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LIPSTICK BOTTOMS (CHICAGO, IL – JULY 2008) by Taylor Byas

July 18, 2020

It’s past 2 am on the southside of Chicago when my aunt Danielle, my father’s older sister, brings me and her daughter Ginai along for a late-night alcohol run. With each step, every part of my aunt ripples. Her hair is half-pressed half-shrinking from the dry summer heat. On her right thigh, clear packing tape covers a hole where she says a spider bite ate away at the flesh. I am too young to know that “spider bite” is a euphemism for an infected track mark.

“Damn girl, you wore those shorts just for me didn’t you?” a white man calls from across the street. I tug my shorts down in the back, even though I’m only 12. A whistle punctures the night air like a needle, and whoops and laughter follow as I grab my cousin’s arm and quicken my steps.

The neighborhood streets are alive, meetings happening in front lawns and at bus stops. The smell of fried foods and grease breeze through windows and out onto the broken sidewalks. S Merrill Ave glistens white against the tennis-court green of the street sign. Dr. Dre raps from the inside of a white Chevy Impala idling in front of someone’s house, the bumped-up bass rattling from the subwoofer in the trunk. I can see my reflection, my wide eyes in the windows’ dark tint. The distant sound of a siren is ceaseless.

We walk past groups of black and white men in white tank tops and black shorts. One group crowds us as we pass, and my aunt twists off the cap of her vodka and takes a swig in response. I tip-toe on the balls of my feet as I walk through the trashed sidewalks in foam flip-flops, avoiding the little glass bowls of broken bottle remnants.

“I gotta pee,” Ginai announces as we walk beneath a small highway overpass.

“We got a while before we get back to the house,” I say. “You can’t hold it?”

“Not for that long.” She turns back towards my aunt, who is stumbling along a few feet behind. “Ma, I’m about to pee.”

“Hell no, not under here. People sleep under here, the hell is wrong with you?” She recaps her bottle and when she catches up, she pulls out a cigarette from her red pleather purse and lights it. “Where some bushes at?”

By the time we find bushes in an area secluded enough, I have to go too. When we ask for tissue, my aunt reaches into her purse and produces a few balled-up napkins with her dark red lipstick on them. When we hesitate to take them, she pinches her cigarette from her lips, blows smoke directly into our faces. “What? You afraid of a little lipstick?” Her breath stinks of menthol and other tongues.

We pee behind the bushes and wipe with the lipstick napkins. I smear red down the back of my thigh, past the point where my shorts stop. This doesn’t stop the whistles or the hoots or the hollers.

“Aye, why don’t you cross the street, shawty?” Another white man calls to us as we near home. I turn my head towards his group, take a mental snapshot of the black and white faces, of those sharp jaws and gravelly beards all neutralized and washed orange under the colored streetlights.

LUMPS by Sean Littlefield Chumley

July 18, 2020

Unlike most people who live near restaurants, I never visit the fast-food place next to my house. Chunkee’s looks like any other corporate restaurant. The shellacked exterior, the vibrant sign a mile high announcing its presence like a lighthouse, the drive-thru menu with its voice-box speaker. I’ve never seen a Chunkee’s anywhere else, and I’ve never seen a commercial for one, and I don’t know what kind of food they serve other than fast. The sign doesn’t give much away. I watch it change every day, but the bottom always says NO BURGERS HERE!!!!!! From the window next to my TV I can see the long sticks the employees use to change the letters, but by the time I work up the energy to get up and look at the people doing it they’ve finished the job and have gone back inside. When I try to look through the windows to see what kind of person eats there, all I see is shiny glass with vague, shadowy shapes behind it and a line of cars waiting in the drive-thru.

Some days the sign says $5, and nothing else. Often it says COME GET THE BOX. I like when it says 3 FOR 12. It’s like a logic puzzle. Three of what? Twelve what? Presumably dollars are involved. Once—only once—the sign read LUMPS. The drive-thru line moved steadily that day. As soon as one driver rode off with their lumps another car would come to take its place at the end of the queue in perfect time, every time. I’d never seen it like that. I stayed inside all day watching the cars get their lumps. The shadow-puppet people inside the restaurant made it look so full, but I never saw anyone come or go. I came so close to going down there, to seeing what all the fuss was about, but I had a date to prepare for.

