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CONSIDER RAVIOLI by Jane-Rebecca Cannarella

April 10, 2020

We’re three in a row and it’s warm like the way the bottom of a plate is hot and comforting after you microwave leftovers. Colleen and Sean both throw off heat to my right and my left, so much blue between both of them like the most blistering parts of a fire. And Colleen wants to know why no one will consider the plight of the ravioli. Pierogis and poptarts are pockets and appreciated. So she wants to know why I won’t give ravioli another chance. What’s to hate? We’re calling them raviolis even though the word is already pluralized but it adds to the gentleness. My heart is all valves and pulleys; with blood sluggish in the in-between seat at the bar. Like three uneven legs on a stool, we fun fight in a rapidly unwinding late afternoon.

Time is a fragmented line from a middle-school notebook, like how you start to write a note but then get called on to answer a question during class. Hours become skipping stunted pen strokes, and Colleen says she's going to open a ravioli stand and name it after me. A little plea for the pockets to get the grandstand they deserve. It’ll make a killing.

Everything needs a little more sympathy and people find comfort from other people. Like the way this dude at the bar who thinks Colleen is cute comes over and we pet his wool sweater. It’s warm and tender like throwing spaghetti against a wall and it sticks because it’s perfect. And who am I to hold a grudge?

Nutrients are nutritious. What if I’m the disagreeable one here? The sort of disagreeable like a person yelling at you for making the meatballs wrong when all you wanted to do was cook your loved one dinner. And while I never ate the meatballs in question, I do know that they were perfect in the way that you just know something. It's the same way that bodies make their own lightning and it travels right to your sternum in shocks and surprises. That sort of knowing. Perfection doesn’t go unnoticed if you actually care.

And we are three in a row. Drinking past our bedtimes on a school night, maybe we'll stay at this bar in South Philly forever? But they’re running out of red wine for Colleen. So I guess we have until the last mini-bottle of wine since it’s the thread of time from the start of hanging out to the end. And until they cut the thread, we’ll elbow lean on the glassy wood bar talking so fast.

I am in the pocket of warmth and red wine is a river in the underworld pulling us all into the winter of the evening. For what it’s worth, I would stay here for another six months with the three of us hothouse flowers blooming indoors during the coldest season. And throughout the frost, I could use the time left to consider the ravioli and all sorts of other things, too.

THE GATED COMMUNITY by Joseph Pfister

April 9, 2020

We received the brochure in the mail. It was printed on that thick paper, the fancy kind, with raised lettering. ESCAPE TO FLORIDA! it read. YOUR OWN PRIVATE PARADISE AWAITS! Everyone in our subdivision got one, but that didn’t matter. It was February, the ground brittle with snow. We were ready for a change.

Overnight, developers transformed miles of Florida swamp into a mecca for the recently retired. Walk out your back door onto replicas of Sawgrass, Augusta, Pebble Beach! Work up a sweat on our racquetball courts! Cool off with water aerobics! Jazzercise! Sure, the amenities sounded nice. For most of us, though, that wasn’t the real draw. The development was owned by a famous mogul, someone our age, who had made his millions while we were raising kids, debasing ourselves at nine-to-five jobs, and paying off the interest on our thirty-year mortgages.

We’re transplants, snowbirds from the Midwest. Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio. Emigres from America’s heartland, headed south to avoid the worst of our arthritic knees, the patches of black ice lurking between our houses and cars. Our children are grown or mostly grown; they went to good schools, earned expensive liberal arts educations that taught them words like “adscititious,” and “calliope.” Now they live on the coasts and have families of their own, 401(k)s, juicers in their kitchens, and pay mind-boggling sums for rent. Our grandchildren play piano, win science-fair competitions, vacation in the Hamptons. They don’t come to visit us. They’re too busy.

The mogul appears only on weekends. He brings his moody wife, his spoiled children, his entourage of men with peppered gray hair, expensive suits, beady eyes. They join him at all the board meetings.

We like the mogul immediately. He’s full of bombast and unrefined charm. A minor celebrity. We like him because he’s outspoken. A straight-shooter who talks tough, who doesn’t kowtow to anyone. Despite rumors that he hasn’t paid some of his contractors and there are several finished houses still sitting empty, we remain south Florida’s most-desirable gated community. To help keep costs down, the mogul buses in illegals to clean the streets, landscape our lawns, water the golf course. He pays them half of what he pays his other workers, he tells us with near-euphoric glee. Sometimes even less.

There’s already a gate around our community—twelve feet tall, wrought-iron. Dour-faced guards check our IDs at the entrance and prowl the overwatered grounds at night, but the mogul insists we’re still not safe. We need a bigger gate. A better one. Built from only the finest in American-made steel.

Yes, of course! we say. Anything to keep us safe! But how will we pay for it? Our pensions, our monthly social security checks only stretch so far. We already can’t afford to fly to visit our grandchildren.

The illegals, of course, the mogul explains. They’ll pay for it.

