Yueying Guo is an English Major from New York City. She has been published in Eunoia Review and Linden Avenue and won first place for poetry in both Newtown Literary and the Penguin Random House Creative Writing Competition in 2018. She also likes art, philosophy, and books.

Bacon and Bitter Coffee

When Nathan told me that he was married after five months of going out, I was afraid to feel. There were so many things I could feel: hatred, anger, jealousy, sadness—but I didn’t feel anything. I only remember thinking that the air conditioning in the cafe was turned up too high, that I didn’t eat breakfast yet and the mushroom omelette in front of me looked delicious, and that Nathan looked good in his casual striped shirt.

He continued on talking, frantically, when he didn’t see my expression change or any reaction. “…I divorced her two days ago and I’ve been gathering up courage to tell you it ever since. I know it’s shameful of me to ask this of you, but—if you still love me—will you stay with me?”

At that moment, I started crying. Adultery was the same thing that brought my dad to hit my mom that day, to leave us, and for my mom to drive into a river.

There was so many things I could tell him at that moment: the fact that if he was fine committing adultery now, about about the future? The fact that if he was keeping it a secret from me for the five months we were dating, were we really in love? Did he really trust me? Or I could simply say no—but I didn’t.

It was only when I remembered my mom’s face that I couldn’t take it anymore. Tears came out of my eyes, my teeth chattered, and I stood up. Nathan was saying something and tried to grab my hand, but I slapped him away before grabbing my bag and running out of the cafe with its bright lights and alluring scent of bacon and bitter coffee. 

I ran through the streets, aware of the people looking at me, smudging my makeup as I rubbed my face, high heels unsuited for running slapping the concrete ground, skirts swishing at my legs. I wish I hadn’t dressed up for today, for him. I had even been so excited to use the new perfume I brought last week, and had wished he would notice it. I even wore pink lingerie because he said pink looked best on me. I tried so hard for him. Yet this whole time he was married. 

Once I was on the train, I had finally stopped crying and trembling. I rested my head against the window and watched the world flash by. All I could do was think. I was committing adultery this whole time, and I didn’t even know it. The very thing that killed my mom and killed half of my heart. I thought about how I felt when I saw my dad’s cold eyes the day he left us. I thought about how I felt when I saw my mom sit on her unmade bed for days after he left and before she died. Mostly, I thought about how for a moment, I was about to say ‘yes’. 

Nicole Efford is a senior at the College of William and Mary, majoring in English and minoring in Creative Writing.

Breakfast with Mom

            Mara cracked two eggs and put bread in the toaster. “Mom,” she said to her mother, who was slumped over the kitchen table, “wake up.” She began to scramble the eggs, mumbling, “I can’t believe this. Couldn’t stay clean for even a week.”

Mara stepped toward the table, “Mom, get up.” She shook her mother, then took her cold hand. “Mom?”

Her mother’s ghost sat next to her body. “I was so unhappy, you had to understand,” the ghost said. Mara couldn’t hear her. Her mother’s ghost tried to wipe away her daughter’s tears, but they couldn’t feel each other.

The toaster popped up.

Mir-Yashar is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA program in fiction. He is the recipient of two Honorable Mentions from Glimmer Train and has had work nominated for The Best Small Fictions. A self-proclaimed Big Lebowski devotee, he lives in Fort Collins and loves White Russians and listening to Tchaikovsky.

We Are Romanovs

My older sister Nancy and I declared ourselves Romanovs after Dad’s constant berating. I was too much of a dreamer, she was too much of a smart-aleck, foul-mouthed. We looked uncannily like Mother. Of course, Dad was a foul-mouthed drunk, a failed actor.

We became Romanovs, comported ourselves with grace. We confiscated Dad’s beer, issued edicts to Dad. Edicts demanding respect, to be addressed as “your imperial highnesses.”

The result? More yelling, but beneath it, fatherly bewilderment.

We played Romanovs in school, people laughed, pointed. We held onto power with a fervency we’d never imagined, heads high, smiles conveying victory.

Suzanne Verrall lives in Adelaide, Australia. Her flash fiction, essays and poetry appear in Atlas and Alice, Monkeybicycle, Archer Magazine, Lip Magazine, Poetry NZ Yearbook, Australian Poetry Journal, and others.      www.suzanneverrall.com

Ogre

The ogre lived in the dense damp core of the forest. His treasures – the sheep with their self-spinning fleeces, the unsnuffling pigs – were born and grew and died as they had for all memory. Only the ogre had no beginning or end.

A silver-skinned princess stumbled into the forest. She wore a look of terror as if having woken to find herself blind.

The ogre smelt her. He lumbered through the forest, crushing wildflowers in his haste to glimpse her amongst the green-black shadows.

Day and night he watched her scavenging for berries, sipping dew from bladed grass. He fell in love. She became more beautiful and his love grew until it reached the last unvisited corner of his mighty ogre heart.

At which time he took the princess in his trunk-like arms and squeezed every last drop of life from her.

It was what was expected of him.

R. J. Keeler was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. Lived in jungles of Colombia, S.A., up to age twelve. BS Mathematics NCSU, MS Computer Science UNC, MBA UCLA, Certificate in Poetry UW. Honorman, U.S. Naval Submarine School. “SS” (Submarine Service) qualified. Vietnam Service Medal. Honorable Discharge. Whiting Foundation Experimental Grant. P&W’s Directory of Poets and Writers. Member IEEE, AAAS, AAP. The Boeing Company. His collection “Detonation” will be published in December.

The high moral tone that he used in the bequest speech was judged to be insincere and moreover was received by all the audience consisting of family and attorneys and friends as borderline insubordination but regardless of the tone we all had to agree with each other that it was delivered the language not the tone with exquisite precision and correctness in addition the grammar was absolutely flawless to the point where during the speech there were at least three phrases that stopped my attention cold and for them I had to focus and quickly in the moment form a mental image of the sentence in question and ask is that correct wow I must have been using that word incorrectly all these years furthermore the content to my ears and listening mind sounded expertly well-crafted and even a bit rhetorical one got the sense that the speaker had labored over the speech well into the night before he gave it and had gone over it in the privacy of his study again and again asking himself what do I want the audience to conclude from this speech and how therefore do I guide them invisibly to that desired conclusion at the end of this bequest speech or maybe an hour afterwards after the show of hands and the signing of documents I began to realize that the whole affair was so very well-scripted and designed as to be underhanded and to manipulate us all into innocent little lambs acceding to the agendas of the speaker but by then it was too late.