Stork Magazine is a fiction journal published by undergraduate students at Emerson College. Initial submissions are workshopped and discussed with the authors, and stories are accepted based on the quality of the author’s revisions. The process is designed to guide writers through rewriting and provide authors and staff members editorial support and an understanding of the editorial and publishing process. Stork is founded on the idea of communication between writers and editors—not a simple letter of rejection or acceptance.
We accept submissions from undergraduate and graduate Emerson students in any department. Work may be submitted at stork.submittable.com during specific submission periods. Stories should be in 12-point type, double-spaced, and must not exceed 4 pages for the “flash fiction” issue. Authors retain all rights upon publication. For questions about submissions, email storkstory@gmail.com
Stork accepts staff applications at the beginning of each fall semester. We are looking for undergraduate students who are well-read in contemporary fiction and have a good understanding of the short story form.
Illustrations done by Clarissa Janeen and Aubrey McConnell
Typesetting done by Eden Ornstein, Aubrey McConnell, & Lauren Mallett
Fall Fiction 2024
The Mockery
By Jagger van Vliet
Illustration by Aubrey McConnell
Tree of Life at the End of the World
By Rita Chun
Illustration by Clarissa Janeen
What Waits In The Woods
By Zenia deHaven
Illustration by Lauren Mallett
Strangers
By Mimi Newman
Illustration by Clarissa Janeen
Cherry Blossoms
By Sam Kostakis
Illustration by Aubrey McConnell
Lost Boy In The Story Drinker
By Charlie Williams
Illustration by Clarissa Janeen
MASTHEAD
Editors in Chief
Aubrey McConnell
Sage Liebowitz
Managing Editors
Stella Lapidus
Gabriel Borges
Ali Dening
Sydney Flaherty
Head Designer
Eden Ornstein
Design Team
Aubrey McConnell
Lauren Mallett
Head Copy Editor
Anna Carson
Copy Editors
Charlie Williams
Eva Windler
Ava Belchez
Roni Moser
Mars Early
Prose Editors
Dana Guterman Levy
Roni Moser
Alexander Pham
Danielle Bartholet
Staff Readers
Patricia Smallwood
Julia Montgomery
Mad Rosofsky
Luke Flanagan
Zach Overholser
Claire Hagerty
Sadie Lallier
Ella Posey
Elliot Berkley
Joseph Fitzgerald
Danika Benziger
Elissa Hill
Emerson Nicholson
Chad Coursen
Faculty Advisor
Jon Papernick
Letter From The Editors
As the Fall 2024 semester comes to a close, so does our chapter as undergraduates. Both of us started working with Stork in our freshman year, and it’s been a joy watching the magazine evolve. This semester, we nearly doubled our staff, and watching our new members grow has been incredibly rewarding. We are proud of their hard work and dedication. Of course, we’re also deeply grateful to our returning members for their continued commitment. Thank you all for making Stork such a welcoming environment. We are excited to present six outstanding pieces of short fiction in this issue. It features authors new to Stork, as well as some familiar faces. Our authors are at all stages of Emerson journeys—this issue features second-years, seniors, and an MFA student. We extend a heartfelt thank you to our authors
and to every Emersonian who submitted their work this semester. We know it takes courage to share your writing. It is daunting to prioritize storytelling, especially in the face of change and we thank you for trusting us with your art. There is a lot of world outside of Emerson and it is easy to feel like your voice does not matter. It does. Write about what matters to you and change will follow.
We also want to thank our copy editors, designers, and illustrators for their invaluable contributions. Thank you to our amazing managing editors and prose editors. Truly, there would be no Fall 2024 edition without you.
To the freshmen years from now who pick this book up at the org fair, welcome. We hope you stay a while.
It is with heavy hearts that we say goodbye to Stork. Storklings, keep doing what you do. It’s incredible.
Sage and Aubrey Editors-in-Chief
The Mockery
by Jagger van Vliet
Illustration by Aubrey McConnell
Acab driver once told me a curious story on my way to London. I shall in earnest retell this story now, and to the best of my abilities, I will omit no detail and imagine only sparing exaggerations:
Here my cabbie conjured an image of a deli shop in England, somewhere nondescript, with no particular importance whatsoever. The character of the town that hosted this deli shop was that of a usual English borough in that it was quaint but not vacant, and to a fault one could consider the residents of the town impossibly general. They were the panoply of individuals who are wont to play cards, chat idly, and provide no more than briefly nosy interactions, all before returning to their unassuming homes. In all, the town was just that: unassuming and regular.
Our hero, at least in this story, is a boy named Otta. His family is Turkish, though his accent is thickly that of the other residents of the town. He was , at the time of this story, no
older than seventeen, and despite this, he had already been working in his father’s deli shop for some years. His father, a hardworking gentleman who understood business far better than he let on, was an unrelenting sort. When the deli shop was dormant and without customers, it would not be uncommon for Otta’s father to conjure up some chore for him to do. It was as though Otta’s father could not handle idleness and would rather have his son haul oats or reorganize shelves than allow for any one moment of respite.
Included in the ongoing list of chores he was made to perform on any given day, Otta was most accustomed to hauling the weekly shipment of kebab meats. These arrived on time every Monday morning by way of an old truck. In the time Otta had gone about doing this chore, the truck had not changed, and Otta felt that if he were to return to the deli shop in fifty years’ time, well into the shimmering future, that truck would still be quite rusted, and quite loud, and resolutely quite old. From this truck, the kebab meats would be unloaded and set upon Otta’s shoulders, whereupon he would carry these meats to the freezer for the week’s storage. It is worth noting here, for the uninitiated, that kebab meats of this sort are tremendous things. As we made our way to London, my cab
driver likened it to a side of beef—cumbersome, weighty slabs, often weighing somewhere over 130 kilograms.
It was required that our Otta be the only one to carry the kebabs, as putting any paid worker up to this task would risk his father’s business practices being questioned by the labor unions. Alas, as Otta was unpaid and certainly not a member of any union, his services were suited for this task. He was not a large boy, not built up, nor did he possess the thews of adulthood. He was in fact reasonably thin despite being made to eat a great deal by his father, who insisted that he would soon sprout healthy muscles.
Despite his slender frame, Otta was dutiful in his chores and carried the kebab meat from the old truck to the freezer every Monday. He did this without protest as his father was not a man who would hear a word of discontent.
One day, whilst Otta was performing his usual tasks and straining beneath a rather large side of beef, he was spotted by a foreign fellow. This fellow was a German, and it appeared he lived up to his title aptly. This is not meant in any way other than to say that the German was a muscular gentleman with a perfect shock of blond hair, high cheekbones, a prominent jaw, and a set of terribly icy eyes. To speak only briefly on his build, the German was not a usual
sort of muscular. His body was stretched far beyond average proportions, and even a generally hale fellow who routinely exercised would have found themselves dwarfed by this German in comparison. In the nature of good examples, the German’s forearms were nearly the size of barrels, or perhaps his chest was a barrel, and his arms larger still. He had come with friends to the deli shop, and they were watching Otta with some intrigue.
Loudly, the German was speaking:
“Look there! See the little junge go! It seems nearly impossible that such a scrawny youth should carry something so terrific. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a thing like it. Here now, boy! Come over. How much does a piece like that weigh?”
Here Otta turned, with the kebab meat still resting squarely on his shoulders putting a tremendous weight upon his back. In truth, he did not entirely know how heavy this particular kebab was, as the deli shop rarely ever weighed the meat before or even after its delivery. But as Otta also hauled smaller, 20-kilogram bags when there was no kebab delivery, he offered that this particular cut couldn’t be anywhere under 120 kilograms.
“One-hundred-twenty kilograms! Well, that explains it. Looks are deceiving things, you
know. Ah well, 120 kilograms is a light sum, a perfect amount for a boy your size. On the bench, I’ve been known to lift 180 kilograms without so much as blinking. These fellows have seen it. Without fail, I can set about even 190 with minimal strain. Let me have a try at it then; I’ll make short work of it.”
The German then flexed his muscles as if to further insist upon his own readiness. Otta was astounded then that somehow the barrelled biceps nearly doubled in size, a feat that seemed nearly inhuman. The German was a regular about town, and so Otta also knew that he was a weight lifter by profession. Indeed, he had even accrued some success in his time traveling about Europe, where he had received many golden medals for his strength. The German’s friends were also weight lifters, though certainly less successful than he. They had jeered eagerly as the German spoke, hanging about him as hyenas might, practically drooling as he boasted. And when it came time for the German to demand he carry the kebab, his words were practically echoed on their breaths, hungrily insisting that Otta do as he said.
Otta was not of the mind that the German was necessarily a malicious fellow, but surely he could now sense some contention. As intimidating as the German may have been,
Otta quickly made up an excuse, something to the effect of store policy prohibiting him.
At this, the German gave a laugh, and Otta detected a note of asperity therein. “Store policy, eh? A likely thing, indeed. And I can’t even have one go?” Uncharacteristically thinking on his feet, Otta declared that he’d happily give the German an attempt. He went on, explaining that although he could not allow the German to handle the present cut of kebab, if he were to return on the following Monday and meet Otta around the back of the deli shop where his father would not observe such activities, he could then have the first attempt at lifting the new kebab.
This pleased the German, who sat back and appraised the boy who had surely called his bluff. The German’s friends feasted on this silence, looking from him to Otta, waiting earnestly for the next escalation. It came sooner than they expected, as the German recomposed himself easily.
“So, Kleinbraten, you believe I won’t be able to? Let me try then, next week at this exact time. In fact, if it won’t add any sweat to your brow I propose a wager. A klein wette: that if I should lift the kebab, I’ll eat for free at this deli shop from now until whenever it is that your father ceases to operate this business.”
Here I will interject that this seemed to me a
rather excessive wager. But again, I can only relay what I was told.
Our Otta was struck by this proposition and momentarily considered the consequences of gambling on such an outrageous thing. He then looked at the German’s build, allowing himself a moment of doubt. He certainly seemed confident enough, and this struck Otta as worrisome. But, as is often the case in these curious situations where a fellow’s dignity is challenged, there was no other avenue for Otta to take than to accept the German’s terms. With all his remaining courage, meager as it was, Otta gestured to the German’s healthy meal and expressed that if the German should fail in lifting the kebab, then he would be made to pay three times the meal’s original cost.
“You have a deal! A good and fair deal. I’ll be back in a week’s time. And I will not forget to be sure. I might even fast before I return to maximize my appetite.” With this, the German left the deli shop, and Otta thought it curious how the onlooking men went about scurrying behind the receding goliath. They looked not unlike little birds, little vicious birds with toolarge torsos and altogether smaller legs. It was a comical thing to see in one light. All the same, Otta only found himself in a deep exhale, finally rid of the present conflict.
In the following days, Otta resumed his attentions to work, and only when the weekend arrived did he begin to fret earnestly. In being honest with himself, Otta did not know why he had accepted the bet to begin with. He had known then that it was a stupid thing to agree to, but of course he had forgotten this under the German’s gaze. It would seem that in endeavoring to talk himself out of a small problem, he had deftly stumbled into a larger one.
As we neared the streets of the city, my cab driver glanced at me in the mirror. Over his broad shoulder, I recall a mischief in his eyes. He went on to tell me how Otta, having resigned himself to his misstep, began conspiring various ways to tip the proverbial scales. Evidently, the fellow in charge of ordering the meats was a strange woman with whom Otta occasionally struck up conversation. Ela, as she was known, seemed always to dislike Otta on principle. Otta, knowing where he stood within the backhouse, approached all discourse with discretion.
To most, Ela was scrutinous and sharply toned, and this was enough to establish a sense of authority. As this was Ela’s general effect, Otta was understandably apprehensive in approaching her on the Saturday preceding his bet. She regarded him without much expression
and listened as he explained the circumstances. He was sure to preemptively note his own foolishness, and it seemed she appreciated this courtesy. While the German wouldn’t be any less muscled, Otta could, with Ela as coconspirator, make certain that the cut of meat delivered would be larger than it usually was. Despite her objection to Otta as a person, she was not above the allure of settling matters with the German. She confirmed, by way of grunt, that Otta’s request would be fulfilled, leaving Otta feeling cautiously hopeful. It was the case that Otta had been concealing a rather notable factor in his bet with the German. Though he had seen Otta struggling beneath the weight of the kebab, the German had not actually seen Otta originally hoist the thing. This was not without reason, as it was truthfully impossible to lift the massive side from the ground without the aid of at least two workers. By some strange physics, once the weight was equally dispersed upon the shoulders, any man could carry the kebab, but from a fixed position on the ground, it existed as decidedly immovable. Otta clung to this fact as it was the only thing that salved his many worries. Perhaps some part of himself was sure enough in this knowledge, and perhaps this was the only reason he had accepted the bet to begin with.
