Volume 15 by The Offbeat

OFF the

beat.

volume 15 spring 2015

OFF the

beat.

There are groups of us, in pockets around the world, whose tastes lean a bit toward the eccentric... Volume 15, MAY 2015

E DITOR IAL STAFF Gina Apone

Caitlin Munch

Kaitlynn Boot

Amber Parsell

Brittany Boza

Sylvia Promislow

Molly Burford

Kayla Putz

LeeAnn Connelly

Morgan Redding

Emily Garavaglia

Lynnette Roth

Austin Goodman

Kayla Samuels

Alison Hamilton

Sarah Shoemaker

Stefan Krestakos

Sarah Spencer

Mary Litteral

Lindsey Spitzley

Emilie Lussier

Rebecca Tencza

Thrishanna Martin

Sarah Waldrop

Emily McPherson

Emmanuel Williams II

Olivia Monforton

SPECIAL THANKS DĂ nielle DeVoss

Julie Loehr

Laura Julier

Jonah Magar

Marla Koenigsknecht

Printed on the Espresso Book Machine, East Lansing 48824-8005 Visit the Espresso Book Machine at www.lib.msu.edu/ebm Copyright ÂŠ 2015 by The Offbeat. All rights revert to authors and artists. Printed in the United Stated of America. ISBN: ISSN, if applicable:

The Offbeat gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Department of American Rhetoric and Cultures, the Professional Writing Program, and the College of Arts & Letters Alumni Association toward the publication of this journal. Visit The Offbeat at offbeat.msu.edu Book design by Alison Hamilton, Sylvia Promislow, Morgan Redding, and Emmanuel Williams II Cover design by Molly Burford, Emily Garavaglia, Stefan Krestakos, and Sarah Shoemaker Cover art by Audrey Kelly This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.49-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Post Script. Sincerely,

The Offbeat If youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re picked last, then youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re definitely not the least. Least of our worries are the conventions that constrain us. That consume us. That damage us. That hinder us. We have moved away from the pack and constructed something unconventional. We are all trying to pave our own way, but sometimes we become cemented in our ritualistic dispositions. So we throw away those expectations and eradicate Average Avenue. We then choose to go off the beaten path. We embrace the weeds and the brambles. We see the cuts on our ankles from the thorns as stories that need to be told. We feel our damp sneakers and know that this, this is what it means to be home. This is a path that allows us to simply be ourselves with all of our prettiest and ugliest imperfections, all making perfect sense. Dearest readers

CONTENTS.

ILLUSTRATED NARRATIVE Moaning Candles .

. 229

The Politics of Language

The 3 a.m. Crowd

. 237

Janne Karlsson

FICTION 97

Brian Michael Barbeito

Adam Berlin

Liquor and Love Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Mix William Blomstedt

Coste Not Desired

Michael Bonnet

Ballerinas Lea Bridi

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better .

Barney

. 178

. 123

Lucie Britsch .

Ron Burch

In the Name of Our Father Gavin Chapman

Rollin Thru the Hood

. 248

. 158

Ray Childress

The Untapped .

Adam Fishbein

Episodes in Embellishment Howie Good

Home Hunting

. 129

. 259

. 104

What If You’ve Experienced Gravity?. .

. 180

Hallows Dawn .

. 205

James Holbert

Foreplay .

Dan Kennard

Through the Door Kiley Ladwig

When He Left .

Caitlin Munch

Michael Onofrey Chelsea Prentice

Lunaphrenia

The Crescent Moon .

. 214

Veronica Jo .

Ana Prundaru Scott Selden

. 160

. . . Alaina Symanovich

. 222

Matt Smith

Sonder

The Second Mouse Gets The Cheese

Parker Weston

Poetry Fingers on the Piano Keys Linguistics Hunger . . Time . . . . . . . The Watery Bone . . .

. 235

. 157

24 . . . . . . . . . . Series 9, Episode 2, 12 Minutes

. 154

. 199

Hanging Lights

Lana Bella

Lucie Britsch Kika Dorsey

Love At First Sight .

. 173

Verdun 3D .

. 194

Whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the Scardey Cat Now

. 117

. 228

Stephen Philip Druce .

Robin Dunn

Martin Durkin

The Air is on Fire . . . . . . The Consolation of Philosophy . . The Most Remarkable Substance Ever Preparing for the Post-Apocalypse . Why Me . . . . . . . . . .

. 204

. 247

. 121

Confiding in the Blind

. 211

Possum Slim

Howie Good

Howie Good and Dale Wisely . . Michael Lee Johnson

. 119

Algebra . . The Plagues

. 122

A Ho. . . Is a Ho

How to Snare a Wandering Womb . Prarie Madness, 1862 . . . . .

. 174

Lee Kisling

Pamela Mack

Megan Merchant

bedstead . . . . menu . . . . . on the Victrola . . parsnips . . . . punctilious. . . . strawberry sundae . vinegar upon nitre .

. 234

. 193

. 120

. 153

The Right of Sepulcher .

. 212

Baked, Cut, and Community Purpose

. 213

Last Stand at McGraw-Hill

Christopher Mulrooney Tracey K. Parker

I Went to Church with Bruises Jessica Robinson

Potato Peelings

G David Schwartz Kelly Trammell

. 196

John Weaver

Ad Nauseam . . Six-Word Stories . Terminal Optimism The Suit .

. 152

. 225

. 226

Parker Weston

. . Joy-Amy Wigman

The Offbeat

Algebra Lee Kisling

I haven’t forgotten algebra— a series of boxes inside boxes, yielding finally the smallest of all, and inside that a circus peanut. Sitting at a small, wooden desk then, wondering this: what would become of me? Algebra was an early clue—I could not find X. X. The son of a bitch. I couldn’t see through his equalish disguises, his numerological fake mustache. What I learned was that X represented a profound and disturbing truth, that being: confusion lie before me like a vast sea—it was my birthright, my coat of arms. It was my squalling alpha, it would be my doddering omega, the landscape of my life, but once— I tell you this, a memory of first steps into the nonsense universe which has become my home, my pilgrimage, my perimeter inhabited by only a few without Xs and Ys for ears and eyes, those few with curious notions, with quixotic taste, with a commission of isolation—once I tore out a page of algebra, put it in my mouth, and sat chewing.

Kisling // Poetry

The Offbeat

I dissolved X. I absorbed him. I swallowed him. X is a tease. He hides in plain sight. He leaped from the soiled pagesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;he became the geometry of family, the calculus of marriage. He became the long division of loss, the tangled equations of why and why not. For Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sake, why this, why now?

Kisling // Poetry

The Offbeat

Linguistics hunger Lana Bella

Hunger gnaws, he opens his eyes to feast on the silver belly of her tongue. Rising grooves and dipping folds, she spins syllables of black-lace silk and organza tulle, smeared thick in linguistic marmalade: slanted Ls curve over spiraled Os then plunge in the vessel brimming of apostrophes. With a makeshift oar he rows, upon her moist pink buds speckled of umlauts’ lilt. When the moon turns gold and he begs for a kiss: she wings her laughs by the air laid cold “Thirst is despair, Darling!” her whisper severs through his parched suspense.

Bella // Poetry

The Offbeat

I can’t Believe it’s not better Lucie Britsch

“did you see what I wrote in the butter?” “What?” she said, cramming her second slice of toast into her mouth, crumbs spraying, and butter dripping down her chin “You have something” I dared say, pointing to the crumb on her nose but letting the ones in her head slide What’s a few crumbs between lovers She wipes her glistening, crumby hand across her face “Got it!” I say because I am supportive My girlfriend is a lost cause Lost to butter “What were you saying about the butter?” she asks putting her plate in the sink “I wrote something in it” I say “Why would you do that!” she says looking annoyed “It was supposed to be nice” I say “Nice?” she says “I wrote I love you” I say in my defence But I know now they lie when they say love can be wrong “…because you love butter” I say whilst clearing the table and hopefully my good name

Britsch // Fiction

The Offbeat

“Yes, I like butter” she says. Fact “I don’t like people messing with my butter though” she says leaving the room “Never mind” I say to myself Later she forgives me enough to walk to the store with me “Didn’t you write me a love note in my Alphabetti Spaghetti once?” I ask She stops walking “No.” then “What?” confusion “Why?” She is thinking I am confusing her with a previous girlfriend I don’t mention it again While she is squeezing peaches I try to remember that meal Did those pasta letters just happen to spell out something? Or had I hoped it said something to remember it that way Didn’t you used to love me enough to say it in my food? Did you ever love me? She has decided against peaches and is sniffing the melons I need to know where we stand before we purchase another melon together “So you didn’t?” I ask “Huh” she rightly says, she has moved on to peaches now melons since Then “No! I didn’t” She should be laughing by now I start to think maybe she has done such a thing for someone else But not me “…but you still thought it was ok to write shit in my butter” she says She has thrust a large melon into my arms and I am already struggling “Not with a pen!” I say louder than I intended A man “sampling” trail mix is startled by my outburst and scurries off “I know not with a pen!” she says Someone should be laughing by now

Britsch // Fiction

The Offbeat

“But your finger” she says “No! Not my finger” I say “Not with your…” she says “No! What boyfriends have you had!” But I know the answer is bad ones Later I see her go to the fridge and check the butter She sees what once said I Love You with knife marks through it I wanted to ask why then she imprinted a heart on my sandwich everyday But I didn’t dare On closer inspection it seemed the lid of my lunchbox had a heart-shaped ridge inside which when pressed down left its mark on my sandwich I had thought it was her Later whilst watching TV together “You did think the cook at Joe’s spelled out HOT with your fries once” “I did” I admit She patted my arm and scooched a little closer Was all the love I thought I had an illusion or worse, a delusion Then she rested her head on my shoulder “I do love you more than butter” she says Because he had worried she didn’t but who says stuff like that out loud

Britsch // Fiction

The Offbeat

Lunaphrenia Ana Prundaru

calcified inside our limbs, certain memories cling to us, welcoming occasional visits, especially when the wreck outside transcends the one inside. Few people are lucky enough to stretch those moments into a safe path between yesterday and tomorrow. This is the story of the life-stopping encounter that would propel me to map out my own impermeable lane within life’s thorny maze. I remember how tears of varied sizes descended from my eyes, mingling with the snowy path behind the gym. It was my sixteenth birthday and my hope ruptured wide open, only to bleed back inside me. I didn’t want it anymore and if hope had a right to decide upon its fate, I was certain it wouldn’t want to crawl back behind my lungs either. In that moment, I expected the rest of my life to be like a mute black-and-white movie, if I was lucky. Worst-case scenario, the following years would serve as an inspiration for another series of American Horror Story. Once I reached the age of 21, I would be able to frequent bars, drive, vote, and live on my own, yet I would never fully take advantage of these privileges, since I’d have to work multiple jobs to pay healthcare bills for meds I needed so I could function. I had already been at the Sanatorium for two months and there was no sign that my alcoholic father would take me back home. He wasn’t a bad

Prundaru // Fiction

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man. I certainly wouldn’t have used the word “neglecting,” but child services only gave me a tired smile when I protested their decision to hospitalize me. I could very well take care of myself while my father pursued his dreams of playing guitar in his friend’s bluegrass band. But neither the Sanatorium nor child services believed that, since pretty soon he left me with an aunt and things went wrong. Inside me. Not my brain, but my heart. Ever since that episode, it had been beating off-sync, as though I was swimming in my own current that was gushing against the natural current, not even knowing what I was wasting my energy for. Bipolar was the term medical practitioners used at the Sanatorium to describe my condition. Tsukiko was the nickname my former roommate gave me. She was half Japanese, and in her native language tsuki meant moon; thus I was the child of the moon. It was certainly a more appealing term than lunatic, which was commonly used by other patients who attempted to add a sublime touch to an enervating illness. If history was any indication, luck did anything in its power to avoid me, but on that day, it finally turned in my favor. In the following months, the scent of bloodoranges lingered in the otherwise disinfectant-filled air. Many days would be unexpectedly sweet, but the nights would almost always be accompanied by a nasty aftertaste. Most importantly, the meanings of purpose and self-containment would from then on unveil themselves behind each charcoal window I passed. The next months and years would be anything but mundane, instead offering me a glimpse into the glasshouse at the end of the horizon—a shelter I never had, one that was surrounded by the tranquility of a boundless lake, which nobody but Tudor and I could cross. Of course I didn’t expect anything out of the ordinary to happen on that December evening, while I stood alone and cried. As I wiped my tears and told myself to stop dwelling in self-pity, the

Prundaru // Fiction

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sun was beginning to set. I felt as though it was pulling me to the peachy horizon. In a daze, I walked toward the bursting colors in the sky, climbing up steep hills and stumbling over my feet every now and then. Indifferent to the fact that my navy blue ballerina shoes were a poor fit for the rocky ground, I placed one step in front of the other, continuing my way up. I’m not sure when I registered that night had broken in. It may have been the moment I started struggling to adapt my eyes to the dim surrounding or when my skin became covered in goose bumps under the thin fabric of my shirt. Disoriented, I lied down on the ground, closed my eyes and listened to the sound of rattling branches. Bugs crawled around me. There were some bird sounds as well, perhaps owls, but I couldn’t be sure. So close to the earth’s nucleus, I acknowledged that I had been mourning my old self ever since I entered the Sanatorium. After all, I had exchanged my youthful wings for a rusty cage. It was an unfair deal I couldn’t get out of. But in that moment, I had discovered a loophole in the system, or maybe I was desperately trying to get drunk with cold water. The night sounds felt safe, and so did the ground, which was vibrating harmoniously, reminding me of a summer spent almost entirely on a plastic boat taking in the rocking motion of the sea and imagining it was my mother who lulled me to sleep me in her lap. It had been arduous to cope throughout the past months without my music player, which held thousands of music pieces, some comforting and others invigorating. But taking in the wind and inhaling the unfamiliar smell of the crisp, wet ground had a similar effect to music, hypnotizing me inside a better world. The peaceful atmosphere didn’t last long, however, as fear started to kick in, picking up my heartbeat and pumping drum beats into the soft skin of my ears. Maybe it was because it felt distressing to be among living things that weren’t dependent on any psychopharmacologic drugs. As I opened my eyes, it dawned on me that I was an intruder, staining

Prundaru// Fiction

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the perfect ecosystem. I stood up swiftly and started to run, gliding through darkness, breaking some branches along my way. Up until then, I hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t even thought about the fact that by arriving past curfew I was getting myself in trouble. I had just recently earned the right to go on short walks on the Sanatorium premises. In the middle of a forest and atop a mountain, my thoughts clashed. How I would be getting back and whether I even wanted to were among the most prominent. Images of my self-harming roommate floated up, followed by the stomach-turning smells emanating from the kitchen and the screeching view of the mint green ceiling circling around me after the nurse in training had pierced several places on my arms and legs. Nausea spread up my throat, while hot flashes metastasized all over my body. Dark outlines of trees appeared to move toward me. Shadows were birthing ghosts, all hungry for my racing heart. I let out a shriek and started to run again. When I stopped to catch my breath, I realized that I was standing in front of the abyss. The clouds shifted, giving way to the apple-cheeked moon, its light shining in front of my dirt specked jeans. There was a shimmering violet pool down the cliff I was standing on, and all of a sudden I was a child again, eager to be rocked by the sea in my plastic boat while my dad and his buddies drink beer on the beach. I stepped forward, breathing in the frigid smell, wondering whether I would float or go down in the deep sea. Either option would be fine, as long as the waves were welcoming. As the moon returned behind the cloud curtain, I closed my eyes and stretched my upper body forward, planning to dive in headfirst. But instead of free-falling into one of my most treasured childhood memories, I was pulled back into darkness. The sky was looking down on me with an army of little white eyes. For a brief moment, I felt like an animal at the zoo; the stars were

Prundaru // Fiction

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temporary visitors, observing my every move. But then I became aware of the branches entangled around my body, and that is when adrenaline kicked in. I was convinced that the tree ghosts had caught up with me, ready to tear my limbs apart, and so I attempted to fight my way out of their grip, albeit to no avail. My opponents were much more powerful and their determination to lock me inside the forest was far stronger than my own willpower to escape. They carried me deeper behind trees, away from the enchanted lake I was so eager to swim in. It must have taken me a good quarter hour or so to break out of the trance-like state and realize I was in fact wrapped in someone’s arms. *** The stranger was comforting me, unaware that I was numb, essentially disconnected between brain and sensory neurons, which, in a normal person, register touch. My knees were coiled around his stomach. Moving wasn’t an option yet. I was devoid of any lifeblood, like a flat tire on the side of the road. Left with no choice of emotional response mechanisms and close to slipping back into the ghost inhabited forest by the enchanting lake, I closed my eyes, directing as much focus as I could to his touch. Little by little, I allowed little bits of reality to permeate my skin. His palms felt like they were dipped in hot coal, but I didn’t protest, after all he just saved my life. For a moment, my body, his body, and the skeleton of the space surrounding us stood in harmony to one another, but soon enough I was alone with the weight of the forest strapped onto my chest. I thought that if I were to suffocate I’d have rather crawled somewhere and whistle my last breaths alone. But his arms weren’t going to let me depart. He whispered something, brushing back a strand of my hair. Meanwhile, I was grasping air, wondering if I wasn’t in fact drowning in a beautiful underwater meadow.

Prundaru // Fiction

The Offbeat

When I opened my eyes, the blurry shapes gave way to quiet scenery. Despite a hint of bitterness in the air, nature looked anything but hostile. By the time my breathing had partially normalized, I started to shake violently from the lion inside me that had anchored its claws around my heart, threatening to cut me open at its earliest convenience. I wasn’t sure whether I would have a crying fit or a laughing fit about the fact that I had believed ghosts were after me. By then, I had figured out how my mind worked. Confusion about where my life was headed turned into a turmoil of emotions, which in turn gave way to anger and finally despair, depression, apathy. I knew how my internal apparatus functioned, yet I couldn’t control it if my life depended on it. His palms continued to brush my cheeks, while his gaze changed between the cliffs and me. I was holding my body, afraid it would break into pieces and bleed out in this stranger’s lap. “Are you OK?” he asked. It was the most sincere “are you ok?” I had ever heard. With my eyes fixated on the forest bed, I answered that indeed, I was. Perhaps my words came out a bit too quickly, as his grip tightened a little around me for a moment. Apart from his collected behavior, the wind must have been partially responsible for my return to the present, its sharp whip crushing through whatever dreamed-up sphere I had dug myself into. My stomach threatened to empty itself. Even worse, little circles of neon lights announced the arrival of migraines. As a form of self-persevation, my mind projected images from that summer at the beach, filling up my eyes for a brief moment. I was nostalgic, likely approaching hysteria, but I failed at expressing either emotion. Instead, I observed them in an abstract and distant manner, the way an impartial party would have. It was as if my brain was saying “Sorry, rain check! Got to reboot now, but we’ll explore those feelings some other time.” I blamed the meds and the stress from the previous months. The lack of

Prundaru // Fiction

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contact with my father wasn’t exactly helpful either, contrary to what the Sanatorium liked to make me think. Neither was the loss of freedom. Attempting to carve a way out of my destructive thoughts, I knew I needed to take baby steps: the first being to return to the Sanatorium. “I should get back. They are probably searching for me.” I said, still unconvinced whether he was a patient, a passer-by, or a health worker. When he pulled his arms away for us to stand up, the little warmth that had been caught between our bodies went with him. The moon made a return between its bulky cloud siblings, shining pale rose on us, prompting my eyes to search for his. Nestled on balmy, chestnut colored skin were two proud shining eyes, radiating calmness. I, on the other hand, had a face the color of old bones, thinning hair, and eyes that were more red than brown. He held out a hand, and I grabbed it, pushing myself off the ground with my other hand. The texture of his hair was that of a black rose. Behind a faint smile, he seemed to harbor something wild and inviting. “I’m Tudor, by the way.” He said, and it sounded like, “Everything is going to be OK.

Prundaru // Fiction

The Offbeat

on the victrola Christopher Mulrooney

lucid colors emerge from the bath enkindling vapid fire on the surface of a bubble floating lazily on the house current up and up till the large shadows drunkenly consume its shape reflections and all something seen in a comic spurt

Mulrooney // Poetry

The Offbeat

Coste Not Desired Michael Bonnet

“Is this it then, Martin?” Gerry asked, ruffling the ears of Olga’s cocker spaniel, “A handful of geriatrics and Rasputin?” Martin smiled and for the umpteenth time that evening glanced at his watch. “Quality not quantity, Gerry” he said cheerily. “That’s what we’re after.” “Well that’s all very well, Martin, but who’s to say you’ve got either?” Gerry swept a theatrical hand across the near empty stockroom. George and Beryl grinned and waved back; Olga stared intently. “Davey Jennings just told me that if a tray of sandwiches doesn’t appear in the next five minutes he’s going home. Says he only came down for the refreshments.” “There’ll be biscuits out soon, Gerry—he needn’t worry” said Martin. “Never mind your biscuits,” a voice shouted from one of the few occupied stools. “The flyer said refreshments, and in my book that’s sandwiches, maybe even sausage rolls.” Martin smiled placatingly. “Come on now, Davey, sausage rolls? This isn’t The Ritz. There’ll be plenty of biscuits out in a minute.” Davey Jennings stood up. “Biscuits do not constitute refreshments,” he shouted. “Biscuits are just, well, biscuits. It’s a flagrant case of false advertising. I could sue, you know. I won’t, but I could.”

Bonnet // Fiction

The Offbeat

Martin nodded and backed away but Davey called him back. “What biscuits are they, Martin?” he asked, a semblance of calm restored to his voice. “Ah, custard creams I believe.” “Custard creams,” mused Davey. “And what else?” “Well, er, just custard creams I think,” Martin replied, the grin beginning to sag at the corners of his mouth. “A single type of biscuit!” boomed Davey, “And a commonplace biscuit at that. No party rings or shortbread fingers, just custard creams. You have a cheek to say plenty, Martin. That is not what I call plentiful, not even close.” With that Davey Jennings knocked his stool over and stormed out. The clatter agitated the cocker spaniel who barked his disapproval. “Is enough Rasputin, stop it!” hissed Olga. The dog gave his owner a quizzical glance and wandered off into the yard. All eyes then fell on Martin. All eight of them. “Right,” he began, clapping his hands together, “seeing as our call for new members appears to have fallen on deaf ears, shall we crack on with the agenda?” Apart from Gerry, everyone agreed the petition looked impressive. Even after discounting the Mickey Mouses, Mike Hunts, and the like that had appeared after canvassing at the 6th form college. “Kids must be reported to the police,” said Olga quite seriously— there was a healthy 131 signatures. There was some grumbling about Gary Walker, who still steadfastly refused to sign. “He says that a Coste won’t affect his pub,” reported Beryl. “Dear, oh dear,” said Martin gravely. “First they came for the communists...” “Then they came for the hysterics,” muttered Gerry.

Bonnet // Fiction

The Offbeat

The poster was greeted less enthusiastically. The main point of contention was the image, a fuzzy depiction that resisted easy identification. Martin explained, “It’s quite straightforward really. The clock tower, the symbolic soul of Pembarton, is preventing a lorry towing a Coste store from exiting the A1342, the main arterial route into the village; thus representing our opposition to the supermarket’s arrival.” “Crystal clear,” chuckled Gerry. “That’s clock tower?” asked Olga perplexed, pointing at one of the poster’s denser looking blurs. “I thought it was transformer, like from movies.” “An easy mistake to make,” laughed Martin. “Beryl, I believe you had a query about the wording.” “It just doesn’t seem very polite,” Beryl said. “I mean, I know we don’t want them, but to say ‘Coste Not Welcome’ feels a bit rude.” “Pembarton’s known for its hospitality, after all,” George chipped in. “Perhaps,” Beryl continued cautiously, “we could change it to ‘Coste Not Desired’?” As with everything debated by the Friends of Pembarton Coste Opposition Group (FOPCOG to its five members), the matter was settled by a vote. Or it would have been had Rasputin not returned from the yard sporting the remnants of something furry and recently deceased on his face, sabotaging the democratic process. Beryl sprang into life dabbing at the dog’s jowls with a tissue, while Olga interrogated: “Rasputin, whose blood is this? What have you done, Rasputin?” By the time the mess was cleared it was getting close to the start of the space documentary that George said was “unmissable,” and the vote was abandoned. “In any case,” said Beryl, “it’s probably easiest for everyone if we just leave them how they are. The chap who designed them has his GCSEs coming up soon. We mustn’t distract him from that.”

Bonnet // Fiction

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“I think his parents would appreciate that, Beryl,” Martin agreed. Two parts parochial politics to one part canine intervention—this was standard operating procedure for FOPCOG’s monthly meetings. Indeed in the times when Rasputin didn’t attend, a lot less actually got done. So it will come as little surprise to learn that Coste, whether not welcome, desired, or otherwise, opened nonetheless. *** Pembarton was a village on the cusp of being idyllic. It sat, as these places often do, amid rolling hills. It was steeped in history, having played host to an important battle in the English Civil War, and it was home to a healthy number of independent, upmarket and unique-looking shops. Shops that uniformly flaunted their independence and uniqueness with novelty names, inflated prices, and boastful credentials. The bakery was an “artisan,” literary-themed establishment called Pies and Prejudice. A Cut Above was not merely a butchers, but a “master butchers and charcuterie.” Even the pub, The Nobody Inn, favored “purveying fine ales” to simply selling beer. Martin’s store, Marsden & Sons, claimed to have been an “organic grocers since 1878.” But Pembarton also had just enough imperfections to stop its quaintness becoming twee. There was the yeasty odor of the nearby brewery, which the locals were forever telling visitors they’d get used to, or the river’s penchant for periodically bursting its banks, much to the dismay of everyone except Knobs and Knockers, the hardware store, did a roaring trade in sandbags. And now, added to the list of minor blemishes on an otherwise perfect face, was a Coste supermarket. Not everyone in Pembarton took the FOPCOG stance on the village’s latest arrival. In fact after it opened many supporters of the anti-Coste campaign quickly changed their minds in the face of such tempting bargains. On one ugly occasion, Olga accosted Jayne Peterson in the

Bonnet // Fiction

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supermarket’s car park, thrusting a copy of the petition in her face as poor Jayne struggled to unload two cheesecakes and a half priced box of wine into her beige Saab. “In Russia, traitors get shot,” spat Olga. Rasputin, tethered to a nearby lamppost, howled his disapproval. Coste’s opening had even tested the resolve of FOPCOG. Gerry, whose involvement with the group had always been more voyeuristic than idealistic, reacted with predictable “told you so” pessimism. George and Beryl said they remained staunchly opposed to the supermarket and that they believed it would herald the beginning of the end of the Pembarton they knew and loved. “But you might see us in the car park from time to time,” Beryl said, “as our grandson has a Saturday job there and often needs picking up.” In the end it was Martin who convinced them to carry on. “Any struggle worth its salt experiences setbacks,” he commenced the first FOPCOG meeting since Coste’s grand opening. “Mandela was arrested. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Jamie Oliver had to jump through all sorts of hoops to change school dinners. The point is, the Berlin didn’t just fall. It was pushed, not literally of course—a lot of it still stands. If you’re ever in Berlin, I’d really recommend seeing it. But—where was I?” “Coste?” Beryl asked cautiously. “Yes thanks, Beryl. What I’m saying is that now is not the time for us to give up. Now is the time for direct action.” Olga nodded her head vigorously. “Peaceful, direct action.” Olga shook her head vigorously. “Many people will lose out financially if something isn’t done about Coste. But this isn’t just about our livelihoods, it’s about our heritage. My great-great-grandfather settled in Pembarton in the 1800s.”

Bonnet // Fiction

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“Oh God,” sighed Gerry. “He was an outsider. Didn’t know the place, didn’t know the people, didn’t speak the dialect. But he set up this organic grocer without a penny to his name. And four generations later it’s still standing, selling the best free-range, fair-trade, locally-sourced produce.” Martin paused, seemingly in anticipation of a reaction that didn’t materialize. “I know many of you will have similar stories, and all of them prove the same thing: this village is special, and that specialness needs protecting. Someone cleverer than me once said, ‘All that evil needs to prosper is for good men to do nothing.’ Well in Pembarton evil takes the shape of a popular supermarket, and it’s our duty to show it isn’t welc- I mean desired here.” It requires a liberal interpretation of the word to describe the sound of four people clapping and a cocker spaniel’s tail wagging as “applause,” but it’s fair to say Martin’s enthusiasm, if nothing else, struck a chord with his audience. Even Gerry managed to sound sincere in his congratulations, aside from the “I’d bet you’d make the woman who works there welcome” comment that is. And, given her usual stoicism, Olga’s “Good speech Martin” was practically gushing, despite the obvious disappointment in learning that Martin’s immigrant kin had only travelled from Yorkshire. “Here to Yorkshire is nothing Martin. In Russia we walk that far to the shops,” she informed him. The vote was unanimous. “Gloves is off,” is how Olga put it. There would be protests and pickets the likes of which Pembarton had never seen before, though naturally a concession was made so that Beryl and George could collect their grandson on weekends. “It’s time for guerrilla tactics,” Olga said as they field out of the stockroom.

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“That doesn’t sound like it would agree with my allergies,” fretted Beryl. *** FOPCOG’s first act of civil disobedience, the sit-in, began inauspiciously. First Beryl arrived without her pile of cushions, which made sitting intolerably painful for everyone involved. Then Gerry turned up with a hip flask, face glowing red from numerous fine ales already purveyed. “We shall overcome!” he warbled at a bemused cashier, before seating himself next to the dairy “to keep cool.” Martin, dressed like a student leader of the Paris commune—black turtleneck, suede loafers—decided the protest was likely to be taken more seriously if he attached the group’s demands to the supermarket’s doors. However with them being automatic, this presented more problems than he’d expected. Eventually he settled for pinning up the A4 sheet on a nearby staff noticeboard. “Like Luther,” said George approvingly. “Ah yes, from Superman,” replied Olga, much to his confusion. It wasn’t long until the store manager came to inquire why five people and one canine had settled down on the floor of Aisle 7 and showed no intention of moving. Martin sprung to his feet and extended his hand, which she warily took. “Pleased to meet you Miss…?” “Timpson. Becky Timpson,” the store manager answered, her tone a meld of curiosity and concern. “Becky Timpson,” repeated Martin contemplatively. “What a lovely name. Well Becky—you don’t mind if I call you Becky do you?” “Not at all.” “Super. The thing is, Becky, you’re probably wondering why we’re lounging round here, blocking access to the yogurts and whatnot,” Martin

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gestured to the sprawl behind him. Beryl waved back enthusiastically. “Could it be you’re trying to get access to her whatnot, eh, Martin?” Gerry shouted in between sips from his flask. Martin pretended not to have heard. “Well, I’ve taken the liberty of pinning our demands up on your notice board. And liberty is the optimum word here. You see…” Becky listened patiently as Martin drew an idiosyncratic line from Peterloo to the Poll tax to Pembarton. “So you see,” he concluded, “what we are doing today is not too dissimilar from what Wat Tyler or Emily Davison did all those years ago.” “Emily Davison died from stepping in front of the King’s racehorse,” Becky said quite matter-of-fact. “Right well, when you put it like that I guess this is a little different. But you know, we’re all fighting the good fight.” A short while later the day’s good fight came to a premature and undignified end. Gerry spilt the remainder of his hip flask, causing a rather overzealous response from Coste staff wielding “Caution Wet Floor!” signs, and convincing them that the group was being “kettled.” Olga proceeded to put up a defense that George described as “spirited” but the police later concluded was common assault. Martin stayed around until the last witness statement had been collected to offer his apologies, but he found Becky was in good spirits. “You know, Coste likes to use experienced managers to oversee the launch of new stores,” she told him. “We start in post a couple of weeks before opening to make sure everything’s on track. Help to interview staff and so on. We stay on for a couple of months afterwards until it all settles down, then they send us somewhere else to start the process all over again.” Martin studied her eyes intently. They were piercing green close to the pupil, but he noticed the colour faded toward the edge of the iris, taking

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on what he decided was a melancholic hue. “And for the last three years that’s all I’ve done. It tends to make for a pretty monotonous experience as I’m sure you can imagine. There’s been entire launches where I’ve struggled to shake the feeling that I’ve opened the exact same shop before. But here,” Becky gestured toward the departing police officers, some of whom were already being welcomed into The Nobody Inn by Gary Walker, “it’s only been a few weeks, and I’ve already been berated on the inadequacies of our biscuit selection, had half a dozen lectures on Pembarton’s role in the English Civil War, and now today’s occupation.” “Davey Jennings,” Martin thought aloud. “The biscuits that is, not the occupation. That was us, clearly.” “I don’t suppose you could give me the insider’s take on this place could you?” she asked. “Oh I’d love to,” Martin replied. “But I’m afraid I’m only fifth generation myself.” *** The next day Martin and Becky Timpson met again. This time they swapped the chill of Coste’s refrigeration aisle for the sub-zero temperatures of his allotment. “A lot of people think you can’t grow vegetables in winter,” he said, his breath hanging in a cloud between them. “But of course they’re wrong; you just have to know what to grow.” “How do you find that out though?” she asked, her voice echoing from the exploratory look inside the compost bin. “Years of experience.” Martin answered “And Google. Google’s good.” Becky wore a heavy-duty Coste warehouse jacket at least one size too big for her, and Martin worried what certain people would say if they saw

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them together. He imagined the accusation and tried to prepare a suitably quick-witted, yet believably off-the-cuff, response: “Fraternizing with the enemy Marsden?” “If you must know we’re on a date. But what is it that they say, ‘All’s fair in love and war’?” That’s a good thought Martin, although it would be prudent to check that it was actually a date first. If her enthusiasm toward his explanation of the science behind companion planting was anything to go by, he was perhaps, a little rusty. “What do you do for fun ‘round here?” she asked all of a sudden, turning spritely on her heels. “You mean besides gardening?” he replied. “Yes Martin,” she smiled, “besides gardening.” *** At the same time that Martin was pondering romance and extolling the virtues of his winter carrots, Beryl and George were rushing home from the WI cake sale in time for a late afternoon documentary. George squeezed through on amber-turning-red light, while at his request Beryl read from the Radio Times on her lap. “The rise and fall of the Aztec ruler Montezuma is explored in this hour-long tale of gold, greed, and gunpowder.” “Marvelous,” said George, as he swerved to avoid a pedestrian who had unwisely ventured out onto the zebra crossing. “And for afters?” “There’s a choice,” said Beryl. “Britain’s Fattest Kids on Four or Nature’s Deadliest Birds on Five.” “Oh deadliest birds for sure,” said George. “Who wants to watch a load of overweight teenagers sit in front of the TV all day?” As they pulled into the driveway George’s face dropped. He pointed toward the living room where his eldest grandson sat in his armchair

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watching something very un-documentary like on his TV. “What’s he doing here?” George asked. “Oh he’s come!” clapped Beryl. “I left the key out for him as Anthony and Helen are out all day, and I thought he might be lonely. Can you believe they don’t even have Sky at home?” George was disconsolate, “But what about his shelf stacking?” “Didn’t I tell you? They had to let him go, he’s just not an early riser.” Beryl shook her head sympathetically. On the way in George snatched the Radio Times from the front seat and readied himself for a showdown. *** After almost being rundown by a maniac at the zebra crossing, Gerry decided it was probably best to have a drink and settle his nerves. He was busy studying the guest ales at The Nobody Inn when the lads in the snug spotted him. “Not doing Care in the Community again today?” shouted Eric. “Thought you might have boycotted here for not stocking local pork scratchings,” said Jonesy. Gary Walker ambled over and Gerry plumped for a blonde session beer. “Your antics in Coste last night seem to have caught the lads’ attention. Surprised to see you knocking around with that crowd of misfits,” said Gary. Gerry took a pull from the pint and nodded in silent appreciation. “They don’t cause any harm,” he shrugged. “Well they certainly seem to rub people the wrong way,” said Gary. Gerry knew the best course of action with Gary was to say nothing and deny him cause to get any higher up on his soapbox. “And why’s that?” he said. Gary rested his burly, publican arms on the bar and pointedly looked Gerry in the eye. “They’ve really taken you in haven’t they?”

Bonnet // Fiction

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Gerry raised his eyebrows in a textbook “who me?” fashion and the landlord took his cue. “That group FOPCOCK—or whatever they call themselves—like to pretend they’re civic-minded with all this ‘save Pembarton’ nonsense, when really they just think they know better than the rest of us. You’ve got Martin bleedin’ Marsden scared to death that a supermarket means he won’t be able to overcharge for his veg anymore, that doddery old couple who’ve probably opposed every innovation since the wireless, and that crazy Russian woman, who, let’s face it, doesn’t know if she’s for or against.” The landlord balled up the drip cloth as he spoke. “They’re just a bunch of luddites, Nimbys, and busybodies with too much time on their hands and too high an opinion of themselves,” he finished, tossing the cloth aside. It was pushing it, he knew, but Gerry couldn’t resist the obvious riposte. “And what if it was another pub that had opened?” Gary fixed Gerry, with another unblinking stare, only this time a new furrow on his brow was apparent. “I’d welcome it, Gerry,” he said tight lipped. “You know me, I’m a businessman. I believe in competition. Now if you’ll excuse me I need to put the match on the big screen. My public have come from far and wide, and I don’t want them to get restless.” *** Olga waited until the football match had started to take Rasputin for his walk. By then most of the kids had finished their own games and gone inside to watch another. It was always better to take Rasputin out at these times. He didn’t so much walk as hurtle—sniffing, snarling, and slobbering at whatever crossed his path. Olga also felt more relaxed the quieter it was. Once she’d been walking Rasputin shortly after schools had finished and lost her temper with a group

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of boys who had followed her round shouting “Crazy Russian.” It wasn’t until she’d successfully hit one with a thrown stone that they went away. The next day the boy’s mother went to the police station to report the incident only to find Olga already in attendance recounting the details of the “hate crime” at length and considerable volume to the desk sergeant and a cast of onlookers. The police decided the case was a simple matter of boys being boys and Olga being Olga and no charges were pressed. Ever since Olga would proudly recall the Chief Inspector’s assessment that she was an “active aggressive” whenever she lost her temper. “What can I do?” she would say, “I am active aggressive person, even policeman says so.” As she walked, Olga passed by the allotments where she noticed that the door to the tool-shed had been left ajar and a Coste branded jacket had been abandoned just outside. *** It was a cold Sunday for a picket. Too cold for George’s Skoda, which spluttered bronchially at the indignity of being asked to start. Too cold too for Martin’s carrots, which had all but frozen solid by the time he reached Coste’s car park. As he ambled over to the others, Martin peered through the shop window trying to catch Becky’s attention so he could discreetly give her the produce before the store opened. “Morning Martin, feeling peckish?” George asked, with a nod to the veg, but before he could answer Beryl excitably cut in. “We had to get the bus over this morning, Martin. Have you ever taken the bus? When you want to get off you just ring the bell, and it doesn’t matter where you are the driver pulls over for you. Can you believe that? Oh it was wonderful.” Beryl and George each held a placard which Martin studied curiously. “Are they made by the same chap who did the posters?” he asked. “Sure are,” said George.

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“He’s on track to get a C on his exams,” Beryl said proudly. Martin squinted at the detail a little longer, then nodded encouragingly. “Good to see a youngster having a crack at impressionism, eh?” said Gerry. At 9 a.m. Coste opened, and FOPCOG took up position in front of the entrance. By 9:15 the only person who’d sought to cross their line was a checkout lady running late for her shift. Everyone agreed it would be unfair to delay her any longer. By 9:30 there had still been no customers. Gerry had taken to whistling the tune from Bridge Over the River Kwai. George stamped his feet to keep warm, sometimes in time with the music, but mostly not. “They are too afraid to come,” Olga told Rasputin. The dog, either for the occasion or the weather, had been dressed in a red vest embroidered with a golden hammer and sickle. At around a quarter to 10 a prospective customer arrived. As they walked across the car park Beryl and George raised their placards. Gerry stopped his whistling in anticipation. “Support local businesses!” shouted Martin. “Screw Coste!” shouted Olga. “Hi Beryl,” said the woman. “Oh it’s Jean,” beamed Beryl, turning to George. “From the WI, she makes that ginger cake you like. Hi Jean, what are you up to?” Jean adjusted her ear muffs. “Well it’s my granddaughter’s birthday today. I’m going to bake her a cake.” “Ooh Jean that does put us in a bit of a pickle,” Beryl grimaced. “We’re trying to stop people from shopping in Coste, you know, encourage people to use local shops instead.” “Oh I know,” said Jean. “I heard all about your last protest.” Jean stole a glance at Olga. “But you know my granddaughter, Crystal, has her heart

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set in a pink birthday cake, and nowhere else in Pembarton sells pink food coloring. I’ve bought all the other ingredients already.” Jean waited patiently outside while the picket line formed a circle to discuss her case. “I can’t have ruining a five-year-old’s birthday on my conscience,” said Gerry. “Not again.” After a couple of minutes they agreed that Jean could go in, so long as she agreed she wouldn’t buy anything else, conditions she readily accepted. “Next one,” said Olga to Rasputin. A few minutes later Jayne Peterson turned up with her husband. At the entrance she explained the reason for their visit. Jayne’s in-laws were visiting that evening, one of whom was a celiac. Jayne wanted to make her famed steak and ale pie for tea, and she’d heard that you could now get gluten free pastry in Coste. “Well we can’t really argue with that,” said Martin. “It’s a sin to deny a man a pie,” said George as Olga scowled behind him. And so it continued. Tabasco sauce for Bloody Marys for Mary Glover’s party. Energy saving light bulbs to help save the environment. Toothpaste for people with sensitive teeth. Each purchase seemed legitimate. By the time Becky came out for her lunch break they hadn’t found reason to prevent a single customer from entering Coste. Martin stood around awkwardly with the carrots, and then, when the moment presented itself, he gave them to Becky. She thanked him but raised concerns that perhaps he hadn’t brought enough? Martin agreed and suggested they might call at the allotment to pick more, which they speedily headed off to. This caused Beryl to think she might not have enough veg of her own for that evening, to which Gerry and Olga agreed that, with it being Sunday, shopping in Coste was the only realistic option.

