Poetry

Rodney Gomez, “Genealogy [6]” (Winter, 37)
Topaz Winters, “Self Portrait As Methods Of Survival” (Summer, 36)


Fiction

Christopher James, “Tigger” (Winter, 37)
Rina Palumbo, “Canker” (Summer, 36)

Essay

Michelle Donahue, “Night Mode with Movement” (Winter, 37)
Kami Westoff, “Our Lady of Respiration” (Summer, 36)

When you’re married, every poem
can be called “marriage.” According
to Catherine Lacey, “a marriage
continues because it continues.”
Jack Gilbert says, “we can break
through marriage into marriage.”
Even with all the marriages
that have ever happened,
there’s only ever the one you’re in.
A friend once told me marriage
is like a wheelbarrow. I think
he’s like a wheelbarrow: full
of shit. The only thing marriage
is like is marriage. What does that
even mean? Let me ask my wife.

Danny Caine is the author of the poetry collections Continental Breakfast, El Dorado Freddy’s, Flavortown, and Picture Window, as well as the books How to Resist Amazon and Why and How to Protect Bookstores and Why. His poetry has appeared in The Slowdown, LitHub, DIAGRAM, HAD, and Barrelhouse. He’s a co-owner of the Raven Book Store, Publishers Weekly’s 2022 bookstore of the year.

I related to Jessica Simpson burning chicken in the kitchen in the cinema of early 2000s reality shows        In what universe am I a baby person, I ask every femme I know        Because cishet white men keep falling in love with a story rather than the reality        When I go for men, I don’t go for ones who look like my father        Every day, I try to avert what my parents’ 14 year age gap has caused me        Actually, men go for me     Please get the story straight [not straight]        In my middle school years, on MTV, Nick Lachey bemoans that Jessica can’t boil water     Why can’t Nick boil the water       My father sits me down at our kitchen table in Vegas        Jessica has always been worth more than Nick        But I will not glorify white women       My father tells me that it’s time to take love seriously        Meaning find love with a man        Studies show that in cishet relationships, marriage benefits men more than women        I hate the episode of Newlyweds when Nick explodes at Jessica for buying expensive panties    Jessica has always been worth more than Nick        But I will not glorify white women        My father is proud to tell me that my mother couldn’t boil water when they met, and now she cooks five-star meals        My femme partner cooks the best meals        I eat my mother’s garlic lobster loudly     Her gai lan has the Goldilocks amount of oyster sauce       When my partner and I eat at a white woman’s house, we eat the most boring vegetables       Fact: it is easier to be vegetarian in Asia where so much is rooted in Buddhism        My mother was 14 when she met my father in my grandparents’ apartment in Kowloon        My femme partner and I were both 25 when we met each other     We spotted each other from across the room and bonded over Audrey Kawasaki     Hello Kitty     Eyelashes        Blackberry and Whiskey cocktails        Sugar Daddies        Bodysuits        Femme Things        How white girls kept interrupting our space and dates        Asian Femme Things       My mother was 25 when she was pregnant with me        Throughout my childhood, my father came home at exactly 5        We ate dinner every weeknight at        5        In what universe am I a baby person, I ask every femme I know        My mother always knew she wanted a child        Fact: my father is the only person my mother has ever been with        My mother is wise without much romantic experience        Fact: every man in my recent history has asked me to have his babies        Fact: this question pops up even before the 5^th date        More like a 2^nd date marriage        In middle school, I fought with a girl who deemed herself Domestic Goddess        She bragged about sewing pillows and leggings and once showed me a napkin arrangement trick        Fact: a man who tried to love me asked me to cook salmon on a plank with him        Fact: He asked me to have his babies on the 2^nd date        In what universe am I a baby person, I ask my femme partner        Fact: I love cooking with her        Fact: she cuts the fish into the most delicate pieces        Fact: our ancestors wouldn’t allow us to waste any part of the animal        In every universe, I am not a baby person        In every universe, I have more worth than any man         Of course he wants my babies.

Dorothy Chan (she/they) is the author of five poetry collections, including the forthcoming, Return of the Chinese Femme (Deep Vellum,  April 2024), BABE (Diode Editions, 2021), Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017).  Chan is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of Honey Literary Inc., a 501(c)(3) BIPOC-focused literary arts organization. Visit their website at dorothypoetry.com.

