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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.

THE WOODHOUSES, THE MARITAL BED IS LAVA, SLEEPWALKING by Ariel Clark-Semyck

December 4, 2021

the woodhouses

"greensleeves" floats through the halls of the high-rise & stops in for the showing. the new tenants are young & comely. they pay no mind to the plea of the piano or the hospital stretcher rounding the corner. the woman’s blonde hair curls inward at the ends, teasing the tip of her heart-shaped face. the man wears a powder blue linen suit & slaps her ass while the realtor isn’t looking. they each excrete a gasp when they see the living room. they make a show of admiring the antiques, the burgundy drapes. they take a thoughtful glance at the writing desk. i can tell they can’t wait to paint everything white. maybe yellow as an accent color. their first night in the apartment, they peel their clothes off in silence & couple on the bare floor. smoke reaches through the keyhole of the closet & threads its needle through my eye. it’s nice to have company.

the marital bed is lava

i watch the occultists sit down to roast beef & mashed potatoes served on fine china. they swirl their glasses & playfully bicker about the pope. it’s chocolate mousse for dessert. one wife notices the funny undertaste but eats it anyway. smoke trails from the armchairs, through the parlor room, to the kitchen where the women wash dishes in rubber gloves. back in their own bedroom, the husband sits five inches away from a televised boxing match while his wife unhooks her garters & comments on the other couple’s dining habits. her body collapses to the floor & turns into a slinky. he picks her up, an end in each hand. her coils stretch & condense from palm to palm as she whispers baby names in the dark until morning. andy or jenny, andy or jenny, andy or jenny suckle at my heartstrings. romance is feeding each other grapes for twenty years while our voiceovers pop off.

sleepwalking

sadism is not a good replacement for self-fulfillment is the kind of shit she says to herself as she wipes the blade on her hem & exits stage left. the hallway tonight is drenched with thick black air. it gets stuck in her hair. it wears her body like a dress as she paces back and forth, the hands grabbing at one another like two animals in heat. one hand mounts the other hand & rubs & rubs. is watching it die the same thing as taking its life? she caught a cricket under a glass once & waited until morning. she caught herself under a crumbling pedestal & waited for years. this little hand. she takes her hand to her nose & then takes it in her mouth. this little hand. she sucks on the knuckle of her index finger. the air watches this, its appetite sharpened. it sops from her hair down to her face & sucks. she thinks goodbye would be like going to the grocery store & picking up a pound of ground chuck or a gallon of milk. the air turns her head over & over on its tongue. is watching him swim further out to sea the same thing as watching him drown? she thinks goodbye would be like sitting on the shore with the sun in her eyes, like taking a photograph of the sunset so she could look back on it fondly whenever she liked. one hand mounts the other hand. the air has whittled her down to an echo of the sound of him at the end of the hallway. he is grabbing another beer from the fridge.

ACTIVE SHOOTER TRAINING by Jason Peck

December 3, 2021

We’ve attended such lessons before, briefings that point us to hiding places and escape routes, drills that teach us quick action and suspicion toward our coworkers. But this seminar is different. This is the best workplace shooter training this company has ever had. People who attended the first sessions this morning still recall them with awe on their coffee and smoke breaks.

Life-changing, they say. An eye-opener, they say. But mostly—very good.

We can already see their transformations. They walk straighter, talk bolder. Evelyn in accounting says she will hear the training again. Roberta from legal holds her calls in preparation. And Max from IT—a joker, typically—remains unusually silent. When it comes to Max and such matters….well, we must be sensitive. He knows firsthand of survival, and his past haunts him.

It’s not something I talk about, Max says, his head down. (He actually talks often of how little he likes to talk, but we remain polite).

Your life will be changed, Evelyn tells him.

Max nods. He very much wants his life to be changed.

The conference room is full for the final session. The speaker is not from the Marines or a SEAL like last year’s speaker. More than one of us finds his potbelly and unkempt moustache disappointing. But he is commanding and serious, even when making a joke. (You know how you prevent laugh lines? he asks. Don’t laugh.) We know he means business by the way he holds attention like a center of gravity, by the alertness in his eyes and the tension to his stance.

