by Ally Malinenko

When she was born the doctors suggested she not be named. She wouldn’t last the night. No one had seen anything like it. Ectopia Cordis was an extremely rare disorder, a child born with their heart on the outside of their chest. But even then it is always at least flesh and blood. It is always a pulpy red organ.

What Mr. and Mrs. Kagit saw on their daughter was not. They called in the specialists who did not speak Turkish.

“But I don’t understand,” Mr. Kagit said, careful to speak slowly so as to not trip over his accent.

“Neither do we,” the doctor said. He still wore his scrubs and Mr. Kagit, who fiddled with the hat in his hand, couldn’t stop his eyes from darting down to the blood and then back to the doctor’s face. Blood. So much blood.

“Is she all right?”

“Your wife?”

He nodded. One at a time. His feet were sweating in the plastic booties.

“We must warn you. Mr. Kagit, the child will probably not survive the night,” the doctor said on his way back through the swinging doors.

Later, by his wife’s side, he held the child. Her dark eyes, stared up at him, a wintery midnight cold. She didn’t seem to blink. Nor did she fuss. On her chest, the child’s small heart expanded and contracted, crinkling, made of paper, like an origami box. It was white and seemed to have the exact consistency of tissue paper. He lifted a finger, wondering.

“Don’t touch it,” his wife said, stirring in her sleep. “They said she will not survive.”

“Shhhhh,” he soothed his wife. Her eyes closed and he brought his daughter closer to his body as if he could pass to her something real, something red and liquid. Something organic. His daughter. With her paper heart.

The reporters came when she survived the night. Then the vigils started. There were candles and weeping women. Baby Kagit was declared a miracle.

More specialists arrived from Istanbul. They took the child and laid her on cold metal and with more cold metal they poked and touched at her beating paper heart. She did not stir. She did not cry. In fact, she had yet to make a sound.

“We’re sorry,” the specialists said, passing the child back to her mother. “She will not survive. One cannot live with a paper heart. There is nothing we can do.” The specialists packed up and left town that night.

They loved her hard and fast, knowing she would not survive. But she did. After the first week they started to wonder, what if? They asked the doctors again but their answer never changed. She cannot live with a paper heart. When a week turned into a month, they named her, Narin Kagit.

When she was two months, they began to play music for her, watching her little paper heart flutter with excitement.

When she turned a year old, the whole town had a celebration; long lines of people filled the dusty streets, their hands full of warm food covered with cloth. The doctors let the Kagit family go home. Why not? Her one year was like a lifetime to most. Each morning, when Mr. Kagit lifted darling Narin out of her crib, her mouth still quiet, her throat fluttering but soundless, her eyes bright and laughing, it was a gift. They doted on her, they loved her, they kissed the dark hair that grew on her head. They kissed her downy eyelids, her round cheeks. They kissed her slender toes, her long arms. At night they wondered, inside never aloud, what she would have looked like if she were able to grow. Her warm mocha skin, her dark hair, her black black eyes. She would have her mother’s beauty and her father’s strength. She would have the best of both of them.

They performed a ziyarat and took her to the türbe, lifted her in the air, and pressed her face against the chalky stone. Even then she did not make a sound. They prayed hard and fast for a cure.

When she turned two, they had another celebration. She was a blessed thing. A child of great importance. She was a message from Allah, from the Great Spirit. The town gathered to watch her walk and run, Narin’s dark hair flowing behind her, her paper heart fluttering. She must be a message, they said, a message from the heavens. We should all live so free, they said. Praise, Allah. She’s a prophet. Will she ever speak?

When she turned five, they decided, with a shrug of their shoulders, that she should go to school. What choice was there? So they packed her a small lunch and brought her to the schoolhouse.

“Don’t let anyone touch your heart, okay taçyapraği?” her father said. He drew with a finger a little circle around her chest and she nodded. “And you stay far from the water, okay?” The water would melt her paper heart, turning it to mush and stopping whatever force flowed through her veins.

As so she did. And the years came and went and came and went and Narin grew up, tall with a strong spine and long fingers and dark hair and black bottomless eyes. And eventually they all stopped thinking of her as their little miracle and the people of the town went back to work, back to their lives and when she passed them on the street they nodded as custom instead of gesticulating and kissing her palm which was by all means, just fine with Narin.

