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winter writin’ wrap by league of evil writers zine no.1 190127

A Road Trip do you remember the morning you came down the stairs on new years day where you had set up two futons and we were curled up in only one

do you remember the immediate shove apart when you coughed from the staircase on opposite sides of the futon like two magnets of the same polarity do you remember the sound of her voice suddenly sharp and pitchy trying to explain that its cold the other futon is less comfortable we wanted to share blankets we were half asleep i didnt even realize do you remember nodding your head 2 glassy eyed as if you never even saw us at all and calling “be ready for church” on your way up the stairs even now i wonder if your wife or the twins or if maybe even you ever spotted us parked in your driveway until 4am or kissing [her] on your couch before we had even opened netflix or brushing her pinkyour pinkies for a moment too long in your kitchen or when i was pressing kisses to her neck by the christmas tree calmly almost quietly while your whole family was praying at the dinner table i’ve heard you toldell the whole town i’m sent from hell and you might be right but if i came from hell your daughter drove me out in her own Honda Civic

hope it works. . !! why is it so grainy tho

3 U CAN MAKE QR CODES: scan to edit this google doc

the soft of it. by rosario navalta

There is a sadness and a softness to not being able to talk to your mother about your broken heart. I’m laying in bed, every sharp first page when i angle of myself poking out so I wrap myself in a dull grey blanket open??? and old sweatpants wishing for my mother’s hands, her voice and warmth. I’m wishing and wanting for something to dull me down, turn me more heart than knife, to take my glass shard spine and grind me into sand, soft and slipping and gone.

When I came out to my mom, I swallowed the bullet I fed myself.

I let it sit, lead and gunpowder and acceptance because I knew she wouldn’t understand my love, the way I love, the people I loved. My sister has her boyfriend and she gets to love him in our house and kiss him without fear and tell my mom. I can’t even tell my mom about the girl who took my heart and handed it back to me like a gift she didn’t want. I can’t tell her about my big dumb, gay heart, my stupid love, my wrong love. She won’t tell me anak, mahal kita, I’m so sorry, are you okay because she won’t know, she won’t ever know. I can’t tell her the way I had a pocketful of eternity for maybe a month, a hand to hold for a small forever, a list of good things with someone else’s smile4 at the top. How do I say, “Mama, this girl, she was full of light and for a while, my life was less lonely, and I was wanted, God, I felt so wanted.”

I haven’t called my mom in a week, making myself let my heart break, making myself want for my mother. I am nearly 20 and all I want is my mom and the house I ran away from because in that house, I am still 10 years old and the crushes I tell my mom about are all boys with pretty hair and soft eyes. I want my mother to hold me and tell me I’m okay and that my love was worth something more than a text message. I haven’t called her because then I’ll have to explain this, this gaping hole in me, and how a month and change felt like it could last, lonely and soft. SBut she won’t get it and she’ll be disappointed I didn’t throw my heart at a boy and have it break on impact instead. What good is a heart if it beats for the wrong reasons and the wrong people?

I keep seeing my mother on my phone as a missed call or a text message and something in me lurches every time, hollow and screaming like a wolf howling to a silent, glowing moon. Wanting

HI I KNOW THIS IS SUPER SMALL IM EXPERIMENTING> THIS IS DAN I’m procrastination. Now scan me:

for home. Wanting for a response. I wish for something that is just short of longing that feels almost like love, almost like unconditional heart. Something in me howling for a home that never was, for a thing that will never understand me.

ok second page??? possibly?? i love u rosario

5

ing

i cry

the middle might be cut off idk h trans/cend fix that james factora α.

There are few things that can get me out of bed on a Sunday morning in the wintertime, when the temperatur ing in line at the pharmacy in a Milk-Hallquist with you at 9 a.m., barely clinging to consciousness. You, on the other task we came here for. First and foremost though, we’re here to pick up a prescription.

You step up to the kiosk and input the prescription code, and as you hit “confirm” I stare through the glass win elaborate perpetual dance. If one of the arms strayed just an inch from its predetermined path, it’d be utter chaos, a gr of a trance. But it’s only momentary, and I snap back to reality as an arm approaches our kiosk. It clutches the bright p ally just out of reach. In a way, I suppose that’s what we’re doing today as well. There’s a muffled clunk as the bottle is d and there, engulfed in gently pulsating light, is our bottle of sabe.

You take it and the screen changes to say “PLEASE SEE A PHARMACIST FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.” We bo us.

“Mickey! Leslie! How’s it going, folks?” says Amari.

“Good, good,” you reply, knowing that I’m definitely not capable of speech yet at this early hour. “How are you?”

“Same as ever,” Amari says with a toothy grin, exposing what seems to be all 64 chrome teeth. “I’m sure you already k We both nod. That’s not quite true, not this time anyway, but we’ve both taken sabe before–just never like this.

“Right,” says Amari. “So you know it lasts6for 24 hours; symptoms include heightened vision, increased physical, men We nod again.

“Great. If you need to cut it short, just take one of these and your trip should stop abruptly,” says Amari, handing us a in for?

“Fantastic. Thanks so much, Mari,” you say, eyes fixated almost hungrily on the hot pink bottle in your hand.

“Anytime, Mick. Have fun and be safe!” says Amari, waving as we walk toward the Humanoid Beings Upkeep aisle.

“So,” I say as you peruse the wares, looking for your favorite can. I swear they’re all the same, but I suppose you’re the of the can more than anything. “What exactly is the plan for today?”

“Ha! Got it,” you respond, triumphantly grasping your favorite red and green can of oil. We start heading for the exit.

“Great,” I say, a little shortly. “So, the plan?”

“Well, I think the whole point of it all is to not have a plan,” you say somewhat pointedly. “But in general, I guess we’ll I bite my tongue to keep from scoffing. You take all this mythology stuff dead serious, and I go along with it because I Wheat Thins. Then again, I’m sure there are quirks of mine that you don’t understand. At the very least I’m getting a t I grab some hydration pods from the fridge by the exit right as we’re about to leave, popping one in my mouth and fee cold–negative 374, to be exact–and brave the short walk around the block to the train stop. I breathe a sigh of relief as ing a small puddle underneath me as we stand and wait for the next train.

“So, debauchery,” I say a little skeptically. “What exactly do you mean by that, and how exactly is that… going to entic comes to religions that were already defunct when the last vestiges of modern faith died out.

A slight grin comes over your face and I can’t help but smile in response. “Dionysus is the god of wine, fertility

The train glides into the station with a slight hiss of released pressure as the door slides open. We step on, and train, but it’s hard for me to comprehend just how fast it moves for something that floats so effortlessly through the ci dots of light that hover right in the center of the car indicating where we are on the route.

