Five Quarterly Fall 2014 by Five Quarterly

GUEST EDITORS Samantha Bignola is an Assistant Buyer at Mulberry North America. Matt Nelson and Jacob Perkins run, operate, over-cooperate on Mellow Pages Library and have published fiction most recently in Hobart Pulp and the Brooklyn Rail, respectively. Brook Stephenson is an educator and cultural critic practicing creative writing, photography, videography, and journalism, is putting the finishing touches on his debut novel and is founding a writerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s colony. Billy Wirasnik is an award-winning sound designer based out of Boston. His work has been heard in film festivals in Pakistan, Brazil and throughout the United States. He is the sound designer of the Emmynominated and Peabody award-winning interactive documentary Hollow. Leslie Yoon is a native Southern Californian living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She is a former journalist, currently working in Post Production.

FOUNDERS Vanessa Gabb + Crissy Van Meter

STAFF Jessica Gray

COVER PHOTO Cristina Sciarra

POETRY Beasts in the Orange Grove Chase Gilbert page 5 Columbus Day Karen Ladson page 6 Inverted Aubade for my Scopophiliac Vincent Toro page 8 Waking Up Next to You Kyle Kaczmarick page10 The Speech Bubble Fattens and I Have Increasingly Less to Say Peter Cole Friedman page 11

FICTION Wake with the Devils Remy Barnes Klein page16 Tides Jeremy Cohen page 31 Pike Place Sara Flemington page 39 End Pages Katrina Johnston page 45 When We Hit the Water Meredith Turits page 52

CONTRIBUTORS page 60

POEMS

Beasts in the Orange Grove Chase Gilbert Two Australian sheep herding dogs, brother and sister and inseparable, held domain in the citrus grove off Treasure Road. They were mean and too smart, had too many teeth. They murdered whatever they could, always some animalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s scared blood on their lips. There must have been bodies decomposing in the dirt, feeding those trees, getting into the pulp and juice of thousands of oranges, cumquats, grapefruits. They would corral me, charge, and break away at the moment I accepted death and made peace with the odd moments of my life. After, they always looked back, always wanted me to know they could have, if they wanted to, and maybe show me, in one gray eye and one brown, that they had killed men bigger and less deserving than me, that their land was fed with the left-overs of old trespassers. I met their only master in that grove often in late darkness, smelling orange blossom, hiding and being too young to keep the world fair. I always expected their teeth from the darkness, not seeing the real danger, the once-sick girl, picking fruit and chiding her puppies, begging them to please not be so cruel.

Columbus Day Karen Ladson

When you have a miscarriage, do it on a holiday. There are more taxis than people on the streets, but they won't see you, banshee in a t-shirt. Run instead. Your jarring footfalls will help. Run to the VA Hospital, clutching your belly like a water balloon. They will turn you away Run further uptown. Run to Bellevue. It's suitable there. Explain what's happening in detail so that they'll be sure to help you. They will. Lay on a gurney for an hour in the emergency room. Realize that the triage nurse is the barfly from your corner pub. Turn your head. Turn your head so that she won't see you. She might want to talk. You want to talk. Ask for a phone so that you can call the father. He will tell you that he might come by, after dinner with his family. His brother, his mother. This helps. This helps you to let go. When you are admitted, lie awake all night. Worry helps. Worry works. Make sure that nobody comes to check in on you. The next day, you will find out that there is nothing to worry about. Nothing to let go of. Reassure the procession

of friends who come. Your best friend will bring you lotion and a book. The man you thought you would marry brings oranges. He remembers. He cares. He asks you why you are here, if you will be all right. You won't know the answer to either of those questions. The father will arrive last. He will tell you, I'm not going to marry you or anything. You will thank him for this. When they take you upstairs to scrape the phantom in your womb clean, cry. You have failed even at this. Â Â

Inverted Aubade for my Scopophiliac Vincent Toro What thorny impotence has steeped you into this kink? So this is how you want me-‐ veiled, stripped? For what boils you is leering at an exposed sliver of waist, a birthmark that protrudes from a naked heel. Your cool fetish is to slip me your card and your keys, promising me I can take what I want, go where I please, while you bug my bodice. Is this what inflames your collar? Perching the circuitry of your mineral eye across the street from my place of work? Leaving recipes in my sock drawer? Does it stiffen your iris to gaze at me molting from the puce dress you gave me on our anniversary, poking your head out from behind the face of a week old newspaper? I would offer you the chance to taste my tunic, to weigh me on the marble slab of your lap, but I’m afraid for you contact is as thrilling as a wart. You covet not to pet me but to collect another pet, to have my aroma pulled over you without having to accede to the oil of touch. A ribald murmuration, you demand for my no to mean yes, use the words probe and investigate as lurid dalliance, a skein of surveillance tapes uncoiling, lavender scented creams applied to cloaked domains. You pretend to be absent when 8

I wipe the soil from my neck, tell me this is the last time, it’s over, until tomorrow night when you return to peek from behind the bushes in my front yard. I’ll leave the bedroom window abreast, because your paranoia is foreplay, the tight clamp of your taloned pupil peeping through a bramble of firewalls keeps us both panting. And I’ll complain that you give me no space, but it would dismantle me if you ceased to feel me up with wire taps and seize my passwords because you are certain I’ll find you milksop and stray. Would it tingle you to know it is our safe word? If you ever came to corner me, to blow in my ear, would you know how to unwrap me? Would you be sated? My darling devourer, trust the explicit kisses that I press into your monitor are for you and you alone. Now start the tape. Hold yourself, pulsing and firm. If you promise not to finish too soon I promise to share with you every curve and crater of my most lambent moon as it abates.

Waking Up Next to You Kyle Kaczmarick A giant saturn inside of me rotates and there is a tournament of heart In the morning I was listening to the birds whistling to each other. The sky marbled into another dawn. I want to go back to sleep They made on the kylix a miniature massacre in black and how many lifetimes later they are still fighting but the light through these broken blinds is ragged on my bed. Hermitages in the dark are bits of haven, the men slept easy for once, without nightmares they sold their souls for the world so that they may have chances to get them back I remember the dream clearly though I told myself to forget it: our dreamselves can be so much ourselves that they look foreign in ourselves, in our landscapes, our unknowns; they can do what we could never, yet they always feel as we could feel and we have to watch them, hurting, until we wake. Then we will be hurting. But I am here now and when I love, it is simpler than what I love. It may be myself wanting to be simpler More mornings to come or just wanting us to be simpler to each other.

The Speech Bubble Fattens and I Have Increasingly Less to Say Peter Cole Friedman Give me a cardboard cutout over an avatar any day. Momofuku has tricked me into thinking milkflavored ice cream is new. Nothing turns me on more than soft core danger. I get off on hiding. Peep. James Franco is the performance art of performance art of not being art. Let's die while helping the cashier bag the almond butter. We're cursed in a good way. I don't want to leave this boat unless there are free pretzels. I butt-dialed the pope because my anger at foresight is religious. He picked up, miraculously, and even said something about MetroPCS and unanswered prayer. Yesterday, a butterfly landed on my shoulder. Sometimes, that's to be expected. I named it Mary Oliver. "A good poem should be as confusing as an ice cube in nature." I'm paraphrasing here. I mean there, there. My hedonism has gotten more and more allergic to bad Chinese food (as if I were an authority). I put air quotes around "air hockey" like it knows. Listen, I'm dumber than you think. Did you hear that? Sometimes I go to Taco Bell and just ask for the sauce. Let's watch the Nightly News together with a total lack of concern for humanity. I'm holding out the deep-fryer because I don't know how to be in a relationship with these hands. It's ok to be scared of spiders. Just don't let it screw with your career path. In other words, you should still floss for the interview.

But if you know you're going to die tomorrow why are you reading this? Sometimes I sit down on my laptop and just grind. Ideas have to come from somewhere. I can feel myself wrinkling like someone else's skin. Quick, quicker. It's hard to imagine Martha Stewart in booty shorts. But someone has to do it. I want to do what the Grand Canyon has done to all hearts ever to yours in a tweet. I want to flip pancakes in our rented Miata. Why are you crying? The GPS said make a left, but when you go left, there's just a room full of doves. It's very zen is a thought I've had after almost everything lately so I know it's bullshit. The symbols in my allegory are: Blueberries, a Scottish Terrier named Mr. Coil, and AIM toothpaste. I've decided to start coming up with the symbols first because the world moves like a light sabre. What a whiz. I'm going to buy you a dictionary and flush it down English's favorite toilet. We're getting close. I'm Instagramming your turtle because our web-presences are growing apart. It happens. One day, our love is a Top 40 hit. And the next, we are cleaning up Michael BublĂŠ's echo chamber with a rabbit's foot keychain. I should draw a map or something. Nope. Take off the goggles. Yesterday I did something original. I put Nutella in Nutella in your stomach. There is turbulence and then there is turbulence. This was both. Like reality and reality tv making out

for the paparazzi. Except it was pitch-black. Except Kim Kardashian spoke like Kourtney Kardashian. If I were a sorcerer, I think the first thing I would do is make everything a spell. When I kiss you it's because I'm pissed about inertia. Every noodle is connected. So Lady and the Tramp are reinforcing a false binary. And that's just what some kids watched in the 90s. Hinduism says it only gets worse. As far as Hinduism goes, I like Hinduism. If it's too soon to go back into the pool then maybe eat your boom box. I feel like burping the Frank Ocean version of your coldest thoughts. Summer needs to work on its beach body. That's what I mean by a tasteful but overcast sky. That's what I mean when I finish your smoothie with a sentence like "the blender is floating away." Like most things, I look better in calligraphy. I look better with my head detached. But my blood and I had this pact. We both feel emotions at the same time. I pick up the clock. Nope - it's not that. I'm pretty fine on my own, listening to Alan Watts lectures on YouTube. It's the rain I'm worried about, how it must feel responsible for all the deaths related to Seasonal Affective Disorder. It's ok. It's funny. It's S.A.D. I'm with the rain. I'm crying. I couldn't tell you the difference. I bought you this apple. Please don't go crazy. Unless it's nutritious. Unless I'm the pyramid. And that's years from now anyway. Ray Kurzweil-style. Ozymandias-style. I do wonder if names, if names in art, do that, like the orange in Easy Mac: sustain. But I think either way it's nice for people to drench each other

in their time. It's the log flume in us. We're all wet before the ride. Mostly I save up for nothing and count the ghosts on the way home. And there's something to be said about keeping whatever-is-before-almost well-shined, kissing before the light changes. That's why I'm smoking this cigarette like its sex. And I don't even smoke. Did you know that?

