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DUNHUANG, IN THE SUMMER by Jiaqi Kang

January 28, 2021

is beige and washed with soft, settled dust. It nests between sand dunes, two-tone hills that whistle and whisper at dusk, the breeze bringing mysterious dreams to those who sleep under its soupy night sky. My guests, pilgrims whose cotton shifts are streaked with the brown patterns of their journeys, spend the last of their silver on a bed and a meal in my inn. They are tired, worn, and bone-thin, but there is that momentary sense of relief in their eyes when they clap an ugly coin into my palm. I lead them to their cots and my husband ladles precious wine into their bowls; twice a year, he makes hard candies out of the sugar grains that have stuck to the bottoms of jars, and I hand them to the pilgrims’ children. “Ah—” I tease, holding the candy just out of reach. “Say, ‘Thank you, Mister Innkeeper!’” The parents smile as the toddlers’ fingers work to unwrap the treats. Inside the wrapping paper, my husband makes an inscription: a character from a sutra, painstakingly calligraphic and minuscule—just big enough to cast a spell. I don’t believe in these words anymore, but he does, and I adore him for his insistence on sewing whole sheets of sutras into our winter clothes so that they sometimes swish and crinkle when I do the morning chores.

Not that we need winter clothes here in the desert, but even after twelve winters—a full zodiac cycle—we haven’t shaken that habit of renewing ourselves for the start of each year. In the weeks before the spring festival, we sew them for each other, then exchange them over a rare feast of pork buns. It would shock our younger selves, the effort we put into every stitch and our miserly use of the cloth, but now that we’re poor, we pay more attention. In recent years, I have become worried that our annual gift-giving lacks fairness, that he has ruined his eyes copying our sutras by candlelight. I have offered to write my own, but he says it wouldn’t work—heathen that I am. It has taken me some time, but this summer, I have prepared an extra gift for him: his own sword.

When we’d left the world, he pretended not to mind leaving it behind—, he threw it nonchalantly into the Yangtze and didn’t look back. In that moment, I’d thought of that idiom, ke-zhou-qiu-jian, about the fool from the Warring States era who, instead of diving to retrieve his drowning sword, carved a mark onto the edge of the boat and said, This is where the sword fell. When we reach shore, I shall dive from here. They don’t say what happened to him afterwards. For what was a wuxia without his weapon? A martial artist without his art; a fool; a wastrel; an innkeeper, a cook—someone without a name hiding somewhere far off doing ordinary things that would never be told of over campfires across the jianghu. I’d thought of selling the sword, but my husband hadn’t wanted to draw attention with such a famous weapon.

He’d been right, as always: when, some years ago, I began to discreetly ask about the sword, it was too easy to track it down to some middle-class collector in the capital city with the audacity to admit visitors in exchange for an entry fee. The hard part was stealing it. I debated whether to reveal myself to one of our old friends, an imperial general, perhaps, who might remember what I did for him in the war, or instead to venture out on my own with some plausible cover story. In the end, it was one of the rare merchants at the inn who helped me secure the services of a rogue wuxia who could travel to the capital and back, no questions asked. All it took was a tumble in the hay with the merchant, under the watery eyes of our one wizened donkey. And money, of course; money all the time, the entirety of my secret savings as well as one of the two gold bars we hid under the kitchen floorboards, which my husband does not often check and which I will blame on a thieving pilgrim when he does find out.

Would a thief only steal half our gold? I must continue to work on the story, but it is hard to focus when all I can think of is the smile that will bloom on my husband’s face when I present him with the sword next week, the kind of pure and joyous smile that even he is unable to suppress, maybe even a smile with teeth! Or else I worry about the naked blade’s condition after having traveled such a distance—I could not afford the scabbard, which remains at the collector’s. I think we could go retrieve it together. We’ll shut the inn for a month or two, go on vacation for the first time; a kind of honeymoon. We could detour through Jiangnan, spy on those we left behind: our shifu, our sworn brothers and sisters who by now will have taken on disciples of their own, the teahouses where we eavesdropped on local gossip, and my husband’s grandfather, though perhaps he has died. Would it be too painful? I suppose that question is too far into the future, considering that we cannot afford to shut the inn. Business slows in the summer for reasons I still haven’t fully comprehended. Some days, there are so few guests that I am able to leave our hired girl in charge and accompany my husband to the market.

In town, we are careful not to walk too closely together. Everyone on the Silk Road has a secret, and people in Dunhuang don’t mind these things, but it also means that any tanned, forgettable face could be masking violence. The assumption, I think, is that we are brothers, and technically we are—brothers-in-arms, fellow disciples under one shifu. I don’t mind: it reminds me of our youth, when there was always this invisible hurricane that raged in the space between our bodies and into which we would throw everything we weren’t allowed to say or feel. Sometimes I miss those days, not because we were wealthy, but because of the back-and-forth of our dance, how precarious it all was, how miraculous, how heartbreaking. Everything was so new that I’d sometimes forget we were fighting a civil war; even in the midst of a battle, when across the melee in the corner of my eye I could watch him slash and parry, I’d felt so attuned to him, as though we were the only ones there, as though my hands weren’t full of someone else’s blood. I miss that, too, but I don’t tell my husband that I do: he’d made me promise, that day on the Yangtze, that we’d leave it all behind. I think he prefers Dunhuang, our inn, the lazy fog of sunlight, the spices and curiosities brought in from the West, the foreign languages that he practices with the street sellers. The callouses on his hands have faded; instead, he has little cuts here and there from the cleaver brought down too fast or too hard.

