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LOW GAS AND A LION IN THE BACKSEAT by Hannah Gregory

July 1, 2021

My hand lives in her belly. That belly has a tumor the size of a banjo. I like to think my hand keeps her company, playing a soothing song on her tumor banjo whenever she cries in pain. I use my one hand to play my non-tumor banjo for her, my actual banjo, like hum-di-bum-hum-di-dee-hum-di-bum-hum-di-dee. No chords because, hello, one hand over here. My girlfriend Tracy is always yelling at me for getting a lion, but Theory: Is it really about the banjo? Tracy refuses to help me with the chords so she just hears me singing in Open G all day. I tell her that every townie who’s been trapped in the town where they grew up deserves to play banjo for a lion they love. Checkmate. Conclusion: Tracy hates banjos.

My lion breathes heavy these days, breathing the breaths of like… really hard breathing. Tracy doesn’t think I’m a biologist, but what about that online course I took? Checkmate. Theory: Tracy is jealous. She says to stop spending all of my money on that lion. Tracy has had to pick me up because my car ran out of gas. More than once. I spend all of my tips from the bar on the lion’s treatments and we barely make rent. Last night, I did donuts in the high school parking lot until my Low Fuel light popped up, blasting Earl Scruggs with the lion in the backseat as a treat in her final days. Tracy says I’m going to have to start paying for my own AAA if I don’t get rid of that lion. Conclusion: Tracy is jealous. She gives me the silent treatment like she knows how to use it, but there’s a button behind her ear. When I press it eight times, she stops giving me the silent treatment. “Stahp. Staaaaaaahp. Quit it. Please. Okay. Stop now. Ha ha. Okay. Ha ha. You really know how to get on my nerves.” It always goes like that and then we make sweet, salty townie love.

I would cry if this car could run on tears and anxiety instead of gasoline. Theory: If my palm sweats the whole way to the vet’s office, I’ll be able to make it there before my tank runs out of gas. My lion can’t get comfortable in the backseat because of the banjo in her belly. Her brain refuses to quit even though her body is trying to kill her. If I run out of gas, I’ll need to put a sign on the window that says: Careful! Lion in the backseat! She bites but be nice to her. She’s dying! I pass by a gas station, but keep driving because I know where I can get gas two cents cheaper. Conclusion: The car coasts into the vet’s parking lot and it shuts off before I can park. Conclusion: Tracy misjudges my thrift.

My body quakes ugly tears and I rest my head on my lion’s. She licks the tears off my face and she has that smile, that desire to keep living, to keep sleeping, to keep waking up, to keep eating her favorite dinner of fresh carcasses and sweaty hands, to keep listening to my one-handed banjo while I sing her a sweet song about love and heartache.

I sit with her until the vet comes out. We all walk inside together and I walk out alone.

Theory: My heart’s going to fall out and never make its way back home. My lion’s name was Bette, by the way. She was young. Only about five years old. I hum Bette’s favorite song until Tracy comes and picks me up. We leave my car stranded in the vet’s parking lot. Conclusion: I’m going to cry until I die.

HAUNTING by Edee James

June 30, 2021

A ghost is a boy who always comes back to you.

We were kissing in his car, which he’d initially parked by the side of the road so we could volley insults at each other responsibly. With his breath sweet and warm on my neck, and his tongue darting in and out of my ear, it was easy to momentarily forget why we were fighting.

It was about another girl.

I grew up learning that a man will stray. You shouldn’t kill yourself just because your man is a community penis, my aunt said. All I had to do was pray he didn’t gift me something incurable. My position in his heart was solid if he had a string of female names on his phone, but it was ‘code red’ if he was focusing on one specific girl.

There was one specific girl.

The boy said it was either me or her whenever he was ready for marriage. The fight wasn’t about the fact that he had options. It was because he wouldn’t spell out my position in his list of eligible women. I told him to go and fix his limp dick, and he told me they were selling oils for my receding hairline. Then we were giggling and kissing, mouths and hands everywhere, stray moans escaping throats, goosebumps like we’d been submerged in ice. An army van screeched to a stop in front of us, tires spraying gravel and sand. Three soldiers leaped out with guns slung over their shoulders to buy roasted corn from a roadside seller. It was then I lost control of my bladder.

There was a pool of urine on my seat when the boy dropped me off.

We didn’t talk about me peeing myself. We didn’t talk about the fact that it wasn’t really about the soldiers--my dad was in the army, so I was quite familiar with officers. We didn’t talk at all.

It was about their guns.

The boy dropped me off without a word. We had been on and off for five years. It was clear we were off again. Inside my house, I stepped out of my soiled skirt and flung my bra and wig against the wall. I shivered under the spray of cold water in the shower, but it was alright because it helped dilute my warm tears.

Right then, I knew two things:

1. The boy and I, currently off, would be on again in about a year2. He was never going to marry me

I knew.

I have always known things. My cousin calls me before he bets on football games. My friend won lots of money after I blurted out winning numbers. When I was younger, my mother took me to a prophet because she couldn’t understand it all. A girl working in my mom’s beauty salon noticed how I always turned up right before my mom started eating lunch on her break. No one believed the girl, so she decided to set a trap for me. She bought ice cream and said my mom couldn’t eat it until a certain time. I appeared as my mother swallowed the first scoop.

