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PURSUED BY FURIES: THE LURE OF THE UNCANNY IN FICTION AND FILM by Kevin P. Keating

July 17, 2019

Madeline and Sophie Ryan are identical twins. They are eight years old. They exude a rugged masculinity and are built like their merchant marine father — thick, solid, broad shouldered, with eyes so dark and glassy they seem to be made from perfectly polished pieces of obsidian. Mass murderers of spiders, flies, moths, and the exceptionally brilliant brush-footed butterflies that sail above the surface of the family swimming pool, the girls constantly hunt for easy prey. They’re also accomplished mimics who delight in doing impersonations of adults, aping their vocabulary with unnerving precision in a single singsong voice and then squealing with malicious, porcine laughter whenever their latest victim shoots them a weary and wounded look. They can be cruel to younger children but reserve the brunt of their wickedness for their long-suffering mother, relishing their roles as jailers and persecuting her in ways that only the most heartless of wardens can. Clever, calculating, supremely subversive, they understand intuitively that parenthood is a kind of indefinite prison sentence, one in which beleaguered moms and dads spend most of their days sequestered from other adults. To neighbors the girls look like a pair of wretched, half-starved urchins out of a folktale, feral creatures that search the nighttime streets for rancid scraps of food before seeking shelter in abandoned barns. They commit acts of petty vandalism. They may possess preternatural powers. They are darkly comic flourishes, or so I once believed, from my novel The Captive Condition (Pantheon 2015).

As I put the finishing touches on the book, I received feedback from several readers who said Madeline and Sophie reminded them of the eerie twin girls in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining. I was a bit mystified, perhaps even disappointed, by this comparison. I truly believed, at least to a certain extent, that the girls in The Captive Condition served as comic relief. Curious, I viewed the movie again for the first time in several years and became so intrigued not only by the iconic imagery of the hand-holding twins in their periwinkle puff sleeves and ruffle skirts but by Kubrick’s masterful storytelling technique that I decided to teach it in two of my college courses, Introduction to Folklore and Introduction to Mythology.

While performing the obligatory professorial research on the film, I learned that Kubrick, justifiably famous for his attention to detail, conducted his own survey of the horror genre and fell under the spell of “The Uncanny,” an essay by Sigmund Freud. The uncanny, claimed that cigar-chomping, glossarial jigsaw-solver of the human psyche, was the only feeling that was more powerfully experienced in art than in life. “If the horror genre required any justification,” Kubrick remarked, “this concept alone would serve as its credentials” (Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, Michel Ciment, Faber & Faber, 1999). 

Toward the end of his brief essay, Freud posits that we experience the sensation of the uncanny whenever a storyteller denies us access to our reality-testing faculties. By this he means that most reasonable people, when faced with a spooky situation and tempted by their “primitive impulses” to attribute perfectly natural phenomenon to some supernatural power, can always rely on their critical thinking faculties to quell any lingering doubts and reveal the mundane truth. For example, we may be lying alone in bed on a stormy night and hear a door creaking open ever so slowly. Our “primitive minds” warn us that a ghost is approaching and yearns to slip under the sheets with us and whisper a bloodcurdling lullaby in our ears. But because we are rational beings who have easy access to those creature comforts provided by modern civilization, we can flip a light switch and quickly confirm that a cold draft has blown open the door and that the rusty hinges need oiling.

As Freud writes, “For the whole matter is one of testing reality, pure and simple, a question of the material reality of the phenomena.” The difficulty only arises when a storyteller keeps us in the proverbial dark for a prolonged period of time and doesn’t allow the trembling protagonist, and therefore the audience or reader, access to a conveniently located light switch. In order to create and sustain a sensation of the uncanny, the storyteller must keep us guessing about the true nature of the fictitious world he has created. Freud writes, “For the realm of phantasy depends for its very existence on the fact that its content is not submitted to the reality-testing faculty.” And according to Freud the critic, as opposed to Freud the psychoanalyst, readers and audiences may retain a feeling of dissatisfaction, “a kind of grudge against the attempted deceit,” if they see through the ruse and react to it as they would react to real experiences. In this case, the intellect serves as a metaphorical light switch and exposes the storyteller as an incompetent trickster.

In Freud’s view the stories most capable of creating a sense of the uncanny are those in which the storyteller “deceives us into thinking that he is giving us the sober truth, and then after all oversteps the bounds of possibility” by bringing about events that can never happen. In the completely fabricated and precisely structured worlds of “once upon a time” and “long ago and far away,” we accept the impossible as being perfectly ordinary. No one ever questions the validity of the tale of an innocent maiden who suddenly awakes from a poisoned-induced sleep and then runs off with a handsome and well-intentioned prince. 

Similarly, in a body of literature that makes use of what Freud calls “poetic reality,” we may experience a sensation of gloominess, but because the nature of this world is still imaginary, though less imaginary than the faraway kingdoms in fairy tales, we do not experience the uncanny. Freud points to the tormented souls in both Dante’s Inferno and Homer’s The Odyssey, particularly the episode in which Odysseus makes the treacherous descent into the underworld to consult with the spirits of the dead, including the grief-stricken spirit of his own mother. In both of these epic poems, the moods are somber, the settings somewhat disquieting, but we cannot say they are uncanny.

For Freud the situation is dramatically altered when the storyteller “pretends to move into the world of common reality” [italics mine]. I believe this phrase, indeed this single word, is fundamental to our understanding of the uncanny. Through the slow and careful accumulation of minute details, the storyteller pretends to create a simulacrum of the world as we know and typically experience it, but from the very start he or she has something else in mind entirely. For example, at the beginning of The Shining, Stanley Kubrick gives his audience, and the doomed Torrence family—parents Jack and Wendy and their six-year old son Danny—a pleasant tour of the Overlook Hotel during a sunny afternoon in early autumn, making everything appear perfectly ordinary and familiar. Only after the hotel closes for the season and Kubrick turns his attention to the secret inner lives of his characters do uncanny feelings germinate. 

One of the earliest and most memorable harbingers of the uncanny comes shortly after the Torrence family is left to care for the now vacant hotel during the long, brutal winter. Jack’s son Danny, while riding his Big Wheel through the labyrinthine hallways of the Overlook Hotel, sees the figures of the twin girls and listens to their unnerving refrain: “Come and play with us, Danny. Come and play with us. Forever—and ever—and ever.” It’s interesting to note that Kubrick’s twins, though peripheral to the plot of The Shining, continue to occupy a central place in the minds of most viewers, maybe because Danny cannot possibly explain the presence of these unfortunate girls who have been badly butchered by their demented father, the previous caretaker Delbert Grady. The indelible image of these girls, purportedly based on a photograph by Diane Arbus (though Kubrick adamantly denied this), serves as a warning to Danny about the very real dangers he will soon face. 

Bruno Bettelheim, in his book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, argues that these fantastic stories can serve a trouble child and help him overcome life’s travails. “Psychoanalysis,” writes Bettelheim, “was created to enable man to accept the problematic nature of life without being defeated by it, or giving into escapism. Freud’s prescription is that only by struggling courageously against what seems like overwhelming odds can man succeed in wringing meaning out of his existence. This is exactly the message that fairy tales get across to the child in manifold form: that a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable.” The trick, of course, is to “master all obstacles and emerge victorious.” A resourceful child, Danny Torrence memorably manages to elude the same grisly fate as the Grady girls by entering into a hedge maze while his deranged, dipsomaniacal father pursues him with an ax. 

Throughout the film Kubrick uses mirror images as the primary means of unmasking, rather than concealing, repressed aspects of Jack Torrence’s persona. To establish this idea, Kubrick stages a scene early in the film. While eating breakfast in bed in front of a mirror, Jack reveals to his wife that he feels oddly at home at the Overlook. “It was as though I had been here before,” he tells her. “I mean, we all have moments of déjà vu, but this was ridiculous. It was almost as though I knew what was going to be around every corner.” 

Soon he begins to see ghosts in the hotel, and in every scene in which he confronts one of these spectral figures — the bartender in the gold ballroom, the deceptively beautiful woman in the green bathroom, the racist caretaker in the red bathroom — Jack is standing in front of a mirror. To fully grasp the significance of these ghosts, and all of the subsequent horrors the Torrance family must face, one must understand certain hidden realities. “The uncanny,” Freud states, “is something that is secretly familiar but has undergone repression and then returned from it.” It’s easy to see that the ghosts in the film are manifestations of past traumas, which are secretly familiar but which Kubrick renders as "uncanny figures" after they have "returned from repression.” For example, Jack Torrence's repressed alcoholism becomes the bartender, an uncanny figure who shouldn't exist but who manifests a "secretly familiar" repression. Similarly, Jack’s uninhibited lust manifests itself as the naked woman in the bathtub of Room 237.

