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FACT: HANNAH AND HER HUSBAND USED TO BE HAPPY by Jennifer Todhunter

May 31, 2020

Hannah passes out with the lights on again, the room as bright as day. Her phone is almost dead from staying up late sexting, slipped underneath the pillow on a bed that’s not hers—a bed she borrowed so she can sort her life, a bed too short for long legs, bent like figure fours on unfamiliar sheets. Hannah preset an alarm (and a backup and a backup for the backup), but she wakes when the alcohol abandons her system instead, her stomach pinched with unease, her brain brimming with a laundry list of what-ifs, always landing on the worst-case:

What if we divorce?

or:

What if we stay together?

On Hannah’s way to work, the train and bus are filled with people wearing face masks, the hysteria surrounding the epidemic-almost-pandemic a fever pitch. The thought of putting something over her nose and/or mouth, the thought of breathing in her own breath despite having brushed her teeth three times since rising, recycling the fumes from last night, the wine and clams and fries and garlic, makes her want to barf.

Hannah and her husband married on the edge of a river, fifty feet from the spot they’d chosen, and neither one of them noticed they were in the wrong place.

Hannah and her husband honeymooned on Tenerife, the largest of Spain’s Canary Islands, and spent the whole time shitfaced.

Hannah and her husband both know the Spanish flu is the worst pandemic to-date, killing over 100 million people, yet they’re planning a return trip despite this other flu taking hold—a trip with their kids, so their kids can swim in turquoise water and gorge on calamares a la romana and patatas bravas, while Hannah and her husband revisit the place they first fucked when married to see if it jolts something inside.

Fact: The odds of being struck by lightning are 1 in 3000.

Fact: The odds of being struck by lightning twice are 1 in 9 million.

Hannah knows in the base of her being, the crunch of her heart—she’s not going to be struck back into anything.

Fact: Hannah’s husband hasn't struck her, but he's struck the wall next to her head and that was close enough.

Hannah stands outside her office building in an inappropriate jacket and casual shoes because living between two places is a bitch and one rarely has what one wants. She watches rain run off the bridge overhead, opens her mouth and feels it fall against the scum on her teeth. She wishes the rain were mucus slipping inside her, pandemic-flavored mucus, the slip more of a twist and a thrust like she told the guy she was sexting last night, and maybe she’ll get infected after all and Spain will be off the table.

Fact: Hannah’s husband is sober but wasn’t always sober.

Fact: Hannah drinks now but didn’t always drink drink.

Every Tuesday, Hannah and her husband carpool home from work so they can both watch their son play hockey, and they always pre-agree not to talk about anything meaningful or difficult in terms of their relationship on this weekly ride. (Fact: Months pass quickly when counted by weeks.) Hannah always buys each of them a coffee—espresso, milk, honey—before they start on the long drive to different homes in the same community, veering in and out of gridlocked traffic.

Fact: Hannah would prefer to be on the bus or train, but there’s the damned epidemic-almost-pandemic, and she can’t bear to bring sickness home to the kids she sees only three-and-a-half-days-a-week, so here she is, in a car with her sort-of-husband. Again.

Fact: Kids under five are more susceptible to the flu.

Fact: Only 30% of women have more than two children.

Fact: Hannah had two back-to-back babies and was done forever.

Before Hannah’s husband stopped drinking, he liked to explode her friendships. To this day, Hannah isn’t sure whether this was something he did on purpose, a control mechanism, or the booze telling him to act like an asshole.

This is what keeps Hannah up at night when the booze isn’t.

Fact: Hannah is aware of the irony.

After this week’s hockey game, Hannah and her husband will sit at the dining room table, listening to their kids talk excitedly about Spain, about its sunshine and seafood, about the novelty of going together. Hannah will sip a glass of wine, consider what it means to move on, how moving on is just taking up space in a different moment, moment after moment, and how all these moments equate to a lifetime.

Fact: Hannah and her husband have one life each of indeterminate length.

Fact: A life has a start and an end.

Fact: Marriages, however joyful, have a start and an end, too.