A ghost is a dearly departed soul who doesn’t know how to return home.

I was drying plates in the kitchen the first time I saw the ghost. It was running up and down, restive. I told it to stop, then wondered if my insomnia was finally catching up with me. The next day it was back, a figure in white floating around the periphery of my vision. Annoyed, I told it I wasn’t responsible for its death.

I was there the day the ghost died. I had swept his skull fragments into a dustpan with my hands after the kidnappers emptied a clip into his head and spilled his brain. He had come to cut my uncle’s hair at home but stuck around because he wanted to help me clean the house. He owned a barbershop in town, and my uncle was one of his VIP clients. That Sunday, he finished his job and got paid, but he insisted on dusting the furniture before leaving. I pried the cleaning rag out of his grip after the police came and took my statement and his body. An officer scribbled something indecipherable as I recounted the event:

a. I was frying plantains when the kidnappers cameb. They took everyone to my uncle’s bedroomc. They asked us all to lie facedownd. They asked for a pen and a piece of papere. One of them asked if I was the maid, and I said yes because of the way his greedy eyes X-rayed my bodyf. They wrote down the number we had to call to pay the ransomg. They killed the barber on their way out because he recognized someone in the gangh. No, they didn't wear masksi. They kidnapped my uncle

I told my aunt about the restless ghost, and she looked at me funny and asked me how I knew. Apparently, some prophet had told her the same thing. We brought people to pray and bless the house.

A ghost is the first love you will never forget.

The boy came back. He glossed over the urine incident now that a year had passed, telling me how I had squirted and almost ruined his car just because of a little kiss on the neck. He suggested therapy when I told him about the dead barber and the kidnappers and the guns.

The boy and I started sexting back and forth until we had chapters of erotica. I’d wake up to the wicked things he was planning to do to me, and I’d reply, threatening something even more delicious. We threatened each other with ice cubes and whips, fire and handcuffs, lace and blindfold. Yet I knew that everything we wrote and did would only help his sex life when he married his specific girl. I was only helping him build a library.

GREGOR MENDEL NEVER KNEW MY FATHER by Kristin Tenor

June 28, 2021

Mr. Chavez stands in front of the classroom and talks about peas. Green peas, yellow peas, wrinkled peas, smooth-as-Mr. Chavez’s-bald head peas. He says when two different varieties are sown together under a blanket of dark, loamy soil, they sometimes yield plants with pods containing green and wrinkled peas or yellow and smooth or maybe they’ll come out the same shade of chartreuse as the faded bridesmaid’s dress hidden in the back of your mother’s closet, the one she wore the night she met your father and got drunk on wild dandelion wine for the first time and conceived you, although she’ll never in a million years say so. You can tell just fine by the way her fingers wrap themselves around the hanger as she keeps shoving it further and further back until it’s pressed tight against the wall.

OVERDRAFT by Michael Seymour Blake

June 25, 2021

THE FUCK’S A TUFFET? by Jonathan Cardew

June 25, 2021

Little Miss Muffet took another hit from her Juul. It was Friday, which meant English class all afternoon. Instead of walking towards the Arts building, though, Muffet detoured into the woods so she could do a little pipe before Hawthorne.

When she sat down on a grassy embankment, a spider descended from a nearby tree--a ten-foot wide spider, big enough to hop and skip over a bus.

She tried to light her pipe, but the spider freaked out and hissed at the flame.

“Oh, just piss off,” she said to the spider, and it promptly did.

Once she was high, it crawled back.

“Are you eating fire?” asked the spider, sheepishly, motioning to the pipe with one hairy leg.

“Go away,” said Muffet.

“I just want to sit with you on that tuffet,” said the spider. “Seems like a perfect spot.”

Miss Muffet enjoyed smoking so much—getting high was her new normal, filling herself with fumes was her new way.

“A tuffet?”

She laughed. She coughed out smoke.

Spiders were not her new way.

…

When she arrived at school, things were baffling.

Two freshmen rushed up to her and flapped their traps about Mr. Karman making out with one of the seniors and getting caught by the principal.

Miss Muffet took a surreptitious draw from her Juul, eating the vape so that it leaked out of her nose.

“Ewww, gross,” she said, but she wasn’t really grossed out; Mr. Karman had a tush like two boiled eggs joined in holy matrimony.

“In the Biology room,” said one of the freshmen, with an exaggerated wink.

Little Miss Muffet thought about the spider.

She mouthed the word, “tuffet.”

Tuffet.

Tuff-it.

She entered the school via the Sciences wing.

…

It was dark in the Biology room, except for the hydroponic lights in one corner.

Little Miss Muffet peered through the little glass window and could just about make out the hunched figure of Mr. Karman at his desk.

It looked like he was bent over his grading, but surely he was staring down into the chasm of his bad choices.

Little Miss Muffet knocked on the window—rat-a-tat-tat.

No response.

She tried again, but figured she might as well just open the door.

The room was eerily quiet—never was it quiet during class time since Mr. Karman operated on a ‘do what you will’ kind of vibe.

She walked toward him.

He looked up from his chasm.

