; the short story collection How Far I’ve Come (2022); the novel The Light Source (2019); and the short story collection Undoing (2018). Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel.
Marcelo Medone
Fiction
Dinner Before Walking*
❦
Robert “Bobby” Carruthers comes up to me with the cart and says, “Sir, I brought you your dinner. We had a hard time finding everything you asked for.”
Carruthers uncovers the stainless-steel tray and exposes the steaming menu. He begins to recite:
“First, we have the Black Angus rib eye steak—you asked for Aberdeen Angus, which I guess is the same thing: easy stuff. Of course, cooked to medium rare, as connoisseurs demand. The most complicated were the chitterlings, which you call chinchulines and the Mexicans call tripa de leche. And the mollejas or sweetbreads. We barbecued them alongside the steak, nice and crispy, following your directions.
I look with delight at the more than appetizing sweetbreads but force myself to be patient for a few more minutes.
Bobby continues, with obvious pride:
“Then we have the special French fries -the bravas fries- seasoned with onion, garlic and paprika. And the tender asparagus with cream. Finally, New York style cheesecake and cranberry juice. Not forgetting the bunch of moras or blackberries that you ordered at the last minute.
I must admit that the presentation impresses me favorably: someone there in Raiford, Florida deserves congratulations for their work. And for doing it within the tight allowed budget.
Carruthers smiles and says to me, more helpful than usual:
“Do you want me to serve you?”
“No, thanks. I'd rather take care of it myself.”
While I try a bite of sweetbread along with the asparagus, I remember the events that have led me to be at this precise moment in this precise place: my arrival in Tampa from Buenos Aires to work as a petisero or horse worker with a Yankee polo patron. My problems to obtain a Green Card, despite working for five long years in full view of everyone at the club, with eternal discussions and negotiations with the Immigration authorities and the Police, including threats of arrest and deportation.
Until that fateful night in the bar. That bastard Frankie Rivera had had one too many bottles of Budweiser and had approached me in a bad way:
“Hey, Johnny Marrano!”
“Maturano. My name is Juan Maturano.”
“Whatever. Give me 200 bucks right now or I'll put you in jail. I need to buy my friends a few drinks.”
Over his shoulder I saw the other State Patrol officers.
“I already gave you 500 last month,” I said, protesting.
Frank Rivera pulled out his 9-millimeter compact -a Heckler & Koch USP- and stuck it in my ribs.
“Let's go to your car,” he told me.
I obeyed and we headed out into the cold of the night. On nearby Route 441 there was still good traffic moving toward Orlando.
“I don't have any more money,” I told him.
Frankie smiled sadistically, snorted like someone who does something he doesn't want to do, and pulled out his handcuffs with the obvious intention of putting them on me.
“I'm going to have to arrest you and turn you over to the Migra.”
I lunged at him without measuring the consequences. We struggled awkwardly. Frankie's overweight and lack of training worked against him. Obesity has become a real national health problem in the United States.
Suddenly, a boom sounded. Officer Frank Rivera fell in the parking lot of the Red Mesa Bar in Kissimmee, Osceola County, Florida, mortally wounded in the abdomen by a shot from his service pistol. The forensic tests showed my fingerprints on the weapon. In addition, several witnesses -including the other officers on Rivera's patrol- testified that they saw us arguing and leaving the bar together.
The court had no choice but to convict me.
I cut a piece of rib eye steak which is masterfully juicy on the inside and cooked on the outside and put it in my mouth. A delight, as I had not tasted for a long time. Now, without hesitation, I gobble down a few papas bravas. I swallow everything with the cranberry juice. After this, I can die peacefully, I think.
With deliberate slowness, trying to enjoy every moment, I finish my dinner. The minutes pass fleetingly, especially for an individual in my condition.
Carruthers, seeing that I had not touched the blackberries, which were alone in their little metal saucer, says, “Are you not going to eat them? They are fresh from a farm here in the area.”
