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GHOST STORY by Shae Sennett

December 13, 2024

Being a girl inside Blue Park is insanely humiliating, but I am prepared to weather the storm. I am cased in my androgynous armor of enormous jorts from the early aughts and a baggy N-Sync shirt that subtly signals irony in an overtly post-ironic way — the mustache finger tattoo of my generation. God bless me, I am positively swimming in a sea of cute boys. I feel like I am in a fanfiction, but I am way too ugly to be Y/N and no one here even cares that I am reading Nietzsche’s Collected Works. Nonetheless, I am doing my best to project an effortless cool, the kind that all guy’s girls have, like the one in sexy clothing who is offering me a hit of her blunt right now. It is an act of solidarity, not friendship, because she is not my friend, just my friend’s girlfriend. I no longer have girlfriends after what happened to Dasha. I also don’t go into the ocean.After I watch the boys skateboard in the concrete park I follow them to Joe’s concrete apartment building, where I am allowed to watch them watch skate videos or even watch them play Tony Hawk’s Skate 3 on Xbox 360, or possibly PS2, I’m not really sure. It’s part of my research as I build an internal lexicon of tricks like bean-plant and sex-change and Casper, like the ghost. I perform my silent assimilation ritual secretly on the couch and before anyone notices I’m one of the freaking boys. I can smoke weed if I throw in, I can do a line if I Venmo Joe $5, I can have a Coors Banquet tall boy if I steal it myself and quickly enough that I don’t keep them waiting. I don’t think about Dasha or the ocean or the ghost and the boys don’t think about me. Sometimes they sleep with me and sometimes they don’t and sometimes they get it up and sometimes they don’t and for some reason none of them ask me to be their girlfriend, even though I am doing such a good job of being just like them. I’m pretty sure it’s because they somehow found out I’ve seen every single episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, even though I wipe my web history every time I watch it, but it could also be that I’m ugly. It also could be that they think I’m a lesbian simply because I bite my nails and have a strong jawline and can’t afford to buy weed and shaving cream at the same time so I keep choosing weed for five years, but I kinda don’t think it’s that.The “third space” is the basement called Heck, where people with dyed hair and gender troubles play the sounds of rattling chains and creaking door hinges off of sub-bass speakers that got broken from being left out in the rain. The boys throw their bodies at each other and I throw my body at their bodies and we all laugh because violence is funny, especially with your friends (they taught me this). A girl dressed like me is there and she makes all the boys laugh and I wonder what her secret is until one of the boys says she’s a lesbian. Figures — everything good happens to people who don’t want it anyway. She asks me to bum a cigarette and I pretend I don’t have one and I turn red hot with embarrassment from lying and also maybe from all the body heat. One of the boys gives her a cigarette and she doesn’t even have to Venmo them $1, which is insane. They are monkey-fucking and my heart swells with jealousy and also maybe some other unparsable passion, I’m not sure. The lesbian is breezier than a windchime and laughs twice as loud and I swear I’m not that funny. She wants to smoke weed after the punk show together in my apartment, nearby and covered in dust and ash and socks that smell bad. I say yes because saying no is harder and also I’m out of weed. I’m probably not a lesbian but I’m sure it will be fine. She rolls us a spliff raw dog on my Amazon plywood coffee table and she explains to me an episode of 30 Rock and all her favorite jokes in it and I say “Wow that’s crazy” seven times and by the eighth time I realize I should probably say something else so I say “Wow, that’s… insane.” It’s here that she decides to kiss me.“Her lips are so soft,” I narrate along in my head, preparing for how I will describe this to the boys at Blue Park. I figure if we can talk about fucking pussy together I will be better girlfriend material. I am choosing which boy I want the most in my head when suddenly the lesbian pulls her lips away from my lips. I am worried for a second that I did something wrong, but also kind of relieved that I won’t be munching box or whatever, until she looks at me with that’s amore eyes and says: “Have you ever seen a ghost?”I haven’t seen a ghost but I have seen all one million thousand episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race in shameful secret. I haven’t seen a ghost but I have seen Dasha follow one into the ocean and never come back. “I haven’t seen a ghost, but I’m sure you have, so… what’s the story?”Usually “the story” is a painting that fell off the wall in your great aunt’s house, or a shadow that passed by your bedroom window of a childhood vacation home and the floorboard creaked from the weight of its absolute spookiness, and every once in a blue moon the story is that a ghost with my name and my haircut is drowning you in the ocean and you are swallowed by the water and the night and all the void-like things that haunt them. But the lesbian doesn’t have a story. “I see ghosts all the time,” the lesbian is like. “There’s like two ghosts in your apartment right now, and they’re both girls. One of them looks kind of Russian. The other one looks kind of like you.”Then she tries to kiss me again, but I am too busy being haunted by Dasha and the ghost that once replaced me in her life. The lesbian calls herself an Uber, muttering under her breath about how expensive it is to sail just halfway across Brooklyn until, finally, she leaves me alone with my ghosts. The Google search “Do lesbians have higher rates of schizophrenia” yields unsatisfying results. Thankfully RuPaul’s Drag Race is already open in another tab, God bless me, and I drift into the ocean of the night, the sea of sleep, and dream of ghosts.

THE OLD WOMEN AND THE SEA by Kate Faigen

December 12, 2024

Sybil unsticks her thigh from the side of the banana boat. She’s been lost at sea with Celeste for sixty-one days now. Sixty-one salty-aired days of morning dips and back floats at sunset. Stolen sandwiches dropped by seagulls into their laps, lunches and dinners enjoyed over chats about everything and nothing. Don’t feel badly for Sybil and Celeste—the old women are coasting. In the sun, they spread their arms and tan their skin, speaking like sailors. They laugh so loud and deep they make waves. At nighttime, Sybil and Celeste lie down and hug the banana boat—Cary Grant, they call it—their heads almost touching in the middle. When the sun rises, they sit up and say good morning to schools of fish already on their way.To people on land, Sybil and Celeste are a news story, a sensation. But “presumed dead” would be sublime, they agree. Not everyone cares to be found. Some days, they lament what they miss: screwball comedies, scented candles, omakase. They’ve found, though, that unobstructed stars at night are a panacea for missing.When they’re feeling especially light, Sybil and Celeste lift the stray oar from the foot area of the banana boat. The one that drifted to them thirty-something days ago. HAPPY CAMPER, reads the blade’s inscription. Sybil and Celeste use the oar as a microphone for karaoke—today, Sybil sings Sinatra, later, Celeste will channel Elvis. The oar takes them to stages big and small, where the main act performs for a one-person audience, each show the greatest on earth.

THE QUIET SHORE by Belinda Rowe

December 11, 2024

Everything has an end — even stars, but still, when I caressed your face that morning, my fingers panicked at the cold of you.Steadfast for thirty years. Every Friday night we dined at our favourite restaurant, ordered spaghetti aglio e olio and a glass of Chablis. You sat opposite the fish tank where the blue groper circled, I sat overlooking the ocean. Remember you whispered, that’s no life.I didn’t think I could go on; cloven heart, heft of silence, but I kept up Friday nights for as long as it took, sat opposite the fish tank, declined the Chablis. I didn’t give a fig about consequences. I mean, what did I have to lose?I dressed for the occasion in my white silk blouse with the cameo carved from conch shell, the silver necklace you cast in delft clay for me, your old military pants rolled up and belted, black tactical boots from the OP shop. I tucked my hair into your green beret.I moved like a sapper to the restaurant bathroom, kindled a smokescreen from damp lichen and twigs. Orange flames crackled and hissed. Gliding through the plumes and wailing alarms, I swept the blue groper into a sack, cradled him down the path to the waiting ocean.Every Friday night since, the smell of salt and seaweed are a salve. I sip Chablis from your hipflask, light a tea light, settle it on a bed of swamp she-oak bark — gentle it out. Watch it bobbing.