It was mid-summer in southern California. I was at the local DMV. I needed fresh air. I drank from a drippy spout of water at the rusty fountain. I fell asleep at my seat in the DMV because there was a two-hour wait. When I woke: I was in the Pacific Ocean surfing with my friends. Just kidding, I don’t have any friends. But there were exquisite sea creatures present. Seagulls, dolphins and star fish. I surfed like an autumn leaf in the wind until sunset. When I finished, I dried off and fell asleep on the cool sand. Later, I woke up back amidst the bureaucracy of the DMV. It was finally my turn, though. I was there to get my yearly license plate sticker. “B-136,” the teller said. “That’s me!” I said, relieved, as I jumped out of my seat.

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024) and The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025). His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, Yale Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He teaches generative workshops for Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshops, and elsewhere. He serves as a Poetry Mentor in The Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program.

A bright orange cone lies on its side by the East River. Plastic
surrounded by rocks and a water-logged pilon.

At low tide, the river gropes kelp rimmed stones for silt.
It takes up to 500 years for plastic to degrade, which is to say,

to become smaller pieces of plastic, which
is also to say that plastic remains. The remains

of this orange cone will lose their luster, fade and bleach,
while the contours of the river flirt for new boundaries,

a plastic touch. For now, the tide pulls at the cone’s edges,
another warning in a world full of them. I imagine losing

myself to the river, pockets lined with invisible plastic.
An orange cone signals serious injury, possibly death,

do not travel along the line you intended, it says. White lines
tread the cone’s plastic surface. Caution. There is another way.

Let me know, should you find it. Thin trails bald the edges
of the park: desire lines, a route carved like initials into the green.

A heart’s curve, when looked at closely enough,
resembles a straight line until you find yourself swerving.

Jared Beloff is the author of Who Will Cradle Your Head (ELJ Editions, 2023). He is the editor of the Marvel inspired poetry anthology, Marvelous Verses (Daily Drunk, 2021) and the forthcoming Poets of Queens Anthology (2024). His work is forthcoming in AGNI and Image Journal and can be found in Baltimore Review, River Mouth Review, The Shore and elsewhere. He is a Poetry Editor at The Weight Journal. You can find him on his website www.jaredbeloff.com. He is a teacher who lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two daughters.

The moon’s gravitational pull creates a tidal force. We waited for it to become dark, or almost. There are no sunsets like those on the West Coast, quite so vivid and virulently lovely. The moon makes tides, but it’s wind that tends to cause waves, friction between air and surface water creating those crests. For a moment, the sky was a pink so tender it made my chest flutter. The moon lures the ocean out, water bulging on the sides closest and furthest from it. With marshmallow mouths and fire pit smoke, we watched the water become slick as ink. I hadn’t lived in California in over a decade, hadn’t visited for over two years.

We walked toward the ocean, the moon a mist-made and murky circle above. We were three generations of women, or almost. Mother and two daughters. Mother: carrying the ashes she waited to release until my return. You have to understand, I don’t believe in ghosts. I can only tell you what happened.

There is no ache like the one from missing the ocean. I would know. I’ve weathered long years landlocked. I don’t know the last time my grandmother visited the ocean in life, but I do know that she missed it. Bedridden, an end of near stillness—how can I begin to imagine the ferocity of her longing? The ocean has its own gravitational lure. In death, she wanted only this: the water around her eternally. You have to understand, I don’t believe in magic. If I did, I believe it would happen by the sea.

My mother plunged her palm into the ashes and scattered them. The night was almost unbearably beautiful. The dusty quality of air at dusk, each second marking an increase in darkness. The waves reflecting flecks of the moon, as if the water could make its own light. I was afraid to touch the ashes. I gave them to the waves straight from the container. It felt too intimate, too awful to hold them directly. I don’t remember the last time I touched her in life.

I think my grandmother believed in magic. As my mother scattered her, I tried to capture what I knew I couldn’t. The voice of the water, the cool lick of salt and sand. This is how we should all be remembered, in near dark, by the sea. To be so lucky, to be so loved. I snapped pictures with my phone. I shifted it to the night mode setting, and suddenly the images lit up, my mother once a grainy blur becoming again her sharp self. 

What is magic but a shift in perception? A slight of hand trick. We believe what we see, or is it the reverse? Can belief dictate how the world unfolds around us?

