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THE PUDDLE BOYS AT NIGHT by Hadiyyah Kuma

December 11, 2019

Though dripping a little, the puddle boys are no longer melting. It is late nighttime. They don’t have to sleep because there is nowhere they have to be for now. They hope they never have to sleep again, but of course this is idealistic. The puddle boys know this too, but it is nice to ignore, it is nice to be fully conscious and in love. Crossing the street is the best excuse for holding hands. Cars echo away from them; some move through and splash people’s face. Everyone forgives them. The puddle boys' backs become green then red. Their hair moves with the wind, so moved, it sheds a tear.

The puddle boys drip into a cookie dough shop and practice spelling each other’s names.

“Devonte.”

“Rehan.”

“De-von-tay,” blows Rehan.

“Ray-han,” giggles Devonte.

The puddle boys tingle as their spirits align and their skins connect. They pass breath between each other. Devonte is excited about mint-chocolate cookie dough and he peruses the menu for a price. Rehan waits patiently behind him with a strawberry sharpie. As Devonte orders for the both of them, Rehan sneaks the marker under Devonte’s shirt and writes, “sanctuary.” Devonte ripples and shimmers.

The server says the cookie dough will take a few minutes; there was not enough mint left, and she has to get some more from storage.

“Can I hold the bags under your eyes?”

Devonte considers this and sees a horse outside, muddling through the street with a police officer on his back. “I could never draw a horse.”

“I never cared for horses very much. I like seashells.” Rehan knows that to be an artist one does not have to know how to draw horses. He reminds Devonte of his beach painting, of the way the seashells seemed to be sharp, yet malleable. How it seemed like a prize just to kiss the hand of the artist who made the world look soft again.

Devonte describes the feeling of being artistically inadequate as building a house with smaller bricks than everyone else, but the house has to be even bigger than every other builder. “It’s okay if you don’t understand what I’m saying.”

Rehan sits on the floor because he understands perfectly. The tiles are a jade-blue and white checkered pattern. They’re not innovative, but their simplicity gives the puddle boys a place for standing water. Delicate in their way, the puddle boys hug the grooves of the floor and change the subject. They are masters at subject-changing. They tell each other all kinds of things about shoe sizes and pony rides and simulated car rides at their respective local malls. There is always something new to talk to about. Water accumulates behind Rehan’s nose each time Devonte says the word, “probably.”

The puddle boys talk big, and soon they are shouting but not at each other, as the woman who entered the cookie dough shop would like. She has a son, he is young and smiles at the puddle boys. The woman’s thumb is ready on the record button of her phone. There is no drama to see. The puddle boys shout different animals’ names, but it’s not a spectacle; it’s two boys shouting about animals. Rehan touches Devonte’s laugh and there is no obstacle. Rehan likes donkeys and Devonte likes cows. These are their favourite animals.

From the outside the store glows white, and an accountant in his office across the street sips his coffee, rubs his eyes, checks his phone for missed calls and finds none. There is a text message that reads: have you eaten today behta? He texts, yes Ma, and puts the phone out of sight. He sees two boys yelling without making a sound. It’s not a dream. He would like to watch them forever but knows this will always be impossible.

Rehan has Devonte’s dark circles in his palms as he licks the cookie dough. A park bench at night becomes a test site of resilience because it’s not clear or dirty; it’s just somewhere to spread and spill. The puddle boys are even darker than before, their calves resting on each other like no simile can describe. It takes forever for a streetlight to come on, but it does. “Your tongue is my fire,” exclaims Rehan.

Devonte chews slowly, watching a man pee behind a tree. “I’m so glad I’m not that tree,” says Devonte. “I’m so glad I’m not that man,” says Rehan, “Alhamdulillah.” “Thank you, Jesus,” says Devonte. The puddle boys unlearn all the rules and discuss how trees can grow both up and down, but also side to side. They can break through and out of the earth, but they can extend as far as they want to go. It is hard to see the trees in this light. The puddle boys’ eyes are glinting, illuminated the worn skin around their cuticles.

Devonte sucks in the air to feel the mint aftertaste cool his mouth. “You can give them back now.”

Rehan places his palms on Devonte’s eyes and returns to him the dark circles.

The streets flex upward and back down again as Devonte and Rehan flood them. Love is big, and there are not a lot of places to hide it. An avenue opens into an alleyway, and the puddle boys crouch behind a crate of onions. They breath droplets and exhaust are the friction in each other’s collarbones. The world’s heat is turning thick and orange. It is not a good sign.

Devonte notices something behind Rehan’s hair. It is a carving made by a key or sharp fingernail. It reads, “Baby Boy and Baby Girl for life babyyyyyyy.” The many Ys lump in Devonte’s throat because he has too many wordless questions. “I wish I could last a day,” he says.

Rehan agrees. “I wish I could own a body.”

“It’s not the same as having,” says Devonte. “I’d build a city of Lego for you.”

“Build me legs and arms too, so that I have the strength to build you a better one.”

A tall man arrives. He smells like Vicks medicine, and he sweats out violence and cuss words. He mumbles, “goddamn” and “motherfucker of Jesus.” Tightening the grip beneath his shoes, he lifts the crate of onions onto his right shoulder and carries it away as if it were light.

“I don’t like men who say ‘goddamn’,” says Rehan.

“I don’t like men who make heavy things look light,” says Devonte.

“You are the best.”

“No, I feel myself giving up.”

The cement is a lighter shade. The avenue closes again, and there is nowhere to be but in the bright. Car windshields flash fire into everyone’s eyes. A cellphone reflects the light, piercing Rehan’s chest. He wobbles but is still breathing. “I feel myself giving up.” Devonte holds him by the waist. It is not easy to keep going when the dawn is so violent.