Spring rolls in to summer. The air swelters. Every surface weeps moisture. The rain in Florida, we learn, is nothing like the rain in Lincoln or Sioux Falls. The swamp swells. Sinkholes appear like giant, angry mouths. They swallow golf balls, whole golf carts. We dream, sometimes, they will swallow us, our homes, our wives.

It is so hot, we can’t even golf. We stay in. We knit. We watch the news. One night, a guard catches two illegals—a mother, her child—trying to cross the golf course.

What should we do with them? we ask the mogul. It’s our golf course, after all. There are signs posted everywhere—No Trespassing!—and the gate! How could they have not seen the gate?

These are just the first, the mogul warns. We have to make an example of them—before they unionize!

And so the mother and child are separated, placed in cages on the back nine. They’re given blankets—we’re not monsters, after all—and calling cards that charge $7.99 a minute. With good behavior, they’ll be “eligible for reunification” in eight to twelve months, the mogul’s people tell us. The next night, security catches three more. The night after that, five. Then eight. We stuff them in with the mother, her child. We deny them toothbrushes. We purchase megaphones and shout that they will never see their loved ones again. We don’t have enough water to let them bathe and water the back nine, so we limit showers to once a week. The lines at our doctor’s offices and Walgreen’s are already too long, so we ignore their persistent coughs, their occasional fevers.

Still, they keep coming.

They watch us through the gaps in their cages, where they stand, crammed like cordwood, their enormous eyes black as gator holes. It’s impossible to enjoy iced tea on our fake stucco porches anymore, so we move our afternoon bridge games indoors. Our own children won’t return our calls. We imagine them, our sons, our daughters, talking about us in hushed tones at dinner parties. The five-dollar checks we send our grandchildren on their birthdays go uncashed.

After some of the more timid among us, those with less-hearty constitutions, begin to worry—they don’t want our community to develop a reputation, after all—the mogul reminds us that he didn’t get where he is by being nice. And, besides, if we don’t like it, we can leave.

But where would we go? We’ve been here so long, we can barely remember the lines, the contours of the world outside our gates. A world without walls, without the freezer-chill of doctor’s offices, and the sweet smell of rotting citrus. We departed our old lives so long ago, we’re not even sure we could survive in that vast, disorienting macrocosm beyond our borders, even if we had to.

So, yes, we tell the mogul. Yes. We’ll follow anywhere.

ALL WORKED UP by Linda McMullen

April 8, 2020

He often simply appears in my office, insouciant grin and silver hair: “I want to show you something.” In the age of #metoo, he is carefully respectful of a female subordinate. No hands ever touch in the exchange of—

A binder with reference documents, paginated and neatly tabbed; a viciously indiscreet email from a colleague; a rare compliment on a memo from his own supervisor… Whatever it is. For my eyes.

For me.

Or: I’ve written his remarks for a major briefing the next day, and he invites me to pull up a chair, next to him, so we can amend and annotate. We talk about politics—TV, movies, books—and our colleagues—

—our spouses.

Or: By 7 p.m., he says, “I just want to go home and sit on my couch.”

I say, “Me, too.”

He grins, “You want to be on my couch?”

And then: half-laughing alarm. “Please forget I just said that.” The word career-ending hovers; I am painfully aware of my own femininity. But he doesn’t want to stifle the burgeoning… unspoken… whatever, either, so he launches into an anecdote about his runaway mouth. And one or the other of us references a “No touching!” moment from Arrested Development.

Because.

And I shut my door, sometimes; I try to dispel this abysmally adolescent captivation. I tell my private rosary: I’m a mother. A professional. An adult. I adore my husband.

And I—we—

—chose work rooted in realism. And devoted to the art of the achievable.

Then I remember we have a meeting to prep.

Or we have a joint phone call in his office.

And our building has an open-door ethos.

And so I open it again. And I vacillate between self-loathing at becoming such a morally compromised cliché and vapid daydreams that would embarrass a self-aware twelve-year-old.

He pops his head in the door. And I try, so very hard, to suck in my cheeks.

JEWEL OF THE DELTA by Noemi Martinez

April 2, 2020

Once called the jewel of the delta, Delta Lake is a tiny man made reservoir where poor families would go and eat in the 80s, claim a table to have lunch or a picnic on the sand and have Easter Sunday cookouts. You’d get there by driving out towards Edcouch, a lonely stretch of a curvy road, tiny and desolate as far as roads go down here. Mom would take us some weekends when the truck was working and there was gas in the tank. As a treat, she’d say, “Pack the cheese sandwiches.”

***

I couldn’t drive on expressways on my own until I was 25. I had this fear my car would veer off the side. It was the 281 exit going towards Edinburg I couldn’t bring myself to get on, no matter how hard I tried. I was superstitious about it. I couldn’t try on Sundays. I couldn't try with the radio on. I couldn’t try because someone did a hex on me. I couldn’t do it because I had a susto when I was 17, driving to Florida with my mom. Her dad was dying and I helped drive. I took the wheel while she slept and it was the rainy season. Now I sometimes wake up from dreams where I’ve fallen off tiny roads, and off I go, towards nothingness. The curves of roads in my dreams never change, they get tiny and nothingness overflows.

