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BIRTHDAY PRESENTS by Gary Fincke

March 7, 2022

Sixth: Her Reborn Baby Doll

Her promised sister, it wasn’t, but her mother had selected the model featuring the optional beating heart and carried the gift-wrapped baby home bundled in a blanket as if sleet had begun to slant from a terrible sky. “What will you name her?” her mother said.

“Bernadine,” the girl whispered, knowing not to say Darla, as she felt the doll’s heart pulse against her body. As soon as she kissed its face, she packed away her other dolls like winter clothes. But one morning, only four months later, when she pressed her ear on Bernadine’s small chest, she heard silence. Her mother said, “Even these babies have a spring that can stick.” The girl placed her fingers upon Bernadine’s wrist, listening to its small, demanding quiet. She didn’t cry until her mother left the room.

 

Seventh: Chatty Cathy

First, perfectly timed, Cathy said, “Now you have a friend.” For a week, the girl loved pulling Cathy’s string to hear “I love you.” When her new school was lonely and scary, Cathy, as if she knew, told her, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Sometimes, though, the girl had to tug the string ten times to hear Cathy tell her what she needed to hear. Sometimes more. One evening she wouldn’t say, “I love you.” Instead, four times in a row, she said, “Take me with you.” The girl pulled harder, but Cathy kept whining. She pulled so hard that Cathy, at last, wouldn’t talk. Like she wasn’t her friend after all. Like she never would be again.

 

Eighth: Wedding Day Midge

“Barbie’s friend, Midge Hadley, is getting married,” her mother said. The girl marched Midge down an aisle she made of a wide white ribbon. All of her old dolls sat on either side and stared like they were jealous. None of them had ever had a special day. The girl didn’t have any boy dolls, but she could imagine who would marry Midge, a boy who was taller and had the same smile, a boy who stood as straight as Midge with hair so much the same texture that he looked as if he might be her brother.

 

Ninth: Happy Family Midge

Happy Family Midge had such a fat belly that the girl barely recognized her. “Midge has been married a while,” her mother said. “She’s in the family way.”

The girl said nothing. She stared at Midge’s swollen plastic belly until her mother tapped it and said “Pull.” When the girl tugged, the belly lifted off in her hand and she found a baby curled in Midge’s plastic womb. “Now you can dress her,” her mother said. “See, there are things for your new sweetheart to wear.”

As the girl unwrapped those tiny clothes, her mother handed her a second box. “Now there’s a husband who won’t leave,” she said. “Now there will be two children because there’s an older brother named Ryan.”

 

Tenth: Her Breastfeeding Doll…

The package had one large-print sentence: “Because you shouldn’t have to wait until you have breasts before you start breastfeeding.” After the girl read it twice, she asked her mother to leave. “Of course,” her mother said, and the girl cuddled her child to her skinny chest. She examined herself in her mirror. She guided the small mouth to each nipple as if her breasts would bloom. At last, she lifted the flowered bra from the box and strapped it on. Two of those flowers would welcome that baby to suck, its mouth fitted perfectly as a lesson. She waited to sense her child’s hunger. There were fierce secrets that mothers knew. Lips and hands will want you. Tongues and teeth. She pressed her baby to a flower.

 

Eleventh: Her Look-Alike Doll

After her mother selected the photo most flattering to form the doll’s pliant face, the girl recognized her infant self. She gazed at that familiar baby, its small, resilient body. All night, as she slept with herself, she dreamt of shrinking. She asked to be photographed. She asked again, and among those faces, she looked for the one that would always best fit the body she was terrified to lose. One morning she crawled inside the closet where everything too small to wear was stored. She whimpered with her forgotten voice, stuffed two fingers into her mouth and sucked on those toys to keep from screaming.

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OUTING by Serkan Görkemli

March 4, 2022

By the time I show up for our weekly outing on Thursday evening, my friend Yaprak has already ordered the first bottle of red wine. We’re meeting on the patio of Büyük Truva Oteli, one of the oldest and most expensive hotels on the shore of the Dardanelles in downtown Çanakkale in northwestern Turkey.

She beckons me with her left hand to our quiet corner. Her right hand puts out one of the many cigarettes she has already smoked. The night is young, and I’ve brought two packs of Camels just in case. I’m a little late, and I already know what she’ll say. 

“Enis, where the fuck have you been, you ibne?” she says and laughs.

Yaprak’s the only one who can call me a fag. The only one I’d let. 

“Didn’t you have enough of your new boyfriend’s dick yet?” she whispers. Her whispering is another person’s talking. 

I look around to see if anyone has heard her. I’ve tried telling her not to be so loud when she says such things, to no avail. 

“Have you had enough of Mehmet’s yet?” I ask.

I’ve been dating my boyfriend for only two months. She and Mehmet have been together for almost six months now. 

“Well, his, yes. Dick in general, hell no,” she says and shakes an empty plastic bottle at the waiter for more water. 

A few mezes—feta cheese, shepherd’s salad, stuffed grape leaves and pepper, moussaka, and sautéed liver—are laid out on the table for our all-night noshing. She pours wine into my glass and drops the bottle into an ice bucket, which is sweating rivulets that seep into the white tablecloth. In the July heat, we like even our red wine cold.

“Trouble in paradise?”

“No, it’s just… Things change, you know.”

She’s being vague, but I get it. We’re both forty-five and have yet to settle down. Neither of us remembers how many men have passed through our lives, she as a two-time divorcee who dates to find her next husband and me as a gey man who can only date because I cannot get married. Yet our hearts, encrusted with heartbreak, both real and imagined, still have room for a teenager’s excitement about a new beginning and a mid-lifer’s hope that it’ll be different this time.

“Siktir et, let’s drink to boyfriends past and present,” she says. 

Yaprak’s cursing like a sailor contrasts with her rather delicate name, which means “leaf.” She’s been like that since we first met in high school, except now she has the life experience to back it up. She’s the only child of one of Çanakkale’s most prominent families—her father is the head of the Chamber of Commerce and her mother’s a lawyer—and she’s an accomplished architect who is not beholden to anyone, so she can speak her mind. She’s what my guy friends and I call taşaklı kadın, a woman with balls. 

I laugh and raise my glass, “To boyfriends. May we never run out of them.”

“Amin,” she says, gulps down the last of her wine, and immediately sips from her water. “Drink, drink, drink,” she says, gesturing to my sweating glass of water, and gets up. “I’ve got to pee.” 

We’ll be prodding one another like loving yet annoying mothers throughout the night to drink plenty of water amid the summer heat to avoid a massive hangover in the morning. 

This restaurant is one of the best places in Çanakkale to view the sunset. I take it all in: couples strolling arm-in-arm, parents dragging behind kids preoccupied with Maraș ice cream in one hand and trailing a balloon from the other, and groups of young men smoking or roughhousing on the promenade of the Dardanelles. 

Further down the promenade on our side of the strait, the fake behemoth of a Trojan horse built for the Hollywood movie broods as it towers over those strolling by. Hard to believe that Brad Pitt hid in it, and that it came all the way from America. The historic site of Troy is about a half-hour car ride from the city center. Naturally, the downtown Büyük Truva Oteli we’re drinking at tonight is pompously named after it: The Big Troy Hotel. Cheap plaster reliefs depicting war scenes with soldiers, horses, and chariots adorn the inside of the building. Ah, the star-crossed lovers: Paris who abducted Helen, “the face that launched a thousand ships,” and Achilles—Brad Pitt—and his male companion Patroclus—Garrett … Somebody. And the carnage and the heartbreak that ensued. I’ve seen the film in English with Turkish subtitles.

My gaze shifts to the clientele populating the nearby tables in the garden restaurant: businessmen in suits probably discussing the vagaries of the economy; their sun-kissed wives or mistresses with perfectly coiffed hair and revealing blouses debating the merits of the dishes and the drinks they ordered; and foreign tourists in T-shirts and jeans imbibing rakı, indulging in mezes, and taking selfies in the waning sunlight. I wonder if there are any gey men in the crowd. Occasional eye contact might offer a clue, but I can’t be sure or take the risk of finding out. I’d check Hornet, the gey dating app popular since Turkey’s Grindr ban a few years ago, on my iPhone, but I’ve promised Yaprak, and myself, to give my current boyfriend a serious shot, so I squash the urge by emptying my wine glass and taking a long drag on my cigarette. The combination of smoke, wine, and heat makes my head spin, so I hydrate. Yaprak would approve.

#

“Allah’ım, we didn’t even say a proper merhaba! How boy-crazy are we? Come, give me a hug!”

