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ALTO by Kathryn M. Barber

October 12, 2020

We’ve spent this summer in your house, the one that belongs to your father, the one that’s brimming to the top with a hundred thousand ghosts. Memories haunt this house: your parents, still together; your brother, asleep down the hall; your college girlfriend, alive, her laugh echoing across the staircase. We sleep beneath a framed photograph of that girl you loved so much, the one whose car went off that bridge we drive across every day. She’s the only thing that reminds me you’re capable of love, that it can even exist inside you. The way you grieve her is the last living thing that makes me not afraid of you—and I am, I’m so afraid of you: I was afraid that night on the pier, that night out on the highway, every time your hand reaches for that handgun beside the bed. I’m afraid of the way you laugh when I’m angry.

The only time I’m not afraid of you is when you play the piano. Your fingers trace those keys you know by memory, and I worship the sound that comes out of it, bathe in it, roll it over on my tongue and suck it in and out through my teeth. It suffocates me, and I hold my breath. As long as that music is moving through you, you’re something else, someone else, somewhere else.

I quit playing piano when I was fifteen, when I could still hear the notes of “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” coming from the piano in my parents’ old house, the one we lugged all the way from my grandmother’s house in Mississippi. My aunt would come from Richmond, and her fingers were the same as those ivory keys; she had grown up inside that Yamaha. You quit and you’ll regret it the rest of your whole life my mama said, and I didn’t believe her then but I do now, because I understand now that somehow, if I could still play, I wouldn’t be here sitting, listening to you. If I could make the sounds you’re making right now, I’d be long gone. If I could remember the notes written inside your hands, in your every vein, if I could remember how to be on my own, I wouldn’t need you.

I had four piano teachers, kept starting over time and time again. The first one, Mrs. H, taught violin and piano, and while I was waiting for my turn, I’d sit out in the horse stalls with her daughter, my best friend, and we’d brush the horses’ manes, braid their tails, shovel out the barn until her mama had to come outside and get me. We were eight and her parents’ house was on the state line, and because her parents’ bedroom fell on the Tennessee side, it was long distance for me to call her fifteen minutes down the road on the Virginia side. We only got to see each other at church on Sundays, when we’d share a Frostie root beer from the drink machine in the hallway, and it would taste sour in our mouths after Mr. Bowling gave us pieces of Big Red chewing gum on the way into the sanctuary. Her mama was my favorite until her daddy convinced the deacons to convince my daddy to resign his church and start over somewhere else.

There were two more piano teachers in between that first one and the last one, between missing shoveling those horse stalls with my favorite friend and the one who taught me I didn’t need notes to play music.

The last one was my ninth grade English teacher, Mrs Rodeheaver. She was Pentecostal and she told me she could teach me to play by ear and I didn’t believe her. She said we didn’t need to read music when we could feel it—said she could teach me to feel music in way it that my ears would hear it and my fingers would know how to play it , that all those years struggling to read music wouldn’t matter anymore, that I wouldn’t need those mnemonic devices Mrs. H taught me to remember which keys were which letters.

I didn’t mean to quit. I was just taking a break during tennis season; the practices kept conflicting. I didn’t mean to never resume those lessons in that Pentecostal church sanctuary at the bottom of the hill. I didn’t know then it was my last lesson. I can feel music now harder than I ever could back then, but I can’t remember how to make it come out of my fingers, can’t remember which ones go where and which ones make which sounds, can’t connect my heart to my head to my hands like she taught me to. That last day, we were standing by the piano, and Mrs. Rodeheaver was telling me to sing louder, sing louder, and my weak airy soprano voice squeaked and faltered. I couldn’t make the notes come out right. I could feel them, could feel them in every centimeter of me, couldn’t make them come out loud, strong.

Louder, she said.

I sang the note louder.

No, she said. Louder. From your diaphragm. From deep down inside of you. From the deepest parts of you.

I sang the note again.

Louder, she said. I want you to break these stained glass windows.

So I did, I did, louder, louder, louder. She kept making me sing that same damn note until we could both feel my voice coming back off those church pews. Until I felt like the secondary version of my own note could’ve knocked me over.

You’re not a soprano, she told me, grinning. You’re an alto.

