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ASSASSIN by Colleen Rothman
November 1, 2018
Between bites of avocado toast, I tell her first. She sucks her breath and smacks the table, rustling the ridiculous pussy bow on her polka-dot blouse. Despite her vow not to cry, mascara clumps her lashes in betrayal. It must not be the waterproof kind I talked her into during our last mall pilgrimage. Better than sex, the glistening pink tube bragged, as though it knew something we didn’t.
She asks what’s on my bucket list. Watching The Bucket List, I tell her. I’m on my third Bellini. She asks whether they have Make-A-Wish for grownups. Yeah, why should sad little kids have all the fun? She asks what I want to do, as though I have a choice in the matter. All I want to do is to sit in this chair, so that’s what I’m doing until I don’t feel like doing that anymore. As long as I sit here, we’re just two basic bitches brunching on a three-season patio. She asks how Dan is handling it. I tell her he’s golfing. I figure I’ll fill him in eventually. I haven’t known him as long.
The sprouted-grain toast forms a gummy bolus in the back of my mouth as she scolds me for not understanding marriage. Paul would be furious if she withheld such information, she says. Of course he’d be furious. He rants about the N.S.A. archiving his emails to anyone who’ll listen, while making no secret of reading his wife’s. You know there’s no escaping a man like Paul.
I swallow hard and shout over the nearby bus, beeping as it kneels, that I haven’t told Dan yet because he’d tell the kids—who, at six and three, can’t quite grasp the bitter karma of Mommy having slept around before she met Daddy. Without looking, I can feel the faces of the diamond-draped biddies at the adjacent table swivel in our direction, then turn away, newly quiet. We have an audience.
“Oh, god. The kids,” she says. Sometimes she forgets they exist. She never asks to see pictures. It used to bother me.
We chew in silence and watch a police cruiser sail past without a siren. My tongue glides over the slimy chia seed embedded in the molar I chipped last year, a casualty of grinding. I don’t want a warm-up, but I let the waitress fill the mug anyway.
Shit or get off the pot, something in me blurts, letting my tongue find the words. “If I got a wish, it would be to wake up next to Ben one more time.” Saying it out loud is easier than I’d expected, though harder than the other thing. Saying it out loud means admitting I’ve been lying to her for years.
“Christ. That’s still happening?” Her face has the serial monogamist’s mask of pity, like it did those mornings I’d stumble home to our three-flat wearing the previous night’s bandage dress. I’d make her swear not to judge me as I peeled off that fetid layer of skank and crawled under her comforter, my hair reeking of smoke from some 4 a.m. bar. I preferred to sleep off my mistakes while spooning her in a Blackhawks jersey from some forgotten boyfriend as she thumbed through a gossip rag. I would have been content to hang out there forever, but then came Paul. “He’s in private equity,” she gushed as she packed her share of our belongings and moved to a neighborhood by the lake that I still can’t afford.
“Only every few months,” I say. “Trade shows, mostly.” A hidden perk of work travel. My editor sent me to trend-scout at the Fancy Food Show, where I sampled Ben’s artisanal marshmallows. Days later, I could still taste the fine dusting of his sugar on my lips from our glancing connection. I pictured him toiling on his Vermont farm: kind brown eyes behind clear plastic frames, cuffed denim revealing inked forearms, leather apron. I contacted him for a follow-up interview for an article I only pretended to write. Our first emails were professional, until I sent him my number one evening, after an accidental bottle of rosé. Now we text photos, though never anything that would appear explicit: artfully plated charcuterie, his pug Belinda in dog booties, elaborate knots. A safe escape from the life I hadn’t known I’d need to escape from.
I haven’t told him yet, either, in case you’re wondering.
She crosses her arms and tells me it’s a terrible wish, that a genie would scold me for being a ho-bag. “Not to mention the kids,” she says.
“Exactly,” I say. “I’d prefer not to mention them.” I promise her I’ll come clean, right after I tell Dan about my chitchat with my obie-gynie to discuss the biopsy results. I hear I get a free pass on everything that comes after. Though, frankly, I’d rather wipe my phone on my deathbed and croak while Dan still thinks I’m a saint.
