As we come to the close of another year here on the Grievous Angel, what better than this story – Garbanzo Brain by Diana Rohlman – about gaining closure? Diana lives in the Pacific Northwest, invariably spending the rainy days inside, writing, with a glass of wine nearby, and her dog offering helpful critiques. You can find her at https://sites.google.com/site/rohlmandiana/
 

Garbanzo Brain
by Diana Rohlman


“Close your eyes, concentrate on your husband.” I close my eyes, hide a grimace, and curse my best friend Delia for tricking me into this. 
    
The fat lady sitting across from me tells me again to close my eyes. I struggle to keep my eyes closed, my eyelashes fluttering vainly.  I can smell the bitter, sharp incense; it burns my nostrils. I fidget. 
    
“Sugar, you have to believe in this for it to work.”
    
I don’t. I desperately want to, but my brain, that wrinkled, powerful organ, is betraying me. 
    
“What are you thinking about, Sugar?”
    
“Garbanzo beans. They look like little brains.” I hadn’t meant to say that.
    
I’d never seen a fresh garbanzo bean until a month ago. The bright green, wrinkled bean inside a dark green pod was strangely beautiful. 
    
The photographer in me itched to recreate that image. I purchased a small bag, and brought it home. Darryl laughed, asked what I intended to do with them after I took my photograph.
    
That bag of garbanzo beans is still sitting in the refrigerator, the green pods gone black with mold. My mind shies away from the obvious metaphor.
    
I shift uncomfortably. The woman across from me is perfectly at ease. The image, two women bracketing ancient garden furniture in a dark, overcrowded shop, should be compelling. 
    
Instead, I want to run away.
    
She speaks again, telling me to close my eyes. I don’t know why, but I do.
    
“Tell me about your husband.” 
    
“He was tall, had sandy-brown hair, grey eyes.” 
    
“No, Sugar, tell me about your husband.” Her voice is unexpectedly soft, a thread of warmth and comfort woven intimately between the words.
    
“There was love in his hugs.” I stop, a painful pressure point growing in my throat, choking me. It wasn’t how I meant to describe him, but as I said it, I heard the truth in it. 
    
“That’s good, Sugar, real good. What else?” 
    
The calm, incessant flow of words from this woman who insists on calling me ‘Sugar’ infuriates me. I want to shut her up. I want my husband. I don’t want to be here. But when I open my mouth;
    
“He didn’t say he loved me.” 
    
It sounds pitiful. My anger is suddenly gone. The bone-deep sorrow and fatigue are nearly crushing. I want to cry. 
    
I stare at the woman for a long time. She says nothing. I feel a need to explain, if just to fill the looming silence. “Darryl always said that, every morning. But that day, he was in such a rush, and in the hurry… he never said he loved me. And then the accident happened and he...” I can’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t make me. The moment stretches, and I can’t stop the tears. 
    
Delia said the pain would dwindle over time. I didn’t see how that was possible. A crazy, stupid accident, and my warm, loving husband was gone. The pain of his death was a white-hot spear in my side. And he hadn’t told me he loved me that day. It was a small thing, but my traitorous garbanzo brain wouldn’t let it go. That thought circled through my head every moment of every day, ricocheting amongst the furrows and grooves, tormenting me. I hadn’t known how important that little phrase was. I would do anything to hear Darryl say it one last time.
    
The woman watched me, her face inscrutable. Finally she smiled. 
  
 “Just hold your hand here, Sugar, just like that. Good.” Her plump fingers touch mine and withdraw fleetingly.
    
I sit passively, thoughts of my husband whirling through my garbanzo brain, tears still dripping off my chin. My feet are glued to the ground, my knees trembling.
    
Finally I stop. The pads of my fingers are white, pressed tightly against the wooden marker. 
    
Madame Gloria pushes a piece of paper towards me, across a tabletop worn smooth by hundreds of visitors. She sets it atop the Ouija board.
    
With inelegant script, she has translated my efforts. 
    
I gasp. I pick up the paper, read and reread the words. Tears blur the words. 
    
I love you.

We've just had the Shortest Day (up here in the Northern Hemisphere) so what better than some short-form poetry, touching everything from time and space travel to primeval horror, to see us into the Festive Season. Our contributors are Robert Shmigelsky, Brittany Hause, Vince Gotera, and Bruce Boston.


temporal archaeology
digging up my own skeleton
from the bedrock


Christmas
window shopping
looking for the right gift
something heartfelt but misplaced in
the past
 
...Robert Shmigelsky


cenotaph

bits of shattered hull
twirling in zero gee
her favorite bear

...Brittany Hause


Snowman

eyes
chunks of
charcoal

arms
black
branches
reaching out

from
under
​the bed

...Vince Gotera


Full Moon Forecast

A ginger sky at twilight,
rich in effluence. 
At dusk a blood moon
on the horizon.
A bestial cry in the dark
trembles the night.

