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LAND LEGS by E.D. WELCH

September 21, 2020

Bittersweet day, this final one together. Frighteningly agenda-less, we wander through the aisles of small, art-filled stores, awkward in each other's company, unaccustomed to hanging out like this. “Do you want to go into this one?” I ask him at each store.

“I don't care.” His only reply.

I learn he likes art galleries—oil paintings, to be exact. I didn't know.

Our aimlessness leads us eventually to the beach, where we find our land legs again. The beach: yes, we spent many, many hours at the beach together during his childhood, so this we know how to do. He shows me the tide pools, the crabs, the anemones. We watch the little mini-pools of ocean water caught in the rocks, populated with hermit crabs of every size and shape. Small ones, smaller yet, and ones so tiny you can hardly see them except for miniscule hair-like legs scrambling from under tiny spotted shells.

“Pick one up,” I suggest. When he does, holding it pinched carefully between thumb and forefinger, I say, “Now promise it you won't put it into a bathtub.”

His face breaks into a shy smile at the memory: When he was a preschooler on one of his first forays to the beach, he collected twelve hermit crabs, and I let him take them back to the house where we were staying. That evening I ran his bath water and stepped out while he climbed into the tub. When I returned a minute later, there he sat in the bathtub, a dozen dead hermit crabs floating around him. He thought he was doing them a favor by putting them back in the closest thing he had to the ocean.

Now, he returns the crab to the tide pool and scrambles over the rocks—not in the carefree way like he used to—rather, heavier, wooden. But still. It's nice to see him silhouetted against the ocean, to talk to him with the beat of the waves pounding in stereo. We don't say much, and I feel bad about it at first. But what can I say? Stay clean gets old after a while, and we already discussed Hurricane Katrina ad nauseum. So I struggle to accept the silence as we walk. It's okay, I finally decide: part of supporting him is just being with him, just being there.

We finally leave the beach and have dinner out with one of his counselors. “Don't stay in your head, man,” the counselor tells him, thumping his own forehead, “it's dangerous in there.” My kid gives a crooked grin of acknowledgement. I sit across the table, look at the two of them, and wish I could stay.

While they eat, I push the food around on my plate, wondering how I’ll manage to board a plane in the morning, to leave my neediest child alone here. Sure, we have a great post-rehab structure in place: a solid sober-living home, counselors, scheduled outpatient work with the rehab place. His bases are covered, and I feel good about what we accomplished in such a short time this week.

But still. Going home is hard to do. It's like leaving your preemie in the hospital.

After dinner, he is antsy to get to the AA meeting.

“Stop right here, Mom,” he says as we’re driving down the beach strip. “I’ve gotta save a seat at the meeting.”

I slide my eyes right at him: he cares where he sits? This same boy who, just a month ago, refused to go to meetings? I pause in the side street, wondering why he’s really asking me to stop.

“On Saturday nights it’s packed in there, standing room only.” He leaps from the car, taking those huge twenty-year-old bounds across the sidewalk.

The car is empty for a moment, vacuum-like, then he’s back, energy in his wake.

We drive to the rehab house to drop off his things: the alarm clock and towels we bought today, the only possessions he has here besides a few clothes. He takes the same kind of enthusiastic bounds into the house. I follow to drop off a check. The night-duty guy looks at me. “You taking him to an AA meeting? You bringing him back?” Before I can answer, he starts talking about my son’s last relapse. “He’s young. He was walking back from AA and—” he throws his hands up “—these girls asked him to come inside and party.” He says girls like he would say pigs. “It’s hard on these guys when they’re so young, you know?”

Yeah, I know.

My son reappears, freshly cologned. “Let’s go.”

I drive him to the meeting, knowing I won’t see him again before I leave. How do you say goodbye on the side of the road in front of AA? How do you impart everything you want to say during that one stopset—that one pause in time?

“Kiddo…” I begin. But it’s hopeless; there’s just too much to say. I make him wait while I climb out of the car to hug him.

He holds me tight for a long moment. “Thanks, Mom.”

And then he’s gone. I watch long enough to see him disappear into the seated crowd, the way I used to watch the kids walk into school. I pray his land legs will hold.

RIDING A BIKE THROUGH THE LONELY CONTINUUM OF TIME by Christian Fennell

September 18, 2020

His name was Leonard. He was riding a bike. His arms held out to the sides of him, his mind never trapped by his own self, never buckling under the weight of what he should be, or shouldn’t be, understanding the truth of himself, always, in this world, hard as that was, and of course, in this moment too, riding a bike through the lonely continuum of time. He smiled at his knowing, where others couldn’t—or fucking wouldn’t, and he was right, and knew he was right, and always would be.

He rode on, his arms still there, to the sides of him, and he said, come, cover me. Gliding and dipping and soaring, and we do, going on and on, down a lonely, long road, and free now, or at least so he thought. Free and wanting.

Free and needing.

