X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

DISPATCHES…FROM THE NALTREX-ZONE by James McAdams

May 30, 2020 · Fiction

Sadonna was always my last visit that summer before she died.

At Derek Jeter Rehab Center-Delray, we dispensed meds between 1900 and 2100. I’d start with the early sleepers at the sober house on 999 Swinton, then swoosh on Freaky Fred’s moped through the back alleys and garbage docks behind the strip mall to the sober houses on 9th and 10th streets, between the head shops and the Amscot. I dispensed Suboxone, SSRIs, SNRIs, B-Vitamins, and retrovirals for the former needle users. On a PRN basis, I distributed: hemorrhoid cream, Midol, hydrocortisone, aloe vera for suntan relief, dimethicone for chapped lips, and Immodium A-D.

We didn’t all take this route. Abdaliz drove the facility Astrovan the other way on Swinton to her complex, Sea Oak, on the fake lake with the sad ducks. She’d put her babygirl to bed and then get high and grub McDonald’s with her cousins.

Freaky Fred hit the NA/AA circuits in Delray to recruit new clients. He had business cards with QR codes, fake sobriety chips, addiction stories stolen from Reddit or Discord. He gushed about finding sobriety at Derek Jeter-Delray. He’d normally return with one or two new clients a week. We secretly called them “Coins,” as in cryptocurrency, untraceable cash. We split $5,000 between us for each client, Abdaliz, me, and Freaky Fred; the rest went to our employer, a Big Pharma consortium that owned hundreds of sober houses across Florida and Arizona and got rich on unregulated urine tests, patient brokering, and what one Florida congressman called the “lethal cycle of intentional failure.”

Those were the good days. They’d chain-smoke under the carport where everyone watched COPS while we verified their insurance. Whenever we brought in someone new, we had to kick out someone old. That’s math. When he recruited Sadonna, it was my responsibility to get rid of Tara.

Sadonna sat lotus-positioned on a deflated air mattress stricken with claw marks when I finally came in at 2105, finished for the day. Always. It was her time to meditate, which involved listening to old Howard Stern in the background. She’d moved into the vacant room after Tara’s overdose.

“Best thing about the air mattress is you can balance your phone on the creases to watch stuff,” she explained, blinking her eyes and flinging her wrists around. She was trying to be positive.

We sat on the mattress together as I got out her EZ-pack and whatever fast food I’d picked up on the way. She identified her meds and signed her initials, a forensic S K, and then we made out for a while until our hips and elbows speared the floor through the flat mattress. We always just fooled around like middle school, even though we were both almost 40.

I balanced a plastic table over the deflated mattress as she separated the burritos, rice, and Mountain Dew from plastic containers into two bowls, two plates, and two glasses, which she called her “good China.” We gripped plastic utensils stolen from Taco Hell. I closed the windows against the sound of people kicking vending machines and ravaged calls for Naltrexone! Naltrexone!

“What did you learn about yourself today?” I asked. I was joking, she knew, but it was also a part of the script, which I later figured out she knew as well. The routine was an important part of our relationship.

“I learned what you did to the girl here before me.”

Sadonna and I still talk even in here, the private prison operated by the GEO group. They busted me as the first violator of Florida Bill 807, which criminalizes patient brokering, in addition to more obvious charges like manslaughter, pharmaceutical fraud, and online solicitation. Body Brokers, Zombie Hunters, Junkie Flunkies, Naltrex-Heads: whatever you call us, the other inmates despise us. Therefore, I stay inside my cell 24/7 reading memoirs Sadonna scans into my brain—Herr’s Dispatches, Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Karr’s The Art of Memoir—to prepare me to write my confessions about The Florida Shuffle, so her death will have meaning, she says.

She hovers in the corner of my cell, still wearing the It’s Always Sunny in Philly hoodie she overdosed in. Just like old times, she asks: “What did you learn today, honey?”

“Mary Karr says good memoirs are vivid and detail-driven.” I notice I project my voice toward her hovering form.

“I miss details, everything’s so blurry when you’re dead,” she rues, looking down at me not with love but something like a new emotion.

We just look at each other until I ask what’s the matter.

“You still haven’t confessed,” she reminds me.

And I say, like I always do: “I’m afraid if I do you’ll never come back.”

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BOLD NEW ‘DO by James R. Gapinski

May 29, 2020 · Fiction

The hairdresser takes too much off the top. Whoops, sorry! she says, holding out a piece of scalp for me to see. I take the little hand-mirror and inspect the damage. A swath of skin pulls away from my brow and wraps around, like a halo. I take the scissors and plunge it into the hairdresser’s leg. Whoops, sorry! I say. She laughs and smears the blood around her leg. It’s red and vibrant. She is liquid inside. There is a glossy sheen brighter than the brightest no-smudge, stay-on, fire-engine-red lipstick. The hairdresser smiles and says I think we should go for it. Just take the rest off. Make a statement. Be bold. Bold. Bold! She keeps repeating her mantra, ripped off the cover of those magazines in the lounge area—everything is billed as bold and new, but I think this is the first time a stylist has meant it. Bold!

