“Hello?”

“Hello, is this Mrs. Winston?”

“Dr. Winston, but yes. Who is this, and how can I help you?”

“I’d rather remain anonymous. I can say that I work in your husband’s department. That, I can tell you.”

“Understood. Continue, please.”

“I’m sorry to inform you that your husband is having an affair.”

“Interesting. Why do you think that, exactly?”

“There’s a woman who comes into his office, between his classes. They laugh. It’s so loud. So very loud. We can hear them down the entire hall.”

“I see. Tuesdays and Thursdays, right?”

“Oh. Um. Yes. That’s right. That’s correct. How did you—”

“Yeah, I’m adjunct. As such, I don’t get my own office. So it’s easier for me to just have lunch in my husband’s office, on days when I teach at the college. I’m sorry that our laughter disturbs you. I’ll try to tone it down, but I make no promises.”

“Oh! Oh my God! I apologize!”

“No worries at all, and have a lovely evening.”

My grandmother’s eulogy made several references to this story, as did my grandfather’s, three years later.

---

Alaina Hammond is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, and visual artist. Her poems, plays, short stories, nonfiction, paintings, drawings and photographs have been published both online and in print. Her novelette “Jillian, Formerly Known as Frog Girl” was published by Bottlecap Press. Three of her flash fiction stories (Jane Passes The Bar Exam, To Serve In Retail Hell, As Numb As I Am) have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, all in 2025. @alainaheidelberger on Instagram.

Chlorine made a home inside of her. It burned her sinuses, sharp, metallic, bright. The scent of something too clean to be alive. Her throat ached, raw from the water she swallowed over what must be days now. Or had it been weeks? Time did not pass so much as circle.

She climbed the ladder slowly, rung by rung. The muscles in her arms trembling from effort or fear. She wasn’t sure which anymore.

Another dive. One more, and if she hits the water just right, it should work.

She stood on the diving board, toes balancing precariously at its edge. It bowed under her, a slight sway. The water waited below. Flat and expressionless, too still to be natural.

There were never any clues as to where the opening would appear. The surface never rippled. Never revealed any change of depth. The was no soft give at the center. It should look like a vortex, she thought.

Or what are those things called? The underwater tornadoes that pull you down? 

A whirlpool. 

It should look like a whirlpool. Like a wound in the world.

She inhaled deeply, stretching her chest until her lungs burned. She steadied herself. She had been a competitive diver once. Before this. She was judged and measured. Seen. She used to think about precision, about angles and clean entry. The geometry of perfection. 

None of that mattered anymore. Now, there was only the descent. The surrender to gravity, the faith in falling. The hope that there was a way home. 

She dove. 

An assault of sensory experience that was over too quickly to register. Muscles tight, wind roaring past her ears, the world dissolving, fear. 

The impact: cold, shocking, absolute. Water breaking, folding over her, filling her ears with the pressure of silence. Above, light fracturing into unreachable gold.

She kicked up, breaking through the surface with a gasp. The sky above was colorless, a lid placed over the world. 

Still here.  Always here.

How many dives had it been? A hundred? A thousand? 

She floated for a while, staring up, steadying her breathing, trying to feel the passage of time. She had lost hunger first, and then thirst. She couldn’t imagine wanting to drink water.

Her skin had gone pale. White, sometimes almost translucent. 

Another dive. One more dive, she told herself, and she’ll find it. She’ll find her way home.

She climbed out of the pool, leaving wet foot prints on cold concrete. She thought she remembered warmth. The weight of sunlight spreading across her skin. The scent of summer rain. But even the memories seemed far away. Belonging to someone else.

Back up the ladder. Toes curling over the edge. The pools surface glimmering faintly. Something moved below the water, slow and deliberate, like a thought forming.

She breathed in. She let it hurt.

She dove.

---

Whitney McShan is a Texas native who lives outside of Austin with her wife and son. Her work has been featured in Hellbound Books Anthology of Horror, Instant Noodles Lit Mag, and the upcoming anthology With Teeth. She is interested in the strange, the uncanny, and the monstrous.