But still she didn’t speak. She carried a slate at her hip and an endless supply of chalk was always dusting everything she touched and leaving little pocks of powder along her cheek or the back of her hands. She seemed unable to speak. Or unwilling. Her parents assumed it was part of her condition. A paper heart and no voice. But still, Narin was happy and light and good.

The day he arrived was just like any other. He hadn’t planned on coming to this town, he told her later, but he hadn’t planned anything, he said often and with a sigh.

His name was Damla and he did not know his parents. He was thin, wiry, as if his body had been stretched too far over his delicate years. He had no memory of his parents. Only of the orphanage, the hot kitchen, later the workhouse. He left when he was eleven and had been walking ever since. He worked when he could and he walked. He couldn’t remember how old he was.

He could not read so when Narin wrote on her tablet he shook his head. Instead he just stared into her eyes and she into his and they understood one another as millions of lovers have for centuries. Damla, like Narin, was born different. But he was never thought to be a message from Allah. Born without tear ducts his eyes leaked all the time. Even when he smiled, even when he slept, glistening tears, dripped down his face, staining his skin, like a river corroding rock. In the workhouses of other towns, they called him the devil. “Serpent tears,” they hissed, spitting at the floor near his feet.

“I cannot stop,” he told her, dabbing a stained cloth at his eyes. “I am always crying.”

The first time they made love, she unbuttoned her shirt. Her breasts hung delicate and light, her nipples turned upward. Between them her paper heart fluttered. She climbed on top, and when he entered her, he touched her briefly, one slender finger just brushing her paper heart. His tears formed a halo around his head, staining the blanket.

They were not to be together, so naturally they always were. He wore no shoes so that he could steal into her home and climb into her bed. When he left she touched the warm dark spots on the pillow, left by his tears. He told her she was beautiful, kissed her slender arms, the nape of her warm neck, the hollow of her throat. He traveled down her body carefully, always so careful to not let a single tear fall on her paper heart.

“Leave with me,” he told her under a sky like a soap bubble. Damla propped himself up on one elbow, his long hair brushing his shoulder. The tears fell, one two, landing on the side of Narin’s cheek as she gazed up at him. “Leave with me.”

She shook her head and smiled, always smiled. Her sweet Damla, with his big plans.

“We can run away together. We can leave here,” he begged.

She pulled him to her, her mouth closing over his to keep all those words inside. He kissed her back, pulled her on top of him, her paper heart fluttering.

But Damla had been right. They should have left. One miracle can bless a town, give it new life, and inflate it like a paper lantern to create a light against the darkness. But two miracles rub up hard against luck. Two miracles are suspicious, greedy. And a third miracle, secret love, is the most suspicious of all.

Towns talk. After the rains, they pull from the mud all the things that people bury. They pull up gravestones and fear. They pull up broken toys and hope. Sometimes they pull up lies and suspicion.

The fire started in the workman’s camp where Damla should have been sleeping. Should have, but wasn’t because Damla was in the poppy field, naked and entwined. The smoke rose like a living thing, tamping out the sky. The flames, new to this world and hungry, licked and tasted everything they could find. They even licked the workers whose screams reached the ears of the two lovers in the poppies. Narin and Damla dressed hastily, racing hand in hand towards all that death and destruction. By then people had gathered, passing bucket after bucket after bucket to try and snuff out the flames. Narin saw her father, sweat on his face, his hands shaking as he passed bucket after bucket after bucket and he saw her. He saw her quickly unclasp hands with the boy. He saw her shirt mis-buttoned so that the collar was split wide and through it one could see the slightest crinkle of fluttering paper.

And the rest of the town saw it too. One miracle is a good thing. Two is spoiling it.

The people saw Narin, her clothing askew, her hair wild, tangled with bits of grass. They saw her now as a woman; as a dangerous woman. No longer was she theirs alone, their gift from Allah. And next to her, they saw Damla, the stranger, whose hands did not clutch bucket after bucket after bucket of sloshing water. Instead they wiped at his face, at his serpent tears which continued to fall, now mocking their pain. And they decided that he had taken too much. First, their sweet Narin and then their peace. He could not stay.

When the smoke cleared, the bodies lay scorched and still. Raw skin bubbled and popped. The death smell drifted everywhere. Eventually, it was all that they could smell.