“Muffet…” he said. “Don’t you have class now?”

“Free period,” she lied, sitting down on one of the student seats.

“Oh,” he said, letting out a sigh.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Karman, but I had a question…”

“Now's not a great time for questions,” he said.

Little Miss Muffet leant back in the seat so it groaned, getting out her Juul device and giving it a quick pull.

She guessed Mr. Karman wouldn’t notice, let alone care.

“Now’s not a great time for anything.”

Mr. Karman looked sexy in the wan light, like a figure from an oil painting, all anguish and doom, haggard.

…

When the bell rang, Little Miss Muffet was already deep in the woods again.

Hawthorne could wait until Wednesday.

Hawthorne and his scarlet letter could go screw themselves, 1600s style.

“You’re back,” said the spider, who was in the same general vicinity as before.

The spider was one of those fat spiders with tiny legs. Pointless. Dragging its hairy-ass belly across the ground when it moved.

A sorry, sorry sight.

“I’m back,” said Little Miss Muffet, using her fingers to simulate quote marks.

She took her place on the small, grassy hill and got out her pipe again.

“Can I?” said the spider, pointing to the same spot as before.

“Can you what?”

It blinked its dozen eyes.

“Sit down beside you,” it said. “On that tuffet.”

Little Miss Muffet sighed, channeling Mr. Karman.

“Look,” she said. “It’s a free country.”

She pushed a nub of weed into the pipe end and lit it, drawing a perfect crackle.

“Can I ask you a question?”

THREE MICROS by Evan Jerome Williams

June 24, 2021

Carl

Carl is a cobra with nine eyes. Carl has seven too many eyes, and none of them see well. He has difficulty finding eyeglasses that work for him on account of his extra eyes.

Carl needs eyeglasses to read. He is a scholar studying applied reptilian physics, a discipline primarily concerned with asteroid-detection and trajectory-disruption techniques. Carl needs eyeglasses so he can protect us.

Carl found an eye doctor who used to be a pirate. The eye doctor poked out seven of Carl’s eyes with precise stabbing motions, then made as many eyepatches with equal precision.

Carl looks like a badass. He has the right number of eyes for eyeglasses now. Carl is going to save the world.

This Is A Threat

I bought an orange sweater at the mall and decided to wear it to my dermatology appointment. Dermatologists study my skin because it is multi-layered, and that is unusual. They want to understand it. When I got there they asked me to take the sweater off. “Please, sir,” they said, “we need to see your layered dermis.” I couldn’t take it off. “I can’t,” I told them, “It’s a new layer of my skin.” I tugged at it. “See?” I said. They walked to the other side of the room to consult their notes. They consulted one another. They all nodded and came back. The dermatologists fanned out around me. “This is a threat,” they said. “Take off your sweater,” they said. “Take off your sweater so we can study you.” They anaesthetized me and peeled it like a sunburn.

Amos

Amos is a man I met in a hot tub. Famous. Famous Amos in a hot tub with me. This makes me famous. Amos says so, in the hot tub where we are both famous. Amos has cookie shorts. Chocolate chip, I think, or raisin. Raisin cookie shorts for Mr. Amos in the hot tub.

We are in Hawaii. I can’t remember if I mentioned that. Famous people are more common in places like Hawaii. Maybe I should omit this detail. Or alter it.

The hot tub in Arkansas. Arkansas where few famous people are found at leisure. Arkansas, so unfamous as to be infamous for its unfamousness. Mr. Amos and I, famous, in the Arkansan hot tub. “Do you want some cookies?” he asks. “Yes I’d like that,” I answer.

RUSSIAN ADVICE by Joshua Hebburn

June 23, 2021

The only tenderable advice Mom had given him was if a woman threatens to throw a plate at your head, she might, but if she takes her shoes off first, she's going to kill you. Mom said she learned this while reading Turgenev. In college.

He started taking magnesium supplements for better sleep. His therapist recommended it when he mentioned his disturbances in his sleep and insomnia. He Googled magnesium. He learned that magnesium burns especially hot, and that bad people—child pornographers, hackers, drug cartel accountants—used magnesium-based flip-switch ignition setups to melt their hard drives full of illegal information when the men in heavy gear and gas masks stormed in. He learned about nutritional magnesium. He went to Target. His dreams became vivid from the magnesium. The dead and the lost things in his life returned to him in everyday settings, and the famous people—politicians and actors and actresses—all articulated together into nonsense. The people were speaking out of character, sometimes in a language that was almost decipherable. The settings flowed into the wrong next one. They committed unconjoined, sometimes tender, sometimes disgusting acts. These would be disturbing. This isn’t speaking of the objects and other nouns. That is if they weren't, as memories, faint, thin, and rapidly fading. But maybe they wouldn't: they don't wake him up in their progress. He thinks of these as his magnesium dreams. He has magnesium dreams almost every night now. He didn’t dream this much before, either. He likes it even if it makes him feel bad.

The other advice Mom gave was—for instance, only eat cake after thirty if you’re not married, women like plump guys but don't keep them—it was stuff that made only surface sense, made too complete a feeling, was calculated to imply a kind of person, it was like a magazine ad.