She slices away more scalp, and she pulls on my earlobes like she’s popping open an aluminum can. She peels and yanks downward. Between cuts, she works on herself. She plunges the scissors deeper into her leg and draws the blade away from its origin point. She goes back to work on my neck. Then she uses the electric trimmer, whittling down my shoulders. She turns the trimmers on herself, chipping into her clavicles. She takes away a piece of my lip. What do you think? she asks. In the little hand-mirror, I see my teeth through translucent bits of leftover skin. I smile, and I’m amazed how white they look in this lighting, like I’ve just returned from the dentist. More! I say. Be bold!

The hairdresser retrieves a paper slicer from the back office for more expeditious work. She chops off anything that has the slightest elasticity to it. She chops and chops until there is nothing but the hardest muscles and cartilage. I think I see bone. A woman sitting across the room says I’ll have what she’s having and thinks its clever.

The hairdresser sits me in front of the salon’s largest mirror for last-looks. The hairdresser takes pictures for her style-portfolio-thingy. She says this will become a hot new craze, and she wants photographic evidence that she thought of it first. She Tweets and posts on Facebook. My phone lights up. I think we’re already trending.

I inspect the polish on my reddened insides, the fullness of the color. I look at the hairdresser as she continues to snap photos. She is the same. She is slick with blood too. Her bones ache between the barely visible layers of flesh that remain. I feel like I’ve seen her before. I think she is my sister, though I cannot be sure.

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AN ALLEGORY by Dan Crawley

May 28, 2020 · Fiction

Take your brother to the orange grove, and do not let your friends throw rotten fruit at his head, or any other part of his body. Take your brother to Stop-N-Go, and do not spend these dimes on anything else but candy bars for you and him. Take your brother up to bed, and do not hide in the closet and scare him. Take your brother outside to play street football, and do not let your friends tackle him on the asphalt. Take your brother to school, and do not let him gawk and gag at all the dog poop on the lawns. And if he does, please, please, this time do not let him go into his classroom with the front of his shirt covered in his own spew.

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¿CÓMO ESTÁ TU MADRE? by Phebe Jewell

May 24, 2020 · Fiction

Every morning Mom digs in the garden plot behind our house, dressed in a faded red shirt and ripped jeans. She refuses to wear black. “I’m done mourning,” she says. “I’ve been grieving since the day he enlisted.”

Kneeling in the dirt, Mom turns the soil with a hand spade. It’s a small plot, maybe five by seven. She says she’s putting it to bed for the winter. No cover crop seeds yet, so there’s nothing to bury, just dark loamy soil she churns and churns.

She’s still there in the afternoon when I open my Spanish workbook at the kitchen table, trying to remember the difference between estar and ser. My book tells me one expresses temporary feelings, the other, permanent being. What does that mean? I look out the window. Mom wipes mud from her face before plunging the tip of the spade back into the dirt. I stare down at the page and answer the question ¿Cómo está tu madre hoy? (How is your mother today?) with Ella está triste (She is sad). I leave the question ¿Y tu hermano? (And your brother?) blank.

Dad starts dinner, pulling out an onion from the pantry. When we were little, Mom used to entertain us by tugging on swim goggles before cutting onions, transformed into a bulging-eyed alien, a human-sized fly. Dad dices the onion at the counter, tears streaming down his unprotected face.

When dinner is ready I go out back to get Mom. Even in afternoon rain, the plot looks like the same mound of dark earth as this morning and the day before and the day before that.

Mom shivers at the table, a damp towel around her shoulders while Dad coaxes her into taking small bites. They face each other knee to knee. “Open up.” He guides the spoon toward her mouth like when I was little. Once in a while her mouth goes slack and food streams from her mouth. He wipes her face with a dishcloth before repeating “Open up,” his voice a hand cupped under the spoon. ¿Cómo está tu padre? (How is your father?). Él está cansado. (He is tired). “Good job,” Dad says as the spoon slips between her open lips.

After dinner Mom gets ready for bed, and I fill the sink with warm soapy water. Dad says spring will come, and Mom will get better, but scrubbing the pan, I know she’s not coming back. Setting the last bowl in the drainer to dry, I sit back at the table and take out my homework. I erase Ella está triste and write Ella es triste, sure my homework will be handed back with a red circle isolating es and a note to review the difference between feeling and being.

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A TRANSVERSE PROGRESSION by Alyssa Jordan

May 23, 2020 · Fiction

iv. Late one night, Fred acted on a whim. She reached out to the one friend who still took her calls.

Together they stood, poised on a street corner with coffee cups in hand. The Friend was tall and blonde and intrigued. Red lipstick lined her mouth, wet like a bloody smear. She held a cigarette in her other hand, taking demure drags that did nothing to distract Fred from the pink smoke that curled around her shoulders.

“How about them?” The Friend asked.

When she squinted at the couple heading toward the bus stop, Fred was met with a charged, acrid tangle of color. The varying shades of yellow and green made her recoil.

“Something about green…it doesn’t feel right.”

Fred shifted her weight back and forth. She still wasn’t sure why The Friend had taken this turn of events so well.

“What does mine look like?” The Friend asked.

“It’s very pink.”

“Oh, good. I always liked pink,” The Friend said and took another drag.

ii. One day, Fred drowned. She coughed up an entire ocean after a woman cracked her ribs and convinced her heart to beat again.

