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EXCERPTS FROM THE NOVEL VENICE by T.J. Larkey

September 4, 2020

Tough

I’m lying on my floor, next to my bed.

My bed is this big padded mat that rolls up and can be moved very easily.

It’s comfortable, but I like the floor better.

I believe that lying on the floor for a few hours a day will toughen me up.

I was a spoiled kid, very soft, so I’m always looking for things to toughen me up.

That’s how I got here.

I got it in my head that moving to a big city I’d seen in movies and television, where I didn’t know anybody, would somehow make me a tougher and overall better human. I was coasting around, not sure about anything other than wanting to live somewhere like that, when I lucked out and found the apartment online. It was cheap for being so close to the ocean and, even though I don't care about things such as close proximity to bodies of water or the correlating price of living in such places, I put down a deposit without even looking inside first.

I was on my way to becoming a tough guy.

It felt so badass.

For about a minute.

Then it transformed into panic.

A panic that remained all the way up until moving day.

I walked in to my new place with a laptop in one hand, a trash bag full of clothes in the other, and my bed/mat rolled up and tucked under my arm, hoping for the best. Hoping for a little more luck. Hoping for a place that would help me become… (something).

First, I looked at the kitchen/living room.

It had a microwave, a mini fridge, a sink, and a small couch that took up about thirty percent of the room. It was beautiful. I realized very quickly there was no bathroom (which I couldn’t remember being mentioned online) and that was beautiful too. I felt stupid for panicking. I thought to myself, this is the essentials, this is beautiful.

Then I looked at the bedroom. It had old brick walls, little bits of it breaking off on to the creaking wood floors, and in the corner of the room the ceiling slanted down because it was right under the stairs. I could hear people’s footsteps all day and night.

Then I noticed something very unusual.

The floor was wrong. It was crooked. If you put a pencil down it would roll to the other side of the room and disappear into the cracks between the brick wall. If I put myself down on the floor, however, no such luck.

At first, I thought the building was poorly constructed on uneven ground-- the first floor is street-level on one side of the building but not the other side. But later one of my neighbors told me that because of the age of the building, and the number of earthquakes it had endured, parts of the foundation had shifted over the years.

A building that could collapse at any moment.

My new home.

I threw my bed/mat onto the crooked floor and laid down next to it, like I’m lying down now, and thought, am I tough yet?

Mouse

I’m in my kitchen.

It’s very dark.

The rest of the city is asleep and all I can hear is my own footsteps.

It’s usually my favorite.

The best time to be alive.

But tonight it reminds me of when I was kid.

I was afraid of the dark.

I remember looking into the darkest part of my room, restless and almost paralyzed, and picturing the worst things possible. I remember knowing that it was all in my head and nothing was happening other than my inability to stop imagining my own demise, but still I’d look in to those dark crevices and think, okay, just, kill me quickly please.

Then remembering that reminds me I’m still afraid of the dark.

I open the mini fridge.

What seems like blinding light pours into the room and I see something small move quickly away from it. Then I hear little scratching noises. It’s coming from behind the fridge and then it’s coming from behind the sink.

I make myself completely still. I tell myself it’s in my head. But the sound gets louder and I move closer, silently, tip-toeing, so quiet that I start to scare myself, always scared, so scared that whatever is making the sound will pop out and systematically list all of my worst moments in chronological order, starting from age five, then murder me.

I open the cabinets below my sink and find the source.

A little family of mice looking up at me, terrified.

“Hello,” I say.

“Don’t be afraid,” I say.

“Let’s be friends,” I say.

Then I reach over in to the fridge.

There’s beer, eggs, a plastic bottle of vodka, and processed cheese I get from the convenience store across the street. I pinch off a piece of the cheese and set it down in front of the mice family, then I eat the rest of it in front of them so they know it can be trusted.

“My cheese is your cheese,” I tell them. “Go on.”

But they seem skeptical.

I leave it and walk back to bed.

I open my laptop, put in a DVD, and hit play.

As the intro credits start, I’m distracted by another creature darting away from the light coming from the screen.

I look over and see the little guy hiding in the corner of the room, between the cracks of the brick wall and partially hidden by my bed.

“Hello,” I say, “You with them?”

I point to the sink.

The mouse looks at me for a moment, then runs away, up the crooked floor and back to the rest of his family.

“Nice to meet you,” I say, and lie back down.

I watch the movie without any further interruptions.

I close my laptop.

I pull my blanket up to my nose.

I shut my eyes.

I whisper good night to my new roommates.

Then after imagining myself dying horrifically in an earthquake for an indeterminable amount of time, I force myself to fall asleep.

***

In the morning I wake up to something tickling my leg.

It’s terrifying.

But it’s nice to have things going on.

Distractions.

I lift the blanket over my head and see my new roommate burrowed under my knee. The same little guy that was near my bed the night before. He looks identical to the rest of his family, but I can tell it’s him. Something about his movements.

“Hello,” I say. “Good morning.”

I want him to tell me everything is going to be okay.

Everything is fine, now that he’s here.

But he doesn’t respond.

Just runs out from under the blanket and back into the kitchen and behind the fridge.

Still friendless.

I sit up.

I get this cold sensation through my body and my left hand is asleep.

Then as I roll of the bed I feel something small like crumbs underneath me and it’s terrifying.

Always terrified.

I yank the blankets completely off, wiggling like a little child, and see a dozen hard little brown pellets, about the size of a mouse’s asshole.

It’s right there.

