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SOUR by Wilson Koewing

June 2, 2021

To escape the midsummer heat, I ducked inside a bar specializing in sour beers on the fringes of Five Points in Denver. I ordered from the happy hour menu, drank sour pours then had my debit card declined.

“I tried it nine times,” the shaggy hair bartender said.

“Try it again.”

“Won’t go through.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

Another bartender, one of those effortlessly beautiful women who always seem marooned in restaurants, came over.

“Nice ink,” I said, noticing an eight ball on her wrist.

“Do you have another card?” she asked.

“I don’t,” I said. “Where do you play?

“Tarantulas.”

“Well, something has to give,” the shaggy hair bartender said, crossing his arms.

She leaned close, “If I cover this, can you Venmo me in a couple days?”

“Sure,” I said. “I could do that.”

She wrote her Venmo name on a ticket.

Outside, I smoked on the sidewalk under the late afternoon sun.  

It wasn’t so much that I was poor, it was more that I didn’t work. My folks sent money sometimes and if they didn’t, I lived modest, rode couches and occasionally ate meals I wasn’t certain I could pay for.

Almost everyone who lived downtown were millennials, working for startups or dispensaries or in the service industry saving for ski bum winters. Either that or virus fired, so nobody cared if you were broke. The prevailing belief was we wouldn’t always be. If you could get in with the right people, asking if you could Venmo later was better than credit. 

I went inside a liquor store up the street. I assumed I had some money on my card, just not enough for the tab.

The card ran.

I exited with a pint of tequila. A guy passed by, down on his luck, and asked for a smoke. I gave him one and offered the pint.

“Nah,” he said. “Gave up drinking.”

“What’s your story?”

“Man…”

“How many cigarettes for you to tell me your story?”

He clasped his hands behind his head and cut down an alley growing smaller and smaller as he went. I tucked the tequila in my pocket and headed toward downtown.

Denver was beautiful at dusk. The buildings appeared rusted in front of the sky.

When the sun slid behind the Rockies it bathed the front range in hard shadow creating, for about twenty minutes, a soft half-light that made the city feel quiet and surreal.

I passed through the tent town on Stout. I had friends who lived there. They weren’t bums but were considered as such. Really, they were burnt out on the bullshit.

Hundreds of tents lined the sidewalks. Trash tumbled by on a furnace breeze. I planned to check in but didn’t consider the time.

No one was around. Everybody was in the dinner line over at the mission.

I crossed Broadway to the 16th Street Mall. The only sign of life was businesspeople scurrying from office buildings.

I continued in the direction of the river looking for Cosmo. He sometimes got high at the confluence. Cosmo was a wild Russian who climbed cranes for Instagram posts. Finding him was dumb luck. His phone only worked when he had wi-fi.

I walked down Little Raven by the high-rise residential along the St. Vrain, crossed the pedestrian bridge into Lo-Hi, and spotted him on the rocks by the water.

“Fuck it,” he said as I approached. “If they don’t construct more buildings, I’m leaving.”

“Back to the Kremlin?” I asked, offering the tequila.

“Pacific Northwest,” he said. “Seattle is growing faster than Denver.”

“Rainy up there.”

“Good,” he said. “I’m sick of all this sunshine.”

“I like it,” I said. “Keeps my depression at bay.”

“Americans,” he laughed. “You think every day should be sunshine.”

As night fell, we got high and watched the windows of the buildings around downtown light up. Around ten, we entered the lobby of the Block 162 South tower. The guy at the desk was asleep. We climbed the stairs to the third floor and took the elevator to the 45th. Once you got a few floors up you could take the elevators without a key.

We accessed the roof through a door with an alarm that Cosmo disarmed with scotch tape. I peered over the ledge. The city took on a green haze. Quiet. The sway of the building was evident and that, coupled with the slow crawl of the cars below, created an Einstein on the bus effect, which is why I couldn’t jump on cranes.

Cosmo was unfazed.  

“Be careful,” I said.

“If I lose my grip, I won’t feel a thing.”

He hung off the ledge, dropped onto a platform, sprinted and leapt onto the long arm of a crane where he dangled by one hand and took a selfie before pulling himself up, moving fast along the arm which led to an under construction building several hundred yards away. I lost sight of him along the way but knew he would make his way down through the building, fucking with whatever hapless security guard happened to be working. I wouldn’t see him again.

I smoked and stared west toward the front range which was visible because of light pollution from the city. From up there, the gradual climb of the peaks humbled, and if you stared long enough, the crisp black of the horizon started to push back.

I rode the elevator down and stepped outside. The return to witnessing life at normal scale always shocks the system. I walked over to Tarantula’s, which was only a few blocks away. The bartender from the sour house mentioned she played there. I figured since I asked it might be on her mind. Maybe we’d run into each other and shoot a game. If not, I’d play for beers, maybe win a few then call around for somewhere to crash.

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NOAH’S MILLENNIUM SOLILOQUY by Maggie Nye

May 31, 2021

I am building a space ark. I have the raw materials to begin. Many can be salvaged from the junkyard, which is the humble throne room of heaven’s inheritors.

Not that I believe in metaphors. We are all best served speaking simply, plainly, and with a cube of bullion under our tongues.

I have collected 130,000 pounds of aluminum rather easily. It took the better part of a century, but I am blessed with dreamless sleep all nights except Sunday, when I drown myself again and again in my indoor jacuzzi until my wife prepares the coffee.

To make a space ark fly, you must affix to its siding the wings of a sizable angel tribe. I was not compelled to do the butchering personally. Thanks be to God, he had them mailed to me first class on dry ice.

God does not need assurance of his own pardoning, but I have it on good authority that angels do not have functional nerve endings.

There is much that displeases God in the world he spawned. Lobsters, for example.

At the stroke of midnight on New Millennium’s Eve, the angel wings will stir with holy motion and the ark will initiate celestial ascent. You and I will not be aboard.

This is well. My children died so many thousands of years ago, and I have begun to move pieces of my home and body into the junkyard. Tomorrow I will move my neck and jacuzzi. I have been promised that my parts will be well used by the needful. You and your friend there are welcome to approach. Come see how easy I am to disassemble.

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SALAD GIRLS by CK Kane

May 28, 2021

I don’t want my mom to die not because I like her, but because she’ll be the nastiest ghost. Unrelenting in death. I just know it. I pull her boots off like always. Using both hands, I make an ugly face and lean my body trying to pull. She moans like always. Whenever she’s not on a horse she’s in this bed. Crumbs of caked mud and crap get on the white sheets as the second boot finally gives and I almost fly across the room. Still in her breeches and a turtleneck, she pulls the covers over her save for a long black braid. The lived-in covers smell like dandruff.

*

A bell sound rattles sharp metallic through my bedroom.  Our doorbell almost never rings, so I don’t get up right away, I just freeze with my hand stuffed down my jeans, distracted from my drawing.

Downstairs in the doorway, she looks like one of the paper cut-out puppets I used to make. Just a dark shape. I recognize her but I don’t know if I should act like it.

“Karl,” says her mouth, like those wax lips we used to get at Halloween that weren’t exactly candy. She smells like the smoking section. Hi Auntie Deb, I say to her grin. A force allows me to stand a certain distance away from her, like the back of a magnet. It almost tickles when I step closer. She hears my mom wailing from upstairs through the walls and her down comforter. I don’t notice until she does.

Outside the bedroom the groaning is unbearable.

Auntie Deb leans in: “Ever since your father, huh.”

I nod, but I don’t remember.

I’m glad I don’t feel much. There’s no room in this house for anyone else’s feelings.

Auntie Deb click-clacks into my mother’s room, chattering.

Lydia, what did you take.

Lydia, this boy must be close to six feet already.

 

Her fingernail is a shade of red I’ve never seen before, almost brown, almost purple. It faintly scratches along the grain of the sheets: “My God, these cost more than my whole life and you wear your barn clothes to sleep?”

I remember a party a few years ago in a different town in Connecticut, one that seemed like the black & white version of our town. After the party I asked my mom if we were filthy rich. And she grabbed my face so hard and shook it and said, “Who taught you how to speak like that? Someone said that, you haven’t heard that in this house, who said that, who taught you that?”

I felt extra dumb. That was the last time I’d seen Auntie Deb until now.

The phone makes its wild sound to remind us it’s off the hook, its cord of tired curls swinging like a noose in waning lopes. My mom keeps it that way. Auntie Deb unplugs the phone from the wall and hangs it up, hard. She sits on the bed and rubs my mom’s back and I watch from the doorway, feeling the magnet feeling but also an upset. Like ticklish surgery.

The fingernail traces my mom like chalk through the dandruff horse shit covers.

“So skinny, Lydia. How do you stay so thin?”

My mom rolls her eyes, I’m not sure if it’s voluntary.

Coke and toast, I say.

Auntie Deb looks at me.

I tell her she only eats Coke and toast. Real Coke, not diet. White toast, I clean up the crumbs. With butter.