The waitress reaches under the propane heater’s canopy to flick it on, blasting my face with an uncomfortable warmth as the lecture continues. “I can’t believe you held this for a week. I’d be texting you before I left the doctor’s office.” She’s right. We took personality tests once, while job-searching. Her suggested careers were for people-people: gallery assistant, art teacher, hairstylist. I gawked at her soft skills in envy; my results included pilot and assassin. I still owe her for those months of our rent from the gap between her landing a dream job as a floral designer and when I started writing news briefs for a trade publication devoted to food service equipment. There’s something catchy for my tombstone—Here lies an expert on stainless steel.
“I’ve been busy—working on my bucket list,” I say. Time to find the little girl’s room. I stand and toss my wadded napkin on the table. A yellow ginkgo leaf spirals down into my empty chair, where it fans out comfortably, as though I were never there.
Nineteen-dollar cocktails mean that each toilet gets its own walk-in closet, adorned with throwback peony wallpaper and a heavy door that locks with a thud. I try to summon a shit, but nothing comes, a waste of the soundproofing behind the wainscoted walls. Instead, I break the seal, thinking as I do every time of when I first learned of this concept: that night we got giggly on the loose Zimas I’d smuggled in my kitty-cat backpack as we watched a group of New Trier boys play GoldenEye.
I hold my hands under the waterfall faucet until my fingertips go numb, then splash my face, leaving cakey smears of foundation on a rolled washcloth that smells like gardenias. In the gilded mirror, my face looks like raw pork tenderloin. My handbag holds emergency makeup, but what’s the point. She’s seen every worst part of me, and she’s still here.
From the lounge-stall, I taunt Ben: I think I’ll be a little tied up when you come next weekend. Instantly, a gray bubble materializes—a screen shot of a Burlington Bowline. One of the safest ones to use, it leaves behind no suggestion on the skin that a rope was ever there. My lips curl upward into something that almost feels like a smile.
I aim the dirty washcloth toward a homely wicker basket that looks out of place, but I miss the shot by a foot. I don’t bother to pick it up. If you tip north of twenty percent, you can get away with anything.
At the table, her phone is on her ear. She’s frowning. Our eyes lock as I brush more fallen leaves from my chair. She thrusts the phone at me. Her screen, larger than mine, feels heavy in my palm, like an old rotary. “It’s Dan,” she says. “He’s between holes. He knows you have something to tell him.”
I stare at the mug’s steam, still rising, and spit the loosened chia seed into the faux-dish-towel napkin, faint streaks of last year’s lipstick shade staining its striped border. I’d always thought she was someone who knew the shortest path to destroy me but would never take it. Here I’d mapped it out for her and loaded her with ammunition. So much for asking her to do the eulogy.
TALONS by Ran Walker
October 31, 2018
Her story went like this: When she was three years old, she was playing with her brother in the backyard, when an enormous hawk swooped down, latched on to her, and lifted her from the ground. The only thing that stopped her from being carried away was her brother grabbing hold of her legs and snatching her from the bird’s grasp. The only evidence the incident had even occurred were the parallel, permanent scars left on her shoulders.
We had been dating for a month before she told me that story. I smiled and tried to play it off, but the whole thing disturbed me. For some reason I just couldn’t shake the notion that my girlfriend was almost prey, that she could have been pecked to death by birds, her flesh stripped slowly from her small body.
The idea haunted me, even as we made love that first time. I could feel the slight raise of her skin when I scooped my hands around her shoulders and pulled her closer. Once I felt her scars, I was unable to remove my hands.
Each time we were intimate I’d rest my hands on those scars, sometimes imagining wings were beginning to sprout from them.
One night I awakened to find her straddling me, the darkness masking my ability to see clearly. I reached for her shoulders, but she eased my hands away. She made love to me, her hands gripping my arms like talons, pinning me in place. When she climaxed, I swore I could see wings unfurling from her shoulders against the night.
Not long after that, I realized I was not cut out for a relationship with her. Much of our relationship had been spent in the dark, and while I was unsure if what I thought I had seen was true, I could never overcome my fear she would one day clamp onto me and carry me off, somewhere deep into the night, where I would be devoured by a family of hawks, not unlike those who awaited her many years ago, my skin pecked from my body strip by strip.
AND THEY WERE ASHAMED by Paul Corman-Roberts
October 30, 2018
Uncle Draco the dragon rolled on down from the star pool to get a gander at his brother Joe’s fancy new terrarium and visit with all his nieces and nephews so freely frolicking, feasting and fucking among the shimmering foliage of their world without a care or concern as to how or why they should be so lucky to do so.
