Berkeley Fiction Review, Issue 41

berkeley fiction review

Issue

41

Cover art by Kristina Kim © Copyright 2021 Berkeley Fiction Review Berkeley Fiction Review is not an official publication of the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC) or the University of California, Berkeley’s English Department.

These stories are works of fiction and do not necessarily reflect the views of the ASUC or the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley Fiction Review is an ASUC-government sponsored, undergraduate-run, non-profit publication.

ISSN: 1087-7053 For advertising inquiries, submissions, and general inquiries, contact us: berkeleyfictionreview@gmail.com Find us at: berkeleyfictionreview.org Twitter: @BerkeleyFiction IG: @berkeleyfictionreview Printed by Piedmont Copy Oakland, CA 94611

MANAGING EDITORS Regina Lim Alex Jiménez Madelyn Peterson Aaron Saliman

A S S I S TA N T E D I T O R S

Claire Ahn Sydnie Alex Bryan Hernandez Benitez Annie Bush

Sukhmony Brar Julia Cheunkarndee Ella Gilbert Gabrielle Guo Noah Hernandez Isabel Hinchliff

Catherine Ly Liam Magee Kasandra Tapia Angela Yin Kaitlyn Wang

D E S I G N S TA F F Kristina Kim Emily Que

F A C U LT Y S P O N S O R David Marno

Mark Aguila Kinza Alwazzani Rebecca Bair Aunnesha Bhowmick Sabrina Brink Fernando Campos Alejandra Cooper Vicky Chong Alyson Chun Cat Chun Alejandra Cooper Briana Courtney Arash Dabstani Emily Diaz Ari Elorreaga Sophia Fox Holly Friedman Mia Garza-Jenkins Elaine Goranov

S TA F F

Fiona Green Julianne Han Jamie Harrison Stella Ho Cassidy Holtzapple Landon Iannamico Amanda Janks William Jeffries Mehakpreet Kaur Kris Kneeland Zara Khan Maggie Knowlton Sarah Laver Matthew Lemus Nicholas Leon Conrad Loyer Alex Luna Kristi Marcouillier Lillian Marsh

Samantha Moran Amalia Munn Mario Nolasco Edith Noyes Cameron Onodera Mason Osberg Taewon (Teddy) Park Carolyn Qian Muskaan Sandhu Bianca Sandoval Elizabeth Sherstinsky Sam Scott Isha Soni Seyo Talbert Daria Tehrani Emily Sunflower Thompson Yaz khajavipour Thompson

Lindy Tweten Cate Vallinote Sofia Viglucci

Kevin Wang Edward Yam Ariel Zarrin

Emily Zakevosyan Mingjie Zhong

SPONSORS

Merna & Stewart Saliman Rhonda Lim Darla Co Whitney Co Ricardo Jimenez Surinder Kaur Gill Jin Hee Park Summer Farah Dee Richards Alison Huh Scott & Lisa Saliman

SPECIAL THANKS TO

Healthcare Workers during the COVID-19 Pandemic Lilian De La Torre Liz Jimenez Aditi Maheshwari Ray Peterson 박진희 Grace Sarzynski Norma Bahena Joey, Tia, and Laura Cheunkarndee Tajaé Keith Menat Allah Et Atma Jonathan Lee Young Joon Lim • 임영준 Roselynn 이서연 Lee 임지은 BTS 세븐틴

EDITORS’ NOTE Dear readers, We made our 41st issue in the midst of unimaginable circumstances; many of our staff and editors faced the hardships of COVID-19, and for the first time in the four-decade history of our journal, we had to create an entire magazine without meeting in person a single time.

And yet, we still (digitally) came together every week to discuss the stories you hold in your hands today. We have been blown away by the dedication, labor, and, most importantly, joy which every writer and staff member brought to Berkeley Fiction Review.

For long-time readers of BFR, you’ll notice the many changes that Issue 41 brings—from the size of the magazine itself, to the inclusion of art for every story, to the very content of the stories we selected. At our first managing editors’ meeting, we agreed to publish something entirely different from past issues while continuing to embrace our mission of diversity and innovation.

The stories you’re about to read were accepted for publication after a rigorous, three-tiered selection process and lengthy discussion at our editorial meetings. Due to the democratic nature of our journal, stories rarely progress to the final level of review—and even then, publication is still difficult to achieve. Out of the hundreds of submissions we received in the last year, only eleven were chosen to make up this issue and we couldn’t be more proud of them. These stories truly embody the change and growth Berkeley Fiction Review has undergone in the last few years and they set the tone for the exciting future of our journal.

Berkeley Fiction Review has always been an outlier in the level of work and editing we put into our writers’

stories. We have been committed to making sure the pieces you see here are the best version of themselves, and believe that publishing is a collaborative effort between the writer and editor, bringing new and exciting perspectives. We are excited about every story that we’ve published this year and are so thankful to our writers for the time and energy they put into Berkeley Fiction Review. We truly could not have made Issue 41 without our lovely writers and are so thankful that they took a chance with us.

We also aimed to have art accompanying every story and are so happy to see it become a reality in our 41st issue. Our artists were generous with their time and energy, and we are so grateful to have featured their art. In the history of Berkeley Fiction Review, we’ve never had a table of contents so robust and diverse, and we are so happy to see the community of Berkeley Fiction Review contributors expand to include the writers and artists you see in the journal.

Our 41st issue also realized our managing team’s long-held dream to finally become a paying market for our writers and artists. We offered a humble twenty-five dollar honorarium to our contributors and hope to continue to offer an honorarium at higher rates in the future as well as increasing the prizes for our annual Sudden Fiction Contest. Our mission of publishing underrepresented writers is more important than ever as we aim to give back to our literary community. As publishing transforms to make room and give space to writers of color, LGBTQ+ writers, and Black and Indigenous writers, we hope that Berkeley Fiction Review continues to do what it does best: change and grow to truly reflect the values of our editorial team.

