Inlay

“Just don’t,” I tell him as I pour my first cup of coffee. Mr. Ackshually blows through that stop sign and informs me, in a tone I’m sure he doesn’t find condescending, that I should put ice packs on my perineum to help relieve the menstrual cramps. I should have known better than to moan, as I dragged myself into the kitchen, "Can I just get on with menopause already?” He's always been a know-it-all, but ever since the kids flew the coop, the stream of unsolicited advice has become insufferable. My friends call him a mansplainer, but he’s an equal-opportunity annoyer. Last week I overheard him lecturing our neighbor—he of the prizewinning dahlias—about the best time to prune his rosebushes. "That’s for after childbirth, hon,” I say, my eyes plotting an escape route. “Ackshually—” At times like this, I usually think back to when I found his aggressive erudition comforting, sometimes even charming—chatting up our gondolier in Italian on our honeymoon, pointing out the constellations to the kids on a camping trip, talking me down with treatment statistics when my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Now all I want is to throttle him until all that misguided certainty explodes out the top of his head. “That’s enough,” I say, stirring. “Ice helped when those enormous babies you put in me left it feeling like braised chuck roast down there. But it’s useless for my current situation.” While he goes on about how he’s sure I must be mistaken, I scroll through my phone. “Average life expectancy is seventy-five years and eight months. Only twenty-four years, three months, and sixteen days until I’m out of my misery.” “Ackshually, it’s higher for women.” He can’t help himself. I almost pity him. “It’s not my days I’m counting down, dear.” --- Jim Parisi lives in Occupied Washington, D.C., with his long-suffering wife, Beth. and their dog, Dolce. He writes fiction and creative nonfiction, which has appeared in FlashFlood Journal, The Bluebird Word, Five Minutes, Club Plum, and The Good Life Review, among others.

You loathe the carseat. Being constrained in any capacity must be fought against with every limb, howled against with every decibel your toddler lungs can muster. Strollers are a nuisance, but carseats are anathema. I tell myself the stress and ear ache are a necessary tradeoff in order to eschew the comfort of couches and TV screens. I tell myself we are encoding something, deep down in your DNA, when we choose horse trails over ipads. That the real magic waits in secret ponds, pickable flowers, in stumbling upon a tiny fairy door at the base of a giant poplar (a wonder even to me). We just have to withstand the tantrum-filled drive to get anywhere. I’m in the backseat, cajoling you into a game of peekaboo, when the car swerves into the opposite lane, pitching my body to the side, then corrects again. “Damn,” my husband says from the driver’s seat. His eyes flash to the rearview mirror. “That was a turtle.” His eyes meet mine, calculating, and the decision is made. The Honda bangs a uey, and we race to backtrack before another car comes. A tiny brown dome sits on the pavement, fixed squarely in a groove carved from an endless parade of tires. Your dad leaps from the car, delicately hooks the sides of the shell with his fingertips. The turtle’s limbs are fully retracted, likely terrified from the close kiss of a hot rubber death. He disappears behind the tree line next to the road, depositing the turtle in wooded safety. You are still wailing as we roll onward to the trailhead. I tell myself, one day, you will not be crying, unaware, but watching these little acts. You’ll be the one to look at us and know. We stop for turtles. --- Mackenzie is a Virginia-based writer with a love of baking, animals, and all things wild. When not writing, Mackenzie is hiking with her dog, baking something chocolate, or cozying up with a novel.

She didn’t know how to drive in this weather; it rarely rained in Sacramento this time of year and she rarely drove at all. She fumbled with the rental car’s wipers, first turning on the hazards by mistake, then the blinker. By the time she found how to turn the wipers off, the rain had become intermittent. There was no way she was figuring out the delay mechanism. She was driving over the Bay Bridge, trying to put distance between herself and everything that happened in Sacramento. She didn’t need to look in the rearview to know that the gap between then and now was widening. Then had heartache, sadness. Now it was the rage she felt toward him that propelled her down I-80. She wanted to be over the bridge, out of this storm, away from the elephants on the road with her, this pack of Escalades ready to push her into the water below. She was dependent on this bridge, as if the road would close up after she crossed the threshold into the Bay area, out of shouting range. The rain kept coming, the traffic never moving, the image of him kissing someone else playing in front of her between swipes of the wipers. She turned the radio up to drown out the ka-chunk of the wipers and the rain splattering against the windows. Ben Folds crooned about an abortion while she calculated the distance between the middle and the end of the bridge. Ahead of her, a sea of red tail lights; behind her, everything she ever knew. She would not let the bridge – the thing that was supposed to deliver her to safety – defeat her. She pressed on, humming softly to the music. Ninety miles gone, who knows how many more ahead.

I press the doorbell and pray that no one answers. My heart pounds a strangled staccato, a knot clogs my throat. I count to three. The door is still closed. I thrill; I can leave. Just as I turn away, the door clicks open. A blinding white fear constricts around me as I realize that it’s too late now, I can’t get away. I want to run. She stands in the doorway, looks down at me. Can I help you, she asks. I try to answer but my voice is a paralyzed whisper. The words come out in a feeble croak, Would you like to buy some cookies? I hold the order form toward her, which has become progressively more mangled by my sweaty grip as I have proceeded from house to house in my ungainly brown felt beanie. The same at each one: I pray that no one is home, or I knock on the door so lightly that I know no one will hear. I am supposed to sell these thin wafers of minty chocolate, these treacly coconut dusted caramel rings. I am supposed to, I don’t want to, I haven’t been able to, I must, I can’t. The afternoon has passed and my order form is still blank. A dog pants behind her. She smiles politely and shakes her head. She closes the door and I run back down to the sidewalk, triumphant. I have escaped. I will not earn a badge for this. --- L.V. Leonhard is a writer who lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Your room is always dark. The lampshade is heavy and the bulb dim; they only make shadows of everything. I run my finger along your desk. I hold back the urge to scrawl my name in the dust that clings to my pinky. I wipe it on your shirt, the one you wore the last time I saw you. It hangs on the bedpost, a ghost of you with loose arms and wrinkles and a fading marker stain on the sleeve. Your bed is cold and sinks down in the middle. I rock back and forth, arms folded inside themselves, legs crossed, a piece of hair caught on my dry lip. I touch your pillow, craving its familiarity. I imagine you’re here. You tuck my hair behind my ear, annoyed that it always ends up in my mouth. I promise to get a haircut. You promise to introduce me to your friends. I stop imagining. I touch the snow globe on your desk, the one with the taxicabs and synthetic snow falling down on plastic people. I shake and the snow falls and falls and no matter how hard I shake, the people always smile and the little taxi never goes anywhere. I crawl back into your bed and remember the way it felt to have your arm draped across me. I remember how you laughed in your sleep. I will myself to feel the weight of your arm on me, to hear the dry whisper of your last good night. It’s starting to snow, light puffs of white slapping against the window. I imagine I’m in the snow globe and I’m always smiling and the clock never moves and the headlights never appear outside the window, making me tumble from the bed and toward the back door.