Today, a week before the wuxia arrives in Dunhuang with the gift, the sunset sends rays of glimmering pink clouds across the sky, and my husband stops by a Persian carpet-seller to feel the soft weave on the tapestries. I am admiring the way that his face, bathed in golden light, seems to be chiseled from the sand dunes that surround and cradle us when I am hit with a nauseating premonition and stumble a little. I steady myself against the merchant’s camel, which wavers its head, as if aware of my distress. It has suddenly occurred to me that my husband may not want his sword back at all, that I have made a terrible mistake; I have overreached, overstepped, overwhelmingly overstated—it is over. I imagine him trying and failing to hide his profound disappointment, turning his back to me as he rolls up his sleeves to knead more dough, the rise and fall of his silent shoulders. My husband is gripping my arm now, saying something with his low voice that I can’t make out—all I hear is the rush of blood in my ears and the fuzziness in my mouth. I am frozen, like that night on the battlefield so many years ago, an agony I’d forgotten. He leads me away from the crowd, into a quieter alley, and I start to calm down a little, I think. He leans against the wall next to me as my breathing slows. After some time, I shuffle closer, lean my head against his shoulder, touch his hand. He lets me.

JEOPARDY by Ruth Aitken

January 27, 2021

As my ex-husband the Jeopardy champion won thirteen games, I racked up quite a résumé myself. I followed advice to shampoo with raw eggs. I dropped a knife and drove myself to the emergency room. I fell in love with a man on the Metro, because he made eye contact when my hand bumped his on the pole. I successfully overheard someone in the break room say about me: Yeah, her voice makes me wanna die. I wondered for the first time whether I wanted to have sex with a woman. I went too far on party drugs that were too young for me, walked into a tattoo parlor and told the guy to surprise me. The whole world was spun on serendipity, and I thought whatever he tattooed on my body would teach me some lesson I needed to learn.

Every light source in the parlor gave off swimming starbursts of color. I had helium in my veins instead of blood, so I was taller than the tattooist. I knew plain as toast that a connection was opening between me and the divine — because eight months earlier I’d had a vision of my [then soon-to-be] ex-husband on the Jeopardy stage. I couldn’t recall him ever watching the show, but in my head he looked so right against that blue background, smiling a stiff little nerd smile behind his podium, trying too hard to make Alex Trebek laugh. And then eight months later he was right where I’d put him. He must have picked up trivia because he needed a rebound hobby once he lost his old hobby of making me feel bad.

The tattoo artist eyed me with caution. My dilated pupils and messy hair, my skirt shedding sequins on the floor. The hospital bandages on my foot. I cried a little, which didn’t increase his trust.

Why don’t you go sleep on it, he said.

I said I no longer let other people tell me when to stop being stupid.

I was so reborn that even my ex-husband the Jeopardy champion and his $268,730 couldn’t bother me. That’s what those dragonflies of light said.

What would you die for? The tattoo artist asked.

These days, thank God, not much, I said.

He gave me a paper airplane, right above the crook of my elbow. It restored my faith in people, to know that you could give your body as a blank canvas to a stranger and not emerge with something big and ugly and vengeful, asshole on your forehead or Garfield on your asscheek.

I still liked my paper airplane when the drugs wore off, still liked it when the redness healed. I went to a bar I’d never been to before and I met someone.

What does your tattoo mean?

I leaned so close I could smell her shampoo and said, I don’t know yet.

I WANTED TO SAY by Michael Harris Cohen

January 26, 2021

The body farm looked like any other chunk of rural Tennessee, black and white oaks, cherry trees and clearings. Only this chunk had a 12-foot fence circling it, razor wire on top, and rotting bodies within.

“Why the fence?” I asked.

Landon, my brother’s best friend since kindergarten, shrugged. “It’s science. Can’t have people messing with science.”

We followed Landon through the woods. Last I’d heard, Landon worked night security at the mall. Now he was day security at the body farm and (supposedly) enrolled in night school. He’d abandoned his signature mullet for a crew cut.

We came upon the first body. It didn’t look like a corpse. It was more mummy or Halloween prop, skin motor oil black and bunched like a deflated air mattress. Its skull all eye sockets and teeth, the mouth gaped in a frozen moment of awe.

“Blacker they are, longer they been dead,” Landon said. “Don’t worry. Your old man won’t look like this. He’s fresh.”

***

I’d skipped my father’s funeral and flown down two weeks later. My girlfriend said I needed “closure.” When my brother picked me up at the airport, I’d told him how I wanted to see dad and say some words. Maybe touch his hand. Kiss his forehead. Closure.

My brother had shaken his head and stroked his tangled beard. “There’s no closure with the dead. It’s a one-way conversation, like talking to a busy signal.”

“Still,” I’d said. “Gotta try.”

But here I felt less certain. In life, my father was as predictable as taxes. In death, he surprised me. How was this what he’d wished and willed for his eternal remains?

***

There were more roped off skeletons and corpses. Some looked alive, just napping in the woods, face down and naked. One was half-covered with black plastic, legs stuck out, like an abandoned car in a yard.

“Hey,” my brother said, “remember how Pops used to take us to the cemetery at night? To light candles and summon spirits?”

Landon snapped his fingers. “That was fucking cool. Your old man was cool as shit.”

“That never happened,” I said.

Landon and my brother stopped and turned back to me.

