Archives

MY SEASONAL EMPLOYER by Caroline Galdi

January 2, 2019

I was told to meet the driver at 300 King Lear Street, which was in this subdivision full of these corny ‘medieval’ names. Court Jester and Shakespeare and shit like that. It was like the developer was stealing street names from a book of word-search puzzles. There was a sign that said “REAL HOMES”. At the end of the street a bunch of the houses were still wrapped in plastic. Later the driver told me they brought the townhomes in in pieces and then assembled them on the spot Ikea-style. I said that was weird but couldn’t explain why.

I parked my car in the parking lot of the pool, which was closed for the winter, and walked around, wishing there was a bathroom somewhere where I could pee, waiting for the driver. One of the first things I learned about working in a delivery truck was that you didn’t get to pee much.

Finally, a big brown and gold truck showed up, and I waved at the driver so he’d know I was his helper. I was on winter break, and wanted to make money, so I’d signed up to be a “driver helper,” which was pretty much exactly what the job title implied. I put on a reflective vest with a brown and gold logo and got in the jump seat, which folded up onto the wall like the seats in a movie theater. The driver’s name was Irvin. He looked like he could be a member of Weezer, or maybe a band that was trying too hard to be Weezer.

Morrisville, it turned out, was full of this type of subdivision. All of them were brand new, with these stone facades that were supposed to look rustic and homey, but looked cold and plastic and fake. Of course, I, too, lived in a suburb, but at least my suburb had trees. There were no trees here. “They’re gonna run out of air if they keep developing like this,” Irvin said at one point. “And the road structure isn’t thought out well at all.” I supposed you became an expert at Morrisville road structures if your job was to drive through Morrisville all day.

“They call this job the golden handcuffs,” he told me. “Everyone hates it, but the benefits are too good to leave.” We made small talk about the job market, and about how expensive and stupid it was to go to college. So I felt silly saying I was studying English literature on my family’s dime, but at least I was up front about my job prospects, which were zilch.

“I was listening to a segment on NPR about student debt,” Irvin said. “And they were talking to this guy who went thousands of dollars into debt to go to Oberlin, and you know what he studied? Trombone.” As if out of everything you could study at Oberlin, trombone was the most ridiculous.

As it happened, I knew someone who was studying trombone at Oberlin—a friend from high school. But his parents were plastic surgeons, so he could study whatever he wanted, wherever he wanted. I didn’t tell Irvin this.

A lot of the job involved speed walking up to people’s doors and up apartment building stairs, but a lot of it was just driving, too. I’d been driving a lot the past couple of days because I’d come back from college and then gone back the next day to get stuff I’d forgotten and then I’d come home again, and in between that I’d driven to pick my sister up from school but she goes to high school somewhere farther away than where I used to go, so I took two wrong turns and ended up in a different county driving over one of those nuclear power plant lakes that stay warm year round. Even driving from Apex to the distribution center in Durham was a hike. I wondered how I’d cope with a job on the road, if I were to do this full time.

The subdivisions were treeless, but once you got on the main road, the woods swallowed you up. As December afternoons are prone to do, it got dark pretty quickly. And with the trees being all empty, you could see really far through the forest. It would all be gone soon, probably, what with the developers stripping chunks of land and putting more houses down, but when you were driving through it, it looked endless. The whole time I was thinking about the Blair Witch Project, which I’d recently seen for the first time. It scared me shitless. But the scariest part of that movie was how they were trapped in the woods, and how they couldn’t get out, walking in endless circles, screaming with nobody around to hear them.

The woods looked like they could have been in the Blair Witch Project. And if it weren’t for all of these highways, you could get lost in them. I was thinking about how roads and cars made everything smaller. Like if you were a dumbass, like I was, and forgot your hiring paperwork at school, like I had, you could drive back to Greensboro to go get it, and still be home in Apex in time for dinner. And that was a couple hours’ drive, but walking that distance would take days. You could probably have five separate Blair Witch Projects in the space between Greensboro and Apex. There were enough woods for countless dumb college kids to get lost in over and over and over, going in circles for days. But we didn’t. We just cut straight through and used GPS.

We ended up near the airport, where Irvin did a lot of airport deliveries. We went past the main terminals, which I’d been to before, and then we drove around all these back parts I’d never been in, other hangars and smaller airfields for private jets. “That’s where the Carolina Hurricanes’ plane is,” Irvin told me. “I saw them boarding once. One of the rookies on the team had this massive bottle of vodka sticking out of his bag.” There wasn’t a lot for me to do near the airport, because all the deliveries there were business deliveries, which needed signatures.

We made a lot of warehouse stops. Irvin knew all the warehouse workers by name, and they greeted him when he pulled up. He’d back the truck up to the big sliding door of the warehouse and we’d load package after package from the warehouse to the truck.

At the end of the night we took all the packages we’d picked up back to the distribution facility, and put those onto a massive conveyor belt. Irvin told me about the place in West Virginia where he grew up. “It used to have more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in America,” he told me. “Because so many people owned small businesses. Auto shops and groceries. And everyone in town would spend money there, because you could make a decent living working in a factory. Then all the factory jobs went overseas. Now the place is a total dump.”

