Scrumdiddlyumptious

A magician lays his tools on a table & waves over a group of school children who eagerly watch as he works / He passes around a purple crushed velvet hat for their eager inspection & the kids all come to agree that while it looks nice enough the hat seems rather unremarkable / From a pewter chalice a vicar might use for communion the magician pours milk & honey into the hat & waves his manicured hand around the velvet brim / His nails are painted black like his eyelids & on his pinky he wears a gold ring engraved with an ouroboros with eyes of delicately cut rubies endlessly eating its tail / With a short wooden wand he picked up off the table he taps the top of the hat no less than seven times to the tune of Shave & A Haircut & says the magic word Scrumdiddlyumptious like a prayer & turns it right side up without spilling a drop / Alchemy / He offers to the children in a quiet whisper almost like a lullaby while pulling a gold coin from his waistcoat / Is the ancient study of fanatic metallurgists & other incredulous men with wandering beards who waste their time locked inside of their stuffy laboratories / Magic / He says as he drops the coin into his top hat / Is an art form like music or dance that I learned from my grandmother in her grandmother’s kitchen / And from his hat he pulled out three large bars of chocolate delicately wrapped like Christmas presents in lavender paper tied with twine / And with enough patience & practice you can learn some magic too / As long as you promise to share what you know with those around you.

Megazord

She is my empress & I am her Green Ranger / You call her evil but she used her dark sorcery to give me ancient space powers just like the rest of you / Trapped for ten thousand years of course Rita Repulsa was gonna obsess from afar over the drama of teenagers / I was locked in a studio apartment for twenty-four months binge watching magical high school soap operas & monster of the week style television shows & no not the good ones you’re thinking so trust me I get it / She even calls the rangers out by name & uses Trini’s preferred nickname / You know she doesn’t have to do that / I understand you think my empress is evil but let me tell you that from her side the whole exile on the moon thing worked out in her favor / She’s picking up new hobbies & from personal experience Rita Repulsa’s focaccia experiments are kinda to die for although sometimes quite literally / The Guinness & rosemary knots tried eating Finster when he pulled them out of the oven so we teleported them to Zordon but ya’ll already figured that out / She is a thinker & always messing around in the kitchen she thinks bigger & biggest / Which is why my empress sent me out before the first commercial break / So I know I’m jumping the gun here but if you don’t mind I’m gonna go full denouement twenty minutes before the credits / I’ll play my flute now so we can summon our fighting robots / Ya’ll can put yours together first thing & when can get the whole Megazord battle scene over with.

An Incomplete List of Things Said by Men with Two Faces

Men are such cocksuckers aren’t they? / You don’t have to answer that / Beneath this mask there is more than flesh / Beneath this mask there is an idea / Trust me my pungent friend / You’ll get what’s coming to you / Your paranoia will be our undoing / Ha! My paranoia will be your undoing / Holy men are martyred & junkies grow legion / You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain / Life is wasted on the living / I’m so great I get tongue tied talking to myself / I knew you were a danger right from the off / I’m never alone / No imagination can conceive the dreadful temptations it sets before me / For some unforgiven wickedness I am knit to this fiend—for a fiend it surely is / Take the boat & swear to me never to tell / The secrets you know of the angel in hell / Azrael that’s your cue to pounce on the miserable beasts in some kind of rage-induced feline frenzy / I simply can’t stop thinking about the miserable beasts every single minute of every single day / Ok I’m shouting / I’m shouting I’m shouting I’m shouting / I’m Batman / No, I am your father / Search your feelings / I’ll be back. 





RJ Ingram lives next to a cemetery in Portland, Oregon & works as a necromancer for Goodwill Industries of the Columbia Willamette. RJ's debut collection of poetry The Autobiography of Nancy Drew was published by White Stag in 2024 & RJ’s second collection of poetry Peacock Lane was published by White Stag on Summer Solstice 2026. Recent work can be found in Pool Party, Be About It, Crab Apple Literary, Quarter Press’s (ly), Lula Luna, among other publications.