The poor guy is anxious and wants me to fulfill all my wishes until the end. I smile and pop a few blackberries into my mouth. I swallow them without chewing, so as not to spoil the seeds. I hope that in the not-too-distant future they will germinate and give rise to new life.
Finally, I wipe my mouth with the cloth napkin brought to me for this special occasion, stand up from the table, and raise my forehead.
“I'm ready,” I tell Bobby.
Robert Carruthers handcuffs me and we start walking down the cold, long hallway of Florida State Prison's Death Row. Bobby is moved to tears, though he manages to hide it.
I proudly maintain my composure, my head held high, as if I were walking down the aisle of a church, dressed in my best clothes, with my freshly ironed orange shirt and blue pants.
A lethal injection of midazolam, vecuronium and potassium chloride awaits me: the cocktail of the convicted.
*Originally published in Spanish as “Una cena antes de salir a caminar” in the personal anthology “Los que están en el aire” (“Those Who Are in the Air”), Editorial Rosalba, Asunción, Paraguay, 2023. English translation by the author.
Marcelo Medone (1961, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a Pushcart Prize nominee fiction writer, poet, essayist, playwright and screenwriter. He received numerous awards and was published in multiple languages in more than 50 countries around the world, including the US. He currently lives in Montevideo, Uruguay. Find him on Facebook: Marcelo Medone and on Instagram: @marcelomedone.
Michelle Ross
Fiction
The Problem with Plants
❦
In early spring, for Dex’s birthday, she gifted them both a wild plant foraging class. They hiked slowly up Pima Canyon trail as their instructor, a man dressed head to toe in khaki, pointed out various plants, mostly for their edibility but sometimes for other uses, too—a yucca, for example, could serve as needle and thread for emergency repairs. The instructor dug into his battered backpack for plastic baggies with samples when the plant in question wasn’t in season. They ate oily jojoba nuts, seedy saguaro cactus fruit, and shriveled goji beans from that backpack. From the trail, they nibbled the soft leaves of a ground plant that tasted like cilantro. They sampled wild rhubarb, which, like the cultivated variety, blushed upward from the bottom of its shoots. They collected the thin, pointy leaves of Ephedra for a stimulating tea that the instructor said served as a decent substitute for coffee when you’re living in the bush.
“Living in the bush,” Dex whispered in her ear. He rolled his eyes.
Later, on the drive home, he repeated the words again. “Can you believe that man?”
She considered the remarkable amount of trust they’d placed in the instructor, eating whatever he’d placed into their open palms. Trust was always risky, but you couldn’t live with other people without it, you couldn’t thrive.
“Yes,” she said. “I believe him.”
Dex shook his head.
A few months later, when they were out hiking on their own on a different trail, they saw what they were pretty sure was wild rhubarb, but not sure enough to pick it and eat it. Dex said that was the problem with plants. When you trapped a rabbit for your supper, you didn’t have to worry that what you’d trapped might be a mock rabbit that would poison you. A rabbit was a rabbit. A deer was a deer. When it came to trapping and hunting meat, any dimwit could be certain that the animal in question was exactly what it appeared to be.
He said this in that self-righteous, know-it-all way that had lately begun to trouble her. He overestimated what he knew, overestimated his competence. This made him dangerous, she thought, as she watched his neck and ears turn a shade of red resembling that of the stalks of that wild rhubarb they weren’t certain was rhubarb.
Romantic Weekend
❦
We woke before sunrise. Already the air was sticky. If you want to see birds, you gotta sweat for it, you joked.
I didn’t ask to see birds. That was your thing. I was a good sport, though. I figured the birds could take up only so many hours of our weekend. The lodge was fancy. It boasted cocktail hour every night, three-course dinners. The pastry chef trained at Le Cordon Bleu.
