Below is an excerpt — you can read the full version for free on p. 109 in Hotch Potch Literary and Art Volume 2 Issue 1, along with some other great fiction, too!

Translated from Mayan hieroglyphs ca. 680 CE by Dr. Wyatt Hawkins in 2047…

Here is a motto I live by: the fish you catch will always taste better if you catch them on the wrong side of the river. Here’s another: the fish you catch will always taste even better if you catch them on the wrong side of the river and you’re about to catch your brother when he’s skipping school.

There’s just about enough space in the fishing hollow for us to sit cross-legged side by side when we are both here, the Poch’il vines draped around us, offering fragrant flowers that look like sunbursts layered with shining moons. I had expected to sneak up behind Kunam and flog the back of his neck with a few shoots of stinging vine I had clipped on my way, but I got here first.

The lazy water ambles past the shore with no particular place to be. While Kunam wastes his morning elsewhere, probably distracted in the enemy jungle, maybe digging worms, I’m sitting here catching the fish he would have caught. I string them up one by one, heart full of satisfaction that each fish I catch is a fish Kunam won’t. Kunam is such a Q’eq’alaj. Idiot.

Feeling smug and fishing. That’s what I’m doing when my secret outing is interrupted by an explosion of light. A scalding combination of colors bathes the trees around me, stretching out over the river. The ground under me lurches backward, then forward, toppling me backwards into the vines and brush. The light continues drifting across the sky until a trailing edge recedes over the water to the jungle on the other side, where I live. Everyone in my city must have seen that. Which means everyone here in the neighboring enemy city saw it, too.

My Q’eq’alaj brother is out here somewhere, and he might need my help.

My name is Malinali. My mother says it means “Runs Toward Danger.” I know the enemy is on the way. I leave the fish to soak in the river, and leave the hollow behind…

Keep reading for free on p. 109 in Hotch Potch Literature and Art

P.J. Powell is a writer, jargon-slayer, and patron saint of slumber parties. She writes weird stories about normal people and vice versa. Her short fiction has been published in Across the Margin, Cobalt Weekly, Evening Street Review, Youth Imagination Magazine, and other places. Her nonfiction and opinion pieces have appeared in Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, Moms Don’t Have Time to Write, The Star Ledger, and Florida Today, and she co-hosted two seasons of the writing and publishing podcast, “Write Away with Nat & PJ.” She is in a love triangle with creative writing and corporate communications. Visit her website, Creatorology.com.

Javier Mayol is an award-winning screenwriter renowned for his exceptional storytelling skills and ability to create captivating narratives. His talent has earned him prestigious accolades, including recognition for the award-winning romantic comedy “Love and Hostages,” which showcased his prowess in crafting engaging scripts. With a diverse portfolio, he has written and produced acclaimed projects such as “Hialeah: A Comedy Series” and the upcoming horror film “iPossessed”. As the founder of Phoenixfire Films, Mr. Mayol remains dedicated to developing compelling projects across various genres and mediums, solidifying his status as a visionary storyteller.

Gram needed to find her Imari ware platter or suffer Dotty’s intermittent digs at the Ladies’ League luncheon. Gram recently committed a cardinal mis-step at one of the League’s teas, a faux pas that demanded every remedial effort she could make.

After decades of china serving-ware oppression endured during endless Ladies’ League events, not to mention entertaining throughout Sal’s career and running the family holiday gauntlet during the years when the Harris clan still held family holidays, Gram finally admitted to herself that, just for once, she’d like to use paper plates and disposable platters. And then, although she could have easily kept this revelation to herself, she revealed this tiny truth of the soul to her girlfriends at the League’s Tuesday tea.

Read more in Valparaiso Fiction Review…

P.J. Powell co-hosts the podcast “Write Away with Nat and P.J.” Her short fiction has been published in Across the Margin, Manawaker Studio’s Flash Fiction Podcast, Perceptions Magazine, Voices de la Luna, and Youth Imagination Magazine. A strategic communications consultant and writer, P.J. is also a staunch defender of the productivity-boosting benefits of short naps, long walks, and dance breaks. Follow her on Twitter @2PSays, and visit her blog at Creatorology.com.