In a year where tragedy struck again and again, we wanted a colorful collection of stories as variegated and

vibrant as possible. When reading the journal, we hope you gasp and laugh as we did when first reading the stories in our meetings. As always, the works featured in this year’s journal went through a rigorous selection process to include those that engaged us on the most basic, emotional level. We take you from a coincidental meeting with an ex, to a woman conducting experiments in bed, to the strangest pieces of wax you’ve ever encountered.

During the making of Issue 41, we added an online magazine to our website to publish book reviews, personal essays, commentaries, and stories from older issues. The magazine, although less than a year old, has already published an array of exciting and engaging content by writers who deserve to have their voices heard. Elevating fresh voices and original ideas is an integral part of our mission as a literary journal and we’re so thrilled to have an entirely new platform to carry that mission out.

Of course, publication would not have been possible without the countless hours our editors and staff put into Berkeley Fiction Review. During the making of Issue 41, we expanded our team to an unprecedented number and added an online magazine to publish book reviews, personal essays, commentaries, and stories from older issues.

The publication of this issue is bittersweet, however, as it marks the end of many of our editors’ time with Berkeley Fiction Review. Seven of our editors—including three of the managing editors writing this note—are graduating from UC Berkeley and parting ways with the journal.

Although it’s sad to have to move on from a community that has entirely shaped our college experiences, it is a privilege that we get to say goodbye with an issue that we are wholeheartedly proud of. We are leaving Berkeley Fiction Review in passionate, capable hands and have no doubt that this journal will only get better and better.

Whether this is your first time with Berkeley Fiction Review or you’re a longtime reader, thank you for your support and for being a part of this journey with us. As we come to a close for Issue 41, we are excited for you to see how else Berkeley Fiction Review will continue to transform and grow in the coming years. Keep your eyes on us, it’ll be worth it.

Happy reading, Regina Lim, Alex Jiménez, Madelyn Peterson, Aaron Saliman

TA B L E O F CONTENTS FICTION The Gallery

3

Finnegan Shepard

Penis Candles

23

Deborah Daniel Shea

Haiyang

33

K-Ming Chang

I, Iris

47

Kimberly Y. Liu

Pillow Practice

65

Annie Williams

Haunted Home

80

Conrad Loyer

Remainder

95

Emily Dezurick-Badran

SUDDEN FICTION J UD G E D BY K . MIN G- C HAN G, AN NA VANGALA JON ES, & ASHLEY HU T S O N Auteur Theory 106 Yasmeen Khan Pizza Talk 108 Gabrielle McAree Last Snowfall 112 Cora Ballek HONORARY MEN T ION The Drive to the 116 Isabella Tong Crematorium

ART The Masterpiece

2

Amy Santa Maria

Penis Candles

22

Julia Jin

Regarding the Sea

32

Mikaela Kristianous

Mindless Eye

46

Amy-Grace Ratanapratum

Pillow Practice

64

Charlotte Bunney

Ocean Dance

78

Sam Hsieh

Alchemy

94

C.R. Resetarits

Sudden Fiction 104 Yasmeen Abedifard

THE END Contributor 120 Biographies

The Masterpiece by Amy Santa Maria

The Gallery

by Finnegan Shepard

I

ran into Madeline at the Met, a week after I went on T. It was exactly the kind of place I had always imagined our reunion would happen, probably because the last event we were supposed to attend together—and did not as we had broken up earlier that month—was an art opening in Soho. I remember the city that winter as a kind of butcher shop: thighs of molding snow, ice like gristle.

“Madeline,” I said.

She turned. She was wearing the same obscure perfume she had when we were together—grassy, mixed with something almost too acrid, like dregs of Pinot Grigio left in a glass overnight. “Sara?” she exclaimed, her right hand hovering around her chin. I had forgotten how long and thin her fingers were, like albino spiders.

“Tilo, now.”

Her eyes flickered down my body, over the flatness where my breasts used to be, the small arch between my legs where I was packing. She reached out and grasped my middle finger, raising my hand to inspect it briefly.

“Still small,” I said.

She laughed and let it drop. “What are you doing 3

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here?” she asked.

“What, at the Met?” “Yes—no,” she said, smiling. “Do you live in the city now?”

“I’m visiting Avi.” “Avi,” she repeated.

When Madeline’s eyes lit up, it was literal; it was the moment ignition catches the billow of gas. There was almost a sound to it. I watched the whoosh of her remembering my old friend. The November before we had broken up, we had stayed with him and his wife at his mother’s apartment in the financial district. The apartment had space for Madeline to build the polystyrene model she was using for her applications to graduate school. Avi and I had roamed the brittle canyons of the neighborhood to find a sturdy folding table, which we set up in the kitchen. We all got along then. Avi and his wife taught Madeline how to pronounce the days of the week in Hebrew. Everyone agreed the sounds came naturally to Madeline because she was French. I’d never been so proud to belong to someone, and for her to be mine— mine! I could barely sleep.

“I’d completely forgotten about Avi,” Madeline said.

“How is he?”

“The same,” I said. “Working too hard, but happy.”

“Ahh, yes,” Madeline said. Her eyes darted to the top right corner of focus, the way they always did when she was untangling a thought she found pleasurable. While we were dating, she had kept a small notebook in which she wrote down clever things I’d said in tight, neat cursive.

