“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.