FICTION

Wake with the Devils Remy Barnes Klein I don’t believe in God, and I don’t believe in ghosts, but someone was leaving these notes in my mailbox. I came out on the awful hot day, soaking my shorts through and on the verge of losing last night’s dinner. I don’t drink anymore— not since the accident— but like a phantom limb always itching, I wake up every morning hungover, breathing nails with hammers in my skull. I can’t shake it. Doctor said it happened when I had my tumble but I say its penance. I went to the mailbox. Sometimes I’ll get a letter from my brother. On the 15th, I get my settlement check. Usually, I just let the thing fill up with sale flyers and the mailman will eventually toss them for me. I opened the flap and inside was a wrinkled old envelope—looked like someone had crumpled it, tossed it, ran it over, tried to smooth it out and used my mailbox as a trash can. People don’t know, but tampering with the mail is a federal offense. It can send you up-water for a nickel if not longer. I’m not too keen on the particulars, but I know it’s illegal. I didn’t want to touch it. There was a smell like burning tires coming from all around me and I thought I was going to lose my guts right there on the front lawn. My neighbor was standing in his baby blue bathrobe watering his daylilies. He gave me a weak wave and furrowed his brow like he was looking at a son he didn’t care much for. The sun was so damn hot and my neck was burning. Hot, salty beads of sweat pushed out from my skull and ran all down my face and into my shirt collar. I grabbed the letter anyway. On the face, someone had written Cutty, my name, with beautiful penmanship. It looked like the type of handwriting on the notes girls would pass me in grade school. When everyone was writing in script because it was the new thing we’d learned.

The C had this little spit curl curling into its mouth. The u blended softly into the two T’s and the Y had a big loop under it. The sure strike through the T’s streaked like a jet trail across the yellowy envelope— the final act of the writer before sealing. I almost smelled it, expecting the lavender-rosemary blend I was used to, but stopped. My belly groaned like it needed to be fed but I knew better. I stuffed the letter in my back pocket and held onto the top of the box. A fetid sour-smelling mash came leaking through my teeth. The tinkle of my neighbor’s hose stopped. He was just staring at me with his finger off the trigger, his mouth all agape. I took a moment to look him in his eyes before I went ahead and purged again. The long trail of chunky liquid darkened the gutter as it made its slow crawl towards the drain that’d take it to Lake Miccosukee. Maybe a couple old coots were out there, drinking beer and talking about the nasty things they’d do to the old biddies and the young ones too. I liked the thought of that. I gave the two-thumbed-A-OK to my neighbor and waddled back towards the house. Viscous liquid bubbled into my throat. I opened my shirt pocket and spit into it. Wet warmth spread across my breast and I went inside the cool, darkened house. +++ I opened the tap and ran some water over a half bowl of dry cereal. I stopped buying milk because no matter the use-by date it always tasted sour. I kept going back to the market to return cartons I was sure had gone bad. The last time, the manager opened up the paper fold and slugged one right in front of me to prove it was fresh like straight from the udder. I can still see the skinny trickle of white liquid working its way down his laugh lines. I had to find a new market to shop at after that.

I poured a cold mug of day-old coffee and sat down at the dining room table. I kept two of the four chairs so I had a seat for ass and feet. The other two I chopped up and burned. While I was crunching on a mouthful, I pulled the letter out of my ass and tossed it onto the pile of past due notices and greeting cards from holidays long past. The bottom of my name kept staring at me from over the Formica and I figured, what the hell, I might as well open it. Not like anyone’s going to pop out or anything. I tore the tail off. Inside was a piece of folded line paper. I read it out loud because no one else talks in this house and sometimes I get lonely.

Hey Cut, You ever listen to those old records anymore? The ones we’d put on and dance to ‘til all hours of the night. Otis and Zeppelin and what was that horn record? Man, the neighbors used to hate us, huh? I’d like you to remember the good times, Cut ‘cause I miss you like crazy.

That’s all it said. No more no less. No name underneath it. And I wouldn’t lie because I used to be a Christian. I had my hand gripped around the page so hard it was beginning to tear under my fingernails. The sweat from my palm was soaking into it. I knew those records backto-front and could probably pick and play any song off the four of them. Those were Bets’s favorites. She wore down the grooves on all of them, dancing around the house in pink panties and a Bud Light t-shirt all cut up, showing off her tanned belly. We had some good times, her and me. Drinking ourselves to sleep and making love with the windows open. All of creation could hear our nasty, bodily noises— honks and clucks and moans and guttural grunts.

Most of my records I burned in that brick-lined pit in the backyard, but some I just couldn’t bring myself to toss in the fire. I spun Been Loving You and let the needle find the groove. In the old pressboard wood-patterned cabinet above my record player, I kept a bottle with a sticky note that said In case of emergency. I cracked the top off and poured half a finger into a dusty shot glass. Most drinkers are seesaws. It’s a little here, a little there. I’m a slide. Or, I was a slide. One of those fast aluminum ones we’d grease up with petroleum jelly when we were kids. I saw plenty of bloody skin back in those days. You’d come out of that slide doing maybe twenty-five and hit the gravel pit. Tear up your jeans and your shirt. Catch tetanus or a bloody nose. The liquor smelled like old oak and gasoline. I set it down on the coffee table and set myself into the cream-colored leather couch cracked like the sides of my eyes. I wrung my hands until they were raw and wet and the wrinkles in my knuckles refused to smooth out again. If I wanted to have a sip, here in the light of a letter from my dead wife, I think I should be allowed. No one, not even God, would deny me that, right? I put the glass to my mouth and breathed in the pungent astringent, and then I dumped it into the carpet. I poured another shot, and did it again. I ditched the shot glass and dumped the bottle onto the carpet like it was the back of my throat, until it was darkened with the liquor. I rubbed my toes in the soggy puddle and laid my head back on the couch. There’s a scar on the top of my head where the hair doesn’t grow anymore. From a time when Bets and I had been fighting bad and she whomped me with a Dirt Devil. I touched it with the tips of my fingers and soaked up the noise of the soul music. The record got to a spot where the groove was all the way worn down and started skipping, the same five words over and over: I got ta have it. I got ta have it. I got ta have it. I decided I couldn’t be in the house anymore. Not

with this ghost flying around. I slid my belt between the loops and my whiskey damp feet into my boots. I let the record keep on skipping and left the house. I went walking and passed another haunted house. See, back before I was lonely, Betsy was getting high with the girls across the way. They were in college and boys with different lengths of hair came and went at all hours. They did all manner of unspeakable things and spent all their time naked. They’d gotten their claws in Bets and she was naked most of the time too. The three of them would play ring around the rosy in front of the house and all the Samoans and neighborhood rats would come and watch. Broken bottles and glass pipes burned at the ends laid all around their yard like glittering bones. Bets would come home smelling like an old tire and burnt hair. If you’ve never smelled bad drugs, well, that’s what they smell like. There was a mother with a young kid living there now. I saw them in the warm light of their living room watching the tube through their old green drapes I helped them hang. I used to do handyman work for a living. I still do here and there but not as much as I used to. I took a bad fall on a contract job, hit my head pretty hard and shattered my pelvis if you must know. Ended up getting an all right settlement. I hung with the woman and her kid a few times too, you could have maybe seen my body between those drapes if all had gone right, but nothing ever sparked. I’ve never mentioned all the bad that went on in the house to them. The soles of my feet were sticking to the bottoms of my boots and they began to itch as I walked in the heat. I walked all the way to town. I live pretty close, not more than a half-mile or so.

I went to Frank’s Place. It was empty except for this young girl in the back. An older guy behind the counter recognized me and smiled the sad half-smile of sympathy and regret. He offered a beer but stopped himself and set a mug down in front of me. The coffee was cold and tasted burnt so I asked him to freshen it up. He poured some steaming liquid into my mug but it tasted the same. I paid for the coffee and left. A few folks honked their horns at me and gave the two fingers over the wheel. I stuck my hands in my pockets and nodded at them. Something about the sun and the folks was making my head spin. Somewhere a car alarm was going off and somewhere a dog was barking and the new competing noises made me sick. Everything drained me. I went home and rubbed my toes in the damp whiskey spot and took comfort in the television talking. When I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore, I slept. +++ I woke up feeling like someone had pulled weeds in my head and stuffed cotton balls in my mouth. My house smelled like a party I’d wished I’d been invited to, boozy and bready with beer and whiskey. I looked out the window and it was dark out. I wasn’t sure if it was night from the earlier day or if I’d just lost a whole day. I’d lost a lot of days like that back when I was drinking. The thing about when you stop drinking is, suddenly you’ve got to find all kinds of new places to hang out. It’s sort of like when you move away from your religion, a thing I also did, and everyone asks, “Where you been?” You have to answer all polite and vague. Or you can be honest and they’ll laugh you out of their address books.

When Bets passed on, all my drinking buddies and all the church biddies were trying hard to crease me into the fold for good. Here in my Great South, we do beer, then we do church, then we do beer again. If you don’t do either, you may as well lock yourself in the house and draw the shades. I walked away from both of them and never went back. That was that. Now I’m a man without a country. Just floating around my house, shiftless and idle to the eyes of my town. When I do go out, I usually go to the library because nobody knows me there. I’ll chat with the librarians and ask them to recommend me a book or two. I think maybe keeping my nose in the books kept it clean in the hardest of times. Maybe I traded one addiction for another. All I know is nothing there reminds me of the past and I like that. I got up off the couch and went outside. I thought about hoofing it to the library but it was probably past close. The tin mailbox drew me in. As you might have guessed, there was another letter in the box, my name written in the same effortless script. I tore the envelope open and let it fall into the street.