RUN by Karen Kao

December 10, 2024

Back then, the law center sat in a squat square flanked on one side by a free needle exchange and on the other by a flophouse that rented its rooms by the hour. I was late to class. I think it was Civil Procedure. One hundred pairs of eyes calculated my chances of failing as I took the only seat available in the first row next to her.She had red hair and green eyes and the kind of adorable tipped-up nose that I have always wanted to have. She came from a working class Irish Catholic family with priests and nuns dangling from foreshortened branches of the family tree. She was the first in her family to attend law school.I was the child of immigrants. We lived on the wrong side of Los Angeles in a cinder block house with Westinghouse Appliances in avocado green. My family consisted of engineers and mathematicians and no one who worked in words. Somehow I assumed life at an East Coast law school would be no different from my college days in sunny Southern California, where a girl could bop about braless. At law school, I could not understand all the attention I got. It shocked me to see my undergrad housemates snort cocaine between lectures, that other classmates took uppers or downers to ease the stress of exams. Neither she nor I had the money for recreational drugs. We had made it into law school against the odds, fueled by scholarships and parental sacrifice. We had no choice but to succeed. I don’t think my parents wanted me to climb the social ladder. I think all they wanted for me was financial security. But I was reckless in those days. I thought I could still run away. I have photographs of her from our first year in law school. The shots are all bad. Dark, out of focus, without any context to tell me when or why they were taken. Surprisingly, we all look happy.By day, we students were competitors in a zero-sum game that would lead to a summer associate position at a prestigious law firm or a clerkship with a prominent judge. We were graded on classroom recitations of case law and at Moot Court competitions. Maybe everyone was smiling because the gloves had come off for the night. Here’s a photo of her and me sitting behind what looks like a piano, my glasses thrown on the closed lid but still in view of the camera. My hair was long then, down to my butt. The only thing that shines in the photo is her smile.Here’s another one with her and three of our classmates. Everyone’s shirt is buttoned up high. She always wore blazers or plaid shirts. I thought, at the time, this was an East Coast thing.This one shows her and me and my housemate on the front steps of the law center. We’re facing the law school parking lot, perched at the end of a no man’s land and the projects that spread from there. The sun has already gone down. My housemate and I look cold. We’re still layering clothes in an attempt to acclimate. She wears a long white cardigan open over a brown checked shirt and dark brown corduroy trousers. She holds herself slightly apart as if she’s a casual bystander or needs to stop herself from doing something stupid. Her green eyes blaze. In all these photos, I am relaxed and smiling and utterly oblivious of the jockeying that is going on around me in plain sight. The family connections, the alumni associations, Mom or Dad putting in a good word for Junior before the first semester grades are released. She and I have no one to give us a leg up. We’ll have to do it all on our own. When Thanksgiving came around that year and she heard that I wouldn’t be going to Los Angeles, she invited me to come home with her. I was grateful for the opportunity. This would be my first break from law school and I was eager to get away. By then, I had been cornered in the library by a classmate who was a fellow Angeleno. He had dark curly hair and alert eyes that calculated the value of what I wore from my hair clips down to my sneakers. He didn’t have to ask which side of town I came from. He said, wow, you must have struggled to get here. It was the first time I thought of myself as deprived. She told me to forget about it, I’m pretty sure. She knew what it was like to have slurs flung at her head. By Thanksgiving, we had been the closest of friends for almost three months. By then, I knew what she wanted. She thought I was the one, the woman she would love for the rest of her life. Together, we would run from the future her family had planned for her. For this dream, she was prepared to pay the highest price: ostracism from her family, excommunication from her church, every branch and twig cut off until nothing remained but a trembling trunk.I remember that her home stood on a steeply sloped street. I remember a clock ticked loudly in the hallway. I remember an afternoon when everyone went to church except us.In the front room stood a couch that was surprisingly hard all over, as if it were too good for the family to use. It was covered in velvet upholstery, perhaps, smooth on my skin, in dark green or maybe that was the color of her eyes. A crucifix on the wall promised salvation. White skin revealed freckles in the most surprising spots, strangely cold to the touch. We had sex on that couch. It was the first time with a woman for either of us. I call it sex because that’s what it was for me though I knew even then that it meant something different to her. When I count the number of sexual partners I have had, I am tempted to call myself a predator. But that term would imply I had intentions. A more accurate description of my sex life then would be that of a rock stuck in a riverbed of streaming water. She happened to be running up that river and I got in her way.No, that’s not true either. I was running, too, from a man who had convinced me that I wasn’t worthy of love. In those days, I would fall into the arms of anyone who would take me in his stead. At law school, that fall, she and I crashed into each other, headed in opposite directions. I didn’t think of myself as queer at the time or, for that matter, now. We’re all queer, aren’t we, albeit to varying degrees. In another time and place, we might give in to our Sapphic urges. But society imposes norms and families project expectations. In those days of Cyndi Lauper and androgynous boy bands, you could only buy wedding cakes with a man and a woman on top. Few of us had the strength of mind to choose desire over the path of least resistance.She had the narrow shoulders and hips of a ten year old boy and a stiff-legged walk as if she wanted to seem dangerous. She had a low-timbre laugh not easily evoked but when she did let it go, her voice hummed in my throat. She chose a queer life knowing the cost. She was playing for keeps.The fact that she wanted me was enough reason for me to throw the dice. If by doing so I might cause harm then that was part of the game.I cannot remember how long our affair lasted, whether it was a one-night or a two-night or a several-week stand. I like to think we would have stuck it out at least until exams had passed and everyone could retreat for Christmas. In any event, I’m pretty sure that she and I did not talk about what you might call our future. Turns out that we never needed to have that talk. Turns out she was pregnant by some guy she met on the Greyhound bus, at least that’s what she told me. Turns out it didn’t matter that she didn’t know his name or where to find him because it was an ectopic pregnancy that went undetected until her Fallopian tubes blew her into the hospital. I wasn’t there when she was put into an ambulance, though I heard after the fact that she could have died. Her family clamored for her to come home. I could imagine her back in her childhood bedroom, surrounded by loving parents and siblings. But that would have meant giving up law school, re-applying next year, maybe getting rejected. She refused to go home. She had run this far. There was no going back.While she recuperated, I brought her my lecture notes and copies of law journal articles. Together, we poured over Property and Contracts and Criminal Procedure case law. She didn’t need to study very hard. She was better than me in all of our classes.I don’t remember what we did for fun on those long wintry afternoons, other than gossip about our classmates. Who was fucking whom, which of our classmates had flubbed their recitation of the day’s case, who was already angling for a clerkship. I think I made her laugh and cooked her dinner. I’m pretty sure I did everything she wanted me to do except fall in love. As soon as she was strong enough to attend class again, I ran. A few months later, I moved into a new student house with another group of law school classmates. She and I no longer had friends in common. We would only see each other in the carrels of the law school library or milling about the hallways between classes or by the vending machines in the basement. Then, we would smile broadly at each other as if we were still the best of friends. Somehow I thought all that tutoring I had done while she was recovering from her ectopic pregnancy was enough to prepare me for exams. I almost failed law school that first year. My grades were so bad that my chances of a decent-paying job were close to zero. Any sane person would have quit law school and gone home to lick their wounds. I would have taken a bath financially but I wasn’t thinking about debt. I had never failed a class in my life and was not about to start. I applied to a law journal and was accepted. My road to success re-opened. Was it cosmic retribution then to be robbed at gunpoint? It was late at night. There were three of us leaving the library and we thought we were safe. The parking lot was, after all, on the other side of the street. Our assailant found us among the cars. He could not have been more than twelve years old. He looked like the kind of boy I grew up with on the wrong side of Los Angeles. Different color, same lack of prospects. When the view from the window shows broken-down tenements and abandoned cars and white people afraid to walk on your side of the street, what else can a kid do but run? We gave the kid what we had and let him go.As I approached my third year, job-hunting became my priority. I had a financial aid job in the Student Placement Office. Normally, I could do my research in peace. Suddenly, my classmates were thumbing through files of prospective employers: public or private, Wall Street or Main Street, in-house or outside counsel. We would all have debts to pay upon graduation, even the richest among us. Throughout law school and long after graduation, she and I lived in the same city. For all I knew, we were never more than a few subway stops apart. She went to work for the government. The law firm where I had spent time during law school as an intern and later a summer associate took me on full-time. My starting salary was more than either of my parents had ever earned.There were three of us associates who started together. We unironically called ourselves the Mod Squad. How else to describe a trio of friends: the white man, the Black man, and the Asian Peggy Lipton? For our first few weeks, we worked by day and bar-hopped by night.At our firm, on the bulletin board, next to the coffee machine and above the free donuts, hung a list of every lawyer at the firm and the number of hours he or she had billed in the previous week. I stayed in the office until nine o’clock every night when FedEx stopped accepting packages for overnight delivery. My cohort knuckled down. All the same, our Mod Squad disbanded by the end of the year. Not all of us could meet the monthly billable hour quota. It wasn’t like government lawyers had it any easier. They lived under the pressures of budgets, legislative sessions, and a personnel shuffle each time the administration changed. I could have learned more about the life of a government lawyer. We could have met for drinks like other young professionals did. We might have reconciled. Instead, I turned her into a distant memory that hurt only when touched. A decade after we graduated, I saw her for the last time. I was married by then and had recently moved to The Netherlands, where I was struggling to find my footing. I longed for the familiarity of the States where I thought I understood how things worked.I don’t know why I thought that seeing her again would be a good idea. It had to have been my idea because she could never have found me in Amsterdam. I wonder now how welcome my overture was.In any event, she agreed to meet. As the local, she got to choose our rendezvous point. An organic farmers’ market had sprung up not far from our old law center. I remember navigating my way past mounds of local produce and coffee roasters and hanging plants in macrame pots. I think it was wintertime because I remember that the light was sharp that day and the lines around her eyes cold and clear. She had a certain hardness to her jaw that I did not recall. She was beautiful, if a little tired looking.I wish I could remember what we discussed. All I have left is a spatial memory: how stiffly she stood, her back as straight as any soldier’s, always more than an arm’s length away from me. A rebuke perhaps, an acknowledgment that I had wronged her, the expectation of an apology? We left these matters unsaid and I flew back to The Netherlands. There are days when I forget her last name and I wonder whether I made it all up. The me that I am now keeps my hair short and my shoes sensible. I don’t have sex on couches. Insofar as I long for those days, it is the sanitized version I play back, the one in which my intentions were always good. On other days, the heat of her laugh rises in my throat and that green velvet couch spreads beneath my thighs as smooth and hard as ever. Then I have no choice but to look for her on the internet, both curious and frightened to see who she has become. I find housewives, nuns, obituaries. Surely she would have run faster and farther than that?

