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UNDERTOW by Tara Stillions Whitehead

April 1, 2021

We pinned their name tags to our knitted sacks. Reynolds. Solomon. Childs. Kennedy. We wrote their room numbers on our wrists and waited for them on the cement benches near the commandant’s office. We sat with our legs crossed, condoms in our back pockets, while they marched the line in their parade uniforms. We tracked sand from dorm to bedroom sheets. Someone's mother washed their civvies and kept them in the guest room or the pool house, convinced we were the ones doing the civilizing.

There were boys whose names we couldn’t share. Boys whose names we’d seen taped inside other girls’ lockers. Boys whose hips were like rip tides. Boys with thirsty eyes. Boys in beach stairwells and stolen cars. Boys in bathroom stalls above the fire pits at Coyote, behind the air hockey tables in Mr. Peabody’s.

Wharton. Claussen. Holt. Phelps.

We carried their desire. We carried the sea.

When they were expelled or graduated or disappeared, we pinned their names between the Christmas lights on our bulletin boards. We cocooned ourselves in our salty-air bedrooms and drank wine coolers and collaged, high on unspent touch, sweating them out like a forever hangover. We kept their parents’ secrets and sent encrypted letters, silently thanked God for cigarettes and earthquakes and all things California.

Today, I write their names on a receipt with crossed out numbers and a long-past pediatrician appointment scribbled in the corner. Heinneman. Daltz. Prescott. The spellings don’t look right, but when I dig through the few boxes harboring those fugitive years, the photos are too blurry for confirmation.

I search Google and find an article about the boys the commandant gave whiskey to and took home. My chest rises and falls with the surge of events I thought fear and shame had erased. The boy who drowned in the undertow by academy barracks. The dime bags he kept in his beret. The boy who touched so long as I didn’t touch him back, his moaning in the beach stairwell, his blank unrecognition when I saw him at the winter formal. There was the boy who sold pills. The boy who bought and could not stop taking the pills. The boy who got so drunk he told us what had been done to him. The boy who slept with his rifle. The boy who fucked his rifle. The boy who wrote poems and was sent to the desert. Somewhere in between, sometime after, there was the boy who called me to tell me he’d been released from prison, to tell me he is not a boy anymore, that he never was allowed to be a boy then.

In the article, I see the commandant’s face for the first time. I read his name in the caption, five times in the article, one for each charge against him.

I do not see the boys’ names—McKee and Smith and Wright—but I hear them—Webb and Fritz and Oh—calling from the Mariana Trench, whispering just below the surface, translating the language of sand far from the sea.

SEALED by Kathleen Gullion

March 31, 2021

The day of my baptism, I wear a neon orange swimsuit underneath my white dress. What was I supposed to do, go naked and let everybody see my brand-new nipples? As I wait by the river, bullfrogs jumping from bank to bank and croaking like a choir, the swimsuit keeps finding its way up my butt crack, giving me what Paw-Paw would call the “cowboy’s hello,” a term he coined for what happens to underwear on a saddle. “That’s why cowboys go commando, Darlene,” he always said.

I yank the suit out of my crevice. Mom, perched up on dry land, yells out, “Darlene, God is watching you!” I want to yell back, God gets wedgies too, but before I can, the pastor arrives.

He wades into the water, his eyes bulging from the cold. It’s only April, and the river flows with leftover winter water. He turns to face us, waist-deep, robe billowing up around him like a tutu. There are six of us getting baptized today, including Phoebe, who always makes a big show of praying with her eyes closed in church and saying Amen when she is done. Once I asked her what she prayed about. She said world peace. I pinched her arm and asked what she really prayed for. She cried and said that is what she really prayed for. Then her mama called my mama and I had to stick my nose in the corner of the wall for two hours.

I pray for normal things like chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, to see a butterfly cracking open a chrysalis, and to have my little nasty brother to shrivel up like a prune and get turned into prune juice that will be served at the old folks’ home where Paw-Paw lives.

I stick my tongue out at Phoebe, that goody-goody. She gasps as if she hasn’t ever seen my red tongue wiggling at her and turns away, blushing like a bride.