When Fred opened her eyes, she was met with a curious sight.

Dense fog hung around the woman’s face. It carried at least a dozen shades of blue, the kind Fred wanted to pet and touch. Strangest of all was the grey film that masked her hair. It encased each strand like a second skin.

Back then, she hadn’t known what that meant.

iii. Fred stayed indoors for the first few months. She was still coming to terms with drowning. And, if Fred was being honest with herself, she had been holding out hope that the woman was a fluke. The lack of oxygen could have scrambled her brain.

A walk to the corner store proved her wrong. She felt as if she saw the world through the bizarre lens of a kaleidoscope.

After a while, Fred came to understand that everyone was different. Some people had dim auras, like reedy threads of smoke, or diffused splotches of fog. Others seemed to fill up the space around them, struck by saturated colors that burst behind her eyes, keeping Fred bedridden for days at a time.

She decided to buy an old T-bird. The rusty hood and layers of decomposing trash were the least of her problems. It got her from one highway to the next, and that was all that mattered.

Fred spent her days driving, constantly heading toward the water, and late at night she would return to her apartment, avoiding people at all costs.

v. “Why not face this head on?” The Friend asked after another day riding highways. Her roommate waved Fred inside with a toss of his head and a faint bluish-glow that made her shiver.

“Clearly running isn’t working. You still have the headaches, don’t you?”

When she nodded, The Friend smiled knowingly. “So stop running and face it. Do your worst.”

vi. At the height of summer, Fred drove to a different beach every week. Miles of crowded seashore motivated her. In the water, a chill would cut to her bone; then, a telltale burn swelled in her lungs.

She always swam closer to shore.

Once she was in view, Fred would jerk her arms and inhale the sea. From below, it looked as if sun-shaped flowers danced along the surface, which were so pretty she almost regretted disturbing them.

Fred drowned three more times before The Friend followed her. Cigarette in hand, shrouded in pink, she took a drag as the latest good Samaritan pumped Fred’s chest. Her fluttery rib cage bruised in shades of sunrise.

“It’s still there.”

Fred wanted to say that after she opened her eyes. Instead, water shot from her mouth in great, hacking coughs. The Samaritan—a man this time—lunged to flip her over. Powder-blue wisps clung to his arms, his hips. On the delicate arch of his foot, gold sizzled like hot oil.

“Dry drowning is a thing, you know.” The Friend peeked over the man’s shoulder. Her silhouette blotted out the sun. She tapped a cigarette against her sparkly phone case. “Wikipedia says people confuse it with secondary drowning. That’s a thing, too.”

Trying to talk just made her cough harder. Fred gestured from herself to the man.

The Friend sighed. “This isn’t what I meant.”

When the man reared back, staring at her in disbelief, The Friend only smiled. She flicked her cigarette into a gust of salty wind.

vii. Fred’s car broke down in July. More than once, she boarded the bus soaking wet, dribbling seawater onto the floor (her jeans were never the same). She must have looked extra pitiful in gritty denim—the bus driver usually let her stay.

In August, a nasty cough took root. The Friend tutted about Wikipedia entries every time she joined Fred. Sometimes, she smoked; sometimes, she sucked down margaritas with tobacco-stained fingers, spilling lime and tequila in the sand.

Fred always noticed after a near-drowning. She spent a lot of time in the sand, too.

viii. On the best days, a dull throb bloomed behind her eyelids. She tried to enact her near-drownings more and more often. It would work, eventually. Everything would go back to the way it was.

“Want one?”

A middle-aged man held out an orange. He unearthed another from his weathered saddlebag. Over his head, buttermilk clouds pulsed with murky green. Fred wanted to close her eyes.

“No, thanks.”

“You sure?” Smiling, he shook the saddlebag. Green tendrils began to grow over his arms.

She laid her head against the window.

ix. In autumn, the man from the bus saved Fred’s life.

She had waited too long beneath the current. By the time she surfaced and flailed, few people remained on the beach. Even fewer left their towels or plastic chairs. As the sea filled her mouth, Fred vaguely wondered if someone would call the police.

Water rose over her head. For a moment, she plunged beneath the waves, slipping into the cool calm as her body sunk. A sense of longing dragged her down, down, down.

When Fred opened her eyes, she was lying on the beach. Water expelled from her aching lungs. The violent, rhythmic motions surged, storming her body. Green flickered in Fred’s peripheral vision. It strung the man’s neck like a noose. Inside his bag of oranges, the dancing flamingos on her wallet swayed with every step.

She limped to the nearest pay phone. Around her, people milled through narrow, winding roads, veiled under shrouds of pink and green and gold. Occasionally, purple or blue would split the churning haze.

It felt as if a tiny heart thumped in her skull.

Palming some coins from the gutter, Fred leaned against the payphone and stared at her reflection. In the blurry metal, bloodless fingers touched her face. A nearby store window showed the same girl.

“You did it again.” The Friend said after she answered her phone. It sounded more like a sigh. “Why do you keep doing this?”

Fred looked away from the window. “I’m trying to put things back. Like they were before.”

“Oh, babe.”

She could easily picture her lighting a cigarette, heedless of the pink wisps trailing her every move, settling on the wing of her shoulder blade. They were like a wound no one else could see.