As we embrace, her low-cut orange summer dress, printed with red hibiscuses, shimmers in the sun. She’s wearing Ambre Solaire bronzing sunblock with coconut oil. Her hair is in a ponytail, the sides of her head wetted with water to cool down and keep stray hairs in place. And of course, her sunglasses are glued to her face, never to come off until after sunset in the summer. Like she always says, she’s a woman of a certain age, so she needs to take care of her skin, especially around the eyes.

“You look great and smell delicious,” I say. 

“Thank you. So do you. I like that baby beard you got going,” she says as she runs her index finger down the side of my face. “How’re things? How’re you?”

“Iyiyim, I just moved to my new office at school, and started reading up on policies and protocols. Necessary evil.”

“Oh yes, Mr. Vice Principal. Congrats again! Çin çin.” 

We clink and drink to my promotion one more time. 

“How do you like it so far?”

“It’s nice. Bigger office with a better view of the schoolyard. It’s quiet at the moment, and I’m excited about not teaching. But it’ll be crazy soon enough—I need to handle detentions and more parents, of course.”

“Ah, parents are the worst,” she says and laughs.

“I wish all parents were like you, canım. How’s Jale?” 

Jale, her fourteen-year-old daughter and only child, who attends the middle school where I work, came out as lesbian a few weeks ago.

“She’s good. We’re learning new things every day.”

“Like what?”

“Vocabulary, people, questions. All of it.”

“Care to elaborate?” I light a cigarette and pass it to her. I light another for myself.

“Thanks, şeker.” She takes a long drag and exhales sideways before she speaks. “She’s been staying up late and reading stuff online.”

I raise my eyebrows.

“It’s not what you think. I’m not spying on her. She told me herself.”

“Okay, what did she tell you about?”

“Well, words. Lots of them. When we were growing up, it was just heteroseksüel, transseksüel, and homoseksüel. Now, it’s panseksüel, nabinary, baç. Who knows how many more—fuck, I feel like I’m being dragged under by a riptide of words.”

“Umm, yeah, I know some of those words. And don’t forget biseksüel.” 

“Of course. How could I? When Jale first came out, I thought she was confused or biseksüel—I mean she’s so young, how could she know for sure?”

“Yes, I remember that. You hoped so, so that she’d have a way out.” 

She purses her lips. I can’t see her eyes behind her shades. 

“You know I accept my child and will support her no matter what. I just want her to be happy.”

“I know, I know,” I say, “I’ll drink to that.” We drink again. “So, what else have you learned about?”

“One day, I’m a heteroseksüel, and the next day, I’m a sapioseksüel. Who knew?”

“What?”

“See, even you don’t know it. And you call yourself gey!”

“Shall I return my gey card, Madam?”

“It means I’m attracted to intelligence.”

“Not to worry then. You’re still heterosexual.” 

She gives me the middle finger and continues, “It’s true. I’ve only married and slept with intelligent guys. Et kafalılar turn me off.” 

“What about Mehmet?” 

Her boyfriend didn’t go to college.

“Come on, Enis, there’re plenty of meatheads with college degrees.”

“True. Ah, the meatheads, they don’t get enough credit either way. They may not be marriage material, but they have a different set of skills. Maybe you shouldn’t date to marry for a change?”

“The old me would say I’m too old for that shit, but the new me screams who the hell knows!?”

“I like the new you.” I raise my glass, and we drink the remaining wine in our glasses. 

She refills us and smokes. She leaves her cigarette in her mouth, wrinkling her nose and squinting from the smoke as she says, “I mean how do I know I’m heteroseksüel? I might be biseksüel. I’ve married both guys I fell in love with, as soon as they reciprocated. Maybe I’ve never met the right woman.”

“Well, it’s not that changeable. I can tell you that. You’d know by now, even if you’ve never slept with a woman.” 

“How’re you so sure? Is there a test or something that I’m not aware of?”

“Yes, it’s called the head-turn test. For me, it’s always been about who makes my head turn on the street. That’s always been guys. Even when I was in denial.”

“What’s your type, again? I forgot how you put it.”

“Broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped guys get me going.” 

“So, a model. Every man’s dream, gey or straight. How original.”

I poke my tongue at her. 

“How can you be so sure? You haven’t always been with such guys.”

“My point exactly. Where’re they now?”

She stops for a moment. More wine. “Fine. What do you think about panseksüellik?”

“What’s that?”

“Your gey card, please, Beyefendi?” She extends her hand, palm up. 

I pretend to get it from my wallet and hand it to her. She throws my imaginary gey card over her shoulder toward a table of all-male bankers behind her. The waiter had forgotten to remove the Rezervasyon: Akbank sign from the table. One of them looks our way. Did my card hit him?

“Bullseye. I think the cute, tall guy at the table behind you caught it.” 

She turns around to look before I tell her not to. She turns back and licks her lips.

“Ahem. Now that my uninformed gayness is out of the way, let me guess: Panseksüel means someone who likes everyone?”

She giggles. “Let me educate you, Mr. Vice Principal. One of Jale’s friends is panseksüel and loves a house. Jale just told me.” 

“What? You mean like getting off at the thought of a beautiful villa or something?”

“Yes.”

“You’re joking!”

“No, I’m not. Jale has a lot of LeGeBeTe friends, and she told me that one of them is a panseksüel in that way.”

“Uh, that’d be a fetish. I think they’re making a fool out of you.”

“Who’s being narrow-minded now?” She crosses her arms and raises an eyebrow.

I don’t respond immediately. I top off our glasses and empty the bottle. She looks around for the waiter and flags him.  

I’m amused and surprised by her confusion. How could an intelligent person who draws plans for the interior of high-rise buildings all over the world for an American firm be so confused about matters of sexuality? Is she, or are we, already drunk? My mind drifts to the world outside Çanakkale; on the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall in America, Onur Yürüyüşü, the Pride Parade, is banned in Ankara, Istanbul, Izmir, Antalya, and Mersin. My Twitter feed tells me that even in America, ignorant homofobikler are in power. Yaprak is certainly more open-minded than my parents, who’ve known about me for more than a decade now. What’s the big deal if she’s a little confused—and drunk at the moment? I decide to go with the flow and not irritate her further. I make a mental note to look up panseksüellik later. 

“Tamam, I promise to be more open-minded if I can get my gey card back.”

“You’ll get it in the mail in seven to ten business days. Call 1-800-031-6969 to activate when you receive it.” 

“Teşekkürler, Madam. What other words have you learned?”

“Nabinary,” she says timidly.

“Not male or female?” 

“Yes. This is the one that bothers me the most. Jale says that maybe she is nabinary.”

“So what?”

“If she’s not a man or a woman, what is she?”

“Nabinary. You need to free your mind.” I can’t help it. 

She grabs the bottle from the metal bucket with a clang, jostling some ice water onto the table, and fills our glasses to the brim. She puts it back with another clang, splashing more water. She takes off her sunglasses and puts them in front of her. The sun has yet to fully set. 

“Please no joking. This one hurts my heart.” She puts her hand on her bosom and tears up. “We can say ‘nabinary’ back and forth between us, but the world is cruel, and I want my child to be happy.” She dabs her eyes with her pink cloth napkin. 

“I’m sorry,” I say and hold her free hand. “You’ve been a great mother—a Gezi Park annesi. You went all the way to Istanbul for the protests. You’ve made yourself an activist. How many women are there like you in this country?”

“Please don’t call me a Gezi annesi. It reminds me of mothers whose children have been injured with tear gas canisters and plastic bullets. Or even killed. And it’s gotten worse.”

“Fine, but Jale is lucky to have a mom who accepts and loves her.”

“I don’t know how to protect her. She wants to go to the unofficial Onur Yürüyüșü gathering in Izmir or Istanbul next year. I could take her, but the thought of her experiencing gas and bullets during her first parade kills me.” 

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t go until you feel it’s safe.” 

She sighs. “But really, when is it going to be safe?”

“I don’t know, but things will probably get worse before they get better.”

“That’s what I was thinking, too.” 

“You’ve got to tell her that.”

“I agree, but just the fact that I need to tell her that hurts.” 

“Maalesef.” I get up, pull my chair next to hers, and sit, putting my arm around her. “I mean what I said: You’re doing a lot just by being there for Jale. In the few weeks since she came out, you’ve come a long way, light years farther than my parents, who keep quiet and act like everything is the same.” I look away to quell the ache stirring in my chest. “All you can do is be there for her and let her find her own way. Like we all had to do. You can’t control the world.”

She nods and kisses me on the cheek. I give her a hug before returning to my side of the table, and propose a toast, “To mothers like you.” 

“To friends like you,” she says and drinks. “While we’re on the subject, Jale has been chatting with Aslı, this older girl, online.” 

“How much older?”

