Nightingale & Sparrow

Category: Fiction

Stuck in the Tape Deck
Stuck in the Tape Deck
Hannah Madonna
The car ran fine, though the air conditioning was spotty, and the floor mats were gone. They spun the knob of the radio dial trying to find a station to listen to. Neither liked silence, and they’d both agreed they needed to spare their phone batteries, just in case. But they found more static than music, a thick, crackly blanket of sound almost worse than the quiet. There was a tape deck in the car, though, and their hands moved idly over the console, half-interested, and when they hit the eject button, a cassette tape popped out. It was hard, clear plastic with no label, and the shiny black ribbon was spooled all on one side. The day was hot, and the road stretched across the dusty landscape like a worn elastic band, loose and crumbling as it sagged over the gently rolling hills.
Fingers with shiny black nails pushed the tape back in.
It clicked into place and then a quiet, rolling static filled the car. A voice broke through. Rough and sad, a deep, aching loneliness —I’ve been searching for you, it sang. Searching for all that I’ve lost. No music played, only the voice, filled with a longing that sank like a dull knife deep, deep into their chests. Molly pressed the eject button before she could stop herself, but that voice was etched, permanent, into her, like the dolorous clang of a bell that would never be unrung.
There had been too much silence. Before they left, it was nearly all silence —hands unclasped, words unspoken, the very breath and beat of their bodies dimmed and contained. After Jasmine shaved her head, she got a tattoo just behind her ear. Lines of thin, scrawly, looping black wound together to make the head of a sunflower. Molly traced the petals with the tip of a finger and held back laughter and asked, very quietly, if it tickled. Jas said yes and cupped her hand over the flowers, to keep the ghost of the touch from leaking away. Molly heard everything she meant, everything she couldn’t say —and they ran, together and never silent again.
The car was silent, more oppressive than the heat, a choking cloud around them with no life or noise. As though it had been an accident in the first place, as though neither had wanted to stop the sounds of that voice, they pushed the tape back in together. It clicked on. That voice played again, heartbreaking and bare and raw. With no music behind it, the voice felt bottomless, a baritone reaching down for something always out of reach. Jas put her hand on Molly’s leg, on the soft bright skin above her knee. Molly clasped her hand and they listened as the tape played, intimate and painful, until the voice whispered to a halt and the sound rolled back into quiet static. Then they rewound the tape and listened again.
The sweltering heat sizzled out as night fell, and the sky was black and cool when they pulled into a motel, dotted with stars that dripped pale light onto the world in strings of gauzy silver. They tripped over each other into the room, buoyed by the high of travel and the strange, demi-magic sound of the tape. They took turns showering, ate the protein bars they’d packed, and then lay together with the lights off, on the top of one of the twin beds. The other stood like a stranger in the room, its only personality the bright, geometric print of the bedspread, washed by the darkness into a slab of dull gray.
Jasmine curled her fingers into Molly’s as they stared up at the ceiling, a crack of light from the half-closed curtain like an orange slice across the soft beige. One of them started to hum, or both of them, together maybe, their voices soft and fleeting and conjoined. It was the song from the tape, the haunting melody of that lost, lonely voice.
I’m still searching, the voice had sung, its echo all around them. Molly moved closer, nuzzling into Jas’s shoulder, their hands in a knot between their bodies. The mass of Molly’s curls sat soft in a pillow around them as they sang about searching—and thought not about what they had lost, but all that they had found.
Hannah Madonna

June 24, 2021
A Midwinter Night’s Dream
A Midwinter Night’s Dream
Fija Callaghan
The celebrations were over. The wan winter sun had long since fallen and the wood rested in the deep, dreamless sleep of the year’s darkest night. Oberon pulled off his holly mask and laid it at his sleeping wife’s feet.
“Sweetly met by moonlight, fair Titania.” He touched the side of her pale face, cold as river water. He loved her, even still—it was easier to remember when she was asleep. Her dark eyelashes were edged in frost and he allowed himself a brief, forbidden moment of vulnerability. Then soft footsteps padded behind him and the moment was lost.
“Are you ready, my king?” Robin Goodfellow, wrapped in white fox fur, was a smudge against the winter landscape. “The Hunter is coming.”
Oberon disliked the Hunt. There was no order, no elegance. Only the wild winter wind stripping them raw of all pageant and pretension, tearing off their glamours and discarding them like falling stars. The distant howling of hounds preceded, just barely, the whisper of fresh snowflakes. Then the hunters came.
Herne, savage god of the wild places, led in his chariot of frost and thorns. Robin left his fox fur lying on the ground as he leapt up to meet them. Sighing, Oberon caught hold of a screeching wind and took to the back of a hound. Its fur was slick and oily and cold to the touch. The Wild Hunt careened across the sky and Oberon felt his carefully constructed facade slip away; here, in this fraternity of primordial elements, he was once again nothing but a man called True Thomas who had followed a faerie queen into elfland.
The land beneath them shifted from dense, snow-laden pines into patches of barren farmland, which in turn collapsed into the slickly-paved streets of the city. Windows winked at them and automobiles slipped in and out of crossroads. Oberon wondered if his Titania knew how different the world had become. There was a time when men out after dark on Midwinters had to mind their eyes didn’t stray skyward, lest they be taken to join the Wild Hunt’s parade. Now men had no time for the skies, no time for the old stories, and their eyes rarely left the slim little pocketbooks they all carried about.