I asked her why she didn’t just tell me that the first week we started, months ago. She smiled, made me keep singing those notes over and over until I found the strength of my voice, understood. She never really answered me, but she didn’t have to, I knew then what I know now: that sometimes you have to sing the wrong note over and over again until it comes out the right way and then you know things your brain could never have known because the music told you. Because the music told you. Some things you can’t know until the music tells you.

You’ve never heard me sing, never seen me inside any song except yours: the way I swing my body when your fingers glide across the piano I can’t remember how to play. Every song we listen to, every track we play, belongs to you,. None of it is mine. You don’t know anything of the basement I was lying in the night I fell in love with Deana Carter or the back porch where only Garth Brooks held me or the lined shuffles of my boots across that beer-sticky dance floor just off I-75. You’ve never heard my voice echo across a church sanctuary.

And you won’t hear the breath I’ll let out as I turn up my radio and drive away from your house for the last time. You won’t hear the songs I’ll sing a few weeks from now under North Carolina skies as I let you go—no, not you, the hope of you, what you could’ve been. What I hoped you were. You won’t be able to name the piano medleys in the songs that carry me to sleep. You’ll never know the ballads that fortify my bones, deteriorate my fear of you. You’ll never see the record player by the window, the screen that separates the porch swing from stacks of country records that remind me I am free I am free I am free.

For now, for tonight, you’ll keep playing the piano, and I’ll keep suffocating in you, and I’ll keep singing soprano. Tomorrow, tomorrow, I’ll hear Mrs. Rodeheaver saying you’re an alto you’re an alto you’re an alto and I’ll sing that note over and over again until I remember who I was before you.

QUEER VISIBILITY by Brooke Kolcow

October 9, 2020

I disappear in large groups.

-John Elizabeth Stintzi, circa 2014

I know it’s starting when my legs begin to prickle like they’ve fallen asleep. They fade away and no one notices. My arms go next, numb from my fingers up to my shoulders. The beer I’ve been drinking falls to the floor and I wince. The bottle bounces once and rolls across the kitchen linoleum. Without legs, I can’t bend down and without hands, I can’t pick it up, but at least this time it doesn’t shatter.

Once, at a Halloween party in grad school, my cocktail glass broke when it fell and one of the poets sliced open her heel on a shard. She started screaming, someone noticed the blood, and someone else shut off the music. By the time a fellow essayist thought to turn up the lights all of me had vanished except for my shame. I later heard that the poet needed five stitches but she never learned my name.

My butt is always the easiest to go; I barely have a butt, though you wouldn’t know that from the way it shimmies into oblivion. Next, my clothes and skin go together into the vast unknown and I become glistening, raw guts and ticking heart; my central nervous system crackles against the air. No one recoils. Someone shuffles nearly through me on their way to the fridge and they don’t murmur sorry or look back. No one asks if I’m okay or if I need another beer.

Once, at a reading in my early twenties, someone did ask. If I needed another beer, I mean. A butch with rolled sleeves and a crushed pack of cigarettes sticking out of her breast pocket. She was holding premeditated beers and she squinted down the length of the space between her lips and my part-disappeared self and said, “I can hold it up for you.” Imagine what it’s like to ride on the back of a motorcycle without any arms or legs, with just a cheap belt keeping you from knowing what thanks prayer the crows recite before they eat. Imagine learning that the name of god is written in a language you can decipher through taste.

The remnants of my torso vanish all at once with a soft splosh, which no one else hears over their chatter and the clunk of beers on wood and the inoffensive acoustic playlist. A laugh peals through the exposed-brick apartment as my tongue wriggles and my eyes roll but then the laughter cuts off suddenly along with every other sound. My ears have gone. I open my mouth, help, but my tongue has already exited the building. My teeth click clack, dancing my skull into absence.

It has always been this way but it isn’t always this way. Sometimes I make it through an entire event and I’m in the pictures the next morning, my smile a tight clamp as though I’ve trapped my presence in my mouth and if I smile any bigger the hereness of me will escape through the gap between my front teeth.

No one at the party turns. They are too busy not noticing me. My wet eyeballs swing through the air, looking for someone, anyone to see them seeing everyone. Too late. The left one goes first, just closes in on itself. I am down to a disembodied wink and the passing thought that I should stop throwing parties. Then, nothing. Darkness.

I’ve never minded being invisible. But I don’t know how much longer I can stand to be nothing.

