Editor Selections for Issue 277
Poetry & Short Fiction

I’ve Never Seen the Northern Lights,

but tonight, i look for them again in the wasilla sky. no dice. god has clipped the toenail moon and hid the stars behind a silver haze. up near the arctic circle, he’s painting his cheeks in violets, greens, and starry nightshade glitter. lip syncing blizzardy gospel tunes in fairbanks and nome. stoking the celestial light show with his ornate hand fan for everyone except me. i can’t see any whirling magnetic fields from this frozen meadow lake. my mind feeds me a faded night mirage instead. i can only imagine what they look like. the pretty stellar peacocks keep avoiding me and my bucket list. as a consolation, i made a pilgrimage to see the mother of american mountains. from talkeetna on the susitna, a wall of clouds obscured the vista. it seems that i’m always out of season. even for twenty thousand foot peaks. god’s never felt more out of reach than in this dirty snowmelt town on the cook inlet. it’d just be nice to see a neon sign up in the firmament with his signature on it. if this is actually heaven like the lucky folks say, then i haven’t been given any angel wings yet. i hope i’m not forsaken. or worse, forgotten by a preoccupied god. if i woke up tomorrow knowing how to fly, i’d soar to the summit of denali. past the chugach range and over the slurry seas. and i’d look god in the face, watching the dancing colors up in the thermosphere. smiling from ear to ear on top of the world, with my beauty hungry eyes like spinning pinwheels.

~~~

Nicholas Barnes is a poet living in Portland, Oregon, whose work has appeared in over eighty publications including Redivider, HAD, and Baltimore Review. His debut chapbook, Restland, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2025. His debut chapbook, Restland, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2025.

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Brian Culhane’s poetry has appeared in such places as The Paris Review, The New Republic, Blackbird, and Boulevard. He’s written two collections: The King’s Question (Graywolf Press) and Remembering Lethe (Able Muse Press). New work is forthcoming in The Hudson Review, The Argyle Magazine, and Plume. He lives in Seattle.

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After spending many years on the East Coast, Doug Fritock now lives with his family in Redondo Beach, California, but still pines away for snow. Previously a tobacco chemist, he has since given up the dark arts and now spends his days driving carpool, tending native plants, swinging kettlebells, and working on poems. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, The Black Fork Review, and Hunger Mountain among other literary journals.

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Sam New prefers to write in nature. In 2025, she received her MFA in Creative Writing from Old Dominion University. A Best of the Net nominee, her work appears in numerous journals including Portland Review, Crab Orchard Review, South Dakota Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Harpur Palate, and Watershed Review. She lives with her memoirist husband and their calico cat.

Short Fiction

Through It

They were on their way back to the States, and Charlie was working on his fourth gin and tonic, his head resting on the plastic airplane window. The steady roar and rumble of the jet engines vibrated his skull, making his vision blurry. He hoped it might cause a stroke or some sort of immediate and total brain damage. If not, he hoped the plane would plunge into the Atlantic Ocean, which was thirty thousand feet beneath the A-320, but completely obscured by what appeared to be an endless expanse of clouds that resembled the mashed potatoes his grandmother used to make him when he was a child—long ago, when he was marginally happy, when he still had a shot at a decent life, before he’d made whatever series of terrible decisions that led him to this place, on this flight, in this seat, his head vibrating against the plastic window of an airplane he listlessly hoped would crash.

* * *

Jenny had been sure she wanted to go to either Malta or Crete. Only, she couldn’t decide which. “Roger and Trish might know which is nicer,” she said to Charlie, referring to their good friends who lived in Edinburgh. “I can text Trish,” she said. “But you know her. She probably won’t get back to me for weeks.”

“I’ll get in touch with Rodge,” Charlie told her. Charlie and Roger had met more than twenty years earlier when the both of them were in university. Roger had taken a year to study in the States and wound up at the same school as Charlie. They became fast friends, then close friends, then something like brothers. They were each other’s best men at their respective weddings.

Roger wrote back right away. Unlike his wife, he was an avid texter. He would text at any hour, and he peppered Charlie with funny videos and random photos at all hours of the night and day. Not just Charlie. Jenny, too. Usually the same funny videos, the same random photos, only he never sent them as group texts. It had started about a year prior, just after their last trip to Scotland. Charlie would go to show Jenny a video, but Jenny would say she’d already seen it because Roger had sent it to her.

“Been to Malta,” he wrote back. “Don’t believe the hype. Just okay. Bit pricey, too,” he added. “I vote for Crete.” And then right after that, another text: “If you two think you could stand our company for a couple weeks, Trish and I have been dying to go. What do you say?”

Trish and Jenny had taken trips together, and so had Charlie and Roger. But they’d never done a proper couples trip.

Charlie relayed the idea to Jenny, who was delighted. “I swear I was wondering the same thing: what if we invited them along?”

So that’s how it happened. That’s how they went away to Crete together. No months’ worth of planning and coordinating. It was as easy and organic as a couple of quick texts. Or so it had seemed at the time. Of course, that was all bullshit, Charlie now knew, his head against the window, willing the plane to go down. It had just been staged to look that way.

* * *

Jenny had been complaining of perimenopausal symptoms like hot flashes and lack of energy and mood swings with deep, cavernous lows. But after the flights and cars and accommodations were booked, Jenny seemed energized at all times. She exercised more. She drank less. She started reading books that Charlie had never heard of, and that were far outside of Jenny’s usual interests. She even talked about moving to Edinburgh, and not just in an idle, musing sort of way; instead she’d become studied on visa types and their various requirements. Charlie expressed his surprise at how seriously she was taking the idea, and she reacted with an aggravation that both stung and surprised him.

“That shows how little you know me.” She saw how shocked he was by her response. And she pressed her point even further. “That’s always been a dream of mine—to live abroad. Always. You know that. And if you don’t know that, then we have even bigger problems than I thought.”