After a week had passed, Uncle Draco quietly led the kids to the grove of apple trees, which Papa Joe hadn’t really mentioned anything about other than to say it was still “under construction” and therefore “off limits.” Uncle Draco pulled down two apples; one red and one blue. He presented both of them to his nieces and nephews, and said:
“Your Father hasn’t explained to all of you that the world is bigger than just this garden you live in. And why should you wonder at why the world is a bigger place when your bellies are always full, when your thirst is always quenched by the dizzying ambrosia that pours from the fountains your father built for you, when sleep is always warm, and there are always arms to hold you when you fall?
But all is not as it seems, for being here, I have seen those times when your beautiful bodies stand, nay strain; against the boundary which your father told you not to cross. I have seen many of you staring at the harvests of the forbidden forests while you thoughtlessly explore and caress each other’s Chakric coils.
And why shouldn’t you know the taste of the Earth’s pungent sweet? Why shouldn’t you come to know all the strange wonders which inhabit the whole of the world of which your terrarium, in which you are essentially well fed slaves, is but a small portion?
So here, as your uncle who loves you as much if not more than your father, I give you this choice: feast upon the blue apple, and you shall never have to wonder again what lies beyond the terrarium and you shall spend the rest of all existence in the only perpetual dream you have ever known.
Or instead feast from the red apple and you will find the knowledge which will allow you all to reach beyond the terrarium; that will allow you all to undertake the glorious adventure of your freedom.”
Uncle Draco was so warm and charming and generous with his offer, that all Papa Joe’s beautiful children feasted on all the red apples on all the red apple trees in the terrarium and it was as great and golden and orgiastic a feast as had ever occurred in this dimension; a cornucopia of sticky sweet amber juices flowing down beautifully curved bodies; soft pillows of rich light condensed into flesh melting among a sudden convulsion of savagely gnashing teeth, biting, touching, hitting, caressing, copulating and consuming until satiated, and afterwards while lying together in a great, huddled, post-coital mass, knowledge came to the children of Papa Joe, and in turn, they were able to see everything their father had been able to see the whole time, and they knew he had lied to them.
With this realization everything the children had ever known began to transform. The colorful fruits throughout the terrarium were suddenly overtaken by molds and fungi. The trees petrified and crumbled to dust before their eyes. For the first time in their lives, air pressure driven wind poured into their realm, building into a screeching howl that caused the tree dust to obscure the light. In this wind, other foliage began to writhe and dance like serpents in perfect time with the whipping back and forth of Uncle Draco’s tail, while the fountains of ambrosia became vats of distilled sludge.
Day became night. Four enormous walls of pitch darkness surrounded the children in their new found freedom, and with that dark came a condensation and chill that brought a new, excruciating agony that pushed out from within their hearts, as well as crushed their spirits from without by the great twin weights of carbon and gravity, suffocating them between icy jagged sheets of loneliness.
Thick blankets of frozen existential doom covered the children. From each and every one of their newly formed orfici their rose a great keening wail, slowly at first, but building gradually louder and louder until the sound became its own screeching, hollow gale of black, the wind that fills the passages between this world and the underworld.
When Papa Joe finally woke from his nap, he discovered this horrific dissonance; found his precious creation had mutated beyond his control, and this sent him into such a despairing rage, that he lashed out at his children and sent them all packing to a permanent time-out in the desert world beyond the ruined terrarium. And for this, they were ashamed and have remained so ever since.
Then Papa Joe looked at his brother, cut his legs out from under him, so that he would never look so charming and handsome again without the stigmata of his belly betraying his worldliness. Then Papa Joe said to Draco: “get the fuck out.”
Draco laughed as he slithered out the door, but not before hearing his brother moaning “why? WHY?” to which Draco paused, looked back over what used to be his shoulder and said “shoulda paid me my money bitch.”
THE FORMER DANCER’S HUSBAND by Cathy Ulrich
October 29, 2018
This man who’s in love with you, he’s married. You play in the symphony orchestra together. He’s a second violin. You play the oboe. What he likes best about you, he says, is the purse of your lips when you play. He is sharp elbows, good posture, freckling of gray hair at his temples. His hands are very soft with you.
His wife used to be a dancer when they met. She doesn’t dance anymore.
You know how it is, says the married man. How there were things you used to do and now you don’t, you know how it is.
I love you, he said once, tipping your head up, kissing you on the chin. Looked at your face. I love you.
Thank you, you said.
You saw the brief flicker of his face. You can’t remember the last time you wanted something.