The speaker taps his microphone once, twice.

Surely you know about this shooting, the speaker says. In his right hand, he clicks a mouse that changes the image on his projector screen. We nod our heads—of course, we recognize this particular shooting. He clicks again to another shooting; this one we identify from the shopping mall where it occurred. This next one too, by its near-iconic Pulitzer photo. And so on with the next. And the one after that. Roberta wishes for a comforting hand on her shoulder. Max’s eyes dart toward the exits. Evelyn notes that the slides this afternoon show different shootings than the training this morning.

He keeps us on our toes, she whispers with approval.

There is only one person who can stop a workplace shooting, the speaker says. (His voice, a measured baritone, defies his unassuming figure.) The police are too slow to help you, he says. Security is incapable. And yet you would rely on those people, would you not? Even with the gunman upon you, you would assume the best, wouldn’t you?

Max laughs once, loudly enough that our eyes turn to him. The instructor raises an eyebrow and addresses Max directly.

And with the gunman directly above you, you would sit there immobile, wouldn’t you? The instructor asks. You, with no clue how to react. Even with a gun in your face, you would sit there like a coward and accept your fate?

Max raises his hand in objection. Then he coughs and lowers it.

No more police, the instructor says to gasps. No more security guards. From here on, only one person can save you.

He gathers his breath and points and Roberta swears that he points at her, and Max swears he points at him, but Evelyn, who attended earlier, smiles because of course he points to us all.

You, the speaker says. You are the only person who can stop your shooter.

He enunciates the word with gravity like a revelation. Perhaps it is. Roberta’s heart swells with sudden responsibility. Max brings his hand to his stomach, where a new sensation begins stirring.

Your shoe can be used as a weapon, the speaker continues. The human eyes are weak points. Throw your shoes at his eyes. He sees someone in management drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup, nods his approval (the instructor himself drinks coffee). Your coffee too can be thrown at the gunman’s eyes, the instructor says. Once something has been thrown at his eyes, he can be distracted. Once distracted, he can be subdued. But fight only when you cannot flee. This is most important.

He walks to Roberta and kneels to face her, armed with his authority.

You are walking toward the elevator, he says. A man enters the front door with a gun. What action do you take?

I will throw my shoe at him, Roberta says. But hesitation makes it sound like a question instead.

No, the instructor says. He points his finger at her head, cocks it with his other hand. Bang, you are dead, he says. You have the opportunity to flee, thus fighting back is the invalid response.

This stings Roberta. The speaker approaches Evelyn.

You are by the printer, he says. Not more than ten feet away, the perpetrator opens fire. What do you do?

I don’t know. Evelyn says with a wink. (She knows the answer, but plays along) I will grab my coffee and throw it at him? And then subdue him? She grabs her cane, hoists it overhead like a weapon.

No, the instructor says. Bang, you are dead. In this scenario, the nearest secured room is fifty feet away, a dash of mere seconds. You could run and barricade yourself, rather than fight.

The instructor stands again, and some force everyone can sense brings him to Max at the far corner of the room. Maybe it’s because of their earlier confrontation, maybe he senses the way Max avoids his gaze, fleeing from challenge. Maybe our host can look into his individual audience and see something in need of resolution. The instructor kneels to face Max, and we know nothing can stop this collision, this moment of truth.

You are working at your desk, the instructor says to Max. A man starts shooting. Two cubicles over, perhaps—in the moment you cannot be sure. Soon he will reach you.

I should have thrown my shoe, Max says, almost to himself. I should have thrown my coffee. All those years ago, I did not act. I accepted my fate.

It’s OK, Evelyn says. Her hand rests on his shoulder, comforting him.

No it is not OK, the instructor barks, without pity. That was then. This is now. In crisis, you have no time to decide.

Max finally looks up from his lap and faces the instructor with a resolve we have never seen. He gulps and draws himself to his full height, the true leader now, and we know we will soon witness the measure of a man.

What do you do? The instructor repeats.

This time, I will fight this shooter, Max says.