On the night setting, my phone commanded my mother to hold still, but she didn’t. She reached into the ashes and gave them to the waves. The moon felt like a ghost above us. They say there is a face of a man in the moon, but I’ve always thought it was a woman. My phone took a slow photo, struggling to capture its image crisply. The result: my mother in perfect, ethereal focus, and a bleary swipe across her hands and the container holding my grandmother’s ashes. A thick blur that moved from the ashes out toward the sea. As if some presence, as if—

Flat, dark plains called maria create the dark shadows that form the moon’s face. I know there are logical explanations to the blur in the photo. A coincidence—my mother’s movement creating it during the prolonged exposure. But all the photos were taken like that—in night mode with movement—and none of them feature a distinct blurry section. Maria comes from the Latin for sea, for it was once believed the shadows were old lunar oceans. Now we know the basins were forged by lava flows. Now we know these meandering paths never contained water.

What is magic except power? What is a ghost, but the power of our memories? What is more powerful than grief, than love.

In the moonlight, we three women walked. The force of the tides pulled parts of us out, lured toward the heart of the sea.

Michelle Donahue has prose published in Brink, Passages North, Arts & Letters and others. She holds a PhD in creative writing & literature from the University of Utah. She is currently associate editor at Ecotone and teaches creative writing and publishing at UNC Wilmington.

I’d just dropped my daughter off at orchestra rehearsal. I had two hours to do something. It was only 4:30, but cars were operating their headlights. Rainclouds huddled in the sky, matching the color of the street. In my shoulder bag lay Kleenex, cough drops, an overdue library book, and just under $15. Maybe that would buy a bag of Marcona almonds, the ones roasted in olive oil and rosemary, and a cheap bottle of Pinot Gris.

The Trader Joe’s I went to, if I went there at all, was always busy, even in the pitch black of dead cold winter. It was close to the university, and university students would, at all hours, be shopping for frozen bags of Mandarin orange chicken, chocolate-dipped ginger, or soap made from oatmeal and honey. They were all young and beautiful. To them I was invisible, but walking in through the automatic sliding doors I felt self-conscious. I had settled. Like a house does. Settled into my parent body, my parent face. Then I saw Harrison.

He’d grown his beard out, which was not gray but white. I assumed this was a tactic to conceal his celebrity. But I’ve known Harrison since he was in The Conversation. I don’t know him, I’ve never met him, but I’ve grown up with him. I can remember a face.

Harrison had done some settling too, but his chiseled looks, his come-hither nose and fireplace earlobes still cast a spell. I’m not saying I would’ve thrown myself at him, but if I’d tripped at just the right moment, and if there weren’t any beautiful basketball-playing boys around, I wouldn’t have minded being caught in Harrison’s Hawaiian-shirted arms.

I was holding a box of pimento cheese puffs, but it could’ve been anything—I wasn’t looking at the box. What’d happened? Was Harrison preparing for a role? Cinema verité? Had he come upon hard times? Nobody seemed shocked. Nobody seemed anything. Harrison was matter-of-fact in his employment, scanning pears and craft beer for people fifty years younger than him. None of them seemed to notice that they’d once owned action figures of the man bagging their groceries. I straightened my bangs. It was time to get in line.

He didn’t look up. You’re supposed to make eye contact at Trader’s Joe’s. I’ve never worked there, but that has got to be one of their rules. Customer Service Rule #1: Penetrate the visage of each shopper with an intoxicating gaze. Customer Service Rule #2: Ask them about their life. Require vulnerable details. I was swiping my credit card.

Did you find everything you were looking for?

Well, I. I suppose I.

Was there something you needed help finding?

I guess. I mean I guess not.

Oh. Well, okay. Stay warm out there.

And he grinned his signature half-mouth grin. Then I realized—I was taller than Harrison Ford. (I was wearing platform mules, but still.) Calcium, I thought, second aisle. Maybe Harrison needed a calcium supplement. Vertebrae compress. That’s how you get shorter.

I was in absolute darkness. A sidewalk was under my feet and I was vaguely aware of a parking lot, but the shapes of cars and figures of other shoppers had been absorbed into the fabric of the night. I’d just had a shopping experience with Harrison Ford. Nothing could be more American. I was taking it in, sitting in my Volvo that smelled like dog and mildew. Then I let myself do it.

