Archives

LACERATION by Victoria Buitron

November 1, 2020

When an iguana’s tail falls off after a scare, I’ve wondered if it feels the pain of a halted human heart or the shame a woman feels after being sexually assaulted in public. On many mornings, I’ve rested on a hammock below robust mango trees hoping an iguana didn’t fall on me. If a branch buckled under its weight, the crack of thin bark would reach me before I could see a green smear plop onto the ground. I’d cover my head with my arms or a book in startled anticipation. Once, my dog woke from a nap beside me and began to chase an iguana until it escaped up a tree, leaving the remnants of its panic behind. Tiny reptiles left parts of themselves around my house—shreds of their peeling skin and minute tails—but never green and black-lined flesh more than a foot long. It trembled a bit at first, as if it didn’t know yet it had been dislodged from a body, the cells still hungering for new oxygen. Eventually, it became still, leaving me to wonder what threshold of fear is required for self-amputation. How many times had I been frightened enough throughout my life that a part of me would have severed? Here I was, with those moments and my body still with me, although no longer whole, quivering at times like a loose tail after being chased.

An iguana’s stump remains a wound the first few days until it slowly begins to mend. The new tail grows the color of spoiled lime, darker, like the healing matte of a scab. The former part of them is out there, most likely in the spot they were most afraid, wasting away, and perhaps they look back at this new self, hoping there’ll never be another scare to fragment them once more. Because—if it were to happen again—how much of them would be left?

I was on a bus from Guayaquil to Milagro, and a man sat next to me and began to speak. I could tell we used to share the same skin color, but he looked so tan it seemed like he had been chafed by the sun. He showed me his ID and talked about how he was a different man from that photo. He had angered his parents by getting dreads and making the beach his home. I nodded, looked out the window as if I’d never seen the fields of banana around us. Whenever the door opened, a thick heat engulfed us as men with sweat dotting their lips sold empanadas withered by the sun. Before we arrived in my town, he announced he was getting off. I was relieved that I could enjoy some silence for the rest of the ride, but as he got up, positioned one foot in the aisle and one in our row, he grabbed my head with his hands and collided his mouth with mine. It happened so fast that I could barely push him off me, but it was enough to leave his spit on my lips. I heard him cackle as he scurried off the bus.

Maybe the difference between an iguana and me is that although we are both capable of fear, only one of us is capable of shame. The fear rushed through me when he was still on me, then came the shame, and by the time I got to the bus stop, my feelings were tangled in guilt. I shouldn’t have said a word. I should have put on headphones. I shouldn’t have given him a chance. I wanted to leave my lips behind and grow new ones, gargle vinegar until my face became numb and his taste fled my mouth. Instead, I simmered myself within scalding water—my body a fragmentation of what it was when I woke up that day. In the adrenaline of thoughts, I wished that my hair had fallen off in his hands as evidence of what he took from me. Take it, I would have said. May the sever haunt you.

HEADS OF STATE

October 30, 2020

My dogs strain at the yoked leash I was so clever to buy. I dream of a free hand for my phone or a coffee cup, to wave at neighbors, flip off speeding teens. A stinky bush next to me suggests skunk. I scan for the varmint, but instead find a stain on the asphalt, not unlike the hundred other oil puddles in my driveway. I peer closer. It’s dark red.

I look over my shoulder for a neighbor I could call witness to this sticky offense. My dogs jerk me forward, but the yanking doesn’t distract me from what’s in my periphery: There’s a head perched on the cab of my pickup. It sits tilted left, tongue out, one oozy eye open, the other squeezed close in a gross, flirtatious wink.

Great.

Last October, I was met with a month of specters of jazz musicians. They were off-key, off-beat. They stayed up all night, and so did I because of it. Buddy Rich on my porch. Jelly Roll Morton in my tub. Lady Day across from me at breakfast.

The year before, nothing but bugs: bugs in my bed, bugs in my shoes, bugs in my Rice Chex. But nothing has topped a decade ago when I woke every night with a series of prairie children in bonnets or suspenders squeezing my hand, cold fingers slipping from my clammy ones as they whispered, “Protect your family.”

I guess this year it’s severed heads.

Something about that one on my truck right now seems familiar. Is it the nose? I run down a list of celebrities, imagining each face distorted into a pus-filled mess on top of my truck. No matches. But, still—it’s downright familiar.

Someone calls my name, and my attention turns from the nasty noggin to the origin of the voice. Shit. I’d recognize that cackle anywhere. It’s my landlady, Skinny Lynnie, her shrill nasal tone an accusation in itself.