At the time, I’d been flattered. Standing in the museum, I realized I was still flattered, and the fact that I cared raised little fibers of bitterness in me. Our sex had been mild; I remembered it as the folding of a fine, cashmere cloth, such that all its ends were perfectly aligned. It was 4

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almost always in the morning, mostly with our hands, and silent except for the slightly heavier breathing. Whenever we came, I was listening to the city—street sweepers, honking, small dogs barking—and so my memory had linked Madeline’s contained, perfectly groomed vagina to the grating roar of the city.

“What a funny thing,” Madeline said, “that his life just continued on without my knowing about it.”

Madeline was standing in front of a Greek Orthodox painting, and I thought that it suited her remote kind of beauty—how her features were neither the voluptuousness of classical or Renaissance paintings, nor the blurry beauty of the Impressionists, but arched and elegant, almost aggressive. Her face was as precise as an arrangement of pins.

“Is he still with…?” Madeline continued.

“Niva. Yes. Still together.”

“And where do they live?”

“They bought a two-bedroom in Gowanus last year.”

“Only one child?”

“None, yet.”

“I wonder what they’ll do.” Madeline trailed off, glanced over her shoulder at the painting, then back at me.

“Someone from my program went on to specialize in this, in making space out of the no-space the city has to offer.

I’m all for minimalism, but children are one of the things you can’t solve with emptiness. They need…foliage. Why are we talking about Avi?” I grinned. “It’s good to see you.”

She took a step forward and grasped my wrist. “Let’s get a cappuccino, no?”

I nodded. We moved toward the exit. For half the length of the room, she held onto me. Her fingers were cool. I resisted the urge to rub them between my palms.

It was important, in the fantasy, for all initiation to come 5

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from her.

“You don’t have children,” she asked, “do you?”

“No.” “Me neither.”

• We went to the cafe attached to the Church of the Heavenly Rest. When we were together, it had been a small, dingy cafe with nothing but an espresso machine and a few droopy pastries, but sometime in the years since, it had reinvented itself into white standing tables and golden lattes. We sat outside, though it was early November and barely fifty out. Madeline ordered a chamomile tea.

“May I?” she asked when my cappuccino arrived, raising her teaspoon.

“No,” I said.

“No?” “I like the foam.”

“But you know I can’t have the caffeine.”

“Then order a cup of foam, Madeline.”

She set her spoon down and sat back in her chair. She was wearing a woolen blue poncho with leather trim and a white blouse, the top two buttons undone, revealing collarbones that pressed up against the skin of her sternum like two delicate keys. Her brown hair fell loose down her back. I sipped the foam and thought about how Madeline’s nudity had always looked so private—not like that of the American women I’d been with whose sexuality bridged clothing to not-clothing with a kind of obviousness, but a dimpled modesty. Whenever she walked from the shower to our bed, it was with a kind of surprise as though she were a figure in a painting whose silk had accidentally slipped.

“You’ve changed,” she said.

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I set the cup down on its saucer and looked across Fifth toward the lake. “I’d hope so,” I said. “It’s been what, seven years?”

“Last June.”

It was nerve-racking to find myself inside the fantasy.

On the one hand, I felt a responsibility to guide its unfolding, and on the other, I felt that years of constructing it had already cast the mold so that we found ourselves on train tracks. I did not know how concerned I should be that the specifics were slightly altered.

In the fantasy, we ran into each other at an art gallery, not the Met, and we were drinking wine, not coffee. Importantly, I would have attained embodiment, something I could never fully picture, or only in parts— the cocked gun of a tricep, a patch of stubble, a London Fog trench coat, its boxiness elegantly obscuring what I could not imagine beneath—as though my proper body was something that would only ever exist in peripheral, fragmented vision. We would go to a candlelit dinner at one of the small, well-reviewed restaurants Madeline knew, and it would become apparent, over the course of the evening, that what Madeline wanted was for me to go back to her hotel with her and fuck her. Consummation would grant the sense of completion with her that had always evaded me.

But sitting there with Madeline across from me, a concern I could not name began to bloom in the back of my mind. It was pure disquiet, an animal moving in the shadows. I felt as though I had missed something. But what does it mean—how is it possible—to witness yourself missing something your mind alone has constructed?

“You don’t look different,” Madeline said. “Not really.”

“I’ve only just started on testosterone.”

She sipped her chamomile with the very edges of her 7

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lips. “Do you remember that Louise Glück poem? The one about you?”

I nodded.

“I read it to a friend just the other day,” she said. “‘It was like living with a woman, but without the spite, the envy, and with a man’s strength, a man’s clarity of mind.’

I speak of you often, you know.” She tapped the side of her mug with her index finger. “I don’t suppose I ever saw you one way or another in particular. You were always such a perfect mixture of both.”

I didn’t say anything. A runner exited the lake and pounded down Seventh. His thighs were river slabs beneath thin skin. It was unlikely my body would change so much as to resemble that shape. I feared that I would always be built of muted curves, stains that could be scrubbed into faintness but never entirely erased.

“How’s your mother?” she asked.

The question startled me. I thought of Madeline as fundamentally selfish. Maybe this was unfair, a later revision. “She’s well,” I said. “Doing her volunteer work most of the time. She’s let go of being a mother.”

“That’s probably good, no?”

“Sometimes we miss her. But yes, it’s good.”

I scratched my forehead. Madeline reached out and took my hand, inspecting the ring on my fourth finger.

It was heavy and silver. Her thumb pressed against my knuckle. “It’s too big for you,” she said.

• In the fantasy, I rose from linen sheets and went to a balcony to smoke. The geography was a little fuzzy—less New York, more European. Consistent with the entirety of the fantasy, I couldn’t picture my body in high definition, but my back was the unfocused shape of a man’s, leaning 8

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over a balcony railing that overlooked a washed-out city.

