I’m fourteen when my mother calls me from the pub, the Jester and his Bells.

“I’ve met the man,” my mother says, slurring her words.

“What?”

“The man.”

“What man?”

“The man who’s going to rescue me.”

“Are you drunk, Mom?”

She laughs.

“So who is this man?” I say.

“Anton Forster,” she titters. “Very sexy. An industrialist. A magnate actually. He’s in metals.” She laughs again. “Liv darling, the man is quite hot. As it happens,” she says, “he’s almost molten.”

The family met Anton Forster at a New Year’s Eve party my parents threw. At twelve, it was the last year I fit comfortably in the cupboard under the stairs; and it was from this vantage point that I saw a man’s hand sliding along the length of my mother’s hot pink mini-dress, and heard my mother’s laugh (her waterfall laugh, it was), a series of coquettishly cascading eruptions from the back of her throat. The hand was dark, heavily ringed. Definitely not my father’s. I saw only the hand at that time. Then a door opened and my mother said, “Oh Clive, have you met Anton? Anton Forster, this is my husband. Clive Jeffries.”

That was the last year in which my father reveled in my mother’s provocative clothing. But her attractiveness to men had nothing to do with fashion.She was one of those women who could appear in a gunnysack and still look good. And two years later, after a chance meeting in the pub, Anton Forster bagged her.

One thing Anton Forster and I have in common is rings. An everyday ring day for me is eight, and on special occasions, donning the larger, heavier brass fittings I acquire from Derek the plumber’s apprentice in exchange for a quick peck, it’s ten. My mother’s lover can best be described digitally. His entire personality can be grasped via his hands which are, if not a window to the man’s soul, certainly to his fiscal solvency. Anton Forster is loaded. But time corrects my impression that Anton and I have anything in common. I have a sympathy for rings—or rather for those who feel the need to cover their fingers. My ringed rebellion—for that is what it is (my mother deplores the cheap ill-matching costume pieces, as she calls them, crammed on to my fingers, nails bitten to the quick)—my rebellion is against my mother.

If I had as many rings as Anton Forster, I wouldn’t keep them in an old cardboard box the way he does. By all accounts, my mother went through that box once, cupping her hands and lifting out priceless palmfuls. The box, she said, smelled strongly of disinfectant. I’d be a fool to believe everything my mother tells me; but this, I do know, is true. I know because, a few months later at the hospital, when my mother lay on the brink, Anton Forster gave me one of those rings. An enormous filigree band. Suitable for a thumb, and smelling scrupulously clean.

My mother calls me from a phone box in the country. She’s there with the ringed wonder.

“Something’s happened. I don’t know what to do. I didn’t plan it, but—”

Something roars past just then—a truck perhaps.

“What did you say, Mother? I can’t hear you.”

She doesn’t answer. I swear, even with the roar, I can hear the woman’s heart beating.

“Mother? You there?”

“Yes,” she says finally. “I’m here… Pregnant, but here.”

“Of course, it’s not your father’s,” she says when we meet later at Anton’s pied-à-terre. “Your father and I, we don’t… There’s nothing left to us. It’s just ashes.”

“You mean you no longer smolder? What, you once did?” I laugh.

“The point is, whatever we did we no longer do.” She sighs. “Anyway, it’s Anton’s.”

“And yours. Why do you say it’s just his?”

“Because he wants it”—looking away. “At least I think he does.”

“Don’t you?”

“I want it. But I’ll have to get rid of it, of course.”

I look at her in disbelief.

“Why of course?”

“I can’t have a baby,” my mother says, her turn to laugh.

“Look, isn’t this meant to be the other way around? I mean, aren’t I supposed to be the one getting knocked up?”

Sitting down on the bed, I say, “What are you going to do? What are you going to tell Clive?” Calling my father by his first name is a recent affectation of mine.

“Oh God, I don’t know.”

“That you were tired of plain old toast for breakfast? You fancied a bit of British upper crust?”

My mother sits down on the opposite side of the bed.

“I detest it when you’re biting.”

That night I lie awake, wondering what it’ll be like having a baby in the house. Downstairs, I find my mother sitting before uneaten toast.

“I couldn’t sleep either,” she says. “Not beside your father.”

