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THE DOCKMASTER MUST NEVER SEE THIS by Claire Hopple

December 17, 2021

Gretchen starts with ditching her cell phone. She connects a landline and absconds with an old friend’s answering machine.

She receives a message from a wrong number telling her to meet at a houseboat by the river tomorrow at nine. The voice doesn’t specify whether that’s A.M. or P.M. She plays the message over and over, repulsed.

The following day, she settles on a bench beside the river. There’s only one boat. It’s docked directly in view of the casino. It’s not a houseboat. Not at all. Regardless, this must be the place.

Hampered by the stranger’s lack of specificity and not yet emboldened enough to track down her hunch, she decides that he meant nine at night, not nine in the morning like it is right now.

Gretchen doesn’t go home. She continues to sit on the bench. She stares at a patch of dormant grass and tries not to think very deeply about its symbolism.

A breeze kicks up from the water. She puts her fingers on her neck to warm them, which feels like being mean and nice to herself at the same time. Maybe she is canceling herself out.

There’s a doughnut cart over by the playground. She stands down from her station for reinforcements and fraternizes with the pigeons by feeding them crumbs.

Finally, it’s time. Gretchen enters what is meant to be the living room, bringing a wake of her own.

“The dockmaster must never see this,” a man says from the ground.

He stops blinking away the blood from a gash on his forehead.

“You’re still alive? I wasn’t sure,” Gretchen says.

“Tell it to the buoys.”

According to the vinyl beside him, he wasn't the only victim. A mangled ball python lies on torn cushions.

“Can it be cured?” he asks, gesturing to the snake but not moving very much.

She wasn’t sure if by “cured” he meant made into meat or healed. She doesn’t answer.

There are so many ways to make it clear that a visitor doesn’t belong, she thinks, and one of them is not using customary specifics when requesting said visitor in the first place, even if the message was intended for someone else. She could have arrived before it was too late. Still, she almost wishes she could decipher the architecture of helpfulness.

He looks like one giant and triumphant recessive gene lying there on the floor like that. He probably studies escape routes of public buildings.

The man keeps shouting at her, “I keep shouting at you!”

But then he reaches a more suitable volume. He volunteers that he used to be a tightrope walker.

“How did you do it?” Gretchen asks.

“I could tell you, but it’s much more interesting to learn how you do it,” he says.

His small table holds what looks like a framed portrait of a slice of rhubarb pie.

“I used to think I wanted to be inconspicuous about my work. Like the daytime moon. Now I know I’ve always yearned to be caught. I can tell you’re the same way. And yet you’ve failed me,” he says, trying to get up.

Failing people. This is the sort of thing she can do.

“I know what you’re getting at,” she says.

The man seems to already know about her. She does want to be reprimanded, but the only people who notice her are the people who don’t seem to mind.

“Look, there’s a horde of angry civilians peering in the portholes and murmuring at us right now.”

There isn’t.

“Do you want...a bandaid?” she manages. “Or an MRI?” she tries again.

A woman joins them below deck and sets down her purse. Her name tag says: LUCKY.

“That student government your son is involved with, it’s really just a puppet regime,” Lucky says.

She sits down on the flayed cushions, right on top of the snake carcass, and unties her shoes.

MEN WHO CAN’T HUNT by James Cato

December 15, 2021

Who but Leatra would sashay onto my lopsided porch late for a 6 PM appointment, her pink top with ribbons tied tight across the front. I didn’t correct her when she called me a masseuse but felt the beginnings of dislike before she lay naked with a towel slack at her hips on the table. Resisting the urge to yank her platinum braid, I ran grapeseed oil on her back in a drizzling loop.

Who but Leatra would tighten at the mention of my brother Ely. I told her how this therapy studio had been his bedroom before he vanished, before we slid posters in windshield wipers, before he was no longer considered missing. We had found and buried something. But he was not found. My body moved with my hands over her bony landmarks. The lingering spoor of Ely clung in this room on hot days like today with no AC and damp towels and blackout curtains.

Ely had been hellishly fixed on Leatra back in high school. She’d knocked him flat on his ass—in one long scroller text she stated he could not be with her, ever, he was unfit, too passive, too cockeyed, too short; he should get the notion permanently scrubbed out of his brain. I’ve often wondered if her cruel words helped punt him down his dark path. Even a big sister beer-run failed to console him. I wanted this patient of mine to make amends.

And who but Leatra would change the subject as I cleaved her spine with my hands in blades, her sweating shoulders soft as tomatoes in the oven. She described how she dated Ammon, Benny B, and Lela on and off and sometimes all at once, because, and this went unsaid, Leatra Feridun needed the affection of not one but three of the most attractive people in town. I chewed ice while I rubbed and she complained about its glacial creak against my teeth. I was attracted to her. I understood Ely’s sickness for her unflinching demands.

And she had talent as an open ear. I kneaded her trapezius which puts most patients in a trance yet she listened thoughtfully to my theory about how skin-walkers in the woods had taken Ely when he walked into the trees with dad’s gun, how once he’d disappeared box turtles started bobbling through my yard with smiley faces and stars drawn in mud on their carapaces. Even in pre-colonial times, stories of shapeshifting skin-walkers had haunted these hills and it was crazier to doubt centuries of indigenous accounts than to believe them.

I wondered: what would Ely think of Leatra undressed here in his old bedroom, speculating about his fate? I shared how the graffiti on the wildlife wasn’t the only sign of Ely’s spirit while pulling her shoulders away from each other, believing her honey skin could disguise ill will as well as any deer skull beast screaming for help in the night. Ely’s online profiles also persisted as if linked to his soul. His cell phone gathered dust and voicemails of garbled wind. I even drove by roadkill mutilated, skinned and headless.

“That’s just the men who can’t hunt,” she butted in. “They drive around and steal the antlers and hides and heads and mount them in their garages. Ammon told me. He’s a real hunter; I know because he invites me sometimes to come along and watch. I don’t mind deer or the killing of deer, but I never go.”

Just like Leatra Feridun, I thought, to not mind a thing and also not mind the killing of that thing. But there was excitement in her voice. Because maybe my brother Ely who never hurt an animal in his life really did stroll into the woods with a gun and had his essence eaten. Maybe he’d actually convinced his monster to feast on rumble strip corpses rather than stalking live victims. I noticed skin crumpled under Leatra’s ear, a scar from a bottle thrown by real hunter Ammon, gossip the whole town had heard but tuned out. I liked her more than when she first walked in. It was important to her to believe, even a little, with me.

