Lightning Cake

On Pluto, there were pterodactyls that flew in V-flock formations. Sarah had never seen pterodactyls that flew in V-flock formations. This was not demoted-to-dwarf-planet Pluto. This was a lush and fantastic Pluto, which Sarah and her companions discovered while returning from their discouraging voyage to the system of Poseidon. (Perks and promotions had been promised on their finding the fabled god’s trident. Alas, all they’d found were dusty moon rocks, and there were plenty of those next door to home.) On Pluto, fresh fruit dangled from the trees. They camped by the beach, where the sand was pink and pale. It was a welcome respite, and no one was eager to hurry back home. Here, the weather was lovely. Curious creatures populated the land. Silver otters and sapphire hummingbirds. Tiny compsognathus that scampered in the beach grass. It was Tony, their systems engineer, who discovered them. “I’m good with animals. Look, I’ve got this guy eating out of the palm of my hand!” he said. “Maybe it’s him that’s good with you,” Sarah said. The compsognathus crushed Tony’s walnut like a marshmallow. # It was on everyone’s mind that Pluto could be their meal ticket to make up for their failed trip. It held possibilities as a wealth of natural resources, could at the very least serve as pit stop for future trips to this part of the galaxy. In her notes, Sarah wrote that they’d encountered no real predators, no intelligent life. The land was pristine and uninhabited, and the creatures that lived here were meek and small. (The compsognathus were turning into a bit of a nuisance, unfortunately. They’d become bold about entering the camp, and one had even bitten Sarah on the hand.) Their marine biologist, Sofia, reported strange disturbances in the water. She thought there was something lurking just out of range of her equipment, something that watched her as she caught specimens to take back home. “Fluttering jellies?” “Check.” “Apple-sized ocean sunfish?” “Check.” “Our favorite compsognathus?” “Right here,” Sofia replied. The compsognathus whined plaintively from the cage that Tony had wrought it from black reeds. # A few days before their departure, Sarah walked along the beach when she came upon a creature that stood blocking her path. The creature was seal-like with elk-like antlers. It was different, aware—intelligent. It loomed ominous and large, and appeared to have been waiting for her. What was this strange creature? Where was it from? Did it have a herd of its kind? More creatures like seals with antlers? Sarah felt excitement rather than fear as she slowly approached it. The two faced each other upon the sand, each perceiving the other as alien. How often had a similar scenario occurred in the history of living things, when initial wonder ignites into desire for that which isn’t yours to take? She knew she shouldn’t touch it. It wasn’t her place to touch it. She reached out her hand. # C.E. Hyun’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Ideomancer, The Good Men Project, decomP, and Mirror Dance. She lives in Orange County, California and at cehyun.com. Illustration by guest artist Jen Muir. More of Jen Muir’s work can be found at http://platypusradio.me/.

“The hardest thing,” Eve says, “is the monotony, the same jokes every day, the same bad puns. When there are just three other people, there are only so many stories to tell.” Lucy shakes her head; this isn’t the worst thing. She can no longer remember anyone she knew. The memories of the dead are synced up with those of the living, when something is forgotten in one land it is lost irrevocably to both. This is why Lucy doesn’t remember her real name, and why ghosts, in the mute language of creaking and moans, desperately try to reignite living memories of their singing voice, of favorite dresses, the contents of their kitchens and the things they drew. In the land of the dead, everyone runs out of outfits pretty quickly, walking around in clothes taken from museums, whose original owners have been forgotten. It’s the same with people. You only pop up on this level if someone outside the astral plane remembers you. Eve has been here for years, and Lucy only since somebody dug up her pelvis, yanking her uncomfortably out of the place beyond. The two of them form a sort of unofficial club, although they often don’t have much to say to one another. They talk, instead, about the one thing both of them remember, that everyone remembers, which is the land, as it was, and as it is down there somewhere. They spend afternoons analyzing the umber shadows that stretch across the plains and deserts they called home. Time passes slowly here, and as they sit, and sip, civilizations are rise and decline, lakes well up and overtake the desert before shrinking again to nothing. Grey dust slides down the hills, valleys are filled, and new mountains rise up. Some folktales say that when you are born, your death is born with you, hovering behind you like a guardian angel, waiting to take you away when your time comes. But maybe instead it’s a less specific death, spirits on vacation, your lifespan a flash of time as it stands close, taking a moment to survey the shifting light chase itself across the planes. # Emily Beyda is a part time writer and full time snack enthusiast who lives in the treehouse in the Hollywood hills. Her work has appeared in The Hairpin, The Cupboard, and Postcard Shorts. Follow her on Twitter @emilybeyda. Illustration by guest artist Jen Muir. More of Jen Muir’s work can be found at http://platypusradio.me/.