“What’re you talking about?” My brother said. “Of course it did.”

“He never did that.”

They locked eyes.

“Mandela effect,” Landon whispered and my brother nodded.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

Landon raised his eyebrows. “I thought they taught everything in lawyer school.”

Landon spat in the direction of a stray ribcage. My brother stared at me with a look borrowed from our father. An open-mouthed, droopy face that said: Is your head screwed on backwards?

“Maybe you just weren’t there,” my brother said.

***

The path turned to gravel road. We followed it awhile, and then I saw her: the old man’s ‘71, 280SL. In the rush of his death, I’d forgotten Marilyn, his convertible. The vanity plates, TOPLWYR, still on it.

“Marilyn Mercedes?” I said.

“Pops stipulated it.”

Landon whistled. “Hell of a car.”

“Mom thought you might try to contest the will. She said, and I quote, ‘I don’t want your brother digging his legal beak into my husband’s last wishes.’”

“Why’s it called the Bar Exam, anyway?” Landon said. “Seems like a test I’d get cozy with. One I’d pass with flying colors.”

“Bar is short for barrister. It’s an old thing.”

“Like you.” My brother rabbit punched me, and I wrestled him into a headlock, like old times. He struggled, and I squeezed, but my heart wasn’t in it, especially with what lay ahead. I let my arm go slack, and my brother wriggled out and ran to the car, like we were kids again, homebound after a family picnic.

As a teenager, I’d told my father how much I hated Tennessee. He’d said, “No rust and nine months top down? Paradise.”

Marilyn’s top was still down, even though it was December. Her leather seats were glazed with leaves and animal droppings. Landon rooted the keys out of his pocket. “You ready?”

I nodded, but I wasn’t sure at all.

“First, I want you to know that your father has done a great thing. Donate your body to medicine, and they maybe use it six months. The research here, with some corpses, goes on forever.”

My brother nodded solemnly, tucking one hand under the elastic of his sweatpants. A candy bar appeared in the other.

“Second,” Landon continued, “prepare for the smell. Especially with a freshman like your father. This ain’t no dead mouse behind the fridge.”

I nodded and he popped the trunk.

The smell struck like a bushel of rotten fruit, a blinding, musty-sweet stench. I covered my nose and retched in my hands. The flies droned like a chorus of tiny saws.

Landon grinned wide. “That bouquet you don’t forget.”

Inside the trunk, our father curled, chin tucking knees, fully dressed in his blue suit. It could have been anyone, but it was dad. There was the scar from his Navy years. His gold wedding band squeezed a swollen finger.

I spoke through my hands. “Why’s he dressed?”

“They like to study all the variables with PMI—post mortem interval,” Landon said, flicking his shoulder. “Some are naked, some are dressed, under tarps or underwater. Some in car trunks.”

I stared as flies crawled in and out of his ears and nose.

“The flies show up ‘bout a half hour after you die. They crawl inside and lay—”

My brother punched his shoulder. “Shut the fuck up, Lando.”

We all shut up. I stood there, gaping at a dead man in the trunk of a car.

A crazy fantasy rushed my head. I’d swipe the keys from Landon and drive off in Marilyn, Dad still in the trunk. Top down, I’d get on I-40 and drive straight to Los Angeles, right up to the edge of the Pacific.

My brother dropped a hand on my shoulder. “You want to speak your thing? Last words for Pops?”

I did. I didn’t. What was there to say? I’d been rehearsing my ‘done with the law’ speech for months. I’d wanted to say that the people in law school were the worst people I’d met in my life. I wanted to say that the worst of the worst, the gunners, reminded me of him. How I’d never retake the Bar.

But I’d rehearsed the speech with a living man as an audience. Talking into this trunk felt useless. The finality of what lay there swallowed my words before I spoke them.

“It’s a weird thing,” my brother said. “Like all that’s left is an empty human suit. An empty cocoon. Like the part of us that is us goes on to something else.”

Landon whistled “Dust in the Wind” and looked at me.

I finally nodded, and he slammed the trunk shut.

Closure.

***

Driving to the airport, my brother cleared his throat and spoke. “You’ve been back two days and haven’t once asked how I’m doing.”

“You have chocolate in your beard,” I said. “Your life uniform is sweatpants and Crocs. What am I supposed to ask?”

He grinned, fingers drumming the steering wheel. “I’m in a transition phase.”

I took the bait. “You’re finding yourself.”

“I’m a caterpillar.”

“Slow to leave its cocoon,” I said.

My brother giggled. I remembered all our father’s rationalizing riffs, the things he told himself and others on behalf of my brother, 30, and still living at home.

My brother reminded me of the time he’d bit a bar of vanilla soap, figuring it would taste sweet. “Remember how hard Pops laughed?”

“He was red as a stop sign. I thought he’d have a heart attack.”

My words rung like a vacuum, sucking out all sound. We rode two miles in quiet.

“He still talked about you all the time,” my brother finally said. “You know, his ‘Golden Boy,’ the New York lawyer. In Pop’s eyes, compared to you, I was one-inch tall. I started hating you.”

“More than before?”

“A lot more.”

“Anyway, I’m not a lawyer.”

“I heard a lot of people don’t pass till the third time,” my brother said.

I wanted to say how it was better to be a one-inch caterpillar—who got to light candles in graveyards and go water skiing—than the butterfly, saddled with legacy expectations. But I just shrugged and watched the cornfields scroll past.

