September 2, 2025
Sudha Balagopal
FICTION
Here and There
❦
I hear the double ring at the other end in India—different from the single ring here in the US. For the first minute, joyous questions, “How are you?” and, “Can you hear me?” tumble and compete.
Amma, who didn’t want to send her only daughter to the US, says, “Don’t marry an American, that’s my only request.” She refuses to use the word “date,” and aspires for me to “marry well,” meaning, within her social circle.
Which is why I can’t tell her about Rod, my office-mate and fellow teaching assistant at the university: how we eat lunch together, how I nibble at my cheese and mango-pickle sandwich while he swallows his burger, how I give him a run-down of my weekend activities, how we go over each other’s papers, how he helps me grade when I’m overwhelmed.
I inform Amma I’m going to Mo’s place for breakfast.
“Monisha,” I correct myself so Amma doesn’t think Mo’s male. “I met her last week.”
In India we wouldn’t have been friends—Mo and I are in different departments—but here at this Florida university, originating from the same geographic area binds us.
The din of culinary activity greets me at Mo’s unit in the graduate student housing complex. She’s dry-roasting cream of wheat. I help her chop onions, tears meandering down my cheeks, thinking I should tell Rod about Amma’s upma, shiny with ghee, topped with nuts, seasoned with mustard seeds and hing, curry-leaf scent wafting through our home.
Mo holds the spice jars close to her heart as if afraid of losing them. She’s stingy with how much she sprinkles into the upma, presumably because she has to stretch them until she can get fresh supplies. She packs the leftovers for her boyfriend―Siddharth―in an empty cream cheese container, doesn’t ask if I’d like some.
I want to take some upma for Rod; I want him to know how the pinch of hing in the dish wrought a wave of nostalgia.
“Good morning, Rod Stewart.” I address him thus since that’s the only other Rod I’ve heard of. He’s eating dry cereal from a plastic baggie. He pats my back lightly, I resist the urge to press back into his palm. He extends the bag. “Want some?”
I don’t tell him while in India I imagined eating cold cereal for breakfast. That I thought I’d make pancakes and french toast and hash browns. That I believed I’d buy a dozen doughnuts each week. I did. For the first month.
Now I dream of the puri and dosa at home.
“I ate upma at Monisha’s,” I say. “She wanted to replicate her breakfast from home.”
“I wish I’d crashed the party.” His gray-green eyes clutch mine.
Mo invites me to a gathering at Siddharth’s apartment. She says the word boyfriend with the confidence of possession. The messy apartment he shares with three other students is noisy and smells of onions, garlic and garam masala.
We sit on the floor, plates held on our laps; we eat pulao, alu-gobi and chana, accompanied by chilled cans of American beer; we listen to taped Bollywood music on a cassette player; we play a game of antakshari. Later, the group makes plans to drive to Cape Canaveral to watch the shuttle launch. I imagine bringing Rod into this group, I imagine him sitting cross-legged on the floor with us. I imagine him sharing my surreal experience, a melding of 90’s food, music, culture.
At lunch, I tell Rod about the get-together.
“Siddharth claims he never stepped inside their kitchen growing up. I can only assume that’s because he’s male. But he’s cooking here, trying to hold on to some sense of home,” I say.
I tell him I miss the pomp and the color of Navratri and Diwali, I miss halva and jalebis, I miss wearing silk saris, most of all, I miss the love and hugs. “It’s why I talk to my family every week. Hard to accept I won’t return until my degree’s done.”
“But you wanted to experience this, right?” he asks. “You chose this university, and you must admit, the education’s good, and if it’s hugs you want . . . I’m here.”
“Yes . . .to all of the above.” I attempt to quell breathlessness, extend my cheese and mango-pickle sandwich. “Take a bite of this, “ I say. Amma would tell me I’m wasting her precious pickle by smearing it on bread.
He leans forward, puts his palms on my shoulders. “Should I?”
“I’m like this sandwich,” I say, hoping to convey my split-ness, hoping he’ll understand how I want to be here and there at the same time.
Rod takes a bite. I wait for the sharp-mango tang to hit his tongue. I wait for his gray-green eyes to light up.