She tells me how she distracts herself with a game. Something Anton said gave her the idea. It started with him comparing his grown children to their child to be. The difference is vast, he claimed. The difference between the London Underground and the Orient Express. Now she lies awake at night finding tube stops to match us. My father, she says, is Piccadilly Circus, all bluster and flourish.

She nibbles on the toast.

“And me?”

“You, darling? Easy.” She reaches across the table and touches my cheek. “Chalk Farm. On the Northern line. Black.”

Later, a party ends with hanky-panky with some stranger in a back garden. Drunk, I almost miss the last train home. There’s nobody in the compartment but me. Looking up at the subway map, I find myself: Chalk Farm, where everything crumbles to dust.

I’m alone in the waiting room of St. George’s Hospital. A dingy place, as only a bankrupt London hospital can be, with hard green Naugahyde seats. I’ve been here for a while, long enough to encounter a fleeing Anton Forster, to flip through the few outdated Daily Mirrors, and to discover that the naked lady on page two of The Sun has been half torn out. I take Anton’s ring out of my pocket to look at it. A gold filigree band encrusted with diamonds, good and heavy, better than my brass fittings from Derek the plumber’s apprentice. On his way out, Anton gave it to me while they pumped my mother full of blood. I had my fingers in my mouth. Naked fingers because, woken up in the middle of the night, alone in the flat (Clive’s away on business), I was caught without my rings on. You’re not called up in the middle of every night, with your mother’s lover on the other end of the phone informing you your mother’s in the hospital. I demand details. Anton gives them.

I leave the flat, hopping in the taxi I call on my mother’s account. This cabbie answers the dispatch.

“No one ill, I hope,” he says.

I catch his eye in the mirror.

“Funny time of night to be going over to Georgie’s place if no one is. Let me guess. You’re a nurse. Going on duty, are you?”

Nosey parker. I glare at him.

“I’m fourteen.”

“Oh, are you? Are you now… Well, and might I say, a very mature fourteen.”

“Can’t you get there any faster? There’s no traffic.”

“Why? You got someone depending on you then? Where’s your mum? You got a mum? She know where you are then, a fourteen year old girl out at this hour?”

“My mother,” I say, as he turns the corner into Grosvenor Crescent, “is probably a corpse as we speak.”

The guy smiles.

“All you teens,” he says, swiveling his head round and looking at me, “all you teens are morbid, aren’t you? That’s how you cope, is it? Well I understand. The world’s not what it was… Here, I heard they were going to pull St. Georgie’s down. Too old. Things growing on the walls.”

We turn on to Hyde Park, and pull up outside Georgie’s. Jesus, I think. I’m calling it Georgie’s. I get out of the cab and stand outside the driver’s window.

“Take 50p,” I say, and wait for him to record it. But the guy just looks at me.

“50p,” I say again. “What, isn’t that enough?”

“You gonna be all right?”

I don’t answer. I look down at the pavement, which I can’t see through my tears, and at my shoes, which I also can’t see, then up into his face.

“She did something with a hanger.”

Poor guy winces.

“Sorry,” I say.

“I’m sorry. Here, I’ll walk you in.”

“You can’t leave it there,” I say, of the idling cab. “That’s for ambulances.”

But he gets out anyway. He’s short. Beneath his cap, which he takes off, he’s impeccably bald. In the glare of Georgie’s lights, his head polishes up like a pinball.

“You’ll get a ticket,” I warn. “Or worse, be towed.”

“Never you mind that,” he says. “Never you mind, poppet.”

No-one’s ever called me that before, and I laugh from the shock and then start to cry again.

“I know,” I announce. “You get a ticket, you add it to my mother’s account. You do that, all right? Promise me you’ll do that.”

He stands and looks at me like I’m the sad screwed up kid I know I really am, and I think, as I walk in, leaving him behind, I should mind him looking at me like that.

I pace the small, depressing waiting room, whose only other inhabitant, an old curmudgeon, snoozes spasmodically in the corner. There’s a poster of the Queen held there by a single bandage of ancient scotch tape. It’s an image from years ago, the monarch’s face bravely upturned and fresh, full of dutiful enthusiasm. Oddly moved, I reach up and straighten the curling corners. The clearing of a nearby throat catches my attention. Turning, I face a waxy-looking vicar standing in the doorway.

“Good evening. They said I’d find you here.”

He returns my scowl with a saccharin smile.

“I wonder whether, at a time like this, you might not like a wee chat?”