“Nothin’ you can do but wait. I’ll come out of this, or I won’t.” Momma says it, and the wooden door scrapes shut behind her like she means it.

A corset of rope binds me to the kitchen chair around my middle. Tied too tight for me to work on with my free hands, Momma made sure of that.

“Gotta truss you up,” she had muttered when she heard the Hodag’s spiked tail raking the side of the cabin, taunting her. Luring her outside. She knew if she didn’t tie me up snug, I’d follow her.

Hunger corkscrews in my belly, turned by knowing that next time the cabin door opens, it will either be Momma or the Hodag. Until then, it’s just me and the giant can of chocolate pudding Momma left behind. Cafeteria pudding. Not her homemade pudding, which lines the counter, freshly canned in neat rows of jars, ready to sell in the town gift shops.

“Let people taste what the factory spits out, then try the real thing from my kitchen. Wisconsin chocolate, Wisconsin dairy,” she always says. If they only knew.

Momma thought the Hodag didn’t exist, told me it was just some hoax designed to lure tourists into Rhinelander. “Fine by me, sugar. More people come to see that nonsense, the more buyers for my pudding.”

I told her the Hodag does exist. That, by All Hallows Eve, it would come for me. I knew because the Hodag shrieked this promise into the air, willing the wind to deliver it to me on summer’s last breath through the crevices in the bedroom shutters Momma always keeps shut.

The wind obeyed, and the season sharpened its crisp edges while it waited. Now Momma’s battle cries echo outside while a familiar shriek drifts through the timbers like a specter. The Hodag does not lie.

Each gasp for air brings agony, my ribs rubbing against the ropes. Each swallow too, but still I scoop gelatinous sludge from the can’s gaping mouth. Moonlight coats the worn wood floors as the slurry paves over the hole in my gut. Times like this, you eat whatever you can reach.

A ragged metal burr on the lid snags the husk of my knuckle. Lets the blood flow, and with it an idea. Snapping the lid free is easy.

I worry the sharp edges against the ropes. Sawing back and forth, fiber by frayed fiber, getting closer to going after Momma. Outside, the uproar only gets louder and closer. The wall shivers on impact, maybe one of them, maybe the wheelbarrow or watering can, hurled in defense or distraction.

“I’m coming, Momma,” I bleat as loud as I can into the empty cabin, hoping she can hear me outside while she fights. Hoping the Hodag hears me too.

Half a rope-width away from freedom, the Hodag crashes through the door followed by Momma, bloodied and righteous, gored in the shoulder and screaming like a pole cat. They hit the table so hard it topples, the mammoth can heaving store-brand pudding onto the cabinet doors as it clanks its way to the floor. Smells of sweat and earth flood the air, mixed with the richer, darker smells of the Hodag’s den.

Full-grown, the Hodag barely fits in the cabin, the erupted ivory spines along its backbone threatening to gouge the walls whenever it rears up to show its armored belly, protecting its softer, furry sides as best it can. Its spiked tail shoos Momma into the corner, bringing me eye-level with the fangs ringed around its red maw.

The beast lunges toward me, claws pointed at my ropes. But Momma slithers out, swings her ax into the Hodag’s head, and the creature crashes to my feet. It groans, its good eye catching mine before dilating. Nostrils flaring, its dying lips form two words: “I’m sorry.” My throat clenches up, choking on despair.

Momma twists her chin upward, her backbone crackling like popcorn. She leans in, a woman more monstrous than the Hodag, her garbage breath scalding my cheek.

“Sugar, did you really think your friend could stop me?”

My only friend. No one else will come for me. Not for all the candy in the chocolate belt between Milwaukee and Green Bay.

