Asking you to meet me on Dead Horse Bay could be interpreted as passive aggressive.  But I could have chosen Barren Inlet or the Millstone Trail; Brooklyn is paved in symbols. You were late. Broken bottles glimmered all along the stained-glass shore. As I bent towards a cracked plastic baby face, you came around the bend.

It had been ten years since you got on the bus without me. Twenty years since we were girls who played until dusk; the shades of our hair tangling in the breeze.  My mother once said she was afraid she would have to cut us apart with her meat scissors. Even as teenagers we walked fingers entwined. When boys asked if they should be jealous, we’d wink; even our lashes were syncopated.

Your voice left its twang at some prairie pit-stop. “Do you still remember how to play?”

When we were kids, we played The Game of Lost Things. We liked to try to figure out why they had escaped or been abandoned. We’d take them home, hidden under sweaters and behind our backs, to rot in sour-salt piles in the backs of closets.

I pointed to the doll and told you go first, curious to see what you’d say.

“After surgery at the doll hospital, they throw the old and ugly faces into the sea. Your turn.” California spattered freckles across your nose.

I stared into the curling pink plastic. I see it at once. The salt ate her chest. The waves plucked off her arms and feet. She felt sand between her fingers and air between her toes. A crab came to live inside her right arm and she felt it scuttling. Then she drifted too far from herself and went numb.

A gull caught her up, her ringlets in its blonde beak.  She thought she was saved. She did not see the second gull, but she saw the grey feathers falling. They fought for her hair. Brittle sections of scalp flaked off. Her eyes rolled out of her head. The gulls wrapped their eggs in her golden curls.

She was left with a mask for a face. She floated for weeks. When the sea eels looked in her eyes, all they saw was sky.

But I said, “I wonder what the new face is like.”

Hippolyte by Richard Larson

They were out on the salt-slimed boardwalk when Jack showed her the tits nestled obscenely in their plastic. Kristine shoved them back in the bag.

“Is it really that bad?” she asked, looking out over nightskinned harbor.

Jack fixed her with his clear blue eyes. “It’s fucking disgusting.”

Kristine weighed the silicon reluctantly in her hands. Jack had brushed back her hair like a highschool sweetheart while she splashed rancid vomit into the toilet bowl. Jack had taken a pityfuck from one of their therapists on an afternoon when she was entombed in a leather chair with IV.

She drew her arm back easily, so easily.

In the coming mornings she would inspect the puckered X-shaped scar in the mirror and leave her bra cup sagging empty. Her lipstick would go on more like warpaint, and Jack’s tits would choke fish at the bottom of the bay.

Roller Coaster by Mandi M. Lynch

Katie left the subway and braced herself against the bitter wind and driving rain that met her.  It had been raining when she entered the underground system an hour ago, but not like this.  Her sultry little red dress and sexy four inch heels were hardly appropriate for the weather, but she didn’t care.  She hadn’t intended to ride the subway all the way to the end of the line, either, but she had.  And here she was – Stillwell Avenue, the only subway stop on Coney Island.

It was half a mile from the corner of Stillwell and Surf Avenues to the end of the Coney Island’s pier, and she walked it by habit: west, then around the stadium, and a turn south before heading directly across the beach and down the wooden planks of the jetty.  When she got there, there were no remainents of her $250 hair appointment; her limp bangs clung to her forehead as if they were painted on.

Any other day, she’d’ve worried about her Manolo Blahniks, but today, the only reason she took them off was because the heels caught the sand.  Now, she fell to her knees and sobbed into Lower Bay.  Coney Island had been the setting for every happy childhood memory; she had summered there with her grandmother, tucked away on the corner of 27th and Mermaid, where they’d tell stories of the mythical creatures of the same name.  Katie would give anything to be back there again, where her wild hair and freckles were a sign of her beauty, not marks against them.

Even on those summer nights, she’d have been tucked in bed a long time ago.  But that was then, and it was a long way from thirteen to thirty, and an even longer way from the penthouse apartment that had hosted the night’s disastrous soiree. Had Harrison really chastised her in front of six hundred of their closest friends and business partners for not getting Botox?  Was that one laugh line really such a bad thing?

