Fiction

TWO SHORT PIECES by Ellie Powell

October 9, 2025

In which Kazuo Ishiguro runs a dating hotline on the radio like in Sleepless in Seattle

MEHello? KAZUO ISHIGUROHello, you’ve reached the Kazuo Ishiguro Dating Hotline. My name is Kazuo Ishiguro. How can I help you tonight? MEOh, wow. I didn’t think you’d actually pick up. I’m Ellie. I loved The Buried Giant. KAZUO ISHIGUROEveryone loves The Buried Giant. We’ll see what Guillermo does with it. Are you dating, Ellie? MENo, but it’s all a bit more complicated than that, don’t you think? KAZUO ISHIGURONo, not really. KAZUO ISHIGURO hangs up the phone. It’s a really bad dating hotline.It’s a pretty good dating hotline.

In which Statler and Waldorf review Bridge Over Troubled Water

STATLERMore like “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wrong”! WALDORFWhere is this bridge over troubled water? I’d like to jump off it!They laugh. STATLERThe only living boy in New York? Not after I get my hands on you! WALDORF“Why Don’t You Write Me”? Why don’t you write some better songs! STATLER“I’m begging you please” to stop singing!They laugh. The air feels tight.

HEIR APPARENT by Jack Lennon

October 7, 2025

Your wife was overjoyed when your uncle drowned in three inches of water at the bottom of a cave. It meant your family would inherit his house. Although you both wished it wasn’t in such tragic circumstances. That’s what you kept saying to people. Not that you had any strong feelings about him or his death. You barely knew him. Was spelunking in Chile a normal pastime of his? Nobody knew him well enough to tell you. Not at the funeral, not during the will reading, nor when you took his place in his very respectable neighbourhood. They would say he was a strange man. An eccentric, one elderly lady had said kindly, more kindly than was necessary. While your wife ripped everything in your uncle’s dingy house out to start again, you took a strange, small set of stairs down to the piss room. That’s what you’d both end up calling it later. It wasn’t quite in the basement, but also wasn’t on ground level. It was as if your uncle had specifically requested the room be created, on its own separate level. Inside, it was a perfect square, lined with shelves which were, in turn, lined with jars of piss. All in the same type of jar, large and wide, which distorted the wall behind in varying shades of yellow. All were labelled with numbers you could discern no meaning from. Some were so aged the piss had turned dark and rusty inside, winking metallically at you, standing outside the piss room door.

Ten years later, the piss jars stood, immovable. Your wife had wanted to get rid of them as quickly as possible. She thought them disgusting, a reminder of a sad old man, not well and not liked. The more you’d learned about your uncle, gleaned through the stacks of papers found throughout the house, the more the two of you understood him to be a bad man. Not just an unkind or cold man, but a man who actively worked to disparage and ruin those around him. There was a time where your wife even believed the jars of piss to have played a role in his evil deeds. Maybe they were cursed, she’d whisper to you in the night. You didn’t know any more than she did. Despite the overwhelming physical evidence, you secretly believed your uncle to be misunderstood. You fought to keep those jars. Not only to preserve them, but to live alongside them. At first you could say it was because of the difficulties of moving so many heavy jars up into the daylight surface of the house, not to mention the horrors of accidentally dropping one. But now, with your wife ten years tired and your children ten years grown, arguing to keep the piss room feels futile. But every time you’d looked at it and thought how much more sensible it would be for you to use this room for storage, or a home gym, or a man cave, visions of your uncle, choking to death in an inch of stagnant water sprang into your mind.

Your uncle had started spelunking late in life. Like almost everything else, he did it alone. The drowning seemed to be a long-overdue inevitability. There were many letters from his old instructor begging him to take a buddy next time. One of these days he wouldn’t come home. The last day you saw your kids, you got a letter from your father. It spoke of the day you were born, and the hopes your father had had for your future. It apologised for how hard things had been when you were younger. It told stories of your uncle when he was a young man, the paths he chose that led him to this end. He loved his brother, but he was a troubled soul, your father told you. He needed things others didn’t. After that letter, more came. Official documents from your wife’s solicitor. Late payment notices for the electric company, complaints from the HOA. Then, one handwritten and yellowed, from your uncle. It detailed his plan to reach out, just when he knew your resolve would be close to giving out. He told you not to listen to your wife or your father. They had a vested interest in this plan going wrong. He knew you’d be up for the challenges this lifestyle would demand of you. He knew there was something different in you from the first day he saw you. You would be the one to hold this heavy burden. Not just for yourself, but for all of mankind. None of this surprised you. You have left the fear and uncertainty of earlier years behind you. You are chosen. You are capable. You are not going to die face down in a puddle and you are not going to become your father. You are the guardian of the piss and you are going to live forever. You slot both letters into the piles of yellowed papers in your office. The piss jars glitter at you in the darkness and you linger for a moment before you close the door.

PORTRAIT OF YOU IN FIVE PSYCHICS by Kirsti MacKenzie

October 6, 2025

First guy says: you’re gonna see a UFO. Like, BOOM. He lays this on me. Right now you’re probably thinking well, if that doesn’t torpedo the whole thing for you. But it didn’t. Okay? It didn’t. I sat there and let him tell me I was gonna see a UFO because sometimes you’re in the middle of a divorce and sometimes staring down the barrel of your life and sometimes you’d pay someone, anyone, to tell you that you’re not completely fucked. “Where do I go with this,” he says. “Do you believe?”“In UFOs?” I ask. “Sure, what the hell.”“You’re gonna have some kind of experience,” he says. “Very abnormal.”Buddy led me into a room in the back of a woo shop three blocks from our apartment. The room was dark but for a salt lamp. Took my hands into his. Told me he was blind from birth, that he sees things. Takes someone’s hand and sees flashes, impressions. Big life events. Traumas, he calls them, both good and bad. His hands smelled of menthol.“Looks like a spaceship,” he says. “With an octopus on it.”“Feels a little on the nose,” I say.“You will have trouble believing it,” he says. “And even more trouble convincing other people.”“No shit,” I say.When he was a kid this guy took the hand of a school teacher and told her she lost her ring, and that she’d find it in the couch cushions. Sure enough. My problem is that I am prone to believing these things. I am, as my ex says, suggestible. Open-minded at best, gullible at worst. I sit down and say hit me, motherfucker. “It’s not gonna hurt me, right,” I say. “Mm,” he says, unconvinced.“I don’t care if I see it,” I say. “Just don’t hurt me.”You might not believe this, but there’s logic to it. People visit psychics and card readers for control. To know everything is gonna turn out okay. Like if I only know what’s coming, I can prepare. The bad will hurt less. The good will sustain me. But nothing prepares you for a fucking UFO, and nothing prepared me for what he said next. “Have you ever had a kiss, like, BANG,” he says. “Fireworks.”“No,” I say.“Not yet,” he says.“With the alien?” I ask, helplessly.