The instructor points his finger to Max’s head, slaps the bottom with his other hand as though reloading an automatic. But that finger rocks back and forth, unsteady. Max takes a breath.

I will throw my shoe, Max says. I will throw my coffee.

Your final answer? The instructor asks.

I will no longer be frightened, Max says. My stapler could stun him. The loose pages of my reports would distract him. He takes a deep breath. I swear I will find something I can throw.

The instructor nods, and his hand slowly turns to a thumbs-up.

Correct, the instructor says. Unlike these other two people, you could not run. With no choice, your attack is therefore valid. You live.

The host will continue speaking. He will play more videos. Many more things can be thrown at the gunman—did we know the chemicals of a fire extinguisher can blind? That a loud noise can distract? Our lives hinge on details we never imagined. Those who fail today’s tests will understand why they would die, those who pass will grasp their survival. Through him, we will learn structure out of chaos, the predictable patterns of a gunman’s mind, the natural progression of a crisis. The host clicks his mouse and another image flashes, and we wait for his words to flow again.

POLICING HEAVEN by Fred Pierre

December 2, 2021

To worship the leader is to worship our god, say cult members before they’re arrested. How does religion make you feel? Certain death, stake chips on the hereafter, or spin earth for a sunrise tomorrow? Truth is, you’ve been duped by your broker and hoodwinked by your minister out of your promised immortal treasures.

“You’ll see your whole family in heaven, my friend,” said the minister as he lay dying. Certainty grows when we parrot dogma. To get into heaven, the test is quite simple: Choose kindness before your self-interest. Only one in ten makes it. So many sublets in heaven they can’t even charge rent. In perfection, complaining is frowned on.

Here on Earth, assholes figure they’re going to heaven. Always got their way. Why not paradise? They’ll find where to purchase the next revelation, the next rung to climb the holy ladder. So you shot the last tiger, huh? Put its head on your wall, then fuck on its fur by the fire. Pay the church, pray to Jesus’ mother. Wash, rinse and repeat. Now you’re ready to knock at the gate.

Sad to say, they don’t allow assholes like you into heaven. It’s not paradise if you’re never happy. “They didn’t try half hard enough. Three out of five stars. Did you see the way that angel looked at me?”

For you, they’ve reserved a place away from the others, because to you, your pain feels like a comfort.

You anticipate finer things and old friends, but in the afterlife your family has choices. That’s why they aren’t here to greet you. At the end of the tunnel you see the white light, but those blobs become alien creatures. You’re being stroked by their tentacles. They need your soul for a cosmic experiment.

Say you do get in, how long before the T-cells of heaven reject you? When you cut someone off on your flying carpet, or flip the bird at one of God’s angels? The third time you complain? Because you can’t be depressed. It drags other souls down from the aether.

The dead infest caverns locked deep in the earth, along rivers of underground memory, but it's too dark there, so we raised the skyline, making gravity fully negotiable. You can fly like in Quidditch, but without all the brooms. Just think it and then you are there. Why limit your vision? Free yourself from the doctrines of others.

Do crushed dreams ice your cocktail? That is your shadow rising. What is heaven if you can’t enjoy it? “Pleasure is the first step on the long slide to Hell,” is what they told you when you felt desire, until you wanted nothing but to tear it all down. Burn Earth for a ticket to heaven.

Get on board the train. The conductor is restless. The train passes into a tunnel. The tunnel gets tighter and tighter around you. You’re expelled from the tunnel, aka the canal, in a burst of light.

Meet your new family.

CATGUT by M.W. Brooke

December 1, 2021

Most days your mother languishes on your couch watching reruns of Law & Order. Doctors can’t explain what’s wrong with her brain. You drive her to appointment after appointment between harp lessons—a merry-go-round of CAT scans, MRIs, acupuncture, marijuana, experimental doses of ketamine, prescriptions for epileptics. Nothing calms the tension behind her eye sockets, like a harp string constricting under the chill of night.