I think about my mom’s deliberate, aggressive cracking of a can of Coke. Almost violent. A sound I try to flee the room before I have to hear. The craziest burps, too. You’d never think such a skinny lady would have these Homer Simpson burps. But when I burped she told me I was disgusting and she hated me. I don’t burp around her anymore.

*

Auntie Deb in my room is awkward like Herman Munster, like she’s going to break something even though nothing is really breakable.

“How old are you, thirteen? You have the room of an old man.”

Her eyeballs swirl around like she’s worried about stalactites threatening to fall from the ceiling and impale her.

What if I am an old man, I reply to the back of her head.

*

Pepsi is the scraggly cat who paces around Auntie Deb’s porch. I call to him with a Psst psst psst. He glances at me before I go inside. Auntie Deb gets off the phone in her kitchen and tells me my mom is doing ok. The kitchen is yellow, everything. I hand her a refrigerator magnet. I stole it from a gift shop at Schiphol airport last summer when I visited Oma and Opa. It’s a small pair of wooden clogs. I guess I thought I might give it to someone at school. They hadn’t seen me in years. Oma was so upset by how much I resemble my dad she wouldn’t look at me. Opa and I would take walks through Oud-Zuid and return to their creaky house on Amstelveenseweg with something new every day: art supplies, a travel chess set, a little dinosaur sculpture, or just some still-warm bread.

“Aren’t you sweet,” her hand grasps the clogs and the fingernail presses them onto the fridge.

“What’s this for?”

I tell her, you know, for watching me or whatever.

I chop a fat golden onion on the cutting board like she tells me to. Stinging drips pour from my nose and I slip.

Blood squirts from my fingertip in weird beats and I wonder if I’ll need a stitch, I think so. Auntie Deb click-clacks over, standing worriedly behind me. I smell the smoking section and also her rose perfume, “Because people to whom the Virgin Mother has appeared, you know, they all report smelling roses first. An overwhelming aroma of rose. Rhapsodic.” The fingernails pinch my blood-finger and lift it to the wax Halloween lips like mini hors d’oeuvres.

And then she sucks.

*

The living room is like a garage sale. I do my homework and Pepsi stares at me through the window’s lacy curtain. My finger is starting to peel from where Auntie Deb filled it with superglue. She always has this cha-cha music playing and I guess it’s supposed to be cheerful but it’s so, so sad. It’s loud enough to hear above all else but also it fades into the carpet fluff like snowfall. I let Pepsi inside and he mews around my legs. Auntie Deb click-clacks out of the kitchen in an apron that she double-tied around her waist, pleased.

“I’m skinnier than your mom, now.”

Her mouth is a purple hole in her face from drinking wine. She notices Pepsi after a while and the purple hole contorts:

“Get him out of here or I’ll break that cat’s neck so fast your head’ll spin, don’t think I won’t do it.”

I carry Pepsi outside and remember my mom used to follow threats with so fast your head’ll spin when she still said things to me, and it always seemed so ghoulish.

The corduroy chair swallows me. Its coils are spent, its dimensions cartoonish. Auntie Deb sips from a chipped crystal cup on the floral couch and taps through the channels as the glow of the TV illuminates the purple hole. She asks if I remember my dad and if so can I still hear his voice saying things, because she can, and she wonders if they’re the same things. I tell her they’re not the same things because he didn’t speak in English to me, which bothered my mom. The purple hole smiles.

“God forbid Lydia feel excluded.”

 An audience looms around us. Saint relics and porcelain figurines of poodles, butterflies and Siamese cats peek from their shelves, dead-eyed.

“He liked—” the purple hole corrects itself in a tone even lower in its gravel throat. “He wanted me, your father.”

I join her on the couch, entering her ticklish force field.  She palms my skull. Her fingernails sift through my hair, letting it fall back into place like she’s flipping through pages in a book. Roses. Rhapsodic. She holds her cup to my face and my teeth clank the crystal when I gulp down her wine.

*

After my dad died a guy started coming over to tune the baby grand piano. He was balding and had drawn on a widow’s peak with black crayon, it looked like. My mom was awfully friendly to him, it wasn’t like her, she was drinking. My stomach flipped clunkily and I told Widow’s Peak about my dead dad while he tapped the same key over and over. My mom dragged me into the pantry and pinned my shoulders to the floor with her knees and gripped my little neck and said through her big square teeth that if I ever embarrassed her like that again she’d kill me, she’d fucking kill. me. Her eyes burned like the nostrils of one of her horses as a big glob of spit dangled from her mouth to my forehead. It splat right between my eyes and it smelled like her breath and her sobs. When she slammed the door, dry pasta rained on me.

*

Auntie Deb watches me eat while she puffs a cigarette, her eyes warming while I tell her bad stories about my mom like she asks me to. The kitchen yellow is bright and sick. Ash dances near my pancake but I still eat it. When I’m done, she tightens the belt on her robe and takes my plate away and says:

“Do you know what our mother did to us? Women are evil, you know. Rotten. Sick.”

*

The bathwater splashes up and down, up and down until I explode. Auntie Deb says I’ll get an infection, I’ll get backed up, if she doesn’t milk me. I can do it myself but her house, her rules. I stare at the same spot of tile grout when it happens. After the bath, I grab a towel and cover up quick. She is a scarecrow blocking the doorway. I tell her I haven’t had a headache in a while but she insists, it’s preventative, it’s better absorbed this way. I put one foot on the closed toilet seat and dig my toes into the carpet material seat cover. Through a rubber glove I feel the fingernail press the tablets inside of me as I try not to clench.

In bed, I picture an agonized, ancient tree trunk stuck inside another tree trunk at the bottom of the sea.

You don’t have to prove your feelings if you don’t have them.

You don’t have to have feelings.

In the dark things are easier.

That’s what I say.

*

When the cha-cha music isn’t playing, I can play whatever I want. Auntie Deb tries to like it.

“I used to be a backup singer for a rock’n’roller. With one or two other gals. We did our hair like a bunch of lettuce on top of our heads and wore lots of rouge on the apples of our cheeks. We started calling ourselves the salad girls.”

The bathroom door handle jiggles open. Her house her rules.

The fingernail pokes my stomach hard through the water splashing on every syllable. “Some-times-I-think-you’re-a-fag-got.”

When she slams the door, a brass ring from around the handle shimmies around and around before wobbling to a stop on the tile, sealing the quiet.

*

Charcoal scribbles hard like someone else is moving my hand for me and when I look up the art teacher looks away quickly and the other kids are already leaving. The guidance counselor’s voice, a phony pleading KARL, yanks me like bad entertainment off a stage into his office.

I tell him it’s art, it doesn’t mean anything. He says art always means something. Well, mine doesn’t. I sling my backpack over one shoulder and put my hair behind my ears on the way out.

The Janitor squeaks a wheeled bucket down the hall. He has deep eye sockets that make him look like an old picture. The soapy water sloshes floral and sweet and I’m nauseous as I run by his sunken face to get out. He might have said something to me or maybe his mouth just moved the way people missing teeth churn their face around their empty mouths.

*

Pepsi makes little snacking sounds when I give him the rest of my chicken dinner. The wind crackles through his parched fur the way it would move through dried grass and he’s happy I think. I focus on that.

“WHO THE FUCK IS IN MY BED?”

A dull punch to the throat wakes me. Coughing and gasping, there’s a blur, a frustrated ape straddling me, bopping the mattress beneath us. A gold chain grazes my eyes and I hear the swooshing of a windbreaker. Sour cologne and crunchy hair gel. Auntie Deb materializes in a talcum whirl and breaks it up. He’s still swinging. Straining between labored breaths, Auntie Deb introduces us.

“Karl, this is my son. Ronnie.”

I ask her if she means my cousin Ronnie.

Heaving, with his mother’s arms locking his by the elbows, Ronnie says, “I don’t got any cousins.”

I remind him our moms are sisters, that makes us cousins.

“I DON’T GOT. ANY COUSINS.”

Ronnie sleeps off his episode on the floral couch in an angel white tracksuit. His big wet eyes make his Disney-long lashes cling in damp spikes. His buttony nose is like a child with a cold’s or one of those Precious Moments figures you get for your first holy communion. I imagine a little ceramic statue of Ronnie, on his knees in his white tracksuit clasping a gold chain rosary. On the shelf of a Hallmark. A laugh I didn’t know I had falls out of me, bounces off my chin and down my chest like a spat-out mouthful of Cheerios. Auntie Deb looks at him from the yellow kitchen table, I can’t tell if she’s sad or embarrassed or both. She tells me that Ronnie’s dad worked in a crematorium.

“It’s no good for a person, to breathe death all day, it does something to them.” Her voice sounds like it’s asking me permission, like she wants forgiveness for living the way she has and birthing the couch angel.

*

Auntie Deb click-clacks down the hallway through clusters of students and their parents whispering over cookies and juice. There’s an invisible forest fire that follows her and once she passes everyone seems wilted, perplexed. Being at the school in the evening feels vulgar. The art teacher raises his eyebrows as he ushers her into his classroom, closing the door behind them, making me wait in the hall.