True as it was that Otta had never seen a man lift the kebab from a resting state, he was willing to take no chances, and on the Monday of the bet, he was heartened to inspect the delivery truck on its arrival. Ela, too, stood watch and nodded with some content at the week’s cut of meat as it was unloaded. It was, as requested, a larger side than usual, and without becoming overly eager, Otta thought it was a bit more lopsided as well.
The German arrived not a minute late, accompanied by the little birdmen who twittered at his heels. It seemed that Otta was not the only one who had made an effort to improve his odds, as the German came with a support belt and gloves, and had even applied a sleeve to his left arm, presumably for furthered strength. Otta thought that the belt made the fellow look grotesque, as his arms now protruded some distance beyond a cinched torso. In all, the German’s upper body had taken on the distinct appearance of a triangle, from which two stalkish legs protruded. The chalk, concealed in a carrying pouch, swung at his side, presenting the scene with a drumbeat. Otta wondered for a moment if he had made a mistake.
“Guten morgen! You should know, mein dunkler prinz, that I am famished! I am looking forward to a good meal when all this is settled. I
think I will start with a doner, or perhaps a roll, or maybe a shish. Maybe I will have all three.”
From here, the German went over to inspect the cut. He circled the thing twice, eyeing it and feigning lifts here and there so as to make it clear that he was not some amateur. In fact, it seemed that these theatrics were even working on Ela, who shot Otta several looks that read more as warnings than sympathies. Otta then considered that there was the heretofore unthinkable prospect that Ela felt something more than harshness toward him.
Before Otta could consider this further, the German loudly proclaimed that he was ready. The little birdmen nodded eagerly, exchanging looks of mutual glee. They were all quite stocky men, and so it was an altogether strange thing to witness them in this state. They were like hens, Otta decided finally. Hens, pecking about and squabbling over nothing in particular.
The German, in turn, had gloved his hands and stretched himself thoroughly. Now, with a steely look and a quick wink towards Ela, the German squatted low to the ground and wrapped his arms widely around the base of the kebab meat. He made a brief noise, something to the effect of a grunt, and then began to strain. He did so only momentarily, and Otta was pleased to see an expression of confusion come
over the man’s face. In fact, the German stopped lifting altogether mere seconds after his first attempt and looked fleetingly about. Having then quickly regained his composure, he stooped down again and readjusted his grip. Once more, he went about straining, and for a moment, Otta believed he saw the kebab shift upwards, but this did not last for a second longer, and the German retreated once more. A newly marbled complexion had traced itself across his flinty face, and the hens were chittering excitedly, presuming that the German was merely playing some sort of joke. Otta, and perhaps Ela, were the only ones who suspected this might not be the case.
Otta, gaining some confidence, then told the German that the ensuing attempt would have to be his last and that his father expected the meats to be stored as quickly as possible following their delivery. The German regarded Otta carefully, then looked to the meat. With a slower movement than before, the German bent down and assumed a new grip. Resolving his face to an expression resembling courage, the German gave a final valiant heave. He labored much longer on this attempt, as if he thought he might force the thing upward if he only tried long enough. This could not be, and so Otta smiled as the German fell away, breathing low. The little hens quieted
some and received the German into their midst without a word. They had not yet determined that all was lost. Dumbly, they were under the impression that this was still some part of the German’s plan.
The German himself had not yet looked at Otta and instead paced some distance from the group, massaging at his biceps and shaking his head. As he turned and showed no signs of further bravado, the hens went to him, confused and upset.
It was in this instant that Otta found himself briefly unwatched. The German and his men were turned away and could not seem to face him. And here, before him, was the cut of meat. Otta looked now to Ela, who, it appeared, could already sense what it was that Otta required. Without a word, she gestured to a fellow worker, and swiftly, without making any traitorous noise, the two hoisted the meat upward and rested it upon Otta’s back. The two then drew back, and Ela bid the other worker away.
It should be noted that this affair all occurred in a matter of seconds, and so when the German turned round, his face became quite pale. In fact, it was as though the man had been drained of his color entirely; his fair skin was now pocky and sour. Otta, bent under
the weight, grinned brightly and shrugged his shoulders as much as he could. This was the only expression he could afford, and it seemed to do its job aptly. The German went to speak, did not, moved to inspect that which he was witnessing, and only in finally resigning himself did he raise a hand to cover his mouth, agape.
“Mein Gott! You are inhuman. Superhuman, I should say. Mein Gott. Oh my . . .”
Such were the sorts of floundering words that emerged from the German, who had still yet to regain his flush. If he were not a prideful man, Otta imagined that the fellow might have dropped to his knees and begun a quiet prayer. Otta saw now a man who was upset and confused, but more to the point, a man who was bested. This loss, apparent in the lines that formed anew across the German’s brow, seemed to weigh on the man. It pulled at him, such that his once wide frame slumped, and even his jaw softened into a frown as he collapsed inwards and became a hollow figure.
Otta, as it happened, did not make the German pay his side of the bet. He felt quite bad for the man and was certain he had already paid quite enough in the manner of abject humiliation. The German was a decent fellow in handling his loss and, before quitting the scene of his disgrace, offered a weak smile in Otta’s
direction.
In the following years, the German would return to the deli shop as a regular. He would bring his friends and family members and would point at Otta, loudly proclaiming that they would never see such a strong young fellow.
“He can carry an inhuman sum, I say! An inhuman sum. Kilograms upon kilograms! He is a god. A kinder god. A prodigy, more like. You won’t believe your eyes! Look there.” In these later years, the German would often challenge Otta to bouts of arm wrestling. He would implore Otta to show his prowess, and in these times, Otta would always manage to produce an excuse that would keep the German at bay. He was, after all, a jovial fellow, and Otta felt that it would be a shame to destroy his curious delusion.
This was a particular story, and it struck me plainly so in the taxi cab to London. I received from the driver no conclusion to the story other than the vague news that the deli shop had closed many years ago when Otta’s father grew too old to run the place. At that time, Otta finally disclosed his secret to the German who, even in his older age, flushed red with embarrassment and then laughed to himself privately.
I found this all to be a trifle odd, and in
stepping from the cab, I wondered if I might take this story for later use.
“I never did catch your name,” I remarked, hoping to secure the driver’s blessing for future retellings.
Only then did my cab driver grin broadly, and while shaking my hand, he replied, “Otta.”
Tree of Life at the End of the World
by Rita Chun
Illustration by Clarissa Janeen
In these next few days, there will be a man standing by the bus stop, sometime between rush hour and the quiet liminality of midnight. He’ll be wearing nothing special, really, and you won’t even notice him until the song stops playing in your headphones (they will run out of battery). You’ll look up to check if the bus is here yet (it won’t be), and accidentally make a passing glance at him (he’ll be in your line of vision, standing just a few paces away).
What will strike you is the thickness of his skin, like he’s wearing someone else’s skin on top of his own. You’ll notice the texture of it, something like a layer of smooth river clay, calm and quiet like sandstone. He won’t notice you noticing him at first, because he’s learned to ignore any probing eyes.
He knows what he looks like, after all, seen his reflection in the mirror, in the eyes of staring passersby. He’ll shift uncomfortably from foot to foot, kicking the tiny gray mound of snow by the lamppost, waiting for the bus to come.
You’ll both wait for about fifteen minutes before raising your brows on account of the missing bus’s whereabouts.
It’s taking a minute, huh, you’ll say, and he’ll reply, Well, no, more like thirty, glancing at his watch, not understanding the turn of phrase. Two awkward chuckles and then, Yeah, these buses are pretty unreliable. Right? Tell me about it. Who says what won’t matter. By then he’ll have noticed how the corners of your mouth are charmingly pointy, and get even pointier when you talk the way you do, with that slight smile. And you’ll have noticed that his voice isn’t gruff and gravelly like you expected, but smooth and slowly drawn out like the lowest note of a cello.
You’ll both say a little more about nothing— maybe the grayness of the weather, or the days being too short—before you start to notice that it’s awfully quiet. And I don’t mean the conversation; he’ll still be talking about something, close to nothing.
But the rest of the world will have gone dead silent.
When you look around, there won’t be any
cars on the road or any people on the street. There won’t be a single pigeon huddled beneath a window ledge, no rats rifling through the black metal bins. A cold, prickly undercurrent will spread down your neck as you take in the eeriness of the night and realize that it’s not late enough for the streets to be so empty.
He’ll stop talking, having noticed the mild jolts in your movements as you glance around. The crosswalk will change from walk to stop to walk to stop, and you’ll pause for a few panicked seconds before breaking the silence.
Is it just me, or is there nobody around?
His eyes will widen as he takes in the stillness hanging in the air like someone holding their breath. But his reply will be nonchalant.
Hm. I guess it’s just not a busy night. When he checks his watch, the hands will have stopped moving.
His heart will be struck by a mild panic as he asks you, What time is it? as calmly as he can. When you check your phone, the time on the lock screen will be gone.
You’ll show it to him. The blank top part of the screen will stare at you both.
What the hell?
Something will unravel in the two of you. Panic will spring up like electric currents through your skin and zigzag out of your pores.
You’ll run to the nearest restaurant, the closest cafe, and there will be no one there.
You’ll keep going, trying the nearest apartment building, checking the empty lobby, running down the street, glancing in alleyways, looking for somebody, anybody. But there will be nobody.
You’ll sit down on the sidewalk, dumbfounded, and wonder what the hell is going on. He’ll sit down beside you and say, This isn’t so bad, really. What? How? you’ll shout. There’s nobody here anymore.
And he’ll reply, Exactly. You hungry?
And your stomach will, indeed, be growling. When he grins, you’ll realize that it’s the end of the world but all you can think about is how hungry you are, and you’ll burst out laughing. What do you wanna eat? A sandwich.
Think food still exists?
I really hope so.
The two of you will walk into a rundown Italian place, which will by then be an abandoned Italian place. The kitchen will be in disarray—a spaghetti pot boiling over, a chopping board with half-chopped tomatoes— as if all the chefs suddenly threw down their aprons and ran away.
You’ll forage a meal, finding bread in the metal racks, meatballs still simmering in the saucepan, provolone in the giant metal locker, and put together a sub. You’ll sit side by side in the black vinyl booth, the seats still warm from the people who just disappeared.
Where do you think they went? you’ll ask.
I don’t know. The ether?
Hm. What if we’re the ones who went missing? You check the frozen clock above the register. None of the clocks are working.
Right. It could be us, not them.
How do we get back?
He’ll look into your eyes as if you’re being completely absurd. Why would you want to go back? It’s so nice and quiet here.
I don’t know, it’s a little eerie, don’t you think? And we don’t know for sure that we’re alone. Who knows who else—or what else—is here with us?
You’ll look outside the window anxiously just after you say that, suddenly realizing you don’t know the rules of this new world. Look, he’ll say with a sad smile. We won’t know till we know.
Aren’t you freaked out by that?
No. Not really.
The fluorescent light above him will flicker, and you’ll see the thin scars on his neck, tracing around and around like long, white worms strangling him. You’ll wonder what happened, if
it’s rude to ask someone who you just met, who you might be stuck with until one of you dies, or until everyone comes back, which might be in the next fifty minutes or fifty years—you won’t have a clue.
Since we’re the only people in the world, I guess we should get to know each other, you’ll say. Tell me about yourself.
The dreaded question, he’ll laugh. I always have no idea what to say . . .
Anything. We have all the time in the world. For the time being, at least.
You’ll blink at him, and he’ll blink back.
He’ll tell you that he works as a dental receptionist, how he loves the smell of the dentist’s office—the clean, sanitized air with a hint of the powdery scent of rubber. He’ll tell you how he lives alone, how he spends most of his time playing chess, either on his phone or by himself with a set that his grandfather gave him. He’ll tell you that there’s nothing much else interesting about him, that he likes eating caramels sometimes, and that’s mostly it. And I like your hair, he’ll add. It looks like a caramel. A round caramel.
That’s exactly what it is, you’ll laugh, running your fingers through your shiny bowl cut, enjoying the way he sees you. A round caramel. When you look into his eyes, you’ll be
stepping into a pond at night, and your feet will sink deeper than you expect. You’ll be wondering about the rest of his story, everything he’s omitting.
Now tell me about you, he’ll say.