“We have problems?” Charlie asked, and he felt the release of adrenaline into his bloodstream. He wanted to believe this was news to him, but it wasn’t. They’d been drifting. He didn’t doubt she was experiencing physiological changes, but he couldn’t help noticing that most of them manifested in her annoyance with him, her desire to have space from him, her pursuing interests and activities that were entirely separate from him. It scared him. He didn’t know how to approach it, to ask about it. Instead he moped, and he drank more. He could see himself becoming less attractive physically and intellectually. And this only made him more apprehensive to address the growing gulf between them. He drinks too much. He has no real interests anymore. I never minded that he didn’t care much about work because he always had other things going. He’d write short stories, poems, he was trying to shop a novel around. I don’t think he’s written a single word in two years. These were the things she might say if they had a real conversation about it, and these were the things he couldn’t bear to hear. “What do you mean we have problems? I don’t think we have problems,” he told her in a voice that was almost pleading.

Jenny sighed with exasperation. “Everyone has problems.”

“They do?” he asked, so naive, so innocent.

“Never mind, Charlie.”

* * *

Some of the changes had bothered him. Like how she would occasionally sleep in the guest room, citing her hot flashes. Even her cutting back on drinking felt less motivated by health and more motivated by judgement, as if it was a way for her to be better than him. But no change bothered him more than how differently she’d started treating her phone.

For years, she’d had an outdated model with a badly cracked screen, which was never an issue because she was proud to be so ambivalent about these devices that everyone else was addicted to. She wasn’t on social media, was—like Trish—not great at texting, and Jenny felt that being accessible to her employers via email anytime of the day was a violation of her personal freedom. She would frequently forget her phone when she went out, or lose it in the house and not even bother to look for it until the next day. Oftentimes, she’d go days without charging it until it simply blinked out, and then she’d have to ask to borrow a charger, because she could never keep track of where those were, either.

But right after their vacation in Scotland the previous year, she told Charlie, “I never have any good photos from our trips because my stupid phone sucks so bad.” So she upgraded. And ever since, she’d become tethered to it. She was on it when she was cooking. She was on it during her morning coffee, during her evening tea. Even when she was reading, she would pick it up every few minutes to tap away at the screen and smile at whatever it was it was displaying back at her. And whatever that was, Charlie had no idea because the screen protector over its glass had a privacy tint—something she claimed she bought accidentally. But even when the phone was right next to her, Charlie noticed that she was always careful to set it face-down.

* * *

He couldn’t take a photo in Crete without capturing the two of them together—Roger and Jenny. He’d snap a photo of the blue water, and there they were. He’d try to get a good shot of the dramatic white rock formations, and he’d find them both in the frame. When the four of them would take walks, they always seemed to pair off at the front while Trish wandered on her own, as if she was making an effort to not get into a one-on-one conversation with Charlie.

When it was time to swim, it somehow ended up that Jenny was sunbathing whenever Charlie was in the water, but that Roger was always just going for a swim when Jenny was ready for a dip.

Jenny and Roger both had a passion for cooking, too, it turned out. So, most evenings, instead of going out, they were in the kitchen together, helping each other prep and peel and pan-fry. But where did the recipes come from, Charlie wondered? It was as if they’d been discussed and planned ahead of time.

Trish spent the holiday anxious, distracted, detached. She’d started smoking again. While Jenny and Roger cooked, and Charlie tried to find things to read or do with himself, Trish sat on a wooden table in the garden and smoked and drank white wine. Charlie asked her once if anything was wrong, and her answer was not only ambiguous but ominous, as well: “I’d rather not make anyone else feel like this when it’s me who’s the crazy one. Allegedly.”

She refused to elaborate beyond that.

Then, on what should have been Roger and Trish’s penultimate night, Charlie awoke at three o’clock in the morning to piss, only to find the bed empty. He looked to their en-suite bathroom and saw it was unoccupied. Shit, I must have been snoring, he worried. He crept downstairs to see if Jenny was reading or maybe sleeping on the sofa. But there was no one downstairs, and the lights were off.

Charlie poured an ouzo and took a seat in the pitch-dark living room. He looked outside and saw moonlight glittering across the sea. The moon illuminated the garden and the beach with a pale, ghostly glow. And it was in that glow that he saw Jenny and Roger walking up from the beach, her nightgown billowing in the breeze. Her hand slipped from his as they approached the sliding-glass door of the house. Roger opened the door slowly, quietly, and crept in, as Jenny brushed the sand from her feet before slipping in. Perhaps because the living room was dark, and perhaps because it was so late, they didn’t seem to expect to be seen.

“It’s OK. You don’t have to be quiet. I’m already up,” Charlie tried to whisper, but he found it difficult to modulate his voice, and the words came out in a sharp, loud voice.

“Oh fuck me, mate,” Roger said covering his clavicle, as if he was going to have a heart attack.

“Charlie, what are you doing up?” Jenny asked him, her voice quivering.

A hundred different responses went through his head, but he was unable to speak. He could only leave the living room, and climb the stairs.

“Fuck! Charlie, mate, come here, please. I’m sorry—” Roger called after him.

Charlie slammed the bedroom door behind him, and sat on the edge of the bed, drinking the rest of his ouzo, wanting to weep, wanting to scream, but he could do neither. He kept expecting Jenny to slip into the room or at least knock on the door, but she did not. He had no idea where she went. Maybe back out to the beach. Before long, he heard Trish’s voice—tearful and angry—and Roger’s—pleading and defensive. And then their voices faded away and there was only the sound of a Fiat starting and driving off into the dawn of a new day on Crete.

Two hours later, Charlie went downstairs for more ouzo. Jenny was sitting on the couch in her nightgown, which appeared damp and sandy in spots. Her eyes and nose were red, and her face was blotchy.

“Nothing happened,” she whispered. “We just talked.”

“I saw you holding hands.”

“Okay, we held hands. But we just talked.”

“Talked about what?”

“That’s our business. But you know what it was we talked about, Charlie.”

“How the fuck could you—” he started to ask, but he just as quickly stopped. He shook his head and poured more ouzo. The details of what happened or why they happened or how long this had been planned—they all seemed so pointless.