“You know,” The Friend said. “Some things are more beautiful after breaking.”

i. One day, Fred stood at the edge of the ocean. Waves skinned the top of her feet for hours. They sunk after each press of the water, tingling from lack of movement. Soon they were no longer visible to the naked eye.

With every year, Fred thought she disappeared a little more.

She remembered loving sun flowers and 80s movies and swimming at night. Back then, she had been so proud of the medals she won. The degree hanging in her mother’s kitchen. The missions she completed.

These things now boiled down to a checklist in her head.

Fred kept reaching further back in time. She tried to assume who she was at 30, 25, or even 20, only to realize those women were already gone. All that remained was the distinct impression of earlier years.

Most of her summers had been spent in the ocean. Fred could still feel her mother’s hands on her back, large and steady as they kept her afloat. So many times they had returned so she could learn the mechanics of swimming. When to push and pull. How to tread water or drop deeper.

Every time she went under, Fred felt okay again. Like she was weightless, her arms outstretched, legs gently pumping, safe and whole in the dark.

Fred bent to gather stones for her pockets. This time, she needed to be heavy.

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SALT IN THE BODY by Kelsey Ipsen

May 22, 2020 · Fiction

Ghosts do not come to me because I grew up by the ocean and my body is still full of salt.

Girl; all limbs, all eyes and sudden fearlessness, dared the waves to become bigger and they did. And of course she was sucked under, tossed about, close enough to death. Of course she was rag-doll, rag-doll, rag-doll. Remember when your body was your body but now it is not. The feeling is like this. I know my body is other things, is waves, is salt. Is once a house/a host/a body with another body’s cells in it. The other body’s cells are still inside me, touching my own cells, and we will be like this forever. An adult body contains 250g of salt meaning I am a walking mix of salt and you. Meaning I was right all along while I was under the waves thinking this is it, thinking this is what I really am. Women understand that ownership of the body is an untruth. I think men only discover this when they are dying.

If I have one piece of advice it is this: if you have not yet learned to be terrified of the ocean you should learn to be terrified of the ocean.

I have heard a needle inside me break through to water like an explosion. I have heard shells chaotic over each other as the ocean breathes out. We are all crashing against each other. We are all life trapped in flesh gods trying. We are only meant to be born screaming. I only wanted your loudest sound.

Noises in the night can be explained away by morning, but the depths of the ocean will just swallow you whole.

Whispers in my ear are not spiritual phenomena, they are voices from me telling me something I don’t want to hear but need to hear: Don’t forget to breathe. Don’t forget the shape of your abdomen, duneless. Don’t forget the length of arms, you can use them to reach in, to grab someone out of the waves, to make someone bird—forever sky, never drowning.

The depths of the ocean, when explained, are still uninhabitable.

I cannot follow you if you do not scream, baby. Scream. Small kicks can’t sound louder than this. You only ever heard me. You only ever heard me from under water.

Ghosts, when explained, will let the water flow right through them.

I am the ocean and you are the ghost. I am still here without you here. I want to know how to breathe when I can’t breathe. I need to know that the salt in my body will surface me. I need to know that the next wave makes sound. I need to know that the next wave makes something other than this.

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A GROCERY LIST FOR A SAND DUNE by K Chiucarello

May 20, 2020 · Fiction

The grains could never contain me.

I had always been a shape-shifting blurry little thing packed tall behind foundation slabs, their windows blown out with the shutters ringing loose, paint chipping off the front tooth. When the coastline birthed me, I was a miracle of wonder: pretty as a Cadillac slicked straight, my mother said. Daughters of the fishermen ran atop me, ribbons rippling in the breeze, pairs of feet driving down towards my candied belly, full of a momentum that had me wanting the snow. I explained by long way of lecture to the hills what it was like to direct spoonfuls of yourself into the hands of others. There was a neighboring boy I had liked and we traded weather forecasts as pendants of desire. Wind high today, flood lines low tomorrow.

One evening, with all the stars dipped neatly above us, I called my boy over and he came to lay with me. My mother made us chocolate covered strawberries and we barricaded the fruit between our bodies. I slowly confessed to his ear, thigh over thigh, my long-game: I had wanted to be a mountain and I would stop at nothing to become so. I knew there were steps I needed to take to present as a mountain and so I hardened my insides blackening them to licorice. I draped my body on ice, hoping it would freeze over or melt down. It wasn’t until I swallowed a house whole did anyone pause to consider that maybe my consumption lay beyond my spit.

The house I came to first held me spellbound. I lowered myself over its roof, loosening my hands around giving door-frames of wood and rotting glossed varnish. I ravished a bathtub clean in one audacious gulp and next made my way over to the pillars on the front porch that echoed onto the beached landscape. There I would sit for a week or two or three months or nine, hoping my hunger would diminish. I swam laps in my appetite for destruction, reclining, sipping its cherry taste through a straw, my lips tender as foie gras in the summertime. Soft uniforms of breeze had whipped me into a devotion that only the birds now could see, a feeding frenzy gone absolutely rogue.

The townspeople became fascinated with me. Newspaper headlines read I was a virgin daiquiri, all cream, no bite, stretching itself half-baked out in the cracks of walls. That was the last dare I took.