“Morning, my children,” the pastor says to us, and I can smell fish sticks and liquor on his breath. “Today is the day of your Baptism, the day you accept Christ into your little hearts. When you become submerged in the river, your original sin will be washed away – all that sin that causes lyin’, cheatin’, stealin’, covetin’, and adulterin’ washed downstream to the sea. When you emerge from the cleansing waters, you will be purified, cleansed, chock full of the Holy Spirit.”

I don’t know about all that. But before I can even say Holy Spirit who? I’m yanked by the pastor and hoisted up into the air like a trophy. “Darlene Harvey, do you take the Lord Jesus Christ into your heart, with love and devotion, in order to be cleansed of original sin?” Without pausing for my answer, he dunks me. The ice water feels like a slap. The pastor’s hands dig into my shoulders, keeping me down, making sure I’m getting my cleansing. Soon, I’ll pop back up and be purified, a good girl, a child of God.

But I like being a grimy thing. I do the only thing I can think of. I bite the pastor’s arm. His hands fly off me and I take my chance at escape, kicking my legs as fast as I can and pulling my body forward with a scooping motion of my arms. I feel movement behind me, but I don’t dare look back. I can swim faster than the pastor can wade. The fabric of my white dress has grown heavy, so I wriggle out of it and it floats up to the surface, translucent as a ghost. Just me and my orange swimsuit now. Without the dress’s weight, I can swim even faster, so I keep going, swimming farther and farther away from the bank where the congregation is gathered.

Feet fluttering, I follow the current, away from those cursed cleansing waters and Phoebe’s prayers for peace and the pastor’s stank breath. Something brushes my foot and my heart jumps. It must be the Holy Spirit, coming to get me. But it’s not a spirit. It’s a catfish. It swims in front of me and looks me in the eyes. Its skin is smooth and perfect, no blemishes or bumps. The sun refracting through the water catches its whiskers, illuminating each one like a pin light. I reach out my hand and scratch it beneath its chin, like I do with the cats that live under our porch. It leans into my hand, letting me scritch-scratch just like one of those kit-kats. My chest starts to feel tight, but I don’t want to go back up to the surface and be a member of the church and listen to the pastor’s thous and thines and be expected to pray for things that will never happen. I just want to stay down here with this radiant critter. I keep scratching it real good and it purrs, both of us free from damnation and deliverance, enjoying the sharp sting of April river water.

I’ve already been under for a few minutes now. I just need one breath, and I can go back under. I resolve to be amphibian. I grab the critter around the middle and propel upwards. I break through the surface of the water and the pale air stings my face. A breath forces itself into my lungs, but the air feels clogged compared to the cool water below. I take another deep breath and prepare to dip back under, then I realize there is no catfish in my hand. What purred at me was a sneaker. A white one caked in pond scum. The whiskers: untied laces. I let the shoe go, let it sink back to the bottom of the river, and swim back to the bank, a child of God, cleansed and alone.

TWO MICROS by Caleb Lyons

March 29, 2021

It Was Clouds

On my way to his house in Malibu, a song about life and death in Los Angeles played on the radio. At the house, the artist carefully signed his work and handed it to me. I wrapped it in glassine and told him his show in New York looked good in the pictures. He gave me a bag to gather avocados from his trees. We talked about how great Chicago is and why we left.

3 years later, when the artist died, I went back to the house in Malibu to pick up his final piece. It was clouds. Have a nice day was the wrong thing to say to his partner.

Dog Food Man

I loaded the mold of the man made of dog food into my van and drove it to the wolf sanctuary. To gain their trust I had to let the wolves smell and lick my face. They ate the dog food man while the artist videotaped. The owner of the sanctuary wanted to be clear that while she appreciated the financial donation, this was not the wolf image she was trying to promote—wolves eating men, wolves eating dog food, wolves eating dog food men.

