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AIR QUALITY INDEX by Mike Nagel

July 12, 2021

Sunday morning my phone warns me that the air quality in Carrollton is low. I step outside and take a few deep breaths. I can see what my phone means. Not great. Most things leave something to be desired. Let me put it this way. There seems to be some room for improvement. Recently J showed me a graph and the line was going straight down.

"Well," I say. "I can't say I'm surprised."

"Actually," she says. "In this case, down is a good thing."

Lately I've been drinking this low ABV cider from the Stella Artois beer company. It's called Cidre. That's French for cider. 4.5% ABV. Basically apple juice.

I can drink four or five of them before I start to feel a buzz. Then I can drink another four or five before I start to feel kind of sick. Then I can drink another three or four before I've made a huge mistake. Then maybe another one or two after that. Then maybe just one more.

Life, I think, is all about finding your limits.

Or, I don't know, maybe it's about something else. I'm usually wrong about what things are about. When I first read Animal Farm I thought it was about an animal farm. I thought Gone with the Wind was going to be a weather movie, like Twister.

To be safe, J and I and the animals spend Sunday inside. We breathe the inside air. It's triple filtered. Passed through brick, drywall, and that pink insulation stuff that looks like cotton candy.

Funny story. My grandpa used to work in a cotton candy factory. I mean an insulation factory. They say that breathing in that pink crap all day is probably what killed him. One of the things. A contributing factor.

Outside, the air looks OK to me. It looks like air.

"It's more of an invisible threat," J says.

She shows me a graph and the line is going straight down.

"Oh good," I say.

"Actually," she says. "In this case, down is bad again."

Sometimes when I can't sleep I watch these YouTube videos of this guy who picks bike locks. The videos are like twelve seconds long. That's how long it takes to pick a bike lock. Bike safety is mostly an illusion.

Other types of safety too.

At night, when the wind blows, I can hear air getting into the duplex. Between the dried-out window seals. Underneath the doors. I've read that the air inside our homes is two to one hundred times more polluted than the air outside. And the air outside wasn't great to begin with. There's no such thing as a breath of fresh air. I think you have to go to Antarctica for something like that.

Last night while the wind was blowing and the air was getting in I was in the bathroom throwing up apple cider into the sink. I prefer throwing up into sinks. I don't know why so many people throw up into toilets.

"Better out than in I always say," my grandpa always used to say, the one who died of cotton candy poisoning at age seventy (at his funeral my brothers and I were shocked to learn that he had “died young”). He really did use to say that too. But even all these years later, twenty-some or whatever it is, I can't for the life of me figure out what that’s supposed to mean.

OPEN MOUTHED by Kwan Ann Tan

July 9, 2021

I knew I was in trouble the moment my co-worker caught me humming the female part to the last duet in La Boheme.

‘That sounds familiar,’ Lucy said as we stacked rows and rows of fragrant soap. ‘My grandmother loves that opera. She’s never seen it in person though, which is a shame. Maybe I should bring her one of these days.’

We laughed and continued restocking the shelves. It was a job that made a pair of opera tickets near impossible. The sound system crackled to life, and my faint memories of the song were drowned out by saccharine pop, making the store artificially cheery.

‘You know what happens in the end of that opera, right?’ Lucy asked, putting a final soap in place.

I did, having read the Wikipedia summary on the bus this morning. But I said nothing.

‘She dies.’

That morning, I awoke before the music started, and lay in the dark, waiting.

I had never been an early riser, but every morning I now shook myself awake in restless anticipation for the performance to start. I arose with scales in my ears, which quickly mellowed out to softer voice exercises then, as I down a cold, half-hearted breakfast, the songs. It was no secret there was an opera singer living in my building, even my letting agent muttered that she hoped I liked music when I signed the contracts. I had already heard multiple curses and shouts from other neighbours in a futile attempt to stop her from practicing so early.

I knew some of the more famous songs. Arias from Carmen, The Magic Flute, and Madame Butterfly, my father played for me on a CD when I was younger. To him, opera was the highest mark of civilization. He lived in fear that one day someone might catch him unfamiliar with some aspect of Western culture, exposing him for the farmer’s son that he was. In turn, he fed me a diet of strange facts and fancies, until I picked up the habit. My phone was filled with tabs from Wikipedia, online dictionary entries for opera terminology, and YouTube video compilations with titles like ‘top ten best opera singers in history.’