He thought of the way she would turn her hand palm up when she talked. She curled her index finger in towards the palm. It alarmed him that he couldn’t think of the hand beyond the gesture. In his mind’s eye it was a smudge, like the limb of one of the figures in the background of a painting, exactly what came into his mind when he thought generically of a “woman’s palm,” or “woman’s index finger.” He could look at his own hand and observe the fold of flesh in the groin between his thumb and his pointer. He wished he could see a picture of the same place on her hand, or, if he could only consult a reference to jar his memory into particulars. He imaged some library that contained volumes of photographs of human hands, human wrists, human arms, and all of the other parts, photographs made in hard light and printed in large format on thick, smooth art book paper. It would be forgotten, the form of any human hand, her hand was going to be forgotten, and even his own hand as it was now because it would be another hand in the future, a hand with different creases.

Nobody's home. He went to her room and applied her makeup from the crowded table. He does it in the same way you might invert your shirt and go bongos on your belly, or sing a song loudly and badly, inserting cusses and slurs, or the way you pretend to be Jim Carrey in The Mask. Hummanahummana! Because you can. First a metallic dusting. Then an outline with a wet black pen. An oyster colored, oyster cool cream on the hands that smells like lavender, and salt. The satisfying twist of the plastic gold tube to raise the ruby worn down by Mom's lips. I'm a glamorita, a glamourpuss. I look divine.

He was occasioned for all of this. He thought while he sat beside his second wife, who he knew he didn't love recently, or maybe never. His hands were folded into his hands. The pew was hard. Everyone wears black. The pastor said the pastor's scripture of love, God, and death. The light passed through the stained glass windows and it filled the enormous room with color.

He thinks of Mom smacking the bottom of the bear shaped bottle of pure clover honey, then looking at Dad at the kitchen table, and moving her hand to the hollowed bear rump, patting and laughing. Later, she would throw something at Dad, and for a reason. He couldn't remember if she was wearing shoes, she often did or didn't inside the house. How did she feel?

Like a duel, he supposed, you make a commitment and do it out of some idea that you will feel some way after you've gone through. They say, go through with it. You go to the dentist. You go to the funeral. You snort cocaine. You divorce a wife. You say Jesus Christ.

BACCHUS AT LARGE by Avee Chaudhuri

June 21, 2021

For six straight days we drank bourbon with delighted urgency: men, women, and children above the age of twelve. The preacher was horrified of course. The Mayor betrayed no emotions. He simply knew what must be done to save the town. Twelve-year-olds were dancing in the streets and exposing themselves to livestock and wild animals. Many of the women had embraced the ancient, sapphic ways under this new regimen. The men were livid but the Mayor kept the peace. “It’s the whiskey, fellas. That’s all,” he said, knowing he was a liar. The Mayor was a man of the world and had been educated in France, then had practiced law and medicine and silversmithing in Brazil before an intense hankering for peaches brought him back to Texas.

For six straight days we drank, and Providence smiled briefly because on the seventh day we were assured that Addison himself, the dread distiller, would ride in from Kentucky and burn everything in sight, and then in the smoldering wreckage he would murder Jason Faulkner with his bare hands. Faulkner had worked at the distillery in Shively, and stolen from Addison about one hundred cases of whiskey, simply because he could. Then he came down to Texas on a wagon loaded with whiskey and books and seed packets for some land and privacy. He was a horticulturalist by trade and set himself up in consultation, in a house off the main square. The whiskey was stored in his basement.

Faulkner was a womanizer too and something of an exhibitionist. He slept with Molly Ibsen under a canopy of blue azaleas in the public gardens, and that’s what set the whole thing off. Molly came home that afternoon without her usual despondent look and her husband was immediately suspicious. He followed her the next day and saw her screwing Faulkner in all these poses facing earthward. He was incensed, then aroused, then briefly conciliatory, and then even more pissed off. Intending to stab Faulkner in the eyes and groin, Tom Ibsen broke into his house through the basement, where he noticed the many cases of whiskey, all stamped with the famous Addison logo: a horse trampling a Delaware Indian. He decided not to kill Faulkner that night, and as it happened Faulkner wasn’t even at home. He was with the preacher’s wife high above town on the roof of the Hotel Sam Houston.

The next day, Tom Ibsen wrote to Addison describing what he had seen in Faulkner’s basement. In a week he received a reply that Addison was on his way to murder Jason Faulkner and destroy the town which had harbored him. Only Ibsen’s home would be spared. Ibsen was so goddamn petty that the news from Addison struck him as fair and equitable. Ibsen drank a toast to himself and fell asleep at his desk. When trying to rouse her husband for dinner, Molly Ibsen saw the letter from Addison and took it to Faulkner. She was inconsolable.

“Calm yourself, Molly,” said Faulkner. Faulkner told the Mayor a little of what transpired and asked him to hold a town meeting and the Mayor agreed because things had been far too peaceful and civil and he was getting fucking bored with it all and restless. Once in Okinawa, a man he had disgraced with his fists had told him that every crisis is an opportunity. But for so long there had been no crisis here on account of fair weather and steady trade.

“Send forth the crier,” the Mayor said dramatically. Then he did a bump of cocaine.