Hey Cut, Remember the time we went out and hit the beach late late that night? I did that to you and the sand and we forgot about all the hard times for a while. I never told no one about it.

I folded the letter over twice and stuck it in my back pocket. I got in my truck and decided to go out for a ride. It’d been a long, long time since I’d done some cruising. I stopped at a gas station and got a bottle of ice cold Coke and pressed it to my temples to ease the sweat and pounding. I took a couple of turns and time seemed to stretch out long and lean. There was a

song I liked on the radio and I turned it up. Before I knew it, I’d ended up at the gravel before the sand, the parking lot before the beach. Like the damn letter was pulling me along. Bets and I went to the beach a lot in the bad old days. I could never convince her to put any clothes on, and the only place other than the camps out in Tate’s Hell you could go stark nude was the beach. Most nights, I’d pack her into the Dodge and we’d go driving and I’d try to get her back on my side. I really don’t think I tried hard enough. I cranked the truck into park and got out. I recognized an old Japanese beater in the parking lot, a blue cross hanging from the rearview. I’d sold this car to a guy I knew in high school. I once went for a ride with him after he’d had it for a while and the car reeked like chemical blueberry. Nothing had changed, but everything had changed. You get it? The moon was high up behind some clouds casting silvery beams of light just barely illuminating the coast. The tide had pulled itself all the way to the other side of the Gulf, probably to Louisiana or Texas somewhere, leaving sand bars out for a hundred yards. The water was calm and black as an oil slick. Someone was a sucked on chocolate Popsicle way down the coastline. I rolled the cuffs of my jeans to my knees. There was a vertical trail of handprints and footprints all down the thick sandbars like they’d been doing cartwheels out towards the water. I followed them for a while. There was a time when Bets and I made something like love here. She was screaming about how she wanted to fuck the beach, fashioning a long rod out of handfuls of sand, trying to sit down on it. Her pubes caked in tiny crystals. She let out a mean cackle every time she dropped down on the sand dick. She kept building it up, and then busting it with her ass. She was breathless when I came to her. Smelled like ocean and musty sex. She pulled my jeans down, got me up, clapped two handfuls of sand on either side of my organ and sat down on it. I told her she

was liable to catch something doing as she did. She shoved two sandy fingers in my mouth and got to her place. That was the last time, I think. I walked way far out from the coast following the trail of hands and feet but they disappeared into the silent black water. I looked back and could just see the reflection of the moon in my headlights but the beater was gone. The wind changed directions on me. I picked up two palmfuls of saltwater and slicked back my hair. +++ For the better part of three weeks, the letters came every day, sometimes twice a day. Sometimes it’d be one letter; sometimes it’d be a whole bunch of them. All with my name in the same, perfect script. Same lined notepaper torn lean from the spine of the same notebook. A couple of sentences detailing places, events and times Bets and I had shared. Little slivers of conversation and code no one else would know but the two of us. The mailman caught me and said something like; you got a secret admirer or something? I thought I might have been going crazy so I called the preacher though I hadn’t been to church in over a year. All he could muster up was, “Sometimes God comes to us in mysterious ways.” Then he said there was a group meeting in the basement on Thursday with punch and baked goods and I could come if I wanted. I thanked him and hung up. I’ve been to meetings before and I didn’t care much for them. I can’t see coming clean to a bunch of church folks all sitting around with their hand’s clasped together like if they squeezed hard enough all the wanting and pain would drip out on to the floor before them. On the bright side, I was getting out of the house more since I couldn’t stand to be in the presence of all those letters. I went back to Frank’s, drank more coffee and had another sandwich.

I hoofed it out to Lake Miccosukee and went fishing. Dale Pendleton was out there and waved me down and we sat in his boat for a while. He drank beers. I drank Coke. We both spit over the sides of the boat. Neither of us caught shit. We talked like two guys who hadn’t told anybody anything for quite a while. He told me about his divorce. I told him about the letters. He asked me why I was keeping them and I told him I couldn’t say but I guess I felt a closeness to something I hadn’t felt in forever. I even went out on a job. Nothing too heavy. I replaced a couple air filters for this old biddy down the way and she paid me in cold water and stamps. I told her to keep the stamps but she pressed them on me. I told her I hadn’t been having the best luck with the postal service. I came home and started emptying beer cans into the rug when someone knocked. I ignored it. Salesmen still come to this part of the world. Jehovah’s Witnesses too. I guess they’re both selling something. I’m not buying either of them. I don’t care the quality of cutlery. The guy knocked again and I told him to fuck off. I heard them doing something to the door and some keys jingling. “Alright,” I said to the house. I went to the door and opened it up. There wasn’t a soul in sight. They probably heard me walking heavy and scattered. I stepped out into the bright-blessed day. The neighborhood was quiet. There was a note taped to the door. No envelope. Lined notebook paper. I plucked it down. All it said was I’m sorry. I’d gotten a few of these before— tear-stained, a couple of them downright damp. I crumpled this one up and pitched it into the yard. I went into the house and stuffed the letters into paper bags. Cleaned up the whole mess of them and found a patch of carpet I hadn’t seen in a while. I took them out to the back yard and

put them in the center of the blackened brick-lined pit I’d burned half the house in and set them on fire. They went up quick. I thought I’d feel something when they were ash but nothing came. The ones at the bottom of the pile were going up and this tiny voice said, “You missed one.” I turned around half expecting to see the ghost of my last good girl. But there was this little pale thing with her arm out. The crumpled up notebook paper in her fist. She was familiar to me. Black eyes like the ocean at night, bags you could camp in under them. The right side of her face— stretching from the top of her ear down across her cheek to her chin and lips— was all puffed out and scarred like someone a long time ago had dragged a hot iron across it. Her hair was shit brown and chopped up, longer in some places than in others like a blind man had cut it with safety scissors. The girl motioned with her hand, “Take it,” she said. “Don’t you want to burn it too?” I plucked the crumpled paper from her fist and chucked it into the dying fire. “I been sending you those notes.” Her eyes were getting all wet and she was shaking like the cold had come early. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know,” I said. “You said so in the last letter.” I jerked my thumb over my shoulder. “I just burned it.” She gave a weak laugh and unsnapped the top two buttons of her white blouse. Rings of sweat dampened and darkened her armpits. She sat down in one of the crumbling blue folding chairs I kept around the fire pit and crossed her ankles. She pulled out a small metal flask with some initials engraved into it and took a pull. “You’re the last person I have to make amends to before I can move onto the next step,” she said. “For my treatment. I’ve done everyone. My mom, my dad. They were the first. Then a

bunch of the guys I diseased. Jesus. Their wives,” she pressed her hands to her face. “Those were hard. I ruined a few lives. You don’t know how that feels,” she said and looked around the yard. “Maybe you do.” “Looks like the treatment ain’t going so well,” I said and nodded at the flask. She took another pull and laughed, “It’s a different kind of treatment. I don’t know why but I thought the letters would help. Thought I could ease my way into it. I guess I got drunk on it. I’m not brave.” I squatted down next to her and made line drawings in the dirt with my finger. I remember the night I found out. It was like I was looking down on myself looking down on it. Like I was two removed from the whole scene. I saw the ambulance, and the fire truck, and the two cruisers, all making lights in the cool night, but nothing else. It was as if the emergency crew was down their having beers together or something. I came down the hill a little more. My legs like jelly under me. The guardrail going over the bridge was broken; a metal gash like god’s hand came down and tore out a chunk of it. There was this old dude with a bunch of crusty blood in his eyes sitting on the bumper of the med wagon. He was saying something. I was close enough to hear it. “She was flying through the air,” he said. “I thought for sure the rapture was happenin’. This angel, nude as her birthday was hovering over my ride. She hit the ground after the truck went into the drink. Most sickening sound I ever heard in my life.” Betsy had been in the bed. They found most of her washed up down river. Animals had torn some pieces from her but they told me she didn’t suffer. She was gone long before the water took her out. The truck was laying chassis-up in the bend under the bridge. One of the girls was

crushed. Her chest caved in over the steering wheel. The truck must have landed square on the driver’s side. They didn’t find the other girl. I guess for a long while they thought her dead, all chomped up by gators or taken bit-by-bit by blue crabs. I sat down on the grass and kept searching my pockets for cigarettes though I knew I didn’t have any. I thought about going over to the EMT boys because they always have smokes, but I didn’t. I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t speak. Sometimes I think maybe I wasn’t there at all. Like I stayed home and dreamt it, or really did watch it all go down from above. Like a ghost. Like God. I slept in my truck for five days after because I didn’t want to go home. When I finally did go back, nothing looked right. I used to sit on the john and watch Bets yank out all the little hairs between her eyebrows with tweezers, until that patch of skin between her two brown caterpillar brows was bald and red. She’d smooth it out with her finger and smile at me. I did that with the furniture in the house. I just started yanking it out and chucking it into the fire pit until the whole place was as bald as plucked skin. Then I stopped drinking and you know the rest. She offered me the flask and I waved her away. For a long time, I figured this little girl was long dead. I was never handed anybody to hate but myself. Forgiveness is a drug I’d like to get fucked up on. If I could figure out how to uncork the bottle, I’d be drunk on it everyday. Now I didn’t know what to think. “When I came out of the river—” she said, “Well, you know how we were. These two dudes came and found me and brought me back to their place on the water. It was bad for a long time. But I guess I owed them something because if they hadn’t found me something else would

have. After they’d gotten tired of me, they left me at a service station with a twenty and a pack of smokes. I probably would have died from exposure that night after the accident. I don’t hate them. I forgave them.” I stood up and dusted the dirt off my hands. Smoke drifted into the sunlight and the burnt ink smell hung in the air. The girl was staring off into the yard she used to roll around naked in, smoking what she smoked and doing what she did. “Cutty,” she said, “You don’t have to forgive me. That’s— I know you wouldn’t be able to do that. You just have to know I’m sorry.” I wanted to do bad things to her. Believe me when I say this. I could have done plenty. Could have said plenty. I could have told her all about my loss and the life she’d ruined. Drag her into my sleepless nights and force her to wake with the devils I wake with in the pale moonlight. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. She knew it all already. I saw the Hell she’d been drug through in the pockmarks etched into her milky skin and her sleeping bag eyes. I popped the bottle on forgiveness and let it wash over the both of us. I couldn’t even see her anymore, just a great big bright light where a girl used to be. “Maybe I should leave,” she said. She took one more pull from the flask and screwed the top back on. She got out of my chair. “Have a nice life, Cutty.” She began to go but I took her by the wrist and spun her back to me. I drew her in, touched her warmth to mine. She smelled like lavender and rosemary and booze and sunshine. I closed my eyes. “I forgive you,” I said, and kissed her on the bad side of her face. She went ridged in my arms. I ran my tongue along the cloud-soft puffs of scar tissue. I could taste all the liquor on her

pores, the heat of the sun on her skin. I tasted her until she was wet with my spit and the booze was all on my tongue. “I forgive you. I forgive you. I forgive you,” I said. My lips grazed the spongy cartilage on her cauliflower ear. I ran my hands through her hair like I used to do and buried my face into her bony shoulder. “I just hope one day you can forgive me.”