Sometimes on my way to work, I caught sight of the opera singer’s harried personal assistant, balancing coffees on a drink carrier and nearly spilling them in a rush to open the front door. She barely had time to nod before disappearing into the mysterious depths of the opera singer’s ground floor flat.

When I left that morning, I couldn’t resist the urge to look at the singer’s window. She stood in the dark lit by faint sunrise glow, mouth trilling wildly in a perfect O. She stopped when our eyes met, mouth still open, daring me to complain about the noise. Even in the dim light, I could see that she was beautiful.

As I walked away, she resumed her song, like a concert performance suddenly unmuted.

My neighbour on the 2nd floor, a single mother with an always inexplicably sticky daughter, moved out on Saturday. I helped—she was lovely. She often dropped by with food as if her motherly spirit couldn’t help but overflow onto anyone younger than her. I was sad to see her go but I would miss her casserole more. Knowing she would never accept a gift from me, I hid a care package of soaps and lotions in one of her unsealed moving boxes by the door.

‘I don’t want to leave but I have to,’ she said wistfully, looking at the mess strewn around the small flat. I had tripped over a mobile and was trying to free myself without destroying it. ‘My little girl’s nursery teacher advised me to stop speaking French at home but that’s exactly the problem—I don’t speak a word of French.’

She leaned down to give an affectionate peck on her daughter’s cheek. As if to illustrate her point, the girl burst into a sweet rendition of Carmen’s Habanera. Although the tune was right, it replicated none of the words’ meaning.

She sighed in resignation. ‘I don’t think she understands what it all means, but she sings in reply to everything now.’

I wondered what the opera-singer would make of this. If they ever met they could sing in reply to each other, making new meaning from the old songs.

‘Between you and me,’ my neighbour lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, ‘I’m hoping the new place doesn’t come with a built-in alarm clock—god knows a child is loud enough in the mornings.’

The first time the opera-singer spoke to me, she mistook me for her personal assistant.

To be honest, we looked nothing alike. Her assistant was a willowy blonde nearly a head taller than me and a graceful heap of angles and bones hidden under a carefully draped cardigan. Meanwhile, I inherited my father’s farmer son stockiness and, because I refused to listen to my mother’s advice to stay out of the sun, had a noticeably darker skin tone. Still: the hallway was dark, and the clock had just ticked past six. Still: like a siren, the sound of her voice lured me into her cave. I never stood a chance.

‘There you are,’ she said in a low voice as I entered the building. It had been a long day at work, and I was looking forward to having the evening to myself. I stopped short in the doorway, face cloaked by shadow. I glanced over my shoulder, wondering if she was really talking to me. The opera-singer wore a dark veil and a black dress with beads that glinted faintly.

She tapped her doorframe impatiently. ‘Well? You’re letting the cold in, which you know is bad for my throat. Close the door and come in quickly, I need you.’

Like a shrouded wraith, she passed through the door and left me to run after her so the flat door wouldn’t shut in my face.

Before I migrated to the gloomy British Isles, I had never lived in a flat before. My family was proud of the fact that we were 三世同堂: three generations living under the same roof. My grandparents and parents still lived in the same concrete and corrugated metal roofed house, and I had grown up close to the sun, moving easily in and out of the outdoors like it was a second home.

Here, things were different. A house was something that hid you from the elements. Somewhere you could pretend that the outside didn’t exist.

Standing there at the opening of the opera-singer’s flat, for a brief moment, I imagined I had stepped into the backstage of a theatre. I didn’t know where to look first. The walls were covered in poster-sized theatre bills, many of which in she was the star, her face in posed expressions of emotion, her name in large capitals at the bottom. I learned her name when a piece of fan mail was delivered to my mailbox by accident. Vases of luxurious hothouse flowers battled to stay alive, stuck in that heady, perfumed stage of half-rot. A costume rack stood to attention in the corner, where the opera-singer had tried on and discarded a few outfits already—the white and gold cotton of an Egyptian queen, the heavy petticoat and bustle of a 16th century noblewoman, the flattering cut of a tongue-in-cheek suit clearly made for a woman.

‘You smell different,’ she noted, not bothering to look at me. I didn’t move, unsure if she would catch me the next moment. ‘A bit like a soap store.’

She had already collapsed into a red velvet upholstered chaise longue and had an eye mask on. There was no chance I would be found out. Just as I was about to reply, she gestured to a neat pyramid of clementines on an ornately carved table beside her.