Momma steps on the lifeless Hodag’s shoulder and grips the ax handle with sticky hands, prying the weapon back into service. My fingers curl around the barbed edge of the can’s lid, hidden by the ruined table. The saw-toothed disc warns me of its bite.

She should have tied up my arms.

P.J. Powell co-hosts the podcast “Write Away with Nat and P.J.” Her short fiction has been published in Across the Margin, Manawaker Studio’s Flash Fiction Podcast, Perceptions Magazine, Voices de la Luna, and Youth Imagination Magazine. A strategic communications consultant and writer, P.J. is also a staunch defender of the productivity-boosting benefits of short naps, long walks, and dance breaks. Follow her on Twitter @2PSays, and visit her blog at Creatorology.com.

Filing your taxes when you’re dead isn’t that different from filing them when you’re alive — you just can’t sign your own forms. As my mom’s only child and caregiver, signing her income tax forms after she died was what brought me, reluctantly, to a fading mall for an appointment at H&R Block to dwell on money my mom could no longer enjoy nor fret over signing away.

Again.

People die once, my mother included. But since she died unexpectedly just before filing her taxes for the prior year, she left the errand twice undone. After she died, it was up to me to file them for the year before her death and for the year she actually died. One death, two tax appointments one year apart, two chances for me to see the story of my mother’s final months told by the IRS in the language of numbers, in acts divided into tax seasons.

“Edith Tompkins,” the receptionist called out into the bland office abyss. I stood, even though this was my mother’s name. The computer carried her name over automatically each year, just one more mechanical prod from the government’s giant adding machine, sucking the paperwork into one side and spitting it back out the other with a final score, catching my heart in the gears for good measure.

The tax-collection apparatus hadn’t let me book the same preparer for the second year, as though preparers were interchangeable cogs. But I had liked the previous year’s cog. He had kept the conversation sparse and let me supply information robotically, allowing me to embrace the lifeless space of income taxes and ignore my vital suffering. I’d left feeling cared for, as sometimes happens when people just leave you alone.

My new preparer, Antonietta, greeted me with a warm smile and escorted me back to the cubicle where I would need to explain my situation all over again. Couldn’t I just pretend to be my mother instead? I certainly could have pulled it off.

Her dementia diagnosis had triggered my reverse-parenting frenzy to get a handle on her finances, medications, medical care, safety, and a house stuffed with fifty-plus years of precious possessions. I’d absorbed her identity in the process, and when she died it was like having a person yanked out of me. No, I wouldn’t pose as my mom. I would just keep the conversation to a minimum like last year.

Unfortunately, unlike the past year’s dear robo-preparer, Antonietta was chatty. “My mother lives with us, too,” she told me. “She’s 87.”

Like my mom and me, I thought, and like so many other adult children caring for a parent. Antonietta’s forehead creased at a red flag on her screen.

“Oh! That’s her,” she finally exclaimed in a cryptic “a-ha” moment, staring at my mother’s name on one of the lines of the tax form.

“That’s her,” I agreed.

“No, it should be your name. It’s the person who gets the check in the event of a refund,” she said, bludgeoning the delete key.

Imagine that. Last year when I filed for her, my mom had owed. I’d never considered a refund with no mom to spend it on. The lump in my throat materialized and a tidal wave of grief swelled, but just as quickly my sarcasm blew it back out to sea. “Okay, yes, that should be my name. She won’t be cashing any checks.”

The preparer’s breath hitched before she caught herself and assessed my expression. I cracked a small smile, and she smiled back into her lap as she read my full name from my driver’s license.

“I guess that would be scary,” she said, now allowing herself to enjoy the joke. Actually, in my mom’s final days, I gave her permission to come back and haunt me anytime, with only an inkling of how much I would want to see her again. But she hadn’t, and I didn’t know why.

Filing your taxes when you’re dead isn’t that different from filing them when you’re alive — you just can’t sign your own forms.