And who among us would not say, such a person as this.

He turned and smiled, reaching his hands up to the breaking blue sky, and he said, yes yes yes, I am here now.

On either side of the road started to appear large outcroppings of shield rock streaked with black and pink and where alder bushes, raspberry bushes, and trees grew from crevices.

He saw ancient trees grown too tall and heavy for their rocky moorings, having fallen onto their sides, great circular walls of exposed roots and dirt pointing to the sky.

He rode past dark and vacant lakes, and he rode past narrow long stretches of washed-out lowlands, sun-bleached trees still standing, dead and broken.

He was tired, and walking the bike now, the sun not yet down, the moon there, and he looked up to it, and he said, love under a big moon.

Why wouldn’t there be?

Of course there would be.

Probably was and just forgotten.

Probably was.

He stopped and looked around, and he thought, what else might be out there?

Endless possibilities of strange and wonderful things.

On a night such as this.

He looked back up to that everyone’s one big moon. Ain’t that right, moon?

Ain’t it now, said the moon back to him.

Why I’m here.

Always will be.

True enough, and always will be.

And he was happy, walking, a coyote following him high up on the granite ridgeline, stopping, looking too, at that everyone’s one big moon.

On a night such as this.

He came upon a house set back from the road. He dropped the bike and walked up the long gravel driveway.

The house was white stucco, cracked and chipped and stained with dirt. Tall weeds running up the walls.

To the right of the house, a clapboard garage the same color as the house.

He looked for a dog, or any sign of a dog. There wasn’t one. Not that he could tell.

He walked to the garage and stopped and looked back at the house. He reached for the garage door handle and pulled, the door lifting up from the ground toward him, a stack of aluminum folding chairs tipping over. He paused, holding the door handle, two weighted cylinders filled with rocks, one on either side of the door, swaying from thin strands of twisted wire.

A second-story light came on and he let go of the handle to see if the door would stay. It did, and he moved toward the back of the house.

The back light came on, mosquitoes swarming the brightness. An old man wearing pajamas and a frayed striped bathrobe appeared. His grey hair disheveled. His watery, hooded eyes, squinting. A single-barrel shotgun in his hand. Who’s there?

He pushed open the screen door to the hum of the evening heat and the sound of the mosquitoes bouncing off the glass of the small light. Well?

He stepped onto the porch boards, the screen door slapping shut behind him. I won’t ask again.

He walked forward and Leonard stepped out from behind the house, wrapping his left arm around the man’s neck. Shh, he said.

The old man eye’s widening. He didn’t struggle.

Leonard pressed the cold tip of a clip-blade knife to the man's throat. It’s me.

The old man. Who?

The one ya been waitin for, and he ran the knife through the thin, slack skin of the old man's neck.

He looked at the blood, pooling on the broken patio stones. He looked at the closed screen door and the light behind the door.

An old woman called from the house. Horace?

He looked to the second-story window.

Is everything all right?

He stepped over the man bleeding out beneath him and he entered the house.

The old woman appeared at the window, the soft bedroom light behind her highlighting the frailness of her thin frame beneath her long white nightgown. Horace?

Leonard appeared in the window, approaching the woman from behind, the old woman turning, and screaming.

He woke and sat up in the old couple’s bed and looked at the woman beneath the window on the floor, her nightgown soaked in blood, a long stream of it having run from her. He turned on the bed and placed his boots on the well waxed hardwood floor and he lowered his head and closed his eyes and ruffled his hair. He looked up at an antique vanity desk across from the bed.

He sat on the chair and opened a jewelry box and ran his fingers through it, an old broach, a charm bracelet, several pairs of earrings, a pearl necklace and matching pearl earrings. He fisted it all and put it in his coat pocket. He looked back at the old woman and stood and walked to her.

He squatted and took her left hand into his, sizing up her diamond ring and wedding band. He tried to pull them off. They wouldn’t come. He pulled harder. He took his knife out and opened the blade. He folded back the other fingers of her hand and pressed her hand to the floor and pushed the blade through the crunch of bone. He slide the rings off the backside of her freed finger and dropped the finger to the floor. He cleaned the blade on her nightgown and folded the knife closed. He tilted his head, looking at the old woman’s opened eyes, and he wondered, what was in there still?

Anything?

Doubt it.

Would it make a difference?

Probably not.

I bet they’re thankin ya?

Bet they are too.

If they could.

Why wouldn’t they?

She seemed like someone’s nice old grandma.

He stood and pocketed the rings, and he walked down the stairs.

Like they’d lived here a long time.

I guess.

And they might of been happy.

I didn’t put em in my path, someone else done that. And if there’s a reason for that, there’s a reason for me.

No doubt. Everything else is just made up, ain’t it?

True enough, just made up. Heaven or hell. Except I ain’t, and I never will be.

He lifted the kettle from the stove and poured out the water and refilled it. He placed it back on the stove and looked in the fridge. He closed it and walked out the back door.

