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A BILLABLE HOUR by Katherine Heath

October 11, 2019

In the time that it takes him to park and unload the maintenance van into the freight elevator of the American Angus Journal, I’ve just rolled over to swipe right on the morning alarm.

The receptionist, Sharon, escorts him past the framed photographs of carved ribeye—gorgeous cuts of glistening and perfectly pink meat—to the malfunctioning Hoshizaki. Normally it produces two-hundred and eighty pounds of ice in twenty-four hours, but this week, in the middle of a Missouri July, Sharon and her coworkers can't keep their sweet teas cool. By the time his hands are tinkering with the organs of the machine, I’ve only made the walk from bed to kitchen table and opened the laptop.

You must work backwards. You clean it, so you can put it back together to clean it again, he would say if ever asked about his process. To disassemble, he removes the deflector, float device, and pump, placing each in the sink to soak in bleach. He sprays solution on the evaporator plates—where ice forms once the temperature drops. He chisels limescale deposits where water and metal meet. He removes black mold from the tubes with a skinny brush designed for baby bottles.

As he works backwards to clean, I stare at a blank Powerpoint slide for a presentation I’m building for Toy Brand Inc. entitled, “Life of 5-to-7-year-olds today.” I need an image to pair with the headline, “Generation Alpha, the True Emotive Storytellers.” I google a combination of relevant search terms like “child” + “writing” + “excited,” and scroll through the results:

“Girl writing letter to father christmas Stock Photo #88415957”

“Boy writing down notes Stock Photo #76758209

“iStock rainbow children drawing art hobby”

“Supportive father helping his child #939050552”

All watermarked and licensed for use, meaning out of budget.

After he reassembles, while he waits for the delimer mix to cycle its way through the nickel-chromium wire cages, he picks up a recent issue of the Beef Bulletin, a publication Sharon and her team produce. This month focuses on selecting cattle at elevation and features real-world bulls from the Connealy farm. One ad promotes a breeding season guarantee. Another offers discounted semen and embryo warehousing from Bovine Elite. Call us today to order!

“It’s like Playboy with cows…and for farmers,” he will later say in jest as he describes the lighting and sheen of monochromatic hair.

While he idly flips pages of fertile livestock, I try another tactic and go to my secret image source, the one in which clients can never know. I open my Insta-Photo social media account and type in ‘@midwestMama,’ the profile of a friend from back home. Her bio reminds me that she is into “mindful homemaking~~mothering three,” and “the simple things done with care.” My right index finger glides through hundreds of shots of her family. Each curated with the right mix of plants, flexitarian dishes, and smiling children—props displayed against soft hues of pink and white to convey the lifestyle brand that is @midwestMama.

I click on the photo of her youngest dressed in costume, a nylon cape draped over the shoulders, holding a wooden shield and sword that look as though they were carved from a tree out in the backyard that morning, an upscale take on homemade. I hit ctrl + C, ctrl + P, then, using the cursor, adjust the placement of the picture to the left under the headline.

We haven’t spoken in years, but her face and her kids, which easily pass for ages 5-to-7, will soon sparkle on-screen for my clients.

Polishing the front and side panels with a paper towel, he knows the exterior speaks for the real work inside; his reflection in the stainless-steel signals a job well done.

As I labor over the next image search for slide twelve of ninety-six, he, Dad, folds up the flimsy aluminum ladder, and before exiting, peeks inside one final time to watch the stream transform into a waterfall of frozen half-moon shapes.

BELL’S POND by Nathan Willis

October 10, 2019

Derby didn’t get out on his own. I took him. Yes, technically he was yours, but he liked me better and you didn’t take very good care of him. At least not as good as I did. Before you go waving this letter in front of the cops, I don’t think you really have a leg to stand on. I’m pretty sure crocodiles are illegal to have as pets.

Anyways, Derby and I hit the road and I started to put on my magic act. The one you always made fun of me for practicing. I couldn’t exactly leave him in the van so I found a way to incorporate him. He seemed to enjoy himself. For the final trick, I would pull things out of his mouth. Handkerchiefs tied together. Foam balls. A dove. A lit cigarette. A cascading deck of cards. Your wedding ring. For each item, I would have to reach deeper and deeper into his mouth.