Sudha Balagopal is an Indian-American writer whose work appears in Smokelong, swamp pink and Vast Chasm among other journals. Most recently, her novella-in-flash, Nose Ornaments was published by Ad Hoc Fiction, UK. She has had stories included in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions and the Wigleaf Top 50.
Allison Field Bell
Hybrid Prose
Be The Woman
❦
Don’t be the woman who falls asleep drunk in the bathtub in her clothes with all the lights in the house blazing into the night. Don’t be the woman who gets drunk. You’re in your thirties now, and drunk is not acceptable. Drunk makes you feel like shit for two days, and depressed and besides that, you need to exercise. You need to get outside and move your body through the desert air. Don’t be the woman who doesn’t move her body through the desert air. The woman who looks in the mirror and then goes immediately to the liquor cabinet, who pours whiskey after whiskey. Don’t be the woman who tries to date women but ends up with men. The woman who’s afraid of other women, because she’s afraid they’ll see through her, afraid they’ll notice the mercurial shifting of moods, afraid they’ll know when she sleeps in the bathtub and wakes up, water icy, body feverish. Don’t be the woman who is afraid. Understand you have one liver, two kidneys, one heart. Understand you only get so many mistakes and then you don’t wake up in the bathtub at all. One minute alive and breathing and the next so drunk and submersed and your lungs taking on water. Don’t be the woman who drowns in a bathtub. Be the woman who runs a bath in the morning with a cup of tea and a book and a lover somewhere outside planting basil and squash and tomatoes. Be the woman with a lover who plants basil and squash and tomatoes. Be the woman who wakes up early and stretches and isn’t afraid to walk down a street arm in lover’s arm, sober, alive.
Contributor Note
Food is integral to my prose. Families sit down to dinner, lovers quarrel over lunch, a woman spends an entire morning contemplating whether she should eat an almond croissant. Or, as in my piece “Be the Woman,” the narrator chastises herself for her abuse of alcohol. Prior to this, I would have said that food often forms the setting for my work, but I think food is actually more of a force than that, and perhaps it is an extension of plot as well. This makes a lot of sense given my personal history: I have, throughout my adulthood, suffered from an eating disorder, and at various times, I have also abused alcohol. During the peak of my eating disorder, I would walk around grocery stores for hours, reading the labels on foods, touching vegetables, and ultimately purchasing nothing. Around this same time, I also drank about a bottle of whiskey every day. Needless to say, food and drink are rife with complication for me. I have worked hard to cultivate healthy habits in my life, but the associations remain. And, for better or for worse, these associations translate to obsessions and then translate to narratives on the page. However, as much as my relationship to food has been wrapped up in self-inflicted trauma, it has also become an expression of healing. I just spent the holidays with my partner, living out happy traditions of food from my youth—bagels and cream cheese—and making our own traditions—homemade lasagna.
Allison Field Bell is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from New Mexico State University. She is the author of the poetry chapbook, WITHOUT WOMAN OR BODY, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press and the creative nonfiction chapbook, EDGE OF THE SEA, forthcoming from CutBank Books. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.
Patricia Quintana Bidar
Creative Nonfiction
The Masks
❦
“Ahh; You are going to where the real thing iiis!” Moisés purred. My friend in midlife shimmered with vigor. I’d stopped by his place after work and he’d fixed us Pisco Sours and produced a plate of warm tortillas and some roasted poblanos in cream. Happy talk drifted up from the ice cream parlor downstairs.
I loved being cared for by Moisés in his bright white apartment, with its gorgeous pops of Mexican art and decor. Ruby glass vases stood in his dining room windows. Folkloric masks lined his foyer. Carved of wood or fashioned from coconut halves or terra cotta in yellow, brown, red, and black; glamorized with feathers and beads.
Moisés called a goodbye to two slim men headed down the interior stairs, freshly barbered and cologned. I knew they were new arrivals from Mexico, young gay men Moisés would host in his guest room for some weeks or months while they got a foothold in San Francisco. I’d barely met him myself when he invited me to sleep in his pantry while I secured a housemate situation.
Moisés worked two full-time jobs to fund extravagant habits: Symphony tickets, good liquor, a sharp wardrobe, and fresh yellow gladiolus in the ruby glass vases. In the year since I’d known Moisés. I’d attended four or five dinner parties at his place. He never let anyone bring anything. He’d spent days preparing and cooking dishes from his native Aguascalientes. After dinner, there were aperitifs and ice cream from the shop downstairs.