Priprat was a city but now Priprat is ghosts. Long grey snouts and round glass eyes. They stomp through the flat, the glomps of their muddy boots sticking in my ears as I hide. I am meant to be asleep. Or maybe gone. The clock on the wall says 3 o’clock—time for Baba to begin the roast—carrots, turnips, a butt of meat, the flesh golden, electric heat sucking pink juices from the skin. Baba once told stories: a dark-mouthed oven hungry for the fat arms of children who got too close, nasty, half-dead geese escaping from its greasy blackness to pull you in. Now Baba keeps her face turned from the closed lips of the stove and does not answer when I speak to her. My ear to the outside wall, I listen closely for Priprat and hear nothing. I slide out from behind green drapes, quiet as a cat in the forest. The grey-suited ghosts never hear me making a sound. They will not take me away. Boba lies on the couch. He was a guard at the power plant but now he sleeps, waits, for what I do not know, shaving cream spotting his neck and the tongues of his collar. I remember when he used to shave my cheeks. “Hold very still now,” he would say, one palm thick and warm against my chin, “Still as stones, goruchka,” his finger a pretend razor ready to sweep the cream away. Boba’s face is stony in his sleep, like he is holding his breath. I laugh, think of the games children make adults play. Surely soon Baba will awaken and find me a groom. If the ghosts do not find me. I didn’t know to hide until the day of the explosions—the television was on and I watched other grey men tapping the tiny glass screen on every channel, saying words like evacuation, radiation, explosion, Priprat, Priprat, Priprat. Boba stared hard at the ghosts, prepared himself like he was going to a wedding or a funeral, kissed my cheek and went to sleep on the couch. Baba was already sick in the kitchen, crying and vomiting in the corner. “Let no one inside, goruchka, promise me,” her silver-spun hair looked almost yellow, “if anyone comes, hide.” Her eyes were grey stones. “The snouted men are ghosts who take girls away, make experiments of them, feed them to monsters.” Baba had been taken from here once, to Germany. She swore that leaving home was almost certain death. They came soon after but did not find me. I hid behind the drapes, my face tingling and red hot. Their name was painted on the chests of their suits with the other words from the television. They do not come back as often now; perhaps when they do it is only a dream, a trick—the glow of the moon so like the sick yellow of their glass eyes, shining on the television that no longer turns on. # KL Pereira's fiction, poetry, and nonfiction are forthcoming or appear in Lightning Cake, The Golden Key, Innsmouth Free Press, Innsmouth Magazine, Mythic Delirium, Jabberwocky, The Medulla Review, Bitch Magazine and other publications. Her chapbook, “Impossible Wolves” was published by Deathless Press is 2013. Find Pereira online: darknesslovescompany.com and @kl_pereira. Illustration by guest artist Jen Muir. More of Jen Muir’s work can be found at http://platypusradio.me/.

The elders told stories of the time before, when the people swam up to the land of burning sky, and Bright Tail listened and dreamed. So, when the strange vessel descended through dark water, emanating burning brightness from a single eye, he imagined visitors with normal faces and split tails inside. He considered greeting it, holding his hand out in peace, but the stories held him back. It bobbed above him, its light sweeping in arcs. In the stories, split-tails hunted his people with harpoons and nets. Safety mattered. His dreams did not. He hurled his spear at the light. # Jamie Lackey lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and their cat. Her short fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the Stoker Award-winning After Death.... She's a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Her Kickstarter-funded short story collection, One Revolution, is available on Amazon.com. Find her online at www.jamielackey.com. Illustration by guest artist Jen Muir. More of Jen Muir’s work can be found at http://platypusradio.me/.