They had us walk into the room where Aunty lay. Her body was rigid, hands crossed, skin yellowed under the cold light. Two nights back she’d texted me that she was feeling unwell—not to worry, she insisted. Now she was arranged in an oak-brown casket. Her eyelids were half-open, as if caught in an unfinished thought.

I pressed my palm against her chest. In an instant, the smell—the thick, chemical-sweet breath of death, sour and intimate, wormed its way up into my throat. I almost gagged. The mortuary and everything in it dissolved, peeled away. Instead, I was standing somewhere else. Not here, but back across the ocean, years ago. The smallest change in the air could still unsettle me; my chest tightened as the heat crept up through my ribcage.

Suddenly, I was at the site of the Rana Plaza collapse in April of 2013. The worst garment factory disaster in modern history. Over a thousand dead, mostly young women, pressed together in the dirt and dust after the eight-story building gave in and folded onto itself.

At Al Jazeera English, I’d just started. They sent me out to cover it, replacing Jay Khan—their big name reporter, blacklisted by the Bangladeshi government for criticizing the wrong people.

Jay looked tense as he explained what I was allowed to do. “For security reasons, you’ll stay off-camera. Voice only. No public credit,” he announced, barely glancing up from his phone. “Doha approved this arrangement.” I nodded, repeating his rules in my head. Only much later did I realize how deliberate it was: he made sure there was a ceiling over me, claimed it was for my protection. But even with those limits, the Rana Plaza story changed my standing at the network.

Jay’s driver picked me up with his producer Salim, and camera operator Shaon. The car jerked for an hour down roads that got rougher as we went. When I finally opened the door, I didn’t watch my step—I landed ankle-deep in a gutter of sticky blood. Salim reached for my arm and guided me out. We climbed a narrow staircase in the building next door, looking for a vantage point. From above, the devastation was clear. Limbs, desperate and limp, dangled from gaps in the concrete. Some bodies were broken, others still alive, their cries rising from underneath the rubble. There were no fire fighters in sight. Civilians threw ropes and reached in bare-handed, pulling survivors and the dead out from the piles. That was the only sign of hope I saw in the mess.

But what stayed with me, past the images and the noise, was the smell. A dense, rotten-sweetness that never faded. For a month, I couldn’t get free of it. I breathed it in the air as I worked. It haunted restaurants, clung to my food and my clothes even when they tried to disguise it with cheap, rose-scented spray. The odor soaked into everything, dense and persistent. It refused to leave.

That memory was here again, sharper than ever, overtaking the intimacy of this moment. My PTSD flaring up as I stood in front of Aunty’s casket, trying to keep myself steady. I learned once that your body remembers things your mind tries to put away. Today, that memory took over.

I stood next to my friend as she cried for her mother. Something old and silent inside me surfaced. The smell pressed in from all sides, not just hers, but the idea of death itself. Old, honest, impossible to ignore. I thought I’d made my peace with it long ago, but it found me again—here, in Los Angeles, and in the quiet, it felt just as raw.

---

Tania Rashid is a journalist and documentary filmmaker.

“Grieving is something you’re still doing,
and something you don’t need a crow for.”
‘Grief Is the Thing with Feathers’ Max Porter

She disappeared without even a trace left. Her books on the shelves, her diary on the desk, her undone bed – it all stayed the same. That’s how I remember it anyway. The next thing that I recall – she is again. The lights are flashing, techno music is banging on my eardrums and there’s a barricade of topless bodies between us but in the neon lights I see her. Her face looks like mine – it’s been almost sixteen years and her face looks like mine. 

The night she disappeared wasn’t a nightmare one would expect it to be. Our parents were annoyed that she was late but too busy to bother. Then hours passed and she didn’t show up – and then a day – actual terror followed after that. The police, the investigators, relatives, friends, neighbors, the school. Police turned the whole house upside down; they confiscated her belongings – but her diaries I had hidden. I read those diaries years after and nothing in particular stood out to me. Don’t know what big reveal I was anticipating but those pages were no different from what I wrote when I was ten years old or so. The boys, the school, poorly described fears and naïve dreams. I’ve read it all through countless times and what hurt the most were the unused pages. And then, I started writing on them too – it was the only way to talk to her that I could come up with. 

