Tiel Aisha Ansari

A TRAVELER’S GUIDE TO THE WORLD OF DREAD by Tiel Aisha Ansari

It’s a desert but there’s a huge river running through it. The water is red and full of skeletal fish.

All the rocks have faces. But only when seen from the corner of your eye. When you look straight at them, they just look like rocks.

The city’s skyline looks like mismatched teeth framed in a diadem of lightning. Mostly it’s hidden by smoke. People here speak truth when they speak at all.

Don’t let anyone ask you to dance.

There’s a man here with stone skin and glass bones. His wife has no skin, but her bones are spring steel. They live in a house woven from shadows of trees they felled before the river turned red.

According to the law of this place, eating while standing is punishable by death. So is eating while sitting. The only safe way to eat is to let no-one see you.

In the market they sell baskets overflowing with nuts and bolts.

These people make what they call music by tapping wood against ceramic. Never ceramic against wood. That’s not music, they say: that’s just noise.

I thought I saw someone walking a giant vinegarroon on a lead, but it turned out to be a wall mural. When I looked again it was gone. This means the street should be safe to walk.

The only way out is through.

FISTS by Corey Farrenkopf

Jared’s goal was to fight everyone who had ever seen his girlfriend, Leah, naked. He started

with the delivering obstetrician. Then it was the two nurses that rinsed the blood and mucus off

her skin. Then it had to be mom and dad for logical reasons. After that it became more

difficult.

There were a handful of uncles and aunts who’d helped change Leah’s diapers, a cousin

or two, the kids from her first swimming lesson, the boy in her playgroup that accidentally

opened the bathroom stall after block time, the changing room attendant at that clothing store

in the mall, the hair and make-up volunteers from her high-school production of a Mid

Summer’ s Night Dream, the entire female roster from eighth grade gym class thanks to a

shower curtain mishap, Leah’s first boyfriend from freshman year (even though they hadn’t

gone all the way), her second boyfriend from junior year (with whom she had), and the seven

boyfriends stretching between number two and Jared.

He kept track of each fight, tallying wins and losses. He’d only been bested twice out of

the one-hundred-and-seventy-eight times he’d entered combat. The opposing side never joined

voluntarily. Sneak attacks were his preferred opener. A gruff voice inside his head told him he

had to keep going, tracing the list of all those who had seen his girlfriend naked without his

permission (that didn’t include Ray and Bill with whom he shared a set of nudes he’d

pressured Leah into sending), until his knuckles were split and he felt in control of the world

around him.

Even after they’d broken up, Jared continued to hunt those on his list, a stray uncle, a

childhood friend, the neighbor’s dog who didn’t understand the concept of privacy in relation

to outdoor showers. His rage built, knuckles hungry for new flesh, that ache shifting through

his shoulders, arthritis setting in. If he scored enough victories, she’d come back, he told

himself, she’d see his glory, her regained virginal status bought with his fists.

And isn’t that what she truly wanted?

Dignity won by a lover lost?

Leah had started to date a new quiet man who worked as a high school therapist. Leah had also

begun taking Muay Thai lessons. Her biceps had grown wiry, her thighs solid as stone. The

martial art favored leg strikes over elbows and fists. Jared only realized the first part of the

equation when he leapt from the bushes outside Leah’s latest apartment (which she moved to

because Jared stood on her last apartment’s porch, reciting his list and howling promises up to

her closed bedroom window each night).

A shin connected with forehead, then a forehead connected with concrete.

Leah wiped a line of sweat from her brow. “That was definitely worth fifty bucks a

month.”

The new boyfriend bent to pick up a piece of paper that had fallen from Jared’s pocket,

a list of name’s with his at the bottom.

“What’s up with this?” the new boyfriend asked as he and Leah walked up the

apartment steps.

“I always thought it was a combination of insecurity, an absence of positive childhood

role models, unspoken fears, and his difficulty holding an erection,” she replied.

“Should we call someone?” the new boyfriend asked when they were inside, the words

muffled through the door.

Jared lay beneath a streetlight, sidewalk concrete cold against his cheek.

Without his list, he felt naked, purposeless, his fists useless hunks of meat.

When the strobing lights of an ambulance flickered over his skin, Jared inclined his

face towards Leah’s front door, surprised she’d shown him such mercy.

She’d had her own list, one he’d never heard aloud, one he’d tried to ignore for years.

He fought to remember Leah’s words as the EMTs lifted him onto a stretcher. His mind

was muddy. The sensation of liquid sloshed within the folds of his brain. He tried to ask for a

pen and paper, but his tongue felt swollen, teeth shifted out of place.

The first responders shrugged in confusion, slamming the back doors into place.

Jared had always struggled to express himself articulately, even without a broken jaw.

TO MOVE ON, THE DEAD MUST FIRST BE MISSED by Yue Chen

I’ve repined too long in the underbelly of the dark. I crawl into the light and drink of the hard cold. It is not yet January, and so I will not begin again. Instead, I count the leaves left on stubborn old oaks, the pines christening slopes of spurious snow. It is not cold enough yet. December is a time for burial. I dig a grave shallow enough to watch a fawn lose its spots. It tests my mettle in curious clouds of breath, wet & warm, silken nose touching to mine. That itself may be reason enough. Tomorrow, I may try again. Today, I may give in. I have always wondered who might come alive, perhaps into a grove of violets, or a violent burst of birdsong, should I choose to die. Yesterday, I already let myself abate into silt, soft beneath a tender crust, lingering for another chance.

AND THE FORECAST IS RAIN, RAIN, AND MORE RAIN by Christian Ward

The morning's pyjama weather makes you want to put a warm onesie on your to-do list, give it a hot water bottle and put it to bed. Not you walking across Vauxhall Bridge while the Thames is the colour of weak tea, tea not steeped like you half awake, out early to fetch IKEA blinds for someone who won't even notice the cyclists trying to outrun the seagulls bringing winter on their wings.