The sun becomes hotter and people pour into the street. Devonte and Rehan are smaller than they’ve ever been. They share memories of the night so as not to lose its darkness. They subject change to the red lights into green lights and green lights into yellow and then back again, and there are cows, but they are all sick and no milk can be obtained from them. The city is thirsty, and so it becomes careless. The puddle boys grow angry, but never at each other because they have hope and that deflects rays, sometimes. They start to yell again, but no one hears them. They try to laugh, but it is difficult with disappearing chests. There is another police horse, and the puddle boys hide under a car to avoid his hammering hoofs. Weight like that is definitive destruction. The streets flex downward and there is no stopping them.

“There is nowhere to hold you anymore.” The puddle boys’ backs are missing. All that’s left is the beginning of a name.

PICTURES by Andrew C. Miller

December 10, 2019

Lauren watched her father saw through the apple pie with a butter knife.

“Want a piece?” He scooped out a chunk, slid it into a cereal bowl. “Got eggs if you’d rather, but no bacon.” He poured coffee into a brown mug, dribbling on the counter. Lauren shook her head, glanced at the half open door to the canning room.

During Christmas they agreed that mother would be more comfortable on the first floor. So they converted the canning room into a bedroom and carried down her things—loose fitting clothes, toiletries, framed pictures of the family and relatives, watercolors from the community college art classes. Her father rolled in an oxygen tank, dragged in a small dresser from the garage. Lauren scooped up a handful of math and logic puzzles from the front closet.

Her father didn’t bother to set sponge up the coffee. He set his bowl and mug on the table, sat down hard.

Lauren frowned. Without her mother in the kitchen, the house didn’t feel like theirs anymore. It was as though someone else had moved in, rearranged the furniture, changed the lights, didn’t bother to pick up.

“Where’re the hospice people?”

“Got them on the phone yesterday. Seemed real nice.”

He set the spoon down, slid a tattered shoebox to the center of the table.

“They haven’t been here yet?”

He shook his head. “Now your Mother—"

Lauren’s eyes narrowed. “You just talked to them?” She opened and closed her fists. “Mom’s in pain, losing weight...”

“Got your Mother on a special diet. Florence—from the church—told us about it.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

He swept his arm overhead. “She didn’t want other women in her kitchen.”

“So, nothing’s been set up?”

He explained that they wanted to give the diet a chance. And, she was starting breathing exercises. They read about them in a health magazine that came in the mail. He jabbed the pie with his spoon.

“What about the pain?”

“All this addiction scares her.” He held up a spoonful, mostly crust. “Have a cup of coffee.”

“You were supposed to get hospice started.”

She walked to the counter, picked up the coffee pot. At Christmas she had downloaded the hospice information, stuck their telephone number on the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a rabbit.

He looked up. “There’s no cream.”

“No matter.” She poured a cup, leaned back against the sink. His shoulders seemed more hunched; his face thinner than she remembered. She wanted to yell, what’s going on here? Instead she asked, “Why’d you call?”

She was almost asleep when he called, asked her to come home. She got up at four, drove the 200 miles in under three hours.

He slid the bowl to one side, flipped open the shoebox.

“It’s the pictures.”

He pulled out a fat envelope, legal-sized, rumpled and stained. He slid out a handful of pictures, began to snap them on the table like he was dealing cards.

“We couldn’t figure out these people.” He glanced at the door to the canning room, then back at Lauren. “It was at the reunion right after your 16th birthday.”

Pictures. A long line of pictures.

At Christmas they had talked on and on about hospice. On their first visit, Lauren would come back home to meet them. They’d discuss everything. As a family. Pain management. Comfort food. Her mother’s wishes. Lauren had told her parents about Dr. Kaminsky, one of her university profs that had just died. Dr. Kaminsky’s wife had said the hospice people were a blessing. A blessing to have them in their home while he weakened, when he passed.

She stared at the pictures, didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she touched one.

“This is Cousin Freda’s daughter. She lives in Arizona.”

MOLD ON THE CEILING by Katherine Tweedle

December 9, 2019

Sophie had never thought twice about the décor in her mind palace. That was, until her counselor barged into her secret space and perched in her favorite armchair.

One moment, the women sat in an office tinted a chi-centering blue; the next, the room had transformed into a dim sitting room. Sophie blanched, her private life now public. Dr. Erwin seemed unabashed, if not actually bored, continuing to pull on a fountain soda the size of a prize pumpkin.

The room was Yin and Yang: clutter and cleanliness; one half as immaculate as a museum, the other half, a virtual kaleidoscope of crap. A thick, musty smell crawled through the air.

Dr. Erwin’s eyes roved over their new surroundings and settled on a shaggy patch of mold inching across the ceiling. She spoke in a lazy drawl, the straw wedged between her lips. “I like what you’ve done with the place.”

Sophie flinched at the quip. “Could we maybe—? Go back to your office?”

“You don’t like how I work?” The counselor’s tired eyes froze her.

A flush rose up Sophie’s neck as her eyes slid from the pristine gallery on one wall to the other half of the room. Crowding around them lay piles of books like fallen avalanches, crumbling cardboard boxes of corroded spectacles, and ragged grocery bags bulging with splinters of previously-fine china.

“Do you collect anything, Doctor?” Sophie asked, plumping a pillow beside her. A puff of dust exploded in her face.

“Everyone’s got junk.”

“I don’t know about junk. Lots of hobbies, maybe.” Sophie swept her arms wide, elbowing a stack of magazines that flapped to the floor.

Dr. Erwin waved a dismissive hand. “Baggage is normal,” she finally said. Then she pulled a face, her cheeks bulging, and Sophie realized with revulsion the woman was trying to smile.

Sophie reflexively perused the wall around them for the expected credential frames, but of course, if they’d been in Dr. Erwin’s office, she couldn’t see them now.

“Your room’s really something.” Dr. Erwin slid the straw from her drink and pointed it at the musty patch overhead. “Why do you figure that’s here?”

Sophie frowned at the intrusive straw, but quickly recovered. “Beautiful plasterwork, isn’t it?”

Dr. Erwin’s caterpillar eyebrows rose. “Is the plasterwork under the mold?”