Unable to face the terrible truth of his moral weaknesses, Jack begins to identify with these apparitions until he is in doubt about his own identity. Freud writes, “The subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which self is his, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own.” In other words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self, and thus we have characters who are to be considered identical because they may look or behave alike. There is also the constant recurrence of the same thing — the repetition of the same features, character-traits, vicissitudes, and — most importantly for The Shining — the same crimes. Freud explains, “These themes are all concerned with the phenomenon of the double, which appears in every shape and in every degree of development.” 

By referring to Freud's work, Kubrick seems to be making a larger metaphorical point: that the spectral images he presents to viewers are not supernatural or mysterious in origin, but rather, completely familiar. Freud cautions us that humanity’s horrors aren't something to be explained away with mysticism, ghosts, or magic, but to be fought off with logic and intelligence; nevertheless, we interpret the disturbing images in The Shining as bizarre, horrific and odd simply because Kubrick denies his characters — and therefore his audience — access to reality. His characters, because they are unable, or perhaps unwilling, to confront the troubling nature of their past experiences, fall victim to their own unconscious minds, which transform these buried memories into a series of warped and nightmarish images.

According to Freud it’s all a matter of intellectual uncertainty. Are we supposed to be looking at the products of a madman's imagination, “behind which we, with the superiority of rational minds, are able to detect the sober truth?” This is a distinct possibility, and yet our critical thinking faculties are incapable of explaining away our sensation of the uncanny. Storytellers like Kubrick know this perfectly well and attempt to manipulate our emotions by exploiting our uncertainty. We cannot be entirely sure whether the ghosts in the Overlook Hotel are products of Jack’s imagination or real apparitions. Our rational minds are searching for an explanation, but uncanniness is derived from the storyteller’s ability to make us doubt any rational explanations we might devise. The most successful stories deliver a raw, emotional experience, and in order to accomplish this goal, Kubrick used every tool at his disposal. 

“Primitive man,” Freud argues, “ascribes meaning to numbers, objects or events which are repeated.” He theorized that we equate things like repetition and patterns with “destiny” and “mysticism,” and Kubrick bathes his film in a semiotic language of repetition, hidden numbers, symbols and patterns, knowing that these images will likely lead to uncanny feelings when discovered. The audience is left confused and enticed by these mysteries and then attempts to bring them to light by creating meaning. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the imagery of “the double.”

But why is such a technique so universal to storytelling? One possibility, according to Freud, is that doubling is “a preservation against extinction.” He hypothesizes that the desire to transcend death led people in ancient civilizations to develop the art of making images of the dead in lasting materials, for example an Egyptian sarcophagus, so they could live forever and ever. Such ideas, however, have sprung from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man. For modern people, the “double” reverses its aspect; from having been an assurance of immortality, it has now become an uncanny harbinger of death.

This ultimately futile desire to make, or perhaps remake, the image of the dead in lasting materials is presented quite explicitly, and with tragic consequences, in the final shot of The Shining where doubling is used to extraordinary and almost vertiginous effect. As the film draws to an end, Jack Torrence undergoes a startling transformation of character until he seems to be composed of several different personalities and finally becomes a permanent part of the “haunted” hotel, memorialized in the unnerving 1921 photograph. The film’s self-referential ending highlights the ambiguity, or rather, deliberately confuses the distinction between reality and imagination. An uncanny effect can often be seen when reality (a caretaker in the present day) interacts with our imagination (the caretaker’s likeness in an old photograph). Freud says this is precisely the moment when our “infantile and neurotic elements” start believing in magical practices. We focus on mental realities and ignore the material reality. 

Despite The Shining’s bleak ending, Kubrick does allow Danny Torrence to escape from the hedge maze and reunite with his mother. As Bruno Bettelheim writes, “It is not that the evildoer is punished at the story’s end which makes immersing oneself in fairy stories an experience in moral education. In fairy tales, as in life, punishment or fear of it is only a limited deterrent to crime. The conviction that crime does not pay is a much more effective deterrent and that is why the bad person always loses out.” Bettelheim continues, “Morality is not the issue in these tales, but rather, assurance that one can succeed. Whether one meets life with a belief in the possibility of mastering its difficulties or with the expectation of defeat is also a very important existential problem.” 

Many commentators have noted that the true hero, when faced with an existential crisis, can only escape a terrible fate by coming to the realization that “the self” is an illusion created for the benefit of other people. We all craft stories about ourselves, stories that are partially true and partially false. In time they become semblances of an identity, but it is crucial that we recognize these stories as the different masks we wear in order to present—or to disguise—our true selves. The problem is just this: many of us are unable to identify with any degree of certainty a single persona that seems entirely authentic. Who are we when in the presence of our friends? Who are we with our parents? Our children? Our employers and colleagues? Who are we when we are alone? The more we think about this, the more likely we will find that there is no “I” at the center of our consciousness. The ego is a culturally conditioned fiction and in storytelling is often associated with the monster—a deceptive, selfish and self-seeking creature that spreads fear and destruction. 

One solution to this conundrum is to become egoless or selfless or, as Odysseus becomes in the episode with the Cyclops, to become Nobody. To be Nobody is not to enter some fantastic condition of egolessness. Rather, it is simply one’s willingness and ability, when the time comes, to drop the self, to let Somebody go and surrender to circumstances. As a reprieve from the cultural demands of egoism, it is important that we slip into a condition of anonymity from time to time. We always worry about what other people expect and want from us. Dropping the illusion of the ego can help us overcome these everyday concerns. Accepting that we are “nobody” can be a difficult and even frightening realization, but relying on pride and ego more often than not leads, at the very least, to profound disappointment. 

In The Shining Jack Torrence is an ineffectual husband, father, writer, caretaker, and former school teacher. Perhaps by becoming Nobody he can escape from these culturally conditioned and predictable roles. The problem, of course, is that Jack is deceiving himself more than anyone else in his life. Consumed by different aspects of his own repressed and twisted ego, he rapidly descends into madness, and this, I think, is the final point that needs to be made about the film.

Just as he uses ghosts to reveal disturbing aspects of Jack’s personality, Kubrick uses Jack to reveal something rather disquieting about human nature in general—namely, that the ego can be characterized by one basic rule: it always wants something. Thus, for the person driven by ego, life is characterized by chronic desire and chronic frustration. We are frustrated because so often in life we don’t get what we so desperately want. Jack wants to become a successful writer. He wants to have a drink and even says, “I’d give my fucking soul for a glass of beer.” He aches to posses the beautiful women in the bathtub. He wants to escape from his wife and child. Since these paths are not open to him, he naturally begins to repress his desires until they gradually transform into terrifying phantasms.  

Looking back on my own work, I can now see how Madeline and Sophie Ryan serve a similar function in The Captive Condition. The adult characters in my novel, fearful of serious introspection and therefore lacking in any kind of meaningful self-awareness, have a tendency to perceive the twins as devious little fiends and, later, as a couple of cajoling ghosts, mainly because the girls have an uncanny talent for revealing the moral shortcomings and the secret, forbidden desires of adults. At certain moments in our lives, our emotions can become asphyxiating clouds of uncertainty, and in a passage near the end of the book, I briefly make use of mirror imagery to acknowledge that, for many of us, determining the difference between what is real and what is imaginary can be difficult:

Some people, when they pass away, leave behind fond memories and wonderful legacies of love, but many more leave long trails of misery and despair, and when the bereaved claim to sense a presence floating along dark hallways or glimpse hooded figures rising up in shattered mirrors or witness fantastic apparitions advancing and receding above bogs and fens and festering swimming pools, they likely are perceiving the enduring gravamen of the dearly departed, a disappointment so profound that it somehow transcends death. So who could say for sure if the spectral figures that…floated above the streets of town were in fact ghosts or illusions conjured up by the drunk and disorderly revelers making their way home on New Year’s Eve. Madeline and Sophie wondered the same thing themselves: was this how ghosts were supposed to feel?

There can be no definitive answer to a question of this kind. We are now in the realm of the fantastic. The passage is meant to reveal more about the reader than the characters enacting the drama, but of course the whole art of the drama is to put into words and images those experiences people know are secretly true but haven’t yet noticed or are themselves unable to express. In this sense storytelling becomes a kind of meditation on the self. As Bruno Bettelheim puts it, “Stories also warn that those who are too timorous and narrow-minded to risk themselves in finding themselves must settle down to a humdrum existence—if an even worse fate does not befall them.” 