You’ll tell him that you’re an art student. You’ll tell him about your current project, How Little We Are; how you sculpt palm-sized people out of shiny objects like mirrors and aluminum foil and CDs; how you spend most evenings placing them in hidden nooks around the city. You’ll tell him that you’re a little scared now because nobody else is around.
If we’re just reflections of other people, who are we now that there’s no one left? you’ll ask, fidgeting with the silver beads in your bracelet.
Can’t say I know, he’ll reply, rubbing a palm against his cheek.
Maybe I’m you and you’re me. If we’re mirrors.
Huh. Maybe. But his frown won’t seem convinced.
A thin layer of silence will gently settle over the both of you. When you glance out the window, it’ll be snowing.
Because clocks will have stopped, there won’t be a sense of how long it’s been. But eventually, you’ll be walking to his apartment. You’ll be free to sleep anywhere else in the world—break open a library door and sleep on the plush green rugs
between the stacks, curl up in a mattress store, in any hotel room in the city, or even slowly walk your way to China—but you won’t. You’ll choose to walk with him.
Several streets later, a tall green building will loom over you both, reminding you strangely of a mountain.
He’ll take you up to the ninth floor, where you’ll see the array of the city through his window, laid out like an infinite board of chess— with every light still on, but no humans left to cast shadows.
You’ll sit beside him on the ledge, taking in the too-quiet night together. Something like a delicious anxiety will spring from your ribcage and warm the top layer of your skin. There will be something in his eyes, something immovable and buried deep in the earth. Slowly, deliberately, you’ll reach out and brush his cheek with your fingertips like touching a wild coyote—scared of the bite.
But he won’t move, not until your fingers trace the nape of his neck, and he’ll pull you in, breathe you in with a kiss.
He’ll be the only other person in the world—I don’t need to tell you what’ll happen next. But let me tell you this: it’ll be tentative, like a song playing out of an open window. It’ll sound like a guitar strummed with a gentle hand.
It’ll feel like watching daffodils blooming on the first day of April.
You’ll lay on his rumpled sheets, on his mattress on the floor, surrounded by his travel books and dental memorabilia: a smiling tooth holding a toothbrush, a golden set of dentures, a small jar of caramels labeled, “Brush After.”
You’ll see his grandfather’s wooden chess set on the table, the pieces lined up in neat rows. These are the things you will remember, even as they fade away when you turn to face him.
There won’t be any distance between his eyes and yours, no question of How far away are you?
His cheek beneath your hand, feeling strangely thick like dolphin blubber, will swell into a smile. You’ll trace the white scars on his neck, slowly, like you’re unspooling a fishing line. How’d you get these?
But he won’t tell you, even if you’re the last person in the world.
That night, you’ll dream about the world’s longest cup-string telephone. There will be two children standing far apart, each in opposite hemispheres. They’ll hold a paper cup to their ears, connected by a long white string that spans from pole to pole. The message will travel precariously across the string like a tightrope walker. But before it can reach
the other child’s ear, it’ll slip and fall into the rustling grass, eaten by night snakes and fireflies. Even after the children run home, you’ll stay behind to look for the message, combing through the dirt, splitting open milk snakes’ bellies with your forefinger and thumb, squishing fireflies in your palms.
And when your fingernails are black crescents and your fingers are coated in snake blood and firefly jam, you’ll have found the message: a tiny plastic tree you’ll coax to your ear, its translucent leaves shimmering with light. And just as you hear it, you’ll have forgotten what you heard.
The traffic will wake you up. Endless honking, ambulance sirens, people shouting. You’ll run to the window, forgetting where you are. There will be an accident outside, an overturned bus. Somewhere you’ll see a bleeding head, rushing paramedics.
Then it will sink in. Where you are; whose apartment. How, last evening, it was the two of you in an empty world. You’ll turn to the bed, but he won’t be there. Through the wall, you’ll hear his neighbor blasting heavy metal. The distorted guitar, screaming vocals, and crashing cymbals will pound your head in.
When you check your phone, time will have
returned. It will be two in the afternoon on a Thursday, two months from the time you last checked. You’ll be late for something, but what it is you won’t quite know yet. The world will still be catching up to you—or, you’ll still be catching up to the world.
In a daze, you’ll call out for him, but before you can, you’ll realize you don’t know his name. He won’t be in the bathroom, or the kitchen. But his clothes will be exactly where you took them off the night before, a crumpled heap on the ground.
You’ll look for his name in his wallet, and find it on his license, printed above his birthday: Adam.
Adam, you’ll repeat.
Next you’ll find his business card, the address of the dentist’s office downtown. When you get there, the new receptionist will have a concerned frown on her face. I’m sorry to be the one telling you this, but he passed away two months ago.
The shock won’t be much. After you’ve witnessed everyone in the world disappear, not much will shock you. But you’ll feel the numb ache in your throat, the hollowness beneath your belly button. You’ll make your way back to his apartment and notice how easily the door swings wide open, how the floorboards are stomped all
over with bootprints, how the spines of all his travel books are facing the wrong way—back into the shelf.
And on the top of the shelf, beside the chessboard, you’ll see the metal wire with two wooden handles, the kind you’ll use in your ceramics workshops to slice clay. The wire will be tinged with blood, but by then it will have dried to look like rusty flakes.
And once you begin, you won’t be able to stop making them, the little clay figures. You’ll forget about How Little We Are; abandon that vain project of shiny mirror people you once placed amidst the smoke rising from subway grates and cigarette butts.
You’ll focus only on How We Are Made Again, a project you’ll work on for the next time being, molding him from the clay you’ll cut with his lifeline. And when each one is finished, you’ll repeat, Adam.
Adam. You’ll place him in gardens around the city, hiding him between tulips and pansies. You’ll sit him on picnic tables and lean him against lampposts, and give him to the children in playgrounds as gifts. You’ll lay him down beneath park benches and in the shade of tall trees.
And that’s where you’ll find me, looking at you in the shape of the tallest elm you’ve ever
seen, peering at you from the sunrays streaming through my leaves.
How long? you’ll ask, wistful in my warm silence. When?
Ever is the answer you’ll receive, from the refraction of sunlight, from the rays bending and changing just as memory changes every time you remember.
Ever is the answer you’ll give yourself, without rhyme or reason, simply by adding the letter r at the end of your name.
What Waits in the Woods
by Zenia deHaven
Illustration by Lauren Mallett
Before little boys and girls were taught their names, they were taught to stay out of the woods.
The lesson was woven into every lullaby, nursery rhyme, and bedtime story that anxious parents whispered to their sleeping offspring. After tucking them into bed and snuffing out the candles, they prayed their children would live to an age when they could understand the importance of caution.
The children who heard the grim tales were too young to fully understand their gravity, but the message was clear enough: Don’t go into the woods. Understood.
So they played elsewhere. It was a small village, one largely forgotten by the rest of the world. It sustained itself with its own food, raised its own young, and built its own homes. The carpenter’s son would eventually succeed his father as the latter began to ail. The teacher’s daughter would inherit her mother’s occupation
of rapping the knuckles of dozing students. The village didn’t need anyone else and, frankly, they didn’t want anyone else, thank you very much.
The villagers were amicable. They congratulated each other on their successes: a marriage, a student graduating from primary school, a relatively painless childbirth. They also joined together in times of distress: a bad harvest, a death in a family, the farmer’s daughter taking up the violin and emitting deafening screeches during her studies.
But, when the butcher’s wife’s belly began to swell, the village groaned.
You see, the villagers didn’t say they hated the butcher and his wife, because it was rude to say that you hated someone. You could say that you wanted a certain someone to slip on their blood-covered floors and fall on their unfortunately-placed upright knife, but to say you hated that person? That was out of line. That was rude.
The villagers strongly disliked the butcher and his wife for two reasons.
Reason
One: the butcher and his wife kept to themselves. They didn’t join in on festivities, nor did they give their condolences to those who were suffering. The butcher simply sold his meat, his wife as his loyal attendant, and when the day drew to a close, they slammed their doors and
were dead to the world until the next morning.
Reason Two: the butcher went into the woods.
Logically, it made perfect sense why a butcher would need to go into the woods. The woods had game. The only living things that could be killed, grilled, and eaten outside the forest were small songbirds, which were barely large enough for a midday snack. Even the fatter ones were mostly bone and feathers. For most of the year, the village relied on its crops, its corn, and potatoes, berries, and pitted fruits. However, when winter’s icy mouth breathed down their backs and food shriveled and died, the red, juicy meat of the butcher suddenly seemed quite attractive. Though the butcher and his wife remained unpopular figures because of their reserved nature and careless behavior, they were a vital part of the village’s ecosystem in the winter. The villagers couldn’t survive without their meat.
But when the condition of the butcher’s wife grew from whispered rumors to an undeniable, rotund controversy, the village grew nervous. It was one thing for the butcher to risk his life for his work; it was another to pass down that brash nature to his children.
Finally, as spring gave way to fall and the butcher’s wife became too large to work behind the small counter, the bravest of the villagers—
the mayor-who-wasn’t-really-a-mayor—decided to ask the butcher how he planned to raise his child.
“You will teach them not to go into the woods, won’t you?” the not-mayor said anxiously as he looked up at the large man. He was a notmayor because he solved many civil disputes and organized town meetings, but didn’t possess any real power. He prided himself on his problemsolving abilities, though he wished he had a more official title—especially in times like these—when the villagers treated him like an ordinary citizen even though he was obviously anything but.
“Hm?” the butcher said, not paying attention as he skinned his latest catch—a young doe. A beautiful specimen, he thought, as he admired her round, meaty torso and sleek legs.
“There’s something waiting out there,” the mayor-who-wasn’t-a-mayor said, growing impatient.
“And what waits in the woods?” the butcher said with a grunt, peeling back the skin of the deer to reveal the lean muscle beneath. The faux mayor stifled a gag, trying to look anywhere but the doe’s large, unseeing eyes.
The truth was, nobody knew exactly what waited in the woods. In the not-mayor’s lifetime, the fools who ventured into the forest met a
grisly end. The miscreants, usually teenagers fueled by the spiced wine sloshing around in their bellies, rushed into the shadowy land, hollering and whooping and creating a ruckus. They never returned. Their fathers would journey in while the sun still shone to find traces of their sons and daughters: a boot with its sole ripped clean off, a piece of a dress caught on a bush, a leather belt somehow draped over a tree branch thirty feet in the air. They never found their bodies nor any clues as to what became of their children.
So for decades, the villagers decided that instilling fear into their children’s hearts was their utmost priority to keep them safe. No one had possessed the gall to journey into the woods in nearly forty years.
That was, until the butcher.
The villagers couldn’t comprehend how the butcher had survived so long. It infuriated them. Their children began to ask why they had to stay out of the forest if the butcher went so frequently and returned without so much as a scratch. It made the parents seethe. It set the definitely-not-the-mayor’s teeth on edge. If he couldn’t prevent one man from ignoring their generations-long rule, why should anyone respect him?
“No one knows, but there is something out
there,” the kind-of-a-mayor said. It was all he could really say. The butcher gave another grunt and sliced sliced sliced. The conversation was over.
A moon passed, and the butcher’s wife bore twins: a boy and a girl.
“I want to name them,” she told the midwife. The young woman stared at the new mother as if she’d asked to cook the babies in a furnace and eat them for supper.
“You have to teach them about the woods first,” the midwife said slowly. Though she had yet to bear children, she knew that the postpartum mind was often riddled with confusion. The butcher’s wife was just exhausted. She would see reason soon.
The butcher’s wife huffed and settled into her bed, her swaddled babies held close to her breast. She didn’t reply.
The midwife hoped that her patient’s disillusionment was just the aftermath of a rattled mind and nothing more. She considered warning the mayor-who-wasn’t-a-mayor about the predicament, but she pushed the thought aside. The butcher and his wife would see reason, she thought. It would be fine.
It was not fine.
The next day, the butcher presented his newborn children, each wrapped in a maroon
cloth, and proclaimed them James and Liza. The butcher and his wife did not teach their children about the woods. The mother sang nursery rhymes about dancing lilies and rabbits and fawns who were the best of friends. Her tales lacked the usual gore, terror, and severed limbs typically featured in the villagers’ stories for their children. James and Liza dreamed of woodland creatures singing and laughing together, not of faceless shadow monsters looming over their beds. So the children grew up without fear, because why would they be afraid of the woods? Papa went all the time and was fine. James and Liza played with the children who hadn’t learned their names yet. They did the things children excelled at, primarily creating games nobody over the age of eight could comprehend. They threw rocks, drew figures in the dirt, and chased the family dog to no end (the dog always won, he was very confused as to why the children kept challenging him). The butcher continued his treks into the woods without incident, the twins grew up without shadowy men haunting their dreams, and the villagers were outraged. Even the young adults were questioning if the woods were truly dangerous. They were born after the last victims of the woods had disappeared, as if they never existed in the first place.