I stepped forward gingerly, trying to leave as little of my presence on the carpet as possible. In that moment I didn’t think of how it looked, the upstairs neighbour who had lied her way in and now was preparing to, well, I could have done anything to her. A series of dramatic scenes flashed through my mind: my hand holding a dagger, like a horror film, where the opera-singer was the beautiful victim; my hand carefully touching her face, as if she were a fairytale princess cursed to sleep forever; my hand reaching out to tenderly stroke her hair, the eye-mask falling off as she looked at me properly for the first time. Our eyes would meet, and instead of terror, I would see understanding, a mutual accord that we had fallen in love.

‘Sometime this year,’ she said, leaving her mouth slack so there was no room for me to mistake her order. Whether out of sheer habit or not, her mouth was curved in a perfect O.

I moved faster, squatted next to the table and peeled the clementine, not caring that the pith and peel lodged themselves in my nail beds and would stain my fingernails orange until I next had a shower. Out of habit, I peeled them the same way my mother did: in a single unbroken strip that curled into a spiral.

When the clementine sat naked in my palm, I split it into its segments and rocked back on my heels, sitting as close to her as I dared, lifting a single fragrant slice to her mouth. Her tongue darted out to taste the juice beading on the edges of the clementine. Then, so my fingers would be safe, she took the piece between her front teeth and retreated to chew her prize. I trembled when her lips brushed my fingers. Even her chewing was measured, and I could see her throat shifting in a smooth ripple as the juice and pulp moved down into the cavity of her body.

I sat there for what could have been seconds or hours, like a supplicant endlessly twisting the rosary around their fingers. If I had continued the motions of peeling and lifting any longer, I’m sure I would have forgotten my own name, where I had come from, what I was doing there.

The sound of the building door opening broke the spell. I cast around wildly and tried to gather my bearings. I dropped the orange half on the carpet and crushed it underfoot in my haste to run from the room. If this was a comic opera, I would have dived somewhere ridiculous to hide—underneath the chaise langue the opera-singer sat on as I watched the action on the main stage. But self-preservation kicked in, and I pushed past the door just as the assistant entered, my head doggedly lowered, so all I saw was a flash of shoes and a small cry coming from her mouth. It was too late for her to do anything. I had already taken the stairs three at a time, sprinted into my flat, and slammed the door shut.

I laid like a dying starfish on my cold floor. My heart struggled to escape my chest.

Over the next few weeks, I did everything I could to avoid the opera-singer and her assistant short of scaling the wall to my flat. I left the house a half hour before the assistant turned up. When I walked past her window, if the opera-singer had started already, I resolutely did not turn around. I stopped humming opera at work, I tried to move past the obsession, I even bought earplugs to distract myself from the morning concerts.

I kept dreaming of her voice. Sometimes I was plunged into complete darkness, with only her music coaxing me to relax and become absorbed by the dark space. Other times she sang without words. Just an endless wave of noise that spilled into her real-life vocal warm-ups.

On a Saturday, weeks after I entered the opera-singer’s house, I left the house around 1 when I would usually avoid leaving or entering. Saturdays were matinee days and there was too much of a chance of meeting her. In the past, her leaving for the theatre was a spectacle that I watched from my bedroom window. When I heard the slowly chugging engine of a taxi waiting on the road, I waited too, to see what the opera-singer would be wearing. From what I understood (the occasional manager did come to shout through her windows), the opera-singer lived her life perpetually late to her next appointment. She dressed and rehearsed at home as much as possible, hardly ever leaving her flat except to travel to the theatre or go on stupendous shopping trips and expensive dinners with men that kissed her cheek as they parted ways on the doorstep. When she did make it to the theatre, it was very often down to the wire—literally flinging herself onstage the moment she arrived.

So that Saturday, as I descended the stairs, she spoke to me.

When I recall it now, she must have been waiting there for me in silence, half-shadowed by evening light. I was on the last flight of stairs before the ground floor, distracted by digging through my bag to make sure that I had my wallet.

‘Can you help me with this?’ She asked. ‘I would ask my assistant, but she’s not in today. She’s sick again. People really need to take better care of themselves.’

I froze at the sound of her voice and looked up.

She was facing away from me, the curve of her spine exposed in a lace dress with a silk slip inside. The help she needed was clear. There was a row of many, many tiny pearl buttons that needed to be done up at the back. Each step I took towards her brought a new detail to my eyes: the angular planes of her shoulder blades, the smooth, unblemished surface of her skin.

The opera-singer stood perfectly still, like a hunter waiting for its prey to slip into a trap.