Antonietta dove into the details of how her mom had lived a vibrant life in Venezuela amongst family and friends until the economy there collapsed and she came to live with Antonietta in the U.S. My chest tightened at the thought of a vulnerable parent so far away, but Antonietta had a more immediate worry.

“How did your mother make new friends? My mother is so lonely,” she said.

I had struggled with this, too, but it was before we moved my mom a thousand miles north to live with us, away from Florida, where life is ruthlessly dependent on the automobile. While Antonietta’s mom had been plucked from a well-knit community, my mom’s life had unraveled as she began to cut herself off from friends and hobbies, presumably because navigating daily life was becoming more difficult, and she didn’t want people to know. Providing her with opportunities for enrichment and community without quitting my job was one of my biggest concerns in bringing her to live with us. I told Antonietta how we had lucked out based on our zip code.

“The county senior center provided transportation to and from home any day she wanted to go. She made friends in her age range and had a chance to do many of the activities she loved that had fallen by the wayside when she quit driving,” I said.

More conversation revealed that Antonietta’s mother could attend that same senior center my mom had loved. I could picture my mom meeting Antonietta’s, then coming home to tell me all about this interesting woman from a country in Latin American…which one was it? Mom couldn’t remember, but they’d had the best conversation. As Antonietta and I worked through the tax return line by line, my mom felt closer.

I was suddenly glad to spend this time with Antonietta, someone caring for her mother the way I missed caring for mine. Somehow, by inviting me into a space with her and her mother, she was helping me see why my mom had yet to re-materialize. Maybe she simply couldn’t because I hadn’t made space for her. Without even realizing it, in closing myself up to the things I wasn’t ready to feel, I’d put up a wall she couldn’t walk through.

While I dug around to find the senior center’s contact information to pass along, Antonietta kept clicking away until she let out a happy little cry.

“You get a refund,” she said, “It should come in the mail in a few weeks.”

What in the world am I going to do with my poor mom’s refund? I thought.

My mom replied in her trademark stage-whisper: “Sweetiekins, why don’t you go buy something fun with the money?”

“Something ‘yummy-fied good?’” I asked, borrowing a phrase from our mother-daughter language.

“Pre-xactly!” she exclaimed, trotting next to me as I walked out into the mall.

I told her not to hold her breath waiting for the IRS to send the paper check, and her cackling laughter lit up my life again.

P.J. Powell co-hosts the podcast “Write Away with Nat and P.J.” Her short fiction has been published in Across the Margin, Manawaker Studio’s Flash Fiction Podcast, Perceptions Magazine, Voices de la Luna, and Youth Imagination Magazine. A strategic communications consultant and writer, P.J. is also a staunch defender of the productivity-boosting benefits of short naps, long walks, and dance breaks. Follow her on Twitter @2PSays, and visit her blog at Creatorology.com.

How Filing My Deceased Mom’s Taxes (Twice) Helped Me Grieve Her Loss was originally published in Moms Don’t Have Time to Write on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the spirit of Bob’s knack for communicating with both words and pictures, we wanted to talk to him because we thought he might have advice for writers about how to play with messy ideas until you have something ordered and meaningful to share.

As with any writerly journey, our conversation wound through the twists and turns of Bob’s magical mind, uncovering the tips and tricks he uses to conjure his humor, while also revealing advice for writers who are trying to get or stay creative. Questions and answers have been edited for clarity.

Write Away: How do you get into a creative space where you can play with your ideas?

There are techniques that I use from different people. One that comes to mind immediately is Monty Python’s John Cleese. The technique is to find yourself in a state of playfulness, so that your mind can experiment and be creative. And you want that playfulness because you want to allow yourself to make mistakes.

It’s by mistakes that you come across accidents — pleasant accidents that could work. If you stay on course and do everything exactly the way it should be from A to B, you’re not going to explore the best opportunities for your story. Instead, you’ve got to freeform in your head, try different things. Most of it you might throw out, but then find the thing that works. That’s worked for me.

Write Away: You decided to attack the topic of stress during one of the more stressful events of our lifetime. How did you manage to make it so funny?