I keep walking. That’s how much I hate Skinny Lynnie; avoiding her is more urgent than investigating the dead head on my pickup.

The dogs huff. I break into a jog for two blocks. We enter the park, heading to our usual weather-worn bench by the scummy pond. My heart slows. I unclip the dogs’ leashes, and they race to the water.

Daisy swims out as far as she usually does and then does a few dolphin dives while Fat Sam paddles in circles closer to shore. Daisy the Deep-Diver is down there a good long while. Too long. I’m about to get up and go in after her when she breaks the surface. Her teeth clutch a large, sopping sphere.

Both dogs paddle back to shore. Fat Sam paces the waterline, shaking off fish-stinking droplets into a shaft of sunlight, catching an inverted rainbow.

Daisy brings it to me, dropping the gift at my feet with a thunk.

Though now waterlogged and blue, I’d recognize it anywhere: the same gruesome orb from on top of my truck. Pond water leaks from a puncture below the gift’s eye socket, and I lurch. Daisy barks at me, then at the head.

Through the swelling, I take note of the nose and finally place the familiar face: Ross Fucking Perot, Presidential Candidate, 1992.

Fat Sam wanders over and slurps at the dead man’s swollen ear. Ross Perot’s eye snaps open. “Will you stop that?” His wrinkly stare darts to me. “Hey. You. Tell your dog to quit it.”

I call Daisy to my side. Ross Perot’s head sighs in relief, and mechanically starts reciting his script: “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to tell you about my plan for an electronic direct democracy, you see—”

I edge away slowly, whistling for the dogs to follow.

“Hey there,” Ross Perot calls as I walk away. “Let me finish. Let me finish.”

Back at the apartment, I pull out my keys. The dogs whimper at the door. I hear my name and startle. It’s Skinny Lynnie, standing there in her matted bathrobe. She rants about a broken pipe and tenant responsibility. As she turns to leave, she jerks her thumb over her shoulder, and says, “There’s a man in there for you. Says he’s your brother.”

I open the door, and the dogs scurry inside. There on my couch sits Bill Clinton. But not svelte, global ambassador Bill Clinton. This is red-faced, puffy, 1992-Arkansas-Governor Bill Clinton.

“If there’s a theme for the day,” I say, tossing my keys on the dining room table, “then you’re in the wrong place. You’re not dead yet.”

“But I am.” says a voice from under the table.

A fully zombified George H.W. Bush crawls into view. Bill helps him to his feet and brushes dust off the shoulders of his decayed suit.

Then, from behind me: “Ma’am, you didn’t let me finish.” Oh, that wet whine. I roll my eyes, turn, and see Ross Perot’s head held aloft by Skinny Lynnie, who’s wearing a pointy black hat and a witch’s sabbath smile. Smoke billows from her mouth. I breathe in the ghost of electoral politics past.

Bill sidles over, doing his thumbs-up-for-emphasis thing, says in Lynnie’s voice, “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”

Finally, someone making a play for my cicada shell soul.

I’d pictured more build-up. I wanted to be offered butter or a pretty dress, to hedge, pigeon-toe, lash flutter. I wanted to trip through a leafless forest, the sky pinned up by thumbtack stars. A silver moon. The smell of rust on a rattling breeze. A hot belly full of rollercoaster fear.

But what do I get? Politicians.

Bill Clinton flashes a Good & Plenty smile. Daisy pisses on the rug. Skinny Lynnie’s bathrobe gapes. I guess this’ll do.

“Yes, yes. A thousand times yes.”

They hold me to it. George and Ross’s heads roll over to me. Bill rubs his belly, and it’s time. They take me, and I hold the heads in my arms. Bill and Lynnie sing to me. Chant to me. Like I’m the only one.

Holding the heads is heavy work, but to sing and be sung to is more than enough. Tepid water spills onto the floor. Daisy growls. I call her name, but my mouth is full of words I don’t know—

To live deliciously is to take what isn’t yours.

DING! by Will Finlayson

October 28, 2020

The kid must have defected. He’s still lying there in the dirt—red-faced and full-uniformed, one arm in the pig’s water trough, that red insignia hot on his sleeve—and what should they do with him? They point fishing spears and pitchforks and kitchen knives at him. Tie him up in the barn that’s what’s to do, Nema says. Kill him right here and now is what it is to do, says Jenko. It’s that we should turn him in to a judge, Harlem says. Isn’t that the wartime law? So they tell Harlem that he should take the kid to the city, but It’s a long way, Harlem says and they laugh at him and agree that they should just kill the kid themselves.