A group of classmates laugh and stare from afar. One of them, a girl, leaves the group and walks towards me purposefully, like she’s doing something brazen and wants to seem cool about it. Like she does badass spooky shit all the time. Like it wasn’t a dare. She tells me she thinks I’m good at drawing and that she might go to Europe in the summer and if she goes to Amsterdam can I teach her a word in Dutch maybe? I say misschien which means maybe. She adds that she doesn’t believe the things she’s heard about me—that I torture animals or that I left a kid in a coma at my last school.

A chair screeches, Auntie Deb is yelling at the art teacher. I open the door. “He’s not zany”, she mocks, “he’s-just-a-fag-got,” whacking the art teacher’s desk with my rolled-up grades on each sound. He winces as she raises the roll like she’s gonna hit him, a warning. She click-clacks right towards me and stops.

“Call his mother all you want. She’s unwell. I’m in charge now.”

The fingernails clamp my arm and she glares at the girl I was talking to and asks me, on our way through the spiritless juice and cookie crowd, “Who was that little tramp?”

*

Ronnie slurps stew in the yellow chair across from me. Each time Auntie Deb says something to me he slurps louder. The fingernails walk up my leg under the yellow table. I ask how my mom is and the fingernails stop and dig. “She’s home. She’s been home, Karl. She doesn’t want to see you. She doesn’t care.”

“WHAT THE FUCK MOM?”

 Ronnie pulls the hand away from my leg.

“Oh God forgive ya, Ronnie, for using that language with me,” barks Auntie Deb, cradling her lonely hand.

His Precious Moments face reddens when he asks what was that about. She tells him my mother is very disturbed so I need kindness, as much of it as I can get. Ronnie slams his fist on the table in front of me, rattling the salt and pepper shakers.

“SHE LOVES ME MORE,” he spews in my face. He gets up and backs away. The loaded slingshot pull of the screen door spring is like held breath behind him when he stops to announce, “YOU’RE NEVER GONNA SEE PEPSI AGAIN” before he stomps towards his car.

The fingernails rub my shoulders as I finish my stew, ripping off pieces of a dinner roll and dunking them in the remains. I’m entitled. She asks me do I want to kill my mommy and that she would help me and we would get away with it. I shake my head no and stuff more stew-soaked dinner roll into my mouth calmly. She yanks her hands away, disgusted by my serenity.

The house is warm, but it’s not mine.

*

I kick a twig down the road on my walk back to Auntie Deb’s. The sun’s exit behind me creates a monstrous silhouette. It reminds me of when Auntie Deb showed up at our door that time. And her shape projected through the foyer, eating it up like black smoke. Consumed. I realize I forgot my sketchbook.

I try two different doors before I find one unlocked and the school’s so empty even my shadow echoes. The locker room lights buzz and then dip, buzz and dip. When I see the janitor, his dopey stance is sheepish like I busted him doing something wrong. Maybe it’s the jumpsuit making him a bow-legged toddler with a sagging diaper. He asks me what I’ve got there and I tell him some drawings but he walks over my words and says filth. He waddles towards me and says it again.

“Filth.”

His homeless mouth makes the shape of filth this time with no sound. He tugs at himself. I become rubber cement all clumsy and stuck. His hand forces mine to feel him get bigger through the jumpsuit.

The toilet tank lid is in clunky pieces next to him. The blood smells like something you shouldn’t. I don’t remember. I look away and think when I look back this won’t be real but there it is, a flesh-filled jumpsuit slumped and stuck to the floor. A wet teabag. This has to be a dream. I’m dreaming. Pressure fills the space around my body and I shake ‘cause Auntie Deb is gonna be so pissed I’m taking so long. Supper is important.

I stand right over him, his entire face caved in now, a collapsed building. A discarded Halloween mask on a paved street. His ghost eyes are milky blue hard-boiled eggs splayed in different directions like a gorilla’s tits. Spit fills my mouth and seeps from the corners. I poke the body with a pen and it’s so crazy, I stab him with the pen all over, each time: does that hurt, does that hurt, does that hurt? I step back, my shoes peeling off the floor with sticky syrup sounds. I take a running jump and land on his chest, clunk, I think I broke his ribs. He’s surprisingly sturdy. I jump up and down until I almost lose my balance on his squishy gut. I imagine his organs are water balloons and I’m popping them. Like bubble wrap. I lift up his arm and drop it, thunk. My jeans and sweater and shoes are spattered.

I sit down on a changing bench and flip through my sketchbook, showing him my drawings and explaining them. I marvel at the sound of my voice. I pause, feeling truly heard, and I giggle. Almost ecstatically. And then I draw him.

My syrup feet make Band-Aid rip sounds all the way through the school parking lot. I’ll walk all night until I get to Mom’s house.

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SMALL SMALL GOAT OR 羊鬼泡面 by Emily Lu

May 27, 2021
  1. I was the most vocal opponent of article 94.1, a new hospital by-law permitting employees to outsource labour to ghosts. I wrote to the department head an ostentatious but sincere email defending the sanctity of patient care. They referred me to another committee, started a new subcommittee, requested further submissions of appendices, etc. The next day, I went to find the ghosts.
  1. When I remembered the small small goat, it was a month later. I opened the fridge expecting death. It was standing on a side dish where I last saw it, unaffected by the cold. Its eyes unblinking. My immense relief sat horizontal in my chest, teetering, solid.
  1. I had been blamed immediately for it. All of my roommates believed I had something to do with its appearance.
  1. Easy, there were loads of ghosts around the hospital these days. I found a team on lunchbreak in the east stairwell. Their leader was a resident doctor which was for the best because they all loved to please, even after death. I e-transferred five ghosts to start immediately.
  1. The small small goat’s hair was stuck up on one side, giving it a stormblown appearance. I offered it what I had on hand: antacids and deluxe instant noodles. After 3 minutes, I lowered the small small goat into the as advertised luxurious six-packet soak. The water level came up to its chin.
  1. I no longer responded to email. The ghost team lead visited to discuss extending our contract. I set down the instant noodle cup. The steam curled in front of her.
  1. If this were a Cdrama, the misunderstanding would last at least ten years. If this were a Kdrama, by episode 16 I’d find out I killed her through some prior oversight. If I were the glowing, oily sheen protagonist. If she told me she only consumes redemption arcs in the afterlife, I’d believe her.
 
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THE SOUND OF VIOLENCE by Ryan Norman

May 26, 2021

Usually the orchard was all light, sunburn cooled by a welcome breeze, but not that day. Fog crept up from the river and swallowed every tree in its path, whetting its appetite for the too short grass that cut like blades, soaking the cicadas’ song. I sat on a cold cinder block and watched my boyfriend wash his car, questioning why he would shine it on such a gloomy day, but daring not to say it aloud. His phone rang and I looked at myself in the shiny apple red door. Winked. Shot some finger guns. Fell to the floor.“What are you doing? I have to go do something. Stay here,” he ordered.“I want to come. Where are you going? How long will you be gone?”“A deer’s trapped in a fence in the upper orchard. I have to kill it, or it’ll make a big hole in the fence, or break its neck.”“I’m coming.”

I didn’t know deer screamed until that day. I watched in awe, my eyes wet, standing at a distance from this huge creature, all muscle, as it screamed into the damp air. Thrashing wildly against an almost invisible wire fence, its antlers trapped, entangled with imminent death until finally all went quiet. I touched my forehead and pulled away sticky droplets on my fingertips. That welcome breeze returned, and my heart sank. I had never witnessed death, and never imagined I would. He told me the deer would be skinned, the meat eaten. Nothing would go to waste. But I sat in silence as the truck hurtled past trees into the thick of fog, uncomfortably aware that in the open bed lay a blood-soaked deer, jiggling stiffly with every pebble on the road. I imagined the process of preparing the deer for consumption, sliding a sharp knife between the skin and muscle. I knew some details. The indignity of it all. Hanging it by its hind feet to drain the blood, eyes wide open like black holes. But hadn’t I done the same? 

Descending the stairs in a southern New York lab, wearing clothes on top of clothes to keep out the formaldehyde—a sticky stench—entering a room with two dead bodies given to science. We were assigned a cadaver, a trick of the language to distance ourselves from the fact that we would be cutting into dead people with scalpels. Uncovering secrets. Naming muscles, veins, arteries. Draping white cloth for dignity. Digging into intercostal muscles with no breath sounds. A smell that hasn’t left me. And when the draping slipped, an image that hasn’t left me either. All that muscle. Exposed on a stainless-steel table. So much gray. Could I really judge my farmer boyfriend for killing a deer when I cut into a human? 

He had been offended by that lab as much as I was saddened by killing a trapped deer. He had told me to stay. Wasn’t it my own fault? But life carried on. Sadness blurred. Judgment faded. We went about our usual things, no hang ups. Trivia on Wednesdays, sunsets on the roof, cider on the porch watching the train rush by. Until we drunkenly ran through the woods one night, searching for a waterfall. We set up camp in a small clearing on the property of the orchard. A tent built for one. We stopped to eat over fire, a hunk of meat thrown onto a cast iron skillet. He fed me a small piece and it was nothing I recognized. I asked him what it was, and he asked, “Remember that deer?” And it tasted of pain and fear. It tasted of violence. I spat it out. 