I spilled my way into the next thirty-seven homes rowed up pretty as pigs in a glass showcase, butcher hooks still drooling crooked off of my mouth. I choked down gardens filled with kale, celery, radishes, heirloom tomatoes. I swallowed one girl in my path simply because she had been there and I had little time to spare before someone would catch up with me. The village began to protest, construction workers bulldozing forks blunt into my ambered sides, the mayor frantically binding my chest. I tested this suffocation and stilled, taking time to do up my hair, pinning wisps out of my face. On the fourth day of silence I bubbled through twice as tight, yeast toppling pyramids onto each other.

Everyone evacuated. My mother and the boy ran parallel to me, adjusting themselves in a mirror of rupture. I had no more houses in sight. I stood there plush in the shadow of myself, a town buried under scoops of thawing sweetness. I had done it; I had become my mountain. Once in a blue moon I ruminated on what I needed to do there to get here, on things that needed to capsize for me to stand erect. I took a bottle of port to wash it all down.

It wasn’t until the liquid reached my toes did I feel a shifting beneath me,

a hot magma afterglow for thought.

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SING TO ME THE ONE ABOUT THE RIGHTEOUS EMBRACE OF THE INEFFABLE by Pat Foran

May 19, 2020 · Fiction

Something

My name is Phineas and if I can get the pose right, a photograph of me will appear in the 1979-80 Ridgid Tools Two-Year wall calendar.

In a two-piece and six-inch heels, I am holding a No. 930 1/2-inch D-Handle Reversing Drill like it’s a semi-automatic weapon.

“I need a little more…something, Phineas,” the photographer said. “A little more serendipity, a little more world-weariness. Show me a righteous embrace of the ineffable. And a little more gam.”

***

Level

We were fixing up a place that needed fixing up. We were going to live there. Her parents were helping, although it was more like I was helping and they were fixing.

“Can you hand me that level?” her dad said.

“What’s a level?” I said.

***

Someday

It’s the voice on the radio, the voice from the moon. The one that sings about someday and orders the Tour of Italy at Olive Garden. The one you listen for when you’re cold. The one that holds your hand.

***

Beaming

I turned to watch her walking down the aisle.

I saw her mother, dressed in fuchsia, freaking a little and fumbling with plastic aisle markers that were melting in the 95-degree heat.

I saw her grandmother, who also was dressed in fuchsia or maybe off-fuchsia.

I saw her father. He was dressed in black. Her father was a practical man, a provider man, a good man. In many ways, a man I was nothing like.

There was a tap on my shoulder and turned to face the tap. Red-faced in the sun, pregnant out to here and presumably miserable, the judge was smiling. Beaming. “Hot enough for you?” she asked.

***

Everything

I’d written the lyrics for “I Just Want To Be Your Everything,” a big hit for Andy Gibb back in the day, and I’d been invited to serve on a panel at a songwriters convention in Kennebunkport, Maine.

During the Q&A, a young girl asked: “What does ‘Everything’ mean—or, more to the point, what did you intend for it to mean when you wrote this song?”

I waxed on the nature of that which is and the vastness of the all, citing instances in popular music within which this is-ness manifested in one individual seeing the is and the all in another individual—witness “You Are Everything (and Everything Is You),” the fabulous Stylistics record. There’s “Everything Is Archie,” perhaps the finest example of a paean to pantheism the world’s heard. But for all-encompassing is-ness and the unbeatable all of it all, nothing tops Donny Hathaway’s “Everything Is Everything.”

The girl, who identified herself as a freelance correspondent for the Neil Armstrong Elementary School Post-Gazette, exhaled with what might have been a combination of impatience and contempt.

“I guess you don’t understand my question,” she said.

***

Taking Names and TRL

A little before dark and a little after the end of the beginning, we saw a toucan taking names on Lexington Avenue.

“Just routine,” the toucan said.

We held the children tight, but they wriggled out of the hold. A pink parchment sky opened, possibly to show itself to the various and sundry sporadic believers, which included Nathan Hale impersonators, anthem buskers and non-committal arena rockers.

“When are we going to visit the set of Total Request Live?” the children said.

***

That One Sade Song

If you were cold and I were cold and the lights were cold and the rabbit ears were cold as daffodils, I would sing that one Sade song to you. Or maybe the cold-calling moon would sing it to us instead.

***

My Name Is

My name is not Mud, but it is.

Just like shame isn’t dread and shame isn’t fear and shame isn’t the smoke-ring halo I think I’ll see if I look in the mirror while I’m shaving. But it is. It's all those things.

Shame also is Cliff Robertson, a guest villain on Batman c. 1967.

When I was 20, I wrote a song titled “My Name Is Mud.” It's about a guy saying, “I know my name is Mud, and I know I’m something of a disgrace, and I’m probably dead to you, but I hope you'll stay with me, metaphorically speaking, in the event the Mud thing isn’t actually a thing.”

It's a thing. It's like when you lose your voice and you can’t sing anymore, or lose your voice so you can’t talk anymore. You can’t sing to people, you can't talk to them, you can't tell them anymore. You can't tell. Also, you can’t tie your shoes.

