Kristina Mottla

Endings, beginnings, nights, mornings, they circled about my head, nipping each other’s tails. Family left messages. Friends texted. Neighbors dubbed me Scary-Gal-in-Number-9.

The loss of my job, this time to the boss’s niece, had turned me into a desert in bleak heat, anger sizzling along my skin, all mirages squashed. How many entry-level LA marketing positions were left for me to crack? The question kept my eyes drier than tinder; my cheeks sandpaper wracked by wind.

As an elderly woman in the supermarket line once said in my youth, tears are for people without strong bones.

Savings accounts ultimately dwindle for the unemployed, and so they did for me. Soon, the sliver of light beneath my door morphed from a flatline into a reprimand. I headed to the mall food court in response. There, years before, behind the counter of the family-owned Smoothieville, I had made my first paycheck, dumped my first boyfriend, lost my first job.

The mall food court ceiling dangled its cement-headed rays across my table. Around me, other groups-of-one settled in similarly, shoulders over their food or paperwork, eyes on their forks or smartphones, each of us baking in our own pans, each of us not thinking of ourselves as hot oil on the edge of popping out. I spent the next five minutes digging into my chicken teriyaki bowl, avoiding eye contact with Smoothieville and planning consecutive mall lunches, from tomorrow’s veggie sub to next week’s cobb salad, ready to map out the year, when an oddball woman plopped down across from me as if I’d been expecting her. Her dark brown, red-streaked hair burst from her head in tattered braids.

I took a bite of rice, eyeing her but not.

“You, Lyla, need a bridge,” she said, leaning forward. Her wrinkles cut trenches beneath her eyes. “I knew it trying on shoes three floors down ten minutes ago.”

Behind me a door opened to the mall patio and the smell of burgers and pasta and curry swirled about the food court on a new lease of wind, making a fragrant oddity (curry-burger-pasta?). And how did she know my name? “I’d like to eat my lunch alone, lady.”

“Of course you would!” she hollered. A few patrons glared my way. She reached over and grabbed my hands, shaking the fork from my fingers. “Let me see them.”

My hands in hers turned my sight into a desert. Suddenly our fleshy digits were miles and miles of bland sand, never-ending and never-beginning sand, heat blurring on the drab khaki tarp, change never on the horizon . . .

“Tut, tut, Lyla. You have misfortune roosting and you need me to spook it out.” She said spook with a forward jerk of her shoulders, so I got hooked in her eyes. They sank deep as wells and pulled me down like a dry bucket in need of filling. Then her voice came soft and twinkly. “You will pay me, and I will save you for my own good.”

I nodded, feeling cool inside those deep well eyes, cool as spring water, cool enough to feel a shock of pain coursing through her veins. The words fell out before I could catch them: “I will pay you, and you will save me for your own good.”

The woman dropped my hands. “Well done,” she said, passing me a paper slip. “Here’s my address. Bring two hundred dollars tomorrow at noon.”

As she left, her bare swollen feet padded across the tiled crumby food court floor, her knee giving way every five steps or so and prompting the nearest patron to lift her back to standing. I decided it wouldn’t hurt to bring the woman money to help, plus extra for shoes and a cane. Already I felt better than the months before.

Tears in my youth I mostly remember as streamlets down my cheeks, or disappearing pools in my palms, nothing that risked my vigor, my growing older. But after my mother shredded her business suits and said crying was for less than babies, after the supermarket woman told me about the tears and the bones, then I put the tears away for good.

This isn’t a pity tale. Overall I’d been fed, sheltered, clothed my life’s entirety. I knew I had it better than many, no matter I grew up latchkey, no matter teens called me Loose Lyla in high school, no matter I’d never been the prettiest, my nose a sliver too long and my eyes a degree too wide; no matter the world seemed to shove as hard as I shoved back.

The Hollywood Hills dipped and climbed as I drove through them, bushy foliage padding the front yards of bungalows, Tudors, modern mansions. The mall woman’s cottage was especially hidden on its woodsy bend, although any passerby could see through the trees how its frame leaned as if with a bad back. The door knocker, a thick silver loop, boomed.