***

Nobody tells you you’re going to get divorced while snorkelling with sea turtles in Maui. Not right that second, not exactly. But maybe one day you’ll be on a tourist boat cannonballing along the broad side of a crater into water so blue it makes you seize up, like you’d drown happy. There isn’t a word for how blue the water is. Around you there will be other sweaty tourists flapping in the water, huffing through masks, pointing and waving at sea turtles. Your husband kicks gently toward them and as you watch him hover above, giving them space, just curious, not an intrusive jackass like the others, you will see him engulfed in the blue and your first thought will be oh, no. Maybe, I mean. Not exactly like that. But something like it. There’s always a moment. The first in a long line of them which leads you to lawyers, and long talks with family, and whispered goodbyes to his back in the middle of the night, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I love you, I’m sorry.

***

In the middle of the reading, menthol guy goes to blow his nose. I record the reading so I can remember everything and the part that I keep coming back to is the part where he leaves to blow his nose. I whisper what the fuck just barely loud enough for the audio. I remember that what the fuck because it felt like being knocked out. One haymaker after another, sitting there, being told all these, I don’t know—things—about you.“I like this one,” he says. “You go to take hands and dance. He puts his hand on your back, like—and I can see you through his eyes. He really treats you like a lady.”“Oh?” I say.“There are rings involved,” he says. “You pick them out together.”“Oh,” I whisper.He turns a little bit red in the face.“You really enjoy undressing him,” he says. “You waste no time, girl.”“OH,” I cried, belting laughter. There were other things, more specific things. I wanted to know everything about you. I wanted to know but was struck too dumb to ask anything useful. All I did was repeat, oh, okay when he found a new memory, or future, or whatever it was he was seeing, all these beautiful scraps of you, and when I did finally get the courage to ask what you looked like I inhaled sharply—the sound of it, a hiss on the recording—because the big dumb asshole he described looked exactly like the one I’d asked for when I stood in front of god.

***

When I left the woo shop we went to the grocery store. We were still living together. We gave ourselves a year and it was okay, because we were still best friends, still needed each other. Made shopping lists and fed the cat and hollered at our sports team. But I couldn’t tell him about the psychic because he doesn’t believe in them. Fair play to him. He’s very studied in science and medicine. Things that you can prove, things that don’t need wild faith or willing delusion.So I stood in the toilet paper aisle feeling tilted. Like I’d been knocked off an axis. The lights were screaming fluorescent. Carts and people flowing around me. If this were a movie there would be some kind of excellent soundtrack, something profound playing while I had my little spiritual crisis, but this is hot stupid life and so I stood there stunned while Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” droned on around me like my own personal Vietnam.No proof, but possibility. You are a possibility, now. Something I can’t unknow.

***

I didn’t mean to go to more psychics. I swear. But it became something like an experiment. The idea was to cross-reference the data. Like if someone could tell me, again, what you looked like, or about the slow dance, or the rings, or the tearing your clothes off—maybe I could believe it for real. This was how I found myself in some grandma’s garage on a hot July day, an hour and a half out of town in a suburb. You don’t want to know what the Uber bill was. “Oh,” she says. “Oh, honey. He’s a mess.”“Uh,” I say.“Does he cry a lot?” she asks. “I get the feeling he cries a lot.”We had a couple of iced teas between us, sweating in the humidity. Her husband had half the garage, some kind of snarling muscle car with her guts falling out all over. The other half was decorated with plants and crystals and stone buddhas and wall hangings that highlighted rainbow chakra points. This lady used to have a call in show on local cable. She had been in the paper. She sat before me in a bathing suit, fanning herself with a handful of junkmail.“I just want to squeeze him,” she says. “He’s a real turkey.”“What does he look like,” I ask. She considers.“You know,” she says, “my youngest daughter is about to get engaged.”“Congrats,” I say. “I called my son-in-law the day he bought the ring, knowing without knowing, and told him he’d better size that thing down. He called me a spooky old bitch.”She took a big gulp of her iced tea and drummed her nails against her forehead, frowning. Her grandbabies were in the pool out back. Screams and splashing over a steady cicada buzz. Heat rose in waves on her freshly paved driveway. “He’s in a relationship,” she says. “He’s not ready to leave yet.”“Oh,” I say.“He’s sad all the time,” she says. “Feels like he has to see it through.”“Oh,” I say. “His eyes, though,” she says. “Goddamn.”“Oh?” I ask.“Bluest you’ve ever seen,” she says. “Like you’d drown happy.”

***

When the divorce was done I took a trip out west. Found myself in the tourist part of a California town. Mexican restaurants and breweries and things. Thumping baseballs at a place near the beach, a batting cage. They weren’t coming fast enough. I turned the speed up, up, up. Each crack of the bat a release I didn’t know I needed. Step in, hips before hands, follow through on that swing. My hands hurt, after. I found the third one because what the hell, I was on vacation with money to blow and there is not a single thing anyone could tell me that would surprise me anymore. She had a little shop at the end of the pier, a real tourist trap. I was probably better off firing money into those old Zoltar machines. The lady was dressed all in black, like you’d expect these people would be. She had some kind of accent that felt Romanian but was more likely fake. She looked haunted as shit. “You have aura,” she says. “Psychic aura.”“Oh,” I say. “Okay.”“It’s purple,” she says. “Tinged with white.”Something that might interest you to know is that I didn’t bring you up to any of these people. The psychics, I mean. Part of rolling in there like hit me, motherfucker is daring a stranger to tell you about yourself without giving anything away. The trouble is that people are predictable. They want the holy trinity of prediction: love, wealth, health. So you could say that about anyone, the love thing. I could use a good word about health or wealth but I never get it because all they ever tell me about is you.“There’s this man,” she says. “Jesus,” I say. “Again?”“He’s going to be in the palm of your hand,” she says. She held her palm out. Without warning, she brought her other one down on it with a sharp SMACK. It made me jump.“He’s scared to get crushed,” she says.“I’ll hold my applause,” I say.

***

There is a lady I see sometimes, on a Zoom call. I found her online. She has a big thundering laugh and platinum blonde hair and very thin eyebrows. She swears a lot and calls me hun and tells me I am not crazy; that you do, in fact, exist. You were the first thing she saw about me. I frowned at my laptop and stonewalled her. “He’s in your energy, hun,” she says. “Ohhh, he’s coming.”“But my wealth,” I say.“Hm,” she says. “You’re going to get a promotion. In about two months.”Sure enough. “But my health,” I say.“Fix your guts,” she says. “Jesus Christ.”Sure enough.She describes you exactly like the first guy did, and then some. Tells me what you look like—That hair! That build! That smile!—how sweet and funny you are, how you talk and talk and talk. Tells me about your big goofy feet and your kind eyes. How I’ll know you anywhere, when you finally get here. She lights up when she talks about you. Says one day I will email her with a picture, and she will get to say a big fat fucking I TOLD YOU SO. “When,” I say.“Soon enough,” she says. “These things happen in perfect time.”She takes my money, keeps the faith. I pay her when I want to visit you. You’re not just data, now. You’re a composite sketch, someone I could describe to a police department (are you a criminal? Nobody ever says anything bad about you.) I wonder if you are just someone that everyone wants to hear about—the sweet, the funny, the eyes. Love stories recycled for a fool. “Big feet,” she says, cackling. “Lucky girl.”