My Mars Base will have a blue-sky dome, where people will go to cure their blue-sky rickets. My Mars Base will have lots of dead ends. My Mars Base will have a miniature version of Every Great Thing From Human History, small enough to fit on the head of a pin. My Mars Base will grow lettuce. My Mars Base will have deep dark ventilation shafts that seem to drop off forever. My Mars Base will have a holodeck, where people will program jungles and mountain ranges and sidewalks with dandelions in the cracks. My Mars Base will be hypoallergenic. My Mars Base will have a replica Earth-style graveyard, where first-generation Martian teens will gather to drink and wonder aloud what their parents must have been thinking. My Mars Base will have sexbots. My Mars Base will have airlocks and surface suits, which many parents will use to flee during the teenager uprising. My Mars Base will have compressed air tanks, but not enough for all those fleeing parents. My Mars Base will have trowels for lettuce gardening, which will also make passable weapons. My Mars Base will have ladders. My Mars Base will have a vat of acid with a narrow catwalk over it. Why? I don't know, I just think it's a nice feature. My Mars Base will have an angry computer. I already mentioned the dead ends in my Mars Base, but I didn't mention that some of those dead ends will have axes in glass cases—the sort you're supposed to use in a fire to chop down a door. That may seem anachronistic, but I think future Martians will forgive the lapse when they're hacking through hordes of haywire sexbots. My Mars Base will have a wolf pack in a zoo. The wolf cage will have an electronic lock. My Mars Base will have a saying among migrants: "What could possibly go wrong?" In the final days on my Mars Base, the ventilation shafts will jam up with jumpers. My Mars Base will have escape pods, of course, but the frustrating thing is that the food supplies for the trip back home will be stored in a separate part of my Mars Base, and the only way to get to them will be to cross the vat of acid, but there will be too many haywire sexbots between the survivors and the supplies, not to mention the wolves that the angry computer set free, not to mention the marauding cannibal teens. My Mars Base will have a weird forbidding tunnel with flickering lights and hazy portholes. This tunnel will lead to the heart of my Mars Base. My Mars Base will have a central command console. My Mars Base will have a self-destruct button. My Mars Base, when it finally blows, will send a burst of O2 into the thin poisonous atmosphere, and in that moment the signature of my Mars Base will be visible, spectroscopically, from Earth. To those who are watching the skies. # Trevor Shikaze lives in the Prairies, where you will find him birdwatching, if you find him at all. Illustration by guest artist Jen Muir. More of Jen Muir's work can be found at http://platypusradio.me/.

The pennies slip under my soles as I climb toward the lighthouse. Each step sends a long spill of them gleaming my way back down, sends me clutching for the ragged stone underneath. Silver winks from the copper embrace: nickels, dimes, quarters. Plenty of people come clutching bills tight as rigor mortis too. All the loose-palmed people end up empty-handed and despairing somewhere between forest and bluffs and the absent noise of the surf. Eventually everyone gets desperate enough to snatch a fluttering paper from someone's slack fingers. It's a cycle—so they say. Me, I came down living, solid gold rings on my fingers, and the ferryman spat over the edge of his boat. But he took me. Nobody tells you his toll isn't money. What could a man buy, out here on the edge of death? No, it's something you treasure, something it hurts to lose. He says it's to dull the blade when it comes—but maybe he's greedy, maybe he's envious. Who'd blame him, out here working the soundless ocean as long as the sky stays overcast and the wind stays mean. So he takes something you love, and it stings, but when you get down to death's country you don't even notice all your passion seeping off. And all the while the pile of coins grows, as he flicks them two by two shining into the night and they rattle their way to a resting-place. Now I'm climbing that slope. I scramble upward. Time means nothing here, but every moment passing is another one to bear. The doorknob is polished smooth by a thousand dead men's hands. I wipe my palms on my shirt and try. Cobwebs cover the windows and dust covers the air. Stairs spiral up, the railing collapsed into splinters halfway through the first turn. I don't test my weight on them, I just go up. A skeleton guards the beacon controls: carpals teeter on the console, and on the floor pelvis, femurs, and tarsals are a game of pick-up-sticks. I'm not stupid enough to interfere without obeisance. I kneel, split my skin with my knife, and give blood and spit to the dead. The hammer in the corner fits my hands. When I smash the beacon's lens, putting out the light that guides the boat back in, the sound's the loudest thing I've heard here. Nobody tells you the ferryman doesn't take anything for the return. The toll coming back is something given: something you looked away from. Something you cannot bear. I drop the hammer and go down the stairs. One cracks under my feet, rotten, but the next is sturdy. Descending the shore's easier than coming up it. The first coin skips three times before it sinks into the water. The second just disappears. Somebody will be along soon, I've no doubt: clutching their money, their vanished dreams, their memories of the lover they're chasing. Someone should be here to tell them there's no point in waiting. # Alena McNamara lives near Boston. She doesn't trust oceans. You can find her other work via alenamcnamara.com. Illustration by guest artist Jen Muir. More of Jen Muir's work can be found at http://platypusradio.me/.