He spoke to you the first time after a concert, said something clever about Chopin. You thought it was charming, how his flirtations all involved dead composers, how his fingers trembled when your hands brushed.
You meet the married man for furtive dinners at an Italian restaurant on the outskirts of town. You always order the lasagna, pick at your salad, let him select the wine. You sit across from him, generic strings playing on the speakers overhead, reapply your lipstick after you’ve shared breadsticks, liking the way he watches the color spread across your mouth.
Did I smear any?
He says: I can’t tell.
He says: Let me get closer. Leans across the table, wipes at your lower lip with his fluttering thumb.
There? you say.
There, he says.
This is what he tells his wife that nights he meets you: rehearsal ran late. You don’t know if she believes him, don’t care if she does. You would like to have known her when she still danced, would like to have watched her onstage, legs shuddering with effort, beautiful. You wonder what he loved about her then, cleft of her knee, pigeon-toed walk, tendril of hair escaping a ballerina’s bun.
Do you love playing the violin? you ask him.
He tilts his head. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t.
You nod, dab at the corner of your mouth with your napkin.
You love the oboe, of course, he says.
Of course, you say, flick your eyes to one side.
You always get to the restaurant early. There is something romantic about the waiting, you think, in a restaurant you don’t like, for the man who loves you. The hostess is always the same hostess. She knows your face, knows your table. Doesn’t offer you a menu anymore, doesn’t make small talk. You like that about her, and the way, once, you found her in one of the bathroom stalls, tissue wadded in her hands, balanced on the lip of the toilet, crying.
Sorry, she said, sorry, I’m sorry, so sorry.
You didn’t think her apology was for you, pulled the stall door closed on her. Left before it came open again, relieved yourself in the men’s room, one finger tracing graffiti on the wall, for a good time, call, wondered if it was the hostess’s number.
When you met the married man again the next week, neither you nor the hostess mentioned it. She didn’t even blink, just took you back to your regular table, poured two glasses of water.
Have a good dinner, she said like she always did.
You never finish your lasagna, let the waiter take it away with the remains of your salad. They used to box it up, but you left the box behind, again and again. The waiter smiles blandly when you order your lasagna and side salad. The married man is always trying new things, always offering to split dessert.
What’s the special? he asks, selects a wine that pairs well. You leave traces of your lipstick on the rim of your glass, rub at it with the broad part of your thumb until your skin is stained too.
When dinner is over, you let the married man walk you to your car, let him put his arm round your waist.
You say: Dance with me.
Above you, the moon is half hidden by clouds, and you think how much larger it is, really, than it seems, and how hard it is to believe that anyone has ever touched it.
You say again: Dance with me, and the man who loves you pulls you close to him, desperately, you think, the way your oboe teacher used to kiss you, sways you back and forth to the sound of music playing from your car radio.
The lights go off in the Italian restaurant; you have the parking lot to yourselves.
You’re a terrible dancer, you say, keep your voice kind. How can your wife stand it?
The married man stiffens, tries to smile.
I guess, he says, she can’t.
The hostess comes out the side door, a bag of garbage in her hand. You smile to her, tiny cat-smile, and let the married man tilt your head up, run his mouth along your throat. You stare up at the moon until you hear the latching of the restaurant door.
ABANDONED TOYS ‘R’ US LOVE STORY/ABANDONED SPORTS WORLD LOVE STORY by Jordan Hayward
October 24, 2018
abandoned toys 'r' us love story
stone cold steve austin sits unaccompanied by a military grade transport vehicle, unflinching in someone’s captured breath, hidden amongst a dark spot on a crowded aisle, watchful and waiting beneath elsa’s hollow glare and woeful pale complexion.
piped music aches in surges from corners and unmarked spaces in the ceiling, whispering ‘so many times’ or ‘say you were the only / toy for me’ underneath ruptured squeezes from a presumably cheap keyboard. aisles creak with age, while skateboards precariously occupy spaces in plain view. the ghost walks with a wry shuffle from sports to outdoor. nerf guns remain unloaded and boxed, resting as an implication. a singular basketball hoop gathers dust, unswished.
small animals infiltrate daily, badgers and cockroaches and spiders and eels and mice and foxes, each looking for their next meal, or action figures, or a crib for a small child.