“Mold? Oh that’s just—that’s been here forever. How about this?” Sophie scurried over to remove a glass box from the gleaming mantel and drew up a chair next to the counselor. The gold inlay gleamed when she lifted the lid.

“Naughty Box?” the counselor asked, reading the inscription.

“Yes. It has...reminders.”

“For?”

Sophie paused. “Anyone ever insult you?” she said. She didn’t wait for an answer. “Everyone’s flawed. Even those people.” Sophie reached in, lifting a pink note from the well-thumbed stack inside. “This one’s Marjorie,” she said, waggling the note in the air, “who seems to find other people more interesting lately.” Sophie flipped the paper onto the coffee table.

“Charles,” she said, extracting another note. “My cat passed away this year. I was devastated. Folks offer condolences, right? Not Charles. He didn’t care.” Sophie flicked through the pile and tugged another slip.

Dr. Erwin interrupted. “I assume you drew up some contract with him about friendship etiquette?”

Sophie snapped the lid shut. She rose to replace the box, taking care to ensure it was centered.

“Did you confront these people?”

“I’d be wasting my time.” Sophie returned to the couch and stretched out. Her foot nudged a box beneath the coffee table. She stiffened, looking like she’d just swallowed an ice cube.

Dr. Erwin leaned forward and squinted. “What’s that?”

Sophie shrugged. “That’s nothing. Not very pretty.”

Dr. Erwin’s eyes met Sophie’s, a controlled softness in her gaze. “Neither is mine.” The counselor’s exhaustion was radiating. It was a little sad; Sophie felt it too.

Sophie reluctantly lifted the box. It was glass like the first, but the panels were foggy with dust, the fastenings dark with rust.

“I keep throwing this nasty thing out, but it keeps coming back.”

“That’s your Oopsie Box?”

Sophie blinked away the juvenile term.

Inside the box lay a stack of crisp yellow notes like citations.

“These show up a lot,” Sophie said in a low voice. Her eyes scanned the first. “Sometimes I leave my shopping cart in the lot.” She flicked her shoulders as if shrugging off a fly.

“You feel some type of way about it?”

“Not really,” Sophie said, and that was that. “Mary. Once, I—this was just after my cat died—intimated to a coworker that Mary’d been withdrawn lately because of her husband’s affair. Apparently there were others in the breakroom, and by day’s end, those idiots spread it to everyone on the fourth floor.” Sophie rolled her eyes into her hairline. “It was...traumatizing.”

“I know what you mean,” Dr. Erwin said. Her eyes went vacant, as if she’d left her whole body sitting there, empty, to run some errand.

“I meant difficult for Mary. She was betrayed by everyone.”

Dr. Erwin took a disinterested pull from her soda. “Next?”

Sophie stared at this new note as if seeing it for the first time. Her face fell. “My sister’s blind in one eye.”

“How’d it happen?”

“You know the thing that always happens to kids who play with sticks?”

They sat in silence a while.

Finally, Sophie blurted: “She’s forgiven me, of course.” She squeezed the papers back in the decrepit box and stuffed it under the table.

Something shifted in the room, like a breeze, and they both looked up to see the mold above them grow. Sophie scowled.

“That’s no normal fungus,” Dr. Erwin said.

Sophie snapped her head back down to face her. “What isn’t?”

Dr. Erwin’s caterpillars climbed up her forehead.

“I don’t know what that is,” Sophie insisted.

“Then I’ll tell you; you don’t wanna let it sit.”

Sophie set her jaw. “Just leave it.”

Dr. Erwin tapped the plastic lid of her cup. “You want warm fuzzy feelings, or help?”

Without a word, Sophie rose. She crossed the room and opened the door, temporarily forgetting which way to turn the knob.

“I’m glad you came,” Dr. Erwin called.

Sophie pivoted. Her eyes lingered on the mold looming heavy and low. The flesh on her face hung limp as if it too were tired now. She nodded and crossed the threshold.

In the room she left behind, the mold on the ceiling flickered.

LIFE, AS OF NOW by Kamil Ahsan

December 9, 2019

The courtship practices of Shalimar Gardens spiked on Pakistan Day. His breath is raggedy. The trees brush the air with heart-shaped leaves, a reminder that the world is passing him by without noticing him sink—the cars that move too fast, the motorcycles that almost run him over, the people, oh all the people, so many people, everywhere everywhere everywhere…

It’s nightfall. He’s never been to the Shalimar Gardens. He never needed to. Fate grabbed him by the collar and shook him before he had a chance to know what he expected. All around him is noise, very ordinary noise. He thought he would feel exhilarated, pained but born anew, terrified. But he only feels the dirt kicked onto his knee by a motorcycle. A man and a woman and two children, one carried by the woman, stop by the side of the road. The din is sliced through by the man’s gravelly voice, as his hands pull on his wife’s dupatta. The older child says she wants to ride in front of him, and there’s a flash of repugnance across the man’s face—even he can see it, from a distance—and it lands as a blow across the child’s cheek. Before he can register his shock, the child disappears, a ballast between her father and mother. The motorcycle speeds into the crowd: the thing holding bodies together. A collective brain containing all these bodies that move like a wave, bursting through the bottleneck’s seams in the traffic. When many things squirm through small openings, it is the smallest of those things that gets bruised.

He feels his face peeling, crackling. A stray dog scampers to his right. He doesn’t really notice it. That is, the part of him that notices the dog is not conscious of the dog. Nor does he really notice that the dog is more careful with the traffic than himself.

At the signal, a family in the car closest to him is squabbling. He goes closer without realizing. A little girl looks at him imperiously and rolls up her window. There must be a shadow, he feels, working independently of him. If a passerby—say, the little girl—took a picture of him, what would it show? A vacant vessel of bone and sinew? A roving shadow stealing away round the corner? If someone was interested by the photograph, would they fail to see beyond this general part of the city, or would they see him—a being that did not coincide with a self?