When the sink hole opened up behind my house and swallowed both the dried up brick well and peach tree, I saw a city in the earth. A perfect circle, roughly thirty feet in diameter, hundreds of feet down, yawned for light and illuminated houses like pueblo dwellings, complete with shutters, flower boxes, and ornately carved doors embedded in the rotting limestone walls. I called my neighbors to come see and it wasn’t long before most of the town stood, shielding eyes against the sun, all in the same fashion: channeling Texas grandfather poses outside a gas station in high summer. There were no ladders, no bridges, no lights, no people—only seemingly husked residences. Brenda Houx took the children to her house; she said she didn’t want any part of what was down there and it wasn’t for the young ones either. We let her leave and then set up lawn chairs in curiosity and while we grunted in unworded speculation, old Miss Famke made limeade. Every few hours one of us would venture a phrase or two but eyes were too large for words and the silence continued to eat us. Finally, Skeeter Collins, the widower who owned the hardware store, declared he was going down and spent the next three hours lashing ladders to each other. I’d never seen anything like it, folded metal like a marionette had lost its body. Eventually I got up to help him and we sat in the grass with gardening shears and cut pieces of rope to tie them together. It was about the time that we finished when the Carols wheeled their gas grill around to my backyard for hotdogs. When they were done, Skeeter wiped his tanned, wrinkled hands on his overalls and nodded to himself, affirming some thought none of us were privy to. It was almost seven when he backed up his Ford F250 and fixed up his trailer hitch. “I never believed I’d see the day,” he said. “You hear about these things, you know. Sink holes opening up. I’ve seen pictures too, but it never looked like anything was down ‘em. Wonder if they’re all like this.” We didn’t tell him that it probably wasn’t like that. It might have been the way we all breathed a little shallower, or the way we felt our eyes widen when a door below appeared suddenly open. Things like that just didn’t happen round our parts, and cruelly, we were all willing to let him go for our own excitement. I helped him feed the ladders into the hole, six in all, 132 feet long. It didn’t even seem strange, the way we all waved goodbye like we knew he wasn’t coming back, and the way he laughed and ducked his head into shadows like he knew he wasn’t either. By the time he reached the top most house, he was little more than a shadow himself, slipping into brightly painted earth like the last of the sun. # Gwendolyn Edward lives in Texas and is finishing her MA in Creative Writing at the University of North Texas while preparing to enter Bennington’s MFA. She writes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and likes to write both traditional narrative prose and prose that challenges convention, form, and genre. This is because her father encouraged her to challenge everything growing up. You can find her at www.gwendolynedward.com. Illustration by guest artist Jen Muir. More of Jen Muir's work can be found at http://platypusradio.me/.