The vicar’s eyes are tiny. He cocks his pickle-shaped head.

“Piss off,” I say, my voice wobbling. When he turns and clicks down the corridor like God’s personal stopwatch, I stand here shuddering. “My mother’s not gonna die!” I yell after him. “And if she did, we wouldn’t invite the bloody Church of England!”

Halfway down the corridor a door opens. The paroxysmal face of Matron appears. To the single finger that flies to her mouth, I offer my swift two and, shaken, turn back into the waiting room and look at the ancient geezer who, with the commotion, has woken up and seems quite perky.

“These religious assholes are always over-dramatizing,” I explain. “My mother isn’t going to die.”

He nods.

“Nor is my old woman. Unless they do me a miracle.”

It falls on me to call Clive.

“What’s wrong?” he says. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“My mother. She’s in St. George’s.”

“Your mother? Chrissakes, what are we, unrelated?”

“Anton was here, of course. Rumor has it they’re going to tear the place down. Things growing on the walls.”

“Slow down. Start from the beginning.”

“The beginning?”

“Yes, Jesus, will you tell me what the fuck’s going on? What did your mother do this time?”

“How do you know she did something? She could have been hit by a bus, for God’s sake.”

“Your mother doesn’t get hit by buses. She is the bus.”

“I’m scared to tell you.”

“I already know about the… Something go wrong with the procedure?”

“She did it herself.”

Silence.

Poor Clive. I give him a moment.

“When I told her to… Jesus Christ. Where’s the doctor? Let me speak to him.”

“Him is a her. She’s got her hands inside Mother as we speak.”

“You stay put. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

When again I don’t answer, he says, “Liv” so softly I’m not sure I’m supposed to have heard. He never calls me that. Never calls me anything much anymore.

I say, “What do you do when two horoscopes directly contradict each other?”

“What?”

“When they don’t agree. It says right here in my Daily Mirror horoscope that the pendulum is finally swinging in my direction. Then The Sun tells me to brace myself for a blow. I don’t know which one to believe.”

Clive says, “I’m coming, OK? I’ll get there as fast as I can. Hanging up now.”

I pause for a moment.

“You can call me Liv if you want,” I say, too late.

It’s two twenty-nine and I’m sitting alone because, deprived of his miracle, my waiting room companion has taken his wife home. Out of surgery, my mother hasn’t come round yet.

“Hello there…”

Who, of all people, should be standing outside the waiting room doorway, but the guy who brought me here. His grey mack is damp around his shoulders.

“Can I come in?”

“I won’t bite your head off. They’ve put me in my cage for the night.”

The guy nods. Looks around.

“Grimy little place, Georgie’s.”

I nod too.

“Any word about Mum?”

I shrug.

“Have you seen her, your Mum? She isn’t…”

“No. Not yet.”

“And she won’t, will she? What about the doctor, what does he say? Have you talked to him?”

“Him is a her,” I say wearily.

“Is he? I mean she. Well perhaps I can talk to her. Have a bit of a chin wag. What do you say, poppet, eh?”

“Him is a her,” I repeat mindlessly, letting my head drop to my knees in exhaustion. I feel my hair tumble forward. The back of my neck feels cold.

The guy sits down, puts his hand on my shoulder.

“You poor kid. You’re done in.”

“I don’t need your sympathy. All I’m saying is him’s a her. It’s simple.”

“I understand. You want looking after, you do.”

“Are you married?”

“Well, yes and no—”

“You don’t wear a ring. Here.” I hand him the one Anton gave me earlier. “Have this one. It’s worth a few bob, though the man who gave it to me isn’t.”

“No, ta,” he says.

“So why don’t you? Wear one? What’s—your wife run off with the milkman then? In beautiful downtown—where do you live anyway?”

“Hendon.”

“—In beautiful downtown Hendon?”

He says simply, “We have our fair share of problems in Hendon.”

“What? Corner tobacconist runs out of your favorite evening read? Neighbor’s dog pees on your prize rose bush?”

The guy shakes his head. “You’re all in a muddle. I don’t reckon you think much of yourself. You take a child like mine. Down’s. In a home now ‘coz I can’t work and look after him as well. Teach you how to love, those kids do.”

He gets up.