Only those who rid themselves of superstitious beliefs can see through the uncanny. Such individuals can shrug off deceptive sights, signs and repetitions, and perceive the underlying truth. In contrast, those who cling to the ways of our primitive forefathers are doomed to believe in the supernatural. Freud states that our ancestors’ fondness for mythology and fables is largely what causes our belief in ghosts, apparitions, and monsters. Thus, our current irrational beliefs are largely due to the irrationalities of our ancestors. They’ve been passed down from one generation to the next, much as generational violence has been passed down in Kubrick’s film. Jack Torrence, who clings to the ways of his predecessor Delbert Grady, reenacts the same heinous crimes simply because he conjures up ghosts of the past, which he uses to affirm his own existence. Freud cautions, “Unless a man is utterly hardened against the lure of superstition, he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to these phenomena.”

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DEATH LAB by Howie Good

July 16, 2019
Air Like PoisonHey, did you see those sea turtles down there? I often see them, though not as often or as many as I did before there were boats, the bridge, some buildings, even a small amusement park. Wherever they go, the turtles seem to leave a trail of watery stools behind. The ocean feels a little sick right now. There’s actually too much sunlight. And it all comes from the same place, a place with air like poison, where you can view the millstones that early New Englanders used to crush Giles Corey to death for being a witch.Grandson (with Apologies to Werner Herzog) Now that you’re almost 8 years old, you have to know how to travel on foot. You have to know how to make fire without matches. You have to know how to catch a trout with your bare hands. (It’s fairly easy. You just have to understand how the trout thinks.) You have to know how to forge a document, let’s say a gun permit, in a country under military rule. You have to know how to open a safety lock – surreptitiously, of course, with burglar tools. Most important, you have to know how to tell at a glance night from other darkness.Lost in BlockbusterThere are places a person can get lost and not even realize he’s lost. I had to cross the creek by tiptoeing over a rotting tree, ignoring as best I could whatever that was I felt grabbing for me with big, meaty hands. Some of you actually believe in fight, fight, fight, the three worst things you can do. So it wasn’t just happenstance that no one but me happened to be there, or that it was night by then, or that everything was also nothing, a lot like when the next to last Blockbuster Video store on Earth closed. 
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MOTHER BUDGIE by David Cook

July 15, 2019

You push open the cracked old oak door and marvel as you step into the room. A whirlwind of budgies, of burnished gold, sunset red, ocean green and all hues in between, swoop down around your ears, chirping merrily, joy infused in each and every note. Others sing from up in the rafters while still more chirrup in colourful cages that line the walls from ceiling to floor. Being here lifts your heart.A woman approaches, clad in a shawl as bright as the birds that skitter around her. This is Mother Budgie. She is famous. Tourists come from all over the globe to visit her. She gestures you closer and says 'Welcome,’ the warmth in her voice reflected in her eyes. The budgies echo her greeting. 'Welcomewelcome,' they trill in chorus. She beams at them and several settle onto her shoulders and chirp 'Mommamommamomma.' Mother Budgie hand-rears every beautiful bird in her establishment and has patiently taught them all to sing these words. Their refrain is picked up by all the other budgies and the echoes of ‘Mommamommamomma’ are almost deafening. Amid all this, Mother Budgie simply smiles, a beacon of peace and contentment.As the clamour settles momentarily, she invites you to choose the birds that appeal to you most. You carefully select four, no, five; two the bright yellow of an undisturbed shore, two the startling blue of a clear sky and one the scarlet of freshly-picked cherries. Mother Budgie nods, then guides you through another door set in the back wall.This room is full of people laughing, chatting and eating. Merriment bounces off the stone walls. You sit at a table and wait for maybe twenty-five minutes as the noise of gaiety reverberates around you. Finally, Mother Budgie reappears, smiling as always, and places in front of you a delectable golden brown pie accompanied by soft mashed potatoes. ‘Enjoy,’ she says as she leaves. Five small beaks emerge from the pie’s inviting crust. Each is slightly open, trapped in silent song.Grabbing your knife, you stab the pastry surface. Rich, thick gravy oozes from the fissure and pools into the bed of mash. Another diner is admitted into the room. As the door opens and shuts you hear the cries of 'Mommamommamomma' from beyond and imagine more birds settling upon Mother Budgie’s shoulders.

You impale a chunk of meat with your fork and take a bite. It is soft, tender and exquisitely delicious, just as you’d heard it would be. Your taste buds croon with happiness. You dab your lips with a napkin and take another mouthful, already planning when you’ll return

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AL WAITS FOR RAIN by Jonah Howell

July 14, 2019

1

I haven’t worn glasses since I was sixteen, so I heard him before I could make out his features. “So you’re not coming?” Pacing back and forth at the corner of Ninth Street, he shoved the phone in his pocket without hanging up. Let the other guy do it.

He walked into a pizza shop, a narrow hallway between Ninth and whatever street runs behind Ninth. I followed. Pizza seemed wise: Forecasts showed a storm, but I was still scheduled for a long landscaping shift.

He stood in the doorway, a tall man, probably six-four but hunched to six-flat, and he kept intense eye contact. I assumed he managed the pizza shop and had been yelling at a no-show employee. I tried to relate. “Kids these days, huh?”

He responded with silent confusion, and a wide Italian man appeared from behind a mountain of pizza boxes. “We don’t open ‘til eleven.”

I left. Tall guy followed me now. “I don’t work there,” like he’d read my mind. “But yeah, I’m stressed out.”

His eyes glowed yellow, and the word, “stressed,” required serious effort. He sank onto a bench in front of the pizza shop’s neighboring laundromat and held out an enormous hand with knuckles like old brass doorknobs. “Abe.”

Looking up at a cumulonimbal colossus, I decided my shift would be canceled, so I leaned against a wall and slipped outside time. “Why so stressed?”

“My girlfriend overdosed on Monday.” He drained a Steel Reserve in a brown paper bag in one quiet gulp.

I have often been accused of pathological optimism. “Is she alright now?”

“The hell are you talking about, is she alright? She’s dead.”

I gave up. “Sorry about that.”

Embarrassed for me, he pulled a tiny book from his pocket. Prayers for Times of Hardship. “People tell me it’ll help, but I can’t get into it.” He flipped through it. The first and last pages were coated in names and phone numbers, and he had highlighted several of the intervening passages. “I want you to answer something for me.” He flipped back and forth, pausing at each yellow section. “Here. The bit with the star.”

Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.

“‘Son of David.’ Nobody’s managed to explain that to me.”

“The original verse, in Hebrew or Greek or something, probably read ‘descendant.’”

He looked at it for a while, nodding occasionally, then looked up as a beat-down Ford Explorer struggled to park parallel to us.

“That’s my niece.”

She smoked a long cigarette and yelled expletives at the cars in front of and behind her. Two kids with mid-length dreads sat in the back seat, calm and silent.

Abe yelled at her, “What are you doing with those two boys?”

She got out of the car. They stayed. She launched into conversation with Abe in an enervated whisper, so I walked to the coffee shop up the road and sat in a wicker chair three sidewalk-slabs away from an ACLU canvasser. In a neuter radio voice, he repeated to each passer-by, “Hi, I’m here defending civil liberties and human rights with the ACLU. Will you help me?” His white mustache ruffled the same way every time like an inched tape. Truly incredible. Rejection after brusque rejection.

After the thirty-seventh a man stopped, green bucket hat aflutter in the antediluvian wind. He looked about ten years older than the canvasser. His stone-blank face could have been a topological map. “Do you oppose the draft?”

“There is no draft.”

“Do you oppose it, though?”

“Well, we’ve recently forced the administration to reunite 2,173 Latin-American--”

“Do you oppose slavery?”

“Of course we’re against slavery.”

“How can you say you’re against slavery if you don’t fight the draft?”

“Sir, there is no--”

“I was drafted.”

“I thank you for your service, sir.”

“For my slavery, you mean? Good day.” 

He started to shuffle off, but the canvasser called out to his back, “Are you sure you can’t make a small donation to defend civil liberties?”

“If you don’t oppose slavery I can’t possibly support you. Good day.”

As he made his slow escape, a hoarse panhandler walked by with an unreadable cardboard sign. He fixed the canvasser with a knowing look and stepped close to him. “I hope you get it just like I do.” He walked a few steps then turned back thoughtfully. “Actually, I don’t hope. You will, just like me, I promise.”

2

Consider the geometry of our Ninth Street Rube Goldberg machine: 

On this block we have a line of forty-three rectangular sidewalk slabs, from the gutted skeleton formerly known as Francesca’s to Vintage South, whatever that is. Numbering from Francesca’s, the canvasser stands on slab four and faces the street. O vos omnes qui transitis per viam, weakly, weakly. 