***

Two years after the divorce, I took a trip out east. I ate slices of pizza dripping with grease and bummed around the East Village until I found a tiny shop. Hole in the wall with a big obvious sign. No bigger than a closet. Two chairs, a big blanket covering the wall with a zodiac wheel on it. Incense smell. Told myself it would be the last time, though, of course, it never is. The guy draped himself over his chair and pulled tarot cards. He told me the wrong interpretations. I know, because I pull them myself. “Oh,” he says. “There’s a man.” “Bullshit,” I say.“There’s always a man,” he says.Logically, I know that he is a grifter. Most of them probably are. But I’m compelled, now. It’s like I can’t stop. Love stories are a drug I can’t quit; just one more fix, one more fix. I’m a sucker for a future that may never come.“He hasn’t shown up yet,” he says, “because you have a block.”“Oh,” I say.“I can help you get rid of it,” he says.“Oh,” I say. “Oh, I’m sure.”“There’s a darkness in your heart,” he says. “You’re faithless.”I’m tempted to believe him. It’s easier to think that it’s my fault, somehow. That I am undeserving of the love I want. The stupid part about this psychic thing, about playing chicken with fate, is that you’re living in the anticlimax. That if these things ever come—the bad you prepared for, the good that sustained you—you will only say, oh, okay. And if they don’t come—well, it doesn’t matter, does it? You survive just the same.“Five hundred,” he says.“No,” I say, and leave.

***

The day I sat my ex down and told him I wanted a divorce was like any other. There wasn’t anything special about it. It was just a day. We went to work and came home and I told him. I don’t remember the weather. March, it was March. So the weather could have been anything, really. I don’t remember what I ate. I don’t remember feeling much of anything. Except sad, I think. I was really sad.“Why,” he asked.“We’re not in love anymore,” I said.“Oh,” he said.He didn’t fight me on it. There was the love thing, and then the kids thing. The hard stop. The way he deserves them, if anyone on earth deserves them it’s him and I was never going to be the one to give that to him. We loved each other enough to let go. “What do you want,” he said.I almost choked on it. It felt too big an ask.“I want fucking fireworks,” I said.He considered for a moment.“Does that even exist?” he asked.I don’t know who I felt more sorry for. Him, for not believing. Or me, for wanting to. But I said that six whole months before seeing that first guy, the menthol guy. And buddy took my hands and, without knowing a single thing about me, told me one day I’d have them—the fireworks. Maybe you think I am stupid, or naïve. But maybe you could forgive me, too, for needing to know I had good reason to make my life go BOOM.

***

There is about as much chance of me getting that fireworks kiss as seeing a UFO. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to say. That I’m rooting for it. The alien, I mean. I want to stare that octopus motherfucker down and know, somewhere, somehow, that you do exist. That one day you’ll light up the night sky, too.

PILE DRIVE ME INTO THE EARTH by Thora Dahlke

September 19, 2025

Althea Downs spends all summer break in her bedroom. Through the pivot roof window, the sun deep fries her no matter where she sits. She drinks berry-kale smoothies and listens to macabre podcasts that give her strange dreams about swimming pools full of blood. She showers at midnight and sweats through the entire night, wakes up cocooned in sheets so soaked you’d think the scale would finally plunge below 100. It does not. She thinks about killing herself, but only casually. This is her tenderest hobby, lazy and indulgent, she spoils it like a rescue. It’s not really death she craves so much as unbirthing herself. She’d like to root out each trace of her existence and unbecome. But dying doesn’t do that, nothing does, once you’ve been alive you can’t escape that fact, so suicide is only a recreational pastime, a little romantic reverie that softens the worst edges of her existential ennui. She would like to be transported out of her body and into something grand, but she’s scared of going into the real world. She hates her knees. She hates the bumps on her skin, the length of her fingers, how her body smells. Summer, which should be stunning and memorable, sneaks away into the night and her heart atrophies. In September, she moves into her college dorm and meets Pilvi. Pilvi is from Finland but speaks with no trace of a foreign accent. She adds liquorice-infused honey to her liquorice tea and eats salmiakki pastilles out of a black and white chequered paperboard box. Althea isn’t sure if she’s satirising her Finnish identity through exaggeration or if this is all genuine. She also isn’t sure if a potential distinction would even matter. She has tightly permed blonde hair and a half sleeve of tattoos. Right above her elbow are two black birds mid-flight, which she explains to be ravens from Norse mythology. On the other side of her arm, there’s Moomintroll surrounded by flowers. She’s reading a book about healing your inner child. The cover is pale green with a border of daisies. It feels ironic to read this book before you’re even done with college. Althea still feels like a child, outside as much as inside. But maybe if she does as the book instructs, her body will catch up and finally grow some tits.‘How is it?’ Althea asks.Pilvi looks towards her and, after Althea nods at the book, says, ‘Readable.’ ‘Does your inner child need a lot of healing?’ ‘My childhood was staggeringly non-traumatic,’ she says. ‘The worst thing that happened was when I saw a lynx eat a fox in our garden.’‘That sounds gory.’‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘But that’s nature.’ Pilvi is studying economy psychology and isn’t going to be a therapist, but Althea imagines her as one anyway. She’d either be awful or really quite good, all depending on whether patients would feel judged enough to change their behaviour. Althea’s childhood was offensively non-traumatic as well. Guiltily, she sometimes daydreams that something awful happened to her—her softball coach, who always paid special attention to her, grooming her or some creepy stranger pushing her into a cinema restroom stall to molest her or her parents’ old Toyota somersaulting off a gravel road and tattooing the seatbelt to her chest. But everything was stable and safe and she did well in school and wasn’t the first or last to get her period and yet she feels wrong and scared and disgusting and sometimes it’d be nice if she could say she feels all of those things because of X. ‘I find pop psychology interesting,’ Pilvi says. ‘That’s why I’m reading it.’ Sunday night of their first week, they agree that they want college to be unforgettable, so they make bucket lists for the first year. Althea stares at the lined page in her journal for two minutes before she grabs her phone and starts googling bucket list ideas and what to put on bucket list and bucket list 100 items. A lot of the suggestions are very stupid: dye your hair, be a bridesmaid, make soap. Making soap cannot seriously be a life goal. Practise yoga, learn to surf, eat frog legs. Yuck. And Althea doesn’t think she really wants to learn to surf, nor bungee jump, snorkel, skydive, rock climb, or one of the other extreme sports that are apparently mandatory bucket list additions. Everyone wants to write a book and see the Northern Lights. The wedding industry also makes frequent contributions. She recognises that this—looking at what other people want to engender her own wants—disrupts the entire point. The fact that she can’t by herself think of anything specific that she wants is depressing. And it’s not that she wants nothing. She regrets that she wasted this summer, feels like that’s what she’s done with her entire life, and she wants to do better now. That’s why they’re making these lists. But does she really want to go vegan for a month or did she just see it on someone else’s bucket list? Does she actually want to go to Disney World? She doesn’t even remember watching Disney movies as a kid. Have sex, she finally writes. This desire is born more from a need to fill a void than for wanting the thing itself. Sex will probably be fine, decent, but more importantly, she will no longer be a virgin, which feels embarrassing in a deep, absolute way. Like Cain’s mark, her own failure smeared across her forehead. Other than that, she can only think of vague shit like: stop being a loser and do something cool. Pilvi has fifteen points on her list. She wants to ace all her classes, get an eyebrow piercing, and do molly. ‘Have you ever?’ she asks. Her expression, when she looks at Althea, is impressively blank. She sucks on a salmiak liquorice. ‘No,’ Althea says. She has not done any drugs, not even weed. She adds molly to her own list because it seems romantic and adventurous, even though she has no idea how she’d acquire it.‘What else is on yours?’ Pilvi asks. ‘Have sex,’ she says. ‘Dress up for Halloween.’ That sounds lame when she says it. ‘Like—something hot, you know?’ ‘Oh yeah. Like a playboy bunny?’ ‘Something like that,’ she says. She imagines herself in something appallingly slutty, fishnet tights and a glitter leotard with a plunging V-neck, sleek heels and hot pink lipstick. In the fantasy, she gets gloriously drunk and she’s so charming, so funny, everyone likes her and she’s not afraid of anything, no longer the girl who locked herself in her bedroom all summer, no, she’s alluring, she’s hot, she’s so fuckable and nothing hurts and she loses her virginity in a threesome and life is finally happening, life is finally larger than her loneliness and dread, life is finally—here.