So they take the kid north of the fields and give him a shovel and tell him to dig. And the kid cries as he digs and digs and they all kind of sit around and watch for a while. And when they realize it’s going to take most of the day they settle in, start a fire and cook sausages. And the sausages are so good they go back to town and Lima slaughters that crippled lamb because she’s been waiting for a reason and they come back with a big pot and steaks and potatoes and boil a boil-everything soup and invite everyone. Gorchak brings bread from his bakery and Jardo has fresh cheese. They even give some to the kid before they make him go back to the hole to keep digging and digging.

Then DING! and the crowd of them look up from over their soup bowls toward the knee-deep hole. DING! DING! They walk over and look down where the kid is digging and look at that. Keep digging, they say. Dig around it, and the kid does. And as the kid scoops dirt away from the metal they can see that it’s a long black cylinder, a fossil, Bera says. No, no, and at the top end of the cylinder a hole, a chimney, Marki says. It can’t be. And as the dirt comes away it gets more and more obvious to the kid the shape of it, the weight of it in the ground, he knows it, the memory of the sound of it, that it’s a cannon, the kid says.

A cannon! oh wow, oh no, what do—how did and where? and who should and how could it? But the kid just keeps digging because this is something, he thinks, and by sunset he gets down to the rotted wood base and then he has the whole long barrel out and a few rusty cannonballs and by the light of lanterns and with every eye peering over his shoulders he steps out of the hole and wipes his forehead. I’ve never seen does it still could it actually? and they look to the kid and the kid hops back down and fiddles with the vent where the fuse would go and smiles a little smile and nods his head sure.

And so they do what the kid says to do, which is to go and bring washcloths and buckets for cleaning the cannonballs. If anyone can find a long pole they could use to clean the bore. Bring a long sample of yarn, a finger of wax, matches, rags and oil, all the gunpowder you’ve got thank you. And as the equipment comes in the kid points out the positions: you stand here and work the thumbstall be careful. You worm the barrel you work the wet sponge, the dry sponge. You’re the Powder Monkey, the Rammer, the Primer, and they fight over who gets what job.

Listen, the kid says crouched down inside a ring of white eyes, the whole crowd of the town standing close around or far away with their hands over a child’s ears or squatting low to the ground or holding a bowl of second or third soup and spilling most of it on their fingers. This is the friction primer, and when I pull it, and everyone nods their heads like of course, sure, and they turn to look out into the dark forest where the metal ball will boom forward just like they imagine how they want it to and blast through a tree, or maybe two trees, and they think of the crater in the earth, the way they’ll step down into it, how deep and how wide. And Ready! the kid says who’s wrapping the pull-string so tight around his fist he could bleed.

X-R-A-Y LITERARY MAGAZINE | COLLECTION II | FALL EDITION

October 27, 2020

click for the PDF, or see the original pieces

TASTINGS by Colin Lubner

October 26, 2020

Nose

So once upon a time this chick gets a job with her boyfriend at a liquor store and two months in he quits after some regular has a seizure and crashes forehead first into a refrigerated shelf of Sierra Nevada.

In the incident’s aftermath she calls the drunk a drunk. Her boyfriend, meanwhile, deems the victim a sort of tragicomic invalid. And while they hadn’t contemplated separation prior to this fight, not once, this divide is by itself enough. He’s a romantic. She doesn’t know who she is.They are different people, he tells her. She agrees.

This is some year in the early aughts and craft beer is not yet a Thing.

She stays at the store. He moves to Nevada (unrelated). She unlearns and relearns terms like nose and head and funk. He texts her ten times a year or so. Mostly late at night. The next morning she always asks how he is but he rarely if ever responds.

When everything happens it does so all at once. Craft beer is massive and she has a nose for marketable notes. She is a manager. She is married to a man who taps kegs.

It is some year in the late teens and she’s in her early thirties when she gets on a Greyhound and goes.

It is winter. She loves the smell of winter. It is a smell she has lost the ability to describe.

Tongue

So once upon a time this kid taps kegs at a brewery named Tastings while during the day he gets his degree in Advertising and Strategic Marketing.

On the night his boss smashes a glass into the nose of some nondescript drunk their most popular drink is a 7.5% Baltic porter. Twice already it’s kicked. The beer’s name is Omega Wolf and on its label anthropomorphic wolves toast glasses across a card-strewn slab of ice-crusted moraine. For reasons the kid has yet to fully understand this is his favorite design.

His boss is a thirty-something woman of whom he has always been unreasonably afraid. That the glass she smashed is half-full of Dank Quixote (a New England IPA, 7.1%) fundamentally alters the irrationality of this fear. Who smashes a half-full glass? Who smashes a glass at all?