He stepped back over the dead old man and the patio stone blood and walked toward the garage. He lifted the garage door and looked at the cluttered mess. There wasn’t even a car. Nothing much there at all.

He walked back to the house and up the stairs and walked inside.

He lifted the whistling kettle from the stove and searched through the cupboards until he found a jar of instant coffee. He made a strong mug of black coffee and carried it to the table. He sat and crossed his legs and took a sip. He lit a cigarette, and he smoked, and he drank his coffee.

On a night such as this.

Love under a big moon

That’s what he thought.

Torrents of Our Time: Twenty-Two Stories by Christian Fennell

LETTERS TO MACKENZIE by Blake L. Bell

September 17, 2020

We were wild girls. Raised with dirty feet, tangled hair. Our dogs followed us down the roads we walked, but our mommas rarely did. We played hard, fought hard, loved hard. Fate cheated us from being sisters, so we bound ourselves together with blood ritual. We couldn’t go downstairs to the kitchen to get a knife, afraid of waking momma. Instead, we broke a jar in the upstairs bathroom and sliced our thumbs open; our skin peeled back, vessels bursting and spilling over. We pressed our cuts together and imagined our blood forever combined. “Soul sisters,” we said, sucking the ruby blossoms clean.

Our world was complicated. Drunk, aggressive father figures. Stressed, underappreciated mothers. Unchecked tempers, overactive imaginations. Our world was filled to the brim, but it was never full without each other.

Our favorite spot was the pasture. We hung out by the ditch which split the open field from where the silos were. We were terrified of those silos. “People die in them,” our big sisters told us. On the opposite end of the field, a wooded area backed up to Gigi’s house. We rarely went there either. “When trees are that close together, something’s hiding in them,” our sisters said.

We named the cows we recognized: Dippin’ Dot the spotted, Esmeralda the jeweled, and Hercules, the Brahma bull. We made up stories about them. Hercules was the dad or the husband, depending on the day. “Hercules! Buy Esmeralda new jewelry. Her nose ring is gettin’ crusty.”

“Stand on top of the hay bale and wait till they get close, then we’ll jump on their backs.”

But the animals were usually impartial to us. Except the day they charged us.

The cows and bull were up by the ditch, and we were walking across, closer to the wooded area. The next minute blurs. Hercules charged, and the cows followed. We ran for our lives hoping to reach the fence in time. Our bare feral feet crushed the leaves beneath us and tore on the fence as we clamored over it, chased by a stampede.

III

We were so much alike. We looked alike, laughed alike. Our wavy brown hair and round blue eyes fooled strangers into believing we were sisters. We had rotten tempers and little impulse control.

Our savagery at home never matched how we were told to behave in school. We went to equally strict Catholic schools for elementary and middle. We neither liked nor understood their many rules. We may have been somewhat neglected at home, but in that, we found a freedom that set us apart.

We went to the same high school in ninth grade, the Durham School: an expensive, non-denominational religious school, a disaster, for both of us. We didn’t have a prayer of fitting in with our divorced mothers and our middle-class-income households. We lacked the social manners those kids had. While those kids knew how to behave, we were still in the pasture.

We befriended Katy, who lived in the Country Club of Louisiana and was a Durham kid through and through. “Y’all don’t have promise rings?” she asked before long. “We all have them.”

“What’s a promise ring?”

“Your father gives it to you for protection. It’s a promise between you and God. You know, not to do stuff with boys.”

We didn’t trust promises. Not all fathers were protectors.

Her mother disliked us almost instantly. Our families were not like hers. They respected my attorney dad, but their noses wrinkled at my two-time divorcee mom with her four children and beat up Suburban, which she proudly called “The Beast.” Did it matter that she was a lawyer, too? Your dad played and coached rugby, laughed at blood pooling in grown men’s mouths. Katy’s father cleaned our cuts and complained when we came home dirty and bleeding from a neighborhood romp.

You were jealous of each other. Who was the best friend? I’m sorry I chose Katy’s side. She was new, and maybe we were sick of each other? Of liking the same boys? You must have been sick of reassuring me I was beautiful too, that they wanted me, too. I was jealous of both of you, but the green monster on my back shrank around Katy, lighter sans the years that fed, piled on flesh, around you.

We defaced each other’s lockers with hurtful words and gave our best withering glares. Our cold war heated up at lunch one day. We met by chance, outside between the lockers and the cafeteria. You turned to me, asked, “Why did you write “slut” on my locker?”

“Because it's true.” I’m still sorry for that.

The next thing I knew, I was catching your fist from hitting my face. Frustrated, you turned and punched Katy instead. Hysteria broke loose after a girl in our grade yelled into the cafeteria, “Fight! There’s a fight outside!”