“Okay,” I say slowly. “But the debauchery part. What about that? And what is this summoning going to do for

Your grin widens. “We do whatever feels good. Whatever feels right. Anything and everything we’ve ever wan first into your pupils, and you haven’t even taken the sabe yet. “The whole point is to sort of… strip away a layer of ou the whole time you’re talking, and I don’t think you notice.

“And hopefully, if we do enough, if we strip ourselves down to our bare essentials, Dionysus will come, and sw

how to

res dip as low as negative 400. One of those things is, unfortunately, my love for you, which is how I find myself standr hand, are practically vibrating with excitement next to me–or maybe you just need an oil change, which is the other

ndow at the dozen whirring mechanical arms as they weave in and out of the aisles of pills and pills and pills in an reat cacophony of clanging metal. I feel my eyes unfocusing slightly as the rhythmic motion lures me into something pink bottle like a prize in those claw machines people used to play for fun, grasping at shiny things that were perpetudropped into the kiosk and the arm slithers away to rejoin its endless dance of machinery. The kiosk’s chamber opens

oth sigh and begrudgingly step over to the next window where, at the very least, our favorite pharmacist is waiting for

know what you’re in for with this one.”

ntal and spiritual sensitivity, potential euphoria, et cetera, et cetera?”

a blue bottle of anti-sabe. Never needed to take one of these–we have a stockpile at home–but who knows what we’re

e one who needs it, not me, so I tend to keep my mouth shut, even though I get the feeling that you just like the color

7 l take this,”–you shake the bottle of sabe–“do as much debauchery as possible and pray Dionysus shows up.”

I love you, even if I don’t understand your proclivity for ancient rituals, or for that particularly festive can of oil or for trip out of this, and who would complain about that? eling it burst instantly, quenching a thirst I didn’t even realize was there. Shrugging our coats on, we step out into the s we enter the platform, much warmer than the outside. The melting snow trickles down every inch of my body, form-

ce Dionysus to come to us? And why Dionysus, anyway?” My knowledge of religion is limited, especially when it

y, ecstasy and theatre–in more modern terms, the god of hedonism.” d the world outside becomes nothing but a flurry of white. You always scoff at me for marveling like a child at the ity. Right now because of the limited visibility, it’s impossible to tell if we’re moving at all, save for the multicolored

us anyway?” nted to do deep down, but felt too shy to do sober.” You lean closer to me and I feel like I’m in danger of falling headur humanity. Return to something deeper than us, than this. To not give a fuck, basically.” You’re gesticulating wildly

weep us up into ecstasy the likes of which no one has ever felt before. We’ll be greater than.”

I would ask than what, but one look into your eyes, which seem now to be almost tinged with gold–no, they are tinged with gold–and I think I know.

“Okay,” I respond, after a beat. “Okay.”

As I unscrew the bottle and shake two capsules out for you and me, I wonder briefly what the sabe will taste like this time. In the past it’s been peppermint, formaldehyde, coffee grounds. I crush the pill between my teeth and it’s earthy–like cool, damp soil in the shade of a tree in a silent forest; like hot, soupy air teeming with life at the apex of summer; like a creature throwing its head back to let something inside come undone. The taste sends a shiver down my spine, and I sit back and wait for the onset as the train drifts ever onward. Ω.

We’re still on the train when it hits me, right as we’re going through a tunnel. I’m staring at you absentmindedly and all of a sudden the light and shadows flitting across your face look almost gelatinous. I reach out to touch you and the pliancy of your flesh beneath my fingers makes me gasp. Our eyes meet; yours are black holes, like your aperture is at its lowest setting. I want to be pulled into your gravity, my molecules spaghettified beyond all recognition before my mass melds with yours forever at the center of all things. You bare your teeth, and for

8 look how much clearer the image is

9

an instant I think you’re really going to swallow me whole until I register that you’re smiling.

I grab your wrist and I can feel the hum of the train’s kinetic energy contained within your pulse–not contained; just passing through. Something about that notion makes me giggle, and the warmth burbling forth from my mouth expands to form a protective bubble around just the two of us. This never gets old, the feeling of slipping just underneath the outermost membrane of our reality, viewing and feeling and smelling and tasting everything through a warped, thin layer of semi-permeable material.

You pull me through a little when you say, “This is our stop,” and we traipse onto the platform. It’s stopped snowing, and the sun is just now breaking through the clouds. The refraction of the light through the glass dome of the platform is forming a rainbow on the ground right in front of you and me and it takes my breath away.

It’s a sign, I think to myself fleetingly. But even in my altered state, I wave the thought away as irrational. Still, it’s hard for me to tear my eyes away as we walk outside.

The slowly melting snow makes everything look like it’s covered in brilliant, dazzling glitter, or maybe tiny shards of glass. I am afraid to touch anything, for fear that it will crumble upon contact and blow away in the wind, or that I’ll get cut. Everything is precious and impossibly delicate. love u james this is amazing<3

It would be narcissistic to say “I’m sorry,” but I have to do it anyway There just isn’t a way for me to officiate the marriage of pen to paper, fingers to keyboard without saying the words Everything I’ve written, “I’m sorry” Everything I write, “I’m sorry” Everything I ever will write, everything I’ve ever thought about writing, every book I read on writing, every paper, every page, every word I write on the air we all borrow I apologize.

It would be narcissistic to assume every problem has me at the focus I understand I’m not the bullseye at the center of the day’s issues Though it’s hard not to see my shadow on the metal frame that holds the board together I know that’s not correct And for that, I say I’m sorry I know this whole thing I’m doing here, This writing, poems, prose, books, papers, pages I know it’s not up to par Despite the fact there is no par and if there were, I wouldn’t know what it means Regardless, if you’ve ever encountered me, I’m sorry Not for meeting me, not for being exposed to me

Professional Memo to Anyone 10

Not for the being there Not for existing I will never be sorry for that.

I’m sorry for the words I say, the things I’ve forgotten, the ways I’ve spent time you needed The ways I’ve spent the money you saved The ways I subjected you to experiences you could do without And for those who will never read this memo I’m sorry for the ways I’ve changed everything

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Presumptuous of me to say that.

You’d all slap me right upside the head saying I never changed I’ve spoken to a lot of folks with a license I think I can drive until I reach a red light My car breaks down I’m sorry for worrying you If Occam were right, and his razor was as sharp as the narrative seems to claim...

Ignore what I have to say It would save us both a lot of time to replace every sentence, every phrase with an apology Every post I’ve ever made Every tweet I’ve ever written Every poem Every piece of prose Every paper Every page Every word printed on the air we all breathe Imagine that.

