Night Picnic Press
VOLUME 8, ISSUE 2
2025 • ISBN# 9781970033397 • 80 pp • 6" x 9" paperback
Night Picnic is a literary journal founded in 2018. We publish novels, novellas, plays, short and flash stories, fairytales and fantasy for adults, poetry, interviews, essays (including popular sci-ence essays), letters to the editors, and artwork. We seek to share and celebrate all that is strange, dark, jubilant, complex, confusing, scary, mystical, fantastic, multidimensional, and metaphysical.
This issue includes:
Evan Satinsky, The Clockwork Giant Wakes
Mae S. Ladle, Drinking Water Straight from the Showerhead
Jacob Lawrence Frye, The Ceremony
Nancy S. Koven, Four
Erynn Wakefield, It Almost Worked
Joseph Randolph, Blue Holds
Warren Woessner, Starting A Fire & other poems
Victoria Martynko, Butter on Toast & other poems
Nicholas Hoffman, Stumbling upon & other poems
Enjoy work from this issue below:
POETRY
WARREN WOESSNER
Starting A Fire
I learned in the woods:
build a small cabin of sticks
with the tinder inside.
The flames will come straight up
and catch larger kindling.
Father used to scare me with stories
bout hungry wolf packs nearby.
I only half believed him,
But slept so close the embers singed my hair.
My tiny apartment in Chelsea
had a working fireplace.
I scavenged boards from dumpsters
but they had been treated
with fire retardant and wouldn’t burn.
Now I live in a cabin up north
with a deep fieldstone fireplace
I have a wood pile too, half a cord
a friend split for free when I told him
my dead trees were mostly walnut.
These days, I start my fires with a log
made of compressed wax and sawdust.
I cover it carelessly with real logs
and the occasional piece of driftwood.
I know it will catch and burn
for at least 2 hours — guaranteed —
and I can even pick the color of the flames.
But wolves still circle, just beyond the light
of every fire I set. They wait for the fire
to die down. They wait for me to lie down.
Werewolf
Even my friends taunted me
almost to my face by howling
just enough for me to hear
and for the 7th Grade teacher
to pretend to overlook. One guy
started chanting “Lupus”
which he found means “wolf” in Latin.
It became my hated nickname
not because I could do the whistle
and get attention from girls,
but because I got hairy earlier
than they did, though not as hairy
as Lon Chaney when he played
a werewolf in the movie. I felt sorry
when I saw him sprouting hair
everywhere but I still wanted him
to rip out Walt’s or John’s throat
and drink their blood like cherry soda.
In another life, I would have been
enchanted with my friends
when Zevon praised the werewolf of London
like he was a cool sophisticate. And no,
I didn’t want to hate my friends —
I wanted to bite them so they could join me
in a band of half humans, Loup-Garous,
searching for nearly hairless prey
and howling for real under the full moon.
The Grasshopper and the Ant
I walk down a dusty path
that’s one wheel rut of a wagon track
slowly fading after the farming stopped.
I pass blue chicory, milkweed and morning glory,
smothering one of the last fence posts.
A Monarch Butterfly, orange and black,
flaps and tips, on its way to Mexico.
Then I am wading through a sea of grasshoppers,
hopping and snapping like popcorn,
then landing five feet in front of me
to jump again when I get too close.
We kids once caught them for bait.
despite the spit we called tobacco juice.
Now I marvel at all the protein, free
and here for the taking.
Wasn’t it the grasshopper
who fiddled away the summer,
while the ant gleaned the fields
and hoarded supplies? In the fable,
I don’t think the ant was charitable
when the hard frost came,
and the grasshopper held a sign
that read “Homeless Musician —
Anything would help.”
Two Ravens
That day the bird life was routine
in the muddy pond where I was hoping
to find something rare: just two families
of geese feeding along the shore
and an angry Killdeer, fed up with my trespass.
Then two huge black birds came into range.
Ravens, all head and beak, looking like drones from hell.
My first thought, one was chasing the other,
defending territory or fighting over a food find.
But just as the chaser was about to strike,
the target rolled over onto its back and they locked talons,
and tumbled toward the earth. At the last moment
they disengaged, croaked and were gone over the dunes.
I stayed frozen, then began to unpack a poem of dark similes--
full of witches cackling curses and riding black brooms,
Then it hit me--this had been a pair bonding,
or maybe just play, a word we have almost banished.
I got the message –summertime living can be easy
if you are a bird as big as an eagle, will eat anything,
and have miles of protected land to explore.
Wait a minute, that’s me, standing in the mud
and poison ivy, applauding inside,
hoping for a second act or better yet,
more playtime for us all.
VICTORIA MARTYNKO
Butter on Toast
the tree keeps shedding its berry bounty,
red as beet soup, into the soil like
blood dripping from my dog's jaw onto hardwood,
red as the off-leash dog’s eyes as it lunged at him
time has wrestled me into this age of farewells
to childhood pets, my friends’ and my own,
some in ash canisters, some in pet cemeteries
i dream of magic and resurrection and reincarnation,
and trust a psychic to hear the answers I need,
but she only says: “If he could dig his way back to life,
he would not see you as a child eating butter on toast.
He would see you stutter through false assurances that
he would soon be in a better place. He trusted you and
you could not explain why his bones gave him pain or
why his red aches only gave way to black. You are not
a kid petting him with sticky fingers in the morning sun.”
i try, really, to dream of magic
and resurrection and reincarnation,
but time reminds me of all that did,
or did not do, to reach my age
i eat buttered toast in the backyard,
and all the past red makes it taste of metal
The Delis I Search
Slicing notches into the charred kielbasa,
I match the number of weeks until I’ll be heading homeward:
One, slice. Two, slice. Three, slice. Four, slice
my finger. I speak to my ancestors these days with increasing frequency.
They hardly answer outright, sometimes with murky signs like
the maroon now pooling by the kitchen sink, avoiding any real inquiries.
(e.g., What runs in it that makes my bloodline want to run?
At what age will my daughter be desperate to outrun my clutch?
What will bind her to home if not for the delis?)
Gravity has pulled my blood down and to the right, and I
believe my ancestors are urging me full speed southeast
toward the grazing sheep and pastoral scenes — until I reach
the Polish deli. And then they speak, whispering
which meats, cheeses, delicacies
to seal hermetically for the home across state lines.