I’ve been seeing a pattern with the men I’ve dated lately. One beautiful date, a few days of texting after that, and then they vanish into the air. Ryan and I went for cupcakes and played video games demos in an electronics store that was going out of business. He wore a too-big sweater and tight jeans. He opened up to me about his past, his hopes for the future, where he sees his life going, and the poetic nuance of foosball. At the end of the date he parked in my driveway where we made out for a few minutes before he said, “Welp, here you go!” He pulled out of my driveway and into Chunkee’s.

Next was Alex. He looked like Vincent van Gogh, but with both ears, and he worked across the street from where I worked. After Alex came Jeffrey who had a piercing anywhere you could pinch a flap of skin together. Jeffrey preceded Mark, who came before Mitchell, Frank, another Alex, Drew, Joe, River, Ben and yet another Alex. All men who came and went at breakneck speed. It’s fun to imagine them stuck somewhere. I liked to think of them trapped in a man-sized jar with air-holes punched into the screwed-on lid. They could wrap themselves up in a chrysalis of their own design and emerge not as the boys they had so recently been, but as beautiful men with distinctive markings and impressive wingspans.

I could tell it was going to happen again. Justin and I went to a sushi restaurant where they deliver your maki on remote-controlled cars. We stopped for drinks at an alien-themed tiki bar on the way home. I asked if he wanted to come inside when I drove us back to my place.

“Yeah, I guess, if you mean we’ll do sex,” he said. I was stunned when he stayed the night, and so was he when he woke up the next morning.

“Oh, you’re still here,” he said. To me. In my bedroom.

I looked longingly at him, “Sure am!”

He shuffled out the door tucking his shirt into his unzipped pants.

“We’ll have to do this again sometime!” he said. “I’ll text you very soon. You can, and should, count on it!”

His car followed the same familiar route, but instead of going through the drive-thru he parked and went into Chunkee’s. As he opened the door a delicious smell filled my apartment. The sign read LUMPS. It was only the second time it had ever said that in the years I’d lived there. I drooled. My stomach gurgled. I threw on last night’s clothes and headed out the door. I walked past my car and set foot on the Chunkee’s parking lot, which was closer to the restaurant than I’d ever been before. I expected the door to expel me. Or, if not, that my hand would pass through it like air. But no, the door was real, and it opened, and a smell rich like gravy, but heavy with grease, delicious, seeped out and clung to me. It pulled me into the restaurant, which looked just as normal inside as it did outside. The same molded plastic booths you’d expect from any burger palace, the fountain drink machine, the yellow bucket with a mop sticking out.

While a lot of customers sat eating at tables, none stood in line and I walked straight up to the cashier, who I recognized as Ryan of the big sweater. His name tag was pinned to it, obscuring part of the alpine pattern. When we’d gone out he’d told me of the job he loved at a store in the mall that sold engraved chocolate family portraits. So I was surprised to see him in Chunkee’s, or at all. He, however seemed elated.

“So great to see you! I meant to text you back, but, you know.”

I didn’t know what to say! He blinked and his eyes turned big and black and segmented like a bug’s.

“What’ll it be today?”

“LUMPS,” I drooled.

His sweater stirred. The knit pattern had a veiny look to it I’d never noticed before. He turned around to fetch my lumps and his sweater unfolded into a massive pair of wings. The air felt warm and moist. I looked for air holes drilled into the ceiling. He returned with the tray of food, two antennae wagging out of his forehead.

“Here you go. LUMPS!”

I took the tray to a table. The lumps resembled a deep-fried pillow, big and crispy on the plate. All around me I saw Justin and Jeffrey and a table full of Alexes. Mark and Mitchell and Frank and Joe. All these men who had vanished from my life, sitting around the restaurant in front of their lumps. They wiggled their antennas and flapped their wings at me, except Jeffrey, whose wings were too heavy with piercings.

I took a seat and joined them. Ben gave me a flirty wink with one of his segmented eyes. I lifted the lumps, inhaled its chewy scent, unrolled my proboscis and dug in.

SEISMOLOGY by James Sullivan

July 17, 2020

In 2011 I was in a 3-tatami room.

That means a tall man can lie down only in one direction.

How do we measure a room? A living space? I don’t know the square footage of my Minnesota apartment. Only that it’s the smallest in this building, maybe the smallest anywhere in town. But when my neighbor moved out and my landlord offered me his place (“It’s a lot more spacious, maybe $10 more a month.”), I didn’t even look before deciding against it.