When she left she took a fistful of mints from the bowl and I waved her croupy truck down the slithering road until it was eaten by trees in the dusk. Her face gave nothing away except a tilt toward the forest. Mosquito larvae flexed in the birdbath as if celebrating with me. I swept a flashlight across the creek-rippling reeds on the edge of the yard. The beam caught the eyes of a standing animal and I held the contact for a few seconds. Then I clicked it off, leaving the night darker than ever.

B.R. YEAGER on film with Rebecca Gransden

December 14, 2021

What film, or films, made the first deep impression on you?

The first films I truly loved were incredibly basic, because I was a kid. And I was a blockbuster kid. I was obsessed with Aliens, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, etc. And I still love those movies, even though they’ve long been replaced as my favorites. But I think the biggest mark they left on me was a love of grandiose scope and spectacle. There’s plenty to critique about those films with regard to emotional or intellectual complexity, but in terms of presenting a spectacular, grandiose vision they’re pretty impeccable. So they’re still a big inspiration—I’m often trying to marry emotional complexity and realism to a grand, mythic scale.

What films first felt transgressive to you? Do you remember being secretive about any films you watched growing up?

I’m not sure about transgressive, but the first film I encountered where I realized I was watching something supremely different was probably Welcome to the Dollhouse, which I saw not too long after it came out. I think it triggered my initial understanding of independent film, that there was such a thing as independent film, and that independent film was substantially different from what I was used to seeing. I remember thinking why does it look like that? Both the film quality and the actors—why does everyone look so fucked up? (i.e. like real people). Like I said, at the time my favorite films were the big blockbusters, so this was incredibly jarring. I kind of reeled from it at first, but it was so well done, so well-written and funny, I warmed up to it, and it’s become one of my favorites since.

There’s this film that no one has heard of that was extremely formative for me, called Slaughter of the Innocents. I first saw it on TV, late at night, when I was nine or ten. I had seen commercials for it, and knew it was about child murder, and that fact alone was so upsetting to me, but also incredibly compelling. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It felt so crazy that there was this film called Slaughter of the Innocents that revolved around child killing—I had to see what it was all about.

It centers on this FBI agent who specializes in child murders. But the twist is that he’s been training his eleven-year-old computer-whiz son to be a forensics investigator. So this eleven year old kid is helping his father solve these grisly child murders, and no one around him bats an eye—not his mother, not the other FBI agents, no one. It’s treated as though it’s the most normal thing in the world. So the whole thing feels like a goofy kids’ movie like The Goonies or Home Alone that’s been folded into this bleak film about child murder. It’s absolutely bonkers. But revisiting it now, I can see how that aspect spoke to me at such a young age. It had many of the trappings of what I loved as a child—these kid adventure movies—paired with this terrifying story that felt very real and immediate. This was 1993, so it was the tail end of the satanic panic, the height of stranger danger, and there are all these stories about child abduction and sexual abuse and murder on the news and on talk shows. Slaughter of the Innocents is full-on pulling from all these anxieties, and as a child it felt so real. Watching it now, it’s goofy and campy, but at the time it felt intensely relevant and powerful.

I’m also now able to appreciate it as an incredibly non-traditional first brush with dark and transgressive themes in art. Most people’s first exposure is something generally recognized as a classic—Silence of the Lambs or Twin Peaks or something like that. For me it was this bizarre D-list rip off of Silence of the Lambs and Twin Peaks. But unlike most D-list ‘90s films that no one has ever heard of, Slaughter of the Innocents still kind of slaps. The acting, writing and direction isn’t terrible. It has a beautiful and eerie vibe. The entire thing feels as though it exists within a world that’s ending but no one realizes it yet—and if there’s one through-line between all my books it’s my attempt at trying to capture that feeling. So despite its obscurity it had a pretty enormous impact.

Can you talk about the influence film has had on your writing?

I’m influenced by film in a fairly unique way. I’d love to know if this happens with anyone else. Essentially: I watch a lot of good stuff but I also watch a lot of garbage. Sometimes I just want sound and image in front of me, and I’m pretty easily entertained. And often I find so much inspiration in the dumbest shit. I’ll be watching something like Detective Pikachu, and there might be a little visual gag, or an offhand remark played as a joke—and I’ll think “What if we took that gag seriously, and played it out to its most logical conclusion?” That sometimes becomes the foundation for a scene, or a character, or an entire story.

Earlier this year when my wife and I were dealing with the side effects from our second vax dose, we threw on the Shrek movies. And no joke, a brief gag in Shrek 2 ended up inspiring the premise for my next novel. The novel will in no way read like something inspired by Shrek 2—it’s this quiet, mournful drama—but I’m almost completely certain that if I hadn’t been watching Shrek 2 I never would have gotten this idea.

I think the way this works is that “good” or “serious” films (however you want to qualify that) tend to be fully realized artistic visions. They’re already taking their premises seriously and playing them out to their most logical conclusions. At the same time, they’re also giving you less to build with. Like, there’s not really anything I would try to change or improve upon with something like The Piano Teacher. There could be structural elements I borrow from great art, but less so with regard to content.

But “bad” movies (or silly movies, or generally unserious movies, or lowest common denominator movies—however you want to define them) can be rich in unrealized potential. There are materials within that can be scavenged and improved upon and built into something radically different from how they were originally conceived and presented. I find that weed helps.

My friend John Trefry who runs Inside the Castle was talking about this too, that engaging with garbage forces you to bring more of yourself to the table in order to appreciate it than a classic piece of art does. It can require a more active engagement (again, weed helps). What you end up enjoying or being inspired by will inevitably be more personal, and have more to do with your own perspective rather than the creator’s.

What directors, film movements, or particular actors have been an influence?

I’m going to use John Carpenter not just because his films have had an enormous impact on me, but he also serves as a great counterexample to some stagnation I currently see within the horror genre. One thing that’s fascinating about Carpenter is that, ultimately, he wanted to make Westerns. But he didn’t have the necessary resources, so he adapted his vision into something completely new, while still holding onto that root inspiration. You can see traces of Westerns throughout his filmography, in the cinematic and narrative languages he uses, but you’d never mistake his work for John Ford’s. Most importantly, he didn’t just go and make a shoddy knock off of a John Ford film. He created something new.