Wasn’t there last night.

But now it’s there.

A declaration.

A black flag.

War.

I get up and check behind the sink cabinets but all I see are pipes, more mouse shit, and the cheese I left last night, untouched.

It’s too much.

Shit on my bed all you want, but refusing my hospitality is a capital offense.

As I get dressed angrily, punching my arms through the holes of my shirt and kicking wildly into my jeans, I decide that’s the rule, my one and only rule. I repeat it over and over in my head like a mantra, then walk out the door and into the convenience store across the street.

“Mouse traps?” I say. “They broke the one rule.”

The clerk points me in the right direction.

I march down the aisle until I find what I’m looking for.

They have the non-lethal, sticky trap device, but I don’t see the good stuff.

Give me the big bad lethal stuff baby.

I see the tag—Tomcat Metal Mousetrap—and the space where it should be.

But no mousetraps.

“Where’s the good stuff!?”

“Huh?” the clerk says.

“The Tomcat?”

“Oh. We’re out. But the Glue Traps work just as good.”

“Hah!” I say. “If you knew the kind of mice I was dealing with, you would be singing a very different tune my friend!”

“Kay.”

I buy the glue traps and head home.

I stick one behind the fridge, and one under the sink and wait, checking every half-hour while sipping beer and watching old Humphrey Bogart movies (a 4-in-1 DVD collection, to toughen myself up) that I’d bought a few days before.

But nothing happens.

***

A few days go by before I see him again.

He’s back in the corner where I had first found him.

“You!” I snarl. “Where’s the rest of them?”

He crawls up on my bed, staring.

There hadn’t been any more shit in the sink cabinet and the traps remained empty.

He seems lonely.

I look into his sinister little eyes, his little whiskers twitching, and I can’t help it.

“You may stay,” I declare. “But if you poop my bed again, I’ll buy the good stuff. Tomcat. Metal. Very Lethal.”

Get your copy here.

Art by Zoe Blair Schlagenhauf @tndrnss_vrywh

SONG FOR AN EMPTY WORLD by Miles Coombe

September 4, 2020

The road is lit with street lamps. It's weak, bulbs on the edge of giving out, but the glow is still there.

I am in his bed, a fresh bruise over his eye this time, and curled into his side. He feels smaller with my arms around him. My eyes are closed and I see an explosion of grey in a room too white to be real, and where I know there should be screaming, my own included, there is only static. He wakes, with a hammering heart and a cry on the tip of his tongue. Something inside him has fractured and a crack in his skin slips from the corner of his eye and falls over the bridge of his nose. I think my chest is caving in, that my lungs have stopped working. Something about the glassy look in his eyes makes me feel exposed. He was beautiful in a sort of starving way, like there was always something more he needed. Clearly, he was more lost than I was. Sometimes he stared at nothing and cried. He was gone, into his head, curled into a ball on the floor.

Something builds inside me. A storm, a tornado, untamed and unchecked, threatening to burst free. It’s the feeling that pushes at my skin when I can’t sleep, when I feel like I can’t breathe, when my ears are ringing.

The world spins so fast it turns to a motion blur of shadows and dim lamp light, and the off-white colour of the wall has turned blue. My head is spinning, everything is spinning, I feel all the air from my lungs recede, and stars swim in my vision. Time narrows down to a single point, a tape recording over itself.

The city lives and breathes on around us.

you were still in the ambulancewhen the cops suggested you’re the onewho tried to burn it down

All I could hear was the empty horizon and his warmth that filled it to the brim. He was nearly there, close enough he could taste the gray on his tongue like cotton wool. The edges of his voice tinged with a gentleness only reserved for the sweetest, prettiest things he saw. There are patterns in my periphery as the world bends and sways around me, like branches of young trees caught in the wind. The evening is quiet now, a sort of careful stillness that would be so easy and awful to break. He welcomes its hold, falls limp and boneless as it swaddles him in its folds. Eyes shut, mouth parted, it’s peaceful in this deep silence, weightless and still.

here I blur into you

I kiss him until the kiss consumes us both. The music has long since stopped and neither of us notices. The lethargy of the high washes over us in gentle waves and we fall asleep curled around each other. I’m falling into him, against him, under him, at his knees, on his back. Everything is falling, everything is collapsing and sliding and slipping, losing grip and sinking, one last point of contact, one last kiss, one last chance, one last abyss to topple into. When he kisses me it's desperate, it's pleading, it’s begging, every midnight cross-faded wish pressed between us like a prayer.

If there was a colour to those days, a colour for me and him, a colour for kisses and pills and dying, it is every colour of pink and blue, the dark lights and the pale shadows in the almost darkness. The memories are blurry but the colours are still there, cutting like knives. I am aching. I feel like I’m drowning and on fire at the same time. I just know that the space around my heart, where all the horrible things build up, thick, and wet, and poisonous - the space I flooded with opioids, weed and pills - is suddenly, blessedly empty. As though someone has reached in and scraped it all away.

he’s spent too many nights in too many places curled up around himselfwishing someone else was thereand now someone is

When he presses against me, terribly thin body, yet grounding as a heavy blanket, his mind slips into my own, his eyes are shut, but not tight, and his mouth is open slightly. I can feel the shallow rush of breath over my skin. If not for the frenzy he had been in a minute earlier, I might have believed he was sleeping. If not for the wet itch of tears running onto my neck, I might have believed he was peaceful. His words hurt, they burned like a brand, but I shut my ears to the flow of his voice and try to ignore the pain in it. I look the boy dead in his eyes, searching for an answer behind the tortoiseshell. There's a desperation at the edge of his iris, fear evident, but he still doesn't look away. Eyes raking over inconspicuous bandages, brushing fingertips over bruised faces, running lips along bloody knuckles. Another collision. A car crash, our bodies strewn across the road, across the mattress, blood on the asphalt, teeth pulled blood up under the skin, gasoline in the air, the scent of sweat. Sharing bottles, cigarettes, forehead to forehead with breath intermingling, afraid to make it real, until we had nothing left to lose.