My wicker chair sits on seven. In this freeze-frame, the Vietnam vet and his green bucket hat shuffle up the row, one foot in slab ten and the other lagging back on nine, turned slightly to one side. He plants his feet with every step as though the wind might blow him away at any moment. The panhandler has overtaken him. We see him paused, airborne, running, above fourteen, where Abe and his niece now reenter the frame, lumbering toward me. They have already parted to allow the Vietnam vet to shuffle between them. Outfold, infold. Like birth, the marble shoots on down the lines and curves. 

The two kids are nowhere. The Rapture, perhaps. If we focus, we see that shimmering translucent strings attach each character to the next, creating a drag on all our movements as storm clouds gather at both ends of the street, walls closing in, pressurizing. We are all Han Solo in the trash chute. The first faint snorts of thunder rattle the strings, and Abe’s eyes darken from highlighter yellow to old book yellow.

3

Niece plopped down in the wicker chair beside mine as Abe paced toward the street and back toward us. “Church said they had $130,000 in donations this month, but I’m still sleeping in the woods. How’s that?”

Niece recited, “Religion’s bad, but God is good. He sent Jesus to die for your sins, so there’s free will. It’s not religion; it’s something you believe.” She took a long drag from her cigarette and hiccupped and coughed simultaneously.

“I ain’t buying that bullshit. There’s something up there, but hell if I know what it is.” 

His shoes had no laces, so the canvasser didn’t join the conversation, and Abe ranted on uninhibited, pacing faster and swinging the book wildly.

“Grandma told us to believe in this man with a beard and all our problems would go away. Where’s he at?”

“You’ve got to change your insides.”

“I ain’t buying that bullshit. God can be good or he can be powerful. Pick one.”

Niece, exasperated and at the end of her cigarette, turned to me for help. I pointed at Abe. “Maybe he’s God.”

She lit another cigarette and walked up the road. By the time Abe realized she’d left, she’d passed the cyclery on slab twenty-eight and fished her car keys from her purse. Abe watched after her for a few seconds then took off his shoes with a sound like someone plucked the string of a homemade bucket-bass. He pointed to his grass-covered socks. “I’ve been sleeping in the woods. And that preacher took out a credit card reader midway through his sermon, had people line up, and told them not to swipe if there was nothing on the card.”

4

I wondered what Abe’s name was yesterday. I wondered what it would be tomorrow. He stared at his laceless shoes, and the canvasser stopped a hunched woman with a yoga mat, and the first drips of rain inflated the parched grass on God’s socks. 

5

A flashbulb of lightning illuminated the street, but the thunder shuddered several seconds later. Abe put his shoes back on. The tongue of the right shoe was under his foot, but he seemed not to notice. He walked back toward the laundromat, book open, highlighter in hand. Behind him, a new figure emerged from a CBD dispensary and stood next to the canvasser and yelled at a Lexus, “How’re you gonna have a nice car like that and can’t even park it? Disgusting.” He paused for a moment and leaned his head back before screaming so hard he doubled over, “Disgusting!” 

Still the canvasser didn’t turn his head but watched the Lexus roll out of his line of sight, his eyes bulging with loss. Abe had walked away and now stood statue-still on slab thirty-one, staring at the parking space his niece had occupied then gazing slowly up the street, down the street, and back at the parking space. He blinked several times, as though something were caught in his eye. He then gazed up the street, down the street, and back again at the parking space. Still unsatisfied, he blinked several more times and shook his head before gazing down the street, then up, then back at the parking space. He slouched back onto the bench in front of the laundromat. His right hand flipped the pages of Prayers for Times of Hardship twenty at a time while his left hand rubbed the bench and his eyes remained fixed on the parking space. Then it started to rain.

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BACKSEAT OFFERING by Janice Leagra

July 12, 2019

He’s just had a cigarette and a TicTac after doing a line on the console. His tongue tastes of tobacco and peppermint. The car is almost too warm. The engine’s running, the heat on full-blast. Still, goosebumps dot your skin. The light from the stereo shines lava red. It’s a raw, frigid night. The threat of snow hangs like a skullcap over Maple Lake.

It’s the eve of your fifteenth birthday. He’s seventeen. He’s giving you your birthday present. Here, in the backseat of his Camaro. Fourteen isn’t so young. That’s what he’s told you for weeks. You thought sixteen would be better, but now you think he’s right.

The car is enveloped by an arched snarl of brambles cut out along the lake’s edge. The bare branches flail in the wind and screech as they stroke the car’s roof. You think of horror movies. You love horror movies. The enclosure is enough to conceal the car from cops and passersby. You wanted to come here. This is where you want it to happen.

Your parents don’t know you’re here. They don’t know you’re with him. If they knew, they would forbid you to see him, ever. He’s not the right sort. You go to Catholic school. He doesn’t go to school at all. He’s too old. He smokes. He does bad things. To you, he’s perfect. They don’t know that he shimmied up the cedar tree next to your house, climbed onto the roof, tapped on your bedroom window, wanting to be let in. You told him to wait for you across the street in his car. You snuck out and ran along the deserted road. The thump-thump of the car’s stereo beat its rhythm from within. Taillights, cherry-red beacons. Exhaust smoke reaching skyward in the wintry air.

There are stories about Maple Lake. This part of New Jersey has lots of stories. Old ones. About these woods. Things people have seen, heard. You’ve read books. Every book you could find. You’ve told these tales to him. You write about them in your diary.

The windows are fogging. Good. There’s no moon. It’s so dark. Still, it’s possible to see things. Movement. Shapes. Flickers.

“Why Can’t I Have You?” by The Cars is playing on the radio. It’s important to remember that for your diary. You’re shivering, but not from the cold.Are you okay? he says, not really caring, all quick breaths and awkward movements on top of you. You nod. Your bare back sticks to the vinyl seat.You focus your eyes over his shoulder to the passenger window. It’s steamed up. But there’s something there. You think of the stories. Cloven hooves, red eyes, horns, wings. They’re just stories, he’s said. There’s no such thing.His fingers. Your underwear. His belt. Your lips. His mouth. No one knows you’re here. Only him.

You look at the window again. It’s closer. Something big. Looming. Red.

Wait. Not yet, you say.

Not yet? Come. On.

There’s something there.

Where? he says.

Out there. Just outside the car. Something big. Moving.

There’s nothing there. Shh. C’mon.

His tongue. Your thighs. His hands. Your hips. The music. Candy smile, all the while, glinting.

It’s happening. This is it. It’s happening.

His body finally goes limp and heavy on yours. He breathes on your shoulder.

The radio voice says it’s 11:29. You’re still fourteen. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t caress or hug you. He just lies on top of you, sweaty.

Then at the window. Gleaming red.

Look. See it? you say.

He sits up. Rubs at the fogged window with his balled-up shirt and peers out.

There’s nothing there. What, you think it’s the Jersey Devil? Christ.It could be.

He laughs, puts on his clothes, tosses you yours. Grabs his cigarettes and lighter from the console. He gets out to smoke and take a piss. You dress and think of everything you want to remember for your diary.

A tiny orange flame flickers outside, lights up his face, then fizzles. You climb into the front seat. Then, a thunk. The car rocks. You rub your cuff on the window and it squeaks against the glass. You press your forehead against the cold surface and look. Nothing.

Except for a distant glimmer.

You roll down the window. The cigarette pack is lying on the ground. Your breath puffs out of you in tiny, faint clouds. No sound but for the gentle lapping of the lake water.

Two bright red embers stare back at you from the shore. They start moving toward you. In the feeble glow of the taillights you can make out the shape of horns and the points of wings as it gets closer. It’s just like the stories.

Perfect.

No one knows you’re here.

It stops near the back of the car. The glowing slits of its eyes consider you. You smile. It seems to nod. Its leathery wings unfurl and go taut as it leaps up into the night sky.

You leave the warmth of the car, but you don’t feel cold. You begin the long walk home and think about what you’ll write in your diary. Your plans, maybe…for next time.

He was right. Fourteen’s not so young.

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A DIFFERENT KIND OF FIRE by Marina Flores

July 11, 2019

Firefighters in reflective neon suits stormed into the blazing Texas Thrift Store as helicopters circled the building in surveillance. The flames that escaped from the structure’s openings whipped and stirred together like vermilion lovers beneath a glassy black sky. A generator on the roof of the thrift store flickered—once, twice, like the first few seconds after lighting a sparkler on the Fourth of July—seconds before an atomic cobalt and orange explosion. Fire swallowed the structure in one gulp, almost offended by the attempt to save the remains of the building with hose water. That night, not much light was needed for the team of hundreds who, for hours, battled the inferno. The slight glimmer from the flames flushed against the white and crimson of parked ambulances and firetrucks from 83 units. Crime scene tape labeled “do not cross” enclosed the perimeter of the thrift store’s parking lot: danger, keep out. 