The sheets in Madeline’s actual hotel room were plain cotton, but there was a small balcony, so I rose from our entangled bodies—I had forgotten how childish her kneecaps were, how perfect, precise Madeline had faint stretch marks in the space between ass and hips—and fished out Blue Camels from my jacket.

The door to the balcony wouldn’t open.

“Is there a key?” I asked over my shoulder.

“I don’t think so,” Madeline said. “Besides, you don’t smoke.”

I went through the drawers in the desk, peered into the bathroom.

“What’s the point of a balcony you can’t access?”

She was thoughtful for a moment, and then said, “Modernism didn’t solve everything.”

“There’s gotta be a key,” I said.

Madeline rolled the duvet tight around her. “But actually, your question is quite interesting, no?” she said. “Is the balcony staged for the benefit of the outside viewer, or the inside?”

“It’s most likely a legal issue,” I said. “Too many suicides.”

“Still.”

I looked at her: flushed, familiar, foreign. I knew what she wanted. “It’s like a dangling ‘de’ clause,” I said, referencing the Greek particle we’d once delighted over together, “the ‘on the other hand’ that never arrives.”

Her face cracked into joy. We each had always considered the other more intelligent. This was what we had shared, what I never found again.

I opened the window and crouched beside it.

“What are you doing?” Madeline said, sitting up.

“You can’t smoke in here.”

“Turn on the fan.”

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Madeline stared at me and then started laughing. She got up and scuttled, naked, to the other side of the room, where she turned on the fan. I laughed, and she did too, and I thought: this wouldn’t have happened seven years ago.

“There’s something philosophically interesting here, no?” she said, standing in the middle of the room, holding her breasts.

I watched the street below. Six taxis passed in a little line. A woman walking a small, white dog got stopped by two tourists and gesticulated wildly, pointing first east, then west. As she marched confidently on, the tourists stood stranded. The man started walking toward Madison, but the woman hadn’t moved, her torso turned toward Park. They began to argue, twenty feet apart. I was sure they were yelling, but Madeline’s room was on the eighth floor, and I couldn’t hear it.

Madeline went back to bed and flicked through a magazine. Her forehead furrowed in the same place. I’d forgotten that detail.

“That was the best I’ve ever had,” Madeline murmured from behind the magazine.

For a moment, I didn’t understand what she was talking about. The sex had been tender and slow, the climax like dotting an “i” or crossing a “t”.

“I’ve missed you,” she said. “You’re more confident, now, as a man.” She squinted at me. “Even though you’re not a man, not really.”

I turned my face toward the wallpaper. It was paisley, hideous.

“Hey,” Madeline said, getting out of the covers and crawling toward me from across the mattress. “It’s just true. I mean yes, sure, you’re a man, but you don’t have a man’s body. That’s not offensive. I prefer it. It’s like—” she trailed off. I glanced back at her. “It’s like your not 10

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being any one thing releases me from needing to be one thing. It’s freeing.”

She raised my hand and kissed it. I tried to smile.

“Let’s find a new beginning. Dinner, no?”

“Sure,” I said. I was supposed to be at Avi’s already.

My hands looked childlike on my thighs. She was right; the ring was too big.

“I’ll just take a shower,” Madeline said.

She left the door to the bathroom open. When we were together, I had berated her into always keeping the door open, such that our bathroom-lives were humorous and shared. It was the opposite of her prim, Parisian upbringing. She loved me for it. I wondered whether she had carried this habit into other relationships, or whether she was just doing it again because of me.

I took a Bible from the bedside table, used it to prop the door to the hall open, and called Rose. She would be home from the pool now, beginning to cook dinner.

Something vibrantly healthy, like her. Dark greens, tahini, sweet potato. She answered on the fourth ring.

“Guess who I’m with,” I said.

“Who?” The sliding glass door to the porch opened. Thin glass set down on wood. I could smell our backyard, which opened onto the wood: balsam, damp soil, and thyme.

She was having a glass of wine. The Beaujolais, probably, which we had opened two nights before.

“Madeline.”

“No way,” she said.

“We ran into each other at the Met.” Rose laughed. “Just like the fantasy,” she said.

Rose and I had been in an open relationship for three of the five years we’d been together. We’d read Esther Perel, drawn diagrams, talked to therapists. Because we understood what we each sought in others, we deemed 11

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our relationship indestructible. I’d fallen in and out of short flings: three to six month arcs that shot across my world as bursts of adrenaline, little booster shots that helped me believe I could be seen, and desired, as male. Sometimes I feared Rose loved me separate from gender, whereas gender for me was the sun around which everything orbited. I needed strangers. I needed to watch myself unfold in their eyes.

“I’m at her hotel now. We’re going for dinner,” I said.

I was speaking softly, though the shower was still running.

“And?” “I’ll tell you about it when I’m home.”

“Have you seen Avi yet?”

“No, not yet.”

There was a brief pause. I heard her taking a sip.

“Should I be worried?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

One of the first conversations we’d had when we opened up our relationship was about exes, and whether they were a boundary we wanted to draw or not. We had decided not; what a rich space that was, and in a way, weren’t they actually less of a threat than someone new?

Didn’t the ex being an ex draw a kind of negative space around their potentiality?

“Just today, Tilo,” she said.

“I know. It’s a one-off.”

“Okay.”

“I love you,” I said.

• The light was long and webbed as we crossed the park.

Madeline insisted on the Seventy-Ninth Street traverse, though Eighty-Sixth was closer. We walked with our sides pressing together, her arm wrapped through mine.

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Runners and nannies and frazzled businessmen passed us. Sycamores lined the path. I hadn’t known about trees when I was with Madeline. Trees were a thing Rose and I shared.

“When they see us, do you think they see a couple, or lovers?” Madeline asked.