DISPATCHES…FROM THE NALTREX-ZONE by James McAdams

May 30, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOLD NEW ‘DO by James R. Gapinski

May 29, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

AN ALLEGORY by Dan Crawley

May 28, 2020

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

INTERVIEW WITH JAMES McADAMS by Jo Varnish

May 25, 2020

James McAdams’s Ambushing the Void is released this month by Frayed Edge Press. I caught up with him for a chat about his book, his writing process, and his inspirations.

JV: Ambushing the Void is a collection of stories drawn together by themes such as relationships, loss, and nostalgia, and told through truly memorable characters. Professor Pankova and Teo are two of many that will stay with me. Did you draw from real life counterparts for these and other characters?

JM: It’s pretty easy for me to look at a person, or read/hear about a person on a podcast or Tweet, and then imagine them into some weird scenario combined with my experience of the world. I guess that’s true for all writers. Teo, however, I have no idea where he came from. I think I had the idea to write about this immigrant character from the 1980s, but I do think some of his determining characteristics (being a young baseball player) was probably taken from a documentary of Yankees players from the Hispanic world, maybe? Professor Pankova is modeled after a Russian literature professor from the Czech Republic I had at the University of Pittsburgh. I was fascinated by how enthusiastic she was to share her heritage with the students (cooking for us, showing us pictures of her hometown, dressing in weird post-Soviet almost-gypsy garb) combined with the utter indifference of most of the class, who were busy sleeping or texting or laughing behind her back. It was sad I guess, everything’s sad, but it seemed like something more. I think adding to her character a sense or recognition that her students didn’t care makes the character work. I hope this is the case. Other characters: Joe the Plumber (“My Friend Joe”) is based on the “Joe the Plumber” character from some of the idiotic Sarah Palin rallies in 2008 and beyond. The most literal kidnapping of a public person for my purposes comes in “Somewhere in FL, an Angel Appeared,” which I’ll get to.

JV: The use of technology is a recurring theme in these stories. How do you feel about modern relationships’ reliance on technology, and is there a wistfulness for a time when social media and the Internet weren’t integral to our lives?

JM: I’m 40, I think around the same age as you. I feel like I straddle the world of my students, who are like, Why wouldn’t our entire lives be mediated?, and the world of, say, my older siblings in their later 40s/50s, who really don’t care about this. So I’m in between and have both thoughts in my head all the time: I hate this but I’m on it 3 hrs a day. Ultimately, I’ll just be old and say 1) there are dopamine functions that the software and hardware and application developers are manipulating and exploiting and there will probably a class-action lawsuit in a decade or so, just like what happened to Pharma and Big Banking; 2) the old Pascal quote, viz. something like “the most important skill for a human being is to be alone in a room”: I can’t do this anymore. Can you? I need to be Mr. Promotion Machine on social media for the next few months but I’m pretty sure I’ll be off everything by the end of 2020. I would like to go off the grid and hike to Alaska or something but I have literally zero abilities to take care of myself without things like microwaves and YouTube recipes and WikiHow instructions so….no off-the-grid for me unfortunately.

JV: Drug use and addiction are peppered throughout the collection; what inspires you to explore them through your writing?

JM: Quick answer, which is true: I’m writing a novel set in a rehab so a lot of the later stories in here (“Delray,” “Red Tide,” “Somewhere in FL…”) are from that. Longer answer, which I’m not sure is true: I think drug addiction is another side of love. So I think you can have love (for a person, or a higher ideal maybe) or love for a drug, or even a phone or app (as I said above), or whatever pings your dopamine. And as you’ve noticed there’s like zero romantic love in this collection, because love is boring to write about IMO, so to fill that vacuum I went with drug addiction, which is just another, less culturally-sanctioned, form of love. I’m not sure this is true as a sociological insight. Do you buy any of it?

JV: It makes sense, having read your book! Talking of, tell us a little about the inspiration behind the story, "Somewhere in Florida, An Angel Appeared." It’s a beautiful piece, quietly moving, and one that leaves an impression, possibly asking more questions than it answers…

JM: I’m happy to! The piece was initially dedicated to Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, but we removed it because I have a big heart and was dedicating every piece to thousands of people until it annoyed my poor editor, despite her patience...Anyway, Amanda has one of the more famous TED Talks called “The Art of Asking,” which she later expanded into a book. It pretty much explains the rationale for the move around 2005-2010 to artists just giving away their work for free online as a reaction to piracy. Anyway, she tells a story about touring with the Dresden Dolls in her 20s and crashing on fans’ couches. In one story, she talks about her band (so we imagine a bunch of loud young brash punks) staying over at a small little hut in a Hispanic enclave in Florida. In the morning, she recounts being woken up by the Colombian grandmother and some other elders, who, while teaching her how to make authentic breakfast burritos (or whatever), thank her repeatedly for saving the life of their little girl who loves her music so much. It’s around the 3/4th part of the video, I highly recommend it.