At the airport, my brother pulled my suitcase out of the trunk and hugged me at the curb. He stepped on my toes, an old trick, and kissed my cheeks like a Frenchman. It was a thing he’d picked up from our father, who’d been to France exactly once during his Navy years.

My brother winked, chocolate crumbs in his beard like mud flecks.

“You’re in a transition phase,” he said.

“Finding myself,” I said.

IMAGINE THE SECOND COMING by Stevie Trujillo

January 25, 2021

Silencio, our guide whispered.

Just then, we were ambushed by hundreds of orange bursts, swirling and darting in every direction, while thousands more blossomed in the pine branches overhead. The sound of their powder-thin wings fluttering so close to my ears tickled the back of my neck, like angel whispers. I raised my shoulders and giggled.

Adult Monarchs normally live three to four weeks, but the ones that migrate south are part of a special generation born towards the end of summer, called the Methuselah. They live seven or eight months—about nine times longer than the average lifetime.

Imagine living for 700 years.

The butterflies, like us, had started their 3,000-mile journey from the United States to Mexico four months prior. In my mind, we were an inter-species diaspora, escaping harsh conditions. Unlike us, however, the Monarchs would only stay until March when they and their progeny returned north, whereas Tree and I would continue onward in our van to Patagonia. We’d lost nearly everything in the Recession—my fancy sales job, Tree’s investment property, our ability to pay rent and stay solvent. Forced to live in our van to make ends meet, we decided to head south of the border where our dollars would go further, and there was less shame in being poor.

Standing in that storm of endangered butterflies ten years ago, Tree and I felt alone in our failures. But the truth is, we were legion; a whole generation in distress. And, now, I’ve read that researchers at Pew are already wondering whether the coronavirus pandemic will become to Gen Z—our daughter’s generation—what the Great Recession was to us, by which they mean a festering wound that hobbles their start in a ruthless race.

Yet, isn’t what’s coming so much more devastating than that?

On March 14th, we suddenly found ourselves locked-down with our seven-year old daughter in an apartment on Tenerife, a small Spanish island off the coast of Africa. Within days, she began experiencing night terrors—anxious manifestations from not being allowed outside.

“Mama! Mama!” she shrieked, night after night, thrashing wildly with her eyes open. I rushed into her room to help, to hold her, to tell her it was all going to be alright but, stuck in liminal consciousness, she couldn’t hear or see me. She kicked and screamed and choked, her voice strangled in the fight against an unseen monster.

Even now, on our walks through the city, the invisible boogieman hides on hard surfaces and floats in the air.

“Stop touching your mask,” I gently scold.

Unbeknownst to my daughter, the baby of Gen Z, a million people worldwide have already died of the virus while the U.N. warns that the number of people dying from hunger could double this year from the financial fallout of confinement. The boogeyman has presented grownups with a horrifying dilemma: keep the economy open at the risk of spreading disease or keep the economy closed at the risk of mass starvation.

Again, I’m reminded of the Monarchs.

Like the Methuselah who journey far to breed in the sanctuaries of the south, my husband and I are raising our daughter abroad where we can afford to give her a better start in life. Geographic arbitrage, it’s called. And, yet, the Monarch’s path has been overbuilt, sprayed with Roundup and stripped of milkweed, just as my daughter’s path has been paved with crisis. There is no escape; fancy terms be damned. In fact, if we could take the long-view of the biblical Methuselah who lived 969 years, we’d see that this current rupture of our “normal” lives is only a preamble for the Second Coming, Yeats' infamous “rough beast” slouching towards Bethlehem to be born: the global food shortages, the mass migrations, the devil that scientists under the current administration are forbidden to name. We talk of “flattening the curve” while the Keeling Curve, the graph that shows the ongoing change in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, continues to rise.

As the Earth gets hotter, conditions favor the spread of infectious disease and the start of new pandemics.

Imagine going extinct.

Over the past 20 years, there’s been an 80 percent total decline in the North American Monarch population. As they teeter on the edge of an extinction tipping point—in which numbers drop too low for the species to recover—scientists warn that habitat loss and human-caused climate change are to blame. In fact, as many as three-quarters of animal species could be extinct within several human lifetimes, imperiling the very systems that keep people alive.

Holding these thoughts fills me with dread. Like my child, I, too, wake terrorized in the middle of the night, strangled by an invisible monster. If this pandemic has laid bare one thing, it’s that we’ve yoked our survival to the survival of the economy—and this economy will kill us all. How will we Houdini our way out of this existential double-bind?

To anyone paying attention, the answer is obvious: we need systemic change. Super-size-me, carbon-based capitalism isn’t working. So, maybe what I mean to ask is, by what sorcery will we extricate ourselves from this corporate chokehold to do what’s necessary and right by our children before it’s too fucking late?

The curve is rising.

In the mornings, before we begin our new normal of homeschool and Zoom calls, my daughter sits on her bedroom floor, surrounded by sticks, an empty wine box, and a hot glue gun. When lockdown began, she started mining our recycling bin daily to create something—a three-foot tall sled-dog, an extended family of dragons, a pregnant fairy with a peg leg (the obvious favorite)—from our waste. An alchemist in her underwear, she turns what was base and broken into gold.

“What are you making this time?” I ask.

“A birdhouse. I’m going to put it on the balcony so I can adopt a little bird but not put her inside a cage, because that makes me sad. Birds should be free,” she explains, without a hint of irony.

Imagine a sustainable future.

