Like Soap

by Slawka G. Scarso | Jun 2, 2022 | micro

When we were fourteen, Tessa, Gina, and I used to laugh at Mrs. Meade, our history teacher, who always came to class like she had dressed in a rush, her hair always boringly tied, her wedding finger always covered in soap, stuck to her wedding band and we wondered how come she didn’t know the trick we knew, of removing the rings when washing our hands, which we did every time with our enamel, and wood, and silver-plated rings – only Gina having a gold ring among us, a present from her Grandma – and we told Mrs. Meade about the soap and the ring, one day, giggling all the while, and she said Hahaha and Aren’t you funny, and Why don’t we talk about it when you also have four children to look after at home and then twenty, forty, sixty more children to look after at work, and Yes, I mean you too, and then, when Tessa got pregnant, twelve months later, we thought Mrs. Meade would go and check her rings for soap too, but Tessa had no wedding band, and when Mrs. Meade went to visit her, in the evenings, it was not to laugh at her, but to help her out with the baby, and her history classes because she said that no matter what, she couldn’t let life slip out of her hands. Like soap.

I Told Them I’m a Vampire Who Likes To Drink Blood

by Kristina Saccone | May 31, 2022 | micro

I wished it on my 16th birthday candles. The school counselor said to believe in myself, so I did. It turned out the junior class at Bellingham High had been waiting for a teenage vampire.

First they stopped sitting with me at lunch. Jesse from homeroom said they didn’t want to watch me drink blood. I had to keep it credible, so I left my tray untouched, even though mac-n-cheese is my favorite. My calculus teacher said I looked a little pale that afternoon.

I used it as an excuse to skip P.E. “I’m just really drained today,” I told Coach Martin. “I should probably get out of the sun.” I moved to the shadiest tree and pretended to perch like a bat in its shadows. 

Mrs. Miller must have heard the kids talking about it on the school bus because when I stepped off, she said with a smirk: “It’s spooky I can’t see you in the rearview mirror.” The twins from the cul-de-sac gave me a look, and just for effect, I swigged some fruit punch Kool Aid from my Nalgene.

I felt like I was practically floating down the sidewalk. By the time I got home, my mother rolled her eyes, holding the door with one arm, pointing to the couch with the other. “Jesse’s mom called. I can’t believe you sometimes.”

I slouched off my backpack, kicked back in the Lazy Boy, and smiled. “It turns out this self-confidence thing really works, Mom.”

Scars and Time

by James Palmer | May 31, 2022 | micro

She has a small scar behind her left earlobe and I wonder if she knows that I’m aware of it. I’ve always wondered how it became to be and I used to make up stories in my head. Stories involving nipping puppies, or a renegade fishing pole cast when she was 13. Then came college and being on and off again and separated by an ocean. Then the marriage and children and parental responsibilities and less and less time for ourselves. There was no time to talk, no time to think about the scar. There was no time anymore. Then there was the separation, but I still had hope until I was handed the bundle of paperwork one day at my door. I nearly dropped my drink.  All these years, memories, placed into legally formatted documents with spots for my signature. Now I have nothing but time to think, nothing but time for another person. I’m sitting here at my kitchen table wondering if her next lover will notice the small scar behind her left earlobe. I fear they might. I fear they may ask what it is from. I fear that she may tell them.

Hardwood Nights

by Margaret MacInnis | May 24, 2022 | micro

Her first love stands in the doorway, a lanky licorice stick of a boy, all words and high tops, sweet and chewy, palms touching the door frame. Insomnia carries him to her, a sleepless offering for bare feet pacing a hardwood floor. If she lingers too long in this doorway, she fears she may vanish like rub my thigh and make a wish.

While awake in the dark, memory performs, so she says no to the orange pill her Magus doctor of a husband promises abracadabra delivers sleep. She prefers to feel the hardened sweet pea of memory beneath her mattress. She prefers to wander the hardwood night draped in gauze with a kernel trapped in her back teeth, wedged too deep to extract. Wedged in that tight spot between crags where spaghetti-strapped nymphs exposing crescent breast moons catch their salty breath. When she yawns, so do these girls, her students in the daylight hours, greedy fledglings in the nest, beaks open, begging.