You never know when you’ll need that money. For supplies. For an extra stiff drink to soften the edges. For an emergency ticket out of dodge.

When I moved to Minnesota in 2017, my goal was for everything I brought to make the trip in my Ford Taurus. For the two years before a friend insisted I take his mattress, I slept on a folding cushion about four inches thick topped with a Japanese style futon.

This was an improvement on my previous setup.

Every so often I see a social media post from a woman bemoaning the state of single men’s sleeping situations, insisting no self-respecting woman would sleep with a man so close to the floor.

This is true most of the time.

Which is good enough odds.

What are the odds of dying in a natural disaster? Of a tornado hitting this building that lacks underground shelter? Of a big enough hunk of destiny hurtling through the blackness of space and striking us? Of dying in a flu pandemic? Of falling in a lasting love before one of the other odds hits you?

Some estimates say the odds of the great Cascadia earthquake, which would obliterate much of the Pacific Northwest of the US, are as high as one in three in the next fifty years.

I’ve never heard of quakes in Minnesota.

Other dangers have longer fingers.

How do we measure space in one’s mind? Span of attention? Capacity to remember details? The ability to hold onto three or more emotions about a single time and place? Or maybe the intervals between each nervous refresh of one’s news feed.

What I remember in March 2011: the rocking buildings in downtown Shibuya, Tokyo.

Images of a tsunami sweeping cars, homes, and people out to sea.

Sitting on my bed in Meidaimae, Tokyo, watching a news ticker drip updates, like irradiated fluids into the water supply, on an unfolding power plant catastrophe.

Tick, tick, update: US Military distributing potassium iodide near Yokohama.

Google searches: How far south is Yokohama from Tokyo?

Potassium iodide tablets how many safe?

Flights NRT to OMA

Tick, tick, update: TEPCO president wants to abandon Fukushima plant.

Tick, Tick, update: “Demonic” meltdown chain reaction possible.

Tick, tick, update: That jolt that nearly threw you from your bed was an aftershock. Stay tuned for more. And watch your head—this room is only one tatami wide.

I tracked down the share house where I lived in 2011. It’s under new management. The room is almost the same, new little rug, bed on the opposite side. But they’ve added a new desk: The same IKEA one now in my Minnesota apartment.

I imagine I’m writing at a desk linking these times.

Or maybe I’m under the desk.

Japan knows about earthquake preparedness. Myriad PSAs lectures about what supplies to keep in case of an emergency, how to prevent the fires that devastated Kobe following its 1995 quake, the reasons for opening doors (shifting buildings can cause them to stick shut, trapping you inside) and shielding one’s head under desks. But hiding under desks always reminds me of Cold War era safety drills.

Put your head under your desk (and kiss your ass goodbye).

Always wash your hands.

During a quake in central Japan in 2016, although I opened a door, nobody in my office took cover. Everyone sat in place, stunned as the building rattled.

Even as the floor moves under you, it can be hard to believe it’s really happening.

In February 2020, I started prepping food.

I’m not one of those preppers, stockpiling food and weapons in cellars, training for the post-apocalypse. But I had seen videos emerging from Wuhan, China of men in hazmat suits patrolling streets, armed with semi-automatic rifles.

How do you protect against what you can’t see?

There is an Early Earthquake Warning system in Japan. Your cell phone, normally always on silent mode, quivers against a desktop, announcing in Japanese: “Earthquake, earthquake,” and maybe the shock and your translation to English cost a lengthy moment processing this information, shaving away precious seconds before the earthquake hits.

Near the epicenter there’s no warning.

Too much warning—and too much time to think—are their own kinds of danger.

The worst thinking is about what the air contains. About the delay between filling your lungs and the first onset of malignant symptoms.

Google searches: nuclear meltdown explained

radiation drift how far?

thyroid cancer symptoms of

Panic is a problem. Frightened people hoard supplies, take rash action, flee countries. Information travels more quickly than ever before. But what do we trust? The noise to signal ratio makes understanding impossible in crises where hours, minutes, even seconds can count.

More bad thinking: To prevent panic, are those who know withholding truth?

What could you even do?