The woman from the mall opened the door and appeared behind the threshold. I must have looked puzzled, since she reached and patted my arm. “It’s me, dear. Gadnes.” Then she gestured to a woman beside her, a near twin. “My sister Borna.” The sisters crossed to the front stoop, huddling next to me. Gadnes gestured to the side gate. “To the backyard, Lyla.”

Borna clapped her hands together as I turned.

Spiny shrubs, willow trees, abundant grasses, wildflowers, the smell of them filled me like an unexpected but welcome visitor. A quaint garden bridge, its slats and ropes withering, spanned a barren ditch in the back corner.

“Stand in the middle of the bridge,” Gadnes said.

Borna pointed and clapped at the request, and I didn’t want to disappoint, not Borna especially, not the sister who’d lost her voice box in the trees and seemed to fancy me. (“An occupational hazard,” Gadnes later said.) And so I stood in the center, peering at the dry ditch the size of a koi pond beneath, wondering whether the sisters would fill it, maybe even with a rock garden. That’s when two slats and the ditch beneath them suddenly broke free and sent me falling until I caught myself. A mile of air now separated me and the ground; my hands gripped the bridge’s ropy edge.

Far below, on land, a smattering of greenish creatures snapped at the air. From somewhere in the bushes, Gadnes shrieked, “Why!?” Then she came close and shook the bridge until one of my hands let go. “Why? Why?”

I shook my head, shifting my grip and bringing the free hand back to the rope. “What?” Words, like the clouds above curling in waves, crashing.

Gadnes whooped, “Wrong!” and threw her head back and laughed and laughed, until her mouth foamed and I thought she or I might vomit.

It was then my tear ducts felt as though they would bust open and let everything tumble out, my veins and heart valves, my job losses, my dry eyes, my parents and friends, my intestines, my nights, the issue of this woman Gadnes making a horror scene of me and not caring if I died. Then sweat streaked down like tears, down my temples, down my nose, down my cheeks like invisible roads, and what of my situation now?

“There, there,” Gadnes said, coming close and pushing a strand of wet hair from my eye, “now don’t you feel better?”

And Gadnes pulled me up, and Borna pulled me into her arms, and there I wept and wept until the koi ditch filled and the yard filled and Gadnes and Borna took my money and we were swimming together and diving like whales.

KRISTINA MOTTLA writes fiction and poetry. She has a BA and an MFA. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as Barnstorm, Hartskill Review, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Raintown Review, and Potomac Review.

Deanne Richards

The glacial glow of mediocrity was the venom, full of fire that dulled his dream. A guitar of ice with chords of frozen popsicles stood in the corner. The reflection of his past was like a dog sniffing foot prints. His belly was a paunch, pie shaped, a chunk of cement.

The other one was a toxin produced by an organism of praise. He lapped it up to excess and spat it back to the audience. There was a collective rousing with cell phones waving in a crowd of disappointment. The cliff was now too high, and he longed for hungry guts.

He was flatlined in an aura of mail. His heart was full of zip codes. His apron was torn from parcels of forgiveness. The truck was full and on time, but he still longed for the celestial notes that raised him out of the bins of licked envelopes.

The other one became the collective whisper that roused the others out of their sleeplessness. The tinge of pungent chemicals siphoned through the air and swayed to the beat of the chosen one. He didn’t play the hand of an ordinariness so deadly. His vitals were yummy and his aura electric with a silhouette that roared.

He ate his dullness for breakfast and choked on regret the size of a pineapple. His dreams hovered above him like a balloon that he couldn’t reach. Prairie dogs visited him with hugs and kisses in a condo made of dirt. He drank coffee full of rusty nails and kicked tubs of stones that had no postage.

The other one had one-night stands and sons who jumped from a penumbra. He didn’t know where he was. His home was a myriad of hotels trashed by an attack of earthliness. His soul was a closet full of empty hangers. There was no one close by, just the echo chamber of the crowds cheering for more of the malignant puff of phantasm.

