Corin Reyburn

Aurora takes inventory of the world, each thing one by one. Everything she catalogs, from silk scarves to rocket launchers, from heat-seeking missiles to wooden porch swings, holds an invisible tag she places there — Aurora’s thumbprint, scannable only by unscanned technology long outdated.

It began with the animals. Pigs, horses, cows and sheep. Birds and fish, flies and swallows and sharks, wolves and dragons and kind little microbes, the infinitesimally small to the uncategorical, the common to the fantastical, the meek and kind to the ferocious and cruel. She touched each of them, one by one, and they spoke. Touched them again and they were simply dumb beasts, roaming the wilds in search of food and other bodies that looked like them.

When Aurora places her thumb against her mark she smiles, beautiful but forgettable. If you are lucky enough to see her you know that no one’s face will ever match hers, but you will fail to remember any specific features — were her eyes sepia or turquoise, her hair gold or ebony? She smiles only to shield you from what she knows and you never will. She is the dream you have every night but don’t know it, a Venetian mask burned in a forest fire. She is the image in the quiet water that disappears when touched, a shimmering hologram that tells you a riddle you will never solve.

It’s been years since Aurora tagged the species, or fruits or flowers or the blue waters flowing above the cliffs. She tags only cold things now. Microchip processors and portable fans, mass manufactured glassware and artificial granite stones you can plop into the bottom of your glass to keep your drink cool. Lampshades made of polyethylene, women’s boyfriends — streamlined and angular and cool to the touch, kept the perfect height and weight as they cycle on steel equipment until they’re acceptable. Then Aurora tags them and sends them on their way. They don’t see her, they don’t say thank you. They are simply dumb beasts, roaming the streets in search of food and other bodies that look like them.

She tags them night and day now, wearing a staunch blue apron, and barely has time to sleep.

At home she pulls out her records of all the things she’s catalogued, and after such long-hour days, finds they all look the same.

Aurora takes her thumbprint against an uneven stone and scrubs it till it’s raw and bleeding. She slips into bed and touches the sleeping figure lying beside her, running her thumb along his spine.

At last, it leaves a mark.

CORIN REYBURN lives in the unincorporated forest lands of Topanga, California, mere miles from Los Angeles, where sunsets take place indoors on 4.4 trillion-color screens, and works as a freelance web designer in order to earn a little bacon. She enjoys single malt scotch and the use of unconventional instruments in rock n’ roll music, and is working on a speculative fiction novel about passive warfare by means of digital commerce infiltration. Corin’s work has appeared in The Subtopian, MBRANE-SF, and The Molotov Cocktail. Check out more of her work at infrastratos.com.

Chelsea Ruxer

He was running low on spaghetti. I had just finished my last carton of Stonyfield Farms. This is how we got here.

“You needed spaghetti,” I say, directing his attention to the pasta aisle. It was nothing indicative; he just said “spaghetti,” for whatever it is spaghetti is worth on the marketplace hierarchy. I consider this as he grabs a nondescript green box off the side of a display.

He asks what I eat when I’m not relying on Olive Garden for my pasta intake, and I tell him the green box seems familiar. At least it’s not Ramen noodles. So he must boil water when I’m not there.

The dairy aisle is inevitable now. I ask if he wants to split up and meet in the front of the store in five or ten minutes, and he says no, that he needs cereal. One day, I will look back on this and wonder why I thought having dinner near Kroger was an acceptable reason to come.

As we reach the butters, he asks if I’ve decided whether I’m going home for Thanksgiving. I tell him I’m not sure and reach for a Smart Balance. He pays no mind to the Smart Balance and avoids eye contact with the other butters. He reminds me his mother makes a special sweet potato casserole, and I elect to change the subject to professional football, remind myself the cream cheese section is no place for these kinds of conversations.

He confirms that I want to watch the Sunday lineup with him tomorrow, seems to think our relationship has reached this point, and tells me about his fantasy football team, which I mistakenly inquired about several weeks ago over coffee. He shows me his phone. His team is called Jamaal Washed Up, a reference to a football player on the white team with red letters. My mother tells me I’m not supposed to judge him for either his fantasy football or his linguistic prowess.

We reach the far left end of the semi-yogurt dairy products, on the other side of the string cheeses. The yogurt section is sharply divided, the far left holding the GoGurts and baby yogurts and some comfort yogurts and yogurt shots. I rush to the string cheeses. The Activia is suspended just underneath, and he picks up a box and studies it, indicates he’s seen a commercial on bowel regularity. I take note. It’s sure to come up later.

We pass the string cheeses and reach the primary yogurt section, which is more telling. The emotional stability continuum runs left to right, Yoplaits to Fages, with political affiliation determining altitude. Conservatives hit eye level big brands, with liberals reaching for lower-level organics and the occasionally stocked local suppliers. I have no idea who shops on the top shelves. I think there might be cottage cheese up there.

People tend to gravitate to one end or the other, the same shelf or two in the same general quadrant. My boyfriend is gravitating towards the bagels, and I have a sudden compulsion to know. So I face him towards the yogurts and hope for the best.

“Do you eat yogurt?”

“Yeah,” he says, like he told his cousin on the phone before dinner when she asked if he was seeing someone, before we even considered the matter of groceries. We should have met on eHarmony, and not in line at the BMV. The idea that these things can just happen makes me want to gorge on kefir.

I ask for clarification on “yeah.” I’m a far-to-mid-right, mid-to-lower-shelves grazer, organics, dye-frees, and originals. My weekly consumption is dominated by industrial-sized Stonyfield Farm and packable Kroger’s Simple Truth Organic, but the snobbery inherent to Noosa: World’s Finest Yogurt is my guilty pleasure.