“I’ll tell you a little secret. I never wore a ring. I mean I never wanted to wear one. Afraid I’d jinx things. That the wife would leave me. Well she did. But not the way I thought. She died. And I always regretted it. I mean not wearing the ring. Not announcing to the world how I felt because of, well, how I felt. If you follow me…”

Getting up, I stand in the doorway, a palm touching each side of the frame.

I say, “I’m waiting to find out whether yesterday was my mother’s last morning.”

I can feel him looking at me. Pitying me. Waiting for me to turn round.

“Do you want to see something?” he says.

When I turn back, the guy has his hat in his hands—a tattered herringbone titfer, it is; he seems to be inspecting it closely.

“You know,” he says, “you can learn a lot from a hat. From certain hats, anyway.” He glances at me. “A bloke buys a hat—why? Because it’s new and he fancies himself in it, somehow he fancies it changes him, makes him better in some way. So Bob’s your uncle, done—five, ten quid later the hat’s his—spanking new and full of promise. A funny thing, though. Though he wears that hat, our bloke, day in, day out, it doesn’t change him at all. And in a funny way he’s quite relieved really. Very relieved, in fact. So relieved that he starts to love that hat—for its mercy, if you get my drift. A few years and enough love later, the hat’s so much a part of him he daren’t contemplate himself without it. But not, as our bloke thought, because it made him someone else. But because it allowed him to be what he always was. Himself.”

The whole time he’s speaking, looking down at the hat, I’m watching him. When he finishes, he looks up.

“What do you call that then?” I say. “A bit of titfer philosophy?” I level at him a nefarious look.

He looks back at me, then shakes his head.

“It’s nothing,” he says, getting up and putting on his mack.

He turns away.

“I know you guys take years to acquire the esoteric information you call ‘The Knowledge,’ but I never realized it extended this far beyond the streets of London.”

He walks out the door.

“My father wears one of those hats,” I call after him. “Looks a right twot in it, too.”

By the time I catch up to him, the cab’s pulling away.

“I’m trying to get in touch with one of your drivers,” I tell the dispatch woman on the phone.

“Name?”

I hesitate. “I don’t know. But he wears a cap. Lives in Hendon. He’s short and bald and very kind. A good driver, too, the best I’ve ever—”

“That could be Blass. Do you want a pick up?”

“Yes,” I say, peering down the deserted corridor. “I do want a pick up.”

“It won’t be before five.”

I glance at the clock. 3:52.

“I don’t care if it takes the whole night. Only I don’t want anyone else. It has to be him. Blass.”

“Came as soon as I could. Heathrow to Grosvenor Square, my last fare. Embassies. Always coming and going at the embassies. Don’t know when they kip.” Blass pauses. “Sorry. I’m going on, aren’t I? Any news?”

It’s five thirty now and the first cold glimmers of light are filtering through the frosted glass windows of the corridor.

“I called you, but now that you’re here I don’t know what to say.”

“We could just sit,” he says after a moment.

“I didn’t know people really talked like you,” I say. “I mean, those words—”

“A word’s a wonderful thing,” he says.

“Yeah, and the hills are alive…”

“—to express your deepest feeling.”

I walk over to the little table and pick up The Sun.

“I’d show you the naked lady, only someone’s torn her out… Anyway,” I say, leafing through it, “I have no deepest emotion. They’re all deep… Here,” I say, pointing to a picture of a large-chested girl in a skimpy outfit. “Do you think she’s pretty?”

“Why do you do that?”

“What?”

“Waste all your energy on rubbish.”

“I just asked if you thought she was pretty.”

“But why? Why does it matter?”

“Because I’m trying to get to know your taste.”

“My taste in what?”

“Oh,” I say lightly. “I dunno. Things… Women…”

Blass stands up.

“You’re not a woman. You’re a little girl.”

I laugh.

“A very sad and lonely little girl.”

“I could seduce you,” I say, walking toward him.

“Yes, but you won’t.”

“What, am I grotesque then?” I’m undoing my blouse.

“You’re a picture,” Blass says. “Pretty as a—”

“Olivia Jeffries?” says a woman’s voice from the corridor.

“Go on,” Blass whispers to me. “Do yourself up. There’s a good girl.”

I do, and walk out into the corridor.

The nurse says: “You can see your mother now if you like.”

Terrified, I look back at Blass.

“You the father?” says the nurse. “The husband?”

“No, no, just a friend… You go on,” he encourages, turning to me. “There’s a good girl.”