“Roger and Trish are going to split up. They’ve been having problems.”

“That’s news to me. You’d have thought he’d have told his best friend. But, no. Just his best friend’s wife.”

Charlie took the bottle and left the house. And after he finished that bottle, he bought another. Late that afternoon, he found his way back to the house. Jenny wasn’t in it. He went to sleep, and the next morning, he awoke to find Jenny downstairs, along with all of their luggage packed. “I checked us into our flight,” she told him.

“We might as well go to the airport now,” Charlie told her.

She nodded. The trip was over. They loaded up the car and drove in silence. He’d discovered his own wife was having some kind of affair with his best friend, and he couldn’t think of a word to say. If he wasn’t so fucking miserable, he’d have been fascinated.

* * *

The plane lurched, and then lurched again. Charlie’s head knocked against the window, but he hardly felt a thing. Jenny looked up from her book briefly, giving him a side-eye glance that was half pity, half disgust. He set his head back against the window, and the plane lurched again, this time even more violently. His forehead bounced off the plastic, and he felt a hint of dull pain, which he very nearly enjoyed.

The fasten-seatbelt light came on. The captain made an announcement, asking passengers and crew to please take their seats and buckle up, because it looked like some rough air ahead, and it would be much quicker to just go through it than around it.

“Yes,” Charlie said quietly, as he set his forehead back against the window, and his skull and teeth vibrated in sympathy with the juddering airframe. “Let’s go through it.”

~ ~ ~

Simon Bittersea is a pen name employed by an American author who has about thirty short stories and just as many long-form essays published under his own name.

Setting the Standard

“In all the world there is not someone who does not believe something.”
—Shirley Jackson, The Sundial

The standard expectancy meter was installed in the kitchen, a brutalist rectangle clouding the sunny striped wallpaper, its camera-lens eye ever watching, its video-screen mouth ever gaping. Robin wouldn’t have chosen to place it there, had she been given a choice, but it’s where she, her husband, and their three daughters congregated. More than once, while cooking, she’d been tempted to snatch the batteries right from the thing’s mechanical spine, the way people used to cripple smoke detectors before the meters took over that job, too. Or maybe toss it in the oven, broil it with cheese on top, serve it with a side of sour cream. Or maybe sever its wiring the way she did kale from its stalky tendons. Or maybe ...

But no reprieve from SEM’s constant feedback would be worth the hassle: interviews on why she’d destroyed it and how she’d done so and who she thought would possibly benefit from her actions, and then the added security protocols, the recidivist training program, the updated, new-and-improved SEM, impervious to water and fire and homicidal tendencies!

And anyway, she’d have a hard time justifying the decision, even to herself. Yes, SEM was an obnoxious overseer, an artificial intelligence programmed to better the neighborhood, but, as SEM’s algorithm consistently reminded Robin, it was only there to help. Didn’t Robin want to be the best version of herself? Didn’t her children and husband deserve that version? Didn’t she want to help—and here SEM would slip into its jangly tagline—set the standard?

She did, she supposed, though she wasn’t sure how scrapping her third dozen of deviled eggs was reinforcing their societal foundation.

It was a blush after six on Friday morning, and she and Dale would be hosting their weekly neighborhood gathering that evening. This only gave Robin a little more than twelve hours to prepare the whole house, and that was on top of a full day of remote work. She did not have time for this.

“Come on,” she pled, holding the platter up for SEM’s inspection. Its little eye blinked neon green, studying her offering.

“Not satisfactory,” it responded, its voice like pennies in a vending machine. You could program SEM to sound however you wanted, but the girls were especially fond of this antiquated intonation. “Calling in ... Mrs. Templer.”

Robin swore under her breath: anyone but Mrs. Templer. As soon as she thought it, though, her neighbor’s owlish face appeared on SEM’s video screen.

“Can you see me? Oh hi, dear!” Mrs. Templer called, readjusting in front of her own SEM. “Okay, now let’s walk through the recipe again. Show me where you went wrong.”

* * *

Robin had to admit, the deviled eggs were perfect.

“No, no,” Mr. Templer said from across the living room, where he was pontificating to a lackluster handful, as per usual. The neighbors gathered around the house in clusters, like decorative grapes. “The government was looking for unification. Maybe you’ve read about what it was like, after the schism, but I was there. Our ideals were tearing the country apart! Who and how one worshiped, be it in a church or a voting booth, had become more important than how one lived their day-to-day life! So we decided enough! Why were we trying to force understanding when we could so easily identify those with whom we would live in harmony?”

One of the audience members raised a finger, started to speak—

But then Mr. Templer was off again. “You see, it was the idea of an intranet, a neighborhood network ...”

Robin had heard this lecture before, about how America was right on the brink of its 250-year empire collapse, how so many people were disenfranchised, impoverished, how disease had ravaged and fire had feasted and violence had fermented, how mansions crumbled from disuse while evicted people starved, how bullets could spray classrooms and confessionals and concerts as easily as confetti.

Anthropologists finally had their moment in the spotlight, explaining that humans were only meant to exist in tribes of around 150 people, that humanity was collectively going haywire from an overdose of external stimulation. For all of history up until the internet, receiving feedback had been a tailored experience: a person’s actions were judged based on the actions of an immediate control group—their friends and family and neighbors and classmates and work associates—and these judgements made sense to everyone involved, because they were all working from an established cultural rubric.

“But can you imagine a child trying to form the idea of their very self while a million strangers on the internet criticized everything from their weight to their complexion to their perceived intelligence to the morality of their parents, without ever actually agreeing on what’s right?” Mr. Templer asked his audience. “No, it was better to raise children where parents could be sure they were receiving the right sort of feedback, guidance on how to best be a member of their control group: their immediate society.”

Speaking of children ...

Robin walked on in search of her own. At 15, 13, and 7, her girls flitted in and out of social events like hummingbirds, collecting their nectar of compliments and shimmering off to hover among more alluring company.