Bob: The North Star I had for the book was to try to entertain, get people through this period in a way that lightens the mood. I’ve been saying, “Things cannot get worse. But they can get funnier.” That was a goal.

At the same time, there’s always a point anytime you’re trying to make a joke. I tried to first lay out principles that I thought would help people, just see what people’s problems were and come up with a different approach of how to resolve that stress. What’s a creative way to eliminate what we are all going through? And from there, the jokes just sprung up.

You pick apart how ridiculous certain things are, the contrasts. You contrast the normal with maybe some kind of abstract suggestion, and then at the intersection is the comedy. You find the comedy within that weird juxtaposition of ideas.

Write Away: We saw what you did there, going after The Elements of Style.

Bob: Most writers had to use Elements of Style and had it on their side, had a copy at the house. I’ve read it over and over a zillion times. And when you read something that much, you want to make fun of it in some way too, tear it down as well as make an homage. You want it to be freshened up.

Write Away: And what does being “the world’s leading snowman expert” have to do with all of this?

Bob: I traveled the world for seven years to try to find out who made the first snowman. To me, the whole interest surrounds trying to solve a mystery, seeing if there’s something interesting beyond the obvious. What I found was that the snowman was an early form of political commentary, an early form of pornography in the middle ages — all these secrets that that were just amazing.

From there, I wrote a book called The Illustrated History of the Snowman, and I often do talks around the world on snowman-making being one of the few activities we still share with our ancestors.

Snowman-making, I should mention too, is one of the few times you’re going to, as an adult, make something that’s a life-sized replica of a human, a sculpture. And make it so public that everyone can see your artwork. Because it’s usually in your front yard — so everyone can judge you.

Listen to the full interview wherever you consume podcasts. Check out Bob Eckstein’s latest book, The Elements of Stress and the Pursuit of Happy-ish in this Current Sh*tstorm and his other books, too!

Cartoons used with permission from Bob Eckstein. Thanks, Bob!

Originally published at http://creatorology.com on July 1, 2021.

Early one Florida summer in the late 1980s, Mom packed us all up in the minivan and took us on a special mission to the retail heart of our small town, Walmart, to buy bottled water and other hurricane supplies. We had gone before, but this trip was memorable because of the tight-lipped way all the adults in the store managed their storm anxiety while the kids enjoyed the big adventure.

We all fought over who got to push the cart, and then the winner was sorry because Mom chose one with a crooked wheel that whinnied the whole time it pulled us down the aisles. But other than that, the trip was a success. Mom patiently explained the purpose of each item on the storm list: batteries for our flashlights; food that didn’t need to be cooked or kept cold; candles, matches, charcoal, and lighter fluid for the grill; a battery-operated weather radio.

We each got a pack of stickers and a hurricane book-I picked a Ramona Quimby book, Jenny probably got Babysitters Club, Greg surely picked something dumb, and I’m sure baby Corey got a coloring book, even though he wasn’t old enough to stay in the lines yet. In the parking lot we bravely loaded gallon jugs of water into the back of the minivan while I planned the shelter I would build for us under the dining room table should the big one hit. From then on, that annual Girl Scout motto-driven visit to Walmart meant summer to us, right up there with the last day of school.

Sometime in college I became a freecycling thrift store shopper, and the habit stuck with me these last few years since I got out and started trying to fend for myself. But sometimes the smell of the collective closet and the letdown of acquiring a half-empty box of paper straws leave me lacking. When it takes months to find a discarded, mismatched coffee table, I long for the ease of those childhood trips where everything you could want or need was right at your fingertips.

A few weeks ago, I went back home for Jenny’s wedding, and she happened to mention the Fruitz drinks we enjoyed every summer as children. The best thing we both remembered was that each bottle had little floating gel candies buoyed by the carbonation. The stinging, fizzing seltzer stung your nose, followed by the peach or apple taste and the chewy candies that made the brand famous.