Yes, Lucas was Lucas. He drank vodka from the bottle at 11am. Snorted pills off the floor. Spoke Dutch while high. Was often dangerously malnourished. Had unexplained bruises in blues and yellows. Sniffed glue in the park after school. He was loud and obnoxious and loved hitting people in the face. That was daytime Lucas, Lucas while awake. But at night, it was Luca. Maybe I comforted him because I knew he was haunted by thoughts of the street and the memories of all that came before. But perhaps we both felt this way and, for some reason, I comforted him the way he did me. Two jagged pieces of a puzzle that together make a complete picture. The nights were broken, fragments of shattered sleep and soaring highs. When I would gasp for breath and be unable to shake the fear out of my face and arms because I was still falling, it was he, Luca, who, with bruised yet nimble hands, caressed my face to still the fall. The nights were the best because it was when he and I were in each others’ presence the longest and in a strange way, most lucidly. At night, when he was illuminated by the moonlight, he was totally different. At night, when we were tangled together, he was all the stars in the sky, soft angles and gentle otherworldly melodies. A song for an empty world.

a low humming settled over the empty housessomething he's never heard beforeit sounds almost like stirring, like waking

And then, the sky would turn from navy to indigo, violet to magenta, amber to yellow, and yellow to that horrid oversaturated, fragmented blue. And in the light, as all supernatural creatures do, he would retreat, to the kitchen, to get a morning cup of black coffee, splashed with vodka. And when I followed him, Luca was lost.

It was Lucas again.

We stand there, looking at each other in the middle of the empty street – two boys, one high and the other sobering, words on their tongues that do not make it out into the waking world.

loneliness grows around us like mouldhe only used my name when he knew I was sinking

The night is suffocating, the sky too wide above him and the houses too big. He picks up the pace, staring intently at the asphalt beneath his feet. He’s running, almost tripping because he can barely see. The tears don’t fall, that would be too certain, he thinks. That would make it all just a little too real.

The road is lit with street lamps. It's weak, bulbs on the edge of giving out, but the glow is still there.

WELCOME TO THE RECKONING by Omar Hussain

September 3, 2020

Your family’s old brown and blue station wagon pulls up to the house. It’s not your house. It’s never yours. At three-years-old, you’ve already lived in four dodgy houses, a mobile home, month-to-month condos and rent-controlled apartments. This is your grandfather’s house. He tells you and your parents that you’re welcome to stay for as long as you’d like, but you’ve heard that one before.

The wagon comes to a stop. The gears slam into park. Your dad is screaming about something—the latest rage attack. He gets out of the car, paces around the hood. To the passenger side door. Your way too pregnant mom is half-way out the car when your dad—still barking and hissing with venom in a way that makes his black mustache transform into the devil’s handlebars—grabs the door and slams it on her. She falls in the space between the car and the curb, sobbing out of fright, but mainly out of shame because you saw it.

Welcome to keeping a secret.

It’s five years later now and you’re all grown up because you are eight years old. It’s Friday night, which means your mom took you and your little brother to Blockbuster after school. You rented Beethoven—the dumb movie about a slobbering Saint Bernard. Your dad doesn’t get home until after ten because he works the late shift and you’re the only one who is a night owl like him so you stay up and start the movie together. He’s cold and short because he probably had a shitty day. At some point, the bad guys steal Beethoven and you begin to tear up. Start to sob. Your dad mocks you for it and in a split-second of dumbass kid compulsion, you turn and swat at his leg.

That was the mistake. That simple.

He lurches at you—grabs the hair on the back of your head, pulling and pushing you until he’s taken the reins. He shoves you to the ground, your palms and kneecaps your supports. His hand slaps your face west, then east, but you just count. One. Two. Three strikes. You count because it stunts the fear. It displaces the pain. Five. Six. A closed fist this time. He sends you to your room. Pulls the mattress off the bed and tells you to lay on the bed boards. You do as you’re told. Your body radiates from its wounds. You think it’s over.

But it’s not.

Twenty minutes later, he’s back. Seven. Eight. He drags you by the arm, burning carpet against your back, into the living room hazed with cigarette smoke. He tells you you’re a lowlife. That you have no respect. He repeats these statements several times and you start to believe them. You melt. He hits you so hard with an open palm between the shoulder blades that you hear it before you feel it. You don’t stop counting until the sun comes up and he falls asleep.

Welcome to waiting for your turn.

Twenty years have passed. He’s long dead. Cancer the ever-avenging disease. Sometimes if you slick your black hair back, let your stubble become more of a beard, you can see him.

You move the cursor on Google street-level view further down your block. You stop at a navy house with white trim. Freshly built porch. In the image, there is a red pickup truck in the driveway. You’ve done this with every house leading to this one—because you’re looking for something.