“Yogurt,” he says. I should have had the guts to look in his fridge last weekend when I was over.

“What kind?” I ask again, deeply regretting my decision to eat the lava brownie at Olive Garden. He considers this for a moment as I reconsider the prospect of online dating. “Strawberry,” he says.

“Strawberry.” He nods. He’s serious. I had him settled in my head as a Fruit on the Bottom kind of guy but wasn’t ready to ask. He nods at a Noosa I realize I’m now holding.

“That looks good,” he says.

“This is raspberry.”

“That’s okay.” He says it like I might share. “I think I’d eat the blueberry, too,” he adds, in case I was considering the blueberry. I turn away and reach for a grouping of acai Fages, which he takes from me and deposits in the basket. I guess now we’re sharing the basket, too.

I didn’t tell him I came here for Stonyfield. There are Monday mornings I devote to digging to the back of the Stonyfield shelf for the last strawberry nestled amongst the plains, discarding it when I see its expiration date has passed, and starting the process over again.

“Do you mind if I get some cereal?” he asks.

“Go ahead.” I consider following him, but he probably eats Froot Loops. I can’t see any strawberries in the first two rows. He shifts the basket to the other hand.

“It’s okay.” I think this is part of his football mentality, that he thinks we’re in this together as some sort of a team. I kneel and consider the masses of plain cartons as he waits.

“I wanted to get some pizza, too,” he says. There’s a strawberry carton all the way at the back, on its side, and I’m hopeful. “Is that okay?”

I reach for it, because we’ve made it this far.

CHELSEA RUXER is a current MFA student at the Bluegrass Writers Studio. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hermeneutic Chaos, 5×5, New Pop Lit, and others.

C. B. Auder

“I need a transplant,” Dad said, and before I could even back up my spreadsheet, the old man had tripped over the coffee table and windmilled into my lap.

I’d always thought of my father as a person only in the abstract, of course. But once that cruller-loving flesh bag was slumped across my chair, pinching my carpal-tunnel arm? Well.

Then the spark left his eyes and it hit: I was alone in the world. Just me and the family’s creeping ficus.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the idea of losing my parents ever bothered me. But at that moment, with everything seeming so — what’s the word, real? — and his elbow crushing my esophagus? Yeah, I felt sheepish I hadn’t thought to offer a parting wheeze.

What kills me is that I could so easily have slipped something in. That moment right after he’d clutched his chest, just before high-fiving the choir invisible. His hairy ear so close to mine I could smell those funny little balls of wax. . . .

I could have murmured, “When’s dinner?” or “Whoopsie-daisy!” or “What kind of transplant?”

What do they say? That when you’re in the middle of it, that last moment always feels so penultimate?

Luckily, I’d learned the fireman’s carry as a kid. I heaved Dad over to the dining room and rolled him onto the buffet table just seconds before the surgeon steamed out of the kitchen, clutching her sterile tray.

She fussed and clacked her shiny silver utensils, and then hacked a panel out of Dad’s sternum.

Seeing that cross-section of ribs, that was a weensy bit too CSI for my blood, so I averted my gaze to the Gauguin. Which I never take the time to appreciate because it’s always hanging over my head, and — don’t tell my boss, but — I prefer Van Gogh.

After the organ harvesting, the doctor disappeared again, and I peeked over.

Dad lay there, like a giant napping open-faced sandwich, and I had to smile. He’d always been such a quiet person. And he loved mustard!

Well, I figured there wasn’t anything more I could do — the embalming machine was making its little gloopy noises — and by then that goddamned sunbeam had arced onto my computer screen. All four of Gauguin’s Tahitian buttocks went peachy-cheeked in the light as though to say, “Hello? This project is on a double-deadline.”

I don’t know, for some reason I was drawn back to Dad instead. Maybe I was curious to see if I’d get any feelings from glimpsing his lifeless corpse? I didn’t expect any miracles, but they say death changes people.

It was a good thing I turned. Dad had risen and was rolling over, mumbling something about having to get back to the office — his hair a bird’s nest as usual — and I lunged in (making sure to bend at the knees, not the waist) and grabbed his wrists.

“You’re semi-retired, remember? You need to relax,” I said — probably too loudly, now that I think back.

I hoped he wouldn’t see my attempt at a casual smile as patronizing, the way the neighbor’s asshole Akita always did. But Dad was so drained by that point, he didn’t even notice the embalmer in the room.

Then again, when had he ever? I took heart in that normalcy and had to chuckle even as I leveraged my leg against the wall to press his earnest cadaver back down.

“Stop flopping around,” I grunted. “You have to stay still or all the tubes will pop out.” (Whether or not this was true, I confess I don’t know, but I wasn’t going to spend the next six months eating my meals above a formaldehyde-soaked rug.)

Then things got weird. An urge came over me: to rock Dad into a slumber with little chuffing noises. I was like, what the hell? Just creepy.

When the doctor returned, I asked, “What kind of transplant had he needed?”

“Brain.” She scowled at a vial of some bubbling purple liquid.

“Ah, of course. That makes sense,” I murmured. Soothingly, I hoped. I mean, people don’t go into the healing professions because they’re well adjusted and happy with their own lives, right?

But the doctor had already forgotten me. Which was a comfort, because it reminded me of Dad.

Funny. It was all so long ago. Two years, now? Three? I think I don’t even own that buffet table anymore.

C. B. AUDER is the Associate Editor at freezeframefiction.com and has had work published in Asinine Poetry and A cappella Zoo.