***

Five weeks into the autumn term, Pilvi buys MDMA from a junior named Kyle. Google says it can trigger extremely high fevers, liver failure, kidney failure, heart failure, convulsions, cardiac arrest, and more. Now there’s a bucket list, Althea thinks darkly. Google also says it has proven successful in treating PTSD, so how’s that for healing your inner child? She puts on make-up in preparation, even though they’re going to get high in their dorm room. She wears a dark red lipstick and brown mascara. Pilvi changes into black sweatshorts and a matching sports bra before she crosses her legs on the carpeted floor. Her socks have little pizza slices on them. Sharing the first pill feels religious. Althea puts one half on Pilvi’s tongue and Pilvi feeds her the other half. Then they both have a long sip of the same can of cherry blossom LaCroix through green straws. Pilvi closes her eyes and lies down on the floor. The effects crawl closer until they’re suddenly just there, blaring through Althea’s nervous system. Strangely, she feels her mouth move into the shape of a big smile. Everything in the room—the scratched-wood single beds and decorative pillows, the storage boxes and paper bin, the neat row of liquorice boxes on Pilvi’s side of the desk—suddenly has an aura. All of it glows faintly. When Althea looks at Pilvi, she’s kind of glowing too. She wishes they’d gone out for this—outside, the world must be so beautiful: all the fallen leaves crisp and the colour of old pennies and gingerbread cookies, girls in knee socks and miniskirts, fuzzy candyfloss clouds on the jammy sunset sky. And everyone is beautiful and lovely, everyone is worthy of attention, Althea wants to talk to them and touch their hands and smile, smile the way she’s smiling now, her heart satiated and overripe. She puts her hand on Pilvi’s knee and it feels weirdly good; her palm tingles and she wants to touch her harder, dig in her fingertips and leave a mark. She wants Pilvi to also touch her. Maybe with her mouth. Pilvi has been talking about one of her professors, Oonagh Bartlett, nursing her own obsessive crush for weeks. She lectures with nearly mechanical precision, smells like shea butter, wears her box braids in a top bun, and is happily married. Pilvi wants to have sex with her anyway; she’s even added it to her bucket list. Althea asked if this had anything to do with some unhealed inner child trauma, and Pilvi laughed. Pilvi’s laugh is very nice, it has a glow to it as well. It always bursts out of her like a champagne cork. Althea doesn’t have any professors she would like to have sex with. She also has no classmates she’d like to have sex with, so progress on her bucket list has been slow. But now they’re high on molly (so she can tick that off) and she’s thinking about foxes and lynxes and Pilvi’s mouth (which is beautiful). Her fears have been sandpapered into a small, smooth pebble which she can easily ignore. Her awe is wide, her hope so raw. Her hand moves up Pilvi’s thigh and Pilvi blinks slowly at her, her glowy eyelashes flutter against her cheekbones, her glowy collarbones are begging to be touched just like everything in Althea’s body is begging to be touched. She remembers that she could die from this and it’s okay. She wants to tell Pilvi that she is so beautiful but she just kisses her instead. Pilvi melts further into the floor and kisses her back, fingers tangled loosely at the back of her nape. This is what Althea should’ve been doing all summer: ridden her bike to the beach and gone to house parties and flirted with everyone. She should’ve been kissing every single girl that looked at her, spritzed herself with a new perfume sample every day, waded waist-deep into the cold water, hotboxed a shed with her best friend and shotgunned weed, but she didn’t have a best friend, she didn’t even have a close-enough friend, she was too afraid to talk to anyone who could see her. She would’ve made such a good ghost. Maybe one day. Her tongue moves lazily in Pilvi’s mouth; she bites her lower lip. She licks against her teeth. Pilvi breathes out this little hurt-animal sound and rocks upwards, sweatshorts bunching between their bodies, and it feels so good and gorgeous. Althea touches her belly, her waist, and keeps kissing her. If the MDMA in her bloodstream curdles now and paralyses her heart, it really wouldn’t be the worst thing to happen.

