Hedge Apple

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.

Widower, 29, seeks S/DF. I’m losing my hair, I smoke non-filtered Camels by the carton, I prefer to spend most Sundays trashing the NFL, and lately no one has mistaken me for Ryan Reynolds. That much said, I had been a loving husband, I like babies and animals, I can hook up a DVR, and I rank fairly high on the food chain.

Justin looked over the Internet message he had typed onto his IBM’s monitor, aware that self-deprecation tended to lose its charm once a woman sensed how well deserved it was. He really sucked at this, and one reading convinced him the ad reeked of defensiveness masked behind a strained attempt at cleverness. Worse, because of what it did not say the personal ad’s content was not entirely honest.

He hit ‘delete, ’and started over.

Widower, 29, physically challenged, seeks S/DF. You don’t have to be centerfold material or even attractive. You can be downright ugly. In fact, I prefer you to be ugly. I don’t de-serve anything better than a hag.

DAMN! DAMN!! DAMN!!!

White hot rage seemed the only emotion Justin felt capable of any more, and the moment got away from him again. He felt tempted to send the rewritten message as it stood but managed to pull himself back. Launched into cyberspace a personal ad this sick might attract the kind of woman who ate her young, but little else. Outbursts happened a lot with him lately, and the time had arrived for a reality check.

He hit ‘delete ’again, muttering while he ran his fingers through wispy strands of sandy hair. Pushing his wheelchair from the keyboard he reached for the photo album on the bookshelf. This daily ritual had become both self-defeating and painful, but he was a junkie addicted to memories of his past. Although his legs were as useless as pine logs, Justin’s hands had developed a will of their own.

He flipped through the photo album again and focused on one of the hundreds of snapshots he had taken with Sheila during the three years of their life together. The photo showed Justin and his young wife on a windy Long Island beach two summers ago. With arms entwined around one another like the newlyweds they were, they seemed the quintessential yin and yang in swimsuits. She was everything he was not, the beauty to his beast, the classic argument for the attraction of opposites. Justin could never fully understand just what Sheila had seen in him, but whatever it was he felt certain it had died the same day she had.

He studied the photo as if he held a Renoir in his hands. His young wife had been a knockout in that hot pink hint of a bikini she liked to wear. On that August afternoon he had been in such a feverish rush to make love to her that Sheila’s bikini bottom remained wrapped around her ankles the whole time.

Justin closed his eyes, and for a brief moment Sheila was there. He could even smell the wild honey scent of her hair. If he reached out she might stand before him, wanting him the way she had during the warm August afternoon captured in the photograph.

As always another memory forced its way into his head, the unwanted and uninvited remembering that chewed into his reflections like a voracious rat whenever his thoughts turned to Sheila. The memory remained inside Justin’s brain, a blood smeared freeze frame slowly churning itself into motion, exposing each torturous second of the last moments of Sheila’s life.

. . . The present collides with the past. Headlights of the oncoming eighteen wheeler come at him in an ambush of white light as the Toyota enters the rain swept Hartford ramp of Interstate 95. Sheila turns to look at him. She is like a confused child, unable to comprehend the enormity of the macabre moment they have entered into together. Ten tons of diesel truck bear down on them, and the small Toyota spins wildly, slamming the guard rail. The door on the passenger side shreds off in grotesque slow motion, and she is torn from her car seat. Thrown from the vehicle Sheila seems suspended in midair like a tossed rag doll. Her body skids upon the medial rail that promptly severs her upper torso from her lower, scattering the sections of her dissected flesh and gashed bone fifty feet apart.

Ten tons of metal effectively slammed what remained of Sheila into her grave and made match wood of the bones inside Justin’s legs.

Enter ‘delete ’and everything disappears. It was that simple.

Disabled Widower, 29, seeks anyone who can make the past disappear.

DamnDamnDamn…

He lit a cigarette, secretly hoping that his lungs might soon turn into ash and end the empty charade that had become his life. Of course, the punchline was that even the tiest life had to go on regardless of the uncertainty he felt about how that could happen.

The monitor of Justin’s computer remained empty. He returned to the keyboard willing himself to write something, anything.

Pitiful paraplegic, 29, more emotionally than physically challenged, desires any morsel of pity a woman might show toward a man who is incapable of getting over the death of the only woman who ever had the poor judgment to fall in love with him.

Succinct and to the point. More important, it was honest.

Who reads this sort of drivel anyway? he wondered.

Only the thousands of agoraphobes who had no lives of their own. Only those pathetic recluses who spent so much time at their computer terminals there seemed no world beyond their door that did not have the ‘cyber ’prefix attached to it. People who, if given the chance, might delete their entire lives.

Maybe he would deliver his personal ad unedited right now. Maybe he would send it out into the vast outreaches of cyberspace just to see what sort of excuse for a woman might respond, what sort of mirror image of himself was as desperate and alone.

The cigarette suddenly burned Justin’s lip, and pulling it from his mouth he realized he had smoked the Camel to a nub.