JV: What attracts you to the form of short and flash fiction?

JM: The earlier works in this collection average 4,000 words, the more recent fewer than 1,000, which is the consensus cap for flash fiction. While this wasn’t a formal decision I made, it makes sense for a number of reasons, some practical, some neurotic: My attention span, because of THE OBVIOUS, doesn’t work anymore. I base my TV shows on those I can watch with 33% of my brain, so I can read with 33% of my brain and listen to music with 33% of my brain. Online, I don’t read anything longer than 2,000 words. I am not proud of this, but I can’t be alone. Even most podcasts nowadays are moving towards 15-minutes…

I think Rick Moody wrote this once, but the cool think about flash is that you can do any weird experiment and if it doesn’t work, then who cares. For example, I just published a piece about a M2F Trans worker who creates fake profiles on online dating profiles in the form of a Reddit AMA. I wouldn’t build a 300-page on this foundation, but for a 500-word micro it’s okay if it sucks. Small achievements, weekly. It’s sort of a psychological trick, but I’m writing a novel now cut into discrete, 500-1,000 word chapters. This way, at the end of each week, I have chapters done, chapters I can publish, that make it easier to concentrate on writing a novel for 3 years.

JV: Who influences your work as a writer?

JM: This will seem crazy after what I just wrote about flash, but I love the big old Russian-Soviet books: Gogol, Tolstoy, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Bely, Nabokov, Pasternak...as well as the poets like Akhmatova, Mayavosky, Tsvetaeva. James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has been my muse for the past two years; His A Death in the Family is pretty good too. Also, Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle trilogy is an amazing experiment about opening your brain 100% to readers.

It’s sort of like what Howard Stern does on the radio since 1980 in terms of pure confessional mindfulness that makes even the most banal quotidian events (10% of My Struggle is Karl feeding his little kids) seem numinous and holy. As for more contemporary authors, DFW (I realize I just lost 40% of sales because people will think I’m a DFW-fanboy…no footnotes in this collection, I promise), Lydia Millet, Colson Whitehead (he of the repeat Pulitzers), George Saunders, J.M. Coetzee, Denis Johnson, Samuel Delany, Kathy Acker, William Vollmann, now I’m just looking at bookcases…and thinking, “I need more non-white males,” so let’s stop here.

Except to say: I’m lucky to be Flash Fiction editor at Barren Magazine, so I get to read real-time Indie authors like Marisa Crane, Chelsea Laine Wells, and Cathy Ulrich, who you probably know about it. Wish more people did!

JV: Cathy Ulrich is a hero of mine! Tell us a little about your writing process. Do you allocate time to your writing every day? How much of your writing time is rewriting and editing?

JM: I’m horribly lazy and have no self-discipline about the writing grind. Most of this collection was written between 2-5 a.m. when I couldn’t sleep and wasn’t watching The Sopranos reruns for the 25th time. I tend to write super fast and don’t revise all that well. I will say, 99% of my editing goes into dialogue. I slash and slash and slash at dialogue until I find something that sounds true but unique. I have a rule where if I can tell what the next line is (“Hello, how are you, Sally?”/“I’m fine, Reginald, how about you?”), then it gets deleted automatically. I stole a lot of dialogue techniques from William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. As an editor, if I don’t buy the dialogue that’s something I really have trouble getting over.

JV: Finally, what are you working on now? Has the lockdown has afforded you time to write much more than usual?

JM: I’m writing a novel-in-flash about The Florida Shuffle Rehab facilities have sprouted everywhere, many of them nefarious, profiting from insurance scams and general duplicity, referred to as “The Florida Shuffle.” "Delray” and “Red Tide” from the collection are in this.