I fell right into it. It was as if I had dissociated and was watching the scene from outside my body, staring at our two figures as if we were set onstage.

My fingers were sure and steady as they made their way up the dress. When they were done up, they looked like an iridescent spinal cord, one I could pluck like an instrument’s string. My fingers were practically on her skin. The gentle heat emanating from her hypnotised me. She was silent the whole way through until the second-to-last button.

‘Do you want to watch me sing this afternoon?’ she asked.

The final button slid into place, as did the rest of my life.

The opera-singer’s manager shut me away in a box that no one else seemed to be in, rolling his eyes and complaining about my attire the whole way through. The crowds we squeezed through were a mixed bag. There were young and old audiences rippling with excitement, murmuring the opera-singer’s name. Glancing at the programme, I smiled when I saw the performance was going to be La Boheme.

I quickly realised why no one else was in the box once the opera started. It was set behind the stage rather than in front. You couldn’t help but be in the spotlight, part of another dimension, onstage being watched by an audience with eyes like tadpoles. The crowd hadn’t realised there was a courtship unfolding outside the opera they watched.

I watched the glossy back of the opera-singer’s head as she twirled across the stage. My favourite part of La Boheme—when Musetta sings a waltz to try and win over Marcello—was riveting. She was singing to an overweight Marcello clearly past his prime, but it didn’t matter. The lilting tones drew me in and tied me down. My father had played it for me as a child. The waltz was transformed before me, a song sung for my ears alone. The only living thing onstage was my opera-singer. As she hit her triumphant high note, she flicked her eyes to my box, a grin on her lips.

I left the box. After the song was over and the lovers had fallen irresistibly into one another’s arms, I fled to the bathroom to compose myself. Trembling in front of the endless rows of mirrors in the black-marbled bathroom, I stood weakly at a sink, trying to banish the red from my cheeks with cold water.

Her manager tracked me down just as the curtains drew over the final act. ‘She wants to see you,’ he said with a slight sneer.

In the dressing room, she had miraculously returned into the high necked, pearl buttoned dress, as if she had never taken it off in the first place.

‘I’m starving,’ she said. ‘We should get dinner.’

We were whisked out the side doors, avoiding anyone who wanted a picture or autograph, to a quiet all-night breakfast cafe down a deserted alley.

We drank wine with our English breakfast. She fed me a scone dripping in clotted cream and jam. She talked—more than I did—about her life and her art. It took her some time to shed the skin of her performance, she said, and talking about it helped her feel like herself. She told me her real name, apparently a different one from her stage name, and offered I should call her a pet name instead. The only type of jam she liked was strawberry, never raspberry, because the seeds in the latter got stuck in her teeth. The sweater I wore reminded her of an old schoolteacher she had a crush on. She loved travelling but hated flying. She’d been to Malaysia once on a layover to Australia. Her favourite novels were mysteries, and a close second was space opera. ‘It’s impossible for us to be alone,’ she said, smiling. ‘I just don’t believe that’s how the universe works.’

We spent another hour before sliding, tipsy, into the taxi waiting for her outside. When we finally drew up, I saw people walking to the train station to begin their daily commutes. The sound of the key unlocking the door seemed as if it might wake up the whole building. We passed by her flat, and I said goodnight as she opened the door.

‘Aren’t you going to come in?’ She asked.

Without waiting for an answer she disappeared into the yellow glow of her flat. The door remained open.

I followed.

I slept that first night deeply and without dreams.

The sunlight woke me, not song. From the angle of the sun entering her window, I knew that it was well past my usual waking time. I had missed my shift at the soap store. The opera-singer was curled up by my side, one arm thrown over my ribcage.

I wondered if I should leave, awkwardly shuffling out the flat, praying no one in the building saw me. Before I could decide, the opera-singer’s assistant flung the door open and stared at us in the bed. The opera-singer awoke and stood by the bed.

‘Eileen?’ She said as the assistant relayed the singer’s plans for the day. ‘You’re fired. Leave the schedule outside.’

The assistant let out a small cry, sunk to the ground and clung to the opera-singer’s knees. Throughout the exchange I feigned sleep but I felt my face slowly turning red.

Only when I heard the door close, and the front door slam did I open an eye to peek at the scene. The opera-singer stood by the window, peeling the skin of an apple with a sharp knife, letting it dangle down in a curl. When she saw I was awake she smiled gently.