They flew low over a fountain in a grand city square. The water was frozen mid-cascade and icicles hung from its crest. Two stone lions stood on either side; one of them looked up and nodded respectfully at the Hunt as it passed.
Oberon wasn’t quite sure what happened next. He looked to Robin Goodfellow and found that he was no longer at his side. The hound threw back its head in a mournful howl, and Oberon’s grip came loose, and then—
Then he was falling very very quickly.
Falling hurt. No— landing hurt. Oberon experienced pain so rarely, and it had been so long, that at first he didn’t recognize it for what it was. He merely identified a general feeling of unpleasantness that intensified as he tried to get to his feet.
He was at the fountain’s edge. The lion lay beside it, silent and resolute. He didn’t know how far the Hunt had taken him from his home, or which direction he should take to find his way back. The square was empty and the snow was falling in heavy clumps.
Not completely empty. A bundle of rags shifted, then pulled itself upright into something resembling a man. It smelled like liquor and human waste and forgotten things.
“Alright, mate?” it said.
Oberon could be many things, if he chose, but he would never be rude. “I am well. Your concern is welcome. I will be better once I find my way home.”
“Tha’s for certain. The radio said it’s gonna be cold as anything tonight. Get safe inside if you’ve a home to be inside of.”
“Yes…” Oberon scanned the unfamiliar landscape. “Where is the nearest woodland?”
The man shrugged, a great rumble of jackets and scarves. “There’s a park a few blocks down there, but they lock it up at night and the benches have those divider things on ‘em. Tha’s the only wood I know of. What’s your name, anyway?”
Oberon— he began to say, but that felt wrong in this place, this form. His lost name hadn’t been in his mouth for so long that its shape was all but forgotten. He held it carefully, uncertainly, like something both precious and venomous.
“Thomas. Thomas Rhymer.”
“Ah yeah? I knew a Thomas once, back in school. Awful bugger. Used to put glue on the soles of my trainers. I’m Jerry.” He held out his hand.
Oberon stared down at it. Surely this mortal man couldn’t understand the sacred covenant he was offering. However, to refuse the being who had become his host in this place would be the height of poor hospitality. With a sinking feeling in his chest, Oberon gave his hand in return.
Two hands joined over an exchange of names. The most powerful magic was often the simplest. The man dropped his hand, satisfied. “Right, you’d best be off while you can then. Hope there’s a good woman and a fire waiting for you. You don’ exactly look dressed for the weather, if you don’t mind me sayin’.”
Oberon nodded, indifferent. “The cold does not bother me as it once did.”
“Ah well, there’s a lot to be said for something to come home to. What’s she like, your lady?”
He felt a flicker of annoyance for this street waste who had so easily beholden him, but it was lost under the torrent of thoughts and feelings. How could he describe Titania? How could anyone? “She is ice and thorns and apple blossoms. She is a fire that burns through the darkest nights of Midwinter. Her heart is full of passion and her mind is a labyrinth of blades. I would die a thousand times for her.”
The man in rags nodded sagely. “I’ve known a few like tha’. Love is a tricky thing.”
The snow was falling faster now, painting the square anew as an empty canvas. The slick facets of the frozen fountain burrowed under the fresh snowfall. A hungry winter wind raised its head.
Oberon turned to the man. “And you? Where is your home?”
He spread his hands and gestured to the square. “My home is where my feet take me. Wherever I can catch a few moments rest, or a kind word. Home isn’ something that exists only within four walls.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “I understand.”
A crash came from behind them and Oberon whipped his head around. A piece of the frozen cascade had come loose and shattered on the ground below. Bits of ice littered the ground like diamonds.
Oberon shifted impatiently. “Have you no woman, no fire?”
“Not for a long time.” The man sat down again and watched the snow collect on his boots. “I had one of the good ones. The good one, the kind they used to write fairy tales about. I know you’re gonna laugh, but it’s the truth. We were supposed to be forever.
“Anyway, I lost my job a ways back—about a hundred o’ us did—and I lost my way for a while. I started blaming her. One day I came home and she was gone.”
Oberon considered the man, already knee-deep in snowfall. “And you live here now? In this place?” There was, he was certain, something not quite right about this.
The man turned his face skywards. Snow clung to his eyebrows. He looked like a drawing that was slowly being smudged out.
“It’s beautiful, isn’ it?”
That winter wind howled.
“The cold.” Oberon seized on it at last. “It will hurt you.”
Even he, king of the summer court beyond the hills, could not take this cold forever. He was beginning to feel it whispering deep in his bones, songs of sleep and darkness. Already he had delayed too long in this place. He searched for the stars to guide him home but they, along with the city around him, were fading into nothingness.
“It’s okay,” the man said. “I’ve no one to leave behind. All o’ my dreams were abandoned a long time ago. This isn’ such a bad way to leave the stage.” He pulled his coat tighter around him. “The snow is awfully pretty.”
Oberon stared down at him. Even under all the layers of hair and clothes, the man looked very small. His face had a bluish colour to it one didn’t usually see on mortal men. Oberon knelt down next to him.