The town gathered and Faulkner addressed the citizens:

“Friends, lovers and enemies. You know me as Jason Faulkner. That is indeed my name on the census but I have been known by many names over many lifetimes: Bacchus, Hanuman, Reynard the Fox.”

“What the fuck is your point!” someone shouted.

“Goddammit,” Faulkner continued, “I am the god of wine and mischief. A terrible disaster awaits. I stole one hundred cases of whiskey from Brody Addison and he will think you all complicit and burn the town. Unless we drink all the whiskey.”

“Seems to me,” said Colonel Bright, “that we oughta dump that whiskey in the river and that you oughta move along.”

“And waste the wisdom of Solomon, the secret pleasure of Agamemnon?” Faulkner said. “We can drink it together in the spirit of fellowship. We can show that evil goddamn maniac that revelry will always triumph over murder and arrogance.”

Faulkner repeated the claim that he was a living god and this upset quite a few people, particularly the preacher.

“You’re simply a man. You fucked my wife and she didn’t come home smelling like ambrosia. In fact, she reeked of horse shit,” the preacher complained.

The townspeople prevailed on their mayor to say something:

Why the hell not, said the Mayor. This is the time for spectacle and revelation. Atrocities in the Belgian Congo, the telephone, the phonograph, a transatlantic cable. They’ve discovered the lost city of Troy and canals on Mars. In about one hundred years, the millennium will be upon us and the world will surely end. The sea will swallow Texas, and we may or may not survive in the coming ether as unlimbered gnats. For so long, the Mayor sighed, all we’ve really known how to do together is kill, so why shouldn’t the king of satyrs appear in these woods and tell us otherwise.

“Fuck it, I’m in. Faulkner, put me down for a case,” said the Mayor.

Not to be outdone, Colonel Bright demanded two cases of whiskey, and soon everyone was clamoring to help hide the evidence of Faulkner’s crimes. Thirty or forty good men and women had come forward and the Mayor issued an emergency order that the children could drink. We started drinking in a concerted fashion. Musicians played day and night in the main square. The drunk children started using cocaine in vast quantities in order to stay awake so they could keep drinking. Old blood feuds were resolved and outstanding gambling debts were forgiven. Tom Ibsen even tried to reconcile with his wife, but by then, in her state of sublime drunkenness, Molly decided she didn’t need Tom or Jason or carnal knowledge of any man or woman. She wanted to be a gunfighter. The Mayor, seated beneath a statue of General Sam Houston, watched it all and thought to himself: somewhere, that old Samurai bastard is smiling upon us.

Late on the sixth day we smashed up and burned all the empty bottles and crates from the Addison Distillery. The Mayor and his valets performed Pagliacci, a rough English translation that had us in tears. The point is it sobered us up. The musicians disbanded. The brothel, which in those six days had served as a hospital for victims of alcohol poisoning, was redecorated in its usual satin and silk finery, in its traditional arabesque. It was business as usual when Addison rolled up. The peach farmers were in the main square arguing with the monocled peach commissioner, threatening to form a co-operative. In the middle of it all, the Mayor wore his finest sable coat and twirled his walking stick, saying, “Gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen!”

Addison was gaunt and high-legged.

“Where is he? Where is Faulkner?” Addison asked.

“Faulkner, we know no Faulkner,” said the Mayor. “we know a Bacchus, Bismarck, Hanuman, Cleopatra, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, and good old George Washington Gomez.” The Mayor kept going for minutes, fueled as he was by cocaine and insolence.

“Enough!” Addison shouted. Then he brandished his pistol.

“Hey there, Addison!” Faulkner cried from his front porch.

The two men met in the center of the main square.

“You are a thief. Where is my whiskey?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve ridden all this way for no reason.”

“The day after you left, I discovered one hundred cases of my whiskey missing. I have a letter from a man named Ibsen claiming to have seen one hundred cases of my whiskey in your cellar.”

“That man Ibsen is a congenital liar. There is no whiskey here,” said Faulkner.

Addison sighed and smiled wistfully, sensing Faulkner had outsmarted him in some way, and then he shot him right in the gut and then once more in the right temple. Faulkner’s blood crested in the wind, splattering among the peaches.

“I am a Colonel of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. I will ride freely,” said Addison.

We buried Faulkner later that day in a shallow grave, and the Mayor spoke a eulogy in a variety of modern and ancient languages. Whenever Faulkner is ready, whenever the horn blows or the raven circles the mountain, what little we have laid on top of him, mere twigs and branches, and some handfuls of dirt, may be easily traversed.

BABIES DON’T KEEP by Janelle Bassett

June 18, 2021

I packed my blue kiddie-sized suitcase that said “Off to Grandma’s House.” In went the socks that I liked to roll down into ankle worms. In went the hairbrush with my spelling bee name tag stuck on the handle to claim it as mine—just like the dark greasy hair wound through it.

Usually the suitcase referred to my dark-haired Grandma, because that's where I took it. This time I was packing for a trip to my red-haired Grandma’s, but the suitcase was still right about where I was headed.

I put in a wax air freshener shaped like a teddy bear. The bear wore blue jeans and I’d melted his head into his shoulders with a lamp light. I meant to—had wished for a real flame and quicker dripping. The bear was a victim but still smelled like sea breeze. I always sniffed my victim before going to sleep. Routines were secretly holding me together.