Something I kind of loathe right now, specifically within the horror genre, is the overwhelming obsession with nostalgia. I see a lot of directors and writers content to ape what came before them. And I’m sure much of it is done out of genuine love (just as much of it is done as a cynical cash grab). But regardless of intention, strictly rehashing what came before leads only to stagnation. It signifies a misunderstanding of what made the films of the 70s/80s/90s/whenever special: they brought something new to the table, and reflected something about the time and culture in which they were created.

You can’t just photocopy magic and expect the outcome to be magical. You need to do something different with it; if not something new, then something personal and sincere, something beyond “I like this.” Like, I tried watching Fear Street 1994 and got maybe five minutes into it. “Oh, we’re doing Scream? We’re just going to do a bad version of Scream?” And I shut it off. I’m not interested in watching a bad version of something good that came before.

So John Carpenter’s filmography is just a persistent lesson in how you can take something old and beloved and transform it into something completely unrecognizable, yet equally as powerful.

Have you ever made a film? If so, has the process of doing that had an influence on your writing?

The past couple years I’ve been collaborating with this filmmaker Nick Verdi.

I acted in his short film Angel of the Night, and co-wrote his debut feature Cockazoid. It’s really forced me to learn how to develop and communicate my ideas in a quick and concise fashion—something I’ve never been good at. Writing obviously tends to be a solitary endeavor—you’re communicating your ideas to yourself in your head and on the page, and then you refine those ideas over an extended period of time until they’re ready for someone else to take a look. And this can take years. But filmmaking needs to be quick—especially run-and-gun, beg-borrow-steal no-budget filmmaking—so if you have an idea, you need to be able to communicate it efficiently. You can’t just wait for inspiration to come, because there's a schedule you need to adhere to. You really have to get in there and problem-solve and make shit work. So that’s been a welcome challenge. It’s forced me to learn how to refine my ideas faster.

Thinking about the places you’ve lived, are there any environments that are cinematic? Have you lived anywhere that has been regularly depicted onscreen? If so, has this had an influence on your perception of the place, or how you’ve depicted it in any of your writings?

I’ve lived in Western Massachusetts my entire life, and maybe it’s just a bias but I’ve always found the area (and New England in general) to be extremely evocative and cinematic. Funny enough, the newest season of Dexter was just shot here (including a diner that’s a two minute drive from my apartment). But yeah, I think part of it is the juxtaposition—vast woodlands and hills abutting rotting factories and strip malls. Cities built on the sides of mountains. There are these insanely wealthy towns with tiny hidden nooks where they keep all the low-income housing, far from sight. Also the architecture—some of the buildings here are hundreds of years old. Same with the cemeteries. The past and the future seem to be constantly scraping up against each other. It’s a dynamic, conflicted landscape.

Are there films you regularly return to, and do you know why?

Hands down my favorite film is Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And here everything collides: it’s a wholly unique blockbuster on a grand scale, with astounding vision and spectacle, and it’s also a little trashy. There’s really no universe where Keanu Reeves should be in this movie, but I love that performance; he fits the character better than people give him credit for. There are also parts in the later acts that kind of fall apart and make no sense, but it doesn’t really matter. It becomes part of the film's overall character. It’s gorgeous and dark and silly and bloody and horny, and there’s this powerful romantic emotion running beneath it all. The ending knocks the wind out of me, always.

I just admire the hell out of it. And it consciously represents an end of something. Coppola made it specifically because he foresaw that big-budget films that rely on elaborate costumes, sets, and practical (in-camera!) effects were on their way out. As a result, he pulled techniques from the entire history of filmmaking. It’s a culmination of the form. He believed this would be the last opportunity to make a film at this scale the traditional way. And he was right! You couldn’t make Bram Stoker’s Dracula today. And that’s terrible. What a loss.

Which of your writings would adapt most successfully to film?

I’m going to go the opposite direction and give one that I think is pretty much unfilmable: Amygdalatropolis. Content aside, the vast majority of it takes place on online imageboards, and I can’t really think of anything less cinematic than that. I know some filmmakers have done desktop films, but as far as I can tell those still primarily rely on webcam footage, and I’m honestly a bit skeptical of how much life the form has.

I’d be very curious to see how someone would interpret Negative Space. I have a very distinct vision in my head of what that would look like, but the nature of literature is that every reader creates their own vision from the text. You can never know what your story looks like inside another person’s head, so a film adaptation would be the closest you could come to actually observing that.

Can you give some film recommendations for those who have liked your writing?

River’s EdgeThe GateThe Doom GenerationBenny’s VideoKairo

TWO MICROS by Grace Q. Song

December 13, 2021

MAGICIAN’S HAT

You find an upside-down magician’s hat on a table. It’s made of velvet, smooth as moonlight between your fingers, and a stripe, broad and white, wraps around its base. No one’s around. The first thing you pull out is a wand. Next, a deck of fresh cards. Pigeons and rabbits who disappear into the dark corners of the room. These are ordinary things you’d expect to find in a magician’s hat, nothing too surprising. So, you keep pulling and pulling, magic trick after magic trick, until things finally begin. The twenty-fifth item is a red Starburst, followed by a hair tie, then a roll of peel-and-stick wallpaper, and a pack of tissues. The forty-third item is a grocery receipt, the one hundred ninety-ninth: a crumpled permission slip for an eighth-grade field trip, the five hundred seventy-sixth: a birthday card from Dave. Money comes pouring in: one-dollar bills, five-dollar bills, even a twenty-dollar bill (plus six dimes and thirty pennies). The table struggles under the weight of all these objects and you’re not even sure what number it is anymore, probably close to the thousands, but you continue. You pull postcards, letters, magazines, sheet music, instruction manuals, screws, AAA batteries, duct tape, mustard bottles, water bottles, water bottle caps, guitar picks, lottery tickets, shirt buttons, skirt buttons, friendship bracelets, hoop earrings, funky socks, plastic forks, recycled napkins, résumés, permits, credit cards, library cards, passwords, prayers, promotions, doctor appointments, apologies, manners at social gatherings, elevator conversations, sweet slices of peace—and finally, a picture of me and you.