Recently supermarkets shelves have been plucked bare. This started the first week in March with cleaning supplies. I took a photo where disinfectant wipes and sprays used to be and posted it to my Facebook with the caption, “Is it starting?” Several people reacted with a laughing emoji. This was my second to last prepping trip before President Trump addressed the nation. I made my last one as soon as the address was announced.

Should I have said something more to warn other people? I wasn’t even sure myself how much credence to lend my paranoia.

Normalcy bias: The psychological tendency for people to believe that events will proceed according to how they have before. Leads to underestimating odds of disaster and severity of consequences.

I wonder how long until fear supplants normalcy. How long the fear from one time period will shape the rest of my life. Will I one day perplex a nurse with my habit of disinfecting groceries? Will they find my baton?

I’ve lost most of my photos from that brief, stressful time when I first tried to move to Tokyo.. The photos left are of my small room in Meidaimae. A tiny folding chair and desk wide enough for a laptop. The bed, the small shelf, the clothing rack where my ill-fitting Goodwill suit hung. The house’s shared kitchen area, the shower room, the toilet. Outside, a narrow alleyway with high, concrete walls. Streets with seemingly infinite twists and turns in which I’d become briefly lost. A sign hung by a playground that reads in Japanese, “If you think it’s suspicious, run away.”

Then there are the photos of food.

Sushi

Tuna mayo rice ball

Menchi katsu sandwich

Mitsuya Cider

Curry bread

Asahi Super Dry beer

This was the kind of junk I ate, and even if I had felt comfortable cooking in the shared kitchen, I didn’t really know much about cooking, especially working from local Japanese ingredients. This hadn’t been an issue when I first moved in. Daily trips to the center of town to buy a few items were part of my routine, orienting myself to Tokyo. After the earthquake, store shelves were empty. Everyone was panicked, and I was perhaps the least prepared person in the whole city to know which items to acquire and how.

The other night, not knowing what else to do, I inventoried every scrap of nourishment in my cupboards and fridge. It all fit on one note card.

Google searches: hydroxychloroquine

N95 masks

Ibuprofen safe?

Sound of dry cough

In a thread on items to stockpile, I learn that “deens” is prepper slang for sardines.

But I don’t buy any deens.

I have many reasons for gratitude. I can work, at least for another month, from home, which is warm and, at least for now, not shaking. There is food, and internet, and a steady supply of power. There is a lock on my door.

If I weren’t alone in this room, the other person and I could keep six feet between us with our backs against the wall.

Tick, tick, update: A stay at home order starts tonight. I’m way ahead of the game.

Update: I was, am, and will continue to be socially distanced.

Update: I’m at the desk in Meidaimae.

Update: I’m at the desk in Minnesota.

Update: I’m under the desk.

WITHOUT YOU, I’M EVERYTHING by Felicity Fenton

July 17, 2020

They went away, left her for others. They called less. They texted less. Soon they were running into each other in the parking lot of the dump, rushing to get back to things. “You look great.” They didn’t mean it. “You seem great.” They didn’t mean it. “So great to see you.” They weren’t sure.

They boasted about busyness. Their kids, their houses, their husbands. She was busy felting socks for refugees. They were busy driving sports utility vehicles. She was busy searching for working pay phones so she could call her grandmother and tell her she had been places. They were busy applying lipgloss on southern California beach chairs. Their busy sweat stained tunics. Their busy slammed into parked hatchbacks. Their busy stubbed toes while shoving laundry into the mouth of a machine.

“Seems like you’ve been doing a lot!” they would say. “We like all of your pictures. You look skinny.” Their happiness was skinny. She would see them smiling for the camera from steering wheels and quickly close her browser window. She was bored by their contentedness, embarrassed by their stodge. Coffee franchises were responsible for their poor taste in music. Syrupy melodies. Always the same album, the same song. “Where did you get that jacket? I’ve been looking for something similar.” they would ask. She wouldn’t remember on purpose.

They were old. She wasn’t as old. But only by a few years. This was a point of contention among them. She still had a chance to escape the blow of societal ostracism. Men still called to her from construction sites. No one wanted to take their clothes off anymore. Not with the lights on. They had complained about losing out on orgasms to detached partners, so she taught each of them how to fuck couch arms via webcam.

Where had she moved from? Who were her relatives? How long did it take to brine pork chops? What was her first kiss like? They wanted answers.