He mops up glittering chunks and the sweet-bitter smell of citrus and hops. He’s grateful that the glass only broke upon hitting the floor, that she was denied any implications of abnormality, of inhuman strength, of all-too-womanly instability. He breathes through his nose. He swallows saliva that tastes of chemicals and fermented grains. She tells him she’ll pay him double if he pulls a solo close. She presses a rag to the man’s hemorrhaging nose with dismaying grace.

Yes, he says. How could he not?

Everyone is already gone, but the dregs of their drinks remain. Shuffling along the bar, glugging flat half-glasses of IPAs and DIPAs and Belgians, he catalogs their tastes: lipstick, cigarettes. Forty flavors of bitterness. A chapstick sweetness he associates for some forgotten reason with loss.

He does this in full view of the over-the-bar security camera. He does this with a certain determined despair.

He is stumbling by the time he stumbles, exhausted, into his dorm. By now his tongue’s become an evil leech latched to the roof of his mouth. He brushes his teeth until his wrist is sore.

Throat

So once upon a time this knight goes to Vegas before their hockey-playing Knights are a Thing. For a stretch of years he is variably unhappy. At last he decides to forsake whatever by leaving his home he’d meant to seek. He heads back east.

Near Albuquerque he holes up in a motel and busses into town with the intent of finishing someone else’s half-finished pint. He is so, so fucking broke. He has never been this broke. He is a broken fucking man.

In a brewery named Tastings he finds an abundance. He pays four dollars for a session on special. As he’s reaching for his third Bonus Beer his former girlfriend breaks his nose. He remembers, dimly, an unnamed man stumbling and shattering frosted glass. He gapes.

In the car she listens to music he remembers her hating. Hip-hop, folk pop. Reanimated jazz. He wishes the radio were off. In their lack of silence all potentiality has been zapped. He looks out the window but the sky past the streetlights is a jaundiced black and he can see no stars.

She asks him where he wants her to go and he says he doesn’t know.

By the time they find the motel she is on the phone with someone else. There is a ring on her finger. Earlier there was not. Light from a nearby lamp does not catch on its facets. It is a small, dull thing, easily forgotten. He exits the vehicle.

She finds him stuck outside the door, struggling to unlace his shoes. His nose has again begun to bleed. His throat tastes of copper and oats and other notes he can no longer afford. He has forgotten whether this woman was ever someone to him. He has forgotten if she is now untying or tying his shoes. He decides to say something. He is at a loss for what to say. He clears his throat.

ROADSIDE MELTDOWN AFTER ULTRAPLEX WEEKEND by Rebecca Gransden

October 23, 2020

Loose teeth in the hot tub. Sun on bug splatter eruptions. Bodies pile in dreamy aftermath.

A bearded chubby man is in the summer house, performative human berserker, rewatching footage of a winter streaker. Somewhere inside the main house schoolgirls dance around a fish tank.

Hairy boom licker in a sunlit bedroom, sweating to his parents’ bootleg. Too shy to risk playing his untitled demo, because it’s flammable. Twin motor lips frozen wrongly. Heavy. Smasher. Forever.

Monster spinster reclines on a duck egg blue deckchair and sucks on a bombsicle. Sweetener for evil. The largest prescription sunglasses you’ve ever seen. She’s the only one who vomited, and she led the cheering. Everyone loves her from a distance, she’s the queen.

Cults hang out at the end of the garden, burning plastic masks on a portable barbecue grill. Their pity party becomes a panic picnic. Water pistols filled with cough syrup spray green over string vests.

The runner is punished for his monohole, poked ribs with rolled up magazines, his face the cover star. He was famous until he felt. He sits on a broken rocking horse beside a fence, looking defeated in a Hawaiian shirt. A coughing fit sees a sticky tooth sprint from his grinning mouth.

A few try-hard students take the ultimate trip to sunburn and feel the drip jam. Gangs are carrying boxes. Bottomless helium damage. Extra bubbles cast shadows over the bare skin of a sleeping minx. The host moves across carpet like he’s got worms and writes acne angst in stardust. Algae on the taps. His milky heart bursts apart and all his yesterdays end up yours.

We spraypaint the road on our way out. The sun sets and a dark glow descends. The girls compare all the times their boyfriends have tried to smother them. Kim wins.

The late evening air stinks of petrol and smoke, like someone is burning the last flowers on the planet. It’s difficult not to sing when walking the road and waiting for a ride.

There’s always someone who claims they can remember before they were born. Imagine the pulse and the seed, unreleased.

Roadside under the moody gloom of darkening equinox skies.

Warm, eating melted Starburst in the beautiful night. Standing over a decaying python.