During rehearsals in third grade, your fourth octave C string snapped from the tuning pin and whipped across your eye. The harp yowled in your arms, a feral cat too close to human hands. Harp strings are more likely to snap when you aren't playing them, your teacher said, indifferent, swiveling on her heel to correct the posture of the student beside you. A few girls set their harps on the floor and stared, mouths agape as a red line marked your swelling cheek like a jellyfish sting. The quiver of Mormon girls giggled into their skinny collarbones.

For years you played pretentious recitals in ball gowns a hopeful size too small, back straight, elbows out, bouncing ringlets from too-tight rollers your mother forced you into the night before. Now you heave your harps up and down flights of stairs in yoga pants, your spine aching. You know the shape of each harp better than your own body, how each one travels, how to angle them into your Subaru Outback. Your students don't understand how fragile your harps are. Or maybe they don't care, too busy fluttering between controlling parents or abusive boyfriends. But they insist on dragging your harps along with them all the same, those downy notes softening the razor's edge of existence. You teach scales and glissandi and arpeggios and “Aura Lee” to children who hold back tears when their mothers’ cars pull into your driveway.

You lost one of your rental fleet once—an expensive lever loaned to a student who fixated on her fingers whenever a black eye bullied past layers of concealer. She skipped town with your harp, and the police contacted you six months later to tell you she had been found dead in her apartment. “You don't want the harp back,” they said. Its porous wood had breathed in months of human decay.

When you were fifteen, your mother drove you home from a recital in a freak blizzard in May, her knuckles like knobs of white coral against the steering wheel as snow piled on the windshield between each scrape of the wipers. A few miles from home, she pulled over to the shoulder and breathed out like air let out of a tire. Car still running and blinker clicking away, she opened the door and shuffled in front of the headlights. She lifted her arms to the sky and started to twirl, snow fluttering around her like TV static. Isn't it beautiful? she said. You shrunk into the crook of the passenger seat and yelled at her to come back inside, embarrassed and scared of how much you loved her.

Now your mother sleeps in the guest room, fetal and withering. Her muscles atrophy and her belly sags like a bird nest built on the lip of an eave. You're awake in the dark, arranging in your head a shitty pop song your ten-year-old student insists on learning. Crickets saw their legs together outside your window—the same, maddening refrain. And then you hear it: downstairs, a wooden crack like a rotting bough giving way to gravity’s pull. It's sharp and urgent and hollow. You slip out of bed and touch the strings in the dark until you find the empty space like a missing tooth. The string’s nowhere to be found, impossibly unmoored from the soundboard and tuning pin. You imagine the harp string unfurling on its own and shooting somewhere between the couch cushions or behind the piano. You could search for it. You could make a game out of it with your mother tomorrow if her brain doesn't rebel. Or maybe you'll find it months from now, coiled on the windowsill like a shed snakeskin. Maybe you'll never find it, another secret kept between the catgut, the woodgrain, the levers and pedals.

JULIET ESCORIA on film with Rebecca Gransden

November 30, 2021

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

I remember watching Beetlejuice over and over as a kid. I got nightmares from things that kids aren’t supposed to get nightmares from, like The Care Bears movie, but for some reason this movie didn’t bother me? Explains my goth roots.

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

I wasn’t allowed to watch rated R movies for a long time (except my parents did let me watch The Shining and The Exorcist in junior high). When Pulp Fiction came out, a lot of the boys in my class—it was all boys—watched it and were talking about how cool it was and I was so jealous, Pulp Fiction seemed so cool and mature to me.

I also remember my parents having a recorded copy of Body Heat on VHS and I was under the impression that this was something they didn’t want me to know about because it was dirty.

Are there any films that define your formative years?

SLC Punk is a silly little movie but I have a lot of affection for it. The party scenes feel true-to-life, and when I was in my teens/early 20s it was really relatable to me. (Fun fact: writer Chiara Barzini appears in this movie.)

The Virgin Suicides made a big impact on me for a lot of reasons—its dreaminess, the images, the portrayal of teen girlhood, and the subject matter of suicide.

I saw Donnie Darko when I was around 20 and it kinda blew my mind. I remember being like Wow, movies can do this! and wanting to talk about it with my friends but I didn’t have any artsy friends at the time and nobody cared.

Do you use film as a prompt or direct motivation for your writing?