Food is the only answer stirring my ancestors these days,
so I keep garnishing kielbasa with notches. I keep
adding dill to the cucumber I slice for mizeria:
One, slice. Two, slice. Three, slice. Four, slice
my skin. Is there hope for the American in me to bleed out?
To be Polish outside of my poor imitation of my parents’ immigration,
crossing state lines and looking for home in generic grocery stores?
These days, I am American until I can say
poproszę po kabanosy y pół funta indyka.
(I would like some sausages and half a pound of turkey, please.)
A Bygone Age of Ascension
I used to lay in the garden, new shirts soiled with garden dirt.
Roly-polies were desperate to climb my arm, and I turned it to watch their ascent.
I wondered at where they were going, and why they kept climbing.
I used to stare at the clouds, thinking they looked just like bacon strips,
the morning sunrise transforming them to a raw, precooked pink
with parts still white and fatty
so long and shapely.
Maybe they were using me to climb towards the bacon.
But I never let them above my elbows.
Usually, by then there were summonings for breakfast.
There is no garden anymore but the roly-polies have found me,
and they have made it above my elbows but this time I am not watching.
They are at my forehead, angry for having reached the summit and still being hungry.
They crawl in my ears and are under my skin,
soiling my tissues like the garden dirt did to my shirts.
They still salivate for nourishment and I lay coiled with shame
because, when I look at the clouds,
they are just clouds.
Now, as an adult hunched with rigid habit,
I kneel at the precipice of the hurt that echoes:
the memory of the summonings for breakfast
and the fact that time has moved past it.
NICHOLAS HOFFMAN
Stumbling upon
I hate not knowing
where they go
Small puddles
ashamed of being looked
at too long by the Sun
evaporate and land
softly somewhere else
Or the pink of the azaleas
paling down stems
as October pulls out
from under us the damp
linen sheet of summer
And what of the more
violent things — vulture,
velvet-rippers, highway
Elohim between
the city’s busy veins
They’re working beak
by bloody beak, thorough
un-threading into nothing
something once quiet
and whiskering — it’s just
I hate how they look
at me, knowing
The boy in question
Are you omen? Again
with your eyes, Hebridean
mist beating lightly
against the tired outcrops of me
Up summer lamppost
moth wings humbly batter
never ceasing, never
seizing anything
Will we try a different night?
when you fall between
skin, ring, finger — every
layer of it, even when it’s not wet
The sighs you make
could cut the air to bleeding
Do we even need to talk
about our Catholic school days?
Migraine of circlets: coif & halo
& Marian crown
Better yet: Are you home?
I want to make a memory
I like visiting — not that
eight-year-old terror, waking twice:
I’m beside the sitting man
with mouth wider and redder than
his eye-hollows
How was it possible?
when he screamed it was
a thundering train
so loud I woke up on the carpet,
so loud it was silent
And can you tell me
how I didn’t know then
you were that barreling sound?
bee-burying
last October we followed cardinal East
and found a gnarled tree after stepping out
from the storm that killed it
like every great city it rose to its sundering
and the bees were waiting
in a heap forgetful of its hum
we could have buried them
easy, arthritic work: arranging sword
in matchbook-coffin, and muttering
half-syllable eulogy
we could have said nothing
over pale bodies threatening pale field
but the worst things are only learned leaving
FICTION
EVAN SATINSKY
The Clockwork Giant Wakes
No one knew where the Giant had come from, who had made the complex clockwork mechanisms which had clearly controlled everything from its mind to its eyelids, from its fingers to its mechanical heart. Miriam was a historian, her research specialization the history of the Giant, but she had as much knowledge of its origin as did any of the denizens of the Giant’s desiccated remains. It had always been there, sticking halfway out of the stone of the earth, face and hand, knee and feet rubbed clean of paint and of features by the elements. Myths existed, of course, stories of how it might have happened; perhaps the Giant fell from the heavens, a gift from God, or was thrown off of a passing starship, cursed to fall to its doom on the lowly planet Earth; perhaps it had grown from the ground, an improbable accidental formation of the metals in the Earth into this miraculous form; the Giant might have truly existed, as another sentient organism upon this Earth eons ago, and had merely buried itself when it knew its life was running out; or perhaps the Giant had always been there, as old as the planet itself, born of the stars and the comets and the gas of space, congealed into this form by whatever mind directed those entropy-defying days.
Miriam lived in the crook of the heel of the Giant’s bent left leg, and her commute was uphill in the mornings and downhill in the evenings to and from the lower knee, where she worked and taught for a local university. It was a long commute, but Miriam enjoyed the exercise and rarely took one of the makeshift trolleys the humans had built from scrap and stone, which fit snugly around welded beams and used the Giant’s own gear system in order to move. It was evening now, and her shins burned from the steep descent of the final hill toward the heel. She arrived just as the trolley was leaving, its metal girders screeching momentarily against the Giant’s steel before it gained enough speed to slide smoothly along beside her, the comforting click-clack filling the chamber. The tangy, metallic smell of home filled her nose and mouth; the knee where she worked was nearly above-ground, and its windows and ventilators cleared the air of the particles of metal and rock which were said to be unhealthy, but which held a strong nostalgia for those born in the lower sections of the Giant.
Miriam opened the door to her flat, one of the dozens of doors built into the wall around this chamber, the mostly residential area which began the neighborhood of the foot; the toes were where the rich lived, taking their clockwork lifts up the arch of the foot to their penthouses, but the heels were packed with dense flats, as if they had pooled down into the lowest area available, an edema of human lives. At least, Miriam thought as she walked through the door, at least she didn’t have to take a tarnished staircase up five flights like some did to reach their doors high up in the walls.
George wasn’t home yet, but she set about fixing dinner, filling her oven with dishes of sauteed, brainlike jumbo fungi, slices of freshly butchered mole and armadillo, and a heaping casserole of the ghostlike, fleshy vegetables, all of which were fresh from the ever-expanding farms those in the lower, buried hand maintained, and exported all around the Giant daily. She switched on the oven, which began to draw power directly from the Giant’s central furnace, which once must have powered the enormous being–assuming it had ever truly lived — but which the humans now used to power their entire lives within their carcass of a home. The room filled with delectable smells in time for George’s return.