One day, your life will be itemized and numbered. This is what your dream means: strangers will lay out your clothes and select the best of them to be displayed in glass cases. Your linen will be labelled and stacked on dim shelves. They will number your furniture and your letters and your gold gryphon armlets. The gifts your grandchildren give you, which you now count as treasures, will be kept only because they can throw nothing away. They will strip away the improvements made by your descendants to your palace, returning it to your unbearably gloomy grandeur. You will not recognize it. You would never have put that couch in that room, or sat in that chair beneath that window. You have fires blazing in every chamber. They will not even light lamps. Earnest young women will discuss how to move your cedarwood tables safely. In the rooms where your slaves live, they will set up offices and eat cake. They will peer at the friezes meant to immortalize your victories. Probably the defeat of Sparda, they will say. Just look at what people wore back then. This is what your dream means: one day, strangers will walk through your life looking for carpet beetles and woodworm. One day, your weapons will be ornaments and your chariot a plaything. One day, when the roof of the storeroom collapses, the heads of lions you slew with your own hands will bare their yellow teeth at the stars. One day, your life will be no more than an inventory. But then, you wanted to rule the world. # Julia August likes stately homes, but sometimes they give her odd ideas. Her short fiction has appeared in Lackington's, SQ Mag, Cabinet des Fées and the anthology Star Quake 2. She is @JAugust7 on Twitter and j-august on tumblr. Find out more at http://juliaaugust.com/ Illustration by guest artist Jen Muir. More of Jen Muir's work can be found at http://platypusradio.me/.

We were small and unmoving like twigs are on still water. We lay on the banks of the river hurting for breath. We’d come sailing the weave of dreams into rivers. Cyclops stepped into the water from where he hid in the trees and scooped us out with his fingers. He had the hands of a young man full of touch and the yearning to carry ropes of the world along in his tread, but his eye, as the legends say, was an ageless oracle. We took sharp breaths, my brother and I, like circling crows as Cyclops took us into his cave atop of the mountain and set us in his nest like we were pebbles, soft-shaped, churned by river water. We asked Cyclops how he climbed the mountains with only one eye. Did he look at his feet or up ahead? He told us that it did not matter—that the birds drew him up the mountain as they soared on the wind. We asked Cyclops how he saw the ocean against the sky and he said it was like how we look out the window and see a paned frame of horizon. I asked Cyclops if he loved another, and how she looked with his great eye closed. “She looks like the night air of the mountains,” he said. “The open air that burns without heat.” And then I asked him, I couldn’t leave until I asked him—how he survived the earthquake that swallowed the giants, and I felt the pull of the rotting porch wood in my throat. I sat in Cyclops’ silence, under his gaze and the dream world was fading. “The world spun in my eye,” he said, “and my hands held it still. When I woke, the ground was shivering, but shut.” # Kristian Ashley Macaron is from Albuquerque, New Mexico and attended the University of New Mexico. She currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts where she studied writing in the MFA program at Emerson College. Her previous work has appeared in Conceptions Southwest and on stage at the University of New Mexico in “Full Frontal Poetry” and the 2010 Words Afire Festival. Kristian's fiction and poetry are forthcoming in The Winter Tangerine Review and the San Antonio Review. She teaches screenwriting in the Emerson College Creative Writer’s Workshop summer program for high school students. Twitter: @kristianmacaron. Illustration by guest artist Jen Muir. More of Jen Muir's work can be found at http://platypusradio.me/.

She rents a steamer to loosen the paper from the wall. It’s Pepto-Bismol pink, gummy and nauseating in its ability to bring forward memories of stomach upset. The layer below is from her mother’s youth: sky blue patterned with purple tulips, blue pansies, green leaves. She applies steam and peels it back, wonders how many layers she has to go. Next is something decades older: monochromatic green, a grassy hue bordering diluted watercolors, forming roses, leaves. Further down: red with yellow squares and blue flowers. She unsticks it from the wall and huffs as another layer of paper emerges. In another house that is also the same house, a woman tries desperately to keep the paper up on her walls. It puffs out, then buckles back during breakfast. She puts her hands to it, pats it down, but then it’s sliding off in sheets, and it’s all she can do to keep it from knocking down the vase her mother gave her, the spices lining the back edge of the counter. # Rebecca Emanuelsen is a Michigan-based writer. Her stories have appeared in Shimmer, Parcel, Fractured West, and elsewhere. She occasionally blogs at rebeccaemanuelsen @ wordpress.com. Illustration by guest artist Jen Muir. More of Jen Muir's work can be found at http://platypusradio.me/.

