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

Absolution in Her Red Eyes

Mara helps her mother out of the pew, hoping nobody will notice them slipping out before the end of service. She’d realized her mom was high when she came back from the bathroom, ten minutes into service, with eyes red and half-closed.

“Hope, hi. How are you?” Todd Baker whispers, blocking the door. His hair is pomaded high on his head—reaching for Jesus, Mara thinks.

She smiles innocently and says, “My mom’s not feeling too well right now. I should be getting her home.”

Todd’s eyes linger on Hope’s arm, and then meet her eyes. She stares back at him, unblinking, then drawls, “You are a sinner.”

He chuckles and shakes his head, “Well, we all are. But Jesus absolved us, Hope, you know that.”

“Mom, c’mon.” Mara says as she tugs on her mother’s arm.

“That’s probably a good idea, Mara. Do you need any help getting her to the car?”

Hope watches the man grow a red tail, then jabs her finger into Todd’s face and shouts, “Get away from my daughter!”

“Mom, stop!” Mara grabs Hope’s hand and pushes past the exit. “She’s really not feeling herself!” she calls over her shoulder, rushing toward the parking lot.

Mara gets in their car but Hope does not.

There is a demon in her car—Hope knows it. God has visited her and He has given her the power to detect evil. Hope stares as the demon in the driver’s seat grows two red horns. It is talking to her but she cannot understand; she has too much Heaven within her to speak to children of Hell. She shakes her head at the demon, “I will not go with you.”

Mara stares at her mother in disbelief. “You need to come with me. How else are you going to get home?” She lowers her voice so nobody around the church will hear, “You can’t go walking the streets doped up, mom. Get in the car.”

Mara’s words get through to her mother, and Hope recognizes that the demon in her car is her daughter. The demon pleads again, “Please, mom, let me just take you home and get you to bed.”

“You are not my child anymore,” Hope spits. She gets on her knees and pulls the cross up from around her neck to ward away the demon. “You, child of the Devil—with the power of God the Almighty, I banish you back to Hell!”

Mara glares at her mother, and then notices the silence surrounding them. She looks in the rearview mirror: Service has ended and people from church are staring. “I’m sorry, mom,” Mara says. She backs out of the spot, slowly, so that she doesn’t hit her. She puts the car in drive, and leaves her mother in the parking lot.

Hope gets off her knees and tucks her necklace back under her cardigan. The Devil has gone. She has saved her church. She smiles, sits back on the parking lot ground, and smiles up at the sky.

Niles Reddick is author of the novel Pulitzer nominated Drifting too far from the Shore, a collection Road Kill Art and Other Oddities, and a novella Lead Me Home. His work has been featured in eleven anthologies/collections and in over a hundred and fifty literary magazines all over the world including PIF, Drunk Monkeys, Spelk, Cheap Pop, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Slice of Life, Faircloth Review, With Painted Words, among many others. His new collection Reading the Coffee Grounds was just released. His website is www.nilesreddick.com

Silent Crushes

The teenage girls decided to end their semester at school with a spend-the-night party. They ordered pizza, made sugar cookies, drank hot chocolate, and decided to watch Hallmark movies. Mostly, they talked about boys who they thought the teachers liked better and who mostly ignored them and preferred sports, hunting, or video games.

The parents who allowed them to flop at their house in pajamas too short for anyone never heard the kitchen door shut or the teens pile in two cars parked by the street and leave the subdivision to head directly into another subdivision. The parents had nodded in recliners, exasperated from repetitive, negative news. The girls parked by the curb of a house whose owners they didn’t know, made sure the lights were out at Nicholas’ family’s house next door, grabbed rolls of toilet paper, and draped the pin oaks in front, the holly that flanked the corner of the house, and the azaleas in the landscaping. Some of them giggled while others shushed them.