When they threatened him, she did not speak. When they banished him, she did not speak. Damla did as he always did, took to the road, one foot and then another and then another.

“I told you not to let anyone touch your heart, taçyapraği,” her father whispered as they watched the boy with the serpent tears leave. The soap bubble sky popped. Her father did not stay to hear her first words, created by sorrow and birthed in pain, the harsh guttural words of a torn paper heart. When she cried, she let the tears fall until it turned first pulpy and then red and then, strangely organic.

ALLY MALINENKO writes poems and stories and occasionally gets them published. Her second book of poems entitled Crashing to Earth is forthcoming from Tainted Coffee Press. She currently lives in Brooklyn where she keeps re-writing the same novel over and over again.

by Ally Malinenko

“Should be right around here,” he said, bent over the dune, his hands working like dog paws, knocking the sand back between his legs. I looked up, shielding my eyes from the glare of the sun. There was nothing around, nothing for miles but sand and more sand.

“Just one more second,” he said, pulling at the ground as if he could move a mountain. Jakob stood, tugging at his sandy beard. I’m not tall for a woman, but Jakob was shorter than me, hunched, with a twisted spine and a bad leg. He’s not the sort of guy you take into the desert.    “Maybe it was the other dune.”

“Christ, Jakob,” I said, slumping down on the sand. It was hot enough to burn through my jeans, like sitting on a range that was just turned off, but I didn’t fucking care.

“What did I tell you?” Jakob said. He was easily seventy years old, but he looked a hundred and acted twenty. “Huh?” he said, watching me retie the sweat-soaked bandana on my head. “Jessie, what did I tell you?”

I looked up at him squinting. He seems like a myth, wire thin and sun stained.

“You said when heroes are needed, heroes get made.”

“That’s right,” he said, turning back to the dune. “You gotta have faith. This is your debt.”

But it wasn’t, it was Bobby’s debt, I wanted to scream. Bobby who made the stupid deal in the first place. Bobby who was Jakob’s partner. Bobby who was my brother. Is, my brother.

“Ah ha!” Jakob whooped. From the sand he pulled out a woven sack, beat to hell, and inside was the blunderbuss, more beautiful than I imagined. Silver detail, pirate’s head butt cap, engraved barrel and lock. “This here is my pistol. I call her Anne.”

“Anne?”

“Oakley.”

“Of course.” I watched Jakob bang the dust out of the barrel. Anne Oakley was the first thing we had to fine. The second was the Arcade.

Hunting up the Arcade was no easy matter. I knew Bobby, crazy fucking Bobby, spent years looking for it. Making a pact with Lieutenant Ray wasn’t something you entered into lightly. You had to be prepared and to Jakob preparation meant you had to have a blunderbuss.

From his ratty waistcoat pocket, Jakob pulled what looked like a pocket watch but I had been around him long enough to know it wasn’t as simple as that. In the beginning, I used to ask questions, but Jakob’s a storyteller and I wasn’t interested in hearing about the time he raided King Ahnkmakis the Elder’s tomb out in the Red Lands and nearly died hiding out in the desert all night. I heard too many stories. I just wanted Bobby back.

“Listen when the train pulls up,” Jakob started.

“Train?”

“That’s what I said, ent it?”

“Jakob, there aren’t tracks for miles.”

“How many times I gotta tell you? The Arcade don’t need no tracks,” Jakob said, hoisting a fat lob of spit on the sand dune. I couldn’t fathom how he even had moisture in him. I was dry as bone.

I pitched a shelter, desperate for shade. Jakob stood, unwavering, the pocket watch extended before him, a small spyglass fixed to his eye. He watched and he waited. I slept fitfully, dreamlessly, waking frozen as night dropped.

“It’s coming!” Jakob hollered, rousing me out of my little tent. He was in the exact spot I had left him earlier, pointing at the horizon line.

There it was, a first just speck of light, growing. The sound came later, after the train morphed into life, a giant clattering rusty old steam engine, barreling through the desert in the blue black of the night. It roared and clanked and whistled as it pulled itself to a stop right in front of us, steam creeping out the sides, the whole thing shuddering with a hiss. Behind the engine, cloaked in the black smoke that churned from the stack, were train cars. And painted on the side, clear as day, was Lieutenant Ray’s Traveling Arcade.

