A Roadmap of Womanhood

by Louise Mangos

The vein travels east from her cleavage across her right breast. Its trail is blue-green, like the motorways in her faded, water-damaged AA Atlas from the nineties, before everyone started using smartphone apps. It resembles the M1 where it meets the M25 at Bricket Wood, passing two freckles and a cherry angioma. After the junction, it takes a sharp turn south and ring-roads her areola, the place on her body where three babes have suckled, partners have fluttered their curious fingers and slid their passionate tongues. Frogmore. London Colney. South Mimms. The vein then travels eastwards horizontally before fading under her armpit into the ancient woodlands of Epping Forest. It transports her iron, her anger, her waste. It has pumped away the pain of mastitis in a steaming hot shower, felt the soft silk of an underwired C-cup, been prodded by doctors searching for cancerous nodules. The vessel should be blood red, but through the curious filter of human skin untouched by sunlight, it becomes the emerald green of a heaving swamp. Once fascinating, it is now shunned by partners, repulsive to lovers, frowned upon by friends. Today this roadmap is for her eyes only. After the fired flush of menopause has chilled her skin to marble, it remains a testament to the men who have overstepped her boundaries, crossed the central reservation, pulled in to a coffee stop for a quick pick-me-up. She looks at herself in the mirror, parked naked on a double yellow line. She studies the tattoo of her womanhood and wonders if she can do a U-turn, take the M4 all the way to the southwest, where there is nothing between her liver-spotted skin and the pot-holed coastal road except the salty tears of the Atlantic Ocean.

About the Author

Louise writes novels, short stories and flash fiction, which have won prizes, placed on shortlists, and have been read out on BBC radio. Her short fiction has appeared in more than twenty print anthologies and magazines. Her latest novel will be published in spring 2022. She lives at the foot of a Swiss Alp with her Kiwi husband and two sons. You can read more of her short fiction on her website www.louisemangos.com and connect with her on Twitter @LouiseMangos.

Edging

by Iona Rule

I didn’t want to be the type of person who went to Carrie, but ultimately I did. I found her in The Anchor, sitting at a ring-marked table, cradling a rum and coke. The stool bucked beneath me as I sat opposite her, stumbling over my stale words. It didn’t matter. She knew why I’d come. I shuffled the beer mats like tarot cards, then gave in. I whispered against her hair, which looped in a question mark by her ear,

“Can I see it?”

She nodded, resigned, as though she’d expected it, but had hoped I’d surprise her.

I took her home. Her gaze lingered on the dead cactus on the counter. Before I could ask, she removed her jumper and turned her back to me. There it was. Running from the nape of her neck, down her vertebrae, was a black hole. The emptiness stretched away, beckoning to something inside me that howled. I stood on the brink. People said if you entered one, you could access an alternate universe, or travel in time. I could return to a place where Sara hadn’t left and I could still keep a cactus alive. If this didn’t happen, if I only floated in the dark, my atoms pulled asunder, it would be enough.

But I couldn’t do it. I steadied myself on her shoulder and pulled back. We had sex instead. That basic human instinct anchored me as I stared from the edge.

After it was over, I felt empty, like that hole had taken something after all.

As she dressed I asked her how many people had jumped into her. She shrugged.

“I’ve lost count.”

I knew there was another world inside her, one where she dressed alone, watered my cactus, then closed the door behind her.

About the Author

Iona Rule has a birthmark but she’s 97% sure it isn’t a portal to an alternate universe. She has been BIFFY50 nominated and shortlisted in TSS Publishing, Cambridge Flash Prize, Fractured Lit and Retreat West. Her writing can be found in Epoch Press, The Phare and Ellipses Zine.

Grand Canyon Official Form 477D

by Debra A Daniel

Standing at the canyon’s edge, I see my ex struggling below. But maybe not. Maybe it’s a bear. Or a clown. Or a clown wearing a bear suit. Or vice-versa.

Although it could be my ex being eaten by a bear. That seems like something that would happen to him. Then he’d lie about it later. He’d make up some story, some half-truth difficult to trace.

“No,” he’d say. “That bear didn’t eat me. We were just joking around.”

“No,” he’d say. “I went to school with that bear. Great guy, Gary. Gary Bear. He lived two doors down. His mom always baked cookies for us.”

I look again. Hmm. It looks more like a clown now. Yes, a clown, for sure. My ex was afraid of clowns, ever since that Stephen King book came out.

Not that he read it. He never read anything. Not even my stories. He just thought it was cool to be scared of clowns.

Now, looking again, I’m pretty sure it’s a clown eating a bear.

Still it could be my ex. He’s so far down in the distance. I can’t tell.

“Is anyone missing a clown?” I ask the ranger. “Do bears suffer from coulrophobia? Have you ever been married to a pathological liar?”

The ranger shrugs. “I can’t answer unless you file an incident report,” she says. “Go to the welcome center. Ask for Official Form 447D Ex/Clown/Bear Attack.”

I take one more look into the canyon. There’s definitely a struggle still going on down below. I hope my ex isn’t being eaten by a bear.

But my tour bus is loading up, and he really isn’t my problem anymore.

About the Author

Debra Daniel, from South Carolina, sings in a band with her husband. Publications include: The Roster, (Ad Hoc Fiction, highly commended for the Bath Flash Fiction Novella-in-Flash, 2019), Woman Commits Suicide in Dishwasher (novel, Muddy Ford Press), The Downward Turn of August (poetry, Finishing Line) As Is (poetry, Main Street Rag), With One Eye on the Cows, Things Left and Found by the Side of the Road, Los Angeles Review, Smokelong, Kakalak, Emrys, Pequin, Inkwell, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River, and Gargoyle. Awards include The Los Angeles Review, Bacopa, the Guy Owen Poetry Prize, and SC Poetry Fellowships. Her second novella-in-flash A Family of Great Falls was shortlisted in the 2021 Bath Flash Fiction Novella-in-Flash Awards and was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in July 2021.

Riptide

by Kathryn Aldridge-Morris

When the nurse returns, he’s in a wetsuit, an oxygen tank strapped to his back, clipboard in his hands, says he’s a mental health nurse and you think ‘Sure!’ as the carapace of a sea turtle grows from his ribs and he shakes seaweed from your files and that thing you’re doing with your arms? you think it’s swimming but it’s the start of drowning and knowing the bottom of the seabed smells of hospital linoleum you try to catch hold of something to help you float, like a child’s armband left behind in the sand, or a mantra, an inflatable mantra: she sells seashells on the seashore—nice—and the nurse seems pleased with you, Keep going, he says, and you don’t let yourself look at the orange windsock behind his head, you focus on the slow tide of words which lap across the lines on his notebook, a memory sunk within you scratching its way out through his pen: Sean’s jacket puffed up in the water; Scratch Scratch, says his pen, then he tells you, It only takes a half pint of seawater to enter the lungs to start drowning, and you look at the plastic cup he’s handing you – that water is not from the cooler, is it? it’s from the fish tank on the side, the fish tank full of dogfish, stingrays, and the red rubber sandal of a six-year-old boy, but you drink it because if you don’t, it’ll go down in a tick box marked paranoia and that’s not a tick box you can swim in, and swimming’s what you need to do right now, swim, out to the buoy where you see your son waving, swim for god’s sake, move your limbs—he needs you.

About the Author

Kathryn Aldridge-Morris is a flash fiction writer with work forthcoming or in Flash Frog, Bending Genres, Emerge, Janus Literary, Ellipsis Zine, The Phare and others. She has stories in seven anthologies, including And if that Mockingbird Don’t Sing. She lives in Bristol, UK, and tweets @kazbarwrites