“I’ll be back,” I say

Blass sits down. “I’ll wait.”

“Look, about what—”

“Apology accepted. Now off you go.”

To the nurse, he adds, “I’ve been helping her pass the time.”

He puts his feet up on the table and winks at me.

“She’s in here,” the nurse says, her hand on the doorknob. “She looks a bit of a fright, but I shouldn’t worry. She’s still under.”

I rest my head on my mother’s chest.

“Ma, can you hear me?”

Thinking of the lost baby, then all babies, including, once, myself, I fall into a reverie. For a brief time, I knew the pounding of her blood in my ears. She grew me. And long before I had ears I had a soul—she grew that too.

“Oh,” Anton says, opening the door and seeing me. “I’ll come back in a tick, shall I?”

I stand to my feet.

“Still out,” I tell him.

I’ve never formally met the man, he only flew past me earlier on his way out. But I remember the hand all right, fully rigged, sailing along the river of pink silk before putting up in the cozy harbor of my mother’s bum. Nothing’s changed. A shimmering ring on almost every finger. He’s already replaced the one he dropped in my lap.

I learn everything I need to know about him in an instant. In this order, Anton Forster brushes something off my mother’s sheet, sits down gingerly beside her, and only then glances at her face.

“Sorry to have to phone you like that. It must have been a shock. I’ll give a call later on. Get the updates.”

He stands, his eyes empty—deep harbors with all the ships gone out.

Before he can leave, I say hastily, “I really liked what you said about the tube stops. My mother and I think it’s fucking brilliant.”

He looks at me coldly. I tumble back to my mother’s side, lay my head back down on her chest.

“They’re taking out all the bad,” she says a few hours later when she wakes up. “Putting in new. The doctor told me. Then I’ll be a new woman. Funny, you can have someone else’s blood in your body and still be you.” She laughs.

“Did you hear anything I said?”

She pats my hand. “I knew you were here…”

“I don’t mind being the one taking care of you.”

My mother gazes at me, a softness in her eye. “Kneeling there looking like you’d lay down your life for me…” She shakes her head.

“I would.”

“What have I ever done for you? I’ve let you down. I’m sorry, Liv. There are things you don’t understand.”

“What—more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio?”

“Who’s Horatio?” she says, with a weary look.

“A character in Hamlet… Mother, how could you have?” It just slips out. “You said you were gonna have it—”

“You’re not meant to tire me out. Didn’t they tell you that?”

“You’re not tired. You’re angry. Like me.”

“I finished what should never have been started. That’s all.”

“You need help.”

“We both do,” she says.

“Someone did help me. Outside. A man. I don’t know why he did it, really. I was awful to him.”

“And how did he help you, this man? By saying all the right things, I suppose.”

“Hats.”

My mother looks at me.

“He talked about them.”

“Oh. That’s nice.”

“No, listen. He said you can learn a lot from a hat.”

“Who was he then, this man?”

“A cabbie.”

“And what did he say?” she asks dryly, “this cabbie?”

“I think he said one should be oneself. Not pretend.”

“Well, no-one could accuse you of that, could they?”

Dazedly, she peers around the room.

“Is it day yet?” she says.

“Nearly.”

“What kind of day?”

“Like a greasy orange rind underfoot.”

She smiles wanly. “My little poet…”

“I do pretend,” I say after a few minutes. “All sorts of things…”

“I see. Like what?”

“Like that. Like I really see the world like that.”

“But you’ve always said quirky things, your little descriptions—”

“For you. I say them for you. Everything I do is for or because of you—”

Unable to beat back my tears, I bury my head.

“You know, I got it wrong,” she says, patting my back. “You’re not Chalk Farm. I am. That great dusty field where nothing can grow.”

Lifting myself up, I scan my mother’s face for a sign of love. A streamer of my snot stretches between us.

Back in the waiting room, Blass stands above me.

“Hello, flower,” he says.

This is how I awake.

I blink up at him. I don’t bother taking my thumb out of my mouth.

“It’s a gris morning, girl,” Blass says in his North London accent. I like how he pronounces it: greaze.

He takes me in the taxi cab, which smells of ginger beer. I know it’s ginger beer, because I smelled it when Derek, the plumber’s apprentice, kissed me.

We leave St. George’s and end up at a cab rank on Pont Street. A line of cabs flanks the pavement outside the park. Through the closed windows I can smell the bangers and beans.