“Jale says she’s sixteen. And she wants to meet her. Enis, you should talk to Jale.” 

“What about?”

“Well, you’re a normal gey, not like my friend Tamer from college.”

“Normal gey?” I scoff. “What’s wrong with Tamer?”

“Nothing, really, he’s just very flamboyant and sleeps around. As if that’s his life’s goal. You know the type. I want Jale to have a more wholesome influence in her life. Not become a barfly.”

“Well, I was once like him. Is that how you thought about me then?”

“Come on, you and Tamer are not the same.”

“Her neyse.” There are more important matters than Tamer. “As I told you before, Jale shouldn’t know about me yet.”

“About that,” she says and simpers.

“You told her, didn’t you?”

“I had to. And she was so excited about it. If you were in my shoes, you would want her to have someone to talk to, wouldn’t you?” 

I can’t believe she played the mother card. I take a deep breath, rub my face with both hands as if it’s the end of a prayer, and exhale. I finish off what remains of yet another glass of wine despite a sudden wave of nausea. 

My head spins as I stumble toward the men’s room inside the hotel. I realize the sun has fully set. The night is upon us, and the darkness that drapes the Dardanelles in the distance makes it look like it’s been snatched away, leaving an abyss in its place.

#

As I squeeze out the last few drops of urine, I smolder at Yaprak’s reckless behavior. I zip up, wash my hands, and check my hair. I have a short haircut that butches me up. Summer freckles on my face. I see a fledgling pimple on the side of my head. How did I miss it? I feel a pinprick of pain as I squeeze it. It’s now a puffy pink spot. I splash my face with cool water. 

As I’m about to leave the restroom, one of the Akbank men enters. He looks at me. I nod. He doesn’t nod back. Does he know about me? Did he hear us talk? I pull down the collar of my T-shirt with my index finger. The sun might be out for the night, but it’s still hot. 

When I step back outdoors, I feel all eyes are on me. I walk through the flotsam of tables carefully to avoid stumbling and drawing more attention to myself. Yaprak is laughing and gesturing as she chats with the tall businessman from the Akbank table. Has she told him about me? I get why her chatting with random men bothers her boyfriend Mehmet. They stop talking, and she turns back to our table just before I arrive. 

“Are you alright? You seem flushed. Drink water.”

“Is it that obvious? I just popped a pimple.” 

“Iğrenç,” she winces.

“I’ll tell you what’s gross. Your outing me to Jale, a child.”

“Come on,” she says, “You know her. She looks up to you. And she knows not to tell.”

I lean forward and glare at her. “You want me fired?”

“I’ll make sure she won’t tell anyone.” 

“Let’s hope she’s not as trusting of people as you are.”

“You’ve always been like this.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s like when we dated in high school. You didn’t want anyone to know. Honestly, I never understood it.”

“It’s not the same. It didn’t feel right. It wasn’t right.”

“So, it still doesn’t feel right?”

“Don’t you dare.” I pound the table. 

“Calm down. No more wine for you,” she says and puts on a smile. Tencere dibin kara, seninki benden kara—pot calling the kettle’s bottom sooty. 

I pour myself another glass of wine. I light a Camel. I make a point of offering her neither. She gives me a sheepish look and fills her own glass. We’re determined to drown it all in red.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she says. “You’ve known her since she was a baby. She won’t tell. I promise.”

“We’ll see. Maybe she already has.” I’m determined not to let her off the hook that easy. “And make sure you don’t blab about her, either.”

“I know how to protect my child. Don’t lecture me on parenting.”

“I just want to make sure you understand. We’re not characters in the Yaprak show of open-mindedness.”

“Siktir git,” she says loudly enough to turn several heads our way. She pushes her chair back and stands up unsteadily. 

I’ve finally gotten a rise out of her, so I pile on. “See, this is what you heterolar don’t get.” I shake my cigarette-holding right hand at her. “You don’t walk in kuir shoes, so you don’t get to tell. Got it?” 

She’d storm into the hotel except she’s drunk. She turns around slowly and walks as if she is an old lady with leg problems. I don’t go after her. For the moment, I want her to feel bad. When she finally reaches the building, she grabs the arm of the waiter at the door and holds onto it as she speaks to him. It looks like she needs support to stand up, but I know her. I bet she ordered another bottle of red. 

#

While Yaprak pouts in the restroom, I pull out my iPhone and call her boyfriend Mehmet. 

“Who’s this?” an unfamiliar voice on the other end asks.

Shit, I misdialed. It’s the new, other Mehmet, the school janitor, in my contacts. I was told to save his number for building-related emergencies. 

“I’m sorry, I dialed the wrong number,” I say, trying not to slur my words. 

He hangs up without saying anything. Fortunately, he doesn’t have my number yet.

The waiter brings a bottle of Kavaklıdere Yakut. Yaprak is definitely coming back. 

I squint at my phone as if I’m nearsighted or really old and can barely pick out the names. I navigate to the two Mehmets in my contacts. No last names. I tap each Mehmet with my fingertip to view their numbers. Not that I memorized them. Who does that these days? Mehmet the janitor lives near the school, and I know my work area code, so I call the other one. 

“Nooldu?” he says. No greeting, no warmth, no nothing. He’s always like that with me, as if I’m not man enough for him. 

“Yaprak,” I say and can’t find the words, like I’m intimidated by him all of a sudden. 

“Is she okay?” 

I hear music and people talking loudly in the background. 

“She’s okay. Where are you?” 

“Eceabat.”

A half-hour ferry ride away, on the other side of the Dardanelles. He lives there, born and raised, and owns a furniture store. They met when Yaprak was doing pro bono consulting for a family friend there. I don’t know what Yaprak sees in him. He doesn’t have a college degree, and he reminds me of my dad sometimes. He is a typical man in the way he neglects her. 

  “What’re you up to?” I ask.

“Hanging out. Entertaining some guests.” 

“Anyone I know?” 

“You don’t know them. Why’s she not calling me herself? Put her on.” 

Bossy. Maybe that’s what she likes about him. That, or he has a big dick.

Which he does. She told me herself.

“She’s just drunk and in the restroom. You know how she gets.”

“Of course, what else,” he mutters. 

Maybe there really is trouble in paradise. 

“Can you come get her?” 

“At this hour? Not sure. And my guests.”

“We argued a little.” 

He ignores that bit of information because he knows how we get when we drink together.

“Hold on, I’m checking the summer ferry schedule.” 

He won’t make it. I already knew that. 

“It’s past midnight. I missed it. The next one is at 2 am,” he says. 

“No worries. I’ll see what I can do. I’ll text you if we need you. Görüşürüz.” 

I see that Yaprak is on her way back. As she approaches, I tally the signs of drunkenness. Her face is flushed, her hair is somewhat disheveled, even though she probably put in some effort to keep it together, and one of the spaghetti straps of her orange dress has fallen below her shoulder.

“Who were you talking to?”

“Mehmet.”

“Why, did he call you?

“No, I called him.”

“Why?” 

“Well, you’re too drunk, and as your boyfriend, he should come and take care of you.”

“What the fuck, Enis?” 

“What?” I feign ignorance.

“You know.” She holds her forehead like she’s received news of death. Dramatic.

“Why are you coming between me and my boyfriend?” she asks.

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are. He doesn’t want me to drink, and you call him and tell him that I’m drunk.”

“Well, I didn’t know that.”

“Now you do. Stay the fuck out of my relationship.” She’s ready to pounce on me like a lioness.

We are quiet for a minute and drink from the Yakut I’ve poured for both of us. 

“I know what you’re doing,” she continues. “You’re still mad at me, so you step over me and call my boyfriend.” 

That’s exactly it. “I don’t know where you’re getting that.” 

“Allah kahretsin, stop playing games!” She’s the one pounding the table this time. Her other strap falls. I reach out to pull it over her shoulder. She cringes and slaps my hand. “Don’t touch me.” 

“Tamam, tamam, I’m sorry,” I say, “I’m just drunk.”

She leans back and takes a deep breath. “Have I ever come between you and your boyfriends? Did I call Alpay when he was fucking around behind your back, and you knew it?”

“What’s my ex have to do with this?” I ask. We’re experts at pushing each other’s buttons.

“It wasn’t easy for me to see you being disrespected, but I’ve never disrespected you. I expect the same.”

She literally held my hand through that debacle and many others since.

“I said I’m sorry. What else do you want me to do?” 

“Call Mehmet back and tell him that I don’t need him. Now.” 

I dial Mehmet and am about to tell him exactly that when the sleepy and angry voice of the school janitor says, “Brother, you misdialed again. Stop calling me!” He hangs up. 

I start giggling and almost fall off my chair. 