Afterwards he drove me back to 300 King Lear Street, and I said goodbye and gave the vest back and unlocked my car and sat in the driver’s seat, exhausted. I was so tired that I considered just lying there and taking a nap. After running packages for hours and hours, my little car felt like home. I would total it the following summer, while driving home from a high-ranking, full-time, paid government internship. I didn’t know that yet. All I knew was that my phone was about to die and I had to remember how to get out of the neighborhood before it ran out of battery and left me horrifically stranded in Morrisville.

The route home took me through the Research Triangle Park, a place that a lot of people liked to compare to Silicon Valley. All the roads and signs looked so smooth and new. It always calmed me, driving at night. When I finally made it home, my mom was still up, doing crosswords on her phone, waiting for me.

I never saw Irvin again. The second day I had a new driver, named Jenny. She was also my driver the day after that, and the day after that, all the way up to Christmas Eve. I was told to meet her in the parking lot of this tiny grocery store on the corner of a busy intersection two minutes from my house. It was in what my friends in high school had liked to refer to as “the ghetto part of Apex,” and I had shushed them for being insensitive. But as I sat there in the parking lot, surrounded by construction workers on their lunch breaks, I realized that when it came down to it I was no better than my friends. I was just as uncomfortable as they would have been: a skinny nineteen-year-old blonde lady with my slicked-back soccer-mom ponytail in an expensive fuchsia athletic jacket with a high school honor roll magnet stuck on the bumper of her car. And I didn’t know how to stop being uncomfortable. It felt bad. People were loitering around in the parking lot, ordering from a taco truck, and giving me weird looks for taking up one of the five parking spaces and just sitting there in my car. When Jenny drove up in her big brown and gold truck, I rushed out to greet her, and she said they’d tow me if I parked there, and let me drive to a nearby bar that wouldn’t tow me.

Jenny had only been driving for three weeks. I asked her how it was so far. “It’s hard,” she said. She had four daughters. They were in her phone background, all dressed up in their Sunday best and smiling for the camera. As it turned out, her route went through three neighborhoods: mine, and two that I drove through to avoid traffic at rush hour. So I knew the street names better than she did: she was still relying on her phone’s GPS to guide her.

The whole time that we were making deliveries, I kept wondering why there were so many houses. What were they all for? Who lived here? It was my own neighborhood, but I realized that for all the nearly two decades I’d lived there, I still didn’t know the majority of the people in the neighborhood. For every house whose residents I knew, there were ten full of strangers. Neighbors and strangers alike, I delivered their boxes and boxes of things, big rugs and doormats and bags of clothing and Omaha Steaks and computers and Christmas wreaths and Bluetooth speakers.

When I was a kid one night—and maybe this was a dream and maybe it was real—I’d been hit with a bout of restless insomnia, and my dad had taken me on a drive around the neighborhood in his car to lull me to sleep. I remembered it so strangely, the way the houses and the trees were so still at night. It was calming, too, sitting in the back of my dad’s car, the same car I’d later drive around in and ultimately total. The neighborhood became a recurring location in my dreams, until the dreams became so vivid that they’d bleed over into the waking world, and I’d wander the sidewalks gazing up at the trees, struck by uncanniness. Now, in the dark, I traveled up and down the streets again and again, jumping out to run packages, running back in, wondering if I could do this for the rest of my life. Every bike ride, every school bus stop, every sugar-fueled Halloween romp was painted over the neighborhood; the sidewalks lined my strongest and most persistent memories. And I painted on more layers with repetition, package numbers, the bitterness of the wind and the aching of my knees as I stormed up and down the stairs of every house, deposited the package (sometimes gently, sometimes not), turned heel, leapt down deftly, and clambered back into the truck. Hundreds of times I repeated this, until the houses blended into each other, a long string of memories as dark as the winter sky at 6PM.

One Thursday, Jenny was sick. She looked like she had the flu. "I'm so weak," she kept telling me. But her supervisor didn’t care, so long as there were packages to be delivered. I didn't think we were going to make it through the route. We had so many packages—the truck was full, past capacity, at twice the capacity, stuffed to the brim with cardboard. The hardest part of the job was to get the right package at the right house at the right time: all of the logistics. And she usually took care of that, mostly. You had to look for the numbers on the box, and then for the house number, and her board—the handheld device that stored all the information—kept freezing and acting up, and we were fighting her brain fog. I had the mornings off, and only helped her with the residential part of the route. She was working twelve-hour days. She was fatigued and over-worked and surviving off of packaged junk foods. While we were re-arranging packages on the shelves, her oldest daughter texted her to say she’d gotten accepted into one of her top choice colleges.

I realized it then: why she’d taken the job. She had to put her daughters through school. I felt like my heart was breaking. There in the back of the truck, Jenny started to cry. I felt like I was watching a tragedy occur. This wasn't where I liked to watch tragedies occur. I preferred them from a distance, with a screen between us, so I could turn it off or click to a different tab if I didn't like what was happening.

I wanted so badly to quit. The delivery route was in the neighborhood where I lived: I could've jumped off and ran home. Selfishly, I considered it. I’d done that before—not as an employee of the delivery company, but in equally uncomfortable situations. I liked running away from things. But I made myself stay through the entire wretched evening. I knew she'd be worse off if I left, and that I wouldn’t be able to face her ever again if I ran off, so I kept running packages and trying to make up for our lack of brainpower, correcting her when she made mistakes and matched the wrong package number to the wrong house. I let myself feel like I was making some kind of grand sacrifice, like there was something noble about me sticking through with it, even though she was the one in pain.