Kali Linux, the hacker’s utility belt, fires up on your computer, its twisting dragon icon filling the screen. You’ve found an exploit within that house. A way in through the beautiful world of internet insecurity. The world that lets you peek into any window or room you want. You remotely access the father’s PC and activate the microphone on his computer to listen in. This digital stakeout lasts days. And then, on a Friday, you hear it. The unmistakable sounds of a child screaming. A man stomping around wooden floors, a belt crackling with glee. A woman pleads until a loud thud against a wall or fireplace silences her. The child never stops screaming.

Welcome to the reckoning.

It’s two, maybe three in the morning. The night, your friend. The darkness, your armor. You circle the side of the house. The sliding glass door to the back is left open. The ski mask gets pulled down, the condensation against your mouth instant. Everyone is asleep or faking it. The lights are off but for one room alive with blue and white hues—ghosts from the television dancing on the walls.

You find him passed out in his recliner. Rotund, balding piece of shit. Crushed beer can by his feet. Wife beater, blue boxer shorts, socks still on. Your hand grips the brass knuckles so tight it squeaks. He wakes up with a pathetic expression of shock. His eyes beg, motion for mercy.

Motion denied.

You strike him in the forehead—his skull bouncing off the recliner like a basketball. You dribble it some more. A left hook across the cheekbone. A straight right to the nose. He grunts and rolls off the chair, crawling into the kitchen, dripping blood along the way. One soccer punt to his ribs and he collapses. You grab his throat. Lift his head.

“Do you understand why this happened?” you hiss.

He doesn’t respond. You grab a framed family photo off the breakfast nook and wave it in front of him.

“This is why.”

He chokes and pinches his eyes shut. Turns his head away.

“Nod if you understand. Nod if you understand what will happen if you do it again.”

Tears crawl out of his eyes. He nods. You watch droplets of his blood fall from his face, listen as they pitter-patter against the wooden floor. A surge of energy ignites a growing inferno within your chest—your lungs and heart the kindle.

You leave him there.

You head back home.

Drink some coffee.

Get back on the computer.

Move the cursor to the next house on the block.

THE LIFE CYCLE OF TEMPORAL BIOMATTER ATTACHMENTS by Jemimah Wei

September 1, 2020

This is completely unsexual, but ever since the ex left, Jennie has gotten into the habit of sticking her hand down her pajama pants and cupping herself to sleep. It started in week five or six of the lockdown. One day, she woke up and her hands were in her pants. Both hands, under her pants, resting on top of her underwear. This happened occasionally, even before the ex moved out. Usually around the middle of the month, when she could feel her body beginning to slush. Whenever it happened, Jennie would periodically stick her finger into the folds of her vagina, to check if her period had come early. This time, too, she brought her hand to her nose and sniffed, expecting the scraping smell of pre-blood. But, nothing. If anything, her fingers smelled a bit like Cheetos.

The next day, she woke up in the same position. And the day after that. After four successive days of waking like this, she started sliding one hand into her underwear before falling asleep, letting it rest there all night. Jennie did wonder if her body was trying to tell her something, and once or twice, pushed her fingers further in, to see if her body would respond. It didn’t. Jennie’s sex drive had evaporated in the last year, and the ex leaving hadn’t changed anything. After awhile, she stopped thinking about it, and it has since become a nightly routine for her to cup her vagina to sleep with her right hand, like a baby with a blanket.

It feels like a betrayal, then, when she wakes one day to find it sore. There is a mild but insistent throbbing, and when Jennie runs her fingers over the surface of her skin, she finds a slightly inflamed bump on the inner folds of her labia. Jennie prods it tenderly, then gets out of bed and tries to get a look at it by sitting pantless with her legs wide open, in front of her mirror. But the bump is too far back and she goes cross-eyed trying to twist herself into a proper viewing position. She uses her phone’s front camera to take a picture, so she can see what she’s dealing with, but even with the flash on, the picture comes out a blur of skin and hair.

Jennie goes online and orders a handheld mirror for two dollars, then wonders if this is the ex’s doing, if he’s left her some kind of venereal disease as a parting gift. She wants to ask, but he hasn’t called in days, and won’t pick up when she does. The last they’d spoken was the last time he’d called, a week prior. The ex rang often, to work through the break up. He was almost done processing it. “The important thing is not to focus on the six years we had together,” he had said, “but to be thankful it didn’t turn into sixty.” Jennie thinks about this as she turns on her computer and fiddles with the settings on her Netflix account. Half an hour later, the phone rings.

“Did you put an age lock on my profile?”

“What? Let me see,” She taps at her computer keys randomly, the phone pressed to her face, his breathing in her ear. “Oh, sorry. Must have been an accident.”

She can almost hear him rolling his eyes. “Jen,” he says. He hangs up.

The mirror arrives three days later. Jennie can’t stop touching the bump, even though it hurts. She’s completely given up on wearing pants at home, and there is very little stopping her from fingering it, when she’s working, watching TV, or stalking the ex. It’s gotten a little swollen and the pain hasn’t let up.

Jennie sits cross legged on her bed and angles the mirror under her bum. It's the first time she’s seen her lower landscape in such clear detail: the darkened inner thighs, the hairs on her butt, the wrinkled frown of her vagina. And the bump. She takes it between her thumb and forefinger, and squeezes lightly, wincing despite having expected the pain. A sharp white blot strains against the surface of her skin, and she increases the pressure, watching her skin stretch and threaten to split. Ah, a pimple. Jennie burns in shame as she puts the mirror away. She cannot help but feel like this is a personal failing, of sorts.

The phone rings again. She knows what it’s about even before she picks up.