I looked at her. She was a few inches taller than me.

I realized that half of me was there and half of me was striding along in the parallel fantasy, and that the fantasy me was, of course, taller—gazing lovingly down at the parting in her hair and the soft, childish scalp underneath.

“Probably neither,” I said. “People here don’t think twice about anyone they see.”

“I’ve never been someone’s lover before,” Madeline continued. “It’s exciting.”

I should have told her then, but instead I just squeezed her arm. We passed an old man sitting on a bench, his right leg resting over his left. I could tell by his blazer and by the way he was sitting that he sat there every night.

To him, it was just another day. I took out my phone and texted Avi that I’d been held up and would be in touch later.

At the restaurant, the server bumbled at Madeline’s beauty, and I wondered whether it was possible for men to watch other men desiring a woman they are with and not feel that desire compound within themselves into something cruel.

We sat. I was restless. Across the table, Madeline’s silk shirt dangled from her bones. She wore the same simple necklace.

“The duck, I think, and the bass. How does that sound?” Madeline asked without looking up from the menu. Madeline always ordered. Madeline was the type of person most at ease in restaurants and museums, places with clear hierarchies, where her natural disposition as a 13

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critic was not only acceptable, but respected.

“Sounds good,” I said. I leaned forward and took her hand. She set down the menu and smiled at me.

“Hello, you,” she said. She raised my hand and peppered it with kisses. “Do you know,” she said, “I still have the notebook with all of your ideas. I look at it frequently.”

She used to call the notebook an “architecture of a beautiful mind.” I had felt acutely while we were together that if I didn’t have a body—and in a way I didn’t, which was what made the whole thing so complicated—we would have been perfect together. Back then, I could think of nothing more romantic than an endless dialogue.

“Where do we begin?” I said.

“In the middle.” She was smiling. “Where else?”

“Sure,” I replied, “but what about the basics? You’re still in Boston?”

She nodded.

“No partner?”

“No. I had a boyfriend, Hamid. An almost-husband.

He was an engineer.”

I raised my eyebrows. She laughed. “A poetic engineer,” she said.

“What happened?”

“Oh, you know.”

I released her hand and sat back.

“Let’s talk about interesting things,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many things I see in the world that I wish I could ask your opinion about. It’s never stopped, that desire for you to be my reference in everything.”

“You don’t have notebooks of Hamid?”

She smiled. “No. He was very patient, though.” She touched the pendant at her neck, and added, “And then there was Louisa, but that didn’t last long.”

The waiter brought a bottle of wine. He deferred 14

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to Madeline. Though I did not want for him to defer to me solely because of any perceived maleness, his lack of deferral to me threatened my confidence in being perceived as male. Our earlier sex—the soft quiet of it—flashed through my mind like an agitated, exposed animal. It occurred to me that maybe its lack of carnality had nothing to do with gender, that Madeline was simply more mind than body, and that all these years I’d assumed it was my gender that was the problem. I’d assumed that changing my body could change her sexuality, but maybe I was completely missing the point. I pushed the thoughts away. To accept them would have been to accept living with a sense of incompleteness about her. The wine was thin and tasted of minerals and citrus. I felt the alcohol instantly. It was a relief. I resolved that after the first bottle, I would suggest we pass through a sex shop on the way back to her hotel to buy a strap-on.

“The other day I came across your line about the task of the classicist—do you remember?” she said.

I shook my head.

“How his task is to provide words where they are missing. He knows what rhyme scheme he is in, and because of the limitations of Greek vocabulary, he uses logic to insert the most likely word, given those parameters. But,” Madeline raised her finger, her eyes alight, “poets don’t operate on logic! That killed me.”

I drank my wine and looked across the restaurant.

Outside the window, a man in an oversized jacket with tears at the elbows weaved into the street. “It’s beginning to snow,” I said.

Madeline ran her index finger down the center of my hand. “I don’t mind that you’re married,” she said softly.

“In a way, it feels like that’s what we were always meant to be. It suits me to be your lover. It suits you to have a lover.”

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Before I could say anything—would I have said something, would I have risked it ending then before I got what I wanted?—she raised her perfect hand. “Let’s live in its hum, at least for a little while.”

• We were on our second bottle of wine before I worked up the courage to tell her what I wanted. “There’s a shop on Fifty-Seventh,” I said. “We can stop on our way back.”

“Fifty-Seventh?” she replied. The corners of her mouth were stained red. “That’s quite out of the way.”

“We’ll take a taxi.”

She cut a small piece of duck. “What about that thing you’re wearing?”

“I can’t use that,” I said, “that’s just for visuals.”

“Oh,” she said.

I sat back in my chair and crossed my arms. I regretted having given in to our reunion so easily. She was the one who had left me. In the fantasy, she had tried harder.

“What?” she said.

“Can’t you see this is important to me?”

“Yes, and I’ve said we can go.”

“I don’t want your permission, I want you to want it.”

She set down her fork. “Don’t be a child,” she said.

“You can’t orchestrate desire like that.”

I stood. “I’m going for a smoke,” I said.

“Ohlala,” she said. “How many times do I need to tell you? You don’t smoke.”

I ignored her and went outside. It was freezing. I stood alone in the empty patio area, watching chairs fill up with snow. The smoke bit my throat. Everyone who passed belonged to a life I did not know. I wondered what Rose would do in my situation, but then, Rose would never be in my situation. Rose would gracefully leave, 16

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slip into the current of the city and wash up whole and self-contained at Avi’s. This was partially to do with who Rose was, but more to do with the fact that Rose had a body—had always had a body—and didn’t live her life according to its tyrannical desire to be seen. I glanced through the window front. Madeline was turned toward me in her chair, watching. She smiled and waved at me to come back. When she looked at me, did she see Tilo or Sara?