As I watched the media’s minute-by-minute sky coverage of the Texas Thrift Store’s four-alarm fire, I held my breath. I wrapped my arms around my knees and pulled them close to my pajama-ed chest. I imagined the sorrow on the faces of onlookers, on the faces of medical crews on standby when two firefighters were not accounted for after an emergency evacuation. Inside the structure, the heat of flames sizzled around brave suited bodies, the smoke heavy like weights in their throats and chests. One firefighter was found and rushed into the back of an awaited ambulance, his body covered in a sheet of black residue. Where was the other unaccounted fireman? Why hadn’t they found him yet? 

Parts of the thrift store’s roof caved in and collapsed, like a house of blocks that tumbled down and down and down, as the blistering fire singed through the walls of other businesses in the shopping center. A tingling sensation tugged at the backs of my eyes, but I continued to watch the news updates, mostly nauseated over what might be unearthed after the last flame was extinguished. As the footage continued to play across my television screen, I wondered if my estranged father watched the yellow firestorm engulf the place we once visited so often.

On one of the two weekends a month I spent with my father, John took me to the Texas Thrift Store. He held my hand as we walked in through the glass doors and underneath giant red letters. The inside smelled like one big garage sale. We browsed the little girls’ aisles for clothes and shoes until I snuck away to the more interesting area of the store: the toy section. These rejected or donated toys—some brand new, others slightly used with a film of grey tinge—were piled in low, rectangular wooden bins for children like me to rummage through. Layer upon layer of toys were thrown on top of one another, sometimes in a pile of rubble already plowed through by other curious children. There, I glanced over dolls with ragged hair, play cash registers without batteries, puzzles, and boxes of Legos with missing pieces. 

John found me in one of the aisles and held up shirts and bottoms that clung to plastic hangers: a faded floral blouse; a pair of scuffed, knock-off Sneakers; and a few pairs of wrinkled jeans and cargo shorts. Round tags that hung from the garments read five dollars, some two dollars. At the sight, I envisioned the little girls who had worn those items before me, how their daddies had purchased these clothes for them, brand new, as a birthday gift or just because. John pushed the items into the crevice of his arm and led me by the hand to the register. A tired shadow clung to the lower-half of my father’s round jaw and his unshaven skin, but his face still looked so much like mine. 

When my father removed his withered and worn wallet from a jean pocket at the register, I recalled how his face looked when I asked for a McDonald’s Happy Meal two weekends before our trip to the thrift store. John had just come home from work on a Saturday afternoon. His skin always smelled of a greasy mechanic’s shop, sometimes with the stale twang of cheap beer and a female stranger’s cigarette smoke. I tugged at the bottom of his shirt that was still stained in white patches near the chest and armpits.

“Please, please, please daddy, can we go to McDonald’s?” I extended the vowels in the question, too eager for the plastic figurine in the Happy Meal.

My father slapped his jean pockets with ashy hands. “We don’t have money for McDonald’s,” he shot back. John used that tone with my mother on the phone. I once overheard my mother say we didn’t need a dime from him, that he could keep his unpaid child support. 

His mother, Ruth, whom I once called Momo, chimed in before I could ask another question. She pulled out a few dollar bills and quarters from her coin purse. The skin on Ruth’s face and arms sagged like the withered branches of the front yard’s pecan tree during summer months. The tree was heavy with rotting pecans and empty bird feeders. I blocked out the fact that John’s mother bathed me, head-to-toe, at age eight, age ten. In the court custody battle, Ruth stood on the stand and testified, under oath, that she always waited outside the bathroom door while I showered. My mother cut my hair like Velma’s from Scooby-Doo because, for most of my elementary school years, I refused to bathe or brush out the knots from the bird nest on the back of my head. Ruth handed her son the money, kissed my cheek with thin, wrinkled lips, and sent us on our way.

The newscast on the thrift store fire continued well on into the early hours of the morning. That night I tried to remember when John and I left the thrift store for the last time. I couldn’t. The television screen lit up my living room like an open furnace until the final firefighter’s body was located. The man, a six-year veteran of the department, was a father of two, his wife still pregnant with their third child. I imagined the Texas Thrift Store’s charred entrance doors that John and I entered and exited through before and after our brief shopping trips. These same doors are the doors that many expected one firefighter to run back through, unharmed, able to return to his off-duty life as a dad after a grueling day of work battling other people’s blazes. For those few hours I exhumed memories shriveled and dried like raisins, discolored by the hue of scarlet fury. For those few hours I, too, battled my own fire. 

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SHOWERLESS by Chris Wilkensen

July 10, 2019

This train is a church in both its movements and its congregation. No one dares interrupt the silence. Metal rolling over rusted metal. Outside the scenery passes by like life to a teenager: fleeting but feeling never-ending. Most passengers wish they could be anywhere else to feel anything else, to feel something other than strictly operational. At each stop people straggle off, mostly alone, onto their next journey. 

New passengers come aboard. She hovers over me. She breathes harder and heavier. No other free seats. Her pink hair raises my own arm-hair. I move my bag to the ground for her to sit. She only eyes my phone. A blank screen that reflects her face. No makeup, freckles. Thin, rough skin covers her well-proportioned face.

When she gets closer, the stench smacks me. I take a deep breath, look at her and cough. 

“Sorry, I haven’t taken a shower in a few days now,” she whispers. The suits and skirts around focused even harder on their cell phones.

“Oh, I see,” I say.

“I’m homeless. Makes it hard,” she says.

Twisting my head to the right, I look at the side of her face. She looks down, maybe ashamed, but I gaze toward her lap, afraid of eye contact. Her jeans are gross, not in any type of style in vogue to teenagers, with black spots and purple spots of dried blood, maybe. Her yellow boots remind me of construction attire. 

“I’m sorry.” I look down at my Calvin Klein dress shoes and North Face backpack. 

“Yeah, me too.” She crosses her arms. 

I’m a suburban transplant who moved to the city to be closer to downtown for school, still new to city life and city people. My parents budget callowness into my college expenses. She can use my parents’ overhead more than we can. 

I can’t let the other people on the crowded train, who I’ll never see again, witness me cry in sympathy. Hunching up in the seat, I take out my wallet from my back pocket.

“Here. Maybe this can help.” I extend the money toward her.

She hesitates, looks around.

“Is this for real?” This is when my eyes meet hers. Wide, blue, elusive. 

I nod.

She looks at my hand, taking the $40 like a busy cashier, before her hand grazes my arm. Doors open at the next stop. She jumps off without waving or looking back. 

I abhor the thought of another conversation, especially with someone who saw what just happened. The passengers just glance at me. I still smell the rough circumstances that embarrassed her. 

The train trails until the end of the line when we all get off. Long after the stop for my studio. Standing outside alone in the train station I wonder which could come first: someone talking to me or me talking to someone. People pass. I fiddle on my cell phone, nothing productive or fun, just killing battery. No WiFi to entertain me. Only me and my thoughts.  

The temperature drops, so I walk faster to warm my blood. Shops are closing, five minutes before 9. I beg a bakery to please stay open because I haven't eaten or drunken anything in hours. They don't care. They just repeat their opening hours. I check my phone to verify the time.

So I walk. I’ll try this for a night. Just one night. In the distance, I see a park without people. The inside top of the slide can be my room for the evening. I’m experiencing and learning new things, what college is for. Hopefully I can run into her again. It’s Friday night, so I can go until Monday morning without showering. 

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CHAMP by Anthony Sabourin

July 9, 2019

Most days I would sit in a big jacket in my stall in the dark of the parking garage and I would open the gate for people when they drove up in their cars. When they were gone and it was quiet again, my brain would be full of this image of a spaceship screaming towards Earth, burning up as it entered the atmosphere. I wanted to shed all of the pieces I no longer needed. To burn away until I was almost nothing. I don’t know, other times I’d just watch pornography but not jerk off. I appreciated everything. 

Today I sat in Greyhound bus in Ottawa; my big jacket with my cold face amongst the heaving bodies and stale air, and suddenly the bus moved and we were on our way to another place. It felt like I was in the middle of a period of great transformation. I had stolen five hundred dollars and two grams of hash from my roommate. I was going to Montreal. 

Outside of the terminal there was snow and cold, and the sidewalks were blue from rock salt. I breathed deeply and it felt sharp and good. I loved it. Matt was there to pick me up. He lived here now, and I had called him from the bus and sold him on old friendships and good times. We hugged and called each other shitheads and talked about how good it was to see each other and we didn’t acknowledge the distance between us. He looked clean shaven. 