Hi.

Hi, it’s me again.

It was delusional – I knew – I know – that. 

Hello, little [smeared with pen ink].

You just disappeared. Why? I hate you for it, you know? I really, really, despise you for it. It wasn’t like you never were – because you were and you left a you-shaped hole in our lives. There is no excuse for a thing like that. 

There was a rescue operation in the town. Volunteers searched through the woods, looking under every bush. Still, she was nowhere to be found. I remember the time, vaguely, more as an alien feeling than as an actual memory, when my sister’s portrait was hanging on every pillar and I couldn’t leave the house without seeing her face. And staying inside I kept hearing her name over and over and over again. The record got stuck. There was nowhere to run – she was there. And at the same time, she wasn’t anywhere at all. Hard to explain. It was the time I didn’t really exist. It was the closest I’ve ever been to my sister. 

When I turned twenty one it dawned on me that I’ve spent more years of my life without her in it than I spent with her. And that hurt.

I hope you never read this.

I got my eyebrow pierced on my birthday that year despite our parent’s wishes. And a reckless irresponsible teenager I was, of course I didn’t bother enough to care for it, so naturally the wound festered. It stinged but I was also too stubborn and dissociated from my very body that I didn’t remove it. The ugly thing stayed on my face for a while. 

Can’t stop thinking about how if you never went, they would never be against my piercing. They’ve changed after you’ve left. They became less fun. They became concerned. I get it, I really do – still.

A few months after the disappearance, I found myself forgetting her face, bit by bit. The fear of not remembering my sister at all was insurmountable so I put a picture of her in the diary. Soon it became the only picture I recall her by. The funny part – it was the same image I saw on every pillar. The same one is on her gravestone now. She is smiling there, a kid in love with life, however, the longer you look, the uncannier the picture gets – her smile a little too wide to be real, the cruel spark in her eyes. Like she never existed at all. The most eerie thing for me when I really think about it is that to this day, I only remember her picture but they are not real her. It’s the photo – a graveyard of artistry. She is gone. I do not know her. 

Rough edges of those days she left got smoother with the years passing. Now as I sometimes think back to them, I am not quite sure if she mattered that much to me, ever. The event of her dissolving was one of the determining parts of my life and of the life of my family. But as a person – I don’t think she really mattered to me. 

That sounded cruel. I didn’t mean it to be. What I meant was that she is a sister, a photo, a diary. Those things defined me. But did she matter to me as a person? Being completely honest, I do not think that even my – our – parents can sincerely answer that question at this point. 

[a page torn out]

I feel your ghost over me at all times and I didn’t even know you. You were not old enough to be known properly. 

My parents were in agonizing sharp pain and I was not allowed to feel it. That chronic dull pain that they bury inside themselves I am not allowed to feel either, because I didn’t quite live through those hideous days like our parents did. I can hardly recall that time, it’s just the shapes, and alien stories told to me afterwards. Then the house went silent and maybe, just maybe I was allowed to feel that it was better when there were cops and neighbors, when people were suspicious or pitying or both at the same time.

[a page torn out] 

[a page torn out]

[a page torn out]

I’m losing my mind I guess but that was you. I know it was you.

She disappeared without a trace left. I’m pretty sure that it’s what happened at least and as coward-ish as it is I don’t wish to know more. 

Darling, do it for you and for your sister. She would be very proud of you, our dad said. There is always this shadow over me. I know, our parents have always meant it as a support but it doesn’t always feel like it – more like a haunting. Our parents really wanted me to be happy – but at the same time, they wanted both of their daughters. Consequently, I had to become worth the two and it is as understandable as it is injurious. 

Why did I not try to find her myself as I became older? It probably wouldn’t lead anywhere but that would be natural for me to at least try. A little detective girl. I do not know. There are some things that you do and you don’t do that you can’t fully explain. There are logical explanations, sure, but those decisions work on some subclinical level that one cannot fully understand oneself. I never attempted to understand, stubborn in my ignorance. Our parents gave up searching for her. She was never completely dead for us – it did never feel that way. As if she would ever come back. We all understood she would probably not. Sometimes hope is a knife piercing.