A car at the red light rolled its passenger-side window down and a dog with tight golden-brown curls stuck its head out. We looked at each other. I couldn’t see its owner.

Small snowflakes landed on its snout. It wasn’t panting, but its face was in the permanent smile dogs have. Its gaze slipped off me and up the street. Eager, I thought. Stupid.

The light changed and the car moved on.

“I’ve ordered us the tiramisu,” Madeline said, as I sat back down. “And a digestif.”

• We were drunk in the taxi. Madeline sat in the middle seat, burrowing herself into me. I stabbed at the TV, trying to shut it off, both of us laughing. I managed to mute it.

An advertisement with interracial couples out to brunch on the same streets we were driving through played over and over.

“New York is so self-referential it’s as though it’s on repeat without realizing it,” Madeline murmured into my armpit.

“Don’t fall asleep,” I said.

There was fluorescent lighting in Eve’s Garden.

Everything was expensive and tastefully arranged.

“Which one do you want?” I asked, standing in front of the dildos.

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Madeline was drifting through the porn, examining it like she would a painting. “Whichever you want,” she called over her shoulder.

“I want you to pick. I want to get the one you want.”

Madeline came over. She pointed at a large, veined one. “That’s awful,” she said. “Why would anyone choose that?”

I didn’t say anything. Madeline sighed, leaned against me, and kissed my shoulder. “I love your mouth,” she said. “You have such a talented mouth.”

“Pick one,” I insisted.

She turned her head, still leaning on me, and pointed at a small, purple dildo.

“You don’t want a realistic one?”

“No. It’s interesting, being a penis and not a penis at the same time,” she said. “Besides, penises are ugly.”

It was one hundred and fifty dollars. I paid, wishing Madeline would offer to split it, not for the money, but as a sign that she too wanted the experience. On the ride back to her hotel, Madeline watched the city lights, her hand on my thigh.

“Will you call me at odd times of the day?” she said suddenly. “It’s fitting, for us to go from not speaking at all to speaking in the useless hours. Like eleven in the morning, or three at night.” She squeezed my thigh. “I don’t even know where you live,” she said.

“Oregon.”

The neon of another advertisement passed over her face. “There are direct flights from Boston,” she said.

“And besides, that means everything between us is middle ground. So many places to meet.”

I took out my phone. 11:37 p.m. A text from Avi: ‘are you alright?’

I switched my phone to airplane mode.

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• In the hotel room, Madeline rushed to the bathroom to pee. I took off my shoes, pulled down my pants and briefs quickly, got into the strap-on, and put my clothes back on.

I was buttoning up my pants when she came back in, the dildo pressing aggressively out against the fabric of my briefs.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

She came to kiss me. “You already have it on?” she asked after we embraced, pulling away.

I nodded.

“And that’s how you want it?”

“Yes.” “Okay,” she said.

“Language helps,” I said, softly.

“What do you mean?”

“Talk to me. Make me feel male.”

“I’m not sure I know how to do that,” she said.

I didn’t want to have to explain. I kissed her instead.

We made it to the bed. I was on top of her. I could not hear the city. She was quiet, only little sighs and murmurs here and there. I undressed her, kissed her torso, went down on her. I still had all my clothes on. My neck began to hurt.

She came.

“Do you want to be inside me?” she asked.

I nodded. I undressed myself, eased myself inside. I couldn’t feel it. The imaginative leap it took to translate the silicone pressing into someone into me pressing into someone was always more difficult when I was drunk. It was like driving through fog. I turned her over. I could tell in the contour of her body that she did not like it, that at best the feeling was neutral. “Do you want me to stop?”

I asked.

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“No,” she said, “I want you to come.”

“What position is best for you?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “On my back?”

“Okay,” I said.

She turned over. I moved slowly in her, kissed her.

Her hands were little birds at my neck. Sweat pooled and ran the seam of my bicep. Far off, like a lighthouse, the possibility of orgasm blinked at me, but it felt impossibly distant, and when I looked at Madeline, at her passivity, it shrank back further. I was male in position and action, but not in sensation: I was not flesh inside her, semen angry to be spilled, testosterone flooding my system. I was all mind grappling around in the dark for a body, knowing in an adjacent way what it meant to be female and what it took to be entered, and I could not attach myself to my release without her active desire for it. I faked it and rolled off of her.

“Mmm,” she murmured into my hair.

I lay next to her facedown, arm and leg tossed over her, the strap-on jutting painfully into my pelvis. She kissed my forehead again and again, ran her hands over my back. I was too empty to cry. After a while I said, “Do you remember when you told me that you might have other boyfriends but that you would always be mine?”

Her hand paused in its stroking.

“It was in the preliminaries of our breakup,” I said.

“We had gone out to buy Drano.”

She nudged me to turn over. I took off the strap-on and got under the sheets. She curled against me.

“It wasn’t true,” I said.

She kissed my neck, my jawbone, my ear. “It hasn’t been true for a while, but maybe it’s true again now,” she said.

“Don’t be a revisionist.”

“Okay.”

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“You never wanted me the way I wanted you.”

She was petting my forearm. “I’ll make it up to you,” she said eventually. “You can keep your life. I’ll be the desperate one.”

She fell asleep quickly. I strained to listen to the streets below, but the glass was thick. Around two, I went to the bathroom and washed off the strap-on. I stared at my reflection, at the worm-like scars from top surgery.

The purple looked silly on the counter, a child’s toy. She hadn’t touched it. I sat on the toilet for a long time, trying to pee. Even turning on the faucet didn’t work. Eventually I gave up and went back to bed. Madeline murmured something in her sleep and moved against me. I wasn’t satisfied. Changing my body hadn’t fixed it.