Moisés’s most recent fete was a birthday party he’d thrown for his 50th. He’d invited his work friends from Wells Fargo and Macy’s. For the occasion, he doubled his flower order and flung his apartment door wide. At its most riotous point, Moisés, dressed in white with a crepe paper headband encircling his sweaty forehead, led a conga line past his collection of masks and into the hall.
❦
“Anything I can bring you?” I asked. I was leaving for a three-month trip to Europe. I’d quit my job and drained my savings to make it happen. I was budgeting for $25 a day including pensiones, but the excitement of the adventure made me magnanimous. Moisés’s eyes danced.
“Castanets from Spain?”
“Definitely!”
❦
Months passed. I’d returned from Europe and started working another dead-end job. I brought home with me memories of careless, enthralling affairs in Dublin and Mykonos. Vienna and San Remo. I never did make it to Spain.
By the time I finally visited Moisés again, the holidays were coming. I’d returned months before with no castanets; no gifts at all. And now it seemed the old Moisés was gone. He was thin; his face lay paperlike upon a gray underpinning. His twin sister Marta was the only member of his family who stuck with him once they heard what he was dying of, a mutual friend had told me. She was staying with Moisés, driving him to appointments and watching telenovelas with him, holding his hand. The young men he’d taken in over the years, fed and sheltered upon their arrival to the states, had all moved on. None of them ever helped Moisés after they secured jobs and good rented rooms.
When I hugged him, he muttered, “Too tight!” I thought for a moment he was joking.
“Just drop your bag on my bed, cara mia.” As if I’d brought in an evening purse and not my faded messenger bag. In his room, I saw tucked into the frame of the dresser mirror the postcards I’d sent from my travels. There was also a photograph of me in a taverna, deeply tanned and bright-eyed beside a new lover.
“It’s hard to believe it’s almost Christmas,” Marta said. She shared her brother’s wide, placid face, and was dressed in a modest sweater and corduroy skirt. “I’ll make us some tea.” Moisés stood to adjust his robe.
I was just 23, with no idea what to say. So little was known, still, about AIDS. It struck me that I’d never known Moisés to have a partner. It was I who carelessly sampled men and drugs in my travels and here at home. Obviously, I knew he was gay. But sex wasn’t really a topic with us. It was a layer of his life Moisés never shared with me. And so in a very real way, I didn’t know him at all.
The bottle of Remy Martin I’d charged at the corner store looked cruel, wildly out of place besides Moisés’s medications and half-eaten bowl of cereal on the table. I should have called first. I should have come sooner. Should have pressed Moisés for details about the progression of his illness. I thumbed a prescription label. His first, middle, and last names, sans accent marks.
Moisés and Marta were talking about the thermal springs of their home city. The homes were painted in such pretty colors, she said. Then the talk turned to Moisés’s collection of masks. There had never before been time to sit and ask about them. Rarely a visit when it wasn’t a party. It occurred to me that I’d never spent time in this flat in daylight. The ruby glass vases were blurred with a layer of dust.
Moisés sat with his eyes closed, his face to the window. He began to instruct me as to who would get each mask when he died: a yellow snake face to a former co-worker, a fanged Mayan jaguar to “a former love.”
“Why aren’t you writing this down, honey?” he said to me, irritation entering his tone.
A month later, it would be Marta who would distribute them. Visages wrapped and boxed and sent via U.S Mail into the world. Joyous, abashed, monstrous, terrible, merry, aghast, drunken. Separated and subtracted of their potency. But right now, the three of us merely sat and regarded them. I remember the sun was slanting in, winter-thin. Although there was no need, I raised my hands to shield my eyes.
Patricia Quintana Bidar is a western writer from the Port of Los Angeles area. Her work has been celebrated in Wigleaf‘s Top 50 and selected for Flash Fiction America (Norton), Best Microfiction 2023, and Best Small Fictions 2023 and 2024. Patricia’s debut collection of short works, Pardon Me for Moonwalking, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in December 2025. Find Bidar online at patriciaqbidar.com; on Bluesky at @patriciaqbidar.bsky.social and at @patriciaqbidar for Insta & Facebook.