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Soon after, Gerry determined that reviving the feeling in his toes was just as important as reviving the fortunes of the local economy, so he hatched a plan to do both. “I’m just off to The Nobody Inn for a swift half,” he announced, leaving Olga. The owner looked at her dog and decided that maybe the streets were quiet enough for an afternoon walk. As they made their way toward the playing fields Olga recognized a beige Saab parked on a corner, nonchalantly she drew her house key down its flanks. “Come Rasputin,” she said, “let’s see if there are any balls to pop.”

Bonnet // Fiction

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a ho...is a ho Pamela Mack

A Man can have multiple partners and this is my conflict— is not the proper term for him . . . still promiscuous??? Let it be a Female she’s instantly a Ho while he’s busy out fucking Ev’rybody that she knows. It’s the “Double Standard” I can’t understand— if it’s wrong for a Woman then . . . it’s wrong for a Man!!! A Ho is really just a “Male-Tool” in bed who’s passing out dick and giving up head.

Mack // Poetry

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If we do the “same” things can’t you catch what I can??? STDs do not care— if you’re Woman or Man!!! Once you pass “It” all out you can’t even be mad— Nobody wants somebody Ev’rybody has had. Ho isn’t reserved for a specific gender . . . Women use your ass up then “Return You To Sender.” Gaze in the mirror don’t mistake the view because. . . the BIGGEST Ho is the one staring at You!!!

Mack // Poetry

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menu Christopher Mulrooney

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll have the told salad on the vine and the fresh Weltschmerz what have you got any schlagobers mit dat OK and drought with a little pickle garrotes and salary and some pain you know French pain and a tub of butter

Mulrooney // Poetry

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potato peelings G David Schwartz

Potato Peelings On the floor Get picked up To make room To make more More potato peeling Not more floor More potatoes occur In a full galore

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rollin’ thru the hood Ray Childress

“Dad, juh lived in that gw’ay building over there when you was a boy?” The enthusiastic four-year-old eked as the white-on-white Navigator passed by the gray apartment building. “Yeah,” Reece spoke, removing his PITT ball cap before casually tossing it onto the back seat—as was the custom for most young Black males when they entered a predominantly Black neighborhood. “You don’t remember the time I took you to play in that big park down the block?” A huge smile spread across the boy’s face, and he began to nod his big head up and down, to the point of it jovially tumbling atop his narrow shoulders. “Yep Daddy… It was fun, too!” Reece’s heart skipped a beat at the sound of so much innocence and jubilance in his son’s voice. After having spent the better part of the day over on the north side of the city taking in a college football game with his bouncy four-year-old, he’d turned off of Penn Avenue to cruise through his old Point Breeze neighborhood, where things were not the best, but were far from the worst. He then drove the customized SUV down North Dallas into the rough and rugged Homewood section of his old hood. Blocks upon blocks of houses and two-story homes that had seen better days stretched on for as far as the eye could see, amid a jigsaw-like collage of abandoned and crumbling buildings, homes, and weed-strewn vacant lots. It was some

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place; a place where only high crime and open-air drug markets flourished. Though unlike most ghettos around the United States of America, this one was criminally ruled by those that controlled the killer alleyways and dangerous cuts that crisscrossed throughout the decaying neighborhood like a complicated crossword puzzle. In reference to Reece, a 25-year-old whom some might characterize as a Street Nigga or a Thug who had lived through it all: the shoot-outs in the middle of the street, the fast women and the drama that came with them, the moving of large volumes of drugs, even a stint or two behind bars—it took nothing more than the birth of the little guy strapped into the seat beside him for him to make a drastic lifestyle change. “There dey go, Dad!” the brown-skinned child suddenly screeched and twisted in his seat to jab a tiny index finger out toward their left, in the direction of two all-American white boys sitting in a police cruiser parked on a side street. “Hondo (The cops)!” “R.J.,” Reece replied, as he watched the cops out of the corner of his eye while passing them by. “Huh, Dad?” the boy probed, peering up through a set of bright and very intelligent dark eyes that keenly resembled his father’s. “I see’em. They’re out here huntin’… Looking for somethin’ young, black, and wearing a fitted cap.” He took another look to make sure they hadn’t hopped on him, “Preferably turned to the back.” The boy’s soft features skewed as he pondered, his small mouth and little snub-nose clearly a gift from his mother—along with his spunk and a lot of his toughness; something even his father would begrudgingly admit to if pressed on it. Reece winked at the boy after giving him a few heartbeats to think over the jewel he’d just dropped. “Son, they like boys like yourself to wear caps…” He eyed him, “It makes y’all easier to track.”

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The boy’s eyes lit up at the extra tidbit of information. “I understand, it’s like on the Animal Planet when lions and cheetahs hunt herds.” His chest heaved with an excited intake of breath, “They w’ook for any weakness. Then dey stalk the ones dey picked.” “Exactly,” he responded, eyeing the traffic and checking his rearview mirror. “They look for any weakness.” Reece glanced down at the platinum band on his left ring finger and thought, “Imma’ family man now.” Then he growled and reached out to claw playfully at his son’s knee, “Ra-aah!” which sent the boy into a fit of high-pitched, uncontrollable, childish giggling. “Nooooo! Aaahh, Da’ddyyyyyy!” R.J. shrieked and squirmed within the snug confines of the seat belt. “Da’ddyyy, pleeeeeeeeze!” “Okay, okay, okay, you know I ain’t gon’ let nobody get at you,” he said, soothingly rubbing his child’s curly head of hair, “One or’thing,” he added, more to himself than the boy, “they’ll never get a chance to get’ chu.” With R.J.’s giggling fit subsiding, he heard his father clearly; thus he turned to him, bit his bottom lip, blinked a few times, then studied him with those deep, inquisitive eyes. “Why would they want me, Dad?” Reece scratched at his shadow of a beard in momentary thought, prior to turning onto Lang Avenue. “They love to hunt black and brown boys like you...because y’all make good game.” With that said, in a huff the boy crossed his arms in a way that belied his four years on Mother Earth, and then went into a bottom-lip protruding pout. “They are not going to get me.” R.J. wrinkled up his brow in anger, “I’m not like those dumb impalas and gazelles... I’m smart.” The young man turned to his boy and grinned proudly. “Yes you are.”

Childress // Fiction

The Offbeat

Hanging Lights Kika Dorsey

They’re hanging people on the walls. I don’t understand why they are in such a rush because the walls need to be painted, the building needs new windows, and we need seats. There is no place to sit and relax. It’s twenty degrees outside and the cold air seeps in.

We will show the walls to our children says a bald man in a black suit while nailing a farmer, his arms akimbo, along the frame of the door. A tall, skinny, blonde woman grapples with a black woman.

I need help, she says, and a construction worker runs to her and lifts the weight gracefully. He has a nail gun and a leather belt. He plans to hang the blonde, too, but she doesn’t know. The Latino man they decide to hang facing the wall, and when he protests, they tell him there are just too many of him, and not everyone can gaze into the mansion.

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The collage of bodies grows. It is full of all color but green. No one is wearing green. A small Indian baby whimpers and then sleeps, hanging in her pink onesie.

Now letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bring in the tree, says the bald man. The construction worker hauls in the Christmas tree, a ten-foot spruce, and sets it in the corner. The woman walks to a box and pulls out ornamentsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; an angel pig with a halo, giant red bulbs. They string the tree with lights and tinsel. There are so many lights you can barely see the green needles. The people on the wall gaze at them, mesmerized, and somewhere outside it snows, wolves step in traps, cars slide on ice and crash, and some lose their homes, some take to the streets, and children peek through the window at bodies and nails and white light.

Dorsey // Poetry

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time Lana Bella

Within an ever-ebbing sense of time, you stood in a forgotten place, but never a forgotten thought. The time before now and the time before that, you had lived in poor pockets of void: slept under torn tapestry of sky, dined on meager bowls of dirt scooped out the dregs of life with a plastic spoon, tumbling, weaving, panting, drowning at no time to have been absolutely sure that life from which wrinkles are born shall lend you mercy in this vain enterprise. You have spared no mind to the ilk of pride, you have grown as a pauper, no smaller than a mite held fixed in doubt, clad thin by the pinches of salt and lost lullabies. Always strayed far from the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pearly gate, never a guest at its cozy dinners or fancy balls. But, the person you were and the person you are

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the half-lost and half-whole the half-woke and half-dreaming, doubled over with hunger when it spawned and gnawed into your belly like an infected cancer. So you slackened your legs, spilled your virtues and gave yourself leave to throttle life and drink from its gilded spout. Your eyes shut tight, your mouth unfurled, whose lips swigged clean all the bitter poison and honeyed wine.

Bella // Poetry

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ballerinas Lea Bridi

Kathleen and Rosie, both seven years old, would often insist on wearing matching leotards to their Tuesday afternoon dance class. The parents of other small dancers would smile at them. “Oh, you’re twins. How cute,” they’d say. But then, their gaze would linger on Rosie, and, almost imperceptibly, their brows would furrow. In these moments one could assume that they were taking in the lumpiness of the white t-shirt she wore under her leotard or, if not that, then her new adult front teeth that were, in addition to being much too big for her face, also severely gapped. Kathleen’s leotard, on the other hand, looked sleek and smooth and she had tiny, straight, gleaming baby teeth. Kathleen and Rosie were different and no amount of matching dance apparel was going to change that. Kathleen and Rosie liked to dress like twins because they were best friends. They lived in the same neighborhood, their houses located at the same latitude on different streets so that their backyards touched. Kathleen and Rosie liked to tell people that they were “back-to-back neighbors,” as opposed to “next door neighbors.” They often wondered why the latter descriptor was a common English phrase while the former was not. In their adjacent backyards, and in their houses, and in their front yards, too, Kathleen and Rosie created a multiverse of fantastic, intricate,

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and oft-visited worlds. A good example was the world of the Darkwood and Forester families. The mother and father of both families were 11.5 inches tall and plastic—the women comprised of an approximately one-toone hair to body mass ratio, the men with hard swooping hair and vague genitalia. Most of the Darkwood and Forester children and pets were also manufactured by Mattel, with the occasional sprinkling of Happy Meal toy supporting characters. The Darkwood family, whose lives were narrated by Kathleen, lived on a pink cruise ship, but they anchored frequently off the coast of Maui so that they could visit their friends, the Foresters. The Foresters, whose lives were narrated by Rosie, lived in a banker’s-box-turned-condo. It was considerably more modest than the Darkwoods’ environs, and initially Rosie had found it inadequate and depressing. She’d tried at first to improve the Foresters’ socioeconomic status with some light bartering. “Both families could live on the cruise ship, you know, Kathleen. Cruise ships are really big. And it could sort of be like the families are best friends and the moms share kitchen and laundry duties to make it easier on everyone.” Kathleen had considered this. “But it’s really supposed to be a private cruise ship. Have you ever heard of two families living together just for fun and to make chores easier? It’s weird. And anyway, my uncle gave me this for Christmas, so I get to decide.” When the bartering fell through, Rosie turned to scavenging Kathleen’s basement and her own parents’ recyclables. Gradually she gathered the items needed for a modest condo renovation. She added a cardboard partition to break up the main living space, updated the master bedroom suite with some ingeniously placed margarine lid halves, and installed some modern-looking beige carpet made from a repurposed

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washcloth. The end result was obviously not as sophisticated as a cruise ship, but Rosie thought it was tasteful and comfortable. And anyway, the Foresters’ less transient lifestyle allowed them to keep a dog, who was, inexplicably, named Judas. *** This Tuesday it was Rosie’s mother’s turn to drive the ballet class carpool. As was customary, Rosie waited with her mother in the family’s minivan for Kathleen to walk through the adjacent backyards to meet them. Rosie always felt a small anticipatory thrill as she imagined what interesting hairstyle Kathleen might have that day. Kathleen’s hair had always been magnetic for Rosie. It was covetable, and it was a symbol of what made them different. It was reddish-gold, almost peach, and at the end of its impressive length were bouncing ringlets—the baby curls that Kathleen’s mother could not yet bare to part with. At seven years old, Kathleen’s hair was now so long that when she put on a shirt the curls stuck out of the bottom—a detail that Rosie found fascinating. At some point during their seven-year friendship Rosie had even developed the habit of combing her fingers through Kathleen’s hair, intermittently twisting pieces of it into coils. It was comforting for Rosie, no different than sucking her thumb. Rosie’s preoccupation with Kathleen’s hair was matched only by Kathleen’s mother’s, who tended to it with the carefulness and attention generally reserved for things like bonsai trees and rare tropical fish. Over the years, she had developed an impressive repertoire of looks. Sometimes she curled and teased Kathleen’s bangs into a fluffy bird’s nest. Other times she created two French braids that joined together at the nape of Kathleen’s neck with a large bow. Occasionally, and this was Rosie’s favorite, she wound Kathleen’s hair around pink foam rollers before bed so that it was an enormous shimmering mass in the morning.

Bridi // Fiction

The Offbeat

As Kathleen rounded the corner of the house on this Tuesday afternoon, however, Rosie saw that her hair was coiled high on top her head in a tight bun, just like the older dancers they sometimes saw at the studio. Kathleen had never worn a bun before, but then, Rosie thought, this year was different. It was the girls’ third year of ballet class. While their previous classes had been called “Creative Movement,” they now took “Ballet One.” Both years of Creative Movement had concluded with ice cream parties at the Dairy Queen, but this year they would put on elaborately feathered and sequined costumes and dance on a huge stage in the year-end recital. Today they were going to learn their recital dance. “Wow, your hair. Can I touch it?” Rosie asked as Kathleen climbed up onto the back seat of the van. “Yeah, but be careful,” replied Kathleen, as she delicately patted the coil, ensuring that all the pins were still in place. In the large mirrored and wood-grained room of the dance studio the ballet instructor, Miss Denise, asked all the girls to sit on the floor with their legs straight in front of them, toes pointed, for beginning stretches. When they were finished flexing and pointing their toes, Miss Denise told the girls to form a single line across the center of the dance floor, tallest girls in the middle, shorter girls on either end. Then, Miss Denise made an announcement. “Now, I’d like the following girls to come forward and form a new line at the front of the room. They are going to be today’s leaders. Let’s see, I’ll have Juliet, Bridget, Missy, and Kathleen.” Rosie was disappointed that she hadn’t been singled out of the crowd for special attention, but she was happy for her friend. Kathleen looked very official and capable, she thought, standing in the front of the room, and she wondered if Miss Denise’s choice had in some way been influenced

Bridi // Fiction

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by Kathleen’s new and serious hairstyle. Miss Denise walked to the corner and turned on the record player. Tinny music, accompanied by a whiny child’s voice, filled the room. The child sang about how much she (or he? it was hard to tell) loved dance class and its rules and customs. Miss Denise allowed the song to play once all the way through. “Girls, this will be the music for your new recital dance,” she said, and she lightly clapped her hands together once. She played the song again, this time demonstrating simple gestures that were to accompany each lyric. The girls, in their two lines, mimicked their teacher, tapping their foreheads with their index fingers to the part of the song about concentrating, rising on their tip toes and reaching into the air when the child on the record sang about standing up straight. After dance class, back in the basement playroom, Kathleen and Rosie were no longer seven-year-olds in leotards; they were Alexandria and Bernadette, respectively. Alexandria and Bernadette were both twenty-one, incredibly sophisticated, and mothers to three or four babies each. Interestingly, in this world there was great prestige associated with precarious infant health and at least two of Alexandria’s babies were preemies who also tragically suffered from smallpox. Today all the babies had checkups. Alexandria explained to the kindly old doctor of Youngmotherland that her twins, Susie and Sally, had barely weighed three pounds each at birth, so Bernadette offered that her favorite baby, Henry the Third, had been born so incredibly prematurely that he’d only weighed one pound, tops. Aghast, Alexandria explained that babies could not even survive at such low birth weights, and did Bernadette want Henry the Third to die? Of course Bernadette did not, and so, after some deliberation, she settled for the mundane and non-life threatening diagnosis of torticollis and lazy eye. At the conclusion of the doctor’s appointments, Alexandria and

Bridi // Fiction

The Offbeat

Bernadette left their babies in the car for a couple hours to grab pizza sandwiches at their favorite downtown cafe. Seated at their miniature picnic table with their mozzarella and cold spaghetti sauce on white bread, however, the girls’ conversation turned to the recent events of Boringworld and Alexandria, Bernadette, and the roasting babies were momentarily abandoned. “I don’t even want to do the recital if we have to do that baby dance,” Kathleen said, then took a bite of her pizza sandwich. “Yeah, and I don’t understand the song. Everything that girl sounds so happy about are all the things I hate.” Rosie wiped some marinara sauce that had fallen from her sandwich off her leotard with her hand, but this only spread the stain. “Well,” Kathleen went on, “remember when we went to see the Nutcracker last year? The part where they were all dancing in lines and snow was falling onto the stage? I thought the recital dance would be more like that. Not just, like, waving your arms around.” “Yeah, me too,” said Rosie, though in actuality her recital fantasies had been limited to dreams of elaborate costumes. But when she looked at Kathleen she could sense that her friend’s disappointment was genuine— genuine, new, and difficult for Rosie to understand. Rosie was relieved when Kathleen began to remove the many bobby pins from her bun and unwind the enormous coil of hair, and she moved to the other side of the picnic table to help her. *** The next Tuesday afternoon the girls again formed their line in the ballet classroom, prepared to practice their recital dance. First, however, Miss Denise would pick this week’s leaders. Already, leader was a coveted position and Rosie hoped that this would be her week. Miss Denise walked the length of the room clasping and unclasping

Bridi // Fiction

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her hands, her strange French jazz shoes clicking lightly on the blonde wood floor. “Okay girls, let’s have Missy and Kathleen again, but this week let’s give Nikki and Maria a shot.” Rosie was confused by this pronouncement. Missy and Kathleen again? There were so many girls in the class. Why did they get to be leaders two weeks in a row? Miss Denise put the record on and the simple melody and nasally voice filled the room. The double lines of girls performed the gestures they’d learned the previous week. Rosie realized that she’d forgotten a few of the gestures, but it was no big deal—she just looked to Kathleen at the front of the room. Kathleen always remembered the dance moves and, Rosie noticed for the first time this week, performed them with extra straight arms and legs. More Tuesdays came and went and, to Kathleen’s enjoyment, Miss Denise eventually taught them some additional choreography to accompany a musical interlude between repetitions of the recital song’s single verse. Each week Miss Denise picked four or five leaders to stand in the front of the studio. The first few weeks she swapped girls out here and there, but two things remained constant: Kathleen’s name was always called and Rosie’s name was always not. After the sixth week, however, the leaders stopped changing. By the ninth week, Miss Denise ceased to even call out four names at the beginning of class because everyone knew who the leaders were. It was also during the ninth week of class that the dancers received their recital costumes. Miss Denise handed each girl a clear plastic bag filled with something hot pink on her way out of the classroom. Kathleen had exited the studio before Rosie and now Rosie took her costume and went to find her best friend in the dance school’s lobby, where together they normally changed out of their ballets shoes and waited for their ride. It took every bit of willpower for her to resist tearing into the plastic bag

Bridi // Fiction

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on the spot, but this was a big moment for the two of them and Rosie knew they should share it. When Rosie walked into the lobby, however, she was met with a sight both magnificent and terrible. Kathleen stood surrounded by the other three leaders in front of the lobby’s wall-mounted mirror. Wearing their brand new costumes, the girls were laughing and lovely and violently, aggressively pink. The sight of them brought to mind flamingos, coral reefs, hibiscus, and other florid, otherworldly things. The tulle of their detachable tutu skirts was so new and crisp that Rosie could actually hear them rustling as the girls posed in the mirror. Watching those four girls from the doorway of the lobby, Rosie began to feel an unplaceable and unnamable new feeling, the origin of which seemed to be somewhere in her chest. She did not fully understand it, but she did know that it was not quite shame and not quite jealousy. She also knew that it had come to tell her something. That something was, “Don’t try to join those girls at the mirror. Leave Kathleen alone.” But even this visceral warning was no match for that appealingly starchy tutu, and she could not live for one more moment without wearing it. She ripped into the plastic bag and pulled out each fascinating accouterment. There were arms bands, bows—everything—and all of it hot pink. When she finally came to the leotard, she pulled it right over the one she was already wearing, until she found that she could pull no more. The straps of this perfect, iridescent thing stopped at her armpits. Rosie pulled hard on the straps and hunched her back and only then was she able to get the straps over her shoulders. Nikki, who always wore scrunch socks over her tights instead of ballet shoes, was the first leader to turn away from the revelry in front of the mirror to notice Rosie, hunched and struggling, in the doorway. “Oh,” she said, beginning to comprehend Rosie’s situation, “I bet Miss Denise can

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order a new one. They probably make some for big people like you.” At first, the other leaders, including Kathleen, continued laughing amongst themselves, but, after a moment, Kathleen left them to join Rosie and help her take the leotard off. For Rosie, however, that moment seemed long and she had trouble forgetting it. *** Many of Kathleen and Rosie’s worlds involved a multitude of small plastic toys, often flesh colored or else pink, and often infused with some chemical that made them smell like baby powder. Rosie’s favorite world, however, required no props. This was the world of Pudding Bay, and it was vast and full of surprises. Kathleen and Rosie founded Pudding Bay when they were five, and had, since then, ruled the land as joint queens. At times, they also held down second careers as ninjas and marine biologists. The best part of Pudding Bay was the tree castle, which, in Boringworld, was just a tree. The girls accessed the very highest towers of the tree castle by ascending a special staircase at the tree castle’s base. In Boringworld, the staircase was just a large old window shutter that Kathleen’s mother lazily left propped against the tree’s base. The queens had just successfully rescued Johnny, one of the realm’s most beloved killer whales, from poachers when Kathleen proposed that they celebrate with a wedding. “I’m going to marry Matthew on the balcony of the tree castle, and all of our subjects can watch, and then we can have pizza sandwiches, and then a parade with the wagon.” Matthew was Kathleen’s favorite male classmate. He was often invoked when the girls’ adventures turned to the domestic or romantic. Rosie had orchestrated the more delicate parts of Johnny’s rescue, and she felt that she, also, deserved to feature heavily in the fanfare.

Bridi // Fiction

The Offbeat

Immediately, she thought of Tyler, another male classmate. He excelled at kickball, and his blonde bowl cut was shiny and perfectly symmetrical. “Okay, then what if I marry Tyler?” she offered. Kathleen thought about this. “No, you can be my maid of honor. You can wear my little tiara, and I’ll wear the big one.” “But that’s not fair. Then one queen is married and one queen is not.” “Well, what if you married Robbie?” Robbie’s hair stuck up at odd angles, and he talked incessantly about raccoons. “Why Robbie?” “I just think you and Robbie match better. You both like drawing and stuff.” Something about Kathleen’s tone made Rosie think of Kathleen and the other leaders giggling together in front of the mirror in the studio lobby. Rosie knew that there was something more to Kathleen’s protestations. She had a sense, however, that it was something that she wasn’t yet ready to explore. But the same compulsion that drove her to watch the part of The Wizard of Oz with the hourglass, even though it scared her, drove her to probe the matter further. “Yeah, Kathleen, but I don’t like Robbie. I like Tyler. Why can’t I marry Tyler?” Rosie could see by the way that Kathleen gathered her breath to address this question that she had taken her refusal to acquiesce one step too far, that she was very, very close to getting what she had asked for but didn’t really want. Kathleen opened her mouth, but Rosie cut her off before any words could escape it. “Never mind, I’d kind of rather be the maid of honor. I’ll be in charge of planning the wedding, and I’ll get to design the float for the parade.” With this, the queens went to gather their wedding finery, and Rosie

Bridi // Fiction

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worked to push back that unnamable feeling that was, for the second time that week, growing in her chest. *** On the last day of ballet class before the year-end recital, Miss Denise did something she hadn’t done in many weeks. “Okay class, today we’re going to try some new leaders,” she said, and the four girls in the short line in front looked stricken. “But I told my dad I was going to be in front tomorrow. He’s coming to see me!” Nicki protested. “No, no. Nicki, you, Kathleen, Missy, and Bridget will still be the leaders at the recital. This is just something special. Just for today.” Miss Denise smiled in a tight, self-satisfied way. “Okay. Today, let me have Amanda, Jaime, Karen, and. . . Rosie.” Initially, Rosie felt the pang of pleasure she always felt when she was singled out of a group of children by an adult who was not one of her parents. She took her place in the front of the room, then looked to her right and left at the girls standing next to her. There was Amanda, a blonde girl who was, for reasons not entirely clear, still not completely potty trained. They’d had to stop class several times to clean the floor after she’d had an accident. Then, there was Jaime, who had been in a special class at school that year that had only joined the other first graders during lunch, recess, and gym. And Karen, she’d noticed, had a tendency to do odd things like leave the line of dancers and wander around the room during rehearsals. Once, she’d licked the girl standing next to her. And then, there was her, Rosie, who was again feeling that feeling, still mysterious but growing familiar, that she’d first felt in the lobby the day they’d gotten their costumes, and then again, later that week, in Pudding Bay. Rosie had already known that she was too tall for her age. People always commented on it. She had known that her hair was boring and flat.

Bridi // Fiction

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She had known that her teeth were huge and gapped. But now, she knew something additional about herself, something new. She’d begun to suspect it that day in the lobby, then she’d just barely prevented Kathleen from confirming it, but now Miss Denise had confirmed it with the authority of an adult. She was not quite sure what it was, this extra knowledge of herself she’d just gained, but it made her feel huge and remote, like an iceberg in the path of the Darkwoods’ cruise ship. *** On the day of the recital, Rosie’s mother sent Rosie to Kathleen’s house to get ready because she did not, she said, know how to even begin to put stage makeup on a seven-year-old. Kathleen’s mother, however, seemed to enjoy the challenge, and she let the two girls sit on tall bar stools in her teal bathroom while she applied blush and lipstick, for the first time ever, to their still babyish faces. Next, she wound Kathleen’s hair into the ballerina bun that had slowly become familiar to Rosie over the course of the year. After a generous spraying with Aquanet, she fastened a feathered pink poof to the bun with a bobby pin. Rosie’s hair posed more of a challenge. “You just don’t got much of it, Babe,” Kathleen’s mother said as she attempted to gather it into a ponytail. “But let’s see what we can do.” Finally, Kathleen’s mother managed to style Rosie’s hair into what the three of them called a “half-bun” -- it was like Kathleen’s, but made with only the top layer of Rosie’s hair, so that that back was still down. Of course, the bun’s circumference was about one-fifteenth that of Kathleen’s, but Kathleen proclaimed it cute, and Rosie had to agree. In the end, Rosie had not been able to heed Nicki’s suggestion and obtain a leotard for “big people,” not because they didn’t make leotards in Rosie’s size, but because it had been too late to order a new one. Instead, Rosie’s mother had taken her to the sporting goods store where she’d found

Bridi // Fiction

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a one-piece bathing in almost the right shade. When combined with all the extravagant pink accessories, it didn’t look too bad, or so her mother insisted each time Rosie asked. In the crowded backstage of the auditorium where the recital would be held, the other three leaders greeted Kathleen excitedly. Rosie stood on the fringes of the commotion until Missy noticed her. Missy was a tiny girl, with hair almost as long as Kathleen’s. “Look Nikki,” she said, “the straps on Rosie’s costume don’t look the same as ours. Hey, I think she’s wearing a bathing suit!” Nikki pinched at the material near Rosie’s belly button. “Yep, that’s definitely some waterproof junk right there,” she reported, and three of the four leaders laughed. Kathleen, who had remained neutral on the subject of the bathing suit substitution, did not join the other leaders in their chiding, but she didn’t tell them to stop. Rosie could not bring herself to defend the bathing suit, so instead she tried to distance herself from it. “I didn’t want to wear this stupid thing, but it’s all I could get.” The edges of her vision grew blurry, and she tried hard not to blink the tears out, but they came rolling down her cheeks anyway, taking some of her blush with them. This reaction startled the leaders, who were not yet accustomed to their ability to hurt other humans. “Don’t cry. You’ll be in the back anyway, so probably no one will notice,” Missy offered, while Nikki and Bridget retreated. Kathleen looked at Rosie a long time, her mouth slightly open, before following them. *** When it was almost time for the girls to dance, they formed two lines in the wings, the leader line in front, the normal and subnormal line in back. Rosie stood sniffling in her designated spot, arms crossed in front of

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her chest in an attempt to obscure as much of the bathing suit as possible. Her face was blotchy, and a rope of wet snot ran from her left nostril to her upper lip. As she waited, she anticipated her mother’s reaction to seeing her so upset on stage. The thought of her mother feeling horrified and sorry that she hadn’t searched harder for a better leotard replacement simultaneously pleased her and fueled more tears. Finally, it was time to emerge from the wings. The girls in the nonleader line could not get their spacing right, and one girl stood alone at the very edge of stage right, while several others were clumped close together in the middle. Miss Denise walked out on the stage and moved the girls to their proper places, hands on their shoulders, while the audience laughed at the cuteness of young ineptitude. Rosie tried to find her mother in the audience, but the auditorium was too dim and too full of people. Still, she knew her mother was out there somewhere, so she made sure to frown dramatically. The music switched on, and the nasally voice filled the vastness. Suddenly rendered amnesiac by unfamiliarity, Rosie instinctually looked to Kathleen to remember what to do. But instead of performing the dance’s opening gestures, Kathleen turned to Rosie in the line behind her. For a moment, Rosie thought that Kathleen had gotten nervous in front and wanted to retreat back into averageness. But then, Kathleen was reaching toward Rosie. And then she was taking Rosie’s hand and pulling her into the leaders’ line. Nikki looked at Kathleen and Rosie incredulously. “What are you two doing? Rosie is not one of the leaders!” “You are not the boss of this class. You are not the boss of me, and you are not the boss of Rosie,” Kathleen replied. Rosie stood in the leader’s line, bewildered but smiling. Kathleen and Rosie made their way through the dance, Nicki pouting

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beside them. Kathleen’s movements were big, crisp, and elegant. Rosie’s were hunched, knobbed kneed, and frequently incorrect. Kathleen and Rosie were not the same. Rosie understood that now. They were certainly not twins. But they were best friends—could continue to be for at least a little while longer. And, for the three-minute duration of that dance routine, at least, they were both the leaders—the Joint Queens of Pudding Bay.

Bridi // Fiction

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The Most Remarkable Substance Ever Howie Good

Eight famous lesbians who were married to men had escaped our notice. Here’s why—not the 20 most terrifying spiders on Earth, or mysterious lights in the sky, but a dog born with deformed front legs that ran on 3D prosthetics. My face showed nothing of what I felt. Others huddled in family groups, debating alternative uses for leftover candy canes. “Don’t you think NASA should hide this picture?” someone asked. Only those there from the beginning had an opinion. The rest of us couldn’t believe who Abraham Lincoln’s relative is.

Good // Poetry

The Offbeat

Terminal Optimism Parker Weston

It was a bright and sunny day, and all throughout the land flowers were burning and bleeding all of the dehydrated fuzzy little creatures slowed to a crawl before ceasing their futile struggle for happiness their big cartoon eyes now as vacant and glassy as taxidermy only the vultures and other scavengers of death remained unscathed by the harshness the overbearing dryness the scalding but cheery day brought with it the scroungers made toys and games out of the flesh and bones from the pieces of the loveable little fluffy carcasses they couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t eat starting to smolder on the searing fields a jackal flew a rancid kite made from a bunnyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s blistered hide they frolicked and feasted long into the merry night then slept peacefully like kings and queens without a single care tomorrow, it looked, was going to be another wonderful day.

Weston // Poetry

The Offbeat

The Right of Sepulcher Tracey K. Parker

An unfamiliar row of townhouses, painted sage. Just inside 4C, a decomposed beer can chicken welcomes visitors from the kitchen table, as it headlessly stares at a photo on the wall. She with steel wool hair and thin lips, he with wisps of white webbing and large, cartilaginous ears. The dishwasher has crept out of its hole, confronting the avocado fridge with its door open, housing tubes of toothpaste, expired in 2007. Cans of food dot the kitchen, mostly carrots and green beans. Dusty sunlight streams into the living room through Queen Anne curtains. Two brown plaid chairs remain, one in fully-reclined position. A half-crocheted afghan waits in the other. The TV tray posing in the middle of the room holds a lone linen napkin, slightly crumpled.

Parker // Poetry

The Offbeat

The bedroom beckons with its neatly made bed and perfumed body powder dresser. In the open closet hangs one garmentâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; a wedding dress, clinging to one side of the hanger in a sad dip, lace and pearls dripping to the floor. I do not belong here.

Parker // Poetry

The Offbeat

Foreplay Dan Kennard

at first i thought I would just sit him down at a café somewhere and have the waiter slip him a note that said “Hey Dan, guess what? You’re a character in a story, your life is not a real life the way you think it is, and everything you do and everything you say and everyone you meet from now on are a fabrication of my mind. You are nothing more than a collection of my sentences!” and then sign my name at the bottom. But when I sat down to write the scene, I realized I couldn’t go through with it. It felt too harsh, just to put all of that on him out of the blue. Besides, I can’t ignore the fact that if he is some kind of distorted reflection of myself, a character made in my own image, he probably wouldn’t believe a note like that anyway, so I decided to take it slow and prove it to him scene-by-scene. The first thing I did was give him a new girlfriend named Kenndra and set them up on a date. Let’s just say that they met at their community center art class, and he loved the way her shoulder-length blonde hair was always falling over her eyes, always seeming to be half-turned away from him or half in shadow, hard to make eye contact with. By the end of the four-week class he had earned her phone number, and a few days later he called to ask her out. Now, in the dim yellow light of a restaurant, he looked at her over their half-finished food and drinks, admiring how delicate and feminine

Kennard // Fiction

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her fingers were compared to his as she held the stem of her wine glass and looked around the restaurant, and it was right in the middle of that thought when I decided to call him. “Excuse me,” he said, putting his fork down and pulling his phone out. I made him make a funny face and then made Kenndra say, “Is everything all right?” “It was just a bunch of zeros,” he said, slipping it back into his pocket. “A bunch of zeros?” “Yeah. You ever see that?” he asked, picking up his fork again. “Never.” “Must be some corporate thing. Probably got my number off a list somewhere.” He forked some French fries into his mouth and chewed. “What list?” “Lists, you know? Like businesses get information from lists.” “I didn’t know that. Where do the lists come from?” She was being sarcastic. “Internet databases. Of course all these places have secret deals with the government or whatever too.” He swiped his beard with a folded napkin. “You know what I mean.” “Do I?” “Listen, that’s not even the point. We’re getting bogged down in details now. Here’s my point, when these places call, they hide the number like that so people like you will be more likely to answer. Not me though.” “People like me? What does that mean?” “You know what I mean.” “I don’t think I do, but your unbridled certainty about the whole process is very compelling. “I’m trying to demonstrate confidence so you’ll fall in love with me.” She looked skeptically over the table at him, but Dan was delighted,

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imagining he had finally met the perfect girl, a girl who he can really banter with, and he was so glad that he decided to join that art workshop. He almost didn’t, and he hadn’t painted anything since it ended, but it was the summer and he didn’t feel like watching Hulu and drinking beer at home every night. He grinned across the table at her, thinking for a moment that this was all too good to be true. The trouble for me was finding the best way to tell him he was right. I had to get his attention somehow. I realized that if I wanted him to know he wasn’t real—that nothing was real at all—I would have to get in his face a little more and really make my presence felt, so after the date while he was driving Kenndra home I decided to call him again even though I knew he wouldn’t answer. At this stage, I felt like the best thing I could do was to be disruptive. It started ringing, and she looked down at his pocket, the phone glowing through his khakis. It continued to ring as he worked it from his pants, and when he pulled it out he saw the zeros on the screen again. “Same number?” said Kenndra. “Yeah.” He looked at the screen, feeling it vibrate in his hand while he waited for it to go to voicemail. “So you’re not going to answer it?” She looked at him from the passenger seat and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I don’t like to answer calls from numbers I don’t know.” He clicked the screen dark, and pushed it back into his pocket again. “I think you should answer it next time. I mean really,” said Kenndra, “what’s the worst that could happen?” “The revelation of an unsettling truth?” I made him say. “But you won’t know anything until you answer it.” “I’m at peace with not knowing anything. My life is good precisely because there are certain things I don’t know.” “That bothers me,” she said. “Something about that bothers me.”

Kennard // Fiction

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I made him wait to call her again for another date, so here we all are three days later and if he was being honest with himself, he was a little nervous on the phone. Who wouldn’t be? He liked Kenndra. In fact, it was safe to say he was falling in love with her. He loved her lithe fingers and her blonde hair, and the way they could talk with ease, but like me he knew he had to take it slow, he had to pace himself so he could get it right. “So what do you think?” he said. “Dinner and a movie?” He was in his kitchen pacing back-and-forth in his underwear, looking down at his socked feet and touching his crotch absently. “Sure. What movie?” “I’ll see whatever. I just want to hold your hand and squeeze your thigh in the dark.” “Well that will depend on which movie you pick,” she said. “Are those the rules?” “Those are the rules.” “I’ll surprise you then. I’ll try to imagine myself as you and decide that way. I’ll ask myself: What movie would give me the best chance to squeeze Kenndra’s thigh?” There was silence for a moment, and all of a sudden his heart ached at the idea that she didn’t feel the same way he did. He thought for a flitting second that Kenndra was becoming weary of him, or that maybe he was showing too much of his own weirdness, but really it was my fault. For a second I had thought of taking Kenndra away from him. “Kenndra?” “Yeah?” “I thought we got disconnected.” “No, I’m still here.” “So what do you think?” “Pick me up at five-thirty,” she said.

Kennard // Fiction

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This time I decided he would take her to the Quack House, a fine French restaurant in downtown Sunset City known for its roast duck, so between that, and the names, and all the loaded dialogue, I was really starting to pile it on. I decided to write myself in for a moment, so now I am waiting and watching from a corner booth as he lifts his first beer from the table and moves it towards his mouth, watching and waiting until I see his lips barely touch the white foam. It’s at that precise moment that I call him again. He put the beer down after a half-sip and pulled his phone out to look at it. Back at their table he says, “It’s the zeros.” “You still haven’t answered?” “I told you my rule about phone numbers.” “What if it’s important?” “Then they would leave a message and I would call them back. That’s actually the first one I’ve gotten since the last time I saw you.” “Really?” “Yeah,” he said, both of them pausing, feeling the bone-deep sensation of what it’s like to live through space breaks, no real memory of anything but each other. “That’s weird, right? That makes me nervous all of a sudden.” They didn’t notice me looking straight at them, holding my phone against my ear. “It’s just a phone call,” he said to Kenndra. “You don’t know what it is until you answer it. It’s driving me crazy that you haven’t answered it yet. And why do they only call when I’m around?” “I don’t know,” he said, tucking the phone back into his pants pocket. “How would I know?” “Well it makes me nervous. It doesn’t make you nervous? Is someone,

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like, following us or something? You know what I mean? The more I think about it, the more I’m like, what the fuck’s with the calls?” “I’ll answer it next time,” he said. “And I don’t think anyone is following us. Who would follow us?” “Can you call them back?” “Right now?” “Please?” “Really? You’re really worked up? It’s just a phone call.” “A lot of things start with just a phone call. It would make me feel better to just find out who they are and what they want,” she said. “I feel involved now. I’m as much a part of this as you are.” “How about I call them back after dinner? I want to enjoy our date first.” “Me too…so could you please call them back right now?” “After dinner. I promise.” Next thing they knew dinner was over and they were back in his car again. Dan was calling me back while Kenndra sat sideways in the passenger seat, staring at him with an anxious look on her face. After a few seconds, he turned to her with the phone to his ear and said, “It just keeps ringing.” “Is there voicemail?” “Not yet.” Outside, the parking lot lights glowed dim orange, casting their faces in dappled shadow as they looked at each other, sitting together in the darkness of the car, within the silent near-darkness of the parking lot, deep within the dimly lit room I’m writing this from. But down in the car I made sure they could both hear it ringing. “I’m hanging up,” I made him say. “No one is answering.” At my computer, I was biting my lip, typing and deleting, typing

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and deleting, second-guessing what I had planned to say, but reminding myself that I should probably keep it short. Despite my impatience, I kept returning to the idea that I didn’t have to throw back the curtains all at once, that there would always be more stories to put them through. I reminded myself that this was only the beginning, that this was just foreplay. He dropped his phone into an empty cup holder between them and turned on the car, but before he could even strap on his seat belt, I called him back. I was ready. I knew what I was going to say. Kenndra turned to face him and said, “It’s the zeros, isn’t it. They’re calling us back.” They both looked down at his phone, the screen glowing with a string of zeros. Now that I was ready they were ready too, and they looked each other straight in the eyes for what felt like the first time, before he finally touched the screen and put the phone to his ear.