The cabbies seem happy to be receiving visitors so early in the morning. They invite us in.

“Give the young lady some tea, will ya, fellas?” Blass says, and pulls out a chair into which I sink.

“You all right, Miss?” one of the other men says. “You don’t mind my saying, you look a bit dickey.”

“Yes, I am,” I say.

“Get her some grub, too, George, she says she’s a bit dickey.”

“I mean I’m all right,” I say.

Blass hands me the tea.

“Just had a bit of a shock,” he says. He tells me to drink up. “But she’s a brave girl,” he says. “None braver.”

They feed me, and filter out one by one for the fares that are radioed in. All except for Blass. He settles into a tatty armchair, cradles his cap in his lap and begins to nod off. While he sleeps, I have the chance to study him. To me, there’s only one thing about Blass that’s of any importance. Unlike most people, he looks, when asleep, exactly the same as when awake. He has nothing to hide.

I don’t mean to, but I fall asleep too. When I wake up, I have his mack over me. My neck is stiff with pain.

“You talk,” he says, spearing a chip. “In your kip. Say things. Quite distinct.” He bites into toast. “‘Chalk Farm,’ you said. ‘Don’t make me get off at Chalk Farm.’”

It’s too crazy to try and explain, so “I’m sorry about the hat,” I say instead. “It’s a nice hat. A lucky hat. You believe in it.”

Blass takes it off his head.

“Have it if you like,” he says, holding it out to me. “But believe in yourself, girl. That’s even better than a hat.”

There isn’t a single man or boy I’ve ever thought beautiful. But right now, his tattered cap in his hand, that’s what Blass is. Beautiful.

I pull Blass’s cap from beneath my mattress and hold it close. It smells of good honest sweat and something else, something sweet—not shampoo (he has no hair), nor cologne (he has no wife left to woo), but the essence of the man, his goodness. The oily rim is tattered from the hand that’s donned and doffed it a thousand times.

When I look up, Clive’s standing in the doorway. Who knows how long he’s been there?

“Whose is that?” he says. I can tell he’s still upset. Walking over, he slips the cap out of my hand and inspects it.

Shocked by his entry, I don’t know what to say. We’ve rarely been alone in my room.

“Whosever’s it is must mean a great deal to you—enough to shed tears over. The brim’s wet.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” I say, “but you’ve got it wrong.”

“Oh yeah? So tell me the worst I could imagine—”

“I’m not pregnant.”

“You go on at this rate—”

“He’s not my boyfriend—”

“Unlike every other boy in town. Why, is he married?”

“Yes, but his wife’s dead. He still loves her.”

“Is that the line he fed you?” Clive’s red in the face. “When will you women ever realize, married men will never be able to give you what you want. Jesus God,” he says, sitting down next to me on the bed. “How did this family end up like this?”

At the sight of him, hunched over, head in his hands, I can almost forget my own troubles.

“He was just someone I met. He comforted me when I needed it.” I hesitate. “You know, all those boys—I don’t really do anything with them—I’m a virgin.”

I’m not lying. A kiss and a cuddle, but woe betide any boy who tries to get into my knickers. I tell Clive what I haven’t admitted to another living soul.

“Come on, everything’s gonna be alright.” I put my arm around him. “Give it time.”

He looks up at me, all the steam gone from him. He tries handing me back the hat.

“Keep it,” I say, pushing it toward him. “It may not look like much,” I tell him, “but Dad, it’ll keep your head dry in a storm.”

“Liv and Let Liv,” part of a larger work, was the Grand Prize Recipient of the 2022 Stories That Need to be Told anthology, published by TulipTree Publishing.

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Julie Esther Fisher’s other stories and poetry appear or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Prime Number Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, Waxwing, On the Seawall, Sky Island Journal, Radar Poetry, The Citron Review, Litmosphere, Leon Literary Review, Passager’s Contest Issue, and elsewhere. She is also the recipient of Sunspot Lit’s Rigel Award, and multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart nominations. A poetry chapbook is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press, and her collection of linked stories, Love is a Crooked Stick, is about to go out on submission. Raised in London, she holds degrees in fiction writing and counseling psychology. Today, she lives on conserved land in western Massachusetts, where she designs gardens and breaks her back building stone walls. Visit her website at julieestherfisher.com or follow her on Bluesky @julieestherfisher.bsky.social.

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