“Is there something wrong with your Netflix?”

“No, why?”

“Now I’m logged out. Can’t seem to sign in. Can you check?”

“Alright, hold on.” Jennie puts him on loudspeaker and googles “vagina bumps.” It’s apparently super common. She makes it through two pages of search results before the line cuts.

The best thing to do would be to leave the spot alone. All the websites—be they dermatologist sites, online magazines, or beauty blogs—concur that no matter what, one mustn't pop it. If it really bothers you, Women’s Health Online says, you can visit a trusted dermatologist and have it safely lanced. Teenage Magazine is more assertive. Under NO circumstances should you deal with it on your own. You will make it WORSE. Jennie reads this with one hand on the bump, rolling the little spot of pain between her fingers, squeezing occasionally but never pressing down firmly.

The next time he calls, she starts talking first. “Sorry babe,” she says, trying to sound as perplexed as possible, “it looks fine on my end.”

“I still can’t get in. Jesus. Jen. If this is some passive aggressive bullshit you’re pulling—”

It is, of course. “It’s not.”

“It’s not like I can’t pay for my own. You know that. It’s just that the algorithm is already stored in that account. Six years of preferences. I’d have to start all over again.”

“I know.”

He exhales violently against the mouthpiece. “Okay, can you please just look into it, please.”

Jennie sends him a text after, saying that she’s reset the password, can he try it again and let her know? He never replies to her texts, something to do with drawing boundaries. He doesn’t reply now either. But she can see that he’s posted a new status on Facebook. Takes a special kind of crazy to withhold netflix from a person during a GLOBAL QUARANTINE. There’s a comment under that, from a new Facebook friend Jennie doesn’t recognize, a Chelsea. Ugh, the new Chelsea says, what a MONSTER. She looks at the comment for a long time, hovers over the like button but doesn’t click.

In her email inbox, there is a reply from a dermatologist she’s written to. Look, the dermatologist says, you can come in after the lockdown lifts, if you want. But I’ll be honest with you. If you leave it alone, it’s likely to go away on its own. She looks for a second opinion, but they’re all the same. A skincare blogger attempts to analogize: Haven’t you had a pimple before? Think of the pimple as your skin trying to heal. You might feel like you’re getting the gunk out, but what you’re really doing is interfering with the healing process!

The phone is ringing again. She counts the rings—one, two. The most she’s let it get to is eight. She watches his name vibrate aggressively before her, then flips her gaze down to the bump. She’s given up on wearing underwear too. She applies a little bit of pressure, watches the white tip reappear. What would it be like, she thinks, to be the sort of person who could press down? Three, four. She squeezes and watches the skin redden, then blanch, the white becoming ever more insistent. Five, six. The pain makes her gasp, she’s never come this close to breaking before. There are tears in her eyes. Seven. Come on, she thinks. Come on. Eight.

NICE AND NORMAL by Diane D. Gillette

August 31, 2020

Janice stopped at the back door when she heard footsteps behind her. She turned to see her husband in the kitchen doorway.

"Where are you sneaking off to?" Rob asked, one corner of his mouth upturned.

"Just getting a little fresh air.”

"Nope," he protested. "This is your family. If I have to stay for Sober Thanksgiving, so do you."

Janice sighed. “I wish everyone would stop calling it that. Like this is all a big joke.”

Rob slid onto a stool and plucked a leftover dinner roll from the plate that sat between the platter with the remains of the turkey carcass and the bowl that held her aunt’s not-so-famous sweet potatoes, only two polite scoops missing from it.

“You’re right. I’m sorry,” Rob popped a hunk of the roll into his mouth.

“You don’t believe it’s real,” she said.

Rob chewed the roll for a moment before reaching out his hand. When she slid her gloved hand into his, he pulled her close. “I believe she’s really trying,” he said.

Janice pulled back and looked him in the eye. “Didn’t you see her at dinner? How happy she looked? I thought she’d just float away; she looked so unburdened.”

Rob smoothed back the frizzies that had sprung loose from the twist Janice wore her hair in. “Your mother has never seemed all that burdened to me.”

Janice bit her bottom lip and looked out the kitchen window. The snow was coming down harder. "I saw a light in the treehouse," she said. "I think Doug’s hiding out there."

Rob frowned. “I thought he just left without saying goodbye again. He barely said two words at dinner.”

“Probably for the best,” Janice sighed.

"Go on. I'll save you the last piece of the apple cherry pie.”

Janice kissed her husband’s cheek and squeezed his hand once more.

Outside she turned her face upward to feel the snowflakes gather on her cheeks and eyelids. The chill soothed her. She made tracks to the big old oak that held the treehouse Steve had built for them the summer before he married their mother. Throughout their childhood, it had been a pirate ship, a castle, and a clubhouse. They’d read comic books up there and hid their most treasured possessions within its four walls.

Peeling off her gloves to get a better grip on the boards, Janice climbed up and poked her head through the opening in the treehouse floor. A light shone in her eyes.

"Jesus, Doug, are you trying to blind me?"

"Jan Jan," Doug said. "Didn't know who was invading my castle. Come to join the party?"

Janice pulled herself up through the opening and crawled on her hands and knees until she could sit leaning against the wall next to her big brother. "Are you drinking up here?"

“I never technically agreed to Sober Thanksgiving."

"I thought you'd be glad that Mom quit drinking."

Doug pulled a flask out of his coat pocket and took a swig. "I'm thrilled. But when I moved out, I swore I was done letting her ruin things."