The island was ocean on one side, river on the other, and in between, mudflats, marshes, and ponds. The island was mosquitoes. “Insects are an integral part of life in this pristine coastal environment,” the lodge’s FAQs stated. The island was alligators, though we saw only the one. In the green pond fringed with white fluff. Egrets, everywhere. You gasped at the sight of them. I did, too. The longer we watched them, though, the more they saddened me. The way they folded their long, slender necks. Hunched their backs. Made themselves less.
Then that baby egret fell from its nest. The alligator, waiting below—perfectly positioned, as if clairvoyant. When its jaw opened then snapped closed, you were so excited, you yelped. Or did I make that up? That’s how I remember it anyway. My skin, your skin—slick with bug spray and sweat. The pond—slick with algae. And sure, egrets and spoonbills and kingfishers and cormorants. But also, you grinning over that alligator devouring that baby bird. What a sight! you said. Going on about it the whole walk back to the lodge. Even after I’d showered and put on that white eyelet dress I’d bought especially for the trip, that I’d been sure would catch your attention.
What did: hurrying downstairs to the lodge’s parlor for cocktail hour, where they served quail legs that evening as hor d’oeuvres. Their crispened skin glistened in the sun. You ate three, picked your plate clean.
Michelle Ross is the author of three award-winning story collections: There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You (Moon City Press, 2017); Shapeshifting (Stillhouse Press, 2021); and They Kept Running (UNT Press, 2022). Don’t Take This the Wrong Way, a collection she cowrote with Kim Magowan, is forthcoming from EastOver Press. Her work is included in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and the Norton anthology, Flash Fiction America. She is an Editor at 100 Word Story.
Elisabeth Meyer Gonzalez
Creative Nonfiction
Brandied Fruit
❦
Energy radiates around this stack of old cookbooks like a mirage. And the Women’s Day Encyclopedia of Cookery, Volume Five–F for frostings, frogs’ legs, and fruit–sits on top. I flip through the pages of candied fruitcake and cherries jubilee in dreamy colored pictures and find a recipe written in faded blue cursive on a stained index card. My mother’s ghost reaches for me.
Brandied Fruit, 1970
1 ½ cups each pineapple and peaches
12 maraschino cherries
3 cups sugar
2 pkgs. active dry yeast
I count out twelve maraschino cherries and pop half as many in my mouth while my mother stirs the fruit and sugar mixture with a wooden spoon. She pours it into thick glass jars, then carries each jar into the living room, which is unfurnished like a dance studio. There’s not a couch or a chair or even a carpet, so I can twirl around without bumping into anything except the soft, gold-flocked wallpaper. She sets the fruit jars right down on the oak floor across from the picture window which I find both strange and beautiful, as with most things indifferent to convention. The June sun casts the room in a golden haze, like looking through butterscotch candy cellophane. And there, in the vast living room, the peaches, pineapples, and sweet cherries begin to brew.
Over in the corner, an avocado tree grows up high out of a checker-weaved wicker basket next to the portable Zenith record player and fifteen or so albums. We sit together cross-legged on the cool floor in the golden living room listening to Herb Alpert’s Bittersweet Samba. I study the picture on the album cover while my mother flips through her new library book, which she says is about the first Black congress woman. She adjusts her cat-rimmed eyeglasses, tucks her pixie black hair neatly behind her ears, and looks toward the window. Sunlight travels through the faceted fruit jars casting a rainbow clear across the floor and straight up the wall. My mother stands up tall in its path to flip the record. “Mommy, there’s a rainbow on your leg!” I reach over and trace it from the hem of her Bermuda shorts down her slender calf and ankle. She’s not at all like the other moms, I think. She’s casting a spell in this very moment just like the lady in the whipped cream dress on the album cover.
stir once a day.
Wait 8 weeks for fruit to ferment.