‘I seem to have lost an assistant,’ she said. ‘Would you mind taking over until I find a new one?’

THE WASP by Tyler Engström

July 8, 2021

I look out the kitchen window and wonder why the flowers won’t grow. I can’t even remember what I planted, what sort of beauty I’m disappointed in not receiving. I’ve given them plenty of water. Was it too much water? I don’t know. I’ve never known. What life does water make, anyway?

Anyway, a wasp comes up to the window and lands on what would be my nose, if not for the window. I lovingly watch his little hands scrape against each other. Adorable! “You look like a fly,” I tell him, “like all the little flies that crowd every rotting meal.”

I tap gently on the window and say, “Little wasp, I love you!” and the wasp zips off. I lose sight of him and miss him already. Has anyone ever kept a wasp as their own? I would’ve been the first. How about an equal? There’s potential there. I think about all the things we could’ve been together and hear a pop against the window. The wasp is back, but this time as a lifeless little Rorschach test exploded against the window. The kind you only ever see on your windshield driving Highway 9 in the middle of July, but I wasn’t going anywhere just now.

If you love something, you’re supposed to let it go, and if it comes back, it’s yours forever. It’s something that doesn’t have to be true to feel good, so what remains of the wasp was my responsibility now. I owe him that much.

I step outside and pick the pieces off the grass. His head, thorax, other parts I’m sure I learned the names of in school, but some things are so easy to forget. Most things are like that, I guess. I wash everything that was once inside of the wasp off the window and place the wet tissue and his little body in the bin. “Back to the earth where you came from,” I say. I throw a handful of dirt in the bin with him for good measure. He was a very good wasp, as wasps go. We had a great time, once.

My neighbor notices my funeral procession and walks over. The down trip must be palpable from across the street, I figure. He asks what I’m doing. “Well,” I say, “I’m tending to the garden and doing what mother nature never had the guts to do, no pun intended. Do you think the wasp would be offended by that? God, I hope not.” He stares through me and I can tell I’ve shared more than I care to. There are no shadows on the ground and the air is damp. His eyes are so glassy, and he looks like he’d been crying. “What’s this about a wasp?” he asks. “The one in the compost, and never mind about that, anyway.”

He starts telling me about my flowers, “They need water,” he says. But what does he know about it? What does he know about the life water gives? What does he know about smashing your head through the glass pane of the world?

BIG DINKY ENERGY by Josh Sherman

July 5, 2021

You really need to figure out how to stop drinking so much. You could ask your doctor to refer a therapist or join some 12-step program. But you’ve got a better idea. It’ll just have to wait until the weekend, when you aren’t busy writing marketing copy for real-estate developers.

***

‘The Mulberry Estates are a charming collection of spacious single-family homes in leafy Elgin County.’

‘Set to rise in Toronto’s vibrant Entertainment District, the Foxtrot is a luxurious 45-storey condo tower by the award-winning Mango Development Corporation.’

These are the sentences you’re paid to write eight hours a day, Monday to Friday, from an office downtown.

You wish AI would hurry up and make your job redundant.

***

Saturday morning you’ve got a raging headache. You don’t even throw up when hungover anymore. It’s like your body has tapped out from the constant abuse, or maybe it’s just your natural state now.

Though you’re resolved to stick to your plan no matter how shitty you feel, you’re also nervous and pace your apartment for an indeterminate length of time. A small part of you wants to back out while you still can.

***

It’s so bright out as you walk across a bridge to your destination. You want to capture the brightness — put it in a package like a light bulb so you can use it later. Someone has spray painted RUTHLESS LOWLIFE on a cement barrier. Seeing the graffiti tag, which is all over your neighbourhood, brings you joy. You consider RUTHLESS LOWLIFE to be your favourite street artist. You think of RUTHLESS LOWLIFE as a kind of light bulb.

***

Automatic doors usher you into Canadian Tire. You haven’t been in a hardware store in a long time — probably not since you were a little kid, when your mom made you wear that colourful leash thing so you wouldn’t wander away and get abducted. Recently, while helping your mom move, you found the leash in a box in the crawlspace of her old place. You wanted her boyfriend to take a picture of you two tethered at the wrists once again, but neither he nor your mom were willing to participate for some reason.

Weird.

***

It doesn’t take long for you to get your bearings. There’s a comforting logic to the store’s layout, and you sense intuitively where the aisle you’re looking for is located. Just in case, you’ve rehearsed a backstory for what you’re about to do.

And then you see it, what you came here for: the dinky-car display.

