Count-Down

T-Minus 570 million years. A quarter turn of the galaxy now the sun hammers away at the spine of the mountain. The ice levers into the cracks where the roots grapple the rock, where they split the crystal into bricks, the bricks into shards, the shards into grains. The squalls that beat the jagged bluff whisk away the sand.

T-Minus 2.6 million years. Feeding time. A Megladon the size of a school bus muddies the bay. A furl of sand escalates upward to paint the underbelly of a swell. The billows darken with blood, and with the bloom of the algae, and with the swarm of the flesh. In the salt of the air at the crest of a dune, high above the bay and the carnage beneath, a dragonfly hovers.

T-Minus 300,000 years. A hundred million years of coral bakes in the sun. The condor wheels out over the sandstone cliff to strike at the hide of the mammoth. The beast bellows. The sinkhole blossoms. The earth feeds.

T-Minus 14,000 years. Centuries of sand sugar up into the wind, hiss out over the sawgrass to settle in the bole of the cypress, the pocket of the pitcher plant, the scallop in the skull of the bison. Into the hatchery it sifts. As the fingerling gator hammers up at the shell that holds her, downward tumble the grains.

T-Minus three thousand years. Up out of the sea the sand it shoulders, then sinks again to marinate in the salt of the marsh, the vichyssoise of offal and plankter and chum, to thicken and then—pressed down and running over—rise again. This is the dune that holds the whole of an ocean at bay, that holds the print of the trilobite, the ammonite, the Tessarolax and the Bottosaurus and the Glyptodont and the panther, that fingers the bones of a billion little critters milled as in a sifter into a powder brilliant as the moon.

T-Minus thirty years. This is the dune the crew displaces. A dozen shovels break the crust of loam, the chunks of peat, the bark and the scat and the fungal bloom of the moss to strike at the white in the heart of it all, the harvest, the mountain of sand. This is the quadrant the map decrees dig. From the lake to that old sinkhole they cut a furrow, a quarter mile or so, to steal the water, to siphon away enough so’s to make, from out a crater, a pond.

T-Minus a day. This is the dune the Cook boys climb, the hill behind the houses that ring the lake. Down the slope—the bay bean and the ragweed and the webbing of morning glory—they slide. At the base, in the dry wash where, back in the day, the water ran and the ditch ribboned off into the pine, they click open the entrencher they stole from their daddy’s footlocker. Not quite a shovel but bigger than a spade.

Into the bushes they toss the green canvas cover with the two letters stamped on the sleeve: US. United States, or so Chuckie says. Philly says no, no, it mean us. Green the blade. Chafed at the tip where the gray of the steel shines, flecked with bits of ochre and reddish clay from Anzio and Nettuno and Cisterna, but Army green up the hinge to the shaft and over the grain of the handle. Algae green.

They argue over who gets the dime store bucket and the broken spatula and the bendy Jolly-Rancher-Rederiffic plastiform beach toy of a spade and who gets the killer tool, the real deal, the combat shovel.

Philly. No surprise there. He plants his feet in the damp sand. The dune towers up, twice the height of a house. Awesome is what it is. A tunnel is what they picture. A tunnel by God, a tunnel! He drives the blade of the shovel into the flank of the hill.