Kennard // Fiction

The Offbeat

Liquor and Love Don’t Mix William Blomstedt

Chores were not looked upon kindly in the house. Some people made up the lamest excuses to get out of their duties, like setting the alarm clock for the wrong month, while the rest of us undertook our bilgy, awful slog of a chore that would make Sisyphus scoff from behind his boulder. Plus these tasks needed to be completed by Sunday morning at 6:30, probably the worst tick of the entire week, when the Cuckoo Clock in the Blue Bathroom would sing “Don’t Come Home A Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind)” by Miss Loretta Lynn. We understood that if life in the house were to continue, chores needed to be done. And we understood that Frank the janitor, with his water buffalo-sized doses of Lysol, couldn’t take care of everything. We were responsible for our own cleanliness and dress, and no longer kids getting an allowance for picking up sticks. Besides, there were no sticks around the house anymore. If George, our five-year-old stick-picking union leader, caught anyone even kicking a stray branch in the yard they might expect a visit from some deceptively miniature kindergarten muscle. But did these chores really need to be completed early Sunday morning? Despite a hoard of petitions and even one muffin-in, where protestors claimed they would not stop eating muffins until their demands were met (where they still continue an ecstatic existence to this day),

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the Cuckoo Clock never registered our complaints, and the ten minutes following 6:20 were always the most feverish and cockamamie time of the week; an anthill of people brandishing feather dusters and tiaras, detergent and Ex-Lax, grape soda and goldfish (sometimes the cracker, sometimes the fish) often running into each other with tempers a-spasming and tears a-fluting. There’s Pearson trying to coax the spider out of the bouncy castle for a walk, there’s Fred Furtherschool opening and closing every window in the house four times, there’s Special Ben sharpening the butter knives, and there’s Nedway licking all the spoons (which wasn’t a chore, just something he always did.) And amidst it all stood Horatio, the unkempt eye of the unlikable chore storm. Horatio didn’t like the chores as much as any of us, yet somehow week in and week out his chore was to keep track of the Chore Chart. This was more difficult than it sounds, for the Chore Chart was always scarce when it was most needed, especially early on Sunday morning. Its usual hangout was the side of the fridge, but if it wasn’t there when the half-asleep Horatio walked into the kitchen, a bump the size of a golf ball would appear on his center-side of his forehead and he would run around with sweat on the face, snot in the nose and a giant pulsing beacon above his eyebrow. We would try not to laugh, but sometimes the laugh would just squirt through our nostrils and this would make the head bump quiver and the color deepen. With any luck the missing Chore Chart was just smoking a cigarette at the loading dock. We tried to discourage smoking in the house, especially around the kids, and since the kitchen lay between the chocolate milk dispensary and the Slip-n-Slide Kingdom, it was certainly a high kid-traffic area. But if it wasn’t there, it could be any number of places. Sometimes the heavy agriculturalists hid the Chore Chart because they thought the presence of Horatio’s head bump would bring early rains. Other times the Chart has been used as an emergency napkin, paper crane,

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or even a scrawled, impromptu treatise on bean bags. But mostly, the Chore Chart went missing because Goiter and the gang invited it out for “one or two” drinks on a Saturday night. Though it might appear to be a good, clean Chart during the week, it did have a bit of a wild streak and only the faintest bit of peer pressure would send it out the back door with its frayed edges slicked back and reeking of cheap cologne. In a few hours the Chore Chart would be on stage yelling belligerence at the karaoke MC, refusing to give anyone else a turn with the microphone and then belting out an a cappella version of “Yellow Brick Road” which wouldn’t leave a dry eye in the house. But then the next morning, after a few hours sleep or perhaps none at all, the Chore Chart would be slumped on the floor next to the refrigerator, stained and sloppy with the ink faded and running or the checks not corresponding to their former boxes. No one could make out who was supposed to do what and Horatio would be forced to grant a heap of extensions which he hated to do because it distracted him from the weekly T-Ball game that always took place later in the afternoon on the adequate back lawn. After Sunday lunch Mr. Peppersniff would put up the scoreboard while Mr. Sniff handed out popcorn and we would play a fairly paced game that involved some runs, some outs, a bit of cheering and clapping of the hands, a whole slew of ‘atta boys’ and always, always, an unwarranted tantrum. But if Horatio, who was one of the best T-ball players in the house, still had an incomplete Chore Chart to worry about, his play would deteriorate and the value of his rookie card would dip, the worst fate he could imagine. Goiter, who always played on the opposing team, knew of this Achilles Heel, and this was why he and the gang always seemed to buddy up to the Chart on Saturday nights. Probably the worst week was when the Chore Chart went to Vegas. The Chart had asked Gary to take over its job and Gary tried his best, even

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attaching magnets to his clothing and hanging on the fridge for the week, but at crunch time Gary fell apart under the pressure. Nobody is perfect, mind you, and the job of the Chore Chart was much more difficult than any of us thought, but that week we had three people trying to alphabetize the spices (which is not more than a two-person job), the majority of the britches remained unbeaten and no one, no one was on Popsicle refreshment duty. Horatio’s head bump reached sizes and colors previously unimagined and we were all happy to see the Chore Chart return from Vegas. He arrived hung-over; perhaps even still drunk, and a few grand in debt. As we took Gary down and hung the Chart back up in its normal place, the Chart swore off the wild life and then promptly passed out. We were skeptical at first, but over the next few weeks the Chart kept his promise. He tucked in early on Saturday night (with a few extra heavy magnets) and looked sharp and chipper for the early morning rush. But one Sunday we piled into the kitchen for the morning scramble and found the Chore Chart missing. With his recent good behavior we had taken his presence for granted and this threw everyone into a tizzy. Horatio’s head bump sprang from his forehead and he cussed a blue mile, followed by a green, before finding another piece of paper and scratching down what chores he could remember: Feeding the pet zoo Galoshing Frumping the couch pillows Burping the cacti Stamping the letters to Borneo Sweeping the mess room Shifting all the furniture slightly to the left Complimenting Ms. Kemsom’s hairdo

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Routing any approaching Byzantine Hordes General Appraising Cleaning the Sphinx Not telling Old Wilson Bones about the invention of the Moon Boots (he still believed he had thought of them first) Petting the feeding zoo Affidaviting Messing the sweep room Grumbling at the dishwater Resupplying the Eggo waffle cart Shining the gumball machine Changing the sneezeguards And began assigning the chores to anyone or anything he could see. Just as the entire list had been assigned and the soldering irons had reached the proper temperatures, a stinking, drunk, loud mess of people stumbled into the kitchen. It was Goiter and the gang, their eyes half-closed with sleep, arm in arm singing “Knowing Me, Knowing You” (it had been ABBA karaoke night at the Sherry-n-a-Shot Lounge) and the chart was with them, singing the high part right on key, even at this hour. We froze mid-chore, waiting to see if Horatio would reassign us all our original chores, or if we should continue with the ones we had started, or if Horatio would just explode at the sight of this debauched crew trying to keep straight faces but overflowing with giggles. But Horatio didn’t say a word. He kept his hands on his hips as his face grew redder and redder and just as his headbump looked like it would hatch out a small alien, Uncle ^^^ pointed out that it was 6:31a.m. and the Cuckoo Clock hadn’t sang. It was true, the kitchen clock was a minute past the half-hour and the Cuckoo Clock never missed its deadline. So we all rushed to the Blue

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Bathroom and to our great surprise the Cuckoo Clock was missing too. Just as we were about to throw up our arms and scatter in panic, Pearson walked into the Blue Bathroom with his cup of coffee. Pearson was the one member of the house who did his chore early, usually on Monday morning as soon as the chart was posted, while the rest of us waited until the final moments. He laughed his famous chortle when he saw our shifting eyes and foam-encrusted mouths and asked us if we had seen the Note the Chore Chart had left in its place? Only then did we, as well as Goiter’s gang, take a closer look at the Chore Chart to see that it wasn’t the Chore Chart at all, but a Written Note that must have been placed in its stead. It took some deciphering through blurred ink, but the gist of the Note said that since he, the Chore Chart, had quit drinking, he and the Cuckoo Clock had not only rekindled their relationship, but had just gotten hitched. They were honeymooning in Toledo this week to visit the Clock’s old aunt, so they decided the house could probably survive a week without chores After the note was deciphered, our happiness for their union quickly overshadowed any of the previous fright and we went undoing the chores we had started, including the complicated yet satisfying process of placing the dust back on top of the ceiling fans. Goiter and the gang were similarly confused, but it had been dark in the kitchen when they “invited” the Chart for a few shots, and they hadn’t noticed the difference between the Chart and the Note. But the Note sang ABBA just as well as the Chart and had been promising Goiter his famous rendition of “Abandoned Luncheonette” so they stumbled to the upstairs disco to start a Hall and Oates morning marathon. But the one who stood the happiest of all that morning was Horatio, who later went on to play some of the best T-ball we had seen, only striking out twice.

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vinegar upon nitre Christopher Mulrooney

what odes odelettes chansons etc. paid in doubloons what quarter-millions to poltroons to prove no mousetrap a betterer

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How to Snare a Wandering Womb Megan Merchant

If discontent laces your skin, scrawls your hair like a cup of ants under heated glass, if nerves take root as ache lines tissue and become the kind of want that slicks a decent wet between the soft crevice of your sex while ironing your husbandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shirts, washing dishes, or mending hems, it can only mean that your womb has packed the yellow Samsonite bags you were saving for that someday-cation and headed north along the stony roads of your inner

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route. That meddlesome bloat is skirting outcropped ovaries, straying the winding maze of intestines, possibly pausing to watch the blush-fat nodes swell the horizon. Remain calm. There’s a cure for such wanderlust, an olfactory trick—a ceramic bowl held under your nose, a tincture so noxious it demands the uterus reconsider its chosen route, ﬂee south. A bowl of French lavender, vanilla, or sage, straddled between legs, the perfume of a debutant to sweeten the lure of its descent. Unless it bellowed loose during a Valium dream and is wandering the world in search of a single blade

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of grass to hold tightly, so that when the wind stirs, that whistle song carries, hums a lullaby of mislaid ghosts, calls them back to roost. It means you haven’t been diligent in keeping your body’s promise. The only thing it could reasonably desire would be to stay ﬁlled.

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Sonder Alaina Symanovich

When I remember Jo, I think of the drywall in my parents’ house, the perfect blankness of it when we first moved in. I was five years old and thought those cream-colored walls looked just like paper: great big sheets of it tacked around me. One afternoon I huddled in the corner of my bedroom with a blue colored pencil, guiding it along the wall in curt, deliberate strokes. Rae, I spelled. Mom. Dad. And then a word I’d overheard on the playground, one the older boys kicked back and forth like a hacky sack. Only when I stopped to admire my handiwork, the curse word that looked more like tuck than itself, did I realize what I’d done. I panicked, fumbling for a fresh eraser. But the longer I rubbed at the wall, the harder I pressed, the more the letters scuffed into a muddled mess. They clouded into a bruise more conspicuous than the words had ever been. I wonder what Jo thinks when she remembers me. “Rae-Rae!” Anne Helen strangled me in a one-armed hug as I stepped over the threshold to our cabin. “Oh, my God, I’m so excited for this summer. You have no idea.” I clenched my teeth, grinding the back molars together exactly as I promised my dentist I wouldn’t. I tried to envision the sorry, pulverized state of my teeth after eight weeks with my cousin and winged a telepathic apology to Dr. Orlon.

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“It’s gonna be something,” I said. Earlier that morning I’d begged my mother to let me stay home. I insisted I needed to tackle the recommended reading list for eleventh-graders, make SAT vocab flashcards, anything. I fancied myself a writer, and nothing struck me as less literary than a summer of polar-bear swims and lanyard crafts. In a throe of reckless selfsacrifice I’d offered to work our church’s Vacation Bible School—seven unholy days of popsicle-stick crosses and sign-language hymns—to no avail. “Wait. Hel!” whined a brunette, grabbing Anne Helen’s elbow. “Finish your story.” “Oh, that.” Anne Helen’s grin snaked into something devious. She tilted her head sideways, bundling her hair in one hand to display her neck. Three girls formed a tittering circle around her, craning for a better look at her hickey. “My god,” one of them sighed. “He must have a powerful mouth.” Anne Helen let her hair cascade back into place, nodding so the strands caught the light. “He’s powerful all over.” Her eyes latched onto mine. “What about you, Rae-Rae? Got any battle scars?” I blinked, remembering Anne Helen passing the mashed potatoes to my dad at Easter dinner, the cross on her neck reflecting the chandelier’s light in my eyes. I tried, blushing, to imagine a boy’s tongue roaming that skin. “Not today,” I said, because a sixteen-year-old couldn’t say “not ever.” Anne Helen’s lips crinkled, ready to spit out a snide remark, when the door clattered shut behind me. I watched a comet of blonde hair disappear off the porch and noticed, for the first time, the rumpled bunk by the door. “Our other cabinmate,” one of the girls explained, sighing. “A real treat.”

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Through the dirty window we saw the girl rocketing toward the main camp, her legs lightning rods beneath her. She covered ground easily—not like someone exercising, but like someone determined to get where she wanted to go. Like someone whose destination would move toward her if she couldn’t meet it fast enough. Anne Helen shook her head. “Fag.”  She read the question in my eyes.  “I guess you wouldn’t know, just by looking. But I’d change in the shower stalls, if I were you.” All the campers at Lakota, it turned out, knew of Jo. They whispered about the cobalt streak in Jo’s waist-length blonde hair, rolled their eyes when she sauntered barefoot through the mess hall with a jar of almond butter because she wouldn’t touch Jif. They resented that she was the only camper gutsy enough to ditch pool hour; some gossiped that she was a witch because she wore a pentagram necklace everywhere, even the shower. Watching her, I understood what Anne Helen and her friends found so abhorrent. Jo cast her own spark in a place where everyone was trying to leech someone else’s. And then I saw the books fanned on her bed, and the notebook she carried everywhere, and I was captivated. It was the writer in me, I rationalized, that had to introduce myself. On the third day of camp, I found Jo lazing atop the accordion roots of the oak tree. Her left leg was cocked so I could see the underwear ringing her thigh. The tendons in her hand rippled as she wrote in flourished cursive: sleek-tailed Gs and alpine Ms, their sine curves converging in a torrent of language. “I’m Rae,” I said, studying the bolt in her hair. It matched her eyes exactly, a small vanity that put me at ease. I imagined her holding her breath before the bathroom mirror, struggling to work the dye into a perfect vertical, and wondered whom she’d wanted to impress.

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She gestured for me to sit, knowing she didn’t need to introduce herself. Folding into place, I felt her tracking my every flex and contraction. She seemed to notice everything, from my frayed jean shorts to the freckle on my collarbone to the tang of apricot deodorant under my arms. “I’m a writer, too,” I said, gesturing to her notebook. The pristine stream of sentences caught my attention: she hadn’t scribbled out a word of prose. Jo met my gaze as she capped her pen. “Writers are hot,” she said. “That’s why I write.” I thought of my dad driving me to camp, his tradition of raising one palm to the heavens when we passed a strip club and imploring Lord, burn it down. “Maybe I should rethink my career plans,” I said, scratching at a mosquito bite on my ankle. Jo’s eyes flicked to me, then away. “Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll introduce you to my friend Kelly. He knows his shit when it comes to writing. He’ll look at your stuff and tell you if you’re the real deal.” I raised my eyebrows, unsure if I wanted Kelly’s verdict. But then Jo grinned, a smile that splashed the world with color. “But I don’t think you need a new career.” “The trick,” Kelly said, fixing a pencil behind his ear, “is to make readers hear music in your sentences. Do that and half the battle’s won.” “But I’m not a musician.” I glanced at the sonnet scribbled on his legal pad. “Or a poet.” “Bullshit,” Jo interrupted, taking my notebook from Kelly. Her thumb, supple from the humidity, smudged his penciled edits. “This is pure lyricism. Flowery as hell, sure, but gorgeous.” I shrugged, sheepish. “I’ve never been concise.” “Huh,” Kelly frowned before returning to his own work. “Since you’re so standoffish in real life, I wouldn’t have predicted such verbosity in your

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writing.” Jo rolled her eyes at me, mouthing verbosity with long, exaggerated vowels. Before she introduced me to Kelly, she’d warned he could be, in her words, a “pretentious ass.” Indeed, when he greeted me with a presidential handshake and asked how I “became acquainted with his best friend, Miss Josephine Mitchell,” I appreciated the heads-up. Jo angled away from Kelly for a better view of the lake. “What he means to say is, trim some of the excess. Like the great Sir Arthur QuillerCouch said: Murder your darlings.” I pivoted too, my shorts grating against the dock’s weathered planks as I slid closer to Jo. Dapples of late-afternoon sunlight played across the water’s surface, pulses of yellow and white that made me think of a heartbeat. We’d ventured to the lake every day for a week, notebooks and granola bars in hand, sometimes missing the entire slate of afternoon activities in the name of craft. “Also,” Jo lowered her voice, her eyes spotlights beamed on me, “you’re not standoffish.” “No?” I grinned. “You should see me at home. My last social outing was a bike ride with Emily Lin, before she left for Yale’s pre-college program.” As Jo laughed, I watched the light ignite her hair. It sparked, the blonde with red and gold, kick started an iridescence in the blue. Like a flame: searing in the center, radiating energy. “That’s all background noise,” Jo said. She waved a hand at the lake, at the woods beyond, and sighed. “This is reality. And fuck, it’s beautiful. I wish we could skinny-dip.” My cheekbones tingled as I imagined the sun licking Jo’s bare shoulders. I imagined her fair skin fledging with freckles, flushing red. I stretched out beside her on the rough dock, close enough to smell her bug

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spray. “Skinny dipping? We’d get in so much trouble.” Jo elbowed my side, slow enough that it felt like a stroke. “Goody two-shoes.”  “I break one rule, and you can bet Anne Helen’ll have my parents on speed dial.”  She groaned. “Fuck Anne Helen.” She nudged me again, at the curve below my ribcage. “She’s not even on my radar. Forget her.”  When I opened my eyes, Jo’s gaze shot through me like adrenaline: it flared in my muscles, sent spasms through my skin. I watched Jo’s lips as she stared down the sun and bellowed, “Fuck Anne Helen!” And for a moment the trees shouted her words back. For a moment, the heavens held our chorus in their hands. Anne Helen refused to be fucked. She continually finagled out of the periphery of my life, elbowing her way into the limelight whenever Jo wasn’t around. Anne Helen made me cagey, as if I was a ladybug and she was an entomomaniac skulking nearby with her ventilated trap. She cornered me in the cabin one day during Jo’s shower. The rest of her posse was staking out the canteen, tossing their hair and cackling until boys offered to buy them candy. “Rae-Rae,” Anne Helen said, her voice cloyingly sweet, “we need a tête-à-tête.” I imagined Jo’s scorn at Anne Helen’s affected French, each vowel as thick as if sludged in syrup. Jo knew French and Latin and even a smidgeon of Greek, but she didn’t toss foreign words around like spare change. “Yeah?” I bit back a sigh, which Anne Helen’s narrowed eyes told me she detected. She wedged next to me on my bunk, donning her most patronizing expression. “I don’t get what’s going on with you,” she said, picking at my woven

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blanket. I resisted the urge to tell her to stop. “Oh?”  “My friends aren’t bad people, you know. They want to get to know you.” For a moment I could see what Anne Helen saw: Alternate-Reality Rae, traipsing across camp with her brunette posse, swapping inside jokes, and gossiping about boys and buying Lakota polos at the canteen. Anne Helen believed I could still play that part—remake myself as easily as swapping costumes between scenes. Lift the curtain and, voila, a new Rae. “I’m sorry,” I said, prickling with regret. Not for me, but for Anne Helen and her fantasy. “I guess I just made different friends.” “But, Rae-Rae, there are things you don’t know about them.” She draped a hand over my shoulder, like a mom from a TV sitcom. “Especially Jo.” I wiggled out from under her touch, shaking my head. “Anne Helen—” “Listen to me. I’ve gone here all these summers, not you. I know things about Jo, things I bet she doesn’t tell you.” “I don’t want to hear this.” “Jo’s not like me and you.” Anne Helen’s eyes shone with meaning; my cramped bunk seemed to shrink. “Rae, you’ve got to know what it looks like, spending all your time with a girl like that.” My pulse responded to her words, drumming a rhythm high in my throat. “And it’s not just that people think she’s a—you know—that she likes girls. She’s also messed-up in the head. Last summer, she—” “I what?” And there stood Jo, statuesque upon the cabin’s threshold, haloed by the setting sun. Jo approached Anne Helen, shaking her head. For a second I thought she’d throttle her with the towel slung over her arm. “Go on,” she said, “I’m

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listening.” Anne Helen shook her head and managed to maneuver off my bunk without any part of her brushing Jo. “Just don’t go dragging my cousin into your psycho-writer thing.” I focused on my half-filled notebook page, on the words I’d been so eager to show Jo. “Get the fuck away from me,” Jo said. Her voice reminded me of the snakes I’d seen on nature documentaries: low and slick and dangerous. Anne Helen made a clucking noise with her tongue, but obeyed, scooping up her purse and sauntering toward the door. When the screen snapped back into place, Jo flung her towel to the ground. There were so many things I could have said: I’m sorry; Anne Helen’s horrible; I hate that I let her say those things to you. But I couldn’t speak. In the end, it was Jo who apologized. “I’m sorry you had to hear that,” she said, rubbing the back of her neck. “It doesn’t change anything,” I hurried to say, “I know she’s a total liar.”  Jo bent in half and gathered her hair in her hands, twisting it into a ponytail. I could see the scar on the back of her left ear, a dainty holepunch-sized circle. It looked like a cigarette burn, but she said she’d gotten it at age five, scaling the trees in her backyard. When her babysitter hollered for her to climb down, she’d swiveled her head too abruptly, right into a jagged twig. I liked that story better. “Even liars tell the truth sometimes,” Jo sighed as she straightened up. “I’m not psycho, but I am depressed. I spent a week in the psych ward last August.” I gritted my teeth. “I don’t care.” “I don’t know what would’ve happened if I hadn’t had Kelly to keep me

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sane,” she said, narrowing her eyes. As if waiting for me to come undone, unravel right out of her life. “I might’ve done something really stupid.” “That doesn’t matter.” Jo looked at her hands. “Doesn’t it? I’ve got a lot of baggage, Rae. Maybe Anne Helen’s right: That shit matters. And you don’t need it.” Instead of speaking, I stood up, walked to Jo, put my green eyes to her blue ones. I loved how they swirled, a vortex of the thousand gorgeous thoughts in her brain. Slowly, I curved my hand around her face and grazed the scar on the back of her ear. That perfect little hole-punch. “It’s all an act,” Jo told me as Kelly handed over the joint. I watched her as I took a long drag and let the smoke sizzle in my lungs. “The confidence, I mean. It takes a good fifteen-minute pep talk every morning to get my shit together.” I leaned back, my shoulder blades flush against the rough slats of the equipment shed. Jo discovered this hideout the first week of camp; after midnight, nobody ventured this far west on the grounds. Good thing too, since Kelly had sneaked a seemingly inexhaustible supply of pot into camp. “No way,” I shook my head so hard, the moon bungee-jumped around the sky. “If you’re insecure than the rest of us don’t stand a chance.” She raised her eyebrows. “It’s true. I try to be all cavalier, and it’s bullshit. Like with writing—I don’t just want to be a writer; I have to be. I’m terrified I won’t make it. Writing’s, like, the only thing stopping me from killing myself.” “You don’t mean that,” I said, hearing the fear in my voice. “Some days I do.” I itched to embrace Jo; the compulsion always worsened at night, and sometimes I worried I’d lose all discretion and touch her face, her neck, maybe more. It was the way her voice sounded smaller in the dark, in need of protection. I wanted to tie my arms around her tight enough that she

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couldn’t fall apart. “You will be a writer then,” I vowed to the night. I wanted it so powerfully for her that I couldn’t breathe. I waved away the joint when Kelly tried to pass it back. “Miss Jo,” Kelly drawled, his voice dreamy and faraway, “encourage our friend here to take another hit of this fine joint.” Jo’s mouth hooked into a distracted smile. “Leave her alone,” She spoke softly., “she’s not used to it.” “Yet,” Kelly gave me a pointed look. “You do this a lot?” I gestured to the joint. “I consider my dealer a close, personal friend,” he laughed, inhaled again. I listened to his long, weighty exhale. “The only plebeian in my town worth an interaction.”  Jo rested her chin on her tucked-up knees, smirking at something in the distance. “Kelly’s not exactly Mr. Congeniality.”  “You wouldn’t be, either, if you lived in Redneck, Pennsylvania.” His twang reverberated in the dark. I felt it in my bones: pain-sul-vain-yuh. “My school gives an extra holiday for the start of deer season, and starts late to accommodate the county fair.” He shook his head. “I’m ecstatic to have nothing to do with those people.” Jo glanced my way, her face still and sad. She didn’t respond to Kelly, just brushed a hand over his shoulder. He didn’t meet either of our eyes as he finished the joint alone. He sat in silence for a long while, finally whispering a goodbye before beginning his long, loping walk back to camp. When I spoke again my voice sounded choked, smaller even than Jo’s. “Please don’t ever hurt yourself.” I pleaded it the way someone would plead I love you.  I watched her silhouette shake its head; she gazed upward, into space.

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“I’m sad,” she said. “But I won’t actually do it.”  I wondered if I could barter with the universe, could sacrifice myself so Jo would be the happy one, basking in awe, and I’d be tormented. I traced my finger across the back of her neck, over the raised scratch she’d gotten on the last mandatory hike. I got a boo-boo, she’d pouted, giggling as seeds of blood burrowed up through her skin. I’d bought her a tube of Neosporin at the camp store, kept having to remind her to reapply because she’d forget. As I traced the topography of the cut I understood two things: She was healing. And, for the first time, I knew someone else’s scars as intimately as my own. “Rub my back,” she whispered, unfurling over the soft grass. She mumbled something about doing mine next, her voice clogged with sleep. I stretched out behind her and assured her she didn’t have to return the favor. She looked like a comma, curled up on the grass like that: like a promise of more to come. My fingers roamed the thin cotton fabric, attuned to her breathing as it slowed. I thought of all the words I could offer Jo: how I longed to protect her, heal her, maybe even love her. Encased in the herbal smell of Kelly’s marijuana, love didn’t strike me as such a scary, consequence-riddled word. With the sky open-armed over us, love seemed like a noun I wanted written in my vocabulary, in indelible blue ink. With only the stars watching, I tucked my knees behind Jo’s and arced so my face was buried in her neck and I could slide my hand under her shirt. When I nuzzled my fingers under her bra, first in the back, then inching around to the front, I heard her heartbeat pound a fast rhythm. We stayed like that for a long time, until our heartbeats melded into a single symphony and I couldn’t separate one from the other. I moved my fingers in smaller and smaller circles, letting the motion flag into nothing. Until there was no back-rub pretense to hide behind and

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we were just two girls beneath the spotlight moon. I pulled her closer, my arm alive everywhere it touched her skin, my hand curtaining her ribcage. I listened to her breathe as I held her racing heart still. During a bout of rainy days, we took to meeting in the craft lodge. For pool hour, while the other campers clamped goggles to their faces and strapped on swimsuits that never lost the musk of chlorine, we hunched over our books. Kelly wrote on yellow legal pads with wood pencils. Jo rolled her eyes every time his tip snapped, every time the scritch-scratch of his portable sharpener interrupted her train of thought. She continued to flood composition books with blue ink, while I rotated between spiral-bound notebooks and loose sheets of paper, indifferent to ritual. Nothing I wrote around Jo came out right, anyway. Not trapped inside that lodge, with our breath and sweat and the endless percussion of prose on paper. “Time,” Kelly announced at 3:45, plunking his pencil down with flourish. “Who wants to read?” Jo massaged her temples, frowning at the ocean of words before her. “God, I hate myself,” she sighed as she capped her pen. She gestured to the page. “What the fuck is that?” “Somebody’s got writer’s block,” Kelly said in a singsong, leaning back and smirking. Jo jabbed her middle finger in the air, then raked a hand through her hair. The blonde strands shook from root to tip, the sapphire streak a shimmer in the middle. “Tomorrow’ll be better,” I said. “Whatever. I’ve been telling myself that for weeks, and—whatever.” Her chair creaked as she stood up. “Like I even care.” Kelly laughed. “Bullshit.” A muscle in Jo’s jaw twitched. “I mean it. I don’t give a shit.”

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Kelly crossed his arms, arranging his limbs like artillery across his chest. For the first time, he seemed more formidable than Jo. “You know what your problem is?”  Jo cocked her chin, looking everywhere but at Kelly. “You’re too happy,” he said, his smile radiant. “What happened to the tortured artist I used to know?”  When I saw Jo’s hand curl into a fist, I clambered to my feet, reaching for her without thinking. In a moment she went from glaring at Kelly to ogling my fingers as they laced between hers. And then she squeezed my hand and drew me in tighter. “I guess,” Kelly’s eyes flicked meaningfully to Jo’s hand, “you’ve got something else on your mind.” “Yeah,” I said, taking a deep breath and meeting Kelly’s eyes. “I guess she does. And you know what I think about that?” Kelly kept his stare locked with mine, but his eyes dimmed before the words left my mouth. “I think you should shut the fuck up.” I felt Jo watching me, felt the smile bloom on her face. When I looked at her, she was staring at my lips as if they impressed her. She grinned and said, “You’re a riot, you know that?” Then, hand-in-hand, we turned our backs on Kelly and walked out of the lodge. I found Jo undone on the grass behind the shed at midnight, alone. Moonlight blanketed her hair in blue and her hands lay open, palms up. “Lie with me,” she said as the grass crackled under my feet. “This is the best time of year to see the stars. Late July.” “Of course you’d know that,” I teased. I wondered what else she knew, what she wrote on the notebook pages she kept from me and Kelly. I watched her doodle sometimes and imagined those ink-drenched pages saturated with stories, with happy endings. I heard a rustle as she slipped something out of her shorts pocket.

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“Do you know,” she said, her voice slowing and honeying as it did when she read aloud, “that if you hold a pen up to the night sky, its tip covers 300,000 galaxies?” She raised the pen overhead, let it captivate us both. “I didn’t.” “And those are just the ones we can see. There are 170 billion galaxies out there.” Jo turned her head to face me, blades of grass fanning her cheek. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” I whispered. She lowered the pen. “I’m thinking that in one of those galaxies, someone like you is finding someone like me. Except I don’t say stupid shit about wanting to kill myself, and you don’t say stupid shit about how you’re not good enough to be a writer. And everything works out okay.” Her hand brushed mine in the darkness. She navigated our fingers so they intertwined, and for a bizarre moment I thought of that old nurseryschool song—here’s the church, here’s the steeple—and marveled that I had, indeed, found someone like Jo. I felt her hand slide up my arm, a warm cuff that found my shoulder, collarbone, chest. “Is this okay?” she whispered, her breath tickling my throat. Since then, when I think of summer, I remember the smell of her hair falling over my face, the damp of her mouth on my skin. I nodded, my chin brushing her cheek. Her tongue traced words across my neck, hot loops of cursive for me to absorb. Skin is transdermal, I knew; Jo taught me that. She taught me so many things. One afternoon she’d looked up from her writing, leaned close to me and spoke in a tone too low for Kelly to overhear. “Sonder is my favorite word.” Something in her voice made it sound like a secret, like a pearl she’d kept tucked inside herself. “I’ve never heard of it.” “It’s not technically a word,” she said, smiling. “Like, not Webster’s

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official. But it’s that feeling you get sometimes when you see strangers: that everyone’s the star of their own life, and they’ve got this huge network of people and problems that you don’t even know exist. And to them you’re just a nobody, maybe only on their radar for a second, if that.” She sighed, casting her eyes toward the ceiling. I frowned. “Do you want to be a nobody?” “No,” she smiled. “But it’s breathtaking to think about. Like, there are so many people I’ve only seen once. Maybe I passed them in an airport. And to them I’m nothing, irrelevant. They’re their own world, and I’m not even in it.” Jo’s eyes glittered as she raised her eyebrows. “Come on, you have to admit it’s amazing.” Her body contoured over mine, I was thinking about sonder—about our big world and the 170 billion galaxies besides it—when a flashlight daggered over us, its glare blinding. Laughter like gunshots ricocheted through the dark and Jo shuffled off me, all lanky limbs and elbows, in white-hot focus. “Oh, my God.” Anne Helen canceled out the stars, yanked me back to the itchy grass and the bug bites that had blossomed everywhere I’d spritzed myself with perfume. “Rae?” “Shit, we just thought you guys had pot,” said one of her posse. Another one of the girls giggled; I watched a black silhouette pop one hip to the side. “Guess your cousin comes here for something else, Hel.” “Freak,” someone scoffed. Behind her, another girl’s laugh bubbled with a worse word, a word that scaled me and left claw marks. Its syllables were daggers: fag-git, faggit, as if I was not only gay, but stupid. If I rotated the words just right in my mind, I could hear them in my dad’s voice. Just like the strip clubs (Lord, burn them down!)—burn the faggots too. I felt Jo’s finger, tentative, stroke my hand in the dark. “Leave us

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alone,” she said. A quake rocked her voice, though, and I hated her for being afraid. I ripped my hand from hers, holding it to myself like it’d been burned. “For God’s sake, Rae,” Anne Helen said, her voice an octave too high. “We got baptized together.” “I can explain,” I said, but the Stacy toting the flashlight moved a step closer. I shielded my eyes, shook my head at the light. “It’s not what it looks like.” Jo’s hand spidered over mine again, insistent. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “Get off me, fag,” I said, smacking away Jo’s hand. I heaved away from her, scrambling backward fast enough to get grass stains. “I told you no.” My eyes searched for Anne Helen in the group as I wobbled to my feet. “I told her no.” For once, Jo was the one who couldn’t speak. She made a small sound, a duet of surprise and pain, and when I side-eyed her she was staring at me, jaw slack. Her face crumpled into a sheet of pain, like all those verbose pages I’d scrawled and thrown away that summer. All my wasted words, mashed together to make a tragedy. I squinted back in the direction of the flashlight, my eyes picking Anne Helen’s out of the crowd. Around her, the girls’ giggles and hoots, carpetmunchers and taco lovers, constellated the night. I folded my expression into one of pleading, and after a moment Anne Helen’s features softened. In a smooth switch, the fadeout from one act to another, she believed me. I saw it in the sneer she redirected to Jo alone. In the two weeks after Jo was sent home, I told myself a lot of stories. If Anne Helen hadn’t been so eager to believe me. If the Stacys hadn’t cackled so loudly. If Anne Helen’s hand hadn’t grabbed mine and pulled me back toward the cabin, out of the dark.

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All those lies, but I still relive the truth: “It’s not the first time she did that,” I insisted as Anne Helen guided me over the rock-stippled path to the cabin. She shushed me, the candy scent of her shampoo glossing the night. “Rae-Rae. I believe you.” She shook her head. “This is what I tried to warn you about.” I nodded, the tears staking my eyes. “She got me high and just started doing that. I didn’t ask her to.” Behind me, one of the posse hummed in sympathy. I cried, real tears, until Anne Helen promised that bitch’ll never bother you again. I swore, one last time, that Jo touched me first. I gurgled a thank you as Anne Helen slammed and locked the cabin door behind us. As if I could write Jo off easily. The one person I couldn’t write off, the one who ghosted the rest of my days at camp, was Kelly. He kept Jo’s memory closer than the Lakota polos I began wearing. When I sat with Anne Helen in the dining hall, spooning Jif on my bagel and trying to make my smile touch my eyes, I’d catch him glaring at me from an unset table. He’d appear, his scowl cutting, when I posed for smush-lipped, cross-eyed pictures with my cabinmates. His middle finger would thrust up, his mouth curdle, as he watched me sprint for home during softball games. I always averted my gaze when I saw him, embarrassed for us both. I counted down the days until life would hurry me away from that strange, sullen boy who looked at me like I’d turned off the sun. He kept everything I’d done, to him and to Jo, center-stage. Some nights, as I sat on Anne Helen’s bunk and painted my nails or braided my hair before bed, I was sure I felt him lurking outside the dirty window. But every time I stared into the glass, I only caught my own reflection, pale and bobble-headed, blotting out the dark.

Symanovich // Fiction

The Offbeat

THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE TEN SONGS FROM THE WORLD Brian Michael Barbeito

SONG ONE: CURSE He has become a success. We walk through his store. A series of stores in fact. I tell him, Hey, do you believe in these people that talk about spirits, about good and bad intentions, and about curses? He doesn’t answer at first, and is in the habit of pausing, looking upwards, as if the answer is in the industrial rafters. Long moments. Dusk particles playing themselves airbound. They want to be diamonds, and somehow always are. Yes and no, he comes with, No, not in the sense your chakra mamas speak about it. They are spun. He fixes a box—facing they call it in some industries. Everything sure, curt, sturdy, standing-attention, looking outwards at the world— never really inwards. Then what? I am listening. He turns around and looks at me. Short. Big ring on his smallest finger. Gold. Gauche. Overdone. Clothing pressed and proving always its quality. Quality in “their” world. He has a syndrome. Small man’s syndrome. Always trying to prove his worth. A superiority complex. Well, of course it’s true. Look, it’s like this. What if someone I know, from far away, comes here to visit. And what if he is poor. He sees what I got. Look what I got. He is jealous. Him looking at it can cause trouble. There is something to that. I am careful of those things. Then I look out the window. For all the newness and modernity, I notice that he has, intentionally or unintentionally, not cleaned them.