            Like adult burglars, they piled into the same vehicles and drove to the next house of a boy they all liked, but who also ignored them, and repeated the toilet paper escapade. They papered a third yard before calling it a night.  The three targets–Nicholas, Martin, and Clay—never had a clue anything was happening outside their windows. They wore headphones and were yelling at their friends who were all played a game on the X-box.

            It wasn’t until dawn that any of the boys’ parents realized their yards were draped in toilet paper. The drizzle started about three in the morning and made for quite a mess when neighbors, out for an early stroll with dogs, saw, shook their heads, and were thankful it wasn’t them who had to clean it up.

            Annoyed more than angry, the parents woke and told their boys what their friends had done, but they had no idea it was sweet girls from their class who had silent crushes on the boys.  Some of the mothers, though, knew what their daughters had done. They had the Life 360 app on their phones and tracked the whereabouts of their daughters. Two of the mothers noted where they had been at ten at night and confronted them.

            “We were watching Hallmark movies, drinking hot chocolate, and eating sugar cookies,” one daughter lied to her parents. She lost her phone and car keys for a week. The other daughter confessed what the friends had done, but the parents told her to avoid that sort of thing in the future, that it was illegal, that if they were caught, it could affect their college admissions.  Plus, the parents had done it themselves in a time when the only app was nosey neighbors who called parents to tell.

Maya Detwiller is a recent graduate of Lafayette College with Mechanical Engineering degree and an English minor.

My Favorite Things

My favorite thing that happens on the street is when a woman walks by and I smell the perfume she leaves behind. I am with her in the morning when her hair was still warm from her blow dryer and her cheek was still crossed by pillowcase folds. She pulls on fabulous clothes in the perfect order, cuffs, tucks, then untucks, and adds vanilla to the insides of her wrists. I want to run after her. I want to ask her for coffee so I can sit in her scent a little longer and ask her who was the first person she knew by their smell. It was her grandmother, who always smelled like the champagne colored bottle from her dresser. The glass had yellow, pink, and green flowers.

My favorite thing that happens in the subway is when the lights on the train flicker. I picture the car grinding to a stop and the lights going out. I would scream and grab the arm of the man who sat next to me. We would make breathy, nervous jokes to one another until the firemen let us out and we would walk through the long, dirty tunnel to the light of the last platform we passed. People would pull us up and over the ledge and we would go in different directions smile and we’d never see each other again.

My favorite thing that happens in my hometown is when I get to drive again. It is usually night and I can make the radio loud and feel the cold leather seats sap my body heat while I shoot through the hills. The people turn into lights and I don’t have to tell anyone a thing about me.

Bethany Bruno is a born and raised Florida Writer. She attended Flagler College, in St. Augustine, FL, where she earned her B.A in English. She was first published in the Flagler Review. She later attended the University of North Florida for her M.A. Before becoming a Library Specialist, she was an English Teacher and a Park Ranger with the National Park Service. She’s working on her debut novel, “From the Passenger Seat.” She lives in Port Saint Lucie, FL.

Food Stamp Anxiety

Pulling into the Walgreen’s parking lot, my senses heighten and I can feel a sense of regret. I shouldn’t be doing this, especially after all the hard work I put into the gym the last week. But, I feel like shit today and just want to eat ice cream and drink my drug of choice, Diet Pepsi. I’m sick of everyone telling me to get off the stuff. I know it’s not the healthiest drink but it’s better than alcohol. Drug addicts, alcoholics, and failures in all aspects of life exist in my circle of friends, yet I’m a fatty who likes diet soda way too much and needs to stop. Clearly, I have the problem.