Who’s Ever Experienced Me

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It would save us both a lot of time, I think It’s why I do what I do Now I’ve done you a favor And for that, I say you’re welcome Until then, if I’ve ever met you, I’m sorry. asdfasfafasfad Preemptively and retrospectively. falkfjalkfjafa I know the tattoos don’t cover the debt, kajdfkadfjalkf so if I’m needed, asdfasfafasfadfa� lfjlkdfjalkjaf you’ll find me at the fire. falkfjalkfjafajfl�

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by Ariel Leal

NOTE: TW for mentions of domestic violence, dubious consent, and death…

NULLA. The good memories were like a wisp, slipping from her touch. She could hardly remember… Yet, a feeble huddle remained and sparked what little was left.

“Elena,” Cecilia whispered, her voice thin and wobbly against the stark silence. She knocked the girl out of her daze. “Promise me… We’ll always be like this, yeah? That nothing will ever tear us apart?”

Her hand snaked through the bright blue sheets mounted between them and her pinky stuck out from her palm like a twig, thin and crooked. She stared back at Elena so earnestly, eyes wide and honest. The way Cecilia’s eyes shone struck Elena with all of its purity. Bottom lip trembling, Elena had to bite down on it to keep 12 it from shaking too noticeably.

Oh, Cecilia was approaching her so sincerely and Elena couldn’t even make such a simple promise. She knew things would change, very drastically and very soon.

“Sure, Cece,” she murmured, casting her eyes down. She coiled her pinky around Cecilia’s and stared for a moment at their intertwined fingers. If only it could truly be this way forever.

Then there came the bad, bumping against everything in that cramped head of hers. They became the things she wished she could forget: her first time, when she’d been sober enough to realize she was hooking up with her friend’s boyfriend but not sober enough to care; the harsh words Cecilia spat at her when Elena told her she was leaving again, this time for good; the time she’d seen her friend get hit by her boyfriend, already bruised lip bursting open again like a popped seam. Yes, there they were.

So many regrets.

However, Elena was about to forget the one thing she needed to remember the most, the one answer to everyone’s question that night: her death.

Doobie brothers.

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Charybdis I am ten years old when I begin to ration my portions, for I cannot quench the thirst nor may I end the cravings for flesh whose bits hang from my lips in crimson chunks and I do not stop myself from tugging the handle and filling myself like a car thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gone so long without gasoline and I wail when I feel the

bubbles forming beneath my skin, searing my insides till the bile billows out from between my lips and dribbles down my chin

and i am twelve when you point to a girl my age, much thinner and say about three of her calves can fit into one of mine as if you are taking inventory And i cannot stop the cravings and the crumbs on my sheets as i shove wrappers under my bed in hopes of you never coming across just how much I consume and I grow till I look in the mirror and wonder why my body is so encompassing so space consuming, swallows everything around it and i feel better as i vomit because i will no longer pop with my skin as thin as that of a balloon and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s good and my limbs stretch with age and i fill so deeply with

water that when i move i ripple into everything around me and i thrash

and i pour myself into others so i no longer have to see the sullen, bloated face in the mirror and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s good and my mother looks at me with fresh eyes yet a monster can only go so long without the sinewy lumps of meat so i gorge until there is nothing left so my stomach wails yet again and i tear my skin apart to feel small like i was before. The dizziness is gone but the vision of myself becomes clear: limbs the size of tree trunks and flesh gurgling, multiplying until the whole sea is full and yet i churn and churn. what a wasteful (wasted) creature i am. ty helen

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i stopped attributin bc im lazy but yall know who u are

also this design sucks and i canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t find my knife tool!!! fuc

Dear God, I think I Got A Faulty Body, I wOuldLike To Return tHis One Please Alternately titled: is this a joke or not? i will tell you when I’ve figured it out When I was a boy Each time my parents turned their back I would pull the kitchen scissors off the counter with the most miraculous clang!

And race into the bathroom Kick the door behind me and push the lock And then i would stare in the mirror and cut my hair to the skullscalp An older time, when I was younger and sharper and less wry When I did not wear my body like it was rented from a costume shop When I was one thousand bees living inside the body of a boy Buzzing and aching and waking early to explore I closed my eyes and something happened that I did not see I think people can be like the auto update on a cell phone No one wants the uninstallable amazon sports calendar taking up more space Once my body was nothing and I could dance and move and feel Something updated without permission and now The processing speeds are too slow I tried to delete other programs to make space to function, But the shitty app keeps auto updating And growing bigger and bigger and filling me up @ God where is settings? How do I turn off auto update? Can I switch to a newer model?

I wish I was Max from Wizards of Waverly Place because I would like to be stupider than I am now. Max didn’t15know how to spell his name and neither do I. Max was a girl and then he was a boy again. I want to waltz in and out of my life in the same way Max popped in once an episode.

When I tell my mother I’ve been wearing kippahs for 15 years, she cries “Don’t make any decisions you can’t undo” As if anything is actually reversible.

Ha ha. If I could reverse anything, I would reverse install the stupid app taking up all my space Sometimes, when the dark is early and I’m wrapped up in sweaters that were never meant to belong to me Smoking one hitters out the window I feel there is a minty chill in the air Like when you spot your ghost from 50 feet away Someone is looking for me And I don’t know his name yet

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omg this is so badadlsfa asldfajslkf lollll

It starts with wearing basketball shorts to ballet class Maybe it starts before that When my fingers clung to the kippahs before every Shabbat service And i would sneak them home and wear them in the bathroom mirror I close my eyes to see clearly and I taste mint When I got lice I don’t think I’ve ever been happier Than when my mom pulled scissors out of the kitchen drawer Clang! -- a miracle And snipped away everything she wanted me to be When she was done I took her into my room And showed her the drawer Where all my stolen kippahs were wrapped in a reversible Lion King pillowcase She brought them all back to synagogue the next Saturday So I don’t think she knew what I was trying to tell her It starts with wearing basketball shorts to ballet class It starts with quitting basketball because they wouldn’t let me play on the boys team It starts with wrapping myself in sweaters and smoking one hitters out the window.

It starts and it starts and it starts. It begins again. It begins again. It begins again.

In Wizards of Waverly Place There was a whole season Where Max became a girl And one day I turned on the tv and he was a boy again 17 I missed that episode I think I need to go back and watch it.

I want to see how they fixed him.

Fix me, too.

When I walk, I am something gentle and unpredictable I want to feel that something exists in the space between my cap and the bottoms of my shoes I sense the beginnings of something there It ends on February 1st When I resume construction on what I always believed would stay half finished I can’t return this dumb stupid body that should have been Max from Wizards of Waverly Place because I don’t have the receipt And I don’t work for Disney channel And neither does God. But I am installing an upgrade I’m setting this shit back to factory settings Don’t you want to hold me close?