My mother sits at a TV table in the living room folding political pamphlets. “Women don’t have to get married or have children,” she says matter-of-factly, sliding her fingernail along the fold to make a sharp crease. I look up at her from my dollhouse and wish I could help with the folding, but I turn my attention to the row of books lined up along the back wall–my mother’s cookbooks and all ten volumes of the Young People’s Science Encyclopedia. I pull out volume 8–T for temperature, theory, and thermodynamics—and hop up on her lap. My mother reads aloud: “Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.” It transforms again and again, like the sticky fruit that has now doubled in size. She gets up to stir the fruit and carefully scoops out one little chunk of peach, one pineapple, and one cherry for me to sample. I hold the pieces of fruit in my mouth and shift them around with my tongue. I’ve never tasted fruit that tingles. My mother says I have a mouthful of jewels.
Feed mixture one cup of fruit and sugar every two weeks.
Serve over ice cream.
Ordinarily, my mother doesn’t like to cook. In fact, she sets little fires in the oven or on the stove or in the toaster. “What’s that smoke?” the neighbor asks. Brandied fruit isn’t really the same as cooking though. It’s more like science or potions, something that transforms hot summer afternoons. Just look at that living room, wild and alive! We jump up and dance to “El Garbanzo” with our arms up high. The chorus of horns sounds like trumpeting elephants which makes me laugh. Even the hungry fruit is moved by the energy. It rattles the thick glass jars as living cells transform sugar and glowing amber bubbles over. And just then, a final crescendo of brass instruments raises a carpet of dandelions and marigolds right up out of the oak floorboards all around our bare feet.
We look around the room with wonder, then fall softly to the floor among the flowers. Our lungs, full of sweet, fermented air, exhale slowly. She looks at me with eyes warm-brown like coffee beans and holds my little face between her hands. My gaze turns gently toward a radiant energy floating around the stack of cookbooks sitting along the back wall. I catch it moving in my peripheral vision, an ethereal, shadowy light in canary yellow. I point to it quietly and track its movement across the room with my index finger. My mother watches too as the light flutters behind the fruit jars, its faint pulse beating softly through the translucent flesh of sugared peaches, pineapples, and sweet cherries.
Note: Brandied fruit can live indefinitely if tended to.
Contributor Note
Growing up, food was love and tradition, connecting the past to the present and future. Brandied fruit, however, felt just a little bit subversive. It was alive. It had to be fed. It could be shared like plant cuttings or chain letters. It even seemed to glow, like a personal or social awakening. The process of fermentation informs both the structure and themes of “Brandied Fruit,” including the preservation of a loving memory when tended to, a mother casting a spell that challenges norms and blurs the lines between past and present, and the infinite transformation of energy.
Elisabeth Meyer Gonzalez lives in the village of Brockport with her family. She has worked with student writers for over thirty years. She currently runs the Writing Tutoring Program at SUNY Brockport. Connect with her on Instagram @emeyergonz.
Lavinia Kumar
Creative Nonfiction
❦
Number 3, Marrakesh, Morocco
We followed a man in worried confidence along a narrow Medina alley, its tall clay-red walls swelling inward, and only a sliver of sky above. Our taxi had stopped at el-Fnaa square, suddenly handed us and suitcases to this stranger with cart. We were relieved to arrive at our riad, the Hotel Scheherazade with bright blue and white-tiled central courtyard wide to enticing sun. We were given a large old-fashioned key, number 3, to the door of a small dark simple room.
Later, we needed to find dinner back at the square. Go left, then right at the corner, and straight, the desk-man told us. We noted each landmark, as though in a forest – dress shop at the turn, mosaic tile seller, a grilled lamb shop tucked into a wall, men leaning opposite, waiting to savor the spiced dinner folded into traditional bread, the aroma so tempting we thought to stop. The square had long picnic tables seating many people, and we were given round khobz bread and delicious chick pea soup.
The next day we instead took a left at the corner, found ancient buildings covered in mosaics, a hop-on hop-off bus, and tables where we ordered tajines filled with hot succulent mild-spiced eggplant, pepper, tomato, carrot (more?) on a bed of onions, and, of course, the khobz bread. This vegetarian tajine and the chick peas became our constants in Marrakesh, along with the ubiquitous crispy-crusted bread – and, I found, easy to make.