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MY DEAD NEW YORK NANNA and B.B. the dead French actress are having actually a whizbang good time processing their shit together in the bardo. They’ve conjured a limboland version of the Plaza Hotel, parked smackdab in the center of the Tuileries, where they sit at the sunniest table, drinking all the coffee, and eating all the best cheese, because there is no diarrhea in the bardo, and the recently deceased need not fear sunburn. For kicks, my Nanna and B.B. both wear giant hats—like women in Proust, or at the Kentucky Derby—and they wear muumuus, because muumuus are comfortable. Their post-mortem trajectories crossed when B.B. was walking her froufrou phantom dog down a Central Park inflection of the Champs-Élysées. Nanna charmed the late bombshell by addressing her dog instead of her, saying, Oh, my, don’t you look ferocious! B.B., in turn, pursed her famed lips to coo, Quel joli oiseau! at the great grey owl on Nanna’s shoulder, which my mother had seen land on a pine branch, loosing a snowfall premonition, just before the robot voice began answering Nanna’s landline with, We’re sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed. Nanna and B.B. both entered the corporeal realm in 1934 (one in the 7th month, one in the 9th); Nanna broke her hip the same day B.B. made her French exit, and never walked again until, days later, she gave her Irish goodbye. In life, they both conserved their best love for cats and gardens—stylish broads, or selfish bitches, depending when you met them, and what kind of animal you were. The shit that Bardot’s in the bardo to sort through is mostly about men, and also about race—she maladapted to trauma by projecting past tormenters on a thousand innocent faces. She was—like so many victims—more trusting of furred, mute beasts. But who knows how many germs of human life were forced into (onto) B.B. Nanna, too, may well have punched her pregnant belly a few times behind a locked bathroom door. And I’m sure she’s in the bardo now because of whatever happened to make her tell me that a woman with daughters must never remarry, because Teenage girls are very seductive. Before we knew Nanna’s body was ash, my mother had a dream in which she saw Nanna’s sister—born later, dead sooner—on the opposite side of a busy street, and heard her call out, Everything’s fine, we’re good over here! Don’t come! I think the “over here” was the place just past the bardo, where Nanna and B.B. are now forgiving each other their trespasses, as they forgive those who trespassed against them; where they finally can laugh about it all, enjoy sunshine and coffee without worrying when the bill will come due. We did the best we could, eh? Nanna will say. And Bridgitte Bardot will say, Absolutment, chérie—no translation necessary, though Nanna never learned any language beyond working-class English. I very much doubt that either Nanna or Brigitte knew the Tibetan loan word for the liminal state between death and rebirth that sounds exactly like Brigitte’s last name, either—as puns go, top shelf. But hardly worth coming back to life for. •





Francesca Leader is a writer and artist originally from Western Montana, with deep connections to New York City (acquired at birth) and to Istanbul, Turkey (acquired through marriage). She lives in Virginia with her children and their tuxedo cat.

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“IT’S JUST THE PEOPLE ARE PERVERTS—not always sex perverts. Mortgage perverts. Thing perverts. Power perverts, essentially. When you’re young, you’re a functional pervert with peers that are also perverts, so it’s allowed because it’s part of your, y’know, your...”

I glaze at the shimmering basil leaves in my Caprese salad, seeking inspiration. The inky dressing oozes between the silver tines of one of our finest forks, fished from the back of the garage, saved for Christmases and Birthdays and—

“—becoming!” I rebound. “Becoming a fully-fledged pervert, I mean.”

Cheryl’s serving tongs clatter to the table. She glares at me, a pagan curse forming in the furrow of her brow, a murderous toe testing my shin.

Bill and Lucinda from next door pick at their lasagne.

“Is there pesto in this, Cheryl? It’s lovely,” Bill leches.

“Is it one of Gordon Ramsey’s?” Lucinda flanks, tonguing at my wife’s sense of self.

“Mmmm,” Cheryl’s eyes crinkle.

“How is the new BMW, Bill?” I norm along.

“Oh, it’s a dream. Ey, I’m sure you’d say it’s some kind of mid-life crisis, Clive!”

I bite.

“Well, you are in your late fifties, Bill, so chance would be a fine thing. Final third crisis, maybe. But this is what I mean about… perversions. This accumulation of wants. I mean flash cars as your poison is a bit missionary with the lights off – hopefully not, Lucinda, you deserve better.”

Lucinda clutches her cardigan closed.                    

"Clive..." Cheryl projects like a melting ventriloquist dummy.