***

One Sunday after church, we packed the sandwiches and she said, "Let’s go to the lake." We didn’t tell our dad, he never wanted to go with us anyways. It was mundano, too worldly I guess to want to be out when sinners who were also enjoying themselves under the hot sweaty sun. My mom turned on her Motown classic tape on the deck, which my dad definitely thought was mundane. Hell, if we're winning, let's go all the way.

This one Sunday, the road kept curving and curving and it seemed like we got lost. The more she drove, the tinier the road got. I wished maybe we’d be transmuted to another world. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d wish, in driving, we’d be found in salvation.

***

This one is different. In this dream, I am mad, but then I become water and disintegrate. I cease to exist and crash into waves of water, right there on the chair.

For the short time, when Mom was in hospice after I found her, I’d have dreams I was so angry that I couldn’t speak. I’d wake up with my heart racing, my blood boiling, my throat a hot stone. My anger boiling and seeping into the night.

That night I told Mom it was fine, she could leave. It rained so hard and violently, a cold front had come into the valley the night before driving the temperature close to freezing. The wind shook my car across the expressway and I inched my way back home. The wind and rain crashed down, and I knew. I knew. I had stayed as long as I could. The roads by then were lonely. It was almost Thanksgiving break. I never saw another car out there. It's like those times when you're driving by yourself and the world seems eerily empty and still. The earth was not still that night.

I had played Mom’s favorite Aretha songs. I had touched her legs. I held her hands more than I had ever in all my life. The day she left, the earth shook and the heavens brought down the rain. Maybe, I like to think, her Despedida surrounded by water was like her arrival surrounded by water.

DOING IT IN PUBLIC by Angela Miyuki Mackintosh

April 1, 2020

Joey likes to do it in public. Other guys prefer the privacy of a locked door, a secluded bedroom, drawn curtains. Joey likes to do it that way too, in the bedroom or the kitchen or the hallway, pushed up against a wall or shoved into the carpet, but he’s not afraid to do it in front of an audience.

The first time he did it outside of our apartment was at a party, after he caught me looking at another guy. He said, “You want to fuck him, don’t you?” I guess it made him really hot, got him going and whatnot. We went at it on the concrete stairway outside—my ass against the railing, then on the steps, my fingernails digging into his flesh, moaning and screaming. We were so loud that everyone in the party came out to watch. I felt a deep sense of shame while he was doing me that first time.

The second time he did it, I felt my shame start to evaporate. It was in the parking lot, after a nice dinner at Angelo’s and Vinci’s, and I’d ran into the only guy I’d dated prior to Joey and hugged him. I guess knowing that there was someone before him made him want to do it. He did me on the hood of my Honda, and then on the yellow painted lines of pavement, our takeout pasta spilling onto the sidewalk.

After the third time he did it, the shame disappeared and I felt nothing at all. We were at Lake Havasu on spring break getting fucked up on piss warm Tecates and tequila, a sea of boats docked side-by-side in Copper Canyon, me in a neon thong, Joey showing off his newest tattoo of a lion with skulls intertwined in its mane, and he wanted to do it in front of everyone. I guess me deciding to dive topless off Jump Rock—heck, it was tradition—and the fact that our friend Sean slapped my ass, made him want to do me right there. Sean even tried to get involved, so did strangers on nearby boats. It was a real show.

Most of the time, Joey liked to do it at band practice. He was a drummer and I sang backup vocals. Our band performed covers of Rolling Stones songs at parties, the occasional Black Sabbath cover, and we always had a jam session. Joey liked to show off by doing drum rolls. He kept a real steady beat—you can imagine how this came in handy—his muscles flexing, the tightness of his neck, his strong hands, him pounding me—bam, bam, bam. I was always sore the next day.

After a year of doing it in public, the last time he did it was after we split up. Our group of friends would go to Magnolia’s Peach on Thursday nights after band practice for Reggae Night because they’d let us in without IDs. I had just slipped by the bouncer when I saw Joey out of the corner of my eye on the side of the line. “Hey!” he yelled. “She’s not twenty-one. You let her in and not me, what the hell!” I was glad he didn’t get in. We had a rough breakup, I swallowed a bunch of pills, and the police were involved. I wanted to forget all that.

Magnolia’s Peach served Budweiser long necks, and to save money I’d stash some in a cooler in my car, go out the side entrance, and sneak them back in again. But I wasn’t going out for a beer that time; I was going out for a cigarette. The sun was just setting, the sky filled with orange and purples, fading like a bruise into grainy grey dusk. I opened a new pack of Camel Lights and lit one, feeling the smooth burn against the back of my throat. Right as I exhaled, Joey walked up. “I saw you dancing with that black guy,” he said. My body tensed because I knew what he wanted to do. It was the same song, every time. Before I could turn back towards the side door, he grabbed me and threw me against the brick wall, pushed his body against mine and lowered his voice. “You want to fuck him, don’t you. You whore.”