As the storm picked up and the waves wiped over the boards, she screamed into them, letting all the frustrations wash away with the water.  To hell with Harrison and his collection of antique silk ties, his arrogance and his impossible standards of beauty, this was all she could take.  Katie reached into the dress and pulled out both 400 cc silicone breasts – loaners to try out the voluptuous D cup size they would make her after surgery and weeks of painful recovery.  Another request of Harrison’s.

She thought of the grandmother who would braid her hair before a day at the beach.  They’d spend days with sand between their toes, stopping only for amusement park rides and corndogs and Sunday mornings at the church across the street.

With a scream that would make a banshee run, she threw the implants into the bay.  To hell with Harrison.  She would leave Coney Island the way she always had – with dignity.

Silicon Breasts, Coney Island by Hannah Karena Jones

She tried to comfort herself with the fact that, though he had asked her to stuff her bra with the silicone implants, he didn’t actually want to surgically alter her figure.

“To me,” he had said, placing his hand over his sagging pectoral muscle, pledging allegiance, “you are perfect. I like you just the way you are.” Underneath the bed sheets, he cupped her breasts in his hands. “It’s the other people, the strangers, these Americans who don’t think you’re beautiful.” He sighed. “I don’t want you to change, but it will be better if they think that you have.” He squeezed her. “The truth will be our little secret.”

She chose to believe this rather than admit that he was cheap. She saw the way he stared every morning when she tucked them underneath her natural breasts, filling the bra she had bought two sizes too big. She saw the smile that hid in the corner of his lips when she adjusted her shirt over her temporarily bulging chest. She knew that, if he could have afforded more than the twenty-dollar, Brooklyn flea-market—“gently used,” the woman had promised him—implants, he would have had her under the knife faster than he could write the check.

Even though the plastic edges peeked out of her bikini, he insisted she wear them at the beach. “We have to keep up appearances,” he said. She stared at the chest hair that grew straight up and out from the collar of his undershirt, stretching for the sky like their sun-starved houseplants, and said nothing. He watched her slip the implants in her canvas bag, next to her book and her subway pass.

She collected sea glass—a nice word for the piles of shattered stout-brown bottles scattered across the beach—before walking into the water, the goose bumps climbing up and over her knees. She held a perfectly circular bottle bottom up to her eye and squinted, wondering if she could see all the way home. The waves crashed against her body and, dedicated to wearing her away bit by bit, to smoothing out her rough edges, a wave dislodged her left implant. The bathing suit top hung empty, gaping and hungry. With her thumb, she pulled the strip of fabric away and allowed its mate to slide out and down into the ocean.

Way to Freedom by Nate Worrell

White hair arcs out of a black skull like a wind tossed wave against the rocks.  The man in rags calls out to people passing by. He offers freedom and salvation.  Yet, none seem to hear.  The twinkling lights blind them, the organ music deafens them, the smell of butter and taste of grease distracts them.  He’s nothing more than another noise in a world of amusement.  Yet for just a second the world comes to a momentary hush. His cry for repentance echoes across the island and lands on the ears of a girl who once dreamed of becoming a great singer, but now sits among the candy wrappers and empty bottles building up the courage to once again walk down that dark alley where men try to quench insatiable thirsts.  She hears him and follows the voice.  He sees her step from the shadows and beckons to her.

-my child do you wish to be made pure-

She nods her head.

-it is only by blood that we are healed, we must die to our old self to live as a new creation-

Her eyes widen as he takes a small knife from his pocket.

-do not be afraid my child, your body is a temple that has been defiled, pain is the way to freedom-

He smiles like he knows a hidden secret and so she trusts him. She closes her eyes as the heat pierces her chest. The pain is raw and electric for the first few seconds but then the darkness explodes into blinding light.  She hears the sound of sweet music and feels like she is cradled in the clouds.   Her body fills with warmth like drinking cider in November.  She exhales and floats away into ecstasy.