“I’m just saying, these... nagging desires are at the root of everything. All man’s problems. From geo-politics to… dumping crap you’re done coveting at the nature reserve. When you take a big step back, we are bipedal organisms just, y’know, propelling ourselves forward towards stuff-filled voids on these janky limbs. Meat bags, really, with frontal lobes and opposable thumbs just grabbing at things that please our perverted…”

“Clivecanyouhelpmeinthekitchenrightnowplease,” Cheryl machine-guns.




The wife slops dollops of chocolate mousse in the cut-glass trifle bowls, her angry back a clenched fist.

“I probably shouldn’t drink on antibiotics,” I offer.

“Mmmm.”

“Well... y’know… that online test you made me take did say I might be a spectrum case, or something,” I offer some more.

“Mmmm.”

I wring a serving spoon. It bends. I bend it back. It snaps. I stuff the pieces in my pocket. “I mean, in fairness to me... I was carrying a lot of the chat, sweetheart.”

She spins, teeth bared, jabbing a dripping whisk at an imaginary off button. “I’m not saying don’t make conversation, Clive. I’m just saying—”

“Don’t be yourself!”

“No! No, of course, be yourself, to an extent. Just don’t call people perverts, for Christ’s sake! I mean, minimising things that bring people joy. Why? What do you care?”

“I was talking about par-a-diiiiigms,” I hunch, pinching my fingers and thumbs together, like an Argentinian midfielder remonstrating with an overzealous referee.

“Clive, my love, listen. Nobody... literally nobody... no-bod-y cares what you—”

Bill pokes his shiny head through a crack in the door.

“I’m so sorry, gang. We’ve been called away. Our youngest has taken ill.”

“Your youngest is twenty-two,” I sneer.

“Yes. And he suffers from anxiety, Clive. Or ‘strategic jitters’, as you put it. Cheryl, thank you for a lovely evening. See you... soon. Ish.”

I become one with the corner unit, clacking my tongue so the silence doesn’t open a swirling portal into the seventh circle.

The front door clicks shut.

“Shall I put the cutlery in the garage?” I address my wife’s quaking back.

“And the good wine,” Cheryl exhales.




In the still of the garden, a luminous crescent hangs like a bitten fingernail, the night air crisp and jagged. I fill my lungs, exhuming the injustice - the ham-hearted vapours of amateur anthropology. The sizzling cells of half-baked philosophies.

The moon understands.

The moon is taken for granted, reflecting the sun back at us from unfathomable distances, humouring the pinned flags of transient spacemen in its cratered face. They’d found water up there, they said. They’d found potential. Viable potential for—

“Hi, Mr Wykes.”

  A fringe-shrouded teenager hunkers on next door’s roof, beyond a dormer window. His eyes blaze down at me like a wounded bush baby.

“Hi George,” I say.

“Hi, errr, I saw that you saw me. Please don’t tell mom and dad.”

I spy the tiny ember between his sneaky digits, a thin seam of smoke snaking to the stars.

“Oh, no, I’m not some narc, George. I was looking at the moon, actually. I was thinking how pissed it must be with people sticking shit in it... hang on, where are your folks?”

“Errr, they’ve gone to McDonalds. They said they were still hungry. Something about a nasty taste in their mouth. They’d been over one of the neighbours, I think.”

“Right. Well…” I clutch our bottle of best red, sloshing the tribute to the hooded eye of Luna, Selene, Diana. “What say you to an exchange of poisons, cosmic traveller?”




“I’ve never seen that word written down before, hyperbole, so I was saying hyper-bowl, and everyone in my class, professor included, pissed themselves laughing. How am I supposed to know that’s how you pronounce it? No one told me. Are we meant to just, like, know. And are we meant to just be able to, like, talk in front of people? Was I off sick when they taught us how to do that?”

I suck on the proffered joint, gripping a slimy roof tile, the sloppy cardboard filter wobbling loose at my lips. George sips at his Pikachu mug of Merlot.

“That’s why I’m dropping out, anyway. I suppose you reckon I shouldn’t?”

I blow my cheeks out enigmatically, squinting at Sirius or Polaris or whatever. It had been twenty years since I’d imbibed, and the claggy cannabis was slamming my tender brain like knuckles in a piano lid.