“Jerry.” The word felt heavy and unfamiliar on his tongue. “Look around you. This is madness. The very world is disappearing.”
Jerry closed his eyes, and Oberon fought the ridiculous urge to pull them back open with his own hands—hands which were beginning to feel the bite of the cold as well.
“Thomas,” the man murmured sleepily. “My mum used to tell me stories about a Thomas. Went all the way to fairy land, he did.”
Trust Oberon of the Faeries to bind himself to another madman, he thought. This is worse than that slovenly playwright. What should it matter to him if this forgotten mortal died alone, on the wayside of human consciousness? He had more important things to worry about, like making his way home to his Titania and reclaiming the shape the Wild Hunt had taken. And yet, the panic in Oberon’s chest rose higher as he watched the man slip away into dreaming.
“Return with me. My family will give you shelter until the storm passes.” He could feel the man’s shoulders stiffening beneath his grip. “You stupid humans live and die like fireflies. Your light will not go out today.” Oberon wondered if he was becoming hysterical.
The man did not respond.
The King of Faeries looked around for help. The square was silent, and the buildings around it were softening into the background like a faraway dream. Only the frozen fountain and the stone lions guarding it kept a semblance of their shape. Oberon stood and brushed the snow off the lion nearest him. It gazed back with empty eyes.
“You.” Oberon pointed regally. “Wild guardian of this mortal temple. You who offer sanctuary to the lost people of this city. Your king requires your aid.”
The snow was already reobscuring the lion’s face. Oberon pushed it away impatiently.
“Lord of the jungle of smoke and glass. My host and I must travel back to the woodland. On your feet, I command you.”
There was no answer. Oberon looked back at Jerry. The man’s eyes were still closed. He could have been sleeping.
He knelt down at his side and gently put his fingers to his throat. A pulse flickered, soft as a mouse’s footsteps. Slow. So slow.
He stood again, kicking up clouds of whirling snowflakes. He looked the lion in the eyes.
“Please. Please help him.”
It had been a lifetime since he’d used that word. It scraped his teeth as it came out. For a single heartbeat he thought he saw movement in the lion’s mane, like a play of sunlight on the ice and stone. Oberon held his breath.
Then nothing.
He was afraid to let the breath out, afraid that in doing so he would allow the moment to pass. But the snow continued to fall, and the lion’s eyes disappeared with the rest of the world.
Oberon stared at the audacious beast. Everything seemed to be mocking him, the great king unmasked.
“We exchanged names!”
Caught in the empty nowhereland between one midwinter dream and another, Oberon watched the landscape fade away.

***

It was Robin Goodfellow who found him, in the strained, straggling twilight that came before sunrise. The snow had taken everything before leaving the world in crystalline stillness. Oberon sat at the fountain’s base, a frozen man in his arms.
“Well met, my lord Oberon.” Robin was wearing his fox furs again, but his cheerful face was bright. “We lost you during the night’s hunt. The Lady will be grateful to see you return unharmed.”
Oberon’s limbs were stiff. The approaching dawn had brought back the face he’d worn for centuries, as natural as if he’d never had another. He shifted the man from his arms and laid him down in the snow.
“Go softly, friend. May you find peace.”
He stood, brushing off slivers of ice and the last dregs of humanity, and took the smaller faerie’s hand.
“Let’s go home.”
Fija Callaghan
February 18, 2021
Vulpes lagopus
Vulpes lagopus
Matthew Pinkney
I hate being woken up from a dream. I always catch it right in the middle of something. It’s like changing the channel to a movie two-thirds of the way through. Everything happening seems important, but I can’t figure out what any of it means. And then, as quickly as it all comes to me, it slips from my grasp.
—
In my dream, I am an Arctic fox, small and thickly suited in white fur. I pad forward on pack ice through a blinding snowstorm — a whiteout, some would call it, while advising you to stay inside and warm up with hot chocolate.
But not me. I keep going, putting one paw in front of the other, bracing against the wind and ice. I see nothing ahead of me, but I feel everything. The cold twists its icy fingers beneath my fur, threatening to freeze me solid. Wind beats at my face. Chunks of ice tear at the soft skin on my paws. I grip harder onto the pack ice, feeling the slow, ominous roll of waves beneath my feet. I grit my fangs, flatten my ears, and take step after step after step, knowing I must take shelter, hoping something will be on the other side.
The ice shifts beneath my feet, rising up suddenly, and I am awake.
—
I woke back into my body, still in the clutches of the cold. Suddenly furless, I reached out for the closest source of warmth I could think of, but there was nothing there; just a warm spot on the sheets and a lingering masculine scent on the pillow.
The disconnect between expectation and reality was enough to pull my brain fully into the land of the waking. I opened my eyes and ran my hands over the other half of the bed while they adjusted to the darkness. He wasn’t there.
Frightful was a good word to describe the weather outside. Wind rushed through pine trees and snow beat against the walls of the cabin. The only light to see by came from the LEDs throughout the house. The moon and stars were hidden by storm clouds.
I wrapped a blanket around my naked body and trudged into the other room.
He was sitting at the kitchen table in his boxers, framed against a wide window, watching the snow fall. A cup of tea sat next to him, thin wisps of steam rising into the cold air.
I sat behind him and wrapped my arms around him, trying to gain what little bits of warmth I could.