MAP FOR A MODERN LOVE STORY

Henry and I stuck to the facts: finding out our Myers-Briggs types (he was an ENFP, I was an INTP), reading Tumblr posts of dates gone wrong, and playing The New York Times’ “36 Questions That Lead to Love.” Afterwards, it was clear that romance was disorienting and startling: a boat accidentally floating out to sea or a tiny house with just one window, and we both had to sit down for ten minutes to reel in our breaths. That night, we unrolled a large 36 by 24 inch sheet of paper on the table. With No. 2 pencils we measured distances, drew forests to explore and rivers to cross. At one point, Henry added a brown bear and then lost him on the page, but we knew he’d be roaming somewhere in the Classical Music territory. Finally, with all the STOP, YIELD, and NO LEFT TURN signs colored-in, we rolled our new plan into motion. It wasn’t easy, of course. But with a map for our expedition, we no longer found ourselves adrift, bewildered. Soon, board games stacked on top of the living room table, and we lost Scrabble tiles to the underbelly of the couch. 1000-piece puzzles framed our walls: pictures of grazing horses and secret gardens. On Sundays, Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words mused through the hallways as we completed our crossword puzzles. Our map kept growing, lengthening into a mural. We fell into a rhythm of yelling at the TV, sneezing from the dust particles, and sharing the cranky espresso machine. Just in case, we lay on a single, skinny bed. Our feet dangled over the edge, and it was a miracle our wrists didn’t brush, that our knees didn’t touch. We looked at each other in half-curiosity, half-wonder. His hair so dark, it almost seemed wet. We were happy, so one night, we ate our vitamins and danced like stupid people. It was almost a bad movie. We opened a bottle of champagne.

THE EARTHWORM by Jennifer Ritenour

December 11, 2021

Earthworm unfurls from an egg. No siblings. Only this one worm of two sexes. E wiggles in fluid and then presses herms face against the soft wall of the cocoon. A beat comes from the other side. Aware of hermself, E is now alive. E thrusts and pushes until the wall tears. Darkness, slick cool mud. The cocoon is now deflated behind herm. The lub dub, lub dub, lub dub is the pulse of Mother Earth and also the beat of herms five hearts.

Earthworm slides through the dirt. Stomach pangs. E opens herms mouth. Soil flows in and through herm. Pebbles and stones grind the rot, dead leaves, old fruit, animal bones and fungus deep beneath the trees’ roots. Out comes the castings. Earthworm feels the life sprout somewhere above herm.

E falls asleep and dreams of an Earthworm, just like herm, and there is a flash of light when they touch.

Earthworm wakes and notices a ring has formed. Inside the cocoon are nine empty eggs.

The other Earthworm, from the dream, slides up beside herm. They touch, skin to skin, and release their fluids. Their ten hearts pump in a rhythmic sway, lub dub lub dub lub dub. A shared warmth, a swirl of light, a ring.

Can it be this way, like it is right now, forever? Earthworm thinks.

I will see you again, The Other thinks, in the glow.

The Other slips away.

As Earthworm pushes forward, the eggs inside herms ring bump against each other erupting herms incubating children into giggles.

A knowing, an instinct, a flash. Earthworm could have done this with hermself. An exact copy. If E couldn’t find The Other to share the warmth, to make the light ring, then E could have given herms own fluid to herms own eggs and be born again.

But for now, herms children are not clones and they aren’t alone. They will hatch, be curious about the lub dub, the sparks of light and rushes of warmth. They will eat rocks and dead plants and help the grass grow. They will meet An Other and share fluids and leave each other or share the warmth only with themselves.

The cocoon detaches from herms body. Slides right off herm and nestles in the dirt. Earthworm rises up. There is no time left.

The breakthrough of this surface is cold and harsh. Rain droplets pelt on herms delicate skin, but the crisp air and dead moss call herm to eat. Opening herms mouth, E never tasted such mulch without the dirt and the rocks to grind it and E became fuller than ever before.

The shush of rain stops. Warmth breaks from above and beams on herms body. E stretches hermself up into the air where there is no mud or dirt. E has a strange feeling of having done this all before.

Earthworm, with herms tiny eyeless face, stares into the Sun, mouth open, and absorbs all the light, the glow.

MEPHISTOPHELES by Emily Kiernan

December 10, 2021

Judging by the state of his teeth, the vet estimated he was five years old, but Ella thought he was older than that—a persistent street-cat scrawniness, knots they could never comb out of his long, black fur. She’d had pets before, but he inspired a desperate love in her the others had not, a need to hoist him up in her arms and wrap his skinny body in hers, to protect him. The friend who had found him in the alley behind the Get Go station called him FluffFluff, but Ella had been reading Faust, and she named him Mephistopheles.

She and Alan adopted him when they first moved into the house; they were just married, in a new town far from home. Adopting Mephistopheles was another reflection of the bright sheen of their lives, their seemingly infinite expansion. In theory they were a trio, but Meph was mostly Ella’s. At night he would curl into the curve of her stomach and look at Alan like a party guest overstaying his welcome. Sometimes, when Meph followed her into the bathroom to lace himself between her legs while she peed, Alan would shake his head from the bedroom, saying, “You know that cat’s a pervert, right?”

The first sign that something was wrong appeared in late December. They’d bought Mephistopheles a plastic collar advertising pheromones the internet said would stop him from pissing on the furniture when they went out of town. The day they put it on him, he sat by the locked basement stairs, yowling as they passed, jamming his paws into the gap between door and floorboards. The house was old and creaky and seemed a little haunted—lights that flickered, strange sounds in the walls. They joked the pheromones were ghost pheromones, that Mephistopheles wanted to descend to the world below, to be with his demon family once more. It was funny, mostly, but there was something disconcerting in his glassy eyes, the weird insistence with which he wailed up at them.

“Don’t let him into the basement,” Ella said, panicked at the thought of stacked boxes and open cans of paint stripper. And something else too—she hated the basement; it gave her the feeling of a steady, malevolent gaze.

Alan slipped an arm around her waist. “I won’t,” he said. “It’s creepy as fuck down there.”

