Author: Sarah Fitzgerald

Ms. Cake Doll Spygirl climbs onto Lego Dino to get across the hot lava so she can meet Ken the Office Man for a dance in the puffy purple mountains. She does not have to look pretty for Ken to like her but she does anyway. She does not have to know better for Ken to like her but she does anyway. She does not have to stop crying for Ken to like her but she does anyway because I taught her how. She does not have to stop crying in front of Leg Dino but she mostly does anyway.

I explain to her that Ken will be around her, but if she wants her friends or her mommy to be around her, she has to teach her eyes to swallow the tears before they come out. I show her again right now because I have to do it a lot even though my mommy did not explain why I got replaced and she is really busy now and I asked her why I got replaced but she did not answer. She just said no a lot of times and that that was not right and I should not think that I was replaced and that my sister is not better than me but I already know she is not better than me because she does not ever stop crying and I know that you are not supposed to cry at all. When you get hurt, you are supposed to suck on it and ask for a Band Aid but then you are supposed to go play again.

So Ms. Cake Doll Spygirl who knows everything by watching other people when they do not know she is watching puts on her happy face when she gets close to the end of the lava to meet Ken the Office Man. He is waiting at the end of the lava for her already so he can help her off of Lego Dino. My sister is too small to get out of her crib but she makes a bigger noise than anything I have ever heard and she will not stop until my mommy comes back.

“It is not fair,” Ms. Cake Doll Spygirl says to Ken the Office Man. “Other people can cry all day and people go running to them.”

“You are not by yourself,” Ken the Office Man says and he puts his hand around Ms. Cake Doll Spygirl’s hand.

Ms. Cake Doll Spygirl wants to pull her hand away but she is afraid she will be alone forever if she does that, so she lets Ken the Office Man hold it. “Yeah, but I am also not crying.” She smiles really big because she is proud. “My mommy taught me how.”

When my mommy comes into the room I have to share with my sister to wake her up from her nap, I start crying. I cannot help it. I start crying because I know my sister is going to start to cry when my mommy wakes her up. My mommy looks right at me when she picks up my sister from her crib. She bounces my sister in her arms and my sister finally stops crying but I cannot. My mommy does not look at me again but my sister does as my mommy carries her out of the room and I am by myself.

The room starts to get really small and the walls are coming closer to me all around and I do not see the door where my mommy left anymore. I just see the hot lava coming all around me when I fall onto the bed and make sure that only Lego Dino can hear me crying.

—

Megan Wildhood is a writer, editor and writing coach who helps her readers feel seen in her monthly newsletter, poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017), her full-length poetry collection Bowed As If Laden With Snow (Cornerstone Press, May 2023) as well as Mad in America, The Sun and elsewhere. You can learn more about her writing, working with her and her mental-health and research newsletter at meganwildhood.com.

Each night, Meredith places her husband’s blue terry cloth robe next to her in the bed. Before she turns off the dusty bedside lamp and drifts into her dreams, she drapes the robe’s fraying sleeve across her body, hoping to feel a faint embrace, if just for a fleeting second. When she wakes in the morning, sometimes she smells the aroma of dark roast coffee wafting into her bedroom. As she journeys downstairs, the steps creek like her bones. She looks into the kitchen and it’s always empty. Maybe the aroma has lingered in the tattered walls. The walls hold a lot of history. Or maybe the aroma has lingered in her head. Her head holds a lot of memories. She keeps the windows closed during the day,
even when the temperatures are sultry. This makes it easier to feel a desperate breeze. The house is over a century old, so she realizes it’s no stranger to witnessing drafts. At dinner time, she swears she sees the tablecloth move every once and a while, especially on the nights when she cooks her husband’s most cherished meal of beef stroganoff, garlic potatoes, and red peppers. She knows that your eyes can play tricks on you, but she’d rather not blame her cataracts. After the sun sets, the same routine begins. Some people
fear ghosts, but Meredith fears missing out on what could have been. Time is an excruciating toothache when it doesn’t give you what you long for. Meredith learns that moving forward is even harder when you want to be haunted by the past.