NO TAKE BACKS by Nikki Volpicelli

October 21, 2020

The phone calls and it makes me anxious. I mean the phone rings, a person calls. It’s been so long, I forget what to do.

“Britt, you there?”

I hang up. Princess. Who else? She’s the only one who still remembers the landline to my dad’s house. Her dad’s house. Ours. Was. Past-tense. She calls back immediately, and this time I know better than to answer just because it rings.

I haven’t talked to my sister in 10 years and I don’t plan on starting now. It’s not sibling rivalry, not just two girls fighting over a boy. Sure, back in high school, he was popular, but he used it to his advantage. He was a blonde-haired Wile E. Coyote, preying on innocent girls with late-night texts like your fun ;)︎. He had good breath because he was always chewing Winterfresh gum. That shouldn’t have been important, but most County boys’ mouths were either full of stringy tobacco or rotting teeth, or both. He had a smile that spread into dimples and up to his teal eyes. But he was Wile E. Coyote—an idiotic predator. That part she’ll never admit because she married him. I saw the picture she posted from outside the courthouse. Just the two of them and that piece of paper got 104 likes. Then they had the twins—Annabelle and Johanna—blonde, like him.

Today I barely recognize him in the photos she posts—the hard hat, belly, beard, lunch box. So much has changed, down to the stretched-out Fighting Irish tattoo on his left rib, but one thing hasn’t. I still fucking hate him.

***

The gum was to cover up the smell of the whiskey he kept in the bed of his cherry-red beater truck. The truck had only one bumper sticker: Bush / Cheney ‘04. It was 2005, and he was the only guy in high school old enough to vote. I saw it that morning as he pulled out of the driveway, right after he kissed me on the cheek. I stood there alone, still dizzy, looking down at my phone. One text, 12:41 am, unread: You awake ;)︎?

My brain felt full of liquor and void of everything else. Questions caught in my throat, anger rose like heat. I let it all out right there in the gravel, bright orange bile mixed with snot. I didn’t even have the energy to cover it with dust.

Sometimes I wonder if it was just a game and eventually, he got tired and picked some girl to marry. Then I remember, she’s not just some girl. My sister pursued him, despite or because of what I told her: It was a party, we were drinking a lot. I went upstairs to go to bed, alone, and I know I locked the door.

I made her pinky swear not to tell our dad; he had single-father venom, he could kill. Then I told her everything—the farmhouse attic, its walls that bent to a peak, the wicker chair in the corner, the morning light slicing the sheets. That shitty tattoo, his chest, less tight than it looked with clothes on. It was something out of a prairie home horror film.

Fifteen years have passed and I can still picture her sitting there, eyes wide, taking it all in. I thought she’d say let’s go get the guy, slash his tires, something sisterly.

Instead, she asked, “But if you locked the door, how’d he get in?”

***

When we were young, Princess would take my favorite toys and if I wouldn’t part with one, she’d call it stupid. Nobody wants that thing, anyway. She’d leave me in the living room with my doll and the dog, sunning his belly in front of the sliding glass doors. That’s where I’d play, petting his warm fur with American Girl Molly’s plastic hand, pretending I couldn’t hear her giggling in our bedroom. “We’re having so much fun in here!” she’d say through the shut door, but I knew she was sitting in there alone, seething. I guess I never really trusted her, either.

***

The house is in dad’s name, so I don’t own it, but I’ve lived in it, peacefully, quietly, alone, for the last decade since he died and she left. Back when he got sick, Princess spent every night at Sportsters bar from happy hour to close while I sat with him for what seemed like all of 2010, Christmas to Christmas, changing his sheets and underwear, spraying Febreeze all over his death bedroom. I’d sleep on the couch so I could hear every cough and labored breath.

It was quiet that night, until 4 a.m., when the sliding doors opened and shut. I heard her sneaking around, whispering. I knew she wasn’t alone, I could smell the gum. Night after night, the sting of peppermint would wake me like a bad dream until she finally bullied him into moving in together. I watched from the window as he lifted her boxes into the bed of his truck—that same truck, with dents all over. When they left, I locked the door and checked it five times.

***

Ring, Ring, Ring. She’s not calling for me, she’s calling for the house. She’s wanted it for herself ever since they moved into that cramped apartment in town. Now she’s got the husband, the twins, the money—and what do I have, other than a dead man’s barely-verbal blessing? It’s my fault, I should’ve gotten rid of the landline. Dead people don’t need landlines.

House hunting is what she called it on Facebook, after announcing his promotion. As soon as I saw it I knew there was only one house she was hunting for: mine.