I’d never done it before—not in a car, that is. But it was night, I was deep in the void of life, and something had to give. I stuck a hand in the bag lying on the passenger seat and pulled out the Pinot Gris. Unscrewing the cap of the corkless bottle, I placed the glass to my lips and took a pull. Not a sip, but a long meaningful swig, the kind where you release a breathy sigh afterward. Something was crushing my will to persist. Driving back to the middle school band room seemed impossible. But I’d have to do it. My daughter would have her cello in its case and on her back. She’d need mac-and-cheese or tater tots once we got home. I began to cry. Goddammit. I was breaking the state’s open bottle law and crying. Raindrops slid down the windshield.

The almonds made me feel a little better, but they’re covered in oil and rosemary, and when I wiped my tears with the side of my hand, some of the rosemary lodged in the corner of my eye. Instinctively I doubled over—gravity would pull it out—and smacked my forehead on the steering wheel, releasing a blast from the car’s horn. The sound startled me upright, and I let out another swear word. Nobody on the planet knew what was happening. Nobody knew of my petty crime and its karmic punishment. Harrison was inside—ordinary, broken Harrison—methodically scanning his next train of groceries, the gray rubber bars on the conveyor belt dividing frozen meals and vitamins, pet snacks and protein bars, dividing all the people in their private lives waiting their turn.

Laton Carter’s previous fiction appears in Indiana Review, Necessary Fiction, New Flash Fiction Review, and The Wigleaf Top 50.

Some of the spell is broken when the light comes back.

                                                                        Winter has held us

                                    close to death. Its slow melt

                                                            still rattles

the stilts we stand on.              Soon, water

      will sink our driveway and the steps leading to our front door.

            The rocks I sweep                   off the porch

will fall through water

                                                                                    to bone

                                    crushing small mammals

under their heft.

                  When the bodies reemerge, you

                                                will wring them out, leave

their small, soaked shapes on my pillow.       Already, the bed tastes

                                    damp.

            The light scatters

long shadows all over the sheets. Something drips

      from the mattress to the floor.

                                                            I talk to myself beneath

my breath.            

                        Remember, there is darkness

                                                                               at the other end of the year. Until then

I close my eyes while you

                        become stone.

K Janeschek is a writer and labor organizer originally from the Midwest. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Foglifter, Nimrod International Journal, HAD, Variant Lit, Split Rock Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere, and has won an AWP Intro Journals Project award in poetry. They live in Alaska.

I ask the man I love to be cruel.  To wring salt from the blue-hot gorges of my whines until I’m
overcome. This neck a door to a past life we close              again and again
with a hiss. His swinging face above mine, rimmed with opaline petals. A sundial glitching the
inhale we live in. And while touching extinction for a sigh, I probe whether he has it in him. This
man whose second language is asking    What do you need, honey?       His room:
quoted mugs, summered bamboo—I find no sharp objects, though my eyes roll back enough to
skate omniscience. What does he know                of a ruptured moment,
the blurriness of its veins?  How quickly the sun blinks away fog to interrogate our faces. The
throat, a corkscrew damming pleasure / crater parroting ache. It’s impossible to feel your color
slip until it boomerangs,        searing someone else’s existence. What does he know of
the wolf who howled over my vodka-logged torso some Novembers ago? How a blink before he
was a hearth de-mythifying wildfires like my father. While the man I love holds my savage
insistence for ransom I hold him      and the wolf               (down)
belly bloating like a fatigued star. When he sleeps—the man I love—his hands are just hands. I
graze them unceremoniously at the park the next day. The way they dangled my breath over the
palm of stillness,               a distant cliffhanger. Orange glaze skims the lake,
rippled softly by pedaling geese. If given the chance to take care of something see how close you
can get to destroying it          then stop—             the way Allah
taught us to.  I know more of this than any satin safeword slicking cheek. I know more of
moments twisting away from you (a stream kissing itself into a bow knot)     than his hands.

Without my enemy who would I be

Against the future, your shadow flickers like a silent film. As if with any paling sweetness, press
the monochrome under your tongue. There goes the trash, dragging father’s black cutout with it.
I sling mother’s sun-pebbled cloud on dreams like the dress of a delinquent bride. Let’s cut the
shit. Old age rainbows over me. To be everybody’s everything, you must carve your desires like
proper state lines. I desire walking through a secondhand store and getting away with breaking
tchotchke. At the farmer’s market, a man skimmed my palm, told me it wasn’t my first bull
ride—this little life of mine echoing like an apology that came too late. O skin, sow and nurture
the daggers I turn on myself. Every apocalypse, petrol-laced salve. Is Allah both an arsonist and
arborist in every reality, or just this one? Because a mirror is another wall you can’t go through.
Rewind the super 8 too many times and it will ignite in the projector. Smoke a town down to a
whisper: What if in this sequel, Icarus decides to flutter towards the moon?