Tides Jeremy Cohen

Elevation: - 24 feet. A tremor. It comes from above, monolithic, tunneling through still blue water, through towering forests of kelp and schools of fish shattered into streaks of color — yellowtail, surfperch, jacksmelt, twisting to silver and gold as they reach upward, into the light. - 168 feet. Deeper now, the water darkens and begins to clear, the swelling waves begin to slow its descent. Before long all that remains of the maelstrom above are a few lines of bubbles, razorsharp, billowing from the car that has just come crashing into the ocean. Strapped into the driver’s seat is a thin, middle-aged man, his mouth shut, his skin diaphanous, his black hair undulating gently. He makes no effort to free himself from the sinking mass. As the current pushes through the open windows behind him, sheets of paper stacked along the back seat begin to flow outward, fluttering at first but quickly picking up momentum, entire reams sweeping silently into the surrounding depths. - 112 feet. Print-outs of hundreds of paintings, ink dripping and faded, form spirals of white rectangles around the car. Goyas and van Eycks, Dürers and Ensors, Böcklins and Delaunays and Whistlers all begin to melt into one another, their figures and landscapes giving way to the steady gyre of the rising tide. A balcony overlooking an invisible scene, a streetlamp’s orange, enveloping radiance, the pink and ochre hills of some ancient, imagined Italy all bleed together, their colors leaking from soaked sheets of paper, their lines warped by the water that presses and runs through them. + 52 feet. Hans Breinlinger, Urknall, 1958. I came across it by chance, in a private collection downtown. The gallery must’ve exhibited it for about a month. It caught my eye as I walked home from work one evening, even in the dark, even from afar it couldn’t be missed: the Big Bang, that primordial blue flash, that early unraveling of the universe. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I’d take the N-Judah down to Market Street, ask politely to have a look, wanting nothing more than to watch it from afar, to feel its colors resonate within me. Fire and light, bursting with compacted energy into space’s empty expanse. After a few weeks, the owner began to grow 31

weary of my visits, or suspicious, smiling blankly as I tried to explain, likely wondering if I’d come back again or how he’d get rid of me if I did. I stopped going once he threatened to call the cops. Still the painting consumed me; I’d spend hours searching for photographs of it online, scanning through broken translations of German websites for some detail about its creation, looking for anything that would prolong the feeling it gave me — something warm, irresolvable, sublime. + 0 feet. The answering machine gives way to his voice, shrill and indistinct all at once. “Hey, it’s me, hope you’re doing well, hope work isn’t too busy right now. Listen, I was just calling to check up on you, things are good out here, the weather is terrible as ever but at least the commute into Manhattan is a little quieter this way. Everyone sends their love, the kids too. Maybe we can get you out here for the holidays this year, if you don’t cancel again this time. Take care, call me back, bye.” - 714 feet. The car sways along a vertical axis as it sinks. Weighed down by the angle of the fall, the man’s head curls into his neck, and for a moment it seems as if his face has been covered by the oval of black hair that lines the top of his skull. By now anoxia has likely overtaken him; the larynx has stopped contracting, the trachea has closed itself permanently, the lungs have filled with water. Soon, cell by cell, light by light, the brain’s synapses will all have come undone. + 132 feet. I’ll always remember the view from the eighth floor. That blue sky tinted black through the hospital window, something like the lighthouse at Point Reyes, beautiful, incalculable. Sitting in the waiting room with my father as the quiet floats between us, his brow heavy and forlorn, his palms facing upward, resting unnaturally on his jeans; my brother on the other side, staring at the floor, and far away somewhere, lost in the maze that stretched past those swinging doors, my mother inching through a CT scan, lying incalculably still. I had found her just hours before, crumpled against a marble counter, the back of her head split wide open, my brother crying: a stupid accident, nothing more. And now there she was, in that narrow plastic tunnel, radiating as its immense ring spun and whirred around her, as blood carried the contrast solution into her brain, up through the medulla and the cortex, spiraling until it reached the hippocampus and the image came together all at once, ruined and illuminated, on a sheet of black

film between the doctor’s hands. Faint indentations near the cerebellum, found but blurred by the x-ray, as if it were too much to bear, too indecent to project out into the world. ∞ feet. Distance and embrace. The earth and the moon are kept in place by a delicate equilibrium, revolving around a barycenter located some 1,070 miles beneath the earth’s surface and some 2,900 miles from its core. The force of the earth’s orbit, which pushes it away from the moon as they spin, is offset by the moon’s gravitational field, which draws it back inward, pulling them toward one another and the invisible center they share. Were the pull of the moon to outweigh the push of the earth’s revolutions, both bodies would collide; were it to be overpowered, the earth would be hurled into space. - 1,920 feet. As the earth spins, water is drawn to those sections of its surface that face the moon and, on a smaller scale, those that face the sun, giving way to the ebb and flow of tides. Tonight, earth, sun, and moon are in syzygy; the ocean’s reach is at its most powerful, spreading to the highest ground and retreating into the furthest waters. Iridescent creatures, emerging from some forgotten tract of prehistory, sweep by us, lanternfish, bomber worms, daggertooths. Powerful, resonant currents rush in and around the sunken car. It rests crookedly in the sand, half-buried, arcane. 0 feet. I lived on Irving Street, just off of Forty-seventh Avenue. Sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d go down to the beach with an old camcorder, lighting my way with a flashlight that, almost inevitably, ran out of battery long before I’d make it home. I’d start near the Cliff House, following the stone walls covered in graffiti, taping the miniature bone-white crabs as they emerged from the marks left by my footsteps. I’d wander along the shore’s dizzying stretch, shrouded in darkness, stumbling into the water, as if my other senses, far from being heightened by my temporary blindness, had all but come undone. Just before heading back, I’d turn the camcorder to the horizon, zooming in on the waves and the purple-tinged spindrift high above, filling the frame with the ocean, with its oily texture and its roar, until all that remained was a void, and the low-pitched rumble of white noise.

+ 0 feet. The door to my room is shut. His voice comes to me muffled, in fragments. “Hey, listen, I just wanted to ask you about that house... I think it was... where exactly... for the kids this summer... me back, bye.” + 52 feet. Édouard Manet, Vue de mer, temps calme, 1864. Only much later would I learn what it brought to mind, like an unresolved melody, or a note awaiting resonance within a chord. The sight of her collapsed body called out to something that alone could make sense of it, or that it alone could make sense of — something empty and arresting, something only Manet could embody, in the black fleet of his Vue de mer and the skin of Victorine Meurent’s face, in the texture of Zola’s coat and the strange calm of L’Homme mort. It was that color, pure and overwhelming, each ship like a drop of ink, colossal, crumpling inward, the turquoise sea like a vision of death itself. Maybe that’s what Manet knew best, how to turn color into darkness, how to reach the immensity from which experience emerges and to which it inevitably returns; maybe that’s what happened when I first saw the Vue de mer in an old catalogue raisonné, a collapse, my mother’s body and Manet’s ships falling together into nothingness... As destructive as it may have seemed, I wanted only to widen that abyss, searching for that same feeling, for those same correspondences between the past and the paintings I began to collect relentlessly. It was as if I couldn’t comprehend, couldn’t take in what she had been sentenced to, but only witness it from afar, endure it and make it endure in images, in color, in light. + 225 feet. The Point Reyes lighthouse one cold, radiant morning last winter. After some convincing, the ranger agrees to take me to the county archives by Limantour Road on her lunch break. Among stacks of forgotten reports, articles, and injunctions, I come across F. L. Harding’s A Keepers’ History of the Point Reyes Lighthouse, West Marin Press, Sonoma, 1937. + 225 feet. “Marshall Hussey, second assistant to the keeper of the Point Reyes lighthouse, was discharged of his duties on April 14th, 1886. During his watch on the night of April 2nd, sometime between three and four o’clock in the morning, Hussey removed the cover of the station’s Fresnel lens, turning the oil lamp beneath the glass into an immense burning orb and melting an entire side of the lighthouse before the keeper and first assistant were awoken by the sound of his shouting. Upon further inspection of Hussey’s room and personal belongings, it was discovered