When he looked back at the computer’s monitor he discovered the screen read ‘message sent’. Some internal demon lurking within the darker chambers of his psyche had delivered the personal ad for him. Or, maybe his hands had operated independently of his brain again, just as they had done with Sheila’s photos in the album. In either case, the IBM’s monitor indicated the message had somehow irretrievably gone out courtesy of the Internet into the furthest regions of cyberland.

Gone. Departed like his legs and what used to be his life. Fading and disseminating out there somewhere in time or space along with Sheila and the scent of her hair during an afternoon on Long Island. All of it evaporating into mist except for the blinding lights of an eighteen wheeler tearing a crevice through the darkness of a rainy night.

It took a moment for the image to register, and at first it seemed his eyes had lost their focus along with his brain. He could see the blurred letters of the keyboard through his hands as if he were staring at them through smoked glass. He held his hand to the light. He might just as well have been staring through gauze.

For the first time in as long as he could remember, Justin almost smiled at the sinister absurdity of his circumstances. Everything was gone, yet at the same time nothing was. Try as he might he could not delete the ghosts. But the ghosts were not what he really wanted to make disappear. Some things were so ludicrous you almost had to laugh just to keep from screaming.

He knew he might remain right where he sat, there at the keyboard for the rest of the day waiting for a response that would never come. That was not the answer. But he knew what was. He typed a single sentence.

Not really seeking anyone, not any more.

Justin smiled again as he watched his hand continue to fade. Considering for a moment, he added another sentence.

Just want to erase it all.

He hit ‘delete ’and kept pressing down on the key, barely able to see the flesh of his own knuck-les.

His smile disappeared last.

—

Ken Goldman, former Philadelphia teacher of English and Film Studies, is an Active member of the Horror Writers Association. He has homes on the Main Line in Pennsylvania and at the Jersey shore. His stories have  appeared in over 970 independent press publications in the U.S., Canada,  the UK,  and Australia with over twenty due for publication in 2023-24. Ken’s tales have received seven honorable mentions in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. He has written six books : three anthologies of short stories, YOU HAD ME AT ARRGH!! (Sam’s Dot Publishers), DONNY DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE (A/A Productions) and STAR-CROSSED (Vampires 2); and a novella, DESIREE,  (Damnation Books). His first novel OF A FEATHER (Horrific Tales Publishing) was released in January 2014. SINKHOLE, his second novel, was published by Bloodshot Books August 2017.

My dead mom’s house overflowed. Potted strawberry plants hung from the ceiling. The
walls curved strangely. Buckets of potatoes and dirt sat under every window. Mom had gotten weird in the end; we’d stopped connecting, so I’d stopped coming around. Last time I’d been here…it hadn’t been like this at all.

In our phone call from this past winter, I remembered her mentioning hiring someone to
help renovate her “hobbit hole,” but I’d been tuned out and had never asked what she’d meant.
This was what she’d meant.
I strolled over to the kitchen, where things only got worse. Mom had always loved to
make food for the two of us. She’d taught me from a young age how to bake bread and dice
various vegetables. She’d said she liked to have a “kitchen buddy.” That was before she’d gone
crazy.

Countless shelves lined the walls. More potted food plants hung and stacked everywhere.
A circular window like out of Pinterest centered the kitchen, showing off…the brick wall behind
it. Overgrown fresh thyme and basil trailed over the countertops and down the shelves. Every
plant’s container was adorned in…I guess you could call it art. Mom had never been good at
finger painting, but she’d finger painted. One of the pots boasted a blotty blue…flower? Another
had what I thought was a dog. Some of them I generously ascribed the category of abstract trees.
No pot lay empty, though. Give her that, she never was one for waste–

And a thought occurred to me.

I counted back the days that had passed, the time it’d taken to arrange her demanded
green burial and funeral “celebration,” and I realized. All of these plants should have been dead.
My gaze slowly spun around the crowded, small house. I eyed every odd vine and dwarf tree.
And I noticed. Everything was green. Not a shrivel or wilt in sight.

My skin broke into gooseflesh. I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry.
“Psshh, they’re just resilient. Or she asked a neighbor to water them…”
Except she had no neighbors. She had insisted on living in the forest in the middle of
nowhere like a “goofy little woods witch.” And abruptly the thought of being utterly alone for
miles in this house scared the crap out of me. My heart began thumping despite my perfect
stillness.

What was I doing? Everything was fine. This was probably some complex grief thing, me
seeing nothing out of something because the person who’d raised me had died. Me searching for
answers, answers as to why a mentally ill but otherwise fairly healthy woman in her early fifties
would suddenly die in her sleep. Maybe even further back than that, perhaps searching for the
reason why my once light-hearted hippie mother had started growing erratic, refusing to leave
her house, singing to herself in gibberish words when she thought no one could hear her.

I started moving at a snail’s pace through the house, placing one foot in front of the other
again. The logical half of my brain told me I would search the house, find nothing, and it would
appease my terrified lizard brain. The other half…was looking for something, something I
instinctually knew had to be there.