“Hey,” I whispered, almost afraid to break his silent reverie.
“Did I wake you up?” he asked, just as quietly.
“A little.”
There was a moment of silence. Then, “Sorry.”
We stayed like that for another moment, him looking at the snow, me hugging him from behind.
I planted a kiss on his neck and murmured into his skin, “Come back to bed.”
“In a minute,” he said.
I wanted to argue, but instead, I just leaned against him and rubbed a small patch of his forearm with my thumb.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked.
“Thinking,” he said, after a pause.
“Is it about what I said?”
“Do we have to do this right now?” he asked.
“That’s a yes.”
“No, it –” he sighed. “Okay, yeah. I was.”
I knew when I asked him if he wanted something more that it was a risk. Right now, we were just… friends wasn’t the right word for it, but trying to find a better one was like trying to catch a snowflake in a blizzard. “Friends with benefits” was closer, but left a poor taste in my mouth. I wanted things to be like this beyond the two weeks we trekked into the wilderness and played pretend at love. I wanted something more than this kindergarten domesticity.
When we finally went back to bed, I found myself staying awake, listening to the snow fall and playing with the hair on his chest, long after his breath evened out into the steady rise and fall of sleep.
I kissed him one last time and felt something inside me break.
—
The Arctic fox is carnivorous, but has been recorded eating everything: seal pups, bird eggs, berries, seaweed — anything it can to survive.
I feel the same as I run back from the airport, take two subway trains, walk three blocks, and climb four flights of stairs to reach my empty apartment in the heart of a snow-locked city. I leave my bags on the bed, run a bath as hot as it can get, and write out a text.
Just got home safe. Love you. Purple heart, because red is still too hot for us.
I hit send and off goes another bit of sunshine from my cold life to warm him. I sit down in the tub, but it is lukewarm before long.
Matthew Pinkney
February 18, 2021
Weathering the Storm
Weathering the Storm
Kristina Saccone
Mom was nothing but a messy bun of unwashed hair and the back of a head. It was better that way, since Didi couldn’t stand seeing the rawness in her face, a mix of fear and sadness since Grandad died. A nor’easter had hit the night before, but Mom needed to make it to the funeral in Tampa that afternoon, so Didi would be taking her to the airport.
“There are four hours till the flight,” Mom said. “We can make it to Logan in the storm.” Now a sideways stream of snow and sleet blinded the roadway. Didi slid a few millimeters forward in the driver’s seat, as if getting closer to the windshield could make the whiteout come into focus.
Before picking up Mom, Didi had rolled out of her dorm room at 9 am to meet Kendra at the dining hall. Was a brunch date three weekends in a row the start of something real? They were still new enough to worry that a long-term relationship might not be in the cards, but old enough to recognize when two people clicked.
“How well did you know your grandad?” Kendra asked, pouring fake maple syrup on her plate.
“We lived far away,” Didi shrugged. “When we saw him, he and my mom always fought.”
Kendra picked at her waffle. “I’m glad you can help her now.”
At least half an inch of snow had piled on the bench outside the dining hall since they’d walked in. “I hope we make it there on time,” Didi sighed. Shortly after, she tossed a cinnamon raisin muffin in her bag and left to dig out her car. She piled on a mix of hand-knit layers and LL Bean for warmth, armor for the road. Her 1996 Honda Civic took forever to warm up, especially in weather like this.
Now on the highway, not far from her mom’s house, it no longer resembled a run-of-the-mill snowstorm. Ice crystals spread across the windshield in a matrix of fractals. The wipers slid across the windshield to little effect; they beat to a rhythm of an unsettling rasp, rubber on ice, rubber on ice. The car moved at about 10 miles per hour.
Mom turned to look at her with fire-rimmed eyes. “Can’t you go just a little faster?”
“Mom, I’ll try,” Didi said. “But look at this storm.”
“I want to get to the airport a little early and find a travel pillow. I can’t do this family thing without a nap on the flight,” Mom said.
Didi thought her mom looked like she hadn’t slept since getting the news. “Why don’t you nod off in the car?” she suggested.
Mom took a long sip of her coffee and shook her head.
“Remember how Grandad used to pick at me for marrying your dad? He loved being right when your dad left,” she sneered. Didi remembered it as her grandfather’s wry sense of humor, cracking jokes to make light of the difficult divorce. Didi had been grateful.
Mom pulled the top off her mug, and the acrid smell of Maxwell House floated through the cold car.
“There was never an ‘I’m so sorry’, or even a hug when we saw each other next.”
Didi hated these stories. Ten years later, everyone seemed to have moved on but her mom.
The blizzard cocooned the car like a cloud of darting bees, droning with the wind. She pressed the gas pedal just a bit more, willing the storm to calm so they could make it to the airport sooner. The back wheels reacted by fishtailing in the ice and slush.
“Jesus, Didi!” Mom yelped. Easing her foot off, Didi steadied the car with the wheel. “I bet you wish you’d gone to school in Florida,” Mom twittered, calmed by the road being righted again. She put her hand on Didi’s leg. “Oh you are warm! I could use some of that.” Mom forgot to wear a coat that morning, and the Civic’s heater was still struggling.
In this frozen New Hampshire tumble, the University of Tampa sounded so foreign. Didi had wanted to leave the state for school, but couldn’t afford tuition.