My beat up tiny silver Nissan shuts off as I slide out of the driver’s seat and begin my walk toward the automatic doors. I’m dressed in my typical lazy attire- oversized hoodie, loose dress that comes down toward my knees, and thong flip flops. Some might say I’ve overdressed myself for only going to the store but the reality is I just find it easier to slip a dress over my head than having to find shorts and shirt that hides my round stomach. I’m not pregnant, by the way. The Scott family just happens to gain all of our weight in the belly region. Everywhere else is well proportioned, luckily. But the one nuisance is that I constantly have to tell people that I am, in fact, not pregnant and just fat. During last week’s failed job interview the assistant manager asked “Do you have any future happenings that would inhibit you from working?” all while staring at my stomach. I just smiled and said no, and tried to remember to suck in my stomach for the remainder of the interview. I didn’t get the job or even a call back letting me know that they had offered the position to someone else. A crappy hotel on the outskirts of town wouldn’t hire me, a college graduate with a friendly personality because I might be “indisposed” in a few months. This was the first of many times I’ve been asked something along the lines of “when are you do?” all while placing a hand on my belly. The answer is always the same – “Not a baby, just fat”… “Oh…” and away they go. The worst time this happened was when I worked at Old Navy. A woman asked me to get onto a ladder to check for a shoe in a bigger size. As I began to climb she grabbed my wrist in terror and said “Oh honey, you shouldn’t be doing that in your condition!” At the time, I had no freaking idea what she was talking about. I told her I was fine and went back to climbing. “But what if you fall?! Think about the child.” It felt like a slap in the face- in fact my entire face became red with embarrassment. I was so shocked that I could only let out a small breath of “but I’m not …pregnant. What?” She too gave me the typical response of “oh…” and walked away. So word of advice to everyone out there: never ever congratulate someone on being pregnant because you just never know. Unless they specifically tell you they are indeed pregnant, and then respond. Even if they have a belly sticking out the size of a watermelon, I would not say shit until they bring it up. It will save you and that person awkward embarrassment just in case you’re wrong.

Ding-Ding! Alerts all to my arrival as I enter the store. Markdowns and tiny shopping carts block the entrance as I move past it all. I anxiously walk down the rows of aisles and finally reach my destination. I pick up a twelve pack of diet soda and to my surprise the Cowbell cherry vanilla ice cream that I’ve loved since a kid is on sale. I grab a carton and begin to walk back towards the front counter. I walk past the sales clerk, an older woman with cat eyeglasses, as she is in the candy aisle helping another customer. I stop at the counter and unload my supplies. I really need to get the hell out of here. I need to hurry up and buy this so no one can see my food stamps card. I know the card shouldn’t be used for luxuries like soda and ice cream, but if everyone else can do it than so can I, right? Sure enough, a little girl and her mom pull up to the counter with their basket.

“Where’d she go?” she stammers at me. “She’s around the corner helping someone” I say, trying not to make eye contact with either one of them. Now my anxiety is really starting to build up inside. Maybe I should just leave the stuff, I don’t need it anyway! Maybe this is a sign from God that I shouldn’t break my diet. An older couple comes up behind the mother. “Can we go ahead of y’all? We just need to buy his batteries.” The mother nods and waves them right up next to me. The old woman is so close to me that she can see everything that’s in my purse, which isn’t much. If I took a step back, I’d step on her toes. Fuck this I’m… and now here she comes. She waddles up toward the register and apologizes. As she begins to scan my soda the little girl says “COW BELL ICE CREAM….” I look down at her, “You know many people died from that, right?”

A million emotions and thoughts go through my head. Should I be a smartass and say I’m counting on it? Or slap her and yell at the mother for raising such a rude little brat. Or just walk out crying? No, I don’t do any of these. Instead I just say “Okay” as the others just laugh. I don’t know if their laughing at me or the little girl, but I’ve had enough. As I slide the food stamps card through the machine, it freezes. The cashier clearly has no idea what she’s doing and just asks me to swipe it again. The pressure to get out of the store is so high that I think I might break and just leave everything. I can see the older woman behind me as she looks at her husband with a “you’ve got to be kidding me” kind of look. I drop the card and bend down to pick up just as the APPROVED writing appears. I’ve never been so relived, and I feel like I just broke through a brick wall that had been stacking all around me. I grab my bag and soda case and half smiled as I walk toward the exit. I don’t look back in fear of what could be said about me.

Next time, I’ll go to Wally World.

Ding- Ding!