I’m about to become something new.

heartbreak to those who fuck milfs with bpd a mouthful of flowers, all pricking my tongue, all with roots in my stomach, all winding through my body, all feeding on my blood an empty house with new paint but a door off its hinges and blown out windows a staircase that creaks in the same place where we once kissed my cold, lonely hands looking at bruises on my chest put there by someone else’s mouth and being glad that the yellowing skin blends with my natural tone so well opening the door to my room and seeing myself laying in bed, wrapped around a mass of something else, of someone else and blinking away my own haunting, scaring away my own ghost every time i open my eyes i see someone, i see other eyes and they’re not mine and 18 they’re beautiful and they’re not mine they’re not mine they’re not mine not anymore the lost sensation of knowing what being wanted felt like a ghost, kissing everyone it once knew and then forgetting, forgetting and forgetting while everyone cried crying about things she liked, breath catching on every shred that reminds me of her anger about space, about time, about feelings and emotions and the things i did that i had to carve out of myself and drag into the light to be okay with another person in my world about letting it happen a whole heart shoved into someone else’s rib cage for what? a necrotic chest? rotting bones? a walking corpse? its staring at someone else’s hands in the sink, washing off touch and memory and good things, sweet things, honey and milk over and over and over again heads rolling from shoulders over and over and over as i convince mine to stay to stay to stay please stay please please bleeding heart, bleeding hands and washing over and over and asking please please stop this this rolling this wave this storm im done im done sex with every one of my favorite ghosts, every single one of my favorite memories, all of them whispering, all of them still here

m keeping this copy + paste auto-correct

snapping, just snapping, after days or only hours or maybe even weeks of not saying anything of convincing myself of being okay of compartmentalizing and her name maybe pops up or i see something or feel something a pang in my chest where something was the space i carved out perfectly fitting a festering organ or someone elseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hands and mouth and tongue and smile and i lose it i got tearing through my mind iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m sobbing im screaming and all i want is for someone to hit me to beat me up so my outside matches my inside all bruised and beat up and ugly ugly ugly a canary cage with feathers littering the entire bottom but no bones and a soft song bouncing on the bars the same song played over and over again, loud and sad and something other than my head other than words other than how or what i feel the whispers in the back of my brain thinking we knew this was coming, things are inevitable and nothing is forever but this was a small pocket of eternity, sunshine in a rainstorm, a good thing, a nice thing19 becoming soft, dulling my sharp edges, folding myself into velvet and rubbing sandpaper into my skin so hard it bleeds, exposing every bit of rot to the bone of me, for someone else, to someone else, letting someone see that, feel that, thinking i did good, iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m soft now, soft is good soft is new a corpse with a mouth full of flowers, of growing things, of silent things and a bleeding tongue. an empty chest of just flowers, all flowers bright and alive and empty.

by Rosario Navalta

it was in the middle of the night when i killed her / the girl sweet like peaches and soft / fallen from the tree at the right time / i killed her in my bed / underneath the sheets soft / and i whispered her name like a prayer / like a curse / i bit into her skin like fruit / like overripe peaches / soft skin / i wrapped my hands around her neck / i took her breath and came to life / frankenstein’s monster / under the humid cover of an old blanket / my hands dug into a ribcage / pulling out a bloody bird / a singing heart / i crushed it between my palms / smearing an old song on my chest / the girl had eyes like mine / glassy sea marbles / dark / abyss-like / they are the hardest thing about this girl / the hardest part about this murder is that my bed will be a grave / the way it has always been a dead place / the way a blanket will be a coffin / the pillows smell like death here / they smell the way girls are supposed to smell / perfume flowers candy and last breaths / here’s the best way to keep a secret / kill / here’s the secret she died with / she looked a lot like me / the summer after i killed her i20cut off all my hair / i laid her down the way my hair fell / soft / without a sound / a dead thing / a weightless thing / the thing about murder is / your hands get dirty / you look like the girl / the thing about a bed for a grave is it’s six feet / six feet from the door / six feet from my parents’ room / the dead girl is crying / maybe she is my sister / the way she cried is very familiar / echoes of the present / the bird opens its mouth and wails / peach-pretty lips shape a drawn out / mourning / comes and the mirror screams back / the summer after i wear jeans every day / i cut my hair / i changed my sheets /

m

ur d er e r b

rio y rosa

navalta

by Rojanaye Daley

t 3 3 e t h I have this recurring nightmare where my teeth have become loose in my gums.

I clench my jaw as if the action is enough to prevent them from spilling onto the floor, and hold my breath to prevent any prisoners from attempting to escape down my esophagus.

They’ll stack neatly in the pit of my stomach, and I can’t help but wonder if I’ll feel full.

My tongue flounders like a fish out of water as my hollow body rattles like a child’s toy.

In my dreams, my teeth shear against each other until their ridged bottoms are smooth and flat, and slide into their new positions like piano keys. This is my body now.

My gums gape and glide across new territory - empty and glistening, pink and soft.

It’s surprisingly warm for space so empty. I drool and ooze: a living ode to leaky faucets and broken pipes.

How quickly we forget these pews once held people.

My morning ritual consists of forcing my tongue against the backs of 21 my teeth, looking for the one that will incite the mass exodus.

I never find it.

I should be familiar with each ridge and bump along the perimeter, but I am overflowing with the bones of strangers.

I cannot tell you when or where I began this collection, this walking carcass of stolen specimens.

I glue pieces of my parents and fragments of my friends to wherever they will stick and pray that they will stay.

Each crease and seam on the skin captures the shape of a human frame.

I pucker and protrude, the appendages awkward and lanky.

As the gears turn in fashion, I creak and groan identical to old churches.

The tenement is made of porcelain, but it is chipped and worn.

This is not a place of worship. It is not beautiful.