I found myself in the basement. Tears pricked in my eyes, building with my anticipation.
Rounding the last dusty wooden step, I poked my head out into the damp darkness. I recalled
from when we’d gone house shopping for her post-retirement that the previous owner had used
the basement as a cellar for fancy wines, filled the place with dehumidifiers to keep up with the
moisture. Mom had never bothered, it seemed. The smell of old mold drifted up to meet my
nose.

And some primal intuition whispered in my ear something I’d never been told, “This is
where your Mamma keeps her mushrooms.”
A cold sweat broke out over my forehead. My breathing swiftly turned into panting. But
it was nothing. It had to be. My imagination was running wild, but my legs moved without my
control, and suddenly I was fully in the basement, eyes adjusted to the darkness, and I saw…the mushrooms.

—

Brynn Lietuvnikas is a graduating student of Hagerstown Community College under its Early College Degree Program, and she is a lifelong Creative Writer. Although she once thought she had retired her novelist cap, she is giving it another go with a personal romantasy project now reaching over one hundred and fifty pages. Brynn did not want to give up her short story practice either, however. She admits that she has written an unusually high number of short stories surrounding faerie circles, but she’s not about to stop now. 

I smile and nod for her to continue, while wishing she’d just shut up. Her hands flair in the air and I hate it. I hate how passionate she is, how much life she breathes into every word.

This is the same way she used to tell me bedtime stories. There were times that I was so scared to fall asleep that she’d be stuck there with me until the early hours of the morning. She never got frustrated or stern with me. No, my older sister, perfect person that she is, that she has always been, would only smile and start another one of her made up adventures. They usually featured two little girls surviving in a world where they could only trust each other.

They had always made me feel better. Somehow lessening the sting that no one else cared for us. She always knew the right things to say.

I try to hold onto those memories, to help ease the embarrassment that I feel when we’re in public together.

I struggle to keep the smile on my face as her hands land on the table a bit too loudly, before picking up the wrong fork.

I discreetly look around, already knowing what I’ll see: old money bitches having entire mocking conversations about us with nothing more than a few shared looks.

I hate them. I hate them more than I could ever hate my sister.

Years ago, I had been excited to marry into this life. It was a fairytale come to life. I had felt special when my husband would tell me that I was a breath of fresh air, someone more genuine than the people that ran in his usual circles, his family’s circle.

It had taken me months to figure out that the compliments my mother-in-law gave me were actually insults. Sharp, cunning, and cutting deeper than any other confrontation I’ve ever had.

Honestly, I hate my husband a little bit too. Him pulling me into this world, where I am surrounded by people who judge and judge until I hate myself more than I ever could them, it feels like a betrayal.

Finally, I can see our waitress making her way over. I have been ready for the check since she brought the food out. She smiles and goes to speak, but all that comes out is an obnoxious blaring sound.

Confused, she snaps her mouth shut, clears her throat, and tries again. The same thing happens, but this time I don’t feel as if I am sitting at the table. It feels like I am floating somewhere above it.

I try to hold onto the dream, to push the sounds of my alarm out of my mind.

As I open my eyes I push back the urge to cry.

I would give anything for just one more miserable minute at that table.

Instead, I sit up in my small twin bed, swinging my legs over the side, feet resting on the cold floor of my studio apartment.

I take a second to center myself before looking over to the only picture frame on my bedside table. It’s scratched, the stain is worn in places on each side, and one of the corners is glued together. It’s perfect.

I trace the face of the young woman centered in the photo. She’s laughing with her head thrown back. There is a kind of happiness in her that can’t be faked. This face was supposed to stand with me so that we could take on the world together. This is the face that I want to remember her by.

Not the thin, worn image from the newspaper article that I have hidden just behind it.

For me she had grown up fast, filling the shoes that our parents refused to. But no one had ever done the same for her. All the comfort and warmth that she provided me, she could only find from a guy named Ricky who sold 8-balls for eighty bucks out of his shitty Pontiac Grand Am.

For a second I let myself feel the embarrassment, the hatred that I have for her, for leaving me to face this life without her.

It takes me longer than normal to push the feelings back down, to stuff them in a box deep inside that I never consciously open. But I do it. I set her back down on the stand beside my bed and get ready for work.

It’s an hour later, after I have flipped off the lights and am halfway out the door that I pause, calling back to her, “I’ll see you tonight”.

It feels like I am trying to pressure her to be there again, and I guess I am. I will spend the rest of my life hoping to have shitty dreams of us together so I can escape the nightmare that is having to survive life alone.

—

Naomi Sheely thrives somewhere in chaos and caffeine. This has led her to the Dean’s list and literary publications at HCC, all while completing a double major and several all-night study sessions. It has, somehow, also given her a steady and calm husband and a well-behaved dog. Predictably, though, her three children are feral. There is no free time for hobbies, only the sweet escape of the written word.