CONDEMNED by C. Cimmone

October 7, 2020

My mother smoked her favorite cigarettes in the kitchen. Smoke billowed out into the living room and crept down the halls. A small television muffled the evening news as the three of us chewed away at overdone meat. Splatters of hot bacon grease slid down our throats as my father hurried through tough threads of roast. He ran the tractor after supper; and my mother splashed hot water around in the sink as she yelled at me for not finishing the black-eyed peas. “Black eyed peas are good luck,” she’d belt.

Holiday evenings were much the same. “Too much sage is good for the gut,” she’d remind us, as she broke cornbread into a large dish. She made one dish without turkey for my father. She made a second dish for him to carry to work. She made a third dish for the rest of us. My brothers leaned against my mother’s kitchen cabinets, laughing at stories she let out in little slivers. Her hands shook with an audience, but my brothers’ wives smoked cigarettes in the kitchen, too, and she was happy to hand them her lighter across the dining table.

Sometimes, when the kitchen offered German Chocolate cake, my mother pulled out a foggy plastic bag filled with red dominoes. My aunt Rita laughed at my mother’s stories and my father shuffled the red chunks as loud as he could. The white dots banged into each other as my mother grinned, lighting another cigarette and shaking her head at my father. My father grinned at my aunt Rita and for a moment, we were glad my mother was not mixing or wiping.

When the kitchen was empty, calls would come in. My mother pulled the long, curly line across the kitchen floor. The line tapped the linoleum tiles as she rested in her kitchen chair. The crisp cellophane crinkle of cigarettes held until she announced, “Dorothy has died.” My father and I watched the television in silence on these evenings of grief; and the kitchen gears paused.

After years of the kitchen exhausting itself between moppings and meals, crying children and daily newspapers, my mother’s bones stuck here and there. Her fingers cracked like eggshells and her eyes served as measuring spoons. She crept down the hall and curled herself into a bed, hidden away in the back bedroom. Her kitchen chair sat empty as black tar spilled like burnt grease down my mother’s face.

With no oil, the kitchen gears began to rust. The linoleum on the floor began to peel up at the edges and the oven hinges refused to do anything but screech. The dining room table began to collect crumbs along its midline and the closed cabinets held their breath of cigarette smoke. The lights from the ceiling began to sag, long screws pulling heavily from the sheetrock. Everything in the kitchen sagged. Everything moaned.

My father sat alone with his grief. The living room chugged along with his vanilla wafers and tiny wrenches. He took the phone from the wall, wound its long cord around the base and the receiver, and placed it in the hallway closet. He took his meals at the coffee table, as the refrigerator--now empty--hummed in place of the kitchen’s small television. The sink tarnished near the drains, but still overlooked the window as, “having a window over your kitchen sink is good luck.”

The roaches crept in as the lights began to flicker out of life and a rat made his home in the bottom of the oven. Pale acidic powder grew from behind the hands of the clock and the kitchen counters began to rot out small crevices for new life to sneak in with sticky legs. Like a dying branch, the kitchen darkened and calloused. The remaining pieces of the house were still green and growing, as the kitchen bore a hole right through its center.

“FLYING” by Michael Seymour Blake

October 4, 2020

…

THE EXPLODING TREE by Kevin Richard White

October 2, 2020

She’s feeding you remains of her meal. Like you’re some animal child.

There’s a tattoo of an exploding tree on her back and right shoulder blade: black ink like paint splatter on her smooth skin, roots pulled up, snapped branches, drifting leaves that become new birds. Hair covers it, but not often.

One day, you woke up, and it was there. You were angry about it at first, but then you realized you had a lot in common with that tree: You both couldn’t move and had nowhere to go fast.

You open your mouth. You want more of the dry chicken she has cooked, but she has thrown it away. You beg to suck on at least a bone, but she whispers, “No.” She takes you out of your chair and lays you down on your belly. You’re a fish again, one of your favorite playtime activities.

After she got the tattoo, you watched from the bed as she cleaned it, kept it moisturized, watched the pitch blackness brighten her skin. You wish you had hands to help her, or at least trace it, make a shape of it to keep. But you watch. And shake. How can something so artistic be out of your grasp. She continues to smooth her skin and you want to scream.