“I mean, there’s so many real scholars on YouTube, these days,” George pressed on. “I can learn everything about Political Studies from those guys, can’t I? Have you watched True Patriot 45’s stuff? He makes a lot of solid points.”

I bend my creaking knees, bracing myself on the slippery gradient, lousy with moss, way overdue a power-wash from Bill, that bourgeois prick. I guess our accumulated weight. Guess the thickness - the compressive strength of the quivering timber.

“I’ve still got my student loan. I think instead of giving it back, I’m going to convert it to crypto. I read a blog that swears I can triple my money if I sign up to their newsletter. Might as well try. I can’t lose money, they pretty much guarantee that.”

I try to remember the cadence of breathing. In, out, in, out. Not too shallow. Not too deep.

“What do you know about the Illuminati, Mr Wykes?”

I hold up a sage finger in consideration.

An owl hoo-hooes.

A dog ruh-ruh-ruh-ruhs.

An idling engine dug-a-dug-a-dug-as.

A truck’s suspension chunk-chunks.

A train tuh-tuh, tuh-tuhs.

A siren weeee-oooo-weeee-ooooes.

A fridge hmmmmmmmmms.

Ancient pipes tic-tic-tick.

All, just filling the dread silence. All, just wanting their noise heard.

An indeterminate rodent with indeterminate viruses scratches and scrapes beneath, forcing its way into gaps it doesn’t belong in. Spaces inside, non-liminal, lived in, where nourishing goodness, curated and wanted in neat little rows, lay thoughtfully stocked and unsullied.

I glance back at the slick terracotta chasm to the open window. My janky limbs turn to spaghetti hoops, my meat bag a sack of spanners, my grabbers flayed spatulas.

“Cher-yllll!” I scream. “Cheryl! Cheryl! Cheryl! Cheryl!”

George’s mug clatters and smashes on the patio as he scuttles homeward. My wife’s slippers shush our garden path, security lights illuminating her oval horror.

“I’m stuck,” my hummingbird heart works my mouth. “Please fetch the ladder. I need to climb down. Help. Oh, Jesus, help! I want to descend!” •





Ian Johnson is a writer from North East England. His work appears in publications such as Trash Cat Lit, Scaffold, Underbelly, and Free Flash Fiction. He is a 2026 Best of the Net nominee.

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Is my hair long
Is my hair short
Do I smoke into lungs
or mouth

Am I celibate
or a luscious creature of touch

Who knows

As I chew on my gum
I longingly think
of something
years in the making
carefully cultivated
very sophisticated

my very own
personal
ick of life

Am I well
or just very good
at arranging my symptoms

Do I want to be held
or observed
very closely

Do I want your hand
on the small of my back
or some evidence
that it was there

Am I soft
or have I simply learned
not to flinch

Someone once
touched my forehead
to see if I had a fever

I have been trying
to recreate
the conditions
ever since

I like the word
benign

I like the word
malignant

I like when someone
says

let me see

and I show them

Notice

the little change
in temperature

the pause
before I answer

the particular way
I have gone quiet
beneath something soft

I can make anything
into a sign

I can make a sign
into a symptom

I can make a symptom
into something
almost tender

And there it is

that little
ick

How disgusting

Come closer





Greta Kaluževičiūtė is a Lithuanian writer. Her prose—published under her own name and multiple pseudonyms—has appeared in Do Not Submit, Expat Press, Hobart Pulp, Plague Circus Press, 3AM:Magazine, Ritual Dagger, and various obscure corners of the internet. She is also a psychoanalytic researcher and holds a PhD in Psychoanalytic Studies from the University of Essex, UK. In addition to her writing and research, she is the author of eskimo kisses, an ongoing photography project examining intimacy through uncanny encounters.

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TOWARDS THE END, I FINALLY  had a confidante. Not a very good friend, really, but someone I could be honest with, and there was some solace in that. Our daughters went to the same Montessori school, a small one in a townhouse in Williamsburg, with a backyard. The girls also went to the same nearby ballet school, once a week. They adored each other.

There were years beforehand wherein this little girl’s mom and I fronted to each other that everything was fine. It’s not that hard to keep your “mom friends” at arm’s length. And pretty much none of them are your friend and everybody knows that, goes along in as-if-ness. You need your child to have playmates, so you need those relationships with other moms to be superficial on purpose. Nobody pries or gets too deep; it’s not about you.