***

Neither One of Us

We were listening and not listening to the northeast wind, which wondered if we'd considered talking things out.

We were listening and not listening to the Voice of America, which asked who do you think you're fooling?

We were listening and not listening to Gladys Knight sing about two people who didn't want to be the first to say it.

"It's not the first of us who says it, but the first to say it again, again, and then again," I said, listening to the sound of you, not listening. "The first to say it so the words take us over the hanging bridge, clickety-clack, to the next ridge, where we pick clover, reconsider the sun, and decide who gets the Fiddle-Leaf Fig Tree, and who gets the Peace Lily."

***

A Full Fuller Fullest Blue

I was to be the last stand-up comedian ever to perform at the Fuller Brush Company annual meeting and golf outing.

“I was proud of you, once, you know,” my ex said, slurping Red Velvet Cupcake Blue Bunny ice cream out of a straw.

“I know you were, and if you knew how much I thought I loved you for it, you would…know it,” I said, leaping out of bed and into the living room, where the Fuller Brush men were waiting.

The Fuller Brush men asked me if I planned to work blue during my routine. I said I wasn’t sure what constituted blue these days.

“We don't need any of that wistful, underlying sadness stuff. Nothing poignant, no pathos—no song sung blue every garden grows one," they said. "Embrace the moment, yes, strike a pose, sure, but remember your audience. And no life insurance jokes. Hear what we’re saying?”

“I hear what you’re saying,” I said.

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IT ALL STARTED WHEN THE CHALLENGER EXPLODED by Shannon Frost Greenstein

May 17, 2020 · Fiction

I sit, tense, breathless, eyes glued to the screen.

I am thirteen years old.

It is cold outside, the kind of cold that stings the tip of your nose and bites deep in your lungs when you inhale.

It is almost time. We’ve been waiting all morning. I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks, obsessively following the news for mention of launch preparations, reading Christa McAuliffe’s simple biography in The Inquirer: an ordinary history teacher, just imagine!

I’ve been lying awake at night, thinking about the infinite nature of space until infinity blew my mind and I couldn’t grasp the concept any more.

“Jordan, will you sit back from the television? You’re going to ruin your eyes.”

My mother, in a gesture of love and true understanding of my inner workings, has let me stay home from school. My father is at work, my sister at school—God forbid she misses a day of basking in her popularity—despite my mother’s offer to let her skip as well. It is just my mother and I, pajamas and mugs of cocoa even at eleven a.m., basking in America’s superiority over Russia and the limitless potential of travelling the universe.

The vestiges of Kennedy’s Space Race, the moon in our corner, the epitome of the country’s collective grit and sheer will.

I want to be an astronaut. More than anything in the world, I want to be an astronaut. I’ve got it all worked out, even as I attempt to navigate puberty and peer pressure and bad choices. I’m going to graduate high school with a scholarship to an Ivy League college, where I will be pre-med and graduate with honors, and then join the military so they’ll pay for my med school. I’m going to learn to fly and be an on-flight doctor, and then I’m going to apply to NASA’s Astronaut Candidate Program.

This has been the plan for as long as I can remember. I am a good student, a hard worker, disciplined, focused. I know what I want, and I’m sure I know what it will take to get there.

“What time is it?” I ask my mother impatiently.

“It’s 11:30. It’ll be any minute.”

The last time I would look forward to anything so guilelessly, so naively. The end of innocence, a swan song, the curtain call of childhood.

I sip cocoa, I fidget, I stare at the images reflected on the television: The launch pad at Cape Canaveral morphs into a stock photo of the NASA command center that’s replaced by a reporter, hugging herself against the unseasonable cold, describing conditions and sensations the astronauts will face over the next several minutes.

“Are you excited?” my mother says.

“Are you kidding?”

I don’t have to shift my face from the screen to know she is smiling, that she doesn’t mind my tone. I know they say a mother is always closest to her firstborn, that the second child is neglected in both attention and love. That’s not the case in our family, just like a lot of things are not the case in our family. My mother and I share a bond that is creepily extrasensory, that borders on clairvoyance or telepathy.

We did. Then I fucked up. It started that day, watching the Challenger.

“Do you know how proud I would be if I’m ever there,” my mother says, “in the crowd at Kennedy Space Center, waiting for you to take off?”

She supports my dream, perhaps subconsciously driven to counteract my sister’s grand, lifetime aspiration to amount to a supermodel and fitness spokeswoman. Every straight-A report card I bring home is prominently displayed on the fridge; I get a whole paragraph to myself detailing all my accomplishments in the yearly family Christmas newsletter. I’m excused from boring family get-togethers and church services if I “have to study.” I’m several grade levels ahead in STEM subjects, and even have a special “gifted” IEP at school that allows me to study trigonometry while everyone else works on binomials.

“You will be,” I assure her absentmindedly, practically manic with anxiety, with anticipation.

There is no doubt this will be me someday. I mean, I’ve been saving for space camp with all my birthday and Christmas money for two years. How could I possibly ever be anything but an astronaut?

“I think something’s happening, I think something’s happening,” I shout, up on my knees on the floor, directly in front of the television, unable to control the volume of my voice, my fingers clenched, my jaw clenched, ecstatic to be watching the Challenger launch with my mother behind me on the couch. It’s only us, gazing in wonder at the culmination of human brainpower to this point, the trophy of generations upon generations of evolution, the ability to explore space.