The cold facts are that in this moment, on this day, on the 23rd of March in Lahore, he has been stripped of all the currency into which he was born. He has no wallet, he has no belt, he has no shoes, he has no cell phone. His shirt pocket is ripped, partially baring his chest. His jeans are shredded at the buttocks, and he holds the fabric together, even as he approaches a restaurant where he thinks maybe he can ask to make a phone call. He stands at the foot of the steps and hesitates. Behind him, there’s a man stabbing through brambles on the sidewalk and onto the small lawn. Ahead of him, people sit inside a glass window on restaurant tables, happy; or at least, ordinary. If this army of the living lives because it has the dignity of the soul, he is dead—or at best, a suggestion of a self.

And the fear and the panic and the pleasure and the longing and the confusion, the absence of all knowledge of an encounter that has happened to him and to him alone, the apprehension, the chance, just the smallest, the smallest of chances that this man who follows him and hides in the darkness can get close enough and grab his arms, thus exposing his bare buttocks mottled with violence that had to have been accidental—"It had to be! It must have been!"—along with the guilt; but then, all of that could just be a consequence of him remaining stationary in a cacophony of lights here, somewhere on Mall Road, the night alive with the smell of foods, each competing with the other, and so he moves as if with this swirling tide up the steps and begins to cry, not for an innocence he’s suddenly lost, but because what if this is relief, or ecstasy, or growth? Despite whatever he failed to feel, and despite his utter lack of innocence, his anxious limbs, prehensile arms and legs pushed. And he ran. And that gave him the forward momentum to speak the minimum number of words for a waiter to lend him his cell phone—until he realized it wasn’t a good idea to call anyone, and then there he was. A trickle of blood pooled over a left thigh, a fulsome pain.

He dials a number. It rings three times.

“Who is this?” Sara asks.

“Listen—I’m in trouble,” he says, and he begins to weep so loudly it orients the nature of the phone call so as to demarcate the ordinary from the extraordinary.

“Umair…What happened? No, fuck that, where are you? What’s going on?”

“I fucked up. I fucked up, I don’t know, I’m at Salt & Pepper, the one on Mall Road. I’m in trouble, I’ve—” He trails off. His eyes drop to the floor and float.

“Have you been running?” she says. She sounds bewildered and as if she’s trying to hide it. But that is not true. She is feigning surprise. It is not a complete surprise.

“Yes. No. Not running…no, maybe you don’t need to come,” he says before a crippling pain travels straight up his legs. He doubles over.

“Where’s your phone?” Sara asks.

“…lost it. Wallet too. Should I take a rickshaw and pay when I’m home? Tell me what to do. I can’t go home.”

He retches, once, twice, and on the third, a wet honk from the pit of a spectral wound empties his stomach.

“Okay, get it out, okay. Okay, stop. Listen. Say yes or no: I shouldn’t call Saad or Raza, right? I can call, um… oh, fuck, well, Zehra’s closer, I can call her. No, wait I’ll come myself. Yes or no? Should I come?”

His feet are bleeding. He barely notices. Two waiters look at him nervously. They whisper to each other.

“Umair! Okay, I’m coming to get you. Umair, just stay where you are, okay?” she says. She’s yelling.

He tries to pull himself together. “No, it’s fine,” he says. But it was like squeezing a pair of trousers five sizes too small; he was maybe a little closer but still too far.

Her voice cut a single chord, flawlessly. Without dropping a note. “Umair, stay right where you fucking are! Come on, stay on the phone, keep talking.”

“I need to give the phone back,” he says.

“Oh. Fuck. Okay, give it back, sit tight.”

“Yes, please.” he says.

“Acha, leaving now,” she says.

“You have to come in,” he says.

“What, why?! OK, I’ll come in but stay put, not even to the bathroom.” Sara’s voice rises in irritation, and it makes him feel as if it is she who grasps the urgency of the situation, not him—and then there’s a relief to that, an impatience that is soothing. Maybe he has overreacted. Maybe there is nothing to any of this. Maybe he is a child as she is a child and they behave like children and things are melodramatic and urgent because they desperately want their lives to be melodramatic and urgent, for perhaps in their world there is a high premium on trauma, a bigger story, a sadder story, a taboo story, a few little white lies stitched into a story that sounds not better but much worse than it is, because fifteen sleeping pills make a teenage socialite more interesting than seven sleeping pills, because three jilted ex-girlfriends are better than one, because two bottles of Absolut in one evening will always be better than one.

This is not one of those stories, even if it retains some of the same elemental capacity for exaggeration. This is the story that would not get told.

He sidles into a booth, taps his feet on a damp tiled floor, a dub dub dub that takes some of the rhythm away from the pain. His eyes droop over the ketchup packets strewn across the table, along with small pieces of chicken, charred bits of food, empty soda bottles. Nobody in Lahore ever cleans up after themselves. Just how it is. Outside the door to Salt & Pepper, there is a soft patter of footsteps. The man sees Umair through it, into a mannequin across the pane of a storefront into it. Or so Umair believes.

The ride to her house in the back of a silver Corolla is quiet. She looks at him and wonders if he’ll ever tell her the whole truth. He avoids looking at her. He thinks she must be thinking he was creating a drama. He is a boy. He could have gotten a rickshaw.

But then she holds his hand, and it is for him an ultimate act of kindness that she looks away from him, though it is for her the natural order of things; an inexorability. The form of something she'd intuited would happen had happened. He dozes off. She wakes him when they get to her house. His breath catches from old cries he was trying to subdue. Like hiccups.

They go inside. He stands in the dark foyer next to a console and a giant round mirror. Sara orders the driver to go. She looks at him standing with his back to her, at the foot of the stairs, shorn of all the willful unrest and commotion that makes Umair himself. She closes the front door behind her.

He’s safe. He’s let go of his torn jeans. The door latch clicks shut. He turns to face her. And although the story will only be told in splinters and things will run their course and nothing will be asked or prevented from happening again, in a knotty shudder of a moment, all of a sudden, Sara’s heart begins to break in ways she does not understand. It will be the barometer she will use for heartbreak for years to come.