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SONG TWO: BLOOD She looks down at the dog. With love. Grace. She is ‘salten,’ salt of the earth. She has brown eyes and dimples, is an electric light queen, a woman with natural beauty, quiet rhythmic walk, and born under the sign of the Virgin. Just. Right. Earthen. The dog is warm-blooded, she says, She is so warm-blooded. Unfortunately, the empiricist is present, thinking he was sent to bless the world with erudition and scholarship. In fact, he is a nuisance. Rude. Arrogant. Non-wise. That, he begins his proclamation with (and I cringe), is not true. She is not any more warm-blooded than the next. If I took their temperature they would all be the same. Unless one had a fever that day. The woman looks at him. Only briefly. She would rather look at the dog. And who wouldn’t? She will give the empiricist a crumb but he will not understand. He is against understanding though he would claim it is his thing. She curls up to me, near my leg. Especially in the night. I love her. She is my dear. She keeps me warm. It is because she curls to me—she is... warm-blooded. He looks at her. Eyes full of condescension. The dog looks at him and lets out a bark. Instinctive, guttural, cold-blooded bark. SONG THREE: ENLIGHTENMENT She was enlightened, and had much wisdom, but little book learning. Read she could and did, from time to time. The lives of the saints. Grocery store flyers. The obituaries. Her friends were dying. We fall off the orb, flaxen leaves dried and undazzled. We will find out about the transmigration of souls, or not. It’s a win-win, as if it’s a “not,” there will be no we to know about the not. She crocheted and waited for something. Follow your heart, was her one idea. Follow your heart. One of the others thought, Your heart is a pump for pumping blood to the rest of your body. She recited decades from the rosary. The world was in a sin it didn’t think it was in. That was the rub. The biggest rub of all. The world said, and with constancy, We are

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right and just. We have worked for our things. They are our things. We love the things of the world. What’s mine is mine, and is not yours. There is nothing incongruous here. Look at you. What have you got? We are the King, the Prince, the Queen. We are the aristocrats of modernity. Behold our secularism. And she did not say anything, because what can you say to people of such an ilk? She prayed to Jesus, Mary, and the holy family. To all the saints and angels. She kept for you the things you would have thrown out. These things included objects and memories. She talked to the rain and the bird through the window. She was enlightened, which really means, endowed with light. SONG FOUR: ENGINEERING It was a machine shop. Lathes. Aisles. Lathe, Aisle and Logos, I used to say—but I never really found the logos—only imagined such would show up. We were down by the presses and beside us was a wall of shelving. The calendar girls had been there for ages—true, dedicated—their bathing suits somewhat outdated, and on top, no material at all. There were hoppers, but it was rare that anyone was called to empty them. We save things, he said. He was a middle aged man, welding all day, and studying all manner and form of scripture at night. I admired him. To live a just life, you have to follow God. And here, what we doing here (he would always leave out the ‘are’), is that we makin’ sumtin’ out of nuttin’, yeeeeeees. We makin’ it, and we makin’ it true, strong, with bearings, steel, welding torch, paint, and such-like. We makin’ it careful like God make a new soul! And that was it for him. There was no doubt about it. He was on the right side—creating. Some of his books were on the shelving. Not far from Miss July full of nipples, lips, and eyes so wanton—sexually Gnostic—rightly sinful. She was a soft blonde—brown eyes and blonde hair. It stayed July forever. What does God and his perfect creation really care for months anyhow? It was a

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machine shop. Always dark, caged in, kept apart, but not without its own brand of peculiar and true light. We makin’ sumtin’ out of nuttin’. SONG FIVE: ANXIETY Far and far, to the south. We were in a store. The Atlantic boasted small white-caps not far off. On the other side—the inter-coastal—calm, affluent—a quiet manta ray going under there. The electric bridges opening up, pining for each vessel that went through. Somehow—will it come back? Will it come back? He said, you were nervous the other day. I saw you were nervous. I thought he must be mistaken, and had misread me. I was anything but nervous. I had just wanted to get out of there. Maybe a bit dissatisfied, but not actually nervous. I had wanted to see the coast, the old fishermen with blood and guts in buckets. The sleepy cargo ships walking slowly across the horizon line. Small shops with scents. Tans layers deep—strong lawns and palm leaves getting teased over and up, being danced by the breezes. And God—the dusk. Bougainville drive. Annette. The abandoned gazebo by the vacant Catholic church. One thousand things besides. Nervous? No, I told him. Yup. I saw. You were nervous. And he looked at me. Jesus Christ, I told him, forget about it. And it was later. By dive shops. By stucco walls with small lizards. By the sound of traffic. I realized he only had one word to denote any type of discomfort. He was right. I had been nervous. Nervous for to be, as he might have said, in the outer world. And it would have not made sense but made some kind of perfect sense at once. SONG SIX: AGED He was at an outdoor market. Looking languid, but with the death pallor. Out from a peacoat black, crusted, and ashen hands. Black and brown spots on the fingers. His head moved slowly, minutely, like a joking clock’s

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hand. Tick and silence, then tock, and silence. Who was he? He could have been a phantom, a grim reaper, an agent of death. He watched there, in an easy silence—already in some definite but unnamed way, dispersed. Bones. Bones with skin tacked or slowly wrapped on. People did not avoid him like in stories and films. No. He was not noticed. But I saw him there. He stayed for hours. I named him Tick-and-Tock. Eyes with a film of white over them. Ashen eyeballs. But still, they, like the head, would go back and forth, roaming slowly—tick, and then tock. There are no verdant shrubberies in the summer’s background. Only hard asphalt ways. Who was he? Not a man of eons ago, not timeless. Not a demon, and not a saint. Tick-andTock was just what you call a very old man sitting at an outdoor market while the dusk learned how to become night. SONG SEVEN: EXITING She. Surrounded. Framed. Couched. By her family. Prayers. Vigil in the cold autumnal house. Turn on the heat, will you? Some astral fairy comes to pray alongside the already bereft. How can we know what to do? God is perfunctory and won’t come right in. Where are the angels and guides? Perhaps present but unseen. How to know? What to do? Quiet are the voices. One day, we will all be estranged. Then, the leaves race around. Old frames fogged. Stacks of something. What was it? She. She as dying. She the matriarch. Our matriarch is leaving. The others don’t have as much fire as I thought. They could not maintain the verve, gusto, the day-to-day. They did not know how to do the most important thing. They did not know how to love. She. On the bed of the last days by the walls of the weary and the kitchens of the famished. She. With the solace of prayer beads and the deeds finally done. She. Where the fallow comes in and out of the door, a door soon to be shut. Condolences? Yes. Anything else? Not so much. She. A perimeter of bloodlines that will end. What can be done is done.

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SONG EIGHT: EXITED They are gone, but they are alive. How? In spirit? Do you mean memory? Is that real? It’s real enough—why differentiate—why split hairs? They could not carry the torch. But, what is it that remains? Oh, they are with you, always. But literally? Yes. Yes? Yes. It’s in the imprint of things, is what must be meant. I shall drink up both, like a metaphysical and physical concoction, an exoteric and esoteric libation—once and for all. They are gone, so how is it that they are alive? You must mean something else. Me, I just deal with the facts. I would rather be factual than wishful. But don’t you wish upon a star? Nope. I wish upon my action. In fact, I don’t wish upon anything at all. Well, it is for you to grieve in your own way and them in theirs. Each in accord with his or her... manner and characteristic. We are prescient of nothing and doubtful of everything. SONG NINE: PALMS The lines in your hand feel complicated, intricate, labyrinthine, folded in on themselves. You are a complex person. Yes, this is your fortune line, and if it reaches up to the top of the middle, you will have a good, well; it is not correct language, but, good money, if you know what I mean. And here are your relationships, the major ones anyhow. Other things, many and varied. But, that is not my gig and I don’t do that anymore. That is not my trick, and by trick I do not mean trick. Trick designates nothing like trickery at all, but is something that means forte, niche, graceful gift, and can transfer to anything done with wit, skill, competence, acuity, prowess. Do you understand? The most important thing is that everyone I met there was unhappy or greedy. Greedy for what they wanted, obviously, and therefore unhappy in the mean time as they say. And many old people, whose only concern was that their middle aged children were trying to get money. Listen, you don’t need the lines. I won’t say fuck the lines, but

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forget the lines for now. Some people can read your feet, your brow, your so on and so forth—there are such people, surely. Right? But I was burned out. I asked for my money and got outta there. I never found my thing. I have no trick, no aptitude. But, those lines look wildly maze-like. I don’t have your solution, but you can’t be accused of being mediocre, simple. There and there and there. Okay? SONG TEN: EYES Sometimes she could be loquacious. It was important to listen. Something might be said that was of value. Look between at the spaces and at the sounds. Innocent enough, just lots of talk, but, sometimes there was something to make one pause. She said, That boy is not right. I see the devil in his eyes. Ouch. He was just a kid. Unruly to be sure, but the Devil? In his eyes. And listening then, because of some non-daunting aura about her—it was gotten that, right or wrong, she did not mean mischief or even “badness” in his eyes. She did not mean devilish thoughts or evil temperaments. She meant the Devil was actually in him. Now, was she right or wrong? Could such a thing happen? It must be said... what must be said? The Christian mystic set I knew, would say it to mean somewhere in-between mischief and the Devil. They would say and mean, The spirit of the devil is in his eyes, and mean the same or similar to the spirit of greed, hatred, et cetera. That is one thing. But that is a compromise. She was saying he was sometimes the Devil. Well, he grew up to be all right. Better than many. So maybe the old one was wrong. Or maybe the Devil was then in his eyes and it got taken out. How to know? Sometimes she could be loquacious. Since then, I have seen something that gave me pause. I saw a person who had the Devil in the eyes. And it wasn’t a projection. You should have seen it. Then you would know that I “tell ya true,” maybe not the same as, but much like, the old one, long gone now, like you and I and the apple tree, will one day be.

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When He Left Caitlin Munch

Would anyone miss me? If I was gone. If I just stopped existing. If my heart stopped and my lungs quit. Would anyone notice if I was gone? Probably not. The birds would keep chirping. The world would keep spinning. The runners would continue running. CEOs would keep working. Children would keep playing. But me? I would be gone, deep below the surface of the earth. Swallowed up by the cold, damp dirt that would otherwise have bothered me. But not anymore. In fact, the dirt seemed welcoming, a wonderful solution to the cold world that I was experiencing day to day. I rarely hear my alarm go off anymore. I turn it off before it has the chance to annoy me anyway. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not like I sleep. I just lay there with my eyes open staring at the wall, wondering how many times those walls had been painted over. Once, twice, maybe six times. Not that it mattered. I left them white. Hospital white. It was better that way. Simple and plain.

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No one would have to prime the walls after me. It would be like I was never here. The water swishes and swirls down the sink as I brush my teeth, out of habit. I stare at my reflection in the mirror and sigh. The bags under my eyes never go away. More like bruises, their bluish, purplish color reflect the abuse my body is taking. The abuse of not sleeping, ever. It’s not that I don’t want to sleep. I would sleep if I could, believe me. But the minute I close my eyes I lose myself. My mind races, taunting me, torturing me with all of the things that rip through my heart no matter how many times I hear them. I grip the edges of my sink as I feel the voices start to creep back into my mind. I squeeze my eyes tight, as if closing my eyes could stop the voices. Those horrid voices that make my heart ache. They echo between my ears, whispers that feel like screams. You’re fat. And maybe I am. Wait. No. I’m not. I only weigh 140 pounds. But if someone else is saying it, then it must be true. You’re fat. No. No. NO. I lift my shirt to examine my body, frowning at my hips that still spill over the sides of my pants no matter how much weight I lose. I frown at the pouch I seem to carry on my lower stomach. I think I’m constantly bloated. I feel my inner thighs rub together as I walk and cringe, wondering if I would ever have a thigh gap. Stop it. I’m only 140 pounds, size 8 jeans, and I wear medium shirts. You’re fat.

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I run my fingers through my hair in frustration, stopping as I grip the strands tight in my fingers. I scream “STOP IT,” as if my pleas will stop my inner demons. You’re fat. It never ends. Even as I slide on a pair of black work pants I notice that they seem to be looser than normal. But that doesn’t matter, because while they fall loosely over my legs, they squeeze my waist just enough to give me a muffin top. I bite my lip in frustration, but continue to dress, sliding a plain gray sweater onto my torso. I stand in front of the mirror. I stare at my tall, awkward body, my hair that seems dull, and my face that could use make-up to cover up my sunken-in cheeks and overtired eyes. You’re ugly. No. I’m not. I’m just tired. You’re ugly. I try to ignore them as I layer on my make-up, attempting to hide every imperfection. A pimple here, a pimple there, concealer for under my eyes, blush to help my cheeks, and eye drops to ease the redness. I reach for a bottle of pills. She keeps telling me to take two a day. Vitamin D will help. As if she understands the extent of my problem. I swallow two. Then I reach for the ibuprofen. Four a day. Eight hundred milligrams per day. It slows the headache to a dull throb. Not enough to put me at ease, but enough to remind me that I’m here, alive. I always wonder what would happen if I take an extra pill, just one, or even two. Maybe three? They say my stomach could bleed. That sounds

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like it could be painful. And after…well after everything, I don’t want to be in pain. I don’t want to feel anything. The radio drones on in the car. The music doesn’t matter. It could just as well be static. I wouldn’t care. I don’t listen. I just drive. Passing irrelevant buildings and irrelevant roads that used to mean something but now just torture my thoughts, so I stare straight ahead. Hands at ten and two, with a grip so tight that my hands start to turn white. “White knuckling it” I think is what they call it. Or at least, that’s what I had heard. I never used to grip the wheel like that, but after, well after everything, I felt like I needed something to hold on to, tight. What is it about elevators? I mean, seriously. What is it about an elevator that is oddly calming? It’s like taking a deep breath in between destinations. When I’m alone on one it’s like I can breathe, I can breathe for the first time and only time all day. Ding. And then it’s over. “Well don’t you look like a ray of sunshine today.” “Good morning, Ally.” “I’m so glad you could...” The voices drone on. As if every day it’s a miracle that I made it into work. I sit in my cubicle and just stare at the computer screen, mindlessly answering emails. I don’t listen to music; I hardly hear the noise of people talking. I just work. People stare. I’m the special attraction. I’ve been on display for the last month. Everyone waits for me to have another episode. She crawled under her desk and cried. I heard she cuts her wrist, that’s why she wears long sleeves.

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I bet she hasn’t eaten in weeks, poor thing. She looks horrible. The voices never stop. “Nice of you to come into work today, Ally,” my supervisor comes to my desk, “how are you feeling?” “Fine, thanks,” I nod. “If you need anyth...” I cut him off, “I said I’m fine, thanks.” He backs off. They always back off. They think I’m psychotic. A loaded gun, just waiting to go off. And maybe I am. But they don’t fire me. They keep me on. Because I’m good at my job. No, they just don’t want to fire you and push you off the deep end. I close my eyes and take a deep breath in. There’s a picture on my desk. Just one. I had torn down all of the other decorations during my last manic episode. That’s why I took extra time. That’s why today is my first day back. I look at the picture and fight back the urge to vomit. Everything about it makes me sick. I hardly remember throwing it in the trash before going to the bathroom to get ahold of myself. I shut myself into a stall and roll up my sleeves. I dig my fingernails into my arms until the skin breaks. I keep pressing them into my skin, ignoring the blood, waiting for the urge to cry to subside. You’re useless. You’re fat. You’re ugly. I’m plagued. My whole life I’ve been plagued by the incessant voices

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that tell me everything that I hate about myself. I’ve never been able to quiet them. At least not alone. I sit back down at my cubicle, realizing that only an hour has gone by. One hour. Sixty minutes. Three thousand and six hundred seconds. That’s it. That’s all of the time that’s gone by since I’ve been here. One hour. Seven more to go. I like the way it sounds when I type on my keyboard. It’s soothing. Tap. Tap. Tap. The constant tapping of keys keeps me calm. It’s the only noise I hear. It drowns out the monotonous voices of my co-workers. It drowns out the vibrating sound coming from the lights. It drowns out the voices for the time being. It drowns out the voices. Quiet your mind. That’s what he used to say. Keep typing. I have to keep typing. I can’t stop. I type faster. My heart starts to beat faster as my fingers chase away the voices. You’re fat. Tap. Tap. Tap. You’re useless. Tap. Tap. Tap. My fingers start to hurt the harder I push the keys. I squeeze my eyes shut. When I open them my hands are frozen on the keyboard. The voices stopped. For now. I don’t know why I bother bringing food for lunch. I don’t eat it. I just

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stare. I can’t eat. I want to, but I can’t. So I just stare. Why do you think they call an orange an orange? But a banana isn’t a yellow, it’s a banana. The orange almost looks good enough to eat. You’re fat. I shut my eyes. It’s just an orange. It’s good for me. It’s a healthy choice. You’re fat. I put the orange back in my bag and choose to work through lunch. Tap. Tap. Tap. I have to chase away the voices, before they chase me away. I hate my job. Or rather, have no interest in my job. It’s just what I do to pay the bills, which seemed to pile up. That’s what happens when your family doesn’t get it, when they commit you to a psych ward, only to have you released after sleeping for forty-eight hours. I just needed sleep. That was the last time that I slept. Do you have one person that you tell everything to? One person that knows the deepest, darkest parts of your soul but still stands by you because, well, they love you? I do. Did. The voices hiss. My hands instinctively go to my arms. There’s something about the feeling of pain that makes the voices quieter. At least for a brief moment. Type. I open my eyes. Type. You know it helps.

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That voice is comforting. It’s not scary. It helps. It knows me. So I type. And type. I should have been a writer. But my family frowned upon that career choice. When I told my mom that I wanted to be a writer she laughed at me. Oh really? And just how do you expect to make money? Really, Ally. I thought you were smarter than that. She never understood. She didn’t realize that writing was my escape. She didn’t understand that writing was the one time when I was able to breathe. There was something about the way my fingers flew over the keyboard that made everything so much better. Tap. Tap. Tap. I could type all day, my ideas flowing from my brain to my fingertips in one fluid motion. She didn’t understand. But he did. He always understood. Write, Ally. Keep writing. I close my eyes. Comforted. But when I close my eyes I feel death. I shiver. I hate the way hospitals smell. Do you know what I’m talking about? That smell of sterilization. The smell of old people. The smell of death. I absolutely hate the smell. I hate the way the sheets feel. They are scratchy. The blankets, while warm, don’t feel warm. Everything about a hospital is cold. The rooms are cold. Their white walls aren’t inviting. They make the room seem cold. Nothing is warm about them. You can’t help but wonder how many people slept in that bed before you did. Or worse yet, you can’t help but wonder

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how many people died in that bed. That’s what we called that wing of the hospital, death row. It’s what it was, a death sentence. I don’t care what you say about it, nothing good comes from that section of the hospital. Stay positive, Ally, I’m here because they can treat me. More like they brought him here to die. So, death row. The cancer wing. I hate that section of the hospital. All it does is bring death. I hate it here. I know you do. You’re dying. Maybe. You can’t die. But I might. The funny thing about the word “might” is that ninety-nine point nine percent of the time it means yes. I don’t care what the situation is, if I say I might do something, there is a high probability that I will do it. But I might. And so he did. I don’t want to talk about it. They keep asking me, but I haven’t changed my mind. I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve sat in therapy sessions but I just stare at the shrink. I can’t tell her how I feel. What will it help? She will just prescribe drugs that I’ll be dependent on to make me feel better. Maybe I don’t want to feel better. Maybe that’s the real problem. I want... no, I need to feel this. I need to remember. Because without it, I’m lost.

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So I don’t tell her how I feel. I sit and stare and keep it bottled up. You can tell me, Ally. No I can’t. You wouldn’t understand. Try explaining it to me. I cover my ears with my hands. How do you tell someone that you’re in so much emotional pain that the pain becomes physical. That sometimes your heart aches so much you wish someone would cut it out of your chest just so you didn’t have to feel it contract in agony anymore. How do you tell someone that sometimes you wished you would just stop breathing? That every second of every day you wished it would be your last and you would just stop. No help, no pain, you would just stop. How do you tell someone that there was only one person that could ever quiet your demons, and that person was gone? No one understands. They say I’m crazy. They say I need meds, that I need to go to therapy. Not him. He understood. He knew how to make the voices stop. He knew how to quiet my mind in a way that no one ever could. And now? He’s gone. I’m so sorry, Miss Lakeman. Is there anyone we can call? No. It’s just me. It’s always been just me. And now? I’m alone. Ally-cat, when I’m gone, I want you to write. Stop. You’re not dying. You’ll be fine. Ally. I need to know that you will be okay. You have to be okay, for me. I couldn’t make promises. I never made a promise. He knew I couldn’t promise him that. And it was okay. He understood. I don’t remember how I got home. That seems to be my life lately. I

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get places, but I don’t remember how. Suddenly, I’m just there. As if the half an hour commute to work just didn’t happen. I was at my desk one minute and the next I wasn’t. I have so many things that I should do. I should go work out. I should go read a book. I should cook dinner, something healthy. I’m more of a baker. I can cook; I’m not saying I can’t. But that was more his job. I didn’t like cooking. It was too stressful. This chicken is boring. If it was a book I wouldn’t read it. I’m sorry. It says there are fewer calories if you just season it with salt and pepper. Ally, I don’t care about calories. This stuff should taste good. I’m trying to lose weight. Ally, you’re beautiful. You don’t need to lose any weight. Our banter was a regular thing, me hating part of my body, him loving it. Even when he proposed to me it was a speech about how he loves every part of me, even the things I hate. For every part of you that you hate I will love it twice; once for me, and once for you. There will never be a part of you that I couldn’t love. When he got sick I fell apart. I tried to pretend to be strong, but he knew better than that. He knew that even though I was trying to be strong for him, I was dying inside. I’m always dying inside. I mindlessly flip through the channels on the television, thinking that maybe I’ll get hooked on something but failing to get into anything. I can’t do it anymore. Yes you can. I’m so lost. I know. You left me.

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No I didn’t Ally. I never left. I decide to skip dinner. What’s the point? I can’t bring myself to cook anything and even if I could I wouldn’t be able to eat it anyway. So I’ll just skip all of this. Would anyone miss me? If I was gone? Don’t do this, Ally. Fight. I know you can. Fight for me. My mom calls at seven like she always does. She just wants to make sure I haven’t killed myself yet, that I’ll actually answer the phone. We ask about each other’s day, I ask about the family, she asks how my first day back was. She’s talking but I just hear words. I can’t forget. You just need help, Ally, and I can’t give it to you. You’re killing yourself and I won’t sit by and watch. She committed me to the psych ward. Without my consent. I was so far gone that I was strapped to a bed, in a psych ward, so heavily medicated that all I was capable of was sleeping. You need help, Ally. It’s seeping from every word. She’s not saying it, but she is. I don’t need help. I need him. No one understands. I’m not some lovesick girl. It’s not like that. He was my person. He was the person I called when I couldn’t sleep at night. He was the person that held my hand when I was scared. Even through chemo, when he was scared, he held my hand because he knew that while he was scared, I was terrified. He was the person that could calm me down in a manic episode. He was the one that could be staring at me and I couldn’t help but smile. He was the person that knew I didn’t need help; I just need to be understood, to be reassured that the voices would go away, that I could fight them, if I wanted to. He was the person that would fight

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with me, and then apologize even when we both knew it was my fault. He was my person. And he’s gone. How do you recover from that? They say it takes time. And maybe it does, but I need it to go away. Now. I know that I can’t keep this up. I’m spiraling out of control. And the worst part of all of it is that I know. I know that I’m spiraling out of control. I know that I’m barely holding on. I’ll hold on for as long as I can, but I don’t know how much longer that will be. I keep telling myself that it will be okay, but for every positive thought, there’s a voice telling me it’s only going to get worse. Just end this. You will feel so much better. But I can’t. I couldn’t do that to him, or to me. I know that I’ll come out of this eventually. But for now, I’m just going to sleep. Sleep until the feelings subside. Sleep until my lungs stop constricting my heart. Sleep until I’m me again. If there’s a me to go back to.

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Whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the Scaredy Cat Now Martin Durkin

your hair scares me your blue chipped room hallway leading to the haunted door your smiley face painted on your bare belly sweater pulled up to say what your face cannot your cigar your cigarettes your body caught in the netting your unshaven armpits

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this ability to become a bird escaping the forest your trousers with suspenders no shirt with bragging eyes and the circus tent collapsing in the background the dog is rolling on the carpet and you watch through the window your ability to stay on the outside the world spinning without thought your used candles unlit they scare me too 118

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Possum Slim Michael Lee Johnson

105 years old today, Possum Slim finally gets his GED, drinks gin, talks with the dead. “Strange kind of folks come around here, strange ghosts,” he says, “come creeping pretty regular. Just two ghosts, the only women I ever loved, the only women I ever shot dead.”

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punctilious Christopher Mulrooney

big broadcast the atomic clock at Penn Station gives you Mountain Time Standard Over Easy what kind you want where do you live now by your ballpoint tip or what precocious hopes awake you fretting up

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Why Me Howie Good

Clouds of Zyklon B, guaranteed to kill 99.9 percent of human bacteria in 20 minutes, roll in at dusk. I wish now that I had finished college. It’s a wish without any discernible purpose as events gain momentum. The county poorhouse begins to rock wildly from side to side. What would Jesus do? Kiss his ass goodbye is what. Every day 2,400 Americans—give or take— go missing, hiding out under assumed names, abducted off the street by strangers, or, as in this case, burned up like fuel in a rocket streaking from the tomb.

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The Plagues Lee Kisling

Part 1: The Plagues of Egypt blood, frogs, lice, flies, pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, death of oldest son. Part 2: The Plagues of Iowa corn, corn bread, corn meal, corn syrup, corn flakes, corn cobs, corn pickers, corn chips, corn dogs.

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In the name of our father Gavin Chapman

Dr. Entintola felt a twitch in his back as the bead of sweat trickled over his brow. He remained focused while chaos ensued around him as the patient reached his 44th second of death. He’d been here before, seen this room and situation, and the Lord was always with them at Saint Matthew’s Hospital. “Bring me the arrest cart! I’m finished, we can bring him back.” “Dr. E, it’s been too long, I think we’ve lost—” “No! We haven’t, don’t speak like that. We’ll pray, if we pray, the Lord will bring him back.” They primed the defibrillator and went to work on the dying heart. The dead heart. Dr. E shocked and pressed on, he prayed and wept, he fought for the man’s life. If he had to pass, then it was God’s will, but Dr. E wouldn’t make it easy. A small sound came from the heart monitor, just a small beep, but Dr. E heard it. “Stop,” he said. Everyone stopped. Things went quiet; the heart monitor only had the oxygen machine and the ticking of a clock to compete with. Another beep sounded. Then another one, and another. The man was alive, his heart was beating again. The man was alive in the cold sterile room. No lights went off, no music, nothing to sound the celebration except

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a small squeal of excitement from a young nurse. “Well done, Dr. E, you saved his life,” Dr. Redman, the anesthetist, said. “Thank you,” Dr. E said, taking Dr. Redman’s hand, “We did it together. We’re very blessed to have such a fantastic team.” A nurse praised God for his mercy. That was how it went in a Catholic Hospital, man does the work, God gets the credit. Dr. E was fine with it; that was the way it should go. “Well, let’s get him to ICU and see how—” Dr. E was cut off by the man’s eyes shooting open. It was like someone had dipped his testicles in ice-cold water. The man started clawing at the breathing tube in this throat, ripping at the tape and trying to remove it. The slow beep on the heart monitor turned into a rapid blur, the man was turning red. “I-I don’t know what’s happening, I haven’t seen this,” Dr. Redman said, “Sir! Hold on, let me take out the breathing tube, Jesus, sir please. I’ve never seen this before, have you?” “Yes,” Dr. E said, ignoring the man’s blasphemy. Dr. Redman removed the tape, then the breathing tube. The man took deep wheezing breaths. He looked around the room, taking in each face. The drugs were still thick in his system. “I saw it, I saw what comes next. Saw it . . . was there,” the man croaked. Everyone in the room looked on in silent amazement. “Saw it. I was there. Was there . . .” Dr. Redman injected more drugs into the IV; he needed the man relaxed for transport. “I can’t believe that, I mean, the man just died. Now he’s speaking? His stats look good, want to just bring him to recovery? Maybe he won’t need to go to the ICU?” Dr. Redman said. “It’s truly a miracle. Let’s bring him to recovery for now, and I’ll stay

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with him. Push back my next case for an hour,” Dr. E said to the nurse, “Come on then, let’s move him.” It was an hour and a half before the man regained consciousness again. From life, to sickness, to death, to normal life. It was a wheel that spun under God’s hand, Dr. E thought. Patient Chad Barney awoke and asked for orange juice, a task that Dr. E was happy to do himself. The man took small sips, Nurse Jenkins didn’t have to tell him to take it slow or lose it all. “What a blessing,” Nurse Jenkins said to Dr. E, “Those hands of yours work miracles.” “It’s an honour to ser—” “I saw it. Fuck me, I saw where we go. Oh my God, I remember it so clearly. Why? I almost don’t want to remember,” Chad said, looking back and forth between his healthcare professionals. “What did you see?” Dr. E asked. “I saw, well, the afterlife I guess. The place where we go. Jesus, it’s nothing at all like I would have hoped. “Are you Catholic?” “Of course.” “Tell me what you’ve seen, sir.” “It musta been a dream, had to. Too strange,” Chad said. “My voice feels strange, it’s all scratchy.” “You’ve had a breathing tube in there, it would be stranger if it didn’t sound scratchy.” “Breathin’ tube eh? Well those girls in the dirty movies have things crammed all the way down their gullet, and they don’t sound scratchy at all come the end of the film.” “Please, this is a Catholic hospital.” “Sorry Doc, I’m just kiddin’ around.”

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“What did you see?” Dr. E asked again. He sounded agitated this time, he was already running late, he didn’t have time to listen to this supposed Catholic’s opinions. “Well, it was a room. Just a plain room, but it was big, real fuckin’ big. Oops, sorry Doc, didn’t mean for the profanity to upset you, anyways yeah, it was big. Just plain grey, almost like a church basement. You ever been to an A.A. meetin’?” Both Dr. Entintola and Nurse Jenkins shook their heads. “Well I have, and it was a lot like that.” “Were there other people?” “Was there ever! First table had a group of guys playin’ cards, and I’ll be damned if they weren’t playin’ Asshole. Remember that game? For kids! But that’s what they were playin’. I heard one son of a bitch call the other son of a bitch the ‘Vice Asshole,’ so it had to be. Right? Am I right?” Dr. E had shamefully heard his children playing this game before, they were scolded. “What else?” “There were TVs all around, like in a sports bar. Surroundin’ the place, big circle, all playin’ different things. But no sound, now that I think about it, there was no sound.” “What were they playing?” Nurse Jenkins asked. Dr. E shot her an annoyed scowl. He liked to be in charge, and she knew it. She just got a little excited. “All different shit. Sports, news, the one even had that UFC stuff, the fightin’. Not for me, I’m a boxin man, but to each their own I suppose.” “Yes, I suppose as well. What else? Please, more details,” Dr. E said. “You know? It’s strange, I mean it was a big fuckin’ room, no question, but it didn’t seem big enough for everyone. Like all the people who are dyin’. You think there’s others? Must be, right?” “Did you see God?”

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“Listen Doc, you seem to be takin’ this pretty serious. The more I think about it, the more I think it was a dream. I mean, seemed real as all hell, but it couldn’t have been.” “Did you see God?” “No,” Chad said, “No God. No good or bad, no classes. Rich or poor. Just everyone in a room. Black, white, brown, yellow, all of ‘em. Tattooed, smokin’, drinkin’, prayin’, cryin’, laughin’, all of ‘em. They were all there. No God, no thoughts or opinions. It was pretty quiet. Kind of beautiful, in its way. Like a hut in the middle of a frozen fuckin’ lake.” “Hm, interesting.” “Do you think it’s somethin’, Doc?” Chad asked. Fear lit up his eyes. “I mean, couldn’t be right? I did confession before I came in, went to the church and by God, I meant it. That can’t be right, right?” “I’m not sure, Chad. I know you passed away, then you came back.” “I hope it isn’t it, my God. I gotta talk to my priest, this is bad.” Chad said. Dr. E and Nurse Jenkins exchanged a glance. It was what they were afraid of. Dr. E nodded and Nurse Jenkins left the man’s room, left him alone with the doctor that saved his life. “Well Chad, it’s really quite miraculous that you have made such a recovery, you don’t hear about this sort of thing often,” Dr. E said. He removed a syringe full of brown liquid he had in his breast pocket, “I’m going to give you a sedative, alright? I need you to rest. But I think after that, everything will be alright.” “Thank you Doc, anythin’ in this world, I owe you. I really do.” Dr. Entintola injected the liquid through Chad’s IV and stood back, waiting for the medicine to take effect. First Chad rested his head on his pillow, then he started to convulse. Just slightly, barely noticeable. Dr. E had seen it before, he wasn’t concerned. Chad’s eyes rolled in his head and

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he started to make a choking sound, like he had a chicken bone caught in his throat. Or as though he was one of those girls he had spoken of. He controlled his eyes long enough to make contact with Dr. E’s, they pleaded to help him, to save his life again. Dr. E watched the man die in his recovery bed. He watched without guilt. This was God’s work; they performed miracles at St. Matthew’s. Once Dr. E was satisfied the man was dead, he walked out to Nurse Jenkins’ desk. “Is it done?” she asked. “It is.” “Doctor, that’s the fifth one this year. Do you think, I don’t know, maybe—” “It’s Satan’s illusion. That’s not Heaven. The Bible tells us about the afterlife that waits. We can’t have people spreading Satan’s lies.” “You’re right, I’m sorry.” “God bless you, Nurse Jenkins.” “And you, Dr. Entintola.” The doctor washed his hands and went out to speak with Chad’s wife; he had horrible news to pass on.

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Home Hunting James Holbert

The first time I met Jeffrey the wolf, he was going door to door selling insurance in our town. It was summer, and the birds had long since been chirping with song from the wake of each morning while the afternoons hissed of cicadas. I was in the kitchen sitting down with my wife Molly and our son Blake, having breakfast. Blake was hurrying through his waffles because he had plans to play baseball at the field with Eric and his other friends. Molly told him to slow down once, but she screened her forehead with her hand like an awning, and he just kept on digging through his overly-syruped meal. “It’s the heat,” she said in days previous when I asked her what was wrong. There was a knocking at the door, and no one was eager to get it, so I got up—actually, it would be inaccurate to call it “knocking.” It was more like a muffled scratching. We’d listened to it for a minute like it was just the sound of nature, like the cicadas buzzing or the neighborhood dogs barking. Jeffrey was standing there, all four legs planted firmly on the ground. His tail whipped to life like a wind sock in a rogue gust, but then immediately fell flaccid. His eyes did something similar, widened as they saw me and then shrunk again as if he was intentionally pulling back excitement. I remember I didn’t open the door all the way when I saw him. He was too big to be a dog, even a nicely fed one. But I didn’t shut the door

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either—it must have been the North Face backpack he wore that softened the sight of him. “Good morning, sir. I was wondering if you had the time to talk about house insurance today,” he said. He was so polite about himself that I felt I couldn’t do anything but invite him in. “Thank you, very much, sir. I promise not to waste too much of your time.” He said that as he trotted into the living room. The backpack, though tightly strapped to his torso, rustled with the sound of its contents shifting about inside. He complimented the way the living room was decorated, despite how I never really thought it was that special. He must have been referring to the bamboo plant in the corner of the room, or maybe it was something about the mirror on the back wall that caught his attention. There was, though, a family portrait of Molly, Blake, and me hanging over the television set. We’d taken it right after Blake’s eighth birthday. That was five years ago. Jeffrey was looking at it, and when I answered that this was indeed my family, he told me that we all looked lovely together. “Please,” I said to him, who stood in front of the couch, “have a seat.” His ears, shaped like the sails of a boat, twitched from their upright position and flicked back. His gaze drifted elsewhere, and I thought that he wanted to continue touring the house décor. But he looked up to me sorrowfully, and the space above his eyes lifted. “I’m sorry I have to ask you this,” he said. “But could you help me remove my sack first? It’s quite difficult for me to do myself.” Of course, I did this, unclipping the two straps across his chest to release the burden from his back. He kept apologizing as I did so, expressing to me his embarrassment of making such a request when I had already been so kind as to agree to listen to him. I couldn’t help but feel indebted to his graciousness, which I seemed undeserving of—despite his manners, I was,

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at this moment, still occupied with memorizing the layout of his fangs in his mouth whenever he spoke. “No, no, please,” he said as I tried to remove the contents for him. “I couldn’t allow you to do that. Don’t trouble yourself for me anymore.” There was a white binder with a front cover that read “Policies” that he pulled out, biting into it with his teeth. It was placed on the coffee table along with two other small binders that he stacked to the side. “All set,” he said happily, and the ends of his mouth curled up slightly in what I thought to be his best attempt at a smile. He nudged the white binder open after that, turning the pages with his snout as he showed me and explained to me the kinds of insurance I could apply for, which were conservative and which provided the best coverage. I wasn’t really paying attention, save for the obligatory nods and mhm’s I gave him when he turned his head away from the paperwork to look in my direction. His fur, colored like pine cones, was well kept and smooth, looking like it had just been brushed. In some places it was darker, more like black, and that was mostly along his spine and at the tips of his paws. As I was worrying about the hair he might shed on my couch, he straightened up and looked at me with eyes yellow like a hornet, and I suddenly feared that I had been away too long from his proposals and was to suffer awkwardness for it. “You know,” he began, “it would be good for you and for me to buy some insurance. After all, if you don’t, I might come back one day and huff and puff and blow your house down, sir, and then what’ll happen?” For an instant, I thought I came out of my body to see myself physically shrink back into the cushions of the couch to bring my knees up to my chest. I know this isn’t what happened, but Jeffrey seemed to have registered at least a morsel of this feeling of mine just by looking at my expression, because he immediately bent his head in apology and insisted to me that he was trying to make a lighthearted joke.

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“I’m not trying to shake you down,” he said. “I’m sorry, that joke was insensitive. Most people tend to like it though, and then I tell them that actually the Big Bad Wolf is my cousin and that he has been exiled from the wolf community for his crimes against those three little pigs. Then, they say, ‘Is he really your cousin?’ and I say, ‘No, that’s just a fairytale.’ And then we laugh, but they always laugh harder and much longer.” I’ll admit that I chuckled a bit at this point, mostly due to nervousness, but I actually did find his story funny, especially as he looked so troubled saying the part at the end. We went on to “being good friends” again after that, as he said. He did express his humiliation once more, but I begged him not to worry about it. It was then that I heard my wife call from the kitchen, and her voice increased in volume as she came toward the living room: “Michael, who was at the door?” “My goodness!” the saleswolf cried and jumped off the couch, now in a tizzy. “I haven’t even introduced myself to you, sir! Oh, how rude of me, I’ve completely forgotten.” Molly came in and saw her husband shaking hand-and-paw with a wolf, who was introducing himself formally as Jeffrey. He and I mutually stared at her like she was a gazelle and any movement might send her flying off into the forest, fleeing for her life. We were so still that we hadn’t even attempted to remove our extremities from the shake, and so the rough, sandpaper-like pads of his paw stayed in the center of my palm. As for Molly, she remained somewhat the same, viewing the scene from across the room with the palms of her hands pressed rigidly to her sides. After a moment, I believe she breathed “Hello” through a tight pair of lips, and then Jeffrey did the same. I sat in the middle stupidly, not saying a word. And for some reason, I was relieved when my son ran in a second later, a bat perched up against his shoulder, topped with a little glove. He came in

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like a firework, lighting the room up with his excited screaming, telling us he was going to meet Eric. Blake was halfway across the room when the explosion stopped, and he fell to silence like the rest of us. But it wasn’t for long because the bat fell to the floor, striking a numb bellow against the carpet, and he hurdled the couch. “Awesome!” he cried, patting down Jeffrey’s ears in a ferocious display of affection. “He’s so cool! Where’d he come from?” I was embarrassed for Jeffrey, but I just watched as Blake’s face erupted with enthusiasm. It was the way his face tended to be when he hit a ball I pitched to him and it went high up over my head over to “home-run turf” in the backyard. When Blake asked if we could keep him, I began to intervene, grabbing Blake’s wrist, telling him that it wasn’t polite to pet your guests. “I’m sorry, my son doesn’t know any better,” I explained. “It’s no bother,” Jeffrey said. “I love kids.” That was essentially my first encounter with Jeffrey. He left the house not long after, and I had told him that I wasn’t interested in buying insurance. He didn’t seem overly displeased, more sorry than anything, I assumed, because he gathered his belongings up hurriedly as if I had just told him he was making a terrible imposition on my home life. When I sauntered into the town’s deli shop a half hour later, Marty Mullen told me that I had not been the only one to have Jeffrey as a visitor that day. “Yup, he’s been a going ‘round all morning, knocking on doors, trying t’sell summen,” Marty said, cleaving a piece of meat in half. He pointed the knife at me and his lips went crooked: “You as’ me and I say it’s a strange, this fella. Selling’s a good job, but I wouldn’t trus’ my own daddy if he a come knocking on my doorstep to get me to go and buy. It’s just not professional.” The next week Molly and I were sitting with the kitchen table between

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us at some late hour of the night. I had woken up and found a warm imprint of where she had been in bed and then found her there at the table. It was quiet except for the grasshoppers outside. We kept the back door open, and the constant chirping found its way through the storm door’s screen and into our kitchen. We stayed like that for a while, and when I put a glass of ice water in front her she ignored it. She had her hand screened across her brow again, a habit that had been growing in the recent days. For that and her uncombed and messy hair, I couldn’t exactly see her face, and something told me that I shouldn’t brush her hair behind her ears like I used to do when we were newlyweds. For all I knew she could have been baring teeth, waiting for me, or anything, to come near. “I was thinking about getting Blake that baseball bat he wanted for his birthday,” I said. “The aluminum one that’s painted orange.” She let out a sigh that would have clouded the table if it had been topped with glass. “I want to cancel the party,” she said. *** It was still warm outside so I didn’t even need a jacket. A breeze would crop up every once in a while, but I learned to cross my arms over my chest when I heard the rustle of the tree’s leaves overhead. The insects were much louder walking beside them, and they didn’t stop, not for a moment. It was like the steady sort of hissing a television does when you leave it on a channel with static. I thought about Blake’s upcoming birthday. Besides Blake’s friends, I’d already invited my parents to come and celebrate it, his thirteenth. Over the phone, my father had laughed and told me what a brat I became when I was a teenager, like no one else in the world mattered because I thought I was all grown up. I laughed into the receiver. “Yeah, I remember, Pops,” I’d said.