The Middle of the Hudson by Eirik Gumeny

My buddy and me were standing along Van Der Donck when we saw it go down. We’d just finished at Westchester Environmental and were covering up the smell of bleach with a couple of cigs. It was late, maybe midnight, not a time when you’d really expect to see any boats, y’know? But we’d see ‘em sometimes. Some trust fund kid’d shove a handful of cocaine up his nose and take out daddy’s mini-yacht to show off for some chick and try to pork her under the moonlight. Almost be romantic if they weren’t such yuppie pricks.

There was a lot of fog that night, maybe the most I’d ever seen. It wasn’t like we’d never seen it, y’know? There were plenty of times when it’d just roll up slow and block out the whole damn Palisades. Looked like all of Jersey just up and vanished. But this fog, this was darker and heavier than we’d seen before. Moved quicker’n it seemed like it should. Me and my buddy, we thought something was up even before that boat froze.

These yuppie kids, they were never the best boaters, but this was strange, even for them. We’d seen boats swerving funny before, stalling out, even crashing into the waterfront, but they never just stopped, y’know? Something like that should even be possible, right? Even if the engines just up and died, there’s still the current, or inertia, or wind… Things don’t just stand still in the middle of the Hudson.

But this boat did.

Couple minutes after it happened, these two guys came strolling out of the cabin. They were moving frantically, like they didn’t know what was going on either. That’s when my buddy noticed the fog was even darker now, damn near black as the sky. And it was starting to roll up ’round their boat. But not like we’d ever seen, couldn’t of been just fog. It looked like there were these long, slow tentacles of mist curling themselves ’round the boat’s bottom.

One of the kids, he saw us, started waving his hands over his head. Thought he was ’bout to start screaming for help, but that’s when the other kid grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him ’round.

That’s when I saw it too.

The fog, it… it wasn’t fog anymore. It looked like a boat, some old-timey pirate ship or something. Had to be at least six times the size of that cabin cruiser, with these tall masts and ripped, tattered sails just hanging there.

The ship, it sailed right into those yuppies, swallowed that little boat right up into its foggy grey body.

And then the ship… it just… disappeared. Turned itself right back into black mist.

Me and my buddy, we stood there, staring, waiting, looking for those two kids and their boat. Thought maybe they were just on the other side of the fog, went to shore, something. But soon enough the fog passed… and that boat was gone.

The Story by Laura Silver

The young people, so modern, they think they are. So wise, they take themselves to be.

We are all in trouble. Deep trouble.

You want deep? I’ll give you deep. You got a minute? Sit down, listen. Listen good.

When I was young, fresh, without a wrinkle, not so far from here, it was the case you could walk in the streets and hear only my language. Like a prayer I tell you, people counted on me, like a prayer. Like I was their only connection to the Almighty, blessed be He. Now they like to say “She.” Oy.

Whoever the Almighty might be, that person should know. Maybe the Almighty is too shy or too polite to tell you. But, not me. I am not here to protect you from your ignorance. After all these years, that is not mine job to teach the new generation right from wrong, up from down, wet from dry. Some things are, how do you say? Eternal.

I was good at protecting people, you should know, from sun, from rain, from being poor. Not that I made them rich.  But I made them laugh. This is better than riches? Sometimes you have no choice. I showed them that they were not so very much alone as they thought. They needed me. They held onto me as if I should be bread, they could live on me and share me with their family. I could do something for them.

You want I should tell you the story of how I ended up like this, turned inside out and twisted in the shape of a challah? (It should never happen to your worst enemy). That means a loaf of egg bread, prepared especially for the Sabbath. Not Sunday, Saturday. The Jewish Sabbath. Challah, you should know, means bread.

Yes. That’s right, a loaf. I know this word, in English, it means something else, like when you sit on the couch all day and read only the newspaper. But nowadays they don’t even use the newspaper, they prefer something called, how do you say… Kindle.

Now we are getting somewhere.

I know, this word, kindle, in English, it means to turn on a fire. You want to turn on a fire? For this you need a newspaper, not an electronic thing that you plug into a wall. You want to know what language I am in? For this you need a saichel. Don’t try to pronounce it. Just know you don’t know. I’ll tell you something else you don’t know. Who I am.