We learned to navigate the Medina after dark, when the tile man was gone, the corner dress store closed, but sometimes became lost in the alleys, before finding the corner to our riad and our #3 key.
❦
Locro Soup, Cuenca, Ecuador
Her swaying knee-length green skirt and bright-white blouse attract us, her arms burdened with long open bread baskets – one at an elbow, the other in her hand. As she comes closer, we notice her Incan face, a long thick braid under her tall black bowler, and, as she stops, we see the wide red shawl filled with baby slung on her back.
We are at a table near the bank of the rocky Rio Tomebamba, one of four Cuenca rivers not far from the Catedralde la Immaculada with its sea of gold altars. We’d seen ladies in bright red or green felt skirts kneel, pray, light candles to Virgin Mary, move to a next chapel, kneel, pray again. Now, though, our view is distant Andes mountains painted in mist. We imagine Supai, god of death and greed, observe insatiable Spanish invaders melt Incan art to obtain the gold. What was his plan for revenge?
Our bread lady passes a wrought-iron gate, the stone house behind it ochre-washed in honor of Inti, sun god, king of kings, god of civilization. She pauses to watch our waitress, in hand-embroidered white blouse, bring steaming buttercup-yellow soup in wide flat white bowls. A chunk of potato emerges at center from a pool of deep gold cheese. Four slivers of avocado on a side plate follow.
Outside, our lady still delays, watches as we slip avocado into our soup, take a first luscious spoonful. Slowly she walks away, skirt swinging. She has to sell bread.
❦
Monsoon Rain, Delhi, India, 1960s
The monsoon’s pounding unhinged my brain. I stood unsure on the side of the road outside the taxi, wallet lost. How? When? Forty rupees, Madam. Rain god Indra sent cascades through the taxi-wallah’s hair, down his unhappy face, splashing his outstretched hand.
I stood up to my calves in a puddle, my bag filling with lollipop-sized drops as I searched. A cow ambled up to my pool for a drink. Even in my dither, I saw her tail hang straight down, not the usual swish side to side – the itchy flies hiding from the driving tides.
My rupees were gone, my husband was gone up north to see family. I recalled extra bills in a pocket under my raincoat. Just a minute, sir, I shouted through the deluge, and with liquid fingers tried to unbutton my coat.
The frustrated man finally jumped into his car, drove off, splashed three already-soaked dogs. The nearby chai-wallah dodged. I stepped under his wide umbrella, stood in relief close to his large pot of hot sweet milky tea and inhaled comfort of steaming chai spice, the sheer relief of cardamom and clove – their god-given calming Om.
Contributor Note
The food I most remember from my young years in Ireland is bread. My mother made fresh bread. And for decade upon decade I made bread, often four loaves at a time, the first rise outside in summer, a warmed kitchen in winter. My brother (who later also made his own bread) and I fought over the crusts and were very particular that it be cut properly. After I came to the US, for college, food variety (after the, at the time, Irish and English food) was a revelation. And the combinations! Bacon, lettuce and tomato, in a small deli across the street from my classes became a treat I could afford once in a while, and I still love it. And who would have thought of putting a circle of plain ground beef inside a rather soggy bun? And adding sliced pickles? The French fries (chips) were a necessary addition, though I did yearn for vinegar on those chips – another youthful favorite being fish and chips folded into newspaper to end a visit to town. A few years ago I drove near 30 miles to a Scottish shop for “proper” fish and chips. And they were so good! Meanwhile, I married a guy from India… So, of course almost every food is attached to an experience, a story, sometimes for the first taste, and sometimes as a memory of comfort.