We performed at just about every venue you can imagine; abandoned malls, VFW posts, car dealerships, and even high school gymnasiums. Things were going pretty well until South Carolina. We were working the boardwalk and someone threw a beer can at us. Derby got startled. He snapped down on my hand and wouldn’t let go until everyone was gone. There was nothing I could do but wait. The audience loved it.

Between my ragged nerves and the even more ragged condition of my hand, our magic days were over for a while. We drove on to Tallahassee where we came across a safari themed restaurant. They have a stage for live music on the weekends and in the middle of the dining area, there’s a giant glass cylindar. It’s as big around as our old house and almost as tall. That’s where they keep all the animals. They have everything you can think of, including two crocodiles.

I told them Derby and I needed a place to stay. They took him in and in exchange gave me a job bussing tables and enough money to get set up in a little apartment.

I thought it was a pretty good deal until I saw how they treat the animals. There’s no love here. They’re just commodities. Their care is a task on a list between mopping the floors and changing the fryer oil. And no one stops the patrons or their kids from banging on the glass. On busy nights, it sounds like an army at war running towards another army.

Derby got depressed pretty fast. You remember how sensitive he was. I would have taken him and left, but he wasn’t mine anymore.

I thought it might cheer him up to do our old magic tricks, so one day after closing we put on a private show for the owner. He loved it. He had us perform for the dining room twice a night during the week and open for the musical act on weekends. It was more work than we’d ever had before. I was happy but it took its toll on Derby. He was old and I was pushing him too hard. I always let people push us too hard. It got to the point that Derby didn’t want to perform at all. They had to use those animal-catcher poles and drag him to the stage. He stopped eating. He wasn’t a threat to anyone, anymore. The diners began to lose interest. Then one day, Derby wasn’t there. The owner said he was at the vet getting a check-up.

There’s an orangutan here with an arm that’s been dislocated for so long I’m surprised it hasn’t fallen off. There’s a conspiracy of lemurs, some young, some old. All of them blind. That doesn’t happen on accident. This place doesn’t take animals in for check-ups. Derby was never coming back.

That night, the announcement for our magic act came through the loudspeaker system like normal. I figured it was a mistake and kept bussing tables. The owner came out and found me. He asked what the hell I thought he was paying me for. I didn’t have an answer.

He pointed to the stage where Clint was waiting for me.

Clint is bigger and less patient than Derby, but I still did my act. And I’ve been doing it as scheduled ever since. Clint doesn’t look at me the same way Derby did. He doesn’t enjoy any part of this. He doesn’t want to. He’s a survivor.

There is a pretty good chance that any night could be my last. When I’ve got my head in Clint’s mouth and I’m pretending to look for something, I think about how you always worried that if Derby got out he’d find his way to Bell’s Pond. He would feel at home there and not know why; not know that’s where you and I met. Then one night we would see on the news that a young girl had been attacked while she was swimming. It was a miracle she was still alive. You would pause the screen on her face and look for a resemblance.

They would say it was a crocodile. They wouldn’t use your name but they would call you an irresponsible pet owner. They would say it's your fault the girl got hurt so bad that she’ll never fully recover. And it’s your fault they had to kill Derby. They would say he was a monster and we would watch them pull his body out of the water with a tow truck.

You said, if Derby ever got away, everything from then on would be your fault. And I want you to know it’s not. It’s mine.

Please don’t write back. If you do, they’ll give the letter to Clint and that will be the end of me. I’ll have to go in after it. I won’t be able to stop myself.