She fled Brooklyn after being terrorized by a dead rock star. Her mother was related to a Tunisian farmer who married a Sicilian gypsy who died on a boat on the way to America. Her father was adopted by eco-warriors who lived on aloe vera and cashews. It took twelve hours to brine pork chops if you wanted them to taste good, but she was sure there were other cooks who could do it in less. Her first kiss was with her cousin, a piece of bubblegum, and a mirror. They were lovers for years.

What did she do for fun? She collected shades of red from the caskets of dead dictators. She took photos of strangers entering and exiting convenience stores. She pinched blackheads from the base of her nose.

She wrote Uncle Ho themed postcards to her aunt and never mailed them:

My pants won’t stay up. I bit my nails to nubs, again. My spine feels stacked in reverse. I walk backwards to keep up with my longing. Sorry to disappoint you. I'll try better next time.

Sadness was common. Mornings were the worst. Instead of turning off her alarm she would cover her head with a stack of pillows and shove her earplugs in further. She would roll from bed without using her arms or legs, thudding the cold tiles with her face.

They would come to her house and tell her about their trips to southern California beaches. How tan their arms were, how taut. “We talked about how lost you are.” they would say. “Maybe you should try accounting?” She would offer them tea, without milk or honey.

She wore baggy t-shirts while racing Olympian ghosts on treadmills. When she looked in the mirror she measured all parts. Her neck, her belly button, her thighs. Her role as human, daughter, beast. She lost to all measurements, then won them back later with a hit of weed.

When she ran out of money she suggested they fund her adventures to a disappearing island. There wouldn’t be status updates or pictures, but it would be real. It was her next big thing. There would be a book, a movie based on a book, and a book based on a book. She would float outside of herself. Nothing would penetrate her wet suit.

She returned unscathed, mostly shiny. No longer longing. Stronger in the hands. When they reached for her she sidestepped into another room, looking for a missing sock, a glass of water, a bobby pin. They were impressed without her having to do much of anything to impress them. Dust free corners said it all. The pork chops were succulent. She paid them back, plus interest, then demanded they remove their clothes.

THE BEEP by Jason Schwartzman

July 16, 2020

I am his tutor and he is trying to tell me about an unknown variable. About X. But he has forgotten that it’s called X.

“The mysterious thing,” he says, laughing.

I love him for this. I will tell everyone I know about the mysterious thing.

During one session we’re in his apartment and I hear a beep. Just one beep. The microwave, probably.

“I’m really sorry,” he tells me, tensing up.

Sorry for what? It feels like I’m missing something.

“Totally fine!”

On the walk home I wonder why he was so on edge. Then I forget about it, my thoughts about him confined to the tiny sliver of the week we share. In the middle of another session, his mom comes home. She sits next to him, asks how it’s going. He’s taken the wrong test so we’re a little behind.

“I wish I had a baseball bat,” she says, smiling.

I see her smiling, so I automatically smile too, before I process what she might mean. Then she makes another comment, this time about throwing him off the roof. She smiles again.

I don’t know what I can say. Or do. Or if I’m just crazy. So far on the outside of something I can’t really see it. I say it’s not a big deal, the test. Not at all. He is doing well. Very well.

Sometimes I think about the beep. I also think he is okay, but I don’t really know. I’m not his tutor anymore.

THREE QUARTERS by Steve Campbell

July 15, 2020

My uncle lost his leg in a motorbike accident. It wasn’t his whole leg, just half of it. And it wasn't lost either, the doctors cut it off, but that's what everyone whispers: He's lost his leg, and then they cock their heads to one side and sort of smile.

As I’m buying grapes for the hospital visit with my step-mother, the lady at the check-out makes the same head movement. She comments on how much my step-mother and I look alike. When I open my mouth to explain, my step-mother prods me so the lady can't see.

“Oh, I’m not his mother,” she replies. She sniffs and holds her head up as she hands over her money. “His mother left him.”

“Awww." The check-out lady cocks her head and sort of smiles. "He looks like he’s doing well though, doesn’t he?”