“Sleepless in Queens, NY” by Michael Seymour Blake

March 29, 2021

…

DOG DENTIST by Stephanie Yu

March 26, 2021

Dog Dentist comes home, takes off his shoes, puts his feet up on the table, and says in a voice too loud, “Man my feet are B-A-R-K-I-N-G, if you know what I mean!” He laughs uproariously to himself. A joke intended only for one.I’m fixing up his favorite: meatloaf and mash. After a day of grinding down dog teeth, he’s only in the mood for food that is barely reconstituted. My meatloaf is a special recipe that’s super moist. More “fudgey” than “cakey” so the enamel faces zero resistance on the way down. I can tell that sometimes Dog Dentist barely chews, just lets the food dissolve a little before swallowing it whole.Dog Dentist started his business by posting flyers around the neighborhood. Super grisly pictures of canine’s canines all rotted out. A crusty black molar against a shock of labial gum line. The flyer didn’t make any sense. It was formatted all crazy so you didn’t know it was advertising for dental hygiene services until the very end (“Ever woken up to put the coffee pot on and water in the dog bowl and when you bent down to pet his furry old head realized that WHEW your dog’s mouth is RANK?”).Somehow, though, calls came in for Dog Dentist. Some were super out there calls. From people who were probably mentally ill, he would say to me. You really start to wonder who is walking outside and sees a flyer and thinks it’s ok to call the number on the paper when there’s no website or any way to confirm this dog dentist is an actual human. But I guess there are some real loonies out there.Business is good and Dog Dentist is happy. One night, he decides to go all out and make me spaghetti and meatballs. He cooks the whole box of Kirkland pasta until they’re way past al dente. Like no more dente left. And he styles the noodles in these two crooked towers with one enormous meatball at the top of each. “What’s the occasion?” I ask. “I’m making money, baby!” he says, wagging around in an apron that says “Trust Me, I’m a Dentist.” He bought it off of Redbubble last week for some reason. “We got funds, we got the goods,” he says as he motions to the bounty of pasta before us.“How’s business, daddy-o?” I’m tapping the table like a stick to a cymbal.“Amazing,” he says. “Never been better. Dogs come in a-howlin’ and leave me a-whistlin’. I’m getting referrals on referrals from people who’ve come in to see me.”I’m about to brave the pasta tower when Dog Dentist leans in and adopts a conspiratorial tone. “I’ll let you in on a little secret.” I set down my fork and knife and crouch low to meet his face. It’s all a big show. I know with his timbre he’s not capable of whispering to anyone. “I put BOTS in their teeth.”Now I’m genuinely surprised. “Bots? What do you mean bots?”“Robots, babe. It’s mind control.” He’s tapping his index and middle finger up against his temple like a loaded gun“Fuck out of here,” I say.“No, for real, babe. This is what’s really gonna make us rich. Like filthy stinkin’ rich. I’m gonna plant all these dogs with bots and when they activate it’s gonna be insane. They’ll run away from their owners and be able to talk to each other. But the GPS is programmed for our place so they’ll show up here first and then I’ll take them on a traveling roadshow. People love dogs who do tricks. And I got the key. The button’s in my pocket and the receptors . . . they’re in their mouths, babe.”I’m sitting there looking at him slurping a strand of spaghetti down. It’s snaking around the spaghetti tower and it’s setting the whole plate spinning like a record player in a cartoon. No way I’m seeing this. No way I’m hearing this.But with Dog Dentist, it’s best to just keep laughing and chum around and be all “That’s amazing, babe.” And he really is in a good mood with his spaghetti—it’s a good sign that he’s cooking anything at all. Much better than the alternative when Dog Dentist doesn’t get out of bed for weeks on end, dour as all hell, basically melting into the bedsheets. When he’s saying he wishes he was dead and had finished human dentistry school instead of being a no-good back alley dog dentist. Better than when he gets a call later from one of his “patients” about their dog spitting something out after dinner, some screwy piece that came out of a hole where a tooth used to be. Better than when the mail comes in from the Better Business Bureau and they’re seeing red and they know he’s been practicing dog dentistry without a license for months. Better than when he’s screaming that he’s going to do it just hit “ACTIVATE” and then the world will see—I’ll see—that he was right all along and his dogs are gonna come running and he’ll sit there on the front porch with his bowl of spaghetti waiting for the call of his hounds because when they show up they’ll answer to he and he alone. They’re gonna stream in like the cavalry and help build his case against the BBB and they’ll publish a story about him in Scientific American oh how amazed the canine science community will be at this feat Dog Dentist accomplished pushing dog dentistry forward by 100 years maybe 150 if you’re really keeping score.