DEANNE RICHARDS is a digital artist and writer who resides in Santa Fe, NM.

Ani King

Thing is, you can’t trust the king of the underworld, not with her blue-black hair, and her blue-black eyelashes, and the way her pale triceps pop when she sheds her battered jacket to reveal a thin white tank top and all manner of mismatched tattoos. Mermaids, hellhounds, dragons, anchors; you name it, it’s inked into a calf or forearm or thigh. You especially cannot trust the king of the underworld if you are a pretty woman in a bar who happens to resemble Hades’s ex-old lady, Persephone herself.

On this occasion, it was fair to say that if a girl could be Persephonic, then the Southern blonde certainly fit the description: abundant breasts with fig-colored nipples, soft arms and heavy thighs. Her lips looked pomegranate-stained and lush.

So of course Hades slicked her dark, wavy hair back and adjusted her sunglasses, and leaned over the pool table so her shoulders cut square and wide. She said, Baby, I think I’m in love, and the Southern blonde laughed at her. No, really, I am; just tell me your name, darlin’, the king of the underworld drawled, and anyone else might think they were being made fun of, but that drawl turned into a purr turned into a kiss turned into a tangle of limbs in the Southern blonde’s head.

Maybe the Southern blonde knew she should be careful the moment she laid eyes on the king of the underworld, but she still accepted a beer, and then another, and then a few more, and stood giggling at jokes that were too old to be funny.

What animal walks on four feet in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening? She didn’t say, hey man, everyone knows that, she just wound her curls around a finger and waited for the punchline.

If there’s one thing the king of the underworld had going for her, it was that bad girl business that good girls like so much, and it hadn’t been but a minute before she pulled a poem out of the air and ran it over the Southern blonde’s plump bottom lip.

Don’t make any noise on the stairs, and you can come home with me, the Southern blonde said, fixing her lipstick and rubbing the smudges of black eyeliner at the corners of her big blue eyes. I don’t want you to wake my mama up, she said, and the king of the underworld could see the Southern blonde probably wasn’t quite old enough for the beer now, but man just look at the gleam of her even white teeth, and didn’t she smell like spring come to life?

Yeah, the king of the underworld rode a motorcycle, and looked dangerous in a long black jacket; that’s not even a question. Hades had the kind of bike that you really had to sidle up to and jump on before it took off on its own. White and chrome and mean enough to make a girl blush while she holds on tight.

Darlin’, one of these days I’ll take you home with me, and we’ll be able to make some noise, the king of the underworld purred, a few nights later, but she didn’t really have plans to do any such thing. Which was fine; girls these days aren’t so naive about the way a bad girl might use poetry and sadness to get you all lathered up and ready to jump onto her bike and speed on back to her place. Don’t you like my place, the girl asked, the pink walls and trimmings positively labial in color. Positively pink, like her tongue, too.

Frankly, it worked well to have the king of the underworld ride off home into the horizon. The Southern blonde was pretty sure that Hades didn’t consider their relationship exclusive, judging by the little bruises and bite marks she wore regularly. And she sure the hell wasn’t the type of girl to go home with someone if they weren’t serious. Well, at least not until her mama caught the king of the underworld leaving one early morning, and said, goddamnit girl, I told you not bring your sin home with you. And look at this one, ain’t no chance she won’t do you wrong, she just smells of it, can’t you smell it? She’ll do you bad, this one.

Wasn’t too long into the argument before the Southern blonde found herself making claims of affection that she shouldn’t, to show her mama wrong.

Sometimes it’s pride that makes a girl do truly stupid things, and the Southern blonde took Hades’ hand and said, mama, you can’t talk that way about the king of the underworld, I love her, and sure enough her mama threw out on her pretty, round ass. Don’t come back ‘til she’s done with you, the tall, rough-handed farmer called, every bit as pretty as her daughter. The king of the underworld was smart enough to shut up and wait on the bike and not say a word. I give it six months, the older woman yelled up the stairs while her daughter did a hasty grab of her favorite belongings: a pink canvas backpack, her three favorite porcelain unicorn statuettes, her dad’s old army jacket, and enough underwear for a week.