Joefel Bolo
Creative Nonfiction
Yesterday is Sugar
❦
This sugar, and perhaps this is the reason why he loves visiting their family house. Such ways to cling to sweetness, as candy emanates with color, differs with its size, and the taste are filled with richness and evenness of sugar. Lola never pronounces hello, and instead she welcomes him with, Kumain ka na ba Moymoy? Have you eaten yet Moymoy? I have candy for you. A smile will slowly carve in his face—he was thankful for this—the way he was spoiled. There’s steadiness, only you can get from your grandmother. She’s expert in catching his mood, and so with every visit, candies are expected to sprout inside his mouth. These candies are not home-made, but they were bought with special curation. She always goes to palengke for groceries, and the best thing here is—Lola has this quest to discover a new flavor of candy—to share with Moymoy. She even jackpots a home-made pastillas, fresh from the market’s delicacies table, looming with lightness and crystals of sugar. This must be the reason why teeth were grateful. On his next visit, the family house felt noisier, as relatives are here. Such a sudden gathering, his mother whispered in his ears as she sees the confusion in Moymoy’s eyes. What’s the occasion? But he said yes to his mother because he was distracted by the aroma of Lola’s bilo-bilo—a food filled with coconut milk, made from glutinous balls (sticky rice flour rounded like a small marbles), and other ingredients such as the prominent sugar, sweet potato, banana, ube, and sago. The assortment of this food creates an alluring language for his happiness. He loves this distinctive mood. This floating sugar is a harmony swathed in a piece of music. And with every visit, candies appeared, sugar subsists, then without warning, it stops. Lola was wrapped with sickness and left with sugared memories. Candies were evident, sugar exist, but felt like it wasn’t. He thought with every particle of sugar he swallows, sometimes, there’s blandness. Still senses are active, still flavors are dynamic, but candies and grief were wrapped in a way so often—he remembers and misses his Lola.
Joefel Bolo is a queer writer from the Philippines. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Harvard Advocate, beestung, Ouch! Collective, and elsewhere.
Timothy Boudreau
Fiction
The Storm
❦
The rain has stopped, but the power’s still out, so they put on their jackets and go to the car. Kathleen drives because Ted’s already had a glass of wine, and because she likes to do as much as she can while she still has the strength.
“I’m definitely ordering the tuna melt,” Kathleen says. They’ve heard Route 4 is flooded, so she starts toward Kennedy Hill. “Lydia’s tuna melts are perfect.”
“You can tell they use the good tuna. Plus tons of butter and what, three cheeses?”
“They’re like someone’s dream of a tuna melt.” She sighs as she drives around a fallen birch branch—chemo sigh that communicates a single worn phrase with infinite meanings, I’m tired.
At the top of Kennedy Hill two downed pines block their way. “Should we try Old Prescott Road—?” she asks.
“Might be rough—but maybe it’s not flooded?”
She looks at the fallen pines, their limbs bending in the still brisk wind. “Or do you think we could, like—get out and try to move that smaller tree—?”
He looks at her; in better days, in younger days, he would’ve considered it. “Better not. Just how strong do you think we are?”
They’re halfway back down the hill when she answers. “We’re stronger than you think, my man.”
Old Prescott Road is littered with branches, and part of the shoulder’s washed out, but it’s passable, and in ten minutes they reach Staci’s Eats. But the parking lot’s empty, the lights are off, and there’s a cardboard sign with magic marker letters in the window.
“Oh shit, they’re closed.”
“Fuck, why didn’t I think of that.” He runs his hand through his hair. “Now what?”
The front door swings open and a lady wearing an oversized blue rain jacket approaches their car. “We’re not open,” she says.
“Hey Staci. You guys lost power too, huh?”
“I was hoping you were the electrical crew.”
“Sorry,” Kathleen says.
“Well, you all have a great day,” Staci says, unconvincingly. She pauses before she turns away: can she guess the obstacles they’ve overcome to get here—feel, by some restauranteur sixth sense, how hungry they are?
“Probably won’t be open later either, huh?” Ted calls after her, trying to be funny, but Staci doesn’t look back.
❦
When they get home the neighbor’s goats are in the yard again. There are seven or eight of them; they gather around the car when it pulls in, their white faces quizzical and kind, as if recognizing Kathleen and Ted from previous encounters.