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“Heh heh, don’t you forget it. I remember the time you went and tried to steal your mother’s car. You remember that? You were going to ‘go get a job,’ that’s what you said. Do you remember that?” “Yes,” I repeated, “I remember.” By the time I realized I made a commitment out of my walk, having already passed Marty’s Deli and Diner-All-Nighter, I decided I would go on ahead to sit in the park. I walked up the path, dotted alongside with the occasional tree that rustled in the wind. There was a drinking fountain there, and I bent over to have a sip; the breeze picked up again, and I pulled my lips into my mouth. I looked up and started walking again. In the not-so-far distance was the silhouette of a figure sitting on a bench and underneath a lamp that loomed over it. At first I considered turning around to leave the person to their peace, but when the figure’s ears flicked from atop their head I went right over. “Hello there, Jeffrey,” I said. He turned his head methodically as if something high up in the sky were travelling in my direction and then suddenly stopped somewhere behind my head. Sitting on his hind legs, his front paws straddled the edge of the bench, but his stature was quite impeccable nonetheless, even as the backpack was still riding on him like a saddle. Between the spaces of the wood at the back his tail had slipped through and dangled over the ground, just kissing the dew-stained grass. “Mr. Walker, hello,” he said. “I thought I heard someone coming over. How have you been?” He held out his paw, and I took it rather firmly. There was something about his tone that troubled me, and I felt that I might reinvigorate him if I was overly forceful with my shake. When I retracted my hand I found that there was thin film of dirt on my palm, and I instinctively rubbed it on my pajama bottoms, masquerading it as a gesture to relieve myself from

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the cold. After I’d answered him, it was quiet except for the bugs again. My knees bounced up and down; I felt like it actually had been a mistake to sit down next to him after all. Just as I was having these thoughts, Jeffrey huffed through his nose, and a shiver sent him tingling all the way from his neck down the length of his spine like the way a wet dog shakes off water. “You know, I very much like the look of the sky at night,” he said, suddenly. “It’s not for the reasons that you might think. I’m sure you’d expect me to say that ‘the stars are like a blanket that keep me warm’ or that ‘the full moon ignites within me some kind of inspiration—primal or perhaps the inspiration to start doing this year’s taxes.’ No, no. I like the sky at night because it reminds me of right here, this sort of spot on Earth. Because the stars, the moon, the sky—they change every night. I think our world might be a reflection of that, a reflection of the stars. Because,” he said, shifting over to me now, his breath crawling up my shoulder, “if you looked at the Earth from a star, would all the lights be in the same place each night?” The corners of his mouth lifted. “I don’t think so.” Jeffrey turned back to the sky and then suddenly to the light hanging overhead. He gave a hard squint with his yellowed eyes as if he were trying to make it shatter, or perhaps he was just letting me know where the orange tinted illumination was coming from. “Wow,” I said. “I used to want to be an astronomer,” Jeffrey remarked. “But, travelling around and selling insurance, that’s—well—just as good.” “How’s that going by the way?” He told me that he got the chance to meet some “really nice chaps” in town. He mentioned George and Leslie Isiah who had apparently been quite charming on their doorstep; Joe Shaw and his girl Ally, who had just recently been married and moved from the city; Eric’s mother and father,

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the Hendersons. By the time he mentioned that he had seen Mrs. Leary, who lived on the skirts of town in a cottage by a little pond, I understood that he must have been out to see most, if not all, of the town. He spoke of them all as if interested, terribly interested in their lawns, their children if they had any, or the way they smiled. I tried to suppress the thought, but I couldn’t help but picture Jeffrey trudging from house to house with that backpack weighing him down more and more with each door that was closed in his snout. I knew if I asked him if he had been turned down all those times he would not admit it. And it occurred to me that he might not have been polite at all—he might have just been full of pride. Just as I was pondering that, I heard a minute whimper escape from him, so low that it just as easily could have been the wind moaning. “Jeffrey,” I said, “what’re you doing this Friday?” His ears pricked, and his head cocked to one side. “My son, Blake, is having a birthday party then,” I said, and he continued to stare at me. “I was wondering if maybe you’d like to come. You know, since he likes you so much. He’d be excited to see you there, I think.” He was mute for a moment, head down, looking at the thin stretch of sidewalk. “I suppose I could if I’m not busy with work,” he muttered. I felt a tickle of something on my rear. When I looked back I saw that Jeffrey’s tail was fluttering to the sides, finding the space between the bench to just be able to touch me. I scratched a spot behind his ears and, never having done that before, I suddenly stopped. A cool breeze floated by but my cheeks somehow would not be quenched of the fire that now burned within them. “Hey, want to go for a drink?” I asked. “Oh, I don’t drink,” he said. “Alcoholism runs in my family.” “You don’t have to get anything alcoholic. Water, or cranberry juice,

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or—” “Most of those establishments have a ‘No Dogs’ sign anyway, Mr. Walker.” “You’re not a dog.” I was quite proud of this, and I could feel my jaw muscles tense with the wide grin I was shining him with. He looked at me, trying to determine if I was serious. Finally, he submitted with a chuckle, and we left the park together. Jeffrey was the first of the guests to arrive to the party that Friday. He had a long, white box tied to his back with a rope, and he told me that it was Blake’s present as I helped it off him. Blake came crashing into the living room when he heard Jeffrey’s voice and immediately set to petting him and scratching him around the ears. “For God’s sake, Blake, don’t touch Jeffrey like that.” He hardly listened, but before I could make him, he dragged Jeffrey past the couch, through the kitchen, and out the backdoor to the yard. By the time the yard was full of young boys scampering about in their shorts and graphic T-shirts, Jeffrey had taken to calling Blake “Champ,” and all the others had rallied around them both, playing some sort of game of endless running. All of the parents stood off together on the patio, and we were leisurely enjoying the beer from the cooler. Rob Henderson, Eric’s father, sipped from his Budweiser and pressed the cold can up against his billboard-like forehead. “Any hotter out here an’ it’ll be like hell,” he said to me. “Not quite hell to you, Rob?” Molly said. She was sitting in a lawn chair next to me, but then she got up and went inside the house. One of the kids was shouting Jeffrey’s name, and he called back playfully. “She hasn’t been feeling well,” I explained. A look came over Rob like he remembered he was some kind of

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psychiatrist and had the world’s most important advice to dole out. I looked him over and saw that he had forgotten his tie. “Lookie here, Mikey,” he said and swigged his can. “Remember when my Ellen had that sorta spin out? It was awful, wouldn’t talk if she didn’t need to, laid around the house doin’ nothing, real awful to be around. She went and told me, too, that she weren’t feeling well. But you can’t believe that when they’re acting that sorta way. You gotta get close and pay attention or else it’ll blow up all over.” “Molly’s fine, she just needs to get used to the heat,” I said. “They say it’s going to be a record this year.” Eric threw a tennis ball across the yard and a crowd of boys raced to go get it. Blake and Jeffrey led the pack. When they reached the ball Jeffrey slid dramatically into the ground and rolled over, paws in the air, while Blake scooped it up and cheered with his arms stretching for the sky. “All’s I’m saying is just pay attention a little, so you can insure yourself against any riff raff.” I was setting up presents in the living room a half hour later. My mother and father sat deep into the couch like their bodies were molded there. They smiled and reminisced with each other about Blake’s previous birthdays and how this year he had seemed to get exceptionally taller. “Do you remember how much a brat you were when you were thirteen?” my father said. “I remember it. So selfish. I hope you’ve knocked it off by now. Do you remember that time when you stole your mother’s car?” The heat dragged most of the adults and kids on in, but I called out to the stragglers in the back to head inside anyway. The living room became crowded with Blake’s innumerable baseball friends and then their parents who idly contributed to the hum of incoherent conversation. Blake sat on the couch between his grandparents, eagerly bouncing up and down, eyeing the stack of wrapped up goodies in front of the television set.

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“Dad, can I open them now?” he said. “Not yet. Let’s wait for everyone to come in,” I said, surveying the range of faces in the room. “I think we’re missing some people.” “Come on!” Blake pouted. I told him to be patient and left the room to look for whoever might not have been there. They were sitting at the kitchen table together, Jeffrey and Molly. Her elbows were on the table, and she had her chin nestled on the bottom of both palms of her hands. Jeffrey occupied the seat next to her, and the legs of their chairs nearly brushed against the other. His whiskers paddled like oars as he spoke in a muddled whisper. Molly’s eyes flicked all over his head, his ears, his nose like they had all been part of some act that I just wasn’t seeing. “I wanted to be an astronomer once,” he was saying. “Before I sold insurance, I mean.” “I wanted to be a veterinarian,” Molly smiled. “Before, well…” “Things change,” Jeffrey said. He nodded to her, and she tucked her hair behind her ear. I took a step onto the tile, and they both looked up, their expressions flying away like a herd of frightened deer. “We’re going to do presents now. Do you two want to come on in?” Jeffrey jumped down from his seat, his claws clamoring against the tile as he came down. “My goodness, how rude of me,” he said. “Yes, let’s go watch Blake open his gifts.” He busily circled the table and darted out into the other room. There was a conjoined cry of welcome from the kids waiting there. Molly’s head was down; she was having a staring contest with an invisible speck of dirt on the table.

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“I think I’m going to go for a walk,” she said. The living room was in a fervor when I came in. Blake looked at me expectedly, and I told him he could go ahead and start. Everybody quieted down when he went over to the presents and started to deliberate between them. Rob nudged my ribs with his elbow. “Betcha he goes straight for the big ‘un there. Kids always go for the big ‘uns.” All of the kids suddenly began to yell for which one Blake should pick—mostly screaming for the big, long, white one. Rob winked at me, and I chuckled. Blake appeased his friends, but it seemed that he had been gravitating toward that one anyway. “It’s from Jeffrey,” Blake said, laying it on the floor. Everyone glanced at Jeffrey, sitting beside me, next to the coffee table, and I could feel a brief wave of smiles being flicked at him. I smiled as well and reached out to finger the spot behind his ears. “I just hope he likes it,” he said to me. Blake tore at the wrapping like a vulture, and he sent the pieces flying into the air with quick, full rips of his arms. The scraps floated down like Christmas. It was an orange, aluminum bat. “Oh, wow! The Astro 3000!” My son held it up with both hands, brandishing it like a trophy to the other boys, to the other adults, to everyone in the room. To me. His friends looked a little jealous with their widened eyes and grabby hands. “When I first met you, I thought you liked baseball,” Jeffrey said when Blake came over to hug him. “Your bat looked pretty old though, Champ. Figured you’d want to switch it up.” Later, as Blake was still opening more presents, while I was picking up torn pieces of wrapping paper, I poked through what remained in the gift pile and slipped out the orange bat I had hid at the bottom of the pile, the one that was from me. It was time to move, I decided. I got the idea shortly into the next

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week. It was bloody hot, getting warmer every day. The grass in the park started to lose its vibrant green, fading into a sort of ragged brown; the cicadas blared like air-raid sirens; and the sidewalks sweated with moist pedestrians who were unfortunate enough to have to take care of some of their business in the early afternoons. Molly was right; Rob was right: the heat was too much. It was time to go. Before the summer was out. I spent the evenings on the computer, and soon I found a pretty good home up north in a good enough neighborhood. It was a two-story ranch, planted in the middle of a suburban stretch of street. Blake would miss his friends, Eric, the others. Molly would miss her couple of girlfriends, Ellen Henderson included. I thought of that, but I was convinced that we needed this move. The realtor on the phone helped assuage my worries, however, one Wednesday afternoon, telling me that the place would be just lovely this time of year for weather. I hung up and looked around the house for Molly. Instead, Blake came bursting into the kitchen from the living room with Jeffrey trailing behind him, who was slipping across the tile floor and feigning low-rumbling growls of anger. Blake squeaked with laughter and romped through the screen door with Jeffrey right on his heels. Jeffrey had recently been about our house in the daytime, playing baseball with Blake in the backyard and whatnot. Molly was laid on top of our bed, with her legs tucked away under a thin blanket. She was reading The Sun Also Rises, and the blurry image of a bull charging a man replaced the sight of her face. Her hair, blown from the fan from the nightstand, tickled her shoulder blades. She finished a page. “The breeze from the fan helps me turn the page,” she said. I sat beside her and Hemingway, staring into her ear. He must have been enchanting because she didn’t look up.

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“Let’s move,” I said. “Out of this town, I mean.” She turned to me, weakly, as if she were in a hospital bed. She looked like she could have been. Molly had stopped putting on makeup by this time. That and the constant sweat beading at the top of her forehead combined to make her look rather sickly, eyes dark and distinct and lips cracked to pieces. “No,” she said. “We can’t. Jeffrey just bought us that tree.” “Tree? What tree?” “The one he ordered here three days ago. The red maple.” I got up and went over to the back wall. The window was open, letting in howls of laughter from Blake and Jeffrey. They were playing baseball. Blake stood on the right side of the yard with his new bat in his hands, tossing baseballs into the air and whacking them when they came down. Jeffrey stood at his side and waited from the ball to sail out into the yard before he broke into a four-legged sprint and hunted down the target, bringing it back in his mouth, caged between his fangs. “Hey, you’ve gotten better at hitting, Champ,” Jeffrey said. “You think so?” Blake squealed. Our yard was pretty sizeable, extending back a half acre until it met the woods in the rear. Raking leaves in the fall was a hassle. I did see it, though—the new maple. It was young, about five feet tall. The earth around it was still darkly colored from having been planted there recently. It rose up in the center of the yard, right in the middle, rooted firmly to the ground. “I wonder if you can see it now, Michael,” Molly said. One weekend morning, I was lying in bed with my legs and arms stretched out across the whole of the mattress. A faint ruckus kicked up downstairs. Molly and Blake’s muffled tones climbed up to me along with someone else’s voice. There was the sound of cabinets clapping closed and

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feet stomping across the kitchen floor. Then finally the creak of our front door, the last conjoined, indistinguishable mumbles of a group talking all at once, and then the slamming of the door to shut it all off. I came downstairs and into the kitchen after sleeping for another hour. I went to make myself a cup of coffee. The cutting board was spread out on the counter, and remnants of bread crumbs were sprinkled around snips of lettuce and skins of tomatoes. The apples I had bought at the corner store last week were gone, but I found their cores in the trash, cut into long rectangles. As I over-sugared my mug of coffee with three tablespoons too many, I looked out the window over the counter. It peered into the backyard and centered on the red maple that stood there. It hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t been long since Jeffrey had it planted, but at that moment I was just able to tell that its branches were growing a little longer, its trunk a bit fatter, its leaves more plentiful. I had told Molly a few times by this point, where the new house was, how lovely the neighbors were supposed to be, that there would be snow in the winters. But she hardly had anything to say on the subject, and I often found myself turning to other idle tasks at that point. For some reason, I thought at that moment, as I stared out that window, I needed an answer from her. We were going to move, and I needed to have her acknowledge it. So I went out to look for her. Molly was in the park. She was sitting under a large sugar maple settled out in the grass. Blake was there, so was Rob and Ellen Henderson with their kid. And so was Jeffrey. They sat enjoying the treeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shade in a bumpy circle with a blanket laid out across the lawn. A wicker basket was the centerpiece and Tupperware-contained sandwiches, watermelons, sliced apples, and dessert cakes were spread around it like planets in a solar system. Molly lay on her hip, reaching over to Jeffrey who sat next to her. Her first two fingers scratched the spot behind his ears, and his head tilted

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toward her. As I crossed the park, they continued in their conversation. Jeffrey was apparently telling a story and Rob seemed to be enjoying it, pointing to Jeffrey with his beer in his hand and laughing hysterically. Molly smiled with her front teeth and Ellen’s narrow, little shoulders bumped up and down. I came over and the smell of tuna fish and turkey sandwiches with mustard wafted up to me. It felt ten degrees cooler in the shade. Everyone looked up to me, laughter gone away, except the two boys, who were giggling about something on their own. Blank-faced Rob tipped his baseball cap to me without anything but a speck on vanilla frosting on his face. “Molly, I need to talk to you about the new house.” Her eyes turned away and Jeffrey found them. “It’s okay, I’ll talk to him,” the wolf said. He got up on his four legs and stalked around the quiet circle of people. “It was a home run!” Blake suddenly shouted to Eric. “Take a walk with me, Mike?” Jeffrey said. We headed back out into the sun. Being in the shade made me realize just how hot it really was, and I started to regret the jeans I was wearing. I looked down to Jeffrey and wondered if he felt the same way about his layer of fur. It must have been like being wrapped in a comforter all year. Then I thought that he must have been used to it by now and no longer cared. He didn’t say anything; I watched his shoulder blades peak like rising mountaintops below his neck, rotating in their rise and fall as he stepped with each front leg. “Did you know,” he said as we stepped onto the sidewalk outside the park, “that us wolves tell the story of Romulus and Remus, too?” I shook my head; I assumed he saw me. “It’s much the same, the way we tell it. But some things are different,

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Mike. You know the part about the ‘she-wolf’? Ah, I suppose you know where this is going now.” Yellow eyes pecked at my cheek. We crossed the street. “She very much loved her two little boys when she found them. The way we tell it, she was unable to conceive for some reason and so suckled them, protected them, like they were her own—an extension of herself. But she sent them off to let that shepherd take them after a time. It distressed her greatly, but, after all, who was she, a wolf, to intervene when her sons were so obviously a different kind of being? It would turn out to be a poisonous thought, Mike, as you can probably already tell. For years, as they grew, she watched them from the forests, from the hills, and from mountaintops. She watched them both tend their farms and build their walls. And her heart leapt for every day that she spent with them, even if they weren’t together like they had been before. And then came the day when Remus jumped over his brother’s wall, and Romulus killed him for it. When their mother learned what happened, do you know what she did?” Jeffrey looked at me expectedly, and his paws slowed, telling me that I would have to stop and watch him speak to me. I kept going. “She was so grieved to hear what happened that she drowned herself in the Tiber. To have one of her own sons kill the other—she felt guilty for it. ‘How,’ she thought, ‘could she have let it come to such an end?’ To let her boy, whom she was watching over so carefully and lovingly, kill the other? She was an observer and a watcher and, in the end, she knew it, and she hated herself for it. So she took her own life.” I got the sensation that he wanted me to thank him for sharing this hidden side-legend with me, for he fell silent, no doubt with the intention of letting his last few words breathe within me. They didn’t. And suddenly I felt that I didn’t have to stand for being talked to like I was a child. Wasn’t it obvious that he was trying to sit me down on his knee and give me some kind of lesson, petting me on the head like I was some kind of silly,

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childish puppy? I immediately began to disassemble all that he had told me, breaking it down into little blocks and reorganizing them in a chaotic order so that even if I recalled this moment later I wouldn’t be able to wipe away the confusion, the fog, the illusion that I had created. “Do you understand, Mike?” We went around the corner. Marty Mullen, the butcher, was bent over the sidewalk in front of his deli with a broom, kicking up clouds of dry dust that disintegrated in the sun-thick air. He called out and waved to Jeffrey. “You should call me Mr. Walker,” I said. Jeffrey nodded to me and attempted a smile before he went back to the park. As for me, I went back home to watch reruns of House. The day before I took the U-Haul truck—stocked so little, I could hear an echo bounce off the aluminum walls, repeating “That’s it” to me— out of town and up north, I woke up at about midafternoon, lathered in sticky, glistening sweat from my neck to my ankles. The throw pillows slipped off the couch as I sat up, and there, outlined in my perspiration, was a vague imprint of my crumbled-up body in the seat cushions. It was almost two o’clock, and that morning I hadn’t heard of or seen Molly or Jeffrey since the last night when they scampered in through the front door in the late evening. I had been in the kitchen, and I lifted my eyes up from images of the new home’s wide, treeless backyard when Molly peeked her head in. “Jeffrey is going to spend the night,” she said. “We’ll be upstairs.” A telescope had been added to the list of gifts that our family took from Jeffrey. From the couch, I assumed that they were looking at constellations all night, the vast and endless galaxies, and the stars that hadn’t been named yet (I once overheard Jeffrey explaining to her that it was impossible for us to name all of the stars out there). Once I thought they found God himself up in the cosmos, hidden somewhere between that world and this one, because I heard her say His name a couple times.

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Blake found me upstairs bent over mine and Molly’s bed. It was unmade, with the sheets tossed at the foot, and it smelled like sweat and dog fur. “Have you seen Jeffrey?” Blake said to me. “He promised to take me fishing today.” I looked at him. “I’m going to be changing now, Blake,” I said and picked up a pair of jeans hanging from the bureau. “Not really. You wore those pants yesterday.” “Don’t get smart with me, Blake,” I hissed at him. “Go downstairs.” He slinked away and, for some reason, I was glad for the space. I tugged on my jeans and tossed my sweat-soaked tee in the corner of the room. A feeling came over me then, and it happened right as I sat down on the edge of the mattress. It was like I had done that a thousand times before. Just sat there, in the middle of the day, on the corner of my bed, no one around, doing nothing but looking out the window. Not because I was being nostalgic or sentimental, but because the window happened to be right in front of me. Except, this time, I couldn’t see out of it well enough. The telescope, standing on its tripod, hindered my view of the tree tops. And, as if the tree tops were some kind of well that directly induced my happiness, as if the ability to sit on my bed and look, for the thousandth time, to the same place as before was an obsessive need of mine, as if telescopes themselves were my sworn and mortal enemies because at one point in my life one had had the gall to give me a wedgie in front of all my middle school friends and left my ass red for the whole day while humiliating me for the rest of life. I leapt from my passive spot on the bed, and my throat livened with the force of a war cry until I gripped the legs of the stand and repeatedly smashed the thing, over and over, into the wall until most of it was a jigsaw puzzle

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that no one could put back together anymore. Then I sat there, on my knees, surveying the rubble of the thing, the thing that is used to look at stars. I think, at that moment, I thought that looking out the window would have been calming, like I had won, defeated the terrible beast and now I could die an old man who had earned the right to look over his kingdom in his final dying hours. If I did have that thought it was a stupid thought. I looked out into the yard, glazed with summer heat, and watched for a moment as a passing breeze swiveled through the branches of the red maple tree. It was starting to look beautiful. That’s how I remember it now anyway. The next thing I knew I was down the stairs heading for the front door. Blake was on the couch and the television screamed with cartoon violence. “If you see Jeffrey, tell him to come home,” Blake said as I left. Walking down the sidewalk of town, I was overtaken by waves of heat rolling in on the sun’s rays, blistering the sidewalk, the asphalt road, the sides of the buildings with a searing flush of angry hotness. The air ached with the sound of cicadas, and the air over the black tar radiated with wobbly lines as if crying out. I could feel droplets of sweat snake down my neck and slide between my collar bones. My shirt was beginning to darken at the crew and under my arms. I was hot, furious because I was hot, then hotter even more from the inside. I imagined turning red from the inside out, and the redness climbing my body like I was a thermostat about to explode. Somewhere after I’d passed Marty Mullen’s deli and then the park, I stopped underneath the shade of a tree planted in the sidewalk to lean my back against a wall. It almost became my desire to stop looking for them, to just head home and drown my body in a cool bathtub soak. But I didn’t. I had to see that. I must

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have had to see it. Molly and Jeffrey came out of the shop I was leaning against. She snorted a laugh into the air and squealed at the same time before I had even seen them. So I knew it was them. If I’d looked closer I would have seen that it was our town’s only jewelry store that they had come out of, but I wouldn’t have needed the sign hanging over the door to tell me that. They walked in the other direction saying words I couldn’t exactly make out. Molly held her hand up in the air above her head, as if she wanted the whole world that walked behind her to see it, too: a shining little diamond. Jeffrey angled his head up as far as he could, directly up, like wolves do before they howl. She came back down to him and ruffled the spot behind his ears. Then she reached behind him and, with the keenest delicacy, she foiled her fingers around the tip of his tail and held onto it as they walked. Before I knew it, I was behind them, calling out huskily through my dry throat. Their looks, the looks they had been wearing when they knew that they were alone together, looks of easiness, of frivolity, of comfort and amusement, those looks stayed in their eyes and in their cheeks and their tight, little smiles as they turned around to me. Molly was wearing makeup again, and she didn’t look so sickly now—it even looked like she had taken the time to put on fake eyelashes this morning. As for Jeffrey, there was something in the way he pointed his chin up, like the gesture wasn’t meant simply to look at a person taller than himself, that made me regret ever picturing him limping around town pitifully selling insurance. For a moment, their expressions hardened, but I still saw that it was an act, a regard for me. Manners. “Oh, this is embarrassing,” Jeffrey said and tucked his lower jaw to his chest.

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I said my last line. Jeffrey nodded to me with a forced smile. Molly’s chin had begun to point in his direction, but her eyes were still taped on me. I watched them walk in the direction I had come from. Molly held onto Jeffrey’s tail again as they went down the street. I stood there, the clap of Molly’s heels and the scratching of Jeffrey’s claws getting less distinct as they continued away from me, like the heat itself was drowning out noise now, as well. It was fine though, because I had said what I wanted to say to Jeffrey just a moment before: “Blake wanted me to tell you he’s waiting for you to come back home.”

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Ad Nauseam Parker Weston

In the mind of my eye, I see a world of sand on fire water turned to stone with shopping carts embedded in frozen suspension s t r a i n e d pigeons caught in them a bloated corpse on a couch inside the rubble of a home in front of a television set that houses syndicated lives a man lives in a clock on the wall chasing a cuckoo with a shotgun that BLASTS at the top of every hour a broken record on a turntable repeats intestinal strings murdering crows perched above roofless beds monitoring stale dreams the sky falls in jagged pi e ces splintering ea rth while overgrown silverfish and earwigs run amok engaging in gang battles with cockroaches

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Strawberry Sundae Christopher Mulrooney

a red mountain of seeds cascading voluntarily slow as avalanches from a great height onto the townspeople in little chalets below the valley rim

Mulrooney // Poetry

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24 Lucie Britsch

That’s how many points you get for LOVE on a triple in Scrabble Love on a triple I was pleased until he confessed he had wanted to play another word in that spot What word I asked Not that I was planning on retracting my LOVE that easily He wouldn’t say Is it PRIVATE I ask Trying to make light of the situation The game was not going well A three letter word had already been played I followed it with APATHY My mother would take one look at the board and tut You haven’t opened yourself up enough she would say Looking at her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend Thinking about a time her husband would play with her Now he sleeps Now she plays online with strangers who are more open than her husband My sister would look at the board and just tell me the truth You’re screwed

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She lets me play profanities TITTIES Only if they’re the good ones though My LOVE stays He plays HUNGRY elsewhere He looks at the clock No meal time can save him I play POTATO He says Potatoe It’s political he says I’m not going to war with you I say He plays CAT It’s the sign I’ve lost him I don’t know how it escalated after that Who knew Scrabble could cause so much tension I had wanted to play Hungry Hippos He fell asleep first Almost spooning the board I crept out Leaving the board where it was Hopeful we would resume our game I got on with my day Waiting for him to wake up To miss me He later tells me he did get up to pee I ask him why he didn’t wonder where I was Or miss me He asked how I know he didn’t Touché

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I thought about sleeping on the other side The board between us like a child I had wanted a cat He had wanted neither I put that game away He’ll remember that he did The score sheet is still there though There will have been a winner We have played since I didn’t look at that game sheet He hasn’t said if he has We played hard and fast Both on good form No CAT sneaked in He beat me I might have let him He might know that I was holding back using all my letters Getting that 50 But 24 is love

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The Watery Bone Lana Bella

Floating up the river, she was just a watery bone sinking into the muddy earth wading down the pockmarked hole strangling by the shadowed moon. Unsown, she came sideways in a hollow pool of muddled thoughts and collapsed silence tied in a skin-sewn cloth of russet hair, caked heavy with dripping clay and crimson blood, where river moss of flaked verdigris falling off from the vacant eyes to the bloated belly, to the undermost of her arched pale toes.

Bella // Poetry

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Episodes in Embellishment Howie Good

1 Having fallen asleep in one city, Thoreau woke up in another. On the train journey back, a belligerent drunk demanded that he give up his job in the family pencil factory, and just minutes later, the man materialized in the aisle again to make the same drunken speech. It’s why Thoreau loved trees more than people. Spies were everywhere in those days, intent on uncovering what had happened to the dancing monkey. Prussian police spies trailed Thoreau across Concord to secret meetings with Emerson and a couple of chorus girls. “Moose. Indian,” they reported him saying. 2 I don’t claim to be a great scholar of the term “Kafkaesque,” but it might accurately describe the Grand, a café in Vienna that used to cater to the literary mob. Kafka especially loved the cookies. Street toughs would run into him there after one of his notorious weekend ether binges, his eyes turned inside out and his sunken cheeks covered in dark stubble. They badgered poor Kafka, who would still be experiencing the occasional chemical hallucination, with existential questions: “When you knock on a door, do you knock just once?” “Which do you prefer, the shortest route or the most scenic?” He wouldn’t ever answer except to say, “I fucking hate

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poetry. A ghost seated before a blank mirror.” 3 Some pimp had stabbed Beckett in the chest, narrowly missing his heart. A neurotic French poet named Manfred Dada regularly visited Beckett in the hospital. One day Dada found Beckett in the sunroom doing arts and crafts therapy. “Why force a giraffe into a flower pot?” Dada asked. Beckett just shrugged his bony shoulders. But, years later, perhaps remembering the abused giraffe, he would remark, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.”

Good // Fiction

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Veronica Jo Matt Smith I went to see her because she’s mixed. She hated that term. “Like, am I a dog?” she laughed. I laughed too and thought of another term: mulatto. In high school, I was referred to as a “mulatto” a few times and liked it. It sounded Spanish and refined. It sounded special. That was before college when I learned the term was derogatory and carried a loose association with mules. When there’s a stark difference between your appearance and that of everyone else, you gravitate towards the positives and spend the rest of your time trying to be invisible. The white people I grew up around never got that. They felt entitled to their idiosyncrasies and their dimensions. They were raised to cherish their individuality, to be completely their own island. For most of my life, I’ve wanted nothing more than to fit in and fade out among the crowd. That’s never been the case. I’m tall, my voice is deep, deep enough for elderly people to periodically ask me if I sing or if I’ve considered radio, and I’m light enough for whites to feel comfortable making black jokes in my presence. I’ve been called black, blackish, and “sort of black.” People at parties tell me, with genuine enthusiasm and confidence, that I’m “the whitest black guy” they’ve met. I don’t know if it’s gotten better through time or if I’m better at dealing with it. Anyways, I went to see her because I wanted to talk to someone who understood. She cut hair and saw clients in a downtown salon. I made an appointment for Tuesday, my day off. I caught the train downtown in the afternoon. Outside was wet and chilly. The sort of day when it looks like dinner

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time and it’s only lunch. I thought it might rain at any moment. Every fifteen minutes the Blue or Red Line came pounding up the rails, headed west. I felt the vibrations and wondered if that made rent any cheaper. The salon was clean and spacious. There were eight chairs but only two stylists. Indian music, like India Indian, played loudly. No surprise. I’d grown accustomed to hearing ethnic music nearly everywhere in Portland. Her eyes were the first thing I noticed. Such a pale shade of blue. Right away, I could tell there was German in her ancestry. Most of my mixed friends were at least a quarter Irish, with darker irises; minor detail, but I like to make predictions in my head before I ask. I waited for a minute while she swept up. She approached me with hand extended, and greeted me by name before I could introduce myself. Shaking hands, she said, “I’m Veronica.” She was short and her autumn layers downplayed her curves. Her curls were big and untamed. She dyed them a rose tint. Our complexions were identical, something like milky coffee. She wore a sleeveless blouse and her left bicep was tattooed: a floral piece, perhaps Japanese. All of this was appealing. I’m racially indiscriminate in dating, but an attractive mixed girl is reason to get excited. I think of those families where everyone’s blond, and I’m half impressed, half creeped out. Secretly, I craved that sort of consistency. I should mention, I say “mixed” because it’s more natural than “biracial,” which sounds like one of the boxes you check on a government form or job application. I was thrilled to meet Veronica. It’s that feeling when you meet that person who looks like you. They were the only person that day, or that week, sometimes that month. And when you meet them, you have to smile, you’ve got to, because you’ve come face to face with all that you’ve endured, and what’s more comforting than a knowing smile? Veronica brought me to my seat and asked what I’d like done. I said

Smith // Fiction

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I wanted the sides and back shaved, but to let the top grow. She spoke in a cool, modulated tone. Right away, I was at ease. While throwing the sheet over me, she probed with all the usual questions about how long I’d lived in the city, what part of town I was in, and where I worked. She was agreeable, or at least curious, in all her responses. When addressing the other stylist, a stout, white woman with more tattoos than you could count, she was direct but non-confrontational. She asked me how I’d found out about her and I mentioned my roommate, Louie. He leased a massage studio three floors above the salon. The two made the occasional haircut-for-massage swap. “She’s really gorgeous, like really,” Louie insisted. “You should go see her. She talks to me about race and growing up biracial, and I always think, ‘Oh, that sounds like Ben.’” “Yeah, Louie gave me your card.” “Such a sweet guy. I recommend him to my clients. It’s nice having him in the building. He’s sort of in the same place as me. We’re both young and trying to get our businesses off the ground.” “Definitely.” “Have you ever gotten a massage from him?” she asked. “Yeah, a few times. Roommate perks.” I laughed. “Oh, you two live together?” “Yeah. We used to live together back in Phoenix, when I was going to school as well.” “That’s so cool. So you guys must be super close?” “Yep yep.” “How’s this?” she pointed to the shaved spot just above my ear. “You feel good with that or would you like to go shorter?” “A bit shorter. Maybe a one.” “Okay.” She continued cutting. “Can I ask what your ethnic background is?”

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I laughed. “You have to guess.” Anytime someone asks, I make them guess. It’s a fun game for me. For a moment I get to be openly ambiguous. I’m potentially any combination of races. Always a combination. “Hmm, let’s see,” smiling, she paused from cutting. “I want to say you’re part Saudi, maybe Armenian.” “Nope.” “Okay, so you’ve definitely got some Irish in you.” “True, true.” “How much?” “A quarter.” “Puerto Rican?” “No, but I’ve heard that one a few times.” “Any other Latin? Native American, perhaps?” “The latter. And a little.” “Ugh! Okay, just tell me.” “I’m a quarter Irish, quarter Lebanese, half black.” “Okay, alright.” She nodded in approval. “So, you’re pretty much the same as me.” “What are you?” I asked. “My mom’s side is half Irish, half German, and my dad is black.” “Yeah, there’s always Irish in there.” “Really?” She laughed. “Oh yeah. Almost every mixed person I’ve met has been part Irish. They get around, y’know?” She laughed. “So what was it like for you growing up in Phoenix? Was it very diverse?” “Well, I lived in Iowa ‘til I was ten, then we moved to Arizona. We lived in Scottsdale, which I believe at one point was the whitest city in

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America. I think it was like ninety-five percent white.” “Really?” She stepped back. “And how did you deal with that?” “I was very aware of it, but at the time it didn’t bother me much. When we moved, I was one of three black kids in my fifth grade class. There was Alan, my oldest friend. He’s dark. Our moms worked together for a few years. Travis was the other boy. He was mixed like me. Same last name, too. For three years we shared the same teachers, who spent the entire year referring to us as brothers. Like they had the roster and all our information, not to mention we’d tell them we weren’t related. But every time Travis was late or absent, they’d ask me, ‘Where’s your brother?’” Veronica laughed so hard she set the clippers down. “Oh my God, that’s terrible.” “Right? I’ve got plenty of school stories. In third grade, I attended Catholic school in Iowa. One day the music teacher brought us downstairs to a big room with all the instruments. Everyone ran with excitement to the instrument of their choice. Most kids wanted to play a horn. Admittedly, I didn’t care much what I ended up with, but the idea of owning an instrument was exciting. Eventually, I grabbed a trumpet and brought it over to the teacher. She told me I wasn’t fit to play it because my lips were too big.” “She what?” “Yeah.” I laughed. “My lips were too big. At the time I was like, dang, I guess my lips are too big. Then, like a decade later, I got into jazz and saw all these black men, with big black lips, playing all kinds of brass instruments, especially the trumpet, and thought, what the fuck?” Veronica’s head shook with disbelief. “See, for me it was the opposite. I grew up in Georgia.” “Really? Must have been nice.” “Eh, it was tough. It was really tough.” She nodded. “I was raised by my mom. My dad didn’t hang around.”

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“Mine either.” “Oh yeah?” she asked. “Yeah, my mom and him were together until she got pregnant. They weren’t married or anything, just dating. He’s always been a deadbeat. He never wanted to be a dad.” “Yep.” She nodded. “Same thing with my father. Where I grew up, most people were black. I was one of a few biracial kids. And the girls at my school did not like me. You know when you’re lighter the other girls get jealous. They thought boys wanted that more. I got into a lot of fights in middle school and high school. Girls would wait for me after class or jump me in the bathroom. They’d shove me into a stall and swing at me, spit on me, call me a whore, or try to pull out my extensions.” “Jesus.” “Public school is still the hardest thing I’ve been through. It was a lot better after we moved,” Veronica continued. “Back then I was still wearing extensions. Now, I let my curls do their thing.” “Curls don’t get a lot of love.” “I love mine,” Veronica raised her chin proudly. I was enjoying the conversation so much it took me a minute to see what was happening. There I was swapping my most personal and painful moments with someone I met 20 minutes prior. This isn’t uncommon in my interactions with other mixed men and women. These conversations happen so infrequently I feel I have to convey my stories at a sprinter’s pace, because who knows how long it will be until the next one. They provide such a deep sense of comfort and help me realize that in confiding, pain can extinguish pain. “They have a mind of their own,” she continued on about her curls. “This is about as much as I can control them” She lifted a ringlet. “Most of the guys I dated, black or white, told me my hair looked better straight.”

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“No way it does.” “My husband was the first guy I dated to encourage me to keep my hair natural. ’Course he’s German, like actually from Germany, German. Over there we’re exotic.” At that I did a double take. “Married, what?” I thought to myself. Louie never said anything about a husband. Thinking about it a little longer, I couldn’t remember him saying she was single, either, but there was a definite implication. I cursed under my breath because I was already rehearsing the “ask her for her number” pitch in my head. “Damn,” I continued. “I always figured it would’ve been easier for me if I’d grown up in a predominately black neighborhood.” “No, it’s way easier for me out here. I barely have to think about it in Portland. Where I grew up it’s still very black and white, you know? You’re expected to pick a side. But when you’re biracial you’re never one or the other. You’re always struggling to give both space in your life. You end up straddling the gap between two cultures. For such a long time I struggled internally to satisfy both. I spent so much time worrying about how ‘white’ I was being and how ‘black’ I was being, stuff like how I talked, or the clothes I wore. I used to listen to the R&B station every evening ’cause I wanted to fit in with my high school friends, and back then all I wanted to listen to was classic rock.” Grinning, I listened without response. There were moments when it seemed she was narrating my life and not her own. She paused for a minute to examine my scalp, then removed the guard and swapped it with a smaller one from the drawer. “Do you have any siblings?” “My family situation is bizarre. Lots of siblings in different places. It’s complicated.” “Let’s hear it.”

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“So, when my mom was pregnant with me she moved back in with her parents.” “How did your grandparents take it?” “They weren’t happy.” I laughed. “My mom says growing up she never heard them say a single racist thing. Personally, I bet they did, it just flew over her head. As soon as they found out their daughter was pregnant with a black man’s baby, they started saying all this ridiculous shit. I guess my grandfather was really worried that eventually I would want expensive Nike basketball shoes and that my mom wouldn’t be able to afford them.” “What?” She burst out laughing. “For real?” “For real. Yeah, they weren’t happy. They pushed her to put me up for adoption. That whole side of the family is Catholic, so they wouldn’t dare utter the other ‘A-word,’ but I really think it crossed their minds.” “No. You don’t think?” “Honestly, I don’t know. I filter everything after, through the lens of ‘I’m still here.’ I know that my grandfather’s guilt was overwhelming. He wrote my mother a letter after my birth. It’s really apologetic; I read it once. He talks about how good it was having me at the house and how ashamed he was of how he’d acted, and he asked for her forgiveness.” “Oh, well, that’s good,” she said, moving over to my right side. “I have relatives that are still pretty far gone. I remember when my mom would bring me over to my great-aunt’s house. I would wander around the neighborhood and meet other kids. And you know, most of those kids were black ’cause it was a black neighborhood, which she chose to live in! And one day we were playing in my aunt’s yard and she comes to the window, sees us, and shouts, ‘Get those niggers off my lawn!’ She actually yelled that. Like it was nothing. That’s the way a lot of my family is to this day. One of the great things about living up here is that I don’t have to see that side of the family very often.”