You’re a man of broken parts. She’s your mechanic. Somewhere, along the line, the manual will be written to make you a new human being again. It could take days or years, but she has promised you, in soft voices, that you’ll have hands again. That you’ll have it all back. But you think and never tell her that you’re past the warranty date.

On your belly, you imagine you’re a guppy, cascading through dark warm water. She rubs your back and shoulders, trying to get knots out. Perhaps she is trying to give you a tree tattoo of your own, you think. You try to say this, but fish don’t talk, and so you just continue to think you’re swimming until she’s done.

She could have left a long time ago, you told her once. There’s no need to take care of me like this. But she smiled. And in response, she whispered, “Well then, who would take care of me?”

After you’re done being a fish, she goes to get you ready for bed. Pajamas on, teeth brushed, and sets up the laptop for you to use. She puts the mouth operated mouse in and you’re good to watch movies for as long as you want. She goes to get ready herself for her job. You watch her undress. The tree is there, shining. She puts on her black dress and bracelets and brushes her hair. She leaves the tree visible this time, usually covering it up. That’s when you can’t take it anymore. You spit out the mouse.

“Don’t let anyone touch that tonight,” you say.

She spins around, still brushing. “Touch what?”

“Your tattoo.”

She smiles. “You’re a silly boy.”

“I’m serious. It’s yours. Don’t let anyone touch it.”

“It’s yours, too, baby.”

She comes over and kisses you. The smell leaves you breathless. Your mechanic. The one who feeds you. The one with perfect hands that are replacing yours.

She puts the mouse back in so you can operate the computer again. Before she leaves for the night, she kisses you one more time and wants you to sleep well. She’ll be back later, she says. The door shuts. You’re still hungry but have to wait.

After some time, you fall asleep, thinking you’re still a guppy. Back through rivers and past sharks, you’re going towards some kind of light. When you get there, it’s a small island, white sand, shells and crabs. But there’s one tree. A large black one that reaches to the ceiling of the sky. Suddenly, you’re an animal, climbing up. You get to the top. Leaves drift and become birds. You want to do it as well. The tree gets blacker against the blue sky, and you reach a claw out, breathing hard, wishing it becomes a wing. They all continue to softly drift up and over the water, and as you pray to fly, you hear an explosion from under you, bomb-like. Something lifts. You fly, but not well.

TRIPTYCH OF FALLING STARS by Wayland Tracy

September 30, 2020

Every night I hear the screams of myself far away. I beg for help but I will not help. In a ditch by the tracks, full of golf balls and bones of careless creatures. White quartz set in circles. I lie down and I am falling. Can’t find the earth. The noises of town rattle like deathbed confessions. Trains hurtle past. The stars encroach. We once had lights that prolonged days. I scrounge for bones with meat clinging on. I once had a table. Pictures of people stuffed into cracked walls, maps that do not help me. No children anymore. Hawks fly full-on head first into trees. Cats and dogs are buried, dug up. Men scream and tear at their own bodies. Become puddles in the streets. My dreams pound my head in continuum of the day. Day pours out of night. A single gunshot every hour. I know what berries will kill me. I’ve buried strangers but I do not kiss them anymore. I howl on my back. Coyotes smell my piss and hope I don’t get up. I found my mother with a meteorite lodged in her heart. My father runs north following the deer. I pick up a golf ball and throw it into the sky. Rabbits cry in their dens. The man who counts crawls into my ditch. The golf ball becomes a star. I poisoned a woman at my table. I beat a dog. I cut the leg off a boy and threw it in the river two days later. Please believe me. The star falls, then the rest.

Through the fields and hills, far away, I follow the deer. I carry a rifle and one bullet. They know my purpose. I eat the grasses and berries they eat. I drink from the streams they drink. I shout at wolves. I carve faces. I follow the descent of owls, the little screams, circling vultures. Lights of unnatural color move among the stars. I write to my wife and son. Letters placed in the hollows of trees and under rocks. A gray man followed me for three days. He scared the deer. A fawn nuzzles my head. I hold it and weep. I cut its side to remember. I eat mushrooms glowing at night. I sleep while I walk. The head of a buck seared to a meteorite. I pray. I burn my clothes. Snow sticks to my skin. Wolves seduce the fawn. The gray man returns. He speaks through the steaming stones, words of my voice, a mirror of ice, one man drowning. The deer wait for me. I beg them forward. I point my gun and the gray man charges.