—

Zach Keali’i Murphy is a Hawaii-born writer with a background in cinema. His stories appear in The MacGuffin, Reed Magazine, The Coachella Review, Raritan Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, Little Patuxent Review, and more. He has published the chapbook Tiny Universes (Selcouth Station Press). He lives with his wonderful wife, Kelly, in St. Paul, Minnesota.

It was happening! Leila's nightmare was about to come true! The thing had finally managed to make its way into her abdomen, coiling around her intestines like a ten-foot viper and setting her pancreas and liver ablaze. She was sure light would soon spring out of her belly button!

Her thoughts went back to that August day in 1995. Lunch was Welsh rarebit with roast potatoes followed by watermelon. Mom recited a Charles Simic poem as she slit its belly open, spilling its juicy blood and exposing the crimson flesh and black pips.

Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile.
And spit out the teeth.

Leila was on her third slice when Mom gently smacked her hand away.

"That's enough, sweetheart. You've had plenty of food already.”

Then, she added as an afterthought,” Did you know that if you swallow a watermelon pip, it can do some weird things and even take over your body?"

The image that popped into ten-year-old Leila’s mind was like a scene from a movie she had sneakily watched with her cousin Raymond - a horror called Alien, where a scaly creature laid eggs inside people's bellies, incubated, and burst out of their chests.

She avoided eating watermelon altogether for a while, afraid the same thing might happen to her.

When she was in her teens, entered the age of reason, and decided she wanted to study quantum physics, she realized that her mother's story was just an old wives' tale. But apparently, the ideas our moms inadvertently put into our heads when we are kids tend to come around, and we can’t let them go no matter how hard we try.

Despite her firm knowledge of how things worked in the real world, the fear of the watermelon-induced inter-belly invasion remained in the back of Leila’s mind whenever she ate a slice of that darned fruit. She tried to resort to her understanding of the principles of matter and energy to rationalize her fear. She told herself that the watermelon's juicy sweetness was merely a result of complex chemical reactions and that any notion of it invading her organism was purely irrational. Yet the "but what if…" lingered.

“What if Mom’s cautionary story holds a sinister truth? What if those tiny seeds, once ingested, unleash evil energy within me, slowly but surely devouring me from the inside out?” she thought, promptly forsaking her university training, and putting the rational side of her brain to sleep.

The tray in front of her seemed to mock her, its cold, shiny surface reflecting her growing discomfort. The once-appealing meal, complete with a watermelon rind, now looked repulsive and threatening. She couldn't shake off the feeling that the pip’s electrons had already done a sneaky quantum leap without needing a superconducting electrical circuit and were about to unleash a grotesque transformation within her. The vision of her body transformed into a weird garden of tendrils shooting a blizzard of shimmering photons made her want to cram her fist into her mouth and vomit the offending pips.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we are passing a zone of heavy turbulence. The captain has turned on the fasten the seat belt signs. Please remain seated until further notice."

The flight attendant's voice rang urgent, but nothing compared to the panic dancing a roaring fandango in Leila's gut. She had always been a fearless flyer jetting off to conferences around the world, but the announcement sent shivers down her spine this time. As she settled into her seat, the dance macabre made her think that the worst-case scenario was not engine failure, hijacking, or even a crash but a watermelon performing physics-defying tricks in her stomach!

The turbulence was now tossing the aircraft like a can of sardines someone was trying to tip into a bowl. Around her, passengers gripped their armrests while the overhead lockers rattled, threatening to spill the luggage out. Leila was sure the next movement would split the plane open, and the machine and the passengers would rain down like metal and flesh confetti, accompanied by the sound of shattering glass and screams of terror.

Soon, the inevitable would occur - the fruit would release its energy and take up all space. The belt already pinched her waist. She could almost see her stomach swell like it had been pumped full of helium. The buckle would pop off and smack the passenger next to her square in the face, gauging out his eyes. It was as if she’d downed an entire tube of Lax-a-Day. The pressure was unbearable. She knew she wouldn’t be able to hold it much longer before exploding and dripping blood and tissue all over the aircraft.

It was hard to believe that out of all the weird things that could happen to her, she'd wind up as an involuntary experiment, proving that quantum leaps both in

physics and genetic engineering were not always a welcome step forward. She'd soon become a human incubator for a watermelon!