HARDING’S REFLEX by Kira Homsher

March 25, 2021

It’s an involuntary reflex, like how looking at the sun can make some people sneeze. Whenever Harding drives past a 7-Eleven, he has to turn around and buy a pack of cigarettes. To be clear, he is not a smoker. He buys a cheap pack of whatever color looks most appealing in the moment, regardless of brand, then smokes exactly one cigarette in the parking lot before stuffing the pack in the glove compartment and driving to his destination. He particularly likes packs in yellow. And sea-foam green, because they look clean and soapy. If he had to explain it, he’d pin it on the parking lots. There’s something about the 7-Eleven parking lots that makes him want to pause and tether himself to the landscape. But Harding is not a teenager anymore and needs an excuse to loiter. Cigarettes are the obvious choice, because they give him the appearance of having a habit.Harding is not a man of habits and this makes him very difficult to latch onto and describe. A man should have one or two habits so that he can be known by them. A man could play poker or refurbish guitars. A man could take evening walks around the neighborhood. A man could stretch, habitually.But Harding is not a man of habits, and so he must simulate them. How does a man pass his days without habits? That’s for him to know.Today, Harding is smoking blue. Because they were out of seafoam and yellow. He was on his way to visit his sister when he saw the 7-Eleven sign and had to pull over. His sister is dying a slow and discerning death. The nearness of her death has given her an uncanny sweetness; her words are full of import. Harding does not like to be around it. It makes him feel threadbare and immaterial. She has always been more substantial than he.Harding has many dreams for a man with no habits. Last night he dreamt the world was a campground and everyone he knew lived next to each other in little tents, each zipped up and doing important research on screens that glowed and buzzed. Having nothing to research, he passed from tent to tent, making sad little visits of himself. One tent had a lava lamp inside. Another had a baby and some posters. When he woke, Harding tried but could not remember the images on the posters. Those sorts of things never make it out of dreams. Harding is smoking blue, halfway to his dying sister and her menacing wisdom. He tries taking deep yogic breaths through the cigarette, then looks down at the shrinking butt between his fingers, a wet heat settling beneath the skin around his eyes. He drops it, steps on it, returns to his car. It takes him 17 minutes to arrive at the house where his sister is dying. Her room is full of flowers Harding can’t identify. She’s propped up in bed, wearing an expression he refuses to identify.Harding attempts conversation: —What are you dying of again?She smiles the infuriatingly patient smile of the near-death. —5G.—Be reasonable. —All right. An infection, then. —Right. What do you want done with the, with your body?—Cremation, please. It’s all written down somewhere. Did you know that the cremation chamber is called a retort? She laughs at her own remark. Harding tries not to cling to the sound of her laughter. Her cheerfulness is an insult. It’s easy to laugh when the burdens of life and loss have turned to vapor. —What will you do when I’m all gone?Harding considers telling her about his dream; the lava lamp, the baby. This is his final offering.—I hadn’t really thought about it. I had this dream…She interrupts.—I still remember our first phone number. —It had too many zeros. They agree about the zeros. His sister looks tired now, and possibly a little bored. Healthy people never imagine their dying words will be wasted in this way, tossed absently about without catching on anything. Her breaths grow shallow and dissembled. Harding stares at his boots and contemplates his dream, passing in his mind from tent to tent, never bothering to zip them up again when he departs. Of his sister, his last referent on earth, he has made another sad little visit. Maybe it is rude to inflict your dreams on a dying person; maybe they are supposed to become the dream. He takes her hand in his and administers the lightest pressure. She squeezes back. And just like that, Harding zips his sister closed.