Lavinia Kumar’s latest book is Spirited American Women: Early Writers, Artists, & Activists – short prose biographies of 90 pre-Civil War women writers, publishers, painters, artists, abolitionists, and early suffragettes. Her Beauty. Salon. Art. (Desert Willow Press, 2019) poetry chapbook has been re-published. Recent poems appear in Book of Matches, SchuylkillValley Journal, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Verse News, Poets Breakfast, Silver Birch Press. She is author of 3 poetry books and 4 chapbooks. Her website: laviniakumar.net
Gillian O’Shaughnessy
Creative Nonfiction
Lemon Jelly
❦
On the way back to your place we stop at the estuary, even though you don’t want to, even though you’re tired and everything hurts. The water is thick in the shallows, and too calm. Grey foam pools in clotted ripples on the shoreline. We need more rain. Further out, over the cut where the current is strong, golden sparkles of light spill across the blue. Look dad, my voice is too loud, too bright. Yellow for sunshine. I know I make no sense. You don’t bother to reply. I hover as you make your way painfully to a bench by the water.
We watch sharp-eyed egrets pick their way through the reeds on spindle legs, spoonbills search for shrimp, sweeping their beaks back and forth like pendulums. An osprey peers down from a nest of driftwood high in the skeleton of a dead eucalyptus. You tell me, not for the first time, they’re known as fidelity birds, they mate for life. My mother’s name hangs unspoken between us. I promise to visit more often. I promise next time I’ll stay longer. You pat my hand, and nod.
We head back to your place, you fall asleep in your favourite chair, in a patch of light on the porch, while I tidy the house and clean out the fridge. I throw out the uneaten food I left for you last time and dust, taking care to get in the corners. I wipe a layer of grease from the stove. I slow cook a soft lamb soup for your dinner, strain out the chunks so it’s easy to swallow, you complain I’ve stolen all the good bits. I check if you’ve remembered your medicine, and you wince like a guilty child.
As we eat, you tell me half-stories of red dirt country and salt lakes. How you never saw rain till you were five in the outback. You shot rabbits with your father’s gun for Sunday lunch, caught bream on the river with the trick of a stick and a long fishing line, salvaged silver foil lids from milk bottles to tinsel the Christmas tree. Or perhaps that was something you read in a story. You don’t remember. It’s not important.
Your voice wavers like a fading desert mist, and you fall into silence, staring at the pepper pot. Your face is grey, your brittle hair, neatly brushed across your scalp no longer hides the speckled skin below. I look your arms, and the tremble in your hand as you hold your fork, you were strong once, tall as a tree, you’d swing me high into the air and catch me as I fell, now you’re as thin as a pick-up stick. Your shoulders stoop. You are smaller.
I turn on the television, find a game show to distract us both. We’ve seen it before, but you’ve forgotten, and we both laugh at the jokes like they’re new. I clear away dinner, wash the dishes, pack the leftovers into plastic tubs I know I’ll throw out the next time I visit. Even if I label each one. Even if I place them on a high shelf where you can see them. I serve you lemon jelly in a clear bowl for dessert. I hold up a spoonful like a jewel to the light. Look dad, I say. Yellow for sunshine.
Gillian O’Shaughnessy is a writer from Walyalup, Fremantle. She has stories in X-R-A-Y, SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Lit, Splonk, Jellyfish Review, MoonPark Review and Night Parrot Press, among others. Her work featured in the Best Small Fictions of 2023 and 2024. She grew up on an estuary in the southwest of Western Australia. Find her at gilloshaughnessy.bsky.social and gillianoshaughnessy.com
Fiona Mossman
Hybrid Prose
Heart-and-Soul Cookies
❦
It’s important to be prepared and to demonstrate that you’re doing better, so when your ex takes the kids over for a visit this is the recipe you’ll need. These cookies will say: I’ve missed you. They’ll say: I’m clean, and I’m well, and I’m out. I’m ready to be your dad again.