She’d worried about them—especially her 15-year-old, Marty—when they were younger, because they’d inherited her propensity for shyness. Starting at age 4, though, all neighborhood children could tune into SEM’s before- and after-school programming, and the public speaking lessons had really untangled her kids’ tongues. Lessons on polite conversation topics had also curbed Marty’s propensity to ask the wildly uncomfortable, a habit that had made hosting a nightmare for a few years.

These days, Marty was sure to be found at the center of some circle, telling a borderline-inappropriate joke with a borderline-sardonic smile on her borderline-bank-vault face. Her eldest, Robin had mused on many occasions, was more imp than girl, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. And from the reports she got from SEM and the girls’ school, Marty danced a similar limbo in just about everyone’s heart.

Sure enough, when Robin did find her oldest daughter, she was giggling away in a gaggle, while Ruby, only two years younger, held an adjacent court of her own. Quinn would be outside somewhere, Robin knew, making friends with the bullfrogs. At 7, she was still more likely to seek out riverbeds than responsibility.

“Mom!” Marty called out, beckoning Robin over with a half-full crystal wine glass. Robin raised her eyebrows at it, but Marty only shrugged. “Taylor’s SEM says it’s fine. Anyway, meet Perry! She and her parents are new to the neighborhood.”

Robin furrowed her brow—did she know someone had moved out?

As if reading her mind, Marty sighed. “The Jacksons? Who didn’t hit the EV deadline?”

Ah, yes, Robin had heard about that. She’d also heard that after their insurance company dropped them, they’d been paying for Mr. Jackson’s Parkinson’s treatments out of pocket, which surely affected their ability to buy a new car. But then again, everyone in the neighborhood had committed to zero emissions, including the Jacksons.

There would be other neighborhoods for them, Robin knew. They were such nice people; surely, they were already getting settled in somewhere.

Perry extended a bird-bone hand.

“And we’re so glad they didn’t,” she said sweetly, her eyes sparkling like black ice. “We’re so happy to be here.”

* * *

Robin didn’t see her youngest, Quinn, or her husband, Dale, until nearly one in the morning, while she was waltzing through the crowded living room with a bottle of red wine in one hand and a bottle of white in the other. Topping glasses off at each turn, she swooped to the phantom orchestra serenading them from the thousands of microspeakers planted in the walls.

She only saw Quinn for a blip—a tearstain skidding through her vision—and Dale for a blob—an amorphous form slipping through the sliding glass door into the backyard. Somehow, though, she sensed the two had one origin, that the same momentum drove them in opposite directions.

Her daughter first, then.

“Quinny?” Robin hummed as she lightly rapped two knuckles against Quinn’s bedroom door. “Is everything alright, honey?”

A muffled mphf in response.

“Can I come in?” Robin asked, and she took the ensuing mphf as consent.

Robin sat next to her daughter, ducking slightly to fit under the top bunk. This room had originally been Marty and Ruby’s, and Robin could still feel the day she and Dale had presented it to them, the way the girls had shrieked in glee over their bunk beds. She wondered if Quinn ever got lonely in here, inhabiting half of a whole. Marty and Ruby had always had a push-and-pull magnetism to each other; at only two years apart, with overlapping friends and clubs and SEM instructions, Robin felt this was inevitable. Quinn existed in her own childhood, though. She was adjacent to the teen and adult world, but she couldn’t quite touch it. Robin imagined that was unbearably frustrating.

Sure enough, when Quinn started to speak, she opened with, “Marty and Ruby—”

Robin’s brain had a bad habit of autofilling. She loved her girls and Dale more than anything, but there was never enough time to truly devote to any one of them. Even now, nodding along to Quinn’s story about how everyone had huddled together outside without her, laughing—were they laughing? is that what she said?—Robin was also quirking her ears for any unusual noises, doing a quick recount of hors d'oeuvres served, making a mental note to check the toilet paper in the bathrooms, wondering what had drawn Dale outside, reminding herself that she needed to get at least a few more guests interacting with SEM—she would set the standard for neighborhood parties, of that she was determined—

Quinn squeezed Robin’s hand. When Robin refocused, she saw silvery tear-tracks running down her daughter’s face.

“Perry just kept laughing, and I didn’t know what else to do,” Quinn whispered. “So I ran.” She hiccuped. “And I didn’t want to cry, I really didn’t! I don’t think anyone even saw me, Mom, I swear!”

“Whoa,” Robin soothed, brushing Quinn’s hair back off her forehead. “Honey, who said you’d get in trouble for crying?”

Quinn’s face shuttered. “SEM says we set the standard of what’s presentable, that if we lower that standard for ourselves, we’re lowering it for the whole neighborhood.”

“Well, yes,” Robin said. “But that’s for things like having good manners and mowing the lawn.”

“And Perry said big girls don’t cry,” Quinn countered. “She said that SEM taught her that.”

Robin sighed; SEM lessons were invaluable, she knew, but they rarely provided adequate context.

“Well SEM isn’t going to teach you that. And even if it ever does have lessons on, say, emotional regulation”—meditation was part of the youth curriculum—“they’re meant to help. No one should ever shame you for the way you feel.”

When Quinn looked up, her eyes were clear skies, and Robin smiled. This was her girl: starry and bright.

“But then how do we get people to do what we want?” Quinn asked.

* * *

When Robin was halfway across the backyard, Dale called out a half-hearted, “Don’t.”

Robin walked faster.

Dale was leaning against a shovel, tip snug in the dirt, and he looked so like an old-timey gravedigger that Robin stopped, carving the scene into her memory. She’d heard Mr. Templer’s endless tirades on cell phones─“technology that was touted as freedom but in reality chained you to everybody else’s expectations!”─and she agreed with him in theory, but she had also heard those very same devices could capture moments like this seamlessly. Robin had a camera, but what was she supposed to do, wear it on a strap around her neck?

She could practically hear SEM’s disapproval: “Not satisfactory.”