CRY BUG by Gregg Williard

December 7, 2019

CRYBUG!!!

CRYBUG SAY WE IN DANGER AGAIN!!!

CRYBUG SPEAK FOR WHITE RACE PEOPLE, ‘CAUSE THEY IN DANGER AGAIN!!!

CRYBUG CRY, WE IN DANGER AGAIN!!!! AGAIN!!!!!!

CRYBUG GOT HOT BLACK TEARS AND SUCK CUP FEET!!!!!

CRYBUG CRY, WHITE PEEPS, WE IN DANGER AGAIN!!!!!!!

HOT BLACK TEARS CRY COLD WHITE FEARS, SAY,

WE IN DANGER, AGAIN!!!!!!

CRYBUG LIKE PAUL REVERE, ONLY WITH SUCK CUP FEET TO STICK TO CEILING UPSIDE DOWN!

THIS ALLOW HOT BLACK TEARS TO FALL INTO BEER IN SPORTSBAR ALL OVER AMERICA!!!!!

ALL OVER AMERICA, BEER TURN BLACK WITH CRYBUG TEARS!!!!!

WHITE PEEPS, WE IN DANGER AGAIN!!!!!!!!

THE OLD LADY WITH THE GOLD LAMÉ PUMPS by Kerry Rawlinson

December 6, 2019

I wonder if you remember her? Whenever we’d pop into the pub, the Old Cock and Bull, she was always sitting up at the bar. Because you loved that place, (not to mention their beer), we popped in pretty much every night. Beautifully dressed, always alone, the old lady would be perched on the high stool, sipping one of her limit of two glasses of beer. Nobody even talked to her, which I found odd. Occasionally her wig would be squiffy; her crimson lipstick slipping sideways. She’d look up into the bar mirror and fix it with a tissue. But the thing is this: whatever her outfit, she always wore the same pair of golden shoes. Do you remember how I’d concoct outrageous histories for her? I’d talk myself into fits of giggles. Like, she was a filthy-rich New York Madam, retired on five-hundred cums a day! She was the heiress of a tycoon who’d made his fortune producing gold shoes. She was a transgendered Air-force General! A futuristic Hologram, beaming her image back through space and time? A naughty Fairy, banished to human mortality? Well, I was a bit bored, wasn’t I, going to the same pub every day, and I always felt that I was the one who had to entertain us. You laughed. You used to think I was so amusing, in those days. It isn’t that funny now, is it, trashing a poor old lady? But we’d laugh at the same things, back then. And we’d drink and laugh and stumble happily back to our teeny-tiny flat for a scrappy-quick supper and a long, glorious fuck. Regular as clockwork...

Then one night, she wasn’t there. And when we went in the next, she was still missing. We asked around, but couldn’t get through to anybody who we were talking about – not even Pete, the bartender. I wondered in disbelief how a human being could be so unseen, even by those who served her daily. But Pete was adamant. He had no clue who we were talking about. It was very odd… So we forgot about her. Well, I know you did. You were always good at forgetting. But somehow, that lonely image of her stayed lodged in my head all this time. I hoped, if she was dead, that someone mourned her. Missed her golden shoes. I would have told her, if I could have, that I missed her.

And then I got pregnant. Just like that, our rollicking pub days were over. Responsibility set in, and with it, the thorny overgrowth and grown-up roadblocks of reality. We tried to make a good go of it, at first. But we really weren’t compatible, were we? Our relationship was based on drinking and nightly sex, not nurseries and nappy-changing. You stopped laughing at me. I stopped finding your drunken antics amusing. Though you could never get through your head the part about quitting, for the family’s sake. We started fighting more. Then we were fighting always. I was so exhausted by the fighting! You took off on "business trips," as you called them, which were actually just extended into long, single holidays. And my days, working at the Safeway daily and raising the two boys, seemed to roll together into one endless ache of sadness, then disappear into thin air like smoke. Where did the time actually go? Feels like it got sucked into some futuristic vacuum… The problem was this: you were in my heart like a thorn. I couldn’t love you, and I couldn’t stop loving you. The more I wriggled against you, the deeper the thorn dug. I was trapped in this schism like a pebble between two sides of a cliff. My hair fell out in clumps. Stress, the doctor said. So I practiced a little retail therapy. Shoes became my passion – but my hair never recovered its fullness. I actually had to buy myself a wig; the final blow to the chafing of my self-esteem.

Years and years later, after the kids had grown and we’d finally managed to split and go our separate ways for good, I visited the Cock & Bull again. Just to see how it would be to sip on a drink there, without you. And just so you know, everything in it is exactly the same now as it had been, way back then, in those carefree days. Even Pete still works behind the bar, if you can believe it! Though he didn’t recognize me, and I didn’t enlighten him. He’s an old codger now. Well, aren’t we all? I perched up at the bar on a stool, feeling beside myself, somehow. Thinking about fracture, and what we’d lost. My scalp itched. I faced down so that the tears would plop into my beer, not onto my dress, and I got out a tissue. I looked up into the bar mirror to fix my lipstick.

And then, everything became clear.

THE FLIGHT OF LIU XIAN by Matt Zbrog

December 5, 2019

He stared out at the world through paneled glass. At his fingertips lay a suite of controls. Switches. Buttons. Joysticks. HUD. Chrome. Glass. Metal. All that blinking light. But Liu Xian focused on the world beyond, gazing out from the cockpit at a domed sky. He breathed in pressurized oxygen through a ribbed and rubberized tube. A voice in his right ear counted down. A voice in his left gave final instructions. And, for the last time in his life, Liu Xian did what he was told.

He fired up the twin jet engines. Cut tether with the launch deck. Blasted forward, soaring down and then up and off the aircraft carrier's ski jump ramp, into blue sky, rushing towards it. Behind his oxygen mask: a little grin. He powered down his comm-link. Veered off his designated flight path. Did a tiny barrel roll -- just because. Then punched on towards the horizon and its afternoon sun.

He would bring the world closer to him.