After Jenny said it, I couldn’t stop craving the fizzy goodness. Who knows how long I’d have to wait for a mostly empty case to show up in my freecycling circles? My craving weighed more than my consumer’s guilt and I decided to retrace my family’s steps by driving to our neighborhood Walmart.

From the driver’s seat of my Camry (as opposed to the nosebleed section of the family minivan), facing the viciously narrow rows of spaces, I could now see that my mother had had the parking skills of a ninja. As with the doomsday hurricane forecasts of my childhood, I imagined the worst was ahead for me, a too-wide swing into the space, the sound of my bumper crushing and smearing against the side of the next car over. And as with the storms I remembered (at least in my town’s case), I rolled through unremarkably.

The building facing me was no longer the sparkling coquina palace I remembered but more of a sunbaked fortress with towering walls. I used to dance across the bold yellow lines of that crosswalk, following the Yellow Brick Road to all the world’s delights inside the store. But here in the stark sunlight, the dusty bands soaked into the asphalt. A mockingbird mimicked a car alarm as the surrounding scrub oaks threatened to take back their land.

Through the whirring doors, a familiar old woman wearing her deep-sea-blue apron greeted me and offered me a cart. She wouldn’t remember me, but I knew her because she always told Mom to give a sweet to her sweeties if they were good, and I knew the old woman meant us.

“No cart for me today, thank you, but could you point me to the drinks section?” Best get in and get out, escape the temptation to fill the cart with stuff. How else had our family always ended up with a mound of goods cresting the top of the cart, at times even kicking my little brother out of his coveted seat facing the handle of the basket?

“All the way back there,” she said, smiling and pointing to a distant corner of the store, “at the back of the grocery.”

They had a grocery now? In the time since I was little, this Walmart expanded into a “superstore,” and as I wandered onto its main avenue, I smelled not only plastic packaging but the fullness of the bakery. French fry aromas drifted from a McDonald’s positioned strategically close to the air vents. Anything I wanted, Walmart carried it.

On the way to the drinks section, I saw mothers pushing carts with squirming children attached, except these moms seemed more tired than mine had been, with deeper lines on their faces than I ever noticed on Mom when I was little. She probably was that tired. How could she not have been? Each of these wide-eyed kids could have been one of us, chattering or grabbing colorful, intriguing items off the shelves.

Passing through my all-time favorite toy section, I remembered forgetting all my worries at the first sight of the colorful boxes with the clear plastic windows. Jenny and I always looked for a certain line of pearly plastic horses with long rainbow hair, Hula-Hoops, pool toys, and giant inflated balls. We would stray just out of Mom’s reach and hula-hoop until we were found out, then scamper giggling back toward the sound of her warning. Now there were no horses or Hula-Hoops. Instead, unfamiliar toys stretched up to the ceiling, threatening to come crashing down with the slightest careless removal from below. How had Mom wrangled four of us while navigating this maze?

“How about a sticker book?” one broken-down mother suggested to her crying child. I guess that’s how. A child farther down the aisle had less luck.

“No! You can play with the one you have at home,” their mother said, returning the prize to a shelf stuffed with dolls. Anything kids wanted, Walmart carried it. But that did not mean they would get it.

Finally, I arrived at the grocery section. The rear aisles held mostly snack foods-countless kinds of crunchy, salty pretzels and potato chips or crispy, sugary cookies. I remembered Friday nights watching movies like Ghostbusters and Dirty Dancing on the VCR while munching on those treats with my best friend and drinking (of course) Fruitz. Remembering the reason I came, I began searching the orderly shelves, discarding one item after another looking for the familiar bottles. Having no success I went to the next crowded aisle, welcoming the juice boxes and other bottled drinks stacked there.

Then the sparkling water, and surely the Fruitz drinks. They had to be there, since Walmart had it all. I started at one end and examined each brand, pushing package after package aside. When I reached the end of the section without success, I studied the aisle once more.