the ghost wanders at a speed that allows his bed-sheet attire to drift cautiously behind him, almost summery in its airiness, bright and filled with an inherent grieving, from his deathly birth to the point at which he approaches a small wooden cabin, sugary and juvenile with its caricature architecture. he crouches down at the plastic green entranceway, and raps his knuckles across it, polite even in haunting.
is there anybody in there? he asks, hoping.
abandoned sports world love story
and from a small hole that a hungry and ponderous fox had made in the far left hand side wall by the car seats and baby clothes, permeating into the sports world next door, a wilted and frail voice makes its way through the air, in a pink and hazy way, lifted by suspicion and communal yearning, navigable in expectation, crossing paths with words like adidas, and drifts softly into the other side, where it reaches a small wooden cabin.
you sound like a ghost, the voice offers.
and the ghost stands up.
captain america sits still nearby, with a stern, discerning look on his face.
friction buzzes within the ghost, as he shuffles mournfully towards the car seats and baby clothes, in search of the voice.
he approaches, hesitant, a fearsome anticipation akin to some desire to stroke a particularly endearing grizzly bear, and brings his face up to the small hole in the large wall.
oh, you are a ghost. wow, i’m getting good at this. wow, replies the voice, gruff and ashen. what’s your name?
the ghost thinks for a second, and then for a few seconds more, before looking down at himself, then through himself, into the walls and shelves behind him, wide and towering, filled to capacity with beautiful things, named things, all staring outwards with a consummate sheen.
what would you name me? the ghost asks. if you had to?
A WANTED WOMAN by Paul Beckman
October 23, 2018
I told him not to call anymore so he started sending me postcards. I had my lawyer tell his lawyer onay on the postcards or any mail. Then the texts started. This time we went to court and the judge gave him a restraining order and we left figuring that was that and no more and good riddance to bad rubbish but the planes started flying low and slow pulling messages—I Love U— I Miss U, etc.
So it was back to court and the judge threatened him good and added planes to the list and threw in drones for good measure. Hot air balloons. We can’t think of everything so I hear what would have been our song blasting. At Last by Etta James over and over and over and I stood on my deck holding my cell phone up so he waved goodbye only to show up in the balloon the next day when I was sunbathing in the yard and no music but he started dropping leaflets until my yard was covered and yes they all said the same thing—Marry Me—I love you.
So the next day back in court and the judge takes a shotgun out from under his desk and hands it to me. He tells me I can shoot the balloon down. So the balloon is out of the picture and he’s gone to ground and I ask around if anyone has seen my Maid of Honor and the looks and coughs and subject changes come out and one day I get a wedding invitation to their wedding and no I’m not going and no I’m not pissed at Sally but I’m not going because I’m afraid these two have cooked up a surprise wedding for me and I don’t want to have to use that shotgun.
I AM SPACE MAN by Amanda Tu
October 21, 2018
I used to think my greatest challenge as a writer was identifying, in the most precise possible terms, how I feel. Most of the time, though, I know what I feel. This is palpable when I am stricken by an emotion I’ve lived through before. No matter how traumatic the sensation—the icy terror of being found cheating on a sixth grade reading quiz calling to mind the chilling shame three years earlier when my dad caught me illicitly scratching off a lottery ticket—there is comfort in believing that feelings are drawn from a massive, but ultimately finite, palette.
Perhaps the challenge, then, is not in the knowing, but in the writing. Language is not what is, but rather a tool for communicating such. It is tempting to conflate the two, I believe, because language is often the most convenient, universal, and expedient channel through which to express our realities. We are instructed as toddlers to “use our words.” My two-year-old sister is learning how to talk, and my stepmom says this all the time. Use your words. Words are helpful for expressing one’s most granular desires. I want milk. Put me down. Where is Mom? But when my sister cries, when she fills our house with these awful, pathetic screams for hours on end, I can’t help but think: is there anything more true than this? How could “I want milk” possibly encompass the depth and scope of what she so desperately seeks to convey?
There is what is and there is what is articulated, and these are two discrete entities unbound by physical phenomena. The best we can hope is to craft the latter to be as faithful as possible a facsimile of the former, approaching asymptotically the trueness of the matter that lives itself in a plane independent of language. This is why I am driven so mad by cliché. Because to be trite is to use a crutch, to say the thing that is almost true, to gesture toward the approximate and beg your audience to fill in the gaps from their lived experience, instead of immersing them—with atomic focus—in yours. To do the bare minimum. Ball’s in your court. The most insidious form of laziness. You know what I mean? Cliché is the reason I can be a vocal participant in math class all quarter and still earn a failing grade. When called on, I can always explain the procedure: well enough to appease my professor, not well enough to solve a single problem.