At one point I started to cry, but in the darkness of the truck, nobody had to know. I just did the only thing I could do: when we got the right package, I took it and ran. My calves had been sore that morning, and my knees were getting torn to shreds, but it was like I didn't feel them. Jog up the lawn, place the package on the porch, jog back. Run up the lawn, put the package on the porch, run back. Sprint up, toss package, sprint back. The faster I ran, the faster it would be over. I don’t know why, but I didn’t get winded. I used to not be able to run in winter air at all—my chest would get all tight and I’d start wheezing like an asthmatic. But that night, I ran faster and harder than I’d ever run before, and I barely felt it.

Finally we delivered the last wretched package and Jenny drove off, and I came home just as my family was getting ready for dinner. My mom had cooked the Omaha Steaks my grandparents had sent us, and the Bluetooth speaker was playing Christmas music from some a capella pop group I couldn’t stand. The Christmas tree was lit with electric lights, and the cat snuggled up to my ankles. My mom was in an unusually good mood. “I thought we could use some red meat,” she told us. “Some iron.” I showered the grime of the truck off of me, and came downstairs in pajamas, clean and dry. We all sat around the table to eat—something that didn't happen much anymore—and as I looked around the dining room, chewing my Omaha Steak, I stopped seeing home. All I saw was the inside of a house that was one of hundreds in a sprawling suburb with streets named after nothing.

X-R-A-Y ISSUE #9

January 1, 2019

FEATURING !! Michael Seymour Blake !! Shannon McLeod !! Francine Witte !! Chris Campanioni !! Melissa Goode !! Carey Shook !! Patrick Reid !! Frankie McMillan !! Simon Henry Stein !! Caleb Echterling !! Christopher Gonzalez !! Edward Mullany !! Benjamin DeVos !! Michael Mungiello !! Zac SmithDOWNLOAD ISSUE #9 JANUARY 2019

FRIEND WITH GOITER by RJC Smith

December 27, 2018

The problem with my friend Johnny was the goiter on his neck, because not only was he self-conscious of his own conspicuousness, but I also found it terribly distracting—it reminded me of the plums on the plum tree in my backyard, which my parents cared for as if it were another child, i.e. a sibling of mine, which is a depressing story in its own right.

When I looked at the goiter I wanted to bite into it and my eyes reflected this and sometimes Johnny saw, and the look Johnny always gave showed a combination of reproach and general futility that reminded me uncannily of a specific, somewhat recent incident in which Gwen caught me staring at her cleavage—Gwen was a friend of mine who had recently cleared the air of any delusion on my part on the prospect of romance.

You know when someone stares straight through you and it is frightening, because you’ve died somewhat inside them or whatever, but also because you’ve just never seen it before, like somehow your everyday POV has been replaced by a film screen and there’s a touch of some horror there and you want to look away but you can’t and like, this is just your life now?

Anyway the thing with Gwen isn’t something I need to recount or spell out—it was just like some recursive nightmare of social erring: offending Johnny in real time and then immediately reliving the incident with Gwen, and in my mind they were each angrier every successive time Johnny caught me staring at his big goiter.

I thought I was gay, it seems stupid now, but something in the chronological overlap of my discovery of my parents’ liquor cabinet and his brother’s pot stash and the development of the goiter, which went from unnoticeable to quite noticeable in only several months, caused an earthquake in me which opened up this big horrible cloying maw of empathy unlike anything I had experienced before. When I went to bed at night I would shiver thinking about him, maybe cry a bit; I would listen to sad music and feel so overwhelmed, like my head would explode and my body would evaporate into the confined space of my bedroom—my sheets still had Pokémon on them.

We were playing video games when I leaned over and pecked him on the cheek. I returned to my position facing the TV screen—a pixelated Stone Cold Steve Austin was celebrating his victory in an endless and silent looping animation—and we just sat there in the whole strange miasma of it until he stood up and threw the controller at my head and said,

“Get the fuck out of my house, dude.”

Walking home was lonely. I sat under the plum tree in my yard and saw one plum on the ground that was rotting a bit and flies were buzzing over it and I thought of Johnny’s disquieting look and then Gwen’s and obviously I thought about what had just happened even though it was difficult.

When I laid in bed that night I was sad but it was fine—I’d been so long with such tapered feelings—and I wondered if things were still all right between me and Gwen. And I thought about Johnny’s goiter.

FRANKENSTEIN, NOT UMA THURMAN by Travis Dahlke

December 26, 2018

You were Mia Wallace for Halloween and I was sexy Harper Lee. 'How to fake blow' was stained on your phone's search history under the spiderweb cracks that cut up my fingers where I typed in my name. In all honesty, I wasn't even going to leave the house, but stoned in bed with headphones digging into the pillow is not where new friends are made. Dancing at the church party, we saw four other Mia Wallace's, each with blood running from their nostrils to the bleached spores of their mustaches. I thought we'd reek of fog machine juice forever, but it leapt from our clothes the second we stepped outside into hurricane season South Carolina. Into pie crust cooked with yams that were already purple at the edges.

'Don't worry, I'm easy to forget about. You won't even notice I'm gone, I promise,' was what you said but it was all glitter sleeting from the band of my bowl cut. It was all wet palms.