A THOUSAND WORDS OF BURNING ALIVE by Serrana Laure

October 9, 2019

The rough bark of the pole bit into the tender flesh of her bound wrists, skin fraying against the rope. Her bare feet dangled, numb from the frigid air that gnawed her bones. The wintry sky above glowed, surreal cerulean. She lowered her eyes from the sky and stared into the jostling crowd below. They muttered and seethed. Somewhere, someone laughed. A harsh, short laugh, more like a bark than a giggle. Cameras and phones pointed in her direction. A flash went off and her mind stuttered at the utter insanity. She was being made an example of, she understood this, but the thought that anyone would want a record of it, something to go back to, to show their friends and family, to remind themselves of the event; the thought of this made something in her brain snap. Another flash went off, blinding her.

She had been suspended there overnight, swinging from her own limbs. Her fingers and palms had long since succumbed to numb, but her wrists shrieked, radiating pain up into her arms and shoulders, protesting having been pressed against the hard wood for so long. The cold, and cramping collided in clearly calculated agony, keeping her awake. The pain should have made her disoriented, but instead, she saw the world in high definition. Hawklike, her eyes gravitated toward the unnoticed. She examined the cellular makeup of the air around her. The dust motes hanging in the halfhearted rays of sunlight seeping their way through the clouds, each needle on the pine trees at the edge of the forest, her own blood rushing her life delicately through her body.

The churning crowd hushed, drawing her attention to the man with the flamethrower – a shadow in the shape of a person. The black hole where his face should have been shifted, looking up at her. She tried to empty her brain, prepare herself. The shadow’s machine spurted torrents of orange and crimson, and the wood beneath her feet burst into heat. It felt good at first. The warmth was some small relief to her frozen toes and she was transported, for a moment to a happier time. A time when they had stumbled in from the snow and he had pulled her boots off near the fire and held her frostbitten feet between his warm palms and they had laughed and smiled and everything had been comfort and heat between them. A time when things had been stable and he had been kind. A time when she had trusted him, despite his station. A time before he had divulged her secrets. It had been sensitive information, she had known that, but she had gone against her intuition, convinced herself that his feeling for her was enough to protect her. She had been naive, she knew that now. But the time for epiphanies had passed. As the flames began to claw their way up the pyre and her toes began to thaw, a dull ache pushed in as if in anticipation of the impending torment.

The throbbing from the cold morphed into stinging shocks and she twitched involuntarily as her skin burst into blisters. She bit down on her lips trying to delay the screams she knew were inevitable. And then, with horrifying speed, the stinging thrust into a searing, that shattered into an agony so strong she feared she would explode. The heat radiated from inside her own skin. She gasped and her gasp distorted into a disembodied shriek: inhuman, feral. Even through the pain, she was aware of how disconnected she felt from the sound of her own voice. As though her very being was rending into disparate aspects of itself. She could no longer tell if she was feeling the pain or if it was simply a memory, an echo of suffering. Her whole body flushed as though she had been submerged into a bath of ice water and she screamed again, but this time it was less of a shriek and more of a whimper, and her head slumped and she was silent.

The crowd below scrutinized her through their glowing screens. They were no longer jostling. The silence thickened as her skin and muscle split and fat and blood began to ooze out of her in rivulets of red. The flames crackled and spat with tiny explosions. As they groped higher up her legs, they caught her thin shift, stripping her pale body bare just long enough for everyone to snap a photo before the fire devoured her entirely. Soon, she no longer looked like a person, simply a black hole where something human should have been. A simulacrum of woman. Tar black smoke stretched from the pyre, staining the blue sky with shadow. The crepitating flames ricocheted in dissonance against the particles of the ominously silent winter day. No one in the crowd made a sound.

HOPE AND HEART by Gregg Williard

September 30, 2019

It was when she started to walk that I lost my sense of smell. Then when she began to run I lost my sense of taste. When she took her first swimming lesson I became mute. Then she learned to rollerblade and I couldn’t walk. Ice skating paralyzed my right hand. When she showed talent in ballet I became deaf. When she went on to the Olympics and won a gold medal in gymnastics I stopped breathing on my own. She visits me every day, washes me and brushes my teeth. I can taste the toothpaste. They say it is a hopeful sign. I don’t have the heart to tell her I hate this brand.