It was the same aisle, still the same aisle. The shelves held the fizzing sodas, the diet sodas, the colas, the “un-colas,” the root beers, the bottled juices, the seltzers, and finally the sparkling waters. Walmart had it all. All except my Fruitz.

The drink section laughed at me. Bottles and cans glistened with satisfaction. A cart turned the corner and headed toward me, several children clinging to it and grasping with little fingers. I fled in the opposite direction to the customer service desk. Walmart had it all. Customer service could fix this.

Deep inside the recessed customer service area, I approached the clerk, a bored-looking guy about Jenny’s age.

“I’m looking for Fruitz. You know, the fizzy drink with the candy in it, but I didn’t see it in the drinks section.”

“Oh yeah, I remember those,” he said, smiling. “They don’t make them anymore.”

Fruitz were gone.

I wanted to climb back into Mom’s minivan with my siblings, but that was gone too. Up ahead were Mom’s shoes, waiting for Jenny to fill them, then maybe me. I walked slowly out of the customer service cave, across the dirty floor, dragging my feet past the mothers waiting in the long checkout lines, just like mine used to do. While they shuffled out the whirring doors to their worn minivans, I wavered in emptiness between my past and future.

P.J. Powell co-hosts the podcast “Write Away with Nat and P.J.” Her short fiction has been published in Across the Margin, Manawaker Studio’s Flash Fiction Podcast, Perceptions Magazine, Voices de la Luna, and Youth Imagination Magazine. A strategic communications consultant and writer, P.J. is also a staunch defender of the productivity-boosting benefits of short naps, long walks, and dance breaks. Follow her on Twitter @2PSays, and visit her blog at Creatorology.com.

This piece was originally published under the title “Once More to Walmart” in Voices de la Luna, a quarterly literature and arts magazine, in November 2020.

1. A Time To Play & A Time To Be Serious

The woods surrounded the girls’ small subdivision on three sides when Jenny was stroller-high. Florida woods, with scrub palms squatting low over sandy, flat expanses, punctuated by pine trunks shooting up at regular intervals, toothpick-thin and tufted with flashes of green needles basking.

By the time Jenny was old enough to play Barbies and write a short research paper on the probable existence of unicorns, developers had razed acres and acres of the woods. Houses sprawled all the way back to the ballpark and the Minute Market that Momma said would be too far to walk without her.

Jenny still had the woods behind Nora’s house, and Nora had a treehouse fastened between four of the remaining pines in the side yard. Plywood walls with a sturdy floor and a sloping roof formed a sanctuary for feral girls with asphalt battle scars and imaginations that spilled into past and future lives. The shaded stillness of the inside enveloped them like a hot cocoon, but the treehouse kept their secrets, and it was theirs.

Jenny and Nora spied on the neighborhood from that height, shouting at a passersby and hiding, watching the house next door to see if little Joyce would need plucking from her evil brothers’ clutches. Joyce was going on third grade. Her disgusting brothers, Nick and James, were in junior high. Several times, Nora stormed in and told off her brothers while Jenny grabbed Joyce by the hand and marched her back to the treehouse. Nora’s older brother had just moved out, and the girls refused to see Joyce endure the same kind of gleeful tyranny from her kin.

Sometime after Jenny’s eleventh birthday, the treehouse became more of a headquarters for a broader settlement operation that Nora and Jenny launched further back in the woods. Their first outpost was a clearing of golden, flat sand they called “The Snickerdoodle,” because it reminded them of those cookies from school. Even better, the location offered enough distance from Joyce’s house and her brothers’ fort that the girls felt confident in claiming it as their own.

The Snickerdoodle was a research outpost. Professors Nora and Jenny, and sometimes their assistant, Joyce, would scour the woods for specimens — leaves, bugs, lizards, toads, bird feathers, bones — and bring them back for cataloging and observation. They set up examination stations using items found on their expeditions: a small wire bathroom shelf, a lightweight end table, a beat-up dining room chair. Nora brought her all-in-one encyclopedia, and Jenny supplied magnifying glasses and a microscope. Bordering the Snickerdoodle, scrub palms provided a ring of shade and cubbies where they could stash their growing collection of curiosities.