BEACH LAND by Lucas Flatt

December 9, 2024

Bushels of sargassum had washed up among the rental chairs. They clogged the beach. And so, fittingly, the day began with disappointment.Marjorie hated it, done up in strawberry print and pale as the moon with sunblock on her little face, thick like cream cheese. She scooped and hurled the stuff away from the chairs, scowling, haranguing the clods of seaweed.Gracie, implacable behind her sunglasses, rummaging through something on her phone, wouldn’t look Paul in the face.Paul toed the pile before his chair. “It’s got berries. We’ll make wine out of it.” Gracie frowned.“I have our tagline: ‘It’s not gone off…it just tastes like that.’”Their daughter made a move for the water and Gracie half-stood, but the little girl sat instead to pout in the damp sand a yard back from the water, to throw into the surf a limp plastic shark, and Gracie settled back into her seat.“It just tastes like that,” Paul said again.The sun climbed and bore into their left sides. Their little girl returned to the work of casting off the seaweed and asked, as ever, for the hundredth time that morning, “Will you play?”Paul took a branch of the sargassum and gave it a long sniff. “Notes of ocean water and fish butt.” “Will you play with me?”“It’s the answer we’ve been looking for–we’ll have to move down here to set up the vineyards.”“Will you play with me?”“I guess we’ll have to cultivate in the ocean. How much is ocean per acre?”Gracie groaned and put her thin hands over her face.“You’d think it’s less than beachfront, at least.”“You play with me.”Gracie lifted her hands, their shadows imprinting on the tight skin around her mouth. “Who are you talking to?”

***

By the pool, Paul still watched Gracie’s face in profile while she watched Marjorie swim with two brothers around her age, one probably younger and the other older by as much. She’d asked the boys to play; she’d ask anyone.Paul asked Gracie, “Why are you mad at me?” He couldn’t stop himself asking.“I’m not mad. Everything is fine.”If Paul ever heard the expression “everything is fine” again he vowed to pick a direction and run forever. Forever for his body would not be long or far, but he hoped his soul, such as it was, might propel then from his eyeballs and keep going at least a little farther.For now he climbed down the pool steps and swam to the deep end and floated there. And just as on each prior afternoon, he recognized that he did not care if he sank or emerged or simply dematerialized. “That’s my daddy,” Marj told the boys.This brought him back. He sang, “Do do, do do,” went under, holding one hand up vertical like a fin. When he caught hold of his daughter’s ankle, she didn’t squeal or kick. The thin bones of her ankles felt reedy and the clouds came across the sun and Paul closed his eyes and lay there long as he could, until she pulled away.

***

On the pretense of buying ice cream for them all, Paul went down to the taco place across the parking lot from their condo and waited in a long line to order a drink. He’d been sober almost seven years. When the sandblasted Heidi asked his order, Paul teared up. She opened her gray eyes wide, as if to say, This isn’t the line for existential crises, and he ordered a rum and Coke. He never used to drink rum and Cokes. He’d drunk beer, which made him fat, which made him uglier.It occurred to him, squeezing into a stool at the far corner of the bar, away from the lines for drinks and tacos, that he might be feeling sorry for himself. That seemed possible. He took a sip. It helped, a little. The weight of the guilt of breaking another promise to Gracie never fell onto him. It just floated up there with the rest of it. A woman near his age took the empty seat beside him despite a good line of empty stools stretching back to the crowded part of the bar. “This seat taken?” She looked him dead in the eyes.“No.”She resembled his high school sweetheart, or at least how he imagined her twenty years later: small face shaped like a heart, round body, hair dyed an aggressive crimson, very tanned. Maybe local, though this bar seemed to be for tourists. She wore a Gov’t Mule t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. “I’m Jen.” “Paul.” They clinked their glasses. He took a bigger drink and the rum curled his lip. “Guh.”“Not much of a drinker?”“No. I always think I’ll like it. Whiskey.” He looked at his drink. “Rum. Whatever. It looks good on commercials.”She slugged her drink, which looked like rum without the soda, and smacked her lips. “Love it.”“It just tastes like what it is. Like you put corn or wheat or whatever in a barrel and left it there and forgot it and then came back and poured it in a glass.”“Well you got some soda pop in there. That should help.” She muttered something, maybe “pussy,” and killed her drink.“Did you call me a ‘pussy?’”She gave him another long look. “What if I did?”Paul considered this. He didn’t have an answer. He said, “I’m not,” but didn’t believe it.“Put your arm up,” Jen said. She slapped the bartop.“I’m sorry?” Paul pulled back on his stool.“Do it, pussy.” “Are we going to arm wrestle?”“You’re goddamn right.”He won without much effort, but when he’d pinned her hand they left theirs clasped on the sticky bar. Paul’s last clear thought before he made himself let go and take another drink was, Buddy, this is getting out of hand.

