Prenuptial Consultation
Creative non-fiction
by Claire Massey
The birth charts are printed on heavy vita paper, the kind that resists thinning over time. The astrologer slides my father’s across the table. He should have lived, she says, by the sea, an inlet, a cove, a way to the gulf. He would have been happy. I nod my head, remembering how Dad trucked his sailboat for miles across featureless plains, to launch in reservoirs and lakes, manmade. Divorce forced the sale of his Flying Scott.
Now the mystic’s long, tapered fingers hover over my birth chart. There’s a legacy of longing to be near the water, she says, that’s where you should live. With a partner yearning for peace.
Our joint attention turns to the life path my mother trod. As if the tips of fingers can sense danger, the astrologer barely touches this chart. My mother once studied a palmistry book, Fortune in Your Hand. I remember her comparing the tangled mass in her palm, the zig-zagging lines of head and heart, to the cover’s ideal map, the lifeline with its gentle, doable slope gracefully curving to end at the deep wrist ring. Your mom was overtaken, the astrologer explains, by nervous exhaustion. You too, must guard against this kind of darkness.
We end with the synastry chart, his fate and mine, entwined within a circle divided into houses of experience yet to be lived. With one hand the astrologer feels the smooth-textured paper, places the other on her heart. I know you wanted another who craved conquest, adventure, but that was not meant to be. This man will be a foil for your troubles, his love a sheltering refuge. Do live with a view of a bay or an ocean, face east in the morning, meditate on every solar return, palms cupped like vessels storing life-giving waters.
Epilogue
We have been married forty years.
Sometimes late at night,
when the moon is on the build
in a fertile sign, we sit on our porch,
among aging pines and crepe myrtles
planted long ago.
Sometimes when unpredictable winds
change course, we hear the give and take
of the surf, ever in tandem
with the shifting tides, the cosmic plan.
Claire Massey’s work appears in many journals, including Bright Flash, Streetlight Magazine, IO Journal, Fictive Dream, Literally Stories, Barely South Review, Wilderness House, Writer Advice, and in her collection, Driver Side Window. She appreciates stories with a deep depth to length ratio and treasures her copy of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.
Going Home
by Armand Rosamilia
My mother was a witch. Burned alive. I was ten. I’d gone to live with relatives in Brazil after that, but when I was twenty-three I flew back. Where my mother was killed.
I went in search of clues. The apartment we’d lived in was still there, a new family occupying it since I’d been dragged away.
The old woman seated on the stoop had smiled. She remembered me. Told me I was as pretty as my mother had been at my age.
I found her broom, dusty, in the basement. I knew what I had to do now. Revenge.
Armand Rosamilia is a full-time crime thriller and horror author who loves coffee, bourbon and bourbon-flavored coffee. Crime Thrillers. Baseball. Horror. Contemporary Fiction. Heavy Metal. Zombies. http://armandrosamilia.com Also on Twitch, writing live! https://www.twitch.tv/armandrosamilia
Peace With Honor
R.K. West
Granddad lives with us because Mom worries about what would happen if he had another stroke. She put a TV in his room so he could yell at the news with the door closed. Sometimes I stop by his room after school, when he is playing music from his old vinyl record collection on a turntable player he keeps on the bureau. When I told him we were studying the Vietnam War in history class, he took a sharp breath and squeezed his eyes shut for a second. “Well, fuck me,” he said. Then: “Sorry, kid, language, but Jesus Christ, couldn’t they at least wait until we’re all dead?”
Credit: This first appeared at Six Sentences.
R.K. West's work has appeared at Johnny America, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Surely, and others.
An Imperial Message
by Franz Kafka
Translation by Ian Johnston
Now and then, we publish vintage stories from historic authors. This was originally published in 1919.
The Emperor—so they say—has sent a message, directly from his deathbed, to you alone, his pathetic subject, a tiny shadow which has taken refuge at the furthest distance from the imperial sun. He ordered the herald to kneel down beside his death bed and whispered the message to him. He thought it was so important that he had the herald repeat it back to him. He confirmed the accuracy of the verbal message by nodding his head. And in front of the entire crowd of those who have come to witness his death—all the obstructing walls have been broken down and all the great ones of his empire are standing in a circle on the broad and high soaring flights of stairs—in front of all of them he dispatched his herald. The messenger started off at once, a powerful, tireless man. Sticking one arm out and then another, he makes his way through the crowd. If he runs into resistance, he points to his breast where there is a sign of the sun. So he moves forward easily, unlike anyone else. But the crowd is so huge; its dwelling places are infinite. If there were an open field, how he would fly along, and soon you would hear the marvellous pounding of his fist on your door. But instead of that, how futile are all his efforts. He is still forcing his way through the private rooms of the innermost palace. He will never win his way through. And if he did manage that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to fight his way down the steps, and, if he managed to do that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to stride through the courtyards, and after the courtyards the second palace encircling the first, and, then again, stairs and courtyards, and then, once again, a palace, and so on for thousands of years. And if he finally did burst through the outermost door—but that can never, never happen—the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him, piled high and full of sediment. No one pushes his way through here, certainly not with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window and dream to yourself of that message when evening comes.
Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924) was a German-language Jewish Czech writer and novelist born in Prague. Widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature, his work typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surreal predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. The term Kafkaesque has entered the lexicon to describe situations like those depicted in his writings. His best-known works include the novella The Metamorphosis (1915) and the novels The Trial (1924) and The Castle (1926). His work has widely influenced artists, philosophers, composers, filmmakers, literary historians, religious scholars, cultural theorists.
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