Then it was Christmas, and they marinated in eggnog and pine and the clamoring love of nieces and nephews. They didn’t think about Mephistopheles for a week, except when the pet sitter texted Ella photos, and she would pass her phone for Alan to see: Meph’s eyes glowing from underneath the bed, Meph sprawled across Ella’s pillows, Meph pressed against the basement door, staring up at the camera. On Christmas Eve they had dinner with Aunts Miriam and Sylvia, and Sylvia kept pushing the wine on them, opening new bottles and refilling their glasses without asking. Afterwards, Alan’s parents went over to the neighbors’ to meet someone’s new baby, and Ella and Alan didn’t have a condom and decided they didn’t care. She felt woozy the next morning and curled herself into an old armchair as they opened presents, feeling like everyone knew.

Every night after they held whispered conferences in the dark of his childhood bedroom, wondering at themselves—measuring their recklessness and their capacity for its consequences.

“How bad would it be?” she said. “We’ve kept Meph alive.”

She could feel Alan’s gaze—the flat smile that said he was deciding how seriously to take her. They’d had this conversation before: bad genes or climate change or the state of public education in this country. Always they agreed in the end, and always the questions sprouted back like plucked hairs.

“I don’t think it’s the right time,” he said. “Look at this world. You think it’s crying out for new life to be added to the pile?”

She closed her eyes and imagined something bright and bursting within her. “Isn’t it always?” she said.

When they got home—nearly midnight, lugging bags, an open tupperware of cookies in Ella’s hand—Mephistopheles was lying like a ragdoll on the sofa, half-fallen into the crack between the cushions. Ella sat beside him, shaking her hand against his side.

“You sleeping, Meph?” she said, hearing the edge in her voice: he’d been too still. He cracked an eye, extended a paw. Working her hand down into the scruffy mane around his neck, Ella felt the pheromone collar, pocked and scarred from where he’d scratched it with his claws. She undid the strap and handed it to Alan. “I think this worked too well,” she said. “He seems really stoned.”

They went to bed, agreeing that whatever had been in the collar would work its way out of his system overnight. Meph did not follow them up the stairs to their bedroom. They heard him jump down from the couch and take a few steps into the hallway, stopping at the cellar and mewing against the closed door.

The next weeks turned icy, a wintery claustrophobia settling over the house. Before, Meph had liked to sit in Ella’s green armchair while she worked, batting her hands for attention, but now he stayed downstairs all day, interrupting his naps only at Ella’s worried insistence. She and Alan conferred over him in hushed voices, like he was a sick baby they didn’t want to wake. Alan said cats slept seventeen hours a day, but Ella knew that something wasn’t right, though neither, she had to admit, did anything seem precisely wrong. He ate his food and used his litter box. He purred when they pet him. Still, every morning she stumbled out of bed and searched for him, half convinced she would find him stiff.

“Maybe he’s dehydrated,” Alan said. It was past midnight—Ella had woken him with her tossing, stomach cramped with worry. “I think cats are prone to that. Take him to the vet tomorrow, they’ll pump him full of fluids. He’ll be fine.”

The vet was closed the next day, so Ella went to Costco and bought a thirty-two pack of wet cat food. She bought a package of pregnancy tests too, and thought it was a funny thing to buy in bulk—how many could she need? But that night, when she pulled one from its pink packaging and held it below the stream of her pee, no lines appeared. Two lines meant pregnant, one line meant not, and no lines meant, she supposed, that she did not really exist, that she was a specter drifting through her house and her body and her days.

When she googled the brand of the test, she found they’d had a few bad batches—she should throw the whole box away. Instead she pushed it to the back of her underwear drawer and covered it with black tights with runs in their thighs. She thought of Alan whispering to her in bed, “It’s not a good deal. We have great lives, why bargain that away?”

“We’d get something in return,” she’d told him. “We’d love it.” But he’d rolled onto his side and stared out the bedroom window at the cop cars flashing their lights along the street.

“Anything you love you can lose,” he’d said. “Don’t bet your heart on anything alive.”

She mixed the cat food with two tablespoons of water and put it on the floor. When Meph did not get up, she brought it over to where he was pressed into the arm of the couch and held it beneath his nose. He took one bite, another. She sat beside him, wiping up the slurry when he pushed drops onto the upholstery. He ate half the can, then began to spasm and gurgle like he was having a hairball. Ella stroked along his stomach until he was quiet again.

In the morning she took Mephistopheles to the vet, and Alan went to the airport. He would be away for two weeks, attending a string of dubiously important meetings. Ella didn’t want him to go and was surprised by her own neediness. She invented worries about the weather, about planes sliding off ice-slick runways, but he only smiled and kissed her goodbye.

At the veterinarian's office, Mephistopheles jumped down from the table and roamed around the exam room, mewling out his indignation. The vet looked at his teeth and eyes, up his nose, cooing to him as she did. She stuck a cotton swab into his ear, and it came away black with something that looked like spring mud or coffee grounds. “He’s got a little infection,” she said. “Pretty common in Persians.” She took his temperature, and her expression changed. She squinted at Mephistopheles as if he’d admitted to something.

“That’s much too high,” she said, and Ella felt her pulse flutter.

They were sent home with antibiotics and instructions to call back right away if he got worse. Ella lay beside him on the couch, stroking along the spine that seemed harder against her palm than it used to. From somewhere above them came the heavy clatter of footsteps—or, Ella reminded herself, something that sounded like footsteps. Hot water moving through the radiators, the floorboards contracting in dry, winter air. Ella wondered if anyone had ever died in the house. She wondered if there were bodies buried in the basement. Perhaps that’s what she felt down there, those angry, forgotten eyes raking her back as she bent to take laundry from the machine. But the rest of the house felt different, animated by some other force; three times in the first month they’d lived there, she’d dreamed of a woman in the attic, pacing the floor with a baby in her arms. The baby was skinny and sick and wailing, and when the woman turned her face, it was frantic, wisps of hair caught in the corners of her mouth.

Above Ella, the footsteps stopped, started again. She got up and went to the basement stairs to check the lock. Meph followed her, stumbling a few steps sideways. He looked at the closed door, then up at her face.