The conglomerate will calcify and ruin.

impossible. this is farewell, after all. to think, all the mothers and fathers putting their children to bed right now, all the upper west side sociopaths drinking a single glass of wine and sleeping in $500 egyptian cotton sheets. all the frigid housewives with botox pussy lips letting their wall street executive husbands get it in for their monthly appointment. that’s violence, is what it is. nyu kids getting drunk off trader joe’s wine and sniffing coke for the first time in some film bro’s bathroom. violence, all of it, violence. and they call us perverse. they call us unnatural. filth is my politics! filth is my life! what

greater rebellion is there than against our own bodies for our own pleasure? what i wouldn’t give to see the village when it was still ours. before all the rich white fags and teenagers leeching off mommy and daddy’s credit cards drained it of culture, right? but that’s what’s impossible about it. in the absence of suppression, in the era of assimilation–where can our people be found? in the glistening behemoth that is the williamsburg whole foods. god, don’t remind me. i hate that thing. i wouldn’t call it an absence of suppression either–a camouflaging, rather. ah, but of course. as long as the banks sponsor our parades– as long as we have rainbow liquor bottles to drink to death– as long as the streets aren’t running red

the am dre se ctora y e u ho es fa d th ur s o o k jamnk g eck e loo ies. h tha n’t c plac mov e, a ic ins s s did . thi ies in is lik mu nequ this o . d s t a ID par place gag man tulle am. just y e e y lik this lad s and and e dr ink. hiske t you a in s t , x p r no e-er bble late ol pi d a d g. w chri no teal s all u s ’ n m fameo. b l and scho i nee getti jesus il. i’ is a ty. it i o r y vid in dle k? ’re g. or pb bil with d v id rin ou ron ot 8 ssi an y m a d er y t’s st e m an $ po our k m t v , i i i is m an ate ul, ’s l an an blood– we u w h ef at me is yo e w car g. th . i nk have nothing to com. h i m n e r g plain about. we have it get cok iddi thou ed d d k x good, really. we’ve made so much an en’t ning 8 mi r i progress. by distancing themselves from we pla an $ m . the dykes and fags and sissies. we’re the disco city s graces. we’re the ones in hiding. and you know t hi what? good. everything is perpetually decaying. everything is perpetually in motion. everything is always an emergency. it’s not all lost. here we are, despite everything. does your collar fit okay? it’s perfect. i run my fingers over the links absentmindedly sometimes, when i’m out at the grocery store or in lecture or on the subway and it’s like you’re there with me and i can’t help but smile. i love you so fucking much i could consume you.

read clockwise :>)

22

TO THE BONE

by Helen Porskova

read the rest of dreamhouse here:

When mother passed, I expected the skies to wail in retaliation, waves thrashing onto our shores like hands clawing to reclaim her flesh.

She died on a Wednesday, when the sky was clear and the birds were chirping. I guess that’s what bothered me the most. The water was still, without a ripple, and it was ill-fitting for a tempest held together by a woman’s skeleton.

It was almost as if she hadn’t died at all.

We held a small ceremony for her, by the pier, where I could hear the water lapping for her. Soft, sloshing sounds that would lull me to sleep as a child. It was almost as if the sea was spitting something out, dribbling it down its chin.

And then the night came. It felt wrong, really, to just go to sleep so soundly while my mother was rotting beneath a mound of dirt.

Odd. Even odder was how calm I felt, nothing at all. I thought my mother’s death would shred a hole in the fabric of my soul, caught in the meat of my ribs and scratching against the rest of my bones.

Nothing.

That night, I dreamt of younger days, chewing the nails on my fingers till I bled.

“Mother,” I cried out when I saw cerise pool at my cuticles. She looked up from the novel she was reading, eyes blank like an unplugged television’s screen and glasses perched so far on her nose I feared they’d fly off.

It took her a minute to register the thumbnail poised between my lips, but as soon as she did her fingers hopped from the page to my face, shooting a searing pain through my cheek and past my irises. The gesture felt as if it shifted my very skull within the confines of my head.

She lost her page. The glasses fell. My jaw gaped open.

“Stop that!” she said, a few seconds too late. The words themselves would have sufficed.

Krrr. Krr… I stirred awake at my desk, hardly recalling dozing off. It was almost as if a fog had fallen over me.

Yet, I realized the very thing that had woken me up was the creaking against my window pane, as if something was trailing along the glass.

My brows furrowed. I stood. The dust in the room from years of neglect swirled above me, like moths to a flame.

By the pane, I realized the scratching sound grew slower with my approach and what appeared to be thin white worms crawled against the glass with each movement. Yet, when I saw they were connected by a knuckle, I made out that they were not worms at all, but the severed, lifeless fingers of my mother prying into the window of my house, leaving thin impressions upon the glass in her desperation to wake me.

Outside, rain poured down in dark globs of water, slamming violently against the top of the house. The wind nearly blew my mother (or what remained of her) away as the fingers, severed from their owner, stood and trembled on their own.

It poured and poured, as she clung desperately to any budging surface she could reach, until, finally, with pity in my heart, I allowed her in. I threw the windows open and let the rain splash over me, chills racking my body.

The hand scuttled in, shyly at first, testing each surface it stood on by tapping. Tap, tap, tap. Krrr, krrr, krrr. A scraping that 23 made me shiver.

Her nails were so long, unlike mine.

Thunder clapped overhead and my eyes grew wide, not from fear but in awe at the justice of god. My mother would get the funeral she so greatly deserved, simply after nightfall, the only time she had to herself. Of course, this was it!

The rain was a welcoming sensation, bathing me, cleansing me, making my skin pearly once more.

I threw my arms and head back, listening as the panes of the window slapped back and forth against each other with the wind, listened to the inescapable commotion of the heavens claiming something I never had the chance of fully knowing, and felt hot wet tears slide down my face, into my throat.

My mother, the one who had hugged me, caressed my hair, slapped my hands from my mouth, pressed a finger to her lips to silence me once I got too irritating, my mother was gone. And the relief and the sadness and the grief all clambered out past the windowsill, trailing alongside the facade of the house, and down onto the path below. And, with a sudden crack, I peeked down and noticed my mother’s pale, fleshy hand, melting into the Earth before it as if summoned by her beck and call, just as I had once been. * My father had not taken her death nearly as well as I had. I recall this the next morning, spurring me to take him out to breakfast.

“Pretty wild storm last night, huh?” I mumbled at the table, reaching for the ketchup near his elbow.

“Storm?” he answered, pursing his lips. “Darling, you know it’s not the season. There was nothing last night.”

I watched as he said these words to me, ignoring the shape and sound of them, only registering the bits of grey bacon stuck to his teeth like bits of carcass. My lip twitched, and my hand slithered out before I could help it to whack his chin.

“God! Rena, what’s wrong with you?” he bellowed out, clutching his face. The whack was not nearly as hard as he made it out to be.

“I told you,” I replied, poking my fork into my eggs and feeling more at ease when the bright yellow liquid poured out of the yolk. It spilled all over my plate. “I hate when you eat with your mouth open.”

Abyssus abyssum invocat.

creativity final: bussy Jonathan- too high to fuck???? boochie

“Poor things,” Edna murmured, eyes tracing the twitching wings of the bugs lying on her windowsill. She let out a heavy sigh, sinking back into the sheets with the weight of grief pressing against her chest. “They’re all dying out before it gets cold.”