Katy cried and cried and cried in the principal's office; I could hear her pleas from the next room. I shut down, turned vacant as the disciplinarian ranted, already desensitized to angry men and too young to untangle fault and blame. I pictured my mother’s weary face. My father having to pick up the phone once again. Another call from an authority, another possible expulsion. I don’t know what you did in there, but you were quiet. I imagine, maybe romantically so, you behaved similarly to me.

Katy’s mom smoothed things over with the principal. She was the victim, and we were the perpetrators. No matter that most of the writing on your locker was in Katy’s handwriting, no matter that Katy and I had done most of the instigating. She wasn’t punished, but we ended up with in-school suspensions, and by that time, we were sneaking out of our respective cells to chat and joke with each other. All was well again, almost like our fights when we were kids.

Our parents referred to us going to the same school as what it was: a failed experiment. I made terrible grades and was often in detention; you struggled with the commute from your house. You transferred to another private school in your neighborhood, and I ended up at a public school close to mine. We made new friends and lived in different worlds. After our freshman year, we slowly went separate ways through the rest of high school. We’d talk here and there but never like we used to. There was no defining moment or dramatic exit, our friendship just faded.

By our first semester of college, we hadn’t spoken in well over a year. That first day, I walked into a spacious auditorium with hundreds of seats and hundreds of people for Art History 101. Feeling overwhelmed, I picked a random row in the middle of the room. At the center, your fishbowl eyes and long, curly brown hair looked up at me. You made that face you always have, where your eyes bulge and your mouth opens, where excitement and energy surge across those high cheekbones. “No way,” you said.

We hugged each other tight. It would not have been strange to see each other on campus, as we would many times throughout the coming years, but we had chosen the same class section, the same row, and ultimately, the same seats. We took this as a sign and skipped our classes to hang out. We never were productive together. Our relationship existed only in a state of play. We had no idea how to be serious, to work, or to function in the outside world around each other. “We should do this more often,” we said, back at your friend’s apartment, high, and laughing together again, as if years had not passed between us. But after that day, beyond stunted waves on campus, we didn’t see each other for a long time.

Did something pass between us that afternoon? Some subconscious thing that knew our lives were changing? The older I got, the more I resented memories of our childhood, of the extent of my stepfather’s violence. Happy memories of choosing to play in the pasture with you transformed into desperate longings to get out of the house. To separate myself from my mother sobbing over dirty dishes, from my baby brother’s broken foot, smashed between the folds of a kicked recliner. Did he ever hurt you, too, Mack?

From what mom says, we were still alike in our early twenties—we were unmoored. Is that true? Did you do too many drugs? Did you surround yourself with men who only loved parts of you? I only saw you once during those years when you happened to be dating my friend’s cousin. Did you worry about me, then? Maybe I should have worried more about you. Did he ever hurt you?

Years have passed since we have seen each other face to face. Your dad died this summer. Before him, your maw maw and your stepbrother, too. But more recently, your father, Mason. You found him on the floor in his apartment. Sounds of ten-year-old you, crying for him that night at the beach—when you got so homesick, he drove to Alabama to pick you up three days early—echoed in my ears, as if I’d strapped two conch shells to the hollows of my head, desperate to hear the sea.

But he didn’t always come get you, did he? Doesn’t matter now. Your memories of him will tinge with sadness and pride. His anger: righteous indignation. His inconsistency: genius. You’ll measure time by his passing, the prized befores, the distorted durings, the long afters. There will be so many afters.

Let’s transform these truths into one of the scary stories we used to tell each other at night in our tent at the beach. None of this was real. Your dad was alive behind that apartment door you knocked on before breaking in. He is alive, headphones on, music blaring, smoking a joint. Oblivious to the world around him and blissful.

Maybe this kind of thing should or could bring us together, but I appreciate and fear the gulf between us. The thought of you is too heavy. Discomfort comes with an oldest friend. You know all the smells of our childhood—grass, blood, whiskey.

I accepted your friend request on Facebook last month and combed through careful, new photographs of a luminous you, showing all your teeth in Cheshire grins mixed with equally careful pictures of your family, the living and the dead, mingling still in your photo albums. I heard your elastic voice in messages you sent me filled with smiley faces and exclamation points. I know I said I’d call, but I won’t. Guilt is only enough to spur my hand, to write, to reminisce. My world is too full, and I fear your added weight would send its contents spilling over the edges like blood rushing out of old wounds.