I hoped my mom would pack a bag for my sister. Without help, her bag would be only Tootsie Rolls, trolls, and hard objects for pelting me when I most deserved it. No underwear, just projectiles.

I finished packing my suitcase hours before I was to be taken anywhere. I sat on my bed with my shoes buckled and looked in the mirror and saw the kind of girl who packed her bag hours early and then put on her shoes and looked in the mirror and watched herself pat-pat her bag to make sure it was staying ready.

I watched Grandma pull up through my sheer curtains. She parked her tan Buick, put her purse on her shoulder then, remembering she was in a small town where purse snatchings were rare and she could acquire her granddaughters for free, set her purse back down.

My mom let me open the door. Grandma was no longer her mother-in-law, so Mom was under no obligation to smile, coo, or offer her pigs-in-a-blanket when she came around. Mom put out her cigarette and put both feet on the floor—she no longer needed to impress but that didn’t mean she wanted to be caught all bunched up and puffing away.

“Look at you, all ready to go! I guess you didn’t have time to brush your hair. Where’s your sister?”

Grandma stood there fragrant and put together, masterfully middle-aged. She was the only person in my life who wore outfits and not just clothes. This gave her a certain authority over my hair. Her go-to look was bright multi-colored tops tucked into solid slacks, plus jazzy belts, beaucoup jewelry, a crisp hairdo, shoulder purse and foo-foo perfume. She had a high slim waist and it seemed like her whole past and future revolved around that fact—her middle being so easy to locate.

Grandma looked past me and saw my mom sitting up straight and not on fire. “How are you doing, Mandy?”

Mom said she was “getting along fine” but did not offer examples of her fineness or ask any questions in return. Instead she got up to see what was keeping my sister from getting this woman off her porch.

I was telling Grandma that I’d packed a swimsuit just-in-case when we heard yelling.

“It’s time to go. Right now!”

“I want to bring my (unintelligible)!”

“You can’t! It doesn’t fit in your bag! Just take everything from inside and pack it. Same thing.”

Grandma and I heard a scream that started upright then dropped to the floor. Then we heard the crunchy brown carpet take some abuse from Tara’s fists and heels. I thought good. That carpet deserved it.

I bet Grandma wished she had her purse to look through while she stood through this tantrum—she could have feigned gum-rifling to break the tension.

I told her, “I better go see what’s going on.”

She looked in at our couch and said, “I’ll guess I’ll wait in the car.”

When I walked in Tara was still pounding and my mom had her face in her hands. Mom saw me and offered, “She wants to bring her entire drawer.”

Tara stopped moving and crying so that her justification wasn’t coming from an out-of-control animal. “I need to bring it because Chomp-Chomp sleeps in there. It’s her bed!”

Chomp-Chomp was my sister’s stuffed rabbit who I’d never ever seen sleep anywhere other than in Tara’s twin bed, in the crook of her arm. I said, “Why can’t she bring the drawer?”

“Because… it’s part of the dresser.”

“We will bring it back.” I made it into a “we” situation, like the idea was gathering momentum. Practically everyone thinks bringing the whole drawer is a reasonable idea.

Tara looked at me to forgive me for about twenty percent of how I’d treated her up until that moment. I had to keep her tipped slightly toward me with these moments of understanding so she didn’t hit me too hard when she hit me too hard.

Mom said, “It’s heavy. And what would your grandma think?”

From the floor Tara watched to see if I was pulling for her strong enough to get past the next, logistical hurdle.

“We’ll tell her it’s a Reed family tradition—that your family has traveled with their dresser drawers for centuries. One guy started it and then that became the way it was done. Like how Johnny Appleseed’s descendants probably still wear pots on their heads.”

Tara put her ankle on her opposite knee and said “Yeah” like she’d just been taking a casual floor rest or doing a yoga pose and not wigging out about a detachable piece of furniture.

Mom must have realized how close she was to being free from us for two days. “Fine. But I’m not carrying it out to her car. You two will have to manage.” She gave us each a kiss on the cheek, went into her room, and shut the door.

As Tara and I lugged the dresser drawer across the lawn we remarked conspiratorially on how light it was, really, and how well Chomp-Chomp would sleep in the city. Grandma popped the trunk without comment. We didn’t even have to tell her about the Reed tradition, she could tell by our unkept hair that we came with a fair amount of straggly reasoning.

***

Tara and I rode in the backseat because Grandma had plastic shopping bags in the front and didn’t offer to move them. Also, we needed to be close enough to fight and huff at each other without getting neck cricks.

Grandma never asked about school or friends or if we’ve been nice to Mommy. She wanted to spend time with us, not with a five- and a seven-year-old. She knew our day-to-day lives were boring struggles and that nothing that happened at school was worth sharing, so instead she told us about her life.

I was glad I didn’t have to produce answers like, “Yes, my teacher is very nice, she grades in green instead of red” but I did want to tell someone about getting under my desk for earthquake drills in my dress and how the cold concrete floor felt on my underwear when I leaned back into a full crouch. And about my daily work digging out tree roots at recess. Every day I exposed more tendrils and every day I became less articulate.