When we arrive on the hospital ward, we have to huddle around my uncle’s bed with the rest of our family. We squash together because the curtains have been drawn to give my uncle some privacy. There are twelve of us. Or eleven and a half if I count my uncle properly. No one is speaking. My uncle looks as though he’s asleep with his eyes open. The blanket that covers him is pulled up to his chin and tucked under the mattress on all sides. It’s flat against the bed below one of his knees. I count two times where someone feeds him Lucozade from a plastic cup, and four times where my nan leans him forward, plumps up his pillow, and drops him back against the bed; to make him more comfortable, she says.

Everyone avoids looking at the space where my uncle's leg should be. Instead, they pat the back of his hand and point out how many "get well" cards he has (seven), and swap out the uneaten bags of grapes, for fresh bags of grapes. I stare at the space on the bed and wonder who has the piece that’s missing.

It's a few months before my uncle is allowed to leave the hospital and when he does, it's with a leg made from plastic and metal that he keeps hidden from view beneath his jeans. On the surface it looks like he has a normal leg, but now he limps when he walks. That's when you can see that something isn't quite right.

I watched him take his false leg off to change his dressings, which was a big white sock pulled up over his thigh. The stump of flesh moved up and down like a normal leg but without a knee, shin or foot attached beneath it.

I don’t realize I’m staring until he catches my eye. Then, I cock my head to one side and sort of smile.

DOGWALKER by L Scully

July 15, 2020

Once, when you were still a girl, you loved another person. At the time, they were a girl too and you relished in your mutual girlhood from the roof of the funeral home in which you lived. You stayed in the funeral director’s suite and put up strings of tiny lights and a record player your girlfriend restored from the 70s. You would lay in the park with this friend of yours, heads on each other’s chests, nights spent giggling and intertwined. When they were a girl and you were a girl they were magic. You would crawl out the open window onto the veranda and smoke, looking down at the flowers below, wearing each other’s shirts and admiring the matching tattoos you got on your wrists. There’s a photo of you like that, bare arms snaking around each other, the little shapes in the crease of your wrists identical. Taken on the balcony. There was always music coming from somewhere, usually you. Putting lipstick on in that rosy pink ceramic bathroom and pulling black tights over your legs in the leaning oval mirror. Dancing together, dreaming together, droplets of childlike tears leaking out from the sides of your eyes together. Doing drugs at the Drug Free Zone playground or hopping the cemetery gates at night. You used to dream of their kisses, when you were both girls.

When you close your eyes you see the house in ruins, overgrown with ferns. You see the veranda on the second floor and the chiseled stone emblem that says Funeral No Parking.

Some nights you hear a sound in the basement and walk down the steps slowly, holding a kitchen knife. There is a suit jacket in the wardrobe on the third floor that you keep for yourself, and an army bag and a series of strange brass rings. There’s the creaky bed where your best friend kissed your house guest. And the kitchen, which is the most haunted room in the house. You forget who told you that. The one perfect finished room in the carriage house where a professor used to live. Tiny and yellow. The garden that always smells a little sticky like sangria and the fallen leaves you dutifully rake. Down the hall there’s a bathroom at the front of the house, a cool grey where you bathe when the owners aren’t visiting. Sometimes you look through the drawers and find lube or intricate lighters or old jewelry. Sometimes you climb out on the roof with your best friend and light up while you watch the sunset and almost put your lips together. There’s an art expert around the corner who could change your life but you’re only good enough to walk his dog. You try not to close your eyes too often.

TO THE RESIDENTS OF NINETEEN-SOMETHING WEST NELSON by MK Sturdevant

July 8, 2020

To the Residents of Nineteen-Something West Nelson,

I had sex in your living room. At the time, it was a fetus of a room, a zygote of a house. Your living room had just been set on its paved frames and caissons like a mother hen about to lay some furnishings. You know those tall, narrow windows trending in the new builds around ’07? The streetlamp light was gushing in, there was no glass, just these wings of Tyvek flapping like a slack sail at midnight on the open sea.

We had gone for sushi in Bucktown. We were both nervous types, easily made brave by unconscionable amounts of sake. We chilled out, warmed up, got ideas. ‘Ah now,’ he said. When he said ‘now’ it sounded like ‘nigh.’ ‘It’s my first project, like.’ He said it and made dimples on his cheek. Then he put his cup down. ‘Come on then. Let’s have a look.’