The older villagers implemented a nightly watch, during which three community members would observe the forest perimeter and ensure that no child succumbed to morbid curiosity and disobeyed. Seven years after he was named in front of the whole village, James asked his unnamed friend why he looked at the woods with horror.
“Why are you afraid?” James asked. James was drawing a man in the sand. The man’s shoulders were bigger than his head, his hair stuck out in every direction, and his arms were so long they almost brushed against his feet. His thick muscles threatened to rip his button-up shirt. James thought it was a great impression of Papa.
“You don’t know?” the child without a name asked. “There’s a thing waiting.”
“What thing?” James asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What’s it waiting for?”
“I don’t know.”
James didn’t like his nameless friend’s lack of answers. He went to his twin, Liza, who was trying to catch a toad. She perched like a frog, her hands between her feet, knees askew, believing this would trick the amphibian into thinking that she too was a frog. Just a very large, girl-shaped frog.
“Do you know what’s in the woods?” James asked.
The toad hopped away, startled by the boy’s sudden presence. Liza stomped her foot in frustration.
“A monster,” Liza said, staring at the lumpy creature as it leaped away and disappeared beyond the riverbed. “Mama says it’s stupid, but everyone else thinks there’s one.” James bit his lip, annoyed that his sister hadn’t shared this information with him. He’d heard hushed rumors of a monster, of course, but never thought it would make its home in the woods— not with Papa so close by. Papa was big and strong; James had once watched him rip a log in two with his hands.
“Do you think there’s a monster?”
“No,” Liza said. “If there is, why hasn’t it hurt Papa?”
James nodded in silent agreement. Well, if there wasn’t a monster, why didn’t he go see for himself? There was no barrier, no fence keeping him out. When he looked at the woods, his blood didn’t turn to ice. When he looked at the woods, he smelled the intoxicating promise of adventure.
That’s the problem with sheltering children and telling them that life was all fluffy sheep and rainbows and squirrels who held tea time in their
burrows: they believed that life was exactly that. They wouldn’t recognize caution if it spat in their faces.
“We should go,” James said to his sister.
Liza looked uncertain, which made James doubt himself. She was always the wiser of the two, but he wouldn’t let her shake his confidence. He would prove to the other children that there was nothing to worry about.
“Papa goes all the time and he’s never seen anything,” James said. “It’ll be fine. We’ll only go a little way in.”
Liza glanced at their home. Their parents were assisting the stonemason, trying to explain that no, he couldn’t return squirrel meat after it had been eaten for a full refund. It was dusk, the sun casting a bloody golden hue over the forest. They would only go in for a bit, Liza reasoned, before it got dark.
“Fine,” she said, because she knew James would never drop the subject until she agreed.
“Yay!” he exclaimed, grabbing her hand and raising it above their heads. “Into the woods!”
James’ self-assuredness was contagious. Liza, despite the worried thoughts floating around her head, found herself smiling too.
There was someone on watch, of course, for children wandering into the woods. But when they saw the butcher’s children slip into the
trees, they smirked and said nothing. While James was expecting the forest to be full of thriving woodland life and beautiful flowers and magnificent views, it was boring. There wasn’t much to look at but naked trees and the occasional bird flittering overhead. Winter had come, and the snow squished under their booted feet as they trekked deeper. This was a good thing, Liza thought. They could retrace their footprints back home if they ever got lost. She mentioned as much to James, who just grunted. He had been spending too much time with Papa, she thought. Half of James’s responses were various intonations of grunts.
The sun was creeping closer to the horizon, and they’d found nothing but deer droppings and a sleek orange fox that rushed back into its hole in their presence.
“I need to pee,” Liza whined.
James groaned. Liza always had to pee. He was convinced that she ate snow when no one was looking.
“Can you wait?” he asked.
“No,” she said. Liza was well aware of the limits of her bladder, and knew she would not make it back to the village in time.
“Just go, then,” James said.
“I can’t go with you looking at me!”
James groaned louder.
“Fine, I’ll turn around.”
Liza still seemed unsatisfied with this conclusion, but she shuffled off a few paces behind James. With his back to her, he heard the sound of liquid splashing on the ground for a moment, and then nothing. He waited a bit longer, assuming that she was adjusting herself. The last time he walked in on her using the toilet, she hadn’t spoken to him for a week, and he would not make that mistake again.
“Are you done?” James asked.
“Yeah, one sec—” her voice cut off, turning into a sharp cry.
James whirled around, his hands already curled into fists. Liza wasn’t alone. The thing moved too quickly for his brain to process the monstrosity before him. It was a thing made of shadows. A thing made of nightmares. Before James could even speak, the monster scooped up Liza in its gangly arms and swept off, moving faster than smoke in the wind.
James stood there for a heartbeat, struggling to stomach this new emotion festering inside him. He had heard of it before, from the children in the village who were raised on horrific tales, but had never felt it himself. It took him a moment longer to realize what this feeling was called.
Fear.
The creature moved so quickly that it nearly vanished from his sight, but Liza’s screams echoed throughout the forest, ricocheting off the tree trunks and startling the badgers deep in the slumbers of their hibernation.
It was getting darker. The sun sunk deeper into the horizon and the snow glimmered like piles of shredded gold.
James ran after her and the monster. A primal part of him wanted to turn back for his own safety. He could go home and say that Liza had gotten lost, that it was her idea and he simply tagged along. But everyone would smell the lie; Liza was the responsible one, not James. And he knew that fleeing was unfair. This was his idea, and now Liza was gone. He could run to Papa for help, but he suspected that by the time he enlisted his father, it would be too late for Liza.
It was too dark to see where the monster had gone, and Liza’s screams were too far to pinpoint. James stopped, bending over his knees to catch his breath. The snow had seeped into his pants, making his teeth chatter from the creeping cold. The moonlight illuminated the breath steaming from his chapped lips. How could James find her now? He would freeze to death at this rate.
The tracks! Liza had thought of the tracks.
James stooped low to the ground, hoping that his frantic running hadn’t disturbed Liza’s footsteps. After wandering for a bit, his heart thumping with increasing terror at every pulse, he found them! There were the footprints of a girl, and then the markings of . . . something else. It was almost bird-like, but nearly a foot and a half long and five inches wide. It had four long front toes and a back toe, all taloned, by the impression in the snow. The two footprints walked side by side deeper into the woods.
Swallowing his fear, James followed. He used the milky moon to guide him forth, deeper and deeper into the forest. The trees grew larger, unhampered by human activity. Their bare branches cast grisly shadows on the white earth. The nocturnal animals had arisen. Owls flew silently overhead, feathered ghosts slipping from tree to tree. James noticed a pair of reflective green eyes watching him in his periphery. When he turned to confront the stalker, a canine thing bolted out of the underbrush and slipped further into the darkness. James shivered as the cold slipped under his jacket and gnawed his skin. He would go as far as the trail would allow, because then his sister would be at the end, and they could go home and forget this whole thing had ever happened.
He stopped, staring at the ground.
The trail ended. Well, one trail did. The footprints of a girl suddenly disappeared, and only the creature’s imprints went on.
“Liza?” he called. His only response was his own voice echoing back at him. Once again, he considered bolting home. Terror had driven a nail into his chest, paralyzing him. He feared what he would find at the end of this trail, and now that Liza’s footprints were gone, his hope of rescuing her had dimmed. What if it was too late? What would following these strange footsteps accomplish?
But James knew he couldn’t leave her; there was still a chance she was alive. He owed her that much, at least.
Shaking away his doubts, he continued. He didn’t have to go much further. He stopped; because, when he thought he was staring at an empty space in front of him, that space moved. If he hadn’t noticed its bloodshot red eyes, he might have walked right into the creature made of shadow.
James had found the thing in the woods.
In the moonlight, he could barely discern its horrid features. It stood over eight feet tall but was hunched, its back crooked. It had a long beak—or was it a snout? Its dark body was thick with coarse, matted fur, and it scratched itself with hooked silver claws. Bugs tumbled loose
from its body, cascading to the ground in a black, writhing mass. A forked tongue flicked from its mouth and licked its purple lips. Drool slipped from its maw in silvery blobs. Its belly was swollen, as if it had consumed a great meal. It emitted a terrible smell, one that reminded James of the fresh game Papa dragged in—carnage. Its crimson eyes met James’s, and its mouth let out a hideous howl that chilled James to his soul.
James ran.
Tears streamed down his face, freezing and forming wet whiskers across his cheeks. He pumped his small arms and hauled his legs through the snow, too afraid to look over his shoulder to see if the creature was following him. As he ran, the image of the monster burned behind his eyelids: its red eyes, its hooked hands, its swollen belly.
Perhaps a god pitied him, because, by some miracle, James broke free from the woods and into the village, where he burst through the door of his home. His parents, who had just moments ago held each other’s hands in collective worry over their missing children, looked at James’s face and the absence of Liza beside him, and knew something dreadful had happened.
Without saying a word to his breathless, half-frozen son, the butcher took his sharpest
knife and went into the woods.
James sank into his mother’s arms, unable to hear her calming whispers. Her hands combed through his hair. She wrapped him in a blanket as she’d done the day after he was born, when she named him and his father presented him to the village. But James felt no warmth. The thing’s howl drowned out any sound. Even enveloped in blankets, he felt the cold nibbling at his skin, forever hungry for his body heat.
The butcher didn’t come back till morning. When he finally did, he was alone. He went back the next day. No Liza.
The next. No Liza.
James never told anyone what he saw. If he even tried to explain it, his tongue would grow heavy in his mouth, numb and useless. If someone asked about the thing in the woods, he would just shake his head violently and storm off, wishing the wetness on his face would retreat into his tear ducts.
While the family mourned, the village bit back its collective I told you so. As much as they wanted to rub in their self-righteousness, a little girl was missing. They all knew that she’d be gone forever, but none wanted to voice the truth aloud. In a few years, perhaps, if the butcher hiked his prices during the winter season, they would mention that they were responsible
parents who told their children not to venture into the woods. They knew children needed to learn this vital lesson before they learned something trivial like their names.
What the village didn’t know was that Liza was not, in fact, dead—but she wasn’t quite Liza anymore.
The thing that waited in the woods did not feel emotions, but when it saw the boy and girl meander into the forest alone, it might have felt something akin to joy. The villagers’ caution of the woods was amusing at first but quickly became irritating. It quite enjoyed feasting on the young humans who thought they knew better. In the last forty years, the thing had survived by eating lesser meals, deer, raccoon, and even the occasional bear, but nothing quite satiated it like human flesh.
And now these two . . .
On any other day, it would have consumed both of them in one gulp. But the creature wasn’t hungry; it wanted something else. It needed a girl. The only human bold enough to cross into its domain in recent years was the girl’s father, but men were useless. It required a girl for its purposes, and this one would do quite nicely.
After the boy had scattered, the thing began to retch. It was a nauseating noise, one that caused every creature with ears within a mile
radius to flee. The thing heaved and heaved and heaved until the thing bathing in its stomach acid finally ascended from its gut and out of its mouth.
The monster had consumed the girl to create a twin of itself—a smaller version, sure, but equally as ugly and monstrous. The new creature was coughing, confused in its new body, trying to scrub away the sticky substance dripping from its fur coat with hands that no longer had fingers. It was so confused, so scared. It had the vague memory of being something else, something smaller and less taloned than this. But whenever it thought it might remember a time before it was this, the memory slipped away like ash in the wind.
The girl that was no longer a girl let out an ear-splitting cry and scrambled away, tripping over its new, long legs, unable to grasp the mushy snow with its talons. And it ran away, away. Into the woods somewhere.
Strangers
by Mimi Newman
Illustration by Clarissa Janeen
George
If these four walls could talk, they would tell you things you’d only be willing to repeat in confession. I could tell you stories that might put you off your whiskey, sure, but some of the bloodstains on the floorboards have been here much longer than I’ve been drinking here every night—since the days when the town was little more than a single street and men were still coming this far west in search of gold; since this was the last bar you passed on your way out of town, before nothing but desert stretched out in front of you for miles.