You think I’m Hebrew? Gornisht you know. Nothing, not a speck. You have water in the brain. And brains in your stomach.

You want I should tell you my story?

Go learn something. Go listen from the ocean. And when you are finished, come back. You tell me what language I am from and I will tell you from my story.

Gowanda’s Sacrifice by Nate Worrell

Mike sat at the edge of the canal, playing the notes his father taught him on his pan flute.  The gray water swirled and a familiar head appeared.

“Hello Gowanda” Mike pulled some French fries from the crumpled bag next to him and tossed them into the water.
He sat on the cement while the seal ate.  He sighed.

“I messed up.  My son’s lying in a hospital bed right now, he’s banged up pretty bad.  It’s my fault.  I only had a few drinks.” Mike choked on the words.  “I know it’s a lot to ask of you, but you helped dad’s heart and you gave me my voice back.  Can you fix my boy?”

The seal bobbed in the water, large stone eyes stared into Mike’s.  He felt the pangs of guilt tear through his insides.  Then Gowanda dipped beneath the surface.  For a moment, there was stillness.  Then the water started to bubble and red ribbons meandered across the surface.  Then the water calmed and the seal came back to the surface.  Mike saw the scars, white like lighting on a stormy night, and ran back to the hospital with tears in his eyes.

Gowanda by Sarah Curry

Gowanda’s eye pooled with blood from where her asshole of a husband had decked her. She sat on the dock holding her face and watching the water shine purple-black in the moonlight. Without thinking, she dove in. Brackish water filled her nose and mouth and immediately weighed down her fur coat. For a moment, she watched bits of trash, worn smooth and shiny, swirl around her like a school of minnows. She did not try for the surface.

*

Earlier that evening, Gowanda had come home wearing an old fake fur, and, like anything else beautiful she received, Bobby was intent on locking it away in his Navy chest. Since the day they married, he had worn the key around his neck where it thumped against the tattoo he’d gotten to commemorate their wedding. Across his chest, an anchor dug its sharp flukes into a red heart that had both their names scrawled across in cursive. But Gowanda’s had come out so ambiguous she wondered if he planned on sleeping with other women. She didn’t trust him after that, with the key and the tattoo of a fake heart covering his own.

Tonight, she refused to take her coat off and Bobby had yanked her arm like he might break it. She had kicked at him but he had dodged her. He slapped her hard then and got out his lighter. He tried to ignite the coat one-handed but she leaned over and sunk her teeth into his flesh. She walked out the door as he yowled.

She’d kept walking until she was at the canal. The garbage smell that hung heavy in the air the rest of the year was barely detectable. The frozen air was fresh-ish even. It was hours before the clinic near their house would open and she knew exactly what the nurse would say when she saw her. “Ms. Gowanda, what have you gotten yourself into this time?” By then, her lips would be covered in frostbite and she wouldn’t even be able to say Bobby’s name.

She kicked a used condom and an old Gatorade bottle out of the way and sat on the dock. The water with its dark oily rainbows called to her.

*

Opening her eyes, Gowanda is surprised to see the dusky grey sky of morning. She lies on the snow, steam rising from her bruise colored skin. She tries to lift her arm to motion to a group of nearby barge workers but her arm doesn’t work like she remembers. Hoarse sighs come out of her mouth. “They probably think I’m a dead body,” she thinks. Frustrated, she lets out a demanding gravelly bark, which delights the men. They laugh and take pictures of her with their cell phones. She looks up at the men with wet round eyes trying to understand. She barks louder as she realizes her entire body is covered in a beautiful soft fur of her very own.

A Bag of Lottery Tickets by Laura Yan

She had been saving the lottery tickets for years. Every Monday, on her way home from work, skin tinted with the smell of Chlorox and bleach, fingers pruned, she stopped at a bodega to fill out the same set of numbers: 4, 22, 1, 13, 12, 5, for her mother’s birthday, her son’s, and her own. Her mother was dead, and her son, somewhere on the West Coast. He was traveling or playing music or trying to be an actor. He rarely called. Sometimes her memories confused her, and in her dreams she could not tell her husband from her son. Her husband had left her years ago. His drinking got worse after he lost the job and  his eyes filled with rage. She still had the scabs on her thigh, when he had rammed the edge of the table against her, the sharp of the wood cutting deep.