“What’s so funny?” Yaprak asks.

“Hold on, I’ll tell you. Let me call your Mehmet first.”

“My Mehmet?”

I hold my index finger up at her as I dial Mehmet. I tell him we don’t need him. 

He says, “Tamam,” and hangs up. 

I tell Yaprak about misdialing the janitor twice. I get the giggles again, which makes Yaprak smile in spite of herself. Her smile is encouraging. Maybe she’ll forgive me. I get up and put my arm around her. She doesn’t move, except for turning her head sideways and offering me her cheek. I give her a peck on the cheek. As I move back to my seat, my head is spinning.

We avoid eye contact and don’t say anything for several minutes. The late-night sea breeze exhales through the emptying patio. 

I rub my eyes and say, “We shouldn’t have ordered this last bottle. It’s so late. And I have a morning meeting.”

“You can leave,” she says, “I want to stay a bit more and finish the Yakut.” 

She’s still sore from our altercation. I am, too, and it doesn’t feel right to leave her drinking alone, but I need to go home. “Are you sure?” 

“Yes,” she says, “I’ll take a cab.”

We both took the bus here today so that we could drink as much as we wanted.

“Call me if you need me.”

“I will.” She doesn’t get up, so I go to her, kiss her on the cheek again, and say hoşçakal. 

As I stumble out of the restaurant and shuffle through the hotel, I fumble for my wallet and apartment keys to make sure I have them. I hail a cab at the front entrance.

Once on my way, I sit back and enjoy the cool night breeze caressing my face and gliding through my hair. 

Then I remember my mental note about looking up panseksüellik. I Google it: “Pansexuality, or omnisexuality, is the sexual, romantic, or emotional attraction toward people regardless of their sex or gender identity.”

Interesting. I return my iPhone to my pocket and lean back. My mind drifts to Yaprak and myself: in high school, when we were mere kids trying to fit the mold; in college, when she studied in Istanbul and I in Izmir, but we stayed in touch and became even closer after I came out; and now, after so many years and so many boyfriends. She’s family. 

I pull out my phone and text her that I’ll speak with Jale, followed by two emojis: a heart and a hug. I add the Wikipedia link to my favorites; it could be handy when I talk to Jale. 

When I arrive at my apartment, I take off my clothes and set my alarm so that I can wake up and check on Yaprak in an hour. Just as I’m falling asleep, I hear the faint ping of an arriving text. I squint at my phone and make out her text: “Teşekkürler, I knew you would!” followed by her signature trio of emojis I cherish: a rock star, a middle finger, and a kiss.

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AFTER NOT LEAVING THE HOUSE FOR THREE DAYS by Quinn Forlini

March 2, 2022

Anna’s mother convinces her to go for a walk. The weather’s getting warmer. Anna feels like she’s been living inside a tunnel, or an artery.  

She’s thirteen. Last week she dyed her hair purple from a box at the drugstore and it’s ugly. She pulls her hair into a ponytail, feeling the roughness as it passes through her fingers from the cheap dye. Her mother tried to warn her, and that made her want it more. 

Her mother reminds her for the seventh time that it’s a bit chilly out, so at the last second, Anna grabs her dad’s black hoodie from the hook in the front hall where it’s sat untouched for months and lets it bury her body. She’s glad she’s so lost in it, no hint of shape, just darkness. She digs her hands into the front pocket so they disappear. 

She follows her mother down the driveway, shuffling her feet and looking at the ground. Her mom talks and she barely listens. She looks up at her mother’s dark sunglasses that are too big for her face and the sweatshirt she has tied around her waist. She examines her mother’s body as it moves against the crumpled knot of sleeves clustered at her belly. The empty arms swing against her thighs like an awkward gift bow. Her mother is slightly overweight, enough that it makes Anna wonder: Will that happen to me? She looks back at the ground, imagining her bleak future as her body becomes filled like a grocery bag a clerk is doing a bad job packing. Her mother talks on and on, her left hand gesturing for emphasis as if the words weren’t enough. Not that Anna’s listening. Not that she has any idea what her mom is saying. 

She doesn’t know how long they’re going to walk. One strip of sidewalk becomes another, and she wishes she’d asked before they left, made it part of the bargain. She doesn’t want to ask now because she doesn’t want to sound like she’s complaining. She has an intense desire to complain all the time lately, and she’s fighting it as much as she can. That’s why she’s here, sullenly dragging herself along on this walk, even though all she wants to do is get lost in reality TV for hours and not talk to anyone. But she hates this desire almost as much as she desires it. 

Anna knows there was a time when this walk would’ve felt easier, when talking to her mother would’ve been all she wanted. Now she speaks one word at a time only when she has to. She hates how hard everything has become, even things that used to seem simple, like putting on socks. 

Her mother mentions that maybe they should start heading back because of the sky. Anna tunes back into her mother’s words, their familiar pattern of concern. She feels annoyance spring in her at how easily her mother becomes deterred, even though Anna didn’t want to go on this walk in the first place. She looks up at the sky and notices how quickly it’s shifting from blue to overcast. She finds herself pulled into it like a movie. She wishes she knew what her mother had been talking about all this time, but she can’t ask, or she’d have to admit she was ignoring her. Was it something about work? A friend? Her therapist? The sky feels like it’s folding in on itself. The grayness makes it feel closer. Anna’s warm, and it feels novel and miraculous that she can do something about this. She pulls the hoodie over her head, releases her body from it, and ties the bulky sleeves around her waist like her mother. They bob forward together, cumbersome with all this bulky fabric spilling around them. 

At the crosswalk they stop and look both ways together, only her mother looks left first while she looks right, so they’re looking at each other, and they laugh because they almost bump noses. Then her mother looks the other way at the line of cars coming and Anna watches the back of her mother’s neck snap in place like a lioness, and she’s flooded with this feeling of knowing she can’t ever know how much her mother has done for her and would do for her, and what it felt like to be held by her for the first time, body to body and nothing else, and the feeling is disappearing, like the blue in the sky, like the morning, like this walk, and she wants to hold onto the feeling because it is angular in a way that makes life seem possible and even tolerable. 

She feels this desperate need to cling to it, to the feeling, and she wants to hug her mother from the side, just a quick squeeze, as if that could make this all stand still, as if that could show her mother all that she wanted to show. It’s all she can do, and even though the feeling is already feeling like a dream she just woke up from that’s drifting back into an unknown place, she knows that, like a dream, it was intense and real when it was there and couldn’t be described with words but maybe with the colors red and grey or the touch of her mother’s skin. But before Anna can reach out her arms, her mother’s head snaps back and her mother’s body is launching off the curb and into the crosswalk as she says, Hurry up, let’s go, let’s cross the street while we still can.

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FIGHT VIDEOS 1-3 by Julian Castronovo

February 28, 2022

I.

 

The babysitter Bunny put me in the basement and locked the door. It was an old basement, a cellar. There was a torn up floral sofa and a boiler and a window that looked out at the bottom of a hole. The hole was maybe four feet deep and was lined with pieces of wood that kept it from collapsing into itself. I walked over and looked up through it. The sky was dark yellow. I went and sat on the sofa and watched videos of fat people slapping each other hard in the face. Then I heard a loud car pull into the driveway. Bunny went to the front door and opened it for someone, a boy. They talked and laughed and moved around the house for a while. Then there was a thump directly above my head and I knew they were doing those things on the kitchen floor. I pictured Bunny on her back with her legs up by her head. I got on the floor and tried to lay in the same position perfectly beneath her. I listened to her breathing hard and whimpering. Outside a tornado siren started to scream but I felt safe and cold. I imagined the dark storm twisting across the plain and pulling the house from the foundation and ripping it into a million pieces. I imagined Bunny helicoptering limp and in blue panties through the sky and landing in a field three miles away. And once it was quiet I would climb the stairs and step cautiously out and walk through the wet rubble like an orphan. But then I imagined a different scenario. I would go up the stairs expecting ruin and waste but the door would open into a house I had never seen before, one belonging to some other people, some different family. The house would be perfectly intact, perfectly still and undisturbed. Maybe it has a beautiful smell, maybe it has a robot vacuum disc charging itself in a corner. But it doesn’t really matter if the strange house is nice or clean or fancy. It only matters that it isn’t mine.

 

II.

 

The first thing in the world was sadness.

For a long time it was the only thing. There was no division or firmament or earth and sky and so there was just sadness in all directions like a sea. Eventually, however, from it there rose little islands. They were covered in nice soft moss and there were animals upon them. The animals were stupid animals and they did not feel sadness. Instead they roamed around eating fruit and sleeping beneath the new sun you put there for them. The animals lived and multiplied and died many times over. But, in due course, there were certain among them born especially pale and grotesque. Such was the beginning of mankind. Each person emerged into this world weeping and weeping too was how they left it. They built houses from mud and straw and inside those houses they would sit in the twisting candlelight and whisper sadly of how the world seemed to grow larger with each day.