That night Ella carried Mephistopheles into bed with her, and he allowed himself to be arranged, stretched out in Alan’s spot like a miniature replacement. Her stomach felt unsettled, and when she closed her eyes it was worse, like the bed was a ship at sea. She drifted to sleep only to wake with a start, reaching out to feel the unmoving form beside her, unable to close her eyes until she was sure she felt his breath beneath her hand. Sometime after midnight, she began to hear the footsteps again, coming from the attic or the slope of the roof, quick, tapping strides above her head. The pipes, she told herself, repeating it in the darkness. The pipes, the pipes, the pipes.

Alan called midmorning, and Ella told him about the footsteps in the attic.

“Probably just squirrels,” he said.

“Squirrels,” she repeated, staring down into a bowl of cereal she had poured for herself and no longer wanted. “How would it be squirrels?”

The line crackled. His voice was breathy and thin, like he was shouting to her over a far distance.

“...get out of the cold,” he was saying. “Living in the ceiling.”

She picked up a spoon and swirled it through the flakes in her bowl, extracting a chunk of freeze-dried strawberry and cracking it between her teeth. “It didn’t sound like squirrels,” she said.

By Friday the bedroom smelled of death. It must have been squirrels after all, Ella decided, sniffing the air and imagining the odor like a cartoon hand, beckoning her to its source. A squirrel with a woman’s exhausted footfalls had crawled into the ceiling and died. Mephistopheles hid under the bed most of the day, except when she dragged him out by his back legs to give him his medicine, which he accepted with an eerie calm. She’d taken him back to the vet when he seemed to be growing only stranger and more distant. They’d given her an additional antibiotic and some ear drops and told her to come back if he stopped eating. But he was still eating. He wasn’t standing up more than twice a day, and he wasn’t playing with her shoe laces as she tied them, and he wasn’t purring when she pushed her fingers into his thick fur. But he was eating.

She had thought they might keep him at the veterinary office, observe him or give him an IV or, she didn’t know what—take it out of her hands. She had not realized she’d wanted this until the vet tech had given her a bottle of medicine and started explaining the dosage, and she’d felt her stomach drop. She knew it was an awful thing to wish for. She ought to want him close, to coddle and mother him. But wouldn’t it be better if he was with someone who loved him less? Someone who would see him for what he was rather than getting lost in the anxious pauses between his breaths? Isn’t that the problem with love, and the price of it?

She woke to the sound of footsteps. She sat up in the bed, staring at the ceiling as if to look through it, but seeing only the cracks in the plaster and the ways they seemed to shift in the darkness. The smell was stronger than it had been before—not rotting away but rotting into the structure of the house.

“Hello?” she called out, and thought she heard the slightest pause in the movement, a second’s hesitation before the next foot fell. Beside her, she could see the glow of Mephistopheles’ eyes, watching the same spot as her own.

On the phone with Alan, she felt maudlin, her heart racing for no reason she could name.

“What if I can’t make him better?” she asked. “What if I give up?”

Two a.m. or maybe three. She sat in the green armchair in the attic with Meph sleeping on her lap. Sometime after midnight, he’d begun twitching—weird, spasmodic jerks of his neck, his tongue darting out against his cheek, then back into the dark hole of his mouth. She hadn’t known what to do, and so had picked him up and carried him, shushing and soothing. When he’d finally calmed, they’d been in the attic, and so she’d stayed there, letting him rest. She spoke aloud, not to him. She said, “Did you wish he would die? Did you wish he would hurry up and die already?” The noises seemed to be coming from the roof now, or maybe from somewhere far below.

A lump formed in the skin behind his left ear. At first she only noticed it when she massaged both sides of his head at once, carefully comparing the rigid structures of bone and the soft spaces between. She closed her eyes to make the differences clearer. By the next day, she could see it easily, a red bulge the size of an apricot.

She took another test from the box, and this time it did not tell her she was a ghost. Two pink slashes appeared before she’d even moved the stick to the sink for the three-minute wait. The thing she felt was neither surprise nor its opposite, but something akin to ceremony, the awful sanctity of weddings and funerals and sacrifices of virgins in flowing white gowns. All the ways one might know love and lose oneself to it. Afterwards, Mephistopheles jumped up on the bed beside her and butted his head against her stomach, and for a moment she thought, maybe.

The sound of footsteps again, and Mephistopheles crying. The footsteps louder than they had ever been, an angry rat-a-tat, a struggle or a dance or an endless cycle of anxious pacing—steps and steps and steps leading nowhere. Pipes, she told herself, squirrels, but the words were meaningless, empty sounds. She tried to think of Alan’s voice or the weight of him in the bed beside her, but the memory felt distant and sleep-blurred. The noise Mephistopheles was making sounded strangled now, wan. When she reached out for him, she found that he was wet, a viscous liquid soaked through his fur. She leapt for the light and saw the sheets covered with blood, thick red streaks from his head to his front legs, yellow pus hanging in tendrils from his whiskers. The thing on his neck had opened. He was whining low in his throat, a noise that rose and fell like breath.

She gathered him in her arms, letting the soak spread onto her shirt and sink to the skin of her chest. She was rushing with him—where? Down the stairs in the dim light of the bedroom, half-running, stumbling onto the landing. In the front hall, she set him down by the basement stairs. He went quiet, staring at her with eyes that caught the scraps of streetlight coming through the front window. The house was silent now; her fingernails jittered against the door as she twisted the lock.

Her voice sounded desperate and strained in the quiet. “I did everything I could to care for you.”

She pulled open the door. For a moment he sat there, still and watching her. Then Mephistopheles stood without swaying for the first time in weeks, and walked through the door. From the darkness below, she heard his voice, a small, inquiring note chirping up to her. And after a moment, she stepped through to follow him.

ON THE TOILET MAKING UNWINNABLE DEALS WITH GOD by Garth Miró

December 9, 2021

“I’ll be right there!” I called out to my girlfriend.

I’d just stuck my cooking-oil-lubed arm halfway up my asshole when her friends arrived for lunch. Someone’s birthday. Heard them out there, smiling, kissing one another. There was clinking and keys and hellos and I was supremely fucked.

When you smoke a lot of heroin you get really constipated. When you get really constipated you sometimes get impacted. Then you’re an animal.