***

Suddenly you’re eight years old again.

You’ve never had alcohol.

Your organs are pink and healthy.

You wake up early to watch cartoons.

Your main concern is your Hot Wheels collection.

You are safe and secure on your leash.

If you could just recapture something of that lost time, even at 1:64 scale, you might find a way out of your predicament. These die-cast toy cars haven’t changed in decades. Something of your childhood remains static, sealed in plastic, and perfect.

So you flip through the packages, picking out a couple models: an ’85 Honda City Turbo, a ’68 Mazda Cosmo Sport, a Nissan Silvia.

You’re already making plans for an Instagram account to post pictures of your toy-car collection. You’ll create it when you get home. The username will be @bigdinkyenergy.

***

You stand in line feeling like you did the first time you bought condoms. You hope the cashier is an old person, someone whose judgment you don’t give a fuck about.

Instead, you end up with a hot 20-something ringing through and bagging your items. You feel totally castrated.

“Just picking these up for my nephew,” you say.

“He really… loves Japanese cars,” you add.

The cashier avoids eye contact when she hands you the bag.

***

As you walk back over the bridge on your way home, there’s a City of Toronto truck pulled up to the curb. Someone in a City of Toronto uniform is power-washing RUTHLESS LOWLIFE off the cement barrier. You just wish some things wouldn’t change, and you’re reminded of the versatility of grief, of all its variants.

Then you notice something else. The bag you’re carrying is so much lighter than what you lug home every day from the liquor store around the corner. And you think maybe you’re more excited to open its contents, too.

SERPENT WITH FIREWORK by Harris Lahti

July 4, 2021

The sunburnt man climbs the steep bank of the lake, dragging a large plastic cooler packed with the last beers of his life. And then? Redemption. Stone-cold sobriety. Through his speed shades, the remains of the abandoned luxury resort rise in nuclear yellow—the shattered windows and graffitied cabins, the crooked doors and cracked tennis courts, the moist volleyball sand where he first slid against his wife and jizzed his teenaged blue jeans. Boy, it sure is nice to discover everything where he left it.

Or not exactly.

From the shallow end of the pool, three skateboarders stare up at him—at his yellow Polo and high-visibility boardshorts, his wraparound reflective sunglasses—hoping against hope the irradiated yuppie doesn’t intend to kick them out. The weekend boating crowd, they know, love nothing more than to report any ruckus that wasn’t of their own making. Especially on the Fourth of July! And so the moment hangs. And hang there—the skateboarders not wanting to rub him the wrong way, lest this lobster call the cops and prematurely end their session—until, with a sudden dart of his tongue, the sunburnt man shaves the foam from his blistered upper lip and declares to them:

“It’s cool, yo!” he slurs. “I used to skate!” All the time back in the day, this sunburnt man and his friends used to lug a generator back here, a sump pump. Gasoline. Fucking mops and towels to soak up the grime. Nets to catch the bullfrogs, snakes, and salamanders living in the sludge. They’d skate this pool until there was nothing left but a crater. “Utter destruction!” he says.

The skateboards stare throughout his summary, blinking back a code that anyone with a dry slab of brain could decipher to mean: Yeah, fuck-o, that’s exactly what we’re doing, just look around, where’s the crater? the utter destruction? the pool’s right here, bro until, apropos of nothing, the sunburnt man cuts off to make a shotgun reloading sound with his mouth, “Kirch-kirch,” and slides another beer from the cooler into his neon yellow koozie. From which, he swigs deeply, damn near polishing off the twenty-seventh beer in a single draught.

Or was it his twenty-eighth? His twenty-ninth, perhaps?

He continues to teeter there at the edge of the pool for some time, his sunglasses flashing sharp blades of sun, as all but one of the skateboarders resume their session—the one with the walking cast on his leg who’s setup on the stairs of the shallow end grilling hamburgers. “Ayo, chief,” this grill master says. “Happy fourth. You want a burger?” All morning, he’d been grilling them, breathing coal and meat smoke out of his toolbox-sized barbeque while watching his friends enjoy the emptied pool as the skin inside his walking cast popping and aching like beaded burger fat. “Medium? Medium-rare?”

“With a pulse,” this sunburnt man responds before draining off his maybe twenty-seventh/eighth/ninth beer with conviction. His throat bobs and knuckles as the beer flows into his purplish neck. However, on this day, unlike others, no shame accompanies this chugging. Instead, a sense of achievement, self-betterment, as if each cracked beer tab opens another door in his mind. After passing through all thirty of them, a new life will begin. A life in which, he’ll return home, apologize. Listen. Just listen. Take the garbage out, load the laundry, then mow the lawn while his wife watches him out the kitchen window, her heart thawing with love.