I looked around to see if anyone was watching, but they weren’t. A row of empty black metal tables on the side of the building, shaded by large palm trees, the spotlights under them buzzing then flicking on. My nerves were ramping up, my skin now slick, wet. “Yes. I want to fuck him. That’s exactly what I want,” I said. The next thing I felt was my cigarette going into the side of my neck like the hot sting of an angry bee. Then a blow to my left cheekbone. My ears ringing like the feedback from an amp, the world spinning around me. I fell to the concrete, struggling to find footing in my heels. He pulled me up by my long brown hair as I screamed, grasping at his hand, a clump of hair coming loose in his fist. With all my ninety-six pounds of strength, I pushed him away and started to run. He caught me mid-air and hurled me back against the wall, clutched my neck with one hand, and ran his sharp fingernails down the front of my face with his other, forehead to chin, dragging my flesh with it. Then there were people there, watching the show, trying to get involved as always. A man confronted Joey, told him to stay away from me. A woman called the police. Joey ran. The police arrived.

I was sore the next day, as always.

This isn’t a love story.

Never said it was about sex.

Joey’s version of doing it in public was a black eye, a scratched face, a cigarette burn, and the ever-present fingerprint marks around my arm. Other times it was a cluster of purple bruises around my neck and a hard lump to the back of my head. That’s how Joey liked to do it.

I’d like to say that the incident at Magnolia’s Peach was the last time Joey did it in public with anyone, but it wasn’t. Twenty-something years later, I look up his full name on Google and find his mug shot. It says that the 45-year-old, 5 ft 11 in, 200-pound male was arrested in Colorado for the Felony Crimes of Domestic Violence: Coercion, Assault, and Strangulation. Apparently, Joey still likes to do it in public. He just does it with other girls now.

DEADBOLT by Kami Westhoff

March 31, 2020

In her dreams, she can walk. She unclips the cord that connects her to the Emergency switch, swings her bloated-log legs from the bed until her feet find her one-in-a-million prints in her purple slippers. Though it’s been over a year since she’s stood unassisted, her legs neither quake nor collapse. Her wheelchair sits next to her nightstand, a foam donut pillow the color of bile positioned just-right by her caregiver.

She thrusts her foot forward. It meets the earth as though it’s the ice she and her first husband carved into arcs and spirals, tufts of ice fluffing the pond’s surface. She shivers at the wind blowing from the north valley, her feet numbing through slippers. Her husband navigates the ice like a first language, bending to steady wind-milling children, scooping the fallen into his arms. Something clenches inside her when he lifts a fallen girl, and their plum-sized baby in utero flexes fingers into fists.

Her roommate’s bed has not been remade since she was relocated. She lifts the afghan, fluffs it until it lays flat on the bed. The wall above the dresser is decorated with photos of children, grandchildren, siblings, spouses, some might be her own, but she doesn’t stop to wonder. She’s had to make certain sacrifices to walk.

The hallway is an illuminated labyrinth. She smells a uric twinge, nothing like the tang of the cotton diapers of her daughter. It’s ranked by haloperidol, clozapine, memantine, valium. Her hands flutter and clench, roll and gather as she changes the soiled sheets from her daughter’s bed. The world was too much for her daughter, her body determined to starve her before her first birthday. The doctor once called her “tiny on the inside,” urethra too narrow, uterus too petite, wrists too delicate for the heavy-hold, ankles unsteady, even on friendly terrain. Her daughter had been trying to sky since birth, while her mother, heavy in all the wrong ways, was born to burrow.

A strip of light slashes the carpet’s taupe. The room it comes from belongs to “Dante Simpson.” The “D” drags her to Dad, who is only allowed one function in her memory: he must save her. She’d read that a parent saves their child’s life an average of forty-five times before the age of two. This saving is a last-second lift from the neighbor’s German Shepherd, Bode—her father tells her this story every time her fingertips navigate the zigzag scars on his calf. Her own scars are like fissures beneath the earth of subcutaneous tissue. The scar from her daughter intersects the one from the hysterectomy. Sometimes she wakes too early from the anesthesia, and the doctor behind the shocked-white barrier sheet, nothing but a strip of eyes between scrub mask and hat, says something that sounds like a prayer, and she’s back in the hallway.

Above her, higher than the second floor where people are in early stages, the third floor, where caregivers smoke and gulp coffee to get through weeks of doubles, is an August sky she hasn’t seen in two years. Stars spatter pinpricks of gas and dust people mistake for light, which is to say, for life. Sky is no longer sky for her. If she were to punch #3194# into the number pad at the front door, drift from the exhalation of the all-but-dead, the thrust of last words love ones carve into tongue, throat, gut to try and fail to translate later, beyond the streetlamps that pale the night, and if she were to look up, she’d see the storm of black and violet erupting on her cheek, her lip stitched with tiny black crosses, blackhole thumbprints twinned on her bone-bright throat.