After many years, however, people grew ignorant of sadness. They invented love and war and fun little games. They became vapid and cruel and the entire course of human history proceeded thenceforth. Still there were, of course, occasionally individuals to whom the new diagrams of living seemed senseless and disturbing. Such unfortunate souls were regarded with pity and disgust and sometimes too they were beat to death with sticks for entertainment. But that was long ago. The events and happenings have since occurred at their somewhat irregular but expected rate. There were civilizations and great pieces of art; there were mysterious inventions and moments of strange coincidence; there were grand celebrations and those who danced high upon the crumbling parapets. And though there seemed at times a progression or “pattern” to these things, it is, we know, incorrect to assume them bound by any such logic. If one were to propose a picture in the non-abstract, say, of the general course of history, perhaps a more accurate view would be that of a child distractedly tying small loops and bows in a string. By this we mean to suggest only that things happen not because they must but simply because can, because they give one something to do, and that in this absence of some masterful “plan” perhaps what matters is simply that for each of us there is someone who, accidental and divine, ties us in knots.

For instance, once there was a girl who very much resembled you, Aiko, because she was long and slender and shiny like a wet dog. One day she was walking down Orchard street with a silk ribbon in her hair. The air was warm and the girl was texting lots of people with a sense of pleasant indifference. A boy, ugly and violently in love, walked along with her. Or, rather, he was walking slightly behind her, following with his eyes as the ribbon ahead disappeared and emerged like a delicate little lure in a river of heads.

Did the distance between them grow? Yes, see it now, ever widening. The boy began to feel a small sense of amorous panic because of this and he considered walking more quickly. The girl appeared not to notice the gap and indeed she seemed to have forgotten him altogether. As he continued to watch her move away he was struck by the sensation that everything around him had begun to rearrange itself as to better speak her absence. Had she, he was thus led to wonder, created the world like this especially for him? Indeed it was she who had created it. That much was clear. Who else, after all, could’ve made the islands rise as they did, could’ve made the candlelight dance so upon the sepulcher walls, could’ve made the angels whisper as they do? And if not for him then for whom? Yes, in his tiny pattering heart the boy knew it was he, sole beneficiary of this vast and unbroken field of sadness. And despite brief time he had shared in her company, he knew that it would be wrong or profane, even, to try to further collapse the distance between himself and his creator. All of this was making the boy feel hungover and alone and sort of floaty. Then he stopped walking and threw up a little blood in a patch of dirt and nobody stopped to look.

 

III.

 

There once was a totally unremarkable man who walked in the woods and with a stream of his piss bore a deep hole in a bank of snow. He thought about how some animal like a deer might come lick it up for salt and he felt sort of useful and happy. Then he zipped up his pants continued along a path until it became lost in a stand of spindly trees. The world seemed to him prematurely dark and his fingers were cold. He turned around, began to follow his tracks toward his car. His bootprints had been half-buried in new snow and so they were small and shallow, as if they’d been made by the feet of a child. The man was therefore struck by the impression that over his brief journey some important change had occurred in his being or that he was slightly older than he had been when, for example, he peed, which he was. He came out of the woods and crossed the parking area. He opened his car door, watched this action unfold in slow-motion from a displaced viewpoint that seemed to be “hovering slightly” above his head. Sitting in the driver’s seat, he turned on the heat and made and unmade his hands into fists. He looked at his phone. The phone showed its lock screen. The man fogged the glass with his breath and rubbed it with his sleeve. He tried to approximate his face with his face. This proved eventually successful, the phone opened with a cute clicky sound and immediately it displayed a picture of a young woman with really huge perky tits. The man blinked at the photo like a stupid idiot for several seconds and then remembered that he’d been looking at it when he’d last used his phone. He thumbed away from it and then he read a text from Mary Catherine, who he’d assumed to be napping but was evidently awake and wondering where he’d gone. He was on his way home, he wrote back, and, as he began to travel at what he felt to be a “furious” pace, the totally unremarkable man experienced a rush of clarity in anticipation of being near to her. Sure, there remained some sense of terror or horrible unease folded in him, but he knew, as sometimes one does, how the simple proximity of the person he loved would keep it balanced and tight, like, say, a little piece of origami.

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CAN’T DIE IN PORTLAND, MAINE by Scott Laudati

February 25, 2022

It was summer everywhere but Portland, Maine. From Brooklyn to Portsmouth road crews sat along I-95 and stared longingly into the finality of their existence. This was it. The winters too cold and the summers too hot. Fall was spoken about with the nostalgia of an old folk song, and spring, of course, ran shorter than a rainy weekend. The crews spent the entirety of these uncomfortable months working on the sides of roads while everyone sped by on their way to somewhere better, or worse. The only time the two groups interacted was when a motorist fell asleep and drove over the short wall of orange cones. “At least we have a job,” one hardhat probably said to the other. And none of them ever walked into traffic; they never even thought about it. But Seal thought about it as he drove past those crews on his way straight north from New York City. In fact, it was all he thought about. Of his existence. Of walking into traffic and freeing himself from the nightmare of being a man.

Seal liked Portland because he never sweat there. It was the beginning of June when he drove by the 7-11 on Congress Street and parked his car behind Longfellow Square. He stopped to play a game of pinball in a laundromat then walked down to Casco Bay. He saw a few crabs running in the muck left behind by a receding tide. He smelled his favorite smell: the chopped bait used in lobster traps—a rotting stink caked into the wooden hulls of lobster boats and imbedded deep beneath the nails of watermen—a stink that grew stronger as their boats headed back to the docks after a day at sea. And he saw his favorite bird: the black backed gull, almost the size of a pelican. Dozens of them gathered and erupted with long calls just as returning lobster boats became visible. The gulls sailed down on the docks with singular focus, arguing for prime spots where a few scraps might get tossed their way.

Yes, Seal liked Portland. He didn’t like kids and their fat parents bumbling around complaining about the price of lobster rolls. Or how they waited in line for hours to try French fries dipped in duck grease. Or how his serenity was continually broken by car horns and idiots screwing up the simple crosswalk directions in ways only tourists can. But all in all, he thought Portland was probably his favorite city. 

Seal didn’t know why he cared about having a favorite city. He was 35 and totally broke; a feat he couldn’t quite understand being that his whole previous year had been spent under piers in Brooklyn rebuilding dock pilings. And when he tried, he couldn’t really remember anything from that time. He wanted to. He wanted to explain to everyone the way your hands feel in January when seawater gets under your gloves. The real maddening blind rage your body goes into when you can feel parts of it dying for $22 an hour. He wanted to tell them that quitting was the only sane thing to do in an insane world. But nobody actually cares about anyone else, so he didn’t bother. And he was thinking about that last winter now and it didn’t seem like it had really been him who’d gone through it. What did his mind do while he hit concrete with a hammer 40 hours a week, week after week? He had no idea. He could remember his ex-girlfriends. His priests. The people he’d once called his best friends. The moment when it all stopped being possible and everything just morphed into varying levels of impossible. What was the point? Did he ever really have a chance?

Now 35 years had gone by. A whole lifetime and nothing to show for it.

He stepped into the water of Casco Bay—the freezing water, replenished daily with new freezing water brought down by the Labrador Current from Halifax and beyond. He cursed but he was committed. After all, it was the same familiar cold he’d known on those days floating under the piers that finally brought him to this. The days spent soaking wet, icicles growing off his clothes and weighing him down like his limbs were the branches of an old tree, sailing into the eternal blackness of a pit whose middle saw no light, the sounds of a city above muffled and rounded out into some inaudible animal roar, like he was sailing around the Congo itself, but caught there in the real heart of darkness, seeing no more than the radius of his headlamp, or occasionally when a hose or machine exploded unexpectedly he might get a second to see his surroundings until the fireball or a fountain of sparks arched into the river, plummeting his world back into the unimaginable desert of darkness again.

Yes. He was going to kill himself one way or the other. It’ll be a better world without me, he thought, one less loser consuming the dwindling water supply. He was up to his neck now. Well, here we go. He took one last breath as a commotion began up on a dock—a high New England dock that had to account for the 30-foot swing between tides. He turned to look and saw the same crowd who just before had been ruining his peace with stupid human moments like: “See how fat I look? That’s a terrible picture, take another one!” and their dad or boyfriend grumbled that this wasn’t what they’d spent all year working for, but still, feeling obligated to prove to their friends watching on the internet that their lives were perfect, repositioned themselves for a more professional stance, and hoped somehow that through a filter or maybe God’s love this next picture would suffice, and they wouldn’t have to endure any more berating in front of the other tourists.