The moon guided us to water, as she is wont to do, and the rushing sound plummeting past wet, slick stone drowned our voices. We left our clothes on the dirt embankment and swam in silver flecked streams, our bodies glowing green underwater and star white on top. I watched him there, standing in a warrior’s pose on an outcropping of rocks among the frothy water, drunk on apples, and admired every inch of his marble-carved body. Maybe I was drunk on apples, too. Everything began to wobble, so we went back to his tent. He laid down, just another naked body in the summer night, his skin still cold from the green river. The moon cast his skin gray as he laid there on a slab of earth, no modesty, just the thin floor of his tent. I covered his face with my palm, his breath heavy, fog caught in my lifeline, obscuring love, and lust; my tongue a scalpel plunging deep into him. I wondered at his muscles quaking with each scream, stealing the silence of the night until I was full.

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REWIND by Amy Wang

May 24, 2021

This is before the bed at my new apartment feels especially wide and I wake up crying over things I barely remember; before the two years during which every night I hear the tell-tale groaning of a broken stairway as it is about to collapse under the weight of ashes and a leaping fire in the second after I fall asleep; this is before I have to start going to therapy in order to keep from crying every time I pass the cafe where you used to buy me peppermint lattes, before I begin reminding myself that it is my fault, my words that manifested into fire and brimstone and inferno and consumed everything  I had once loved. This is before they show me your body, or what’s left of it, before they tell me that you were trapped under a fallen beam, your spine melting into the burgundy corduroy of our sofa cushions as your eyelashes turned into dust. This is before I wait on the sidewalk, cold despite the heat of the flames that still roar above my head, waiting, waiting for you to appear, for your head to pop out from the doorway; this is before the moment that I realize that you weren’t going to, before the moment I knew that you couldn’t. This is before the roof collapses and buries you under it, before that first fire and before the final one; this is before I stumble down a rickety flight of steps as soon as the alarm sounds, at the first sign of smoke, before too many first-hand experiences acclimate me to the dangers of heat. 

This is before I make you sleep on the couch, before I shut the door of our bedroom without even giving you a blanket. This is before the argument that even led to that fire in the first place. This is before I get sick of the way you laugh, before you burn the edges of the painting my mom had given me for my twenty-sixth birthday and I scream at you for doing it. This is before the coiled heat of irritability begins lacing itself every weekday night, before we lose our ability to have conversations without our words melting into the barrel of a gun primed to explode. 

This is before you lose your job and we downsize to a shitty apartment two hours away from the house you used to say we would raise our kids in. This is before our two year anniversary, during which you light the entire cake on fire courtesy of cooking oil, because you “thought it was undercooked.” This is before you get diagnosed as a clinical pyromaniac and before I have to go through every room of our house, flipping over sofa cushions in case lighters are hiding underneath. This is before I realize that you have a problem falling in love with things that hurt you, and judging from how long I’ve stayed, so do I. This is before I wake up to find the quilt smoking around me, to your thumb flicking a lighter as your fingers hover gently over flame. This is before we move in together, and my father tells me that you will never make me happy because you have never known stability and I tell him to fuck off. This is before I have to take over making dinner because all too often what you make is burnt black, because you forget to turn off the stove while you’re busy staring at the flames. This is before I ask you why you smoke so much, and you tell me that it’s because you crave warmth. 

This is before all of that. It is summer, and the groves of orange trees that we always drove by whenever we went on road trips are laden with ripe fruit. The air is filled with citrus and lies thickly and still and syrupy over the two of us. The sun is always golden and red and dying; the sky is always flame-pink; every oxygen atom in the space around us is perfectly seared salmon. You have yet to break your leg at the construction site where you work, and on Sunday afternoons, you still flip over the chain-link fence, filling your pockets with mandarins and handing them off to the kids that live on our street.  On Wednesday afternoons, we go driving in your old Toyota, windows down, heat warnings and fire danger signs wavering in strips of silver, summer mirages slipping over the horizon and through our fingertips as you rewind the CD in the stereo. We are comfortable still, the two of us, caught in the divot between the awkwardness of learning to love and the exhaustion of forgetting how to.  I lean in for a kiss, and when our lips touch, your skin is so hot it feels like fire. I think, to myself, that I would give anything, anything to stay in this moment. You are lovely, next to me. Your smile is incandescent. 

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LONELINESS AND HEARTACHE IN THE DISCARDED APPLE CORE PIT OF AMERICA’S ROTTED DREAM FOR AND OF ITSELF by Nathaniel Duggan

May 21, 2021

Lately Frank has been feeling especially Frank-like, his days reduced to the potato chip crumbs he has failed to brush from his lap—as if he, the essence of himself, is a shirt that can be slipped on or off and has been worn perhaps a few too many weeks in a row. He wets the bed more than when he was a child, although back then his piss was hot and searing as shame, whereas now it is simply cold as a metal unexpectedly touched. His sweat, too, is cold. His dreams are muggy as incest, bratty stepsiblings fucked. He works at a deli sandwich shop, his shifts spent fondling various meats through disposable plastic. He is 32-years old and having trouble, lately, imagining what will fill all the years left ahead of him.

On his days off, Frank visits his mother. At one point Frank had friends; then, suddenly, as if through a magician’s whirling trick of smoke and exploding pigeons, he woke and did not have friends. They had vanished. They had slipped into the cracks of better lives, found secret passageways hidden behind their medicine cabinets into mortgages and tropical island vacations and jobs with business suits, places thoroughly and utterly inaccessible to the Franks of the world.

“Maybe you could try grad school,” his mother suggests over lunch. “You always did so well in school. Or what about teaching English overseas? Plenty of young people are teaching English overseas these days, they’re saying.”

“You always do this,” Frank says. “This is all we ever talk about. Can’t we ever talk about anything else?”

“You were just always so good in school,” his mother says.

The previous day, Frank remembers, he fucked up a wrap at work. The wrap had folded wrong, split against the bend of itself, crumbled and unspooled. He’d looked at his coworker, Kyle, in mock-shock. “How do you fuck up a wrap,” he said.

Kyle was in his early twenties and attending community college, acne still surging like meteor showers across his face. He was grinning.

“Yes you did,” Kyle said. “You sure did fuck that one up. But hey, there’re children starving in Africa, there are tiny babies without food or homes or mothers, and one fucked up wrap doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of their suffering.”

In response, Frank slam-dunked the wrap into the trash can. Across the service counter, customers were watching. Frank felt strange and unreal, felt almost, as if in a video game, unbeatable—like there were forces trying to defeat him and they could not.

That kind of thing happened sometimes, he knew. In certain moments, a hatch opened in your brain, and you crawled up and out through it to escape the piloted machine of yourself, got far enough from your own way of seeing that your life became as unrecognizable to you as a telescoped planet, and for a moment, then, even beneath the insect-splotched lightbulbs of your workplace, everything kind of glimmered like it was covered in fresh dew.

Of course, like anything else those flashes ended. The customers coughed impatiently. Kyle shuffled his feet and suggested they get back to work, he and Frank. You were just you, after all. There was no way, as of yet—as discovered and postulated by scientists, by physicists in nuclear basements and engineers pale-faced by the rays of computer screens stared into late at night—to be anyone else. So Frank made the wrap. Although really he did not want to make the wrap. He wanted instead to talk about how those children overseas were only starving because of American bombs and governmental policy destabilizing their infrastructure.

“You were always so good in school,” his mother says again in the dining room, her voice a sigh. as faint now as a tapping on a windowpane.

Although it’s bright summer, all the lights in the house are on, making the space look cold and drained of the day. They finish the meal in silence. Afterwards, his mother excuses herself to the bathroom. Frank hears her run the shower and then, muffled by the water, quietly scream.

Frank gets in his car and does a few laps around the neighborhood. He is not drunk but he feels the dilation of drunkenness, as if there are air bubbles moving in his bloodstream. This is the suburb where he grew up, adjacent to the city where his current apartment is. It occurs to him he has not made it very far outside of his life, the neatly cropped and segmented lawn of it. When he returns to his mother’s house, all the lights are off, and he finds her asleep on the living room couch, sprawled and open-mouthed as a child.

 

***

 

After a lunchtime rush, Frank asks Kyle, “So what’s up this weekend? Any parties?”

He means it as a joke. He has always assumed that Kyle, still living with his parents, returns home to play video games after each shift. To his surprise, Kyle freezes at this question, the color draining from his face.

“I mean,” Kyle says. “Well, it wouldn’t really be your kind of scene. Kind of a different crowd. I mean, younger. No offense, dude.”

On Frank’s smoking break, the clouds roil apocalyptically in the sky above. He tries to light his cigarette with a dramatic flourish, like it’s the last cigarette he’ll smoke before the ash-black end of the world. He thinks about a boy he kissed at a New Year’s party five years ago who he hasn’t seen or spoken to since.

“We just had such a connection,” he says when he steps back into the kitchen.