Dropping the orange pill into the toilet, she sees her reflection in the torrent of the flush. Some nights she considers waking the Magus doctor husband. But instead she follows the licorice path to the backyard flower beds and lies down eyes closed, barking back at the neighborhood dogs, barking so quietly that she cannot hear the rainfall. Abracadabra, she opens her eyes to the Magus standing over her opening his umbrella.

Little Worlds

by Nathan Alling Long | May 19, 2022 | micro

Sara’s building tiny huts made of mud that she hollows out with her thumbs and then covers with sticks from the wood chip pile at the edge of the playground. She’s trying to create the village like the one she’s seen in pictures from the National Geographic that rests on the coffee table in her living room.

Jason is squatting next to Sara, helping, which means doing nothing but telling her the village looks great.  Now and then, he glances over at the boys playing king of the hill on the chip pile, wishing they’d let him join, then he looks back at the huts and thinks how it must feel inside them, dark and quiet, like his room at home.

Arnie stands on top of the chip pile, beats his chest, and roars like a lion, for no one appears to be able to knock him over without getting knocked over himself.  He thinks of himself like his father, a police officer, looking over the playground, keeping everything in order.

While Jackie, the only girl on the pile, pushes her way up the hill, undeterred when the other boys gang up on her, as though the pile of chips is theirs alone to fight for. She looks at Arnie and thinks of her father, who is always correcting her, always telling her no, then calculates her move, how if she grabs Arnie’s ankles and pulls just right, he’ll tumble down and she will rise up.

Sugar Baby

by Alexa Logush | May 16, 2022 | micro

When Danny turned six, his mouth rotted and a host of flies swarmed his lips. They laid their ugly eggs beneath his tongue and zipped right through the holes in his gums. Nana washed his mouth out with Listerine and soap, scolding him for not being more careful. For not acting his age. For not growing up.

But back then, when autumn fell like Danny’s baby teeth into Nana’s unsuspecting palm, she cradled the little spotted things and planted them in a flowerpot. She placed it in the window above the kitchen sink and tended to it incessantly, sprinkling water from the tap with her fingers, raking the dirt tenderly with Danny’s old plastic comb. It was the same one she once used to tug all that soft hair back from his face into a silly little tail atop his head.

In the morning, Nana came down the stairs to find Danny pointing at the pot. I watched his tongue probe the new gaps in his mouth as Nana stopped before the kitchen sink. She pressed a hand to her lips, beckoning to Danny, as they watched the frailest tendril curl right up from the base of the pot, reaching towards the ceiling, not unlike a silly little tail that’ll eventually get cut.

How to Embed your Legacy

by Anita Goveas | May 12, 2022 | micro

Take one pair of lightly-arched, freshly-manicured feet, slip off your mother’s gold-edged chappals that always chafed, and plant them firmly in the soft Mangalorean soil of your exacting grandfather’s garden

Rub at your slightly turned-in ankles, that resemble your father’s, and recount the memory of how your perfectionist Nana massaged them with intent and warmed olive oil when you were newly born and mouldable

Feel the sharp lines of your sturdy calves, so similar to your hockey-playing disapproving Uncle Lazrado, and keep them as tensed as the robust badam trees

Ignore the pulsing pain in your Auntie-Felcy-like dimpled knees, and wait for the rush of belonging from this ancestral earth

Erase the echoes of recalled laughter at the waddle of your fleshy thighs the first time you visited from London and wore your favourite Minnie Mouse printed raspberry-coloured shorts, and enjoy the sensation of hundreds of years of blood and perspiration flooding into your veins

Relish in the destroying tides of incoming birthright as they replace the otherness coiled in the craters of your stomach

Revel as your broad shoulders, that favour your indifferent Cousin Mingel, release the oppressive weight of imposterhood and collected hurts

Savour the taste of dirt and sweat overwhelming your too-square chin, and your tip-tilted nose, so unlike anyone’s else’s, as all your cells take root in this space where you were discounted and overlooked and envisage the decades of frustrated fury as it’s established you’re part of this legacy now and can never be removed