The next year you were 'Frankenstein Mia Wallace.' Same wig, white buttoned-down and blood, but with olive skin that made you look seasick, finished by a surgical scar you drew from one corner of your forehead to the other in the visor mirror of a Taurus. An expert on pretending with baking soda. On glued-in bolts. Here it was agreed upon that we were the kinds of people who bail and eventually there would come a time when we probably wouldn't talk anymore. Realistically, most people who are friends now won't still know each other in five or so years, right? It's just how things work. Two Halloweens is a good run, let's just appreciate that. But then the make-up became real.

We found out you were allergic to cheap face paint that night and for some reason I obliged when you asked me to take an Instagram of you in the hospital bed. True devotion to the character. Method acting in a wing of Scorpio babies born under another tropical storm.

By the fourth annual Monster Smash we got more specific. This was getting a little ridiculous. I asked you not to watch over me if your dream ever came true. That recurring one about a poisonous grasshopper biting you in the field behind your parent's house. It was narcissistic to think you'd want to follow me around when you had the galaxy to explore, but we still shook on it. We would not hang out as the drafts that make curtains look like they are breathing. I wouldn't haunt you and under no circumstances would you ever, in a million years, haunt me.

There were no more costume parties. There were gaps. There was returning with a sketchy tattoo of some non-existent planet, which was really a logo the city branded to you. You drew re-imagined Disney princesses in Photoshop while I stayed at home, making fun of you to my friends in our father's armchairs. 'Miriam used to be normal. She was cool. Remember that?' Before you were seized by tall buildings and drooled back out an entirely different person. Jeggings to high-waisted jeans. Dust to dust.

I heard it happened driving home from your parent's house in the Pennsylvanian woods. You swerved to avoid hitting a deer and your Taurus ended up upside down in the empty river, blood rushing to your head to rush out of it. They tested you for chemicals to see if that was a factor, but only found shrimp scampi in your stomach because that's what you always asked your mom to make. Your dad began to feel something again from the Classics of Rock Pandora station. He will spend the rest of his days hunting for deer. Avenging your death with bottle upon bottle of Buck urine.

It had been over a few years since we had talked and the person you were to me was made from different parts. Frankenstein, not Uma Thurman. Only the traits I chose to recall, branded cattle iron style on the rosy sirloin of my brain. You said 'it's all about authenticity. I know that incision mark is there, even though it's covered by the bangs of the wig.' I thought a lot about the scorpion kids born when we met and how they were all old enough to run away from home or hide up in trees now.

I didn't go to your stupid wake. I heard they played an acoustic cover of Van Halen's 'Dance the Night Away' like it was a g.d. trailer for an erotic thriller. My eulogy would've involved the shrimps trapped in your belly, that you decided to take with you. They were going down with the ship, into the barren tributary of the Susquehanna. Miriam would do that. No one would've gotten it except us.

But these were not things that were said. These were not things that happened at all. Rather, I stayed at home to watch a movie on my laptop and during a quiet part I think I heard your sneeze. We didn't make it weird, though I knew it was you. The actual you. The kind of person who, no matter how much they spit in your hand, will break a pact.

SCUFF MARKS by Alecz Yeager

December 21, 2018

The corner of a tortilla chip rested vigilantly against the surface-smooth chest of Ivan’s “School is overrated” t-shirt. Next to it pooled a puddle of drool that was escaping from the twelve-year old’s chapped lips. The remainder of chips lay hidden beneath his hand that limpishly slept inside a plastic cereal bowl. It was five o’clock in the afternoon, and after eight hours of middle school boredom, Ivan had come home, sat in his favorite chair, cracked open a root beer, and began eating chips and salsa: a perfect mirror to his father’s drunken habits.

When his mother woke him up to set the table, he unstuck his lashes from one another and wiped the sleep from his face. He wasn’t even hungry at this point, but Mother had cooked dinner, and Ivan knew that Father would be no such help.

He lifted his body from the pleather, sweat-drenched chair and placed the last bit of chips on the ground for later. He knew that Pepper would probably find her way to the bowl at some point, and he’d only have to refill it later, but for now, Ivan could see the Golden Doodle wagging her tail in the yard and deemed his snack safe.

The placemats that hid in the third drawer from the left of the stove were always used for everyday dinners. Mother only let Ivan pull out the fancy cloth mats if company was over. The plastic mats were plain except for a rooster pattern that bordered the edges, and they came in a pack of four. Ivan’s family only needed three, and that was a good thing because one of the mats was melted in the middle from when Ivan accidentally put it into the dishwasher. That was the same day that Father caused the scuff mark on the dining room table when he thought that Mother had been the one that made the mistake. The other three placemats covered the table’s mark nicely, though, just like Mother covered her own.

CHILDISH THINGS by Barrett Bowlin

December 20, 2018

Hours after I first hear her voice in line at the bank, I make peanut butter & jelly sandwiches for the both of us with tall glasses of cold milk, edible memories from decades ago, and then she and I move to the daybed, together, her voice as cozy and warm as a mother's breasts.

“Point to something pink," she says, my fingers on her chest.

Her voice is bright and clear, a sparkling peal of sound, a live version of the recording made for the Little Reader for Girls I remember having in second grade, the one that took four 'C' batteries. And she's with me here, right now, warm and next to me in the nighttime.

"You found it!" she says, laughing.