“Fuck.”

“Indeed,” Jakob added.

The car door rattled open and the sound eclipsed the clanking of the engine cooling down. The man that stood there was wider than I had expected, not thin, wiry, or demonic. He was like a fucked up Santa. Fat, hairy, but also dirty – dirty nails, dirty beard. Even his smile was all dirty teeth, a fat cigar plugged in the side of his mouth.

“Mornin,’ Jakob.”

“Ain’t mornin’ yet.”

“Close enough. Nearly daybreak.” He eyed me up. “Boss is waiting.”

“Is that Ray?” I asked foolishly.

“Nope. Ray’s inside, hopefully with Bobby,” Jakob said hoisting himself into the darkness of the train car. Having no choice, I followed.

Ray sat at a card table, fingering the deck of cards, dressed in black leather, a wide brimmed hat on his head. When he tilted his head up, his eyes were charcoal black, pupil-less like you’d expect. He smiled a raw smile around a cigarette and gestured at the table before him.

“Howdy, Ray,” Jakob said, sitting, and I joined him at the table. Ray shuffled the cards and dealt Jakob a hand.

“I don’t play women.”

“She’s got the debt.”

“No women.”

Jakob shooed me away from the table, muttering something about taking care of it. I stood, reluctantly, bumping into the fat man, who pushed me through to another train car. I saw him there, chained, starved, his stomach concave, his face beaten.

“Bobby,” I said, dropping to the floor beside him.

“Jessie,” he croaked. “What are you doing here?”

“Saving you,” I said with a sad laugh and lay beside him. “Jakob’s playing. Everything is okay.” But immediately I knew it wasn’t from the low exhale of breath from Bobby’s body.

The train started with a shutter, a clank and a low, sickening whistle of steam. We chugged through the desert, Bobby at my side, my head on his chest, listening to the low thump of his heart. The train clanked. Thunk. Bobby’s heart thumped. Thunk, thump, thunk, thump, and to calm him, I told my twin the story of our life.






ALLY MALINENKO writes poems and stories and occasionally gets them published. Her second book of poems entitled Crashing to Earth is forthcoming from Tainted Coffee Press. She currently lives in Brooklyn where she keeps re-writing the same novel over and over again.

by Ally Malinenko



The devil looks exactly as you imagine.  That is the first thing you should know.

“Right here,” he said, pointing a long fingernail at the paper in front of him.

“And then that’s it?” she asked.

“That’s it.”

“And I get whatever I want?”

She wiped a few stray hairs from her warm forehead.  He tapped his finger again and though she wasn’t entirely sure she thought she saw him roll his eyes as if this was a daily occurrence.  And then it dawned on her, to him, it was.

“What happens afterwards?”

“After what?” he asked.

“After I die.”

“I own your soul.  Look, I will give you everything you will ever want in life.  Anything.  You want it, it’s yours.  Material possessions; new house, new car.  Done.  Physical changes; bigger boobs, smaller waist.  Done.  Fantasies; being the envy of all your friends; amassing power and wealth.  Done.  Honestly,” he said with a slight chuckle.  “And when you die your soul belongs to me.”

“What happens then?”

“It’s like a great big pleasure cruise.  Lots of laying around, doing nothing, being waited on by my servants, occasionally be forced into banal conversations with other passengers and listening to over enthusiastic conductors slaughter classic doo-wop tunes.”

She couldn’t tell if he was joking.

“Okay,” she said.  She held the pen over the line and just before touching the paper it dawned on her how quickly she was willing to sign away her immortal soul.  She had often been accused of not being a believer.  You know those people who wait outside of grocery stores to convert someone in the summer heat while their tub of coffee ice cream slowly melts into the same oblivion the believers won’t stop talking about.  She was that person you always see stuck talking to them taking handfuls of leaflets as you skirt by thinking, Thank God that wasn’t me, your ice cream soon to be safely tucked into your freezer at home.  But though she had never been a believer per se, she often let her mind wander to the potential of life after death, as any creature capable of foreseeing their own demise.  And not once did it ever dawn on her that she would wind up in Hell.  Yet here she was, on a perfectly average night, fantasizing about how her life could change if she signed on the dotted line.