The man beside her, Jonathan Van Ness, raised his eyebrow at the statement, though he didn’t ask any further. He never engaged Edna in times like this. He would always ignore her after the sun had set, as if she were an apparition only ignited by the daylight. Melissa if ure out there...

Edna and Jonathan Van Ness had been married off a month ago, with Jonathan Van Ess eagerly sweeping her into his arms when the pastor finally finished his lengthy service. It was as if he couldn’t stand to be so out of her reach for even a second. Yet, he wouldn’t cast her a lingering glance that same night.

He’d only love her in the rare hours, when the sun was swimming alongside the horizon. Even then, Edna was too anxious to enjoy whatever affection he’d dole out 24 to her because she knew it would melt on her tongue, never lasting till the daylight.

Without a word, he turned onto his side and flicked off the light, sending the room into darkness. Edna sat there with her hands folded into her lap, feeling as if something were sitting on her chest and would no longer allow the air into her lungs.

She lay very still until sleep blanketed her.

Jonathan did not speak to her the next morning, though she prepared him a grand breakfast of his favorite sausages alongside eggs she cooked to perfection, making sure no bits were burnt. She’d risen early despite knowing she hadn’t gotten enough sleep, the circles under her eyes having already permanently settled into her skin.

He ate it silently and read the rest of his novel. Finally, when she made to move his plates, he tugged her down by her shirt lapel and pressed a sloppy kiss, one that tasted of yolk, onto the corner of her lip.

“Thank you, my love,” he murmured. The words ignited a light within her as she recalled their fonder, younger days in which he would press loving remarks into her skin at any opportunity he could. He loved her. She had been loved, and there had been something to live for then.

Perhaps it could return.

Edna felt stupid much later on, when the couple Jonathan Van Ness had been friends with since college came for dinner, settling in the wooden bench across from them and slouching all over each other. Edna sat stiffly, not daring to lean on Jonathan Van Ness in fear he’d briskly shoo her away in a display of being repulsed by her very touch.

“Jon, darling,” Mrs. Albright chimed in to the chatter, once both couples settled into giggling about the capers they used to go on within the campus grounds. “Do you remember when you stole those exam notes from our professor? The old fool

had absolutely no idea!”

Mrs. Albright was very refined, with cherry red smeared over her lips, a sharp contrast against the painful white of her teeth. Everything about her was meticulous, articulate, and well-formed as she absolutely charged through the dinner hum with her charm.

She was a spout of gold, brilliance pouring from her mouth, leaving a trail of crimson along the tabletop.

“Edna, dear,” Mrs. Albright exclaimed, turning to the girl. Her long fingernails tapped against Edna’s knuckles when each gaze turned to her. “You would not believe the stunts he pulled.”

“Oh,” Edna answered, flushing at having everyone’s very sudden attention. She pressed her wine glass to her lips and chortled into it, praying no one expected her to say any more. She could not live up to Mrs. Albright’s charm, and she noticed Jonathan Van Ness’s gaze dim at her inability to participate in the conversation.

After the main course had been served, Edna was shrinking into herself with each casual touch Mrs. Albright placed onto her husband, and the way he would languidly lean to her, as if she had been the one for him all along.

“Dessert,” Edna murmured to herself, some primal urge within the back of her brain yearning for any excuse to escape the room. “I’m going to get dessert.”

She ignored how hot the dish was, not yet ready to be tugged from her oven, clinging to it as her palms grew too hot to take it. She dropped the dish slightly when placing it on the counter, and cursed to herself as she saw the jelly dollops shift slightly on top of the pastries.

Ignoring how it burnt her flesh, she scraped the two ruined pastries out and flung them into the trash bin, afterwards correcting her hair as if to conceal her distress from witnessing all she had tonight.

“Here they are,” Edna announced upon entering the room, feeling a chill come over her at witnessing her husband’s back huddled over the Albrights as the missus was displaying something in her purse to them.

“They’re a bit hot.”

25 It did not matter… They had not heard her. :3333333 and future and present u :3 “Oh, Edna, darling, these are lovely!” Mrs. Albright exclaimed, slamming her purse shut before Edna could peer over. “I’d love to take a bite. Could you bring the tea out?”

“They’re too hot,” Edna could not help but begin mumbling at this point.

“Speak up,” Jonathan Van Ness said, voice stark and slicing through her. “You know I hate when you speak under your breath.”

“I’ll get the tea right now you dumb fucks whom i hate,” Edna replied, forcing a cheery grin that nearly split her face in half. She padded back into the kitchen, eyes fixating on the wall before her as she poured into the teacups for each guest. However, a scream caused a crash and she stared down to see she had dropped the tea kettle onto the counter, with the glass shattering below. Shiny white porcelain glinted at her mockingly.

Ceramic roses littered the floor from where they’d bounced off the cutting board.

Lizzie sexy

No

i hope this is absolutely unreadablew

THE BOTTOM OF EVERYTHING James Factora

Inspired by “At the Bottom of Everything” by Bright Eyes Characters: Laura The Stranger The Flight Attendant The Pilot

read the rest here.

SCENE: Lights up on the empty coach section of an airplane.

Slowly, people file in, find their seats, stow their carry-ons, sit in silence or mime conversation. The last to board is Laura, wrapped in a brightly colored 26 coat, roller bag in hand, backpack on her back, both of which are visibly stuffed. She stumbles somewhat breathlessly into the center aisle, panting as she scans the seats to find hers. She straight-

ens a little as her eyes light upon her seat (the aisle seat), shoves her carry-on in storage and her backpack under the seat in front of her. The Stranger sits in the window seat in her row dressed in all gray, his only defining characteristic being how unremarkable he is, seeming almost to blend in with his surroundings. He stares out the window, expressionless, stiff.