...Bruce Boston

Two new pieces of microfiction for you now. We've fantasy in the shape of The Button Box by Jamie Lackey and yet more fantasy with The Boy in the Picture by Morgan Crooks.

* Jamie Lackey has appeared in Daily Science Fiction and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her novel Left-Hand Gods is available from Hadley Rille Books. Find more at http://www.jamielackey.com and on Twitter @anyaselena.
* Morgan Crooks grew up in a hamlet in Upstate New York and now teaches ancient history in Massachusetts. He lives with his wife, Lauren, near Boston. You can find him at http://ancientlogic.blogspot.com and on Twitter @raponikoff


The Button Box
by Jamie Lackey

The cardboard box on Frederick's stoop was dented and soggy and unexpected. The handwritten return address had spidered out into the wet cardboard, leaving it completely illegible.  
    
It rattled when he picked it up.  
    
He dumped it on the kitchen table with his overdue bills and forgot about it until the next morning. The now-dry cardboard had gone brittle, and the tape peeled away easily as he picked at it over his bowl of cereal.  
    
The box was half-filled with buttons. No two of them matched. There were pink buttons and purple buttons and yellow buttons. They were round and square and oval and hexagonal. The flat buttons had two or three or four or seven holes. As he dug down, he started to find shank buttons. One was a swirl of red and blue plastic, the next was covered in stitched silver leather. One was shaped like a duckling.    
    
Frederick dug through them, looking for a card or a note or an invoice or something.  
    
But there were only more buttons. A green faceted button, a gold-edged navy blue rectangle button. A crystal button that threw tiny rainbows when the sun caught it. One was shaped like an egg and cold to the touch. Another gave off a faint hum when he picked it up.   
    
Who could have sent them? And why?  
    
At the very bottom of the box, he found one that he recognized. It was a tiny tyrannosaurus in green-black plastic, and it was from what had been his favorite jacket when he was eight.  
    
It had fallen off at the zoo, and he'd cried at its loss. His mother had consoled him with a large dish of Dippin' Dots, and he'd pretended that it helped.  
    
He transferred the other buttons to a new box, taped it up, and wrote his return address on the corner.  
    
Then he left it out on his stoop, confident it would find its way to where it needed to be.  


The Boy in the Picture
by Morgan Crooks
    
I looked down at a smiling boy running through trees in a pool of broken glass. This picture followed me through high school, college, and my first apartment. My father never had a chance to take many pictures of me and so I treasured it, kept it safe in a golden frame, sealed behind glass and out of view. Why look back?
    
As some point in the trip to Boston, the frame had broken, scattering bits of glass everywhere in the packing box.
    
I fished the picture from its frame, and brushed off the glass. I’d always thought the image unusual. Had I even owned a red and blue vest? My expression in the picture puzzled me; I wore a smile below wary, watchful eyes.
    
On the picture’s back was an inscription: my name; the address of the home where I’d grown up; and a date now only three weeks away.
 
*****
    
No one asked why I took September 24th off work. Even my mother assumed I returned for old things. I made for the woods as soon as I could, and spent hours tramping through the sugar maples, looking for that one right place.
    
I held the picture at an arm’s-length in front of me, maneuvering until I had the right angle and distance. Despite the years, somehow I knew when I had found it. I looked up from the trembling picture.
    
There ahead of me, perhaps only a few steps away, a maple bore the imprint of a tiny hand, as though its grey bark had once been as pliable as fresh dough. I put the photo away, pressed down my left hand into the mark, and found it made a perfect fit.
    
I stared at it, astonished.
    
“Come on son, we’re heading home,” came a voice.
    
My dad put down his camera, beckoning to me. I ran to him, the sun pouring down on leaves cast aside by my swift feet. 

We've a delicious mixture of shorter bite-sized sci-fi, fantasy and dystopian poetry for you now from Francis W. Alexander, John Reinhart, Holly Walrath, Greg Schwartz, Susan Burch and Lauren McBride.


Universal Fads 

Segregated Southern graveyards
proudly peering at infinity
When the end comes.
broken and boiled
caskets and bones mix
with no regard for race.

...Francis W. Alexander


superheroes

on the bus
on the lightrail

cutting through traffic
flying away
flying home

superheroes
in ordinary costumes
on cell phones

working day jobs
making a living
making change 

...John Reinhart


Confessions of a Supermassive Black Hole                    

You can’t escape my body.
I deform spacetime, invisible
collapsing even as everything surrounds me.
I am the center of you, of your galaxy.
Sieving particles, radiation, light, through my skin
I search for the ghost of my former self. 
My gravity is also my weakness.

...Holly Walrath


Dwarf Regiment Marching through the Forest

Their warboots 
    shake the earth
but their helmets
    don’t even graze
the lowest branches.

...Greg Schwartz


the end
of our spaceship
romance –
too many days
stuck on the dark side
of the moon

...Susan Burch


to save space
we brought e-books
to New Earth
one by one
batteries dying

​...Lauren McBride