“Wait,” she said, pulling the pen away again, eliciting another groan from the Devil.  “But during my life, you know before I die, will you be needing anything?  I mean, am I going to have to do your bidding?” she asked, her pen wavering over the line.

The devil sighed.  “How did they all figure out this question?” he asked, to no one in particular.  He concluded, correctly, that there must be some sort of leak from the inside that he would have to undoubtedly get to the bottom of.  Someone needed to keep their little demon mouth shut.  He looked at her.  “Yes, on occasion, I might ask a favor or so from you.”

“What kind of favor?”

“Oh, the usual.  New recruits, creation of bridges, that sort of thing.”

“Creation of bridges?”

“Yeah, it was sort of necessary in the past but I haven’t needed any in a while.  Look, I wouldn’t really worry about it, okay?”

“What would you need a bridge for?  To get to the world of the living?”

The devil held up his hands in exasperation.

“Do you really think I need a bridge?  I mean, here I am.  No bridge in sight,” he said.  She looked around the sparse landscape.  She did not stand at a crossroads, as is often considered a popular place to parse out one’s soul.  Nor was she at a carnival fairground, where seedy characters of every nature might seduce a distraught young woman.  Not that she was distraught, technically speaking.  Or for that matter, young.  They were not near a cemetery or a potential gateway of any sort.  Instead she was in the parking lot of the mall that she worked at.  Nor was it the first or last day of the month, or during the waxing or waning moon or midnight or 3:00 am, a purportedly known witching hour.  It was a Tuesday.  And it was nearly 7:10 which meant she was going to be late visiting her elderly mother at the retirement home which would lead to the inevitable accusation her mother always made that the woman didn’t even love her enough to visit her in the hell-hole that she had put her in nearly five years ago.

“The bridge,” the devil continued, “is a rather easy way to set up a toll.”

“A toll?” she said.

“Yes.  Like a tax.  For instance, I believe it is common around here to pay a fee of some sort in order to get to the other side of a bridge or tunnel.  Is that not still the case?”

“No, I mean, yeah, we pay tolls.”

“Well exactly.”

“So you collect money?”

“No darling, I collect souls,” he said again tapping at the paper in her hand.

“As a toll?”

“Pretty much.  In the past, I used to have my faithful create bridges and whomever passed would forfeit their soul.”

“Wait a second.  So anyone who went over this bridge automatically gave up their eternal soul without even knowing it?”

“Pretty much.”

“That seems a little unfair.”

“Well it was a rather difficult bridge to create and quite breathtaking to behold.  Anyone worth their salt might have taken a look around and said to themselves, you know, this seems to go against the very nature of physics.  Maybe I should think twice before crossing it.”

“That’s just wrong.”

“Be that as it may, I have the right to not play fairly.  That is sort of my thing.”

“So do I have to build a bridge?” she asked.  The woman didn’t have the foggiest idea how to build a bridge.  She imagined there would be engineers involved.  And zoning permits.  The whole thing was starting to give her a headache.  Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.  Maybe there were going to be a million little loopholes and she would wind up doing way more work than just giving up her soul.  She put the pen in her mouth and chewed nervously.

The Devil reached over, removed the pen from her mouth, and wiped it on her sleeve.  He put the pen back in her hand.

“You will not have to create a bridge.  It seems that in the end it was determined that the relative unfairness was too great and I was getting greedy, which let’s be honest, is sort of a joke, and collecting too many souls without doing any work, so, now, it’s all gotten a bit more complicated.”

“Complicated, how?”

“Complicated in that I’m standing in a bloody parking lot in a bloody mall explaining the whole thing to you!” he roared, dropping his voice to such a decibel that the woman could feel it in her very bones, in every cell of her being, in the very fibers of whatever her soul was made of and she shook from the intensity of it.

“My apologies,” the Devil continued.  “I will not have you build me a bridge or steal babies or any of those other rumors you have heard.”

“Steal babies?”

“Yes, it’s too easy.  Their souls come right out.  There is no challenge.  Even I can admit to that as a sort of cheating.”

The woman swallowed.  She felt the weight of the contract in her hand.  In stories it was always a single sheet of paper.  This felt like a phone book and was covered in a degree of legalese.

And then a thought hit her.

“What if I wanted to?”

“Wanted to what?”

“Build the bridge.”