He offered her the flask. Janice took it but didn't drink. "Com' on. I thought we agreed that it would be easier if no one drank on the holidays this year."

"Why should we make things easier for her?" He eyed the flask.

"She did give us life."

"And then proceeded to spend the next few decades trying to ruin it? Is the irony of this Thanksgiving so totally lost on you?"

"I was kind of looking forward to a nice, normal holiday for once," she admitted.

"Nice and normal. That's all you ever wanted."

"Is that so wrong?"

"It doesn't exist. Like Santa Claus. Or sobriety. You and Rob though, that's normal. That's nice."

"You could have that too. What happened with Lucy? She was sweet and smart. I liked her."

"None of your business.” Doug reached over and removed the flask from Janice's hand. “She was too pushy. Kind of like you actually. Couldn't date my sister."

"She was worried about you, you mean?" Janice watched him take another swig from the flask.

"She worried about everything."

"Did she ever worry about how much you drink?"

"Fuck you, sis."

Janice sighed. She looped her arm through his and rested her head on his shoulder. She thought of the times they’d sat just like that when they were kids, when Steve would send them out of the house for a while on their mother’s worst days.

"Just, why now?" Doug said after a quiet moment. "Why now, right before the holidays? After all this time? After all the Thanksgivings her drinking ruined, she's now ruining them by not drinking. Brilliant of her, really."

After a moment, Janice said, "Maybe she just looked around and saw how alone she was."

"Steve will never come back. He only stayed as long as he did for us."

Janice shook her head. "When you love someone, you have a lot of second chances in you."

“You believe she’s for real this time?” Doug asked.

She turned her head so she could see the snow falling. “If I don’t, who will?”.

The snow was accumulating, and the treehouse was getting colder. The moon shone down on the snow-covered yard, and she was just about to remark how pretty it was when the soft, secretive light of a candle began to glow in her mother’s room. She turned to see if Doug had noticed, but he’d closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall. She knew she should try to get him inside. Make him eat something. Make him some coffee. For the moment though, she sat next to him, and tried to put herself in his place, feel his pain, his compulsion to drown it, and asked herself what it would take.

A WEB, A TREE by Eileen Tomarchio

August 30, 2020

Up close, they were groves, nebulae, Medusa’s head of snakes. Two ragged thatches, one on each of my mother’s outer thighs, a Rorschach pair. Seen in full only when I lifted her covers as she snored and lay beside her. By day, she had her ways of hiding them, fooling the eye. Let-out hems lengthened with ribbon, ricrac, lace. Concealer sticks and opaque hose in rainbows of flesh tones. Napkins over-draped on her lap at barbeques. Napkins that slid off after too many daiquiris like a magician’s reveal, my mother’s cue to rise by an invisible thread and tango with the breezes before my father dragged us home. As long as she slept, I could touch her at will. The thatches felt nubby, like the silk pillows she monogrammed for horse-farm wives. No name I could connect by penciled line to the hairless figures on my worksheets. Remnants, I guessed, from when humans still needed their appendix to digest apple seeds, their coccyx to keep from always falling to earth. They made me think of strange women in my dreams—ancient grandmothers, aunts and great-aunts who terrorized with hugs. They made me think of curses and bruises. I crayoned marks on my dolls’ legs and my own, certain I could draw out whatever buried shame my mother carried around and make it mine.

By my teens, they were everywhere. The backs of knees at checkouts, the flanks of ladies in visors at craft fairs. The noses and arches of my mother’s boyfriends who kept me company while she sewed sober enough at night to grow my college fund. Those days, she wore cut-offs and got tans and pined for old modesties. We’d knit legs on the couch and she’d trace them, my veinlets—scattered and ready to forest. In truth, I wanted a tally. I wanted to ask When? Since I couldn’t, I knocked her hand away, told her to keep it the fuck to herself. After the fourth in a six-pack, she was spouting, slurring: Never wait tables. Never cross your legs. Don’t sleep with your mouth open or they’ll crawl inside. Sometimes I volunteered to deliver Mom’s sewing jobs to the horse farm wives. Those women who never wore Sheer Elegance or knee-length anything or invited me inside as they wrote their checks against the posts of their porticos. At night, I dreamt of spiders spinning, seeding babies under my skin.

Years later, still single, I got tired of my concessions. The swim-skirts and sarongs packed for company retreats to beachfronts. A closet of midis, maxis, peasant frumpery from Dress Barn trying to pass as Free People. The procedure was out-of-pocket, a shallow priority of my pale-skinned cause. It was painless, surprisingly. Little needle pricks at splinter-depth. I imagined it as more a severing than a rooting out, soundless and slow-motioned as a felling before ground is struck. What I was left with seemed less like vanity than… what? Shamelessness? Whether one or the other, I didn’t know what to do with it, not at all. Will they come back? I asked the doctor. He said it’s always possible, that blood is stubborn. Sometimes in dreams, I’m with my mother in her last days when she couldn’t walk anymore, lifting her housedress to massage the pliant bark of her thighs, feeling a waft of cobwebs, the stone of her thatches’ gaze, my phantom daughter in the room somewhere, hating me.