One summer day when the girls were three, I was with S at McCarren pool. Some of my most treasured memories of early motherhood are at this pool. How S clung to me in the water, especially the deep end. The deep end of deepening trust. I will not leave you. At the same time, I want you to be free. The tension in using dependency to nurture liberation. How her tiny body couldn’t thermoregulate as quickly or efficiently as my larger adult one. I had it down to a quick efficient science; opening the locker to get our clothes with one arm while holding her shivering body close to me with my other arm, her balanced on my hip. I am here. I will keep you warm. The amount of time you are going to be shivering is only going to be seconds. I will carry you home in the Ergo and a car service, never subtracting my body heat from your body even for a moment until you are warm again. You are going to be a great swimmer. I can tell. I know it, I know it.

That summer afternoon though, we ran into her Montessori and Ballet friend, B. And B’s dad, not mom. B’s dad wanted to get a bottle of wine and take the kids to his loft for a playdate, after the pool. At his fancy loft, B’s mom was home. There was conflict in the air; an unfinished fight. I took the girls to B’s bedroom, where they played dress-up. We could all hear B’s parents fighting. Then the slamming door, when they left to go fight somewhere else. They never came back, either. It got dark. At dinnertime, I called a car service and took the girls to my apartment. B’s mom appeared at my house in the dawn hours, a sobbing wreck. She poured out the fragments of her story in the disjointed PTSD style of someone subjected to psychological abuse for a few years. It’s okay. I understand. I made her some toast. If everything sucks, and someone is really upset, I really believe that toast will help. I fling toast at the void and never fill it, only add some toast, I think. When we went outside to take the girls to school, her Mercedes was gone. She was sure her husband had taken it. I called the tow yard, and we took the girls to school in a car service. The Mercedes was in the Brooklyn Navy Yard tow compound, and after we retrieved it, we sat in it chainsmoking and talking until it was time to pick up the girls.

There were some good times. She was a redhead and a daredevil driver, and we blasted Fleetwood Mac on the BQE, taking the girls places. In a way, I think she tried to warn me about the fickle and tenuous friendship available to us then, in our circumstances; the impossibility of any real solidarity. “Being victims together” isn’t a basis for a friendship. We were like prisoners chained to the same wall—we understood each other but were powerless to help. She told me, “You should watch Big Little Lies.”  Not: we should watch it. You should watch it. I watched it. Late at night in sultry humidity. Bit by bit, with the windows open, luxuriating in fictive escapism and syrupy July air.  It didn’t exactly apply. Maybe the vicious social networks. The abuser didn’t mirror hers or mine. There was a disturbing eroticism, not present in either of our marriages. The Nicole Kidman character’s abuser was sexy all in black in the homicidal finale. Same erotic pull for the women all banding together to shove him off a balcony. We didn’t have any of that. It was much uglier and much more boring. Jeanne Dielman with no redemptive violence. We sat in her Mercedes and smoked. We raced on the highway to DUMBO, Spotify cranked. We drank wine from our kids’ Disney princess water bottles as we sat in the back of their ballet class… strangers who talked too much, revealed too much to each other on a flight from JFK to Orly after too many free first class drinks and wanted to forget it, once we checked in wherever with the asshole husbands we couldn’t leave, not yet anyway.

Her husband and his lawyer included a video of her in their divorce filing. That she had to respond to in a reply motion. The video was of her crying and saying she wanted to die. You can hear the husband coldly trying to get her to state this more audibly. “I’m sorry, what did you say? Could you repeat that? You’re crying so much it’s hard to hear what you’re saying.” He was… recording you on purpose and wanted to save it to use against you later, I said in horror.  At least he never hit me, she said, offended. Victim hauteur. Hitting is déclassé. I understood the assault on personhood of prolonged abuse; why she would cling to an absurd self-protective superiority.

There isn’t anything you can say after watching a video of your friend crying and saying she wants to die, while her husband icily entices her to make better evidence he can stash and weaponize later. There’s nothing to say; any shred of a word is an insult. I should have asked for her car keys and run him over. •





Sylvia Math fled California for NYC, and has work in Hobart, X-R-A-Y, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Burial, and others.  She's editing her memoir “Looks Bad on Paper,” and working on a novel called “Future Murder Victim.”

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