I want to say here, because we are literally deluged with two types of drug/addiction porn these days: the crime procedural like Ozark, Narcos, Zero Zero Zero etc. and the memoir or documentary, so Intervention, Dopesick Nation, writers like Augusten Burroughs…My book is working on a completely different, supply-side angle. What is it like to run these rehab scams, what’s it like to work there, what kind of people work these jobs? I know enough to understand these jobs pay like $12/hr for the resident advisor positions and so you end up with a curious irony where the people on the frontlines treating the clients in recovery often have the same issues with money, substance, fragile relationships, etc., as the clients themselves. So, this isn’t just another drug thing. I hope!

Pick up a copy of Ambushing the Void here.

"Ambushing the Void explores the margins of 21st century America, with characters confronting new worlds, new technologies, and new social structures while attempting to retain their identities & worldviews. These quirky, off-beat stories (with a tinge of the weird and disturbing) are thought-provoking takes on the post-modern search for meaning."

¿CÓMO ESTÁ TU MADRE? by Phebe Jewell

May 24, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“THE LINE” by Michael Seymour Blake

May 23, 2020

A TRANSVERSE PROGRESSION by Alyssa Jordan

May 23, 2020

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

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

“How about them?” The Friend asked.

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

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

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

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

“It’s very pink.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She always swam closer to shore.

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

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

“It’s still there.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Want one?”

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

“No, thanks.”

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

She laid her head against the window.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, babe.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SALT IN THE BODY by Kelsey Ipsen

May 22, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THINGS TO SHIP TO AMERICA by Jessica Evans

May 21, 2020

Is heaven a proper noun?

Here, I learned to love myself. To love the thick full shimmy of thighs against one another; to appreciate the height of my traps compared to the valley of my clavicle. I fell in love with butter churned from cream produced by cows who live only a few kilometers away.

I learned to seek out the salted rotisserie chicken, its skin crispy and shimmering after hours on a spit. As much to bite into something with savage need as because there's ownership that comes from eating simply to eat. But chicken is only good when washed down with room temperature fest beer, brewed like their ancestors and consumed within modernity in overcrowded but not too autophobic beer tents where everyone knew everyone else, except for us because here we are, moored inside something that looks like expat living but is actually attempts to recreate America whenever possible.

Our circle within a circle confuses even us. We drive roundabouts and autobahns and pay tolls on roadways, deposit euro coins into bathroom vending stalls so we can enter and not be able to tell the attendant there's no soap, the water is too cold. We recede into the background if we're not on post.

Or.

We become obnoxiously loud and boisterous, the kinds of Americans who boast about a war that ended seventy-five years ago, who consistently remind the local populace that had it not been for us, the entire world would look different, feel different, be different. Well. That's so consumable and true and entirely false that the congruencies between understanding now and then becomes complex and altered so it's easier to reach for another warming beer.

We travel, we rove, we move, searching for something that feels like home but gives us enough space to learn to grow. I take moments for myself, carve out instances in which I can identify as myself and not (just a) spouse, my own person, my own truth, my own evocation:

Mornings when the moon is bright, and there's no one else in the forest so I can turn off the headlights and pretend I'm a real forest witch.

When half my drive has no cell signal, so I'm forced to sit in silence, contemplative, and settled.

Looking for the quiet markers of age—the creasing of an elbow joint, the slow upstart of lifting from a chair, I settle into this time-space, being the preemptive feelings of being nostalgic before it's time.

And in nostalgia for here comes past-longing for forms of then, tangible or esoteric, the kinds of memories that come unbidden:

Dima buying a bedroom set, Ken buying an air mattress, his aging skin that looked like leather from a distance and felt even more snakish next to mine. The first two airmen I slept with, their introductions into my life only a half-week away from one another. The expectation that eventually, I would find myself grown, polished, and with a family to support.

A mother, two toddlers, and an infant strapped to her chest, EPT test in hand as she sets down birthday candles, plastic party favors, sweets and treats onto the conveyor belt, her hand clutched around her wallet, head constantly evaluating her two small humans, looking for relief and answers and silence. And I watch her watch that which she's produced and clearly her womb isn't hollow, her tribe is continuing to grow, (though I sense that she gleefully accepts the silken luxury of sitting in a bath in solitude, or spending a morning reading and drinking coffee, luxuries that she's never going to be able to afford, not now, not with her progeny continuing to propagate and just once), I want the openness that might come from being able to reproduce; mitosis at its very core, a concept that has both alarmed and paralyzed me, left me bereft with longing and sighing with relief.