“The poor things are probably freaked out by this weather,” Ted says, looking at the sky.
“Let’s walk them back to the farm,” Kathleen says. “Sorry goat girls, no power here either,” she tells them, looking back over her shoulder as they start up the road.
Ted takes her hand, prepared to support her if needed, but today her stride is sure, strong. “Why do they always follow us?” he asks.
“Because they remember,” Kathleen says. When she turns her eyes sparkle; a stray silver curl, one of her last, falls from under her scarf across her forehead. “When they get lost, we always lead them home.”
❦
They don’t use words like diagnosis or treatments; they try not to say the specifics out loud. They remind each other, “Time for meds,” but don’t name them, as if they’re a couple of ibuprofen, or a daily dose of vitamin C. They say, “Remember we have to go down on Tuesday”—go down meaning to Lebanon, to Dartmouth-Hitchcock, meaning a visit to oncologist Dr. Ellen Misner: sweet, sagacious woman with bright eyes, practical advice, clinical cheery voice of doom.
Back home in the candlelight, Ted makes them peanut butter and jellies, grabs a couple of bananas. “Not too much jelly,” Kathleen says, adjusting her scarf above her ear. “Make sure it’s proportionate.”
They eat the sandwiches on the couch, huddled under a blanket. “Power should be back soon, right?” she says. “I’d like to take my shower tonight, since we have to go down so early tomorrow.”
He glances at his phone. “Eversource says one to two more hours.”
She kisses him, leaves a bread crumb on his forehead, returns to her sandwich for another bite. “Wow, these are actually pretty good,” she says. He’s happy her stomach’s okay today, tries to think of the protein, vitamins, fat, whatever nutrition there is in the sticky kids’ sandwich, working its way through her intestines to where it’ll do the most good. She laughs, though her laugh is nearly silent now, a thin exhalation through pale lips. “Everything tastes better when you’re hungry.”
Contributor Note
Food is often a solace for me, and so it is for my characters. I enjoy gourmet food and dive enthusiastically into unfamiliar cuisines, but for comfort I turn to old favorites. When we were sick, our mom served us toast and jelly, milky rice with salt and butter; our dad was never happier than when he made himself a stack of peanut butter Ritz or dunked a hot dog in a bowl of baked beans. Pain, fear, and illness are complex, but the temporary relief provided by comfort foods—and our memories of them—is one of life’s true simple pleasures.
Timothy Boudreau lives in northern New Hampshire with his wife, Judy. His collection Saturday Night and other Short Stories is available through Hobblebush Books. His novel All We Knew Were Our Hearts is due out from ELJ Editions in 2026. He is an editor at The Loveliest Review. Find Timothy on Twitter at @tcboudreau or at timothyboudreau.com.
Kim Magowan
Fiction
The Thing People Know About Someone Before They Are Formally Introduced
❦
Rank in order of tolerability
You are Keith Richards’s illegitimate child.
You were kicked out of Choate at the end of freshman year for getting caught on the lacrosse field at 1:00 a.m., giving Tad DeGrasse, the bucktoothed lacrosse captain, a blowjob.
Your boarding school roommate complained to the dorm mistress that you smelled bad.
The irate wife of your own wife’s lover, after discovering their emails to each other, went nuts and forwarded one particularly X-rated email thread to every single parent of the grade school all of your children attended. “As if it’s anyone’s business,” the parents brave enough to bring it up at all say to you. But obviously, despite their commiserating faces, they all consider it their business.
Your husband got #MeToo’ed.
You are Natalie Portman’s first cousin. The truth is, you barely know her, but there’s one story you sometimes tell about making red velvet cake with her when you were seven and eight, respectively. You only had blue food coloring, so it was blue (very muddy blue) velvet cake.
In ninth grade, on a bet over who could eat the most potato pancakes, you ate seventeen and threw up all over Melissa D’Ambrosio.
You are polyamorous and have two “husbands.”
You had a bad reaction to Botox and now have Bell’s Palsy. You have to wear an eye patch to sleep because your left eye won’t close.
Your son is a rapist.