“Wait,” Kyle says. “This isn’t about what’s-his-name, is it?”

“Brian,” Frank says. “We just really kicked it off. We had such a spark.”

“Jesus,” Kyle says. “We’re not really talking about this for the thousandth time again this week, are we? Didn’t that happen like, a century ago? Just let it go, man. Please let’s not talk about this again.”

When Frank gets back to his apartment, he doesn’t turn on any lights. He eats a prepared supermarket meal by the orange glow a streetlamp tosses against his bedroom wall and drinks half a beer. Teaching overseas…He imagines himself copy and pasted, a file moved but otherwise unmodified, into China, South Korea. In the scene he is in a classroom and the students around him are faceless. He himself in the scene is faceless—actually, he is censored out, a digital conglomeration of squares. After his lessons he would probably go back to an apartment no bigger than the one he currently occupies, eat a prepared supermarket meal, and drink half a beer. The thought makes him feel bereft of hope, like in the second act of a summer blockbuster where aliens have invaded the earth and toppled the government—the part where the heroes lose and fog shrouds the horizon. Faceless Frank. The problem with leaving for anywhere else, he suspects, pulling the covers over his head, is that he would have to go there with himself.

 

***

 

And so for a while, for a couple several years and decades, Frank feels formless. He feels like a cookie cutter shape, its limits defined and rigid, but its details bludgeoned, the features misshapen as blurs. He gets enraged every now and again at his mother. For what reason, after all, did she have to create him? To force him pink and vulnerable into the cruelty that is the world? He feels often and especially like a supervillain abomination, like a—ha ha—a Frankenstein, and when he visits her, he screams and shatters her plates. He still works for minimum wage wrapping sandwiches. He is 36, and then he is 47. Kyle has long since quit, graduated with his college degree and gone off somewhere probably to teach English overseas. Frank himself has begun to drink at an admittedly destructive rate, although he does this in a subtle, calculated way that doesn’t feel so much like blatant annihilation of the self but rather quiet sabotage, trapdoors and tripwires laced intricately throughout his heart. He feels, now, like he is a spy in the country of himself, engaging in acts of treason, and so appropriately one morning he calls his ex-boyfriend Adam.

They decide to meet on the beach. It is late fall. They lay out their towels and then lay on top of their towels, side by side.

“That gull keeps circling me,” Adam says. “Are you seeing this? Maybe it thinks I’m dead. That I’m a carcass. A corpse.” 

“Jesus,” Frank says. “You never change. Everything’s always about you, isn’t it?”

There are leaves scattered about the beach, autumn red, like so many cooked crabs spilled. Seagulls keep pinwheeling overhead. The ocean sounds the way the inside of an empty shell sounds. The weather is cloudy, and it’s one of those days where you cannot tell if it is a buoy washing ashore or a headless, half-eaten seal.

Afterwards they get a hotel. Adam turns on the television. There is a rerun of “Shark Week” playing. “Shark Week” is a TV series produced annually that, for an entire week, dedicates itself to shark-based content—divers getting into deep-sea cages with sharks, lifeguards interviewed regarding shark-based deaths on their beaches, entomological investigations into the history of sharks and the possible existence of super sharks, ancient and lurking things at the bottom of the ocean the size of sunken ships.

Frank is realizing sex will probably not happen tonight.

This is, simply, not a situation in which sex between two people can occur.

Shark Week keeps playing, a rerun of a rerun’s idea of itself. Frank and Adam fall asleep together fully clothed, and the next day after leaving the hotel they do not talk ever again.

Later a decision will be made by ad agencies and corporate lawyers to transform “Shark Week” into “Shark Month.” And after this proves a rousing success, they will extend it even further, until there are entire Shark-themed calendar years, and before you know it your very life has become a Shark Week rerun regurgitated and interrupted regularly by commercials.

That night as Frank fell asleep against Adam’s warmth, he dreamed of a room black with mirrors—every inch of it paneled with glass such that the light inside bounced continually and endlessly until its expiration, leaving nothing then but darkness. Although he could not see, Frank was aware of his reflection in the mirrors, multiplied a million times over. He could sense it there moving in all that glass like a hole in the back of his head, a hole the size of the moon—no. A hole the size of the disappearance of the moon.

 

***

 

One Friday Frank goes to the bar alone.

No one there talks to him, and he does not talk to anyone.

He spends several nights in a row eating fast food in his car in empty supermarket parking lots.

Late November a centipede scuttles down his neck.

Somewhere a terrorist whispers the word “galvanize” in a Wendy’s before ordering chili cheese fries.

Overall love is renounced across the globe, as is life, death, inner city bus drivers.

Various presidents and prime ministers acknowledge in hastily assembled press releases that nothing will ever happen to anyone ever again.

People are a bit perplexed by this—should they feel secured or doomed?

More worrying, they realize: can they even still tell the difference?

Each day sheds the skin of itself and slithers into the next. On interstates everywhere rodents dart in front of roaring 18-wheelers. The chipmunks have grown crazed and carnivorous, caught—on camera!—gnawing one another’s bones. Fathers are blamed for America. Founding, suburban, whatever, it is the father’s fault, whether he was absent or perhaps so present his touch reaches across the span of centuries to tangle each life and word and thought of his great-great-grandchildren like puppet string. And so a feeling of doom pervades and closes each day. Schoolteachers drive to little league baseball fields late at night and shoot their brains out atop dusty mounds that seem almost Martian in the moonlight. The stock market, meanwhile, does pretty well.

Frank tells his doctor, “I feel displaced and without purpose. I am utterly depressed. I know I have a drinking problem, but the problem is not the drinking, the problem is what causes the drinking, the problem drinks itself dry, it is an abscess, I feel it as a scabbed drought on the back of my skull where fluid cannot help but lump and end in an aneurysm because it is a lack that must be filled, because nothing always wants something. In this sense, the symptom is the same as the cure.”

“Yes,” the doctor says, hands stuffed deep into Frank’s mouth. “OK. Frank, you know I’m a dentist. Have you thought about seeing a professional regarding this?”

Frank is 54-years old, driving to his mother’s house.

They argue over salad.

Frank is intrigued to find himself so self-righteous while so full of greens. The same mouth spitting acid at his mother is chewing vegetation, mincing arugula into mushed bits—what could be less threatening than grazing on grass? Yet she gets so small when he attacks her. To Frank her retreat is contemptible, her face crumpling in on itself like a beer can’s crushing, even her wrinkles wrinkled, sad eyes lost in folded decades of skin. But he knows, when he goes outside to smoke a cigarette, that he cannot blame her—she is only trying to help. He should not be so hard on her. Sometimes it is necessary to shrink yourself, he understands. Sometimes, confronted with the vast, metropolitan sprawl of life and its disappointments, you have to reduce yourself to your smallest unit, to slip rodent-like through the cracks and avoid all that gargantuan existential nonsense, those questions, asteroid-sized and incoming, Why am I here, Where am I going, and What am I going to make for dinner?

 

***

 

Life becomes a four-walled thing for Frank, always closing in, a phone ringing at midnight and an unfamiliar voice asking, “Is your refrigerator running?” He is suspicious of nostalgia, the sugared deceit of it. Any moment can become nostalgic with enough refraction, any person can be yearned for if placed at a far enough distance.

His heart, the bargained yard sale of it, continues to pump. He does not find love. He is 60, his mother is dead and he has inherited her house. He sleeps each night in the guest bedroom and he washes the sheets after.

One afternoon in the supermarket he runs into Kyle. It has been, it seems, generations since he last saw Kyle. His acne is gone. His hair gleams and he is wearing a business suit and tie. He looks, Frank muses, professional—which begs the question, then, professional of what exactly, of teeth, of blue-gloved hands plunged into the gape of a mouth, of football, of politics, of sandwiches, of teaching overseas…

“Frank,” Kyle says. “Oh, hey! How have you been?”

“Kyle,” Frank says. “Not bad, man. What’re you up to these days?”

They talk for a while. Kyle has one of those jobs and is living one of those lives—“You know how it goes,” he says, and Frank does, and together they nod their heads in understanding. Kyle would like to catch up, he invites Frank to dinner. As they part ways, Frank reflects that so much happens in the supermarket, so many people loveless and wandering and checking their eggs before purchasing. The parking lot is vast as an airplane landing strip, and as he navigates it he feels the distinct melancholy that comes with a journey’s beginning or end. Where did he park again?

And then it is 1am and the leaves of the trees in his neighborhood are limned by orange streetlight and there is no moon. A moonless night: imagine, Frank thinks, to be –less, to be, in a word, without. Frankless, he thinks. He cannot sleep. He leaves the guest room and makes the walk down the hallway to his original bedroom, the one he slept in as a child. The floor creaks beneath him as if he is an intruder in his own house. The bedroom is a belly of darkness and trapped air, the lights off and the shades drawn tight, everything perfectly preserved by the stale smell of dust. He crawls into his old bed, pulls the blankets to his chin, and closes his eyes. His eyelids are shut tight but he is utterly awake. Somewhere in the house there is a window open and the breeze it lets in sounds like his mother’s soft sighing. Secure as he is beneath his sheets, he feels cast-off and drifting, like an island untethered. He feels like someone else, someone completely and thoroughly not-Frank: like an old childhood friend of himself, one of the kids he had been close to in grade school before they had moved somewhere away and irrevocably exotic, to Florida or Hawaii; a friend lost then, but coming back now, rendered strange and unknowable by so many decades apart, yet familiar as a constellation is far, returning to a place they had never properly left.