Back when I first got to town, everyone in this joint was a stranger—just passing through, stopping for a drink and maybe a meaningful conversation if you were lucky. Nowadays, though, I notice when there’s a new face sitting at the bar. I feel as if I know these people now, even if I don’t know most of their names. The girl in the red dress is always sitting at the bar at this time of night, but never drinks on the job unless a paying customer wants to charm her
by getting her something. The two men sitting at the small round table closest to the bar come every few days and talk in hushed tones, each nursing one drink for hours at a time and only leaving when the saloon finally closes. The guy behind the bar is the only one whose name I know; Henry’s been running the joint since before I arrived in town, and he’s the only one I ever talk to, but he never wants to talk back.
I gave up on making conversation earlier than usual tonight—only at the second drink— but four drinks later I can’t remember why. I’m occupying my time by watching the man closest to me at the bar, sitting halfway between me and the girl in the red dress. Six drinks deep it’s a little harder to recognize a face—even more so when most of that face is disguised in shadow from a hat pulled strangely low over the eyes— but I’m sure I’ve not seen him before. At least not regularly. He must be an out-of-towner. As I raise my glass and take a sip, I hear two barstools screech as they are pushed away, and over the burn of liquor in my throat it sounds far away, muffled, as if I’m underwater. The flash of bright red in the corner of my eye tells me who one of the people to stand up is, and when I put my glass down and turn my head, I notice that I’m the only one still sitting at the bar; both the girl and the stranger are standing facing the door.
It’s over before I’ve had time to realize that it started—to turn and look at another newcomer standing on the threshold, pointing his revolver at the girl, or to notice that the stranger from the bar is suddenly holding a gun as well. The sound of it firing is clear, bright, deafeningly loud, like I’ve broken the surface of the water now.
The girl’s dress is billowing around her on the dirty floor. It’s spreading and flowing and collecting in the cracks, and it smells like metal, even through the residual smell of gunpowder. The bright red tendrils of it have already ensnared the stranger lying motionless next to her and they’re creeping their way toward me, so I pick my feet up off of the floor, out of the way, and drink the last drop in my glass.
Henry
She was the youngest of her kind I’d ever seen when she walked in and sat down at the bar for the first time; she’d run away from home, I’d’ve guessed, maybe chasing a man or money or trying to escape the quiet life and a father who gets violent when he drinks. She arrived with sixty dollars and two dresses in a brown suitcase, fresh-faced and too skinny and looking young enough to be the daughter of most of the men at the bar, and she seemed more intelligent and experienced than any of the girls that had come
through town before her. Even then, the stories she would tell me rivaled any tale of gunslinging criminals and bar fights with no winners that I could ever tell her. She would sit at the stool in the very center of the bar and twirl her dark hair around her finger as she told me of the men who had chased her affections across six towns, of times she’d found herself the only woman for miles and made hundreds of dollars in a night, of the witnessless wedding that she regrets every time she hands her ring to me to keep safe behind the bar while she works. In return for her stories entertaining me on slow nights, I promise to swap out the bourbon for watered-down root beer whenever a man buys her a drink, because she’s heard of too many working girls’ bodies showing up in alleyways to want to risk losing any of her sense while she’s on the job.
Annie’s stories may be more interesting than anything I’ve witnessed from behind the bar, but I’m still familiar enough with the sound of a revolver being cocked to recognize it long before anyone else has even registered that someone has walked in, let alone realized that they’ve pulled a gun from their holster and pointed it at the only other unfamiliar face in the room. Before I have time to yell a complaint or even put down the empty glass in my hand, Annie and the stranger at the bar have both jumped to their feet. Their
sudden movement draws the whole room’s attention; from where I’m standing I can’t quite make out the people sat in the dark corners, but I can assume that they, just like everyone else, have ceased their conversations and turned to the bar where the tall, faceless stranger is staring down the barrel of a gun.
The only sound breaking the silence is the creak of the saloon door swinging closed behind the figure silhouetted against the late-evening light. Even George, who spends every night attempting to make slurred conversation with me from his seat at the bar, has placed his glass down and turned to watch.
Everything is perfectly still until the man in the low-brimmed hat reaches down, pulls his gun from his holster, and aims it at the man in the doorway. He does it surprisingly slowly— almost leisurely, as if he knows he’s at no risk of being shot despite the cocked gun pointed at his head. The whole bar seems to draw a nervous breath, not daring to move—with the exception of Annie, who takes a slow step backward into the shadows, her breathing making her pale chest rise and fall at a panicked speed. She might have gone unnoticed had her foot not landed on a loose floorboard, shattering the stillness and silence with a creak that seems deafeningly loud. In the time it takes her to audibly gasp and
jump farther back into the darkness, the man in the doorway takes two steps forward toward his target, and the man standing by the bar swings around and aims his revolver straight at the shadowy corner where Annie is cowering in the darkness.
Maybe it’s because her stories of outlaws and gunfights have stuck with me more than I realized, or maybe I’ve just been working in a rough bar in a rough town for too long, but I instinctively drop to the floor behind the bar and out of harm’s way before the rest of the room descends into total chaos; screams ricochet off of the smoke-stained walls, and the saloon door squeaks on its hinges as people rush out, and through the ever-present stench of liquor I catch the acrid smell of gunpowder. Usually, I’d be able to tell you how many shots were left in the chamber of the gun just from the sound it made when it fired, even from beneath the bar, but when both revolvers fire at the exact same time, I can hardly think through the ringing in my ears. Until a body hits the ground, and the floorboard creaks again.
Annie
If I’d’ve been at all in my right mind, I’d’ve gotten up and walked out of the joint the second Eddie Mason set foot inside. I should’ve left
before he had the chance to sit down at the bar, three stools away from me. It didn’t matter that he was wearing his hat low enough to obscure his eyes; I could tell just from the way my skin was crawling that he was staring right at me.
Now, though, his gaze is locked on Billy, and it’s the first time since he crossed the threshold that he’s not looking at me. He’s not looking at the gun, either, even though he could’ve seen right down the barrel from where he’s standing. He’s looking past it, past the hand that’s holding it, to its owner—to the face hidden in the shadow of the doorway. The last time I had seen Billy, he’d told me he had a bullet in his gun with Eddie’s name on it—saved for the man he used to call a brother.
Men will confide a lot in you when you get them alone and do as they ask, provided they can forget that they’re paying for your company. They’ll tell you all about their wives back east, and the money they made when there was still gold to be found around here, and the men they killed in the last town they passed through. Some will even tell you they love you, if you’re not careful. If you’re even less careful, you might say it back; you might even find yourself borrowing a white dress and accepting a cheap wedding ring as payment for your services. There’s a man that loves me in every town
from here to New Orleans, from what I can remember. And now there’s two of them in the same town, the same saloon, guns pointed at each other’s heads, and the one in the doorway still thinks I’m his wife.
You would never be able to guess from the way he had been staring at me not even a minute ago, but Eddie doesn’t like me in red. Says it makes me look cheap. He told me so the first time he came through town and paid me almost double what I asked of him as if to prove a point. He might’ve proven it, too, if Billy hadn’t paid me twice that not two weeks later and told me that my red dress was his favorite.
But now I wish I could’ve picked out a black dress instead, and better disappeared into the dark corner of the saloon. I wish Henry would’ve been looking at me when I tried to catch his eye instead of staring at Billy just like everyone else in the room. I could’ve stepped with my left foot instead of my right, and vanished without a sound. I wish I could’ve heeded my mama’s warning about how men like him will turn the gun onto girls like me before they ever kill one of their own. As all of the eyes in the bar turn toward me, I find myself wishing I had never left Louisiana and had married the first man who asked me, because the target of Eddie’s revolver has shifted onto me.
And then the gun goes off.
Billy
I wonder if he knows that he looks like a coward with his hat pulled low over his face like that, hiding his eyes from our entranced audience. A real man shows his face when he’s looking death in the eye. And lord knows we killed enough men back before we parted ways for both of us to know what it looks like when the life leaves someone’s face.
I should’ve shot the fucker years ago when I first had the chance. I would’ve, if the unseasonably cold Montana spring weather hadn’t frozen the ground too solid to bury him. It might have made him respect me more if I’d tried to do him in back then. It might have made him finally accept me as his partner in crime instead of his lackey. I should’ve shot him the moment I walked through the saloon doors, before he had the chance to turn around, but I wanted to do it like a man. Wanted him to look me in the eye and know it’s me that fired the gun, know he’s about to die right before it happens. I wanted him to die knowing what happens to men who touch something that belongs to me. That, and the sight of her sat at the bar catches me off-guard enough to stop me in my tracks, gun cocked and aimed but finger
off the trigger. She’s wearing the dress I like the most—corset pulled tight around the curves of her body, skirt a dark, vicious red to match the greasepaint on her lips.
Men like me don’t marry. Neither do women like her, unless they find some poor idiot naive enough to think she won’t take her wedding ring off the second she sits down at the bar. I used to doubt that women like her have it in them to truly return a man’s love at all, but she proved me wrong the first time I came through this town, back when I was first out on my own instead of following Eddie wherever he went. I like to think I’m not easily fooled—not the kind to fall for a whore just because she says she loves me, unless she truly means it. And she’s wearing the dress that I said I liked her in—even though she thinks the color doesn’t suit her—because she must’ve known I would be back for her. Since coming west I’ve killed enough men to lose track of the number; if killing one more means Annie belongs to me, then I’m hardly going to lose sleep over it.
Except I still haven’t shot him. The lower half of his face—all that I can see of it—is smirking at me, and it seems like it’s been hours since I took my gun from its holster and loaded a bullet into the chamber, and for some reason he’s still breathing. Judging by the palpable silence,
Eddie seems to be the only person in the room not holding their breath.
Until a floorboard creaks in the corner, and the whole room gasps as the silence is shattered. It’s not noble to draw your gun on a lady, and it’s not something you would do to a woman you love, but he’s not a noble man, and I doubt he ever truly loved her as I did, so I shouldn’t be surprised that he changes his mind and points his gun at Annie. But his sudden movement is like a bolt of lightning striking me where I stand, jolting my brain into action, and I remind myself that it’s not cowardly to shoot a man who’s turned away from you if he knows you’re about to do it. And the fucker’s still smirking under that goddamn hat as if the idea of me being the one to finally get him is somehow amusing. So I pull the trigger, and I hardly hear it go off because my heartbeat is so loud in my ears, and I kill him for Annie’s sake. Except by the time the smoke clears, two bodies lie on the ground, and the red of Annie’s skirt is pooling beneath her and seeping into the floorboards.
Eddie
I turn the gun to her because you’re better off treating the cause instead of the symptom, even if you love that cause, and because she knows I hate her in red. I never see her drop to
the ground, never see the blood, but I see the cross hanging around her neck glimmer in the dim candlelight, and I wonder if whores and gunslingers occupy the same part of hell.
Cherry Blossoms
by Sam Kostakis
Illustration by Aubrey McConnell
Content Warning for self-harm, suicidal ideation, depression, and alcohol use.
She sits curled on the counter, knees pulled up to her bare chest. Her forehead is inches away from the mirror; her nails dig into the skin at her hairline, rubbing over the series of small red bumps that have formed there.
My place today is low to the ground. I slot perfectly into it, hidden next to the toilet. I’m not convinced she knows I’m here.
She drags her fingers down her face. They catch at the skin under her eyes, dragging her cheeks out of shape, leaving a thin line of beading red near her jaw.
She squeezes her fists over the tops of her knees before she sees me. I hunch lower, settling onto my stomach. My tail thrashes back and forth, slapping against the wall on one side and the toilet on the other.
She tilts her head at me. A small smile
twitches at the corner of her mouth.
“Hi,” she says. “What are you doing down there?”
She climbs off the counter and moves to turn on the shower, stopping only to scratch between my ears before disappearing behind the curtain. I rise from my place and arch my back, relishing the stretch.
Above me, the toilet paper dangles from the roll, a white flag hanging over my head.
She is hidden behind the curtain. She won’t know anything until it’s too late.
I flex my claws and attack.
She sits at the kitchen table, her head buried in the nest of her folded arms.
I watch her from my place across the room, standing guard over her as much as the halffilled dish behind me. It is almost time for a fresh offering, and still she has not risen from the table.
I cry out, a high-pitched yowl she would normally be quick to respond to, but she doesn’t move.
I pad across the room, silent as always, until I reach her side. She doesn’t react to my first touch against her leg, so I sink my claws in.
She flinches, jolted from what I realize now was deep sleep. She rubs the scum from her eyes
and squints down at me. I sit, tilting my head back to peer up at her.
“Shit,” she says. “Don’t do that, Elias. What the fuck. Jesus.” Her elbows hit the table with a thud, and she buries her face in her hands. The loose sleeves of her sweatshirt slip down her arms, exposing the thick white scars she has had since I came to live with her. Laddered between them is a raised red one.