I long to be the woman of the candlelit painting, floating in a river. All my blankets are gone. I scrape mold from cheese. I wear curtains, sit in corners. A boy climbed to my roof and has not come down. My neighbor tells me she intends to go to the moon without her husband. I never trusted her. Never open the door. I wave a revolver at a mouse. It was my husband’s. Coyotes sit on my porch every night, scratching the door, shaking the handle. I tell them about my day. I chew on salted wood. My father plays me his harp. He sits in the tree outside the kitchen window every morning. I knew it to be him right away by his smile. Such a smile you don’t see anymore. I cannot bear the noises. I tie rags around my ears. I hum till my throat is sore. The coyotes leave when the census man comes. I show my gun through the window. My father shows me the place I must sit when it is time. I watch my neighbor kneel on the tracks. The census man slips papers under the door. I burn them. I know of a place where the floors aren’t cold, where I might see my family again. I whisper into black holes, to mice no longer gathering my hair. Scurry now, friends. I confess. I sing in the fire of paintings, the clouds of heaven. The shrieking sky opens.

NORA LIVES IN PIECES by Mason Parker

September 28, 2020

Everything crashed into its true form following the blackout in New Orleans when Nora missed her flight and we drove to Little Rock, buzzing as trashy manic fairies. The Ozarks flopped and rolled, redefining themselves every few miles. Nora had proposed to me after pissing on the fence of an electrical transfer station somewhere outside of Austin where the grass grew through the chain link. I laughed at her, and she said, “I’m fucking serious, mate.”

“You wouldn’t want to marry me, Nora.”

“Fuck man, I love America. We could get dual citizenship.”

“It wouldn’t be worth it. I’m a difficult person.”

We forgot about it driving all the way to the bayou after picking up three Adderall from a Phish fan off 6th street. We made it to Lake Charles, but I couldn’t keep my eyes open. When I laid down, I couldn’t sleep. The next morning, I-10 was closed, and we didn’t get to New Orleans until dark. It smelled wet, and Nora’s eyes swallowed everything around her.

In those years, when we were bumping up against each other, it never registered how the interactions were shaping things. I was pushed up against myself and wanted to torment everyone around me. Torment, perhaps, is not the right word, but shape, engineer—that’s more accurate. I just wanted to take up emotional space. There was nothing intimate between us, because I had laundered all my affections for someone who viewed me as a bridge to carry them over those chasms between bouts of Real Love. In those moments they were afraid of falling, of being consumed by loneliness.

We checked into a hotel in Baton Rouge and caught a cab to the French quarter.

The cabbie said, “There’s been a lot of robberies lately. Plenty of cab drivers getting their cashboxes stolen. That’s why I carry this…” He pulled out a .50 caliber pistol from the center console.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” said Nora. “Did he just pull out a huge gun? Holy shit that is so fucking American. I have never even seen a gun before.”

From some angles the firearm was a shadowy, invisible thing, and from others it glistened with a mechanical beauty under the spectrum of neon lights piercing the window tint as we drove down Canal street. Stepping out of the cab there were two mingling bodies engaged in an acrobatic performance. They seemed to be merging, appendages growing from one another, legs and arms like fingers woven together.

By most measures, it was a bad trip. Everything had gone wrong. But I finally came to recognize Nora as she was—a movement I could not control, floating into my life in Prague where she had a fuck you tone toward everyone but me, and I never understood why. Nora became a perceptible junction of turmoil amid an expanse of purposelessness. Then the big blur came, and I woke up to an alarm clock.

“We need to get you to the airport.”

“Just a bit more sleep then.”

We woke up two hours after Nora’s flight took off. The first leg of her trip back to London. She called the airline. She could get home if we made it to Little Rock that afternoon. It was a tedious drive through the swamps, and the humidity hurt my head. We listened to Christian talk radio explain why transmogrification was not weird. The roads remained clear, and we made it in six hours.

As she got out of the car, she said, “The offer will always be on the table. I will leave my future husbands for you. So, just let me know.”

I smiled at her, “I’ll let you know, Nora.”