MISSING by Brian Brunson

September 16, 2020

Recollection A:He has a distinct memory of being told the story about Uncle Ringo’s missing index finger. More like he remembers that at one point it was a distinct memory. But that was years ago, when he was five or six, and nothing from way back then is distinct. Still, he is sure that his mother, standing in the kitchen, making fried chicken for dinner, told him and his brother that their Uncle Ringo lost his finger when he was sixteen in a meat grinder in the deli he worked at after school

Recollection B:Somewhere, sometime, he is sure that Uncle Ringo told him that a catfish had bitten off his index finger. Which sounds like something an uncle would tell a gullible nephew, but in that case the uncle would probably have said it was a shark or piranha that had eaten it, not just a catfish. His uncle was serious, he is sure of it, even if he can’t remember when he was told this, can’t picture the moment or any details beyond that his finger was eaten by a fish. Probably in a river or creek just outside

the small Missouri town that the family was from. A small town he had never been to. Never even been to Missouri. Probably never will be. Can't even remember the name of the town. Still, he liked Uncle Ringo, the youngest of the three kids, the only boy. The only uncle he had. His father only having an older sister. The missing finger fascinated him. The absence of a finger and the remaining scar was the strangest thing ever, like it had been hastily erased by god. When he first saw his Uncle's hand

he was terrified of it. It was grotesque. That’s how he learned that word, grotesque, at such a young age. It meant monstrous, almost unholy. Uncle Ringo seemed to be a part of the family during his childhood, but he shied away from him and his scary missing finger. The mangled hand

he laughed. To a five-year-old, it was hilarious. He thought it was a gag, some sort of magic trick, and the missing finger would suddenly materialize. But it stayed missing the rare times, a holiday here and there, he saw Uncle Ringo, and he would stare fascinated at the missing finger

that eventually he grew to think of as normal for Uncle Ringo, like it was normal for Grandma Vi to take all the pills she took. And then it was super cool to have an Uncle who had such a gruesome, unique hand. A whole missing finger; brutally ripped off. He told his classmates about it and the girls thought it gross, but the boys didn't think it was awesome like he thought because they didn't believe it at all and he got angry because he couldn't prove it, so he

dreamt about getting his own finger or hand deformed and mangled in some freak accident like the can opener going awry or getting it stuck in his bike chain, and then all the kids would think it was cool and gnarly and gross but of course that never happened. And became jealous of his uncle and his awesome

tried to find a picture of his Uncle Ringo’s hand but they had none, so better yet he’d bring him to school to tell the story about the fish that ate it, but that didn’t seem plausible so he was doomed to be teased about it at school. And it tore him up so much that he started to really resent his uncle and his stupid

missing finger with the gnarly nub of a knuckle at the end, or would it be the beginning, which wiggled just a little bit, creepy and cool all at once and it really gave Uncle Ringo an envious distinction, so he was relieved that at some point, if he remembers correctly, Uncle Ringo

drifted away from the family. He didn’t move far away, they just wouldn’t see him for a while, then they would, but not for long, then he realized he hadn’t seen Uncle Ringo for years. He was forgotten,

was banished from the family for reasons never disclosed, only that he was rarely mentioned, and even then only awkwardly and silently so as if he were listening, but he wasn’t because Uncle Ringo was gone,

which he now knows is often what happens to extended families, even immediate families. The ties loosen throughout the years and things that were once important become just nostalgic details like Uncle Ringo's missing finger that intrigued him so much and to this day is clear as day in his memory.

MY DOUBLE by Michael Loveday

September 14, 2020

I made a cardboard cutout of me. Clodagh, I called her, and my family took to her well. That first evening at the dinner table, they didn’t register any difference, as they slurped and gnawed, licked their lips, and gorged on their lavish daily meats. At last, I was spared the disgusting sounds of them eating. I spent more time alone in my bedroom, reading tales of the headless Dullahan grinning on his night-black horse, and slowly starving myself, praying that I would one day become invisible.

My parents grew to like that Clodagh endured, without disruption, their long-and-short-of-it stories of misfortune. My brother Aidan liked that Clodagh never ate any of the food set down in front of her, so Aidan could sneak spare chips for himself without any complaint. A cloak of relief settled itself over the house.

Soon it was clear that my family actively preferred the cardboard me. I let them drag Clodagh to the park and the shops when there was an outing. My Aunt’s Cath’s birthday, Easter Sunday Mass, a bank holiday at Skerries—Clodagh took my place on all these occasions.

I wouldn’t have suffered except Clodagh seemed increasingly perfected, her smile ever more winsome, her clothes pristine, her hair now tidily combed, a smart-arse gleam appearing in her eye instead of the dopey expression my parents always chided me for. I was never this brilliant, never this lovable.

I wanted to no longer be part of my family, but I wanted to be missed at the same time. This was not how it was meant to be.

Baffled, I began to deface her, the picture-postcard version of me. Something compelled me to snick at her skin with a Swiss Army knife. I ripped the edges of her fingers where they pointed absurdly at whatever was in view. I graffitied vile abuse across her forearms. I yearned to rip her goddamn dazzling head off.

Slowly Clodagh was disfigured until finally my family could see the inevitable path that they set all their children walking down. Both of us, cutout and I, faced a ravaged future. We were no more than scrap ready to be thrown on the fire. Ash amongst ash, we could keep each other company through the long Dublin winter.