Something somewhere cries: maybe a fussy hinge, or a northern mockingbird, and she lifts her newborn from its crib. The effort cricks her—the baby’s shoulders nearly split her into one only days earlier. Her breasts throb with the rush of milk that pricks like something barbed. And there is that fence on their property line that plucked tiny bulbs of raspberry blood on her back when she didn’t crouch deep. It’s hard to hold onto a baby sometimes, no matter how hard you try, and everything around you says let go. He’s there again, his voice a bomb in her kitchen, the baby a lit fuse against her chest. She believes him when he says he’s not fucking around, promises to forget it ever happened, what she thought she saw.

Laughter scatters across the hallway, but it’s trenched before she can ride its wave. It’s maybe what she misses most, laughter so expansive it cannot gather sound. Like a scream underwater, or into pillow, or in the woods past the barbed wire fence the night she thought he was too drunk to notice her slink from their bed, the baby’s grunt and whimper, the clunk of the backdoor deadbolt.

In this place, all hallways lead exactly where you started, though it always feels like the first time. Her room is as she left it—all at once her childhood bedroom, the room where he reminded her he could take anything he wanted whenever he wanted it, the room her second husband moved her bed into when he couldn’t stand the trench her body caused the mattress, the room where she pressed her mouth to her baby’s ear, voice a steady hot hush of Shhhh, palm a cradle beneath its moist diaper, the room where she lay, feet, pale and useless as fish in a fistfight, hands in a constant flurry of fuss, heart refusing to untether her body from the stubborn habit of beat.

TO TEACH by Tyler Barton

March 30, 2020

Whenever she passes a picture she’s in, Jewell closes her eyes. She laughs. Jewell’s earlobes are drippingly long, and her granddaughter Tanny would like to see them pierced nine, maybe ten times. This makes Jewell laugh. Jewell has been convinced by friends to join the poetry club, because, they say, Jewell is always finishing their sentences with a slant rhyme, and damnit they want the real thing! Jewell laughs at them. The poetry teacher is a bear of a man at a pottery wheel until Jewell is told he is the pottery teacher. Jewell laughs through her apology. The poetry teacher is twirling with joy at something Lucille Clifton said. “That woman is a loon,” a poet in a wheelchair whispers. Laughing, Jewell watches the poetry teacher teach, but then she sees that the poetry teacher walked out of her apartment that morning and screamed a mean thing because she saw a ticket on her windshield, but then—and this is what tickles Jewell—when she saw that it was only a papery yellow ginkgo leaf, the poetry teacher screamed an even meaner thing. Jewell discovers this moment in the poetry teacher like a crumb in a man’s beard. As the poetry teacher speaks of inspiration and fearlessness and squeezing the muse’s two cheeks, Jewell sees through to the room where both screams started, small as pepper seeds. Jewell’s hand is up. The poetry teacher says, “Yes, you?” Jewell slides down out of her chair and crawls across the carpet toward her. “Here,” she says. “It’s a haiku.” Jewell doesn’t listen to her classmates’ gasps as she peels a leaf from the woman’s shoe. The yellowness turns to orange in her mouth. Then, blue. She can’t laugh while she chews or she’ll puke.

BLACK HOODED NUN by Caroljean Gavin

March 29, 2020

Stunned, I took the subway and rattled off to work at the Starbucks on 51st and Broadway. My brain’s way of assimilating my mother’s news was to take customers’ orders while imagining plunging a knife into their chests. Would I have to struggle to penetrate their clothing? Would there be a slurp of suction when I tried to yank the weapon back out of their flesh and muscle to repeat? Would they fight? Would they be angry? Surprised? Terrified? What would they say? What would their eyes look like? What would it feel like to not turn back? To go for blood? To go for death? And when death came would I know it right away? And when I knew it, what would I know?

I knew I would probably feel alone.

I mean, customers would call the police. Co-workers would restrain me. I would be physically surrounded. I may even be physically assaulted. If any of those people liked me before, they wouldn’t now. They wouldn’t know who the hell I was. Their eyes would drain of all recognition. Fill up with something else.

But if I was by myself? Say it was just me, and the dead woman who raised me, rent open on her bed with her violet patterned sheets, her down alternative comforter that had comforted me when I was young, and scared, and overtaken with the flu? If it was just me and a sudden silence? No burbling? No screaming? No pleading? No labored inhalations. Excruciating exhalations. Just me and the darkness, and the curtain blowing over the window where I had left it open after I crawled inside? What would it feel like then? With only myself and this thing I did? This bad, bad, bad, bad thing? Would I feel horrified at myself? Regretful? Or proud? Satisfied? Hopeful?

They say he did it for the money she wrote him in her will.

Two years before the killing the killer told me he was scared of birds.

The killer wasn’t a killer when I met him in San Francisco in that shitty old car full of my shitty old relatives and my mom’s friend Becky, who wasn’t old or shitty, but hot in a 1980’s way: hairspray, lip gloss, frosted hair. The killer was still a kid. A teenager. On drugs, sure. A high school dropout, sure. But he was still a kid, a teen, a young man, a person with positive potential.