The remainder of Miriam’s day went as most did: dinner and a radio show with George in the living room, cleaning up the kitchen while he cleaned the table, washing up in the washroom, and finally to bed, having used each of the flat’s four rooms to their fullest. Miriam may not have been rich enough for a toe penthouse, but she had what she needed for a meaningful and happy life within the Giant which was her home. There were many things which held the possibility of ruining that life, Miriam might have admitted — losing her job, perhaps, or a freak accident at George’s job repairing welds for the thigh neighborhood — but she would never have guessed a dream would do the trick, nor what followed that dream.
She was atop the Giant’s great belly. That, alone, was odd; Miriam rarely dreamed of the Giant at all, other than as a setting for whatever was happening within her dreams, and when she did, she was never outside of its hospitable bounds. Besides which, the Giant’s midsection was almost entirely underground in real life, but in the dream it seemed to be lying atop the ground rather than buried below the surface. There she stood, exposed to the elements, the wind she had felt a handful of times in her life buffeting her as she had always imagined it might in the open air, the sun beating down, baking the metal beneath her slippered feet. Wanting to get away, anywhere away from that wide open plain of belly, Miriam began to walk, which soon turned into a run despite her slippers and sleeping-gown. In the manner of a dream, her steps seemed to carry her leagues at a time, and before she realized she had moved, she was standing on the Giant’s chest.
Before her lay its great head, a poor approximation of the head of a human. Miriam had seen images, renderings of its head many times in her work as a historian, but had never visited herself; that trip would require days off of work which she and George had never quite felt were worth the trouble. Rather than the pencil drawings or doctored images which she had seen, this dream head was very real. Its bright metal gleamed in the sunshine, and the features on its face looked almost lifelike, the closed eyelids looking like they might twitch any moment, on the verge of awakening, the nose detailed enough that she could see little metal hairs poking out. She was surprised the chest she stood upon wasn’t bobbing up and down with the rhythmic breathing of a peaceful slumber.
The wind stopped, and so did Miriam’s breathing. The entire dream was waiting, holding its breath along with the Giant. Then, suddenly, it raised its head. With the logic of a dream, Miriam was no longer standing on the Giant, tiny against its broad metallic chest, but was on the ground, the true ground made of grass and dirt and leaves, the ground she had never touched in her life, and sitting across from her was the Giant. It was still larger than her — perhaps half again as tall as Miriam — but with it sitting and Miriam standing, she could look directly into its eyes. Those uncanny eyes, shaped like the eyes of humans, with eyelids of darkened metal, but empty inside, mere black portals into the hollow head. It sat up straighter and turned its head to stare directly into Miriam’s own eyes, the clockwork gears ticking and clicking audibly from deep within its body.
Its mouth opened mechanically and a voice sounded, not from the mouth but from all around, from within Miriam’s own mind, as if plucked from the mind of the Giant and put there by two gentle but clumsy fingers.
I awaken.
“You cannot awaken,” Miriam said, a statement she felt was simply true; it was impossible. “You never even lived.” She could not have said that this was her belief while awake, but it seemed true here, in the dream world. Yet, there the Giant was, sitting and speaking to her.
I once lived, and I awaken again; as the thunder claps and the ground shakes, I awaken.
Miriam sat up in bed, drenched in sweat — not the cold sweat of a frightening dream, but the hot, drying sweat of a hard day’s toil in the sun — and for a moment she didn’t know where she was. Not only the bed she was in, or the flat, or even where in the Giant’s body; for a moment, Miriam had never stepped foot in a Giant, or even heard of one, and the knowledge that she found herself within one now was terrifying. Then, the unreality with which dreams often leave us seeped out of her open mouth and she gasped with relief. She knew who she was now, where she was. The left heel of the Giant; her home.
The rest of this story is available in Volume 8, Issue 2 of Night Picnic.
MAE S. LADLE
Drinking Water Straight from the Showerhead
The shower room was still damp from his husband's shower thirty minutes earlier. A veil of condensation blurred the mirror. It made him feel like he’d taken off his glasses. He tried to take them off twice. Ha! How slow his brain was today! A slow, lazy Saturday afternoon where the mind slumbers and the body stumbles through the motions guided only by motor-memory.
Three shirts hung on the rail, trying to smooth themselves out in the lukewarmth. Three shirts, all his. One of them white, one off-white (it had gone through a few years of weekly washings), and a purple shirt, which was his special shirt. His Wednesday shirt. Wednesdays were good days.
He barely noticed undressing, as though his mind had decided to cut the unimportant details, like film editors cut movie clips together to keep an audience enraptured. The turning on of the shower startled some life into him, skin crawling at the coldness. But once the boiler started its faraway churning, and the water turned the temperature of peppermint tea, his thoughts turned back to the Saturday complacency.
He took his time soaping his body with the sudding bodywash. The skin on his arms was white and smooth, shielded from the sun by the long sleeves of his many shirts, a pigmentation mark here and there, a few dark hairs. The shadow of a scratch his neighbor’s cat had given him a week or so prior. Had it been a week? How time flies! As he rubbed, his skin grew pinker. Healthy color, his mother would say. His mother always had a lot to say about healthy color. She wanted children brown as berries, cheeks flushed by wind and weather, hearts beating hard in tune with the hearty English countryside. Instead, she got two pasty boys who went a delicate shade of pink, bordering purple, when they ran and seemed to attract cuts and bruises like dogs attracted burdock and foxtail.
He went on rubbing, the same spot still, watching in bleary-eyed fascination as he grew pinker still. His mother would shake her head over his and his brothers marred bodies. “Any stranger would think I maltreat you!” It ended in the tailoring of long-sleeved shirts and trousers, which was an anomaly back then, when the elbows and knees of little boys were on display all seasons of the year. It turned them whiter still. His arm right now, it was red, and something seemed to be flaking off it. Bits of pink somethings. He paused, then continued, gripped with an odd fascination as globs of skin washed off his arm. Dead skin, he assumed, what a great amount of it! His husband had a big exfoliating sponge for these purposes, but he’d always assumed it to be rather trivial, a vanity sort of thing, and he wasn’t a vain man. Perhaps he had been wrong on that account? Perhaps the average human male needs some sun to burn off all those dead cells — or however that worked. Biology was not his strong suit.
This couldn’t be the result of just a day's worth of dead skin. The idea that he might have been washing himself insufficiently for god knows how long made him start on his other arm, rubbing vigorously, using his nails to loosen the slips of white skin. How red and smooth he was underneath! Was that what skin should look like? He grew frenzied, rubbing his legs, his belly, his face — feeling sickened when his hands returned covered in thin webs of flesh. How disgusting. And the red seemed to be coming off too, chunks of it, dissolving in the lather of water by his feet, running down the drain like coils of red string.