Ingredients
- 200g dark brown sugar
- 200g butter, softened
- Vanilla extract
- 2 eggs
- 400g plain flour
- 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- Your freshly plucked and sliced heart
- Your soul, crushed
- Chocolate, in fragments
Method
- Preheat oven to 180°C. Line 2 baking trays with baking paper.
- Cream the butter, brown sugar and vanilla extract until fluffy.
- Add the eggs and mix well. Take care not to let small, sharp parts of the shell fall in.
- Mix with the bicarbonate of soda and the flour then sift into the mixture.
- Take your bluntest knife and gouge out your heart. Slice it roughly and fold it into the mixture.
- Clean up the blood – that won’t make a good impression when the kids come.
- Lift your finger and your thumb to the nape of your neck. You should be able to feel the edge of your soul where it meets your body. Pinch gently and without losing your grip, carefully pull it free all in one motion. Try not to look too closely at the blackened patches. The whole thing needs to go in: scrunch it up in your hands until it is small and round, then fold it into the mixture.
- Add a dash of milk if the cookie dough is looking dry.
- Fold in the chocolate. Make sure everything is evenly distributed.
- Bake for 30 minutes while you pace the kitchen and listen for a knock at the door.
- Make careful conversation with your ex, taking care not to let small, sharp parts of your life fall in. Serve the cookies warm.
- Enjoy the gusto with which your cookies are eaten. Insist on a doggy-bag when it’s time for them to go.
- Watch your kids leave, carrying with them your heart and your soul and seven fresh, black chocolate-chip cookies in a brown paper bag.
- Put the dishes in to soak.
Fiona Mossman is a librarian and writer from the Scottish Highlands now based near Edinburgh. She is obsessed with short stories, folklore, philosophy and kindness. She likes to find herself up mountains, in forests, and in other unexpected places; everyone else, however, can find her online at www.fionamossman.com, and some of her recent writing in Crow & Cross Keys, the anthology We Are All Thieves of Somebody’s Future from Air and Nothingness Press, and elsewhere.
Kathryn Silver-Hajo
Hybrid Prose
You Are What You Eat What You Have What You’re Given That You Take and Try to Make Better
❦
When you were little, food was bountiful, your mother being an adventurous cook, who learned to prepare Mandarin dishes from the Chinese wife of your father’s colleague, Italian from an Umbrian friend she met at a gallery opening, Indian from a physicist from Calcutta (who married and divorced his German lover who wasn’t handy in the kitchen, but brought back marzipan pigs from visits home, an irony not lost on her Muslim husband) not to mention Sunday roasts, ham on Easter, meatloaves any old time, layer cakes robed in chocolate frosting, doughnuts hot out of bubbling oil, dunked in cinnamon sugar, fudge spread on a Currier-and-Ives platter, salads made from iceberg lettuce and tomatoes in cello-packs that didn’t give up any more than they had to and still it took many hollered reminders for your dad to come to the table, but he savored and praised everything your mother made, talked to you about the future of AI, how we’re all basically robots in flesh-and-blood bodies, and maybe he pointed out a rare conjunction of stars to you before retreating back to his computer, calculations, programming, books and manuals in the seclusion of his office in the attic.
When you were eleven, your mother divorced and remarried, her loneliness and sense of adventure having taken a dangerous turn, and her new husband—who criticized everything about her (her swirling, primary-colored oil paintings, unruly kids, her cooking style—too bland, too rich, too hot, too cold, too spicy, too crisp, too limp, too weird)—was fully entrenched before she realized too many things too late and lost her interest in cooking and life which is when hamburgers with Mott’s applesauce, spaghetti and Prego from a bottle became your typical dinner fare, which you consumed grudgingly while he scowled and she sat stiffly, ate minimally, headaches, stomachaches, and ill-will having replaced the lively conversations and simple enjoyment of the mealtimes that had served as the shrinking glue of your original family.