that he had amassed dozens of rodents, lizards, and small birds, who wore dresses and lived in glass boxes of varying shapes and sizes, often decorated with curtains and pillows tailored to the type of creature they housed. The animals, he told the keeper, had been trained to live in a human environment, in order to demonstrate the distressful effects of culture upon the nervous and physical systems. Many of the animals found over the course of the inspection had been dead for some time. Hussey, who had no known surviving or extended family, was sent to an asylum in Stockton, where he died without a word three months later.” + 225 feet. “On the night of November 23rd, 1871, Peter Codling and John Chamberlin, keeper and first assistant of the lighthouse, had been assigned to night watch together. Just after sunset, Codling complained of a violent migraine — likely resulting from the sound of the foghorn, which had been ringing every seventy seconds for nearly three days — and asked to be excused to his room to rest, assuring Chamberlin he could make it up to the cliffside without any assistance. When he awoke the next morning, making his way down the three hundred odd steps that lead to the lighthouse, he was stopped in his tracks by the sight of the structure’s roof, caved in and crushed by an enormous fragment of rock which, he would soon learn, had broken off from the cliff and destroyed the room where Chamberlin had been keeping watch. It took six men and twelve hours to recover Chamberlin’s body from beneath the rock. The cliffside was paved over with concrete the following spring.” + 82 feet. I turn onto a winding road that sweeps upward, making my way past rows of crooked houses until I reach the grove of Eucalyptuses that hem in the brownish, run-down condominium where my father moved some seven years ago. He said it’d be cheap and quiet here though I can’t help but be depressed by the place, by its sprawl of strip malls and gas stations and fencedoff schools, by the grayness that runs through it all. It must’ve been around seven years ago that he started drinking, too; took me seven years to catch him, piss drunk on a Sunday morning, muttering about the fog, about its ugly veil — “can’t change it, that’s for sure, just have to sit back and wait for it to pass, maybe drink a bit to give it some warmth, give it some color, can’t lose your balance though, drink too little and you won’t have any fun, drink too much and you won’t know what fun even means, ha!, just keep your footing now, you hear, keep the crack-up on the surface and don’t let it crack open down below” — smiling as he looks up at me, as

laughter resonates through his seasick eyes. We never spoke of it and I didn’t catch him again. Most of the time we were content to sit around and watch the news, occasionally breaking our silence to take Josephine out for a walk along the hillside. We must’ve gone to my mother’s grave twice in seven years. Somehow I think that it was harder for him, that her death wasn’t so much a shock, a fracture, as it was a shift in balance in his old ways — something that twisted his view of the world quietly, without respite, something that warped the bones within him like the buildings without, until one day everything became so mangled, so unrecognizable, that he could no longer look, or even find his way back, to the source of its strangeness. + 0 feet. Again that voice, disembodied now, unreachable. “Hey, it’s me, haven’t heard from you in a while. How’s everything out west? I heard dad bought a dog, the pics looked great. Call me back when you get a chance.” + 52 feet. Once a signal has passed, the printer’s resistors begin to heat, forming the bubbles that press ink out of each of its three hundred nozzles onto an awaiting sheet of blank paper. Minute droplets of color, each one smaller in diameter than a single human hair, rain down by the thousands, tracing an invisible trajectory, a constellation, that coalesces into an image as the machine projects it outward, into the light. Each printed painting is placed atop an unfinished stack, one of dozens that rise throughout the man’s room. As the towers of paper grow, the clock ticks; the printer trembles; the night keeps watch, unflinching. + 52 feet. For a moment it seems as if his car, idling in the driveway with its headlights on, is the only source of energy for miles, the origin and end of light and life around him. He sits behind the wheel with the windows open, cycling in and out of static as he changes stations, looking into his rear view mirror from time to time to check on the print-outs heaped upon the back seat. He stares at the garage door, letting his focus come undone, watching its glaucous lines swell and contract as his vision begins to blur. + 132 feet. The worst part was having to face her. Looking through her empty eyes, holding those tepid hands that seemed closed even to the intensity of suffering. She emanated nothing more than a kind of flatness, her head curled unnaturally into her neck, her entire body like some

crumpled figurine, some cruel approximation of existence, reduced to the visible, to a surface that could never be pierced through. At times I felt as if I were the only one who understood the horror of it, as if my brother were too far away and my father too close, as if the tangle of events leading to her fall had come undone within me, and had brought us together in vast, unraveling solitude. + 52 feet. Francis Bacon, Study for a Portrait II (after the Life Mask of William Blake), 1955. Melancholy, captured in an image. I quit my job the day after my thirty-ninth birthday. I stopped driving to Pacifica to see my father, stopped returning my brother’s calls. I couldn’t understand how he kept going. Maybe it was something in the new life he had sought out on the east coast, with its unfamiliar landscapes, its glow of unknown feelings and faces. I began to turn inward, searching for some new combination of colors to shake me, for some warmth to twist through my gut. I felt as if I had grown into every painting, every sketch and watercolor I had printed out, or as if each one had retracted back into me. My limbs felt turgid, elastic, pale. I began to keep the blinds shut almost all day and night, opening them only from time to time to watch the moon. Soon everything began to feel immeasurably distant. ∞ feet. Our experience of limits within the visual world is neither static nor illusory, neither open nor hermetically sealed. In many ways, the lines we see stem from those we cannot, from the structure of those microscopic entities that weave above and below, throughout and around us. The image is like the amoeba, the parasite, whose cell wall reaches outward to feed and twists inward for protection, hungry and encysted, dormant and expansive all at once. ∞ feet. The contour, then, is the image’s skin, its membrane, tightening into singularity as it gives way to the folds of an unending reality. To delineate is to oscillate — between the inner and the exterior, between the warm tunnels of beating arteries and the glacial blackness of the sky, between the soundness of the self and the din that overtakes it, ever slowly, ever more with each passing hour. + 225 feet. One afternoon, on our way back home, we decided to pass through Point Reyes to try and catch the sunset. My brother sat up front with my father, my mother behind with me. I

remember watching the marshlands spread into the bay as we raced down the highway, their golden grass specked with old farmhouses whose faded, red paint reminded me of the bark of Manzanita trees. The power lines above, stretching between colossal iron towers, seemed to watch over us, to pace us as we accelerated into the coastline’s blurred, shimmering landscape. I don’t remember a single word, not even a face, from that afternoon. All that remains is a feeling in my stomach — something warm, unresolved, sublime, something long gone now. And as I make my way onto the cape, down the furthest reaches of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, I can only wish that it were still here, that, somehow, it hadn’t come undone. All I can do, as I drive into the night, is open the windows and let the roar of the waves overtake me, rising from the ocean far below.

Pike Place Sara Flemington It's hard, when you know someone can hear you, or is waiting for you to finish and do up your fly and flush. And I still can't go in the urinal yet because first of all I'm afraid I'm not tall enough and it's gonna get all over the wall or hit the edge and splash back at me, but also because it's gotta be even harder to piss in front of people who all they have to do is turn their eyeballs to see. But I guess it was because I was taking so long that she must've forgot about me in there. Like got distracted you know, by some fudge or cheese or Elvis garbage. There's lots to see at Pike Place, and sometimes you can even forget to look where your feet are going 'cause your eyes are moving so fast, and you forget to listen to one thing specifically because there's so much noise all at once. And mom was getting distracted easy a lot lately, wandering around the house sometimes like from kitchen to living room to kitchen to living room and talking out loud like “What was that thing we need again?” or “What on earth was I looking for?” and so I guess it's not surprising that she would have followed her head somewhere else while I was stuck in the bathroom for a thousand hours trying to get the piss out. Anyways, so first I stood in one spot by the door to the washroom, because I remembered her telling me to “stand right here and don't move” all these times before, like at the grocery store checkout when she forgets something and has to go get it, or at the laundromat when she has to go to get more coins. And those times she always came back. Or there was even that time at the Aquarium, when she got sun stroke while I was watching the trainer feed the sea otters who reminded me dogs, but dogs meant for the water, and I asked mom, Mom, can we get a dog like those otters? but she didn't answer because she wasn't behind me like I thought she was. So a

different mom with two little kids told me to stay with her and “don't move” until my own mom came back from the washroom. So I'm keeping on standing there but all these big guys were almost stepping on me and knocking me over, like they were getting frustrated with me being in the way, but if she remembered that I was using the toilet, I wanted to be in the exact right place. Because she'd been forgetting more lately too, like where she put her hairbrush and her watch. And sometimes the day of the week, and sometimes our ages, and sometimes when she had to go to work next. And it's not like she could have just written down “Austin went to the toilet” on a Post-it and stuck it somewhere like the bathroom mirror to remember, like she could for other stuff. But then it started to feel like a lot of time had passed, like hours maybe, because I had seen probably like fifty people go in and out of the toilet, and the way they looked at me as they passed by made me feel more and more like I was in the wrong place, and maybe this time was different and I should have been moving around instead of standing still. Mom liked to take me to Pike Place a lot on her days off from work. She said once that she loves the crowds, and how no one is really looking for anything, just being in a place where there's everything. I repeated this to myself lots after, and in my bed in the dark too, trying to figure out what she meant. But I think what mattered more was how she sounded when she said it, like she felt safe. So most times she would bring her big black sketchbook to draw in, and I'd bring my paper with the anchors on the bottom right corner, and we would get lunch from one of the food stands, and mom would get coffee, and we would sit at the lookout with all the tourists looking through the coin telescopes and the groups of older kids standing around in circles with their skateboards. I liked to draw the yachts in Elliott Bay, and mom liked the Olympic mountains, and the fog.