“I’m so blessed to have you close by, Dee,” Mom said, looking out the window again.
That morning, Didi told Kendra, “My mom says it’s a blessing that grandad passed quickly after his cancer diagnosis. I’m not so sure.”
Kendra didn’t look away. “Hmm. Why?”
“I would have liked to hear his stories. Like how my mom was before she met my dad,” Didi said. She’d seen pictures, her mom holding Grandad’s hand and looking at the camera with a smile Didi didn’t recognize.
“Dammit,” said Mom, in the car. “I forgot to eat this morning.”
“I have a muffin,” Didi said, rooting around in her bag behind the passenger seat. With just one eye on the obscured road, she saw a flash of red tail lights and tapped the brakes. The Civic slid like waxed skis on its own momentum. Propelled by the composite of fresh powder over a crushed slick of ice, they careened into a railing.
Mom’s open coffee sploshed on her lap. “Shit, shit, shit,” wiping at it with the sleeve of her shirt a few times. Then, she broke into tears.
Didi laid her head on the steering wheel, its coolness pressed into her forehead. It reminded her of Kendra’s fingers touching the back of her neck when they hugged goodbye that morning.
“Be gentle with your Mom,” she’d whispered, brushing her lips on Didi’s. “We all grieve in our own way.”
Kristina Saccone
February 18, 2021
Night Walks – Part II
Night Walks – Part II
Penny Pennell
Once she woke in the middle of the night to the sound of a picture frame sliding down drywall. Discombobulated in shadows that once loomed familiar, she slipped out from his side, where he continued to sleep soundly, and made her way down the hall. Seeing the fractured frame and shards of glass, she contemplated ghosts and gravity. Barefoot, she fetched the broom and dust pan.
Eyelids heavy, she felt stuck in a dream, listening to the scrape and clatter of glass on tile, waiting to hear footsteps behind her. When a piece of glass slid through her skin, it took moments and a deep yawn before she felt it. Before she saw the droplet of blood fall.
She sucked the blood from her thumb. At the sink, she let cold water run over it and then wrapped it tightly in a paper towel.
Outside she could hear the rattle and scrape of a snow plow. Yellow lights pulsed from the other side of the curtains. She peered out from the side to see a blanket of white and whirl of snow still falling. From the hall closet, she grabbed her husband’s overcoat, slipped on her boots, and coiled a scarf around her neck.
The cold air made her gasp, made her think of pop songs and snow days, cocoa and burning the tip of her tongue. A shudder and then the memory of making crafts with her mother, watching her use the iron to melt shards of crayon between waxed pages. A kaleidoscope of color and the pungency of wax and no memory of what she was thinking about at six.
She heard the snow pack under the first step off the porch; inhaled a long breath and felt the first flakes surrender to the heat of her skin. Soon her breath found the rhythm of the wind circling her. Her spine was rigid, the cold air encircling her bare legs under the long coat, coaxing her back inside. But she walked on.
She walked the length of the driveway to where she thought the sidewalk should be. She thought about where she should be. Who she should be. Why she longed to be lost in the hush of snowfall.
The wind lulled, gathering its might, and for a moment she could hear the hum of streetlamps. When she wrapped the coat that smelled of him, of sandalwood, tightly around her frame, she felt a clump of snow slide down her spine. She kept walking.
The houses were quiet. No lights. No traffic. No moon to lure her away. Snow too deep to run through. The fire of cold numbing her toes, her skin. Yet, she kept breathing with the wind. In and out. In and out.
On the wind she thought she heard her name. She glanced behind to see him standing on the porch, incredulous at the thought of needing to call her in from outside. She threw her arms up and twirled under the snowfall. He laughed. She smiled at him and started back.
She wondered what she would remember from the last night sleeping at his side; whether it would be the sound of breaking glass splintering into corners and crevices, or the wind.
Penny Pennell
February 18, 2021
Dagger
Dagger
Andrea Lynn Koohi
Life is chaos and crumpled clothing leaking from suitcases on the floor. We’re staying in a room at my mother’s friend’s place because there’s nowhere else to go. I don’t know where our furniture went, or the box of toys I taped in haste, or my mother who left while I slept last night. I have a mattress on the floor. I brought my cactus, our cat, my CD player, and outside the window I can see it now – the feather-light arrival of my favourite season. My body jumps just after my heart, and I slide the window open to breathe the change. I hold out my hand to the falling snow, the friend I’ve been waiting so fervently for, the joy that was certain to come, to stay. But then: a dagger falls in the center of my palm; I yank my hand back inside the room, gaze at the pool of red that’s forming, wonder at the compression of pain into something so small. I’m angry and I cry, and someone I don’t know stands in the doorway and asks what happened. I tell her an icicle fell on my hand and she laughs a little and says I’ll be fine, says she might have a Band-Aid inside her purse. But I won’t be fine because Winter did this, and how could it do this when I loved it so? When did it join ranks with all the rest? The next day it snows as I walk to school, fresh layers on the ground like icing sugar. Thick flakes glisten, fall gently for me, but still I feel the throb beneath the bandage on my palm, so I don’t put my heart out, just keep my eyes down, scour the sugar for nails and glass.