I shared the backseat with him and my mom’s cousin who was the type of woman to carry a purse big enough to fit her full size salad dressing bottle and leave enough room to spare to shovel in more free samples of dog treats from Petco than was reasonably appropriate. Like, the employees side-eyed her and hated her with every fiber of their polo shirts. I could tell. They weren’t happy with me either. My mother’s cousin, Jackie, introduced me to the killer, “He was my job after you,” she said.

She knew us when we had tiny faces and giant eyes. Before we learned how to wash our hands.

I’m not sure why the killer went on the crazy lady outing. Maybe he was bored. Maybe it was about the free food. Maybe it was Becky and the vanilla perfume she wore.

I wanted the free food and the ride to the pet store. I was in the process of replacing my boyfriend. I had already bought a vibrator and was currently on step two: companionship. I wanted a bird. Something beaked and winged that had the potential to fly to wherever the hell it wanted and start a beautiful life in the tree of its own choosing. Something that could poke the eye out of anyone who tried to stop it. I wanted a metaphor for my spirit (the irony, cruelty of this, totally lost on me at the time) and I wanted something to make sounds in the night to distract the ghosts that played mean tricks on my dreams.

While Mom’s cousin was shoving “free” pet food crap in her purse, I looked at the birds, the killer orbited around me, hands in his pockets.

When I found the black hooded nun finches, I knew I had found my bird. The auburn body, the waxy blue beak erupting from a jet-black head. Unconventional. Goth. Tiny. The employee I fetched was not wild about having to do what he was about to do. I overheard him talking to a coworker, “Last time we did this, all of the fuckers got out. Some of them are still up there,” he pointed to the beams beyond the lights.

The black hooded nuns bolted into all corners when the employee stuck his hand inside the cage. So much frantic flapping and fluttering. A bird was caught. Dropped into a box handed to me.

“I don’t like birds,” the killer said. He hadn’t left my side. He watched the whole thing.

“Why?” I said, the small brown box in my hand. It was so light. It could have been empty.

“Scared of them,” he muttered. I probably made an understanding face, but I thought how stupid, tough guy, scared of birds. Really I wanted to laugh at him so hard.

The box with the bird was so light.

I didn’t laugh at the killer because I gave a shit about his feelings, but because the box was so light.

I didn’t laugh at the killer because I wanted to shake the box.

I wanted to shake the box so badly. I had to breathe slowly as I carried it to the register.

I was scared of myself, shaking that damned box.

Knowing and feeling are totally different things.

I knew there was a living creature in that box. I knew shaking the box would be bad for the creature living in that box.

Feeling is a body knowing.

It felt like there was nothing in that box. My body just wanted to check. My body just wanted to know.

Maybe the killer’s killing had nothing to do with money.

Maybe he didn’t even hate the woman who raised him?

Maybe he didn’t even want to hurt her?

Maybe there was just something he wanted to know?

Maybe I’m just full of shit.

The customers I didn’t hack up and kill got their delicious lattes or Frappuccinos or whatever the hell and they left, going on with their day, and if they thought of me at all, they probably thought I was nice, or awkward, or cute, or wasting my life, but they probably didn’t think of me, and they certainly wouldn’t have imagined that I was thinking about where best to stab their particular body, and with how much force.

Sometimes, those days, walking around New York City, I’d be walking behind a group of young women in skirts that lifted up above their knees, exposing that soft place of skin behind, and I wanted so badly to lean in and touch them there. Just this small little trespass. Just this one little thing. Who could that hurt?

I just wanted to give the box the littlest jostle.

Something people seem to believe is there is only good or evil, only person or monster. People are good. Monsters are bad. Supernaturally bad. Demonic. Diabolical. People are superior to the monsters. No empathy for the devil. ‘Cause once you start empathizing with the killers, what does that make you? A monster yourself? An accomplice? A devil with a Fast Past to an afterlife of somehow very painful horrors? And fire? Lots and lots of fire.

Writers know that to make a believable character, a human being, you mix the good with the bad. The NICU nurse shoplifts candy bars. The arsonist brings flowers to the nursing home.

The killer wasn’t always a killer. Once the killer was a baby, born drug dependent because of his mother’s choices. Once he was a toddler learning how to walk. Once he was a little boy laughing, milk dribbling down his chin. Once he was so small with shining eyes that still trusted the big people around him. Once he was innocent.

I named the black hooded nun finch Quiver. The thing I didn’t kill, I caged, fed, and played classical music for. Eventually I gave him away to a nice lady on Craigslist. I moved to the other side of the country. Found out that troubled kid my mom’s cousin loved so much brutally murdered his mother, and I couldn’t understand how someone could do something so grisly, so heartless, so willfully violent. I could get how someone would want to do it. How someone could think of doing it. How someone could imagine doing it and plan doing it, but how do you actually do it? How do you push a knife into someone, and hurt them, cause them horror and pain, and not throw up, not throw your body into a shock of seizures to stop you from doing this thing?