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While we spoke, the next appointment took a seat next to the window, a white woman in her late forties. Nervous she might overhear and be offended, my sentences shrunk and my speech muffled. I get that way around white folks when there’s a racial conversation. What do I have to be ashamed of? I blame this on my mixed heritage. It’s the urge to please. Well-intentioned, yes, but it does no one any good. Somewhere along the line I’d adopted the notion that the very mention of a racial disparity was inappropriate conversation around white people. “What’s your relationship with your grandparents like now?” Veronica asked. “Since the day I came to live with them they’ve treated me like royalty. Catholic guilt,” I laughed. “I just realized, you asked me about siblings, and I’ve gotten way off base.” “That’s okay. Keep going. I love hearing these stories.” “Okay, so when I was three my mom met my step-dad, who’s always been my dad, always will be my dad. He’s always treated me as though I were his.” “No way? Same here.” “Yeah, so they got married when I was three and had my sister when I was five. Out of all my siblings, I’m closest with Ashley. We grew up in the same house.” “Right.” “When I was four, my biological dad had my brother Mark with another woman. Mark’s a great guy, and we get along really well when we’re together, but that’s rare. I’ve seen him twice in the last five years, and both occasions have been brief.” “He never lived with you?” she asked. “No. He and his mom have moved around. They started in the Midwest, then went out to Virginia. Now they’re in Illinois. I also have an eight

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year old brother named Kyle. I didn’t find out about him until he was four. One night I came home from the bar and logged onto Facebook and there was a message from my aunt, sent to Mark and I. It went something like, ‘Hey, by the way, you’ve got another brother. His name’s Kyle. He’s four. Here’s a picture of him.’” “I can’t imagine. And did you feel angry, or excited, or...?” “Both. I was excited to have another sibling, but it pissed me off. I wanted to yell at my father. I wanted to say, ‘You couldn’t take care of the kids you have and now you’ve brought another life into this world!?’ At least I had my dad, though. Mark grew up without one. Ray made a lot of broken promises to him. And with Kyle, it was a sort of Catch-22. If Ray abandoned him, he was an even shittier father. If he hung around and raised him, it just bred resentment. I’m not sure which he chose. We don’t talk, but I’ve seen a few photos of him holding Kyle. That’s all I know. To be honest, I had a strong feeling I had other siblings out there before I found out about Kyle. What little I do know of Ray is that he’s a womanizer. It’s possible I have more siblings, but I’ll probably never know.” “My immediate family is similar. Mom met Charlie when I was 4. He’s always been the person I’ve called dad. They had my brother Michael when I was five. Charlie, Michael, and my mom are white, so that makes me the oddball.” “Did it bother you?” I asked. “No, no.” She hesitated. “They’ve always been loving and supportive. Lots of friends I grew up with didn’t live with both parents, and I was always grateful I did. I was ashamed of our family photos, like I didn’t belong. It’s always been three white people and me.” “Same on my end.” “Right!” she said. “You get it. Oh, the expressions I get when people see my family photos! They’re curious but not sure how to respond, like

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they have to address it but don’t know how. Some will hint and hope I’ll just come right out with it. I have my mother’s eyes but other than that we don’t look alike. A lot of people just assume I was adopted.” “For the longest time, I struggled to find a place of my own. You know that phase you go through in your adolescent years?” I asked. “I call it the ‘blacker than black’ phase. When you’re trying your hardest to find acceptance and proof that you’re worthy of being accepted. How old were you?” “I was about thirteen,” she said as she grabbed a pair of scissors. “It’s always earlier for girls.” “You think?” “Happened to all the mixed girls I’ve known, in their early teens. I was almost 19 when I went through all that.” “I was always really aware, though,” she interjected. “I guess I don’t think of it so much of a phase ’cause I still struggle with the same stuff. It was just my first attempts at being an individual.” A wave of embarrassment came over me for the insinuation. “I can remember my mom sitting me down at a very young age,” I continued. “I was maybe four or five. She had this awful story, bless her, about how we were all God’s cookies; only some of us cooked longer than others.” “Aw,” Veronica put her hand to her chest. “Well, that’s kinda sweet.” “She did her best,” I said. “She told me I was different but that it didn’t matter because I was just as good as anyone else. Certain people, though, awful people, might give me trouble. I think I repressed a lot of that for years. I knew I was different, how could I not? But like most kids I just wanted to fit in. In fourth grade a boy called me a nigger on the playground. I was so angry, I threw the football in his face and ran home. My mom held me as I sobbed and told me over and over how he was ignorant and insecure, but it didn’t make me feel any better. I was 9, and all my

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friends were white. I was too ashamed to talk to them about what happened. I wouldn’t have even had the words to describe what I felt.” “Do you think of yourself more so as black or as biracial?” “When I’m around black people, I’m mixed. When I’m around white people I’m black.” “Why’s that?” “Black people already understand everything I have to deal with, but I know my experience is different. Maybe only slightly, but it is different. I ran into a lot of trouble with that in college. Every African-American Studies course I took, the conversation inevitably led to question: Is being biracial or mixed the same as being black? I’d say no and get scowls. Students would get upset and tell me I was just black and to get over it. It really bummed me out. I was in a room full of people who were supposed to get it, but they didn’t care. It’s possible that’s been my problem all along: placing acceptance above happiness.” “I’ve never felt ‘welcomed with open arms’ from the black community,” she said. “Most of the time I was lonely. I wanted to be a shade or two darker. Even now I fantasize. In high school, I thought it would make the other girls like me more. When I stood next to them at the mirrors, I would look at their faces and at the texture of their skin. The darker girls were so beautiful. I loved how deep and rich their skin looked. I’m inconsistent.” She pulled back her shirt to reveal a pale shoulder. “I want to look the same all over. I tanned routinely until I was twenty-one.” “Yeah, I wish I was darker, as well.” “Do you burn easily?” she asked. “Sometimes. But if I do burn, it fades into a deep tan that lasts for weeks.” Veronica added the final touches, then removed the sheet and led me over to a shampoo chair. From that point on it was mostly hair talk. She

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gave me pointers on how to take better care of my hair. I sat there, my head craned back, for a good ten minutes. It made me wonder if she was prolonging things. I wanted her, but it’s frivolous to pursue a married woman. I was happy we met. Happy in the truest sense of the word, because everything felt a little clearer and a lot brighter. “It was really good to talk to you,” she said as she walked me to the counter. “It’s not often I get to have these conversations.” We hugged and she handed me a few of her business cards. She told me there would be a free cut involved if I got her three referrals and told the cashier to give me a discount because I was Louie’s friend. Twenty-five dollars wasn’t bad considering the therapy involved. We hugged, and I was on my way. *** Being mixed or biracial, or whatever you’d like to call it, is a solitary experience. It has no culture of its own. It has no pride parades or day of celebration. The only literary movement to track its rhythms and history has the adjective “tragic” attached to its name. Thus far we’ve survived through camouflage and assimilation. Bleak perhaps, but not permanently so. Isn’t our very existence proof that things can’t remain separated forever? Before finishing up, Veronica mentioned a National Geographic article from a few months back. It was something like, “The Faces of America in 2050.” It featured a collection of composite photos that predicted the average faces to come in the next half-century. The pictures made me think of the Melanesian folks in the Solomon Islands; a population with charcoal skin and big golden locks. Veronica was excited about how different her would-be grandkids might look. “Soon,” she said with jubilation, “everybody will be so blended up that no one will bother explaining what combination they are. It’ll take too long.” I took comfort in that.

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Love At First Sight Stephen Philip Druce

I went shopping and fell in love with a lady i saw standing in a shop window. I didn’t drool over the usual body parts that some men do, but i appreciated the more understated qualities of her female form. She had the most incredible pair of fucking ankles i’ve ever seen— unclimbed mountains of gristle bone draped in cloaks of smooth, golden flesh. Her nostrils drove me fucking berserk—those mysterious tunnels of hair phlegm. I salivated at the sight of her fucking armpits—unbridled yet secretive, like two sweaty waste dumps. I walked into the shop to declare my love for her and realized it was a plastic window dress model.

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Prairie Madness, 1862 Megan Merchant

I. Grasshoppers, like thick ďŹ ngers slapping the wind. I walk amongst them, a ghost displacing little bodies at will.

II. There are no edges here, no sight-lines, no sounds not swallowed by the bursts of grit and feathers of dust,

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and the songbirds that dare to winnow forget one minute from the last. They hum spelt memories without so much as an echo to blazon something sharp. III. Their song is a string looping my throat. Their beaks are plows pulling into the wind, into the metal hardness of it, the cold whistle beheading any chance to bloom. IV. I boil tea with dandelion roots, even they are wrinkled with malaise.

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V. A woman could rattle in such wide spaces, hunted by wings and wind. VI. I dream a mosaic of centipede legs and scorpion tails leaking from walled slabs of sod by my bed. They chew my skin, secrete my hair, nest in my ears until the paper clippings I hung begin to cry. VII. There are no edges here, no sight-lines, no reasons why Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m slipping to the side.

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VIII. If the wind stops it’s only to watch a woman in ﬂames running headlong for a stream, a stream parched with silt.

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Barney Ron Burch

Barney, the black terrier, sits on a bedspread so smooth it looks ironed. He finishes licking his balls and jumps off the bed, heading to the bathroom where wet towels still lay on the floor. He shits on them, too tired to go outside. Barney trots into the other room and down the stairs, wondering if the cook will give him warm meat again for lunch. She has told him before that he will get a bone if he’s a good dog, but that has never come to light, never been proven. In the massive living room, Barney jumps up on the blue couch and looks out the window. He lives in a white house in the middle of the street. He has never wanted for food or shelter. He has never been too cold or hot. People have taken care of his every need. Even when he didn’t graduate from obedience school, he still received a diploma. So protected, he has neither wanted nor feared. His mother was a royal and he was given to his owners while young. He never had to scrounge for food, or work for it by guarding chickens or other animals, or ever heed a command. His owners love him very much. Barney likes to play with balls: tennis balls and volleyballs are his favorites. He loves to chase them around the huge offices where his owner lives. He doesn’t like to go outside where it is hot, usually over 100 degrees and sandy. There are people out there who would hurt Barney, but luckily he doesn’t have to face them. He can live

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inside; within the little dog house that was made for him. Other dogs outside go hungry and die. They kill each other, ripping out their necks in bloody battle. Barney doesn’t have to deal with these dogs. He can watch the fights from the window. He thinks, being a dog, that he could go out there and fight too if he wasn’t trapped inside these walls. His owners’ friends, who sit lopsided on their chairs because of the big wallets in their back pockets, shower Barney with gifts: dog toys, bones, even money and diamonds. Barney doesn’t know exactly what to do with the diamonds, but he buries them in the back yard, knowing that they must be good for something. Finding the cook busy, Barney returns to the living room, leaps on the blue couch again, and watches a massive dog tear a small, dark dog apart on the street. Barney, bored, jumps off the couch, thinking that this can’t go on for too long, there are only so many dogs that can be killed. He runs toward a noise in the kitchen where he hopes the cook will have warm meat waiting for him—never again remembering the small, dark dog out there dying lonely in the street.

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What If You’ve Experienced Gravity? Michael Onofrey

The Photograpgh is of the two men sitting on a bench, a black-andwhite photo that has yellowed. It is about the size of a postcard, and it looks to have been carried around in someone’s pocket or purse for a long time because the edges are riddled with small tears. The man I am sitting next to is showing me the photo. We are on a bench, and there is some space between us, maybe a foot. The man has his arm extended so that we can both view the photograph. He is pinching the bottom edge of the photo with his thumb and index finger. The situation developed with me sitting on the bench alone. I had just finished my lunch and was reading a paperback book. I work at a nearby warehouse, a shipping and receiving clerk. The bench, along with a few other benches, is in a small park that is almost always without people when I take my lunch break. If the weather is good, as it often is, I eat my lunch in the park. I noticed someone standing to my left, and when I looked I saw a man, who was looking at me. It was, and is, a sunny afternoon, about 75 degrees, typical weather for July in Santa Monica. The man, though, wasn’t dressed for Southern California, for he was wearing a gabardine suit that was large on his body, gabardine charcoal-gray and looking to be worsted wool, a heavy fabric. The man was wearing glasses, and he looked to be my age,

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mid-sixties. He stepped over and said, “I have something to show you. Would you mind if I sat down?” He indicated the bench. His speech told me that he was probably from Southern California, but he didn’t speak fast as is current among young people. The man spoke slowly, like I do. “No, have a seat.” So he sat down and that was when he pulled the photograph out of a side pocket of his gabardine jacket. He looked at it, and then extended it out at arm’s length, which allowed the two of us to look at the photo at the same time. The photograph is of me and the man, and we are sitting on a bench. In the photo, the man is wearing a dark gabardine suit and a white shirt, and I am wearing a solid-colored T-shirt and a pair of khakis. Since the photograph isn’t in color, the maroon of my T-shirt isn’t evident. My gray cap, though, is gray in the photo. Thus, the man and I in the photograph are dressed the same as we are while sitting on this bench in a small park on a July afternoon in Santa Monica. The background in the photo looks to be the same background that the man and I are in front of while on the bench. So it looks like someone just took a photograph of me and the man, but the photograph is aged. “How do you explain this?” the man asks. My eyes shift from the photograph to the man. “What do you mean, how do I explain this? You’re the one with the photograph. You tell me.” I’m feeling a bit uneasy about this, but that’s not all, because I sense that the man is feeling uneasy, too. “We haven’t met before, have we?” he says. Behind the lenses of his glasses there are brown irises on bulging eyes, whites bloodshot. His face is square, and, as the photograph so clearly

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exhibits, my face is vertical next to his face. The man is clean-shaven in the photo and clean-shaven now, and so am I. “No, we haven’t met before.” The man nods slowly. “That’s what I thought.” “Where’d you get this photograph?” I ask. “From the pocket of my jacket.” “Yeah, I know, but . . . Where did you get it before you put it in your pocket?” “That’s just the thing. It was in the pocket of this jacket. That’s all I know. You see, I snuck out of my house early this morning, about fivethirty, and went to the garage so I could put this suit on. This suit belonged to my father, who passed away years ago. It was in a trunk in the garage. I knew the suit was in there, and to make sure, I checked on it yesterday afternoon when Nora was at the supermarket.” I dog-ear the page of my book and set it aside, which now strikes me as kind of interesting because I’m not holding a book in the photograph. “This started two months ago. It started with Nora’s arrival.” The man moistens his lips with his tongue. His lips are plump, and they are purplish. His tongue, I notice, is whitish. Actually, the tongue looks blanched. I sense a confession in the making. “I was in the food court in the mall down here in Santa Monica, and I was having coffee. It was a weekday, about three in the afternoon, and then there she was, standing in front of me and looking at me. She had this small, brown suitcase. She set the suitcase down and dug into her pants’ pocket and got out a photograph and looked at it.” The man moistens his lips with his tongue, again. “So she leans forward and sets the photograph down on the table in front of me, and it’s facing the correct direction, so I can look at it properly as opposed to upside down. It’s a black-and-white photograph,

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and there are obvious signs of age, just like this photograph.” He indicates the photograph he’s holding. “But it wasn’t this photograph?” I ask. “No, not this photograph.” I nod. “The photograph that Nora, the woman who had just walked up with the suitcase, had set down in front of me was a photograph of her and me, and it looked like it had been taken recently, because our ages in the photo were like what our ages are now: Nora 39, me 66 .” “Like us in this photograph.” “Yes,” he says. “In that sense, it was, or is because I haven’t thrown it away, like this photograph. But that’s not all. In the photo Nora showed me, Nora is on top of me. Her torso is vertical and I’m prone. We are both naked, and we are having sex.” I look at him, and with this he moistens his lips with his tongue, a whitish sweep over lavender. I say, “Let me guess. You had never met before, right? Maybe never seen each other before?” “That is correct.” The man sets the photograph down between us on the bench, the photograph of me and the man. “So she says to me, ‘Can I sit down?’ I, of course, say, ‘Yes, please sit down.’ So she sits down opposite me at the table. She is slim, and her hair is short and black, a bowl-like look.” I nod. “She tells me that she just walked over from the Greyhound bus station that’s a couple of blocks away. She also tells me that she just came out from New Mexico, Albuquerque to be exact.” “I see.”

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“Naturally I’m staring at her, and in response to this she says, ‘I’m Nora.’” “Okay.” “So I pick the photograph up and look at it carefully, and there is no mistaking who’s in the photograph. It’s Nora and me.” “Right.” “I turn the photograph over and look at the backside, and I find: Santa Monica, California. This is written in script, and it’s in blue ink from a fountain pen, very legible.” The man brings a hand up and adjusts the set of his glasses on his nose. His glasses are bifocals, horizontal line between upper and lower prescriptions. I, too, wear bifocals that have that same sort of line. “‘Where’d you get this photograph?’ I asked Nora, and she tells me that her mother left it for her in an envelope. Her mother had died two weeks before, and she had left some things for Nora, money part of it, and there was this envelope on which her mother had written, ‘For Nora.’” “Was the handwriting the same as the handwriting on the back of the photo?” “I asked that same question, and Nora said, ‘Yes.’” “So her mother must have written Santa Monica, California.” “Yes, it would seem so. But, since Nora didn’t actually see her mother write this, it only seems so.” “Of course.” “So I say to Nora, ‘Can I ask you a personal question?’ And she kind of smiles at this, and says, ‘I think we’re past worrying about personal.’ Of course she was right about that.” I smile. “So I asked her if she resembled her mother. You know, implication being that maybe it was her mother in the photo from a long time ago,

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along with a man who looked like me.” “Okay. I see your reasoning.” “But no, Nora said that her mother was short and fat. Nora is slim and somewhat tall. Nora said that their faces reflect this. So their bodies and faces were completely different. Nora said that it wasn’t her mother in the photograph. It was Nora in the photograph.” I nod, but I’m having problems with this, yet every time I glance down at the photo that’s on the bench I am forced to allow for something that I can’t articulate. In addition to disbelief, there is this eerie feeling. Yet, at the same time, this man seems like a reasonable person. “So then I asked Nora about her father, like maybe he was the man in the photograph, and to this Nora said that her mother told her that she, Nora, was either an immaculate birth or that her father had disappeared along with a lot of other men once pregnancy became evident.” I smile. “Yeah,” the man says, “I had never heard it put that way either.” “Well,” I say, “it would seem that Nora’s mother, in one way or another, is somehow involved with this.” “Yes, that’s what Nora and I have concluded. But . . . Nora’s mother is dead, so we can’t very well consult her. And, according to Nora, when her mother was alive there was never any weird stuff, like these photographs. And here I want to emphasize the plural in photographs. You see, in addition to the original photo of me and Nora, and this one today with you, there have been 10 others.” “10 others?” “Yes.” “Any nudity in the others?” “No. The others were like what we have here.” The man gestures toward the photo that’s on the bench between us.

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“You mean, you and someone else, together in a photograph?” “Yes.” “An old, black-and-white photo of you and some stranger and in the photo your ages are like what they are now?” “Yes.” “Was there anything written on the others? And is there anything written on the back of this one?” “No. Nothing on the back of this one or any of the others. The only one with writing was the one Nora brought from New Mexico.” “I see. Well, what did the other people have to say about this?” The man smiles, but it’s a hesitant expression, a half-smile. “One lady told me I should consult a psychic. Someone else suggested a priest or a rabbi, depending. A man said I ought to see a psychiatrist. Someone else told me to go to the police with this. Two people said that I should go on TV. YouTube was also mentioned. One lady screamed.” I nod. “Actually, you’re the first person to consider this with a sense of decorum and reasonableness. I really appreciate your consideration, because, to tell you the truth, this has really unhinged me—these old photographs showing up around the house or in a pocket, and then me taking a walk and running into the people who are in the photo.” “Yeah, I can see how this might be disconcerting.” The man’s white tongue makes an appearance. “So don’t take a walk,” I say. “Just stay home.” “I tried that. But then the doorbell rang. So I open the door, and here’s this lady. She’s nicely dressed, and she’s with some religious organization. She’s got pamphlets and she wants to talk to me. So I invite her in for coffee. I don’t usually do that. Actually, I never do that with people who come to the door. But . . . You see, I recognized her when I opened the door,

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recognized her from the photo that I found on the kitchen counter that morning when I went to make coffee. “So here this lady is, seated on the sofa. Nora is in the room, but then Nora goes to the kitchen to make coffee, and then here comes Nora with three cups of coffee on a tray and the photograph. Nora sets the photograph down on the coffee table in front of the woman along with the woman’s cup of coffee. “It took a moment, you know, everyone smiling and fixing their coffees. Nora had brought spoons and sugar and a small carton of milk. But then . . . Well, you know. The woman left without touching her coffee. Decaf, she had specified decaf, so Nora had made her a cup of instant decaf. The woman had put milk in her coffee and was stirring it when her eyes got hung up on the photo, which was a picture of the woman and me, the two of us on the sofa.” I’m laughing. “Yeah, I know, it’s kind of funny. But on the other hand, it was kind of a cruel. I felt bad about it afterward, you know, after Nora and I stopped laughing. The woman definitely didn’t see any humor in it, none at all. She thought we were playing games with her, and we were, but not like the woman thought. She thought we had a camera and had taken a picture of her, and had worked the thing up while Nora was in the kitchen fixing coffee. I tried to explain that it wasn’t that way, but she was on her way out the door.” My laughter settles. “I’ve been losing sleep over this. I keep trying to figure it out, one way and then another. I’ve suspected Nora, like maybe she’s been putting these photos in places for me to find. That was part of the idea of my slipping out of the house early this morning and changing out of my pajamas and into my father’s suit in the garage. I wanted to get out and walk around without

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the burden of a photo. But of course that wasn’t to be, for once I started walking, I stuck my hand into the pocket of the jacket, and I knew. “It was cool this morning, the usual summer overcast in the morning, so the suit wasn’t so uncomfortable. I was walking toward the pier on Ocean Avenue, and I was feeling kind of good. But then, there was the photo. When I looked at it, I knew I’d be running into you sometime today.” “Wow.” “This almost certainly proves that Nora isn’t the one placing these photos here and there for me to find. She couldn’t have possibly known about the suit in the garage, and my intention of getting out of the house before she woke up this morning.” I nod. “Yet these events certainly have something to do with her arrival and presence.” “Yes, it would seem so.” The man moistens his lips with his tongue. “Well, have you thought about asking Nora to leave?” “Yes, I’ve thought about that. Actually, Nora and I have even touched on that in conversation. But how can I ask her to leave, when she’s like a dream fulfilled, a dream that I wasn’t even aware of? Let me explain. You see my wife passed away four years ago. So that’s one thing. And then two years ago, I sold my business and retired. I had a high-end jewelry shop here in Santa Monica. My father started it, and I got interested in making jewelry, precious stones part of it. My father did well, and I did even better. When I sold the business there was a nice lump sum. I have a house here in Santa Monica, a couple of blocks off of Ocean Avenue. To be honest, I don’t have any money problems, and I like where I live. But I was lonely. I have a grown son. He and his family live in San Jose. They come down for Thanksgiving.

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“So, I thought, ‘This is it. I’ll just live out my life like this—alone in a nice, empty house.’ But then Nora showed up and everything changed. That photo she had was a harbinger.” He moistens his lilac lips with his pale tongue. “And then there’s Nora’s side of things. She says that there’s a clock ticking. It’s not real urgent, but she’s aware of it, and of course it has to do with menopause.” “Does she want children?” “No. She says she doesn’t want children. She says what concerns her is that she doesn’t know what’s going to happen with her body and her mind when menopause begins in 10 or 15 years. So she wants to take full advantage of how she is now. That’s why she up and left Albuquerque after she opened the envelope and saw the photo. It gave her someplace to go and something to do. She said that she wants to live life before it slips through her fingers. That photograph, with Santa Monica written on the back, represented an adventure that she is now living because she hadn’t imagined any of this. That’s what she said. And in that sense, I’m no different.” “Yes, of course.” “And it’s not that Nora’s taking advantage of my wealth, because she isn’t. Her purchases since she arrived have been modest, if not meager. She says that shopping doesn’t interest her. She says that what excites her is that she’s found a new environment, a new way of living, and a new way of relating to sex. We’ve talked about these things. We’ve even talked about the fact that we’re not in love, but that doesn’t deny us this enjoyable, new way of living. Not only her environment has changed, but so has mine. And that’s strange, because I’m in the same house and in the same town—the weather’s the same, the neighborhood’s the same, the beach is the same. But—none of it’s the same since her arrival.”

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He moistens his lips with his tongue. “I can’t possibly ask her to leave.” “I understand.” “And you know, I have a clock ticking, too. But my clock isn’t about menopause. My clock is about old age and death. Nora and I have discussed this. Actually, we’ve talked about all kinds of things, and that’s another thing. I can’t tell you how long it had been since I’ve had had a meaningful, interesting conversation with someone. And now, with Nora in the house, there are these intriguing conversations. So it’s not just the sex. It’s also this sharing of thoughts and ideas. Furthermore, there is this astonishing degree of honesty.” I nod. “But . . . there’s the issue of these photographs.” He looks at me with those bulging eyes. “Well, what does Nora say about the photographs?” “She’s very straightforward about this, very honest, and in a sense very down-to-earth. She says that she doesn’t understand it. But then she goes on to say that she doesn’t understand a lot of things in this world, even though she’s living in it. Repetition, she says, is what makes us think that we understand this world, for repetition allows us to get used to this world. Take gravity, for example. Who understands why it’s here, why it’s part of this world, part of this universe? But really, gravity is a strange thing. It’s a blessing is what it is, because without it this world would fall apart, and so would the universe. But, with the exception of theoretical physicists, we don’t stop to marvel over it or question it. And yet, what is it, if not magical? This is what she says, and of course it’s true. But when we have something like these photographs, we think it’s supernatural because we’ve never come across this type of thing before. In other words, it lacks repetition. But what are they? They’re only photographs. Incongruous, yes.

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But they’re not dangerous or harmful. It’s just that we’re not used to them, so they shake our foundations. Nora says that certain religious experiences are like this. According to Nora, and here she refers to William James, experience is experience, unless people are lying.” He moistens his lips with his tongue. “Did I mention that Nora is very well read?” “No, you didn’t mention that.” “Well, she is.” I nod. “Anyway, Nora says that these photographs are mementos of time, as are all photographs. Pick up a photograph of your childhood or your youth, and there’s this sense of trying to believe your eyes. That’s what she told me. She says all you can do is accept it. “Is it any wonder, Nora says, that some people in the past, and maybe even now, believe that photographs capture one’s spirit? That, to us, seems like a supernatural notion. And yet, there it is: your youth preserved in a photograph. Your youth is gone, but the photograph has it.” He looks at me, and I shift my weight. “The paper has yellowed, the edges torn. But there you are— 16 years old.” “Yes. I can understand that. But this?” I gesture at the photograph between us on the bench. “I had, and have, the same argument. And to that, Nora tells me to accept these strange photos as part of my world, or at least part of my world now. This might, after all, go away. But here’s the important part: if it’s my experience, why not accept it? And accepting it means why worry about it? Or, stop worrying about it. This is to say—believe it. For what could be a more basic constituent of belief than experience?” I’m listening to this.

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“If you were to go and explain gravity, for example, to someone who is without that experience, that someone would think you were talking about something supernatural. That person might even think you were lying. But what if you’re not lying? What if you’ve experienced gravity?” The man and I sit, just like we sit in the photograph, and as in the photograph we are cloaked in silence. The man gestures toward the photograph. “I’ll leave this with you as a memento, a memento of our time together, and of my deep appreciation for hearing me out. I feel that I understand Nora’s point of view better now. It’s clearer to me, and I feel that our little talk has really helped in this regard.” The man rises from the bench and looks around the park, which is bathed in sunshine. “They say that New Mexico is enchanted. Perhaps Nora has brought a little bit of that out here with her.” He turns and walks away, and when he’s gone, I look down at the photograph.

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parsnips Christopher Mulrooney

truly yours sincerely yours etc. P.S. and there is the night following unto day the complete thought expressed completely only the puddle has any sky in it to gaze upon remembering the lake and a pot of large vegetables brought in with the mail from an uneventful day

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Verdun 3-D Robin Wyatt Dunn

One, two, three, four, And here release the dogs of war, Bark, bark. In the land that is the mother. In the land that is the father. I’ll spin you a yarn to last a thousand days, a thousand centuries, I’ll take this distaff down to flax and trip the wax onto the missive like a missile sent at your head, into your box: Deutschland erwache, Awake, Land of the Dutch! Your father’s in the ground, your mother’s there, I saw them both, digging round, calling you to die, calling you to rot and reap the rich rewards of peasantries uncountable, to war, to war, to war for all you’re not, for all you’ve got, for all the roped worlds you’ll fire at the sky, the combat veteran ogled mad by faces vast and waxed, dripping with paint and lasting leaves, the moribund arch, the bunting on the century! The Caesar’s hat! The kaiser’s czar! O Hairy laurel ape, I lay before your feet the man I ate, we’ll glue his skull onto your daughter’s door, the better to see us withal, as we wake up. Hey, hey, it’s Herzog Zwei, the Sega game, spin the Rampart’s sizzling

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fat, the Triumph, the Triumph, and shall we make, and shall we make, O Designers of the Weird and Worlded, and shall we make The Great War Game? After one hundred years? In Flanders Fields Again? Over the top! Over the top of the charts! Over the top, boys! Into artillery! Into the pocket of the general, with his pocket watch and mine on wrist we’ll glue the gristed gist of your unsorrowed heart atop the grinding spark we lifted to the cannon, we lifted to the stars, our songs of death a beautiful dirge to lift the youth into their dreams, out of suburban things, and down to Flanders in the march, One, two, three, four, We can hear the dogs of war, We can hear their mighty growl, We can wear the Panther’s Cowl, We can use the Power Glove, Over the top! Over the top, boys! My watch ain’t workin’ but the machine guns are, and with élan vitale we’ll rush ahead Gallipoli at once and red for all the songs we memorized at school, we’ll chant into the microphones stuck at our chins, over the top! No aid station but PlayStation, and can we count the minutes and the days? I’ll see your boys weeping ‘fore we’re through, when we stick them in the trenches true, the Smell-O-Vision and the 3-D sound, it’s coming through, the reviews are glowing like your match’s end (don’t light that third cigarette). Fire. Dunn // Poetry

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Last Stand at McGraw-Hill John Weaver

I wonder if the schools on the Pine Ridge reservation use The Americans As the textbook in their history classes. I wonder if the schools on the Pine Ridge reservation start American History in 1870, Like my son’s school does. I wonder if the teachers at Pine Ridge read the sentence explaining that White settlers Were able to move on to the prairies Because “Native American cultures were in decline” And think, “Yep, that’s about right…We were in ‘Decline.’” I wonder if the students at Pine Ridge notice that their textbook Devotes three whole pages To the reasons for the “Decline” of their culture. I wonder if the authors of the textbook can sleep at night Knowing that they have whitewashed the way in which this country Was built. I wonder if the authors gave any thought to the foundation of our country, One hand holding the chains enslaving one race, And the other hand holding the bibles and guns to exterminate Another.

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I wonder if the authors thought of many things: Of deceit, of disease, of starvation, of massacres, of broken Promises, of broken lives, Of genocide. I wonder if the authors thought of their responsibility to the truth, Or if all they thought about Was how the victors write the histories. *** My primary intent with this piece was to raise awareness of the portrayal of indigenous people specifically, and other minority communities in general, in the typical textbooks used to educate our children about American history. My son’s 11th grade American history class at a highly regarded local high school uses the text The Americans and begins teaching American history starting in 1870. The first section of the book that is taught to 11th graders at his school is a three page section on the conflicts with Native American tribes throughout the western United States. The systematic destruction of Native society is described as “native culture was in decline.” By reinforcing that this is what is being taught to our children, my hope is for readers to think about what is appearing in these textbooks and what the actual reality might be, and hopefully encouraging people to do some research on their own. Ultimately, this is a call to action for people to stop and have a conversation about this country, its education system, and how we teach and think about race. The title of the poem, “Last Stand at McGraw-Hill,” is meant as a commentary on the mythologizing of the “last stand” in regard to the genocide inflicted upon the indigenous peoples of North America by white settlers and colonizers since the “discovery” of America. This belief that those who fall in battle in “last stand” situations, be they at the Alamo or the Little Bighorn or any other, are somehow inherently noble, to be

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celebrated, has been passed down for generations and is now venerated as a true piece of the fabric of American history. For Native peoples, these kinds of events still have resonance today and are not symbolic of the greatness of the American spirit, but are instead emblematic of the problems that still face tribal communities in that they continue to promote the racist messages sent by white America today. In many real ways, the narrative presented in American history texts used in high schools and colleges is the â&#x20AC;&#x153;last standâ&#x20AC;? for Native people and their cultural and historical identity. This sort of message, through its inclusion in high school history texts continues to be sent to new generations of American students.

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Series 9 episode 2 12 minutes Lucie Britsch

We cut hair long it reads It’s supposed to say time We cut hair long time It wasn’t meant to sound like a racist joke It was just because we couldn’t afford anymore letters The pseudo Japanese noodles-and-soup restaurant next door is called miso hungry That’s apparently ok We’re situated in the furthest corner of the mall Near the toilets Near the shoe key place Near where most crimes happen And public urinations Did I mention we’re near the toilets? I think we’d get more customers if we joined forces with next door Then we’d be Souper Cuts A name people can trust Because people don’t trust our stylists that much Did I mention we’re near the toilets? We don’t get much foot traffic

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Piss or hair cut? Crap or blow dry? It’s not a stick or twist situation We always lose out Mostly to the shiny shiny places Where they have to have at least one gay stylist Or several camp ones And clean under their nails It’s the law People like that shit We are where hairdressers come to die Sandra died of being fat Jerry died from smoking related diseases, all of them I heard he had the black lung I’m pretty in awe of him Sandra number two died from heartache when her daughter shaved her head but got someone else to do it I am disappointed there have been no scissor or heated appliance incidents I can live in hope Because of our location people have to seek us out They have to really want it And be brave as fuck to get past the hoodies, hobos, and heroin addicts who will attempt to stab them up a little on their way to us We greet them with utmost respect They come to us with secrets clutched to their chests Pictures of movie stars One girl dragged her entire inspiration board to us “The rainbows like represents how like pretty all the colours are, together,

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you know, like all people, not just the white ones” she tells us chewing her nails We nod and pat her shoulder It doesn’t matter what they say, we treat all our clients the same No one gets a softer towel or cooler temperature This is how it is And they all leave with the same feeling of disappointment Like we all do Everyday It’s not uncommon for people to scurry in under hoods or scarves We’ve only had one bag They already feel like shit so our job is easy We can’t make them look worse It’s the dream When I was younger and still had hope I would spend my lunch breaks spying on the fancy salons in the main mall People never came out like on the ads People just looked like “well that was a thing” Not like they’d just had a hairgasm It made me feel a little better And I stole their old magazines from the trash Just to keep us slightly behind the fashion Behind the food court, by the toilets I waited my entire career for that Jennifer Aniston moment That moment that cements you as a real hairdresser My certificates were questionable But it never came You hear rumors that it’s the most asked for cut

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Even now But we had seen no evidence of it And we’re so behind the times we could do that cut justice If I just had the chance No, we get people that bring in photos of themselves “I want it back like that” they say mistaking us for time lords Because they cut their own fringe in or let someone else One girl brought a photo of her mum in “Do what you want” she said “as long as I don’t look like that” I didn’t have the heart to tell her she already looked like that I patted her shoulder there, there Another unsatisfied customer One less and I would have won a Twix One girl brought in a cartoon drawing of girl One girl brought another girl in off the street “I want her hair” she said We all did, and her face, but I had to let the poor girl go She was already wondering if this counted as kidnapping and if she should call the police One girl brought a picture of her horse in At least it was her horse and not some random horse right That would have been weird And that horse did have particularly good hair For a horse I learnt the word fetlocks that day Who said you can’t teach an old hairdresser new tricks Because I refuse to learn new styles I cut straight, what more do you want And I know the word fetlock

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Just when I thought I wouldn’t have my moment this girl turns up All my stories are about girls The guys come in, get cut, leave This girl’s clutching a DVD “Do you have a player?” she says “Did you bring popcorn?” I ask She looks at me like I’m mad I’m already dreading another wedding video It’s not It’s a Friends DVD Lucky for her we did have a TV in our break room Lucky for her we were used to the crazies Turns out she wanted a Rachel cut But a very specific Rachel cut One that could only be found by watching several episodes “There!” she yelled, pausing it and leaping up to point at Jennifer Aniston Only once paused the screen was a little blurry She rewound it and tried again Blurry After several failed attempts to freeze frame her perfect hair she burst into tears “You guys need a better TV,” she spat And that was it She was right We did need a better TV I was glad she hadn’t seen our scissors

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The Consolation of Philosophy Howie Good

It was hard work being stranded at the end of the industrial age with blue whales and a dying giant sequoia, hard work detecting illuminations he could never really be sure were there, hard work imagining assembling an ocean from tiny polka dots of rain. At 33, the age of a crucified prophet, he cut the top of his ear off. Fish and birds exchanged puzzled glances. It feels as if something even more unlikely could happen. Please don’t hoist yourself up onto a cross. Every day people send strange items through the mail. Who knows, maybe tomorrow, or the day after, you’ll receive a molar, a zucchini, or a complete McDonald’s meal.

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Hallows Dawn Chelsea Prentice

It’s cold and the ground is wet, soaking through her Payless slip-on sneakers and freezing her toes. She was watching the news before she walked outside, and it had the temperature listed as 48 degrees but in the dark before sunrise, feet damp and wind biting hard, it feels close to freezing. She holds on tightly to Bowser’s leash as her 85-pound German Shepherd leads her around the corner and down the sidewalk to the cul-desac behind their development. He pulls her along just enough to make for a brisk walk and prove he’s in charge of where they’re going. The sun hasn’t even peaked over the horizon. The garbage trucks are winding through the streets around her noisily while she pulls her hood up over her head to shield her ears from the wind. As Bowser pulls toward a dumpster on the side of the street, she hears a short whistle that sounds like it’s coming from behind her. She turns around, looking at the corner house where she sometimes sees a man sitting on the porch who says hello to her when they walk by, but no one’s there. She looks around, thinking the whistle may have come from another direction, but still no one. Her brow furrows and she thinks she may have imagined it. It had been a whistle towards Bowser if anything, not like a cat-call. Just a short

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whistle, like how you would if you were trying to get a dog’s attention, but Bowser’s ears don’t seem to have caught it, so maybe it didn’t happen. She turns back to him as he pulls her across the street and into the island of grass in the middle of the cul-de-sac. He sniffs around the wet grass catching all kinds of scents and pulling her back and forth until she has to pull him in check. He heads over to a tree near one of the edges of the island and she catches movement out of the corner of her eye. She turns as Bowser lifts his leg to the tree and sees a black cat crouching in the wheel well of a beat up, old pick-up truck. The cat’s big yellow eyes stare back at her, not six feet from them, daring her to tell Bowser where he’s hidden. She smiles at the cat, knowing damn well she’s saving his life right now, and leads Bowser off the island back onto the sidewalk across the street. Bowser’s ears are pricked high, rotating constantly as he takes in the early morning sounds of trash trucks, construction crews, car doors, and metro trains that inhabit the city at this early hour. She hears a car coming down the road behind them; the headlights shine ahead of her to the left, illuminating the pavement. The car slows when it gets next to her, and she hears the window roll down, but Bowser keeps pulling her ahead. “Ay beautiful,” a man says to her from the driver’s seat with a Spanish accent. She keeps walking without turning her head and silently wishes him to keep driving. “I said good morning, mami,” he says to her, a bit louder now. She ignores him again and Bowser pulls her around the corner where the stop sign is; the car doesn’t pause, turning in her direction. “Hey, I’m complimenting you, you should thank me, mami,” she hears from the passenger’s side window. She’s about 200 feet from turning into her townhouse development,

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but it’s still pitch black out. The man in the car has now managed to get Bowser’s attention and he’s pulling toward the car, barking at him. “Hey, shut your dog up, alright?” he yells over Bowser’s barks. She holds onto Bowser with the leash wrapped tightly around her arm. She pulls him back and tries to soothe him. “It’s ok boy, come on. Come on, Bowser, let’s go home,” she says under her breath so that the man can’t hear her. She gets the dog’s attention back and Bowser pulls her up the sidewalk toward home. The man keeps following her slowly, and then she hears him put the car in park. She turns and sees the driver’s side door open and him getting out. She starts to walk faster and leads Bowser into the grass, cutting their distance to the development entrance in half. She turns back and sees the man following her. “Ay mami! Come back here,” he calls to her, closing in fast. “Fuck off, asshole,” she yells back, facing him but continuing to let Bowser pull her toward home. “What was that?” he says, now quickly jogging to catch up with her. Bowser has stopped, turned around, and is now pulling her hard toward the man while she tries to restrain him and stand in place. “I said fuck off, asshole. You didn’t seem to get the point when I ignored you.” She’s now facing him holding Bowser back as he viciously barks louder and louder at the man.. But the man takes no notice and is coming hard at her now, his face full of rage and a creepy grin. She only has time to think What the fuck, really, on Halloween? before he’s on top of them. But Bowser’s no joke and the man never gets his hands on her. Bowser’s barking never ceases as he lunges hard at the man’s legs when he gets close enough. Bowser catches hold of his shin and the man screams in agony, having completely underestimated the dog for all bark and no bite.