So I decided to go check the fish stand, where we sometimes picked up salmon to take home and cook for dinner. There's a watercolour mom made, hanging in our kitchen, of the fish stand. In it there's a man tossing a fish from a bucket over the counter to a woman on the other side. It made it look soft and welcoming, which I always thought was magic, because in reality the stacks of giant dead fish were kind of spooky and glossy, and kind of hard to look at. Mom made everything look different than how it looked in real life with her watercolours, like she had a special power to see in a way that regular people who didn't do watercolour paintings could. But right now she was taking a “break” from painting. I don't like it when she takes “breaks” because she's “too tired” all the time, and she doesn't put records on when she cooks. So she gets more quiet, and the apartment gets more quiet, too. Plus I always worried that one day she might take a break that never ends, like she'd lose all her powers, and not be able to see again. I tried to follow the smell and the shouting men, but it was hard to track the fish smells with all the other million smells, and the shouts with all the other million voices. And on top of that, I was only four foot one. Most people were taller than me and it seemed like they were getting taller the more I tried to see around them. I kept reminding myself that mom was wearing the light blue sweater, the light blue sweater. But I couldn't remember much else, like what her hair looked like, or her shoes. And the more I tried to see her all put together in my mind, the less I could actually see, until even her eyes didn't have a colour anymore. That's when I got stopped by my own eyes at a table covered in tiny colourful beads. There were rows and rows of bracelets and necklaces all really close together, like so close so you couldn't even really see the white sheet underneath. They were like Petal's curtains, my aunt, who wouldn't let me call her Aunt Petal. Just a bunch of tiny wooden beads all strung up together over her window, as well as some pearls, that I liked to drag my fingers across. I had sleepovers

with Petal when mom had dates, or needed a night to “focus” or “clear out the brain clutter” usually during one of her “breaks.” We would drink chocolate soy milk and watch Mary Tyler Moore until I started to fall asleep on the gushy couch, because Petal put silk scarves over the lamps, and it made me warm and tired. I got lost staring at the table and hugged my arms into my body, like the beads were hypnotizing me, until the woman sitting on a tiny folding chair behind the table asked if she could help me, which snapped me out of it. I shook my head no and she asked if I was lost, sweetheart, and I shook my head no again. I didn't want to look at her because she was so huge, and her boobs were so huge too, they looked like pillows. I couldn't help thinking how it would feel to fall asleep on them, which I didn't think was right to think about. I wanted to leave and never talk to her again, and I also wanted her to save me and be my mom until my real one found me. Then it felt like I was standing on a trampoline with all the people crowding behind me, and I lost the smell and shouts I was following, and then couldn't even picture the real fish stand in my head anymore, just the painted one. My favourite part about Pike Place were the buskers. Mom would give me four quarters every time we went and said I could pick four buskers to give them to, or if I was ever “especially inspired” by a someone, I could give them more than one quarter. I saw a teenage boy who could hoola hoop four hoops at once, and two men with beards who played a banjo and the spoons. And they were all pretty good. But once, I saw girl with a purple dress who tap danced to an accordion player. She moved all of her arms and legs and hands and feet so quick and perfect, like water after you whip a rock at it, and she had a dimple on one of her cheeks I couldn't stop staring at. She's especially pretty, I told mom, and that was the only time I gave

away all four quarters at once. That evening after dinner mom sketched the tap dancer in her black book for me and water-coloured the purple dress. So I was feeling pretty dizzy trying to get away from the bead table and get around all the legs in the crowd, but I thought if I could get out onto the sidewalks maybe I'd find mom getting inspired by a busker. I hoped more than anything that she'd be doing that, so we could go home and put records on, and later I could colour at the kitchen table while she sat at her easel. And it would be fun, and maybe she wouldn't shut herself up in the washroom for so long, or sleep all night on the couch, or misplace her stuff so much. That was when I started to wonder, what if I couldn't find her. What if she couldn't find me. How much time had passed now. Probably like seven or eight hours it felt. I almost thought for like not even a second what if she doesn't ever remember, like that she has a son, but I told myself not to think that and then I even told myself to forget I had in the first place. Maybe that's what mom's brain does sometimes. Makes itself forget stuff, maybe by accident. Then I was wondering so much I forgot to keep my eyes peeled and I walked straight into the big belly of a man who when I looked up at him, I couldn't see his face because he had a beard covering up most of it, and sunglasses covering up the rest, which reminded me of having a nightmare, so I just ran between his legs and didn't look back, as fast as I could even though my own legs felt tingly from being scared. When I finally got out to the sidewalks I didn't end up going very far, because I found a dog that was tied up to a bench and by this point I was feeling so bad, like when I catch mom crying on the toilet, that I just didn't want to walk anymore. I just wanted to sit on the ground with this dog and pet it and make it happy. He was small but not too small, a medium-sized dog, and brown and white all over. I pet his head and thought about Petal petting my head while I sat

beside her on the couch. The dog licked my hand and I knew the answer would be no, but I thought if mom remembers she has a son, I'm gonna ask her again if we can get a dog. I've asked her like fifty times already, but maybe now she'll finally say yes. The dog laid down on the sidewalk and put his head in my lap, and a kid rode past us on a unicycle. And so that's how we all were, when I finally saw the light blue sweater. And all the hours and hours that had passed turned into minutes, and I thought I hope she can see us in her different way, with her powers. I hope her eyes are turning us into watercolours right now. Â

End Pages Katrina Johnston Last summer, at the behest of my parents who claim to be extra busy, I began to shadow my Uncle Bill. But first I had to find him. He's an old retired dude, seedy-looking and enormous. He stands well over six-feet tall. And now he's gone to flab. My mother claims he's not doing well these days. See, he never got married, has no kids. She wants to know everything about Uncle Bill's whereabouts. I think she should just ask him. But it's not that simple with my mother. She angles in with an indirect approach and she develops a secret plan which involves me following him and spying on every move he makes. “Why drag me into it?” I ask her. “I hardly know him.” “He'll open up to you more readily, Roland. Because he's always liked you. He used to call you his favourite nephew.” “I'm his only nephew.” “He won't see you as a threat. You're the younger generation. Besides that – you've got all this unstructured time. You could check-up on him, talk to him and gain his confidence.” “Even if he doesn't like it much?” “At least try. Find out if he rents a room?” She paces back and forth. “Maybe he's holed up in a downtown hostel or some god-forsaken shelter? He won’t share anything with me. I'm worried. He's got no pension to speak of and no source of income. No one to look after him.” She thinks I've got nothing better to do just because I'm 24 and waiting to go back to finish my university term this fall; third year engineering. And then my father tends to avoid the

family politics, so he lets my mother orchestrate the whole thing. I've been conscripted as a detective. I wish she'd pay me wages. Twenty years ago, my Uncle Bill made his living crewing the coast-guard vessels, repairing the local cutters and occasionally an ice-breaker way up north. He's an expert at inboard motors and he served as a marine mechanic. My mother thinks he's slipping into dereliction and probably becoming mentally unbalanced, drinking himself into oblivion. When I first catch up to my Uncle on a late Tuesday afternoon – and it's not easy – he's walking behind Gold’s Gym. I watch him for a few minutes and then I run up beside him. “Hello there Uncle Bill.” “Rollie! How's it going? You still skipping stones at the university?” “Sure. Sure I keep trying to keep up. On a break right now.” He looks okay. I mean he isn't wasted or drunk. However, he does appear a bit unsteady. I detect a tremor in his right hand. I accompany him inside the public library. Bill sits down at the computers located in the foyer and he attempts to log-on and play Text Waterfall which is his favourite online word game. His gaming persona is the 'The Unscrambler.' We talk. I mean, 'The Unscrambler' does. He tells me that he often parks himself at the library. He describes the word game. “Similar to a rapid-fire version of Boggle. In intervals of three minutes, each player forms as many words as possible. The letters tumble down the screen. I'm truly addicted,” he says. “Could play forever and forever.” But that day, his password is denied and his access code completely fizzles.

An angelic-looking library clerk explains it. “We need some kind of documentation with an address,” she tells him, not even looking up at Bill, or at me. “An ID with a proof of residence to renew your borrowing and your computer privileges.” My Uncle Bill leans across the counter. He deciphers her shiny name tag and pours on his honey-coated voice. “Shana,” he says. “Well hello there Shana. I reside at number 712, high in the sky at The Paragon Towers. That's on Pine Avenue. It's a condo.” That's a whopping lie. The Paragon is an outrageously luxurious place. Millionaires live there. Shana doesn't flinch although Bill looms in close and he starts wheezing. Theres a hint of halitosis – his, not hers. “See,” he whispers, “an unfortunate occurrence regarding my wallet. Stolen ID and cash and credit cards.” He snickers softly, almost strokes her hand. Thankfully he refrains. He looks at me and then he winks. Gazing back at Shana, he doodles with his index finger scribing figure eights upon the surface of the counter. “Everything was purloined, but I do have this.” He proffers a routine letter from the gas company which is addressed to one William Stokely at The Paragon Towers. “Pulled it from the recycling bin,” he whispers in a quick aside to me, a whisper that Shana does not pay attention to. “Let's see how this plays out,” Bill says. Because his proof is duly addressed to a person bearing the first name Bill, it works. My Uncle's library status is renewed and he can continue to log-on with impunity and borrow books which he does also, and frequently; at least three books every week. He resembles a muscle-bound wrestler gone soft. He does manage to keep his clothing fairly neat, but his hair’s an unsightly tangle, a kitchen scrubber of dark grey steel wool. He appears older that his years; wears a lot of sweaters no longer stylish, jeans and a wiry beard,

extra short. His face bears ruddy hints of too much drink, but I suppose a stranger might decide he's a down-scaled millionaire as long as they don't scrutinize too closely. On another day when I meet up with Bill, I convince him to go to the free clinic on Walden Street. I thought they should assess his overall condition and check out the tremors in his hands. I go inside with him. They weigh him in at 316 pounds. There is no definitive answer for the trembling. The doctor says: “It's likely too much booze,” and then he closes the chart and says: “Take care.” The clinic aide shakes her head and tsk tsks. She looks down her nose at me as if I have influence. She records Bill's blood pressure and speaks of diabetes and heart disease. I doubt that Bill gives a flying fig for this routine. When she's finished, a volunteer comes around and offers a generous plate of cream-filled pastries. Bill grabs three of those: “Thanks.” Gradually, over several encounters, I get to know his routines. He usually scores a nutritious hot breakfast at Our Place, a shower and hair wash at Cool Aid. Clothing items or personal necessities are provided by the Monterey 'Free' store. Once in a while he manages a laundry at StreetLink and then he hikes over to the Grayson City Outreach Program where the volunteer barber trims his hair and beard. He takes long naps at St. Augustine's or inside the Cineplex whenever he can sneak in and watch the screen or sleep through the B-rated films reeling out in Cinema Five. If it's a slasher flick, he watches. He finds a way to creep inside on days it's pelting rain. I report back to my parents that my Uncle Bill is an expert at availing himself of every possible social service. But I don’t know yet where he actually spends his nights. “He knows how to work the system,” I tell my mother. “Knows where and when to smile, how to go and be polite, and how to act invisible to fade into the background. He gets everything he needs from many volunteers and a wealth of supportive agencies. Bill spreads himself around.”