Grandma told us about selling high-end stuffed animals to rich children and the parents who wanted to shut them up, and about her new dummy cat who tried to sleep on the wrought iron headboard but kept falling into the crack between the bed and the wall with a squawk that must have meant “I thought this time would be different!”

I filed away all this incoming information. I looked like a blank incapable child who might sit watching houseflies, but I was a Rolodex in cotton tights. These stories were clues and demonstrations I might need someday when I learned how to be a person.

Tara looked out the window. This made me furious. I wanted to hurt her so that I didn’t have to think about how she saw the world when I was busy with my own investigation.

I whispered to her, “You smell like the dog when she first wakes up.”

She frowned, hurt and small, and tried to kick me.

Grandma said, “Stop that fighting or you won’t get to see what’s in these bags.”

Tara stopped so I gave her a victorious look because even though we both stood to gain from the bags she had already sustained my critical comment while I remained unkicked.

Tara told Grandma that we’d each gotten a puppy from a neighborhood litter. Spunk, the puppy she’d chosen, was still alive and chasing cars while the dog I’d chosen, Lucky, was killed by a car just as soon as I’d named him. Tara said, “Isn’t that kind of funny? Lucky?”

And Grandma laughed because it was kind of funny when you weren’t the owner and the namer of the unlucky pup.

So Tara kicked me back without compromising the bag of goodies, and while I stewed about the comedic, deflating death of my pet I was also relieved that my sister had tipped us back to even. I did my best damage in retribution.

***

We’d been driving for two hours when we stopped at a gas station. Grandma needed to fill up and said we could get a snack, which meant candy because we weren’t the kind of girls to walk out with a bag of pretzels.

Tara and I stayed in the car while Grandma pumped. We wordlessly watched Grandma push buttons while the back of her belt sparkled for us. When she turned around with the nozzle she tapped it on the window, like a fun-loving warning. Give me a smile with your hands up where I can see ‘em.

Inside the gas station I found the candy aisle and decided to get Sixlets which are like rounder M&M’s, with even more of that factory-made taste (bouquet of dye with notes of clanking).

Before I could finalize my choice by swiping it off the rack, I saw a man in the next aisle. He was in the salt aisle: chips, peanut butter crackers, jerky sticks, mixed nuts. He held a bag of Funyuns and I recognized him immediately. If I hadn’t been with my Grandma I might not have made such swift connections. I might have thought, “Bus driver? Farm hand? Yoyo’s Pop-Pop?” But in that context I easily remembered that he had once been my low-level, temporary, menacing Grandpa. An image of him reclining on the couch leering and sneering in pajama pants made my stomach grasp at my inner-skin for balance and composure.

I froze and tried to understand the implications of this sighting and whether I wanted to be recognized by this man. I scanned for Tara. She was safe with Grandma and the cold drinks. I considered army-crawling to them but I knew the Sixlets would make me a conspicuous rattlesnake.

He hadn’t noticed me yet. Then I recalled how unremarkable and forgettable a child I was. People never remembered me. I had to be formally introduced to my great-grandmother each holiday and every picnic. I could probably do a cha-cha dance with several packages of Sixlets and this past-Grandpa wouldn’t even look up.

This was a relief. This Grandpa had, for a brief time, been the partner of my red-haired Grandma who was now only feet away with the cold drinks. I didn’t know if they had been married or simply boyfriend and girlfriend, but I think they lived together. His razor and comb had been in her bathroom with her seashell art and her round cakes of pink soap.

I’d only picked up slivers about their relationship. From listening to adult conversations I’d learned that he’d been stealing from Grandma and had done the same with other women, that he’d pushed a girlfriend down concrete steps, that he’d gone by other names, that he was bad inside—wanting and taking. All while smelling of sharp pine. But the final point of all the gathered slivers was this: she’d gotten away from him.

Until then. When he loomed one aisle over with his Funyuns.

I wanted to sound an alarm and be an alarm. I didn’t want to be unremarkable but ultra-remarkable, like a swirling flame that screams in beeps.

“Hey! Hey you! You’re my grand baby! Aren’t you my little grand baby?”

He was looking over and down at me, identifying me correctly. Except I was never his and he knew me from ages five to six, when I could read and shower alone and wear bodysuits—so not a baby.

I decided not to speak but to cower. So much for being an alarm, for swirling in response to danger. In the heat of the moment I was all prey, all rabbit, begging for mercy only with my eyes.

“You are my grand-baby ain’t ya? You’ve grown. You’re gettin’ lady legs!”

He was leaning on the rack between us and studying me like his eyes were the sun and I grew into a woman only under his edifying watch. I didn’t know he was drunk but I knew he was loose in a way that meant anything could happen. And that the “anything” felt tipped toward bad and toward irrevocable.

He knew I was scared and this only brightened his beam.

I heard my grandma’s shoes tipping across the store. I saw her approach, looking only right-at-me because she’d had previous experience with his mean and binding focus.

She stopped at the entrance to my aisle. “Come on over here.”

She was my well-dressed embassy.

Tara was at her side, looking frightened and like she forgave me for another twenty percent of my awful behavior because she disliked seeing me in a vulnerable situation.