Arumandhira (she/her) is a Blasian queer writer and marketer born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia (now surviving in Los Angeles). Her work appears or is forthcoming in Wax Nine Journal, Bruiser Mag, SWWIM, and Fauxmoir. She makes music under the name Ohyeahsumi.

On the train from Tokyo to Oku-Tama, Flip fell into a conversation with a Japanese man who claimed not to know what Flip meant when he said he liked sushi. Sushi, said Flip. Sushi! The man must be pretending, winding him up. Shaking his head, shrugging. Was Flip pronouncing it wrong? He tried to find the kanji for sushi on his phone, but the man kept shrugging. Flip got off the train at his station feeling hard done by, like someone had got one over. It was frustrating not to know if the man was yanking his chain or not. If it was a joke, okay. If sincere, fine. But which? Then he had to take the bus from the station to the dam, and he found the system for paying confusing. His money went in the machine and it spat out coins, some of which coins needed reinsertion. Too many steps involved. He snapped at the driver, who was trying to help. The man on the train had looked like the man on the news the night before, the man giving a press conference, the man who’d lost his daughter. If you’re out there, honey, we want to know. If something’s happened, we want to know. He started to cry then stopped. If you’re dead, we want to know. Flip thought, would you? That’s why he’d talked to him, but the man had only said You English? You like Tokyo? You like ramen? Sure, said Flip, ramen is okay. What I really like is sushi. Sushi? How could he not know sushi! But when he arrived at Lake Okutama he forgot all that. Gracious, it was beautiful. The sun was out, the sky azure, the cherry blossoms blooming white and pink – gleaming almost holy. The water was a colour Flip had only seen before in subaqueous photographs capturing the famously hidden seven eighths of icebergs. There must be a second sun, he reasoned, at the bottom of the lake, making the water look like that. And to his left the dam stretched out vast and dominating, a solid curving white wall that invited swift descent. He wanted to walk across it. He did. Halfway across the top of the dam he needed to vomit – he leant over the edge, and his hurl flew to the bottom without dirtying the white wall. The nausea disappeared as quickly as it had come, and Flip hoped no one had seen him. He was getting used to vomiting. On the other side of the dam a gate blocked entrance to the path, and Japanese words Flip didn’t understand forbade him access. That was okay. He’d walk the other way, along the road. Google maps said there was a soba place a mile away and he was starving. As they say in England, he could eat an ‘orse.

Back in England, he’d left his wife and daughter. He hoped they realized he wasn’t coming back, hoped they forgave him for it. Gauguin had left his life and family to begin a new career as an artist in Tahiti. Doris Lessing left her two young kids to write in London. Flip was part of an artistic tradition, though he had no artistic ambitions of his own. He thought if he learnt a little Japanese, he might get a job in a coffee shop. He’d gone first to Malaysia, where he’d been attacked on the beach by a pack of crazy barking dogs. He’d barked back, which startled them, and he’d waved a big stick at them, which they avoided, but it wasn’t until he walked far enough away that they completely left him alone. A lot is said against running away, but not enough is said in favour of walking firmly in the opposite direction. There were no stray dogs in Tokyo. They killed them all.

The soba place was a mile away, as long as he kept the lake on his left and the cliff walls on his right. Tokyo’s pedestrians, as a general rule, wait for the lights to change before they take a zebra crossing, even when the road is empty. It had taken Flip a couple of days to get used to that, but now that he had he thought it reflected a great propensity in himself to adapt to whatever life throws at you. There were few pavements, so at times he had to walk along the main road, pushing himself into the rocks when a car rounded the corners too fast. Steel nets covered the rockface, to catch big falling stones. Where the road couldn’t go round the cliffs, it went through them, and Flip ran down the tunnels from one end to the other, thinking if he was going to get hit by a car anywhere it would be there, in the dark. All of the cars looked expensive. Vintage highly-polished European two-seaters driven by older men. Tops down, sunglasses on, leather driving gloves and hair blowing in the breeze. Escaping Father Time. Please don’t kill me, Flip whispered so often it became a chant. After twenty minutes of avoiding death, he reached the restaurant, climbed some stairs to enter, and ordered a lovely bowl of home-made noodles with onsen egg. He savoured the broth, the healing broth, and through the dirty windows he could still see the vibrant lake blue.