On the drive home, I was alone and I-40 was long. The Ozarks gave way to the plains—a yellow, dry surface endlessly inhaling the landscape. I thought of Nora on her flight, pestering some old man sitting next to her, coaxing him into three whiskey shots. I haven’t seen Nora since that afternoon, but when I think of her, she appears to me as countless swirling pieces. The car was quiet then and I heard only the humming of the asphalt and the air as I breathed in and out through my nose. On the edge of the west, there were clouds.

LISTING by Michael Todd Cohen

September 25, 2020

MARBLEHEAD, MA — ESTATE SALE BY YOUNGEST SON 4 bedroom / 4.5 bath with 5,679 sq ft. of ample space for nuclear family on .26 acres.

Below listed are the items for sale and a description of the property. Not listed but offered for the specific buyer: being told as a child you would be disowned if gay.

BASEMENT Offered in sale: workbench at which father and youngest son built miniature soapbox derby car for Cub Scout competition. Mostly father—who hip-checked son saying,

“watch out, watch out,” as his hulky frame jostled miniature car parts into a sleek red bullet. Son did not win derby. A warm, enveloping hug was given as compensation along with the statement: “They cheated. This is bullshit. I saw the guy squeeze the wheels before he put ours on the track.”LIVING ROOM The ground floor affords a large living room with tile floor in good condition despite the dog’s old-age accidents which could not be prevented because the slight-voiced mother couldn’t yell without coughing. Honestly, it was for naught with a deaf dog.

Offered in sale: a 47” television cabinet. We regret we can’t offer a larger television, but the mother cried when the father brought home a 50” to watch golf on because it “overwhelmed the space."

Additionally offered in sale: a well-loved reclining chair swathed in striped fabric to be deodorized, prior to sale, of what the father referred to as medication-induced “chemical farts."DINING ROOM An open plan allows for a sizable dining table next to the kitchen. This is not offered as part of the sale, but it is not hard to find a dining table to fight around.

Offered in sale: double-sided fireplace with slate ledge. Ledge has some wear from mother standing on it to reach father’s lips for a kiss—silent and sweet—while youngest son looked on and wondered what boy he would kiss on a ledge or a stoop or a doorstep one day and what would happen when he did.

FAMILY ROOM Offered in sale: a Bose sound system and a sun-bleached blue couch where the father lay in semi-darkness listening to Enya after returning from chemo sessions in Boston.

KITCHEN Boasting an abundance of natural light, the kitchen offers overhead and under-counter cabinet space containing a red pitcher, drinking glass and bag of rice that the mother used to teach the youngest son how to pour neatly from one vessel into another, her hand over his in gentle guidance.

Offered in sale: a double-door refrigerator with room for two shopping bags filled with live lobsters that the father often lay onto the cold floor tile in a mock “race” despite youngest son’s whinnies of fearful protest.

You will hear the ice dispenser on the fridge churning from time-to-time, like when the youngest son came down to the living room in the middle of the night for lack of sleep and saw his dead father on the television guffawing in the audience of a comedy festival he attended the year before. It was Father’s Day. God has a bizarre sense of occasion.

BEDROOMS Up three easy steps are four bedrooms of good size, including a primary suite.

Off the hallway is a small office, formerly “maintained” by the mother, with tax papers and medical bills exploding outward like a burst whitehead. Papers to be removed prior to sale.

To the left is a bedroom with an orange shag carpet and an en suite bathroom including shower stall. Offered in sale: a full-length mirror with some smudging from where the youngest son mashed his face into it, stared himself in his own eyes, and said, “I’m gay.”

Also included: a laptop with a start-up screen featuring a picture of actor Chris O’Donnell, a twin-size bed with salvageable springs that weren’t put to the test with much more than sweaty solo action while thinking about actor Chris O’Donnell, and a small sound system with CD tray and radio used to drown out the father’s intermittent vomiting in the primary bedroom.

DRIVEWAY Asphalt in good condition with minimal wear from garage sales, car washes, a Bar-Mitzvah party and the night the youngest son confessed his truth to the oldest brother and stopped there, forgoing his own peace of mind for peace in the moments he had left with the father.

Offered in sale: repeating he knew anyway in your head as a salve.

GARAGE Space for two vehicles, including champagne colored 1997 Chevy Blazer offered in sale. Blazer is in good condition with 38,000 miles from youngest son driving away regret: Essex antique shops, Danvers strip malls and the Marblehead Lighthouse, staring into a roiling sea. There are minor grip marks on the steering wheel from where he bore down; knowing a thing and trying to unknow it.