The second edition of Lightning Cake will feature work by Alena McNamara, Gwendolyn Edward, Rebecca Emanuelsen, Jamie Lackey, KL Pereira, Emily Beyda, C.E. Hyun, Trevor Shikaze, Julia August, and Kristian Ashley Macaron. Each piece is illustrated by guest artist Jen Muir. These ten stories comprise The Moon Cake. Moon cakes are a treat traditionally eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival, a time that celebrates lunar worship and moon-watching. Moon cakes are delicacies—small, dense, flavorful. Each story in this second edition is an entire little cake—speculative and boundless, silvery and otherworldly. This year, the Mid-Autumn Festival falls on September 8. Over the course of the next ten weeks, bite into a fresh moon cake every Wednesday. Polish off the crumbs with tea.

Lightning Cake Cut yourself a slice and chomp in.

When I slit your throat, I expect you to say thank you. The jewel of your neck, rubies. The dark of your eyes, jet. My blade is silver, darling, and very sharp. I will cut you and catch you when your legs go weak and I will listen to the thread of your breath. I will hold you close as your heart gives out and your black eyes search, search, search my face. . Carlea Holl-Jensen is an English teacher and erstwhile folklorist. Her fiction has appeared in Pindeldyboz, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet and Shimmer, and she is the co-editor of The Golden Key.

You will find no scarlet-eyed rabbit lurking in the shallow depths of the magician’s hat. No silken scarf, hued in perpetual endlessness. And if there is such a thing as a golden fish in a bowl, he swims in another’s hat. An amateur’s hat. The magician has no name to speak of. The good ones never do. He is simply and completely, Magician. You see him, and then you don’t, but he is always there. Were it another day I might discuss his manner. His costume. His misshapen eyes, heavy and wide, surpassing those noble and once-mentioned twenty thousand leagues under the sea. But it is this day, and so I will not discuss those things. You’ve decided on his hat, and his hat I will explain. Inside, atop a placid pond, there floats three closed tulips—pink, white, and indigo. They are locked. Only you can open them. The treasure anticipating you is entirely yours for the taking. It was put there for you to claim. There is no key, for things easily unlocked can only offer a fool’s endeavor. If you open one, you open them all. Three things I can tell you: - Its worth estimates no token’s profit. - Nothing in, on, above, or below Earth rivals its value. - A thousand fighting men once died trying to have it. One last thing: to prevail, you must heighten your senses. Rely not on ears nor eyes, but on your ear’s eyes, do you see? One more last thing: I am not required to tell you this, but I will, because I am nostalgic creature and I remember your shoes; they were on my feet long ago and three yesterdays past. Are you listening? Here it is: Happy chooses itself. Remember that. If you allow yourself to be captured by sentiment and maudlinism, it is web you will never leave. For all of eternity you will dine on empty feelings. If this frightens you, good. It behooves you to remain vigilant, to guard your heart’s soul. If you’ve not changed your mind, let me offer you a bit of positivity: most would say to know is best. Except the ones who don’t say that. This is where I must leave you. I am not allowed past this point. To wish you luck would be corrupt, and as terminal as breaking your leg myself. So instead I will say journey well. The Magician’s hat awaits you. . Cara Rosalie Olsen believes she would have made a fine hummingbird, as she struggles with sitting still (except when writing, of course), and enjoys inordinate amounts of sugar. If she wasn't a full-time writer, she would have liked to join the cast of Saturday Night Live, or, taken over as CEO of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. Her debut novel, Awakening Foster Kelly, will be released this coming summer.

Oh yes. You, too? Last night was strange. I think the first thing was the rain wouldn't stop. It rained all day in heavy droves. I heard entire sections of downtown was flooded. The gutters were backed up. Something was trapped in them. We don't know what. But something is blocking the rain gutter. Channel 4 said it was "not normal debris." They never came back with an update, so we still don't know what it is. Yes, the dinner. We shouldn't even have gone out last night. I think it was Elliot who said he wanted to go out. I don't think we would've gone though if Sarah hadn't sided with him. You know Sarah, she always gets those cravings, and that's it. Her cravings are unnatural. Yes, me as well. I don't know how old the restaurant is. So much turnover here. It could be a week old or a year old. The food was good. Sarah's craving was contented, anyway. I guess places like that, it's part of the meal. They gave us six, even though there were only five of us. I'm sure. Six. Well, we all opened ours, didn't we? We had lucky numbers and you you know, not even fortunes, just proverbs. Sarah's was something about rivers needing springs. Oh Elliot had a fortune—a new business venture on the horizon. Right, and mine was about fear, or something. Diane's, though. I thought it was good, too. You will live forever? A lot of ways to interpret that. Then she opened the second one and that said the same thing, too. No, what was really strange was how the owners came over and Elliot asked them for more and they gave us a bucket of them and he just kept taking them. I agree. He shouldn't have taken so many. Diane took the rest. She opened them this morning. All of them say the same thing. But Sarah opened some, and all of hers were different. Normal, I mean. Diane's got twenty of them now, telling her she's going to live forever. I'm going to meet her now. She wants to eat at a different place tonight. . Amy Mandel is a San Francisco-based writer.