I watched the light drain slowly back into the sky. For as long I could remember, I had thought the mistranslation of my gender was the only thing standing between me and the seamless coming-together of bodies. How easy it had been, to mistakenly whittle down the barrier between myself and others to this belief. And to think the mistranslation could be corrected—to think anyone else could ever correct us. At five, I dressed and slipped out. The street-sweeping trucks were vibrating along the avenues. Halfway to the subway, I realized I’d left the dildo behind.

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Penis Candles by Julia Jin

Penis Candles

by Deborah Daniel Shea

S

ay you’re invited to a dinner party at the home of someone you don’t know very well. Perhaps they’re the chairman of your department at a college in rural, upstate New York, one of those private, liberal arts schools with twelve hundred students and six hundred faculty.

And suppose, for a moment, that it has been snowing for three days, and that it’s snowing still as you drive to the dinner party. The house is far from town, on a country road. It’s a damn estate, you think, when you finally see it: blazing with red and green Christmas lights, and perched high up on a cliff, like a fort, or a medieval castle, or, because of the abundance of red and green lights, a confused, landlocked lighthouse.

And what if, as you glimpse the chairman’s house on this snow-covered acreage far from town, you have the thought that the chairman must be a WWII veteran to own such a fine house, because he could never afford it now, on the salary new college professors earn, about thirty thousand dollars a year. He must have received an interestfree mortgage, and a free college education under the GI 23

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Bill, and, later, a highly paid, tenured, teaching position with a 2/2 course load. He must have left graduate school with no debt, with a PhD in British Literature and no debt, no debt at all. Certainly not the debt that you have: forty thousand dollars for your BA, twenty thousand dollars for your MA, and seventy thousand dollars for your PhD— debt that you’ll be paying off until the day you die. And maybe you think of how lucky the chairman and his family in their fine fort of a house must be.

Well, those days are gone for good, you think, as you turn onto the black paved road that leads to the fort, or the lighthouse, or the country estate, or whatever the hell it is.

The road is so clear of snow you think it must be heated.

As you drive up to the house, you continue to marvel at the snow-free road. At the same time, you comb your unruly hair, first with your fingers and then with a plastic straw bent in half. Or maybe you happen to glance at your shoe, the one lightly resting upon the gas pedal. A shoe you diligently polished before you left your apartment, but now, out here on the heated road, a shoe still scuffed and faded. But you tell yourself not to worry about it, you’ll buy new clothes, a new pair of shoes, with your next paycheck, let the bills wait, they’ve waited before, and you’re relieved at the thought of a steady paycheck, something you can count on, in a way that you haven’t been able to count on anything for the past five years.

And you think, just maybe, this is the beginning of the good part of your life. The part everyone says will come if you hold on long enough through the bad part.

Because the bad part, as everyone says, has to end one day. As you drive to the dinner party you believe that maybe it’s true, maybe it has ended, and maybe you even feel a little grateful to the chairman for hiring you, too, even though the salary is only thirty thousand dollars a year, and you have a 5/5 course load, because, with one 24

Penis Candles

collective nod of their hoary heads, they moved you out of the unemployment parking lot and onto the road to future financial security.

And now you want to get there as soon as possible. You want to be there. You want to be the person who arrives at a faculty dinner party on an estate far from town. You can’t wait to be accepted into the warm group of friends who have known one another for twenty or thirty years in this small, rural town that’s a four-hour drive from the closest city, Ottawa, where they go for culture, they say, and to shop, they say, and to break the claustrophobic monotony of the impossibly long, unbearably frigid winter.

And then, finally, you’re there.

You don’t really have to go to the bathroom. You go because you want to look in the mirror. You go because you were in an agitated state when you left your apartment, driven by your fear of being late, because arriving late is a sign of disrespect, a sign of someone who has had a bad time for five years and now wants that bad time to end. And you don’t have to wash your hands because it is snowing, and you are wearing gloves, and, inside the gloves, your hands are clean. You just want to look in the mirror. You just want to make sure that your mascara isn’t smeared across your face from squinting into the dark.

Imagine, for a moment, that the candles inside the hall closet, a closet that you mistake, at first, for the bathroom, are white. A creamy shade of white that immediately brings to mind the vanilla-scented, votive candles you buy at Pier One because they’re so cheap you can afford them. The hall closet candles are white, ten inches long, and shaped like penises.

And maybe you wonder, now, if the penises are scented. You decide they’re not, because scented candles fill a room with fragrance, and no fragrance issued forth when you opened the closet door. You don’t know why, 25

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but, for some reason, you think scented, penis-shaped candles would be worse.

There is no attempt to hide them inside the closet.

Anyone who opens the door to look for a towel, or a bar of soap, would encounter them there, lined up on the top shelf. All of the penises have wicks, too. At the top, where candle wicks should be. Long, white wicks. Untrimmed.

A little too long, so you know the candles came by mail order and not from a store, because you worked at a candle store in college, and you always trimmed the wicks before you put the candles on the shelves.

And perhaps you decide to count the candles, too.

Seven penises the color of cream. Seven. Why seven?

Are they for an altar or a shrine? Are they holiday grab bag leftovers, part of a prank by a colleague in another department? Which department, would you guess?

Theatre Arts? Religion? Psychology?

But, if they are a grab bag gift, then why are they not displayed on the mantle above the fireplace where everyone at a faculty dinner party could have a chuckle over them, the way they chuckle over someone they call “weird Professor Howard,” and his unusual lab equipment in the science building.

And now you think that you ought to go into the bathroom, run the tap water, and flush the toilet. Maybe you’ve been gone a long time now, standing in the hallway with your hand on the doorknob, staring into the darkness of a penis-packed closet. You’re not ready to return to the dinner party just yet, not until you check your reflection in the bathroom mirror to make sure that the surprised, perplexed, and, possibly, even frightened, look on your face is gone.

