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By Amy Barnes



My mother’s hands are coated with darkroom fluid or melted carob, I can’t tell which, but one is caustic and one is healthy and she forces both on me; pose for this she says do it again until you look happy AND skinny she demands, but I’m not happy because the chocolate is fake and my smiles are too, even forty years later when she sends me the developed photographs for Christmas, signed by blurry Kodak autographs, inserted into yellowing plastic jails that trap me and my first boyfriends and first dog and first bicycle and first car and last grandfather, right before we ate Farrell’s real chocolate ice cream wearing brown 70s bell bottoms and frowns when she only let me lick the spoon, but I find myself buying carob now out of curiosity at health food stores and it makes me frown and smile and take digital pictures wearing a brown sweater and brown boots and brown jeans, until I melt a little when my daughter with carob-colored eyes and hair smiles at me,



Amy Barnes lives in the South with dogs and kids and words and at @amygcb on Twitter.


Photo provided by author.

By Margaux Williamson



on the phone with Grandma, we talk in circles—how are you, I'm good, how are you, I'm good—due to the shortage, the interruption in what was the extended chord of her mind, straight, pulled taut, and plugged into infinity; it's a circuit now, the sharpness blurred and rounded, around and around, a relentless ring, staticky, steady, until a shocking, unwarranted cachinnation shines and spreads, her reaction to an unshared joke or some one-sided quip, or a memory fixing me, its receiver, elsewhere in time; I'm a child on the living room floor before the flickering, the outage, my tiny laughter, bright and clear alongside Mom's, my uncle's, my aunt's, and there's Dad, taller and broader than most, also laughing, louder than most, tossing Grandma over his shoulder, and she is a wisp, a light, whooping, playfully slapping his back like she's eager for grounding, though we know she's not—her mind is, was, a projector, large, illuminated, easy to read; so we laugh, and it’s riotous, sharp, visceral, crackling, and now, back from this charged reverie of hers, of mine, on the phone with Grandma, we talk in circles—



Margaux Williamson is a US-based legal associate working in advertising; she lives in the Midwest with her wife. 


Art by Jay Baker, an artist from Colorado living in Oregon, by way of New Mexico; he records music as Tom Foe.

By Natalie Warther



You didn’t mean to get married on Mother’s day, it just happened, the way death just happens, but that’s not what you mean to say, this is the happiest season of your life, and before you know it, it’ll be gone, just like her cat is gone, her car is gone, the tree the three of you planted for her in the front yard of the old house is gone, to think the new owners just didn’t like the way it looked, skinny and leaning towards her shutters, you drop your apple in the sand and she’s still gone, ants crawl out of the outlets and still, gone, you buy a veil, and something blue, and none of this makes her un-gone, but you’re getting married, there’s a lot to do, so you schedule her, write MOM on the list next to VENDOR TIPS and EYE LINER, carve out five minutes to pause and be her kid, you step out onto the driveway and say her name out loud, first, middle, and last, it might be the first time in decades that anyone has said it like this, “mother of the bride,” you say it once, twice, three times like some sort of prayer, go back inside, put your dish in the sink, cross her off, as if by acknowledging the want you could fix it, (THANK YOU CARDS, STEAMER,) as if motherlessness could ever be finished,



Natalie Warther is a senior writer at 72andSunny with an MFA from Bennington College, and her most recent fiction has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Hobart After Dark, and Maudlin House, and she was a finalist in Smokelong Quarterly’s Grand Micro contest and the recipient of the New Flash Fiction Review Editor’s Choice award, oh, and Natalie lives in Los Angeles.

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