The earth feeds.

~~~

A teacher at Valencia College, Alan Sincic’s fiction has appeared in New Ohio Review, The Greensboro Review, The Saturday Evening Post, Hunger Mountain and elsewhere. Short stories of his have won contests sponsored by The Texas Observer, Hunger Mountain Review, Driftwood Press, The Prism Review and others. After an MA in Lit at the University of Florida and a poetry fellowship at Columbia, he earned his MFA at Western New England University. Back in the day—after a dozen years in New York City as a writer and performer of comic/satirical pieces—he moved to Florida to write/produce a pair of full-length plays (American Obsessions and Breaking Glass) that premiered at the Orlando International Fringe Festival. Last year the opening chapter of his novel manuscript, The Slapjack, won the 2021 First Pages Prize (Judge – Lan Samantha Chang, Director of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop), the second chapter the 2022 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, and a later chapter the 2021 Rash Award in Fiction—details at alansincic.com

We the Girls, We the Boys

We the girls swipe smokey-eye across our lids, red lipstick to our mouths. We the boys ask our mothers to knot our ties. We the girls pull thigh-high combat boots over fishnet stockings. We the boys snap our suspenders and muss-up our hair; we sneak into the pantry and fill a flask with gin, we think those girls like gin. We the girls pick up those boys in our car, they sit in the backseat like little boys, so we drive slowly, responsibly signaling left, right, left all the way downtown. We the boys want to buy tickets from the scalper because we like saying scalper, and we want to impress those girls with something illegal from the city. We the girls pose beside the venue door, plastered with posters of the men we love; we kiss the paper-lipped guitarist, bassist, drummer, lead singer—but then those boys start jostling each other, mad because we aren't kissing them, so we say, Come here. We the boys rest our chins in their palms. We the girls apply cool liquid eyeliner to their eyes. We the boys say, Gin? We the girls say, Dance! We the boys follow those girls inside, then climb the bleachers and share swigs from the flask. We the girls head straight to the bathroom, a grainy light, a sweating brick wall; by the cracked mirror we smooth our blunt bangs, check our safety-pins and patches, practice our pouty-pouty lips and twirl in our plaid skirts. We the boys thump our thighs when the drums explode and the horns blare and the electric guitars grab us by the neck, playing our muscles like we are living teenage instruments. We the girls are no longer our mothers' daughters; we flee from the bathroom and charge elbows-first into the dancehall; we dance next to older versions of ourselves: nose rings, flame tattoos, chainmail and studded chokers. We the boys point and laugh: there's Olga, Betty, Beatrice, and Sofia—here we call them by their pretend names; they are cute gothic punk, dark drama; their ponytails bouncy-bounce as they mosh and stomp their way through the crowd. We the girls want to get close-close-close to the stage; we want the musicians’ sweat to land on our cheeks. We the boys have gin-spirit power coursing through our bloodstream; we want to kiss those girls, we will kiss them. We the girls throw up our arms and are lifted, fleshy man-hands on our thighs, we lie like we're dead, carried atop the crowd; our skirts sag and men peer at our underwear, but we are stiff girls, determined. We the boys go looking for those girls but are kicked and shoved—they call this dancing?—and now we don’t like this scene; we thought it would be joyful trumpet buoyant ska but it's all skinhead rage; we want to leave, we want to play outside and stay happy. We the girls are carried too far, grabbed in the wrong places, too hard, they won't release us, and now we are screaming, flailing, being taken somewhere we don't want to go. We the boys cry sometimes when we think of them as little girls, when we chased their corduroy and pigtails across the schoolyard. We the girls leave scratches on hairy chests and bite down on a thumb and we slap a man’s laughing face; we grab each other's hands and run towards the Exit door. We the boys will find those girls and ask, Want to go to the park? and then we will finally taste those lipsticked lips; we'll dance silly and pick a blooming daffodil and say, We love you, girls. But we the girls are not children anymore. And we the boys will soon be men. We the girls, we the boys find a park two blocks away, surrounded by a chain link fence. We the girls, we the boys stare at each other across the swing set, adrenaline crashing. We the girls look for falling stars beyond the city lights. We the boys go hunting for flowers. 

~ ~ ~

Candice May is a writer from British Columbia, Canada. Her work can be found in a variety of literary journals including Epiphany, PRISM international, SmokeLong Quarterly, Pleiades, Carve, The Masters Review, and anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2022. She is currently working on a collection of short stories.

Santuario

Cristian’s apartment belongs to the plants. First light and they reach for the halo of sun at the open window. Potted ferns. Monsteras with heavy leaves. Little cacti that prick your fingers. You envy them their milky roots.

Chicago will be safer than Texas, Diego, your sister Lucía has said twice this week. But still, Tía Rosa dreams of your corpses. The same dream repeated to you and your sisters on the eve of leaving home is repeated with urgency to Lucía using prepaid phone cards: the four of you, buried in different soil.

You should leave now while Cristian is asleep.

You picture the cemetery where your brother Sebastían rests. The mercadito where your sister María turned back. A hundred routes going nowhere. The one that led here.

Here, some plants bend their leaves closed in the Texan heat, but in your homeland, grow big and wild, drunk on humidity. They change themselves to fit the composition of soil and the water that comes from hose more often than sky. You can still map the walk for water from your abuelita’s house, smell the indoor fire boiling it clean. That smell seeped through your pores—is part of you.

Cristian takes care of plants others would throw away. The angelonia with roots escaping its plastic pot now lives in a ceramic planter on the windowsill. Marigolds with dry dead petals are coaxed back to life under a warm lamp. Wilted clearance violas, once surrounded by dead brothers in black rectangular packaging, flop in the wind on the balcony. Cristian sleeps with the blinds angled so the garden wakes to daylight even if it means that neighbors can see in.

You never before had a lover who didn’t hide you.

You met in the garden department. Cristian in his orange vest, spraying begonias with fine mist as you hefted bags of mulch into a neat stack, both of you with dirt under your fingernails. He touches plants with a confidence you don’t understand. Lifts them by their stems without tearing the leaves with the consideration of a surgeon. Pulls tangled roots apart, sliding his fingers through in a single, deliberate motion, like Tía Rosa dragging a comb through your sisters’ hair to release the knots. The yellow stamens leave pollen on his fingertips.

At work, Cristian goes by the anglicized version of his name, an identity he can put on and take off at will. He is tejano, grown from this particular earth. It gives a kind of power, a safety that follows him everywhere.

What power does your soil grant? Years after your parents left for America, a mudslide killed hundreds near your home. The explanation: degradation of the soil, too many farms, not enough trees. But the next year there were more farms. More loose soil, shallow roots, and fewer trees to hold the land together.

Last night, your sister Lucía gave you the train ticket. And when you left with it folded into your pocket instead of packing your belongings for the next day, she didn’t ask where you were going.

She is twenty-four and knows the stories reach you. Raids at factories and ranches and restaurants like the Chinese one where she works the fryer. She comes back to the little room you share in an apartment with two other families, bringing the smell of grease baked into her skin.

She doesn’t know there is no such thing as sanctuary.

It is a crime to come to a country that didn’t birth you without papers or money, if you can’t prove your worth or the danger left behind. A bullet in your brother’s skull not enough to make you refugees. You are no longer children, taking the long way home from school or hiding under the bed when fists pound the door.

Beside Cristian, you try not to think of the train to Chicago, how fast and how final disappearing can be. You smell his pillows, his skin.

You have not mentioned the parents you and Lucía are searching for after a lifetime without them. Though you’ve known them longer than she has, their faces are not their own but a blending of the dusty, sun-damaged faces of strangers.

Would there be words in Chicago for that distance?

In bed, Cristian faces you, almost awake. The sunlight reveals him without shadow. The way he reaches for you is with that same confidence used for dying flowers, that old world knowing that transcends boundaries and skin and soil.

 ~ ~ ~

Heather Hobbs spent seven years as a bilingual teacher, advocating for empathy and equity for Spanish-speaking immigrants and their families. Her short fiction has appeared in Southeast Review, Chicago Reader, The Midnight Oil, and Luminarts Review. She lives near Chicago with her husband and dog.