He paused for a moment, panting almost, the hot stream of water washing away anything he had managed to loosen. Melting him like butter. He felt like that time he’d opened up the vacuum cleaner and pulled out great clumps of dirt and hair that had been clogging up the machine. The mere thought of how much skin still clung to him made him feel so unclean, he started trembling.
He tugged at big hunks of his leg, his heart beating fast as they loosened and thudded to his feet. Oh glory. He spotted the exfoliating sponge and grabbed it, getting rid of all that weighed his torso down. After little time, the previously white sponge was thick and heavy with all the flesh and skin he had shed. It seemed more practical to use his hands and nails after that.
Something flushed out of his belly, and he thought it was dark red and smooth, like a liver. He laughed, short and guttural. How ridiculous! And more and more of him dissolved into the hot, steaming shower water.
The passage of time was difficult to grasp. It was a Saturday after all; time was funny on Saturdays. Through chunks of red flesh that had to go, he spotted a smooth grey-white mass. He did not pause. Bone? Hah! That was the core of it all. Weren’t all people meant to be clean, white bone? All that meat and webbed skin; all dirt, the disgusting mess the world had spat on them, and no one cleaned themselves off properly. The thought made him sick, only the place where he usually felt sickness was strangely light and empty. Clean.
He breathed hard and erratically, until his lungs flushed out of his body; his lips opened and closed silently until his lips too, loosened and fell to his feet with an inaudible splash. Clean. He was getting clean for the first time in his life. He smiled a lipless smile.
***
He left the shower two hours later. His limbs clattered like pearl curtains. He toweled himself off thoroughly, marveling at the smoothness of his bones, truly white, and long, and pretty. The condensation cleared from the mirror, but he needed his glasses to see truly. Hah! He looked like Mrs. Hutchinson’s classroom skeleton, a great big grin and dark hollows for eyes. Only his bones were held together by translucent, elasticated sinews. Like skeletons on Halloween sweets! Skeletons on x-rays, in biology books. How had he never seen that they were true? They were clean? The way everyone was meant to be. He laughed a laugh that was no laugh at all, and rattled in his ribcage like maracas.
JACOB LAWRENCE FRYE
The Ceremony
When we set out in the morning, the mudflats hadn’t been in our plan for the day. We had intended to wade up the creek and trawl for minnows and crawdads, but then we got a little hungry and had the idea to head north to see if there were any blueberries ripe enough to eat yet, even though it was still early in the season, and that was when we had found that the field had been transformed by the hot sun baking the rain-soaked field repeatedly, the mud hardening into a shell and cracking into millions of pieces so that it looked like a vast puzzle that stretched as far as the eye could see. Entranced, we spent the better part of the morning army crawling across this otherworldly landscape, marching our tin soldiers through thick brambles and over boulders and wading them through the warm, shallow puddles that remained from last week’s rains.
I had just dug a shallow trench for my soldiers to protect them from incoming fire when I heard the bleat of the horn. I didn’t know it at that moment, but it was the sounding of that horn that would irrevocably alter the trajectory of my life.
Billy played on as though he hadn’t noticed, though, which made me wonder if I had just imagined it — that is, until it sounded again, echoing through the forest and sending up a jolt of birds.
“Did you hear that?” I said.
“The enemy's battle call!” Billy cried out in his mock-soldier yell. “They’re about to attack! Prepare to engage!”
“No, for real,” I said.
Billy turned toward me, his face an equal measure of disdain and confusion. I had committed a serious faux pas, piercing the fictional veil we had spent the morning carefully weaving.
As if to give me a second chance to make up for my blunder, he turned to the soldiers and slipped back into the game like a fish released into the water. I tried to as well, but the horn sounded once again, this time breaking my suspension of disbelief entirely. The tin soldiers in my hands were no longer soldiers on a life-or-death patrol in enemy territory, but lifeless pieces of metal with their paint job flaking off to reveal the dull gray metal beneath.
“We'd better go,” I said, reluctantly. “I think a meeting's being called.”
“A meeting?” Billy said. “At this time of the day?”
“Must be a special meeting,” I said. “Even more reason to head back.”
“Yeah, maybe in a bit,” Billy said.
“You stay if you want,” I said. “I'm going.”
I stood up and brushed the mud from my overalls and pirouetted on my heels, heading back across the field to the trailhead. Sure enough, Billy didn’t follow and instead continued to play — loudly, as if to entice me back into the game, or to prove how little he cared that I was leaving. I too pretended not to care, but I couldn't help but look over my shoulder now and then to see if he was going to change his mind. He did continue to play, but patently so, and I could see that his resolution was weakening. I even caught him casting a furtive glance in my direction now and then. Finally, once I’d nearly disappeared from view, he put his soldiers in his pants pocket, stood up, and loped along after me, like a feral dog that was intrigued but wary.
I made my way along the well-worn trail that wound its way through the forest to our village, past the tall termite's mound, under the hanging green beards of the hall of mossy trees, over the little arched stone bridge with the gurgling brook beneath, Billy several hundred paces behind me, walking along casually, whistling as if he hadn’t a care in the world. I went slow enough that Billy gradually caught up with me — though once he did, it didn’t improve my pace, and in fact, slowed it to a halt as we were sidetracked by this or that, stopping to investigate a bottle half-buried in the sediment of the creek whose glint caught our eye, an old bicycle embedded in the trunk of a tree, a log with shelves of mushrooms that was so rotted the soft wood fell apart when we pushed our fingers into it.
By the time we got back to the village, all the other kids were assembled together, though not in anything resembling order. Not that I'd expect any less. Even the most serious of meetings in our village were chaotic affairs. Gregory was dashing about screaming nonsense, Lenny was making his signature mud pies, Sylvie swinging back and forth on a rope, Susie doting on her Raggedy Ann doll, and so on. It was as close to order as it could get, anyway.
Now that we had arrived, all the children were present and the meeting could be called to order, which Timothy now attempted to do. “Attention!” he cried out, standing atop the flat stone slab at the center of the village, cupping his hands around his mouth.
He was roundly ignored.
“Order!” he called again. When this still had no effect, he said, “The flag has been run up the pole at the House!”