Your wife, whom you love madly (for twenty years you hubristically prided yourself on having the best relationship of anyone you know; hello karma), developed early onset dementia when she was forty-seven, and now, at fifty-two, can no longer sign her name, and sometimes mistakes you for her father.
You have a 1.2 rating on Rate My Professor.
Your first book won a “best debut novel” prize, but the three books since—all of which you worked on harder and cared about more—have been called in reviews “disappointing,” “redundant,” “derivative,” and “failing to deliver upon early promise.”
You were denied tenure.
You are estranged from your only daughter.
Your only daughter wrote a memoir where you are prominently featured as what she calls a textbook narcissist.
Your last communication with your only daughter was an email (subject heading: “It’s MY LIFE”) where she quoted Annie Lamott: “If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
What Monica’s Husband Doesn’t Understand
❦
What Monica’s husband doesn’t understand is that when he’s an asshole, it takes a while for Monica to bounce back. What he doesn’t understand is these slights embed themselves into her like splinters. Then two hours later, when he’s forgotten all about snapping “I’m in the middle of something!” in that sharp, hostile voice, when all she did was ask him if his new jeans could go in the dryer or if they needed to be air-dried flat, she still smarts. What he doesn’t understand is that Monica spent her formative years folding herself up small, because she had a mother who yelled, yelled about ridiculous trifles, like Monica’s clothes were too tight, like Monica had left her cowboy boots in the family room. What her husband doesn’t understand is how growing up like that felt, somatically: Monica afraid to interrupt, even when her mother was doing something that didn’t seem particularly important or requiring full concentration, like fluting the edges of a pie crust. What he doesn’t understand is that such a childhood makes a person a little thin-skinned, when it comes to someone speaking to her harshly, when all she was trying to do was save his jeans from shrinking. It would be total bullshit, getting blamed if he doesn’t fit into his favorite pants. (How about, don’t eat corn chips after 8 p.m.? Or Chubby Hubby Ben & Jerry’s? Chubby Hubby, ha! That might be the culprit here, as opposed to Monica putting jeans in the dryer). What her husband doesn’t understand is that she’s currently trying to prevent a future situation of him being an asshole, but because he’s being an asshole right now, that effort is thwarted. What he doesn’t understand is that jeans take forever to dry when you air dry them, and where is she supposed to find room to lay out his enormous jeans? It’s not like their house is full of flat surfaces. It’s not like they live in a castle that has warm, clean flagstones on its extensive courtyard, upon which to spread clothing items to dry in the sunshine. What her husband doesn’t understand is that in order to feel romantic, Monica needs to feel loved and respected. What he doesn’t understand is the principle that Lily’s kindergarten teacher, Ms. Zonderman-Bunn, drilled into all the kids. When you behave kindly and generously towards someone, you “fill” their bucket; when you’re short-fused, selfish, or obnoxious, you “empty” their bucket. What he doesn’t understand is what five-year-olds understand. What her husband doesn’t understand is that Monica’s bucket is fucking empty.
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.
Nora Esme Wagner
Fiction
Please Take
❦
4:54 PM —
Morgan leaves the pink box in the break room. She clocks out six minutes early. She hugs her belly the whole drive home.
4:53 PM —
An image rises to the top of her head, and floats like whipped cream. A huge ship, clogging the Suez Canal, blocking more than 400 vessels from passing through. She pauses eating. She can picture the stacked containers, the tugboats, digging and pulling. The scene is surprisingly HD. In her mind, the boat is freeing itself. She is being carried to land.
4:47 PM —
A French cruller. A donut exploding with raspberry jelly. Four holes, gummed together. An old-fashioned, strongly nutmegged. Strawberry frosted, and coated in tiny rainbow pills. Three glazed, which Morgan alternates taking bites from. They dent in response to her fingers, like soft skin. She can’t breathe. She can’t breathe.
4:45 PM —
Morgan scrapes her fingernail through the pooling glaze. It reminds her of the white, snotty crust of discharge in her underwear, a pair that she has been wearing for five days. She picks one up. A bite, she promises. Only a bite.
4:02 PM —
Apparently, dredgers are finally making progress. The ship could be freed in three days, maybe two. Everyone in the office is eating more donuts to celebrate. Morgan pictures a cork popping from a bottle, the bubbly, uncontrollable stream.