MY MAMMAW’S BOYFRIEND by Dalton Monk

September 13, 2020

He looks like Stan Lee. And we call him that behind his back. Stan Lee’s real name is Marvin. Right now I’m in Marvin’s truck and we’re parked at the grocery store. He goes inside, and I stay in the backseat of the truck, which is old, the fabric cutting loose in the corners. It’s full of long cucumbers and cobwebs and ants. And a putrid smell that can only come from an old man, specifically an old man that looks like Stan Lee and wears Stan Lee glasses. This is an old man I hardly know. I sit in the hot truck for a while, comparing this man I barely know who looks like Stan Lee to my Pappaw who is dead. Stories often spill from Marvin’s lips at the dinner table. He’ll say things like how he just about had to knock so-and-so’s block off and how he’d told so-and-so to get lost and how he, Marvin, was so suave. He has a grandson named Trevor that comes to Clendenin with his Tonka trucks and toys and his speech impediment. I can hear him now saying his own name and he sounds like this: Twevol. Marvin is old or maybe he just looks old. And all of us think Mammaw is out of his league, which is an interesting thing to think about your Mammaw.

So, here I am in Marvin’s truck. And I’m twelve and the backseat smells and I’m sweating from the summer heat and closed doors and from being surrounded by all the odd-looking vegetables.

But I’m remembering now. I’m not twelve. I’m twenty-four. And that truck probably now belongs to Marvin’s son or maybe even his grandson Trevor who says his name like this: Twevol. Or maybe the truck sits in a junkyard, still filled with vegetables, still just as ripe as ever. Or maybe another old man bought the old truck and he’s dating someone else’s Mammaw and maybe he also looks like Stan Lee.

Marvin doesn’t own the truck anymore because Marvin is dead. He fell off the roof of Mammaw’s house—I don’t really know what he was doing up there except trying to prove to Mammaw what a man he was. I imagine him saying something like, “Look at this, this’ll be a story, won’t it.” And it is, I guess. He fell on the gravel beneath the gutters where my cousin Daniel and I had, just earlier that summer, picked up the smallest rocks and tried to throw them into the Elk River.

But this is where the old man named Marvin who was dating my Mammaw and who looked like Stan Lee fell, where the pain caused him to go into a coma, where the healing caused him to get better, so much better that he was at the next Thanksgiving dinner, telling stories that all of us knew were lies, where the healing then turned back into something that was killing him, something that made him go back to the hospital, which is where he died, but here he is, actually, not dead, but very much alive, getting back into the truck with me in the backseat where I’m keeping my arms at my sides, a loaf of bread placed in my lap, and now here is Mammaw, who I forgot had come with us, and they’re both in the front seat smiling and the day is hot and Marvin starts telling stories and Mammaw listens and I listen and we both know he’s lying, but we hang on to every word because whether it’s true or not, whether he’s remembered something the wrong way or in a way that romanticizes everything, it’s a story, and it makes us forget about the sweat on our arms, the musty smell in this truck, and the death before us and the death to come, and we just breathe and we listen and we listen and we listen.

FREAK DEATHS by Aishwarya Mishra

September 9, 2020

Lasya transfers to our school in the peak of summer when the heat makes us more mirage than matter. Our mothers warn us against going out, but we want to see that translucence that makes us inquire after her surname.

“That house is Lord Krishna’s mouth,” our mothers say, “containing the entire universe within it.”

The air-conditioners are dismantled first. The first time we step inside their house, we find it throbbing like the angry vein we sometimes see on our fathers’ foreheads. Lasya’s Ma gives us watermelon juice to cool our stomachs and tells us of the family that went to sleep in the icy coldness of the air-conditioner which later became heat and debris and death.

We try not to look at their bruises. They are livid like their house.

Days later, the perfumes go too. Lasya smells of sandalwood-lemon-rose water as she tells us of a newly wedded wife who spritzed on something her husband liked and went into the kitchen. We cry for the husband, who will now love her forever, for no fault of his.

Our mothers mumble on the terrace as they lay out the pickles to dry.

“You cannot save your children from everything,” they say, their hands bright red from the pickle oils.

We think of Lasya’s bruise.

In the monsoons, we stare at the house until its stillness becomes bright green needles inside our heads. We hear of a man who got electrocuted in an ATM nearby. Our mothers shake their heads as they restock the refrigerators, even as we stick our fingers in the air, looking for sockets, for something a bright electric blue, like her bruise. We shudder at the mute violets and pinks that streak the skies. Our mothers tell us about lightning that strikes elsewhere. We see her looking at us from her room, the windows both her eyes and skin.

We think of that bare house, now swollen with the rains and anticipation, that lushness of nothing. We sleep to the thickening of crickets and want to ask her what drowns out the night in her house?

We have trouble sleeping. We wake up to the pricking absence of a knife, or to the moon-mothball hidden inside the clouds to keep the darkness fresh. We want to ask Lasya if this is her Ma’s doing.