That did the trick.
Everyone stopped what they were doing and turned to stare at him.
“Whaddaya mean?” Gregory said.
“Earlier this morning. Sylvie saw it from the Crow's Nest.”
The children all turned to Sylvie.
“It's true,” she said somberly — or, as somberly as one can when swinging on a rope.
Silence fell across the village. We looked down at the ground in disbelief and consternation. Even Gregory was quiet.
The pledge flag hadn't been flown for… well, who knows how long. Time meant very little in our village, it being mostly an adult quirk and generally considered a bad habit, like smoking, or math, or arthritis. It had been long enough that the last time had been obscured by the mists of time and memory, anyway.
“Do you really think they need a pledge?” Lenny said, looking up for a moment from his mud pile.
“Let's not jump to any conclusions,” Timothy said.
“Come on, no need to pretend,” said Gregory. “Just say it straight. That’s exactly what it means!”
“Is it true?” little Susie said in a tremulous, frightened voice, her eyes large and rimmed with the first hints of tears.
“We don't know anything yet,” Timothy said to her softly, placing his hand on the crown of her head. “Yes, that’s usually what it means, but let’s not get all worked up until we know for sure.”
“Bollocks!” said Benny. Benny always said “bollocks.” He had no idea what it meant; he had heard it somewhere once and had become infatuated with it, saying it at every opportunity that presented itself (and then some).
“We need to send some messengers to the House right away,” said Amy. “Find out for sure.”
“And then?” said Susie. “Say they do need a pledge. What then?”
“And then…” Timothy said. “And then, well… we give them a pledge. That’s the Agreement. It’s not like we have much choice in the matter. If we don’t, all this all falls apart.” He gestured around at the village and up at the treehouses linked together by rope bridges and intricately interwoven catwalks. “You know that as well as I do.”
“But… who will be the pledge?” Susie asked.
“We have ways of figuring that out,” said Timothy.
Murmuring and discontent rose up from the children. Susie cried. Lenny punched his pile of mud flat. Gregory whacked a tree with a stick as if he were trying to chop it down.
“Calm down,” Timothy said. “We don’t know anything yet. First thing tomorrow morning, we’ll send someone up to the House.”
“But,” Susie said, lip trembling, “I want to know right now.”
“Sorry, Susie,” Timothy said, “but it’s probably too late for anyone to make the long trek. It would be better to send someone out at first light.”
“We'll go right now,” I said, pointing to me and Billy.
“We will?” Billy said.
I kicked him in the leg.
“That's right,” I said. “We're the fastest ones here. Everyone knows that. We should be able to make it there and back before nightfall.”
The rest of this story is available in Volume 8, Issue 2 of Night Picnic.
NANCY S. KOVEN
Four
There’re four of us in the car, making it a four-car, making it lucky. Mom’s driving, which means her knuckles are white, with Dad in the passenger seat, which means his knuckles are also white. Kitty’s behind Mom, and I’m behind Dad. Because Kitty’s called Kitty, I get called Puppy, but my real name is Walter.
Four is a good number, a happy number; if the world did everything in fours, it’d be a better place. People say three gives you balance, like the wheels on my Radio Flyer Twist, but I think four’s even nicer. It’s more stable. S-t-a-b-l-e. Five, on the other hand, is too crowded. No one likes a five.
Mom’s a careful driver, but she has to hurry because it’ll be dark soon. She says it’s best we get off this mountain before evening because the roads are twisty and there could be rocks in our path, ones that fall from higher up. I ask if I can add these to my rock collection at home, but Dad says they’d be too big and too heavy, plus we’re behind schedule. We’re always behind schedule, but this time it’s Kitty’s fault because she’s the one who lost her shoes at the cabin. Then Mom couldn’t find her keys.
They say the sun’s setting, which is weird because it’s shining pretty bright right now, supercharging before bed. Maybe it’s like me and sneaks candy late in the day, then gets hyper right as everyone else gets sleepy. I’m too little for sunglasses, so I cover my eyes with my fingers. Kitty tells me to grow up and that I need to cut my fingernails when we get home. Dad says I better not need to pee anytime soon because there’s nowhere to pull over, but luckily I remembered to go before we left. I tell him this, but he just stares out the window.
I like the number four because it sounds the same as other words, like f-o-r. Mom says there’s also f-o-r-e, but I don’t know what that is. Kitty often calls me four-eyes because of my glasses, but Dad tells her to shush, says that having four eyes is better than having two. I wish this car had four eyes. With four eyes, it could see all the rocks in the road and not go c-r-a-s-h. I don’t like c-r-a-s-h. It’s a loud and angry word, with blood.
When I sit behind Dad, he lets me put army figures in his hair so they can fight battles. He’s got thick curls, which is great for gunfights. Plus, when I sit here, I have a good view of Mom’s arms while she’s driving, and seeing her arms makes me feel safe. She gives the best hugs, Dad second best. Kitty doesn’t hug me because it’s gross, she says. The watch on Mom’s wrist must’ve stopped working because the hands aren’t spinning anymore. I wish I knew what time it was.
My stomach’s growling, but no one’s paying attention, so I announce to the car that I’m hungry. Mom says it might be a while before we can have dinner, and Dad tells me to focus instead on what I had for lunch, to try to imagine it. It’s not hard imagining it, though, because I always have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. With milk. This is a dumb game.
There’d been one, then two, and now there’re three birds in the sky, big black ones. I don’t think we get eagles here, but these are big like eagles. If I tilt my neck far back, I can just see them. They don’t flap their wings much, so they probably fly the way airplanes fly even though they go in circles instead of straight. Mom says there’s no reason to be afraid even though their heads are scary red, like the cuts on my arm. Maybe if I go as one of these birds for Halloween, I’ll get lots of candy.
Kitty’s in fourth grade, which means she’s old already and boring. She’s learning all the major bones in the human body for Mrs. DiTullio, and, because of this, she thinks she’s f-a-n-c-y. Dad blurts out we have four bones deep inside our ears, but Mom corrects him. We only have three, or six if you count both ears. She’s been helping Kitty study. The names of the bones make me laugh. They sound like the names of big ships crossing the ocean.