Doris Lessing’s childhood nickname was Tigger. The craters on Mercury are named after dead actors and writers – Italo Calvino, Dorothea Lange, Utagawa Kunisada. Paul Gauguin. Benjamin Franklin ran away from his family in Boston to Philadelphia. He published letters under the pseudonym Mrs. Silence Dogood. Harry Houdini ran away from home at twelve. He once wrapped himself in handcuffs, chains and leg shackles and got wedged inside the rotting carcass of a beached sea monster. He freed himself. Who knows what the sea monster really was. Steve McQueen at fourteen ran away and joined the circus. He had a malamute named Mike. Flip knew lots of famous people who’d run away. Nine times out of ten, he’d say, they made the right choice. He loved his wife. He loved his daughter. Every Sunday they woke up at nine and went cycling together to the chocolate croissant shop. He’d never see them again. Never ever ever, see them meet them again. Focus on the soba, the soba tasted good. But he’d never hug his wife in bed again. Never hear his daughter laughing in the kitchen talking with her friends again. Never hold all their hands anymore. Still, not good to think about that. Focus on the soba, the present, the future. As soon as he finished the noodles he paid for them and as soon as he’d paid for them he left. He didn’t like to see the people who worked in restaurants clear his plates away, better not to know what happened at the end of the meal.

He chose not to take the bus back to the station, it was only a ten-mile walk. A popular walk. Lots hiked from the station to the dam, Flip would hike from the dam to the station. There was a river down below, a busy main road up above, countless trees, few people. Very calming, the air smelled like elves had grown it, the path was well-formed, well-signposted, Flip took his headphones out his ears to better enjoy the sounds of the forest. Walking is a meditative process, a time to reflect. Flip thought of the day before he’d left, in the doctor’s office, the way the doctor had composed his smile. His ribs ached, but as he walked the ache grew comfortable. The sun was hot. The leaves absorbed most of the heat. Flip walked from light to shade to light to shade to light.

Two bridges crossed from the path over the river it ran parallel to, one old and holey, one new. You could walk across both of them, and Flip did. Walking to the other end, stopping in the middle to look over the edge and feel the view. Was it called a view when it was directly beneath you? Then turn around at the end and come back. He didn’t know or care where the bridges went, but had to cross them. Bridges needed to be crossed when one came to them. The bridges moved with a rhythm related to his step yet out of time with it. Only two people were allowed on each at one time. It wouldn’t be safe to carry more. Would he one day go back to England? He didn’t know. His family would be disappointed with him, and he wasn’t sure he could weather that. At the time of his leaving, it had all felt so clear, but now it was vaguer, he was less sure he’d made the right choice. Robert Frost, he thought.

Underneath one of the bridges, the second one, he saw a dead body. In Japan the mind leaps to suicide, but was that unfair to assume? It could just as easily have been an accidental fall. Fifty feet down, they might have even survived it. But Flip didn’t think this person had survived. They looked very dead. Flip stared at the body for the longest time, from up there on the bridge. What would it feel like, to fall over the side? They were wearing a red jacket, and it had traveled up their back. Flip wanted to pull it down, make them neat and tidy. It could be the woman from the news report, but was that too convenient? Too cute? As far as he could tell, there was no easy way to the bottom. After about ten minutes, he left. Kept walking firmly away.

I’m sorry, the doctor had said, carefully. He’d packed as quickly as he could, didn’t want his wife to see what was coming, didn’t want his daughter to know. Better they thought he was still out there, still alive. An asshole, but a live asshole. Better they didn’t have to know. What comfort could come from knowing? Just extinguished hope. Was he right, though? Or should he return.

An hour along the walk, ten minutes from the station, he ran into a distraught woman. Did you see my daughter on the pass? she asked.

No, he said. I didn’t see anyone.

She’s wearing a red coat.

Oh yes, then, he said. And he wondered what she’d do when she knew.

Christopher James has had work published online with Split Lip, SmokeLong, Wigleaf, Booth, Tin House and others.