I didn’t bring any luggage. I saw him notice this and begin to look worried so I gave him another great big hug before he could talk about it. He walked me through the crowd past buildings that were brown and jagged, avant-garde and ugly. That’s the art museum. This is the subway station. I didn’t trust it. The signs were in French. He handed me a weekend metro pass and we walked into one of the brown buildings and submerged. The whole ride, Matt was talking about his new city - he was effusive in his praise, using words like “history” and “culture” and “Leonard Cohen”. 

I remembered a night from when were in undergrad and the group of us took a bunch of mushrooms to watch the sunset from the Prince of Wales bridge. When the sun went down it looked like the sky above us was on fire. And we looked down and the water below us was on fire too. It felt like the end of days was coming, like this enormous hellfire was reaching out to embrace us and there was no escape. Matt looked at us and shouted out, “If we’re all gonna die then I want you to know that none of this has been worth it! None of it! You’re all pieces of shit!” 

He jumped into the water and he was fine. The sun that night continued to set and instead of armageddon it just got dark. It looked like he was doing well for himself now. 

He took me to his apartment and it was a long rectangle of open space and soft white light. There was an exposed brick wall and minimal furnishing. By the kitchen with the gas stove and the new fridge there were sliding glass doors that led to an outdoor seating area that was snowed in. Matt pointed out that in the upper left corner of the view you could see a small ‘+’ that was the cross on top of Mount Royal. The rest of it was blotted out by neighbouring apartments. He said that Montreal was the last affordable Great Canadian City and I said I had read that in a magazine, but I was lying. I was waiting to ask him about doing hot knives. There was a picture of him and his wife Lauren that was framed on the wall. It was from their wedding. They were holding each other happily and there were white flowers in the background. They had met in law school. She was hard-working and relentlessly cheerful in her disposition and so we hated each other. I asked Matt where she was and he told me she was working late. I asked Matt if he wanted to do hot knives. 

We had sunken into the couch with blank smiles on our faces and scorched knives in the sink when Matt remembered he made dinner reservations for us. We walked through the streets at night with faces red as our bloodshot eyes, in the kind of cold that makes everything crunch. The restaurant, when we got there, was burnished metal, big windows, and tasteful wooden accents, a chalkboard menu written in elegant cursive handwriting and no prices - it was unadorned by branding, which meant expensive. 

The people in the restaurant looked pleased and inert and they chortled away in their language. I didn’t know what anything was. Matt spoke casually to the waiter and a man came out from around the kitchen and made a show of presenting us with a bottle of red wine. He uncorked the wine and took Matt’s wine glass and poured a mouthful in and placed it in front of Matt. Matt picked up the glass by its stem and how he drank this wine was he swirled the glass around and brought it up to his nose and closed his eyes and inhaled through his nose. Then he opened his eyes and looked at the wine and brought it to his mouth and closed his eyes again and took a long slow sip. When he was done he nodded. 

Now this motherfucker came up to me with the wine and I was too high to be around all of these rich people. After he poured it I wondered if I could have the same experience as Matt, so I did what he did. I swirled it around and I brought it up to my nose and inhaled and then took a long slow slip. But to me it just smelled like wine and tasted like wine. I started to drink quickly.

When it was quiet again I asked Matt what I should order and he said poutine so that’s what I did. To be honest I wasn’t sure if I liked food anymore. I mostly ate breakfast wraps from the coffee place on the way to the parking garage, and if I got hungry again I would buy another coffee and if I was hungry again at home I would pick at the leftover shawarma platters my roommate would leave in the fridge. My mouth felt like it was always full of acid. My diet made getting high more efficient, and I was becoming gaunt but in a fashionable way. 

To say something, I told Matt that I was training for a marathon. I had been really into telling people that I was training for a marathon ever since I watched this video of a person in this spandex bodysuit undressing. It was this black room; all you could see was this person and their suit and it was like this tight blue androgynous cocoon. As the camera got closer you could see by their eyes that it was a woman. And then she started to unzip the suit and she took the head part of her suit off and this long blonde hair  flowed out of it. It made me think that we can all be anything we want. Two naked men walked into the frame of the video and then it was pornography. In the parking garage I thought that I would better myself by becoming a marathon runner, and I did research online and bought nike running shoes at full price and a grey sweatshirt that said “CHAMP” on it, with the quotation marks, in welcoming letters that arced like a rainbow across my chest. I told my roommate and my dad and my manager at the parking garage that I was training for a marathon. Everyone is so happy when you tell them you are running a marathon. Or not happy, but they act like they are impressed with you, and it’s nice. My stuff came in the mail and I tried to run once but it was stupid. There was nowhere to go.  Still, I started to wear the sweatshirt around to show that I was serious, and it became something to talk about with people. “It’s harder to train in the winter,” I said now, “but the key is to invest in good crampons.” I nodded to emphasize the importance of crampons. 

Matt told me it was inspiring that I was training for a marathon. 

We got lost in old memories. We talked about the time we did thanksgiving for our other roommates but we got too day drunk and fell asleep and almost burnt the apartment building down. It would have burned fast too - that apartment was littered with balled up Subway wrappers like so much kindling. Matt’s dad died when he was a kid and his mom never had much money so he worked at Subway for all of undergrad, and the smell became a part of him, it lingered on him like he was haunted. I remember I’d go to his Subway when it was quiet and I’d make logic puzzles out of convoluted sandwich orders to help him with his LSAT. He didn’t need the help anymore though - the waiter was coming with our food. 

I looked at my poutine and there was this strange grey meat on it. I asked what it was and Matt told me “Foie gras.” They make foie gras by sticking a feeding tube into a duck, and force feeding it until its liver is big and fatty. They do this for a hundred days, sticking the feeding tube into the duck and feeding it against its will, and then they kill it and take out its liver. I knew this because when I felt bad about watching too much pornography I would watch a video about factory farming. I was curious about the foie gras though. Maybe it was worth it. 

I took a bite and it made me sad. It was this smooth rich blankness, but it was just a texture. I wanted to eat a breakfast wrap. I sat picking fries and watching my food congeal into this brown-grey sludge. I looked at it and thought of soft splayed legs and sexual pumping and food tubes shoved into baby animals and rows of ducks in tiny cages. 

Matt, overtaken by hunger from the hash, was drinking wine and eating lobster pasta with an intense focus. After a long pause, Matt looked at me like he had something important to say, some big epiphany that he wanted to share with me. He told me there was something that had been on his mind a lot lately, and so he told me a story and it went like this:

THE BLUE SHIT STORY

Lauren’s law firm has this famous bake sale. It was this big charity thing to raise money for cystic fibrosis or diabetes, he couldn’t remember. The partners at the firm took it very seriously though, it raised a lot of money and made them all look like pillars of the community. Lauren was an excellent baker, and she wanted to impress the partners at the firm. She wanted to make something that was decadent, artful, and difficult to bake, so she made macaroons. They were perfect blue clouds that tasted of chocolate and raspberries. People at the bake sale loved the macaroons. They sold out, and therefore they were making a difference for the people with the cystic fibrosis or the diabetes. 

It took Lauren a day to realize what she had done. She used a lot of blue food colouring to make the macaroons the right colour, and now Lauren was in the bathroom, and she had just taken a shit, and it was blue. Matt ate some of the macaroons and his shit was blue too. All of these lawyers who had loved the macaroons were going to the bathroom and looking at their blue shit and they all knew why their shit was blue. All of these people who were supporting the people who had the cystic fibrosis or the diabetes were dropping these big blue hosses. Lauren was embarrassed. She wondered how she could go to work and practice law and also be the person that made everyone in the office shit blue. She was worried about getting a nickname like Blue Shit Lauren. Like she would be in courtroom and the judge would call up Blue Shit Lauren to present her closing arguments. But she went to work the next day and nobody ever talked about it. 

Matt said he thought life was like that blue shit. He said life was this strange and wonderful collective experience that nobody was talking about. 

He spun a tumorous mass of spaghetti around the tines of his fork, and shoveled it into a wide open mouth. I thought it was a terrible fucking story, like of course Laura would make macaroons, and who even cared what happened to a bunch of lawyers, and now all I could feel was foie gras lingering in my mouth and maybe it was the wine or the hash or I don’t know, but I felt the saliva pooling and I looked at the floor and one moment it was fine and the next it was covered with so many chunks of grey mush, so much reddish bile, and I felt like I would never stop heaving. 

Outside of the restaurant, I was breathing out puffs of air while snow fell around me in fat flakes. Matt was still inside, smoothing things over and apologizing. 