On Tuesday nights she waited in front of the TV, fingers poised over each number as they showed up on the screen. She did this always with calm and diligence, double checking just to make sure. She had to double check herself about other things, too. Her eyes weren’t what they used to be and her hands shook often. She didn’t think of herself as old, but perhaps it was the impression she gave to others. Sometimes people stood up to offer her a seat on the train. Maybe it was just her stooped back that gave her the look of carrying more weight than she was.

Mostly what she wanted was for her son to settle down with a nice girl. If she won the lottery she would buy them an apartment on the West side, with wood floors and big windows. She would move into a small room there and prepare their meals. She used to be a great cook, though these days she made the same thing every day: a hard boiled egg and tea in the morning, a  neat sandwich for lunch, and a vegetable casserole for the week for dinner.

One night, she couldn’t sleep. She lay awake for hours and listened to the sounds of cars outside. She felt her body like a coffin, ungainly and stiff, suffocating her. She clenched her eyes shut. She would go for a walk, she decided. She used to do it often. She pulled on a ragged coat and paused. She went to the drawer where she kept the neat stack of the lottery tickets, her history of failures. She stuffed them in a plastic bag that swung against her knees as she walked. She walked alone and slowly in the dark to the park where, once, long ago, the man she loved had gotten down on one knee and held out a ring that caught the rays of the sun. She could see it, her young, slim self and their long, hot kiss. She felt her young, slim self turning to watch her now. With relief, she met the girl’s eyes, and let the bag fall into the shallow pond. She did not look back.

The bag bobbed on the surface of the water, bloated and complacent until the daylight gave it new life, and someone walking past pointed and laughed.

Fat by Tanya Bryan

Things come easy to the young, the pretty, the thin. When you’re fat like me, your prospects narrow. As you grow older, uglier, fatter, you realize that it’s not going to get any better than the mediocre that’s already happened. I’m not bitter that I get paid less for the same job that younger and less experienced colleagues do. I’m bitter that my own body has worked against me all these years, held me back from doing better, being better.

People barely notice you when you’re fat. Or if they do, they glare. They glare at you for eating, for sitting, for breathing. The judgments passed are based on appearance without regard for the struggles and pains of being obese. Eating well and exercise work for some, but never for me. I was always this way. As a child, the teasing was unbearable. I threatened to run away every week. But I never did. I was a good girl. I ate my veggies, went to fat camps, and tried every diet my mom could find in her women’s magazines, but I remained a dumpy child. By the time I became a dumpy adult, my mom had given up. She was loathe to invite me over for Christmas dinners since the sight of me reminded her of her failure to have a beautiful, successful, thin child.

Despite all that, I try to maintain a certain weight, even if it doesn’t fall within the 0-2 range that the women in my office are. Next to them, I am a giantess. But I continue to ride my bike to work every day, and on weekends I run through Prospect Park, ignoring the people staring at my gobs of flab flopping about like uncooked cookie dough.

My vice, my only vice, isn’t pizza or chips or nachos. It’s lottery tickets, or “the idiot tax,” as my dad calls them. I buy them by the dozen, hoping for a way out. If I could just win some money, I could change things. Maybe get liposuction. Move away from the reproving eyes that have haunted me since childhood. Brooklyn is unforgiving in it sentencing.

One day, feeling nostalgic for the self I never had, I stuffed all the losing tickets I’d saved over the years into a plastic bag, and brought them with me on my morning run. As the fat shimmied one way, the bag slipped the other, two failures rubbing against each other as I ran around the pond. Halfway around, I tired of the impermeable plastic against my back making me sweat even

more than usual. I plopped it down, stared at the ripples in the water, breathing heavy. This is stupid, I thought. I’m fat. And I’m lugging around a bag of losing tickets. Why? So I did the most reasonable thing I could think of: I stood up, swung the bag around me, and flung it into the water. Then I continued running, hoping nobody had witnessed my latest failure.