“STAGES OF FLIGHT PHOBIA” by Michael Seymour Blake

September 30, 2019

…

2005 by Tom McAllister

September 30, 2019

2005

In February, LauraBeth (then my girlfriend, now my wife) flew to Iowa City to visit me for my birthday. It was colder there than I had ever thought possible—negative thirty degrees, factoring in wind chill. The kind of cold that would kill a Martian. The college students still went out at night in short skirts and t-shirts, because they didn’t want their jackets to smell like smoke. These two years in Iowa City were the last time in my life when I would know what it felt like to sit in a bar with dozens of smokers, lit cigarettes glowing like alligators’ eyes in the dark, smoke snaking its way into my lungs and my hair and my clothing forever.

I didn’t have to pay for utilities in my apartment, so I set the thermostat to 80 and we quarantined ourselves in the greenhouse heat. My mom had mailed me a care package that included authentic cheesesteaks, Tastykakes, and a birthday banner, which we hung above the couch. We ate chicken parm and an ice cream cake, and we watched the NBA All-Star skills competition on the new TV she had bought me that morning. We’d driven together to Best Buy to pick up a 27-inch flat screen, replacing the one I’d owned since I was 15. This was now the fanciest TV I had ever owned, though it was still a monstrous tube model so big didn’t fit in my hatchback. We removed it from the box at the store, crammed into the trunk, and drove home with hazard lights flashing and the rear windshield flapping in the wind like a ridiculous mouth laughing at us the whole way. I lived on the second floor, and carrying that TV up a narrow, winding flight of stairs was the most physically demanding thing I did in all of 2005. I preferred watching sports to engaging in them. I was gaining weight again rapidly, and people kept saying things like, “You’ve really filled out,” which is only meant as a compliment when you say it to toddlers or rescue dogs.

Sports have always been a central fact of my life, but never more so than my two years in Iowa City—they were the one thing that helped me still feel connected to home when I was alone in my apartment and feeling like a failure as a writer and a teacher— and so I was as invested in the dunk contest as anyone in the country that night. This is the point where, if I’ve had a few drinks and a somewhat willing audience, I would spend the next hour demanding justice for Andre Iguodala, who was robbed of the dunk contest title that year. This is also where I would complain about Nate Robinson getting unlimited attempts to hit his final dunk. But I’m trying to get better about that kind of thing. I realize nobody cares.

LauraBeth grew up with two athletic and ultra-competitive brothers, and through a combination of genetics, conditioning, and sheer force of will, she now harbors an antipathy to competition that is healthier than my worldview but is, frankly, a little unnerving. She played field hockey in high school, but never felt any particular drive to win. She will not play board games or engage in other competitions with the rest of the family because of how much she hated all of it when she was young. She watches sports with me, but can’t help feeling badly for the losing team after the final whistle (even if it’s a team we all justifiably hate, like the Dallas Cowboys). She asks me to change the channel so we can look away from their sagging shoulders and heartbroken faces; she sees them not as enemies, but as young men, some young enough they can’t even legally drink, enduring one of the worst moments of their lives. Though this is not remotely how I live or think, I understand it to be an admirable trait. All of which is to say, exhibition sports are the ideal environment for her. The guys in the dunk contest, like every pro athlete, are pathologically competitive, but they are just having fun and there are no real consequences for losing.

I want to clarify something: dunks matter more than you think they do. You may want to tell me it’s all a big dumb spectacle and the scoring doesn’t make sense, and it’s just a show to sell Sprite and sneakers, and yes, sure, that’s what it is. But strip all the nonsense away and you see an aesthetic achievement that can only be performed by a tiny percentage of humans in world history. Each dunk is one of the most perfect sporting achievements on the planet, a beautiful expression of athletic perfection, of power, speed, and creativity. These players—their bodies built specifically for this feat, spinning in the god damn air, not just floating because there’s violence propelling it, and throwing it down behind their heads with more grace and fluidity in the coordination than many dancers—are the culmination of a century worth of training, learning, and evolutionary adaptations. Major sports leagues should take themselves less seriously anyway. What’s more ridiculous than watching a group of NFL men in a TV studio, wearing suits and standing on a fake field while they shout about honor and duty? It’s one of the worst aspects of our culture. Events like the dunk contest puncture the veneer of self-importance that covers every major league. They remind people that this is dumb and the dumbness is what makes it fun.