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Bowser’s grip is hard and unrelenting as he digs deep and the screams get louder. The man falls back and she lets Bowser climb onto him. The dog tears at his clothing and bites down on his right arm when the man tries to push him off. His leg is bleeding profusely. She steps down on his shin where Bowser tore into him and hears another cry of agony. Bowser bites into his other arm and starts clawing at his face with his left paw. His ability to multi-task has always amazed her; she didn’t think dogs were that smart. A lot about Bowser amazed her since she first brought him home as a four-month-old puppy. Now she watches him as he bites once more into the man’s left arm, closer to his wrist this time, and then she looks into the man’s face. The man hasn’t stopped screaming and his eyes are horrified brown globes; the scratches on his face are deep and start dripping blood down his neck. He’s lost a lot of blood from Bowser’s wounds. “Enough,” she says in a monotone voice, commanding Bowser. The dog immediately stops his biting and clawing and backs up until he’s right by her side, then sits down. “I told you to fuck off.” He looks at her, a fear in his eyes that she’s familiar with. She turns to Bowser. There’s blood on his front paws and around his mouth. The dog is sitting silently looking back and forth from her to the man, breathing heavily from his strenuous morning activity. “That would’ve been easier,” she finishes. The man is still staring at her, not moving from his mangled position in the wet, cold grass. She tells Bowser to stay and she recognizes the acknowledgement in his eyes. Then she drops his leash and looks around quickly as her hand pulls out a switch-blade from her left coat pocket. She doesn’t see anyone around.

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She flips the knife open and moves quickly, standing over the man, with one foot stepping on his left arm hard to keep him in place. He flinches and lets out another quick yelp before his eyes get even bigger and he silences himself. “No, please. I’m sorry,” he manages to get out, staring wide-eyed in disbelief at what’s in her left hand. “This is one lesson you won’t learn from,” she answers him. And with a quick flick of her wrist, she slices open his throat, cutting his carotid artery easily, and moves to the side to avoid the spatter. Blood starts gushing immediately and he chokes for a brief few seconds before his eyes go dull and she knows he’s dead. She wipes the knife on his shirt, then flips it closed, and stands up straight. She looks around again briefly, catching no signs of movement, and then looks at Bowser. “Good boy,” she says and goes to him, petting him lovingly on the head while he puts his ears down and welcomes her praise. She picks up the leash and they turn around. She continues to walk in the grass to avoid Bowser’s bloody paw prints leaving marks on the sidewalk. When they get to her townhouse she picks Bowser up, his 85-pound weight almost too much for her 135-pound body, and carries him through the front door. She carries him upstairs and into the tub where she starts a warm bath and grabs the dog shampoo from under the sink. She lathers him up and smiles at how miserable he’s managed to make himself look, his ears folded back in obedience and a sad frown lining his face. “Oh stop it, I hardly ever make you bathe,” she says to him. She scrubs his paws, face, and neck clean and watches as the water turns red going down the drain. She thinks about what she should dress him up as this year. She had been planning on a nice, quiet night in with ABC Family

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Halloween movies on tape and maybe a bottle of wine with her favorite pasta dish. But this morning’s changed things. Her adrenaline is still going and she can feel Bowser’s steady heartbeat, telling her he’s craving more too. The sun peaks through the tiny bathroom window in purple and orange streaks, a beautiful sunrise for Halloween morning. It makes her think of the man’s brown eyes staring up at her, his face covered in streaks of blood. She pulls Bowser out of the tub and onto a mat as she starts drying him. He stares at her, defeated, as if this bath is the worst thing that she could’ve possibly put him through. She decides she’ll dress Bowser up as Batman, the irony alone should make for a few interesting encounters. Besides, it’s been a while.

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Confiding in the blind Howie Good and Dale Wisely

What I need more than anything / more than this job / more than Chekov / & other bearded 19th century authors / is a pair of wings & a flaming sword / or a flat screen TV that measures / 90 feet octagonally / or one of the smaller / of the 180,497 islands in the world / smaller than Cuba before Castro / I need at least a woman / who wants like me / to be killed by sex / & then killed again / who looks back over her shoulder / her eyes the lean of her body / encouraging me to hurry catch up / because weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re allowed / weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re free to take / whatever honey we find there / & then confide in the blind / that we took it

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I Went to church with bruises Jessica Robinson

magnets pulling metal to the surface of the earth, collecting in pools burst blood vessels clotting thin skinned layersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a people for his own possession, hiding under white sheets warriors of Roman promiscuity an army of dry bones rising, we of the world and not in it courageous refusal in practice but not theory while these passions of the flesh wage war against our souls, sharp tongue swift hands, black eyes cold

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Baked, Cut, and Community Purpose Kelly Trammell

Grown among peers all in a row All appear similar from afar Lumpy and freckled but filled with purpose. They will bring joy and pleasure unknowingly. Thrown together from the start, Crammed too close in confined space. Maturity will steal them away from home, Unfamiliar places with unknown fates They remain together Some more desired than others One bad member can infect the whole group. As they travel through new territory, They are taken to their final destination. All will meet their end, but all in different ways. Sitting on the brink of death, they smile to themselves, For their death will bring good to others. However violent or docile their fate, Purpose meets peace in the end. By the way, we are potatoes. Trammell // Poetry

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The Crescent Moon Scott Selden

i’ve lived at the Crescent Moon Hotel & Motel for 11 years, and every day has been a delight. Wait. No, I’m kidding. It’s mostly shit. Last Thursday, someone left a baby next to the pool. No one around of course. Some baby sitting there, next to the deck chairs made up of strips of cracking white plastic that I keep meaning to replace but never do. It just sat there gurgling and bubbling. I called the police, and when they got there the two patrolmen were deep in conversation about whether goldfish get depressed, and, if so, whether or not the addition of a little plastic treasure chest to their environment would cheer them up. I pointed them toward the baby and they said, “That’s a fine looking watermelon,” and got back into their car. So I drove the baby to a church, set it on the stoop, and left. I haven’t had a friend over in probably nine months. Even Whitney Ellsworth in East 4 won’t walk up to my apartment on the third floor anymore. I ask her to come up and she says, “No, it hurts my knees.” So I tell her to use the elevator. And she says, “No, then I wouldn’t get any exercise” which is all to say: I haven’t had sex in a while, and now I can’t sleep. I used to take Ambien or Benadryl until they stopped working on me. My bedroom is right underneath the big neon sign, so I have to listen to that mechanical buzzing and buzzing until it becomes white noise and I can finally fall asleep. It reminds me of summers on the river and listening to cicadas. My brother once told me they made the buzzing sound when they were fucking, but I don’t know if that’s true or not.

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Last Friday Whitney from East 4 got back to the Crescent Moon at 1:43 in the afternoon. She worked at Rhiner Rollers Bar. Whitney skated down the street in her fake lederhosen and kneepads, avoiding the cracks in the pavement and what little traffic was around. Her white top was covered with a brown stain, but thankfully she hadn’t changed it. From above it was easy to see down her shirt. As she turned the corner into the Crescent Moon parking lot, her skirt lifted high enough so that her green panties showed, and she quickly clutched at her hem with her right hand to keep it down and held out her left arm for balance. Whitney never wore a helmet and her black hair whipped around into her face. She was stained and clumsy and the loveliest human being I had ever seen. Outside Dave, who always slept outside the hotel, looked up at her from his pile of rags and filth and his collection of empty cereal boxes. He bared his teeth and shook his head from side to side like some kind of spastic bobble-head. His hair was grimy and hung together in clumps. “Let’s see that ass, girl,” he must have said. “Fuck off, you dick,” she probably replied. “My ass is my own business.” She skated past Outside Dave, so she didn’t see him grab his crotch and shout back at her. The wind whistling loudly in her ears most likely prevented her from hearing what he screamed in response, but it could have been something like, “My dick wants your business, baby.” But she skated into the middle of the four buildings and rolled past the pool to East as the sun beamed onto her from behind and her thighs shone back like the headlights of an oncoming car. Once inside her room, she lowered the yellowed blinds that were 11 years old, but thankfully she didn’t close the slats and could still be seen from the outside. She jumped backwards onto her bed and watched the area where the ceiling fan would be. Whitney grabbed the remote and clicked

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on the television, and Seinfeld must have been on the local affiliate because she laughed so hard she covered her mouth. “That George Costanza,” she could have said. Whitney stood up and unbuckled her suspenders and then wriggled out of her skirt. It pooled on the floor beneath her. She took off her top, and just as Whitney was about to unhook her bra, That Bitch With Fat Ankles in North 2 threw open her own door and started tossing shit out of it onto the sidewalk. Clothes, a telescope, a pair of skis, and a very revealing lumberjack outfit complete with a plastic axe, the handle of which had a comfortably rounded end, clattered onto the cement. That Bitch With Fat Ankles screamed at whatever man was staying with her that week, and the sheer sound of her voice pierced the earth and the sky and made me want to puke. That Bitch With Fat Ankles pushed the man out of her room with such strength that he fell to the ground and cut his arm on the cement. The man was young and blonde and he was crying so hard he pissed himself, and it spread slowly across the denim. Still sobbing, he hugged his axedildo to his chest for comfort, and Whitney parted her blinds with two fingers to see what was happening. She looked up. Whitney from East 4 stuck her fist between the blinds and the glass and raised her middle finger before snapping shut her blinds. I put down my binoculars and waved to no one. I looked around for a minute, and then I climbed down the fire escape and off the roof. At 38, my brother Max is three years older than me and tall and tan and he’s got muscles all over the place. He came over four nights ago with a lot of lady friends. All the women seemed vaguely thin and their hair was papery. But they were women and they took off their clothes to go swimming in the pool, and though they left their panties on, it was nice all the same. Whitney from East 4 walked by and said “Jesus, Charlie” and slammed her door so hard the thin glass rattled in the windowpanes. Max

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watched her go. “Man, I’m getting so much puss,” he said. “I think Whitney’s mad about all this,” and I waved my arm to reference the six or seven mostly naked women in my pool. They were laughing and splashing and trying to dive off of the diving board. They always jumped from the wrong angle and ended up landing on their backs. I thought maybe that was the way they were most comfortable. “I think I like her.” “It must have been like four times last night.” “She’s really nice. You’d like her,” I said, although I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to like her. “Are you a pimp?” A woman pulled herself out of the pool and bounced over. The neon from the big sign gave her skin an ugly bluish hue, and it made her seem like she was something from somewhere else. A corpse that still jiggled. She had dots on her arms and her eyes were a dark and muddy brown. “Daddy, you got any food? I’m hungry.” I looked over at Max, who was rummaging in the bag next to his deck chair. “Seriously? Are you serious with that?” Max withdrew a carton of apple juice, some Goldfish, and a small Tupperware container full of green seedless grapes. He held out the snacks to her and she eagerly snatched the Goldfish from his hand. “Thank you, Daddy.” “You’re welcome, sweetheart. Make sure to come back and eat a few grapes.” “Okay.” The woman turned on her heels and walked away, giggling and shoving handfuls of Goldfish into her mouth. Her bare back was clean and perfectly curved. She was strangely beautiful, and for a minute I thought

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she was a real person, not a whore with needle marks on her arms and between her toes. Then I wondered how many times she’d collapsed a vein. “Dude, I hit that like eight times last night,” said Max, eyeballing her as she walked away. The woman must have heard us because she pulled down her panties and flashed her ass at my brother and me. It was pale, and I stopped thinking about heroin. “You sure did, Daddy!” she yelled, and her laughter echoed over the water of the pool and briefly overtook the splashing and talking of the other women. For one sublime moment, her laughter swallowed everything except the breeze. But I could feel Whitney in East 4 bristling in silent rage and sending voodoo my way, through brick and air. I decided to ignore her vibes, so I whistled at the whore with her underwear down, and then I got blackout drunk. Maybe I got laid. You never know. I noticed the trees first. The dogwoods at the corners of the buildings began to move and then move a lot more. Wind screamed into my face. God flipped a light switch, and the sky went dark in two seconds. I hadn’t really believed that the hurricane would make it so far inland, but it was coming. Shit. The lights around the pool were dim and struggling. If the power went out I knew that the power company would take its time coming around here, and it didn’t help that the last time I lost power I told the VA Power phone secretary she had a voice like a pony getting murdered. I walked down to the small shed that housed the fuse box, next to the pool. All I could do was lock the shed with a padlock and hope the wind didn’t get strong enough to rip the door from its hinges. Whitney opened her door and stood next to me. “I don’t know what else to do,” I said. “You didn’t prepare at all?” “No. I didn’t think it would come this far in.”

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“God,” she said. She looked at me hard and shook her head. “You’re the worst.” “Yeah. Um . . . I’m sorry I was watching you.” “Whatever.” “Okay.” I cleared my throat, and she looked around. “I just bought some Seinfeld DVDs. You want to watch during the storm with –” “I’ll see you later,” she said, and walked back to her room, but just before she shut the door she called out, “Be safe.” So that was something, I guess. Once the storm had passed, I made the rent rounds, and I was fucking pissed. It was hot and three people had been short and in West 3 I found the body of a possum lying in the middle of the bed. And That Bitch With Fat Ankles had given me shit about my rates and asked for a deal. I said, “Just have more men stay over. Aren’t you a whore?” She replied, “I’ll come into your room when you sleep and cut off your ear. I’ll sing into it real loud.” I started to walk away and I said, “I’ll come back at six.” I was a little further down toward East when she shouted, “I’ll fuck you for it?” “You’re a bitch with fat ankles, and I’ll be back at six,” I said, without bothering to turn around and face her. I had saved Whitney’s room for last. As I got closer to the door with the wooden 4 nailed to it, I began to feel the distance in my belly. I took a step and felt a little sick. I took another, and I felt worse. There was a small, lopsided piece of quartz on the ground, so I kicked it into the wall to my right, but it bounced back in front of me. I knocked on her door and she opened it immediately. She looked me in the eyes. “Rent?” I said.

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“Yeah. Gimme a second.” She disappeared from the doorway, and, while she moved into the darkness of her room, I stepped over the threshold. She had hung photographs, and there was a small oriental rug at the foot of her lumpy double bed. It was orange and black and it clashed horribly with the light green wallpaper. The picture above her bed was a huge group somewhere red and dusty smiling at the camera, could have been at the Grand Canyon. I found Whitney in the picture crouched toward the bottom left of the frame. A row of men stood above her. She thrust a stack of bills into my hand. “Is that your family?” “Yeah,” she said, turning around to see where I was looking. “So do I, like, need to pay more since I put nails in the walls?” I looked into her eyes and for the first time I noticed that they were deep blue—blue like the Atlantic during a rainstorm. “Why are you here?” She recoiled. “Do I need to leave?” “No, you don’t. No.” I looked at the picture again. She was smiling in it, and her eyes were fog lights shining from somewhere far away. Cutting through the mist. “I just, I mean it seems like you maybe have family or something you could go to, or, I don’t know.” I paused. “So.” I reached up and scratched the back of my neck and looked down at her absolutely Godawful rug. “Nice carpet?” She leaned against the wall, and I caught those eyes again. “You haven’t asked me that before.” I shrugged. “I didn’t care before,” I said. “That’s a horrible thing to say.” I shut my eyes and shook my head. She was quiet, and I didn’t want to look at her. “It’s just that you shouldn’t be here if you have somewhere else to go. Anywhere else. It’s not great here. I, um… I don’t have a lot.” I finally looked up again, and she was sitting on the edge of her creaky bed that dipped in the middle. I was surprised I didn’t hear her sit down. Whitney

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was looking at me closely. “But I don’t know,” I said. “You’re something. And I had that for a while.” “It takes more than just fucking someone to keep warm, Charlie,” she said. She smiled a little bit, but it was small and sad and she tucked a strand of hair out of her face. It stayed behind her ear. “Yeah. I get that.” I nodded and smiled a little back. Then there came a screaming from behind me. I turned quickly, and I saw a huge dog with dirt in its matted, brown fur and a chewed up right ear chasing a tiny, black cat whose bones showed through its fur. It yowled and screamed, and I could tell it knew it was about to die. Out of what must have been sheer desperation and fear, it jumped into the pool and landed with a small splash, barely disturbing the water. The dog stopped at the very edge just as the tiny form slipped underneath the surface, and I felt Whitney clutch my arm, and we both knew that the cat was going to drown right in front of us. Right in my pool. Her nails dug into my skin, and I started to bleed. So I kicked off my shoes and jumped in. I opened my eyes and saw the cat floating softly downwards into the blue water. Its mouth was shut but its eyes were open, staring at me. Pleading. Its eyes were points of emerald, sparkling green. I gathered it into my arms, and I felt my feet touch the rough bottom of the pool so I pushed up as hard as I could. We broke through the surface and scattered drops like rain all around us, and the sunlight was bright and warm. The cat opened its mouth and spat out water, and I laughed and smoothed down the fur around its ears. Whitney was kneeling by the side of the pool and there was water running down her face, but I couldn’t tell if it was water from the splash or if she was crying. I think she was crying. Her blue eyes seemed huge and infinitely important as they looked down at me. I handed her the cat and she clutched it tightly against her breasts. “You got him,” she said. I smiled. “Yeah.” Selden // Fiction

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The Second Mouse Gets the Cheese (with a Side of Arsenic) Parker Weston

Blind confusion. I am struggling in a writhing mass of others like me, confined to a panoptic prison. I can detect ladders of daylight descending through many holes in the ceiling. Day is always a sign of danger for my kind. Suddenly, the ceiling cover vibrates as it is being lifted. The rushing wind of something immense infiltrates the musty atmosphere and plummets into our captive heap. It is a giant fleshy claw, callous and without talons, wrinkled like wood, but not as solid. I am caught along with a few others in its grasp and scooped out of the enclosure. We are being passed around to additional claws, hopelessly surrounded. The fresh air that greets us is moist; we must be close to water. Before I can get my bearings, I feel something foreign and sturdy, smoothly impaling one of my ganglia. Wriggling with negative stimuli, I am reared back. I dangle from a peg, before the force of one giant claw flings forward at great speed. I am now submerged in water. The current is resistant to my desperate dance, but I can sense the tugging of whatever is connected to that which is impaling me. I do not drift long in a suspended haze before the vacuum of an aquatic leviathan traps me in its toothless abyss. The smooth hanger stabbing me gores its jaw, sending the creature into a fit. Apparently, I am part of some trap conceived by the giants, as I can feel

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the retraction of what the goliath and I are caught on, toward my original captors. The scaly monster and I are drawn from the water and plopped onto wet earth. The peg is pulled from the thingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mouth, then I from the peg, ripping one of my ganglia messily. I am discarded and mangled, but free. I waggle desperately through the soft ground and tunnel without a thought of the horrible fates the others will be delivered to, those torturous traps. I crawl through warm, cramped soil without stopping until I have no more fleeing left in me. I rest for some amount of time, feeding on decaying plant matter. The longer without food, the more likely one becomes it. I go in and out of sensory flashbacks deep in that hole, haunted by the sadistic indifference of the giants. After a while, I dig upward until I infiltrate cool air. I had been hiding for some time, the night is starting to divide and the cautioning warmth of dawn is breaking. My short-lived relief turns to dread as the safety of darkness is dwindling. A swelling sense of something flapping nearer and nearer makes me leery, then the earth shakes as some force lands before me, though not as large as the giants of earlier. A scaly set of talons mercilessly pins me to the ground. I can sense a sharp mandible aim down, hovering briefly before snatching and constricting me in a crushing grip. The predator then takes off into flight. The chill of the wind numbs the dull clamp the jaws of impending death bondage me in. I fear what waits at the end of this aerial trip. I want it all to end, to slumber eternally underground, like the husks of the giants I often fed upon and rested in the cavities of; the bittersweet irony of being both a scavenger of death and tender prey in the vicious cycle of the pecking order, a sardonic game. An abrupt momentum comes from below. I can sense the devastating impact to the flying beast, which loses volitation. We descend at a rapid speed. The lifeless creature still clenches me in its stubborn mandible. We

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fall from a great height into a thick of bushes. Before I can wiggle free from the corpse’s clutch, the drooling hot breath of some hairy behemoth comes to collect the carcass I’m captive in. It is like one of the giants, but slightly smaller and on all fours, with claws my prostomium feels. It carries the fowl thing in its jaws, which now seems inferior to this abomination of fur, right into the hands of a giant. I recognize the firm grip handling the dead thing that almost made me dinner. It is odd being saved by a force that once imprisoned and used you as a luring device. Before I can take the time to feel grateful, I am ripped from the dead mandible and flung to the ground. My neural net is overwhelmed with negative stimuli. All my pairs of setae dance, my egg capsules spill out of my ripped clitellum, excrement from my periproct. I lay in numerous pieces in that spot until I can sense the giant and his companion are some distance away. Trying to be mobile at your normal speed with only a fraction of your original length is a bit difficult. Before I can reach the sanctuary of soil, another of these flying terrors swoops down and gobbles me up, though this one is smaller. The blunt chopping of its beak softens me up, before I slide down its throat, a sticky slide of death. Hanging on loosely to this mortal coil, I am inside the foul monster’s unbearably humid realm of acidic digestion. Before I am completely absorbed and turned into waste, an upheaval of all the contents I am wallowing in ejects me. I ride the wave of regurgitation, spewed out in various states and pieces, straight into the huddled mouths of this wretched thing’s offspring. The jabbering jaws of these mewling larvae hungrily snap me up. Thank the creator, a mercy killing. I would have liked to lock with a mate once more and exchange spermathecae . . . oh well. Yesterday and today, I ate dirt. Tomorrow I’ll be dirt.

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six word stories Parker Weston

We visited the combustible genital exhibit. Number 9, that’s the fetus responsible. Her helicopter wound is healing nicely. The asshole doesn’t need the head. Preacher launches bible at possessed cripple. Snack kid swallows dwarf stripper alive. Claustrophobic astronaut needs to air out. Blind cartoons never hear onomatopoeia coming. Lunch lady’s hands look like hamburger. Which racing ambulance has bigger emergency?

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The suit Amy Wigman

I make a pretty rubbish girlfriend, so I tend to stay free, The metaphorical shelf seems comfy to me, Doctor Who, Make and Do, endless HUGE cups of tea, I like what my life is about. But then you show up, with your stupid scruffy hair, And ridiculous over-grown schoolboy air, And I’m starting to find that when you’re there, I’ve the poise and allure of a sprout. My conversation skills start to wear thin, I go poncing about sporting a ridiculous grin, And the furious feminist deep within, Has apoplexy and keels over. Even though your childish phraseology, Reveals a deep and dark misogyny, An unfortunate quirk of cruel biology, Turns my brains into pavlova. And I’m an intelligent girl, I scrub up alright, But you’ll give me attention for maybe a night, Then ignore me for weeks you rude little shite.

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But what happens when I see you next? My tongue swells up to twice its size, An unattractive twitch hijacks my eyes, My gut contorts like it’s digesting pies, My immune system gets quite perplexed. And I wish it were just an allergic reaction, But it’s like Richard Curtis has just shouted “Action!” And I’ve got to get shot of this pigging attraction, Because you’re only a twat in a suit. And I try to ignore it, but I know in reality, That you’re quite unnerved by my bisexuality, And I can’t come to terms with the perverse actuality, Of a misanthropic bi-phobic whom I should want to shoot. It would seem that the only immunisation, To counter the saccharine, sickening sensation, Is a huge tub of some Ben and Jerry’s creation, And a bloody large bottle of wine. So really I’d rather appreciate, If you could find your way to capitulate, In buggering off. Or maybe. . . a date? A date, I guess, would be fine.

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The Air is on Fire Howie Good

A military band strikes up a rousing tune. The age of criminal responsibility—that is, eligibility for the death penalty—must have just been lowered again, this time to 12. Even the innocent have begun to speak in code. “Rain” means that a neighbor has been arrested. “Snow” that a curious bystander is missing. Easily, almost absent-mindedly, a shadow on the scale of a metropolis has evolved. You’re not familiar with the science of it or, for that matter, with what happens to those who believe their own computers spy on them while they sleep. This is ironic, as when a book that took years to write takes you only a couple of days to read.

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bedstead Christopher Mulrooney

the laurel motif shrewdly observed and studiously avoided just the luxuriance of a cameo setting for that trousseau of a brideboard and its mountainous train to the far Antipodes of pilgrimage

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Fingers on the Piano Keys Lana Bella

You still miss me from the time I drew upon your lips with my whiskeylaced fingers; the fingers that I’d danced across smooth dual-toned piano keys, to the tattooed flesh with engraved beast on the strapping bicep. Your breaths came through heavy and sweet stirring gone the cigar smoke so close I could taste your frothy scent. You leaned forward, both arms resting on the console grand, where throbbing veins ached rhythms of the briny sea. There, at the scarred shadow of your funny bone: clear echo of painted ships and pine-knot smokes, a well-dressed suit of slate-flawed skin; dusky light swept gold the blunt-cut fingertips, slow whirl of the ceiling fan skimmed across

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your brown hair cool. Into the whiskey-varnished air and against the wisps of smoldering mist, my fingers flirted with the familiar refuge of octavesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; crunched desire and toyed sleigh bells, upon the ivory white and charcoal black keys of the piano.

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The 3 a.m. Crowd Adam Berlin

The kid sticks his hand in the trashcan, pulls out a section of The New

York Times, looks at the headlines. His hands are red and raw, his knuckles scraped, one of the nails black. Hands tell the whole story. The days and nights of on-the-street life. The kid’s been homeless for a while. It’s early March, still too cold, still officially winter. I rub my own gloved hands. “They all throw away the same section,” he says. “The kid’s talking to himself. “I should tell the paper about that. That would be useful information. They all throw away the same section of newspaper.” The kid puts the paper under his arm and walks past me, his hair disheveled, his pants too big for him, his hands raw. He’s not the only one around. There’s a black guy, who looks like a toothless Harpo Marx. His gestures are more mime than real. He isn’t performing, but he’s so insane it’s like a performance. He sneaks behind the kid and follows him with exaggerated footsteps. The kid doesn’t care. He’s too busy. And there’s an Asian guy walking back and forth close to the platform’s edge. He walks ten yards, stops, turns, walks back, fast, fastwalking. And there’s me.

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I walk to the edge of the platform and look into the tunnel. A rat skitters from one piece of garbage to another, then disappears under the third rail. It’s 3 a.m. Usually my dates don’t end so early. I’m a pro at closing the deal, but I liked this one, a contradiction in some ways but not all ways, and the kiss had been enough. Sometimes a great kiss is more fulfilling than the whole shebang, and her lips had been sweet and full and wild, as wild as mine, and when she got in the cab both of us had tasted blood. I lick my lip and still taste the salty iron. I walk away from the platform’s edge, plant myself solid. Harpo is doing all kinds of gestures in front of the kid with the newspapers. He stretches his hand out as if introducing a king. He stands on tiptoes as if peeking over a wall. He extends his arms ready for an embrace that probably hasn’t come in years. He smiles his toothless smile. If he had a horn in his pocket he’d be tooting it, filling the station with more than the Asian man’s fast footsteps. I have a full day of work in the morning. My mailbox will be full of papers and I’ll have to stay in my office and slog over them, ticking off commas and semicolons, circling incomplete thesis statements, writing comments about the need to use evidence to persuasive advantage. The Asian man comes to the end of his marked distance, pauses, my stomach growls, and the Asian man starts walking again. A couple come down the subway stairs, her hand on his arm, an innocent-looking couple, college kids probably, still wet behind their freshmen ears. The guy looks at the 3 a.m. crowd and doesn’t like what he sees. This is one of those nightmare scenarios. It isn’t the nightmare of the muscle-bound man with a knife in his hand demanding a wallet. It isn’t the nightmare of falling asleep on the train and waking up so far uptown the streets have names instead of numbers, streets with Bloods and

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Crips instead of Yups. It’s the nightmare of nightmare figures, strangers, deranged, the ones who congregate in the city because the city really is the last stop on the train. When you can fall no further you stop here. If I wanted, I could give the guy a reassuring smile. I could let him know that if anything happens I’ll protect him and the mousy thing he’s been out with all night, maybe even kissed, tamely. But I just stand here, feet splayed, balanced evenly, squared-up as they say in boxing, making myself solid. My date got to the bar late, so I’d already finished my second bourbon when she walked in. I ordered her a drink and another for myself. She’d suggested the bar and she seemed to know the bartender. He was a little annoying. He lingered too long, went over the limit of small talk, laughed too easily. I liked the woman, but the things she was saying to the bartender just weren’t all that funny. They were good for a smile or a smirk, but not an out-and-out laugh, which the bartender laughed, horse-toothed. When we finished our drinks, the drinks I ordered and the next round on the house, the only advantage to fraternizing with foolish bartenders, we went to an Italian restaurant. We were going to go to a diner, but there was a line of people waiting for burgers and shakes, and I was in no mood to stand in line, stuck between one inane conversation and another. So we went to an Italian restaurant a block away. My date twirled her linguine expertly and fed me some, and I forked through my lasagna and fed her some, and we leaned over the table and kissed and then I leaned a little hard and my plate of lasagna fell off the table and shattered when the busboy gave me a dirty look and it got to the point where we had to leave quickly. I kissed her outside the restaurant to let her know it was just one of those things, one of those incidents that happen in a city where everybody is crowded too closely together. People aren’t supposed to be that close. I asked her if she wanted to get some dessert, but she said she wanted to catch a cab home.

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I think I kissed her just as she raised her hand to hail the first cab she saw and that’s when I tasted the blood. Then I was closing the door for her, very chivalrously, and waving goodbye. The kid is holding half dozen copies of the same newspaper section under his arm. Harpo is gesturing this way and that. The Asian man is fast walking. The kid comes over to me. “Do you know what time it is?” the kid says. When I’m not teaching I don’t wear a watch. Why should I? Why should I watch the minutes tick away? I turn my head and look at the subway clock and I tell the kid it’s 3 a.m. “Is that the right time?” he says. “Sure.” “Are you sure it’s the right time?” It’s a good question. I try to think if I’m sure. “I’m not sure,” I say. “Because you didn’t look sure,” he says and walks away. Harpo is looking at me. He smiles and then shakes his head slowly, mime-talk for you-don’t-know-what-the-hell-you’re-in-for. I don’t really care. If I wanted I could kick the mime’s gums in. My students are often lazy. They’ll wait until the last minute to write their essays even though I tell them, repeatedly, that the key to writing is revision, that every day you grow in some way, that the paper you wrote at night won’t look quite the same in the morning. Last time I was talking about revision, I told them that revising an essay was like picking up a woman at a bar. You get drunk and you pick up a beautiful woman, but like the cliché goes, when you wake sober you find out the beautiful woman isn’t beautiful at all, so you get out of bed with your cock hanging out, stinking like bourbon and pussy, and catch the first subway home. I got in trouble for that analogy. One of the students complained to the chair. Some of my

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students don’t do the reading and so when we’re discussing a story or poem they look at me, glazed-eyed, and sometimes I get angry about that. One time I got very angry and some of the students complained to the dean about me. It happened pretty recently. I know there must be a ton of papers in my mailbox. I know they must be piling up. I started giving them two papers to write per class. I thought that would force them to focus. Harpo is following the Asian man now, fast walking with exaggerated steps. He’s not as tall as the Asian man, so he looks especially ridiculous trying to keep up. When the Asian man stops, Harpo does a fake skid, smiles, and moves out of the way to let the Asian man start walking again. The dating duo is standing a safe distance from the platform’s edge. I’m sure they’ve heard the stories. It’s the same story over and over, and it happens periodically. Every once in a while someone gets pushed onto the subway tracks. On TV they always show some guy being taken away in handcuffs, and the guy always looks out of his mind. I always try to focus on the hands in the handcuffs, and the hands are always scuffed the way they get from being on the street, like the on-the-street hands of the kid who’s now at the far end of the subway platform, fishing around in the garbage can. So the news story breaks, and for about a week you notice how everybody in the subway is keeping a safe distance between themselves and the platform, and as soon as the sound of an approaching train starts vibrating off the iron girders everyone takes a step back. Better safe than sorry becomes the subway cliché. But after a week there are other news items, other crimes and crazy acts, and so people start to inch closer and closer and by the end of the month they’re practically kissing the train when it pulls in. But now it’s 3 a.m., or so the clock says. And there’s no need to rush onto the train to get a seat. And the dating duo is playing it safe. The girl is really holding onto the guy’s arm, as if with each passing second she feels more and more isolated.

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When my date got into the cab she seemed to be making a point not to look at me. It was a little annoying because we did have a good time. We had drinks. We had dinner. I don’t make much money and I eat a lot of cheap meals just so I’ll have enough left over in my wallet to be the big spender when I go out. These women invariably have better jobs than me, more lucrative professions than being an adjunct lecturer, hustling for classes every semester, running from one college to another, subways across town and uptown and downtown, to make ends meet. My stomach is growling on this 3 a.m. platform. I’m hungry. My feet are hurting. My hands are cold. I rub them together in my gloves. I feel like I’ve been standing here a long time. The woman I went out with has a job as an accountant in a big firm and she makes a big salary and she receives a big bonus and has a big Christmas party, and when Christmas comes around to the colleges where I work, I don’t even get a bottle of wine. All I get is a card from whatever chancellor happens to be in power at the college. A generic card, with raised letters, wishing me and mine a merry merry. I get annoyed at the “me and mine.” It’s just me. How could it be anything else but me when I’m making such measly wages? So I saved my money to take this woman out and she drank the drinks I bought her and ate the food I bought her and then she didn’t even look me in the eyes after I kissed her before she got in the cab. The guy breaks free from the girl’s viper grip and walks toward the edge of the platform to see if the train is coming. I could tell him it’s not. The tiles across the platform take on a light sheen when a train is coming, but you have to look very closely and you have to know what to look for. I don’t say anything. I just let the guy peer into the darkness, and I know it’s darkness because no trains are coming, there’s no sheen on the tiles. It’s not easy being a teacher. People think you have it made: all that vacation time and the young students you can fuck. But it’s not that easy.

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You have to be upbeat for every class you teach. You have to perform. You can’t hide in some office or cubicle. You can’t hide behind a computer or phone. You’re there, right there, in front of everyone and they can see if you’re off. They can sense it. If you slept poorly. If you stayed out too late. If you skimped on dinner. If you’re feeling down. It’s not easy. And the papers keep coming in, the same bad sentences over and over, turning pages over and over until it seems like a never-ending paper, with never-ending missing commas and incorrect semicolons and paragraphs that aren’t complete. They just don’t write complete fucking paragraphs no matter how much I tell them to revise their work, no matter how much I tell them that they change every day. Every day. And sometimes I think they’re lazy just to piss me off. They can tell when I’m pissed, something about how I slam my briefcase on the desk or snap the chalk against the blackboard from pressing too hard and they’re always watching me so I have to hold myself a certain way. I’m standing here, feet splayed, solid. Harpo walks over, stands next to me, and assumes the same position. I turn my head to look at him, and he turns his head to look at me. I turn my head away, and he turns his head away. I look back at him quickly, and he mirrors my move. He’s smiling a lunatic smile. I try to sense what my face looks like, if my lips are spread, if my teeth are showing. I look away, and he looks away. I stare straight ahead. There’s no one on the other side of the tracks. After a while, Harpo gets bored and moves away. The kid is going through the newspapers. The Asian man is pacing. The couple is standing a safe distance from the tracks. “Hey,” I say. My voice sounds flat in the station. It doesn’t echo the way you’d think it would. The steel and cement just suck up my sound. “Hey,” I say again just to test the flatness.

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The girl’s gloved hand tightens on the guy’s arm. I’ve always been able to project. You need to project in the classroom. The guy’s gloved hands tense into fists, but he’s not the kind to use his fists. “Hey, hey, hey,” I say. The both of them are pretending not to hear. The kid with the papers is coming over, and Harpo is coming over, and the Asian man has stopped walking because he’s at the point in his walk closest to me and he wants to see whatever there is to see. For some reason I don’t mind that they’re watching me. Actually, the fact that the couple isn’t watching me annoys me. If they were in my class I’d be very annoyed. But I’m not in class. I don’t have to perform. On this subway platform, I’m free. I can continue saying hey hey hey until I’m hoarse, until the cement and steel suck me dry, and it just won’t matter. “Hey you,” I say. “Where are you going?’ The guy looks at me. He knows I’m talking to him, but he looks like he can’t quite believe it’s me doing the talking. “Where are you going?” I say. “Downtown.” “How far downtown? What’s your last stop?” I always tell my students to be specific. If you give specific details, you’ll be far more persuasive. If you use concrete evidence, you’ll be able to make your point. “Around the Village.” “Around the Village or in the Village? What stop?” He doesn’t want to tell me. He doesn’t want to divulge too much information. He looks away, but I know he can’t see a thing. He certainly won’t be able to see the sheen on the tiles across the platform. I check the tiles. There’s no train coming. Not yet. “Hey,” I say.

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“Hey, hey, hey,” I say. They could just walk up those stairs and leave. They could just wave down a cab and take the safe route home. Maybe the guy walked into the station thinking he’d show the girl his mettle, but now that he sees the 3 a.m. crowd, maybe he should do an about-face. “Are you new to this city?” I say. “I’ve been here a while,” he says. “Like how long? How many years have you been here? I mean, exactly how long have you been here?” “What do you want?” he says. “Specifics. I want specifics. I want to know exactly how long you’ve been here and exactly where you’re going.” He doesn’t say anything. “Do you use commas correctly in your papers? Do you use correct semicolons? Do you put them in correctly? Do you? Do you? Hey, hey, hey.” He looks away. His hands in his gloves are scared fists. Her hands in her gloves are scared hands. I’m standing here, squared-up. I could walk over to them. I could ask him again, right in his face. I could walk over there with the kid with the newspapers following me and Harpo following him and the Asian man might even break away from his back-and-forths to join us. But I’m done asking questions. I’m done trying. I’m done. The sheen touches the tiles. And sure enough, a moment later there’s the sound of steel wheels against steel tracks, the subway coming in. The light grows, the first car passes, and the second and the third, and the cars slow and stop. The doors open and the couple walk in. If I’d closed the deal tonight, if I hadn’t liked her kiss, the blood on my lips, we could have been doing just that. Me and my date. Standing on the subway platform until the train came in. It feels like a long time ago. It feels like the date ended a long time ago. A day or two. Maybe even three.

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The subway doors close. The subway starts up and the cars pass, the third to last car and the second to last car and the last car, and the sound diminishes and it’s gone. The tiles lose their sheen. The rat comes out from under the third rail. I’ve heard subway rats are deaf. I’m standing here. The kid with the newspapers walks over. “They all throw away the same section,” he says. The kid is talking to me. “I should tell the paper about that. That would be useful information. They all throw away the same section of newspaper.” “Exactly,” I say. The kid offers me a paper. I take off my gloves so I can touch the pages. I look closely. The commas, the semicolons, the periods are all in place. I look at my gloves and then throw them onto the tracks. Harpo mimes the gesture, a big throwing motion. He lifts his head up to watch the gloves rising. He lowers his head to watch the gloves fall. He’s smiling. I look at my hands. “Hey,” I say. “Hey, hey,” the kid says “Hey, hey, hey.” The Asian man starts his fast-walk along the platform. The mime follows him, his legs too short to keep up. “3 a.m.,” I say. “Are you sure?” the kid says. “I’m not.” “I didn’t think so. I’m looking at my hands. My bare hands. My knuckles cold and starting to go red.