There was a concert we went to in our final year of law school. It was a reunion show in a small club, some punk band Matt was into. When the lead singer came out he had this substitute teachers head attached to a substitute teacher’s body - kind of frumpy and washed out. It was shit - the band was too drunk to do anything, and after four songs the substitute teacher just set his guitar up by the amp to generate a wall of feedback, and he walked off the stage to leer at the young girls who were waiting by the bar. After the show Matt kept apologizing to us. I really enjoyed it though. I think it was the first time I understood getting old. 

Matt came outside and he looked at me, only now where before his face was flushed and happy, he just looked sad. He asked me if I needed help. 

I told him I did. I told him I needed the kind of help I used to give at Subway. I needed help to go to shitty rich restaurants to feast on suffering, and that I needed so much of his help to be so pretentious and empty.

And still he did not jettison and burn off and fly away. He told me that he was worried about me - that I looked sick, and that he was scared for me, and that he wanted to get me help if I needed it. He told me that he worked hard to get the life he had, and that it made him happy. 

I didn’t talk for a long time, but when I did I asked Matt if he thought that the average person could step into his life and do a better job with it. He asked what I was talking about. I took the five hundred dollars from my pocket and told him that it was my fee, and that I could free him. He looked at me one last time and left. 

I was relieved. My throat was burning from the vomit and there was so much more that I could be doing. I had always felt like a patient zero in search of a disease.  

*

Sometimes when I pictured the future, I saw myself as the King of this Great Pile of Garbage. I was seated on a mound of garbage bags, and it was so comfortable. People would come to me and seek my advice, and I would tell them to throw it all out. My garbage empire would grow and grow. Other times I could only picture blackened wood, embers fading into smoke. I was okay with that too. As for Montreal, it was alright. I walked by a costume store that was selling masks of babies and horses and dogs, and in the display window they were all perched on mannequins of male models. I walked by bars and saw young people who moved around as lithe and panicked as gazelles.

I had been drinking and was now great friends with these two punks. They both had shaved heads and leathery skin. They were older but spoke English. One of them had a head that was dented like a soup can. And the other one had a growth on the right side of his forehead, and that was how I could tell them apart. Otherwise it was a mess of patchwork denim and bad tattoos. I was buying us quarts of Fifty because I was rich. Quarts of Fifty were great because they came in these big bottles and were served with a tiny glass on the side, and you could poor from the big bottle into the tiny glass and feel like some kind of foreign dignitary. The guy with the dented head was telling us about how he got all of these dents. 

HOW I GOT ALL OF THESE DENTS

“So I’m waiting at the Bonaventure Metro, right?” he says. “And, wait, shit, you don’t know. The Bonaventure Metro is brick everything. Even the benches. With the heat from the trains it feels like you are trapped in this great furnace.” I nodded. “So I was there waiting for my train and I look across the tracks and I see this deer. It’s just standing there on the tracks opposite from me, and I look at the deer and the deer looks at me and then it goes back to grazing. And I look around me because there’s a fucking deer on the metro, and I am telling people, regardez, c’est un fucking deer but nobody is doing anything. Actually, they are looking at me like I’m the crazy one but I know what I see. And then I hear the rumble of the train coming, and I get really nervous because the deer is right there, yes? It’s still on the tracks and it’s not moving. It just looks up again and stares right at me, and now I can see the light from the train, and there is more noise and you can feel the rush of air, and I just walked right onto the tracks.”

“Bullshit you walked right onto the tracks,” I said.

“It’s what I did!” he said. “I walked onto the tracks and I reach out for the deer only it’s gone, it was like it had never been there at all, and now the only sound in my head is the sound of the train, and I look and the train hits me smack, right here!” - he smacks the middle of his forehead with his palm - “and that was it, that was all I could remember. I woke up later in a hospital, and my head was covered in bandages. I became very famous in Montreal for a time as the man who survived getting struck by a train. They let me shake Jean Béliveau’s hand.”

His friend, the other punk, laughed and said “You got those dents in a bar fight don’t be an idiot.” Then they were both laughing and I was laughing too. I felt comfortable with these old punks. 

I told them about how I had lost my job at the parking garage because one day I just left the gate open and went home because it didn’t matter. I talked about my roommate and how I was always stealing his food and how I owed him two months rent and had stolen all of his hash and money to come here, but that I’d left the rest of my hash at my friend’s apartment. I asked them where they bought drugs because it looked like they knew where to buy good drugs. They asked what I was into and I said that I pictured my body as this purification plant. I wanted to take in the world’s poison and process the chemicals and feel good or bad or powerful or ecstatic or tired or sick and leave only piss and shit smoke behind. 

The guy with the growth on his head never told us about why he had the growth on his head but we all agreed about the drugs, and so we left the bar together to go and buy them. 

We walked past portuguese chicken places and butcher shops  and rows of houses with walk up stairs. It was late and people were leaving bars and clubs, pushing past us in the streets with their jackets full of the feathers of dead baby geese. The punks talked about hockey riots and jaywalking tickets and how Montreal was a city built on old garbage dumps, nobody knew how many, they just paved over them and built schools and parks and houses. We walked down sidewalks narrowed like clogged arteries from snow. I was impressed by the state of disrepair I encountered. There was exposed piping and holes in the street. I wondered if my friends the old punks were going to kick the shit out of me and steal my money but I didn’t care. We walked for so long that all feeling left my body.

We stopped in front of a house. It had white siding that was yellowing at its edges and windows that were covered in garbage bags and tape. This was the place. They walked up to the door and knocked on it and it opened. I couldn’t see past them into the house. They held open the door and I walked towards them. I could only make out curdled wallpaper and a soft blue light inside of the house. I walked inside. It felt like a church to me.

*

I smoked something crystalline out of a foil packet and I didn’t feel like I was drowning in the undertow of euphoria, I didn’t get to watch my spirit hover over the Lachine canal while my body stumbled alongside watching, and I didn’t get to meet the lizard king of my third eye. I smoked it all up and sat there with my head of asbestos, and my ashed cigarette body, but this was normal. 

I looked over at the punks, who were passed out inside of their own heads like monks at peace with the world and I rifled through their pockets but found nothing except receipts and lint. I walked around the room kicking things over, knocking down lamps and picture frames and breaking glass. I punched at a wall but it didn’t make a hole like I wanted, it just really hurt my hand. I was bored of everything. 

I left the house and stepped into the midnight blue of the sky and the yellow of street lights. The quiet of the street was interrupted by the crack of a drum and the sound of trumpets, and I watched as a procession of revellers marching in a dance down the street, in the middle of the road. They were wearing strange masks and thrift store clothing - tattered plaid jackets or dirty leather; nobody was dressed alike but it still looked like they were in uniform. Their leader  was wearing a rubber face with cut-out eyes and I couldn’t place who it was supposed to be. He had a snare drum, and behind him there were women in animal masks with cut out mouths swaying and making cheerful noises with their trumpets. Behind them was a crowd of people - thirty or so men and women, all dancing behind them, shooting confetti into the sky. It was a cacophony of noise and jubilation. I watched as they came down the road, but when they got to where I was standing in front of the house everything stopped. There was no more marching or drums or sound, just confetti slowly tracing seesaw patterns in the air as it drifted down onto the street and a bunch of masks looking at me.

I said “English?” out loud and there was no answer. 

I said ““If we’re all gonna die then I want you to know that none of this has been worth it! None of it! You’re all pieces of shit!” and I dove into the snow on the sidewalk and writhed around in it and got snow down my neck and back but it was still quiet on the street. 

I got back up and looked at them and the grotesque shadows cast by their masks in the light of the street, and said “I don’t know what you want.” 

A child in a jester’s costume broke through the crowd and grabbed my hand and pulled me in. The people in their masks patted me on the back and shook my hand and wordlessly welcomed me into their ranks. Everything smelled like tobacco, but there was something sharp behind it, like vinegar. The drumming started again, the quick rat-tat-tat of the snare, and we were dancing through the streets again. 

We moved through the city past the fluorescent lights of Jean Coutu pharmacies and parks with trees that were collapsing under the snow. We passed under bridges and through neighbourhoods where houses were being demolished to make way for unfinished condos. When we passed people on the street they cheered us on. I thought of the mother I saw the day I left the gate up at my parking garage job, of her rusted green Corolla and car full of plastic bags and children pulling at her from the back seat and how it felt to leave the gate up. Of how it felt to see the spandex suit unzip in that movie, that moment of shedding your skin, and how I could never find it again afterwards; how some days I thought that I’d just dreamed it, but when I pictured it in my head it was so real. And we danced through the streets in the dark, and I felt a sense of belonging. More and more, people in the street applauded our marching. 