As soon as she reached her husband, though, she realized she wouldn’t need any help committing the moment to memory. She looked at the tangled mess at his feet and retched.

Dale scratched at his beard absently. “What should we do with it?”

Robin had no idea. She imagined walking back into the kitchen, loudly inquiring, “SEM, what to do with a mutilated cat corpse?” The living room jerking to a halt with a record scratch, another of those anachronistic sounds her daughters adored. Mrs. Templer jumping in with a helpful hint or two: Have you tested the limbs for rigor mortis? When it comes to burial, the bendier the better, that’s what I always say!

“Guess I’ll get to work,” Dale said with a shrug, kicking at the shovel. “What do you think got at the poor thing?”

“Some kind of wild animal, maybe?” Robin said.

“Well, don’t worry,” Dale said. “I’ll get the neighborhood watch to look into it.”

Was Robin worried? She supposed she was.

* * *

In the kitchen the next morning, Marty and Ruby huddled together at the table, listening intently to SEM’s history lesson.

“The neighborhoods were designed to restore harmony. By adhering to Dunbar’s number, these microsocieties centered around shared morality. Imagine the world prior: you had no guarantee of moral homogeneity within society, so you had no guarantee of compatibility, and as a result, violence erupted. The government knew, in order to keep that old discord from infecting the new social order, mankind would have to neuter its greatest creation: the internet. It could not simply be eradicated, though; the power that made it such a threat likewise made it such an asset. The answer: fully insulating this preposterous network into a funnel of information carefully metered out by the government. The Office of Standard Expectancy, which monitors all SEMs, tailors each individual neighborhood’s flow of information with topics that match its individual goals. This educational and entertainment zeitgeist is the pulsing soul of said neighborhood, encouraging conversation, deeper collective learning, communal outings—”

“What’s up, Mom?” Marty asked, finally looking up from her breakfast of sub-standard deviled eggs. Three still glistened on her plate.

Robin cut her eyes to SEM, wondering if Marty had already gotten a lecture on eating food Robin was supposed to have tossed. So much waste, Robin thought. Her girls didn’t need restaurant-quality food, not at every meal.

“Look at you, up so early after such a late night,” Robin said.

Dale scooted into the kitchen behind her, kissed three individual foreheads, snagged two deviled eggs, and scooted out the back door without one word, a legal pad clenched between his teeth.

“How are the lessons?” Robin asked.

“That’s not true, you know,” Ruby said, pointing a milky spoon at SEM. “It’s not just the Office of Standard Expectancy that chooses what we learn.”

Marty rolled her eyes. “Oh really, dumbass?”

“Hey,” Robin cut in, her voice curling up in warning.

Marty rolled her eyes the other way.

“Umm, yeah really,” Ruby snapped back, quick as bubblegum. “’Cause SEM learns from our neighborhood algorithm too. Otherwise we’d be getting the same old stuff all the time.”

“The algorithm doesn’t choose, though, it just allows whatever the OSE originally programmed to evolve,” Marty said.

“Perry says she thinks she can teach it,” Ruby said, smug to her eyebrows that she’d been privy to intel her sister didn’t have.

“Yeah, well, Perry’s a dumbass, too,” Marty shot back.

Robin could tell her eldest didn’t mean it, though. It was there in Marty’s very inflection: admiration.

Marty’s usual shadow, Taylor, was earnest as a duckling in her devotion. This friendship with Perry held a new dynamic, one Robin remembered well from her own girlhood: That desperation to impress. To feel wanted. To be special. Robin studied her daughter and found contours of nostalgia, memories of the way Marty used to look up at—and to—her. It was a rare sight these days.

She sighed. When was the last time the five of them spent the day together?

She and Dale both worked full-time jobs, the girls took SEM lessons on top of their normal schooling, and neighborhood-coordinated events seemed to balloon into all the in-between spaces. Robin couldn’t even remember where Dale had raced off to minutes ago: The gardening committee? The neighborhood watch? Or had he mentioned something about going into the office this morning?

Sometimes Robin wondered what the blueprint for the standard expectancy of a family even looked like.

“Nu-uh,” Ruby said. “Perry’s super smart. She’s gonna be a doctor.”

“Good morning ... Robin,” SEM chimed in as Robin walked across the kitchen to the refrigerator. “Would you like to hear about the history of the neighborhood?”

“I’m okay, thank you,” Robin responded, nearly as mechanically, grabbing a deviled egg of her own.

“Are you sure? As Carl Sagan said, ‘You have to know the past to understand the present.’ Would you like to hear options for more lessons?”

“Skip,” Robin replied, the generic keyword to make SEM disengage with its current topic.

“Okay. I am glad you are happy with your current level of knowledge ... Robin. And what’s this about ... Perry ... wanting to be a doctor?” SEM continued, turning back to a more captive audience. “How good for the neighborhood! Would you like to be doctors ... Marty and Ruby?”

* * *

Marty wanted to try duck; Perry had told her it was just divine. Plus, Marty added, it would make an impressive potluck addition at Friday’s neighborhood gathering. It was important, Robin knew, to show up as a generous guest after hosting, otherwise it was easy to fall into a pattern of slack that was impolite at best. So duck it was. She’d never cooked it before, but with SEM, she could set a new standard!

“Instructions on how to prepare duck,” Robin called out, tying a gingham apron over her work attire. She had another video conference in half an hour, but she could at least start the prep work.

“Step one,” SEM jangled, “pick up the duck by its feet, its head pointing down. Place the duck in the killing cone and extend its neck—”

“Skip,” Robin said, a little too loud. She tried again; SEM could be awfully finicky about wording. “Recipe directions for roast duck.”

“Pull feathers against the grain, holding skin taut so as not to tear—”

“Skip!” Robin called. She looked around to make sure none of her girls overheard, shivering a bit. They had a habit of eavesdropping, Quinn in particular. “How to roast a duck in the oven.”