HAM SANDWICH, DRY by Caroljean Gavin

August 29, 2020

One day, in the middle of the week, a Wednesday or a Thursday, in the humid summer, with the air conditioner broken, and the ceiling fan so feeble, I fell asleep under my down alternative comforter and had a dream of walking through a lush field, thick blades of grass slithered against my legs, dandelions swung in the breeze, little hammocks for lazing bees, and when I woke up, covered in a loose sweat, I walked down the stairs step by step, blinking my eyes open, open and closed, flexing my fingers, balling my fists, and I went to the fridge, drew out some ham, folded it out gently over the white bread I just bought the day before, two loaves for the price of one at the Harris Teeter, and you know what, I didn’t have any tomatoes, or any lettuce, and guess what, I didn’t have any mayonnaise, so guess what, I just ate it like that, just dry, and guess what, that was completely bullshit, all of it, every word I just put down, complete bullshit. This is supposed to be nonfiction, and I’m supposed to tell the truth and only the truth so help me god, so help me, God, the truth is none of that happened, the truth is that I tried to write as boring an opening to this essay as I could think of so you wouldn’t make it this far, and the truth is I gave this the most boring title I could come up with so when you came to it, you would look at it and you would think to yourself, “Snore!” and your eye would jump to one of the other titles, surely, something with a big, bright, unusual noun would pop out to you, and you would be happy with that, and I would be safe, but the truth, the no-bullshit thing is I am never safe, even though I am really good at manipulating words, and saying things that are technically true, like when my husband asks me full of disbelief, “You don’t look at other men?” and I say no I don’t, and he fills in his own meaning, which is that I’m a weirdo, but at least he doesn’t have to worry about me cheating, and I don’t tell my secrets, I don’t tell them to myself, I don’t say, “No, that’s not why.” I flirt with the truth, “I don’t watch much porn, I don’t like watching men and women have sex,” when the truth is I like watching women have sex, and I don’t watch much porn, because women don’t have sex like that, because I want to see two women who are genuinely hot for each other, who fall all over and into each other, who don’t look up at a camera, and don’t lick their own lips and trace their long, sharp finger nails up their own naked thighs, and the truth is I want to see two women truly caught up in making love, in fucking, and the truth is I want to be one of those women, and the truth is I’m not straight, not even a little, even though I stand by the “I want to fuck Eddie Vedder” note I wrote to my friend sophomore year, and the truth is I’m out as bi, well kind of sort of, to some people, not really, and I know, I know I should claim myself, my identity, who I am, and I should probably leave my husband, even though I love him, and I should let my kids see me happy no matter who I’m with, but my own happiness has never in my life been the first happiness that matters, and I am not young anymore, and I am not cute anymore, and no woman would even want me anyway, so why tear up my family’s life like that just to be profoundly lonely on my own terms, and even all that isn’t true, because I started writing this so I could write, so I could finally tell the one secret I’ve been keeping my whole life, and I was going to get to it right away, but then I stopped myself, hey, there’s this other thing, it’s a pretty big secret, and it’s risky, my husband might read it, or his mom might see it, and other people might be angry at me, might think that I’m telling people that they don’t need to live their own truth, which is not what I’m saying at all, and I know you really are getting bored with me, and I know you really are getting tired of me, and believe me, believe me, I am trying to tell you, but my heart is racing, and my littlest kid is running around and he keeps digging his nails into my arm and hopping on the table and taking my fingers off my keyboard, and I think I’m going to cry, and I think I’m going to be sick and the thing is I know, that day, that summer day years and years and years and years ago, a day in the middle of the week, when that girl Melanie who lived in the same apartment complex as us came over, and there was a card table folded out in the middle of my room with a blanket over it, and we hid under it and pretended like we were camping, and she thought of a game which was to take off our pants and touch each other on our privates, and I know that as far as kids go, that happens, but the thing also was I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t like how it felt, and I didn’t like that we were hidden, that even in the moment I knew it was a secret I was going to keep all my life because it was meant to be, and I felt so much shame, I felt like all the people who touched my mom on her privates when she didn’t want them to, because I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know my mom was molested by her father and brother and raped by boyfriends, and I knew this was a sex thing even at 5 or 6 and I was dirty, and that was what I was supposed to feel with sex stuff, and the thing is, and I didn’t even know that when I started writing this, but here it is, sex was not supposed to feel good, or pleasurable, so when I felt that way, later on, with men, again and again, I knew that was just the way it was, just the way it was supposed to be, and so I never really questioned my attraction to men, of course women aren’t attracted to men, that was the assumption I always went on, of course we’re not, because men are gross, and blank, and rough in the bad ways, no woman is really attracted to a man is what I thought, but they’re what we have, what we’re stuck with, so we say we have crushes on male celebrities that kind of look like girls or women our own age and when we’re older we wonder if straight people are drawn more to movie characters they identify with or those who they want to want to sleep with, and we remember the first time we saw Ghostbusters and Sigourney Weaver and we Google things like, “How to tell if I’m gay,” when the answer is, “If You’re Constantly Googling to See if You Might Be a Lesbian, guess what, YOU ARE A LESBIAN!” but I don’t like labels, and I’m not going to call myself a lesbian, I haven’t earned it, I haven’t earned identity, don’t you see, I let myself be swallowed, I make it happen. I can disappear so quickly I didn’t even realize I missed the mayonnaise until I finished the sandwich and a snack bag of salt and vinegar Lay’s and was so thirsty I had to drink two full glasses of water before I went back up to finish my nap.

THE MOON IS SAD by Kyra Baldwin

August 28, 2020

It’s raining in Seattle. I catch sight of my face in the drop-spattered glass of the bus stop. It’s lit by a phone-screen. The moon is out. It’s lit by a phone-screen. No one is texting either one of us.