I cry out again when I see it, and she tips her head to watch me from between her fingers.
“I didn’t feed you,” she says. “Shit. Come on, Elias.” She gets to her feet and crosses the room to the cabinet, removing a single silver can from the stack on the top shelf.
She pours the fresh offering into my dish, and I hunch over it to eat, thoughts of the fresh red mark on her wrist momentarily forgotten. o-o-o-o-o
She wakes, screaming, in the middle of the night.
I am not asleep when it happens. I am taking advantage of the empty first floor of the townhouse for exercise, sprinting first one way, then the other. It wouldn’t do to be out of shape next time the neighbors come, with their beast that they keep leashed on the front porch.
I hear the shrill noise as I make another pass by the staircase, and I skid to a halt, my nails
scraping against the hardwood. I stand, back arched, contemplating the staircase.
I mount the first step, then the second. The smell of sweat and fear strengthens as I approach her bedroom door, left open just a crack so I might access the bed in the corner while she sleeps.
I let myself in and go to her. She is sitting upright, arms folded over her chest, nails digging into the skin of her upper arms under the thin straps of her tank top. In the corner, the little space heater wheezes away, almost masking the panting of her breath. It is almost as harsh as the leashed monster.
I sit at the base of the bed and look up, gauging a jump I’ve made a thousand times before.
I leap, and she doesn’t startle, though I land on her ankles. I climb over her blanket-covered legs and settle in with my back curled against her stomach, burying my nose in the soft fleece.
For a while, there is nothing. Just her gasps and my low, rumbling purrs.
I feel her fingers against my spine, digging into my fur as she cries.
She lifts me into her arms and takes me into the office the next morning. I protest my removal from the patch of sun I had been
relaxing in, but she ignores my cries and deposits me on the carpet, closing the door behind us. I leap into a box, half-filled with old papers, and sit back, my eyes just reaching the cardboard lip. I lean forward to bite down on it, chewing idly as she logs into her computer.
There is absolutely nothing like starting your morning with cardboard. Usually, she would notice, would rise from her chair to take it away from me with a stern no. Today, she does nothing.
The face of an older woman appears on the screen. My human calls her The Therapist, or usually just Miss Kate. I imagine she must get quite bored, waiting inside the computer box all week until my human logs on again.
“Hi,” my human says.
“Hello,” Miss Kate says. “How have you been?”
“You know,” she says. Her thumb and forefinger form a circle around her wrist, and she twists her hand back and forth, rubbing against the fresh scar I know she’s hidden there. “Maybe not so great.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Miss Kate says. Miss Kate, in my expert opinion, is somewhat useless. She never prescribes the chewing of cardboard as the cure-all it clearly is. “Do you want to get right into it, or should we start with GLADS
and go from there?”
“We can do GLADS.” She glances around, catching me with my teeth sunk into the corner of the box. “Really, Elias?”
I open my mouth and jump out of the box before she can pick me up again.
“Something you’re grateful for,” Miss Kate prompts. This is a frequent topic of conversation for my human and Miss Kate, though the answer should be obvious by now.
Me. Of course.
I sit behind my human, preening, wedging my tongue into all the little crevices of my paw. If I am going to be praised, the least I can do is look the part.
She sighs. “The little demon, I guess.”
It is something she has called me many times. I refuse to answer to it.
I set my paw back down, stand, turn, arch my back. I curl up in the center of the carpet, my nose tucked under paws, my back to her.
“The cat,” Miss Kate says, and I like her even less. “Something you’ve learned this week?”
“Uh,” she says. “Um. The French make really fucking weird movies.”
I wonder how much longer I’ll need to pretend to nap before she apologizes. The floor is not nearly as comfortable as a human lap.
“French movies, huh.” Miss Kate shows
good judgment for once. She sounds almost as bored as I am.
“Yeah. We read a screenplay in this class I’m taking.”
I pull my nose from the stacked pile of my paws, stand, turn back around. I pace closer to the chair.
“Something you’ve accomplished?”
My human laughs, and it’s a lower sound than I’m used to. She sounds like she’d shatter if I pushed her. “I didn’t kill myself?”
Miss Kate looks up. Her face is a grainy mess on the computer screen. I wonder if she’s happy, living in a box like that. I’ve never seen my human bring offerings to Miss Kate. As lovely as boxes are, I rather enjoy the offering dish.
“I’d like it if we could go a little beyond that, but I’ll count it,” Miss Kate says. “What about self-harm?”
My human hesitates. Her hand goes to her wrist.
“Okay.” Miss Kate peers out from the screen. “Take a deep breath, Nova. It’s alright. I’m not here to judge.” She hesitates, then adds, “You know I have to ask: If it gets bad, is there someone you can call?”
My human makes the same sort of face I hold in reserve for when there are no Kibble
Treats mixed in with the wet food for dinner. “I guess.”
“Let me rephrase. Is there someone you’d be willing to ask for help?”
My human laughs again. It’s still the low, dry, bad version. I sit back on my hind legs, checking for obstructions on her lap. My front paws curl, ready for the jump.
There’s nothing. I leap.
She jolts a little when I land on her lap, but her hand immediately finds its way into my fur. I settle in, kneading my paws against the soft material of her clothes.
“Hello, Elias,” Miss Kate says. I ignore her.
“He says hi,” my human says. I most certainly did not say hi.
“Someone you can call,” Miss Kate prompts. My human hesitates. “My mom. We call every week. I don’t want her to worry about me like that, but, you know. If it gets really bad.”
“Hmm,” Miss Kate says. “I’ll take it for now, but we’re circling back to this later. I want to make sure we go over your safety plan again. Is there anything that brought you joy this week?”
My human gazes past the computer with Miss Kate in it. On the opposite wall of the office, the window is open. It’s not a nice day; there are no convenient sunspots in here for me to relax in, to my immense displeasure. Still, my
human stares at the waving branches outside like they’re the most fascinating things in the world.
I tilt my head, considering the window. My human’s palm smooths the fur on my back as I watch tiny white petals from the tree blow out onto the grass.
“The cherry blossoms are blooming,” she says.
She leaves the next day. The offering dish is full, but she did not clean the toilet box.
I sit in the front window, even though the sun is gone today, and take the time to clean every inch of my brown- and black-striped coat. Then I curl up for a nap.
She does not come back to refill the dish at dinnertime. I eat my way around the crusty bits of the leftovers, then destroy the tissue box on the kitchen table in retaliation.
The toilet box is still full. I do my business in a clean corner and bury it as best I can.
She returns long after the sun has set. The points of her heeled shoes click against the hard floor as she stumbles inside. She lets the door swing closed behind her, drops a small black bag on the ground, and collapses onto the sofa, where I’m not allowed to sit.
I pace to the door, sit in front of it, and meow. My human does not respond, does not
come over to pick me up and say the thing about how I don’t know how good I have it indoors.
I pad my way over and investigate her foot. It’s dangling off the sofa. The point of her shoe is directly in front of my mouth, so I take it as the invitation it obviously is.
I bite down, very gently. It doesn’t taste very good.
I jump onto the sofa, where I’m not supposed to be but where I have taken many naps, and bite at my human’s hair. It’s up in a pile on her head, wisps of it falling free over her back and shoulders.
She doesn’t respond. She smells strange, like something sharp and bitter. I don’t like it.
I pick my way down her spine and sit on her back, where it dips under a shiny black fabric that doesn’t seem to cover as much of her legs as usual. It’s as reasonable a spot as any to sleep.
I am woken by a rush of air around me. My paws slap against the floor. I yowl in protest, and something rustles on the sofa above.
“Shit.” My human stirs, sits up. I gaze at her, knowing how wide my eyes are, how small I must look from so high up.
“Elias.” She leans over, picks me up. I wriggle halfheartedly, but she’s already cradling me to her chest, burying her face in my fur. I
freeze when I feel the first small, wet droplets against my coat.
“God,” she says as I relax against her. I don’t know who she thinks she’s talking to. I am the only almighty being with any sway in her life, and my name is Elias. “God, I didn’t even clean the litter box yesterday.”
Her body lurches, and she drops me to the sofa before tipping off the couch. She stumbles into the bathroom on her pointed heels. I hear retching and decide not to investigate. When she comes out, her face is pale. Strands of hair cling to her cheeks. She’s removed the shoes.
She goes to the cabinet and removes a can of meat, which she scrapes into a fresh offering dish. I bound over, circling her feet as she kneels to set it down. “There you go,” she says, scratching the skin behind my ears. I barely notice. I’m already face-first in the food.
She’s gone when I finish eating. I wander up the stairs to the bedroom and find her struggling with the zipper on the back of her black dress. Her arms are twisted behind her back; her dark hair is free of its knot. Strange black smudges roll down her cheeks with her tears.
She screams through her teeth. It’s an odd noise, one I’ve never heard her make before. It’s like it died before it even made it out of her
mouth. Her fingers curl into the fabric, and the dress rips. She stumbles out of it and collapses onto the floor, sitting with her legs sprawled out in front of her.
In my expert opinion, this is not typical behavior for my human.
I turn and scamper down the stairs. Her bag remains where she dropped it last night. My teeth close around the strap, and I begin the arduous process of hauling the thing upstairs. It’s heavy, but many battles fought against creatures that invade the townhouse from the outside have made me strong.
By the time I make it back to the bedroom, my human has risen from the floor. She’s changed into an oversized shirt, one that still smells a little like the human who first left it here. I’ve been sure to put extra claw holes in it as a result.
She still doesn’t have pants on. This doesn’t stop her from coming into the hallway when she sees me with her bag. I drop it and sit, my spine straightening with pride.
“Don’t just sit there looking guilty,” she mutters as she scoops the bag up from the floor. “You absolute menace.”
I should have remembered that at their cores all humans are ungrateful bastards.
“You left tooth marks,” my human says. She
opens the bag, dumps the contents out on the dresser. She picks up her phone; it’s the only thing in the house I’d actually get in trouble for hiding.
I don’t want that thing anyway. It makes too many noises.
Still, sometimes my human uses it to talk to the other humans she keeps in there, and that makes her happier. Why anyone would want to interact with another of their own species, I don’t know, but who am I to judge?
She turns her phone over in her hands, then taps the screen. I watch her brow furrow as she examines it.
It comes to life in her hands, and I jump, back arching. She lifts it to her ear as she sinks back to the floor, extending a hand for me to sniff.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m awake.” I pad closer to her, sniffing at the tips of her fingers. The sharp smell from the night before has mostly worn off. Now, she just smells dirty.
“No. I’m fine.” I rub my face against the side of her hand, and she scratches under my chin.
“You don’t need to worry about it, Mom. Yeah, I know you called a lot, I’m sorry. I meant to call you back.”
She’s quiet for a little while longer, and then she says, “Yeah, no, I know. It’s just been a lot
lately.” I push past her hand and into her lap. She doesn’t protest, just shifts her legs to make room for me. “School, work, y’know. I’m just a little overtired.”
She smells filthy. I nose my way along the inside of her wrist and start licking the skin there.
“I love you, too. I’ll call next week.” She puts the phone down, and there are little pools of water at the bottoms of her eyes. Her chin is quivering.
“You ever miss your mom?” she asks me. Sometimes, she refers to herself as my mom, and she’s right here, so this is a ridiculous question.
“I’m not allowed to kill myself, Elias,” she says. “It’ll kill my mom.”
She doesn’t cry, but she lets me keep sitting there, bathing the inside of her wrist and kneading my paws against the side of her leg.
When someone knocks on the door the next day, she doesn’t get up to answer it. She’s sitting at the kitchen table again, staring at her laptop. Even I know she has to push the buttons in front of her if she wants anything to happen on that screen, but she’s not doing that. I am trying to be helpful by pressing the buttons for her. She keeps pushing me away.
I jump off the table and trot into the foyer,
hiding behind a large plant in the corner that I get in trouble for playing with even though the leaves dangle at just the right distance from the ground for swatting. I wait for her to follow me, to open the door, but she doesn’t move.
The knock comes again. She’s still sitting there. She’s still wearing that shirt from the night before, and I think about putting more holes in it. Instead, I pace out from behind the plant, cross back and forth in front of the door a few times, yowl in her direction.
She looks up, finally, and says, “It’s just a salesman or something.”
It’s not. Even through the door, I can smell lavender. I cry again, and she sighs. She stands, walks to the door, bends to pick me up as the knock comes again.
“Nova? Are you home? Is that Elias I’m hearing?”