***

They grunted and tried to dry-hump in the front seat of her SUV, some kind of Jeep, but didn’t fit well behind the steering wheel. Paul wished like Hell he’d look out over her shoulder and see Gracie likewise straddling some douchebag somewhere in the half-empty parking lot. Maybe also in a cobalt-colored Jeep. But all the Jeeps were empty save this one, steaming up.“Yes,” Jen stage-moaned.Her butt-bone dug into his thigh. “Shift a little,” Paul said.“Ooh.”“Uh huh.” Just as things became pleasantly frictive, Jen pushed back till she squashed against the wheel and said, "I don’t know if I want to.”This was a relief. “Me either,” Paul said. “I already feel guilty.”“Me, too. I'm married. We're separated. I came down here to spend my savings and drink myself to death, I guess. Like that Nicholas Cage movie.""Face/off.""Yeah." Jen reached down to the console for a pack of Camel Lights. "Let's just talk.""Ok. It's kind of hot in here.""I didn't mean dirty talk.""I wasn't.""Tell me something about yourself, Paul." She stayed on his lap and felt in her shorts for a lighter.Paul thought. "I always park in the same place at the grocery store so I don't have to look for my car.""That's honestly fascinating.""It is?""No, Paul. I wish you'd told me any other thing in the world."“Where’s your husband?” Paul tried not to sound peevish, but mostly everything he said these days did.“Home. Birmingham.”“Why are you split up?”“He wants me to stop drinking. I told him I’d quit the first of the month.” Today was the tenth. “My wife told me I had to ‘get over it’.” Paul waited for Jen to ask about “it.” She did not. “I think I want a divorce. I’ll probably tell her about this. That’ll do it.”“Don’t tell her.”Paul ran his hands through his hair. “I don’t know how not to.”“Just don’t.”“That’s the problem. I just do. Every little thing that bothers me, it’s like I have to. It burns in here if I don’t.” Paul rubbed his solar plexus."OK, tell her, then. Sounds like it won’t matter. Because I’m sure she didn't mean to marry a big whiny bitch." She slid into the passenger seat and lit her cigarette.Paul considered. “That’s probably true.”"She must be a profoundly strong woman to put up with you. You should run back to her fast as your mismatched legs can take you." "I forget my legs are different sizes."They both regarded Paul's legs. Jen frowned. "I'm afraid I never will." Paul coughed and popped open the driver’s side door. "Well, enjoy drinking yourself to death." He hung in the doorway, waiting for her snappy retort, but when none came he looked back at Jen's tight-lipped profile. She stared ahead at the sunset through the steamed-up windshield. This was a record, two women he'd put that long face on in a single afternoon.When he'd made it halfway to the cross walk toward the beach he looked back and saw Jen pouring the last of a bottle out of her window. She nodded to him and jumped the curb and screeched off toward highway 98.Or anyway that's what he pretended he'd seen, not looking either way at the intersection, just watching his legs carry him to the water.

***

At the showers by the beach access were a few sandals and someone’s boogie-board leaning against a splintery railing. It wore the Tasmanian Devil and seemed too small for Paul, who stole it anyway. If he’d ever stolen anything before, he couldn’t recall it. He thought someone might shout for him to stop, but there was no one around.By sunset the beach was empty save the kid who rented chairs who stood up from his tented kiosk and welcomed Paul by name. “I just broke down your chairs,” he said, apologetic but not offering to set them back.Paul waved him off. “Thanks, Brayden.”“Hunter,” the kid said, still apologetic. Paul nodded and headed in. The tide was out and he had to walk a good way before the water reached his knees. One family watched him from the sandbar.He waded to the bar, went over into deeper water and began to float on the boogie board. The water was warm and he paddled out, unhurried, wondering how far he could get. There was some kind of fishing boat puttering along the horizon. When he looked back, the beach was far and someone–probably Brayden–stood cupping their eyes and looking out, probably at him. He waved; the person didn’t wave back.The waves came heavier and he had to hold on to the boogie board to keep it under his flabby torso. The family on the bar were looking out at something his way. Here it is, he told himself. It’s time. He really wanted another drink, shuddered away the image of Jen in her Jeep, glad at least not to have to explain that to Gracie, or anyone.Out of habit, he still imagined himself explaining, how he’d bring it up, what combination of words would yield which response. He didn’t know how to stop. But what he wasn’t imagining, despite blinking hard several times and wiping the salty haze from his eyes, despite truly hoping that he was, were the sizable dorsal fins trolling toward him from farther out to sea. The people on the sandbar shouted.“Fuck,” Paul said.The sharks neared. They circled, two fins, one significantly larger than the other, like a mother and child, perhaps. A father and child. He was going to die as some kind of hunting lesson for a shark.He held very still, but the circling closed and closed. He tried to pull himself up entirely on the beach board but the scrabbling only seemed to excite the sharks.He decided to try something. He lied to himself. Paul, you can fight off these sharks.It helped. He said out loud, “I’m OK. This is going to be alright.” And just before the shark clamped down on his leg–the smaller shark on the smaller leg–he finally had it, just a glimmering thought, but halfway to a plan that possibly might save his marriage.“Ah, fuck!” It really hurt.

***

In the end, he did fight away the sharks. In his shrieking and flailing he kicked something several times. It didn’t fight back. He must taste bad, was the only logical conclusion. The sharks circled. They trailed away, possibly regrouping.When his panic ebbed, he felt himself and found what he guessed to be a decent tear in his calf. Blood came smokily up in the water rolling around his board.For once, his mind was truly blank. Then there was a great noise and he violently peed himself. It was an air horn blast. The fishing boat had spotted him in the dying light and shone some kind of spot his way. It trundled on. Somehow he knew the sharks were gone.Any semblance of life-altering epiphany had voided with his bladder. He let go of the board, slipped into the water with his eyes closed, and shouted away his air, his breath bubbling and his head immediately light. He was deep enough to turn all the way over and with his head facing down he kicked out his arms and legs and sank. He opened his eyes to the saltwater, expecting silty purple-black, but found instead a tawny haze. Then it was like he could breathe in some kind of air bubble, and in the golden light he saw someone, a person, smiling at him. A radiant woman. She wasn’t a mermaid. She had on a pastel blouse and very kind, pale blue eyes, and a gnarled hand with swollen knuckles reaching out for his. He took it. It was his mother, who he’d not thought about in maybe a week. She shook her head and held his hand. She looked into his eyes and then Paul rolled over into the purple-black and kicked up into the spotlight of the fishing boat.

***

After the old couple had helped him aboard with a rope and a lot of undignified scrambling, his shorts halfway down his ass, his leg bleeding on the boat’s slick beige finish, Paul sat in the cockpit with blankets around him and a towel done up on his head. The old lady had gone somewhere out of sight looking for a first aid kid. The bite on his calf was curved and long as a hand.The old man, Hank, sat above him and worried with a radio. “We watched you for a while but you seemed like a strong swimmer. We didn’t think anything until we saw the sharks.”“That’s OK,” Paul told him again, touched, honestly, to be called a good swimmer. He loved compliments.“What were you doing out there?”He was cold. It was hard to remember. “I guess I meant to drown myself.”“Huh.” The old man, Hank, turned that over in his head. “Well, we could get you out past the sharks a ways and let you out.”The old woman, Joanne, was back in the cockpit with a box and flashlight. She gave her husband a long look, shaking her head. “God damn it, Hank.”

***

The last of the sun burned out and the navigation lights glowed so that the horizon dimmed away and they were just rocking on the purple-black. It might well have been outer space.Hank gestured around them to the boat itself. He’d been extolling it for a while, Paul thought. They were borrowing it from a friend. “If we buy it, we get to name it, of course. What should we call her?”Paul knew without thinking. “Sweet bitch of the evening time.”Hank squinted at Paul, turning this too over in his head. “Did you say ‘time’ or ‘tide?’”“Tide.” Paul liked that better.

***

Heading in, Paul played out what he would tell Gracie. He thought about seeing his mother and that she wanted to tell him something. What was it? What had he been thinking before the sharks attacked?“What was your name?” Hank asked.“Carlos.” He lied, and felt better, and it was coming back, the answer to everything. He leaned against the cockpit railing and closed his eyes. “Carlos Santoya. My folks are from Spain.”When the dock came into view Paul said, “Hey, I think I was just in shock before. I wasn’t really trying to drown myself.”“Oh yeah?” Hank frowned. “Nope. I was training. Boogie boarding. Walton County, regionals.”“Regionals?”“Oh yeah.” Paul nodded with big emphasis. More emphasis than he’d had in years. All of it, surging back.