You found it, the Little Reader would say, its rainbow push-button keypad worn down where I pressed my fingers.

She arches her back in my bed, cocks an eyebrow at me, says, "Point to something red." In the corner of her mouth is a breadcrumb. I leave it where I find it and move my hand away from her lips.

“Super job!" she whispers, the crow's feet at the edges of her eyes contracting. "That's great!"

She's tanned everywhere I can see, with the lines on her forehead stilled by clinic-grade botulinum, and she lives here in Santa Monica, I've learned, neighborhoods of stucco and adobe away from me, stringing a late retirement together off royalties from the recording sessions for toy companies like Hasbro and Fisher Price, from the studio work done for Mattel and Tyco and Disney. She drives a pink Mercedes she's parked in my complex's handicapped spot.

“It is great,” I say, blushing and happy after years spent away from the toy box. Somewhere over in Riverside, somewhere in my mother's attic, next to the luggage my father didn't take with him, the Little Reader for Girls' batteries corrode in their slots, acidic and dusty.

We kiss. We touch. We stretch and pull toward each other like figurines. On the nightstand next to my bed, the glasses of chocolate milk are empty, just gray rings at the bottom and lip prints on the rims. "Do you remember any other lines from the Little Reader for Girls?" I ask.

"Did you know Mattel sold millions of that unit?" she says, finding the breadcrumb on her lips and flicking it onto my floor. She's taken me up on an invitation, one stranger asking a favor of another while in line at the bank. Due for an appointment with her nephrologist first thing in the morning, she's explained, this is a one-time thing, and we'll have to be quick, so I wedge my hands under her skin.

“Can you find the letter 'C'?" she says. The words come out like music through a warm speaker.

I breathe her in close and mumble out, “Thank you so much for this,” remembering Saturday afternoons spent in an oversized papazon, pushing letters and numbers and seeing LCD cells flash on and off while the voice behind the plastic belts out, That's right! This will be over soon, this happy memory in the making, so I say, "Thank you for everything.”

She sighs after a sweet minute, rolls and turns away, and we stare at the flecks of white paint on my bedroom walls.

When she lifts up to fasten the clasp of her brassiere, she shoots a glance at her chain watch. It's late. The cloth rises up her legs like sea foam from the Pacific.

“Sorry to bother you,” I ask, “but could you say, 'It's matching time!' for me?”

The light from the neon outside glints on her fingernail polish as she clasps the front of her bra. She smirks at me before letting her lips curve down into a flat smile that says it's time to go. I smirk back, abashed, somewhere years away from here, and I watch as a stray hair from her head wheedles up into the air, dances in a blizzard of dust motes only I can see from this angle.

"Please stay," I ask. "I need this."

"You all do," she says as she clips her earrings back on, her voice turning and leaving away from me. "Every single one of you does."

BOREDOMS by Grant Maierhofer

December 19, 2018

I’m a better tabloid than citizen. A friend of mine once wound up on the cover of their city’s something having passed out near the lawnmower he worked. He’d fixed up nearby within a building for soil and various landscaping tools and nodded off on a hillside holding his penis. I met him in treatment. He’d left one day for court and returned with pornography flat against his belly, tucked and sweated within jeans. He’d exhumed it and hatched a plot to scoop away the ceiling’s makeup and tunnel into the female rooms. I hid that night seated on the shower’s curtain while it ran, my foot wedged beneath the door so as to stop intruders. We weren’t allowed locks. This method sometimes left massive red scrapes on feet and some hid, compulsive, on the floor—their backs against the door—to compensate. I’m always compensating. I grin often and phonily. I’m not in treatment any longer.

On leaving I discovered circles of likeminded tabloids not comfortable in therapy and we’d formed groups who’d caused eruptions of boring discord. First I’d gone to the university and spraypainted NEVER WORK repeatedly down its walls. Then a friend and I we’d freed a slew of kept animals. My friend spent the night drinking and howling as was his wont, I followed the animals I kept pace with ensuring they were not hit by cars, ambling furry masses of potential yipping and sprinting at lights. I woke up sunburnt in weeds near a highway and spent the morning trying to fashion materials with which to write.

I did work, and it didn’t suit me. When I met Ivan and his cronies, then, my mind was exhausted with possibility. Ivan had worked for radio stations mostly, deejaying a bit or cleaning up, holding fundraisers or conducting yearly festivals. Through this he'd managed to start a minor label primarily made up of Japanese noise acts and solitary rural black metalish recording artists who'd likely have taken to terrorism were it not for whatever this was. I'd attended regional shows where androgynous blondes might punch guitars to spray their blood and hooded art students might conduct some throb on ancient drum machines. Ivan recorded these sets meticulously and shared them online for interested droolymouthed depressives. He sold albums, either on tape or seveninch vinyl he'd pay to have pressed when money existed. Mostly this meant nothing was released but when it was you'd hear it whispered at and slowly cults might build.

