In June I celebrate my wedding anniversary with my husband. We’ve been together for over half my life at this point and yet somehow, stubbornly, we remain enigmas to each other, even as we know every worst habit that the other one has. The unknowability of another, however they are related to you, is one of life’s biggest mysteries. The promise of reading has always, for me, been the possibility of understanding another person’s mind—what’s really going on in there, beneath the surface. This month’s pieces all, in their own ways, are probing this eternal mystery as well. 

“Boris” by Jackie Sabbagh is one thrilling sentence long, a love story between the narrator and the titular Boris on the surface. The potential lovers meet cute in the library and go on a date and take drugs together, meanwhile roiling beneath these typical young love moments is the narrator’s struggle with their body and their identity, with their desire to become a woman but also to be loved and accepted. Does Boris know what the narrator is going through? Does he care? 

“Playfighting,” by Luke Dunne is a story of precision. From the precise way the narrator’s favorite glass is chipped to the way they describe their imagined scream of anger, each image and sound is so clear, and yet the precision functions as a way of keeping both themselves and the reader distanced from the very scary actions happening both internally and externally. It’s easy to get lost in the beauty of Dunne’s images, briefly forgetting how much tragedy is being wrapped up with them.

In “Heart,” Allison Field Bell finds the way beauty can transform to horror and back again. As the narrator takes in life-changing news about their mother, everything around them transforms for the reader as well. The flowers are no longer odes to life but reminders of death, their very existence vulgar. Breath and blood are life forces that may be snipped as easily as a stem, reminding the reader that they, too, are as fragile as a flower petal.

“Under the Heavy Moon” by Jenny Stalter tells a love story that spans decades yet remains ambiguous. Even as the logistical reasons no longer keep these two women apart, will all their private sufferings be too much for them to overcome? And is it possible to sit comfortably with that uncertainty, and simply admire all the terrible beauty and heartache they have experienced together over the years?

“A Glimpse of a Different Skyline” by Laila Amado is this month’s shortest piece. In just over  100 worlds it conjures all the unknowable possibilities that lie hidden in a puddle’s reflections—the upside-down world that might have been, might actually be the real one we are all experiencing. 

These readings spoke to my own internal mysteries, my own unknowable self. I hope they will do the same for you.

Carolyn Abram
Guest Flash Fiction Editor
The Citron Review