***

He came into the condo wild-eyed, angry for no reason that Gracie wasn’t waiting at the door, and found her on the couch, Marj sleeping with her head in her mother’s lap. Don’t blow it, he told himself, knowing that he was.She asked, “Are you OK?”“No. God, no. I need to go to the hospital.”She looked at his bandaged calf.“Did you get hit by a car?” “No!” Paul’s hands curled into fists, which Gracie hated.“You don’t have to.” She looked down at Marj, awake now, feigning sleep. “You don’t have to be an asshole. Where were you?”“It doesn’t matter. I need to go to the hospital.”“Let me see it.” Gracie reached for Paul who pulled back.“Not for that. Not that kind of hospital.”And they were fighting, and the girl was awake. Before Paul could get a handle on himself, she was carrying Marj into the bedroom, locking the door.

***

That’s how Paul imagined it, provided the old Paul. The elevator smelled like cat urine and some kind of slime glazed the carpet. He braced himself at the door, punched in the code and slipped in quietly, limping, laden with ice-cream.Marj slept in the bottom bunk and he knelt there and tousled her hair.“Paul?” Gracie looked asleep, and scared, standing in the kitchen.“Sorry, babe. What a night!”“Where were you?”“Let’s get this in the freezer.” He limped there for effect. “I went to talk to Brayden about the chairs.”“Who? Hunter? The chair guy?”“Yeah, and there was all this pandemonium.”Only now did she seem to notice his limping.“Oh my God!”“People were running around. They were pointing at something in the water.”“Oh my God.”Paul closed the freezer. “There were some kids out there and this lady was just yelling, ‘Come back, come back,’ and people were watching. The lifeguard was dragging over a kayak or something.”“You went in?”“Well, I’m a pretty good swimmer. But it was just instinct. I didn’t really even know what was happening. I went in with my shoes and everything.” “You got bit by a shark?”“A little one.” Paul held his hands apart yay far.Gracie made some kind of squeal and wrapped him up. Marj climbed out of the bunk bed, mostly asleep, came dragging her blanket and wrapped up their legs.“Oooh, easy,” Paul said. But it didn’t really hurt. “Daddy’s a hero,” Gracie said. She was crying hard into his shoulder.“No, no,” he said. “It was the lifeguard who got the kids.”

***

Later, with Marj back asleep and the ice cream containers stuck to the coffee table with the spoons standing up together, Paul and Gracie held each other on the couch.“I’m gonna fix everything.”She squeezed like maybe she believed him.“Oh yeah?”“Oh yeah.”She pulled back and put her hand on his collarbone, her eyes wet. “I want you to know, you don’t have to change yourself. You don’t need to be a different person for me to love you.”He pulled her in. “I know that.” He grinned over her out the balcony window. Lying felt better and better.She called him a hero again. He let her. “I guess I am,” he said. He tried to push away any kind of questions. The only one kept resurfacing was, what now? How does this end? Maybe that’s what his mother wanted to tell him. She’d seemed worried. That had been her way. But not now, maybe. Why should she? She was like a mermaid queen all gold and radiant in robes that billowed in the undertow, emerald scales. Or maybe she wasn’t. She’d just been his mother, underwater, quite unhappy. Her pale eyes pleaded. She was mouthing something, but there wasn’t any sound, of course, underneath all that water. Probably she’d wanted to tell him not to start this. You light it, you build it up, you’re glowing and you’re billowing, it seems like you’re coasting over, it seems like the answer, but when do you stop feeding the fire?He looked out into the dark toward the ocean where heaven must be. He wished he could tell her. It was OK. For once he had the answer. You never do. Not ever.

POTENTIAL DOWNSIDE OF REPLACING YOUR EYEBALLS WITH CORN ON THE COB by Tyler Plofker

December 8, 2024

Me and Johnny replaced our eyeballs with corn on the cob. One cob stickin’ out of each socket. Buttered. Went in easy. Johnny’s aunt, Joann, said, “Stop that, you boys need your eyes!” We said, “Shut your trap, ya old hag!”We ran into the backyard. Could see just fine. The cobs fell into our skulls and bumped around as we climbed into Johnny’s treehouse. He dared me to dare him to jump from the treehouse to the grass, which was uncharacteristic. I dared him to jump from the treehouse to the grass. Johnny jumped from the treehouse to the grass and broke his right leg and right hip bone, and then we weren’t allowed to hang out with each other for three and a half months.

LADIES OF THE PRIVY CHAMBER by Mark Iosifescu

December 5, 2024

“There was a russet-coloured moon of ominous size too low above the whispering bushes; he danced exuberantly for five minutes beneath it after the click when his neck broke. His bowels opened. What a mess!”—Angela Carter, “Elegy for a Freelance” It was on the basis of his sorry reputation that we arranged for Puccio the ex-valet to desecrate the chapel. When we first arrived in town, we were told by villagers of every description—the lordlings and plainclothesmen, the monastics and innkeepers, the stewards and eelbaiters and whores—that he was a timid man and a coward. Puccio was, they said, bumbling and ineffectual, hopelessly maladroit, constitutionally avoidant of drinking and fights, a slow worker, and a punk around women. The older nuns recalled how, as a child, he’d been too scared to milk the cows. Though he had the body of a nominally grown person, all spotted and hairy, he yet retained the anxious, carping predisposition of a little boy. He was stunted and aggrieved, so pilloried as to justify any counterclaim. He was estranged from creation itself. Mwah. He was perfect.We devised a plan: the town pariah, the dead animal glorified, and the awful village brought low. Whirlwind, heat, and flash.To prepare for the ritual, we camped out in open forest by night. Mornings we entered the village, disguised assiduously, to collect information. Few in town knew where to find the young man, but eventually a pair of pockmarked merchants pointed us in the general direction. These days, they said, Puccio kept mostly out of sight, bivouacked with the sick and unwanted animals in the far field behind the burnt stable.“They say he accidentally started the fire,” one of the merchants told us, clutching his wool wrap against the biting wind. “Since then he’s been a shiftless louse, Mesdames, if you’ll pardon my saying so.”The men were under the impression we were Ladies of the Privy Chamber, maidservants in the household of a regional consort. Though they were determined to play it cool in this regard, they were idiots, and their titillation was obvious.“I’ve seen his type before,” the merchant continued. “Too lazy for a trade, too womanlike for military service.”“And too warped for the church,” the other one said. “Prone to unholy acts, how I’ve heard it put.”The first merchant clucked and shook his head. “You don’t know that, after all.”“What, about his deviant behaviors?” The second man made a lewd gesture and grinned, revealing several broken teeth. “His tendencies contrary-to-nature?”The first merchant covered his ears. “You shouldn’t speak of it, not in front of strangers—”“It’s alright.” We affected clean, girlish accents and placed reassuring hands on their shoulders. “I’m sure we’ve heard worse before.” “Course they have,” the second man said, looking us over, trying to be impressive. “Anyway it’s just how he is, innit? Once a stableboy, always a stableboy.”