This was the nature of the thing: youths without desire for parents hunched over in rooms while longheld droning notes pushed them and they pushed back. Some were older, I was older. My friends and I we’d get in fights and get called immature by cops who’d break them up. They were right but we were searching. We’d fight each other by various rivers and fall in laughing while night slouched its dullard way to day. I don’t care for bands but experiences. I have long teeth and people look at me quick to turn and change their mind. We fed our heads on slews of chemicals and having eradicated one possibility moved on to tempered, acceptable rebellions. Bands worked. People were desperate to make these bands perform. People bought generators and stole generators and found fields far enough away where bands would play in cold. We’d circle up what cars we had to bob and hobble into one another swelling and contracting with the music. It wasn’t about longevity or rejection, it was about the sense of fabric against your skin and knowing it might rip but pushing and quieting the language in your head. It wasn’t about relating but still existed this primal scream to dress and stitch clothes together while dying down in alltoohuman smelling basements in the day.

STUNG by Sheree Shatsky

December 18, 2018

Mary found her honey bee the same way as her momma and her momma before. She paid for him.

She first saw the fine young man while watching the Billy Graham Crusades on television. He sat next to the big man himself and she liked how his suit shined in the sunshine. It was enough to make a girl pull out her credit card and tithe online and that she did, adding a note—More where this came from should you email back stating the name of the spiritual being sitting left of the world’s finest preacher.

Deacon Willis, came back in reply. A woman true to her word, Mary tithed ten percent of the amount she felt appropriate for a Christian match-up. Please have Deacon Willis email me at LordmyGodinfinity@gmail.com and I’ll finagle a few more dollars your way.

An email popped up in her mailbox, a form letter request for contributions to help the suffering children enduring life in the war zone known as Haiti.

Happy to help the effort, Deacon Willis, she replied, upon learning your first name. Best, Mary Temple.

The answer popped up quicker than quick. William. William Theodore Willis. (If I may be so bold, as the Lord has instructed us to go forth and procreate, I am happy to say, I am a single man in search of a good woman.)

That I am, a very good woman. You sound like a gentlemen I’d like to meet, a true man of the cloth. I imagine Billy Graham doesn’t travel to the place of my home and heritage. Yet, I would not find you presumptuous to board a plane and come calling.”

Thank you for your kind invitation, Mary. I’ve placed your contributions in my personal travel account and will catch the next flight your way. Our brief counsel will console me during my mission to Haiti when darkness falls and the streets are lined with candles and the debris of lost souls.

Sir, I’m off to buy a fancy dress to meet a faithful man. Let’s meet with the Lord’s blessing Sunday at Hopewell Church. I’ll look for you at the church supper.

Following services, she scooted past the milling parishioners and sat at the far end of the table by an impressive potted split leaf philodendron. An enthusiastic reception greeted the deacon as if Billy Graham himself stood before them. Willis maneuvered around the table, shaking hands and greeting the ladies.

Mary watched him save her for last. The philodendron tickled the back of her neck as the breeze trickled through the screened window. He stopped behind her chair and rested his hand on the back. The tickle turned red hot. She dabbed a napkin at her lady dew as he asked all to bow their heads for the blessing. “Thank you, Lord Jesus,” he breathed down her neck, “for this bountiful food and these good people. Amen.”

He sat himself down. “That is a very nice plant you’re wearing, if I may so say.”

“Oh, this old thing?” She laughed. “My name is Mary Temple, which likely you well know and I promised to support your mission in some small way.” She removed an envelope from her purse.

Willis slid open the flap, his eyes on her. He unfolded the legal document inside, the title of her home.“Why, Mary. I can’t accept this selfless contribution, but I tell you what.” He whispered in her ear. “I’d love a tour.”

“Deacon Willis, by all means. Let me show you the way.”

The deacon made his excuses to the gobbling congregation and met Mary out front of the church watching a woman parade by, pushing a baby stroller with a wild-looking dog leading the procession and a black cat taking up the rear.

“Bless you,” Mary call after the odd procession.

The woman stopped short. “Sunday words don’t pay the rent,” she said, turning round the stroller. “How ‘bout blessing me with something a bit more substantial?””

Mary took a step back. “I meant no disrespect,” she said.

“That’s quite a dog you have there,” Willis offered, stepping in front of Mary. “What’s the breed?”

The woman shrugged. “No telling, though It’s said, if a black cat follows along after a dog, it’s sensing a bit of the wolf. Or so, I’ve been told.” The black cat looked at Willis, closed its eyes slow and opened wide slower, strolling over to peruse the deacon’s ankles, rubbing the full length of his body in and out.

“Cats don’t usually take to me,” he said.

Mary fished through her best purse for a couple of dollars. “Again, I meant no harm,” she said, handing the woman the money.

She accepted the offering. “None taken, it’s just I’ve got my brood to care for,” she said, giving the stroller a sharp tap and a harsh jiggle.

Willis chuckled. “What’s inside? A wolf pup?”

The cat circled eight around the deacon’s ankles one last time.

“See for yourself,” the woman invited, zippering open the stroller enclosure. “I won’t charge you one red cent.”

Willis leaned in.

The bees swarmed the deacon and knocked him flat to the ground. His struggle proved short. After certain he was good and dead, Mary fished a cartridge from the pocket of her new fancy dress and freed a queen bee. The bees followed their mistress and were gone as quick as they had come, a dark cloud of audible darkness.

“That cat is never wrong,” the woman said to Mary. “Senses the wolf each and every time.”

Mary smoothed away the hair from what had once been the forehead of a handsome face. “I don’t know, I sort of liked this honey bee.”

The woman sniffed. “Now don’t you start getting all blubbery on me.” She zippered the sticky stroller closed. “Plenty of fancy pants out there preying on those with little or without, stealing and thieving whatever they’ve got, all in the name of the Lord.”