Not dead and not alive – my sister got stuck in this eternal soulless purgatory. At some point in my childhood, I stopped answering yes to the question if I had siblings. 

because you ain’t here.

They never renovated my sister’s room but locked it – I remember the day. The act provided an illusion of us being ready to move on whereas in fact it was more of an act of cutting a tongue out. Or piercing it right through, nailing it to that door. There was a nightmare that I had frequently at the time – that she wakes up in that room, and it is the same as she never left, and she is the same as she was, she does not know what happened and how much time passed, she wants to leave but the door is shut. Despite fear I once stole the key and opened the door. No one was there. 

You were not there.  

The first time I brought my at-that-time boyfriend to meet my parents, I showed him around the house. What’s that room, he asked, pointing at the old wooden door. Oh. That is my sister’s room, I said. I almost forgot myself that it was there. You never told me you had a sister. He expected me to have an answer to that, but I didn’t find one. It was embarrassing. He asked about her afterwards, a few times. I told him that I didn’t want to talk about it. I dumped that urge emerged. 

I am an adult. I don’t need to talk to you anymore.

When I left for college, I didn’t bring the diaries with me, however, regretted it afterwards. It was empty without them – the jigsaw piece missing. I didn’t necessarily need to write in them or reread those pages but just the presence of them felt home, that shadow I couldn’t sleep without, that comforting stinging pain in my eyebrow. So, when I returned for holidays, I did grab those fat books from the shelves. I wrote rarely to save the pages. There are still a few left. There is still the same eerie picture of her smiley face inside. 

You are not a real human person.

[smeared with pen ink]

Maybe I shouldn’t have drunk as much as I did that night. I vaguely recall vomiting in the dirty club toilet while a lady with awful mascara smears under her eyes and a stinky cigarette between her fingers was holding my hair. I don’t know her name, wouldn’t even recognize her face. I only remember two things from that night – my adult sister’s face and the streaks on the tile under my knees. They were dark yellow and brown. My hair caught on the eyebrow earring. My sister, it’s like a piercing – you stop noticing after some time. You even forget that it is there, even though your flesh was pierced, ripped apart and healed wrong. But as I touched what used to be an open wound it still stinged and smelled wrong. 

I was drunk. It wasn’t you. It couldn’t be you.

She saw me though – you did. We shared a long-lasting glance of recognition. Something confused and maybe a little cruel sparkled in her eyes, like she was about to run to me and simultaneously from me. Like she was mirroring my actions. And then someone hit me on the back of my head – don’t stand still on the dance floor, that’s an unspoken rule – and I lost her again. Then I could see her sparkling top, but not her face. I tried to follow it frantically, panicking, but eventually got lost in the crowd and found myself only as I was leaning on the wall by the restroom’s door. The nausea got overwhelming. Pulsing lights, pulsing head. If she was real, why wouldn’t she find us? What could have possibly happened throughout those sixteen years? A full life could have happened. But she recognized me – that’s how I saw it and that is how I am going to remember it. 

After that I found her journal again – it was hidden on the shelf and covered in dust. I started writing. 

I saw you today. I didn’t follow you – and I hate myself for it. I didn’t even try to do so. You were pretty – and in that one picture of yours too. Yeah. I could follow you – but I didn’t. Maybe I’ll imagine that I did later and reshape my memory – it always works with me. If I don’t even remember your face, if even your name feels alien, if you are not real, what else is there for me to do other than imagining you or tearing you out of my life? I could have shouted your name. That way I would know for sure – but I couldn’t say your name out loud. I barely remembered your name at that time. I barely recall it now. Where were you? Do you even remember your name yourself? Do you have a life? Did it hurt more for you than it did for me? 

Were you at all?

[a page torn out]

[a page torn out]

You are a sister-thing in my mind. Not quite a full-on sister.

That is only how I remember it anyway.

---

Vera Podell is a Russian-born writer and photo artist. She writes in three languages which are English, Russian and German. Vera tends to experiment a lot with her writing style, primarily focusing on the theme of memory and how it forms our identity. You can find her on Instagram as @verapodell.