Laura Hogan

Every day they adorn this desk with stones smooth and polished, medium and small, the size of my palm or the roof of my mouth. At five o’clock they collect my rocks in a bucket and put them in a drawer. There is a man in the break room stirring glass cleaner into his coffee. He says his cup is stained. There are sixteen black and white photocopied portraits of Jesus on the walls of his cubicle. Security escorts him to the fountain in the courtyard, and I pound on the glass, afraid they will drown him for offending the Pharaoh. He gets away, he runs, his picture is posted in reception.

On Thursdays they collect bleating lambs and small goats for sacrifice on the game show stage. I see them gathering in the morning. There is a sign that says we will be poisoned to our daughter’s daughters. Chemicals in this Garage are known to the State of California to cause Cancer and Reproductive Harm.

Parking is difficult on Thursdays. The game show people arrive at the appointed time but there is something wrong with them. It’s the mingling of generations. The old and the young can bring water from the well, mash the beans, weave the cloth, but they cannot operate the elevator. The wise ones are weighed down by purses, keys, and hats. Their feet are hobbled. They mill outside the elevator mewing and counting the young ones. They lose track and have to start over. They push the button again.

When the doors close, the smallest one is left behind. He looks up at me, afraid he has done something wrong. He’s afraid I’ll sacrifice him, but I keep my knife from his soft throat, the color of buttermilk. There are signs in the elevator for people who can’t read. A stick figure of a man descending the stairs chased by flame.

The acolytes wear navy blue blazers. They have clipboards and headsets, and they herd my goats before me. The stragglers are chased by golf carts and forced behind a barrier made of rope. I wave my arms and shout to scatter them, but they won’t run. I knock down one of the blue blazers and rip down the barrier.

“Run away! Run away!”

They look sad and they bleat. “We’re from Chicago,” they say. “We’re on vacation.”

The blue blazer is getting up. He raises his hands above his head and the people still to listen. “Is anyone else here from Chicago?” he yells.

The people clap and hoot.

Maybe I can save just one. I chose an elderly man because he looks like he might be hollow inside. I pick him up and try to carry him away, but he gets too heavy. When I put him down he toddles back behind the rope.

Security is coming to take me to the fountain.

LAURA HOGAN has an MFA from the University of California at Irvine. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of literary journals including Binacle, Lullwater Review, Red Rock Review, Zone 3, and Willard & Maple.

Keely Cutts

Helena dreamed of her teeth falling out again. She woke with the lingering panic of crumbled molars and sharp-edged enamel cutting against her tongue. In the cold of space, she expected nightmares about the endless abyss or burning up under the unprotected sun, not speaking around the remnants of her mother’s hard-earned smile.

With sleep no longer appealing, she got up and checked her messages. A new shipment of supplies was due in the middle of the day cycle. Command wanted an update on the excavation of B site. Her father rambled for ten minutes before his cat walked across the console and ended the feed. A host of ads and offers tempted the rest of her reading, a holdover from when she could have fresh fruit or pedicures. Thirty-six people lived on the moon. No company shipped to them and they were thin on services.

In her tiny bathroom, she programed the shower to shut off halfway through her one-minute allocation of water. She tossed her clothes behind the door, where they used to make Em crazy in their shared apartment off Dupont in DC. The impersonal, medical-quality soap slid over her brown skin before she flicked the switch for the water, counting through each second.

At ten seconds the soap was gone. At fifteen she cupped her hands into a well and poured the water over her face. Twenty seconds and she closed her eyes. What was it like to breathe fresh air? To feel the touch of another.

The water cut off five seconds early while she was still in the midst of walking hand in hand under spring-snow cherry blossoms. She jerked at the interruption and pounded on the wall with her fist, a wordless rage caught in her throat as she was denied her momentary escape.

At her workstation, her screen was stuck loading for half an hour, and when it came online, it wouldn’t respond to her touch. The shipment arrived. Helena bent her head close to the panel to monitor touchdown and felt a hot breath wisp across the back of her neck. She turned.

Jenkins was eating at his station, spreading debris in a five-foot arc.

“Quit it.”

“What?” Crumbs fell from his slack mouth as he looked genuinely confused.

Half an hour later, Jenkins complained of a headache, then dizziness and left before the end of his shift. Typical of his work ethic and their relative isolation. He was replaced by Martinez, the slim blonde scientist from Nevada who wanted to be friends. Their usual conversation was stunted when Martinez asked Helena to repeat her question, but Helena had said nothing at all.

Helena took her time walking through the narrow corridors of the base after her shift. Someone — maybe one of the first colonists — had tried painting familiar landscapes on the slate gray walls, but the paint pitted and peeled. In a common area, she read digital copies of Dr. Seuss for their bright pictures and short sentences. At dinner, the mess was empty, but she still felt like she was being watched.

When Helena thought about the Moon colonies she was promised as a child, she imagined bright, open glass domes filled with little dome houses and Astroturf lawns. Like the suburban neighborhoods she saw on television with her mom late at night when neither one of them could sleep because the gas was shut off again.

Colonists were meant to stay through the end of their contract. Helena’s was a five-year stretch, just the break she was looking for after Em packed up a single suitcase of clothes and headed West for some artist commune. Just twenty-three months in, Helena understood why so many colonists went home early, or got sent home.

Her mom’s mom used to talk about spirits that walked the halls of her childhood home, the sure and steady presence of the dead lingering among the living. Helena never put much stock in those stories; Grandma Pam was old, and things were different back then. When books fell off shelves or doors creaked, it was the settling of the house, nothing more.