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A DAUGHTER NEEDS A NAME LIKE AN AMULET by Sara Comito

May 20, 2021

She wakes up laughing at her dream that she is a chest of drawers with a single knob in the middle. She wakes to find her belly button has popped like a Butterball turkey thermometer. She dreams she is eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She wakes and makes a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She drinks from the milk carton and guzzles down half its contents. She dreams she is a milk carton. She wakes to find her nightgown is wet with her first milk. Mmmmmm she breathes. It smells delicious. She dreams she is weighing grapefruits in her palm at the supermarket while making sure the other customers aren't looking. She wakes to find her breasts painfully engorged. She takes a long, hot shower. She dreams her boyfriend is drinking at the bar. She wakes to find he has not come home. She calls the bar. The bartender who knows both of them says, Ummm, nope, haven't seen him. She gets up and sits on the couch, falling into a slumber. She dreams she is leaning against a vibrating washing machine. She wakes to find the cat purring, curled up on her belly. She starts upstairs and notices snowy boot prints on the carpet. The boyfriend is open-mouthed and snoring on the bed. She returns to the couch. She dreams she is eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She writes “milk” on the shopping list on the fridge. That evening she dozes on the couch, book falling closed on her belly. The telephone startles her awake. She had just had her tests that day and all is well, but the midwife tells her to come outside to watch the northern lights. The midwife has brought a pot of soup. She dreams she is a moon with an elliptical orbit. When she is at her closest point to her huge planet, she is squeezed so she might burst. She wakes to find she is having Braxton Hicks contractions. She feels her belly and is surprised at how strong and tight it is. This makes her smile. She dreams she is a tree being chopped down. She wakes to her boyfriend beating on the door. She has locked him out. It will be a long night. She dreams she is a tree whose roots gently surround a squirrel sleeping in a hollow. Roots penetrate the earth and even come out of places they're not supposed to, like her branches and leaves. She sees the veins of the leaves, pumping red, illuminated from behind by the sun. She wakes to a loud pop she can both feel and hear. The contractions leave her breathless. She stumbles to the phone and has to stop halfway there. She calls the midwife, just down the street. The midwife says, Shit, it's sounds like you're transitioning already. She drops the receiver and lurches to the bathroom. Her bowels empty spasmodically while she vomits soup into the sink. The midwife uses her own key and runs up the stairs to find her on the floor of the bathroom. A second set of heavy footsteps up the stairs – the doula. Oh, thank god. She delivers after four hours from precipitous start to precipitous finish. The baby is fine, better than fine. Perfect. A girl, which she did not dream but somehow knew. The snowy villas are lit up in ambulance red while green aurora dances overhead. On the gurney down the stairs she is being pulled from her body the way the baby was. All she sees is red. She thinks about primary colors. The midwife's voice somewhere up above calls her back, You have a lot of work to do here, young lady. Don't you dare leave us. She feels the way she does when she's trying to ignore an alarm clock. At last her sense of obligation brings her back. It is snowing. Each snowflake shimmers pink. The most beautiful thing she's ever seen. In the emergency room, a doctor reaches in and pulls out the placenta, turning her inside out. She hears fabric ripping, the kind of thunder that sounds like the sky is zipping apart. You've lost most of your blood, the doctor tells her. The midwife holds her hand. She dreams about holding a bowl of red Jello. She can't steady her hands so it will stop wobbling. She wakes up kneading her belly. So empty, so loose. A haunted house. This is the one thing they don't tell you about, she says to nobody. The baby is warming in a compartment near the bed. The companion chair is empty. A nurse walks by and notices she's awake, approaches the bedside. She smiles. Good morning. Are you ready to hold your baby?

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ON THE SUGGESTION OF ROADKILL WALKS by Evan James Sheldon

May 19, 2021

I hear an odd sound and go out front to investigate only to find my mother holding a vulture on a leash with a harness like people buy for tiny yippee dogs. There’s snow on the ground and on the pine trees by the house and I can see where they’ve been by the tracks. She’s been walking the vulture through the neighborhood.

And now she’s walking it back and forth out front and it hops and waddles, occasionally flapping once or twice. It’s large enough that I bet if it really wanted to fly away my mother wouldn’t be able to hold it. Maybe she knows that too, and knowing the vulture could leave whenever it chooses but continues to stay, offers her a kind of comfort.

Hey Mom. What do you have there?

Oh isn’t he beautiful? They’re really such elegant creatures. And clean too. Everyone has misguided notions about them just because of what they eat. She cocks her head to the side and then, as if speaking mostly to herself she says, But eating carrion is a kind of cleaning too isn’t it? She looks at me, eyes bright. You’ll never guess how I got him.

A pickup truck passes our house, the driver oblivious to my mother, to the vulture, and I wonder how many odd occurrences I’ve missed just because I was on my way somewhere and too preoccupied to look around. Maybe the world is filled with women who have been recently abandoned by their priggish husbands strutting around with giant birds on leashes and I’ve never noticed. Maybe there’s strange things happening all the time, just out of sight, just beyond my focus. An odd feeling sweeps over me, something akin to loneliness.

Mom. Why don’t you come inside? Warm up a bit?

A compact SUV pulls into the driveway a few houses down and two women in dark dresses get out carrying pyrex casserole dishes covered in tin foil. One of the women shifts the dish to one arm and opens the rear driver’s side door, offers a hand to a kid—maybe five or six years old—wearing a dark suit and snow boots. He’s holding a mylar balloon that says Sorry for Your Loss. When he doesn’t take the woman’s hand and jumps down on his own, she joins the other woman inside.

The boy is looking our way and his eyes grow wide as he realizes what my mother is doing. Children always see more than adults and more than we give them credit for. The vulture flaps once, twice hard, but my mom pulls it back to the ground. I know the bird is probably attracted to the shine of the balloon but I can’t help but think it’s going after the child. It’s beak and talons are meant for tearing flesh and a terrible image flashes through my mind

My mother hasn’t noticed anything.

Did you know, she tells me, that in areas suspected of containing natural gas people will walk them like this, like I am, because they’re so good at sniffing it out. Amazing. Aren’t you amazing? Yes you are.

The boy takes a few steps toward us like he’s deciding whether to come over. I move to the edge of our lawn, in between the boy and the bird, in case I need to intercept.

Mom, I say with my eyes still on the boy, you know that’s probably because they’re used to sniffing the gas escaping from decomposing bodies, right? Why don’t you take a stroll and see if anything has gotten hit? Maybe you can use that bird to clean up like you said? Or go inside? We can go through some of that stuff you wanted to donate.

The boy moves closer. He’s only one yard away now, just an icy patch of mostly dead grass away from the vulture. I don’t want to have to run at him or yell and scare him, particularly after what I’m guessing has been a terrible day for him. But I will.

Hey, I call to the boy, that bird isn’t so friendly. Can you stay back a bit?

Instead of listening to me, he steps closer.

I’m so focused on the boy that I don’t realize my mother is staring at me.

You don’t have to manage me, be so delicate. I know you want to protect me from this. To help me shoulder what he did and all that he ruined, but you know he left you too. I’m doing my best. And it will get better.

The boy chooses that moment to let go of the balloon. The vulture flaps once, twice, and again my mother pulls him back down, but this time he doesn’t stop. I run and grab the leash and the bird drags us both forward, our boots slipping on the ice, but it doesn’t get away. The boy cackles and runs off. I guess he knew what would happen the whole time.

We hold on together until the balloon disappears and turns to a bright shiny dot over the snow-crusted trees. The vulture settles.