NEVER REALLY OVER by Kate Shapiro

January 22, 2021

My resort in Thailand is a beautiful picture ringed with spider eggs. I angle the phone so the fat cockroaches with long wandering antennae are not within the frame of my selfie, but the beach is. I know I look beautiful because beaches make you beautiful. They make you shimmer. I am shimmering now, like an iridescent fish.

Two weeks before Thailand, Charles put my face between his two palms and told me he met someone named Suzanne at a live sitar show and he could not deny their attraction any longer. He said that he loved me and believed we would get married someday but he had to see how it worked out with Suzanne first.

What if I love her? he said, as dumbass-tears leaked out of his right eye and a lizard crawled over his hand and joined the other lizards congregated by the door watching us break up. Charles threw a rock at the lizards.

An Israeli soldier named Noy stays in the cabana next door and does mushrooms every morning at the mushroom-shaped club blooming out of the cliff over a guava-shaped resort. I find him one day inhaling nitrous out of a rainbow-shaped balloon. Give me some, I say, and sit next to him.

Noy needs a haircut. His army uniform is rolled up over his shoulders, the green of it lightened from the sun, stains dotting the collar and sleeves; badges peeling off.

How does it feel to kill a Palestinian, I ask.

I build radar equipment, he says.

But how does it feel to kill a Palestinian, I ask.

They send us to Thailand to make us forget we do it, he says.

Noy and I watch a girl with a fiery baton do backflips on the sand. I put my arm around Noy and tell him to smile. We have a glow around us. It is like the world is a bright, shining thing and we are the deformed creatures that inhabit it. The contrast is stunning. I post it on social media.

A text arrives from Charles. Hey, how you holding up? I hold my phone close to me and scream. I tell him, Great! Just Great!

I gleefully swat at bugs. I slice millipedes in half with my index finger.

I slap a spider so hard its guts are splayed in a perfect circle on the inside of my elbow. Sugar ants swarm the dregs of a pink, plastic champagne flute.

Noy watches the centipedes and drinks a Chang. A rocket once landed in an abandoned lot choked with weeds and beer cans next to my kindergarten, he tells me. It never exploded. My teacher told me to go underground and I remember my classmates hugging each other and crying. I thought, what for? Nothing will happen. This is how they want us. Scared and also bored. There is a word for it in Hebrew.

The next day I sob while a Scandinavian family does yoga.

What’s wrong, Noy says.

I show him my phone. He shields it with his hand. It’s an Instagram post of Charles and Sitar Suzanne with their arms around each other on top of a dusty mountain. She is very thin; you can see every one of her bones, and her hair is straight and shiny.

Noy asks her: is this what is attractive to Americans?

The sitar girls are the most attractive, I tell him. They are a clean white sheet to throw over a dusty piece of furniture.

She is not prettier than you, Noy says.

You only think that because you are on mushrooms. I am actually fat, I say and point at my fat belly lined with bug bites and moles.

But fat is good, Noy replies, perplexed.

Thank you, I say, but I know better. Charles is better. He is the bare-faced Birkenstocks-wearer and I am the cretaceous organism desperate to split in two.

Noy and I drink one milkshake full of mushrooms each and watch a group of monkeys on a nearby cove. One monkey picks a leech off another monkey’s butthole and eats it. Kindness, I believe, is not a thing humans value. I have a theory that we are not the product of our parents, or their parents, or our stupid fucking genetics, but instead a product of the country we are born in and its stupid fucking ideas of how to live and die. I tell Noy this as the ocean fractures into a million black centipedes.

Can you please stop mentioning the Palestinians? he asks.

He removes his uniform, then his pants, until he is naked, stretching his limbs out like he is an Israeli starfish. I also remove my clothes and spread myself out so I can touch his toes and fingers with my toes and fingers.

I tell Noy that we must ride a jet ski in order to kill our past. I tell him, in America, jet skis represent the apex of happiness.

It is the first time I want to kill my past and not resurrect it into a slug that I fuck.

I let Noy drive it into the open ocean and clutch his waist as he hits the waves head-on. I let him scream for a long time when nobody can hear us. I scream too. A wave kicks us off and we tumble into the open ocean. I can hear the sting rays, giant squids, and whales swimming underneath us while Noy squeezes me.

We park the jet ski at a cay populated with feral cats. They fight with each other over crushed guavas swarming with fruit flies and maggots. The victor feasts on the spoils as the loser watches from behind a rubber tree. Noy tells me he killed someone once with a 160 mm gun from two miles away. I felt nothing, he says, then I felt I should feel something, which was much much worse.

The cats do not bother me and Noy because they detect us as comrades. I like the horizon because it does not contain Charles or Sitar Suzanne. I like it because it is just that: a horizon. It’s not even that good. Boring, really. No pretty islands. The water is ugly. The cats begin to wail. Noy produces a peach. I ask where he got it and he shrugs. We split the peach and watch the horizon. Maybe we hold hands. Who cares.

BAD SEEDS by Tanya Zilinskas

January 21, 2021

You were supposed to turn them over to the Department of Agriculture if you received them. Packages without return addresses showed up in mailboxes all over the country, each one containing a single packet of seeds. The official line was inconsistent but grim: they were from China, they were from Russia, they would kill the crops, they would release pests, they were a Sino-Russian hybrid that would release pests that would kill the crops.

When I received the seeds, I planted them. I planted them because I wanted to see what would happen. I planted them because I didn’t trust the government. Because I was bored. Because with this, I was chosen, and because I had nothing else to grow.