They were well on their way, they felt, to cataloging most of the smaller species in the woods when they arrived one day to find The Snickerdoodle ransacked. Their specimens were gone, scattered or stolen, and little Joyce was hunkered on the ground drawing in the sand with a stick while the tear tracks dried on her cheeks. She had come to the outpost early with fresh treasures in hand to catalog, only to discover she had been followed.

Nick. James.

They had done this. They would pay.

Jenny biked back home, two streets over, grabbed her tackle box out of the garage, and waved to her father, who was under his Buick tinkering. The whole way back to Nora’s, the Spooky-Dook beads chimed on the spokes of her wheels, like little church bells tolling for the dead. Meanwhile, Nora retrieved two shovels from her garage while Joyce scouted for sharp sticks.

There was a time to play, and a time to be serious. Soon, those woods would be booby-trapped.

_________________________________________

2. Unfurling

Pennsylvania.

“Everything happens for a reason,” people say. I guess it’s easier to believe we are dominos, organized neatly in rows, than Pick-up Sticks, spread out in haphazard piles.

In the May drizzle, I walk my new dogs, Piper and Chloe, wondering why I am here. I think of the various twists and turns that brought me from Florida to Philadelphia. My life thus far has been been unremarkable, one perhaps notable only in the details, or with skillful telling.

Piper’s black head is wet from the rain. She’ll start to care soon, I think, but for now she is content to snuffle the ground, her back shielded by an inexpensive, but quite attractive, chartreuse raincoat.

I have become a woman who dresses my dog. Who has a dogs, adopted on a whim. The brindle dog, Chloe, marches confident and naked through the rain, feels right to me since I have yearned for a brindle dog since the first time I saw one. But Piper, she is a surprise.

Piper is a black dog, a lab and beagle mix. I have nothing against black dogs but I never thought I’d have one. Piper was born in North Carolina almost ten years after I left. I wonder if I had I finished my law degree and stayed, would I have adopted her and Chloe down there before someone from a New Jersey rescue ferried them out?

When I think of black dogs, I think of the ghost stories I used to read. You see a black dog, a glimmering spectral sentinel with edges smudged by the drizzle and fog, and it means death is near.

Piper stops and wet-hacks to clear her throat, as though the only thing she wants to warn me about is the tree pollen we’re probably still ingesting with every breath, even in the rain.

Why Pennsylvania? Maybe I was meant to be here. I moved up because of my husband’s job, but my mother grew up five hours away in Pittsburg. Some New Age lore that resonates with me says our souls choose where and when to be born, and to whom. If I did decide to be born to my mother, did I anticipate a meandering return to her home state? Or was there some cosmic misunderstanding whereby I thought I would be born in Pittsburg, but instead found myself caught in the Florida sticks between DisneyWorld and Kennedy Space Center?

Chloe is pulling. I pull on her leash because pulling and jumping are the two things we correct. It works because someone before me who chose a brindle dog and a black one put the time into training them. Someone who is in a nursing home now. It’s not Piper’s fault she’s a death harbinger. Anything can be.

I’m guiding the dogs out of the sightline of a squirrel, cutting near the creek on the way into the park, when I see the pallid hand extending from a culvert, fingertips frozen but beckoning.

Piper doesn’t even notice.

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P.J. Powell co-hosts the podcast “Write Away with Nat and P.J.” Her short fiction has been published in Across the Margin, Manawaker Studio’s Flash Fiction Podcast, Perceptions Magazine, Voices de la Luna, and Youth Imagination Magazine. A strategic communications consultant and writer, P.J. is also a staunch defender of the productivity-boosting benefits of short naps, long walks, and dance breaks. Follow her on Twitter @2PSays, and visit her blog at Creatorology.com.

This piece was first published in Across the Margin on Sept. 6, 2019