Predictions

She longs to be my friend, she says

Christine Butterworth-McDermott

and invites me to dinner, a posh meal deal to solidify what is mere air between us. I see how she positions herself among the tines of the forks. This is battle. The way she speaks is the concave side of a spoon against a wine glass, a clang bang. Her smile, an ice cube that floats in water, but fails to sink in. The wheels in her brain churning up the right responses. All orchestration and arrangement, nothing organic, although the lilt of good people bless her heart masks judgment with flowers. This charade she plays eviscerates me, whatever goes outward is wounded and I fold inward like a napkin, hide my hands, expressive as they are, under the tablecloth as she drops names like breadcrumbs. She turns her faux-lashed eyes toward the waiter, and orders the chicken blah blah blah but with only a dollop of cream, it’s so fattening—a glance at my bare arms. I skipped the gym to come here and be flayed. I smile anyway. The waiter nods when I say martini (make it a double his eyebrow suggests). I want to escape with him, his white apron a buoy, bobbing to the open kitchen door in the back. Imagine a sashay in the parking lot. Imagine a rhumba to dumb down this incessant patter. Quick quick slow. This is only temporary I tell myself—this cadence of insults that goes up and up as she builds a house upon every four syllable word she’s ever learned, need and greed oscillating. At home later, I mix another drink, say the word fuck several times for pleasure, and imagine her stiff self on a twin bed, lonely doll, accessorized with blank achievements, flat stomach growling for sustenance and affection.

Predictions

Christine Butterworth-McDermott

In some cultures, a rune is marked with blood and thrown down like dice, to prophesize fate. It is also true that people in glass houses love throwing hard objects, despite risk of cutting themselves, spilling their own blood.

We must be careful what magic we practice, what heaven we intend for ourselves or anyone else. Some gods don’t have our best interests at heart. Let us be mindful of what is spilled or split, what broken mirrors shard into the eye, heart. Restoration flitters, arbitrary.

What are we but bits of pebble broken from a bag? What can be mortared back together is often unclear, for what is magic without kindness? How brave can we be when broken? This changes the meaning of divination. Once, my friend rolled over a hood

of a car, hit windshield, struck pavement—and did not lay still, but rose like some sort of human miracle to take the hand of the weeping driver and give the blessing of forgiveness. Believe me when I speak to you of the resilience of flesh and spirit. Here. Now.

Believe me when I speak to you of casting your own will to bury bad luck. You have the power to turn the runes once they’ve hurtled through your window. You have the power to arrange a new story out of thin air.

Night Thirst

Michael Lyle

so different from day’s glasses filled and drunk

lazy loathe to uncover wake the dog or other

just to drown a dream in coarse stale gulps

The Blur

M. A. Istvan Jr.

Just after you kissed her on the crimson beach and bared your heart with that intensity of dreaded-but-needed self-abandonment, she threw up into the sand, heaving hard and not wanting you to touch her or be near.

Her upheaval was “not from you,” but from saltwater swallowed after a rip-current scare. And yet she might associate—blur—that panic in her gut with you. And she might leave you as a result of such blurring.—Do not forget

our bestial nature. Things thus can change for the most irrelevant, trivial, of reasons. Not everyone is as high-powered in thought as you. For the sake of honoring diversity and preparing yourself for the “real world,”

remember that.—But also remember that you are finite, determinate. And so what seemed trivial and irrelevant to you, may—just may—have been more substantial, relevant, than even your mind could have gathered.

Never the best swimmer, water is not for her. What would her life have been with you, then? You love the sea, crave its borderless scene, the freckles and the bleaching from the sun. Here the sense of being a monad gives way.

Thirteen Angles on Hate

M. A. Istvan Jr.

Hated by one’s mother for good reason.

Trying to confirm that you are indeed hated, and that you do deserve death, with a suicide too gruesome for your loved ones to handle.

One pink slip given out by a tranny boss has a God-hates-trannies campaign carry on for a lifetime, and spread down generations.

What if your dislike for another is just a matter of his having features that you dislike that you have?

God hates Hard Shell Baptists who are overweight and pasty white.

How can those so warped by hatred love the same music and movies as us?

Sabotaging your dreams, hurting what you love, only to fuel some deep program of self-hate.

Smart people intrigued by hate groups and quack-science, Holocaust-AIDS-moon-landing deniers, because they fuel our deep down faith that man cannot make it.

9

We stay away from in-laws—sibling in-laws of our sex, in particular—because the sight of them exposes the absurdity of our gay hate.

10

His family abandons him, the loathsome illness too revolting to bear.

11

So many figures loved from history around whom so many would hate to be.

12

Reaching the level where people bother to hate you.

13

Doing something you hate with someone you love.