My human freezes. She lets me go, and I scamper back behind the plant before she can change her mind. I watch as she unlocks the door with shaking hands.
The woman on the other side wears jeans and a purple sweater. Her dark hair is streaked with gray. She has the same dark brown eyes as my human, but hers are deeper set and surrounded by a web of fine lines. The smell of lavender wafts into the townhouse, set free from
its usual imprisonment behind the phone screen. It’s been a long time since she was here last, but I remember.
“Mom?” my human asks.
“Oh, honey,” her mother says. I watch her eyes flick from the shadows under my human’s eyes to the scars on her arms. The mother reaches for my human, and they fall against each other.
“It will be okay,” the mother says. “You know that? I’m proud of you.”
Behind them, I can see the sun peeking out through the clouds, promising warmer spots to nap in. The wind rattles the branches of the cherry blossom tree, sending white petals spinning through the air. As my human lets go of her mother and leads her inside, one of them catches in her hair.
As the door closes, I think it’s a shame it didn’t land somewhere closer to me. I’d love to know what a cherry blossom tastes like.
Lost Boy in the Story Drinker
by Charlie Williams
Illustration by Clarissa Janeen
Captain . . .
He awoke, all panic and thrashing limbs, in the creaking dark.
Where is your crew, Captain?
His grasping hand found the torch, the oil jar beside it, the matches bound to the lid with string. He doused the torch head, angled it between his hook and forearm and, with his good hand, set it to a match. Amber light filled the remains of his ship, playing across the round face of the helm, belly-up cannons and their carts, necks of wasted rum bottles in their cloying puddles, balusters of the ruined starboard rail spanning the overhead gloom like vertebrae in a felled giant’s spine. Just above lay some 150 pounds of dripping rum barrel, stopped from
crushing him flat in the night only by a length of horsehair rope strung taut with the strain.
They’re dead, Captain, aren’t they . . . all of them . . .
“I know you!”
From the mouth of the wreck, where nautical smithereens gave way to glittering sand and sea, came the laugh of a child—impish, disembodied, somehow audible over the roar of the surf.
Know me? But how can that be, Captain?
“You’re the one who killed my crew. You’re . . . Pan, you are!”
No, Captain, no . . .
Pan sounded disappointed, but amusedly so. It was the crocodile that did it . . . wrecked your ship, devoured your men, and took your hand . . .
“But you sent it.” The captain gritted his brown teeth as he pulled himself up to a sitting position. “You have a way over things here.”
Maybe so . . .
He wandered out of the overturned hull to the beach, squinting in the sunshine. His ship was more pathetic from the outside; hopes of repair died at the sight of the gash in the side, the same hollow he’d spent the night in. Even so, he began gathering wood from the debris scattered about the sand, making a pile by the opening.
And what is it you’re doing, Captain?
He didn’t answer. A plank of barnaclecrusted wood, sodden with brine, split to mush in his hand. He threw it down and reached for another.
You can’t hope to repair your ship singlehandedly. Pan chuckled at his own humor.
“I intend to do just that.”
But haven’t you tried this before? Aren’t you weary of doing so again?
Now he knew Pan was lying. How had he spent his time, if not trying to depart this place?
He drove a fist into his forehead, gritting his teeth, trying to force recollection. The days after the shipwreck seemed a murky jumble; he remembered as far back as the first sighting of Neverland, the beach and terraced jungle behind it, tiers adorned with snarls of green vine and opalescent waterfalls. The shout of “Land ho!” followed by the splintering of wood, so many men hurled up, down, into the fathomless waters, where awaited only the undulating scales and teeth of a creature so vast the depths swallowed the extremities of its shape.
Then marooned, crawling up the beach, vomiting ocean water, collapsing in the shade of his doomed ship.
Then . . .
Nothing. Black. And yet he knew Pan from
prior days, recalled his feelings of animosity for the boy-god in the same way he could recall love and respect for his lost men. Both were real to him, perfect memory be damned.
Food would do you good, Pan counseled. There are edible fruits in the jungle, and wood you can cut for your project. Your supply here’s nearly finished. He threw the last plank on his meager pile and ducked back into the ship. His boots and coat lay beside a wooden chest with iron trim; from inside he drew his cutlass and wineskin, strapping both to his hips with a length of raggedy leather.
There was nothing else of necessity in the chest. He was hoping for a firearm, but found only a handful of coins and a journal mostly ruined by seawater. Darling Wendy, one page began, but the following words had run together. Don’t drink earwax, advised the next. 5102979, the only legible line on another. Gibberish. He left it in the chest and picked his way out of the wreck.
Properly outfitted, he started toward the looming jungle. Sometimes he muttered to himself, twirling fixedly at his sand-caked mustache with his hook. He walked up a shallow canal of intermingled sand and dirt, the way still of birdsong or the buzz of insects. The ground sloped gently at first, a difference slight enough
that a man unaccustomed to rolling with the pitch of a ship might not have noticed.
Hook treating you well?
It itched him fiercely, not that he’d tell Pan. Somewhere in the wreckage was his chafing powder, good for when saltwater irritated the skin around the stump, but it was of no use to him now. Smee, he thought, and with the remembrance of the name came warming fondness, gnawing regret. Smee would always powder it for me before my shave.
Why do you suppose you killed him, Captain?
He paused at the top of the path leading from the beach. All above was mountain wilderness, or trees, or ascending pathway, impossible to say which beneath the layers of creepers and shield-sized leaves.
“You killed him.”
He’d said it softly, but from the trees overhead came a returning You killed him, lifting the leaves as it whispered along. Close by his ear it turned to a chuckle, and he swiped his hook savagely around to that area.
“Stop it!”
I’m sorry, Captain, but I won’t have you pinning all the blame on me. You killed him, yes, and why . . .?
Pan’s words held the tone of a reproachful parent; oddly stung, the captain found himself
lowering his eyes to count the sand crystals stuck to his boots. But with no clear reason for why he should suddenly behave so, the feeling of shame melted just as quickly into one of utmost self-contempt. He glared around at nothing in particular and muttered something under his breath.
What was that?
“He wouldn’t stop looking at my hook,” he said again, louder. Yes. Decades of service as his first mate, and Smee had never taken such open horror to the sight of his trusty prosthetic as after the wreck.
What a strange reason to kill someone. Especially a friend so loyal and dear.
“He lost his mind. Nothing else to be done.”
How humane of you, Captain. I’d not have expected such mercy from a hardened buccaneer.
He’s mocking me, the captain thought plainly, trudging onward. I shall keep my eyes on each tree I pass. A sign of him, and I’ll gut him like a—
Like a codfish, Captain? Gut me like a codfish?
“Witchcraft,” he muttered, gaze flicking from trunk to trunk. “Fae magic. Voodoo.”
Around noon Pan caused a great wind to sweep the bundle of gathered branches from the captain’s arms, scattering them to the paths and foliage below. Pan did this twice more, always after the captain had amassed enough to perhaps
be satisfied and turn for the beach. Each time the captain screamed curses to the sky, vowed death and destruction for Pan and “all his fae friends,” and shook his hook in the air, twice drawing his cutlass to swipe at nothing at all. He ceased partway through the third tantrum, allowing his sword to fall harmlessly back into its scabbard.
“That’s not . . .”
What is it, Captain? You almost had me!
He squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head. “Why have I chased you so?”
But you always chase me, Captain.
“You haven’t any ‘fae friends.’ There’s nobody here but us. And I’ve gotten nowhere.”
On the contrary. Look.
He hadn’t expected the heights to which the cycles of Pan’s sabotage, and his own perseverance, had taken him. The beach was a white crescent miles beyond and below the loops of green pathway. The sea, icy blue where it met the shore, obsidian at its distant reaches, sat farther still.
It took a moment to recognize the whistle in his ears as breath through his arid throat, the pounding of Native drums as blood throbbing in his skull, tongue, chest. The captain slumped against the mossy rock face, hand passing to his brow, then his belly. He hunched over his
legs to retch, vision spinning.
“Wh-what is this?”
Dehydration, I think. You’ve been traveling for some time without rest.
He coughed up a single acrid strand, all that his empty stomach could muster, while fumbling with his great brass belt buckle. He ripped the wineskin off its leather strip and held it to his groin, licking bitter flecks of bile from his lips as he strained to make water. He managed a few seconds’ worth, and was putting the skin to his trembling mouth when Pan said, It has the opposite effect, drinking urine. Dehydrates you further. I’m curious, Captain, where you heard a myth like that?
Eton. Again, the answer came before he’d had the mind to shut Pan out, the thought and attached memory appearing to him without any strain on his part to conjure it.
Eton College.
He hunkered over the discarded wineskin, eyes shut against the sudden flood of images and sensations assailing him. A hulking, hacking city of labyrinthine streets and spires rising like defensive spears against the industrial haze. A wood-paneled tavern nestled somewhere in all that iron and smog; voices and songs he hadn’t the mind to realize he’d forgotten. Their words presented clearly to him before melting away,
leaving only a familiar ringing in his ears and a pleasant warmth about his neck and cheeks. Does the most feared pirate in the seven seas still wish for London? After all these years, Captain? His eyes flew open, and before Pan could slip another word into his ear he was stumbling around the bend, head thrust skyward, tongue wagging for the telltale drops of the waterfall sure to await him up ahead. He had seen the falls sparkling from the beach—yes, he had, Pan had hidden them from him but he would sniff them out. He hummed as he went, the tune of a halfforgotten shanty that rose to a desperate whine in the pit of his throat as the path unwound one cruel turn after the next. The next. The next. No water.
There came a bored sigh on the air, and with it, at last, a sudden lash of moisture against his cheek. The brook was upon him seconds later, sweeping out his legs and sending him halfway off the pathside amid the sparkling runoff. He snagged a cluster of rocks at the mouth of the runnel and lay there, wedged against the current, gulping water until he vomited. Sweet coming up. He drank some more, then pulled himself over the far side and lay on the path, chest heaving.
I’ll tell you what, Pan said from somewhere overhead, the wood of Hangman’s Tree is sturdier
than all the rot you’ll find in this jungle. For the day you’ve had, I’m willing to let you reach it. All the timber you can carry.
“Another trick,” the captain said between heavy breaths. His hook itched him terribly, worse after his plunge into the stream. He didn’t care.
Maybe so. But the day is shortening, and you still have no wood for repairs . . . or a fire. The crocodile, Captain, think of the crocodile . . .!
Hangman’s Tree must have been a gargantuan thing when it still stood. The tree stump composed the whole of the summit, age rings sprawling like a frozen ripple from the embossed gnarl at dead center. The captain crested the stump and fell upon its vast grooves, glad for the coolness of the petrified wood after his climb.
“Where is the tree, Pan?”
Silence. The captain waited for a reply, then repeated his question. His own voice sounded tired to him, lacking any surprise that, yet again, Pan had deceived him.
This place, Pan mused at last. I’m curious if it supports or challenges your theory of wormholes, captain.
“My theory of what?” Wormholes, you call them. They’re all over the
maps and designs in what’s left of your navigation room. It seems you and your crew were seeking evidence of them before you reached me. Tunnels through the fabric of space-time, you theorized. Pan chuckled. Such slaves to plausibility, you fourthdimensioners! So much research, so much exploration, and you couldn’t fathom the concept of a destination beyond your plane.
“If this is another game, Pan—”
We’re almost through with games, Captain. And questions. I asked this one, my last for you, because I myself am quite interested in wormholes. I know they exist, though they appear differently from my end of things. My own cochlea, which I see you’ve chosen to lie against, is one such portal . . .
He rolled over to stare at the tree stump, and it stared back. Gazing into that spiraled knot set his head spinning, worse for Pan’s continued gobbledygook.
It’s very lonely, being your own reality. You’ve no idea how long I’ve waited for something like you to come tumbling into my void.
The captain’s heart thudded painfully in his chest. “Something like me?”
Something compostable, Captain. A fleshy thing brimming with delicious dreams and stories for us to play in. This tale was your favorite, as a boy, so now it’s my favorite. You can take that off now, speaking of.
He blinked, and his hook was in his hand, the single eye of his stump peering up at him.
I thought it fair for you to see things as they are, before I reset for the day. Watch closely, and be patient; I kept my ear open for eons before you found your way inside it.
His severed wrist was at eye level now, filling his vision, swaying like a cobra turned on its charmer. The knotted swirls of scar tissue and white nubs of his ulna and radius were all he knew, duplicating and lengthening into eternity, swallowing him down a gullet of his own cauterized flesh.