In her three-by-three shower she had thirty seconds of peace, as the roar of the water washed out the moans of the metal base and the shuffle of footsteps that couldn’t be there. When she entered her main room, the bed was turned down, though she’d left it made. Had she carried the spirits with her as she launched from Earth? Perhaps there was something else with them on the lunar surface. Or maybe she was tired and it was time to go home.

KEELY CUTTS holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rosemont College and has work published in Front Porch Review, Crack the Spine and Inaccurate Realities. Originally from Florida, she now lives in suburban Philadelphia with her wife.

Brandon Barrett

Sue Nguyen told me she’s an anomaly in her family. They’d immigrated to San Francisco from Vietnam by way of Singapore. Mother, Father, Anh (later to call herself Sue), sister Diu, Grandmother, and maternal Aunt, all bunched atop each other in a dismal apartment across the street from the deli where Father worked. A hand-to-mouth existence, it would seem, but the real tragedy in Sue’s life was that she saw no ghosts.

The female lineage had been seeing ghosts for generations. Decades of ghosts in the alleys of Hue, later soaring in the skies above Singapore, splashing in the ship’s wake all across the Pacific, skulking about the San Francisco tenement. Grandmother was a particularly accomplished communicator with apparitions, conversing at length with Grandfather every evening, planning the details of tomorrow’s activities. “I will make coffee, you will open the windows,” she murmured. “I will wash the cups, you will bring the paper in.”

Aunt specialized in the infamous: Ngo Dinh Diem came when Aunt called and would answer questions posed to him and was unable to lie, and once she asked Rasputin the secrets of his powers and then fell quiet and withdrew, refusing to speak for three days.

Mother, for the longest time, rarely saw ghosts — mostly quick takes of spectral cats traversing ceilings — until Father passed. At that point the gift blossomed thoroughly in her, and she was visited frequently by skeletal forms wearing white suits. It was not described whether Mother was a reader of Tom Wolfe. The skeletons lived in the apartment in parallel with Mother, drank from wispy cups and slept in invisible beds.

Diu, two years older than Sue, was born simple and learned only rudimentary language, and from age five onwards directed her speech (incomprehensible babble and laughter) exclusively toward individuals not present, leading the family to conclude that Diu saw only ghosts.

But for Sue, not a glimpse. She confided to her father, one time only, her shame at this deficiency. He hugged her and whispered in her ear: Don’t you ever worry about it. You take after me. And he looked at her for a while with love, smiled and seemed ready to cry, and started to say something else. But then Aunt passed through the room and squinted, and that was all he ever said about it. Anyway he died a few weeks later.

With Father gone, her deficit became ever more apparent. It never seemed that Father outright disapproved of discussing the talent, but following his passing the phenomenon shifted from the periphery of their lives right onto center stage. Grandfather’s spirit was now joining them at the dinner table, which he’d never done before. Franklin Roosevelt — via Maternal Aunt — dominated an entire night’s conversation with his postmortem views on the role of modern Vietnam on the world stage. Even Diu’s incessant garble seemed more insistent, awakening the family at night with outbursts of shrieking horror and laughter, alternating in the same breath. And Sue spent less time at home — a place increasingly frenetic with the activity of ghosts she could not see — and more time reading at the library or sitting in the park late into the evening.

Time passed. Sue started high school and found a niche for herself in the world of home economics, cakes and quilting and whatnot, even going so far as to join an unofficial, unfunded Homemakers Club. She’d been invited by a nice pudgy girl named Emily who was timid and shrinking in the way of nice pudgy fourteen-year-old girls the world over, and whom Sue would thank in the dedication of her first cookbook years later. Emily was her first friend, and there was initially a soul-wrenching confusion as to whether Emily was a lesbian or not, or for that matter whether Sue was a lesbian or not. It’s unclear if this ever worked itself out.

Sue and Emily walked to the bus stop from the Homemakers meeting one evening, which had consisted of five adolescent girls deciding that virginity until marriage was a good idea, and Tracy was going to report back as to how vichyssoise is pronounced. They said little on their walk, but finally Emily asked where Sue lived, and offered that she’d like to come by sometime, if that was okay, and they could make some brownies or something, if Sue wanted, or if not then that would be fine too. And Sue said, Yeah, maybe, I’ll let you know, and jumped on the first bus that came by and went fifteen minutes in the wrong direction and cried and wasn’t sure why.

She got home late. The front door was locked and nobody answered, although there was a fair amount of racket from inside. She fumbled for her key and pushed the door open. Diu was rocking on the ground in the living room, pointing at the ceiling and screaming nonsense, syllables drawn out to the very end of her breath. Grandmother paced from the living room into the kitchen and back, looking over her shoulder and crying in Vietnamese: It was your fault, you were never home, what was I supposed to do? Maternal Aunt was scribbling on the living room wall with a pen, stopping every few moments to cock her head and listen for instructions. Mother, unable to live with the ghosts any longer, had slit her wrists hours prior and bled out in the corner of the kitchen.

Sue stood in front of her mother, blood spreading out underneath the body like a shawl, maybe like the one Sue had sewn last week and given to Emily as a gesture of who-knows-what-exactly. Mother’s eyes were open. Grandmother passed by behind Sue every ten seconds, brushing up against her. Sue’s first coherent thought was: maybe now I will see Mother’s ghost. The passage of time has not borne this out.

BRANDON BARRETT is a practicing cardiologist, originally from the Oregon and now living in rural Virginia with his wife and son, writing in his spare time. He has been published in the Literary Review.