The first child came on Monday, scratching at the patio door, naked and covered in earth. I fed him everything in the pantry and after he ate it all he said to me, have you considered how your environment contributes to your mental health? We spent the rest of the day purging. We took down the television that was hung like art, unshelved the books I hadn’t read since college, and gathered the face creams that lacked the alchemy of beauty. We threw it all in the trash and rolled the bin out to the curb. Then we sat on the porch until we were sunburned, eating blackberries from the bushes that had taken over the yard.

On Tuesday the second child came. This is always how creation goes, one new thing a day, one day after another. The second child said nothing until that night when the neighbors’ dog barked itself hoarse. I can’t bear when something’s in pain, the second child said. The children and I went into the neighbors’ yard, unleashed the dog, and opened the gate. We ran after it in the street, barking and howling, darting between the headlights of bleating cars.

Wednesday’s child was already yellow when he came to us, and by noon he had withered away. We buried him under the blackberries so we could eat him next summer. Thursday’s child went straight into my bedroom and refused to come out. Friday’s child was a pyromaniac, so Monday, Tuesday, and I spent the day dousing everything with water. When questioned, Friday said some things needed to be burned. Saturday arrived and said they were the last of the children. They were excruciatingly beautiful; we learned nothing they said could be trusted.

Monday had grown tired of all this. He said there were too many children; this had gone too far. He said we had grown too wild, and I agreed, but there was no putting them back in the box.

On Sunday, I picked the last of the blackberries and fed them to the children for breakfast. I played Dolly Parton’s Wildflowers and told them to listen to the lyrics—that I was the garden setting them free—but the children didn’t like country music or metaphors. I opened the front door and told them to go forth and multiply. I took a picture of us before they left with the sun just right in the sky. I watched my seeds go out into the world, and then I went back inside and locked the door.

ARE YOU MY MOTHER? by Allie Zenwirth

January 20, 2021

A

I used to get these pangs of want, filled with unnamable desires. You would find me jumping. You would find me erratic. I want to make something. I want to dance with somebody… I want to feel the heat with somebody… yeah... With somebody who loves me. Я хочу. I want… I want… I want… I don’t know… I want… If you were that stranger at the bar you would ask me, “How do you have so much energy?” and I would say, “I don’t know,” and then jeté away.

Now I’m drained, all my juice is gone. Instead of yelling at people to, “Wake up!” I’m alone in a desert of darkness, amputated, stuck on scalding asphalt, bleeding as I push myself forward by my stumps one inch at a time into a never-ending nightmare. Nobody’s home inside me. My voice is deeper and flatter, allowing my new apartment-mate to clock me as trans:

New Apartment Mate: Can I ask you a question?

Allie Zenwirth: Sure

New Apartment mate: Your voice is very thick

Allie Zenwirth:

New Apartment Mate: (winks, gives thumbs up)

I am in a manhole of wanting to die. The lid standing between me and the street weighs 249 lbs (as manhole covers are wont).

My therapist points out that my suicidality is reasonable.* That makes me feel better.

*he phrases it differently.

B

In the beginning of 2020, Corona Time, New York was the epicenter. I stayed with my Russian professor in Yonkers for a month, and during one particular dinner, as I talked everyone’s heads off about the Community, I got a text.

Father: How are you feeling?

I announced: “Guess who just texted me?” I consumed everyone. “That’s a weird text, right? The first time in months: ‘How are you feeling?’ How should I respond?”

From my father’s perspective, a concern regarding my health was reasonable. About half of the Chasidic community was infected by the virus. He was. My mom was. His brothers were. My mom’s siblings were.

I had a follow up call with my father who said he’ll call me back, but he never did. However, the virus gave my mom an excuse to talk with me again. We hadn’t spoken in a year.

C

For a while, her disembodied voice was a grounding presence. She was someone to talk to when I moved back to my room in Jersey City. A windowless basement room in which I couldn’t stand upright, without A/C, and infested with both cockroaches and ants. Housing-wise, things improved when I paid the extra $150 and moved up to the second floor. I was still unemployed, alone, without many friends.

D

Throughout my years at Sarah Lawrence College, I would be on the verge of homelessness during the winter breaks when the campus closed, relying on the kindness of strangers. During the break my senior year, January of 2019, I called my mother, asking her if she wanted to get together. Just like the year before, she asked if she could think about it and call me back. After three days, she decided she would be down to meet, but just like the year before, it would need to be in secret. We discussed our options and my mom determined it would be as if we were to have an affair. We would book a hotel room.

The following Wednesday morning, after eating two egg and cheese English Muffins I had gotten from Dunkin’ the night before, I looked out the window of a room in Hotel Le Blu and watched as a woman approached the hotel. She had gained weight. As usual she was wearing body-covering dark-colored clothing and false hair.

My mother entered the hotel and came up the elevator. I found her in the hallway, looking lost. I hugged her as if she were a pillow. Going into the room she put down her bags of Greek yogurt for herself and homemade cookies for me and we sat down on chairs facing each other. She got straight down to what she wanted to tell me.

Mom: I love you.

Me: I love you too.

Mom: I like talking with you on the phone.

Me: I like talking with you too.

Mom: I know you are well intentioned, but you writing a memoir has been incredibly hurtful to me. I know you think you’re doing it for the right reasons, but I don’t think it’s ok that you expect me to keep talking with you.

Me: Is it because I am writing about you? I could use a pseudonym.

Mom: Being written about is part of it. You know I’m a private person.