3:11 PM —
She opens a granola bar studded with chocolate chips. Slowly, she swallows. Oat by oat, seed by seed. It takes her 45 minutes to finish, and by the time she does, her stomach is a screaming pit.
2:00 PM —
Morgan walks past the break room. To the water fountain. To the gender-neutral bathroom. To a cluster of co-workers, to see where they’re heading after five. To a baseball game. To their families. To a warm, roasted dinner.
12:50 PM —
Today, everyone wants to discuss the clogged canal. Some events seem to exist only for the sake of having something to say to your colleagues, Morgan thinks. A group assembles by the whiteboard, calculating the dimensions of the waterway, of the obstructive ship. One of them, a woman who sits two desks away, whose email sign off is “hugs,” who is in the midst of a messy divorce, is eating a donut. Her first? Morgan wonders.
12:01 PM —
She licks the yogurt stuck to the foil lid. There is a moat of whey, gross to reincorporate. In the microwave, her container of steamed broccoli and brown rice revolves. Before leaving, she peeks into the pink box. The remaining donuts look like they have survived a stampede. A peeling layer of glaze, like lizard scales, covers the box. As if it had sprouted protective plates to ward her off.
11:22 AM —
She tries not to eat before 12. If she splits 900 calories between two meals, lunch and dinner, the potential of what to eat at those times seems endless. Breakfast makes her panicky. The wasteful feeling of spending a paycheck the day it is earned. She alternates between Gmail and Twitter, her eyes glazed. The remaining hour drains like an abscess.
10:40 AM —
She refreshes her Inbox. Most days, she feels stuck in a feedback loop, of sending or responding to messages that say I hope this email finds you well. The loading icon reminds her of a donut, hypnotically spinning. She switches tabs. Twitter is obsessing over a cargo ship that has jammed a too-narrow strait in Egypt. A vital shipping line. The boat is wedged sideways, like the hypotenuse of a right triangle. People are sharing memes, headlines, think pieces. Predicting that everything is about to get much worse.
9:55 AM —
Listening to the spitty sounds around her, Morgan feels like Pinocchio, trapped inside the mouth of a sperm whale.
9:15 AM —
“Take a donut!” a voice exclaims whenever someone new shuffles into the office. Morgan isn’t sure if she is listening to one enthusiastic reporter or multiple. She watches her co-workers stream out of the break room, clutching what remind her of life rings. They chew loudly. They discuss plans for the weekend, which they never do on Wednesdays. But, as they remind each other, today is not an ordinary Wednesday. Today, there are donuts in the break room.
8:43 AM —
On Google Maps, Morgan’s entire route glows green. She always accounts for 10 minutes of fudge room, but today, the extra time is unnecessary. Her passage is entirely clear, an open throat. She arrives early, and scores one of the only shelves in the break room’s fridge without smell or stick. She feels overwhelmed by the day’s early promise. The thrill of an empty stomach. On the countertop next to her is a box of donuts. They are deflated, like oily pillowcases, and smell of burnt sugar. Someone has attached a Post-It that says “Please Take.”
Don’t Put Rice in the Rice Cooker
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If I don’t put rice in the rice cooker, there’ll be no dinner. If I don’t put rice in the rice cooker, I should at least remember to defrost some chicken breasts, and to place the freezer bag on a plate, so ice sheets don’t form lakes on the kitchen counter. If I don’t put rice in the rice cooker, Mom will claim she doesn’t need the carbs anyway. If I don’t put rice in the rice cooker, Mom will fall asleep immediately after her 12 hour shift, without food, without setting an alarm, without applying Retinol to her nose, poppy-seeded with dirty pores, without a word to me.
If I don’t put rice in the rice cooker, Mom will rinse, measure, salt, boil, her swollen feet huge, plodding blimps.
If I don’t put rice in the rice cooker, I’m an ungrateful brat. If I don’t put rice in the rice cooker, Mom will pour herself a tall, foamy beer. If I don’t put rice in the rice cooker, Mom will scoop raw rice into a bowl and demand that I eat it all, which I do, crushing grains between my teeth like crunchy larvae, slippery bile easing each spoonful down. If I don’t put rice in the rice cooker, Mom will lock me in the pantry, a 20 pound sack of short-grain rice in the corner, half-depleted, slumped like a drunk.