***

We emerged from the woods on the third night, rubbed clean and slicked in hot tallow, moonlight catching where it would. Each of us had drunk heavily from the consecrated sacks of wine, and as we sprinted through the dark, our breaths inside our masks resounded like wet slaps. The members of our detachment were giddy, lightheaded by the time we reached the clearing and fixed sights on the ruined stable.It was a four-cornered plot, patchily mown but much neater than what the townspeople had described, at whose center the smolderings of a recent campfire smoked beside some wire-lined animal hutches and a pair of shabby linen tents. Though the intervening distance was largely obscured by darkness, we’d taken care to reconnoiter the whole of the field during the prior days of close observation. We knew exactly where to be.We squinted through the loose, flappy eyeholes, trying to bypass the smoke from the camp while our visions adjusted. Finally, at the clearing’s far edges, we saw them: our Sisters, in all their finery, standing stock still. Shapely forms, angles all glistening, fleshly knots of curve and slick straightaway culminating at their necks, where the fearsome glory of the masks slipped over the top like a churchmaid’s headdress. Gazing at them, noting their formidable bodies against the dark, their towering nakedness, the easy dominance of their stance, we felt rushes of pleasure. We loved the idea that this was how we looked. We howled the signal across the clearing. The other detachment howled back its readiness. And together we moved in.We found Puccio in the larger tent, asleep on a pallet of loose cloth and hay, a small earthenware bowl balanced on his sweaty belly. In the corner, a clatter of personal items: sacks of food, sheep shears and farming utensils, a bridle, a guitar, other pieces of frippery. Beside these, a corpulent sow lay snoring facedown, a dozen or so fussy piglets vying for access to a single exposed teat.“Peace?” When he woke, Puccio’s voice was high, tentative, trembling. He couldn’t see us yet, but he knew someone was there.“Shhh,” we answered.We bound him to the tentpole with his bedclothes. Within a minute or so we’d commandeered the rusty shears and started in on his long, greasy hair. On account of our not having gagged him, he made a lot of noise at first—shrill, ribboning sounds that seemed to aggravate the nearby animals, some of whom we could hear neighing and stomping fitfully from their hutches outside. But everyone soon calmed down, and by the time we completed his shave, Puccio had become docile, accepting, eyes sort of passively unfocused as he gazed into our false faces. It was as though, in feeling the monastic tonsure we’d cut out of his crown, he’d begun to intuit his role.The assault on the chapel and the breaking of the town would require, we knew, another animal of sufficiently encrusted contempt. We asked after the ones in Puccio’s care: their number, the nature of their ailments, the causes of their abandonment. It turned out he kept an ancient pack donkey named Cephas who’d been worked to lameness by a village farmer, beaten badly and left at the edge of town. The creature couldn’t walk or even stand, having developed enormously inflamed hoofs; it also suffered from infections along its flanks, where it frequently worried the flesh and bit itself raw. It would be dead by Sunday.“Can the animal be transported into town?” Our speech flowed slow, slurred almost to indecipherability; the night was heady, and our voices caused the air to warp inside the tent.But Puccio nodded easily. “I can use the old stable van,” he said. “It made it through the fire in good shape. Two horses should be enough to pull it.”We smiled beneath the masks, petting the halo of locks we’d left intact along the rim of his skull. Puccio’s cheeks were clammy, and a steady, obedient pulse could be seen beating out from a notchpoint at his temple while we whispered instructions into his ear. Our little monk.

***

That weekend, the chapel was full, the sabbath having drawn the attendance of nearly every townsperson: the church officials, of course, but also the midlevel nobles, all manner of working folk, indigent passersby. Sneering shopkeepers lined the benches beside combative drunks, shameless propagandists and wifebeaters, sanctimonious elders and loudmouth zealots. The merchants who’d shown us the way to Puccio’s camp were also visible in a front pew, their skinny, dour families crumpled beside them. They didn’t recognize us in our disguises, but we knew everyone, and as we scanned the room a hot feeling of anticipation moved through our centers.The portly priest stood, and his painted throne heaved a sigh. Though he wore the highly decorated garb of his order—the ornately-woven sackcloth and cuffs, the heavy pendants and jewelry, the bulbous crown of damask and gold cloth—he resembled nothing so much as a bloated pigeon.He began his invocation, turning toward the altar and chanting in a low voice while a pair of punctilious aides bobbed along the perimeter with perfume censers. The congregants picked up their end of the chants indifferently, eventually finding a sort of delicate unison, one filled with subtle desynchronizations and flatnesses of tone, with distracted murmurs and slow lullings. Human voices, shabby and drifting; testaments to impoverished, complicit spirits, to lifetimes of violent disregard. And our miracle, sudden and senseless, coming to free them.We closed our eyes, listening as the crowd thrummed and droned toothily, and thought of the instructions we had given the stableboy, that night in the tent beside the broken stable. “You might imagine it as a doorway,” we’d said, directing his lolled-over head toward the small symbol we’d painted in the dirt: a loose oval, an egg shape, rendered in the darkened purple of our upchucked wine. The ritual, we explained, required that the symbol be wordlessly pondered, fixed on with concentration, revivified in the incorruptible space of one’s steadfast attention and enlarged, slowly and carefully, to a greater and greater stature. To the size of a key. To the size of a knob. To the size of a door.“Carefully look over the door in your imagination.” Puccio’s hands had been tied, fingers outstretched, bloodless white. Tears on his cheeks as he nodded.“Now open the door.”At that moment, a crash was heard from the chapel’s entranceway.We opened our eyes just as an enormous shape skidded across the floor. The broken donkey, lobbed deadweight into the center of the space. A terrible smell filled the air.“If you wish to fatten up on blood,” a voice said, “then spill it in sight of the throne.”A hush had fallen, but as soon as the congregants could see who was speaking, the tone changed again. People scoffed, rolled their eyes. More than one attendee gestured to their neighbor, indicating the speaker’s clerical haircut with ridicule.“Stableboy.” From the altar, the priest snorted. “Are you good?”Puccio entered, his head low. Stubbly patches had begun growing back in across his scalp the last few days, little crusts of dirt and bunchups of dead skin along the crown, along his neck and thin forearms and the furled hideaways beneath his threadbare tunic. He looked beleaguered, filthy, abject, the way they thought of him. But his smile was clean.Looking up, he loosed a stream of curses, of invective, of magic in the old style. Probably he spoke of youth and humiliation, of unspeakable memory made concrete if not quite knowable—the details of what was said being academic, really, where actual practice is concerned. Nothing to relate about his words that isn’t irrelevant, not so much paltry or inadequate as altogether meaningless when conceived in context, amid generations of injustice, of massed mourning, of increments of voltage accumulated, held, and discharged, finally, in a single paroxysmal move. Of what consequence is language, anyway? We’re talking about action here.Instantly, the building itself seemed to slip out of phase. A chair snapped and splintered of its own. A mother wept, staring at her baby. The flames in the censers leapt their containers, and the shocked aides dropped the vessels to the floor. The donkey’s hoofs began to twitch.Puccio had been speaking continuously as he came up the aisle. “If you want to feed your gods on sacrifice,” he said, “then take a look at what it is they actually eat.”Probably nobody heard him. The crowd pressed against itself, flexing and roiling, falling into the walls and the locked doors. The flames from the censers spread slowly, inching themselves along the timber floorplanks, fingering the tassels on the woven rugs. We stood, calmly, irrevocably, and in one move, cast off our disguises and revealed our true faces. Cries, prayers, panic. Behind us, the merchant with the broken teeth, desperately avoidant of our sightline, was trying to climb the masonry, scrambling over his family, knocking over icons and paintings.In the cleared central space of the room, the donkey wiggled a leg, pressed on it tentatively, and rolled onto its feet. It breathed steady amid the building smoke, rocking back and forth for a moment, then reared up on its hind legs and, with an unbidden bray of pleasure, began to cross and uncross its forelimbs. It stood on one hoof then the other, trotting and shuffling, circling the burning chapel decorously. With a stately tempo, it danced a processional for the end of services.

WHAT I REALLY MEAN WHEN I SAY I’VE BEEN DOOMSCROLLING by Benjamin Ray Allee

December 4, 2024

We presumed the forbidden knowledge would be some eldritch thing. The death-in-thought, a word for God. A space at the universal end we could not reach. An unthinkable color. A demon in our brother.Horror of all horrors, it is none of these. The secret that obliterates the mind, the antidivinity, it is not great, it is not God, it is not ultimate.Instead, swiping up the cosmic edge, I find:A momma making breakfast. Using more eggs than I would’ve thought, apron on, divulging drama from the clothing store and I do not want to know—An athlete dancing. Sultry eyes for all who sees he sways and lets a rhythm catch him wild by the neck, tear my eyes away—A farmer mourning loss of calf. Seven hundred miles away and I can see his whiskers wet with loss, the space between proclaims heat-death—A toddler learning how to eat. How could I see it, know her name, not picture mandalic lives for her, some pruned by Murphy’s shears—Soothsayer claiming madness for the world. Espousing foolish notions that the secret is a word, a craft, a harbinger, a ghostly God whose visage is a killswitch, voice atomic bomb, a basilisk thought-virus unending and unstoppable, an elder mind we would commune with, be demanded by, and kneel to as we cry—No.There is a plum cut this evening, sweet trickle on the counter for a child I’ll never meet, and I do not want to know that.There is a meal, device, a ritual taken in my backyard by neighbors opening their folds to me look away, look away, look away—There is a quiet dance we’re sharing that once belonged to the space beneath our eyes.I have seen it. I have found the killing thought.