“I think Momma would’ve liked the deacon.”

“Good Lord Almighty, child!” She bent over laughing, clapping her hands together. “Your momma would’ve liked you tossing the queen bee into the mix, though she probably would’ve watched that no good shyster swell a few minutes longer. She was hard like that.”

She looked Mary straight in the face. “I knew your momma and though she struggled with passing on the work to you, as sure as I’m standing here, she was dead right to school you in the family tradition, just like her momma taught her. Don’t ever lose sight of your purpose on this earth. As for me, I am happy to help you rid the monkey suits from our little piece of heaven, bees willing, as long as I walk among the living.”

Mary sighed. “How much do I owe you, Ora?”

“I’ll take the watch. I need myself a reliable time piece. You’re doing the Lord’s work, sugar.” She pushed the stroller on down the sidewalk, dog in the lead, cat in the rear, heading towards the hive back home where she would find the bees killing off their queen, like their mommas and their mommas before.

DOGS AND THE SMELL OF GIN by Scott Manley Hadley

December 17, 2018

In the years since my nan died, I’ve taken to drinking gin. She always smelt of it, it reminds me of her.

I didn’t realise what her scent was until I was a student, only a few years before cancer killed her. One morning after a party, I woke up not alone and was confused by how vividly the smell of the room made me think of my grandmother. Diving into old memories, I sought repressed images of cross-generational incest, but (thankfully) there were none. I sniffed harder at the smell of the room and realised what I recognised and, finally, I understood that my nan was an alcoholic.

Many things suddenly made sense: the clinking sound that accompanied her alone in a room; the muttered comments my mother used to make when I came home drunk during my last years at school; my mother’s repeated discouragement of me and my sister from ever getting into her mother’s car. My nan smelled of gin. All the time, all through the day, however sober she seemed. Less so, the last few years of her life as she began what was to be a fruitless fight against tumours (when she began, instead of juniper, to smell of nothing and, later, rot) but for all my childhood and teenage years, that weird smell of my grandmother’s wasn’t perfume, it was liquor.

I am an alcoholic, too. People say that it runs in families, and I suppose I’m proof that it does. My mother is pretty much tee total (often a response to parental alcoholism), and my father – though he drinks occasionally – I have never seen drunk. Neither of them seem to like it, the feeling of intoxication. I’ve tried many other intoxicants because it’s really not hard to get hold of them, but nothing’s ever felt as good as alcohol. It raises you up, straightens you out, lets you sleep and makes you happy. You can still laugh, you can still cry, and you don’t feel unfuckingstoppable. Alcohol extends the self without erasing it, subdues anxiety and tastes delicious in a myriad of ways. There is nothing like a cold beer on a hot day, nothing like champagne to celebrate, nothing like a swig of neat gin to, just for a while, quieten the furies in your head.

My drinking’s been a problem since adolescence, but over the last few years it’s gotten worse. Perhaps it’s more noticeable because I’ve got less friends now, and most who remain are also alcoholics. Perhaps it’s more noticeable because I drink mostly at home now, and the empty bottles are waiting, collected, in my weekly recycling rather than scattered across the city’s bars. I get the DTs when I don’t drink. The days after I haven’t been drinking hurt more than the mornings after I’ve blacked out. The days when I drink, I carry on until I pass out. And as I usually drink at home, now, nobody knows how bad things have got. Nobody knows I slept half the night next to a pile of vomit on the kitchen floor. Nobody knows I was so hungover on Sunday I didn’t take my dog out, and he shat next to my bed. Nobody knows I left the shit there until Tuesday.

My nan had dogs when I was a child. She had three when I was a baby, and slowly they died. The last one, a rescued Labrador, lived until I was around eight. She is the only one whose name I remember, it was Kirsty. A year after my nan’s death, I bought my own dog. For the first few months, I was better. Better behaved, drinking less, getting up early every day to walk him. But I’ve since realised that the hole I thought he was filling was a hole much bigger than a dog. My grandmother had dogs and gin to hide her unhappiness, and then only gin; then death. When she lay on the bed she died in, skin hanging like fabric from her bones, I held her hand and said, “Thank you” and “I’m so sorry”. I don’t think she’d enjoyed her life and I think she knew I wasn’t enjoying mine. She also knew, though, that I’d been happy when I was a child, back when the world was something I hadn’t learnt to worry about, when cancer and booze and depression were words I didn’t know.

And for me, that combined smell of dog and ethanol-juniper is the smell of childhood, the smell of warmth and peace and contentment, the smell of my nan being alive and the smell of the future feeling like one long adventure I could enjoy forever.

You’ve probably read about alcoholism before and you might think it’s boring and repetitive, but imagine how boring and repetitive it feels to live. Imagine being stuck in repeated habits where the only thing that gives you release traps you tighter.

Alcohol feels like it helps, even though it doesn’t. But, as I know and my nan knew, having something that feels like it helps is better than having nothing at all. Having a dog helps, but having a dog is hard and having a drink is easy. And when everything else feels hard, too, having something easy is difficult to resist. I need to walk my dog. But first I need a drink.