We had sex in your living room, and even though I haven’t gotten to that part yet, I want you to know about it. Right away. I was the first. To have sex in your house. Before you did, I did. Right there in the living room, where you may be sitting now, with heavy, non-modular furniture, wishing you were having sex with him, too. His family were all farmers, and when he was about seven he got his leg caught in a combine and nearly died. Years later he could run again, he even ran a marathon. We went running together. Once my shoes were dirty and I was banging them on the sidewalk to knock the mud cakes off before I went up to ring the bell at his apartment. He came out and said, ‘I thought some eejit was out here knocking. But it was just you, clattering the bejeezus out of your runners.’

Well, the sex in your living room was great. We weren’t comfortable, but the situation had a feeling of surprise and sexy special circumstances. I think this is what sex requires. It was on a palette of drywall. We were directly in the middle of your main room, maybe a bit towards the east wall, heads to the south.

It wasn’t just the ambiance of the Tyvek wrap and the drywall, though. We had been talking at dinner about whole cities burning down. We were enthusiastic about this bond we shared, the Great Chicago Fire and the Burning of Cork, and despite it not being 1871 or 1920, we were having a passionate historical discussion about devastation and pride and human triumph, while drinking, so.

The stairs weren’t done while we were in there ripping our clothes off. Just these pits and gaps, marked everywhere with yellow tape. We walked all over your house afterwards. He told me how it wasn’t supposed to have four bathrooms, just a master, a regular, and a powder, but you wanted another powder in the basement. So you got it.

Do you gasp for pleasure while looking at your ceiling? I did. Above and behind your ceiling there are these planks with spray-painted instructions about electrical lines. You know this on a theoretical level maybe, but you haven’t seen them, the raw planks on a Friday night, beached whale bones organized into a grid, a luminous ribcage in the dark, exposed to the open air and city lights.

I saw your specs about the kitchen countertops by the way, christ jeezus. Not long after he built your house, our apartments got too expensive. I had to move farther north, and after the crash of ’08 he moved back ‘over home,’ he called it. There’s nothing affordable. They say soon there won’t be sushi, either, you know that? Different reasons. Sort of.

If you put this down a second and walk over to your fireplace and run your hand along the wall behind the mantel, there’s a beam back there where it says m & m 2007! xoxo, and, no new fires!

After we capped the giant Sharpies and put on our shirts, we jumped out of your plywood front door onto the dirt where your steps would be laid. He said he just hoped you really lived in it and stayed there awhile. Then showed me his name printed on the permit tied to the fence out front.

Don’t move out. Don’t keep moving. Use the fecking fireplace then, he said to you when you weren’t there. And use the walk-out over the garage. He was totally knackered after putting the fecker in. To spec, even. Might’n put him over budget, he added.

Think of you in it, think of us gone. Don’t let it rust away; go out there to your magazine roof and have sex and get high or call your mother or something big like that. Invite underpaid people to live with you. Deliver a baby up there. You know, Live, like.

OFF COME THE MASKS by Mitchell Waldman

July 7, 2020

I'm driving down 104, out in the thinning herd of metal vehicles in pursuit of essentials, my mask on the seat beside me, right next to the miniature bottle of hand sanitizer and the pack of Marlboros, when I see him standing on the corner of 104 and Lake with his thin frame, long white beard, and the sign thrust up in the air "Prepare to Meet Your God!" I don’t know what comes over me, I slam on the brakes, the car behind almost smashing right into me, bleating its horn. I get out of the vehicle, and walk up to the figure, my heart pounding, fist clenched. I want to smash him in the face, get up close, closer, as I raise and cock my arm, ready to propel the clenched fist into his stupid face, when he looks right at me, a blankness, no expression in the eyes, like a zombie gone gone gone. The Gandhi on my shoulder whispers "Violence is not the answer," so I drop the arm, just stare at the man, his breath right on me now, his sign still held up high, high to the heavens. I turn and walk back to my metal vehicle, hearing the horns honking, seeing the face of an angry driver mouthing silent words, not sure if he's cursing me or the zombie. Across the intersection on the opposite corner stands a second specter with a sign which says "Jesus Is Coming Soon!" thrust high up in the air. I open the car door, sink back in my seat, stare at the mask on the passenger seat, my hands shaking on the wheel and sit, just sit there for a minute. Then I pull back out into the traffic herd, just another desperate human out on the hunt for essentials: meat, toilet paper, and a shred of the sanity I lost somewhere back when this all started.