Whisk(e)ys we like

Bushmills Original only in basement Irish bars watching soccer and listening to 90s "classic rock" while we're both recuperating from the walking and the sleeping outside of our schedule, the constant seeking of something that we're certain, if we just keep traveling, we're going to find. In these basement bars, we avoid serious discussions, like what's going to happen when we never have children, and how should we deal with deployment, or our next concrete steps after the army, after uniform, after boots. Instead, we talk about the better band and I toss out suggestions, none of which are ever, ever better than Nirvana. The light is low, which hides the shimmer strands of grey that color both of our heads, our lines from lack of sleep, hollow nights lost to wonder and worry.

Glenfiddich, good for dessert cheese plates when we're feeling fancy and pretending like we were born fluent in sophistication, though communism and generational poverty rarely suggest a fluency in anything but loss and longing.

Paddy and Red Breast for those nights when we've finally made forever friends and we can just be loose but that would require us to be in a place longer than a tour and we're both so hard to get to know that ultimately, we learn to lean into our own patterns, create tradition that can exist outside the need for friends

and finally

Querceto Chianti that's a little overpriced paired with Italian food that a chef didn't prepare but we're hungry and trying because it's been a long weekend full of unknowns because we're on the way to listen to a symphony, something purchased well-ahead of time, that Sunday morning when we planned the trip to Salzburg; when it felt wrong not to include a small dip into the sort of chords that make each of us whole.

So tonight—

I'm sitting in a 17th century palace where Mozart first performed, watching a small group of students play a selection of winter music. Two whiskeys and two wines in and the viola player looks exactly like a powerlifter I used to fuck but can't remember his name. Exactly like him, even down to the shape of his nose, the way it meets the beginnings of his lip because I used to think it was so endearing that his youth meant he couldn't grow a beard (and even in those endearing moments I used to find a slight smidge of pleasure at knowing even at my age, I could still pull one so young; but that was always accompanied by the idea that at my age, I shouldn't need to pull because I should be settled, which would revolve like glass doors of emotions that shouldn't be examined or even seen during the middle of a little better than average sex) so in the palace, for the next 90 minutes I focus in and out of trying to remember what his name might have been, studying this Austrian's face for similarities to the Ohioan kid, but now I'm thinking maybe he was from somewhere north in Ohio where they're committed and focused on OSU football because their small towns are devoid of industry and therefore absent culture or other events. I can remember his numbers; he was a beast on bench, pushing with ease and his youth made it so he could easily shed weight before a competition or put big gains on the bar without really struggling and I always wondered what someone so objectively physically gorgeous was doing with an old lady like me, until I realized from his perspective that I was the one who had my shit together; early thirties graduate student who could afford an off campus rental that came with a driveway and a basement, two gym memberships because I was just that serious about making myself into what I wanted to see. One day, he came over, residually stoned and hiccupping about not being prepared for his next day and all I could think was how delightfully not serious it must've been to just exist for one single day.

At the palace, I'm flanked on either side by two pregnant women and their presence makes my womb ache in ways that feel hollow, mountainous, bereft.

I watch my husband watch a promising Virtuosos whose hair reaches her hips and whose lace cuffs land delicately on violinists' wrists. He leans in, whispering between Vivaldi's notes, that our daughter should play, too.

And I want to tell him that we're both getting old, geriatric for conception, so maybe that very pressing desire needs to be butterfly-fleeting, the way spring sunlight can't be captured, the way trills and scales feel real and immediate in the moment but whose notes eventually, ultimately, finally, fade away.

The Heart of Joy premier vegan but we're starving and don't look at the menu because it's snow-raining and we're more attuned to fashion and photos.

Dead animals, eggs, Buddha, a repeat loop of some Kundalini style retreat, servers dressed all in white, heads covered, I can practically hear tables repeating Bhajan's words

We need meat

A runners' body, the server's face

Falls