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Preparing for the Post-Apocalypse Howie Good

I have returned repeatedly to the beginning, where the night is still being tilled by insomniacs. Ideas come to me the same way they come to flowers, encountering the same bookcases without books, the same insults, the same anachronistic Soviet aesthetics, the same darkness in the same unknown. Grandma Gussie (my fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mother) lived her last 10 years groping for bowls and spoons in the ever-deepening gloom of glaucoma. A cart is bound to appear sooner or later to collect her body. Hundreds of us line the street in excited anticipation. A photographer, a black drape over his head, is setting up a shot. I have a question. Why does it have to be in focus?

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The Untapped Adam Fishbein

Until a few months ago, Gordon Morlock’s favorite activity was to walk home from work everyday. After hours of standing in a small office scanning documents, he enjoyed nothing more than stepping into the sunshine or clouds or wind—the particular weather or sights or sounds didn’t matter—and wandering from street to street, staring at storefronts and traffic signals and birds peeking out of trees. He never took a direct route to his apartment building. Each trek was fulfilling and unique. But one day, he was inspecting a bottle of barbeque sauce in a corner market when a man stopped him. “Any idea where the Nutella is?” the person asked, curly hair, wide eyes. “No, I don’t.” “Really? You’re not a fan?” He was wearing a green hoodie and loose, dark jeans. “Sorry?” “You’re not a fan of Nutella?” he repeated, his mouth slack, his eyes glazed. He had not yet blinked. “Oh, I don’t know. Not really.” Gordon looked away and reached out towards a can of olives. “Wow. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like Nutella. Unless they

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haven’t tried it.” “Sorry,” Gordon said. He grabbed the can of olives. “I have to go.” He rushed out of the aisle and purchased the olives at the register. Back outside, he took a deep breath. The man popped out again. “Oh hey,” he said. The wind flicked the drawstrings of his hoodie. “I should introduce myself. My name’s Tom.” He held out his hand, staring. Gordon squeezed the can of olives. “I—I really need to get going.” “But I’m new to the city. I feel like we have a connection.” Gordon tapped his toes. He didn’t feel a connection. He just wanted to leave. His body reacted for him: his arm reared back and flung the can of olives against a nearby lamppost. A loud clang. Tom looked towards the sound, and Gordon’s legs sprinted him away. *** The next day after work, Gordon had drifted into a dog park where he was gazing at the trees and sniffing at the grass, when Tom confronted him again. “Gordon,” he said. The same hoodie and jeans. “You forgot your olives.” “How…” The can of olives, dented on the rim, glimmered in Tom’s hand. “How do you know my name?” “It’s not important how,” he said. “It’s your name, right?” A pine needle hung off one of his curls. He shook the can. “I don’t want those. I just bought them yesterday as an excuse to leave.” Gordon stepped away. “And now I need to go again.” But his body jerked back. Tom was squeezing his shoulder. A small dog let out a high-pitched bark. “Let me go.”

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“Look.” He dropped the can onto the ground and it rolled away. “Let me tell you the truth. I’m not new to the city.” He let go. A leaf struck Gordon’s cheek. “I don’t understand.” “I’ll get right to the point,” he said. “That’s what you prefer, correct?” He stared in the direction of but not quite into Gordon’s eyes. “I’m a researcher for a digital media company. I’ve been studying you for the past couple of weeks. I now realize I should have initiated contact sooner.” “You—you’ve been following me?” “Collecting information, yes. But for harmless reasons, don’t worry. My company simply wants to learn more about people like you.” A tennis ball bounced off the olive can. “People like me?” “Yes. People who are off the grid. Who have no digital footprint. You don’t exist, you see, on the Internet.” Gordon’s heels sank into the grass. Had he done something wrong? He simply did not like computers or the Internet. That world didn’t interest him. “Am I in trouble?” “No, Gordon. Of course not. We simply want you to go online and establish an identity.” Gordon took a seat on a bench. A woman walked away with her corgi. “I already have an identity.” Tom joined. “I’m talking about an Internet identity. An expression of your physical self.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Why me?” “Good question,” he said. “In fact, there are many people like you. Mostly older or incapacitated, but other young healthy ones. Which surprises us. You represent our last untapped market.” “Untapped market?” Tom stood up and slid a black object out of the pocket of his hoodie.

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“Here.” It was a cell phone, the kind Gordon had seen many people tapping and staring at. His parents had given him a simpler version years ago, though he’d never used it. “We’re willing to give you this to try.” He shook his head. “I’m not interested.” “It won’t cost you anything, don’t worry. We’ve delivered a laptop to your apartment as well. Free trial. No pressure.” Gordon stood up. “Look, I appreciate the offer. But I don’t want to participate in your experiment. Please leave me alone.” Tom glared, the corners of his eyes creasing, on the precipice of a blink. “I guess that’s it then.” *** But of course it wasn’t. Gordon enjoyed two days of peace. Uninterrupted walks. Rain. Racing cyclists. A newfound vitamin store. Purple cloud formations. A trumpeter offering gambling tips on college football. Then, on Saturday afternoon, Gordon heard a knock at his door. Green hoodie, loose jeans, wide, lifeless eyes. “Sorry to bother you,” Tom said, his upper lip tensed in a snarl. Gordon shook his head. “I’m really too busy for this.” He’d been sitting on his couch, listening to an Irish folk record while sketching a picture of an old iron he’d found at a yard sale. “Doesn’t seem like it.” Tom stepped forward, his concave chest puffed out. “What do you want from me?” Gordon closed the door behind him. “I notice you haven’t opened your laptop.” He pointed to the cardboard box by the shoe rack. “Oh. I don’t want that. You can take it with you.” Tom trotted around the living room. Stopped at the record player.

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A burst of fiddle chords. He picked the needle off the vinyl. A mumbled screech. “Analog scum,” he said. He lifted the record and smashed it over his knee. “Wh—what are you doing?” Tom kicked at the record player. A crunch. Then kept moving. The iron. He picked it up. “Outdated shit.” He reared back and flung the hunk of metal against the wall. A thump and pop as the plaster cracked. Gordon attempted to shout, his hand outstretched, his feet unmoving. “What?” Tom yelled, stepping up to his face. “Are you mad? Why aren’t you doing anything?” He held up Gordon’s sketchpad and sparked his lighter near the corner. The paper burned. Tom stomped on it. Then roasted the pencil with his flame. Gordon squeezed his temples. “I’m calling the police.” “Oh yeah? With what phone?” Gordon’s mouth trembled. This man was crazy. He wanted to cry. Tom put away his lighter and yanked a phone out of his pocket, the same sleek black one. Gordon reached for it. Tom jerked it back. “So, now you want it?” he said. “Please.” He let out a deep breath and shook his head. “Gordon. Relax. I apologize. You don’t have to call the police. My company will replace everything.” Gordon stared down. “Why are you torturing me?” “Torturing? I’m just trying to jar some sense into you.” He raised his chin. “What’s wrong with the way I live?” Tom sighed, asked him to sit. “Let me show you something.” He brought the cardboard box to the couch. He ripped it open, dug out the packing foam, and removed a thin silver computer. He set it where the iron

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had stood a few minutes ago. “You’re missing out on a whole new world,” Tom said. The machine’s face grew bright. “All the information you can access. All the people you can connect with. And Gordon,” he said, lowering his pitch. “That’s not all. By withholding yourself, you’re also ruining your place in this world that you seem to cherish so much. Do you realize that?” Gordon rubbed his forehead. “I’m happy with my life.” Tom clicked at the computer. “Do you think people at work respect you?” “Respect me? I guess so. I’m a good worker.” He nodded. “Do you consider them friends?” “Sure, we’re friendly.” Tom squinted. “What if I told you that they hated you, that they were disgusted by you, afraid of you. That they thought you were weird and strange?” Gordon’s throat clucked. “That can’t be true.” Tom held up a finger and pecked at the computer with his other hand. He motioned for Gordon to look closer. There, on the screen, Gordon saw what was somehow a picture of him, many pictures of him. At the scanner, in the snack room, in the elevator. A picture of him bending down to tie his shoes, with stink lines drawn out of his backside. A picture of him eating lunch alone in the cafeteria, with a caption below that read, “Gordon, doesn’t even have imaginary friends.” One of him scanning documents in the dark—must have been the day when the light bulbs burnt out—that said, “We hid the extra light bulbs.” Cruel. Unbelievably cruel. And lastly, a moving picture, like a flipbook that repeated over and over again, images of him slipping, dropping, then tumbling down the stairs, his pants sliding past his knees as he fell. Gordon stood up from his couch, blinking away tears. “They couldn’t

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have—you must have made these.” Tom shook his head. The broken vinyl sparkled on the floor behind him. “Gordon, I didn’t, I’m sorry. They created a whole website about you. They knew you wouldn’t notice. I have the emails and text messages they send to each other as well,” he said. “They say terrible things. They think you could be the next mass shooter.” “But—” He dropped back into his couch. “I would never. I’m just quiet.” “Hey, I know that. But they don’t. And that’s my point. You have no online presence. So people assume you’re strange. Inhuman even.” Tears welled up. “Close the computer. I can’t hear any more of this.” “Gordon, I’m trying to help you. They are being mean. But it’s not without reason. You’re choosing to be strange.” All he’d ever been was polite and kind. “I didn’t ask for this.” He shook his head and slammed the computer shut. “You need to leave. Tell your company that I’m reporting them to the Better Business Bureau. And you too. What’s your information?” Tom’s glare widened with excitement. “My information? Of course.” He held out a business card. “But I think you’re just overwhelmed right now. Give yourself some time to calm down. Then call or email me if you need anything.” “Leave,” Gordon said. Tom nodded and let himself out. *** Alone, Gordon’s stomach burned. His shoulders pulsed. His lungs rattled. He wished he’d never met Tom. He wished he’d never seen those images of himself. How could his coworkers be so cruel? He sat on his couch and wept. When he was drained of tears, he stumbled around his living room.

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The record player was in shambles. His pencil was burned to a crisp. He should just go outside and enjoy the sun. But the laptop glowed on the table. The cell phone shimmered beside it. Maybe Tom was right. Maybe he’d brought the abuse upon himself. Maybe he was denying himself a better life. He opened up the computer and pushed his finger at the keypad, clicked open a browser, remembering what he was taught in middle school. The cursor blinked. The machine hummed. What was he supposed to do now? What did people find so interesting? He recalled a phrase that he’d heard mentioned at work, at the park, at the coffee shop: a face book, a book of faces, something like that. He typed the letters into a narrow box in the middle of the screen. A new page appeared with a list of information. “Facebook,” one word, was at the top of the list. So easy to find. His heart chirped. He searched for a few people to see if their faces would appear. Cousins, high school acquaintances, his coworkers. They were all there. Every name he searched for delivered the person he wanted. He tried his parents and even they were on here. He really was the only one. His body grew faint. After a few breaths, he signed up for a profile using an email account his teacher had assigned him fifteen years ago. Then the next few hours were a haze. After wandering around Facebook, he opened a tab for Google and found himself searching for answers to questions that he’d stored in the back of his mind for years—why do leaves turn red in the fall, when did Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, what is a kumquat, where was Scarlett Johansson born, who invented liquid soap. Questions occurred to him that he didn’t even know he’d wondered: How much revenue does NASCAR make every year? How many hours a night do dolphins sleep? He watched a video of a gerbil rolling in a litter box that

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had been viewed over seven million times. He sent a message on Facebook to a girl who he’d liked very much in high school but had been too shy to talk to other than to offer a piece of gum. His legs twitched. His eyes ached. Time had leaked away. But there was one more thing. One more tab. He typed two words into the search box: his first and last name. A burst of text and images. Other Gordon Morlocks came up first. He scrolled down. Then he stopped. There it was: the link to the website Tom had shown him earlier. He clicked it. The images. The jokes. The embarrassment. His naiveté. Why was he looking? Why did he care? He ripped away from the computer and slammed it shut. Useless. Soulless. The cell phone rang. Gordon swatted at it. It kept ringing. His mind raced. He carried the devices to the window and threw them to the ground. *** That night, he found it difficult to slow the pace of his thoughts. Why hadn’t he noticed them mocking him? Had his parents seen the website? Who won the 1999 World Series? He pushed at his eyes. I should defend myself. I should talk more. Who decided to mix milk with cereal? He swallowed a tablet of cold medicine to help him fall asleep. In the morning, he woke up calmer. He was able to stare at the newspaper. But after breakfast, there was a knock on the door. He tried to ignore it. “Open up,” Tom shouted, knocking louder. “I know you’re in there. Come on, buddy.” Gordon clenched his fists. “No,” he whispered. The door flung open. “Congratulations!” Tom announced. “We noticed you made a profile.” Gordon backed away, fists in front of his chest. “You’re breaking and entering.”

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“So what was the defining factor for initiating your web activity?” “Leave me alone.” His wide eyes twitched. “I’m confused. Didn’t you enjoy your experience?” “I like my life how it is.” Tom pulled out another phone from his hoodie pocket. “I took the liberty of creating accounts for you on Twitter and Tumblr and Instagram, as well as Snapchat. I think you’ll find yourself most fulfilled from a broad use of social media.” “I don’t want that,” Gordon said. “I don’t want to use any of these things. I like my life the way it is.” Tom’s gaze narrowed. His cheeks flushed red. “That’s not acceptable.” “Leave me alone.” He fell into his couch. Tom pushed his index finger at his ear and lifted his watch to his mouth. “Subject unresponsive,” he whispered. “Permission to proceed to phase D.” “Who are you talking to?” Gordon yelled. “I can hear you.” “Directive confirmed,” he whispered again to the watch. He looked up and blinked twice. His lips curled into a smile. “Gordon Morlock,” he said. He slid a silver gun-like object out of his pocket and grabbed Gordon’s shoulders, held the device to his neck. “This is for your own good.” A high-pitched pop. A pinch. *** The silver object, Tom explained after I regained consciousness, was not a gun but a delivery device for a liquid serum. He’d injected me, you see, with an experimental chemical cocktail intended to increase extroversion, sociability, and unrepressed self-externalization—or oversharing as some people call it. According to Tom, 22% of subjects experience full behavioral changes after two injections, 53% after four, and 79% after six. Those who

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do not show results after six doses continue to be unresponsive even with dozens more injections. Tom calls them the “lost ones.” For me, the serum worked the very first time. I’m one of only 9% to be so receptive. That evening, I already felt completely transformed. I utilized all the social media accounts Tom had set up for me. I detailed my interests and uploaded pictures that I took with my new phone. On my new laptop, I chatted with some old friends from high school and even connected with a few of my coworkers. Now I’m one of the most popular people at the office. I created my own set of captioned photos mocking myself, which everyone enjoyed. They welcomed me into the group. Now I’m the office’s top jokester and the life of the party at every happy hour. My tweets get hundreds of retweets and favorites. My Facebook statuses receive likes and comments from a wide variety of people. I’ve even had sex with four women who liked my photos on Instagram. And I kill at Tuesday Trivia Nights. Yes, I do feel sometimes that I’m missing out on something intangible. I no longer take long walks after work. It’s hard for me to grasp how I could have enjoyed them. All that time alone. All that time doing nothing. I walk quickly now. I never wander. When it rains, I take the bus. At night, in the dark, when I turn off my phone and close my laptop, I do feel an ache sometimes in my forehead. It’s not a completely unfamiliar feeling. This tension. I used to experience it in the opposite situation, when I was in the middle of a large group of people and tried to engage in the conversation but nothing I said came out the way I wanted. Like I couldn’t express my true self. Like what was inside of me was too complicated for words, or too strange for anyone else to understand. But I don’t take this discomfort too seriously now. I like the way I am. I like my life. I like barbeque sauce. I like olives. I tried Nutella the other day and that, let me tell you, I really really like.

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Through the Door Kiley Ladwig

They floated through the air, swirling and whirling around her head. She reached up and plucked the sentences from the sky, pulling them towards her ear so she could understand what the wind was saying. “Pretty, pretty flowers. Pretty, pretty meadows. Pretty, pretty world made just for me. Made just for me,” a soft, high-pitched child’s voice crooned. She cocked her head to the side, listening intently now. Before it had been a folly game, wanting to know what secrets the wind held outside this locked air door, but now her attention and imagination were captured, holding her mind steadfast in its whispery fingers. “Pretty, pretty lady. Pretty, pretty as can be. Pretty, pretty world made just for me. Made just for me,” she smiled, the rhyme sounded lovely, a pretty tune to behold the ears. “Pretty, pretty looking glass. Pretty, pretty watch it crash. Crash to the floor. Crash to the floor. It is no more. It is no more.” And just like that, the soft, high pitched child’s voice was ripped away from her as the wind grew angry and sped up around her, pulling and tugging at her favorite dress, yowling and screaming at her. A shiver of dread, of danger, of destruction, of evil ran through her, and she bolted, leaving behind her dollie as she worked against the wind

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that forced her back, towards the air door that was slowly swinging open. She was out of the current suddenly, and she ran. Never looking back. She was attempting to touch the sky, the ground racing beneath her. Her dollie was swinging with the motion of her body. She was singing a made up melody, bliss encasing her like the heaviness of a thick blanket, blocking troubles from her mind. Suddenly she stopped, looking around her. A door of heavy oak was resting against air, drawing her like a moth to a flame. A warm, fuzzy feeling washed over her, making her forget about past and present. The dominant emotion was curiosity, for we all know that it was curiosity that did kill the cat. She reached forward, laying her petite hand on the entrance metal and pushing slightly. It swung open with the absence of sound, gliding away from her touch. She walked through, her dollie hanging at her side, looking around with glassy eyes. It was beautiful. The colors were radiant, bright, vivid, stunning. Everything was begging to be touched, to be appreciated, to be loved. Flowers were painted with daring colors; the meadow that was surrounding her was colored with the prettiest gold she had ever seen in all of her seven years. She spotted a path that was a sky blue color dancing through the field on its way to a hidden destination, for it disappeared into a green abyss, not letting her see what in the name of goodness it led to. The trail beckoned her, whispering and spelling out her name in the dirt, telling her to come forth and follow it to wonders and dazzlements. Smiling, she started to skip again, following the trail as her seers roamed the rich land. Then she came to the forest, the atmosphere around her changing from beauty and amazement to wonder and delicious mystery. The path remained its blue color as it sped through. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Pretty, pretty flowers. Pretty, pretty meadows. Pretty, pretty world

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made just for me. Made just for me,” she sang, happiness radiating from her. “Snitches get stitches and wind up in ditches! Snitches get stitches and wind up in ditches!” a voice laughed, the sound swirling and whirling around her golden head. She stopped and looked around; the curiosity that we all know did kill the cat flaring up once more. “Hello?” she called to the still laughing voice. The laugh was highpitched and infectious. “Hello?” it mimicked. There was silence for two heartbeats before it laughed again. “Who’s there?” “Who’s there?” then something was right in front of her, hanging the wrong way up from a tree limb. Porcelain color was smeared all over the face; fire color circled the eyes, was painted on the lips, and dotted the nose. A water color star was on the left cheek. It was a messabout. “Are you a clown?” she asked, lightly poking the mark on his cheek. “Are you a fairy?” the clown asked, swinging down from the tall wooden structure. He tugged at her pink glitter wings. “No,” she giggled, swatting away the clowns hand. “I’m a human.” “Well, I’m not a fairy, so I must be a clown!” the clown cried, hopping up and down and clapping. A happy sound burst from her lips again. She put a hand up to her mouth to stifle the noise. “What is your name?” the little girl inquired, cocking her head to the side slightly. She gripped her dollie close to her core. “My name is Deemo! And what is yours?” the clown cried, whirling around then pointing at her heart. “My name is Isabella, but my friends and family call me Bella.” She answered, mimicking the clown’s jolly actions.

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“Well, Bella! Are you here to see the Queen?” he asked, placing his hands on his torso and adapting a serious look. His eyes squinted at her. The mess about tapped his hands together once more, smiling in glee. “Then come with me, Miss Bella! And I will show you to the Queen!” She nodded, following the clown as he started to march all the way through the forest. “Pretty, pretty flowers. Pretty, pretty meadows. Pretty, pretty world made just for me. Made just for me,” she sang, marching in the wake of the clown and looking around her. Soft, warm, fuzzy creatures lingered on the edges of the sky path, seeming to beam at her. She smiled back, pleasure shining once more from her very being. “The Queen has been wanting a daughter for a Princess, you know,” the clown stated as they romped. “Oh?” “Yes, and I think you would be the perfect Princess!” She giggled, the thought settling happily in her mind. Oh, how she would love to be a princess! The clown led her to the edge of the forest, where he pointed to a grand looking castle. “Follow the path till you get to the castle!” She nodded, wondering if the clown would follow her. He did not, melting back into the dark forest with a laugh. She began to walk again, humming her made up tune, thinking of words to add to it. She looked up and noticed that the sky was pink with light blue clouds. The flowers in the field around her were now pretty paper flowers, not like the ones in the field on the other side of the forest. She took no notice, however. The world around her was perfect, she reasoned. Why should silly things as the color of the sky or the feel of the flowers taint her thoughts of this world?

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When she reached the castle, she stopped walking to gaze at it with wonderment etched into her face. The castle was huge, pretty, amazing. With white stone and purple water racing around it, it was a fairy tale castle come to life. She walked across the bridge, breathing in the wonder and excitement that seemed to resonate from the very stone. Inside, there were an infinite number of people milling about, doing tricks and laughing and having a grand party. People smiled at her as she pushed through the crowd, intent on finding the Queen who she knew would be in her grand room. Someone pointed towards a closed door, and she nodded and smiled her thanks, running towards the place with her doll clutched tightly to her. She pushed the door open, walking in and taking in the sight around her. The Queen was beautiful, sitting on a throne made of yellow, sparkly rocks. “Pretty, pretty lady. Pretty, pretty as can be. Pretty, pretty world made just for me. Made just for me,” the little girl sang quietly, hovering in the doorway, waiting for the Queen to invite her in. “Come in dear! Come in!” the Queen proclaimed rather Queen like, waving with a fabriced arm and a wide smile. She did as she was told, sprinting into the room and halting right before the Queen’s throne. She bowed low, almost toppling to the ground. “What is your name, dear?” the Queen asked as she appraised her. “Bella, your majesty.” She replied to the floor. “Bella, please look up at me. You must always look at the Queen.” The Queen said, sounding stern but looking anything but. She nodded and looked up, taking in the grandeur of the Queen. “I think you will make a perfect princess!” the Queen proclaimed, causing the little girl to beam with happiness. “Just one thing. Princesses

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do not need to carry around dollies.” “But, I love my dollie.” She protested, hugging the dollie close to her, as if protecting it. “Princesses don’t have dollies.” The Queen repeated patiently. “So give me the dollie.” She reluctantly handed over the dollie. The Queen snatched it up with a wide, shiver-inducing grin. She threw it onto the ground, and it caught on fire. The little girl shook her head violently, tears streaming down her face as she watched her dollie burn. Light refracted off something as she did so, causing her attention to shift to a rather large mirror that was suspended in the air to her left. She walked towards it, curious. She looked into the mirror, thinking she would see her reflection. She didn’t, however. She saw herself, she did, but not as she was now. She saw herself pale, almost see through, staring at the air door with a grim expression. This frightened her. Without knowing what made her do so, she reached forward, placing a light finger on the glass. It fell, crashing to the floor. “Pretty, pretty looking glass. Pretty, pretty watch it crash. Crash to the floor, crash to the floor. It is no more, it is no more.” She sang quietly, not knowing what made her do so. The light around her darkened, and an outraged howl pierced through her thoughts. The little girl whipped her head at the sound, as saw the Queen, who was now standing up. Her face was twisted into a look of pure rage, and she was no longer beautiful. She was horrifyingly ugly, scary in every way possible. “You little wretch!” she screamed, pointing at the little girl. “Now you will be forever imprisoned in a terrifying world! Wouldn’t it have been nicer to be imprisoned in a beautiful world?!?”

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The little girl gasped in horror. She whirled around, sprinting for the door. “GET HER! SHE MUST NOT LEAVE!” She ran, ran through the crowd of scary people, people who moments before were laughing and partying with each other. They were now fighting; dark blood streaming from wounds and cruel laughs wringing through the air. Tears streamed faster down her face as she bolted through the courtyard. The castle was no longer white, but black, the water no longer purple but blood red. “Ugly, ugly meadows. Ugly, ugly flowers. Scary, scary world made just for you. Made just for you.” Her own voice swirled around her, but it was twisted, sounding jeering and mean. The little girl ran across the bridge, looking up at the sky and noticing it was the same color as the water, and the clouds where now a sickening mossy green. The paper flowers were on fire, and she dodged the flames that threatened to lick at her and burn her to a crisp. “Ugly, ugly lady. Ugly, ugly as can be. Scary, scary world made just for you. Made just for you.” She ran and ran, sprinting into the woods that no longer looked mysterious, but looked dangerous. The fuzzy creatures were now evil monsters, staring at her with beady, hungry red eyes. She heard the clown laugh, and looked above her, watching as the clown leaped to the ground, his make-up smeared and a deranged look in his eyes. She screamed in terror as the clown began to chase her around, laughing maniacally. “Come back, Princess!” it sneered, starting to foam at the mouth. She shook her head as she ran faster and faster, not looking back but looking in front of her to make sure she didn’t trip on anything. She burst out of the forest, the clown not able to follow her anymore.

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“Scary, scary looking glass. Scary, scary watch it crash. Crash to the floor, crash to the floor. You are no more, you are no more.” She fell to the ground, not able to move anymore. It was like she couldn’t breathe, like the air was being stolen out of her body. She watched in terror as the Queen flew down to her, riding on the back of a terrifying, unnamable beast. This was her last image before she died. The girls’ dollie lay on the floor where she had dropped it outside the air door, looking up with glassy painted eyes. The air door swung open slowly, and a ghostly head peeked out. She could not go more than a few feet from the door, but it was enough. The ghost girl bent forward and picked up the dollie, smiling as she caressed it in her arms. “Pretty, pretty meadows. Pretty, pretty flowers. Pretty, pretty world made just for me. Made just for me.” she crooned to the dollie, holding it tightly to her.

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CONTRIBUTORS. MARTIN E. DURKIN

from

would be glazed with honey.

Ontario, Canada. He likes to write pulp-poetry-noir. In the shower,

TRACEY KRISTEN PARKER is a

he sings “Emperor Penguin” by

fiction and creative non-fiction

The Tragically Hip, and he would

writer from Springfield, Missouri.

love to sing with The Arkells.

She would like to be a Charlie’s

Personified as a potato, he would

Angel, and would be a potato

be a baked potato to guarantee

cooked au gratin because she loves

himself some time on a sunny

cheese. If she could be any liquid,

beach.

she would be a cheap Pinot Grigio because “it’s my favorite wine,

ANA PRUNDARU was born in

and given my salary, I have to be

Romania and currently resides in

frugal. Also, I am a bit tart.”

Switzerland. She writes mostly poetry and literary fiction, but

MICHAEL ONOFREY lives in Los

enjoys delving into new terrain.

Angeles, California. He primarily

If she were a liquid, she would be

writes fiction, short stories, and

liquid oxygen because she likes to

novels focusing on realism. He

stir things up. She would rather

occasionally dabbles in fantasy

be the Spice Girls’ manager than

and nature pieces. He would like

a Spice Girl. When asked how

to be a Backstreet Boy because

she would be cooked if she were

he can imagine hanging out on

a potato, she answered that she

backstreets. He likes to sing Bob

Dylan’s “Just like Tom Thumb’s

Rimbaud (Finishing Line Press),

Blues” in the shower. If he were a

and

potato he would prefer to be tossed

Angelene). His work has recently

into a campfire and toasted.cuptae.

appeared in Bacopa, Carpathian

supergrooviness

(Lost

Health Resort, Poetry Ireland CAITLIN ANN MUNCH is from

Review, Cut-Thru Review, Dink

the “frozen tundra” of Northern

Mag, San Diego Poetry Annual,

Michigan. She loves to write

Synecdoche, San Francisco Peace

young adult romance stories and

and Hope, and Coup d’Etat.

hopes to publish a novel one day. If she were a potato, she would

MEGAN ANN MERCHANT is from

be cooked just like her grandma

Prescott, Arizona. She likes to

makes it: mashed, with cream

write poetry, which she feels fits

cheese, butter, milk, garlic, salt,

nicely into naptime. She would like

and pepper. If she were a liquid,

to try being a waffle fry for a bit,

she would be the ocean “because

and given the chance she would

the ocean is unpredictable. One

live in Stoneybrook, Connecticut

second it can be calm with soothing

because “then I could easily hire a

waves, and the next you can get

babysitter and take a nap.”

massive waves and hurricane-like winds. I think that’s a lot like my

ROBIN WYATT DUNN is from

personality,

but

Jackson, Wyoming and writes

regardless of the oceans’ status,

novels, novellas, science fiction,

it’s still beautiful and has a calming

poetry, surrealism, short stories,

effect on others.”

and short plays. The fictional

unpredictable,

society he would reside in: “I really MULROONEY

like Ursula K. Leguin’s Marxist

is the author of toy balloons

revolutionary planet in Four Ways

(Another

to Forgiveness.” Personified as

CHRISTOPHER

alarm

New

(Shirt

Calligraphy), Pocket

Press),

a liquid, Dunn would be an IPA

beer because it brings him closer

type of liquid he’d choose to be:

to God.

“Rye, because I like to think that I go down bitter, but then make

Kika Meeks Dorsey lives in

people happy and do things they

Boulder, Colorado, but grew up

normally wouldn’t do.” He would

in South Bend, Indiana. She has

live in the world of Animal Farm

a Ph.D. in comparative literature

so he could tell Boxer that there’s

and has written many essays,

got to be a better way.

although mostly writes poetry. Personified as a liquid, Dorsey

Ronald Eugene Burch Jr.

would be water because it is the

is from Columbus, Ohio and

giver of life. If she were a potato,

mainly writes flash fiction that

she would be roasted with olive oil,

are

lemon, and rosemary.

would jump into a Harlequin

mistaken

for

poems.

Romance if he could be the hero. from

When choosing between being a

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and does

Backstreet Boy or Spice Girl, he

urban writing. He has no time to

would be a Spice Boy in order to

sing in the shower because he is

meet the Spice Girls. When asked

thinking about his next adventure.

how he would be cooked if he were

Given the choice to be any

a potato: “Poked a couple times

fictional character: “Casper, he’s a

with a fork and then microwaved.

fast thinker, quick on his feet, loyal

You know, like life.”

Ray

Childress

friend, he has a hot girlfriend, and a true hustler.”

Lucie Claire Britsch is from Middle England, which is less from

Hobbitty than Middle Earth. Her

Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and

type of writing is done crouched

writes transgressive fiction and

on a stair with a worn out Biro.

literary fiction. When asked what

Given the choice, she would live

Gavin

Chapman

in Moominvalley and if she could

Lana Bella hails from Vietnam.

personify herself as a liquid she

If she could live in any fictional

would be “unicorn spit, because

society, she would live in “Blefuscu

people think they’re all sweetness

in Gulliver’s Travels because it’s a

and light but they spit, they swear,

land where everyone is tiny, as am

they’re bad ass.”

I.” If Lana could personify herself

as any type of liquid, she would be

Chelsea Ann Prentice is from

“melted wax. It’s the instantaneous

Gaithersburg, Maryland. If she

process of self-morphing from a

could personify herself as any

hardened solid form, to liquid then

type of liquid, she would be beer,

back to solid. That has always

“specifically

intrigued me.”

Guinness,

because

that way I could party with the Irish.” If she were a potato she

Adam Berlin resides in New

would be “baked in an effort to stay

York, New York, but if he could

healthy, but loaded with scallions

live in any fictional society, it

and cheese for good taste.”

would be “the New York City in

Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Like the Brian Michael Barbeito is

movie, the book felt technicolor

from Ontario, Canada. He doesn’t

and full of possibility, at least for

sing in the shower, but if he did

awhile.” Adam would rather be a

it would be a Tom Waits’ song.

Spice Girl than a Backstreet Boy

Between the Backstreet Boys or

because British pop seems more

the Spice Girls, Brian would be in

fun. And if he were a potato he

the band Human League, not in a

would be “french fried potaters,

singing role of course. If he were

Sling Blade-style.”

a potato he would be “cut up and fried with strange spices!”

William Blomstedt is from Gill,

Massachusetts

and

now

resides in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

His favorite song to sing in the

flammable.”

shower is “Meredith Monk Turtle Dreams.” Instead of a Backstreet

Parker

Boy or a Spice Girl, William would

Mesa,

rather be Barney.

welcome-to-anywhere

built on top of the desert like our

Lea Bridi is from Beckley, West

human brains extending from

Virginia

mammal and reptile ones.” If he

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. If she

were personified as any liquid,

could live in any fictional society,

he would choose “lysergic acid

she would live in The Giver because

diethylamide, poetically started

well defined roles are comforting

as an agent of the government

and romantic love is overrated.” If

not long before it was prying open

Lea were a liquid, she would be “all

the third eye of counterculture. I

natural grape juice: heart healthy,

would go with that.”

and

now

resides

Weston Arizona,

“a

concrete that

but annoyingly purple.” Alaina Janelle Symanovich Joy-Amy Wigman was born

is from State College, Pennsylvania.

in Kent, but now hails from

She likes to dabble in all genres of

Cheltenham. She likes to “write

writing, but she’s mostly drawn to

straight from the brain fudge.

creative nonfiction, starting her

I treat writing as an emotional

MFA at Florida State University

reaction to something, whether

this year. If she could personify

that is anger, love, or laughing my

herself as any liquid, she would

head off at a pug with a sandwich.”

pick Diet Coke. “I’ve consumed

If she could personify herself as

enough aspartame in my lifetime

any liquid: “I think I would be

to qualify for lab experiments.”

petrol. It keeps you on the move, if you look directly at it then you’ll see rainbows, but it’s also highly

Matthew

Patrick

Smith

has lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa,

“Backstreet Boy, no doubt. I just want it that way.”

Phoenix, Arizona, South Korea, and now resides in Portland,

Jessica Robinson resides in

Oregon. He prefers to write short

Thornhill, affectionately referred

fiction usually centering around

to as “The City Above Toronto.”

the mishaps and quirks of everyday

She writes page and stage poetry,

life,

along with nonfiction journalism

science fiction. If he could live in

to make a living. Her favorite song

any fictional society, he would live

to sing in the shower is “Circle

in a world where humans have

of Life” from The Lion King,

mastered interstellar travel. “I’d

complete with intro. If she were

hang out at one of those dingy

a potato, she would prefer to be

way-stations

“baked and fully loaded.”

occasionally

dabbling

where

intelligent

life from around the galaxy pass through. Strange food, drink,

Kelly Michelle Trammell is

potions,

ever-present

from Jackson, Michigan. She likes

possibility of getting pulled off on

to write down her thoughts and

some wild adventure.”

feelings in a way that is short to

and

the

write and read, so she prefers to Hailing from Richmond, Virginia, likes

fictional society, she would attend

because

Hogwarts after Voldemort was

“there’s just something fun about

defeated. “I could study and enjoy

desperate people in dangerous

the school without any outside

situations.” If he could personify

threats.” She is pretty certain

himself as any liquid, he’d “want to

that coffee runs through her veins

be a gin and tonic. No one says no

instead of blood, and if she were a

to a G&T on a warm, spring day.”

potato, she would be a chip so that

Backstreet Boy or Spice Girl?

she could be surrounded by her

Scott

Selden

writing

crime

mostly

write poetry. If she could live in any

stories

chip friends.

and likes to write fiction and the occasional poem for his wife (aww.)

Kiley Nicole Ladwig hails from

If he could live in any fictional

Jackson, Michigan and enjoys

society, he would choose Lewis

writing books. If she could, she’d

Carroll’s Wonderland, because it

want to live in The Wizarding

seems like it would be fun, as long

World of Harry Potter, because

as he didn’t have any run-ins with

“magic, yo.” She might have to

the queen.

find a new favorite song to sing in the shower, though, because we

James

don’t think witches and wizards

Plymouth,

know “Tough Lover” by Christina

enjoys writing a combination of

Aguilera.

magical realism and just plain ol’

Holbert

Massachusetts,

from and

realism. He hums the theme from Michael Lee Johnson is a poet

House of Cards in the shower, and

living in a northern suburb of

when he’s done with that, he runs

Chicago by way of Brazil, Indiana,

through all the Frank Underwood

and Canada. Johnson’s favorite

quotes he can remember until

song to sing in the shower changes

he’s squeaky clean. He likes to

daily, dependent on whether or

think he’s the only one who cleans

not he is wearing his dentures.

themselves to the various sounds

If he could personify himself

of political corruption. If he were

into any liquid, he would choose

a potato, he wouldn’t want to

“Mercury since it is liquid at room

be cooked at all. He’d rather be

temperatures, or rubbing alcohol

allowed to “live out my potato life

so I could burn inside the skin of

peacefully: get a potato job, pay

my enemies.”

potato taxes, and start a potato family. You know, potato things.”

Daniel Charles Kennard is from Ocean City, New Jersey,

Howie Good is a poet that lives

Cook, WC Fields, Tony Hancock

in Highland, New York, by way

and Stewart Lee.

of Michigan, North Carolina, and North Dakota. He’s a soulful

Lee Kisling is a poet from

guy who enjoys singing “I Heard

Hudson,

It Through the Grapevine” in

recently been dabbling in long

the shower, and would rather

prose/poem hybrids. He prefers to

be a Beatle than a Spice Girl or

sing “Botany Bay” by Bob Dylan

Backstreet Boy. If he would be any

in the shower, but he’ll break into

type of liquid, he would be wine—

“Falsetto Goodbye” by Danny

because almost everyone would

O’Keefe if no one’s around. If he

want a sip of him.

could personify himself as any

Wisconsin

who

has

liquid: “I’m tempted to say really Stephen Philip Druce is a

old holy water, abandoned in a

fifty year old comedy writer/

stone cathedral basement, but

poet

[I’m] not sure that’s wise.”

from

Shrewsbury

England. He is published with Bad Scents Of Humour Mag,

Janne Karlsson resides in

The

Linköping, Sweden. If he could

Inconsequential,

Hermes,

Bareback Literature,

be any type of liquid, his top three

Pulsar, Fade, The Screech Owl,

choices would be “Jägermeister,

Century

beer, and red wine (preferably

121,

Muse

Literary

Journal, and The Write Place

Californian

At The Right Time. His style

Because

of humour is quirky, surreal,

good.” Between the choices of

outrageous, and a little risqué. He

a Backstreet Boy or a Spice

writes humorous anecdotes, witty

Girl, Janne would rather be a

poems and sketches. His comedy

backstabbing,

heroes include - Groucho Marx,

alley cat. Janne’s favorite song

John Cleese, Alan Partridge, Peter

to sing in the shower is the same

they

Zinfadel).

Why?

taste

damn

bush-whacking

song he would like to be played at

Pamela Estelle Mack is from

his funeral: “Here I Go Again” by

Kansas City, Missouri and labels

Whitesnake.

her writing as “Descriptive Erotic Poetry.” If she could live in any

John D. Weaver is from Grand

fictional society: “It would be in

Ledge,

writes

the Sky Pad apartments where

poetry and short stories. Given

The Jetson’s reside because...it’s

the choice Weaver would live on

Futuristic with elaborate robots

DC comics’ Earth-2 because of

and whimsical inventions; plus

the characters representation of

a Spaceship would decrease my

a simpler time. In the shower he

travel time drastically.” Pamela

sings “Kung-Fu Fighting” and if

doesn’t take showers, only baths

he were a potato he would take on

and her favorite song to sing in the

the form of hash browns.

tub is “Rubber Duckie.”

Michigan

and

G. David Schwartz is the

Baltimore, Maryland, and likes

former president of Seed House,

to write literary fiction, humor

an on-line, interfaith community

pieces and some screenwriting.

forum. He has also published

Fishbein would live in the world

three books -

of The Truman Show as a “bit

Appraisal of Dialogue” (1994),

players--a

“Midrash and Working Out Of

Adam

Fishbein

mailman

lives

store

“A

Jewish

clerk--who would do his best to

The

make Truman’s life in Seahaven

recently “Shards and Stanzas”

feel real and authentic. Because

(2011). He is currently retired

there’s nothing better than good

and, besides writing, spends his

TV.” Given the choice of being

time volunteering with Meals On

a Backstreet Boy or Spice Girl?

Wheels America.

Spice Girl.

Book” (2004), and most

Submissions

Calling the zany, the weird, the thought provoking and the quirky...we want to read your writing! Here at The Offbeat, we cater to the bizarre and the whimsical. Send us quality writing that falls off the beaten path in an intriguing way! We accept fiction and non-fiction short stories (6000 words), graphic short stories (10 pages or less), and poetry (multiple submissions permissible, 10 pages or under total). Email submissions to offbeat@msu.edu. Deadline for submissions is January 10th.

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