PILOT (off-stage) Goooood evening folks, and welcome aboard. This is the flight to JFK in New York City. We’re in for the long haul–21 hours, weather permitting. And it looks like it’ll be quite the bumpy ride– lots of turbulence. So get comfortable, buckle in, get to know your neighbor, and we’ll be in New York in

here’s what to do with your big heart:

by Rosario Navalta you break it. / break it over and over and over again for people who never wanted you or thought they saw the light in you, fleeting and beautiful but bright enough to be there. maybe they saw something flicker in you, saw the living of you and thought “mine” and thought “I have to have it” they saw the birdsong in your throat and thought of you in a cage, day after day, singing and singing and singing until the birdsong is an echo and all you are is a fistful of feathers and bone. turn it into something bite-sized, something you could swallow whole and still want more of. / turn it into loaves of bread and fish and feed a mountain while you profess the way you love. hand it over willingly to the first person who asks, melt it down and smith it into too many coins and devalue it. turn it into a commodity. crash your own economy, raze your own palace, kill a god for your big heart. / feed it to hungry mouths with your own quaking hands. smile the blood in your teeth away and sigh love into everyone’s necks. call it love and soak in it every day until your skin melts off and your hair falls away. you have a big heart and you don’t deserve one damned bit of it./ love people who only want you for a month. love people who only want to use you because you care. love people in a way that is so forgiving that you are dying with an apology in your throat. love people love people love people. call it love. call it living. call it okay. / you watch a movie with people you love and a character gets yelled at for not accepting the fact they are loved and you feel something like your name plaster itself all over your skin and the sluggish dead thing in your chest climbs almost out of your throat but you bite down fast enough. /you have a big heart so you rip it out with your hands and you can’t find ways to make it whole so instead you try to give it to other people. / you have a big heart and it makes you dough and people make their finger-deep impressions in you. / you have a big heart and it hurts so much all the time. / you have a big heart because every time you rip a part of it off it grows back dammit why won’t it die why won’t it stop why is it still there, still alive, still almost-whole i’m tired of being almost anything. / you have a big heart and people keep telling you it’s a good thing and you don’t how to say you wish you couldn’t feel a damned thing, you wished you never decided to love people because you are selfish and the poorest man in the world and all you want to do is keep giving so now you’re only part of a person. / your big heart is not an honor or a good thing it is a dead thing it is an unsustainable thing it is polluting my air and drenching my streets in acid and sadness and you’re never angry. / you have a big heart and it beats a death march you’re the one marching and you know you will die eventually and soon but not before you suffer and all your energy goes into marching and not into being angry so you’re never angry. not really. you’re always sad and always on the 27but your heart is too big and everyone will always know it is you. verge of disappearing somewhere else /you have a big heart and here’s your secret: it makes you want to be cruel. it makes you wish you were cold and biting and angry so angry but instead you are just sad because you love so much because you give all of yourself to people and you don’t think you deserve to hear your own name leaving the tongue of someone who loves you. you don’t think you deserve to be surrounded by people that only want to love you. you don’t think you deserve a second thought and you don’t think you just feel and all you feel is sad and you call it love. you say you love it you love people and you love youloveyoulove till you’re nothing but and love is all consuming. it is the fuck that won’t leave it is the plague that exists in arctic ice the cockroaches at chernobyl. it is the feeling of falling in love with the person who is trying to suffocate you with your favorite comforter it is knowing that for as long as you live, you will always be a victim to your own body. your heart has never been yours and that’s the shit that sticks that’s the rotten middle of it that this glorified muscle, this disgusting mess of a living dead thing, my frankenstein’s monster of resurrected misery and lovelovelovelove, that you don’t think you deserve one to the point of it no longer being yours. / almost twenty and your heart is so big and so full of everything you don’t deserve and i don’t know how to look around a room and accept it all, the idea that people want to cherish this thing. the people who won’t eat my heart or covet it or be greedy for it that are just happy that i am offering, that want to care for it in the way that means it will survive. a big, biting heart that counts out its own death march, that plays russian roulette where the barrel has bullets in every chamber made of my teeth, that would rip its own atriums out if someone would ask that doesn’t want to be alive. that wishes it were deaddeaddead an old birdsong, a forgotten smell, the last touch of someone who loves you, the last time someone breathes your name with want in their voice. cont. next pg

cont. hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what you do with your big heart. give it a name. let it stumble like a newborn babe into the eyes of anyone who would look at it kindly. let it learn love from people who donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know how and then let it drench itself in its own blood. let it bleed all over the place and stain the sheets and feed itself to hungry mouths and smile with bile in its throat. let it be a bleeding, open, festering wound. let your big heart kill itself. call it love.of

are tje [po;lka dots on the dge too tacky? eh

28

IDEA

FAULT

i tried.... polka dots?! i guess so

Rosario Navalta 29

Rosario Navalta Rosario Navalta

Nava lta Rosario damn this amesssssss but love u rosario

Star wars fanfiction #32 (milf) :0 I refuse violence.

When I rip you into nothing You will smile and thank me for it.

When I create nothing, the remains Find a way to become again, I will make you one with the wholelifeforce of the planet Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t you yearn for it?

Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t you need for it?

Smile wide and Wet your hair.

30 Your toes lift away from what is known Consume the concept of destruction In the moment before you are pulled under If you listen to the conch, I will tell you: Seek weightlessness elsewhere I am too diluvial to renounce your offering.

Hold caution when you wade into my deep. I am going to swallow you up.

Tempest?

More flooding imagery ? :) Feels like a god giving advice to the reader who plays the role of hero

The narrator is above it all

I refuse violence - i dont care about ur problems :) sweetie :) Keep subtlety --- maybe diluvial is too obvious ?

More mischievous energy?

The woman on the couch rests in the haze of the blue light that bathes her, a lone floater in the ocean of advertisements.

The television remains a quiet murmur as Ten Easy Ways to Prevent Yourclick

by Ro D a l e y Local woman findsclick The best sleep in your lifeclick -on one of our couches, money back guarantee!

She’s fallen asleep on the remote, again. I wonder how long the tv has been watching her, night after night, flipping aimlessly from one conversation to the next.

I can’t help but admire the commitment of her exhaustion. It’s been weeks since she’s made it to the bed, just two flights up. Today’s suit miraculously turned into tonight’s pajamas, a miracle that has become too common of a sight. I wrestle with the remote, scared to wake her. click.

“I was watching that,” she says, stringing the words together as if her mouth was full of cotton. Her eyelids flutter, and the guest of the couch gently wipes away the tears welling in the corners of her eyes. “Why did you turn it off?”

“You have to be up early in the morning Mom, you can’t keep staying up so late.”

“It’s nice to turn your brain off for a moment, you know? Just forget about your own problems and focus on someone31elses for a while…” she began again. “ I think I deserve that much. That mess with my sister, and you know all about the drama at work.

I just can’t have five minutes to think about me, just focus on me.”

“And you know sleeping on the couch always hurts your back- you can’t keep doing this.” I’m nagging again, and she’s too tired to listen.

“I love you, do you know that? And I’m sorry,” she says as I wrap my mother in her favorite blanket, tucking in the strong arms that once put me to bed.

“It’s okay, please don’t be sorry. I’ll see you in the morning.” I kiss her gently on the forehead, and wish her sweet dreams.

mm

-Caring for each other dynamic?

-Show more of relationship bt narrator and mother?