PRIMARY BEDROOM Cavernous space with a glamorous oversized wood-paneled walk-in closet.

Offered in sale: the father’s clothes that hang like meat in a butcher’s freezer—stiff and gruesome.

Not included in sale: a California king size bed that the mother will take with her to the house in Swampscott so she can sleep in the same divot she’s made over thirty years and sometimes run her hand over the one he made too; like an incantation to bring him back.

A MOST DEPRESSING WEEK by Chris Milam

September 23, 2020

Monday

I tell my therapist that her milkshake brings all the depressives to the yard. She laughs. I laugh. I don't tell her I spent hours the night before trying to think of something funny to say to her. I also think: I love you. I think: you plus me equals happiness. I think: when does this session end? I think: I want to sleep with you to help murder the pain. She goes on about reframing or something. I'm still focusing on my joke. Time's up. Fuck.

Tuesday

A murder case on Dateline. A beautiful wife is found dead in the snow in Ohio. I know it's the husband. It's always the husband. Plus he had a girlfriend on the side. Fast forward to the end. Guess what? It was the husband. I think: I knew it. I think: what do I do now? I think: I really want to die because I'm so depressed. I think: just do it, coward. But I don't do it. Instead, I watch more true crime. Men doing terrible things to women all day long. It's revolting. I don't leave the couch. I smoke a shit ton of cigarettes. I don't eat. I don't sleep. I miss my therapist.

Wednesday and Thursday

Nothing. 48 hours of blue death. I can't move. I don't want to move. Though I want to fly with birds, maybe a sparrow or a crow, just soar far away from the darkness inside me. I want to stare at the sun and let it melt my sadness. I want to stop breathing. I want my therapist. I feel lonely. No, worse than that. I feel completely devoid of life. I am nothing. I take my pills. Candy for the mentally ill. I think: please work your magic. I think: will I ever feel normal? I think: maybe I should take the whole bottle of pills. I think: goodbye, everyone. At night, I stare at the ceiling. I don't count sheep, I count things I've lost.

The weekend

I pick up my daughter and her best friend and go to the roller rink. She’s a bit awkward on skates, but she holds her own. I watch and watch her. She doesn’t see me looking at her. I’m glad. She prefers I not stare at her. She prefers I keep my distance. I’m not cool enough for her. She’s at that weird age where adults are not to be seen. I don’t tell her it hurts me a little. I don’t tell her how much I need her love and approval. I don't tell her about the black days. I look around the place. I think: all the other dads here are better than me. I think: they are kinder and more loving and less sad. I think: I want to disappear. I want to dissolve in my chair. I also want to be them. They seem so content. I buy the girls pizza and drinks before leaving.

The next day I take them to see a horror movie. They debate who has to sit next to me. I don’t tell my daughter that I feel hurt again. I don’t tell her to please sit next time to me, it will make me happy. I don’t say anything. They eat popcorn loudly. The movie is terrible and predictable. On the drive home, I secretly listen to their conversation. They talk about boys. I think: please stop talking about boys. I think: boys only want one thing. I think: boys grow into men who kill their wives and are shown on Dateline. I don’t speak the entire way to my house. I take them home the next morning. I tell my daughter I love you. She mumbles something that sounds nothing like I love you, too. I think: I’m going to miss you. I think: you are so beautiful. I think: don’t go, honey.

Monday

I have no funny lines for my therapist. We talk about depression and anxiety and techniques to cope and whatnot. I just stare at anything other than her. I wish I were a poet so I could tell her how gorgeous and special she is using better words than gorgeous and special. I think: I'm not a poet. I think: I want to crawl in her mouth and knock on her heart. I have questions to ask of that muscle. I think: will her heartbeat be a song, a melodic longing for the client sitting in front of her? I think: please cure me, fix me, remake me. Baptize me. Love me. I think: stop being delusional you fool. In a flash, time's up. Fuck. I think: I survived another week.

THE END by Zac Smith

September 22, 2020

The seasonal jobs came back to town aboard a gleaming, diesel caravan. We all stepped up to carry water and dirt and to do all the other things that would be asked. Brought our resumes, our lunch boxes, our good gloves. Someone was going to see us, buy our labor for a week or month—see something useful in the junk, like Giacomo did as a dropout teen, buying a rusted-out chainsaw to bond with mom and get it running again. And just like that ideation, we’d take off for somewhere else full of better promises. This we knew, believed, felt, etc.