The Wrong Numbers by Nate Worrell

I always thought you were a 7 11 53 but you turned out to be just another 2 38 49.   Maybe it was because I was always 8 31-ing when you wanted to just 17 19.  I tend to lean towards it being my fault that we never worked out, but a part of me blames you.  I always remember 01 10 20 11 at Prospect Park where you introduced yourself as 55 57 28 67 80.  It was the luckiest day of my life.   So yeah, there’s bitterness, but I understand.   Sometimes things are just a number or two away from being a perfect combination.

Baby Doll Heads Beached by Matt Crowley

I’m standing on Dead Horse Bay beach to see off the hurricane, to get a good look at its inconceivable proportions before it moves on to do its marauding elsewhere. And here I make an uncommon discovery: a group of simulated-ceramic baby doll heads enmeshed in a slummy cloud of soggy refuse, pitched onto the sands by the fury of the storm.

The detail of the facial features indicate fine craftsmanship: the furrows carved into the forehead and their direct configuration with the curvature of the lips, the flaring of the nostrils, the wrinkling of the eyes, and fluctuation of the cheeks, to indicate expressions of happiness, sadness, confusion, anger: each head seems to be equipped with its own custom-built emotion. Some dolls blush to accompany their smiling or crying, their smiles revealing different numbers and shapes of teeth, their crying different numbers and shapes of tears. The painted eyes are alive with color: blue, brown, green, and . . . yellow? This head’s got blue irises around dark orange pupils. I also notice that while there are freckles on one cheek, there are none on the other. If I had looked at another doll carefully enough I would have noticed that while the its eyes were crying and looking quite gloomy, its mouth was smiling, even laughing. Is this an expression that’s even humanly possible? Each head, in fact, shows some sort of slightly inhuman characteristic. What were they, some failed, mad experiment? Evidently they were part of a trial run whose prototypes were rejected, judged not worthy of bodies.

–

This whole grotesque tableaux, I envision, was the result of a rescue effort gone awry:

A stealthy group of artists who favor recycling found objects had spirited the heads away in a pickup truck before they were properly disposed of by their manufacturer, a doll-making factory upriver (as to which river, the Hudson or the East, this might be determined by a careful examination of debris caught among the dolls’ nylon hair fibers, each river’s filth being quite distinctive). During the artists’ getaway on a dark, curvy road running close along the riverbank, their driver swerved suddenly to avoid a doll which he mistook for a human child. The truck overturned, emptying its cargo straight down into the water . . .

Or maybe the fugitive artists’ trip was without incident and the truck reached its destination, a pier on the river. There the heads were loaded onto a small boat to be ferried across to the opposite side. On its way the boat capsized in the wake of a monster container ship, the heads tumbling out to be carried away in the current and lost, the sailor artists too troubled about their own survival to make any effort to retrieve them. And here the heads finally rest, as though they could be mistaken for an art installation of the kind their artist abductors had intended to use them.

Of Dreams and Dolls by Nate Worrell

One man fills another head full of powder. He wonders what sort sad story will hollow out the doll’s head for the sake of hollowing out their own. He can’t give it much thought though because several boxes of heads are waiting to be stuffed with snowy dreams.

Another man carries a doll in a garbage bag. He awoke this morning gazing into the empty eyes of the doll head. It reminded him of the daughter he once pushed on the swings. He’s on his way to give the doll to her now, the first gift he’s given her since she was stumbling through her first steps. He hopes she still plays with dolls.

A young woman sits in the sand and wipes a lonely tear from her eyes. Tossing the doll into the bay was hard, but she needed to let go. She’d lied to herself for too long, he wasn’t coming back.

Baby Doll Heads by Hailey Briggs

Samantha had listened as long as she could.  With catlike reflexes, she slinked away from her school group.  There was only so much history and intrigue to Dead Horse Bay.  She longed to swim in the waters, but even she could not come up with a likely tale as to all her wet clothes.