I didn’t try to empathize with the killer to understand him. I wasn’t trying to excuse what he did. I wasn’t trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. I was asking the monster in me how far it would go. I was asking myself what was I really capable of.

How do any of us actually know what we’re capable of?

I was a terrible bird mom. I had no idea what I was doing. I named my black hooded nun finch Quiver because it seemed scared all the time and of course it did. I was this huge lumbering thing that trapped it.

When I’d slip my hand in the cage for feeding or cleaning, Quiver would freak out, flap in a frenzy.

I didn’t know finches weren’t supposed to be alone, without other finches that they could die from loneliness. I tried to get him a friend, but no one else would sell me just one.

When I bought the bird it did not matter to me that I probably wouldn’t be living in San Francisco much longer and that I wouldn’t be able to take a pet with me when I left.

When I did give Quiver away, I gave him away to the first person who answered my ad. She seemed nice and knowledgeable about birds, but it’s not like I checked, not like I made sure she was going to be good to him and not hurt him, and even though I never shook his box, and even though I never purposely hurt him, I felt like shit about the indirect harm I did.

I made myself imagine inflicting horrible physical violence on my customers, and I could imagine it, and it made me physically ill, hunched over my register shaking.

All there was for me to understand was this.

So if you should ever see me shudder while you’re talking to me and you worry I’m thinking of jabbing you in the eye with the kebab skewer, just know it’s nothing personal, just know I’m probably as harmless as a tiny, tiny bird.

SEVEN IS A HOLY NUMBER by Jen Julian

March 28, 2020

And yes, that is how many children she has, and I’m talking of course about Mrs. Goth, who every year selects one of her children to be her favorite in a ceremony she performs for us: a blessed clique of friends and neighbors. She lines the children up on the lawn in white folding chairs, and we like to watch their faces brighten with tension, their shoulders rigid, and we like the springy carnal heat of late June, which makes us feel pagan. Mrs. Goth is not intentionally pagan. The truth is, she schedules the ceremony while her husband is away at a yearly business conference. He doesn’t know about any of this.

Supposedly, this ceremony started as a joke, though now Mrs. Goth and the children take it deadly serious. Angelina, the eldest at nineteen, came all the way back from her college in California to participate, even though she hasn’t been favorite in ten years. The current favorite is Jacob, who’s eleven. He took the honor from Margo, thirteen, the previous year, and yes, any observer might think Mrs. Goth is transferring the title in a sequence, from oldest to youngest and back again, or that she’s otherwise appeasing all of her children with a soft and predictable pattern, as Mrs. Goth, who never so much as squeaks a word at community council meetings, gives the impression of being a soft and predictable lady. But this is not the case when it comes to her children. Margo was the favorite four years ago when the honor went to Emma, Jacob’s twin, only to jump back to Margo the following year. We knew from the look of shock on the children’s faces—and the specific look of shameful pleasure on the face of Margo—that Mrs. Goth’s choice was unexpected. We knew intimately the demon grin of Oliver, the second eldest, who was favorite two years in a row before finally seeing the title passed along again to Charlotte, the third eldest, who once snatched it so gleefully from the baby she was scolded by her mother in front of us and went to bed early for the shame. The baby is Wanda. Along with Angelina before her, Wanda hasn’t received the title since.

This year, on this evening, the dayglow wanes and the lightning bugs come out. Mrs. Goth has set up a table of pinwheel sandwiches and expensive cheese, which we peck fretfully, and a crystal bowl of boozy punch, which drowns the lightning bugs and makes our conversation sparkle. The children, still stiff in their lawn chairs, are dressed in church clothes. Their feet root to the ground like dandelions. Their mother is a kind and obsequious hostess, but when she’s making her choice, she tucks her hand behind her back like a decorated general. Yes, in the past, we have put money in a pot, though that’s not the point. We have never tried to persuade Mrs. Goth to choose one child over another. The point is that it’s not anyone’s choice but hers, because we don’t know what elegant criterial chart Mrs. Goth goes by, and we have decided that any one of her children are average enough be the favorite at any time, that they are all equal parts charming and irritating, intelligent and stupid, and they vary almost meaninglessly when it comes to their creativity, sense of humor, athletic prowess, political awareness, and physical grace and style. By now, all have made neighborhood contributions they can be proud of—Jacob’s YouTube videos and Charlotte’s paper craft and Oliver’s volunteer campaign work for the county warden—though Emma’s newspaper-worthy success last year with amateur theater told us that measurable accomplishments are not the deciding factor for Mrs. Goth. Or, maybe, Mrs. Goth thought Emma’s performance in The Gondoliers wasn’t any good, and who are we to argue with that.

The children, if they know their mother’s criteria, have said nothing about it to the other neighborhood children, or maybe they have, and everyone involved is sworn to keep it secret from us grown-ups, the same way we’re sworn to keep the ceremony secret from Mr. Goth. But we wouldn’t want to know the criteria, even if we knew how to find out, because we like to think the favorite is more divined than selected, because we have talked about it over drinks on back porches, around fire pits and masonry ovens, and in the shallows of our swimming pools: this is our I Ching, this is the primal blood-spill of chicken entrails, this is our peek through the door of the celestial house. Neither we nor the children have the power to control this outcome and nothing can prepare us for it, but that is where power is, and here in this neighborhood power spirals its infinite coil into the secret mind of Mrs. Goth.