Not all that long ago, he'd taken an oath:

I am a member of the People's Liberation Army. I promise that I will follow the leadership of the Communist Party of China, serve the people wholeheartedly, obey orders, strictly observe discipline, fear no sacrifice… blah, blah… and under no circumstances will I betray the Motherland or desert the army.

Well, Liu Xian thought, so much for all of that.

She'd married someone else. If there were any reason for this egregious and drastic course of action he'd taken, it was that. Not that Liu Xian had ever held any illusions of marrying Mai himself. No. From those first days at the civilian college, he'd known she was destined for greater things than a military-bound farm boy from Xinjiang. She'd been to Paris. Spoke French and English. Wrote poetry. Dearest Mai. Still. She'd treated Liu Xian as if he were an equal. Smiled at him, without shame. No one could deny she was brave. There was that picture she'd given him, in secret. They'd argued about what it'd meant, in whispers. If anyone had ever found out – well, they didn't. And who's to say it mattered anymore? Even though he hadn't seen her in years, even though he'd long ago burned that picture, its resonant image now flickered in his mind as he flipped on the afterburner: a man, in front of a tank, in Tiananmen.

Cruising at 2,100 kilometers per hour, Liu Xian felt something akin to vertigo, a sensation he'd only read about before, but never felt. He attributed this new feeling to his lack of any immediate plan. It was new psychic territory for Liu Xian, the man of the memorized oath, the man of groupthink, the man of math and plotted trajectories. So much order and obedience and for what? Something pinned to his chest, near the heart? One day flying for the August 1st Aerobatic Display Team, a role in which his precise non-deviation could have been a source of entertainment for drunken crowds during Tet?

It seemed strange to him now that he'd been fine with such a destiny for so long. But for so long he'd had Mai. Or rather the idea of Mai. The enduring symbol. The quiet hero. The source of a type of hope that one might feel for one's children. She'd existed in a pure and independent state. Untethered from a system Liu had felt powerless against, even as he'd helped perpetuate it. She'd wielded both the power and pedigree to bring about a new future. A change. Was that naïve to think? Even though it flew counter to his own life trajectory, he felt it'd been her duty to remain that contrarian beacon. She'd owed that to herself. To Liu Xian. To the vast and evolving country they called home. To the children of the coming century. But she'd broken that silent promise. She'd married someone else. And not just any someone else. A politician.

Fuck, Liu Xian said, in English, out loud, to no one but himself.

He tilted the joystick and rocketed towards Taiwan.

Most of the English Liu Xian knew, he knew from Mai, from unofficial study sessions in her private room at the civilian college. Hello. Please. I love you. Yes. Fuck. But when she'd tried to teach him the word democracy – she fell into a laughing fit. Perhaps it was the way he'd pronounced it, his northwest accent mangling the letter R. Perhaps it was the way he’d repeated and repeated the word, fruitlessly attempting to grasp its proper sound. Perhaps it was all these things, the absurd context of it all. But she laughed, and couldn't stop, turning her pale cheeks bright red. And it made Liu Xian feel embarrassed, poor, dumb, mad, and exactly like the farm boy from the Northwest that he was. So he stood up and shouted. Scolded her in Beijing-dialect Mandarin. Forget her precious Cantonese. Forget her Anglo affectations. He told her what that funny word of hers really meant. What it cost. What it wrought. He lectured her with textbook rhetoric. With a guffaw: democracy. He called her nasty names. He mocked her tears. And, still, she begged him to forgive her. He laughed at that, and it made him feel strong. Then he left. He hadn't seen her since.

Now, at nearly 10,000 meters up, Liu Xian wept.

The blue sky hardly seemed to move, even at such speed. The horizon, never nearing. The sun, slowly setting. The enveloping roar of twin jagged-nozzle engines washed out the world. There didn't seem enough time to change anything. He was a traitor now. A refugee from an old way of living. Where else to go but into the arms of the perceived enemy, to a different vision of the same homeland?

Is this what Mai felt, he wondered—then pushed the thought away.

Perhaps he could prepare some sort of statement. Something to say upon arrival in his new land. Words that could one day be chiseled beneath a statue of, yes, him. The hero. The rogue. The brave Liu Xian. Perhaps the statement could even be made in English. He'd taught himself a little more in those lonely intervening years. Mostly short phrases he could use as playful barbs if ever he saw her again. There's only one China, my dear Mai, he could've said. Yes. The irony, the wit, the new Liu Xian, the master of pronunciation and complex linguistic sentiment. Would that line have impressed her, made her laugh, been apology enough?

But as he entered Taiwanese airspace, the only English that came to mind, for some reason, was a jingle he'd taught himself as a way to practice his pronunciation, a jingle he'd whispered to himself over and over, late into the hot nights of the barracks at flight school, never knowing for certain what all the words meant but repeating them all the same, under his breath: Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce cheese, pickles onions, on a sesame seed bun.

It took him by surprise when the Taiwanese opened fire. It shouldn't have, but it did. New psychic territory. And, as his strange and half-made plan disintegrated, his old training and reflex kicked back in to fill the vacuum. The fruits of past obedience manifested in action, and they did the thinking for him. Obedience, training, reflex, yes, but something else, something older – an ancient muscle stretching itself.

He evaded his pursuers. Re-engaged his aircraft's stealth. Ran quick diagnostics. The damage was real. But he still had fuel left. A slight bleed, yes, but enough to get away. He lit up his HUD, only for a moment, to keep his radar signature minimal. He watched himself lay in a course for Kiribati, a sparsely inhabited archipelago several thousand kilometers to the east. He wasn't sure exactly why he'd picked it. He knew little about it. Better options, more practical options, existed. But instinct had decided. He went with it.

Perhaps the symbolism was all that mattered. The resonant image therein. If only for something for himself to hold onto. Kiribati. The last land mass this side of the International Date Line. He was headed for the future.

There wasn't much left to do in that final leg of Liu Xian's trip. Nothing to do but watch the clouds fly past as he thought back on old decisions. He hadn't made a whole lot of decisions in his 25 years.