About a week afterward, I catch up with him again, one late Wednesday afternoon. He's over at the Sally Ann's Men's Hostel enjoying his second helping of the soup and sandwiches. He seems a bit depressed. “Tell you what Rollie,” he says, “I'm drifting. Like a patrol boat without good engines, waiting for neap tides. I'm floating along wherever the waves decide to steer me.” I try to get him into talking about his days on the boats, but he seizes up, grows quiet. He starts asking me about my courses and I don't want to say much either. We share an awkward silence. Later on, he goes up Ellington and we both load up with oranges from the Mustard Seed Food Bank. I leave him as he heads over to the library for a stint of Text Waterfall. Because it’s still relatively early in September and pleasant weather, Bill quite often hauls his butt to the Carnegie Park benches, the ones behind the statuary. He sits there and reads and reads, devouring the library books he pulls from his knapsack. I’ve checked on him many times without making my presence known. He actually studies those books, sucking in the great classics of literature or the learned philosophers. I’ve managed to make out a couple of titles. He’s reading heavy tomes, like Kafka, Proust and things like that. On another afternoon, he ambles toward the library again. It's boring stuff for me. He’s playing the word game until he’s blitzed. The game saps and fulfills him. He doesn’t worry, doesn’t think, doesn’t sweat and doesn’t move his tush. He plays until his eyeballs hurt or it’s closing time. He showed me once, and proudly he did it too, his on-line ‘trophy room.' He’s got six green stars, five yellow, one red, a whole mess of badges that look like half moons, and the status of a ‘champion.' He’s ranked in the top fifty players of the world of Text Waterfall.

It kills another day. I had an easier time finding him the next time. I shadow him without letting him become aware I am on the case. I follow behind, lurking in the alleys, dodging into storefronts, feeling like a scheming private eye, the kind Bill, in his old-time idioms would call a gumshoe. He ambles along to The Paragon Towers. And, yeah, Bill apparently does reside at the luxury address. I stuck around like a haunting ghost. Somehow he’s acquired a key fob. I don’t know how or where he got a hold of that, but it works. The embedded electronics perpetually activate the service entrance. He takes the back stairwell winding down through the parking levels. At the lowest garage, the state of the art security cameras are not functioning and Bill successfully avoids the regular security patrols. And I do that too. It's actually rather easy. He knows his way. Beyond the recycling bins, he opens the door to a storage cubicle, a sort of cinder-block structure which has likely been a build-on for an extra recycling endeavour. Presently, it's not in use. Bill crumps inside. I’m guessing after that, because I can’t see through the cement walls. My parents did not endow me such x-ray vision. I imagine that by the light of fluorescent tubes inside this crazy storage place that Bill reads all night long, straining in the glare. If nature calls, there are sewer grates. The dawn of a new day likely announces itself with whirs and noises that reach into the depth of his dungeon. No one knows he’s living there, reading, thinking, breathing. Presently, he’s devouring an analysis of Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe and a late edition of Plato's Republic. After I’ve been back at university for two months; a little more than that, my mother informs me that there’s been a development. I listen to her carefully. She tells me the whole thing in a matter-of-fact tone with no emotion in her voice. I would have thought she’d weep.

After all, Bill is her brother – or he was. Bless his soul. He must rely upon the heavenly angels for his upkeep now. Apparently there was a new custodian hired at the Paragon, an officious keener who inspected the recycling bins, mapping a schematic for new pipes and solid connections for an upgrade of the AC. He opened the door and found a homeless dude, this enormous guy, unresponsive, like a whale. Bill was pronounced comatose at the scene. Paramedics hauled him out. It took four of them to do it. They pried a library book – Tolstoy – from his hands. He died at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow two days after that, a suspected coronary occlusion. So, I took it pretty hard. My Uncle Bill, a homeless friend. Sure. And I had barely begun to know him. No bed, well read. Now he's dead. They should put that on his memorial. And there are no explanatory notes at the end of his life story, no legacy of my Uncle Bill who used to work the coast-guard boats and read such books. I wish I’d found out more. What’s going on in the next unpredictable chapter? Where will he drift now? I hope he’s playing his word game and winning, everyday in heaven.

When We Hit the Water Meredith Turits Tom is sitting across from me. “I can’t believe she’s gone,” someone says. I think it’s Katharine. I don’t know who it is. It doesn’t matter. We’ve all said it at some point today. We’ve all said it so many times since Tuesday, it’s lost its meaning. Chris readjusts his seat on the splintering wood bench, which is still a little damp from the morning rain, and the other two of us sitting on his side shift when he does. Tom doesn’t move, because he is sitting across from me. Brennan is the first one to touch the food. It’s like he breaks a seal when he reaches for a fried clam. The stack tumbles like Jenga; first, the pile of clams falls, and somehow, the fries below decide to give out, too. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes to no one, his voice clipped. No one decides to reply. He looks around, but the restaurant is empty save for the five of us. Our heads break the fog. Nothing else does. It seems wrong to say there are ghosts here, because ghosts are not real things. Neither are spirits, nor any of the other classifications people want to use. What are here are memories, and things we are not acknowledging because Summer is not here with us and it feels wrong to do that without her. And also, because gathered here, all of us for the first time together in this place in what’s become more years than we can now easily recall, we are not sure if we should remember. If the web that has life has spun, and in cases unraveled, since the last time we were all here is worth remembering. Tom is looking down in his lap until Chris points out to him his napkin has blown away. “Okay,” Tom says. He reaches for a clam strip that has fallen loose onto the table, and drags it first through the ketchup, then through the tartar sauce, leaving a streak of pink in the center of the white glob in the paper cup. Katharine looks up at him like she’s going to say something, but

doesn’t. Tom looks at his food for a while before he eats it. I don’t consciously decide that I’m not going to eat anything, but I know I won’t. I can’t. The silence is hard to avoid, especially as we sit quietly. The small seafood shack on the coastline with its gravel parking lot and outdoor picnic ground—that’s all it is—isn’t usually deserted. This is a place on which we were raised—this was our 6,600-person Connecticut town—and from eleven a.m. to eleven p.m., it was always decorated with at least a few people. People we knew, because everyone knew each other. We passed hours after youth soccer with our parents; walked to the picnic grounds after middle school when we felt old enough to be on our own; when we got our licenses, here was the first place we knew to drive each other. After prom, when we didn't know how to to say the goodbyes that were coming, when we didn’t know if we’d make it through college as couples, when we came here in the dark after everything had been shut down, sat at the water, and drank cans of cheap beer until we fell asleep. “Should we go to the house after this?” Katharine asks. She’s sitting next to Tom. “No,” Brennan says quickly. “Her parents don’t want any more guests. I just—I think we should just kind of call it from here.” I picture the inside of the house Summer grew up in and wince: the staircase at the left of the front door, which led up to the bedroom in which I slept over so many nights growing up; a mental panorama stopping dead on the white wicker mirror lined with photos of her and Brennan going as far back as I can remember. I look at Brennan’s greyed-out face, and he is not the groom from two months ago, nor is he a widower. He is our high school valedictorian. Katharine nods. She and Chris reach toward the pile of clams, and alternate grabbing at the stack. Chris sucks at his straw without using his hands on the soda cup. “Over there, do you remember the—”

“Can we possibly sit here without you talking about about prom night?” Tom cuts in. He finally looks up from his lap. “We’re thirty.” “Jesus, T.J. I was just… I wasn’t—” Tom narrows his eyes. I have been okay—I have been fine enough—until I see Tom’s stare slice into Chris. This is how I know Tom isn’t okay, either. These eyes aren’t Tom’s to make when he simply bristles—this is a look that comes from a place inside him that I had a key to for ten years; that I don’t any longer, but I can still see through the glass. “I’m sorry, Tom,” Chris retreats, and resumes picking at the food. I haven’t eaten anything, but I know it tastes completely different from how it used to. Saltier, maybe. Oilier. All that remains in the red-and-white checkered paper boat that I’ve seen one million times before are a few over-browned French fries and flash-fried clam crumbs, which Brennan ferries into his mouth by pinching the corner of the container like a funnel. “Brennan, Cait didn’t get anything,” Katharine says. “It’s fine,” I say. “I didn’t want anything.” Behind our table, I can just make out the silhouettes of two seagulls picking apart the remains of other visitors’ meals overflowing from the trashcan, though it’s hard to see between the fog and the dim floodlight under which the garbage is situated. I look up at Tom across from me to see his hands clasped together over the table. His eyes are still drawn tightly; his lips gently pursed. He is looking at nothing. “I feel weird not talking about her,” Katharine says again. “Like, that’s what we should be doing right now.” The paper on which Katharine’s eulogy was printed is rolled up into a tube and sticking out of the side of her bag, which is hanging off the corner of the table. She talked about a lot of things. About the three of us girls playing soccer growing up, and about being a bridesmaid for Summer. She talked about all of us together, here.

“What are we supposed to say?” Chris says. “Like, really, what haven’t we said?” “Fuck, Chris,” Tom says. “Come on.” “I don’t mean it like that,” Chris says, throwing his palms open. “I just mean, like, there’s nothing that we’re going to say that’s going to make it better.” “Brennan, say something,” Katharine says, leaning forward across the table to appeal to him. When she does, she obscures half of Tom, who’s leaning back on the bench precariously. Brennan just shrugs. He is spent, and his whole body looks like it has surrendered. He turns to me, but I’m not sure why. I turn to Tom. I can’t think of a time where I haven’t turned to Tom—especially not in this place. Tom gets up with the trash from the table and starts walking towards the garbage pails. The two seagulls scatter. Tom can’t be taller than he was the last time that we were here, but he is. Tom is taller, and he is thinner, but his gait, a rubbery bounce, has not changed. He deposits the waste on top of the trash because there’s nowhere else to put it, and before he walks back to our table, he flips his tie over his shoulder. Tom is the only one still wearing a tie. When he sits back down, the entire picnic table shifts, and we all grab the top board to steady ourselves. “Do you guys want to get a drink?” Chris asks. He looks mostly at Brennan and Tom, even though Katharine and I are included. We play chicken without actually acknowledging each other. Some of our ancient ESP still remains. After a while Chris says, “We can go to Kith’s.” “Where else could we go,” Tom snipes. “I should really get back to Summer’s parents’. I don't want to leave them alone,” Brennan jumps in. “I have a train back to the city soon,” Katharine adds. “So, I shouldn’t.” Chris knows better than to turn to Tom, so he appeals to me. “Caitlin. For Summer.”