RHETORIC, GIRL! by Amie Norman Walker

December 16, 2018

Radio wire mutated with the Cicadas, every Midwest heart bled to this expectation. Knowing of no reason for time to come undone she perched herself on the couch as Carjone’s car snaked the driveway. Elevated humidity levels sweat the brows of every surface as evening rolled over, drooling for nightfall’s reprieve. Unstable minutes turned around the clocks face before he walked in with blood on his hands in a stride unfamiliar to her. She stared at him, her head cocked left and her lips pursed tight until they popped open with confusion. A need for her reflexed in his shadow. A smile straighter than his muscles acclimated, licked across his lips before he spoke.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Angel.”

Thumb on one cheek, four fingers pressing into the other, he squished her face forcing her mouth back shut, then into puckered lips.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Angel,” he hushed at her moon-eyes. Her mind spun webs of wonder around every thought of what he had done to produce this new gait and heretofore glean of violence in his eyes. He leaned in and she thought he might kiss her. Inimically opening her mouth with pressure, he slipped two fingers past her lips, pressing against her tongue. Salt and metal coiled her taste buds as he fingered her cheeks interior, sliding back wisdom tooth deep. Fingers threatened her appetite but panic yet to sway her perch, arched on the precedence of his swagger. He knew her gag reflexes lacked control, over the years he had to learn to accept the self-sacrifice of each contraction. She gagged against his fingers slender tips, her gut reacting with his gentle push to the floor, so from her knees she’d vomit at his feet. He didn’t expect her to grovel, his need was to see her bow, and if he knew her at all, she required force into such a position. Her insides heaved molten, splattering the tile and his shoe tips, the bottoms already marked with the dog shit he stomped through on his way out her lovers door.

“I’m not going to hurt you” he confirmed again, as if convincing himself, wiping her mouth against the back of his hand. Crouching down his rhetoric seared, “What was it you were hoping I’d find?” Panic thrust for a turn to choke her, eyes shut tight, she pressed forward until her face met the floor, vomit reaching for her hair. She numbed the rush of fear to reason what foment the shift in paradox. A defeating larrup to her cerebral cortex, she suddenly smelt the dewy rush of this morning. She left his address on the kitchen counter, left behind, in the steno pad under the “?” she sketched in grey pencil shades, curving out her feelings into a simple symbol. The ? mark symbolizing not only risk of dalliance, but undulating her impuissant cerebral firing. Carjone’s taught her everything she knew. Carjone’s reminded her daily of the promise she must keep for him. This maldestro error, unacceptable in its formation, was the suicide she’d not asked for.

Some people do not survive outside familial derivation of monogamy, a fact bunked against hypothesis producing population health risk adjustment factors. The Status Quo wet-nursed the belief anything they control is theirs and theirs only. Dearly devoted demand their possession, labeled love, wean from all others, to promptly be tethered solely and firmly to the other in a package christened commitment.

Carjone was a man of his commitments, Carjone wasn’t capable of living outside any boxes. She however, worried no reasonable thoughts after she removed the veil of misunderstanding each other. Her tether to Carjone’s did not demand passion but he worshipped her as if the ground she shat on moored the gateway to eternal youth. Materialized out of actions unmistakably natural, her pheromone ejections of interminable sums, pumped Carjone’s ego but would also that of any caught in the trajectory.

“I’ll tell you pretty baby, I don’t need to question you.”

She had not mistook his new stride, tuned to the Midwest’s old song, from a time when cowboys were more than junkies. She had not mistook the blood, red and caked, on his hands baked unmistakably against Carjone’s rage. Between his worked hands and her saliva it formed a glue, sticking to her chin as he cradled her up into his arms. Panic grasp at her expression, molding it submissively into position.

Her breathing held a steady pace, continuously, by her own demand, but she couldn’t control her heart. Palpitations un-steadied her, she grasped his arm in a natural pull at survival. Her thumb pressed against the scar he won when he tripped over her playing hide and seek under the warm vanilla sun chasing a hunter's moon. Childhood suddenly seemed far away, trembling she lost a reason for words.

“I’m not gonna hurt you, Angel.”, he whispered. She anticipated his actions would fall into that scars memory, warm as it bled back then, and perhaps he would not end her.

“In fact, I brought you a present. How do you like that?”

Her mistake inspired a killer. She caught it again in his eyes, causing her thighs to empty out an ache, collapsing her out of reality then back into it, drowning any possibility of truth beyond that her lover is dead. A certain hurt need be felt before a person can do the most amount of letting go they’re capable of. Carjone’s felt that hurt. She now felt it as hard. He half pulled her up with him, she floated on along.

He wrapped his arms around her, choking out a silence capable of healing, but a cry interrupted from over his shoulder, a sigh she didn’t recognize, breaking the domestics into a louder noise. She felt tension shatter when she found the girls face held recognition, this was the face of her lover’s daughter. “I’m not gonna hurt you, Angel. But that mistake was killer.” he grinned through his confession. He gasp at the reflection he caught in the mirror, as he turned around to leave her, as if it spoke his rhetoric, who was the most monogamous of all?

She walked backward into the bedroom closet, truth setting into her face, blood gloaming her jawline. Blood was on her hands, blood in her veins beat against her new pain. She hoped the wardrobe would swallow her into a place too dark to return from. She yearned to be forgotten, lost into the closet, passing through inanition with guilt the limbic grand finale fed through the amygdala. She sucked back her breathing and shut the door on herself, listening to her Daddy’s new lover cry.