I was sweating. I jammed my arm up further, and really, it was probably only my hand, but I heard something rip. No. There was no turning back. I’d quit heroin, that’s what I told my girlfriend, so I needed to finish and get out there and host this thing without shit and blood all over myself. Hello! Yes, welcome. Oh this? On my shoulder? No, I think it’s a leaf or something. No! Don’t touch it! Couldn’t have some such slip-up happen. Needed to finish ass-spelunking and clean up. So I could serve them little foods on little comfortable plates. I didn’t know how I’d endure such a truce because I hated food right now, what it’d done to me, and it didn’t deserve plates. It wasn’t my fault that I’d used again. It was the food. I’d been in here for thirty minutes, digging out what seemed like endless buckets of super dense onyx stones, scooping and slopping them down the toilet. Why! I made my hand into a tiny shovel. It smelled ten times worse than normal. This shit that wasn’t quite shit yet.

I heard a knock on the bathroom door, a light tap.

“Seriously,” my girlfriend whispered. “Come out. What are you even doing? Better not be what I think. We talked. It’s rude. I’ll open some wine, but you need to be nice and come out.”

“Everything’s fine! Everything’s fine!” I said, probably much too loud and maniacally happy. A bad performance and I was woozy.

I was getting very weak. It takes a lot out of you: the position of hovering with your legs spread wide open, hunched just right above the toilet. Impacted bowels were rotten vicious bitches. It was so bloody. It was war.

This was becoming an unpardonable lifestyle. This sneaking. Everything behind bathroom doors. The hateful putrid secrets just behind where people smiled and clinked, and it was a pit, my life. Out there were normal people, shine spilling out their heads. And maybe I belonged in here with the shit.

“What’s he doing?” I heard someone say.

“Oh, you know, when he’s….” My girlfriend said something I couldn’t quite pick up, but I could tell she was doing that thing with her hair she did when nervous.

I sucked in some air. This was it. I was going to have to dig my way out the trenches. I swore to God I’d never smoke heroin again. I made all the unwinnable deals. I’d be good. If He just let me get out of this without ripping myself in two. All this blood. Was I going to be OK? God? I promised it was no more cigarettes or buying contraptions off TV, kitchen gadgets I never used, that were cheap, that required great human suffering to produce. I’d take my Suboxone and shut up. I’d tuck in my shirt. Go straight. Be good to Michelle. She put up with so much. All my drugs. The tinfoil everywhere. The tinfoil with slick black tears that slid down past all my hells. The hell I had as a kid, being touched. The hair on his arms like the hair on my arms now, up my ass, up my ass also then. I was an animal eating myself, or pulling myself out my own uterus, giving birth to myself. That’s what it felt like.

My girlfriend knocked again, harder, louder. “What the fuck, hurry up! What the fuck is going on?”

“I think I have a problem,” I said.

SWEET GIRL by Regina Caggiano

December 8, 2021

The difference between her and me is that only one of us is sweet. 

There may be other variables at work but none of them weigh nearly so much. I have learned this in a month and a half of living beside her blue bedroom. Case A: she is always walking around the house in ball-busting heels. Case B: when cooking for guests she is undaunted by expiration dates. What she wants and what she does are often in 1:1 ratio and she will always tell you the necessary truth, but no more. When we go out to neon bars she is not worried by the way her body escapes her. She is never concerned about untethering from the cord of herself while in line for the women’s bathroom. But in the morning she loves a woman who grinds coffee beans for a living and is bitter about it, and so there is always a fresh brew waiting for her on the stove. In the night I am sometimes taking home a boy with overlong hair. He spends one afternoon under the gun of our living room. She tells him that the way his hair hangs across his eyes has him looking like he is seven years old, he turns red and itchy in response to this. They are my words coming from her mouth.

To be sweet is to be willing to fall away.

She has poured herself into me in the nights beneath the skylight stars, we stay up suckling ethanol and vinegar on a sunbleached couch in the living room and together we find the root. Root: to be sweet is to be Mother. To have Mother so deep in your bones, you must’ve grown up with a good one, she says. We decide, always with a never-mother she had no chance at ever being anything but a taste that smarts the tongue.

Mother in the right way exists for me and no one else. Her body and her mouth are mine. I have seen the way I guzzle her wholly. I have seen the mirror of her marked on me, the way I once paid little mind to the exchange of things and the sake of balance. It is the cyclical nature of matter that you cannot take without losing. But being close to Mother and the creamy blanket of her arms is worth whatever infusions may take place at the site of skin contact while I am sleeping against her heart. 

To fall away is to be Mother.

(If) the doctrine of motherhood is self-effacement (then) the doctrine of loving a boy with child’s hair is supply and dependence. I will be his need-it-in-the-nighttime until he weeps no more, until he cannot sleep without a lock of me fingered between him. He refuses all haircuts and when he asks what must be changed and the answer is nothing, because, like all beings that emerge from you, he is perfect. Here is where it all comes together: a convergence between two moons.

To be Mother is to share a body.

Some women hold stars at the site of their never-home hearts. Some women circle each other as celestial bodies do, on a long long string with nothing in between. Sometimes their orbits are impenetrable. Two sad looking drunk girls are beholden to no one and may accomplish anything in the way of persuasion, and through this route hold the power to take over the world (given). 

(Hypothesis) she and I wear black boots at night but for him I will always be sweet. In the bedroom beside hers I crave and unfurl myself into his relief. I make whispers that he stretches into one dimension while he sleeps. I say, with all his infinite strength, he cleaves the universe in two when he turns over on the sheets. I make him fall in love this way, I knead the skin raw, he becomes new again. A boy in love is small and will fold easily against your heart. I hold him until our bodies are the same shape. We are both my creation.

THE HUMMING MAN by Rachel Laverdiere

December 6, 2021

I know better than risking the mall, the Salvation Army Santa’s bucket near the bus stop, but they’ve got a two-for-one on frozen pizzas at the E-Z-Mart, and I’ve been craving pepperoni all week.

Santa’s jingling coins follow me into the store, but I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams…blares overhead and soon enough I join the long line of paunchy, middle-aged men and wonder how many have a Christine who left when the ruts cratered.

I unzip my parka, press the frozen pizzas against my cheek and try to figure out what’s making the hum I’m thankful for because it distracts me from the sound that drove Christine away, the slot machines throbbing in my temple.