I don’t put rice in the rice cooker, because Sally, who has never spoken to me before, not even when our tables were placed next to each other at the Science Fair, wants me to come over, so she can put braids in my long, fine hair, like I am her pony. I don’t put rice in the rice cooker, because Sally’s eyes fascinate me, green, black, tortoise-shelled. I don’t put rice in the rice cooker after I eat three sleeves of Ritz crackers in Sally’s kitchen.
I don’t put rice in the rice cooker, even though I remember that I should.
Contributor Note
Even when I don’t set out to write about food, it always surfaces in my writing. Food is one of the longest and most consistent relationships we have in life, even during times of grief. When the rest of the world seems to inhale and pause, there’s still the question of what’s for dinner. (After a recent breakup, my first meal was kimchi pancakes and soft boiled eggs.) Food is a low, omnipresent buzz, the reliable backdrop to unreliable events. The anaphora of “Don’t Put Rice in the Rice Cooker” is a nod to that hum that accompanies thinking about food, preparing it, and eating. However, food is fraught for many people, including for the narrator of “Please Take.” Food transitions from being a stable point to the source of instability, of insecurity, of oscillations between restriction and binging. The backward chronology of this story represents, among other things, regurgitation. We learn (or unlearn) to see food as poison rather than as nourishment. In my writing, food is both bullet and bandage, the way that we harm and care for ourselves. I’ve had many delicious experiences over the years, but I still think my purest, happiest time of eating was when I was three or four, and donuts were donuts—nothing more, nothing less.
Nora Esme Wagner is a junior at Wellesley College. She lives in San Francisco, California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in JMWW, Wigleaf, Milk Candy Review, Ghost Parachute, Lost Balloon, New World Writing Quarterly, Moon City Review, 100 Word Story, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Her work has been longlisted for Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel and the Prose Editor for The Wellesley Review.
Elinor Ann Walker
Hybrid Prose
Heirloom Receipt
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Unless the recipe is seared into your brain already, find the card stained with grease and blood [or ink where pen leaked, faded to purple]. The handwriting will be cursive, neat, with notes inserted: “don’t forget to slice an onion; lay the rings on top” [crucial afterthought]. The cut should be lean and can be tied but usually is not. No need to measure the flour; just put some in a plastic bag with coarsely ground black pepper and salt. Place meat inside while flour drifts around you [like a ghost]. Seal and rotate gently in your hands [hear the sighs]. Or dredge the roast in a shallow plate, shaking excess flour off. Find your heaviest, oven-safe vessel. Cast iron [with a lid is best], slicked with oil or bacon grease. Heat over flame until a bead of water dances, skids across the surface [like a memory] with a sizzle. Brown meat evenly on all sides. Watch out for what will sputter and pop [to mind]. Then fill the skillet with boiling water halfway up—careful, careful [voice in your head]—plume of smoke and steam. Start in a 400-degree oven; cover and hoist the skillet in; set a timer so you don’t forget to check [time slips by]. You’ll turn the oven down in about an hour. The kitchen will be hot—so will you, a-flash, perspiration on your lip. [Tenderness takes a while.] The hours will go faster if you contemplate what’s worth keeping close: anything handwritten, especially if you know the writer’s hand by heart [and if the writer is now dead], the skillet, itself heirloom, surface seasoned smooth, how dark it is, reflective as a mirror [so many faces], strength of wrist [and ancestors] required to lift it in and out of flame, time taken to write the recipe down, letter by letter [slant and flourish], how every afternoon, light bends through the kitchen window, how sensitive the tongue is to [more than] heat, how flesh will fall apart [but what else remains].
Elinor Ann Walker (she/her) holds a Ph.D. in English from UNC-Chapel Hill and is on the poetry staff at River Heron Review. Recent and forthcoming poems appear in AGNI, American Poetry Journal, Bear Review, Nimrod, Plant-Human Quarterly, Plume, Poet Lore, Quarterly West, The Southern Review, Terrain, and elsewhere. Her chapbooks, Fugitive but Gorgeous, winner of the 2024 Sheila-Na-Gig First Chap Prize (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), and Give Sorrow (Whittle Micro-Press), are forthcoming. Find her online: https://elinorannwalker.com.
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