The grill master proffers the bloody burger. “You want this or what?”

The sunburnt man peers down through the metallic glasses: “I didn’t order that.”

To which the grill master gives a half-hearted grumble and tosses the burger onto the paper plates, adding to the other gray and shriveled patties his buddies refused throughout the morning, to this greasy leaning tower that has grown into a metaphor for his life—because, once upon a time, not even a year ago, this grill master would’ve found solace in a well-cooked burger, would’ve enjoyed a day spent simply watching his buddies skate. But his string of recent injuries has been too long, too suffering, and at the ripe old age of twenty-five, this master of char and broil has taken a hard look at his life: the future he’s stepped into is old and hurting. Just like this radioactive drunk, he thinks. This boozed up kook who won’t stop word salading at me like I could give a fuck: What do I care about his good old days? His wife? The way they used to roll around over in the volleyball court? How her red hair used to spark in the sun? How she’d moan like Medusa when they fucked?

“You’d understand if you saw her,” the sunburnt man tells him. “Matter fact,” he says, fishing a large cell phone from his cargo pocket.

The grill master glances at his friends, trying to transmit a call for help, a refocusing of social responsibility. But their skateboarding only continues, as if it was now up to the grill master, and him alone, to run interference with this drunkard, to sacrifice himself for their opportunity to slash at the pool coping with their skateboard’s metal trucks. To carve over the light fixture in the deep end with a poetry he felt he’d never again be able to write. Then: this spit sucking sound. “What the fuck?”

The sunburnt man nudges him: “Lookit.” And for a split-second dream-moment? this crazy-eyed red-headed woman? she bobs in the grill master’s lap? a fiery mop of hair? right there on the stairs? in the shallow end of the pool? where he’s been all morning? sucking him? giving him the first head he’s gotten in months? a whole year? Only his dick is redder, more curving.

“The only picture I have of her,” the sunburnt man says before slipping his cell phone back into his pocket and opening the lid of the cooler and starting to fish for his maybe twenty-ninth/thirtieth beer—fishing, fishing, fishing—for that maybe final one—the key with which he will crack the final door that lead into his new and sober future, where after completing the lawn, he’ll enter the kitchen to discover his wife overflowing with a pent up a sexuality that says please fuck me, right here on the laminate counter, you sweet animal, I’ve missed you so much—except, no, this final beer, nah-uh, there isn’t a final one. Apparently, he drank that one, already stepped into that future life. Without realization or ceremony. And instead, he comes up with a damp firework: a big red cake he must’ve purchased earlier at the Exxon along with the thirty pack to celebrate this moment. The start of his new life that’ll play from here forth into eternity like a prime-time family comedy. And so, to mark this occasion, he flicks his Bic lighter and holds flame to fuse. He ignites a spark that travels hissing toward the firework’s center clenched in his scorched hand. He cocks his arm and sends the cake flying.

The skateboarders stop to gawk at the pool’s deep end as the grey braids of smoke diffuse up into the thick pines, into the shadows the branches hold down, waiting for an explosion that doesn’t come. Refuses to. (Perhaps, this firework, too, has failed to thrive? the grill master wonders.) But then: explosion! A heat. An unleashed wrath shoots upward and launches off the pool’s curving walls into the pines, where a large bird startles high up in the branches. With a flap of enormous wings, its shadow frees itself, soars over them, a vulture, a hawk, no, a bald eagle—majestic and full of glory—up, up, up into the patches of blue skies above, shrieking its rage, piercing at their eardrums, so loudly that even the sunburnt man stops to watch the thing flap and shrink into nothingness. Into memory.

And in the blast’s wake? Aside from the tattered box and ruined pool slick with charcoal, confetti, and myriad destruction that’d surely bite into the steady roll of any skateboard wheels? There’s something else: this rope: this rattling sound: this glitching movement in the pool that makes no sense: a missing puzzle piece of movement where there should’ve been none: a reptile that must’ve fallen from the eagle’s mouth as it raged against the blast: a snake with a rattle, a diamond-shaped head: red eyes staring back.