Perhaps that's why his mind flew all the way back to Xinjiang Province, that 'New Frontier' where, when he was nine years old, he'd attended his first day of a new school. Dust on the classroom floor. The air smelling of animals and manure. The teacher read off roll call, and Liu Xian learned he was seated both in front of and behind students also named Liu Xian. In retrospect, it wasn't that unusual. There were a quarter million Liu Xians in the country. But he didn't know that then. Liu Xian, the teacher said. Liu Xian. Liu Xian.

Liu Xian pushed himself away from the desk. He stood up. And then he ran.

Out of the classroom. Into the field, where the wheat stalks rose high above his head. He couldn't, then, have told you why he ran – and maybe couldn't still – but he ran, and he ran. It was a command from somewhere on high in a time when he wasn't allowed to believe in anything on high. It was a command he obeyed at full speed, with heaving breath. And when he reached the far side of the field, he hopped atop the saddled horse that stood there. He untied its reins from that crooked fence. He couldn't have told you the breed of the horse, but he definitely knew how to ride. It was easy. You trust the horse. Trust the huffing and hot-blooded mass of muscle and limbs that sit below you. Direct the speed and vector from above. Meld will with power. Harness the language and kinetics of instinct.

So off he went. With a click of his heels. He hadn't known where he was going.

And here he was, running—flying—still.

Nothing lies near Kiribati. It's surrounded by a vast expanse of deep blue. Somewhere out there over the Pacific, after the sun had set, a warning light blinked on in Liu Xian's aircraft. He'd run out of fuel. He couldn't turn back. He kept going until the engines made their last sputtering breaths. Then he took his hands off the controls, and, in his final, roaring, flaming, smoking, screeching descent, he ripped off his oxygen mask and screamed and into the cockpit's black box: There is only one Liu Xian!

He hit eject.

Liu Xian floated in space. Through a sky full of stars. The air – cold and clean. A dream-like fall. He splashed down into the twinkling sea. Training kicked in and cut his parachute lines for him. But it was a youthful instinct that made him start swimming.

AT HOME WITH THE MARTINIS by Joel Allegretti

December 4, 2019

4 p.m., Sunday, July 16, 1978

The white house with the gray trim at 33 Harper Road is the home of Elizabeth and Edward Martini. They were newlyweds when they moved to East Bedford, a Central New Jersey township, in 1957. They are both forty-four years old. Liz Martini, née Sprezzante, is a homemaker. Ed is an attorney in private practice. Liz is an accomplished cook. She makes homemade pasta. Last week, her skilled hands produced two pounds of pappardelle. Ed likes to work outdoors. He planted the juniper bushes on either end of the driveway and the impatiens and tulips along the front of the house. Liz and Ed have two children. Their son, twenty-year-old Jerry, is spending the summer backpacking through Italy and Switzerland with three Rutgers University friends. He has sent Mom and Dad postcards from Milan, Venice, and Geneva. Jerry called collect from Zurich and promised to call when he arrived in Montreux. Their daughter, eighteen-year-old Deb, is spending the weekend in a Sandy Hook beach house. Deb will begin her freshman year at Oberlin College in September.

The woman in the green culottes and yellow halter top at the kitchen counter is Liz. She is tenderizing six veal cutlets for saltimbocca alla Romana. The stainless-steel mallet hits the pink slices again and again. A glass pitcher, half-full, is also on the counter. Liz pauses to pour herself another gin and tonic.

Ed enters the kitchen. He is wearing a blue bathing suit and a short-sleeve button-down paisley shirt. He watches his wife for a few moments. He doesn’t say anything. Liz doesn’t say anything, either. Ed takes a can of beer to the backyard. He stretches out on the cedarwood chaise longue by the built-in pool. A squirrel loiters on the diving board. Pine needles float on the water.

Although it is a hot day and the central air conditioning is running, the kitchen window is open. Ed hears Liz’s meat tenderizer.

Although he is right-handed, Ed holds the beer can in his left hand because of the metal splint on his broken right forefinger.

FOR A MOMENT by Dixon Speaker

December 3, 2019

Noelle was a response to Sophia. He learned relationships in a high school science class, each action creating an opposite reaction.

He peeked at the Yankees score while having sex with Sophia and it changed the atomic properties of rooms they shared going forward. Hives appeared on his back like islands of the Solomon Sea and he had to shit in a plastic hat for a month so they could run tests, which came back inconclusive. She hated his friends. He had visions of their wedding in an empty room made of wood.

Noelle smelled more than Sophia because she was heavier and had a worse diet, but he inhaled deeply under the covers while laying in bed all day, all night, on Sundays, ordering Ruebens from the deli up the street. They drank wine she stole from her dad and smoked weed she bought from her ex who she said was just like her dad. He asked her to consider a deeper meaning to that statement and she plunged her head down through the smoke and screamed into his face, don’t tell me what to do! He ignored it because he convinced himself she was attracted to confidence.

Noelle also had no interest in his friends, but would see them if they came to her.

She had an African Grey that knew party tricks, of course, like how it would say hello in Noelle’s mother’s voice whenever a phone would ring, or how it would bob its little head to the right kind of dance music. She left the cage open during the day so the bird could climb out and enjoy the sun. It had a murderous, unfiled beak which it smacked on the metal when your back was turned. She brought it into the shower and let it drink from the water rushing off her fingers.

That summer she just stopped showing up to work. She wore the same cotton bra every day for a month. She tore her ACL jumping on a trampoline and instead of going to see a doctor she pulled all of the blankets and pillows off of her bed onto the floor. But she never stopped caring for the bird, as if the care and passion draining from everything else was pooled and collected between her and this little squawking thing.