I scrunch up the side of my mouth. I don’t know where I will go from here, exactly. Home, a studio apartment on a side street abutting the Yale campus, is quiet and empty. I will not go back to the house next to Summer’s where my parents still live. “I think I’ll pass, too, Cooper. It’s been a day.” The floodlight above the trashcans flicks off. The fog is now the least of our concerns; save a string of lights lining the seafood shack, which will soon be gone, too, there is no other illumination between all of us. No way to guide us back to our cars in the lot. “Look,” Katharine says. “Tom's, like, glowing.” And he is because of the way the moon is carrying off the water. No one seems to have remembered we are still here. “Well, I’m getting out of here,” Chris says. “I’m going to go drink. See you guys at the next funeral or never.” Chris gets up and he doesn’t turn around to say goodbye. He stumbles on his way to the parking lot; I don’t see it, but I can hear it. He will find his way back to his house in our town, because he never left. “Asshole,” Tom mutters. He looks up at me, but then quickly back down. Katharine shakes her short hair out of her ponytail and frowns. The blond looks mousier than it did even a couple of months ago at the wedding. “It just still seems so insane to me that we were ever together, even that long ago,” she says, and forces out a laugh that all of us know is not real. “When is your train?” Brennan asks Katharine. She puts her hand to her stomach and shrugs. “Oh, I don’t know. I can catch one back tonight at some point,” she says. “I just didn’t… you know.”

“I’ll take you,” Brennan says. “I can take you now. It’s on the way, anyway.” Brennan turns towards us. “You guys both have a way home?” He looks at me, then Tom, and us standing alone together, and then his eyes go wide and shut suddenly like he’s been hit with something. There is a cricket in the background, one that I know we all notice at the same time, even though it’s probably been chirping the entire time we’ve been sitting at the restaurant. There is also probably the faint rolling of water coming into the beach, but I can’t hear it. We’re too far. I only know it’s there. I know everything about where we are. I open up my mouth to say something, but Tom cuts me off. “We’ll make it.” Tom’s voice rises the hairs on my arms. It does. Katharine, Brennan, and I get up from the table. Everyone looks like shadows with air pumped into them. Tom still sits in the glow of the moon, which seems to touch only him. He finally stands. Tom and I hug Katharine and Brennan. “Let’s hope we all see each other under better circumstances next time,” Brennan says to everyone and also no one. He scratches at his hairline, which looks freshly sheared. “Another wedding, maybe.” His hand flops down to his side. This time, he does not look at Tom and me. Maybe I’m just looking too hard now. Brennan and Katharine start walking up the hill towards the parking lot, and they disappear into the dark. We hear the engine of Brennan’s car start, and soon after the headlights roll over us and light the landscape around us, though we don’t need the brightness to remind us what everything looks like. Tom and I are still standing, and between us there is a distance that is not great, but we are not close together like we could be. Tom slips off his suit jacket and drapes it over his forearm. He shakes out his head and looks at the ground. I wiggle my toes in my shoes, even though they are closed leather heels, and he cannot see what I am doing. But he looks up at me after I move them.

Tom starts walking out from the picnic area towards the water. I scramble to follow him, trailing steps behind. “Wait,” I call, and hop onto the grass parallel to the gravel path, kick off my shoes, and grab them. We start walking again, and this time we are in step with each other. “I feel terrible that I missed their wedding,” he says looking down, still walking. “There’s no way you could have known, Tom.” His name is like salt on my lips. But it’s like butter, too. He doesn’t say anything back. We reach the edge of the water and Tom lays his blazer out across one of the big rocks; sits down on another. He looks at me until I do the same. “With whom are you staying?” I say when there’s finally so much nothing that I can’t take it any longer; when there is so much pressure pushing in on my ears that I fear my eardrums will burst. “‘Whom’,” Tom snorts. “That’s so you.” “Alright,” I say. “My girlfriend’s parents on the Upper East Side. I fly back tomorrow morning, so I need to get back to the city tonight.” “We can get going—” “Sit, Caitlin, for the love of god.” I curl my toes again, but this time, Tom can see. Musing, remembering, he asks me, “How many people do you think have passed out on these rocks?” The ocean cracking against the shore, hitting the jetty: it is a lullaby, and I know it’s probably cooed many people to sleep, but I want to tell Tom it’s only us. Only Brennan and Summer; only Chris and Katharine; only Tom and Caitlin. Why did Brennan and Summer survive? I want to ask Tom, and not us? when I know I can’t, and when I know now that “survive” is such a relative term.

“How have you been?” I ask him instead. “Like, for real. Now that we’re alone.” “You want two years of catch-up?” “Sure,” I say. I don’t think I really do, but this is the answer an adult should give. “I’m not sure what you know,” he says. “Through Summer and Bren or online or whatever. After I moved to Chicago—I don’t know—I took the bar there, and now I’m working for a firm, and I met someone about a year ago, and that’s about everything. Things are good. They’re good.” I nod. “That’s… great.” I bite my lip. “I’m really glad. It’s—” “Yeah,” Tom says. “How about you?” I draw my lips tight into some sort of a smile, which is also not one. “You know. Still here. There. In New Haven, I mean.” Now Tom nods. “Not much to report,” I say. “Working on a Ph.D. is a lot to report,” he offers. “Sure,” I say. I look down at my hands, which feel heavy, and start scratching my bare nails against the surface of the rock. Tom is only a silhouette framed in reflection out of the corner of my eye. My heart is beating in a way it hasn't in years—not in a way that is fast, necessarily, but where I feel like it has physically moved from in my chest to some other place in my body that I have forgotten existed or has shut down or where a lease has expired. I am somewhere that is full with memories and another warm body, but it is the loneliest on earth. “I feel like I should apologize,” he says, and the words hit me across the face. “For keeping my distance earlier this morning. Or, I guess, for the last couple years in general. I haven’t known what to say.”

“It's fine,” I say. I want to get up, because it is as far from fine as possible. A few arbitrary chosen belongings, because there was no concept of his things or my things since everything had been just things for so long, in a couple suitcases on the sidewalk outside of our Brooklyn brownstone. No words because we had run out, or because there were nothing that could be said. The last time we talked we said nothing. “It just—I’ve thought about it a lot. You know. I’m glad we both decided on everything together, as awful as it was.” “Did we, Tom?” “Of course,” he says quickly. “Of course. Neither of us pulled the trigger on getting married for ten years. Not even when we were engaged. Something was wrong. We both knew it.” “Summer and Brennan took their time. What if we were just taking our time?” “They were both finishing med school. They had a reason to wait. We never really did once I got out of law school, and even then…” he trails off. “Wait, Cait—you’ve been thinking about this for the last two years. You’re not over it.” Tom shoots up, but then sits right back down, neither closer to nor farther from me. “Sorry,” he mutters. There shouldn’t be an egret still out, but there is. She’s balancing on a buoy about fivehundred yards out into the water. It’s close enough that we could swim it if we really wanted to. “Caitlin,” Tom says, and the sound of him saying my name is now like glass shattering. I don’t know why he says it again. He says it like he doesn’t know if it belongs to me. He says it like he doesn’t know me. I just keep looking out at the water. “So much time has passed. We’re so far past this.”

I stand up and feel the gravel under my toes. The rocks are bigger this close to the water. I can’t call it gravel, really. The only other lights at the restaurant have been turned off. No one knows we are here. Tom getting in a black cab to take him away, the trunk packed to the brim with those things, because no yellow cabs would come down our side street. Tom not looking back. I looked for him to look back at me. I unsnap the closure at the back of my neck holding together my shirt and unzip the side. I want to look over my shoulder at Tom, but I don’t. I pull my top over my head, drop it at the foot of the rocks; next, I push my skirt below my hips. “Caitlin!” Tom calls out. I keep walking, past where my the water grazes my toes, and even though we are in the dark, anyone could hear the tide change pitch when it hits my ankles. “Caitlin?” The beam from the lighthouse brushes my body, and the air on my skin is hanging with salt and mist. I bend down to run my hands through the current. It slips between my fingers, dragging with it comets of sediment. The coastline is so rocky, and my feet remember every pebble. I step forward, which maybe is also like stepping back. I’m not sure. But when I hit the water, everything feels just a little colder. My legs doggie paddle and my arms breaststroke; floundering is the only way I know how to swim. Looking out, there is no horizon line. I could swim forever, and for a moment I think I might—to the egret, past the egret, to nowhere at all, and maybe beyond that. But I don’t get very far at all until I stop. My feet can still touch the ground, even. I close my eyes and go under. The roaring below the surface, the pressure—it’s just as great as it is above. If only I’d have learned that by now.

CONTRIBUTORS Jeremy Cohen is a student and writer from San Francisco, currently working on a master's degree in French literature in Paris. Sara Flemington is currently completing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph at Humber and her first chapbook of poems, humidity, was released with Bitterzoet Magazine in January, 2014. Peter Cole Friedman is a Brooklyn-based poet and co-editor of glitterMOB. Chase Gilbert was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, spends his days working in Manhattan and the rest of his time writing and surviving in Brooklyn. The goal of Katrina Johnston's story-telling is to share. Kyle Kaczmarick lives in Houston, where he spends time with loved ones while pursuing writing and music. Remy Barnes Klein writes and drinks in Texas; his opinions on popular culture, fried food and football can be found @remybarnesklein Karen Ladson is a writer and youth mentor residing in Brooklyn, NY. Vincent Toro is a poet and playwright living and teaching in the Bronx and a 2014 Poet’s House Emerging Poet’s Fellow. Meredith Turits is the senior culture editor at Bustle, where she oversees the Books vertical, and the fiction editor for The Brooklyn Quarterly.