Andrea Lynn Koohi
February 18, 2021
Followed?
Followed?
Nicola Ashbrook
Alina wades through the deep powdery snow, her snow-shoes crunch-mashing, crunch-mashing. It’s silent in the forest, save for her feet.
She knows this trail well, the pattern of Spruce trees like a 3D map to her. She stops to look at a lichen fluffing from an upper branch; to wonder at the path of a hare whose footprints have left gentle indentations.
She approaches the old mill, hesitating in admiration at the rapids coursing beside it, as she does every day. There’s a straight line where the river ice turns to turgid water, as though God himself climbed down with his giant ruler to ensure an accurate edge. Alina smiles at the thought before continuing her hike.
At each pause to inspect the landscape, she listens for the silence. It’s there – her ears thrum with it. But the forest doesn’t feel silent today. She senses a presence behind her but can’t see anything when she turns to check – just her usual arboreal playground.
She involuntarily speeds up, looking back more often, the frigid air nipping at her cheeks. Perhaps it’s a pine marten, she tells herself, or a wolf. Maybe even a lynx. The thought reassures her: those creatures are shy – they won’t approach.
Alina reaches a hillock, casting her eyes behind every tree. She shakes her head. She’s never doubted the forest in her life; never paid heed to the folklore, the rumours of a clawed beast.
The horizon pulls the sun from the sky, painting everything strawberry ice-cream. Alina looks heavenward at the candyfloss treetops.
She marches on, using her poles for extra propulsion. A twig snaps. She hears the crunch of her steps duplicated behind her. She pauses, turns.
Silence.
Light evaporates quickly at this time of day. Brilliant white fades to grayscale, shadows elongate and deepen.
A giant wolverine, some say, whose eyes glow crimson. Others talk of a rabid bear, eight feet tall, salivating for flesh.
Alina pushes on, her sense of unease magnifying. The stories cannot be true. The forest, her familiar friend, sweeps her forward – branches and roots, its fingers and toes – urging her onward.
It’s true some tourists didn’t return after a hike last month, but they were likely ill-equipped for the temperatures; exposure’s a quick killer at twenty below.
The dusk closes in, liquid darkness running into the gaps between trees. Alina switches on her head torch, its beam casting a bobbing circle of yellow safety. Snow begins to fall again, juicy flakes tickling at her eyelashes. The flurry quickly thickens, softens the landscape, comforts her.
But the foreboding grows. A wisp of evil weaves between trunks, not just behind her, but sometimes to her left, sometimes her right: moving, surrounding, constricting. Alina inhales it. It metastasises, creeping to her most vulnerable corners.
She stumbles.
The Kota is close now, Alina’s almost there. She’ll light a fire, drink her berry juice, eat her supper. She’ll feel safe. She speeds up, poles clashing with trunks in her haste. Her hand meets the worn handle, and her head whips backward, to check she’s really alone.
The red eyes she fears do not stare back.
Alina goes into the Kota, prepares for dinner and sleep, while puffs of breath condensate on the windows and a thousand claws skitter the walls.
Nicola Ashbrook
February 18, 2021
Nurse Logs, and Other Lessons from Nature
Nurse Logs, and Other Lessons from Nature
Maggi McGettigan
“There’s something about being in the woods, away from it all, that is healing. I promise. Nature knows how to explain things, how to help understand things.” Dana is a poet, and also an optimist. I am neither of those. Nothing will ever help me understand what has happened. But I can’t keep living in my townhouse that reminds me of what I used to be, walking by neighbors with their pity-filled, knowing eyes, wandering around with the aimless desperation of one who was left behind. So, I go to Dana’s cabin in the woods, armed with wine and books, in the hopes that Dana is right.
From the rocking chair on the front porch, I watch the woods for answers, for understanding. I have been here a few weeks, and even in that short time, so much has changed. I am amazed at how much life can thrive even in the deep shade of thick forest. The fiddleheads have become little ferns under the tall pines. Where there was only a hint of color— a pop of purple crocus, a drip of buttercup yellow— now there are all shades of wildflowers beginning to emerge. While I don’t feel healed, I feel distracted, and that is something. Nature has allowed me to focus my gaze outward because my interior would be too much to bear.
Although sometimes, even distraction is upsetting. The geese by the small pond are pairing up, mating for life, while I am no longer a part of my pair. The birds call out to each other, making nests for their young, while the nursery in my townhouse grows only cobwebs and dust. In these moments, I curse nature, the natural order of things, the familial organization of the forest. How can there be so many signs of life, while I am plagued by death?
One morning, there is a knock on the cabin door. I assume it is Dana, coming to check in, so I rush to open it with my toothbrush dripping behind me and no pants on. It is not Dana. It is a handsome stranger. I slam the door on his outstretched hand. He knocks again. “One sec,” I shout, already running to spit out toothpaste and acquire pants. I look in the mirror, wish I didn’t, and run back to the door.
“I’m so sorry,” I say as I open it.
“No worries,” he says. “Would have called but I didn’t realize anyone was here until I got here, saw the car. And the lights. You keep these outside lights on through the night?”
I glance in the direction he is waving. “Yes,” I say. “I have to admit the dark scares me a bit, out here at least.”
“Ah,” he says, nodding but judgingly. “Well, might confuse the animals. They need to know the dark to know the light. No matter. Anyway.”