The king of the underworld couldn’t take back the invitation to come home with her, not after all that, and plus it really it might be nice to get another woman in the place again.

Problem is, the Southern blonde, blue-eyed with heavy thighs, she didn’t have the same constitution as Persephone, the famous woman she so resembled. So after the tour of the room of souls — mostly storage for unlabeled boxes and garbage bags full of who knows what, and a quick yogurt and pomegranate seeds, she lay in the massive bed, under the sheets of pure midnight with the king of the underworld, thinking shit, maybe this was a bad idea, her heart slowed, and her body cooled.

And what the fuck was Hades supposed to do then but drink more whisky and pace and mutter to herself? The Southern blonde was definitely her problem once the girl was dead. Maybe it was her eatin’ those seeds, I suppose, murmured the king of the underworld.

Hades laid back down next to her new live-in and said This is pretty weird, babe. No pun intended of course. I’m too drunk for this shit, you know. Plus, I’m not much of a night sleeper. And off the king of the underworld went to play with her three-headed dog’s new puppies and think.

It probably should have scared the hell out of Hades the next morning when she went to go deal with the body and get some sleep and the Southern blonde was sitting up yawning, a little blue around the edges, but otherwise right as rain. I’ve never slept so deeply, she said, running her hands through oddly untangled hair. I don’t think I even dreamed.

Every night the Southern blonde fell into death once the sun laid down and closed its eyes, but the king of the underworld couldn’t think of a way to tell her, so Hades just nodded when her old lady said she’d never slept so well, every morning.

By the end of the first month the king of the underworld was bored with the whole goddamn thing, pissed off that she’d gone and fallen in love with the first girl she’d seen in ages, and the Southern blonde only spent half her damn time alive. To be honest, she was starting to worry the whole bad break up business with her first old lady had been her fault, and fuck all if she wanted to consider the past with so much intensity.

During the day, the king of the underworld would try to stay awake as long as possible, sacrificing sleep for tastes of the Southern blonde’s soft skin, or her wheaty scent afterwards.

Now, it’s true that at some point in the months they’d spent together the king of the underworld had taken to making the Southern blonde’s cooling body dance do the occasional tango, or sit up at bizarre tea parties, or watch all the films she declined to see during the day. You’re getting a bit weird, Hades said to herself in the mirror more than once. And no doubt she considered all the things she could be getting away in the dark hours of the night, but she stayed true. She was pretty proud of herself, too.

A few months in, the king of the underworld finally settled into a routine. She slept a little more during the day and it felt like the situation wasn’t so untenable. Hadn’t the Southern blonde been patient herself, dealing with some pretty lonely days, and giving up her pink room she’d liked so much? Hades thought, I should really do something nice, something special.

One morning a few weeks later, the Southern blonde woke up alone, no sign of the king of the underworld, and wandered through all the rooms she never went in, occupied as she was with Hades. She found the tea room of misery and wondered at the two settings, lipstick so like hers on the edge of one cup. In the ballroom of despair, the speakers hissed while the record player turned almost silently, album long since done.

Who was the king of the underworld spending time wooing like this, the Southern blonde wondered? All she knew was that her mama was right, it had only taken six months. She packed her meager collection of things back up and hitched a ride out of the horizon, up the highway towards home, ignoring the snow gathering on her shoulders and hair.

When the king of the underworld came home, white and chrome and mean pickup truck carrying cans of pink paint and newish blonde-wood furniture, she was surprised to find a note on the counter saying the Southern blonde didn’t know who Hades was dancing with at night, but she sure the hell knew she was going home. Everything has a season, she wrote, and our season has ended.

And the king of the underworld thought about jumping in the truck, roaring down the road, and bringing the Southern blonde back, but like the note said, the season had changed, and maybe Hades would turn her eye to brunettes.

ANI KING is from Lansing, Michigan. She enjoys good bourbon, great books, and bad pizza. She can be found at thebittenlip.com