COAGULOID by Hank O’Neill

September 17, 2025

It tastes so god I can’t hav another bite I say — and the hole of evrybody jus shuts up like oh is she about to stop? Loud one second and then gasping like is this reel? I hear somone literallay go holy fuk is that the end of Mis Plasteek? They’re holding out ther phone recording as they say, Guys I can’t beleev I’m catching this on video, plees like and subscribe.Meenwile I see the Produser behind the curtain mouthing to me: okay nice, now milk it. Which is jus wat we rehursed. The guy with the phone is holding it for a selfee so he can be in the shot. Guys this is reel, this is monewmental, He says. Though some person next to him yaps, Hey I din’t buy tikets so ur dumass could blok my vew with a camra. And so on.The Produser’s noding his hed in reel satisfakshun. I giv him a wink like oh yah we totallay get each other. We kno wats happenin.He offen says to me, Sweethar, make them go wow this is reelly happenin and/or I din’t buy first row tikets for nothing, like it’s the experieuns of a liftime, etsetra etsetra.Well, this is wat I do rite about then: I hold the las bit of plastek up to my mouth and bulg out my cheeks like nope I’m dun. Maybe I burp a litle. Maybe I wip some reel blod from my mouth but don’t bothr to cleen it. I look ofstage and say, Sir I don’t think I can do this anymor, even as the Produser's givin me the thumbs up from behin the curtan. He yells somthin loud then, or makes the dogs bark. People go, Did you hear that? Is she bein forsed to do this?But of corse what the Produser said/did was jus nonsens, jus part of the show. And thos dogs by the way arn’t mad at all.It’s arond heer I shake a litle. Like I’m scared. Like I’m gonna brake or apolagize to the audiunse — Hey sorre folks, I been so rite up til now, but I jus can’t do this anymor. With reel teers in my eyes. Ha ha. Jk.I remembr one time durin this part a guy tride to hop on stage saying to me, I’m Dad! I’m ur Dad! And it throwed me jus for a sec. Like my chest went hollo. I din’t kno this guy. I new that. But he got up to me. He was rite in fron of my fase, lookin in my eyes. He hopped over the fens and burs up onstage. Then he grabed my arm and said, Look at what they dun to u. For a momen I din’t kno ware I was.My litl sweehar, He said, holding my hand. I wasn’t evn breething. It was the way he said it, like in a dreem.I’ll tak u away, He said.Then the securty delt with him, carreed him away. I don’t kno wat I wud hav don. I jus sat ther, not evn moving. The Produser whisper-yelld over to me, Hey! Remember las bite!Wat? I thoght. I din’t evn kno ware I was. Oxigen! The Produser yelld. And I took a deep breath and coffed it bak out. It felt like the air got stuk insid me. I was liteheded. Teers wer fillin my eyes.Wat is hapnin? I herd someon say.I jus couldn stop my eyes from waterin. My wrist was throbin. Everythin was spinnin around. Then the lites cut and nobody coud see a thing.Or maybe my eyes were shut. I don’t kno. I remembr bein in the makeup room with the Produser whisper-yellin somethin I couldn heer. Aparenly they weeled me ofstage and had to run the defribrilator. I droold all over my shirt.Someon yelled from ouside I stil love you, Mis Plasteek! Do you kno ware you are? The Produser kept askin me, Do you kno? Then I herd the Produser’s ring and him going Helo as he answrd a call. He stepped away. I reely was in the makeup room—I saw this as I opend my eys. But wat? I kep thinking. The plastek was still on the plate in fron of me. I neerly brought it up to my mouth, looking at my fork, but I stopped because I smelled burnt sugar in the air. A cake was sittin on the counter with burnt waxy sparklers sunk in the top. The Produser was already eatin a slice with his fingers, lickin it off the tips.And the door was wide open. Not like open-open—craked—like a mouth almos don chewin, breething a litl thru the lips. I stared at it.The Produser was still talkin on the phone. His ring was buzzin again but he din’t pick up. He was sayin things like no she’s fine, no I got it, etsetra etsetra.Meenwile my head felt as tho someon was slamin it in the door—empty and bam, bam, bam. Like my skul was craking and my body was froze up, all pumped ful like a mannekin, and all I could feel everythin pushin around inside me.But I was on the other side of the door alredy. Throwin it all out of my mouth, moovin down the hall, not in my mind.And my hands were on the weels. The cold air was bushin pas my cheeks. I herd him call from behin me-–Hey! Com back heer! But I was far.My face nevr looked like it had befor, tryin to hold back my excitemen.Because that’s when the walls of the hallway backdrop lift, all the furnitur gets pushed off by the crew, and evryon remembrs I’m stil on stage. Then the Produser weels me center—my body tips.And the audiunse lets loose my favorite part.

YOU TEACH ME HOW TO BE by Emma Burger

September 15, 2025

You’re all so thin and beautiful. I only wanted to be like you. To want for nothing. To live in a gorgeous Tribeca loft. To wear Brunello Cucinelli and Loro Piana like it was nothing. To show up to morning drop-off at P.S. 234 with an expensive blowout and a full Alo set, en route to pilates. You lived the life I thought I deserved. One day. For now, I was supposed to be your yoga teacher. Your guide. I wanted my body to look like all of yours, but I was the reason yours looked the way they did. Well, it was partly me, and partly your private chefs, your nutritionists, your meal delivery services. Your microbiome mojo salad, your yoga bunny breakfast, your metabolism super powder smoothies. You filled my hospital room with flowers. Peonies and white roses. The designer kind that arrived in sturdy gift boxes. The types I’d seen in my Instagram feed to celebrate influencers’ birthdays in Dubai and anniversaries at the Ritz Carlton. I resisted the urge to peel off the EKG patches that dotted my chest. To roll the adhesive residue between my fingertips. Instead, I closed my eyes and listened to the rhythmic beeping, almost soothing in its sterility. I snapped a picture of the boxed white roses and posted it to my story, as if it were a Valentine’s Day gift from my husband and not a sympathy gift from my yoga students. The roses looked so crispy and white and clean in their black box. Their fragrance the antidote to the boxed mashed potatoes and stale urine smell of the hospital. Lying in my hospital bed, I imagine I’m here to deliver a baby. I imagine the roses are a push present, motivation to get me through hours of labor. I picture myself cradling a baby boy in my arms, just like you all have done. They look like you. I’d like to look like you too. Students. It’s strange to call you my students. If anything, I’m yours. You teach me how to be. I ignored the warnings, believing myself to be invincible. Believing the risks to be overblown. Heart attack. Stroke. Sure, okayyy. Maybe if you’re out of shape. Maybe if you’re old. I’m a goddamn yoga sculpt instructor. I’m 23 years old. If I have nothing else to offer, I have my youth. And you, my students, seem to love that about me. I have something you don’t. Had something, anyway, before this self-inflicted heart attack, which is what my doctors are now saying it was. Time. You wanted my youth. I wanted your everything else. I’ve been lying to my care team. I squirm in my bed as they try to discern why an otherwise healthy young woman might be stuck here, in this position. I could tell them I was abusing speed, but I’d rather see if they can figure it out. I first learned about speed on Reddit. It sounded too good to be true. These chronically online bodybuilder types didn’t care about the risks. They were motivated, like me, by the end result. By the optimization of our bodies to look exactly the way we want them to. They taught me to stack ephedrine with caffeine pills and aspirin. Warned me that I’d be carded at CVS for buying the ephedrine from behind the counter, but not stopped. Your bodies were my inspiration. You lived lives that made them possible. Easy, even. You resided in palatial apartments with elevator doors that opened right into your living rooms. I lived in a Chinatown two-bedroom with three other girls, all of us willing to do whatever it took not to go home to Long Island. Early mornings teaching yoga sculpt, late nights working bottle service at Marquee and TAO. I’m only making money when I’m awake, so I try to stay up and up and up. The speed helped with that. It felt too good to be true. This little cocktail allowed me to transcend my need for food. For sleep. I could make money around the clock. I could look like you. I buzzed with manic energy, ran laps up and down the West Side Highway. Vowed never to sit down when I could be moving. Taught more yoga sculpt classes, subbing whenever I could. Picked up more shifts at TAO. Brought home more in tips with my new body. My energy was infectious, one guest told me beneath burning sparklers.My heart pounded as I moved through sun salutations, but I paid it no mind. My chest pounded as I handed out flutes of Dom from the tray balanced precariously on my shoulder. My body shrunk. The packed club felt easy to glide through when I was high. It felt like I could fly over the crowds, straight to VIP. I’m too embarrassed to admit what I’ve done to myself. To be like you. To look like you. I thought I’d found a cheat code. Who cares that it made my thoughts race. Everything race. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do anything else but move fast. I look at the box of flowers you bought me and cringe, filled with shame. I’m not telling anyone what I’ve done. And when I’m all better, I’ll go back to class and teach you how to keep those bodies you already have. Those bodies I so badly want to inhabit.