As I scanned the faces in the crowd, I saw one that I recognized as my own. The face was my own dumb face, but it the cheeks were fuller, the eyes a bit brighter. The man looked like me but different - he was put together, a nice peacoat and an expensive haircut, but he was less interesting somehow. I broke off from the people in their masks and I approached this man and he said “Avez-vous besoin d'aide?” and I took whatever money was left in my pockets and thrust it into his hands and hurried back to the revellers, who again clapped their arms around my back and welcomed me with open arms as we moved down Rue de la montage past rows of old houses and construction sites and garages, galleries and glass buildings reflecting nothing but the cold.  We continued to march until we approached the mouth of a tunnel. The man with the drum walked up to each of us and shook our hands and when he got to me he took of his mask and I understood. And he went back to the mouth of the tunnel and started drumming again and he led us inside, and soon there was only a perfect darkness. I reached out with my hand and felt for the person in front of me, and I found them and we walked together, and another hand reached for my back and we all walked like that in the dark, linked to each other. We followed the echoing sounds of the drums, and the story of the tunnel was this: as I kept on walking through the fertile, fetid darkness, I told myself I didn’t feel any different, but I didn’t know anymore if this was true. 

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SEVEN DROPS OF SALT WATER by Ariel Kusby

July 8, 2019

First, she thought he was a man. Then, she thought he was a seal. But if you’ve ever seen the way a sea mammal disappears, becomes dark water, you’ll understand why she never thought he was a warm body but a bit of ocean contained for a while. When a slick being emerges fully formed from a void you want to grab hold of it. You want to ask it what it’s seen. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re any different, that the deep is darker than your own blood. The body is full of stories. Your blood will always let them in.

Her story begins with rough water. A year of sleeper waves that claimed beachcombers, obscured by pulses of marine layer. They say she was born on a night like this. That she rushed out of her mother’s body in a giant wave and after that, they couldn’t keep her away from water. She learned to swim before she could walk, and before she could swim, her father took her into the swells in a plastic pink floatie, far beyond the break.

By the time she was twenty, no one could navigate a red-flag day like she could. They say she would have made a great lifeguard, better than the stoner boys who patrolled the beaches for extra cash, but there was something about her that was too odd. She rarely made eye contact. She walked the beach by herself and swam at night. The neighbors judged her father for letting her go alone but he believed he had taught her well. 

Imagine her: lonely, filled with adrenaline, ecstatic in her held breath as her body curved below fifteen-foot swells. Silver turbulence, sea spirits rising up from the drop-off. How deep could her legs have propelled her? How powerful can a body ever be? 

Mornings she’d work for her father, a fisherman. She’d slice each catch and gut it, smearing blood along her arms no matter how careful she was, then wash it off before school, where she studied folklore.

Do you think she did it intentionally? During all of her sea-walks and secret sadness wrapped up inside her like invasive kelp, did she cry seven tears to tempt fate? Or did they just come, unaware of what they would bring?

Before this, she’d dated a few young men she’d met in class. They couldn’t swim, were afraid of water, but inevitably she’d end up in the shallows with them, holding their bodies like a reluctant mother, telling them to kick, to breathe, to cup their hands and move. 

Then, one day he appeared like a washed-up flower from a funeral boat. Dark and surprising. Swimming in the shallows where moments before, there had been no movement. 

The first thing she loved was the way his body moved. With soft intention, a moonpull. Then, his voice, friendly like he already knew her. Like a shell knows how to whisper intimately into an eardrum. 

She had never seen him before. He greeted her, walking up the shore to his belongings. A black canvas bag she hadn’t noticed. He was new in town and wanted her to show him around.

Picture her walking with him, amazed that she could talk with him more easily than with anyone she’d ever met before. He seemed lonely too, hungry to talk about books and folklore with someone who shared the same esoteric interests. 

Some say they saw the two eating together, and then they left town and walked back to the beach, where they disappeared beneath a pier. They lingered there for hours between the barnacle-crusted pilings. Imagine his silken hands on hers, his lips tracing her collarbone. Imagine her suddenly wet on top of the sand, wet like a wave spilling over him. Salt concentrated in their mouths, surprising heat overriding the damp cold. His energy like a wave sloshing into a coastal cave, rippling all the way into its back corners. A phosphorescent red tide of wild hormones and tenderness and the idea that they’d finally found something really good. Imagine him cumming on her belly, semen shimming in the moonlight like a silver snake. 

After that they were never seen apart, swam together everyday. He kept up with her even when the swells grew into monsters with enough power to kill. He taught her a trick for holding her breath.

Some say what eventually happened between them was the result of great passion. Or of getting what she asked for. When a human and a sea creature love each other too much, it will always lead to destruction. Some say it was her cruel heart, a sealhunter. Others believe he transformed in more ways than one. He was many seals and many men, and mapped the bodies of young women to find deep spaces he could glide into and haunt.

She found it in the black bag in his closet, where she was looking for a lost pair of underwear. It’s glint from the overhead light caught her eye, and she pulled it out, repulsed and terrified. It was a sealskin with the cleanest slits, like a wetsuit, ready to be stepped into and zipped up. Was it fresh? Why did it look so immaculate, almost freshly laundered? She didn’t know what to think, but she knew he had a secret. 

And then she remembered the passage from her book about sea legends: “Selkies, or seal people are shapeshifters. They can be summoned by seven tears shed into the sea. Selkies often seduce humans on land, only to quickly leave them again for the ocean. The only way they will stay on land is if their lover hides their seal coat. Then, they will be locked in human form.” 

She couldn’t leave it but she couldn’t hide it, so she did hide it because being alone felt unbearable. She buried it in the dirt in a public park far away from the water.

She considered confronting him, but was it worth it? She was finally happy for the first time in her life. So, he had a secret. She spent her days cutting the hearts out of fish. Who was she to make assumptions? 

She hid her knowledge like an anemone bloated with water, sucked up inside of herself. Truth is, she was never good at hiding anything. A toxic feeling congealed. In her body, muck built up. 

He became moody and withdrawn. When he came over to her house, he touched her with rough hands and foggy eyes. She asked him what was wrong. What did he need from her? He threw a plate against the wall behind her head. Nothing. She ran out of the house all the way to the water and dove in, dropping tear after tear into each indifferent surge. He ran after her, crying too. I’m sorry, he said. How can you ever forgive me. I would never hurt you. And then he held her, warmer and softer than the water did. 

So they stayed together. And every week this pattern repeated. Often they would be body-surfing, tethered by their intensity, and then: a comment he didn’t like. A wrong question. And they were like two sharks turned against each other. 

Below the surface, who could know what ultimately happened between them? Some say he would take her underwater and breathe into her mouth and it was a sort of high for her, breathing half-air, her blood a roiling boil molten in cold water. 

How could she have known he’d find it? That he’d end up in that park with another woman he’d secretly been seeing the whole time? The myths never mentioned that a selkie would be able to smell their own skin and step back into it. 

Like that, he dissolved. They say she went to the ocean every day, and that eventually he did approach her, transformed again from a fish to a man. She asked what it was like down there. Surprisingly warm, sublimely bright, he said. If you want to come with me, I’ll take you. Then they’d fuck in the water, so desperate for it that the awkwardness didn’t matter. Salt water inside her, semen dispersing like pale squid ink. Then he’d melt back down into the darkness, and all night she’d ruminate about joining him.

They say there were months more of late-night conversations, of wet trysts that ended in fighting, and then an evening when he grabbed her and pulled her underwater against her will. Fading light, tightening muscles. Love sucked up by the instinct for air. Or perhaps not love, but something else. She fought her way back to the surface and knew. She liked it better up there, away from him. Even if that meant facing a different type of void.

Not long after this, she moved away from town. Some say to the mountains, where she lives beside a river, and has never come back to the ocean again. They still love to talk about it. They call her the sea spinster, or the water witch. No man would want her now, the women say. She was soiled by a figment of the imagination, a dark archetype. 

Imagine her now living amongst the trees, bathing in the river filled with pinkly glittering trout. The deep feeling of the body: something dark swimming, rising up and holding her. Perhaps it breaches and disappears, only to breach again, different every time. 

Truth is, she isn’t close to water. She knows what it must have felt like for our ancestors when they crawled out of the ocean, fins flailing in the dirt for a chance at something better. Was it for a good reason? If you’ve never known anything but slipperiness, you want something to hold onto. Imagine her now, having made it for herself. Imagine her warm and dry.

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“OUR BOB” by Michael Seymour Blake

July 6, 2019
Michael Seymour Blake is the author of the art book 12 Days of Santa Crying. Shirts featuring his art can be seen on hot bodies around the world. He eats, sleeps, doodles, writes, lives in Queens, NY. He easily gets lost.Instagram: @michaelseymourblakeFabulous (It’s True!) Website: MichaelSeymourBlake.com
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