“Insert index and middle finger into the top of the chest cavity, pushing down against the spine ...”

* * *

Robin had never been particularly close with Taylor’s mom, but she had to admit the woman collected the shiniest bits of gossip. The two were propped in the kitchen, overseeing the Friday night festivities, which Taylor’s family was hosting.

“Carl at Border Patrol said the Jacksons never came through,” Taylor’s mom said, stirring her martini lazily. She popped the plastic sword into her mouth, sucked off the bleu cheese olive, then looked sadly at its skeletal remains. “Took me ages to stuff these, and poof—gone like that. Anyway, it’s possible he just wasn’t on duty—I’ve never heard a man who loves to flap his trap like Carl—but I find it awfully curious.”

“Everything seemed fine at their going away party, though, didn’t it?” Robin asked. She hadn’t gone—didn’t Quinn have a cold that weekend?—but Dale and the older girls would have, surely.

“Oh, who can tell, what with that man shaking like a leaf all over the place?” Taylor’s mom said, refilling her plate. “Does a chihuahua enjoy its quinceanera? Ha! This duck is divine, by the way.”

“Oh, thank you—” Robin began, but she was interrupted by a swarm of teens.

“And where are you all running off to?” Taylor’s mom asked.

Her daughter, leading a pack made up of Marty, Perry, and Ruby, barely took a moment to call out, “Nowhere!”

“What are you girls up to?” Robin asked.

“Nothing!” Marty responded, right as Perry said, “I’m just showing them something SEM taught me!”

“Okay, well remember to have fun,” Taylor’s mom said.

“Will do!” Taylor responded.

Then they were off.

“Ah, I remember that age,” Taylor’s mom mused after a moment, leaning back against the wall, arms loosely crossed. She finished off her martini in two elegant sips. “What I wouldn’t give to go back to it.”

Robin raised her eyebrows; she would have painted Taylor’s mom as one of the happiest clams in their shoal. Everything from her designer bookshelves and perfectly seasoned guacamole and matching casual sets and freshly waxed eSUV screamed comfort and competence.

Taylor’s mom caught her look and laughed out a sigh, rolling her eyes. “You’re right, listen to me going on. Not exactly the best version of myself.”

Robin wasn’t sure what to say, so she said nothing at all. Then her brain autofilled: this is where you got sidetracked. 

“So no one’s heard from the Jacksons at all, then?” she asked.

“Sure doesn’t seem like it,” Taylor’s mom said. She flashed a grin. “Suspicious, no?”

Almost as suspicious as the way Marty was slinking back through the kitchen, one hand gripping the other so tightly her knuckles blanched.

“Honey?” Robin asked, and then one criminal crimson droplet splashed across the pristine white tile floor. “Oh shi—shoot, are you okay?”

“I’m fine!” Marty said too quickly, voice too high. “It’s just a little cut!”

It wasn’t just a little cut—it was a gash that grinned across her whole palm.

“Jesus, Marty!” Robin gasped as soon as her daughter unfurled her fist. “That looks like it needs stitches!”

Marty inspected the canyon, prodding at its bloody rim in a way that made Robin’s stomach turn. A globule of yellow fat glistened from under one of the flaps. Marty picked at it.

“Yeah, probably,” she said. She brightened. “Can we stop back at the house on the way? Perry said I should bring my laptop so I can interview the doctor.”

When Robin looked over at Taylor’s mom, her face was a very particular shade of green. The other woman swallowed down whatever she was thinking, though, turned to Robin, and smiled.

“A doctor! That’ll be great for the neighborhood. Maybe Taylor should spend a little more time around Perry, too. Seems like she’s a good influence.”

* * *

As Robin prepared breakfast the next morning, SEM’s programming flipped to a recording of Mr. Templer. This was an additional so-called perk the OSE could program in: if the neighborhood included verified experts, those experts could have their own SEM segments.

Robin sighed. Even if she hadn’t been up until 3 a.m. with Marty in the ER, it would be too early for this.

She could always skip the segment, but the action would be registered, and if Mr. Templer wanted—and he always wanted—he could pull up the performance stats of his recording, see which users disengaged, and voila! That would be a guaranteed conversation topic the next time he cornered Robin at some weekly gathering.

Typically, Robin could tune him out, but there was something about a 75-year-old man preaching his opinions on early childhood development that grated against her. Mr. Templer hadn’t done much besides bore children in more than forty years.

“Curricula were largely made up by individual teachers—they chose the reading lists and homework frequency and media consumption,” Mr. Templer droned in SEM’s jangly cadence. “The only aspect the government controlled was standardized testing, and by that time, it was simply too late; too many children had been left behind, lost in the cracks of a derelict system. With the formation of the OSE and the SEM curricula, public schools had a rubric from which to work. The jump in unification was immediate.”

Robin had to admit, she couldn’t imagine trying to keep on top of the girls’ schooling plus everything else in her life—just making sure they all functioned from one day to the next could zap her brain power. It was a miracle of technology that SEM molded so seamlessly with the school systems, that the girls were never really alone in their learning. They could always ask for what they wanted, and Ruby was right—SEM learned from them, too. This created a mutualism, a symbiotic benefit: SEM fed the girls information, the girls fed SEM questions, and with enough repetition, the menu tailored itself to its clientele.

* * *

Robin hadn’t realized Perry and Taylor had slept over until she wandered into the kitchen early Sunday morning. They’d come over the previous day and stayed at Marty’s side for hours, and whatever those three were scheming about, it thankfully kept Marty distracted from her stitches. Robin could have sworn Perry and Taylor had split after dinner, but maybe she’d misheard them; it was just as likely they’d only run home for overnight bags.

“Good morning!” she called as she walked into the kitchen.

The little hoard—which included Ruby, Robin could now see—shifted in response.

Teenagers, Robin thought. If they’d just responded normally, she wouldn’t be suspicious, but now—

“What’re you getting up to bright and early?” Robin asked, inspecting them.