Three minutes appear on a giant screen, counting down, the seconds ticking away like little eternities, each number illuminated for a lifetime before finally surrendering to the next digit.

I squeal, my hands balled into fists, my eyes burning because I am forgetting to blink. At this moment, I am sure the universe is affirming my plans, my destiny. Just as I always have, I feel a pull, a calling almost religious in nature, toward the billions of stars and planets and moons out in the great beyond.

Christa McAuliffe wanted that, too. She wanted it, just like you wanted it. Imagine what her last moments were like. Do you think she had time to regret ever signing on to be a Payload Specialist before she died? Do you think she was alive when she hit the water?

The clock counts down.

Two minutes. One and a half minutes.

“Come on,” I shout at the television, believing I can speed up the process in Florida from my living room in Philadelphia.

A minute.

The longest minute of my life. Except for many minutes which would come after takeoff.

“I love you, Jordan,” my mother says suddenly. I tear my gaze away from the screen to look over my shoulder at her briefly. She’s grinning, her eyes bright, unable to sit still as her hands flutter around her hair, her collar, her mug. This is just as exciting for her. I feel kindred, a flash of pride about having brought this joy into her life. At this moment, I am already an astronaut, just by the sheer weight of both of our beliefs—certainties—that it is what will come to pass.

Remember that time you thought you were going to be an astronaut?

“I love you, too,” I say happily, bubbling from within with exhilaration.

A minute. Forty-five seconds.

The clock is stubborn, exploiting time’s relativity, insisting on stretching the spaces between each second to impossible lengths. It ticks down, and the camera zooms in for a close-up of the shuttle, where things are starting to happen.

Challenger begins to tremble slightly and then shake in earnest, a vibration I can almost feel through the television, across the states and into my teeth. Smoke billows, and I see the flickering of flame.

Ten seconds. Five. Zero.

Against nature, against God’s design, in an awe-inspiring show of ability and triumph over the elements, Challenger takes off, rising up like a revolutionary, fighting gravity to lift its bulk upwards and upwards into the sky and through the atmosphere.

“Yes,” I shout, rising up myself, on my feet as if I’m taking off as well. I feel something foreign and natural at the same time, something I can’t begin to describe, but which I would later come to recognize as something sexual, the endorphin-rush of orgasm, an orgasm of possibility and expansion and the human experience.

It continues to ascend, smoke and fire trailing the shuttle like its own comet’s tail. I am already wishing I could see it enter the stratosphere, exit it, enter and exit the exosphere, enter open space. Everything in the world is as it should be. I am truly happy.

Challenger explodes.

There is more fire and smoke, but also shrapnel, chunks of engines and rockets and ceramics and body parts and dreams. Challenger, disembodied, plummets to the Earth in pieces, like heaven is weeping the kibble of human invention.

There is no God.

“What?” I cannot grasp what is happening.

The debris hits the ocean at an unfathomable speed. Plumes of smoke still hang in the air like huge lazy clouds, the only evidence that seven people once lived their dream for 73 seconds.

x-r-a-y magazine

BERMUDA by Danny Cherry Jr.

May 17, 2020 · Fiction

It was somewhere between the fifth and eighth rendition of the “birthday song” when I began to see the appeal of a tight noose and a wobbly stool. That’s what this job did to me. I prayed to the chain restaurant gods to put me out of my misery, but all I heard instead was the firework-like pops of sizzling meat and the chefs’ philosophical debate over which one of the new girls had the fattest ass.

I sat on the milk crates in the kitchen and scrolled through the social media feed of my ex acting school classmates and hate-liked as many of their photos as possible. This one got a gig in a commercial. That one got a stage play role. Another somehow got a role in a big-budget film. In the group message, they asked how my luck was going. I responded with the truth. “I think I may have found my most challenging role yet.” They sent back happy faces and hearts. I responded with “thank you” and enough exclamation points to emphasize my happiness.

Then a sinister sound low below the chefs’ passionate debate grew louder, closer, like the music in slasher-films right before the victim’s throat got slit and the carotid artery splattered against the curtains.

“Alright, Diggity Dog customers!” The manager and crew continued to shout and clap their hands. “We have a special birthday guest today!”

I closed my eyes. “Fuck me.”

I filed in and clapped along. “Happy happy birthday! From our crew to you!” And with each mangled verse of the song, what little pride still lingered evacuated my body.

It was at this moment when I realized I wasn’t lying to my friends; this was my most challenging role yet: a 20-something post graduate with a useless degree and a job in the hometown he practically sold his kidney to escape. And I was nailing it.

“Welcome to Diggity Dog where our franks are as pleasant as our customers. What will you be having today?”

I smiled at the four-top table and passed out the menus with vigor. I nodded as they ordered but watched our mascot through the window on the sidewalk spin an arrow up and over his head like a helicopter, letting people know we had a special going on: two franks for the price of one. That damned arrow worked better than the Pied Piper, but instead of attracting kids, it summoned all of the plant workers and foremen and their overly made-up wives, along with their gaggles of children who somehow always turned their food into a mosaic on the floor.