But now they all pointed at Seal, screaming, “HELP.”

That was when he saw a dog, thrashing wildly under the dock, being bounced against barnacle covered pier legs and letting out a fading yelp with each hit. Seal hated people, all people, on some days even his own mother, but he loved dogs, all dogs, and he didn’t hesitate a second before swimming madly to the drowning creature.

Blood seeped out of the dog and thickened the surrounding water like a chemical spill. Barnacles worse than serrated knives attacked their bodies and Seal took a good sticking as he caught up to the dog. It was a big pit bull, probably the king of many dog parks, but it submitted immediately into his arms, and paddled the best it could, not just to assist, but because it was a good dog, and it didn’t want to be a burden to anyone, even upon its possible death.

But it did not die. Seal got the dog up onto the beach and saw that the wounds were basically superficial. The dog was exhausted more than anything else, and after a few seconds of heavy panting his tail began to wag like a toy coming back to life. “You’re a good dog,” Seal said, and patted the dog’s stomach to reassure him. It was a beautiful moment. Man and dog lying there under the fading summer sun. Blessed with this Maine shore. A savior and a life saved. Nothing could mean more than this. 

A blonde girl with a tattoo above her eyebrow and a shirt that said “PUSSY IS THE POWER” slid down the embankment toward them like a skier with no skis. “Cornwall. Cornwall, my poor doggy,” she said. “Is he ok?”

“He’s ok,” Seal said. “He is what he’s supposed to be—a good dog.”

“I can’t believe you were out in the water already. If you hadn’t been there Cornwall would be dead. You’re a hero. You saved my dog’s life. It’s a miracle.”

Was it a miracle? If he hadn’t decided to kill himself once and for all, about seven hours ago in Brooklyn, he never would’ve driven here, he never would’ve gotten into the cold water, and Cornwall would be a floating snack bar filling the stomach of every crab and seagull in the bay. Was this fate? His life now had meaning. He was a man who’d found his moment. For the first time not marginalized by circumstance and bad luck. I am The Peoples’ Champ, he thought, I am indeed a hero.

Then the girl started sobbing and put her head against Seal’s chest. The pandemic was over but he realized it had been a year since a woman touched him, and he liked it. She pulled her head away and apologized for the wet mess of her face, but she didn’t really sound sorry and he thought she looked pretty good.

“We’re catching an REI Line out of here in an hour and heading back to Asheville,” she said.

“Ohhhh, you’re a gutterpunk.” He pointed at the tattoo on her face. “That makes sense. You don’t smell like a gutterpunk, though.”

“Have you ever done it?”

“No.”

“Come with us.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to! There’s a zoo we’ll pass in New Jersey. They have hyenas and you can feed them popcorn. Have you ever fed popcorn to a hyena?”

“That does sound pretty good. But I was supposed to kill myself. I only stopped to save your dog.”

“Come to the popcorn zoo with me. You can’t kill yourself now. That would be absurd. And I’ll feel responsible.”

She was right. It did seem ridiculous now. Seal’s life had gone from completely meaningless to almost the guarantee that he was going to get laid if he could just hang on a little while longer. I can always kill myself tomorrow, he thought.

They left the beach hand in hand and the dog never strayed more than a foot away. They crossed Munjoy Hill and she lay down in the street in front of the lighthouse and told Seal to take a picture of her from an angle that made the lighthouse look like an erection growing from her crotch. Then they went down to the railyard and sat in the weeds.

“If you can count the bolts in the wheel, it means the train is going slow enough for you to jump on,” she said. “I’ll go first. When I get on, you toss Cornwall up to me, then climb up.”

A freight train that had to be two miles long crawled by. They waited for the engine car to follow a bend out of view and sat silently while the oil cars followed one by one. Eventually the boxcars were up. 

“Let’s go,” she said.

She threw her bag into an open boxcar and it disappeared inside. Then she put both of her hands on its floor and hoisted herself up. 

“Ok,” she said. “Get ready, Cornwall.”

Seal and Cornwall were slow trotting along with the speed of the train. She laid on her stomach and extended both hands out from the boxcar. Cornwall was pretty seasoned at this and basically jumped up and landed in her arms. Once the dog got situated, she reached her arms out for Seal. He was ready. Suddenly a big jolt jerked the train back and forth and then it started to speed up.

“Hurry,” she said.

Seal started to fall behind. His feet slipped on gravel laid along the side of the tracks and made a full sprint impossible. Do it, he said to himself, you’ve got one shot at this. 

He lunged at the open door. Both of his hands slapped the floor next to the girl and her dog, but there was nothing to grip. For a second it looked like he had it but then his hands started to slide and the momentum of gravity pulled his lower half under the train. Then he was on the ground. He saw his legs bounce limply between the bottom of the train and the tracks before  they disappeared out the other side. He looked at the open boxcar, growing further away, and her face, her beautiful face decaying into some kind of horror, etched into the last seconds of his memory. And the dog, too. Cornwall’s mouth moved in vicious agony, teeth bared and unforgiving, barking with no sound.

Will the hyenas get enough popcorn tonight? he wondered. Will they go to bed hungry?

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BUNNY: A TRIPTYCH by Yasmina Din Madden

February 23, 2022

1.

The rabbits come in dozens it seems. Nothing one minute, invasion the next. They crouch in the grass like tiny statues, gray fur flecked with white. Cottontails. Leaf-ears at attention. Waiting. Kits, short for kittens, now called bunnies, as if kitten is not cute enough for the tiniest of these rabbits. Bunny, diminutive of the Scottish bun, a nickname for a pet rabbit. Also, slang for a young, attractive woman. She’s a real bunny. A male rabbit is a buck, a female a doe. Before mating, the buck chases the doe until she turns and boxes at him with her front paws. They crouch and stare at each other. Face off until one or the other leaps into the air. Leap, leap, leap, come together. 

2.

No matter how long I sit on the back porch watching, I’ve never seen any of the rabbits mate. Yet there are so many of them, dotting my yard like some kind of Disney movie. Bunnies hop through the grass, nibble and twitch, go still as stone when birds dive bomb the shrubs. My child, who is too sensitive, who moves worms off the sidewalk and carries stink bugs outside, tells me that a doe can produce up to ten litters a year, with up to twelve bunnies in each litter. Sometimes the mother eats her litter if she is too stressed and fearful of predators, or she just eats the runt because it’s going to die anyway. My daughter tells me all of this matter-of-factly, like a little old woman familiar with the cycle of life, rather than the ten-year-old that she is.  A phantom elbow or foot punches me from within, the ghost of an ache low in my abdomen. 

3.

Giving birth can be painless and it can be full of pain. It can be easy or difficult or anywhere in between. You can give birth in a sterilized hospital room or in a kiddie pool in a living room to the dulcet voice of your doula or midwife. You can give birth in the back of a car, on a bathroom floor, in a field, in an elevator, on the side of the road, in a mall, a forest, a library, an airplane, at prom, or in a Walmart parking lot. The list goes on and on and on. While giving birth you may say or hear the following: birth plan, epidural, fuck, breech, Pitocin, I don’t want this, breathe, I’m sorry, push, no, in distress, crowning, don’t touch me. You may not hear or say any of these things. But at the end you will have a baby or you won’t, and what you feel will depend on which. 

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DEREK MAINE on film with Rebecca Gransden

February 22, 2022

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

The first film I saw in the theater was Flight of the Navigator. We must have arrived late. Or it was unexpectedly full. We had to sit in the very front row. I was very uncomfortable. I was seven or eight. It came out in 1986 so I would have been four but that can’t be true. Anyway, when you are four or seven or eight you are really small. I remember the screen was huge. I couldn’t handle the sensory overload. It felt like the screen was going to swallow me up and take me away on the spaceship. It was a very good movie. I have not seen it since.

I was visited by an apparition the night I watched The Care Bears Movie (1985). This sounds like something I would write in a story, but it’s true instead. My parents did not believe me. They told me to go back to bed. They said, “go back to your room,” or something just like that. They said I was scared from the movie. They said it was because of the movie I was scared and not the apparition. But I don’t remember anything about the movie, and I certainly remember the white mass of light that stood over my bed. That was 35 years ago. What did Daniel Johnston say? “Some things last a long time?”

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

I was downstairs on the couch, alone, and it was late. I pressed rewind a whole lot of times. Let me back up a bit.