In autumn, we meet Lasya and her banked fire of a bruise. It holds colours that the fall has never shown us. We shuffle leaves with our feet as she tells us the stairs are being removed in the house. Something about someone having broken their neck in another house.

These things happen, she says.

Our mothers tug at their sarees and wring the necks of banisters when we tell them.

These things happen, they say.

Winter brings with it bright rich soups and frenzied dancing. Lasya tells us the meaning of her name, and that she prefers Tandava, that dance of rage to Lasya, that dance of grace. We struggle to keep ourselves warm. She tells us her Ma read about the dancing plague that began with a girl like her. Bread can get fungi, fungi brings madness, she says quietly. We wonder at all the things that ferment. We wonder how we will live without bread or rice. We wonder at the rage that household grains can cause.

Ferment. Foment. We fail to grasp how something that relieves inflammation then becomes the cause of rage. Lasya tells us the story of a tyrant who catches fever. A blanket soaked in distilled spirits is sewn on to him. Then he dies once it catches fire. Do you choose the fever or the flames?, we want to ask her.

Next summer, the pregnant elephant dies first. We hear it from the villagers who come into town for the weekend markets. We stroke our stomachs as they tell us of her having ingested a pineapple filled with firecrackers and then having gone into the water to stand silently for three days as life fizzled out of her.

We who grew up on stories of mad elephants terrorizing entire villages do not understand this. We run to our mothers, who soothe us and nod silently. Do they understand this? We know rage as pineapples bursting with firecrackers; they know rage as the gently laughing ulcers in the womb. Is that what a child does to you?, we want to know.

Lasya’s Pa dies a few weeks later. Cardiac arrest, the doctor says. All of us, and our mothers, gather at the house. It is buzzing in a way that is almost disrespectful to death. We see new furniture, new utensils, new appliances. Our mothers smile softly at their presence. We stare silently at the absence of their bruises.

HORSESHOES by Mary Alice Stewart

September 8, 2020

She says it big and like a threat and smiling, horseshoe in hand, “I don’t like losing,” and she swings, lets go, and hits the stake head on. A ringer—iron rings against iron and I hold my drink up and shout for her. The game is alive again. Kayla plays inconsistent. It’s sometimes hard to watch, some bad throws, can’t even get one close, then she gets pissed off and you can see in her face that she’s decided it’s over for her and she’s just going through the motions. It’s awful playing her when she gets all fixed like that. But other times, she’s full of fight, and makes these huge comebacks, and turns nights into something full of suspense. Tonight, she’s playing against Friend and is wearing his Sublime t-shirt, which hangs past her shorts so it looks like she’s wearing nothing else. She’s behind a little but she’s got that sharp look in her eye and it suits her. Her nose and cheeks are pink from the sun and her freckles are at their deepest across her knees. Her hair is wispy from sweat, and her curls flicker red when she moves. Friend and her are together again, the same way me and Lee are together again. Our rhythm of returning, constantly returning, like a tennis ball against a wall and back again.

Next, Friend gets his first one pretty close and as he sets up for his second, right before the horseshoe leaves his hand, Kayla lifts up her shirt and flashes him. Her tits stun. One of her nipples is pierced. I was there and held her hand when it happened. It bled, stained the shirt she wore that day. I look at Lee and see where his eyes are at and of course they are on her and he catches me in the corner of his eye watching him stare so he looks up at the sky and studies it as though he is innocently and curiously bird watching. I think about how he looks at me topless—plainly, like familiar architecture. Friend misses bad and curses, spits into the dirt, but not seriously. “You play dirty,” he says, and she shrugs, her eyes ablaze. She grabs the horseshoes from the grass and moves herself into position. Her face turns serious, dark even. Her light brows scrunch up, and she sucks air in and brings her lips together like she’s about to jump deep underwater. The shoe turns in the air and hits the stake straight—dead on. Nobody talks because she would have our ass about it. She picks up her second shoe, no ounce of celebration in her body. I am breathless despite it being common, days like this. Something about seeing her get close to winning gets me tense and emotional. And I always feel proud to know that I knew it was in her this whole time. Kayla brings the horseshoe up to her chest, large against her small frame, pulls her arm back, and lets go. It turns in the air; and though this one looks like it was thrown with a little too much arm, looks like it’s about to fly right over the stake, the shoe turns again just so and it hits, and spins all the way down. Kayla throws her fists up and punches the air and we all cheer. She comes over to me, and I get up off the cooler, and she pulls herself out a tall Twisted Tea, cracks it and gulps. “I like that feeling of coming back. I wish you could feel some of that every day,” she says and Friend comes up behind her and spanks her. Kayla has always lived in the trailer beside mine. Our windows look into each other’s. Sometimes when I turn my head to the side when Lee is fucking me, I can see Friend fucking Kayla. Sometimes on accident we make eye contact and it makes us laugh.