A couple years after I moved back to the east coast and we bought a house and got married, we finally bought another new TV, upgrading to HD, which helped us more clearly see the anguish on the faces of the losing teams. The TV she got me for my 23rd birthday was transferred to the attic, and then when we moved again it went to the basement of the new house, and, finally, we hauled it out to the curb, where it sat for a week before I learned that this is not how you dispose of a TV anymore (on any given day in the suburbs, sidewalks are dotted with hulking tube TVs like meteors crashed to earth). I could have left it on the curb for years. Eventually I would drag some old furniture out there and that would stay too and soon our whole living room could be on the sidewalk, a mirror of the lives we tried to hide inside.

Because our house is full of toxic materials the township won’t collect, we drove one afternoon with a trunk full of paint cans, dangerous solvents, and batteries, to the landfill in Pennsauken, New Jersey. I wrote a research paper on landfills in high school biology, but I don’t get the science behind them, whether there is anything more to it than digging a giant hole and filling it with garbage until the earth is too full and then you move down the road to a new hole. Once it’s out of my sight, I trust that it is someone else’s problem. All this stuff was alive once and you expect it to smell like death, but it smells like nothing (the landfill itself has a 5-star rating on Google, with the top review stating, “It don’t even smell”). We dropped our trash in the appropriate areas, ending at a walk-in dumpster, a container for obsolete electronics. Inside, piled floor to ceiling, were TVs and computer monitors. The foundation of these stacks was several vintage console TVs, each of which I imagined having been passed down through their families they became too unwieldy to move anymore. Maybe they trundled through thrift stores and flea markets, through the homes of various well-meaning people planning to fix them up and turn them into a cool showpiece in their art school loft, but eventually they were hauled to this spot.

Being in the center of a county dump is humbling and a little upsetting. It is a reminder that even if, like me, you think of yourself as being a minimalist, most people are surrounded by garbage. It’s all disposable and you’re disposable too. It’s all replaceable and you’re replaceable too. In 2005, this TV was the center of my world, and now it would be piled, for the rest of the life of the planet, in this dumpster in Pennsauken. It would outlive me by a million years, and that whole time it would be utterly useless, just plastic and wires, there forever.

GALVESTON, TEXAS by Alex Weidman

September 29, 2019

This Texas night is similar to a Mexico night. Both are deeply oppressive, deeply black and unyielding, lunar in no real sense, unless one is thinking about the dark side of the moon and, really, only the appearance of the dark side of the moon. Outside the car windows it is absolutely unchanging.

It is not like an El Salvador night Javier thinks. El Salvador nights are fertile and alive, and similar to Guatemalan nights and similar, up to a point, to very southern Mexico nights. They are deeply alive, which Javier knows to mean they are deeply human, which really means that the will of life seems to radiate up from the ground itself and hang in the air like humidity.

Nothing promising seems to radiate up from the blackness outside.

Javier had been warned not to hitchhike after he crossed. Hitchhiking they said was a sure way to get yourself killed. But Javier had been lead so far astray that it would have been fatal trying to get back east any other way. He’d known something was very wrong when the land around them had turned into the desert, so it was either hitchhike and die or don’t hitchhike and die. So Javier hitchhiked and got unbelievably lucky.

For hundreds of miles through the Texas night it would be just him, this stranger who picked him up, the small, repressed section of highway visible in the headlights, and the border, sometimes no more than fifty yards away. All through the night they’d pass white trucks driving back and forth along a patrol road that paralleled the highway, driven by seemingly no one, or by men in black masks and black sunglasses despite it being the middle of the night. Javier would begin to form an understanding of the relationship between this land and extraterrestrial sightings. The mind can only do what it can with the strangeness of this place. It must put together a coherent picture.