“Anyway.” I wait. He looks around. He seems to get distracted by something in the woods, maybe something he sees or hears that I do not. “Can I help you with something?”
He snaps back. “Right. Yes. Well. I’m Sam. I live up the road. Or through the woods, depending on mode of travel. I study them. The woods. I’m a botanist.” He stops, as if checking for understanding.
“Cool,” I say. Always been a great conversationalist.
“Right. I’ve been tracking the progress of a nurse log on the property here, I wondered if you mind if I spend some time with her today.”
“Sure, right. Whatever. Fine.” I start to close the door. If he is here to murder me, I should at least make it more difficult.
“Wait,” he says, so I stop. “Do you want to come?”
“No,” I say, without thinking.
“It’s really fascinating. And if you are up here, in the middle of the woods, I assume you are fascinated by such things? Else why would you be here?”
“My husband and daughter died in a car wreck six months ago.” It just comes out. I’m not sure I’ve said it like that yet, so directly. He doesn’t respond. But he doesn’t look uncomfortable. He doesn’t give me awful pity eyes. He is waiting for me to continue, as if that isn’t the end of the story. As if there’s more. “And I got sick of everyone staring at me and being weird. And Dana said nature is healing or something, I don’t know. So that’s why I’m here.”
For a minute he says nothing. “You should come and see this nurse log.”
I laugh. It is a crazy, weird, guttural sound that I haven’t heard myself make in months. Had he not heard me? Is he not fluent in English? This is the part when people get awkward and back themselves out of being with me, of having to deal with this impossible tragedy of mine.
“Really,” he says. “So much to be learned out here. Dana is right. Besides, what else are you doing today?”
We walked along an overgrown path, and Sam chattered about the trees and plants we passed. “What fascinates me about nurse logs the most is that they are actually more alive when they are dead. What I mean is, when trees are growing upright, they are only about five percent living matter. When they fall, they contain five times as much! And they do so much for the life around them, letting in more sunlight, providing protection from soil fungi, and nutrients, it’s just amazing.”
“Amazing,” I responded, though I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about.
The nurse log was out by the stream that fed the small pond by the cabin. I had walked along it several times but never paid much attention to the enormous fallen tree that marked our destination. It was the size of a car and covered with thick green moss, patches of mushrooms, and all different kinds of grasses and plants. This must be a nurse log. Sam emptied his backpack while I took off my shoes and put my feet in the water of the stream, something that has always brought me comfort. As a child, I would pretend you could toss your worries into a river and it would carry them away for you. I closed my eyes. I listened to the sounds of the water maneuvering its way around the rocks, around my feet. I felt the chill of it on my legs. The birds and bugs around me continued their conversations as if life had not been interrupted by my presence.
“Wow,” said Sam, so I walked over. He pointed to a thin little sapling that seemed to be growing right out of the dead log, its roots a tangled mess that clung to the rotting bark. Clinging for life.
“Cool,” I said.
“Really cool,” he said, and smiled. He looked up at me and smiled again. So, I crouched down to listen. What else did I have to do today? “This is one of the biggest nurse logs I have seen. Beautiful old girl. This sapling here, Eastern Hemlock, will help decay this old tree, but the old tree helps her too, gives her nutrients, protects her from soil fungi that can get to little seedlings. And look, these mushrooms are flourishing. I wasn’t sure, being so big, how things would grow together. But this shows, like, no matter how big the tree, how hard and traumatic the fall, nature takes over. The tree is not gone but changed. It provides life for a new microcosm, a new world. It has given itself to this new world.”
He is now facing the log again, lifting up leaves and rocks and dirt, making notes as he talks. “The forest has it all figured out. It doesn’t stop when one of its own is destroyed. It doesn’t stare at it as if it is now rendered useless. Think of rotting leaves, just dead garbage, right? Absolutely not, they gift their nutrients back to the soil. Even animal carcasses, when not used by other animals as food, will give their body back to the dirt and the dirt becomes better for it. There is no life without death here.”
I wanted to cry. But before I could, a chipmunk ran right in front of us, knocking us both backward in surprise. I laughed again, but more naturally, less gutturally. Sam laughed too.
“Nurse logs, huh. Is that all you study?”
“Actually, I saw you went right to the stream. As it happens, my next project focuses on rivers, creeks, and streams. Fascinating to me how the water you just stepped in will never return to us here. Or will it? See, it is off towards other adventures, a bigger river, maybe the sea. It brings with it the pollution, the debris, of the places it has passed through, never to return. Or does it? It’s a water cycle, right? So how can we tell…”
I let him talk as we both moved closer to the stream. I put my feet back in and closed my eyes. Not healed but distracted. And that is enough, for now.
Maggi McGettigan
November 26, 2020
Ode to Turkish Delight
Ode to Turkish Delight
Liana Tsang Cohen
The night I signed my divorce papers, my daughter and I drove an hour into downtown Manhattan for our first taste of Turkish Delight. The documents had arrived in the mail, an unceremonious stack in a nondescript envelope, as I was settling down for my third dinner of poached eggs that week. Otis was always the chef in the relationship. In the old days, back when I still felt a flutter in my belly at the thought of him, he would cook extravagant meals for us on Sunday mornings: piles of plush French toast sprinkled with strawberries and powdered sugar and bowls of jook, the rice porridge he’d grown up eating, with soy sauce, ginger, and flecks of pork, and we’d wash it all down with steaming mugs of coffee.