TWO DAYS AFTER THEIR MOTHER DIES by Kim Magowan

September 10, 2025

Josie uses her key to let herself and her sister Amy into Cora’s apartment. She walks in first, then turns to see Amy standing in the doorway, hand braced against the doorframe. Josie says, impatiently, “Come on.” Finally, Amy enters this apartment their mother lived in for three years, moving here after she injured her knee and at last accepted that it made no sense for an older woman to be living in a house with two sets of stairs. But Amy has never seen it, because she’s so stubborn and unforgiving. Watching her older sister walk slowly into the apartment reminds Josie, painfully, of their mother. After she got sick Cora slowed down too, as if just moving her body hurt.Josie opens the window over the kitchen sink. It’s stuffy, the air stale. The apartment has that unlived-in feeling of coming home after a trip. Cora had been in the hospital for twelve days prior to dying, during which Josie came here only once, to pick up her alpaca shawl and pairs of cozy socks. But it’s very neat. There are three plates and a coffee mug drying in the dish rack. Cora never used her dishwasher—“What’s the point?” she’d say. “It’s just me.”. Now Josie puts the plates and the coffee mug in the cabinet. It’s not a big apartment, all one long floor with the bathroom and the bedroom in the back. Nonetheless it’s pretty. Their mother has great taste.Had. Watching Amy look around, Josie wonders what Amy will want, will claim. The painting over the decorative fireplace is quite valuable, for instance. Amy must remember that painting; their mother bought it years ago. It was inspired by a photograph of a girl sitting in a cornfield with her legs bent behind her. The girl in the photograph was crippled, couldn’t walk, though you can’t tell that from the photograph, or from the painting. At any rate, it’s worth money. There are other things in the apartment worth money. Josie wonders whether Amy is assessing these items—the artwork, the knickknacks on the end table, a ceramic pear, a Murano blown-glass vase—and calculating their value. She studies Amy, in her cowl-neck cashmere sweater. Amy, like Cora, values material objects. Earth signs, both of them. Josie feels her lips tighten and thin into a grimace. Amy pauses by the framed photograph of the three of them on the end table, taken that day they went to Point Reyes and ate three dozen oysters—so many oysters! It’s the one photograph of Amy in the living room, though Josie knows there’s another one by Cora’s bedside table, taken after Amy’s graduation from Smith. The living room photo flatters Amy more than Josie, who is squinting. They used to argue about photos. “Delete that one! I have a double chin!” Watching Amy, Josie hopes she feels bad. The heat of the feeling surprises her, since just yesterday she was telling her friend Bridget “My relationship with Mom was good—well, Mom was complicated, but mostly good. I’m worried that Amy will take her passing much harder than me, because they were estranged.” But now, she wants Amy to feel shitty. To confront her rigidity and selfishness. To brim with impossible regrets.How hard could it have been to visit Cora in the hospital? To make peace? Every time Josie visited her, she saw her mother turn to the door, see her, and a flash of disappointment would slip over her face. Because of course Cora would have hoped that the silver lining of dying is that Amy would want to see her. “Mom is dying.” Josie told Amy that, two weeks ago. The only time Amy had come up in conversation was towards the end, when Josie was holding her mother’s bony hand and Cora looked into her eyes and said, “Tell her—” She never completed the sentence, and after waiting a minute, Josie said, “I will, Mom.” And she will. Someday. At some point Amy might ask, “Did Mom give you any message for me?” and Josie will tell her, because Josie knows perfectly well what Cora meant to say, even if she never in fact said “Amy” or completed her own thought. But Amy will have to ask! She will have to fucking ask.Josie watches Amy pause in front of the loveseat and coffee table—that’s where their mother used to sit and watch TV, her Brit Box detective shows, and do her needlepoint. Her sewing basket is on the coffee table, as always. Amy bends, fishes inside of it, and grabs Cora’s embroidery scissors. She always bought the same kind of scissors, tiny ones shaped like a stork, the upturned beak the blades. The loops you stuck your fingers through were the legs. “I want these,” Amy says, looking at Josie. How they loved those scissors when they were little girls! They always wanted to play with them, to cut out their paper dolls and snowflakes. “They are not a toy,” Cora would say, sternly. Also: “Be careful!” Though Josie understands that she probably meant be careful not to cut yourself, not what she’d assumed then—be careful not to damage my scissors. The sisters regard each other. The scissors are lovely, but not valuable. They probably cost less than forty dollars. Amy isn’t asking permission, Josie thinks. She isn’t saying “May I have these?” She gives permission anyway, as if the scissors are hers to dispense. “Take them,” says Josie, putting peculiar emphasis on the verb.