This failure of precision is reinforced by the way most of us learn English in grade school. First we cover the basics: phonics, spelling, punctuation, grammar. Only when we have mastered fundamentals do we move on to fun stuff. A simile is a comparison using ‘like’ or ‘as.’ In tenth grade English class, I once had a test over all these literary devices, maybe eighty or so. I sat in the library one day after school, drafting up a thick deck of flashcards: Metonymy. Synecdoche. Asyndeton. When I actually sat for the quiz, I was disappointed to see that it was just one big matching exercise. I had studied way too hard. That exam was as easy as stealing candy from a baby.
The very framing of these tools as “devices” implies they are window dressing. You don’t say: “her eyes are beautiful,” because, my teacher told us, that is boring. Try instead: “Her eyes shine like diamonds.” Points for style. We internalize the notion that the world is simple, and, I guess, to keep morale high, we must invent creative ways to describe the basic phenomena of our existences. This—I have come to believe—is backward. Perhaps it is the universe that is more complex than we could ever begin to communicate with symbols on a page. That the most artful, vivid, evocative poetry is, in fact, the simplest thing we could conceive.
I know what it feels like to be in love, I am so confident I know. I know how it felt the first time I told my first boyfriend “I love you,” my whole body pressed up against him in the grass, my lips firm against his neck. I know how my whole being tingled electric, every cubic inch of me, how I wanted to cry. I know how right it felt, saying it again and again. I couldn’t fathom anything else: I love you. I love you. I love you.
But even that seems unfinished. Tingled electric. What an impossibly insignificant phrase. In attempting to write this paragraph, I have contemplated electricity and fire and flora and oceans, the very biggest and the very smallest. I don’t feel insufficient so much as I feel incorrect. I have made an error. In describing how deeply I felt for him, I have told a lie. I might as well be recounting the relationship of two strangers.
And even this: love. Who taught me that this word is that feeling? Maybe the birds and the bees talk should always include this critical clause. That every parent in the universe should have to sit his child down and tell her: one day, you will meet a person who makes you feel as if there is a current running through the deepest part of your being, the strongest possible force your body can withstand before splintering into a thousand bits. And you should say: Love! And they will know what you mean.
The night before my nineteenth birthday, I had a dream so juvenilely transparent in its symbolisms it is nearly too embarrassing to recount. As in most dreams, the logic of its universe was tenuous and inconsistent: rigidly committed to certain physical principles with zero regard for others. I was traversing what I can only describe as a parking garage with a hollow core, of infinite height and devoid of gravity. I could send myself accelerating upward through the building with the slightest push off the floor. Sometimes, though, without understanding how I had gotten there, I would end up standing on solid ground. It looked like the interior of an office, maybe, or an old library.
As I explored the levels of this structure, I kept running into people I knew. My ex-boyfriend was there, inexplicably, irritating me over something I can’t recall but perceived with sharp awareness nonetheless. I bumped into a guy who had run and lost for student body president at my college, whose face I’d seen on a poster outside my dorm every day for two straight weeks. He was smiling, but for some reason he was wearing an awful chartreuse velvet sweater I’d paid twenty dollars for the month before. That sweater had been final sale, and I had regretted the purchase since the second I’d left the store.
A few family members filtered through the loose outlines of the narrative. This included my dad. In real life, Dad and I barely spoken in months. We had not had a falling out, but rather an awkward, glacial drifting apart. I knew, deep down, he loved me, but I don’t think he liked me very much. I spent a significant chunk of my dream working on something for my dad. I can’t recall what. I remember he was disappointed in me: not for what I was doing, but for trying at all. As if any measures I took to appease him just made him more upset. I kept circling this building, floating up and down, and every once in a while crossing his path. He never confronted me, but I could tell he was not happy with me, and I was not happy with him. This all felt so familiar.
I could not explain why, but eventually, I was stricken with the knowledge it was time for me to leave. I drifted back down to the bottom of the building, planted my feet on the cement floor, and walked over to say goodbye to my family. My dad wrapped me in a tight hug. I couldn’t tell you a single detail of what he looked like, but he was there, I know for sure. I loved him so much. He was so far away; I missed him. I started weeping, and I felt my face grow damp. I cupped his chin with one of my hands. I told him: “I am space man. You are earth man.” Dad looked at me, deep into my eyes, and he nodded. He understood. He let me go.