THREE HOOKERS AT THE HOT DOG STAND by E. Nolan

March 24, 2021

This guy, Bobby, called asking for money. He was with three hookers at the hot dog stand and they needed to be paid. He had enough to buy them each a hot dog, but that would only hold them off for so long. Soon they were going to find out that he was broke. The skinny one was almost done with hers, he was telling me, and, lowering his voice to a whisper, he said he knew she wasn’t going to ask for another one. She ate as if she had other things on her mind, like where’s my goddamn money, stuff like that. Even if she did want another one he didn’t have the cash for it, the three dogs had wiped him out. He was lucky to have enough for those three, he said. He was lucky.I paced around the dark apartment, phone to my ear. I could see how he was lucky.Playing off my silence, he mumbled some more into the receiver, fast talking, while I was trying to figure out how to react. He said he met them online. He had been under the impression that they liked him for who he was. After all, he confided with me, he had been a little famous. He said he didn’t know they were hookers and now he owed them for the entire night. Actually, maybe, he said that again—maybe—he didn’t need to pay all three of them. The skinny one was totally his type and, he could be wrong, but maybe there was something there. Something real. She looked French, and it had always been a dream of his to have a French girlfriend. He starting talking about this TV show they’d watch in French class back in middle school about a Parisian family with a beautiful teenage daughter, and he had been floored by how she looked so at ease with her boyfriend as they’d stroll down the street in spring and discuss going to the boulangerie or the supermarché and buy some fucking pomplemousse, the entire time while she wore a sweater with no bra underneath. They’d hang out with her little sister and help her with her homework, not giving a rat’s ass about who’s getting stoned without them in the Genovese parking lot. The show was so wholesome that it was pornographic, filthy, foreign propaganda and his adolescent brain was confused about whether he should buy it or not. The part of his mind that dreams, or maybe it was his heart, invested in the girl, big time, and it tore him apart. Each episode was a new way to desire her, to fall madly in love with her, but also a new way to understand that he was trapped in his blue-collar pain cave, growing up out on the island, smoking stolen women’s cigarettes on the playground, giving kids wet willies and purple nurples for looking too pensive. He had forgotten about it until just tonight, had completely buried it in the scuzziest corner of his soul, until right now, talking to me, but he realized that his love for her had been there all this time, propelling him forward in life, yanking him backwards, closing doors while opening up others, kicking him to this dirty curb, right here. The shit we learn in school, you know what I mean? But it’s not too late, right? For a French girlfriend? He just turned forty-five, he reminded me.The poor guy had the wrong number. I didn’t know who he was. Before I could speak up he was off again.Ah, bitch finished her hot dog, he said. It’s now or never. Maybe it would be safer just to have all the money. What did I think? He was asking me for three thousand dollars. Three thousand or two. My choice.A desperation had creeped into his phrasing and it seemed to throw him off. He must’ve sensed I wasn’t who he thought I was. I sat on my couch, then got right up. I blurted out the first thing that came to my mind. It was one of those moments where the act of speaking was more important than what words you chose. Say anything just to keep him talking. “Let’s play it safe, Bobby. Three thousand.” My voice didn’t match whoever’s he thought he was talking to. He let out a knowing groan, like he got a punch to the gut. “I fucked up again,” he said. I stayed on the line and walked around a little, waiting for him to hang up.But he just breathed into the phone. Heavy, middle-aged breaths. A half a life’s worth of heartbreak pushed those breaths out of his inner organs. “Dans ces affaires . . .” he said to himself, recovering from his bout of nostalgia. During our conversation I had paced around my entire apartment trying to picture a world full of famous people and hookers and hot dogs, midnight playground dates with middle-aged Frenchmen smoking stogies. My mind was getting spun around. It was late and I was up only because of a text I received from my friend, Jay, claiming that he had met an old high school acquaintance of mine, who turned out to be someone I didn’t remember. He remembers you, Jay wrote. He reenacted your jump shot from memory. Right outside 7-11. And he nailed it bro. A moment passed, maybe while he sipped from a Big Gulp, then one more message. Looked so pure. Unsettled by the compliment and reunited with dead memories, I dug in my closet and found a videotape that I knew was there, the only remaining recorded proof that I had once played ball, saved for future children that might never appear, and I reconnected my VCR. There was a rumor that the team manager had a crush on me so he had zoomed in on my ass for most of the game. Between the auto-zooming in and out, his nervous hands, and the fact that it had been recorded by an ancient camcorder on low batteries, there were streaks everywhere, as if we all played while on acid. The artifacts overrode the facts. The tape had transformed into shit. When the phone rang I had paused it precisely at the height of my jump, the ball ready to be released by my fingertips. My head streaked like a comet. Bobby was still on the line. I stood in front of the TV again, staring again at my fiery face. “What are you doing, Bobby? Watching them eat their hot dogs?”“Yeah.”I backed away and turned the thing off. Black dots sparkled my vision and I rubbed my eyes, giving up, letting go. “Tell me about the girls. They beautiful?”He dismissed my question with a snort. I could almost hear him shaking his head on the other end of the line. I got it. He had been answering that question the entire time. All of it. Everything he told me was about the beauty of the three hovering hookers.“I was duped,” he said. “I thought I was back, you know what I mean? I thought I was back.”I already had my coat on and was heading out the door, my cell phone cradled next to my head. I patted my pockets to locate my car keys. I didn’t have three thousand dollars in the bank, but I had something.

