Issue 7, Winter/Spring 2009

Very Good Advice, by Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney

Neither the duration nor the source of an idea ought keep us from accepting it if it is a good one, her grandmother had said.

But she didn’t trust her grandmother. She was a headstrong thing.

She ate the blue sexy pill anyway.

In flew the angry crows.

Her hair, her eyes, had become magnetically attractive.

She cursed her curiosity; the flapping drowned out all other sound.

Amid the oily black feathers, something white fluttered down: a godmother?

Deus ex machina? God of the gaps?

The birds had pecked beads off her dress as if it were birdseed; Read the message in the blank bits, the godmother said, in Grandmother’s voice.

She isn’t God or my mother, she thought.

But the old lady threw the magic necklace at her and it caught around her neck.

She said Thank you without thinking, then looked down and saw her body disappearing from the feet up.

She opened the locket: no answers, just questions.