Me: (nods unsure)

Mom: But...

The real problem? I would be writing negatively about the Community.

E

Talking with my mother in the bowels of my basement room was not all bliss. We would argue in almost hour-long bursts. Strangers would look at me strangely as I broke the silence of the night, making laps around my neighborhood, raising my voice in vehemence. She argued that I wasn’t Paul Revere rousing the colonials, that my memoir was not whistleblowing, that I was sharing with the world a warped version of the Chasidic Community, one driven by hatred and personal grievance.

I argued that the Chasidic Community was a place where human rights were being violated.

In August of 2020, when my mother recruited an aunt and an uncle to help refute my claims, when three people telling me that my experience in the Community was my own fault* became too much, I told my mother so. I told her we could continue to speak but I will not be gaslighted. She stopped calling me.

*My mother will laugh. How predictable: another conversation that I warp and misconstrue. What else is new?

F

So now here I am in September of 2020, isolated, with a deadness all too familiar. My feelings blend with those of my still-in-Community-self, the mirage of pain I left behind in 2016, when I escaped. An experience I hoped would never return.

G

In 2011, when I was thirteen, I would sit beside Halberstam, a rabbi who was also a therapist, in the uncomfortable chair besides his desk, waiting. The darkness that had surrounded me since the age of five had turned into a throbbing pain. I was waiting for Halberstam to tell me why. To prescribe me some Advil.

Like a pediatrician walking into a room saying, “Hi, how are you doing?” who would hear a few symptoms then confidently declare, “So here is what I’m going to do,” Halberstam found the problem: it was my parents. They had been putting “interjections” in my brain, programming me to believe that I deserved to be miserable. He implied that I was abused. I had never liked my parents, but I never realized their terribleness. “Oh boy, poor me.”

Halberstam’s abuse theory was not based on anything I said. I found out later that my mother had been seeing him as a patient as well. He must have based it on what my mother told him during her therapy. Something real. Unwilling and unable to tell me the truth, he turned it into something vague, which turned into “my parents are abusing me.” He didn’t bother to check in and see if that was my lived experience. He didn’t bother to check in and see if that was what made me unable to see anything but bleakness.

H

In 2014, after my second hospitalization in a psych ward, at sixteen, my mother and I became friends. Prison inmates. My mother shared that she never wanted me to be born. I was grateful she told me as it meant I wasn’t making things up. For a while, that was all that was mentioned of it. Then, in 2020, during the few months we resumed talking, my mother added that she didn’t want to get married either. She described her increasing dread as the wedding date had drawn nearer.

I

In 2020, when we would be on the phone, I argued that the Community was to blame for her marriage and my birth. The Community made her get married to someone she didn’t know at 18, and made her pump out one kid after the other. But in her mind the fault was her own. She could have decided not to get married and be ostracized. She chose to get married because deep down she wanted to. “We all need connection.” She could have gone on birth control even though she wasn’t allowed to without permission from a judge. She chose to have kids to prove to the world that you can have kids and not love them.

J

Sister Cathleen (Margaret Qualley) is a novice in training at a nunnery in Novitiate (2017). She is intimacy repressed to the extent that she can’t bear hearing the object of her desire, Sister Emmanuelle (Rebecca Dyan), read the bible. One night, Sister Emmanuelle wakes up to a knock on her door. She opens it a crack.

Sister Emmanuelle: (whispers) You can’t be here

Sister Cathleen: (inaudible pleading)

Sister Emmanuelle: Okay

They both sit down on the bed nervous. LONG pause.

Sister Cathleen: Do you remember… Do you remember when you asked what I was starving for? I just want to be comforted… please will you just comfort me… please… please will you just… please will you just… please I just want to be comforted… please will you just comfort me... Please… Please… Please… Please will you just comfort me… Please will you just comfort me…

Unable to shut up until she is held, kissed, smothered, and eaten.

I feel that.

NEW THING KISSES by Robin Zlotnick

January 18, 2021

They breathed each other in for ten years before they married, and then they were married for forty years, and the whole time, they needed to know every bit of each other, not just know but suck in and taste, so they had this thing, a sort of game: any time she noticed something new about him, a wrinkle on his forehead or a mole on his wrist, she would kiss it and vice versa, like when a pie-baking burn bubbled on her hand, he kissed each blistered bump, and when her chin grew a hair he kissed that too, and when she yanked the hair out with tweezers and blew it away, he kissed her chin once more because it was new again since the hair was gone. Together they kissed their new things for fifty years, and then it got so they knew every piece of each other, or else they started predicting the changes, or else they didn’t want to see them anymore. In any case, the new thing kisses mostly stopped, and then one night he decided he wanted to stay up later but she wanted to go to bed at the regular time, so he did and she did, and when she got up in the morning she kissed the top of his head because that was new, coming to bed at different times, and he asked What was that for? like he didn’t know, so she kissed him again because he’d never asked that before. Soon they never got into bed together and he kept changing, like one day he came to bed and his left foot was shorter than his right, not by a lot, but she noticed it and she kissed it because that was new, then the next night he had one less finger, a pinky was gone, and she kissed the shiny stub because that was new too, and then the next night his eyes when he opened them were green and fearful but they had always been brown and kind so she, trembling, kissed those too. Every night she kissed his new thing until he was unrecognizable to her and then she could do nothing but kiss him—she didn’t think she had a choice—so that’s what she did; she kissed him and kissed him and kissed him and then she died.