This was important because there are many, many ways to kill your bird. Avocados are number one on all the lists. Even a nibble at the skin or leaf can kill your bird. Guacamole can kill your bird. Caffeine will speed the beat of its miniature heart until it explodes in its chest, so don’t leave coffee out. Salt will unsettle the electrolyte ecosystem in its tiny bird body causing it to become dehydrated and die painfully while you’re at work. Non-stick pots and pans release toxic fumes, so don’t boil water in the winter to release humidity or this will suffocate the bird in your home. Smoke obviously kills your bird, so when she hit her surface-to-air-missile sized bong in the morning, after lunch, and right before bed, she tucked the bird behind a decorative sheet. And while not on any of the lists, the most common way to kill your bird is to bring it to bed, roll over on it, and crush it while you sleep.The bird makes no sounds while it happens so you wake up well rested before discovering your mistake. He almost did this once in Noelle’s childhood bed, but she had her hands locked around the bird like a shark cage. She thought of everything.

But what she didn’t think of was that having his friends at her apartment would make him approach the cage. Or that the prospect of creating a moment, something that could be referenced down the line in a speech at their wedding, laughter all around, would cause him to forget that only she could handle the bird. Or that he looked into empty cups of coffee wishing he could CTRL+A+Delete parts of his life like bad writing. Or that getting into relationships was much easier than getting out of them. Or that he would attempt to forge ahead, determined to make new memories, better memories, memories that would fit the picture of his life he kept in a trick drawer in his chest. Or that bird would step out onto his fingers to give life to that moment, for a moment, before creating a river between his knuckles. Or that he would jerk his hand so quickly. Or that the bird would hold on too long instead of getting go, and hit the wooden floor with such force, such violence, snapping its neck on contact.

Noelle may have never left the couch had their reactions not betrayed them. The friends vanished. She picked up the bird and held it out to him like she was serving a hot dish. Her face looked like someone had taken it off and put it back on.

He left the apartment after she locked herself inside the bathroom. She was going to wake up the neighbors. Around the corner he realized he had left his phone on her couch. Keep it, he thought, and smiled, thinking all this time how easy it was to start a new life.

MY PERSONAL BRAND by Matt Leibel

December 2, 2019

My personal brand is integrity. My personal brand is fresh, innovative thinking, and a commitment to excellence. My personal brand sets me apart, in the sense that many people refuse to stand within 50 feet of me, as if my personal brand stinks or something; my personal brand does not stink. If anything, my personal brand exudes a fresh, clean scent, evocative of wintergreen, or a cool spring breeze. My personal brand does not harm the skin. My personal brand contains no known carcinogens and has been extensively tested on laboratory rats. Unfortunately, one of the rats has recently escaped his cage. If you happen to see him, do not panic, do not subject him to an inhumane trap, for this is no ordinary rat, but a spectacular rat, one infused with my own personal brand, and all that this entails. You can find out more about my personal brand on my website, mypersonalbrand.ki. All of the other internet domain extensions for “mypersonalbrand” have been taken, by the way, so I had to use“.ki,” the extension designated for the tiny Pacific Ocean island Republic of Kiribati. I even traveled to Kiribati’s main atoll to set up my personal brand’s website. That’s how new and fresh my personal brand is. In Gilbertese, incidentally (the official language of the I-Kiribati people), the word for dog is Kamea. Apparently the etymology of this is that European invaders used to say to their dogs, “Come here, come here!” I didn’t learn that on Kiribati—I discovered it on the internet. But the internet is only the tip of the iceberg so far as my personal brand goes. Speaking of icebergs, I’ve projected my personal brand onto the face of several massive ones spanning Greenland, Siberia, and Antarctica. You can see videos of these projections on my YouTube channel; they are rather spectacular. I’ve done all this, by the way, at enormous personal cost and am beginning to wonder if the payoff justifies the expense I’ve gone to to get my name out there. My personal brand has destroyed both of my marriages and has deeply strained my relationship with my teenaged son Zeke, whom I enlisted in my scheme to light up the endarkened, icy ends of the Earth with a gigantic symbol of myself. This involved, among other challenges, taking Zeke out of school for an entire year, and hiring an instructor to train him in the driving and care of sled dogs. Zeke now vows that he will never forgive me, but he is still young and as yet lacks the perspective on what really was a truly unique once-in-a-lifetime experience he will one day thank me for (which other of his friends have had the chance to enjoy the meaty tang of fresh-killed whale meat?)—and that thanks will come, in part, via a full-throated endorsement of my personal brand, once he himself is in position to become an influencer/thought leader/social media superstar on his own. My personal brand is all about providing unconventional and memorable branded experiences. My personal brand is “sticky” like that. My personal brand is—and let’s just be honest about this—my last real chance at this point. It’s a shot in the dark, a rabbit I’m trying to pull out of a hat, and, in fact, I’ve had some hats created for my personal brand including these premium models made out of genuine rabbit fur, and take it from me (and Zeke!), these hats will help you get through even the most brutal of winters. My personal brand still hasn’t gotten the recognition it deserves—but now is the time to change that. I’m coming to you with an opportunity, in other words, to get in on the ground floor and see your own personal brand piggyback on mine and take flight (not literally, as pigs can’t fly!). My personal brand has now been certified 100% rat-free, and will focus henceforth only on areas reachable without access to sled or snowmobile. Think about it like this: in the end all things will die. Penguins will die, whales will die, rats will die, icebergs will die, the I-Kiribati will die. I will die, my ex-wives will die, my ungrateful but only son will die, and you will die, too. But our personal brands will live on long after we’re gone. Our personal brands are, in many ways, the ghosts of our lives, and if you don’t want to have your own personal ghost—well, you’re missing out on a chance to reach the coveted 18-45s, as personal ghosting is all the rage right now, according to my influencer friends in the know. But if you’d rather not join forces, beware: my personal brand is not fucking around. It will win out in the end, because it is desperate, it has no other choice. My personal brand is no longer merely an extension of me. It has become an independent organism, a lab creature on the loose, a monster that I can no longer contain nor control. It will not be forgotten. It will not be denied. It will flutter under your floorboards and creep into your brain. It will achieve maximum stickiness. It will make its mark upon you.