KEVIN CHESSER HAS A HEADACHE: AN INTERVIEW WITH A POET WHILE WATCHING AN ORIOLES GAME by Dalton Monk

December 3, 2024

Kevin Chesser lives above a candy shop in Thomas, West Virginia, which is a historical coal mining and railroad town with a population of less than six-hundred people. I met Kevin almost a year ago when he came to Huntington to read from his poetry collection, Relief of My Symptoms, at a reading series I host called Ham’s House. Kevin read his poems, played the banjo, and made people laugh. I’ve thought of him often since the reading, and so have others who were in the crowd—they’ve asked me about him. He has that effect on people. He makes them feel special.We met at his apartment as the cool, end-of-summer evening swept over Tucker County. He had just gotten off a shift at the Invisible Art Gallery and looked just as sprightly as he had when I’d first met him. His apartment was dimly lit and decorated with nostalgic relics: framed drawings of Garfield and Charlie Brown, childhood photos stuck to the fridge. On his bookshelf were multiple VHS copies of Twister. His partner, Carina, shook my hand and exuded a similar nirvana as Kevin. He offered me a cup of tea, which I took, and then we sat down in his living room while, on the TV, the Orioles played the Tigers. Dalton Monk: Did you grow up playing baseball?Kevin Chesser: I played baseball until I was about thirteen. I was not… I’m not very athletic. When the kids started hitting their growth spurts, I didn’t hit a growth spurt. That’s when I went to my dad and was like, “I’m not doing this anymore. These kids are seven feet tall and two-hundred-and-fifty-pounds.”DM: Did you grow up in Thomas? KC: No, I grew up in southern Maryland. I lived in Elkins [WV] for like fifteen years before I moved up here. I went to school there and stayed.DM: How old were you when you moved to Elkins?KC: Eighteen. I moved up here [Thomas] in 2020. Kind of at the height of COVID.DM: The last time I saw you, you said you see the same people every day. Who are those people?KC: Well, I see my coworkers. I see my downstairs neighbor, which she’s only here half the time. I see my next-door neighbor out walking her dog. She’s usually out walking her dog at the same time I’m usually out walking. I like to walk after dinner every night because I have trouble sleeping…I see a little bit of everybody. Honestly, I run into a lot of people in the alley back there [points in the area behind main street]. Back there is where a lot of people live in these buildings, and the alley is where they actually hang. It’s actually really nice on a walk. I can come across four or five different pockets of people out chilling. Because there’s that big retaining wall over there it kind of makes it feel like you’re in a place that’s separate from town, like it’s kind of secreted away. So, that’s nice. That’s nice right there.DM: In what ways does this town influence your work?KC: I first started coming up here to do readings and shows probably around 2016 and started spending more time here in 2018 or 2019. There’s a really dense concentration of different kinds of artists who live here because this place has become a magnet for all kinds, like transplants and tourists. People up here have always just been really encouraging of stuff that I do. I think that if you’re a local and you live here and you know everybody—if you approach somebody who has one of these spaces here and say, “I have an idea for this,” they will likely give some time and energy to help you with it. If they recognize your face, if they know you, they’re like, yeah. It’s easy to make shit happen. That environment is really good for me. Once you get your boots on the ground here, you get to know people pretty quick. It’s not super competitive. There’s a lot of people doing creative stuff, and there’s a lot of support. If you’re a transplant here, you’re probably looking to be somewhere that doesn’t have too many people but feels funky and creative… I find it inspiring for my work. It’s beautiful. I like that there’s a lot of open space where I can walk and not see anybody. There are trails out in Davis that I love to go on—camp 70 trails. There’s a whole lot of boggy sods type terrain. Different times of year there’s amazing colors and it’s all muddy and weird and there’s trails all through it. I love being out in that stuff. It’s good for my brain.DM: As I was reading Relief of My Symptoms I felt that there had to be an influence from David Berman or James Tate. Then I came across “Self-Portrait at 35”, which is dedicated to David Berman. How did you first come upon Berman? Was it through his music or poetry?KC: His music first. Poetry shortly after. I was a big Pavement fan in high school so I sort of knew about Silver Jews. I was visiting my aunt and uncle in Chapel Hill and I went to some awesome record store in Chapel Hill and I got The Natural Bridge by Silver Jews. I put it on and was like, “I don’t even know why I exactly like this so much but I do.” I got really into them and got his [Berman’s] book a couple years after that. I still love his book. I read Actual Air once a year. Very few people—musicians or artists of any kind that I listened to when I was seventeen—have stood the test of time. He’s something to aspire to. The references, the way that he phrases things. That kind of flat humor that runs through everything. I just love it, and I think it’s only gotten better with age. That poster [pointing to a Silver Jews poster on the wall behind him] is from the liner notes of The Natural Bridge. My girlfriend my freshman year of college gave this to me and I’ve had it in every place that I’ve lived since I was eighteen.DM: What’s your favorite song on the album?KC: The first one [“How to Rent a Room”]. I love that the band is really not trying too hard. The production is pretty middling. He’s not an amazing singer. He writes great hooks and melodies. He writes amazing lyrics. It just all kind of like—it just has some magic.DM: Do you read or have you read James Tate?KC: Yeah, I like him a lot. I feel like his older stuff, like the Worshipful Company of Fletchers, that stuff is a little more interesting to me. As he got older, the stuff was always good, but he had really locked into one thing that he was doing. He and Russell Edson were the two guys who kind of taught me how to write a prose poem.DM: Relief of My Symptoms has several poems in which the narrator details a rich interior life—maybe even isolated at times—but there are also poems in which it’s clear the narrator is around others, maybe too often. Tony Paranoia, or Tony P., shows up a few times. Is Tony P. an amalgamation of several people? Is he made up? Is there an actual Tony P.? Tell us about Tony P.KC: Tony P. has like a seed of maybe a couple people who I grew up with. He’s not really based on anything super specific. I came up with his name in the moment. In that poem that’s called “No Mercy” his name kind of popped up out of just working on that. That poem was written well before I had any idea to make that book. So he was already in that poem and as I was putting together the book I realized I should just bring that guy’s name back in so it would be a character. He’s really just there as one of the people that the speaker is speaking to. Most of what I write is first-person, so I will admit to having a lot of one-dimensional creatures orbiting around me. DM: As a reader, I got excited every time Tony P. showed up. He felt like a friend.KC: Yeah. He really doesn’t do very much. He’s in the hospital and he’s in the baseball game and he’s talking about wanting to play the pipes. I realized that that’s what I wanted to do when I was reading Bud Smith. I was reading Double Bird, that collection of stories. They’re not supposed to be super strongly linked, in terms of characters or narrative. But, for example, in multiple stories there’s references to a store called Food Universe. It’s such a great touch, just a really simple way to add some continuity. In order for me to do that with my book, it was just a cosmetic change. I already had that stuff written. That was something that clicked for me as I was going along. I was like, “Well, I’ve got a couple characters that are mentioned by name and since the family stuff comes up over and over again, I’ll give them all the same name and it gives it a little bit of continuity.” But it’s a cosmetic change. I just repeat people’s names a couple times and I love the effect. It’s like a trick.DM: When did you know you had a cohesive collection? Was that the original goal?KC: I just put my balls in my hands and prayed. I didn’t have an editor on it. I had Carina and my friend Séamus Spencer give me some basic notes. I think when I figured out when I was going to have recurring characters and names, I was like, “This can work.” Before, I was putting the manuscript together because I knew I was definitely going to put it out with my friend’s press. My friend Jen Iskow is the one who runs Ghost Palace Press. She’s a designer and visual artist mostly… Oh, oh my god [talking about the homerun just hit on TV]. And he caught it in his hat! This bullpen guy, when guys hit homeruns into the bullpen, he’s caught about four of them in his hat. This is a momentum shift that we’re seeing happening on TV right now. They have not been scoring like this in two months... Sorry. I don’t even remember what I was talking about… I knew I was going to do the book. I went through about maybe three years worth of whatever I had and I found the stuff that seemed like it was somewhere in the same ballpark, as far as tone and the shape. It ended up being more prose than anything. I knew I had a cohesive thing because I said, “This is about as cohesive as it’s going to get.” Because we had already planned the party to release it and it’s got to go to press at some point. I need some kind of external pressure to finish something like that. I’m kind of bad about letting go of it. DM: In addition to writing poetry, you make music under the name Wizard Clipp. What got you into playing music?KC: I started playing guitar when I was ten. We had my mom’s old Epiphone laying around. I really loved music at a young age, so I naturally wanted to play around with the guitar. I kind of half-played it all through high school. The guitar is something I’ve never really been good at. Playing five-string banjo is my main thing. I started playing the banjo when I was twenty, living in Elkins. There are a lot of old-time musicians there. I found a really good banjo player to take lessons with. The banjo just made a little more sense for me. Something about the tuning and picking was something my brain could grab a hold of.DM: Everyone loved hearing you play at Ham’s House. We need more Kevin Chessers.KC: A lot of the people I know who are musicians first—almost all of them do a little bit of writing. Maybe not so much the other way around.DM: I’ve seen on Instagram that you’re doing Tarot decks. KC: Not yet. I’ve got a Tarot installation up.DM: And you’re possibly coming out with a Halloween chapbook?KC: We’ll see. I’ve been sort of restless on social media lately just trying to get somebody to gas me up. I’m going to try to put together a reading up here in early November, and my friend Cole Fiscus—who I’m going to do the reading with—he’s going to try to get a chapbook out. And I thought, “Man, I wonder if I should try to slap together a little chapbook.” I was fucking around with those little haunted house haikus and I thought, “I bet I could write a bunch of these.” I did a haiku chapbook one time.DM: Is it important that you always have a project to work on?KC: It’s helpful if I have an idea of a finished product that I’m working towards, but I don’t always get it done. That’s not always a bad thing. That’s the thing that’s cool about living in this town. It has made me a little more focused and constructive because of getting encouragement from people here. Knowing people who have got spaces where you can hang some art on the wall or put on a show... And they’re approachable people who will be like, “Yeah, sure.” It has made it so that I’ve gotten more constructive with finishing stuff. But generally speaking, I feel I’ve always been a little aimless with it. I like doing it and just kind of scratching away at it all the time because it comprises ninety percent of my interests. If I don’t have a project I’m working toward, it doesn’t necessarily keep me from working on stuff. Sometimes I like it better if I don’t have a project.DM: What are you reading right now?KC: I brought these in from my bedroom. [Gestures to a stack of books on the coffee table: a Richard Brautigan anthology which includes Revenge of the Lawn, The Abortion, and So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away; Small Moods by Shane Kowalski; and Nature, Man and Woman by Alan W. Watts.] I really love all of this [talking about the Richard Brautigan anthology]. I’m almost done with it. I liked it better than the three-pack that has Trout Fishing in America… My friend turned me onto Shane Kowalski. It’s really good. [Picks up Alan Watts book.] I love Taoism and Chinese philosophy so I’m reading this Alan Watts book. DM: What’s next for you?KC: I think we’re going to try to get tarot decks printed. I drew all the cards on 5x7 pieces of mat board. There’s seventy-eight of them. It’s this big wall installation. Earlier this year, I was playing a lot of music and I was feeling like I was getting enough material together to do another record. But I don’t have the money for it. So, right now, I’ve been writing a lot, just trying to build up the biggest heap of poems that I can get. Just trying to generate so I can do another book and maybe send it out to presses with a little wider distribution. I don’t know if that’s worth it or not, but if I came up with a manuscript that I was excited about—especially because I’ve got a better idea of what I want to do in the future—it would be cool to get it further out into the world. But historically I’m kind of bad at that. I love finishing projects and putting a bow on them and polishing them and getting them how I want them. Once they’re out in the world, though, my interest in them really drops off precipitously. I think a lot of people can relate to that. Or maybe not. Poets can relate to that. Maybe musicians can’t. Musicians have to maintain some enthusiasm for their material because performing is so essential to being a musician, whereas being a writer, performing is more of a minor part. You could much more easily write a book and disavow it, but if you’re a musician, you can’t get up on stage and be like, “This stuff sucks.” I’m hoping to have another draft of a manuscript next year. And then I want to see if I can screw up my courage enough to send it out to a bunch of places. They’re all just shots in the dark… which is frustrating. But that’s also what I like about it. I think I like the fact that it’s such a fucking headache. It’s a headache when I’m sitting down to try and focus and then it’s a headache to send out the submissions. And then it’s a headache to try and go back and revise what I’ve written.DM: That should be the title of this interview: Kevin Chesser has a Headache.KC: I actually suffer from chronic headaches… [Now, looking at the game on TV] Corbin Burnes is about to strike you out. Yeah, and that guy’s shaking his head. He just roasted you, you fucking idiot, and you just stood there looking at it. Order Relief of My Symptoms:Ghost Palace PressAmazon(Or send Kevin a DM).