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TROY JAMES WEAVER DOES A LITTLE CHATTING WITH GRAHAM IRVIN

May 18, 2021
Troy James Weaver is the author of Wichita Stories, Visions, Marigold, Temporal, and Selected Stories. His work often centers around young and vulnerable characters from rural areas struggling to fit into the world. He writes with an unparalleled rawness in quick, powerful bursts. A Troy James Weaver novel is quick and slim, but will change the way you think about writing and people both.In a blurb for Temporal, Scott McClanahan wrote, "[Troy] is our Witold Gombrowicz." For Marigold, Michael Bible wrote, "[he] is the poet-laureate of Midwestern absurdity with a heart a mile wide." Dennis Cooper wrote, as a blurb for Selected Stories, Troy's collection out with Apocalypse Party, "There is something weirdly perfect about Troy James Weaver's stories. Perfect because they are, down to their syllables. Weird because what they do feels so broken it hurts."These statements drew me to Troy's work years ago when I first began wading into the indie lit waters. Last fall, through a groupchat of writers named the $illyBoy$, I became close friends with the man himself. Troy is an amazing writer and an honest, loving person. I am lucky to know him through his words and kindness.
Visions, Troy's first novel, was reprinted by Apocalypse Party in March of this year. We recently got drunk over Zoom and talked about the book. Below is the transcript:
G: In that scene in Visions when the narrator is at the graveyard with Jessup, trying to contact the dead, Jessup says, “He died by suicide,” but it’s a one-year-old baby. That seems to nullify the idea of ghosts or spirituality or whatever, but it’s working on these different levels. It’s an incredibly spooky situation, it’s insanely haunted that they’re doing this, that this person is trying to push energies onto the other person, that they’re in the graveyard, that they’re drinking, the age difference in general. That Jessup is trying to convince the narrator of something and the narrator is aware, and critical, of Jessup’s attempts, but also wants Jessup to like him. The narrator is aware of what Jessup wants to convey with his attempt at tricking him about the Ouija board, and lets him believe he is successful. It is a scene with a lot of spiritual energy and spiritual vibes, but it ends with a slapstick image of a baby hanging itself. T: I’m glad you found that. No one has ever asked me about that part. They gloss over it. I think it’s the funniest part and also it kind of has the entire thesis of the book all in that moment. Power trying to grab power, or understand power, or manipulate power. It’s a book almost entirely about manipulation, or grooming. From all angles of life. That’s why the bible and masturbating are almost inextricably combined. They’re symbols of two different things, but also the same thing, but also completely the opposite. You can get pleasure from both, and great dissatisfaction. You can be controlled by it. G: Like asceticism. Punishing yourself because of inherent sin. The gold chain wrapped around the narrator’s penis is a really interesting thing because when that comes up in the book I think of Wise Blood, the dude with the shoes filled with glass, but it’s only in the first instance when you describe the gold chain digging into the skin that you use negative language. Afterward it becomes pleasure. It made me question the purpose of the image, because it seemed like asceticism at first, but it’s about finding pleasure in pain, how close they’re tied. T: Yea, there is a lot with that symbol of that chain, unintentionally. Mostly, I was going for what we were talking about: pain and then pleasure out of the pain. But then when I started thinking about it more after Visions was published, reviews pointed things out, or had ideas about the meaning behind the images, which is awesome. A lot of times I’m like, “I didn’t intend that, but I think it’s great that it’s there.” The chain was Marilyn’s mom’s gift to her and then her mom died in a car wreck. He finds spirituality in it, but it’s also a desecration of a sacred object from someone he loves. There’s a duality throughout the whole thing with, I think, all the characters. Like Jessup is this horrible dude, really horrible, and you sympathize with the narrator when he experiences the horribleness. But by the end Jessup is almost sorry about what he’s done. Each character arc kind of inverts and crosses others. The arcs are making an X throughout the whole story. The whole story almost negates itself because it’s about a horrible person who realizes how horrible he’s been, kind of, toward the end, and the main character going down and becoming drawn to evil behavior. I don’t think any of it’s evil. I think it’s these conditions that are set for people. They do evil things. Or they choose not to anymore. That was my goal. I’m kind of bummed it’s tagged as a book about a David Koresh-like childhood because he was part of my research but I think he was murdered unjustly and those people were too. Honestly. I think he had bad intent, but I think there’s a better way of going about handling that than burning down a compound with seventy people in it. I had a lot of thoughts on that. I wanted to build around that. But it’s all fiction. It’s not based on his life at all. That shit didn’t happen. I was leery of the tag. But whatever.  G: It’s a coming-of-age story. In those intersecting arcs, the narrator becomes less innocent and knows his power. And it ends with him wanting a break. He understands he has a power, but he isn’t ready to use it yet. So, it still ends in this moment of hope. It doesn’t seem like things are going to be going well for anybody. Marilyn is going to be killed or have her baby killed or be a single mother. She’s fucked. She’s got this relationship with her uncle. That’s fucked. It ends on this moment of conflicting hope, but it is hopeful because the narrator realizes his ability to control energies and he doesn’t jump into it yet. When I think about David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, I don’t think about it ever in a hopeful way. That might be my problem with the tag. David Koresh as a name is such an end stop and this book is not an end stop. Leaving it where you ended it allows the reader to have hope or maybe rewrites the guy’s history. Things didn’t have to go that way. They could have gone differently. Just because someone has this ability doesn’t mean they’re going to use it for bad behavior. T: When I wrote it, I thought the visions were products of mental illness from being neglected and abused. That’s how I saw it. But when the narrator realizes his power is when he sees other people being neglected and abused and that’s where the power lies. Like, “this happens to all of us.” And he says, “I can do this too.” But he doesn’t understand. It’s not really a cycle of abuse story. That’s not what I mean. I was trying to comment on religion. I feel like there is good in religion, but at the time I wrote it I felt like when you’re taught this shit from birth you don’t have an option in what you believe. A lot of these people are trapped in religion. They can’t think outside of it because it’s what they’ve known since birth. So, if you did the same thing with abuse, the abused person would think it’s normal too. And accept it. Not to make it too simplistic or too general. I think certain people can love their nonfreedom. They can love being told what to do. And certain people have to break away from it, in whatever way that is. But some people accept religion and abuse as a part of their life because they don’t want to hurt the people they love. G: Related to cycles of abuse, maybe outside of the story, I had a thought. If you experience something when growing up, that becomes an option for experience. Even if it’s the most horrible thing in the world, it becomes an option for experience. So, to continue living you have to make an excuse for it. You had to have it happen, no matter how young you were, then continue onto the next moment until you got to a point where you were in a position to do it to someone else. You don’t think, “that person doesn’t have that experience, I shouldn’t give them that experience,” you just think, “that’s an option for an experience.” So, it’s easier to act that way because you might not have the empathy to know everyone is a blank slate and it’s best to not have that experience. The person, possibly, thinks the experience exists as an option. I experienced it, who’s to say it’s bad, I dealt with it, why can’t someone else?T: What I’m saying in the book is everything is a choice. And, at the end, I think you’re right. The reason why the last part is written in italics is because it doesn’t really happen. It’s hopeful because he walks out into the desert to contemplate everything that came before and sees this vision of the house on fire. I think he’s trying to fight it off. And I think he does do that at the end. I think you’re right. I think there is kind of a hope at the end. It’s also pretty fucked up. A lot of people were like, “This is a very uncomfortable, dark book.” I’ve never seen it as uncomfortable and dark, but that’s because I wrote it. It came from my mind. G: I don’t think it’s dark. I think there is hope and I think the narrator is a good person. T: Yea, I do too. That was the point, really. I think as it goes on, he gets ideas of control, but he also rejects it. Peggy tries to get him to preach and do his sermon and he says, “I’m not ready; I don’t want to do this.” G: He says, “I know this is my destiny, but at this moment I would like to not do it yet.” T: That was really important to be in there. I rewrote that last section the most. Everything else came pretty quick. At one point it was bad in the middle section. I rewrote that a couple times. Like where the narrator killed Ray. Then I took that out and rewrote it where Ray fell and hit something because he was drunk, and he was just dead. I thought that was really important because I didn’t want the character to seem like he was lashing out but, he was definitely fucked up. G: Covering up Ray’s death is an ethically grey area, but you build a world where he could be tied indefinitely to that moment, legally speaking, or he could be free from that moment. He alone could make that choice. He had the vision to see the two options. Even if Jessup wouldn’t have seen that, or no one else would have seen it, he—I think—understood that. I wanna get to a thought I had. I think it is difficult to talk about meaning and symbols in books. You go into it; you have your certain things, but they just give you the energy to continue the story. You don’t chart symbols and their meaning. Most people don’t write that way. Overall, what I take from the book, is this person is in a really fucked up place, but they’re able to find good in the world. I think the narrator and Marilyn are good. Their relationship is good. I think it’s beautiful that in such a small book the narrator calls her, “Mare.” Also, I think there is something about the narrator’s loyalty that is important. Even though Marilyn kind of loses interest in him and is drawn to Jessup. Almost by destiny. Jessup is going to be her destiny. Jessup is a fucked up dude and the narrator knows it and tells it to his face and still has the power to say, “I’m not going to give you what you need to feel better” but he doesn’t tell him to fuck off. T: It’s also how the narrator manipulated Jessup into moving the body. G: Oh yea, he knew he had done fucked up stuff. Maybe I’m a dumb ass for trying to find the good in this character. Hmm, why bring Jessup? I guess he has the car. You need the car. You see Jessup rape Marilyn and you still bring them together on this journey