“Seriously, what the what?” The skateboarders exchange glances, shrug. Repeat this process again. What do you do in a situation like this? Bash the rattler with a rock? Coax it out with a stick? There were no obvious answers. No other actions to take than to turn toward the sunburnt man with murder in their eyes, as if he’d conjured the snake on purpose. And this drunk dayglo dickhead, you know what he does?

Laughs—because for him, right now, the universe aligns. Its cosmic beer sign arrows blink the fated way: First through the thirty pack, then the firework, and now this rattlesnake, another set of doors inside the other set of doors inside his mind through which he must walk. After capturing the serpent, he’ll skin the thing and gift the hide to his wife as a totem reminder of how far he sunk without her love.

(If it doesn’t make sense to you, I can’t explain his logic.)

The grill master tries to stop him. The two other skateboarders try to stop him. But the sunburnt man moves too quickly toward the rattler, who only continues to amplify and sustain its warning clatter. “Kirch-kirch, kirch-kirch, kirch-krich,” the sunburnt man responds, hoping to confuse the animal—because, boy, this rattle snake is a stupid one. The sunburnt man realizes this right away. Easily distractable. Lacks the reflexes that I possess, he thinks.

Even the sizzle of the grill master’s grill falls silent as if to watch the sunburnt fool close in on the rattler, like he’s done so a thousand times, making it hard not to wonder: Was this sunburnt donkey a snake handler, a reptile wrangler, a herpetologist of some kind? Of course not. Maybe, though?

Drunk as he is, the sunburnt man senses his audience’s captivation and this makes him make the mistake he so often made in the past—his other signature—the one where he says, “Just one more beer,” and attempts to amplify heaven. He lurches. He grabs. Then, before he’s even aware of his success, he’s twirling the rattler by its tail before his belly like a lasso.

“Kirch, kirch, kirch,” he says, repeatedly. The skateboarders say nothing. Just stand in awe. Gawking at the beautiful way this crimson kook gyroscopes the rattle snake, the way this hologram of death blurs before his toasted body. The grill master can’t blink. He can’t breathe. On account of the adrenaline now coursing through his blood, flooding him with a feeling he associates with his own good old days. Remember?

The sunburnt man does, remembers everything. His idealized life moves before him, inside the action of the snake, caged there like rare diamond in a wedding ring. Each time the snake passes, his smile cracks wider, his lip oozes blood.

Meanwhile, the sunlight that snaps off his metallic sunglasses causes the skateboarders to squint, to shield their eyes, not wanting to miss what happens next, as the rattler’s fangs continue to snap and miss him, snap and miss him, until, okay, maybe they haven’t. Maybe the fangs have connected after all.

It takes a moment, but the sunburnt man feels this venom pooling, too, as an energy, and within this accumulation he senses a fissure, the sudden formation of another door. A final door. One whose edges are flooded with heavenly light. One door at the end of the thirty pack and snake that he hadn’t anticipated or imagined. An emergency exit of sorts. And it’s in this moment, with this realization, that the scene’s energy swells too taut. Too impossible. It needs somewhere to go, too. Anywhere. And so, with no other options left, the energy plunges itself into his burnt body, burrowing behind the venom toward the sunburnt man’s over-cooked heart.

I THINK ABOUT YOUR COCK DURING TIMES OF CRISIS by Lexi Kent-Monning

July 2, 2021

The first thing I thought of during the coup was your cock. I think of it when I need comfort, and what I wanted to remember was the first time it saved me. We were on your bed, a Friday afternoon, both skipping work. I’d been bent over in the shower, but you know I faint easily so you moved us out of the hot water. Our just shampooed hair made dark blotches and streaks on your grey sheets, while stars encroached on my vision and echoes rolled through my ears, the two telltale symptoms I’m about to pass out. Instead of the stars and echoes, I focused on your cock like my life depended on it, and the deeper I plunged it into my throat, the more I kept the fainting at bay. Your cock brought me back to full consciousness, so now when I don’t have my faculties or when my faculties are too present, when I need a jolt or a numbing, it returns me. When I have to wake up in a few hours but haven’t gotten a whisper of sleep, your cock comes faster than sheep into my head and soothes me. When I almost drive off the road and need to stay awake for a few more miles, remembering the taste of the first lick of the head puts me on cruise control until I pull into the garage. When I’m on my knees about to retch into a toilet, I think about swallowing you down, and my stomach immediately stops churning. So when guns and Confederate flags filled the screens again, the first thing I thought of was your cock, and how it’s never been used for violence. When crises arise, I think of your cock and I know how to stay alive.

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