Well, I’m not going anywhere. Just to my bedroom, where it's quiet. I turn the doorknob right to left to right to left to right, the only way to know for sure. I’m safe in my teenage tomb with Abercrombie bags taped to the walls, my nightlight, and a handle of vodka under the bed. Tonight I’ll drink it gone, first to wash down 4 milligrams of Alprazolam, then to keep me company as I scroll through Instagram and wait for sleep. I see baby blankets with numbers on them. I see two white wine glasses and an orange sunset. I see all the happy couples I haven’t spoken to since high school. I see an ad for a true crime game: Discover the evidence, collect the clues, solve the crime. What a stupid game. In real life, you can lay it all out on the table and still, no one will believe you. I take one more pill and go to sleep.

In my dream, we’re five, six years old, and Princess opens the door, tells me to come in and play. She says the game is hair trade—a real sister act. Ours is the same mousy-brown, but she wants mine anyway. She says the only way to do it is to tear right from the root, one giant tug, just like ripping off a bandage. Once I do this, there’s no going back.

On top of my head are a bazillion strands of hair, each plugging some quiet open mouth on my scalp, begging me to say no. It’s my choice, but it never felt that way. I pull on my ponytail until my head is howling angry, until I can’t think, I can only see her in front of me, pulling hers—a skeptic’s eyes under those thick lashes, making sure I’m pulling as hard as she is. I see that bratty smile crawl up her cheeks and I pull until I can’t see anymore.

There’s a knock at the door, somewhere between one room and the other, a world away, and then, a scream: her scream. She’s screaming; it’s working. I ignore it. I’m too busy playing the game, a game I’ve finally won.

SMACK by Chella Courington

October 19, 2020

Meet me @ Aquarium, he texted. By jellyfish, 7. She would perhaps, most likely, but not before researching jellyfish, for she knew his habits, the way he liked to make it impossible for her to say no wherever they were.

Adults spawned daily if given enough food, and for most, spawning was triggered by dim light so the entire population bred every day at dawn or dusk, floating through water, dropping eggs and sperm, tentacles (though she preferred tendrils) never touching. While most men she’d known like to roll against her in the morning, he was a night creature. Fortunately, for him, she was not bound by time.

In a few species, the sperm swam into the female’s mouth to fertilize the eggs. She knew he knew she liked him between her teeth and indulged her in a way most men would not. At sixteen her lips took over in the backseat of a baby blue Trans Am, and they quivered for days.

She could never open her mouth without thinking of possibility.

FRIDGE by Xueyi Zhou

October 16, 2020

Say you just move into a new apartment. A freshly finished apartment with a lingering smell of paint. The apartment is not big but it’s your own, and that’s something. You work hard for it, wall by wall, for a tiny cell in a honeycomb. However, a bare box with only a man inside seems more like a lock-up than a lodging, which means now you need appliances. Your choices are limited by the small space and your thin wallet. But you decide to treat yourself, to get something nice. To make it cozier, more like home. You are torn between an air-conditioner and a fridge. An air-conditioner is important, especially when you are settling in a hot city. It’s unbearable most days, with the biting heat and the biting mosquitoes. However, a fridge sounds like money better spent. You grew up with a constant hunger and it pains you to see food go bad and get thrown into the bin. Also, you can take advantage of the AC late in the office after your boss leaves, since he never pays for overtime and hasn’t spotted anything wrong with the utility bill. The transaction is fair so long as you don’t press your lucky temperature too low.

You know what? Make it the fridge.

Now you’ve decided to buy a fridge as your first home appliance. That’s a big step. You need to choose carefully which fridge to bring home. Cheap fridges suck out more electricity and break down frequently. Besides, you don’t like the look of them. They are too tacky, with poorly-lined flower patterns pretending to be luxurious. The Japanese one looks inviting. Much more attractive, actually. Almost too perfect, too out-of-reach. You roam around the mall collecting sidelong looks and silent contempt from the saleswomen, still empty-handed. Then you see a bright white fridge at the corner tagged “on sale.” The price is marked way down due to a small scratch at the front door. You inspect its label to find that it was made in Germany. The suspicious low price now makes sense. You know how the Germans are. They take things very seriously. The fridge works well and you have a secret fondness for German products, for their reliability, even though you have never been to Germany, nor have you ever met a German. You take out your credit card and swipe away your next month’s salary and bring the fridge home. Back-breaking inconvenience for an extra saving of delivery fee makes it a sweeter deal.