Giacomo had his old hat, the lucky one he first fucked in. He used it to wave down men and women in their shiny white trucks. I spat in the dirt. Same difference, same result. Whatever happens is inevitable. Giacomo never believed in fate. We got picked up, taken to tryouts. Giacomo wanted to swear so bad when he saw all the if-onlys and why-nots pass us to hit the exit ramp last minute. We were heading further out than everyone else. What sun would beat us down then, way out there, we wondered.

They grouped us out, saw favorites quick. Barked like big dogs except we all knew what kinds of barks meant what and how and when and how much. He pushed the crates and I held the hoses. We both considered it best. I heard him try to angle in around the edges, get some networking in, as people liked to say, get some human decency out there in the good spring heat. Sweat in his eyes made him squint like a little bird, one of those no-feather ones, just skin and slime. I tried counting to ignore my present self and state—rocks, steps, crates, yards of hose and stacks of coil, counting everything and anything just to pass through the tautly pulled time we floated in. We heard buzzing off in the distance, something making sawdust, or something like it.

Giacomo huffed and chattered behind his crates. Hush up, waste your breath on better things, I thought. Push your crates to make the bosses feel the things your words can’t make them feel. They are in their own way illiterate like us, like mom, like everyone else who would care about any of this, but the language of cost and control is better to know than the language of push and carry. I imagined horses cutting down trees because of something Giacomo said years ago.

His hat lay twisted on his head, beguiling, wringing laughs when he passed the foremen and their kids. He didn’t see them chortle over the tall crates, though, or maybe just over his old stubborn spirit. He breathed in our stinking huffs of exertion and sighed out hope. I liked Giacomo and didn’t want to see him spoilt anew. We were small moons in orbit of something pretty which harbors life. We were not the show. I wanted to push him back, somehow put legs on the crates, watch him dance and distract himself to keep them lined up, dunk us into the irrigation trough, rise up laughing like a couple years ago when we thought it best to rinse off the sawdust.

We talked scrapes and cuts before sleeping in the grove under the stars out there by the end of the highway. We talked about distraction, old technology. I was bored and thus unclear, hoping to chisel out some new thing by vagueness, bring our thoughts into a new space, maybe knock him back down off his prideful course, back down to me, where I was. Giacomo was never as down as I even though he slept in the deepest hole on the worksite. Something about initiative, action, teamwork, sacrifice, leadership. I ate my bad food in silence while he buzzed on about these foreign words he found somewhere, something about coffee. I thought then and continue to think that work is work, is the same thing as last year, next year, the very beginning times, the very end times. I considered the stars pretty enough where we lay out in the gravel, but he had thoughts of strange rooms out in the grassy hills with windows as big as our tar-paper ceiling where one could somehow see even more stars, though I didn’t ask for detail.

We worked as hard as needed, but Giacomo caught heat stroke before catching any attention. His mom said to keep your head down and she said it literally, although Giacomo somehow thought he could improve the way deep channels wind through the earth. I don’t think they make a saw big enough for that.

I saw him lay in the shade while the owner’s son wandered through the stacks and stores trying to devise new things to array and bundle up and sell. It was bad timing, caught recovering in the dirt, hat over face. The boss boy ripped it off and tossed him out. Where to? We held our breaths and worries so no one would think us human. We pretended to be delicate machines in the industrious frontier instead, things just brought in to wring together pretty bundles or rip apart nature. Giacomo got canned, hat in hand, just like he was when we climbed aboard that promiseful truck. Canned is a euphemism for the gorier details of our rumpled-up contracts, as you might imagine.

I dug the ditch he lay in then, and I laid the soil thereafter. It was only natural that I not feel the need to test his boots, swap our hats, turn his pockets—I knew how they fit and what they held. This showed promise to someone, they mistook my sadness for integrity or some other obscure thing they considered good. They gave me a bundle of his things, including a book that seemed impossible to read. I flipped through it and saw things we had together, neatly lined up in little lines.

The company asked me if I had anyone or anything to keep me back in town instead of going elsewhere for more work and more money. I told them no, tamping the dirt with the company’s spade. I told them to take me away.