Driving through the deep night Javier would not know that when he arrives in Galveston he’d go directly to the beach. He’d go directly to the beach like some sort of pilgrim drawn naturally to an edge. On the beach Javier would take refuge under the pier, where above he could hear laughing children and the sounds of carnival games. He would almost swear he could hear the exhaustion of the parents who were shepherding the kids around. Javier would not understand why someone would come to the beach in January, in this weather. To him it’d seem miserable.

Sitting next to this silent stranger Javier would also not know that when he arrives in Galveston his cousin would no longer answer his phone. Anyone even remotely paying attention would know that things had been getting very dangerous, and Javier’s cousin would end up backing out, leaving Javier stranded without so much as an address.

Javier would end up wandering Galveston, a beach town that seems to absorb nothing of the vitality of the tourists and vacationers who come there (though if one paid any attention they’d realize that these tourists aren’t the picture of vitality either, but more like wanderers as well, people mostly lost who only by chance happened to have stumbled upon something familiar to what they think they’d been looking for). Instead the town will grow increasingly tired, like the maids and waitresses and cooks who are ubiquitous in service economies. Javier would end up wandering endlessly through this town that seems to grow emptier and more desolate, as if the people were turning into cardboard cutouts, as if it is a border town in the truest sense, a town that is set up only as a façade of a town, likely for official use.

Driving through the Texas night Javier does not know about his wandering. Instead he thinks about Luisa del Rosa, who he’d already decided he’d never see again. He thinks about Luisa and about the future and her absence, and the inability to reconcile completely the disappearance of a person from one’s life, which is also a way of being unable to reconcile the disappearance of one’s self from any reference point. Eventually in Galveston Javier will fall asleep on the beach, under the pier, where he’ll dream of Luisa. He’ll dream Luisa is with him, that they are together under that pier, and he’ll dream that despite his cousin not answering his phone and despite having nowhere to go and having no money and despite being technically pursued, everything is okay. Everything is okay because Luisa is there, and Luisa being there suggests something about being a teenager still and something peaceful, something similar in the sound of the waves that will rock Javier to sleep again and again for days that’ll end up being innumerable.

HOLES IN THE STOMACH PROVIDE WINDOWS INTO DIGESTION by Kate Lohnes

September 27, 2019

Picture me a babe no words throated there has to be context. Like pigtails at Brookfield Zoo, once I lost my mother, all greeneyed bulbous, looking window through at tiger sleeping on riverbank, sketchers and ratted jacket rattled I was child then, was child once. Not here temporally isolated at this locus where you touch me [touch me touchme pleasetouchme]. Carbonbodies grow in time with nutrients so I ate once, you know, thick chilled carrot mush and chicken tenders but that mole I have here has always marked me cain.

Under canopic and dense Dublin smoke settles on pores and clots them. Tell me I’m being dramatic. So pathetic lass. Lonely lass ununique, the river says. I say river in hellfire Cassandra burns and burns with Ajax. And river he still touches her. [7 year re cycle skin cycle reskincycle it hasn’t been that long yet]. So yeah she feels him and I’ll whine when I want to because always are we performative. You know this. Darling I told you of A. St Martin. His body burned through by bulletrip, hole stomach gaping so why not keep it open. Why not tie meat to string and dangle dip like candlemaker in gastric juice mmmmm let us see what it means digest.

And that’s actually what happened do you get that alive with hole gaping. Alive with hole gaping and writhing doctor poked St Martin living trial belly bright under operation light, he never sewed body up. Even though he promised. Do you get that. Dipdipdrip meat let bacteria break down flesh inside bulletbrokenbody. It was education. Like when Erasistratus strapped men [slavebody he justified] living in auditorium cut larynx first to silence screams. Carved one throughline from genitals to throat opened spread eagle said look here look at heart beating living bodywrithing but heart heart heart thumpthump dyedha dyedha dyedha. Men died soon after. Thick cut unscreaming but shook violent on restraints. The people of auditorium took notes vigorously. So yeah it was a window and only a window.