So you run cold water into the bathroom sink, and you wonder what else is in the hall closet. You want to look one more time before you return to the party. Maybe 26

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faculty at small, isolated, liberal arts colleges have strange rituals that they conduct in their small, isolated towns.

Or maybe they’re making porno videos. You’ve read about that. You’ve watched those cable TV news channels that feature savage murderers and brutal child molesters and always begin with the words, “It’s a small, rural town, peaceful, where nobody expects anything like this to happen.” And maybe you have listened to so many brutal, savage stories that when you hear those words you begin to shout: “But that is exactly where these things happen.

In small towns. And you should know, because you’ve had twenty such stories this year. And it’s only February.”

You flush the toilet for the third time, and maybe now you begin to think that everything is a big mistake.

Everything is a big mistake, and maybe you ought to go out there to the dinner party and announce that you have a fatal illness, cancer or lupus. The chairman would understand lupus, because when you entered the house you noticed several first editions of Flannery O’Connor’s books on a shelf just inside the door. Or maybe you think you ought to go out there and say that you’re sorry, but you cannot take advantage of such nice people, such warm, nice people, anymore, and you’re leaving, tonight, you’re going back to Massachusetts, yes, back to Boston, where you’ll get your old apartment back if your landlord hasn’t rented it yet, yes, and maybe Matthew, too, maybe get Matthew back, too, if Matthew hasn’t left Boston yet, even though Matthew said that four hundred miles wasn’t far enough, and, therefore, he was moving as well, far away, to Los Angeles, where he had no memories of you, and, therefore, he would be free to make new memories with some other woman.

You could go out to the dinner party, and say that Matthew had a little trouble when he came back from Afghanistan, yes, he had a little bit of trouble, but it didn’t 27

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matter, no, because Matthew is Matthew, and, one day soon, he will be all right again, right as rain, as he used to say, good as gold, A-Okay, the way he was before he went over there, despite the fact that his medical insurance isn’t as good as the chairman’s or any of the other GI’s after the second world war, no, only VA hospital insurance, and everyone knows that VA hospitals hire the worst doctors, and that the U.S. government is committed to a policy, no, committed to a line of bullshit that says a combat veteran really doesn’t really need anything at all, no help of any kind, he just needs a little time to readjust to civilian life, truly, he needs no help at all, even though he takes a knife one day and holds it against his throat and oh so slowly begins to slice into the skin until a red line appears where you love to lay your head at night, and you could just go out there to the dinner party, and say that you must leave tonight, right now, and drive to Boston, but you would never get another job in academia if you walk out on your teaching contract during the semester, because the chairman won’t be able to find anyone who would to move to an arctic wasteland in the middle of nowhere to teach five courses at fifteen thousand dollars a semester at the very last minute, which is how you imagine the minute you’re in.

“Academia is a very small world,” your thesis advisor told you before you left graduate school. “Remember that.”

In other words, graduate school is over, and this is it.

So maybe you turn on the cold water, and you let it run for a few minutes, and you put your hands under the water, and you wet your hair down flat against your head. And, perhaps, you reassuringly remind yourself that you’re in the bathroom to wash up, a normal thing to do at a party, before you eat, when you’ve only just arrived, after traveling a great distance on an unfamiliar road in 28

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the cold and the dark of an interminable winter. You’ll just wash up, and then get the hell out of there, quick, quick, quick, get back to the party where you truly long to be.

You think you saw chocolate cake on the buffet table in the kitchen. Chocolate cake. Your favorite. People who serve chocolate cake at a faculty dinner party can’t be too odd, can they? You’ll just have a piece of chocolate cake, and then you’ll be right with the world again. Right as rain, good as gold, A-Okay.

But you have to pass the hall closet to get back to the party. And now, perhaps, you wonder whether someone might be standing outside the bathroom door. But when you open the door no one is there. You realize that in a house like a fort, or a medieval castle, or a landlocked lighthouse with a confusion of port and starboard lights, there are probably two bathrooms, at least two, possibly more, four or five or even six bathrooms, so that the privileged inhabitants will never have to do anything as banal as wait for a toilet.

You’ve been away from the party a long time now, you realize, longer than anyone should be away who is merely using the bathroom to freshen up after a short drive down a long road, or a long drive down a short road, which is precisely the purpose of a bathroom at a party. Now you will have to tell them that you’re sick to explain the long time you’ve spent inside the bathroom. Maybe they’re out there at the dinner party, yes, those smug, faculty friends, secure in their debt-free lives, owners of mortgage-free houses, possessors of life-long tenure, secure in a way that you’ll never be, and Matthew, and, surely, they are thinking that you must have an eating disorder, either that, or you’re taking drugs. Their voices have become quieter, you think. Less animated. Silent, almost.

You have to go out there. But you have to look inside the closet, too. One last time. Just to make sure you 29

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haven’t imagined everything.

The penises are still there. They stand neatly in a row, something you didn’t notice the first time you looked.

They are lined up on the shelf like toy soldiers, guarding several big, red boxes stacked behind them. Yes, it’s true.

You see it all quite clearly now. That’s why the penises are there. They are guarding the big, red boxes.

You don’t have time to look inside the boxes. Maybe you take out your phone and check the clock. Maybe you’ve been gone forty-five minutes, far too long for any reason you can think of, any reason you can make up, any reason that would make any sense at all.

The conversation among the group of old friends has stopped, and an eerie silence hangs over the house.

You grab two penises from the shelf, one in each hand.

Holding them out at arm’s length in front of you, one a sword, and the other a shield, you go in.

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