that is just for you. T: That is the complexity of my feelings about people. How you can love and understand them and know that they’ve done horrible things. And use that to understand yourself better. It’s complicated. I agree that there is good here. Not in the actions of the characters, but there’s hope, there’s delight in the darkness. It’s like the absence of light in some of those moments. And a voice comes through and gives them hope. I found it completely absurd, but understand it more now, when I asked Juliet Escoria and Brandon Hobson and Brian Allan Ellis to blurb it, they said it was beautiful. It kind of blew my mind. I was like, “Really?” Because it’s a fucked up and kind of strange and weird book. But really beyond religion and the abuse stuff, I was talking about a kid feeling how someone might feel in response to less dramatic things. Like when you’re bullied in school, or whatever. That feels way bigger in the moment than a couple years later. Those experiences stop mattering later. I was talking about bigger things, but those things are involved in the themes. It’s the only book I’ve ever written where I was really heavy on symbolism. I don’t know if it’s heavy, but it’s there. Like the fish, the Jesus symbol, and relating it to a cock molesting you. Trying to reconcile those two things. I don’t want to sound like I’m anti-religions. I’m not. My wife’s a Catholic school teacher. I don’t believe it myself, but I don’t discourage people from believing it. I have my own brain and it works a certain way and I grew up in a very oppressive religion. That’s probably where my aversion to being attached to a religion comes from, but mostly I want people to be happy. That’s really it. I don’t see my books as downers. I think they’re hopeful. There’s a lot of complexity in being human and I think a lot of people find that depressing. G: I think it would take a very cynical mind to say this book is a 100% negative view of religion. That would be a bitter, resentful, reading of this. I think as hard as this character’s life is, as dark as this book can be, a lot of hope does come from seeking something bigger. The bible is more of a representation of something larger than the self in the book. To go back to the graveyard scene, the Ouija board scene. That scene made me feel the way I feel when I have a shitty interaction. Even now, like when I text you about having to hang out with someone and it being bad. Later on, when I’m able to break down how they said something or did something shitty, I feel better. I can say, “it was weird they ate the pizza we ordered and didn’t offer to pay,” or “it was weird they made gin cocktails for themselves but didn’t offer Kaitlin or I any.” That moment in the graveyard in Visions feels like that. Because the narrator is thinking, “He’s trying to fucking trick me. He’s trying to do this to push a certain emotion on me, to make me endeared to his ideas. I’m immediately sensing it, and it doesn’t mean he’s evil, it just means that is how he is trying to endear me. I’m endeared to him for wanting to endear me, but I’m not tricked by the Ouija board.” I still want people to like me, I still want to be friends with these people even though bullshit happens. I’m not trying to compare my life to your book, I’m just saying that scene felt so real. T: I think those feelings in day-to-day life are what I write about. I just made it more fucked up in that book. But I don’t think it’s that fucked up to compare puberty and sexual awakening to coming up in religion. The character was interested in becoming religious because his dad was dead. He was just looking for something and what he found was a friend who basically molests him, convinces him to jerk him off because he says it’s in the bible, but the dude’s never read the bible. So, I compared the dick to the fish later on. I’m glad you picked up on the Mare pet name. A mare is a horse. It carries people. I thought that was a good choice of a nickname because the narrator is following her. At first, it seems like she’s following him, but it’s always been her dragging him. When they walk by Joe and his girlfriend perched in the tree like stooling owls, Marilyn says, “Do you think we’re like them?” Later they’re up in the tree doing the same thing. G: I think when Marilyn asks that, the narrator says, “No,” then later says, “Yea, probably.” We haven’t talked about Peggy at all. Peggy’s very interesting. T: Yea, I named her after the King of the Hill character. All the names are funny. Jessup’s named after the grip tape company. Ray is named after the book Ray by Barry Hannah. I kind of imagined him pre-narrator of Ray. But, he was kind of doing that same shit in Ray too. And Marilyn is named after Marilyn Monroe. That was an easy one. G: The mom is just Mom. She didn’t have a name. T: Yea, I didn’t give Mom a name. G: I think Peggy is great. She’s such an interesting character. She comes in late, but that works with the intersecting arcs of the story. T: At the start of the book, these horrible things happen to the main character, and you think it’s going to be this slope toward redemption, but what he starts doing, as a defense, is using the things he learned to help himself. In the opposite direction, Jessup, who had probably learned the same things, before you meet him in the book, is doing these horrible things. By the end of the book, he’s like, “I can’t bury a body.” He tells Marilyn to be proper in front of Peggy. He’s starting to gain a conscience. I don’t think the main character’s conscience is degrading over time, but where he was used and vulnerable at first, he’s not anymore. He’s learned from that shit. Sometimes it gets ugly, but he questions those things too. What’s interesting about Peggy is she’s the only person the kid had known who showed him love, but she’s abusing him too. He’s about it, though because she’s showing genuine care. He’s willing to accept it because there’s this element of actual belonging.G: She has more power than Marilyn. She might be offering something that looks like what Marilyn could offer, but she has more power. She understands that what she is offering means more, therefore it means more. Marilyn is just trying to fill a space for the narrator; Peggy knows what she’s giving him. T: What I realized happened is Peggy is giving him love. She’s still abusing him but she’s showing him love. So, there’s a divergence when they get to Peggy’s house because Marilyn’s drifting toward Jessup, who’s manipulating her, and the main character is drifting toward Peggy, who’s manipulating him. They’re both showing love in the ways the others couldn’t. At the very end, when Jessup leaves, that allows the main character to bring Marilyn into the fold. He invites her into Peggy’s bedroom. He shows them their family. G: That moment is so wild. It makes sense as a symbolic gesture, and it also makes sense for the narrator’s journey in learning how to bring people together. Also, it makes sense because he is an intensely loyal character and never gives up on anybody. Him recognizing that Marilyn and Jessup have a relationship and he’s not judging them. He’s not jealous. The moments they have together when he knows she’s pregnant and he knows it’s not his baby, it’s her uncle’s baby, are intense moments that make a lot of sense. I feel like you could pitch that scene in a way that is very slapstick. “There’s a threesome between a geriatric woman, a pregnant 13-year-old girl, and a 14-year-old boy. This book’s crazy. You have to check this shit out. It’s so cool!”T: The holy trinity, dude. G: Exactly. But it makes sense, and is a loving moment, while also being a moment of manipulation that shows he has an agency he hasn’t used before. T: I really wanted this fucked up ending where religion was intertwined with all of it. Marilyn trusts the narrator and he trusts Peggy because they’re the only people who have shown each other warmth and love. They’re the only ones who have cared for each other, but they also are fucked up and manipulate and abuse each other. That’s what I was going for with the ending. I wanted it to be three people and I wanted it to symbolize religion. Because it fucks people up. The amount of guilt people carry due to what they were taught when they were young is unbearable. I’ve witnessed too much of it. Nobody should be taught shame and guilt for doing next to nothing when they’re kids. You don’t teach morality; morality exists inherently in the world. All the friends I had who grew up with atheist parents, they were the most moral, forward-thinking, awesome people I’ve ever met. I can’t say that about atheists who became atheist when they were 30. They become moralistic and weird. When it becomes a doctrine that’s when I turn off. G: I think that’s why it’s such a hard thing to write about religion in a way that doesn’t paint it good or bad. There are obviously problems with religion, and it’s painted into this book, but it also seems like the bible for this character means a lot. It brings him pleasure in ways that is valuable. T: I didn’t want to condemn either side. That was the whole point. If you’re a human, you’re looking for something that gives you comfort whether it’s good for you or bad for you. Then you latch onto those things. I don’t think that’s bad. But, yea, It’s complicated for me. I know what I was thinking at the time, but I also don’t know exactly what it all means. G: When I first got your books, Visions and Marigold, but I read Visions and I thought you were doing something with fiction that I didn’t expect from a writer in the indie world. Then I read Marigold and even though I didn’t know you, I felt that Marigold came from a lived experience. And Wichita Stories is very lived, real experience. Visions seems, to me, a tone poem for the stuff that you’re interested in. It is autobiographical in another way. The way you lean toward symbols, the way you lean toward ideas in philosophy. There’s obviously philosophy in Wichita Stories but it feels like a collection of things you would talk about when you talk about where you’re from, whereas Visions is about your ideas on moods, tones, religion, good vs. bad. T: I think they’re complimentary. Wichita Stories is the surface stories, the emotion, and Visions is the brain component. I was filtering the traumas in my own life through other people. Visions is 100% fiction, at least I hope so for anyone in this world, but that’s how my brain was processing how I was writing about my own life in another book, because I was writing them at the same time. I think I even used the same line about my little friend with the rattail getting fucked up in a trailer park. G: The dirty shredded ribbon. T: I used that line in both books. It wasn’t because I was cannibalizing the writing, I was just writing both books at the same time. I do that in all my books. I look back on Visions and Marigold and everything and think I could have fixed certain parts, but I stand behind the work. They’re not all perfect sentences, but I think I’m getting better at that. Some of the best shit I think I’ve written is in Selected Stories that Ben DeVos put out. I think I come at the same things from different angles. Or try to. Sometimes I’m super annoyed with myself because I’m rewriting the same thing I wrote and published six years ago, but it’s different. G: I think that you write about similar things is good. Especially because I know you as a friend. The writing is information about your mind, a complex and interesting mind, capable of telling these different stories, and I am extremely privileged and happy to have read these things and know you and everything. T: Thank you, dude. G: I love you, man. T: Love you too, brother. 

Find Visions by Troy James Weaver here.

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