They were huddled around the kitchen table, practically obscuring it, but even so, Robin could tell there was something not-quite-right about the tableau. The air felt chewy, like goat cheese or sugar coating. Thick. Slick.

“Nothing!” Marty called.

Robin eyed her oldest, and her scan hitched at Marty’s hand. It was covered in blood.

“Hon, have your stitches opened up?”

Marty looked down, surprised. “Oh, um, I guess so. Maybe ...”

She skipped down some yellow brick road of excuses, but Robin wasn’t really listening. There was something about the smell in the room ….

A mutilated cat corpse clawed its way through her memory, nipping at her side.

“Where’s Quinn?” she interrupted.

“Quinn?” Marty asked.

The fear agitated into panic, but Robin couldn’t have said why. Well, maybe that wasn’t quite right. Maybe she just didn’t want to ask herself why.

“Yes,” Robin insisted. “Quinn. Your sister. Where is she?”

“Well, we thought about asking her to join,” Marty admitted. “But it didn’t feel right.”

“Yeah,” Perry said, jumping into the conversation with a nod. “She’s too little—”

For a moment, there was no sound, just the grotesque squirming of the girls’ mouths, like corpse-fingers unburrowing. Then Perry’s lips split in a peal of laughter.

“—our knives are almost the same length as her bones!” she crowed.

Taylor, Marty, and Ruby dissolved with mirth, a noise as jarring as salt in lemonade.

What a poorly constructed joke, Robin thought, in lieu of any real thoughts.

“What do you mean?” Robin asked, clenching her hands in order to keep her voice steady. “Asking her to join what?”

Her brain may not have wanted to accept it, but her body already knew. Was already tagging the evidence.

“Our SEM lesson,” Perry said brightly. She raised her hand, exhibiting a scalpel, poised as a ballerina. “Anatomy.”

“We’re going to be doctors!” Ruby chimed in.

“No,” Robin said. Or maybe she just thought it—she wasn’t sure.

But even as she shook with denial, she was walking farther into the kitchen, gesturing for the girls to separate, move apart, show her what was on the table, show her that the alarm smashing through her brain was as faulty as those old-timey smoke detectors.

They did—but they didn’t.

Plopped atop an industrial sheaf of curling wax paper, a raw human form bled freely. Robin’s first thought was of the local deli counter, those shining hunks waiting to be measured out; her second was a dazed note-to-self—

I’m going to have to update Carl at Border Patrol.

She half-smiled: Taylor’s mom had nothing on this sort of intel. Then putrid comprehension set in. Robin turned away, horrified.

And she finally saw Quinn. Huddled in the kitchen doorway.

She stared into her youngest’s eyes, praying she could expand into the corners of Quinn’s vision, veiling the slaughter behind her. She wanted to sweep her girl back to the riverbeds, the bullfrogs.

But Quinn looked over Robin’s shoulder, to her sisters. Slowly, queasily, she put one foot in front of the other until she, too, stood before the table.

“I want—” she started, nearly whispering. She swallowed hard. “I want to be the best version of myself.”

She picked up a scalpel, held it awkwardly.

Ruby laughed gently.

“Like this, silly,” she said, repositioning Quinn’s fingers. She held Quinn’s hand up to SEM’s all-seeing eye. “Right?”

“What—” Robin began, but a thousand questions jammed together behind her teeth. She didn’t want to ask a single one of them. She didn’t want to know.

She cleared her throat. “What are you girls doing?”

“Curing Parkinson’s,” Perry said. “We’ve been studying!”

Doctors, Robin thought from somewhere very far away. They’re all going to be doctors.

“Standard expectation met!” SEM cheered. “Congratulations ... Marty and Ruby and Perry and Taylor and Quinn ... you are—setting the standard!”

It would be good for the neighborhood, having so many doctors.

SEM’s eye blinked neon green. “Aren’t you proud ... Robin? Of ... Marty and Ruby and Perry and Taylor and Quinn ... for—setting the standard?”

She supposed she was.

~ ~ ~

Savannah Brooks earned her MFA in creative writing from Hamline University and spent the first decade of her career working in publishing, first as an editor and then as a literary agent. After contracting a debilitating illness, she left the field to focus on writing and teaching. Her work has been featured in the Guardian, Hobart, and the Hong Kong Review, among other publications, and has been nominated for a Best of the Net Award. A disabled writer suffering from the most literal of broken hearts (and stomachs), she lives in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina, with her two black cats, Eggs Benedict and Toaster Strudel. 

The Expansion of the Sky on Monday

No one was safe at our office, except for Wallace and Cathy. Wallace was a numbers man. He had a calculator in his brain and maybe nothing else. Our manager, Chuck, hated Wallace. You could tell by the way Chuck spoke to Wallace, kind of down his nose, even though he was a good three inches shorter than him.

Wallace didn’t seem to notice. He’d sit with his tall self almost bent in two staring at his numbers all day on the computer with that level, focused expression of his, one line furrowed straight between his brows. Sometimes he’d even talk to the numbers. Once when I passed by, I heard him say sternly to a digit on a spreadsheet, “What are you doing there? Get back in your place.” He clicked a couple buttons, looked back up at the screen and said, “That’s much better. Thank you.”

Wallace never took lunch breaks in the cafeteria. Instead, he’d log off his computer at precisely twelve ’o’clock each afternoon and pull out a square Tupperware container with a ham sandwich inside and a paper towel folded in quarters on top of the sandwich. He’d unfold the paper towel, put it on his desk, put the sandwich on it, place his phone with its edge perfectly lined up with the napkin’s edge, hunch himself over even more than usual, and eat and scroll on the phone for exactly twenty-nine minutes. At 12:29, he’d fold the napkin up with the leftover sandwich crumbs, put it in the Tupperware, put the Tupperware in the backpack beside his desk, put his phone in the front pocket of the backpack and, at precisely 12:30, he’d get back to work.  