The parking lot was full with F-150s and jacked up trucks with confederate flags hanging from the back. I would guess there were more rifles and AR-15s in the parking lot than the weapons cache at our Sheriff’s department.

At dinner once, one of my classmates asked, “Is your hometown like ‘Friday Night Lights’?” We were at our favorite restaurant, which sat atop a skyscraper that sliced through the clouds in the sky. The glass buildings across the way looked like pitch-black monoliths, like giant Carbonado diamonds, with the exception of squares of light that came from individual rooms and offices.

I sipped my twenty dollar drink. “Yea, I guess it’s like ‘Friday Night Lights,’ except fewer black people.” She and my other friends laughed, and one made a white hipster comment about how quaint it must be and how they’d love to visit one day, just to see one of our antique stores. Or to see the stars in the sky. But there were no stars in those skies; a constant orange tinge from the gasoline plant’s flames loomed over the town night and day.

I told them no, they didn’t want to visit. My town was nicknamed “Bermuda” because no one ever left. One of my friends put an arm on my shoulder and said, “That’s not true,” and shot me a corny, soap-opera gaze. We laughed and toasted a night that was foggier than the early mornings over the New York waterfront.

That was a year ago. Now, I was back home, where the Confederacy and football were kings, where bonfires often replaced house parties, and when there were house parties, they were thrown by those whose parents could afford two-month vacations in Europe. The type of parties where I’d be the black fly-on-the-wall and every group would swat me away and whisper “who invited him?” The type of parties where the few black people who were there huddled up off to the side in their letterman jackets. I wasn’t permitted into that group either. I was the “faggot” in the drama club.

Bermuda is a place I spent many years trying to escape. I applied for a “Minority In The Arts” grant and took out student loans so I could find myself in a city of millions. And I did it. It required thousands of miles, six figures, and four years. I chiseled out the person who I always was and made friends, had girlfriends, and went on misadventures in the city. I stayed in an apartment with rickety floors and cockroaches big enough that we considered asking them to go half on rent with us.

It was hard to accept I wasn't there anymore. As I take this table’s order, I wish I could take back the joke I made about people never leaving Bermuda. If that were true, I would never leave this fucking hellhole ever again, and I’d be doomed to spend the rest of my life clapping and singing happy birthday songs to the very people I tried to escape.

A woman with snow-white hair sat at one of my tables. She wielded sarcasm like only Baby Boomers could, using a smile to dampen the stab of her patronizing remarks. I wanted to remind her she shouldn’t expect five-star service from a place with ten three-star reviews and several food safety violations, then I remembered the lengthening zeros in my student debt balance and shut the fuck up. “I’ll take it back, ma’am.”

My next table wasn’t much better. Two baggy-eyed parents clung to their cups of coffee as if they contained the water from the Fountain of Youth and allowed their kids to scribble with red crayon on the walls. My tongue-biting and forced courtesy only netted me the loose change from the bottom of their jeans and a dollar older than the coffee we served. I accepted the “tip” with a smile.

I ambled to the kitchen with another dissatisfied patron’s dirty dishes in my hand. Then I heard it.

“Squirt?”

I froze. The old nickname excavated old memories I had buried under expensive therapy and four years of distance. I turned to see a table full of people from my high school days.

“Darius ‘Squirt’ Miller,” he said again. I stood like a sentry as he flashed his smile at me. My body reacted like he was an apex predator baring his teeth. While I stayed in character, I placed the dishes in a bin near the kitchen entrance and dragged my body towards the table.

He asked, “How you been?”

“Been good.”

“You’re a big-time actor yet?”

The memory of my stint as “Dead Guy #3” on Law & Order came to mind. “I do all right.”

The wrinkles under his eyes and his stray strands of remaining hair read like the life-lines of someone who had their vitality and motivation sucked dry after years in a town that eats people’s souls and shits out withered clones. He raised his arm to shake my hand. “Well, that’s good to hear, man.” Muscle memory told me to flinch, but I tightened up and gripped his hand in return before I walked away.

Some last words were said to my back. “It’s good to have you back in town, Squirt.”

I walked away and sped up once I was out of eye-sight, throwing my one-second finger up at my tables, flashing my smile, and letting them know I’d be right back. I went into the restroom where somebody stood in front of the faucet. I hid out in a stall and waited for the hissing of the faucet to stop.

When the door opened and closed, I took one deep breath, balled up my apron, and screamed. I screamed into it like it was a vacuum in space that could swallow my frustrations, like it was an endless void where I could deposit my angst. The apron muffled my shouts, but my throat strained. I belted and belted until I felt Bermuda’s sharp talons unleash itself from me. I got up when I heard the door open again. I walked out and straightened my apron.

When I got back to the floor, the table of ex-high school classmates was clear. I was directed to a new table by the hostess; they looked like truckers. I clutched the menus and, for a moment, pretended as if I was back in art school. I closed my eyes, whispered my lines, and asked myself what the character’s motivation was: not to be broken down again by the antagonist, this town.

I took out a pen and notepad and smiled at the truckers. “Welcome to Diggity Dog where our franks are as pleasant as our customers. What will you be having today?”

x-r-a-y magazine

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