BAD CAT by Anthony Varallo

March 22, 2021

Yesterday I met the bad cat. He was lying on our neighbor’s driveway, sunning himself in the last of the day’s warmth. He had gray fur, slightly mottled with black, and white paws. His eyes were closed, restful. When my family and I walked past, the cat yawned and stretched his tongue the way cats sometimes do. The cat blinked at us for a moment, curiously—pleasantly, I thought.“Here kitty-kitty!” I said. “Psst-psst!”“Dad,” my daughter said, “don’t do that.”“Do what?” I said. “Cats love that sound.”“Please, Dad,” my daughter said. “It’s embarrassing.”“Plus,” my son said, “I think there’s something wrong with that cat.”“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, and lowered my hand to the ground, as if I were cradling food, a trick from my childhood that had never failed to lure our cat, Pumpkin, out from beneath my bed. “Psst-psst! Here kitty! Hungry for a little snack?”The cat blinked his eyes once more at me, and stood. Interested.“Dad,” my daughter said, “don’t trick him.”“It’s not a trick,” I said. “He thinks you have food,” my son said. “He’s not going to be happy,” my daughter said.“The kids have a point,” my wife said. She’d been checking out her new iPhone for the past few minutes. The walk had been her idea: we’d take a nice selfie of us walking in the neighborhood and then post it when we got home. This time of evening, the light was soft, perfect. “That cat looks a little scraggly.”“He’s not scraggly,” I said. I crouched to the ground and made eye contact with the cat. “Psst-psst! Here kitty!” But the moment I said it, I noticed the weeds and sticks and briars clinging to the cat’s underbelly. “Dad,” my daughter said.“Honey,” my wife said. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”“You guys are being ridiculous,” I said. But, as the cat clicked closer—one of his rear legs tapered to a wooden peg that clicked atop the asphalt—I saw that his teeth were preternaturally large and that his left ear was held together by what seemed to be industrial staples and barbed wire. “Dad, don’t,” my son said. But I wouldn’t let up. I made the “psst-psst” sound even louder, and pretended to dip one hand into the other, then place something presumably yummy into my mouth. That had always worked with Pumpkin. Do that with Pumpkin, and ten seconds later he’d be purring at your feet, only too glad to have you pet him with your not-actually-holding-food hand.“Honey,” my wife said. “I think that might be a bad cat.”“He’s not a bad cat,” I said, as the cat approached. Up close, I could see that his fur wasn’t actually black and gray: the black was really a little leather jacket studded with rivets, from which something I would soon learn was a switchblade bulged. The cat was smoking a tiny cigarette, which sent smoke into his crusted, bloodshot eyes.“Here kitty-kitty,” I said. “Dad,” my daughter said.When the cat nudged my hand with his nose ring, I opened my fingers to show him that there was nothing inside.“Ta-da!” I said. There was a moment I would like to dwell upon here, if I might. A moment when the cat looked at me with genuine surprise and perhaps even more genuine disappointment, before everything else unfolded. I felt, in that moment, as fleeting as it was, that the cat understood something about me, about my lonely childhood, those long summer days playing umpteen bazillion games of hide and seek with Pumpkin, or persuading Pumpkin to watch cartoons with me on the family room sectional, or me reading all of my old Hardy Boys books to Pumpkin, who often needed me to point out the clues. It was, I would like to think, a special moment, one I know I won’t long forget.And then the moment passed.The first cuts of the switchblade weren’t too bad; it was the nunchucks that really smarted. What with the way the bad cat struck them expertly against our ankles, to get the most pain. He was good at working them with one paw while thrusting the switchblade with the other. When the bad cat bit my hand while simultaneously stabbing and nunchucking the rest of my family, I knew I should have been angry, but I couldn’t help it: I felt a little proud.

WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE A GUN AND NOT A TARGET by Sutton Strother

March 19, 2021

He’s the only other person you know who loves David Bowie. Not like your friends tolerate David Bowie for your sake or how your mom only knows the radio hits. He knows all the albums you talk about, every deep cut. “Modern Love” is his favorite Bowie song (killer drums, he says right before the first verse kicks in), so on days when there’s a test in his class you listen to it while you dress for school. It reminds you not to hate him, no matter how difficult he makes the questions. There’s power in the not-hating.And when your step-dad slams your step-brother's body against the side of the family van, he listens. And when your mom gets knocked up, he listens. He listens during lunch and after school and on his planning period (he won’t rat you out for ditching history to visit him). You sit together on the tables of his empty classroom, your leather platform boots kicking the toes of his Payless loafers.He lets you steal his CDs – not just Bowie but The Police and Peter Gabriel and The Who – and brings you DVDs from home. He tells you what to love about everything, and you repeat his opinions back to him like a clever parakeet. He compliments the haircut your friends say is butch. He tells you your singing voice is beautiful when you practice “Kashmir” for the talent show. When the bell rings, he stops you in the doorway of his classroom to finger the sleeve of your new satin blouse and whisper his approval.He signs emails with Love and his first name.He smells rotten. It’s nothing you’d notice if he weren’t hovering over your desk to murmur an inside joke, but he hovers so much. Sometimes you catch yourself putting distance between the two of you, avoiding the radius of that stench. You’re never quite sure where on his body it’s coming from, but it’s bad enough to keep you from doing something stupid. Not that you want to do something stupid, although at seventeen you’re aching for some wildness that could set you apart from the Christian girls in Abercrombie. The joke, of course, is all those girls are getting laid while you’ve wasted two years pining for a boy who doesn’t want you and a girl who can’t want you. Nobody will ever want you. There will only ever be him with his stink and his weak chin and the swirls of back hair peeking through his cheap white dress shirt. You don’t want him. There’s power in the not-wanting. You wrest his desire from his own hands to wield against him. You mock it with friends who call you a cock tease, and even then you say things like What if I’m not teasing? then cackle when they shriek Who would ever fuck him? Certainly not you.Though if you did, you wouldn’t be the first. When you were a sophomore, all the seniors told you a soccer player sucked his dick for a college recommendation letter.But that might not be true.And anyway, you wouldn’t. Not that he was asking (the smart ones never ask, you’ll learn from some feminist blog when you’re twenty-two). He talks a lot about giving up teaching to become a doctor. Some days he means it, and on those days, you come home and cry.You wish he were your step-dad, real dad, foster dad. He’s barely old enough to be any of those things.And he’s too old to marry. Isn’t he? You sometimes imagine it anyway, more thought experiment than wish. It would mean living with his mother, but she would die eventually. It would mean never leaving your hometown. It would mean a partner with a steady job and a music collection you didn’t hate. You could do worse than that. Your mother did worse than that. But there’s the stink of him to consider (maybe it’s halitosis, you and your friends posit, maybe it’s a glandular thing). You think of curdled milk and mummy wrappings. You couldn’t endure it for very long. Then one day you’re in a crowded room somewhere in rural Pennsylvania, watching a robot from North Carolina battle the robot your classmates built, and suddenly the stink is everywhere. It stings your nose, trickles sour down the back of your tongue, clogs your pores. It settles on your hair and clothes like smoke. Two hands grip your shoulders from behind and begin to knead them. You remember the day sophomore year when he taught your class about chromosomes. The boys all laughed and said you were so mannish you must have been born with an X and a Y. He laughed too, but when you gave them all the finger, he didn’t frown or tut or send you to the principal’s office. You let yourself believe he was on your side.You lock eyes with a friend across the room. She’s taking all this in, biting into her lip like she’s holding in a scream (I was jealous of that attention, she’ll confess fifteen years later, I just wanted someone to love me, even a creep like him) and you’re holding in a scream of your own (you’ll tell her you wanted the same thing). He slips his fingers beneath the collar of your T-shirt, and no one is stopping him (he will kiss your face at graduation, in the middle of another crowded room). You’re not stopping him (next year, when you’re at college, he’ll tell his students lies about you). This moment just won’t stop happening (you’ll hear a rumor that he’s sleeping with one of those students). You bite your cheek and keep holding in the scream (this time you’ll know it’s true). You believe (he has probably done all of this a dozen times before), you have got to believe (he is probably doing this right now), there’s power in the not-screaming.