Unlike Wallace, I was disposable. Most of us were, even the scarf girls, who tried so hard to get in good with the executives. Every office has scarf girls, shivering under their blanket-sized pashminas in winter and summer alike. There were four scarf girls in the office. They all traveled in a pack, but watched each other sideways, noting which big CMO or CFO or COO or Vice whatever had stopped at which of their desks, racking up points on an invisible scoreboard for each second a bigwig stopped to chat or asked one of them to make a note in his calendar.

All of them were pretty and thin as sticks, strutting in and out the doors with bags that cost more than most of America makes in a month. But they needn’t have bothered with that invisible scoreboard. Cathy led them all by ten thousand points.

Cathy, easily the width of all four of the other assistants put together, burst into the office each morning like some neolithic goddess, bestowing “hello-my-darlings” in every direction and all at once we all leaned towards her, trying to catch a “hello my darling” for ourselves, until the CEO saw what was going on beyond the glass walls of his office and raised himself up from his big desk and opened the glass door and called to Cathy. When she saw him, her eyes fixed right on his and if he was frowning, she frowned, and if he was smiling, she gently smiled at him, just as if she was his mother and he was an infant in her arms.

Even though she was looking just at him, the CEO would sweep his eyes jealously around the room and we would all duck our heads and look anywhere except at him and Cathy as she followed him into the office, and even though we could still see both of them behind the glass, they were so inaccessible they might as well have been in another galaxy.

There were no windows in our office, except in the CEO’s suite, where one wall was all sky. With one flick of the wrist, he could blot out the sun by closing his shades, leaving us all in the twilight world of fluorescent lighting, with no way to tell time except for the digital clocks in the corner of our computer screens.

In the winter, I would get to the office in the morning before the sun rose and leave after it set. We had our lunches served in a big, windowless cafeteria a few floors down, so that the only natural light I saw all day was that sliver coming in from the CEO’s office if he didn’t close his shades. In the evenings, stepping out into the same dark as the mornings, I wondered if a day had even passed, or if time had just stopped when I entered that immense skyscraper, resuming only when I walked out.

In the autumn, a different feeling took hold of me when I walked inside that silver tower. Passing through the park on my way to work, the reds and yellows of the trees hovered over my head. The grass was still bright green, not yet the dull shade of wintertime. The sky was clear. Every leaf, branch, and strand of grass stood out before me in the vivid primary shades of a child’s paint set; like God’s original colors before the fall; before dilution.

When I spun through the revolving doors of the office lobby, the color stopped. The lobby was white. The tiles were white. The doorman wore a white uniform jacket with navy stripes circling the lower third of his sleeves, severing his wrists from his upper arms. The lonely dull slash of blue felt like an insult. The violence of the whiteness in every direction made me want to tear my eyes out. Until I entered the dim elevator. As I pressed the button to the 59th floor, the despondency settled in. It settled deep; my soul turned gray with it.

On one nondescript fall Monday, as the elevator began its ascent, the despondency sank into me as usual, but this time it didn’t stop; as if it was on a reverse elevator, the feeling sank deeper into me as the metal box rose higher. The numbers denoting the floors went steadily up and the despondency plummeted steadily down, towards the base of my being.

When I stepped out onto the 59th floor, I felt so low I could hardly drag myself to my desk. All day, the office seemed to wave and fold around me; the ceilings surged down and then swooped back up. Walking down the long hall to the bathroom, the walls on either side swerved in, threatening to crush me between them, and the floor slanted so steeply before me that I was afraid I might tumble downhill.

Making it back to my desk only by some miracle, I sat very still, afraid the wheels on my chair might at any second give in to the tilting surface beneath and carry me away on the undulating waves of gray vinyl flooring. To make matters worse, the air was becoming thick and hard to inhale. I could not catch my breath.

In the roiling room, a double stripe of still light appeared across my desk, as unmoving as if it had always been there; Cathy had opened the blinds in the CEO’s office and the sunlight coming through now lay quietly before me.

Through the glass wall and the open blinds, I saw clouds moving lazily across a wide expanse of blue. The office continued to tilt around me as I walked towards the CEO’s suite. I passed Wallace at his desk, eating his lunch while he stared at his phone. On the screen was a video of a little girl with a concentrated expression on her face, one line furrowed straight between her brows. In the video, the little girl’s hands went up, she leaned forward and tilted into a handstand. She held the handstand for a moment and then tumbled down, and the video ended. Wallace pressed play again. He pressed play three more times while I stood beside him, not seeing me. Each time the girl fell and the video stopped, there was such anguish on his face it looked like his heart was breaking.

The floor was still moving beneath me. I staggered past the scarf girls, who did not look up. Inside the CEO’s office, Cathy was arranging papers on the desk, putting pens back in drawers.

“Hello, my darling, can I help you?” she asked.

“Can you open the shades all the way?”

“Of course, my darling.”

Cathy drew up the shades and we stood together, looking out. The window glass was so clean and clear, it appeared as if there was no barrier between us and the sky. A storm was moving in. Behind the gray clouds, the sky had turned a deeper blue, the basic vivid blue you’d find in a child’s paint set, but brighter, the way it must have looked when God first invented it, before the fall; before dilution.

I had thought the view of the sky, of the real world outside the office, would steady me, and it did. The floor was no longer moving beneath my feet. I felt as still and peaceful as those sun beams resting on my desk.

But the sky itself was not still. The curling clouds were rolling towards Cathy and me. And so, it seemed, was the deep blue vastness. The sky expanded towards us. It lapped at the sides of the window in waves; smaller waves at first and then greater waves. The windowpane was gone, or it had never been, and the blueness entered. It surged across the floor, the ceiling, the walls, splashing up the sides of the room until there was no room, and no Cathy and no up and no down, only that dazzling, primary shade of blue in every direction, the way it must have looked when God first invented it; before dilution.

~ ~ ~

Rachel Kalina’s fiction has appeared in Litro Magazine, Bending Genres, and Cornice Magazine. Originally from New York, she now lives in Chicago.