AVALON by Saoirse Bertram

September 9, 2025

On the Fourth of July the grandmother took Vase to the top of the warehouse where a rickety carriage of iron stairs led to the roof. The sky was as orange as a snake’s belly and smelled of powder and dust and oil. They sat without speaking watching the brilliant detonations which Vase had never seen before just as she had never seen the full horizon of sky over Los Angeles and when the grandmother felt tired Vase was sorry to have to leave the sight so soon. Vase had only been with the grandmother for a couple months at that point. The grandmother had taught her how to garden and read and she was now learning new words from the library of old paperbacks printed on groundwood paper that were stacked in piles over much of the warehouse. While Vase did this the grandmother worked in her private quarters on humming machines doing business for the municipal government. Then in the evening the grandmother would cook herself a stew using the root vegetables Vase had harvested and sit sipping at her table while Vase stewed in the black bath that bubbled in a metal basin which had been built into the center of the kitchen. Then the grandmother would say good night and leave Vase there in the dark until morning.There were no guests. The grandmother made short calls and sent messages through her computer about her work and men in black vans would once in a while knock on the heavy front door to drop off boxes of essential equipment and supplies. When this happened the grandmother would tell Vase to keep to the agriculture room or one of the other out of sight parts of the warehouse before unbolting the latches but the men never stayed anyway. By fall the grandmother began to let Vase ask her lots of questions because neither of them had anyone else to really talk to. She tried to answer in as many words as possible so Vase would learn how to be a conversationalist although she kept professional and revealed as few truths as she could.That winter the grandmother received an especially long phone call and told Vase that she had to leave for the night or possibly two to deal with some pressing matters for the mayor. She packed a briefcase with folders and hard drives and set the black bath to boil and left Vase in the dark locking the door to the warehouse behind her from the outside. The car that arrived for her took her north to City Hall on a circuitous route that was without incident but when the driver started it again in the morning to return the grandmother to her warehouse they were both instantly killed by the detonation of an explosive device that someone had wired to the ignition switch.Vase stayed in the black bath for a long time. Her hair and skin became black and her teeth became black and her eyes became black too. The mayor tried sending some of her staff to the warehouse to retrieve what the grandmother had been working on there but the city broke into real disarray and none of them made it. The lights had been left on in the agriculture room and the vegetable garden overgrew and vines and bunches of foliage took root in the decomposing books and doves and chickens made their way in through one of the windows after it was knocked out by debris from one of the neighboring buildings which had only been reinforced for earthquakes. The sky was red and black then but Vase did not see this.After the bombings stopped boys began to make their way through Los Angeles in search of sustenance and items of value to sell secondhand. One of them entered the grandmother’s warehouse with a crowbar through the door in the roof and was surprised when he found a bubbling vat of what looked like oil with an oil-colored girl asleep in the middle of it. He thought she was very beautiful and took a photograph with his phone and when she remained unresponsive to his camera flash he touched her to see if she would wake. Her skin made his hands itch and smell like copper and he tasted copper in his mouth too. When Vase stood up they were both startled. Vase tried to talk to him after waiting in the dark for a while but by then he was the one who did not move no matter what words she spoke to him. She heard the door swinging upstairs and went to the roof and watched the sun set in the green sky over the far-off encampments of Santa Monica.By that next Fourth of July the rains had really picked up and so had life in the city. Inside the squash and tomatoes rotted into stinking beds of seed. The birds which had survived began to move out of the warehouse and traffic could be heard again on some of the streets in the distance. No one wanted to set off fireworks anymore but the air was so thick that people could use colored spotlights to create patterns in the raindrops and chalk particles in the sky. Vase sat silently on the roof and watched a blue and magenta spiral burn through the atmosphere above City Hall and saw shapes like silver serpents move eastward over the Hollywood Hills and into the long desert where Las Vegas had been. She did not understand that the grandmother would never come back home.The rain covered her completely. Her skin became translucent and she felt warm and cold at the same time. She wondered what the word was to describe this feeling but when she asked the last of the doves it answered with a cruel platitude that had nothing to do with her question at all and soon she was all alone again.

COME AND SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE SYSTEM by Saul Lemerond