And then I pulled away from him, and I leapt upward with the tiniest exertion, ascending into the abyss headfirst. My eyes were blissfully shut and my limbs elongated to full, graceful length like a free diver gliding through water, floating to the surface. I was off to somewhere, alone.
I awoke, then, in that moment, soaring high above the ground. I touched my cheeks, and they were slick with tears. It was my birthday. I am space man. You are earth man. How special it is, to finally say what you mean.
JUST MARRIED ON BRIGHTON PIER by Tomas Marcantonio
October 19, 2018
The two women with blood sprinklers in their eyes stood at the railings and looked down at the water. It churned about like great whips of cream under a lazy spoon, throwing petulant fountains of oyster salt over the groynes. Foam bubbled at the shore when it came in with the morning tide and seagulls barked at the brooding ceiling of grey. The flags along the pier whipped against their poles with heavy slaps.
'The doughnuts are smaller than they used to be,' Poppy said. She brushed the sugar from her fingers and fished the pebble from her pocket, a souvenir from the night before. It felt dry between her forefinger and thumb, like the rub of a tongue against a brick wall. 'Oh, God. Betsy.'
A woman wearing a pink meringue for a dress was walking barefoot along the beach, lipstick-pink heels in one hand. One of the straps of her dress was halfway down her arm but the white sash was still tied over one shoulder. Her cheeks were purple pomegranates, clashing with the pink of her dress and the orange knit-bundle of her hair.
'God, I hope she didn't sleep on the beach,' Poppy said. 'Let's—'
'I can't face anyone yet,' Marie said.
A seagull came into landing on the dome behind them and war-cried, its gullet throbbing with undulating golf balls. The other gulls joined the chorus of laughing madness and swept low over the pier, looking for smash-and-grabs.
'Listen, Marie, it happens all the time. No one's going to say anything. Dave probably did the same thing on his stag—'
Poppy's words dropped between them like ducks shot from the sky. Marie removed her elbows from the railings and followed the boardwalk out to sea. She watched her feet, heard their rhythmic clapping against the wood. She watched the zoetrope of water in the recesses between the boards, washing up against the iron pilings below. The rank rot of tequila still lined her throat and she tasted it on her tongue.
'You're not thinking of telling him, are you?' Poppy asked.
Marie walked on, past the kiosks selling joyous Saturday rock and oversized rainbow dummies and fish and chips and crepes. She leaned up against the face-in-the-hole photo board and doubled over. Poppy opened the paper bag of doughnuts and held it out under Marie's mouth like a horse's feedbag, wincing as it filled up.
Marie straightened up and wiped the back of her hand across her lips. She looked at the picture on the board, of the bride and groom riding off together, their faces missing; through them she saw only the sea, bleak and rusted green, frothing all the way to France.
MARBLES by Bram Riddlebarger
October 18, 2018
"Sit down and take a load off," said Jack.
"We've been working like the queen's bees."
"Yeah," said Tommy.
He was tired.
"Which one did you go out on today, Tommy? I thought I saw that #4 sagging a little."
Jack wasn't joking.
Tommy was real fat.
He was tired, too.
"No," said Tommy. "I stayed on shore and flirted with that cute little Amy. The one with only one eye. Besides that, she's real cute."
"Are you shitting me?"
"Nope," said Tommy.
They drank warm beer out of brown bottles.
Jack couldn't believe this Tommy.
"Hitting on the ladies, huh?" said Jack.
"You know, I'd watch out for that one-eyed . . . "
But that was as far as Tommy would let Jack go.
He let Jack have it with some real dialogue.
"Now, hold on there, Jack," said Tommy.
"Just watch your mouth about the one-eyed women.
Amy seems okay."
"Okay?" said Jack.
"Have you lost your marbles? Or did this one-eyed Amy eat ‘em already?"
Jack was a mean-spirited man.
He had watched Amy switch around in the office at the building beside the water many times himself.
He had wondered what it would be like to be with a one-eyed woman.
Tommy said, "Yeah. She ate them."
"What?"
"She ate them."
"What?"
"She ate them."
Jack emptied his brown bottle of beer.
He looked at Tommy.
He squinted at Tommy with one eye closed.
And he knew that they weren't there anymore.
Poor guy, he thought.
No marbles.
Jack stood up to get another warm bottle of beer.
Tommy said,
“We both got something missing now."