See, the sun fucked the moon and the moon is sad now. The moon is already a depressive character because the moon is Vitamin-D deficient. The moon wanted to get a SAD lamp to remedy this, but the impassive physical laws of our universe said nuh-uh moon, because a SAD lamp in the sky would just look like another moon.

“There can’t be two moons,” they said.

“Why not? I’m loooonelyyyy,” replied the moon with comical sadness.

“Because we’ve already set the gravitational pull of Earth to just One Moon.”

“Mars has two moons.”

“Well, you’re not Mars.”

“Jupiter has sixty-seven.”

The laws shrugged.

“Does either Jupiter or Mars have life?”

“No.”

“Nobody gets everything, Moon.”

And the impassive laws of the universe walked away, except they also stayed exactly there and didn’t change at all.

“But I don’t even get to experience life. Earth gets all the life,” sighed the Moon into the black void. There was no one to talk to.

Moon would talk to the stars, but the stars are all friends with the Sun. And Moon fucked the Sun and now they ignore each other. It happened just last year, in that odd 4 a.m. hour where the Moon and the Sun are equals in the sky. After billions of years, Sun looked at Moon in its harvest gown and thought Moon looks pretty good right now. And so the Sun fucked the Moon and came shooting stars. Ew. Sun made Moon laugh by describing what earth is like during the day. “Sweaty.”

The next day at 4 a.m., Moon waited restlessly for Sun to come back. So many people had already loved Moon and left (Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Harrison Schmitt). Moon didn’t think it could take losing any more love. But when morning came up over Australia, Sun wouldn’t even look at Moon. Sun ignored Moon and just stared out at Sagittarius A. It wanted something bigger and sadder than Moon could ever be.

So that’s how the Moon and I got to talking. Moon said we look alike because my face is round and doleful too. I told Moon that it’d be really cool to control oceans and menstrual cycles. Moon shrugged and said it’d be cool to go in an ocean and have a menstrual cycle.

VEGAS by Mackenzie Moore

August 27, 2020

I shudder, feeling the heat as I approach the straightaway where all you see are the shells of casinos looming. Blink-182 cranking, asking me what my age was, again. I keep ticking past billboards that tell me when the buffets will return. I jam my foot down on the accelerator. Tempt fate with out-of-state plates.

I think about five months earlier when we peeled away, me from the curb at Terminal 2, and him off to the Mirage for the weekend. It feels like years. I-15 north is an unavoidable corridor, but I hadn’t considered that I’d get a visual reminder of how much we’d splintered in a couple dozen axial rotations. How it doesn’t take a flight, or a drive, or much at all. You can survive thousands of miles apart and months on the road, only for it to blow up in your face less than a mile from home. Tell Zoom to use that as their marketing hook.

The wheeze of a beige Super Duty trying to edge me out of the left lane would piss me off, usually—it would underscore how tiny my car is, and that in it, I’m basically flyswatter bait on the freeway. But the growling hum at the bumper just feels like another twitch, or tremble, like the ones radiating up through my floorboards back in LA. You know, like when the downstairs neighbor turns the air conditioner from dehumidify to cool. A nuance so distinctive you’d bet your paycheck on it. When I merged out of LAX those months ago, the transmission seized immediately, the tach shot to 4. I should have known, because just like the floorboards, it’s hard to deny when the Earth shudders, but why linger on some small roll indicating a piece of life is about to go sliding out the door.

***

When you stay long enough, you become salaried on estimating limits, knowing where the plateau levels off matters; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Because sticking your thumb on the exact moment of how long someone can drive without getting drowsy, or how long you can wander on foot before devolving into hungry-tired bickering matters. It means you’re really fucking great at anticipating, at predicting patterns, at working within reason.

But approximation is an art. Science dictates you’ll only go so far, so fast on medium grade gas. You’ll keep moving, sure, even if you skimp on maintenance. Thing is, the little corroded pockets will keep digging deeper, and only later—maybe once you’ve finally started to spring for premium when you’re deep in airport traffic, or alone in the Mojave desert, will the shudders come.

And maybe with 1,000 miles to go, hearing the low reverberations that confirm something was wrong, you’ll finally pay attention to the low roll, preparing you for when the tectonic plates start shifting.

HIGHWAY 25 by Lindsey Heatherly

August 26, 2020

I remember that night we parked at the drive-in on Highway 25 and steamed up the windows before static on the AM station switched over to previews. Previews came before a raunchy, college-age comedy, alternating between raindrop rivers and lip-locked intermissions that cut through windshield fog. Foggy windows were smeared by my gray cotton jacket through your steady hand. The hand that sat on my knee during a panic attack on the drive back. The drive through dark and rain and a flooded road too immersed for good traction on those too-old tires. Tires that skidded across water when you asked if I was okay and I just nodded my head. The head that bowed under the awning to get inside, when we stripped each other of soaked clothing, and I straddled your lap with my legs. We took laps around our troubles–the anniversary of your mom’s death passing quietly with brute force, the burdens of raising two boys alone, and my cycles of manic depression–and I told you I loved you and I was sorry it was a tough night, tough year. Tough tears you’d deny when your eyes welled up and so did mine, and we had the best sex we’d ever had on that couch while the rain just poured and poured. Words poured through your salt and pepper beard piercing my paper skin, leaving red welts I wish I could have peeled off and saved for now when I wonder if you still make the drive to work down Highway 25 or if you finally gave them the middle finger and found something better. Found someone better.