“Well, looky here. Pretty Miss Dreena. Here with our grandbabies. Looking so nice.”

Grandma didn’t acknowledge him or meet his eye and I understood all the strength she had in her—her strength in that moment and in the moment she finally kicked him out. I understood her strength in the moments I couldn’t imagine, like what bad men did when they had the chance, and moments I wasn’t privy to, moments from before I was born, like when she was ten and a neighbor boy pushed her down, lifted her skirt, and stood over her because he wanted her to know he could do more if he felt like it. In that moment her strength kept the truth of that powerlessness from penetrating her being.

I took my Sixlets and went to Grandma. She held my hand and led us to the checkout. She looked straight ahead but Tara and I were weaker and watched him following us.

“Where are my three beautiful girls heading tonight?”

Two people were in front of us in line. Grandma gripped our skulls and turned our faces away from him.

“Where are you taking my grandbabies?” His voice was becoming more threatening and more cajoling.

I started to cry. It felt like he could do whatever he wanted since he’d claimed me as his. His grandbaby.

Grandma pulled me into her hip. We were next in line.

Tara saw my tears and turned back to yell, “We are not your grandbabies! And you smell like your dog when she first wakes up!”

He laughed and he came closer, both actions that made the tears come harder.

Grandma had to yank the Sixlets from my upset hand to pay for them.

He was right beside us, nearest to me. He called Grandma’s name. He called her “the little wife.” He asked where we were going over and over.

The woman behind the counter said, “Is there a problem here?” and I wanted to scream an affirmative and scramble behind the counter with her, back with the telephones and the guns and the propriety.

But Grandma very coolly said we were fine and closed her purse and handed us our candy.

She said to us, “We are going to walk to the car and drive away.”

I just knew he’d follow us and scratch at my window until he saw that none of my haughty confidence remained. I knew he wanted to put his yellow teeth in my face and feed off my disgust.

But once we started toward the door he stopped shouting and simply let us go. We got in and we drove away, just like Grandma said. I looked out the window at the gas station. He hadn’t emerged. He wasn’t chasing us.

We were not his grandbabies.

As she pulled back onto the road Grandma asked, “Are you girls okay?”

As Tara said, “No” I said, “He didn’t even remember my name.”

UNFINISHED by David Osgood

June 17, 2021

My wife brushes her teeth in the shower and doesn’t spit, so the toothpaste foams around her mouth and drips down her chin onto her breasts. It reminds me of the two people I fear the most: my mother and my dentist. Tonya oversleeps again. She is starting to look like her mother. I burn my wife’s sprouted grains toast because I hate her new Vegan diet. She doesn’t notice because it is covered with half-ripe avocado. I crisp up a whole package of uncured maple bacon to give her something to complain about.

Tonya yells at her mom like a teenager, though she is only twelve. I cannot imagine what the house will be like when I leave and she doesn’t have an audience. She and I lock rolled eyes. It’s the only thing we have in common that keeps us from falling apart.

On the way to school, Tonya mentions drugs. I tell her I smoked pot in college, but that’s about it. I try to remember what it was like when I was her age. I feel bad for Tonya, having a mentally vacant dad and an emotionally unstable mom. No wonder she is doing drugs already. I picture Drew Barrymore doing a line of cocaine off a Tiger Beat magazine with Jonathan Taylor Thomas on the cover. Maybe I just wasn’t as cool as the other kids, sweaty palms and counting down from ten to muster up the courage to kiss my girlfriend. She broke up with me and the other kids called me a prude. I entered high school with the enormous false sense of confidence that I would sleep with every girl in my class. When that didn’t happen, I drank to feel something, then drank not to feel anything, then just drank.

Tonya opens her car door before I come to a complete stop. She runs up to a group of girls and hugs them all at the same time, showing off what looks like a tattoo on her backside. I drive away thinking I should be upset or disappointed or concerned in some way. I wave begrudgingly at an over-caffeinated school mom tipping her oversized coffee cup to my obvious right of way like she is performing a humanitarian feat. I fantasize about her tailing me home where we drink mimosas and cheat.

I locate the piece of oversized luggage we used to take on family vacations and pull it down from the closet shelf; I find a tampon, a trial-size body lotion, and a foldable toothbrush in the bottom of it. I pack up everything I can fit into it, sit on top of the full suitcase, and get lost in a ceiling stain.

Tonya and her mother come home, furious I missed their calls and voicemails and texts. They stomp up the stairs like walking temper tantrums, following the noises to the bedroom. I look down at them from the attic through a large hole in the ceiling where the stain used to be. “I cut a stain out,” I manage to utter. “I’ll replace it.” They look up at me as if to confirm my suspicions that the father-daughter dance was not, in fact, cancelled this year.

My wife makes curry for dinner and Tonya stays at the table for the entire meal. She asks if we are getting a divorce and I tell her no I just hate my life and she says join the club and we smile like a familiar pain masking a deeper one. She looks high but I don’t say anything. My wife doesn’t talk to me for the rest of the night, even when I am unpacking the enormous suitcase and cleaning plaster off the bedroom floor. I pretend to sleep while she cries; she sleeps and I get up to pay bills in the dark.