Inside, strangely, he stood still. There was no sense of a tunnel or enclosed space, though he ran his hand along the walls of caramelized muscle and found them solid. He saw that these walls funneled slightly, joining at a white point some miles ahead, their blemishes repeating every few yards like the aspects of two opposing mirrors.
He turned and found the stump again, running the other direction for an equally boundless distance, a perfect double for the first but for the gangrenous veins squirming down its length. He was drawn in this new direction and wandered that way, voicing any thought that began to form in his head without expecting an answer. Often his words felt informed
by an elsewhere mind, snatches of memory and reasonings with no immediate sense of ownership attached to them.
“There’s no crocodile, is there? Something crashed us, but . . . can’t remember.
“We were searching for time bridges in the Messier cluster. No, Aldebaran. Second star on the right, straight on till . . .
“How’s it I’ve been breathing without life support all this time?
“James, my name is. My name is James. James Hook, scourge of the… nonono, that’s all wrong. Hook was when I had my—me Jolly Roger, me crew!
“Smee I guess I killed, but what about the others? Mullins? Jukes? Starkey? “Why am I dressed like a pirate?”
Far ahead, the twin circles of bone seemed to be growing larger with each step he took.
Finite after all. Five minutes more along the ridged archway his stump began to itch again; absentmindedly he began digging pieces out of the fused flesh and casting them behind him. He had to stop fifteen minutes later, leaning against the side of the flesh tunnel with his head in his hand. The images in his mind flashed by quicker than those of London, in greater clarity, and were entirely alien to him. A ship, nothing like his galleon, sleek and white, with fins like
a fish and cannons aft, each barrel mouth large enough to swallow a man. A ladder leading up to a hatchway in the side of this ship; his own hand waving out of a spotless glass window; the smell of ozone, sterile gunpowder; engine roar, greater than all the artillery in the world, greater than the sea.
At the point where their terrible noise became deafening, it all vanished, and he was able to move on.
Smee met him forty-five minutes later. The dead man wore a bizarre aluminum jumpsuit and a crooked leer, clutching a photograph in one hand and coils of spilled intestine in the other.
“Captain,” Smee said.
“Oh God,” the captain said.
Smee dropped his entrails to jab at the picture. Himself and a beaming blonde woman. The bluish coils squished against the ground between his legs, pooled there. The captain’s fingers began to knead the flesh of his own belly, as though checking it for similar leakage.
“Promised my Wendy you’d get us home safe. And what for, that you can’t?”
“Forgive me, Smee. Oh God, oh God—”
“Stuck some junk in your arm, then opened me up for criticizing you for it! Did I deserve that, James? Did I?”
He stumbled on, weeping, and did not slow
until Smee’s voice faded away.
These aren’t even our real names, he thought serenely, wiping at his tears. He smiled. We’re just playing pretend. Pretend on pretend on pretend. He giggled and giggled until the weeping came back.
The twin portals of smoothed bone, colossal, gaped down at him as he approached. A pale glow brightened the way around each opening, caustic light patterns dancing up the walls and ceiling of the passageway. Bathed in the penumbra, he remembered Smee, and what he’d done to him, and why, and he began to sob, the grief so enveloping that he hardly noticed the change in feeling within his stump, no longer an itch but a starving burn. Still weeping, cradling what remained of his arm, whispering pleas for forgiveness and death, he stepped through the larger portal—his radius bone—and found himself returned.
For a moment he still knelt at the summit of the tiered mountain, familiar ground beneath him, earthy scent of bark and jungle moss all around. His hook was still in his hand, bare stump itching dully. The sight and sensation of these things were at first enough to sell their reality, and when the first blink came he was able to overlook it as just another of Pan’s tricks that, this time, he wouldn’t fall for.
In this first blink, during which the wood of the tree stump became tallow-colored and calcified underhand, he clung to the smell of earth in his nose until the correct summit returned. In the next, when the sleeves of his velvet petticoat and lace undershirt fell to a tattered silver jumpsuit, a cane of stained rebar in one hand and a pus-clogged wound in place of the other, he closed his eyes and held tight to the memory of his itching stump, counting his breaths.
He managed five. Cock-a-Craw! Pan crowed, and there was nowhere in Neverland that hellish trill was not. Craw! Craw! Nighttime, Codfish, Craw! Get ye gone, little fish. Scurry, scuttle . . .
And the captain went, crying and whimpering and screaming and laughing, over the side of the hideous spiral, down the tiers in a miserable, maddened tumble. The path underfoot seemed unable to decide whether to keep its mask; it was dirt, bramble, and jungle moss one moment, flaxen, hair-like grass and ossified cartilage the next. He rounded another bend and deposited knee-deep into what had been the brook, punching through the tallow goo that slouched, with the sluggishness and consistency of magma, where water had run. He associated that sludge with a sour taste in his mouth and
some warning words in a waterlogged journal, and what he vomited up looked like the oozing current, and it was swept indifferently away. This nearly proved too much. He might have keeled over and been swept away himself, but Pan’s voice came close behind, crowing— Caw-craw! Onward, Codfish, onward!—and he screamed back that he wasn’t a codfish, no, no, he wasn’t! This insistence, evidence of a snapped mind, seemed to placate Pan into silence, but the captain was already back in motion before the words left his mouth. He pulled himself free, leaving behind a boot (white silicon, steel-toed, the printed words “UK SPACE AGENCY” visible beneath a flag of superimposed red, white, and blue crosses) in his haste to exit the muck and scramble on.
He pushed through an intestinal tangle of ventricles, arms wrapped over his face. Beyond, down the pale canal, lay the beach, the promising sea, his ship.
His ship.
All reverted as he approached, as though Pan was reluctant to relinquish the gag just yet. The elaborate gold stern returned moonlight in ghostly green bands across the sand; wrecked mizzenmast and crow’s nest creaked conspiratorially. Then came another blink, just as he threw himself down on the sand in an effort
to worm as far into the safety of the wreck as he could. In that blink he saw the nose of the shuttle from his vision in the stump, a solitary white fin still clinging to the cylindrical body by drooping lengths of metal sinew, curled strips of aluminum flesh. Stern and captain’s cabin turned to the black-mouthed cannon engines, deep, dark, and dead, three silent Os of apparent shock turned to the ink-dark sky.
He crawled inside the wreckage with a moan, in the direction that felt like up. Under a grime-grayed archway of synthetic rubber, tatters of exposed electrical wire spilling down its length . . .
. . . through a trapdoor half-jammed by an oak board laid across the other side; Walk the plank, he thought in vacant sing-song, walktheplankwalktheplankwalktheplank . . . . . . between two rows of padded silicon seats. The reek of rum, ozone, metal, and charred meat seemed to tug at his flesh, weighing him down. Near the ship’s wheel, he became hopelessly tangled in a mess of horsehair rope . . . . . . now seatbelt straps, and hung in the fabric and the steely rot. His blood was thunder in his ears, vision warped by the nauseating sensation of being upside down no matter which way he turned. He caught sight of a beastly something in the ruins, screamed his throat raw,
and shrank into the tangle of seatbelts, which seemed to choose that very moment to let him go. The space near the bow, previously occupied by the helm, now comprised an arachnoid array of computer screens. Soulless matte eyes and the snaggletoothed legions of switches and dials between them.
He fell against the control panel, sobbing, holding his head aloft from the venomous pincers sure to latch into him at any moment. His good hand could not recall the hours it had spent memorizing each feature of the computer array, and it began making frenzied grasps at the seatbelts hanging just out of reach. In a final act of desperation he swiped at the straps with his hook, and he loosed a triumphant whoop as he did so, knowing that his trusty prosthetic would close the distance.
A sane sliver of the captain’s being, perhaps the last such piece amid the rubble of his psyche, understood what was about to happen as his hook hurtled toward the seatbelt tangle. He choked on his cheer and watched his arm fly. Watched the green-brown blur of sores, veins, hair, and crudely bent rebar. Watched a thin tatter of flesh tear from his stump and flutter somewhere else. Watched a birthmark he’d never noticed before. The sane sliver, beyond fear, beyond pain, made no attempt to stop any of it.
“Oh,” was all he managed to say. Then rebar met seatbelt, and seatbelt tore rebar halfway out of his infection-softened forearm, and he fell back against the control panel with a howl. He stayed like that, whimpering in the dark without an idea of his own name, whispering unintelligible things to the gutted nose of his shuttle.
Along the cartilage canal, across the jungle of tubes and wax-slicked ventricles, all through the great organ which, minutes before, had been Neverland, flesh pulsed and strained toward the wreckage for a taste of the captain’s words. The cochlea undulated delightedly at its summit, slaked by the dreams of its broken prisoner, by tales of smoggy London, pub crawls and bar fights, red-faced tenders with rags over their shoulders and clubs on their belts. Visions of a cosmos not its own, pastel smears of galaxies and asteroid pepperings set against an impossible void, starships rocketing to destinations yet unknown by the crews slumbering within. Shanties of the high seas and her fathomless depths, her monsters, her treasures, battles, lovers, sweet rum, daring escapes.
The captain succumbed to exhaustion a few hours later. Falling back against the control panel, his ear flicked a switch that, were the ship
still adrift in space, would have set a course for one of Jupiter’s lesser-known moons. That single click, and the captain’s continued mutters as sleep claimed him, were the only noises to stir the carcass of the shuttle.
When the stories grew stale in the swirls of its cochlea, the dreaming thing that called itself Pan dreamed a single word into existence and blew it over the expanses of its own sated flesh. Where that whisper passed, Neverland appeared, faint at first, just the outline of moss and leaves, bark, the curvature of stone, gradually growing in opacity until all was whole, solid, real. The word passed through the external canal, sowing dirt and white sand in its wake. Down to the beach, to the shuttle and its single occupant.
The control panel, what he’d mistook for a great spider, seemed to tug down and away, as though the whole array was merely the pattern on a pulled curtain. In place of the computer screens went the ship’s helm; beneath it, the captain slumped down to the sandy floor and did not wake. When he rose and dressed, as he had all the countless mornings since his arrival on December 5, 2979, he might reach up and give the wheel an idle spin, his mind going to memories of seaborne battles and adventures never his own. He’d look at the rebar stuck through his amputated wrist and see his trusty
prosthetic, a vestige of his swashbuckling life to aid him in his struggle against the boy-god Pan.
“Pan . . .” he whispered, and frowned in his sleep.
What delicious stories might the dreaming universe squeeze out of him today? Curious, insistent, the whispered word was at the galleon, inside the wreckage, dancing about his ears like a child calling an elder out to play.
Captain, it murmured, Captain . . .
About the Authors
Zenia deHaven (they/them) is a second-year graduate student in Emerson's Popular Fiction Writing and Publishing MFA. Their work is published or forthcoming in FruitSlice, SIEVA Magazine, NoVA Prism, and Page Turner Magazine. When they're not writing, they enjoy video games, group exercise classes, and giving their dogs welldeserved scritches.
@zeniadehaven_
Mimi Newman (any pronouns) is a sophomore Creative Writing student from London, England. When they aren’t writing weird genre fiction, they work for Concrete and Green Mag, co-host the Not Serious People podcast, and love to read all things high fantasy.
Born in Maine and currently living in Boston, Jagger van Vliet is an undergraduate student at Emerson College studying Writing, Literature, and Publishing. Their other works can be found in Index, Generic Magazine, Sieva, High Tide Literary Magazine, and Concrete Magazine. Presently, they work as the Editorial Head at a Boston-based fashion magazine. Jagger is, above all else, a Dadaist, writing mainly novels, novellas, and short fiction prose, as well as numerous editorial pieces.
Charlie Williams (he/him) is a senior Creative Writing major from Northern Virginia. His work has been published in Page Turner Magazine, Eunoia Review, and Maudlin House. He is not a codfish.
Rita Chun (She/Her | Emerson ‘25 | Creative Writing BFA) is a South Korean writer, musician, and artist. She is the founder of Writers Bloc, a community for writers and poets. Her work has been published by Eunoia Review, Wilde Press, Lunchbox Magazine, and Rabbit Hole. Exploring the beautiful and painful aspects of being human is a throughline in her multidisciplinary art.
Sam Kostakis (they/he) is a Creative Writing major (Class of 2025), the President of Theyta, published in Page Turner Magazine, and proud owner of two cats named April and Finn!
About the Type
The running text for this issue is set in Adobe Caslon Pro, designed for Adobe by Carol Twombly based on specimen pages by William Caslon between 1734 and 1770.
The display types for this book are Yu Gothic Pr6N designed by Morisawa Inc.