She searched every crevice in the land, hoping for some sort of washed up treasure.  Mostly she found cans, trash, and ugly rocks.  She stared the way she had come.  She was determined to not let this day be for nothing.

Her steps hurried.  In minutes she was running.

Something red broke up the monotony and directed her path.  She chased the crimson.

The closer she neared, the deeper the sense of dread.  The dirt, the rocks, the sparse grass, they all were painted with blood.  In a center of trampled earth was a duffle bag.  Samantha hesitated only a second before she carefully unzipped.  As soon as it was open, she stumbled back, expecting snakes or something to rush out at her.  When nothing happened, she inched the bag opened and stared inside.  Over twenty baby doll heads stared up at her.  All had different hair and eye colors.  On their foreheads they had a name inked on them.

A manila folder was stuffed in the midst of the heads.  Samantha retrieved it.  Inside she found numerous newspaper clippings about missing women and girls.  After skimming through a few of them, she focused on the heads.  The names on the dolls matched with the missing females.

As soon as she realized this, Samantha dropped the papers and rose to her feet.  She turned away from the bag, but nearly fell when she collided with something.  Steadying big hands grabbed her arms.  She stared up at the man who balanced her.  His mirrored sunglasses prevented any way to know what he was thinking.

He smiled.  “You lost, sweetheart?”

“Um, no.  My class is just right over there.”  She pointed with the shift of her eyes.

He, however, did not follow her movement.  “I have something for you.”

He dug in his pocket.  She tried to back away, but his one hand still attached to her was iron strong and unyielding.  His pocketed hand ceased moving.  His smile widened, revealing dirty brown teeth and pungent breath.  He slowly pulled out a doll’s head, with the same hair and eye color as hers.  On the forehead, her name was written.  Samantha screamed, or tried to, before everything went black.

Never Alone by Cynthia D. Witherspoon

If I was going to die, I refused to do it alone. Call me a romantic. Or insane. Whichever fits your fancy. Either way, I’d made up my mind. Just walk into the water. Never look back.

But not alone. Never alone.

Momma said only criminals and heretics died alone. I was neither, though I did leave my bible at home. Maybe that’s why I was doing this. Because I couldn’t believe.

God had abandoned me as quick as I abandoned him.

I made it to the beach of Dead Horse Bay and held on tight to my companion. The poor dear had no idea what was coming to her. As I approached the water, I remembered when she first joined me. I named her Suzy. Loved her. It was only fitting she would find her end in mine.

The water blended well with the night here. I felt the waves lapping at my toes and smiled. If I was going to do this, I would do it right. No blades. No tears. Just give up. Make it look like an accident so Momma would attend my funeral.

Wouldn’t she? I stopped when my first fear hit. What if no one attended my funeral? What if they couldn’t bury Suzy with me?

I decided to leave Suzy on the beach. I placed her just out of reach of the water with a pat on her plastic head. She deserved a funeral more than I did. The doll was my only friend. Especially after everyone left me.

Momma shunned me for being crazy.

My sisters left me for their own lives.

I shook off the sand coating my feet before I stepped into the water. It was warm tonight. I started to turn back. Grab Suzy so she could enjoy it too. But no. She had to be buried with me. So I wouldn’t be alone.

I took another step. Then another, stopping only when the water came up to my waist. The night was silent. I was grateful for that.

Just as I was about to go further, a rough wave erupted and knocked me off my feet. The salt water stung my eyes. My clothes became heavy. But it was no matter. What made my heart stop was when I caught sight of the shore.

Suzy was gone.

My beloved doll had disappeared.

“No!” I cried out, struggling against the water. I had to get back. I had to find her. I couldn’t be buried without her.

Unless I was never found.

I screamed this time. Not because of the water, but by the fear of being lost forever.

Of my only friend abandoning me.

I struggled to get back to land, all considerations of suicide gone. But it was too late. I was too far out. As I began to sink beneath the waves, I saw something that filled my heart with joy.

Suzy was floating above me.

She wouldn’t let me die alone.

Never alone.