Kitty says her leg hurts. Mom can’t turn around in her seat to see, so she asks Kitty to describe it. I learn that the big bone in the leg is called a f-e-m-u-r. This one sounds more like an emotion, less like a ship. I’m feeling f-e-m-u-r, haha! I spell it over and over so I can learn it. Mom tells me to simmer down, then tells Kitty she needs to be brave, which they spell for me as b-r-a-v-e. I can’t tell if Kitty’s being brave or not.
I’m four years old, too young for school. Mom says I’ll be making lots of friends once I reach kindergarten, which I guess will be okay. I don’t want any friends to be like Billy down the street, though, because Billy peed on my foot once. Speaking of pee, I kind of have to pee now. I could ask Dad to take me, but I think he’s fallen asleep. He must be pretty worn out because he was up late last night grading kids’ homework. Tomorrow the weekend’s over, and Dad goes back to work.
It's taking a long time getting off this mountain. It was quicker going up. I think going up the mountain must’ve made the car tired and that’s why it doesn’t want to go down. I tell Kitty we ought to give the car some candy, but she says we don’t have any. I actually have half a chocolate bar in my pocket, but I can’t reach it under my seat belt because Mom says I need to stay buckled in or else I’ll fall upside down.
Four times four is sixteen which is crazy. I tell Kitty this can’t be true, that there’s no such thing as one number times another number, especially four, but she says I’ll be learning this down the road. I ask if that road’s like this one, curvy and with rocks, and she nods her head. I say we’ll need a faster car, then, for me to learn all this because the road’s likely to be a super long one. I ask if there’ll be places to stop and eat on this other road, and Mom says yes, plus ice cream stands.
It’s nighttime now. There’s a light rain so the moon is blurry, like it’s crying. I ask Mom why she doesn’t turn on the wipers, and she says they don’t work anymore but that I should pretend that they do. I hear a cricket through the windshield, and I try to imagine that the wipers keep time with the chirping. You’d think crickets wouldn’t like getting rained on, but this one doesn’t seem to mind. I’d let it borrow my yellow rain hat if I had it with me.
Mom says we should follow Dad’s lead and get some sleep. Usually, I hate when Dad’s asleep because he snores. I sometimes hear him through the wall at home. S-n-o-r-e! Right now, he’s quiet, which means it must be a really good sleep. The seats in this car are comfy; plus, there’s a screen built in so we can watch TV. Mom says it’s too late now for any TV. I wish I could give her some of my chocolate because then we could all stay up late and watch. Cricket too.
It’s morning now, and there’s a fourth bird. They all landed in that tree, and they’re sniffing the air. This must be a family of birds because four means family. I tell Kitty this, but she’s not watching the birds. She’s watching Mom. Mom’s hands aren’t on the steering wheel anymore, so she must be driving with her knees. I’ve seen her do that before — drive with her knees, especially when she takes a sip of soda. Mom says I can’t have soda until I’m fourteen, which is four with t-e-e-n tacked on. That’s a long way off.
I don’t think I’ll like being five. Maybe I can ignore the fifth candle on my birthday cake and stay four forever. But then maybe they won’t cut the cake with a candle still burning, and I’ll have to turn five to get any. I’m hungry, and there should be a peanut butter and jelly sandwich coming soon. When I’m five, I wonder if I can still play with Dad’s hair. Kitty and Mom are talking about f-e-m-u-r again. A fifth bird’s landed, and the tree’s crowded now.
This mountain is tall. Taller than me. That means the mountain must be older than me. I wonder if it’s as old as four times four, which would make it older than Kitty. Kitty just promised Mom to look after me. Mom seems like she could use a hug, but she won’t let me undo my seat belt. I tell her that, if I can unbuckle even for a second, I’d give her some of my chocolate. If I remember right, I have four squares left.
I peed my pants, I couldn’t help it. It’s night again so they can’t see my pants are soaked, and I’m not going to tell them. I peed my bed a lot when I was three, which feels like a long time ago. I’m not going to cry. I think Kitty’s crying on her side of the car, but it’s so soft I’m not sure, plus the cricket’s back and it’s really loud. C-h-i-r-p! I try to teach it a new song, I try row-row-row-your-boat, but it doesn’t work. Kitty says she gets to shush me now and that I should shush. But she calls me Walter instead of Puppy.
When it’s morning, I ask Kitty if she’ll get in trouble for missing school two days in a row. Dad should also be at school because that’s where he works. Kitty says it’s okay because she probably won’t ever have to attend school again. I ask if this means I can skip school in the future too, but she says no. She says I’ll have Mrs. DiTullio in fourth grade but that I need to stay b-r-a-v-e and first get used to one, two, and three. I’ll surprise Mrs. DiTullio by already knowing about f-e-m-u-r.
Four’s a magical number. It sounds like a bicycle with training wheels, the horn of passing ships, a puppy for Christmas. It sounds like candy and crickets, like family. Kitty says many families are only three and some are just two, then she asks what I think of the number one. I say you can’t go anywhere with one, can’t even balance on one wheel, and she tells me about unicycles. She says you can go anywhere in the world on a unicycle. I say one’s a sad number, a lonely number, but she says it doesn’t have to be. She doesn’t say anything else after that.
I wonder if I can get off this mountain on a unicycle. I think maybe I can. I can unclick my seatbelt, supercharge on chocolate, then ride a unicycle all the way down. I’ll follow the road and be careful of rocks, and, if it rains, I’ll turn the wipers on. No one will ever know I peed my pants. At the bottom of the mountain is a glass of milk and birds without any red on their heads. Plus, a car that works, with working versions of Mom, Dad, and Kitty inside. Dad will have woken up, Mom’s watch will tell time, and Kitty will hug me. I might be five when I get down the mountain because the mountain’s very tall. But, when I’m five, I’ll be taller too. When I’m five I won’t need four anymore.
ERYNN WAKEFIELD
It Almost Worked
The memory of what we were lingers, as stubborn as his flesh and bone. I am reduced to recovery tactics from late-night Google searches. Every list advises me to write an unsent letter, one where I forgive him in the end — not for his sake, but for mine. Ruminations of him — relentless and blood-sucking — fill my head. I want to hate him, but I don’t.
Gusts of wind whoosh through the kitchen window as my gaze elongates and an almost dizziness falls over me. A distant ringing sound disperses through the kitchen, the piercing ring approaching ominously.
“Can you help?” A voice calls from below me.
My niece, Lou Lou, stands at my feet, reaching her little hand up toward me. Her fake phone in one hand; squished, saliva-covered Oreo cookies in the other. A grin spreads across my face, the first sincere smile I’ve had in a while. Pure emotion yanks at the corners of my mouth.