You carefully place the fridge in the kitchen, the center piece of the puzzle. Your sweat forms a little mirror on the floor and you smell worse than the paint, but you don’t care. The fridge looks beautiful, even with the scratch. In fact, the scratch is what brings life to it, like a painting by Fontana, breaking the line between dream and reality. A cut from which life pours in and flushes out possibilities. The fridge fills the apartment and life fills you. You feel like you are not alone, a new feeling after your mother died. The fridge is freezing inside, but its surface is warm. You touch the scratch gently as if touching a wrinkle on someone’s face. The scratch is the only reason you can afford a nice German fridge.

Next you visit the supermarket. You spend rather generously, taking all quality food to the cashier without hesitation. A packet of Japanese noodles, a jar of Australian jam, and, of course, a bottle of Parisian water. They are not cheap but it’s OK, take a breath and loosen up a bit. You are holding the basket handle too tight as if those things could escape. You feel like you and your fridge deserve them. You two deserve something good once in a while. Don’t run away. You are allowed to have them. The girl at the cashier asks you whether you would like to have a free magnet. “Sign up for our membership and the magnet is yours. You can save 2% with every purchase.” You mumble to yourself what a rich-people’s scam, and you will not set foot in this pretentious supermarket again, but the magnet grips you at first glance. You recognize that it is the Golden Gate Bridge. Plus, what’s the point of buying a fridge without dressing it up with a magnet? You surrender your credit card and swipe again, carefully pocket the magnet and out you go on the road, with a bag of heavier debts.

You enter your apartment and open the fridge. It has the new fridge smell, somewhat similar to what you remember smelling in the hospital. A smell of nothing-ness, dominant by its absence, a smell you will never forget. You put all the countries into the fridge: Japan, Australia, France. All the countries you and your mother have never been to. Now they are all inside your new fridge. Oh, don’t forget, there’s one more: USA. You stick the magnet onto the front door, not to cover the scratch but to decorate it, and to be decorated. But wait, no, something is off. Right! You turn your wallet inside out and insert a tiny photo between the fridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s a very tiny photo, taken a long time ago. The cheap ink keeps fading but you can still see the woman’s face, though faint, much prettier than the face you saw at the funeral. Suddenly you notice the fridge is as rectangular as a coffin. No matter where you are from—Japan, Australia, France, USA—eventually you end up inside a rectangular ice box. You are at lost for a moment until the warmth emitted by the fridge pulls you back. Everything has been improving, you think. You even have a nice German-made fridge now, with all the fancy countries in it. You stroke the scratch again and say thank you, and get ready to leave for work again. Before you go you take a reluctant final look, at the bright new fridge with a scratch, a Golden Gate Bridge and your mother and a world inside it. You look closer into the silhouette in the photo. The cheap ink is fading and the black is no longer black. It fades into a Chinese red, a color that reminds you of blood and good omens.

MALE ENDURANCES by Nora MacLeod

October 14, 2020

My college friend asked me out for drinks and named a bar equidistant to our offices and apartments. The last time I went there a dentist had hit on me with his Argentinian friend who claimed he worked for the CIA. The time before that I’d fainted on the sidewalk during a first date, it was the best date of my life. Arriving at the bar, I felt as though I was returning to the dumping ground of a dead body, coming back to touch his hair and maybe sit on his rotting face.

In a dream I felt I knew he was the one because he presented to me a pair of beautiful pink shoes and then proceeded to eat them—peeling them apart like sliced lox, wetting his face.

Men are always asking me if I’ve just made a sound.

I know a relationship is over when I am lent books.

He had raped his ex-fiancé and that wasn’t even a deal breaker on the first date, or the fourteenth.

I watched the men fighting on the screen and then the faces of the spectators beside me, all betraying a humorous indifference. And my date, I couldn’t look at him. Goosebumps came in waves and I shuddered, realizing that tonight he would beat the shit out of me in bed.

I said, I don’t know how to feel, I am a cold corpse. She said, Try acupuncture.

Somebody using Foley’s photo on a dating app—or it looks just like him, or I can’t tell—so I reverse Google-image-search the photo and swipe right and pray for a miracle.

Two men who know each other have said the same strange thing to me in bed, but I will not repeat it here.

By the time I got out of the shower he had prepared himself breakfast and was bent over his laptop. He felt safe in there, like a small, dirty, white dog, loved too much by someone, constantly at risk of rupturing and spilling his guts everywhere. Himself, neither filthy nor unhealthy, but his mind, his character, threatening uncanny flaccid explosion.

I’m annoyed when men I date or sleep with tell me that I have a cruel undertone or that I seem annoyed with everything they say or do. But I am truly disturbed to hear from a man that I am seeing now that I am kind, too kind and understanding, confirming my own worst fears and beliefs.