Not entirely, but at one point during the writing of Juliet the Maniac I got this strange idea that I needed to match it with the color palette of East of Eden? This doesn’t even make sense. I don’t think it even made sense to me at the time. I was feeling lost in the manuscript when this happened.

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

I want to use this question to talk about how much I love Riley Keough. I love Riley Keough! She’s amazing in everything I’ve seen her in. I love her voice. She’s hot. I have a big crush on her.

American Honey (with Riley Keough)—there are some scenes in Juliet the Maniac that take place in a van. I watched that movie and tried to get the van scenes to at least resemble the van scenes in American Honey. That movie got the milieu of “fucked up youths in a van for long periods” thing down perfectly.

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

Yes, I made a bunch of short films directly related to my first two books. I don’t really think they had an influence—mostly I just found it exciting to work in a different medium. Writing is my favorite artistic medium and I find it to be the most… spiritual? in that you can directly inhabit another person’s mind and thoughts… but there are still limitations to it. There are certain things you can only do with film. It felt fun and freeing to be able to work with images and, especially, music. I’d like it if you could force people to listen to a soundtrack to your book.

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

I watched Drugstore Cowboy about a hundred times when I was dating this junky who was very bad for me. (Referring to him as a junky seems harsh but also accurate.) He’s dead now. Bad memories.

Another dead boyfriend (different dead boyfriend) memory are the movies of Jim Jarmusch. I still don’t like Jim Jarmusch movies, excepting the zombie one. I liked the zombie one.

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?

All three places where I’ve lived as an adult were cinematic. I grew up in Del Mar, CA, which is sandstone bluffs, blue ocean, bent Torrey pines, and that soft golden light that is distinctive to Southern California. The beach in front of the house where I grew up has always felt creepy to me, which I tried to portray in this movie and the corresponding story. It has a lagoon that gets misty and just looks vaguely ominous.

West Virginia, where I live now, is so beautiful that it feels aggressive. I regularly feel distracted while driving to work by the aggressively beautiful mountains and trees and rivers and sky. I have some stories in my new, not yet published collection that feature me writing about this aggressive beauty. It makes me kinda sad that movies set in WV are generally filmed in Georgia, rather than on location. I wish WV would get a decent airport and give out tax credits so they could be filmed here. Seems like a missed opportunity.

And New York, where I went to grad school… I think the way it’s depicted in movies, books, and music is a big reason why I wanted to go to school there in the first place. I’ve tried to not write about it too much because it’s been covered so many times, but I also didn’t want to shy away from it either. When I had a story that I really wanted to write that absolutely needed to be set in New York, I let it be set in New York.

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

I feel the need to watch Gangs of New York about once a year. I’m not even sure why. I guess because there are so many good characters, and it feels so ambitious in terms of scale. Goodfellas and Taxi Driver are other Scorsese movies I feel the need to watch fairly regularly.

The aforementioned The Virgin Suicides is another one. I’ve watched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood four times and could watch it again (fuck the haters for this movie, you all are losers). It’s pretty much a perfect movie, from the editing to the acting. I am also really into anything related to the women of the Manson family—not Charlie, he’s boring, but the women—and anything that could be described as California Noir.

Under the Silver Lake is another recent “California Noir”ish movie I could watch again.

And David Lynch movies, of course: Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, and Wild at Heart are movies I could watch over and over.

I loved Midsommar (again, fuck the haters, you’re boring) and feel like that movie was kinda made for me, with the imagery and the weird nature/pagan shit and the woman character getting the upper hand in the end.

I saw Ganja & Hess for the first and so far only time last year but it really hit me hard. Like the other movies, I think a lot of it has to do with imagery/general aesthetic.

What films have roused a visceral reaction in you?

Waves was the most recent one. It gave me a stomach ache, big time.

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

All of the ones under the “films I regularly return to” section, plus Good Time, The Neon Demon, The Witch Who Came from the Sea, Ordet, The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, The Hunger, American Honey, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely… I could go on but that’s a decent list.

This series has not much to do with my writing, but I want to recommend Small Axe. That series was amazing and it got less recognition than it deserved.