3 MICRO PIECES by Amy DeBellis

December 2, 2024

Yakutsk

Temperature dropping like a dive off a cliff. My lungs full of winter air, clear and sharp as ice. After the airplane and its stale box of other people’s exhalations, each breath is like mainlining oxygen. When I rub my lips together their skin is as dry as the snow beneath my boots. The salt of this morning still furs my tongue. My hands tremble brittle in my coat pockets, and my fingers rub the edge of a ticket, a mint, an obsolete coin. In only a few moments I will put my memories behind me and walk into the taiga. Try to forget your face and its smiling cruelty, the soft malice that always comes with power. Try to forget how you uploaded your consciousness into the cloud and cheated death, how you turned the ouroboros from a snake to a mute circle, a faceless loop: a splotch of ringworm, a spreading bulls-eye rash, a scrawled zero. Try not to wonder, a hundred years after I am dead, how much of this forest too will be gone.The wall of trees yawns before me. No fresh green breast here, no—here is a frozen emerald heart, holding within it no ability to nurture but only to embalm, to write my body like a stone carving, immersing it gemlike in years of snow. I step forward and the trees swallow me. They are tall and green and endless, speaking of everything I have forgotten how to say to you.

Wake

Morning: the sun smears blood across the sky. My mother’s body is as white and long-stemmed as a lily, a flower in its velvet casing. I’m drenched in black like I’m trying to melt into the shadows around the walls. Like I’m trying to camouflage myself from every distant relative—their exhalations sour with coffee, their smiles oily with false sympathy. I think of the last time I saw my mother smile: at the sea, the last place we traveled together. Inside my head I say Mother. The word flutters, dark and silent, on my tongue. I remember the green endlessness of the ocean, how we lay back on the sand and let the sun bleach the water from our bodies. Brine and salt in my mouth. The waves rising, cresting, falling. Time a noose around our necks.

Even My Fantasies Are Chronically Ill

Ringing in my ears like the seconds after an explosion, except it’s constant and unending, shrill as silver, and there was no explosion. Only days, soft and slow. I try to stand and my body fails me. A collection of diagnoses accumulates like a layer of filth on my skin: mast cell activation, dysmenorrhea, chronic urticaria. I try to stand and my body fails me. Craniocervical instability, hyperacusis, photophobia. My windows are shuttered; the layer on my skin is permanent. Postural orthostatic tachycardia, myalgic encephalomyelitis. The words of my diagnoses grow longer and longer until they might not even be real anymore, just syllables contorting themselves into agonized, impossibly labyrinthine shapes. My body keeps failing me forever, an endless loop of standing up and crashing back down again. My legs grow thin and brittle like matchwood. The ringing in my ears now more like a screaming. Lying in the soundless dark, I picture everyone who’s ever doubted me crowded around my bedside. I imagine them emptied of all the Have you tried and I don’t think and Are you sure, their throats cleared of all words, their esophaguses silent and moist. I imagine seeds sinking into the damp flesh there, weeds sprouting from their mouths, finally blooming into bright fistfuls of flowers: a perfect copy of the garden outside my window, the garden I can no longer see.