-Reference brain paragraph and

My family was born in Vietnam: my mother in Saigon and my father in a rural village whose nearest city was Nha Trang, the capital of Khánh Hòa Province in the southeast region of the country. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, both my parents’ fathers were jailed, catalyzing a post-war displacement that landed my parents in Morgan City, Louisiana, where my sister and I were born amidst the familiar humidity of another country’s South.

From the beginning of my life in America I felt enclosed by my queerness. It was a peculiar displacement that, like the humidity in Houston, Texas — where we moved when I was three — engulfed and shrouded every aspect of life lived gay and Vietnamese. It was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The suburban space of our empty two-story home felt doubly foreboding in its blank austerity, simultaneously acting as a space for freedom while enabling self-delusion.

When I was 5, the family took what would be my first and only trip back to Vietnam. Over the course of a summer, we revisited my paternal grandfather’s home32in the countryside where several contractors and village people were working to renovate a once bare-minimum shack of clay, wood, and bamboo. In Saigon, I stayed in my mother’s childhood home where her second oldest brother’s family now lived. The 550 square feet apartment was small and full, housing a shower that stood without so much as a-tiled divide next to the toilet.

The city roared with tempestuous sound as motorbikes flew by me in traffic. The air felt perpetually caked in dirt, dust, heavy with the sound of honks both verbal and motorized. “Tránh ra!,” loosely translated as “get out the way!” echoed in waves as vehicles dodged pass one another. They, barely missing streetside vendors and their large plastic buckets sitting like traffic cones colored in bright red, orange, green, and blue.

The shimmering heat of that summer carried through to my childhood in Texas, beating in self-same intensity, while I channeled an understanding of secularity opposed to love at home. My uncle, a pastor at our predominantly Vietnamese church, told stories of his devotion to God weekly. By the time I was in school, that intensity of devotion had already fractured my queerness as a Vietnamese-American, a product of two cultures. This fractured identity further complicated as I came, amid suburban seclusion, into my own understanding (and/or misunderstanding) of gender as I had been taught.

In Vietnam, I had seen the male contractors, uncles, villagers, and my paternal grandfather at the helm of it all. While the women and children stayed inside, they reconstructed the childhood home where my

father and his siblings used to live.

In America, I had seen sermons absent of women in the pews, only to find them in the dining area preparing meals for post-spiritual edification. It was like their own salvation didn’t matter. They’d perhaps taken a separate course toward paradise.

Instances of cultural interaction with strict binary gender roles confused my understanding of a world that became further displaced as I entered the public school system. From a young age, as I think it is with most children, I had apparent ambiguities in gender expression: a pair of heels (gifts from family members in Vietnam) here, a costumed dress there.

In my displacement as a Vietnamese-American I found ways to express myself freely beyond the gender binary.

It’s in this confusion of perspectives that I grew up hearing the stories of my family’s transmigration. This was the foundation for a Vietnamese queerness naturally concomitant and paradoxical.

36 years later, amid the first snowfall on another foreign land, I’ve puzzled the loss of queerness within the traces of my familial lineage. I am on Long Island, 35 miles east of NYC in the suburbs of Hempstead. Under the auspices of religious conservatives that have served as community and cloister to my extended family, any vestiges of queerness have either been erased, closeted, or denied in their various forms. The responsibilities of this inheritance are lost among the already countless losses of diasporic displacement. I’m trying to say that diaspora doesn’t have to be/isn’t all lost. It is a gift, it is abundance, it is multiplicity and it is me - Vietnamese and queer, twice displaced and twice gifted identities that wear and strain on one another like polar forces. I am saying that my family was born in Vietnam, that I was born in America, and we are together born from both.

33

draft 3 i think of this piece:

it me- Dan. Love, me stream:

CAERUS “Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, ‘The night is shattered 34 and the blue stars shiver in the distance.’

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.”

Pablo Neruda

I.

Ants.

Theo’s eyes couldn’t help but flit to the three ants squirming across the kitchen cabinet as the bugs trekked towards where Bruno was hunched over the stove. The space was far from pristine, but it’s not as if they had ever resided in luxury.

“Are you sure you don’t need my help with anything?” Theo inquired from where he hovered in the doorway, gaze directly trained onto the flame that was cooking potatoes.

The flame was probably much weaker than Bruno had anticipated. Still, he made no indication that he was struggling with any of this, singing nothing but praise towards the apartment even though his grin instantly fell upon entering.

Either way, it was just a temporary residence until they adjusted to life in the capital and paid off the last of Theo’s university fees. Well, hopefully.

“Nope,” Bruno chirped, glancing away from the stove for a moment to flash Theo a grin. “Just take a seat. You make me nervous when you breathe down my neck like that.”

Theo sighed, swiveling and moving into the entryway where the boxes stood. There were only three of them and they hardly had any possessions within them, considering they left their home in such a rush. It was mostly clothes and books, nothing they would’ve wept over if they lost.

The apartment only had one room, which Theo and Bruno had to share with a narrow hall leading into the kitchen and a bathroom once one got past the entryway. The wallpaper peeled to reveal a second older skin, and the tiles were grimy beyond cleaning.

Odd stains decorated the floor where Bruno spread a blanket for Theo to sleep on for the night and a jacket for himself. No matter how hard Theo argued with him about it, Bruno insisted he felt too warm to use the blanket.

Thankfully, Theo observed the ants didn’t extend into their bedroom.

He gazed out of the window into the dark alleyway below their apartment complex, lingering as he realized this was not the countryside he was used to. This was a city that 35 could devour him given any chance it got.

The brothers settled onto their makeshift table which was simply a box Bruno emptied the contents of and placed into a corner of their cramped kitchen, spreading their food out on a set of paper plates.

In truth, Theo had not had an appetite for a while now, yet Bruno was insistent that he get some sort of nutrients into his body. He dumped the potatoes alongside a mix of carrots and green beans he’d made, though there was not nearly enough for both of them.

Theo’s hand shook as he scooped the food into his mouth, and Bruno eyed him for a moment before piping up, “Nervous?”

Bruno didn’t need to ask, really, considering he knew Theo better than he knew himself.

His brother had a bad habit of asking obvious questions, though.

“Of course,” Theo replied, releasing a weak chuckle. “Wouldn’t you be?”

Bruno shrugged. “You belong there.”

Theo wrinkled his nose, murmuring, “I belong? I’m going to stick out like a sore thumb.

All of these kids went to elite training schools. What if they only admitted me as a mistake?”

“Mistake?” Bruno raised an eyebrow. “Theo, you worked your ass off to get into this program. That’s more than I could say for the others who had their admission handed to them on~

e 36

I couldn’t fit these guys but scan and read em here!

“i would be okay impostor syndrome with just this” The Smell of Peaches

zine no.1 190127

REMNANTS