She squeezed her eyes shut when the violent quaking got harder and harder.

"Miss! Miss!" the flight attendant standing beside her struggled to shake her awake.

"Are you okay? We're experiencing some turbulence, but we'll be through it soon. Just hold on tight and try to stay calm."

And just suddenly, as it had begun, the bloating and the fear of a pip transmuting its energy inside her vanished. She was back in her seat, safely strapped, her flat stomach tucked into her skinny size-8 jeans, the turbulence subsiding.

"I have no idea what I could have named the watermelon infant. Perhaps Dolores… Dolores Beckett, like in the “Quantum Leap” TV series. I can bet it must be excruciatingly painful to give birth to a monster fruit," she chuckled as the loudspeakers spluttered back to life, indicating they were about to land.

—

Polish by birth, a citizen of the world by choice. First story short-listed for the Irish Independent/Hennessy Awards, Ireland, 1996.  Since she went back to writing fiction in 2020, more than 80 of her stories, flash fiction and non-fiction, have been accepted for publication. She has recently won 1st prize in the  International Human Rights  Arts Movement literary contest.

I love my brother. I really do. But I would be remiss in my duties as an older brother if I did not make a reasonable effort to embarrass him as publicly as possible. I could tell the story of the time he accidentally fell out of a tree while trying to jump from one branch to another (he claims he wasn’t). I could tell the story of the time he accidentally broke his arm while trying to impress his girlfriend (he claims he wasn’t). Instead, I will tell the story of the time he accidentally made scrambled eggs while trying to make brownies (he offers no defense).

Many dessert recipes involve mixing butter into the dough, and brownies especially almost always require it. To do this, people with the foresight to plan ahead know to leave some sticks of butter out to warm up to room temperature. Room-temperature butter becomes soft enough to mix with other ingredients. However, my brother is not especially known for his patience. His timeline between deciding he wanted brownies and actually making brownies was measured in minutes, not hours. My brother turned to a technique common among those of us who have a desire to cook something but lack the foresight to plan ahead. He stuck the butter in the microwave to melt it.

Normally, this works perfectly fine; The butter becomes partially melted and whatever is left becomes soft enough to stir into the rest of the ingredients. However, the laws of physics say that this process is dependent on what temperature the butter starts at and how much energy is added to the butter. Not enough energy and the core of the butter will still be too firm. In such a situation, the butter can simply be put back in the microwave for a bit longer.

My brother did not think to check the butter. He saw that the butter was starting to melt and thought that it would be good enough. I don’t know if he started with colder butter than normal or if he set the microwave to less time than normal. But, regardless of the reason, his butter was still too firm. Unfortunately, in his craving-driven haste, he did not pause before adding his next ingredient: eggs.

My brother did his best to try and beat the eggs and butter together, but quickly found he was no match for slightly chilly lipids. So, he did what he always did when the butter was too firm. He stuck it back in the microwave. What he forgot about was that he was already trying to mix eggs into the butter. A few moments later, he had his lightly warmer butter and proceeded to continue mixing it into the eggs.

It was at this point that my brother realized he had screwed up. The brief trip in a microwave was enough to cook the eggs. As he tried to beat them together, instead of a liquid mixture he got flakes of cooked egg tossed with butter. It was actually pretty decent scrambled eggs. Nice and fluffy with a firmly buttery flavor, if a bit light on spices. But, a far cry from the brownies he intended.

I should offer a defense of my brother by saying he is a perfectly competent home cook; Not only can he feed himself, but he often contributes delicious dishes to family gatherings. He took to making some brownies without thinking because he had done it before and they came out fine. But anyone who spends enough time in the kitchen will eventually have a few embarrassing mistakes. And, to my brother’s misfortune, I was close enough to witness this event. So, he was unable to hide it like many of my own kitchen mistakes have been hidden.

—

Jonathan is an environmental scientist who enjoys dabbling in literature.  He has published a poetry book titled Through the Ages and maintains a website of some of his works at Crayshack.com.  He has also been previously published in Bittersweet, Z-Sky, and Plants & Poetry.