Best Friend

Candy crawled behind the battered settee, where nobody could find her, and held her knees tight to her chest. Sleepy raindrops smashed at the window, echoing like someone rapping at the door. Someone who cared.

“Rain will be my best friend now,” Candy resolved.

She didn’t need anyone else. People grumbled she had the shape of a baby elephant; people rolled their eyes and tsked tongues like she took too much space in their lives. Even her darling Beckie said she looked ludicrous.

She turned to the dotted window. “You don’t think so, do you?”

It tapped a little harder.From Guest Contributor Malvina Perova

Malvina is a warrior writer, creator and illustrator from Ukraine, the amazon from https://goamazons.tumblr.com/ and an artist at https://www.instagram.com/goamazonsart/

Survivors

They live presently. Now they tear the soft meat from the bone, now they hear the twang of resistant tendons. The vibration of it. A chorus of crows. Scudding wings of moths that search for the darkness just beyond. In the pit is hunger. We exist, hands pasted to rifle stocks, glimmering gunmetal eyes, rattle-boned. They know family born of teeth, defined by the low moans of their communes. Their tongues hang together. Our hands hang separately, our nails scratching our own stomachs, our thighs, our faces. But we are all hungry. We will all ooze the same black ichor.From Guest Contributor Carrie Cook

Carrie received her MA in Creative Writing from Kansas State University and is currently living in Colorado. Her work has appeared in The Columbia Review, Midwestern Gothic, Menacing Hedge, and Bartleby Snopes.

Drum

There is one bright dancer among them. Her hands trace the music onto air. The “U” of her hips sways, telling bedroom stories. Melodies float her toward the youngest doumbek player, barely bearded.

She bends to him, smiling, flirting even, to the ululating tongues of all her watching sisters but as the hafla pauses to draw a collective breath, I see the truth: her focus is not the boy drummer. She shines for the pulled-skin drum.

An elderly man leans near me. “It is all that remains of her husband.”

“He played?” I am confused.

He shrugs. “He had enemies.”

From Guest Contributor Laura Lovic-Lindsay