“Hello?” I squeak, my voice hiked up so high in hopes she doesn’t notice my apparent disdain for pretend.
“Oh? Really? Well, she’s right here… You’ll have to ask her for yourself.”
Her wispy eyebrows raise, one at a time, left, then right.
I hand her the phone. “It’s for you, love. They want to know why you have soggy cookies in your hand,” I say.
She takes the phone from me, as tickled as ever. I reach down and take the soggy cookies from her before flicking them into the garbage disposal.
"Go. I’ll come play with you when I finish the dishes.”
Her pitter-patter expands into the distance. With Oreo residue in my hand, I press what’s left of them into my palm and watch it ooze through my fingers.
“Oh, Lou!” I call through the house.
The wood creaks beneath my bare feet — a song of the past ringing through the house. My brother’s wife has a knack for decoration, a gift. Burnt orange and brown bleed through the house, woven into the old architecture of the 1960s and 1970s.
“Auntie Faye!” Lou calls back.
The sun bleeds from the skinny front door window and around the corner into their living room. Lou Lou sits, shoulders rounded, immersed in her train track reconstruction. I sit down across from her, scanning her creation to help her work. Her eyes pan up to mine.
“You look sad,” she blurts out.
Unaware of implications, merely an observation — plain, clear, almost kind. Sad doesn’t mean ugly to her; it just means sad. Her childlike honesty shines through.
“Just tired; last night was long. I went on a mission to save the mermaids,” I lie.
How cruel of me to cut her honesty with a lie. Is this where children first learn to do the same?
“That’s not true,” she snorts.
“Who are you to say that? You didn’t see it!” I say, nudging her playfully.
“I don’t have to see it; I just have to feeeeeeel it,” she drags.
It must have been something she heard from one of her little cartoons. Her innocent grin becomes blinding. Surely, she hadn’t come up with that on her own. If so, her discernment is prudent in the way mine used to be.
A tense giggle slips from my mouth.
The ringing appears again; this time it doesn’t grow closer. Lou Lou and I direct our attention to her abandoned pink play phone, strewn across the floor in the corner of the living room. She points to me, accusatorily.
“I think that’s your phone, Auntie Faye.”
My legs carry me to the kitchen as quickly as possible. Bent over the kitchen island, I reach for my phone. A hollow lurch in my gut manifests at the name across my screen.
“Thomas?” I whisper, pressing the ice-cold phone screen to my ear.
“Faye? Hello? Are you there?” His deep voice bleeds through the speaker.
The pitter-patter of Lou Lou’s feet draws closer. Her tiny palms gather my pant leg and begin to yank, her neck craned back, eyes meeting mine.
“Yes, yes, I’m he—”
“Is that Uncle Thomas?” she screeches.
“It’s just Thomas, Lou.”
Her yanking grows more vicious by the second. I catch her wrist in my hand and bend down to her.
“Give me one second, and then you can say hi,” I whisper.
She runs back to the living room.
"Hi, sorry.”
“She can still call me Uncle Thomas.”
His words hang above my head.
“What do you want, Thomas?” I huff.
“Would you want to go to Wayne’s tomorrow?”
Wayne’s, a nearly dilapidated bowling alley in town where I once thought I had my last first date. Silence disperses throughout the room. I can’t even hear Lou Lou banging her trains on the tracks.
“You know, like a last date,” he adds.
The last one sounds like pure defeat to my ears.
“Why?” I say wryly.
“Our last conversation wasn’t what I’d hoped.”
A shallow breath escapes my mouth.
“Sure, I guess — tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow’s perfect.”
I let the silence fill the room again.
“So — can I actually talk to Lou Lou?” he asks sheepishly.
“Mhmm.”
The floor creaks beneath my feet once again, echoing my heart's drop.
“Here, Lou,” I whisper, barely able to get any words out.
She sprints over to me, barreling into my legs, reaching for my phone. She greets him with nearly the same excitement I used to. The hum of her voice, along with the echo of his, becomes heavy, suspended in the air. I wait in the kitchen for the call to end.
Tomorrow comes all too quickly. My thighs stick to the leather seats of my car as I swerve into the nearest parking spot to the door. I recount yesterday’s events in my head — able to muster up the exact feeling of my eyes meeting my phone screen to see his name. Selfishly, I wish I’d let the phone ring until it stopped, until he never called again.
The car silences as I pull the keys out of the ignition, trying to avoid his eye contact. Every glance up at him slows the world around me — his faded red shirt waving in the wind and his perfectly blue jeans that fall right at his ankles.
I scoff, viscerally and undeniably disgusted by my sheer admiration of everything he is. A grin spreads across his sculpted face. My eyes shift to the middle console. I dig my hands all the way to the bottom, feeling around for my film camera. The last time I used it was on a road trip to Washington last summer. I yank my hand out and check to see how many exposures I have left — one. I throw it into my bag and get out of the car.
My gaze meets his. He stands still, leaning on the trunk of his car.
“Hi.”
His voice is raspy, almost like it was on one of our slow mornings, just a few weeks ago. I force a smile. He opens his arms to me, but I continue walking; he pushes himself off the car.
“Is it not okay to hug now?” He scoffs.
“I’m uncomfortable, Thomas; this is hard for me,” I say, leading him inside.
He runs up next to me, placing his hand on my shoulder to stop me as if he’s about to say something. He presses his lips earnestly, making my heart sink.
I walk ahead of him, clutching the strap of my bag in my palm.
The rest of this story is available in Volume 8, Issue 2 of Night Picnic.
JOSEPH RANDOLPH
Blue Holds
They built Platform Seven out of things that remembered other purposes: ship hulls welded into walkways, stadium seating turned inward around a central oculus, an old cathedral bell cast into ballast and set to ring by water flow alone. Dawn rose in slow bands through the hexglass canopy, a bruise of light sweeping the classrooms in measured stripes; the color — first slate, then the faintest peach — came filtered through particulates that hung far below them, a permanent weather trapped above what used to call itself a world.