A winter came once when the snow fell hard at an angle for days and days and we were too young to be wary of our roofs being warped under too much weight. Kayla was sick from withdrawals. A peace came after weeks of it, and we were tear stung, and she said, “We need each other,” and I knew that was true, and always had been. Before we met each other even, something further back. I said back to her, “Thank God."Kayla and I are outside sprawled out on the couch facing the woods. We watch Friend and Lee walk off, thick clouds trailing behind them from their vapes, so much it makes a new weather. They are taking their guns to go shoot at cans. Kayla is rolling her face with a glittering rock. “It’s a rose quartz roller. It makes your under-eye circles go away and rose quartz corresponds to your heart chakra…” she trails off, leaving me to assume I knew what that meant. She shoplifted it yesterday and didn’t have to. She is searching for new ways to feel good again. She brings my head into her lap and rolls my face all over. Muscles in my jaw—I had never noticed before—were tight as a drum, and the rock over my cheek felt like the first careful steps onto a recently frozen over lake. Kayla is on again about the duplexes they are putting in across town. How nice they seem, how big and new. How they are set back from the road so you wouldn’t hear cars pass. Her hope is to move in one with me right there on the other side of the wall. I like when Kayla talks like this, accelerated and dreaming. And I like the idea of life, right beside her. But on my side of the wall?—I am not sure Lee loves me or has ever loved me or will someday love me. I can’t count on it. I’m surprised I don’t care. I imagine a large, blue rug, thick and plush, that I can lay on like a cat. I imagine Kayla coming over for dinner. There are things I can see perfectly.

The soft wind tangles our hair together. Here—the smell of the air is two different things, coming at each other from different sides when the breeze lifts lightly across the yard. From one side, it is ocean, from the other, it is the smell of cow shit coming from Thibodeau’s. The way it can hit you can feel strange—no cows in sight, no waves, no immediate sounds to match the smell of things—and it can make this place feel like a mirage, a place that can ripple and disappear like one of those holographic school folders that change animals depending on how you hold it.

Once, Kayla and I decided we wanted to die together and we set a date. We walked to the edge of a cliff and we leaned over. We decided against it. We decided on going somewhere else.

THE MILK BOTTLE LEGS OF THE HIGH WIRE WOMAN by Frankie McMillan

September 7, 2020

When I look at her legs I see upturned milk bottles, and I’m talking here of the glass bottles that milk used to come in and I love the shape of those legs, I could stay out all night on the frosty grass looking up at the wire and Miss Tatyana walking the wire in silence, only the guy ropes creaking and the twang of the metal pulley, and you know, those legs get my score, those legs belonging to Miss Tatyana all the way from Russia where they didn’t have glass milk bottles, only Mr Stalin, his mouth a hard line, his eyebrows a nest of ideologies that to tell you the truth wouldn’t suit a man like myself, a man who needs the freedom to pour his love into a vessel of his own choosing.

They say anything you love, anything of value is bound to make a break for freedom.

Some nights I’m afraid I will lose Miss Tatyana. She’ll move on from the wire. Trapeze, maybe. Or maybe it’ll be the persuasion of a baby. In my dreams I throw her over my shoulder, gallop away with her on a horse. We get married in Porto, at night she wraps her milk bottle legs around my throat. When I wake she’s gone. My breath curdles into silence.

I wait for Miss Tatyana by her caravan. Under a cool mackerel sky, only the fin of a moon peeking out. She moves between the tents and down the alleyway. I catch a glimpse of her legs as she walks past. And here’s the thing. She knows I’m there waiting for her and she knows that I know she knows this and that’s why I remain hidden in the grass. And she sits, smoking on the steps and I’m lying spreadeagled on my back, useless like something poured out. Smoke drifts over me, I close my eyes and I swallow and I swallow.

AFTER SHRINKING by Hannah Cajandig-Taylor

September 6, 2020

We lived in a pale blue dollhouse with three stories & a basement. Obsessed over hot air balloons & weather blimps. Collected snowglobes & birdcages & convinced our giant neighbors to order countless pizzas by jumping on the remote buttons until a commercial with extra-large pepperoni flashed across their TV screen. Until we snuck enough triangular pizza box tables to furnish the place. Grew make-believe green beans & perennials on the roof. Protected our cardboard porch with Venus flytraps. A drawbridge. Toothpick mailbox. The works. Repainted our plastic appliances with glittering silver nail polish. Sharpie’d our heights on the wall, our grip clenched tight as we struggled to lift the permanent marker, shoes digging into the ground. Took three of us just to carry the marker back to the attic. Summer came. We were placed in the untamed backyard. When the crows moved in, our sky tarred & feathered, all we could think was to close our lopsided windows & send hope to our neighbors with chocolate coins in gold foil & tooth fairy kisses & after the birds abandoned our balcony view, the blue became a smiling child in a turquoise t-shirt, cutting little blankets from a washcloth to leave beside our front door.