UPHOLSTERY by Corey Farrenkopf

July 6, 2020

Silva left the tacks on the floor. Rick said to. Sweep up after, it saves time. The upholstery shop smelled of pulled cotton, dry foam, and whatever scent the furniture carried from its original home. Sometimes it was garlic, sometimes mothballs and wine. The plaid wingback chair propped before Silva held an odd copper aroma. He pried rusted staples from the armrest with a pronged screwdriver, tapping its steel end with a rubber mallet. Sometimes the metal was so old it turned to dust beneath Silva’s blows. Just leave them. I’ll cut them out later, Rick would say from behind the bench where he sewed throw pillows with a foot-pedaled Singer.

Occasionally, Rick would remove a nail gun hanging from the wall to tack wayward cloth in place, sometimes he’d go out back to smoke.

It was Silva’s first reliable job and he wanted to avoid doing anything wrong, hence the constant questioning of Rick, who’d been dissecting antique furniture for fifty years. Glen needed the money. His father passed away three years before and his mother’s bookkeeping business barely kept the lights on. Rick paid eighteen an hour, far beyond minimum wage, enough to save, keeping bank accounts stable.

Rick’s hands were notched and carved from stray nails and scissors, scars thick and winding over his knuckles. Rick knew Silva’s grandfather, decided nineteen was an ideal age for apprenticeship. Silva liked the work, liked the fact his boss let him listen to music while he peeled fabric off couches from the eighteen hundreds, ottomans riddled with cigarette burns. Strip the old skin, restitch the new, Rick said.

“They have me re-cover that one every five years,” Rick said, as Silva began to fold back the chair’s fabric. Unlike most of the furniture Silva worked on, there was a second layer beneath, not the typical mesh of cotton and foam. The material was badly stained, the copper smell swelling with removal.

“What the hell,” Silva said as the fabric fell away between nail taps.

“Just ignore it. Those people pay three times our rate to leave the base layer. Get the rest off and I’ll take it from there,” Rick said.

“But, I don’t…” Silva stammered.

The majority of the fabric lay curled over the chair’s arm like discarded skin. Beneath, the outline of a body had been pressed into the material, a dark brown fading to crimson around the edges. It looked like a man who’d been reduced to the contents of his veins, as if a body had bled out and dissolved into the cushions.

“You don’t what? You’re going to see weird stuff if you stick around. Objects that shouldn’t be stuck beneath seat cushions. Notes left in pockets that were never meant to be read. You’ll see,” Rick replied, the pedal of the Singer whirring, needle never faltering as he stitched the final raised seam.

“Someone literally died in this chair. We’re destroying evidence. Shouldn’t we call the cops?”

“If I was going to do that, I would have done so thirty years ago. And we’re preserving it if anything. Some cultures leave bodies of loved ones propped in their living rooms until the decay really sets in. I think of it as more of a remembrance, someone holding on to someone they miss.”

Silva fought down his revulsion, tugging loose another dozen nails, their tarnished points singing off the linoleum floor, allowing the second skin to slip to the ground. He needed to see the image in its entirety. The outline of a man’s body was unmistakable, down to the folds in his pants, the press of his fingers into the armrest. The silhouette almost looked burnt, seared into the seat.

“Now get the underside,” Rick said.

The doorway to the shop pulled at Silva’s naval, the urge to flee tugging at his insides. His face had grown warm, sweat clawing at his armpits.

“I can’t. This is messed up. I need a couple hours of sick time or...” Silva said.

“No, you don’t. It will take ten minutes, then it’s over. I’ll do the rest and you won’t see this chair again for another five years. You’ll forget. The money’s good. A little unease is worth it.”

Silva’s best friend Chuck made nine-fifty stocking shelves at the local market. His girlfriend, Beth, pulled in just over eleven cleaning bathrooms at the hotel on 6A. Most of the older adults in his life were barely making above twenty, and they’d been at their jobs for decades. Eighteen was unheard of for starting pay. Rick promised he’d earn more than 50K when he graduated from apprentice, nearly fifteen grand more than his mother made a year.

Opportunity was rare. Silva couldn’t let it wither.

“Ten minutes isn’t much,” he said, sweeping a cluster of tacks from the base of the chair, clearing a spot where he could kneel to get at the layer of underlining draped beneath the seat. “I can do ten minutes.”