THE COLLAPSE OF A STAR by Jamie Etheridge

January 15, 2021

We sit in the van parked on the railroad tracks not knowing if the train is coming, or if you are going. You want to die. You said so and we believe you. Momma cries out, “Bill, please,” over and over and we wait, inhale then hold, for you to decide.

It was always like that. Random moments of drama; life or death, on the side of the road. That time in Texas in the middle of the worst blizzard in thirty years. The truck’s engine exploded and we were stuck, freezing, as semis whooshed past on the highway and the truck rocked in the aftertow. ‘Bill, please,” she pleaded as the baby cried in her lap and we huddled in the back of the cab, fingers crackling in the cold.

The FBI mailed out wanted posters. Later, when I finally got the files: thick black lines redacting my childhood alongside the names of the agents who’d tracked you. I found facsimiles of your face, eyes front, turned to the left, turned to the right, and your aliases, pages and pages of them. You were always a good storyteller, a natural whipsaw with a lie.

There were pills and booze and cons. And days when you could hardly get out of the bed in whatever cheap motel and whatever cheap town we’d drifted to, and Momma had to scratch out breakfast, lunch and dinner for us on the $10 she had hidden in her wallet.

There were joys. You driving us through the looming hush of the redwoods of northern California, explaining how the dinosaurs scratched their bellies against the Cretaceous bark. Or the sound of your cowboy boots crunching on the gravel as we followed you to the edge of a cliff in the Cherokee National Forest, your smile wide as the vista over the valley below.

The melancholy of Willie Nelson singing about angels flying too close and your voice, melodic and on key, despondent as a star in an empty universe.

I can still smell the smoke from your Winston King trailing out the open window as we children slept folded against each other like paper bags. The infinite hours, days, weeks, months and years we cruised I-10, each mile bringing us closer to, or taking us further away from, what you couldn’t face.

Then the time in Vegas when you disappeared for two or maybe three days, I can’t remember. We ate cereal and milk and watched endless episodes of Knight Rider and Three’s Company on the small, staticky TV in the motel room. We knew you’d come back. We hoped you’d come back rich or at least with enough money to buy food.

You almost died in Arkansas.

Why do they call it that? I always think of the ark of the Covenant and the followers of Moses. Here are some rules to follow: Never tell anyone your real name (I didn’t know mine until I was nine years old.) Help your mother take care of the little ones. Always stay close in case we have to leave in a hurry. Don’t sass your father or you’ll get a slap. One day when I’m gone, you’ll be sorry.

I’m sorry, Daddy.

The heart attack came on so swiftly that your face turned blue with the pain, and your eyes, already bulging, bugged out and scared us all. The nitroglycerin pills weren’t working and Momma called the ambulance and they took forever to come. Seven children left behind in the motel room, too terrified to talk, hungry and squabbling over the television because at least that was something we could control. They airlifted you to Tulsa and Momma said there would be an operation. They would slit open your heart, chip away at the blockages the way miners dig for gold.

But in the night you stripped the IV from your arm, ripped out the catheter, painting the ICU floor and walls with your blood until they called security and Momma, and she flew to the hospital with your clothes and boots. We woke up in the morning with you in the bed, in the motel room, smoking, your skin like drain water after a fierce storm. We knew nothing and yet understood that everything, everything, was wrong.

You said you dreamed you would die on that table, an open heart at 5am and so you kept it closed. The doctor yelled after you that you wouldn’t live to see tomorrow. 365 tomorrows are what you got instead.

After that you wouldn’t leave the South but circled in a meandering loop between Florida, Georgia and Alabama, between your parents, her parents and other relatives. Life being relative, we knew by then. We stayed close to ‘home’ in case something happened.

Only you were our home, the blazing, burning sun of our universe and when you collapsed finally, sinking in upon yourself, the morphine dimming the light in your eyes, the doctor shaking his head slowly from the doorway, our world went dark. And like planets long orbiting a dying star, we were freed to float away, off into the silent, empty universe, or to collapse ourselves into the hole at the center of the world.

EILEEN GETS A LITTLE BIT DRUNK by Natalie Warther

January 13, 2021

My sons were watching a movie in the living room and I was upstairs, rummaging through their bathroom. I’m not really sure why, I almost never go in there, but there I was, and I’d had some wine, and we hadn’t left the house for twelve days, for Christ’s sake, so what else was I supposed to do? I looked in the drawers, looked in the shower, looked in the trash can, looked in the mirror and I looked old. I stuck my finger out like a cane, pointed it at the mirror, furrowed my eyebrows, and whispered at my reflection, “You pick up this hallway right this instant.” It was odd at first, seeing what my boys see. I thought about leaving, turning off the light, and joining them in the living room. But it felt a little bit good, mi petite performánce, so I tried, “You think I like being the bad guy?” And that felt a little bit more natural, so I kept going; I kept scolding that mirror.“That’s it, no phone for a week.”“Cut the shit, young man.”“You get your ass back up those stairs, NOW.” I was getting braver, the boys were in the living room, I was sure they were, so I gave my voice a slightly longer leash, “This is the last time I’m going to tell you to put that mother fucking phone down,” and “Hit your brother again and I’ll give you something to cry about,” and, yelling now, I mean, really pushing it, “You’ll drive me to suicide, Eileen!” Just how my mother used to say it. And then I turned the light off and left. But before I did, I used my oldest son’s toothbrush, because I missed him dearly, even though he was there, just down the stairs, watching a movie in the living room.