You have to understand. I was a child once unperforated. Body unlicked by flame, gastric juices unbubbling unmeattouched. There was a time when heart beat first so why not keep it open and see. I used to eat, digest, used to burn and swoon let fire touch me like Ajax, oh yes, just like Ajax. So there is context, you see, a throughline connective between who I was and the woman standing here, in front of you, Liffey at my left and your eyes so angry. Sunk and blue and angry, like river entered them reflecting shards of promised morning in the worst way. Me my eyes green no river. Everseparate, everclinging to somewhere between the rapture you know then god mountainside said kill for me. Me marked I had no choice prophecy is not one to bargain.

But you know this. You know this part of the story. How one night eveslicked after swallowing serpent I folded myself into the felt hills of western Ireland. You know the sheep bleating mimicked fjord ruthlessly like when she spoke to us and it was not soft. Body wet with rain troyfire fading I had way too much gin and I liked it. And yeah evil maybe. But I was not A. St Martin no juices to play with no liquid left. So how could I tell you of twenty years between here and my beginnings and have it seem like anything other than performance through tinted window.

Instead just picture me a babe body still slicked viscous with heaven’s syrup and pretend momentarily that time has always been linear.

GLORIA TIPENE by Kaye Gilhooley

September 26, 2019

Really? Is it? Gloria Tipene in layers of dirty designer dresses? Gloria Tipene with hay-thatch hair and farmer’s cheeks? Gloria Tipene who is watched and wondered about aloud, shuffles along the street stopping at each bin and lamppost and shop window that catches her magpie eye; carries her life in a performance of plastic bags, string-tied parcels, pull-behind and push-forward trolleys; whispering harshly and sometimes shouting her lines.

Is that Gloria Tipene, dazzled by the display of gold and rubies and pearls and diamonds, dreamily tracing the circles of engagement rings, wedding rings and earrings with her skinny dirt-encrusted fingernail. Lingering on miniature markers of life’s journey she gently taps, strokes the glass-bound dog and breathes. Startled by the sudden appearance of a shop assistant, drops her finger and flees, melts into the mass of other people not like her.

Gloria Tipene, despite the grime and clutter, despite the owl hood eyes that can’t look up but see everything, despite the words that come with every shuffled step but never address another person, never more on a stage or film set to be heard and adored.

Yet, Gloria Tipene holds inside the poise of unicorns and the daring of dragons. Rainbow blood pumps through her veins and heart and brain. She re-holds conversations with directors and artists and politicians, re-signs fans’ programmes, hands, arms. In her hand-stitched heart knows that she is loved by thousands and by no one.

Glimpsed sometimes on the next street, by the traffic lights, under the bridge, I never get close enough to check, to gaze closely on that clue-filled weather-worn face.

Gloria Tipene always just far enough away to never really be sure and one day will disappear and tread the pavement boards no more.

BODY OF BLOOD by Sarah E. Harris

September 25, 2019

The average adult carries seven percent of their weight in blood. Number of wonders and of sins.

Blood is a sacrifice and so is a woman, which I suppose explains some things. Like: the scar at the top of my head, from the hospital machinery when I was born. Like: loving the taste of a copper penny, acid and hard and bright on the tongue. Like: the vertigo that comes even now, standing suddenly. How hard it is to hold this ground.

When the pain started they said it was nothing, then they said to seek therapy, then they said it was a solid mass, a simple procedure. I imagined a ball of hair and teeth turning into a grinning mouth, a grim bezoar with a changeling smile, expanding through the bright fruit sizes in all the baby books. A pea, a blueberry, a lime. And all the time my blood baby grew strong, grew from fruit to fist, grew until they could not ignore her, and she was seen.

It will have to come out, they say. And everything else with it. All that sticky mess, they say, and laugh with bezoar faces. When they take it from me I will be hollow at the center, unmoored, all my strength withdrawn.

They recite their saving phrases; in and out, small incisions, a short recovery. But I know the truth that grows in me, which is that the stories are wrong, and the science too. Wheat made bread is no longer wheat, grapes made wine cannot return to grapes. This is my body and my blood. Its copper taste, its sticky richness. Take it. Leave a scar.