I knew why Friday the 13th (1980) made me horny. I wanted to be a teenager at a summer camp having sex on the bottom bunk. You could pause it and pretend. That wasn’t transgressive at all. If anything, it was obedience. I was secretive about watching it (and wearing out the magnetic tape of the VHS) because I did not want my parents to catch me being horny. I think that is good and I hope my son, when he gets there in a couple of years, affords my wife and I the same courtesy.

Oh, but I started to tell you the real answer which is Disclosure (1994) starring Michael Douglas and Demi Moore. Demi Moore sexually harasses (assaults? rapes?) Michael Douglas in the movie. Spoiler alert or content warning, perhaps. Demi Moore and Michael Douglas used to date & have sex with each other. Michael Douglas is married now. Demi Moore gets hired to be his boss. One night they are working late. She makes a move on him, and he demurs. She gets more aggressive. He gives in, momentarily, and then, while she is giving him a blowjob and he is saying nasty things to her, he recalls he has a family, and he is able to break free from her grip.  Well, I’m not interested in the movie on its terms so I won’t summarize further or offer anything resembling an opinion of its internal politics, but it was the sexiest thing I had ever seen, and I felt so naughty over and over every time and I would like to say two things about that:

  1. The idea of desire so overwhelming it upends your life is extremely appealing to me. I don’t mean Demi’s desire. Her desire, in the context of the film, is to set up an encounter that forces Michael Douglas to lose his job. Michael Douglas’s desire for her, and the transgression of that desire, is where I am at. I am someone with big feelings, not always knowing where I am supposed to put them.
    1. Sometimes my feelings are inappropriate. I do not act on them. I share them, sometimes, in my art. Sharing them is not a ploy to make my reader complicit. It is a bloodletting, a release, a solemn prayer that I am not alone.
  2. I know now, because I am older and have some life experiences under my belt, that my own desires awakened by the scene were intimately tied to the feeling of transgression itself. It is a naughty thing to be a pre-teen boy downstairs, alone, on the couch, and it is late, and touching the private parts of your body to arouse apleasure. I connected with Michael Douglas’ feelings of wrongdoing, of sin. Bad, bad boys we were.

Are there any films that define your formative years?

Tombstone (1993). I wrote a fictional essay that touches on the ‘why’ and was fortunate enough to have it published by/at Misery Tourism, but it honestly boils down to “I watched it a ton of times, at a certain time of my life,” which feels sort of accidental/incidental. Most of my favorite pieces of art feel that way. A friend gave me Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives as a 30th birthday present. My father liked North Carolina Tarheel basketball. Our tastes and preferences are less like choices and more likely circumstantial or inherited.

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

I can’t claim much, truthfully. It’s difficult for me to parse out my (non-literary) influences, but film is such a visual medium, and I cannot think visually. You know that exercise they give you, sometimes in therapy, where they ask you to visualize a red cube and then turn it over, so on and so forth? I cannot visualize a red cube. I thought, for a long time, that my memory was leaking out of me faster than I could make new memories, but it was just that I could not, and I cannot, imagine visually. The elements of films that have stuck with me are always lines. Or, more precisely, how it felt and how I was feeling when I saw the film.

Once, for instance, I went to an afternoon showing of Being John Malkovich, with a friend. When we went into the movie it was light outside. The movie messed with my head. I have some fears surrounding consciousness that were tested by the film’s premise. I was feeling sick to my stomach. I did not like thinking of someone else up there steering my thoughts. I have enough trouble controlling them already and back then, sometimes, they’d try to hurt me. When my friend and I walked out of the movie theater it was dark. I felt like I’d lost time. I felt like I was lost in time. I did not like that. We went to a Boston Market next where I had one of my spells. It was an unpleasant feeling. If I need that particular feeling for a character or scene then I can access it, but I cannot picture what John Malkovich looks like.

Are there films you associate with a particular time in your life, or a specific writing project?

During my mid-to-late-teenage years I lived with a much older man. He had an open-door policy and a couple of guest rooms for young boys to stay with him and he let you smoke in the basement and have full access to his impressive record collection. There was bread and cheese to eat, and usually he would bring home a case of beer and watch us drink it. Some nights he gave us pills and we’d take our shirts off and dance in the living room. If anybody asked, I was eighteen and just didn’t have any ID with me.

He would start asking, usually around midnight, if anyone was up for a massage. That was the only time you could go into his room, if you were up for a massage. I did not ever want a massage and my secret weapon was I can stay up later than everyone else always. So, I waited him out. But as soon as someone did take him up then I would have the television and his video cassettes all to myself. He had a copy of Koyaanisqatsi (1982). The film just blew me right away and I watched it every chance I could get. The house was small, so I turned it up loud and the score was done by Philip Glass and the whole movie was just a series of images illustrating how much we fucked up the environment. There is no dialogue or words, I don’t think. I cannot remember a single image now (no visual memory), but it gave me a feeling of great unease and catastrophe. I have never written about that period of time. I can’t recall anything of interest or particularly literary happening. But I do remember staying up later than everyone else to watch Koyaanisqatsi and being drunk and not understanding the film, but completely digging it.

Do you have any lines of film dialogue you regularly use in your daily life?

  • When I am arguing with my wife, “I’m calmer than you are,” (Walter, to the Dude, in The Big Lebowski [1998])
  • When I am stuck in a social situation I cannot get out of, I mutter to myself “I realized that not only did I not want to answer THAT question, but I never wanted to answer another water-sports question, or see any of these people again for the rest of my life.” (Anthony, to the two girls Dignan invited over to the pool, in Bottlerocket [1996])

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EVIDENCE IN SUPPORT OF MY CAPACITY by Barbara Lock

February 21, 2022
  1. One time I punched a wall that I thought was made of plasterboard but was in fact concrete. Either way, I would have broken my hand. The side of my fist near my pinky crunched up and my girlfriend told me I was a lunatic. Stop it, stop it, she said. Then she covered her face with a shroud, which irritated me to no end.
  2. I wore a white wool sweater in the style of Irish fishermen last year which placed me fifteen years too far in the past, or possibly the future. It’s hard to know. My appearance was very similar to what you see now, which is to say approximately young, though male. I kept my pace steady and would have gotten there in time if I hadn’t fished around in my bag for something to drop.
  3. There are bridges being constructed and deconstructed all the time. I can tell you about Tappan Zee, Sakonnet, Charles, just off the top of my head. The things we think of as static are not just rarely so, but never so.
  4. I am thinking now of a girl in a nightgown with a ruffled hem. She plays in a driveway next to a house lined by lilacs that make the house, for exactly nine days, the most sweet-smelling place in the universe. After that, it smells like Tang and kitty litter.
  5. A woman I once knew used to dislocate her own shoulder to scam drugs from hospitals. One time she roared up to the ambulance bay in an old Town Car, popped her shoulder out, cursed and screamed until they came with a stretcher. What a story she spun for the doctors! Said that she served in the military in Spain, worked the pile after nine-eleven, took care of orphans, the like. The psychiatrist declared her incurable and she was discharged with a parking ticket.
  6. Four bas-relief carved stone ropes flank the bay window of the brownstone where I used to live. The segmented ropes look like worms, or perhaps a certain type of plant, though I couldn’t tell you which one. I’ve had a difficult time recalling plants along with birds, brand names, varieties of cheese. The spiral of the detail runs clockwise up. At the top of the windows, the stone rope gathers into a swirl above a central rosette. The rosette is not a window, but it’s made of glass or some other translucent material and the morning sun lights the face of the rosette such that it radiates like a beacon into the park.
  7. Sometimes I jump from one time and place to another with insufficient preparation. Indeed, this is the rule. The key to enjoying yourself in this situation is to avoid judgment. I can’t be all things to all people, I tell myself. There is a sadness that never goes away. The man knew this, and he followed me, sat beside me, put his arm around me. I’m not who you think I am, I said to the man.
  8. A tree looks like a fistful of dripping wounds.
  9. The flash from the man’s digital camera blew onto my face and collected my skin in a sort of vacuum. I wasn’t removed from the sidewalk. I was still there, and as I expanded and looked out at the little mirrored triangles spreading across the park, up over the moraine boulder and the sycamore trees, the man pulled his camera from his face so I could see his eyes. When he blinked, a thin translucent membrane spread across his corneas, making his irises appear briefly blue, though they were not.
  10. I am remembering the time that my mother threw a party and afterwards I wondered who was in love with her. Someone was in love with her, one of the guests, or perhaps two or three. A situation of passion suspended in the air as a sort of mist, something I could see, but I didn’t know how to pin it down. Situations like this one are happening to me all the time, contemporaneously with each other. It is difficult to know where to land. I still must eat and drink. Basic bodily functions must be exercised.
  11. In the park across the street, shards of a mirror arranged themselves into the shape of a flower, then a bell, then a fountain. The shapes hung over the sky above the playground where toddlers and 6 year-olds hid behind skinny metal poles, covered their eyes with their hands. You must be hungry, said the man. He rubbed his hands on my back. I could eat, I said. The man moved to grab my wrist, but then I was gone.
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STICK FIGURES by Sara Solberg

February 18, 2022

In an eastern New Mexico desert, amid a forest of mesquite and bluestem grass, overlooking nothing but miles upon miles of iron-pressed, sunbaked earth, sits the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP for short). On the surface, it looks like any other government base: a simple grid of unremarkable squat buildings, the tan color of which bleeds into the surrounding arid landscape. But step into one of the elevators that spend their days bobbing up and down WIPP’s vertical mine shafts, ferrying hard-hatted workers between ground level and the ancient salt bed 2,150 feet below, and it’s a different story.