When you were seventeen, and allowed to visit your (real) father’s parents on your own, you’d take the train to New York and out to the Island, where you were greeted with hugs, your grandfather’s off-color jokes and lectures about how socialism would soon save the world, your grandmother calling him the “eternal optimist,” while serving you chopped liver on crackers with a shot glass of dry Vermouth, followed by noodle kugel, beef brisket bathed in burgundy, carrots, onions, celery, or perhaps a lemony filleted flounder caught fresh from Long Island Sound by a friend, served on Stengl fruit-and-flower-patterned plates with a half grapefruit or slice of cantaloupe before the meal, cake afterwards, sometimes with a scoop of ice cream, which she’d learned to enjoy after years of loathing, following a childhood of bereavement in the teeming New York tenements, a mother who was institutionalized, a father who couldn’t work two jobs and raise two children and had no choice but to send them off to distant relatives already stretched to the limits with too many mouths to feed, drowning in debt, never enough money and when she almost died of typhoid fever and the doctor ordered that she be fed every fatty, creamy thing the resentful family could possibly manage in order to get her weight back up and off their consciences, it would be years before she learned to appreciate food again, finding inspiration in both her Russian Jewish roots and her year in Paris as a young art student who, having weathered the worst, found that she took joy in life again and, later still, took joy in spoiling her granddaughter, who in turn loved being spoiled, craved the shelter of their small home that was painted yellow like the sun and smelled like family and safety and always, always, good aromas of food cooked with loved wafting from the kitchen.
When you grew up and moved far, far away, ended up in a distant land, married into a big, robust family of accomplished cooks, you would prove that you weren’t just another crass American with no family values, who ate nothing but hamburgers and spaghetti (as if!) but were eager to belong, to tie on your apron, crack every culinary secret awaiting your hands, tongue, heart, your whirring brain that soaked it all up like water and sun, energy and life itself, returning home with a seemingly limitless new language—meat stews teeming with fresh vegetables from the fruitful Bekaa’ valley, rice and lentil dishes, flat pole beans in tomatoes and oil, hummus and baba ghanouj, sweet-savory spices and sauces seducing your senses with all of this on top of the knowledge of what was already imprinted in your brain through good marriages and bad, ancestral trauma and resilience, adventurers and homebodies, incorporating that most basic of instincts to fill our bellies and souls with good nourishment that’s come to you across cultures and countries, families and generations, all of which taken together has made you exactly who you are.
Contributer Note
I suspect my lifelong love of food, cooking, and eating began with my first tastes of mashed yams, pureed peaches, the cold thrill of ice cream on my tongue, my parents no doubt as excited as I was to see this whole new world of gustatory possibilities opening up to me.
I’ve had the privilege of travelling to many different countries and regions and each place opens up a new way of thinking about, and experiencing, food, each with its own traditions, deeply entwined with cultures, languages, values—along with the produce and spices the land offers. I always strive to learn the secrets of what makes each cuisine sing, gives it its unique tastes and textures, and I do my best to faithfully reproduce the dishes I love, sometimes modifying or experimenting to make them my own.
People’s choices and customs around food say so much about who they are. To truly understand the characters in my stories, I like to see what’s on their dinner table, who’s sitting around it, who’s missing from it. Even if food doesn’t prominently enter each narrative, it’s lurking in the background somewhere. I want to know what they eat and why, who they share a meal with, as they swap secrets, celebrate successes, mourn losses, toast a birth, a marriage. Their relationship to food, their desires, fears, cravings, and loathings, say so much about who they are, make them come alive on the page in unique and exciting ways.
Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s work was selected for the 2023 and 2024 Wigleaf Top 50 Longlists and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Food Writing. Her work appears in Atticus Review, CRAFT, Emerge Literary, Ghost Parachute, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, Ruby Literary, The Phare, and others. Kathryn’s books include her award-winning flash collection, Wolfsong, and novel, Roots of The Banyan Tree. More at: kathrynsilverhajo.com; facebook.com/kathryn.silverhajo; twitter.com/KSilverHajo; instagram.com/kathrynsilverhajo