There is a kind of truth: I can tell a man that domestic violence spikes on the day of the Super Bowl and they nod and say, Oh. It does not matter if this is factually true because it is another kind of truth, one that is substantiated by the man’s reluctance to be moved.

He had escaped his head—it was an optimistic meditation on rebirth. I’m not so concerned with his head, but when it does enter my mind it is peeking out from between my legs dripping in more ways than one.

You know what is triter than a dream? Saying that dreams are uninteresting. I swear to god if you don’t take your hand off of your dick I am going to cut it off.

It isn’t about war—it’s about exhuming a dead man’s dick.

If you knock on anything long enough, it will become a door. I was specifically not expecting you.

I like not having a steady boyfriend because it means I have to carry less in my purse.

Manufacturing faith, manufacturing emotions. The best time to break someone is during the Christmas season.

He didn’t even come that night; I think he was high on cocaine. I didn’t mention to him that I’d had unprotected sex with three strange men earlier that month.

This was it. I’d been in the city long enough to be sitting in this bar with some guy, who loved this bar, the same bar where I met my ex years ago. The same restaurants, same haunts, all these guys liked the same drinks. And before my ex, I’d played pool in the back room with another ex, all three of these guys would grope me in the dark corners and pay for everything with cash.

I clutched my overly full stomach and let it come out in my skirt. I could appear believably three months pregnant.

At first I’d squinted to avoid the gory photos, but once the heat passed through my face I looked more closely at the series of tightly cropped video stills. While still alive, the face he assumed was disgusted—what other expression was there to have?

And the blade was so small. Not at all what I’d imagined. I thought a ‘beheading’ required a guillotine, a machete. That knife could have made it through TSA. He didn’t look like himself with his head shaved and his body in the wrong place.

In high school I published poems about the death of my brother. My favorite brother, my parents’ favorite. He called my mother from Iraq and she would cry for hours after their brief lovely talks. He never asked to speak with me and I was never mentioned. I’m so glad that my mother never took an interest in anything I did. If she had, the shitty poems would have tested our relationship.

I heard my brother’s voice as I remember it from the 9-1-1 calls on a news report that I’d watched online after a short ad for Sea World.

His shaved head looked filthy and the stuff came off on the palms of my hands. I asked, Do you want me to sit you up in the car? Do you want me to get someone? No words came to him. So I propped him up against his own rear wheel and went on.

A dead man’s doppelganger becomes undone by the hole in his pocket disappearing.

Looking at cell phone shame videos online of "Pervs Jerking-Off on the Subway."

I told him I’d had a miscarriage. I didn’t say it was his, but I didn’t say it wasn’t. His horror more so reflected his fear of me than his pity. That I would have been pregnant, that I would have carried a child long enough to call what had happened a miscarriage, that’s what stole his color. He would never think to cross me again, to even talk about this with another single person. I’d stolen something from him and without consequence. In truth I’d never been pregnant in my life. And this moment amounted to a belief that it was impossible to become pregnant.

Before I could catch my breath he turned out the bedside lamp. He grasped me and began speaking with a tone that I’d never experienced before. His voice was round and his heavy arms held me to make the sounds travel all the way through me. He said, When I was in college my sister died. She moved south with her boyfriend because he was in the Army and he strangled her. That night I slept more deeply than I had in recent memory.

He took out a drawstring bag. You don't want to know what's in here, he said. I wasn’t frightened. I wasn’t anything. I couldn't think or rather was resigned not to think. Then I looked, I focused on him, his arms. The way he held the bag away from his body, up at his eye level, was like he was greeting a baby.

I went downtown, down to my favorite neighborhood for shopping. I told myself that I had errands but really I was looking to indulge in a dress that I imagined I’d wear to the funeral of the man I was sleeping with. When I got out of the subway I checked my phone for the time and saw that he had texted me a vague message potentially threatening suicide. I doubt my pulse quickened because this had happened before.

There is nothing defining men from one another until one is severed from himself. I want you to carve out of me all the good stuff.

Then he sent me a picture of his erect penis looking dry and unappetizing in the flash. On it he had written my name with a black gel ballpoint, which was funny because my name means pool of sorrow. And I could imagine mere moments later that he’d produce from his own pen a splashy pool of sorrow, disappearing ink.

I printed out hundreds of copies of that photo on pre-addressed, stamped postcards and put one in every copy of his new book that I could find in lower Manhattan.

Do you remember when we were friends, I’m not sure we ever were.

The drink has an entire sprig of rosemary in it. Laughing, I say, I have no sense of humor about this. Laughing, my college friend recounts her break up.

“Do not fuck with a world sensation.”