One day she went to her mother’s and never came back, claimed the rows of rolled quarters and dimes I hid in the sock drawer suffocated her, six of which, through the pocket of my sweats, I press into my thigh.

The man ahead of me unwinding his scarf, tugs the toque from his bald head, and the hum becomes a buzz.

He turns to me, points to his ear, says, “The buzzing bothering you? Just trying to relieve the tinnitus.”

My eyes must plead “yes” because he replaces the toque and the buzz fades to a hum, but then my slots go wild.

I spot the humming man near the Salvation Army Santa, get in line next to him and count change for the bus.

He smiles and says, “Money concerns, hey?”

I raise my eyebrows. “You can hear my sound?”

“Clanking coins. Sort of like a slot machine. Just like you’re picking up on my skeeter.” He points at his ear.

Tears sting the back of my nose—Christine thought I was crazy, the doctor said it was stress, but this stranger hears it too.

He leans towards me, pulls off the toque and says, “Go ahead. Take a closer look.”

A tiny mosquito is poised at the entrance to his ear. “Is it real?”

He chuckles .“Tattoo—she did a great job inking.”

Coins cascade like a waterfall.

He winks. “Best investment I’ve ever made. Not sure how it works, but this skeeter releases some of the noise from inside my head.” He hands me a business card, says, “Tell her Frank sent you for noise relief.” He puts his toque back on. “Far as I can figure, it’s people like us who hear noises in our heads who’s sensitive to the sounds in others’ heads. Right now, your coins are driving me mad!”

As the bus pulls up, he waves farewell, tosses his bus fare into Santa’s bucket and laughs when the slot machine strikes a jackpot.

On the bus, I doodle a stack of coins on the back of Jaina’s Tattoo Parlour. Instead of ignoring the ticking clock, I try to pinpoint the toque that muffles it.

THE TREES by Melissa Reddish

December 5, 2021

One of my crushes, a male professor with whom I work, is texting one of my other crushes, a second male professor with whom I work. The first one never speaks above a whisper and the second one has bushy eyebrows I’d like to grind between my molars. They are texting each other snide comments about my taste in fashion and music. At least, that is what I assume. Sometimes I imagine laying with each of them, but we keep our clothes on. Sometimes I imagine coating each of them in polystyrene to keep them from shedding their beauty like silk.

The first male professor has climbed to the top of a very tall tree. It is one of the ancient pine trees that has been cut down to make way for progress. He is scanning the horizon, his hand shielding his eyes. I wish he were scanning the horizon for me, but I’m standing at the base of the tree, chucking peanut shells at our feet, so there’s no chance of that. Once I have amassed enough peanut shells, I will step into my final form as the saggy, baggy elephant, and my disappearance will be complete.

Meanwhile, the second male professor, the lesser of my two crushes, has begun his final lecture to a hall full of ants. That’s what he calls the kids these days. Of course, they’re not really kids but women in their fifties who are waiting for the second male professor’s unparalleled knowledge of modernism to transform them. Some of them get a little antsy and clip a lock of his hair when he isn’t looking, which is often, because the second male professor rarely makes eye contact. One of them has gathered a jar of her own urine and is waiting for the full moon so she can do something witchy with it. Another has lined the classroom with funhouse mirrors so that no matter which way the second male professor looks, he will see her. All of them are vibrating to the second male professor’s solipsistic frequency. The frequency cannot be found on a radio, but if it could, it would be a twelve-minute guitar solo by Buckethead.

The second male professor has left the hall, even though there is still an hour left. I think about finishing the lecture for him. After all, it is on Virginia Woolf, and I am a bit of an expert, having once dreamt a sexy all-female version of The Waves back in grad school. Each line of dialogue was nothing but vocal fry. But the second I walk into the room, the women in their fifties hiss and wrap their ill-fitting cardigans around themselves. They have taken each silken thread of the second male professor’s narrative, the secret one that laments the male pattern baldness that runs in his family, and woven it into a chrysalis the size of a small mangrove.

Even though my salary is based on my accomplishments and not my hopes and dreams, I stay with the chrysalises. I feel a kind of tenderness to them, and by that, I mean the pull of a future both terrifying and tidal. It is the same feeling as watching a small child order the wrong flavor of ice cream, like mango. Nobody likes mango. I try to name the women in their fifties: there is Helen and Miriam and Peaches and Cushion. They don’t respond to these names, but they don’t seem to hate them, either. For once, nobody has mentioned the way my lips pucker inward or the way my laugh sounds like butt cheeks slapping together. I think maybe this is love. I think maybe I don’t need the crushes after all.

The women in their fifties have no natural enemies except time and a general malaise that sets in around the eyes and hips. I can’t protect them against either, but I can spray each chrysalis with a fine mist and rub it clean. Each one is as shiny as an oil spill.

Days pass. Weeks. The carapaces are beautifully structured things, the outside a smooth poly-cotton blend. By contrast, I seem to be diminishing. Every day my skin sags and I keep losing chunks of my foundation. If only my crushes could see me now, I think as I cough up phlegm the color of interrupted sex. Sometimes I try to climb atop a chrysalis so it can cocoon me in its amniotic comforts, but the chrysalises are too busy to notice me. Always the bridesmaid, I chuckle as I wipe away my own viscous trail.

Soon, men in blue jumpsuits begin to wheel the desks away. I try to find my authoritative teacher voice. Excuse me, but class is still in session. One man grunts, a second one shrugs. A third hands me a paper the shape of a tombstone as he wheels the entire teacher station out the door.

We are deeply apologetic

for the unfortunate role

the institution has played.

Deepest condolences go

out to the families affected.

No refunds will be provided

at this time. –Admin

After the men leave, nothing is left but a patch of dry grass, the chrysalises, and me. A better woman would leave since I’m definitely not getting paid anymore. Of course, I haven’t gotten paid for years since the money has been deposited directly in an offshore account and the remainder rounded up for charity.

Perhaps at this point, you are expecting a beautiful transformation, a metaphor that will gather the latent power of Mother Earth in one final burst of florescent magnificence. But all that happens is I gather the chrysalises, which have begun to rot, into the hollow of an old oak tree. Here, in this fungal gloom, I can finally let my hair down. The women in their fifties (who are breaking down into the most delicious slurry) tell me it reminds them of their youth. I shouldn’t change a thing.