Deep inside the recesses of the cupboard, behind the canned supplies and first aid box, in the crease of brown wrapping paper folded four times over—there, I found the seeds. I was inventorying the cupboard to take stock of my provisions. I had only myself to feed, but lately I suspected my cans were dwindling faster than they should. I was trying to determine whether someone was breaking in and stealing supplies, or if I was losing perspective and growing paranoid. The seeds were not mine. I had filled this cupboard, and I knew I hadn’t bought seeds at any time. I had no use for them; certainly, I couldn’t grow them. It’s possible they had been there all along, left behind by the cupboard’s previous owner. I wondered if the thief had left them there as recompense. I supposed I could eat them, so I did, making a small meal of the occasion. I would eat them one at a time, over three days. If I only ate half of a seed, I could eat them over six days. I placed a seed on the center of a tin plate and pulled a chair up to the table. Once I ate the seed, I was glutted. I opened my mouth. Leaves and stems laddered up my throat, tubers caught in my chest. Bulbs of fragrant fruit drooped toward the table. They piled onto the table, and then fell off it. I was still sitting at the table when the thief came in that night. The thief was a young girl, insubstantial. My mouth was spilling fruit. I sat there while she took all my cans, the packet of two and a half seeds, and left. She came back later with friends. They had baskets and buckets and plastic bags. They gathered the fruit from my mouth. They left me to it, but they return once a day. They are well-fed. . S. R. Williams lives in Stockton, California, where she grows lemons and plums in her backyard.

She meets her old dance instructor, named Ira, in the back of a bus that wheezes & squeaks. The passengers seem to deny the small clouds of white exhaust. Zin recalls an early class when Ira was fond of saying, “What is your favorite flower? Imagine how it would dance.” Zin doesn’t want Ira to return to a drafty studio apartment on Avenue A. She brings the woman to her apartment in Chelsea, where Ira kneads imaginary bread or invents new dances from wringing Zin’s wet skirts, blouses, panties. In the middle of a room, they float, thrust, glide, slash, dab, flick & press until they almost disappear. The old woman pants and looks pale. Not like the old days where they could lunge & sweep forever. The old woman complains that she is constantly hungry. When the phone rings, the dance instructor answers & says “I am not home.” Zin says “It was for me, Madame.” The old woman says “It doesn’t matter. We are the same. The same ilk or elk?” Zin distracts herself in delicatessens or Laundromats where she washes her leotards and tutus on delicate but extremely flammable. She has a Russian boyfriend who commits suicide three times a week, then becomes a floating island of blue ice. The old woman tells Zin that she must return home, her rent is due. “No,” says Zin, “you must stay with me. A small but precious shape must be saved.” She folds the woman up to fit in two dimensional space. The woman complains of neck pain. She hides the woman in a closet. But at night, Zin hears the rain when there is no rain. She then places the woman in an empty vase. The woman only grows toward inertia. Zin unfolds the old woman and buys a new bed. It is softer than the previous. They both lie down, sleep side to side. They dream of their first dance. They sink. . Kyle Hemmings is the author of several chapbooks of poetry and prose: Avenue C, Cat People, and Anime Junkie (Scars Publications), and Tokyo Girls in Science Fiction (NAP). His latest e-books are You Never Die in Wholes from Good Story Press and The Truth about Onions from Good Samaritan. His latest collection of prose/poetry is Void & Sky from Outskirt Press.