The arrival of the papers was not unexpected. Otis had been gone a month, just long enough for his side of the bed, compressed into the long, angular shape of his body, to regain its former flatness. The decision to separate had, for the most part, been mutual. There’d been no blow-out fight, no torrid affair or surrender to alcoholism or drug addiction. The aloofness in our marriage had been building for a while—it started after Ariel left for college. It should’ve been easy to be in love or at least be content with just the two of us in the house, but, instead, the things we loathed about each other, those little annoyances we’d learned to ignore, began popping up like whack-a-moles. I hated that he never made the bed even though he always left for work after me. He hated that I never removed my hair from the shower drain. Over time, I started noticing that he’d stopped calling me during the day to check in or kissing me before bed at night. One morning, I woke up and he was already awake and staring at me, which told me something was wrong even before I looked in his eyes and saw that he wanted to leave.
The pen was bleeding a small, angry circle of ink onto the line for my signature when Ariel came into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes sleepily. A second-year law student at Fordham, she’d trained herself to take 20-minute “power naps” during study sessions. Having made the journey to Yonkers the night before, she’d spent most of the day preparing for an upcoming exam in the cramped quarters of her childhood bedroom. After Otis left, she’d started visiting me more frequently, appearing at the front door on Saturday mornings with her hair in a tangled braid and her arms hugging a stack of textbooks. I knew it wasn’t convenient—but I couldn’t bring myself to ask her to stop.
“Mom?” Ariel’s eyes caught on the papers as she approached me cautiously. “If you don’t want to sign them now, you don’t have to. Gosh, look what you did. Do you have any Wite-Out here?”
I released the pen as she went over to the kitchen drawer. When she returned to the table, however, she didn’t have Wite-Out. Instead, she held a worn copy of C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia. She flipped through the yellowing pages, her face aglow with nostalgia.
“Do you remember that scene…?”
“You mean the one where he eats…”
“The Turkish Delight!”
“God, I always thought it sounded so good.”
“So good.”
It turned out that, although neither of us remembered the book very well and hadn’t seen the movie in years, there was one image we both remembered perfectly: Edmund, the misfit middle child, devouring the magical Turkish Delight given to him by the evil white witch against the frigid backdrop of Narnia’s forest. It was the treat so ripe with promises of grandeur and clout that its taste alone had convinced him to betray his sisters and brothers. I wondered what it was like to experience something so powerful, so transcendent, that it made you want to throw everyone away just to have a bit more.
“Let’s go get some.”
“What? Now?”
I nodded, certain. Ariel assessed me for several moments, evidently trying to figure out if this was a “Mom is being cute and impulsive and I should support her” moment, or a “Mom is off her rocker and should probably seek professional help” kind of deal. She must have decided on the former option because her face broke into a slow smile.
“Okay.”
We grabbed wool sweaters and hats, and I retrieved the car keys from my room. When Ariel went to lace up her boots in the foyer, I picked up the pen and signed the divorce papers.
Outside, the moon was a cold, hard orb, like butter that someone forgot to take out of the fridge before serving. Ariel offered to drive, and we took our respective positions in the old Honda—or “Leslie,” as Ariel called it after watching a bit too much Parks and Recreation in high school. The dark homes and yellowish streetlights sped by in the night, too fast for my eyes to catch hold. Ariel drove in silence. I leaned my head against the frosted window and imagined spreading the moon on a slice of bread.
The international grocery store was near closing time when we arrived. We headed straight for the back, where a balding man with a large birthmark on his cheek lifted tender pieces of our treat from their place behind the glass case, nestling them gently, like infants, in a bed of wax paper. We brought the package outside and ate our dessert with gloved hands on the front stoop of the store.
The Turkish Delight was soft to the touch, yielding to the pressure of my fingers. It melted on my tongue, forming sweet puddles as powdered sugar collected across my lips, like snow. The gummy interior clung to my teeth and the roof of my mouth, like an embrace. It was the food of gluttony, of pure selfishness, of me, me, me. It was the exact opposite of anxiety and loneliness, of impersonal pieces of paper with hard, sharp edges. As the little squares warmed me to my core, the world of goodbye’s and poached eggs felt impossibly far away.
Neither I nor Ariel said anything as we ate. Her eyes were big and watery, and she gripped each piece with all five fingers of her right hand, like how she used to hold her food when she was a child. Sirens screamed as an ambulance sped by. A group of drunk teenagers clambered past us, chattering over each other. All around me, the city twisted and pulsed, but I felt peaceful. Resting my head against my daughter’s shoulder, I let my heart compose an ode to Turkish delight.

Liana Tsang Cohen
November 26, 2020
Maggi McGettigan
Maggi McGettigan
Fiction Contributor
Maggi McGettigan is a writer and educator living in Pennsylvania, where she enjoys the beautiful woodlands of Chester County. Her work can be seen in Halfway Down the Stairs, The Stonecrop Review, and Flora Fiction.
Works in Nightingale & Sparrow
Nurse Logs, and Other Lessons from Nature

November 26, 2020