September 3, 2025

It’s another hot day, and the tide is rising. The son shoulders his father’s rifle and walks back toward the beach house thinking the reason he’s shot the hole in the tank is because his dad refused to buy him a half million follows.“Please like, comment, and subscribe.” He says, holding his phone at eye level and trying to steady his hand because he is still shaking with generational anger he will probably never understand. Water spills out onto the ground as the cat patiently watches the flapjack octopus scurry to the opposite side of its tank. Time is running out. The big cat hopes to eat soon. There is a large hole in the glass that the son put there, and soon this flapjack octopus will be sucked out with the last of the water onto the beach where the cat is waiting. “I can’t wait until the tank drains,” the really big cat says. “Because I’m going to eat you.”“I don’t know why you want to eat me so bad,’ says the flapjack, who is a gentle creature. “You know, I’ve never ever given you a reason to dislike me. I don’t really have anything against cats. It’s the rich man that bothers me, and I think he should bother you too.” “I imagine you are tasty,” the cat says. “The notion preoccupies me. Anyway, don’t blame me. This isn’t my fault. It’s not anyone’s fault. Blame Capitalism.” Neither of these animals actually say these things. Not strictly speaking. Animals cannot talk. At least not in any way we can understand. What the cat actually says is this:Meow. What it means, and what the flapjack octopus knows it to mean, is this: Blame Capitalism. Because they’re in Miami and because Miami is in Florida and because Florida is in the United States of America, Capitalism is the system on which the cat places most blame. What the cat thinks, and would say if it could, is that their owner, a multi-billionaire, is the reason for a great many conditions directly relevant to their present moment. The flapjack octopus would not deny this, though it does find it a tad ironic. It is a fact that the very big cat, the hole in the tank, and the boy with the rifle have all come to their present circumstances because of this very rich man. This man, a man who heads a notably successful private equity firm, likes guns and cats and rare octopi and has a son. If it were not for him, all of their material circumstances would be very, very different. Incidentally, he is very busy, this rich man, and ignores them all unless it’s convenient for him, which is most of the time.At any rate, there are octopi in large tanks all over the premise of this beachside property. Cats as well. Big. Well fed. Cats. And oh boy, do they want to eat the octopi. Every single one of them, especially this one. Meow. Luckly for this cat, the others haven’t yet come to investigate. That the cats had, up to this point, never been given the opportunity to eat any of the owner’s exotic octopi is a great source of consternation. One that leads them to understand they are living tragic lives, surrounded by what must both be delicious and lovely rubbery meat they can never chew because, among other things, they don’t have the resources. Meow.Capitalism. It was the only reason for all the octopi to be in and around this rich man’s house where the cats could see but not eat them instead of in the ocean where they belonged. This is doubly true for the flapjack octopus, which is exceedingly rare and unattainable to anyone who is not super rich. It’s also the reason for the hole in its pressurized tank, which was put there by the son of the rich man. “How about that, Dad?! How impressive is your big tank now?!” He had shouted while uploading the video of him shooting the tank to his socials. The flap jack octopus, who we might assume is trying to calculate its chances of survival, is running out of time, and the cat has a point as to why this is the case. “Damn this rich man and his son and his cat! God, I don’t want to die.” the flapjack octopus laments. “This is all very frightening. Beyond all that, this cat refuses to take responsibility for any of its actions, the state of its life, or recognize its own culpability in a much larger, very flawed system!” This last part being a common criticism of those who level systemic critique toward their specific and individually lousy lots in life. The flapjack didn’t say this last part. If you wanted to get overly technical, it didn’t say any of the parts, not precisely.What the flapjack octopus actually says is this: Bubble. Bubble.But it says it emphatically so, and as you might imagine, the cat is unmoved. To be fair, the octopus is conflicted as, as much as it’d like to, it can’t really see a clear path beyond our current systems of capital. Not that there couldn’t be one, it’s just that it can’t imagine what that would look like. “I am but a simple creature,” admitted the flapjack octopus on many an occasion, “so, it could be that in this case my pessimism is the result of my limited imagination.”Despite the self-deprecation, it is important we do not underestimate the complexity of the octopus, who it could be said, much like America’s Bard, contains multitudes. The flapjack does not want to die. To be eaten. But even more than this, it doesn’t want to be alone anymore. To be possessed by some rich man. It does have hope for freedom. For too long it’s been like a fish out of water, only instead of a fish, it is an octopus, and instead of being out of water, it is in a tank, separated from any kind of good company, or anything familiar to its species. It has not just been lonely, but existentially lonely. What’s worse than this is that the tank is in clear view of the ocean, so that the octopus, for as long as it’s been here, can see its true home. It can see the surf rolling up, over and over again, inviting him back to the place it knows it belongs, with what we as human beings might think of as equivalents of friends and family.What the cat doesn’t understand is the octopus has actually been waiting for this opportunity because it could be a chance to escape. The boy doesn’t understand this either, though this shouldn’t be a surprise to any of us because there are so many things the boy does not understand.Another thing he doesn’t understand is how, due to increased levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere, the sea level has been raising. For the octopus, this is a very important because if the pressure of the water leaving the tank is strong enough, and the tide is high enough, and the sea level has risen enough, then it has a chance at that thing it’s been waiting for. Freedom. But not just freedom. A return to the world it belongs. This would make the flapjack octopus very happy. Happier than it’s been in a long time, and the flapjack octopus deserves to be happy because it is a gentle creature. Bubble. Bubble.Is this octopus capable of the complicated calculations it needs to solve concerning its chances of survival or not? Probably it’s capable of some math. Most creatures are, even the son of the rich man. Speaking of, he is still walking toward the beach house, checking the engagement on his video. People are watching. They are liking, commenting, and subscribing, which is good because that is what he’s asked them to do. If asked, the son would’ve been able unable to say why he got so mad he shot the hole in the tank other that it felt like the right thing to do after his father refused to buy him a half a million bots to increase his subscriber numbers. And that he thought the video would make good content and generate no small number of followers, which in his mind was only fair since his father had denied him so many. The real reason? He is acting out because he idolizes his father more than anything in the world and never gets to see him because his dad is always too busy figuring out ways to increase his wealth, which communicates to his son, either subtly or unsubtly, that his father loves money more than he loves him. The fact that this was true for all major movers of commerce and industry does nothing to make the son feel more loved. The fact the father is just repeating the behaviors of his father before him doesn’t make the son feel more loved either. Ultimately, what the son wants is for his father to smile at him the way he smiles at his exotic flapjack octopus. To care about him the same way he cares about his money. In the absence of this, the son has learned to seek validation through the praise of people he’s never met by making social media content in hopes of becoming a major influencer. In short, the cat is right. Capitalism is to blame.Meow.And what of the flapjack’s chances of survival? Let’s look at the variables. The number of gallons in the tank. The tide. The position of the sun and moon and their gravitational pull on the ocean.The current. The speed at which this octopus must swim to get to a livable depth. And most of all, the release of CO₂, the warming of the earth, the melting of ice, and the rising sea levels. The conclusion? We cannot know. This story encapsulates only a brief moment in time. But one might imagine the flapjack’s conclusion is this: if the ocean level has come up just enough that when it gets sucked out of the tank, it rockets directly into the choppy surf and out to sea. Then, there is some likelihood that the flapjack octopus can safely get to the bottom of the Atlantic where it can spend its time hanging out with its friends and family waiting and watching the ocean levels rise and rise until everything on the surface, including the rich man, the son, and the cat, eventually drown. It's a very satisfying thought for the octopi. Mostly because the only rich thing left on the surface then would be the irony. Bubble. Bubble.

WOULD YOU TREMBLE IN THE PRESENCE OF THE VIRGIN SHOULD SHE COME TO YOUR TOWN? by Cortez

August 25, 2025

When Mother’s belly bloomed again, she pointed a french-tipped finger at the richest man in town. The accusation, though baseless, haunted him-- it polluted his polished lawn, noosed his silk ties. This was a man shrunken, a spirit corrupted, a man of real stature driven sick. But the town was small, and Mother was only getting bigger, and so he wished her away with a lump sum.Mother had two girls at home. The little one, blue-eyed and painted with the peachy, airbrushed skin of Jesus, thought she might’ve been born of dirt, like Adam, or rib, like Eve. The big one was old enough to know that she was half from mother’s tummy, she assumed the other half might be chipped wallpaper, or oil spills, or the pink in the faces of men at truck stop diners. Even when it seems these things disappear, the rich man often thought to himself, a certain stain is left on a man, a certain debris accumulates inside the soul. The girls had attached to their mother erratically. They sat sunny-side up, transverse, breech-- had to be unknit by gloved hands, unzipped from the same scar on her belly. The births were emergencies-- horrific blurs of fluorescent lighting and hospital blue. Mother requested a mirror for each procedure, glimpsing, in the fuss, creation-- the whole red mess of it. The rich man had three of his own. On Sunday, terror among the parishioners. Mother and her girls arrived late, sulked into a front pew during the Nicene Creed. Wives’ eyes darted in horror between Mother’s belly and their husbands. Through their loyal recitation-- Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen-- they wondered: who made her a mother? Our fathers? Our sons? -- God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God-- Or worse, someone from out of town? The rich man’s own voice shook at the pulpit. He thought, a man can assemble a kneeling congregation-- He will come again in glory-- A man can raise a town from dirt-- His kingdom will have no end-- and for what. When Mother was young, she’d gone to a city. She was a girl then: golden, freckled, life so everywhere in her. It was a city from tip to toe: sparkling up into the clouds and carrying on a grisly, sticky version of itself underground. Mother stood in the highest point of that city, over evry metal monument reflecting sun and blue, over every creeping thing that crept in concrete veins, over every clay creature men had sculpt from dirt, and, summoning the miracle machinery of her insides, spoke:I will name this silver, and this riverThis, beneath my rib, cityThis, beneath my city, railI, blessed by the maker and the maker myselfWill tear trembling towns through mine divine routeIn agony, I will bear the fruit.