Ji-ho kept the lift engines alive. They were housed three decks down, past the laundry centrifuges and the classroom printers that extruded desks on demand. The engines had been pared to their bones: counterfield rings shaped like anklets for giants; stacked coils in vats of dielectric gel; a lattice of conductive veins that bled light when touched by the right current. He woke before first bell and slid into his harness, clipped lines to brass loops, and descended along a maintenance spine that shivered with every correction the platform made to hold position. The console spoke through small lamps rather than speakers. Blue meant equilibrium. Amber, minor adjustment. Red, prayer.
He carried tools that fit the world they’d made: a rubber mallet with a threaded head for torquing couplers; a field meter that wrote values in a scrolling, paper-thin ribbon he kept folded like a priest keeps notes; a kit of flex-circuits packed in oiled cloth. When he pressed his palm to a ring’s hot flank, he could feel a distant sway, as if a city below had breathed out and the platform answered. Each coil bore hand-painted instructions from the first cohort of engineers — no two alike. “Check lichen on flange C,” someone had written, and indeed a pale crust had tried to make itself at home in the chalky seam. He scraped it clean with a pocket blade and made a note: “life insists; life finds metal inviting.”
Above him, Hyun-soo watered vines in the chapel. They’d stretched a transept from reclaimed trusses and set multilingual plaques in the floor, remnants of old parishes and public schools. The greenhouse portion opened with a sequence of seals that kept the temperature steady and the humidity high. Rows of basil and sorrel ran like small soldiers, their leaves shining with condensation that smelled faintly of pepper and cut stems. He checked wicks, lifted the reservoir lids, let the nutrient solution trickle from valve to root-ball with a sound that felt older than language — this steady thread of water doing exactly what it had done in creeks his grandparents had once named.
The chapel needed a caretaker who believed that care could be a complete thought. He trimmed the tomato suckers with small scissors and palmed the clippings into a cloth bag for compost. The bees — quiet imports, husbanded like jewelry — worked the squash blossoms under gauze tents. Their keeper, Sister So-byok, had taught Hyun-soo the signs: slow loops meant contentment, a jitter at the entrance meant a queen in trouble. He wore the veil only when they swarmed; otherwise, he stood among them bare-faced and attentive, the way he’d stood as a boy while a friend recited lines from a textbook to a goat that had learned to come to the sound of apple slices hitting a dish.
By midmorning the administration deck stirred. First-years filed along the ring corridor in pressed blue jackets, each with a bony satchel that held a tablet, a pocket stylus, a canteen made from a repurposed serum bottle. They rotated between modules: history in the amphitheater with its terraced seats; mechanics in a lab where children practiced aligning microcoils; literature in a room with walls that darkened at a touch, taking on the color of old paper. Teachers spoke from the center, not because tradition demanded it but because the acoustics turned one voice into many when placed there. A child could sit in the back row and still hear breath catch on a hard passage, the living edge of thought.
What lay below them entered conversations as a map and as a story. Once a week, classes gathered by the oculus to watch the brown-white weather grind past — the endless, bellying fog, the broken rivers threading through salt. A sensor array sent up a chem-profile, numbers in a column that the students copied before lunch. On certain days, when the atmosphere shifted and distance thinned, landforms announced themselves: teeth of rebar in a city that had cooked too long; a football field turned to mirror; trains going nowhere, each car breaching, dipping, breaching again as if taught by whales. The teachers set no music to this. They let the room fill with the sound of shoes against plank and pages turned.
On Platform Seven, faith and maintenance shared a calendar. Ji-ho’s log and Hyun-soo’s planting schedule looked alike — columns, checks, small marginal drawings of rings and leaves. They met at noon at a foldout table under the figs and split a protein brick, crosshatched, browned with a torch. Hyun-soo brought greens with tiny punctures where beetles had taken a taste. Ji-ho lifted a leaf and inspected the bite marks like a mechanic reading wear on a belt. They spoke softly, because voices carried, and because the vines listened — or so Sister So-byok insisted, and once someone you respect teaches you to speak with care in one room, you start speaking with care in others.
Ji-ho would talk about the morning’s minor panic: a coil in Ring Three flirting with amber, a heat plume that didn’t correlate with load, the way the console flickered when the ring took on more current than the schema had promised. He liked the map of it, the way causes could be chased and persuaded. Hyun-soo would answer with plant facts: the way basil turned bitter if water hit leaves at high noon; the curl of a tomato leaf when its roots tasted too much iron; how honey thickened when the bees gorged on a single crop. Between the two, a conversation took shape. Machines preferred steadiness. Plants preferred cycles. Human beings could endure either, for a time, though joy tended to bloom where rhythm lived.
After lunch, children filtered into the chapel with small tasks on cards — wipe tanks, tie up vines, count seed. Hyun-soo gave them string and showed them how to loop it from stake to stake, a clean line with just enough slack for growth. The youngest always asked to ring the bell: a bronze shape with a scar down one side, hung by braided cable above the cistern. You rang it by letting a ladle’s worth of water fall through a channel onto a set of paddles; the paddles turned; a cam lifted the clapper; the clapper fell. The sound carried through the fuselage and into the decks below, where engineers felt their lives receive a measure.
On inspection days the two of them walked the skin of the platform together. They tied in at hip and shoulder and stepped onto the outer catwalk, a ribbon around the whole campus with only a bar at knee height and another at the hand. Underfoot, the mesh sang a quiet metallic song with each step. The sky — they still called it sky — looked both near and endless, a sheet of light that moved like water, then like smoke, then like the inside of a pearl. Far below, a storm rolled over what maps labeled as sea, but the sea had taken on the color of metal under tarnish. You learned to read texture where the old world would have offered colors.
They checked seam tape where panels met. They peered into joints where wind — strong at that altitude; everyone learned to brace for it — poked fingers of cold through any lax maintenance. Their gloves turned slick with a fine brine that rose from below and crystallized along edges like frost. Ji-ho tightened fasteners, pulled slack from a cable, made a chalk mark where a panel wanted replacing on the next resupply. Hyun-soo brushed salt from a vine that had reached through a vent to taste the world, then tucked it back and cinched the mesh.
At dusk the platform glowed. Not bright — bright had been waste for decades now — but a soft constellated wash from path lights and classroom sconces and the occasional lantern jury-rigged from a wine bottle. Children took turns at the oculus to watch the night fire move along the liminal regions where people still burned things. A boy with a scar shaped like a comma pointed at the dark and said his mother had lived there before she came aloft. No one answered. Some gestures wanted silence around them like a moat.
The rest of this story is available in Volume 8, Issue 2 of Night Picnic.