TOGETHER WE GROW by Katie Oliver

March 18, 2021

My boyfriend is a plant enthusiast: the more exotic the better. Old man’s beard, elk horn, fishbone. The bedroom is particularly full of them. They hang from curtain poles, draping down like Rapunzel’s hair. Distressingly phallic cacti loiter in corners; succulents take up space where they shouldn’t.Cacti are a type of succulent, he tells me.Whatever, I reply.You’re succulent, he says, and bites my neck. I roll my eyes.I go along with it, because it’s easier.When I get back from work, more seem to have appeared.Did you buy more plants?No, he says, flipping through channels. I squint at each wall, the table, the windowsill, unconvinced.The other day, practically cooing, he’d shown me a time lapse of plants moving over a twenty-four-hour period, wiggling their little arms wherever the sun went. Disney versions of plants. Cute. Not like the ones in here, which seem to writhe and moan during the night, creeping tendrils into my dreams. When I wake up they’re in different positions to when I went to sleep.Are you fucking with me? I ask.What? No.I wasn’t talking to you.The next week I’m reaching into the bookshelf when one of the cacti stabs me. That’s the only way I can describe it: it skids along the shelf and plants its spiny arm into mine, deliberately. My boyfriend is coldly incredulous, the way he tends to be whenever anything unusual happens; as if the unknown is personally offensive to him. He said that I must have slipped when I was getting the book, and was I on my period or something?The paramedic said she’d never seen an allergic reaction like it.I call in sick for the rest of the week, burrowing under the duvet and then abruptly emerging again as I come into contact with something lumpy and unexpected. I pull a fat little succulent out from down near my feet. Soil scatters over my arm, which has started to turn green.When I wake up, more of them are in bed with me. My boyfriend has started to believe me, because last night he rolled over onto a cactus and now he’s on the sofa, sulking. I keep trying to move them out, but as soon as I turn my back they’ve jumped in again, snuggling in close and giving happy little sighs. The swelling has started to go down, but my arm is green from shoulder to wrist, and soft spines have started to grow from where the little hairs used to be. The next time I wake, the old man’s beard has moved from the curtain rail and is now perched directly above me. A seaweedy frond has snaked around my wrist and grips iron-tight.Get off me! I shout, struggling.I think I hear it say no.My boyfriend left a few days ago.Those plants are taking over your life, he said.I know, I said. Sorry.I haven’t been able to move from the bed for several weeks now. More plants have gathered around, eager to join the fun. Each limb bound with strong vines; my body tapestried to the mattress and woven over with flowers. Kindly souls drip nectar into my open mouth and allow me sips of water. I am leaf-skeleton light, but alive. My spines have hardened into dangerous points. I no longer know where the plants end and I begin. Together, we begin to creep back to the perimeter of the room, to breathe and grow. Waiting for the next one to join us.