One of the few deep geological repositories in the world, WIPP’s raison d'être is to store the radioactive waste produced by the US’s nuclear reactors. While the facility is only licensed for 10,000 years, the barrels of waste that get buried there will be harmful to humans much longer than that—250,000 years, to be exact. But with its rising popularity as a cleaner, more reliable, more land-efficient alternative to other forms of energy like fossil fuels and solar, both nuclear power and the often lethal byproducts that come with it seem here to stay. 

Storage is one thing. What happens to that storage after we’re gone is another matter entirely.

…

A few months before my mom died, I asked her for a favor.

“I just want Dad to have something he can keep going back to,” I said, feet folded up onto the recliner in Mom’s office nook while I watched her work at her desk. I spent a lot of time like this in those days, trailing behind her around the house like I used to when I was little, desperate to soak in her presence while I still could. “You know. For different occasions and stuff.”

Outside the window her desk faced, a cardinal swooped back and forth across the bronzed orange trees lining the border of our yard.

Her bare brow furrowed beneath the rim of her fleece cap. “Write him cards?” The cancer had spread to Mom’s throat by then, and her voice was rough, her words sounding as though they’d been scoured raw with a steel dish scrubber before being set free. 

I rocked back and forth, springs creaking as the chair bobbed in time with my rhythm. “Yeah. And on the envelopes you can put things like ‘open this on our anniversary,’ or ‘open this when you’re having a bad day’ or something. Like on Pinterest.”

Mom, ever allergic to technology, didn’t know what Pinterest was. 

“Like a letters to your future self kind of thing. But for Dad.” Trying to prepare for the future was another thing I did a lot of in those days. But how can a person prepare for something that can only be understood in hindsight? 

When I looked outside again, the cardinal was gone. 

…

In 1981, the US Department of Energy commissioned a multitalented team of experts (physicists, engineers, environmental scientists, political scientists, sociologists, archeologists and behavioral psychologists, to name a few) in anticipation of the Yucca Mountain geological repository that was to be built. Though plans were ultimately scrapped in favor of the repository in New Mexico, the team—christened the Human Interference Task Force—became founding members in the emerging field of nuclear semiotics. The sole purpose of this field is to answer one thing: How do we stop generations 10,000+ years into the future from unearthing radioactive waste?

Similar to WIPP, it’s a deceptively simple question on the surface that gains immediate complexity with a little digging. Creating a warning message that will be understood by people 10,000 years out is the bare minimum goal of nuclear semioticians. Ideally, such a message would not only last a couple hundred thousand years in addition to that, but could also be deciphered instantaneously—an unmistakable Turn Back Now; Do Not Pass Go; Do Not Collect $200 that can be understood by any person in any context. But 10,000 years is already double the length of recorded human history. 250,000 years is almost as long as Homo sapiens have existed. 

To come up with a clear message that will not only survive in meaning, but in material form—something that will resist the decay of time, that won’t wither like a plant carcass in the searing New Mexican heat, eroded by nature or chipped away by human hands—is almost incogitable. 

…

I stopped by Target to find some cards that looked worthy of being the message bearers to my future, widowed dad from his future, deceased wife. The fluorescent lights reflected off the white shelves and white tiles and white ceiling, and it felt like I was the dead one, ascended to a heaven that resembled the gift section of a department store. The Hallmark dogs with their halos and wings only solidified the mirage. 

I stood in front of the blank, boxed cards for several minutes, trying to choose from an assortment simultaneously too meager and too diverse. What, I wondered, was the appropriate design for a situation like mine? Colorful circles, bumping up against one another in random patterns like marbles tossed across a floor? Shadows of birds balanced on a wire, twittering quarter and eighth notes that trailed in a wispy string above their heads? The tidy, monochromatic lineup of trees, each a different shade of blue? What design most strongly said, I’m sorry I died? What most said, I was thinking of you then, even if I can’t be there with you now?

I ended up buying two boxes of flower prints: the first a diverse bouquet, the second a wreath of roses and daisies, in the center of which perched a green and yellow, vaguely bohemian sparrow. Its one visible eye, just a small black dot on its turned away face, stared into the distance, perhaps contemplating the wrapping paper a few feet away, or maybe its own two-dimensional existence, frozen on paper until it was either destroyed or disintegrated with age.

Mom loved flowers—loved the wild bouquets I’d sometimes pick for her, loved getting dirt under her fingernails pulling weeds from the garden. Mom loved birds, going as far as to get a few birdwatching guide books so she’d be able to identify the species that tended to hover around the backyard feeders. She loved life. 

The cards weren’t enough. They were never going to be enough. But they were better than nothing at all. 

…

Numerous solutions to the nuclear semiotics riddle have been proposed since the 1980s, each with their own unique shortcomings. Perhaps the most commonly suggested warning is a simple written message—Rosetta Stones whose multilingual inscriptions can be updated every handful of decades for indefinite millennia. Languages, though, are as alive as the people who use them, ever-changing as they age. It’s only taken six centuries for the English used in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to become unreadable to modern English speakers. Given the infinite unknowns that await humanity, it’s an act of pure faith to believe a message written today will still be translatable 10,000 years out.

Some have suggested using pictograms; Carl Sagan famously insisted the most effective message would be a simple skull and crossbones. But symbols, like language, are ever-evolving. Before it became an omen of death during the Golden Age of Piracy, the skull and crossbones was used by the Knights Templar as a symbol of the Christian rebirth. Today, it’s inseparable from children’s Halloween costumes and Disney movies featuring Johnny Depp. 

The next logical step after individual pictograms is a series of them. A narrative. A comic strip depicting a person dying after they’re exposed to the radioactive waste buried below. Stories and stick figures, after all, are two of the few universals that have existed as long as humans have been around. But even then, there’s no guarantee future humans will interpret a comic strip in left to right sequence. Read right to left, it becomes a resurrection story. 

Other solutions have included everything from folktales to atomic priesthoods to bioluminescent cats that will glow when they’re within a certain distance of a repository. 

And others still have said it’s all a lost cause. Humans have always had a compulsion to excavate. To know. To remember our forgotten histories. Surely, any warning message we leave is just as likely to be seen as an invitation. Why waste our own finite time on earth trying to protect some distant perhaps? 

…

Mom bought a small, hinged box from Hobby Lobby to put the cards in—one that resembled a pirate’s treasure chest, complete with an arched top and fake iron plating. It sat in my room for weeks after her funeral, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag to shield it from dust, shoved to the far corner beneath my bed. 

As I promised her I’d do, I gave it to my dad once things settled down and the reality of our new lives had started to take shape. There was nothing I could think to say in response to his tears or shaking hands when he reached out to take it—no comforting Hallmark platitudes, no way to boil down the immensity of our loss into something comprehensible. 

That’s the paradox of such situations: finding a way to communicate the incommunicable.

I left my parent’s bedroom in silence, quietly closing the door behind me. 

…

Many people mistakenly assume WIPP is located where it is because it’s remote. As survivors of disasters like Fukushima can attest, after all, living in the vicinity of radioactive material isn’t an enviable position. In actuality though, the facility owes its placement to one thing, and one thing only: the 2,000 feet of continuous salt below.

The remnant of a sea that evaporated 250 million years ago, the salt bed is an ideal burial ground for nuclear waste for multiple reasons. It’s accessible. It’s malleable, and therefore easy to mine. It’s geologically stable, and impermeable by water. 

But above all else, salt is capable of healing. Eventually, 75 years or so after WIPP’s mine is filled to capacity and closed off, left to sit for time immemorial—either remembered or forgotten, as all things are—the salt will collapse around the barrels of waste. It will collapse, and then it will begin to stitch itself together, fractures and fissures filling over the course of a few decades until the barrels have been wholly encapsulated, the surface sealed once more. 

I wonder what scars will remain.

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