“Excellent.  By all means, build a bridge.”

“I mean for you,” she said.

“I figured as much.”

“Okay,” she said and, with a quick movement, as if her body had to move faster than her brain, she signed the paper.

“Thank you,” the devil said snatching it out of her hand.  “Now the fun part.  I think we should start with all this,” he said waving his hand over her body.



Twenty years later, she stood at the center for a bridge on the outskirts of town, waiting for her brother.  As she gazed around the familiar landscape she knew she had picked the ideal location.  There were trees, craggy mountains, a steep gorge, a small bubbling stream fifty feet below.  And the bridge itself, stone arched, like a woman’s back mid-tumble.  Every season was breathtaking.  It was perfect.  It was romantic.  And it was hers.

The first person had been the hardest decision.  It took her a while to track him down.  She had not seen him since high school but when they finally met up for coffee she was amazed that he smelled the same as she remembered.  It was like going back in time.  He still had the easy laugh, only this time when he laughed it was with her.  She frowned about his divorce and rubbed his hand that he left on the table.  Every hour, he told her how amazing she looked and she smiled a sheepish smile.  Indeed, she had changed, hadn’t she?  Blossomed, if you will.  Her face no longer pale and pockmarked.  Her hair shiny.  Her waist thinner than it was in high school.

She waited awhile before bringing him to her bridge.  She wanted it to be a special night.  The stone echoed under his shoes.

“It’s absolutely gorgeous,” he said.  “I can’t believe I grew up in this town and never knew this was here.”

“It’s easy not to notice things,” she said looking down over her hands at the drop below them.

“When was it built?” he wondered running his hands over the smooth stone work.

“Oh, I have no idea,” she said.  “Probably a long time ago.”

“Doesn’t it seem like it was built by monks?  I heard there was a monastery around here a long time ago.”

The woman chuckled at this and grabbed his hand.  “Come on, let’s go,” she said leading him across.

She was nervous.  She had no idea what would happen.  Would it be immediate?  When he got to the other side, would he vanish?  Would he shrivel up and die?  Would the devil show up?  Would there be screaming and pain and misery?

But instead, to her mild disappointment, they just crossed, continued down the path, toward the waterfall.  He seemed fine.  As if nothing had happened.  She worried that it didn’t work.

Later that night, as he slept next to her, she removed the heavy band of papers from the nightstand, flipped through to the back and saw, underneath her own name, his.  She smiled, and snuggled down into bed.

The others had been easier.

She checked her watch again.  Her brother was nowhere in sight.  She glanced over at the gazebo on the other side of the bridge.  Everything was set up.  A giant banquet table, the food was waiting.  The tables decorated with the same flowers she had used on her wedding day, ten years ago.

She heard the crunch of gravel on the road and the chatter of voices, bickering, exhausted-sounding voices growing.  Her brother arrived, with his wife and their three kids.  In front of him they pushed their elderly mother, now wheelchair bound.

“How did you find this place?” he said gruffly.

“A friend told me about it,” she answered. “It’s wonderful to see you.”

“Yeah, you too, sis.  I mean, it was a pain in the ass to get out here, but hey, I’m glad to see you.”

She smiled.  That was typical of him.  She kissed each of them on the cheek, thanked them for coming, and she ushered them over the bridge.

One by one.

Next came her father.

Then her stepmother.

Her sister and her sister’s family.

Two aunts and six cousins.

Then the long line of friends that she had only in the last ten years been able to accumulate.  Good friends.  Who loved her for her kindness, her tact.  Friends who weren’t jealous even though she had everything they could possibly want.  They loved her too much to envy her.

And she thought about each name that was being added to that list.

Her husband made a toast.  It was touching, about family and love being the things you can count on.  The things that go on forever.  About how lucky he was.  About how lucky they all were.

“Happy anniversary to the love of my life,” he said as she felt the tears gather.

Everyone smiled, clinked glasses and drank.  And she thought to herself how beautiful it is that they would always, always be together.  Not even death would take a single loved one at this table.  Not from her.  They would all be reunited.  She had made sure of that.






ALLY MALINENKO has been lucky to be published in numerous online and print journals. Her first book of poems, entitled The Wanting Bone was published by Six Gallery Press. She currently lives in the part of Brooklyn the tour buses don’t go to.