We watch her children, seated with calm and anxious dignity, sweaty hands folded in their laps. Their toes recoil like worms in their sandals as their mother strides by again. She’s still deciding. We watch and hold our breaths as she bends down and opens the ceremonial bin, brings out the dried laurel crown, silk ribbons dangling. Every year, we smell its delicate bay scent spicing the lawn, hanging over the heads of the children. But which head? Whose perfect head? We lean forward to hear Mrs. Goth’s whispers: Who is it this time? Who is it? We think: How long can we hold this ecstatic breath? We think: how will the universe have realigned when Mr. Goth comes back home?

GLAD YOU’RE HERE by Dan Shiffman

March 27, 2020

You are the one who goes back for the remaining Christmas presents while the rest of the family hugs in puffy coats by the doorway. The straps on the duffel bags pulled from the trunk of the car are rough and chilled. When you come inside, everyone is already seated around the fireplace or in the kitchen.

They ask a smiling question or two, then the conversation floats to the other side of the room. The dog—it’s a golden retriever; it used to be a Schnauzer—stretches and walks over looking for attention and reassurance. You pour a glass of Coke, then sit back and listen. When you stop petting the dog’s head, it strokes sharp nails against your knee and looks you in the eye until you start petting it again. No one exactly blames you for moving to another continent.

It’s really great that you get to see so much of the world, they often say to you. Can you get peanut butter there? What about taxes? You do like your quiet routines in foreign places, the picnics by the river when your small, glassy apartment gets too hot. One of your favorite things to do wherever you find yourself is walk around and look at stuff; Spazierengehen the Germans call it. It’s hard to explain precisely, and you’ve stopped trying. Much of what you do is seen as nice and interesting in a mild, ill-defined way.

And yet they keep wondering why France or Lebanon doesn’t have one of their own who can do what you do. And maybe you programmed wind turbine software in Hokkaido for a year, but Hokkaido doesn’t fully exist until your in-laws’ wealthy, adventurous friends visit there and write a long Facebook post about it. No one goes where they go. That’s the consensus in the room.

When you had an appendectomy in Ankara, you spent one night in the hospital. The air conditioning was broken and the grandson of the jaundiced man sleeping next to you fanned him with a bath towel. You remember the flutter, snap, and air reaching you. When your sister or her neighbor or your aunt had an appendectomy in Akron, she got some kind of allergic rash where they stuck her with the IV and the doctors couldn’t figure it out. They had never seen anything quite like it and wanted to keep her in the hospital for another night but the insurance company was being a pain in the ass, so she had to call them herself for approval and they put her on hold for an hour. There is a chattering urgency about their lives that always seems to be in the process of being reported. This kind of detail is no longer available to you—at least not when you’re here.

When your mother dies, you live farthest away and grief mixes with jet lag throughout your week back in Baltimore or Pocatello. The other mourners standing around platters at the reception form tight circles, and for a few seconds, you look at the blouses and jackets of your siblings or cousins. You walk to the circle and place your hand on the back of an elbow that, for a moment, neither pulls away nor moves to let you enter.

When you help put an extra leaf on the sturdy oak dining room table before the meal, your in-law or cousin or uncle finds the latch under the table before you do. You know where it is, you just needed a moment to find it, like the moment it takes to locate the wiper control on the rental car before you pull away from the airport after a long-haul flight and drive here, passing your old high school and the new movie theater before turning off the state highway.

But sometimes, the same or another in-law or cousin or uncle lets you briefly into the tension he has with someone else in the house today. He sighs, tilts his head, mutters, “She really should think about that the next time she. . .” Ancient radiators ping against the muffled laughter of a story being told in another room. You know better than to take sides, and, besides, you no longer have the right to take sides. Even showing concern feels like a violation of some kind of agreement you should have accepted when you decided to renew your contract in Norway or Hong Kong. The revelation closes, and the table pinches against the added leaf. He doesn’t say anything else. It’s only a little while longer to dinner.

You aren’t the black sheep, the troublemaker, the failure. You aren’t a scapegoat exactly. Animated feelings are directed toward these people. These uncles and sisters don’t even need to show up to have these emotions aimed at them. Listen, they are being talked about right now. You genuinely try to show up at least once a year.

You didn’t mean to be condescending about their overscheduling, helicopter parenting, multiple cars, politics or whatever. Different versions of the same things, you’ve discovered, happen in most places anyway. And, if you brought any of this up or tried to clarify further what you were really trying to say, they might even agree with you, then tell you about a plan that has already been made: We are going out for ice cream! Save the date for the wedding! We’ve rented a cabin; maybe you can come this summer.

You scoot forward on the couch and clear your throat. You might have something to say, something that would surprise them because it is neither exotic nor judgmental. It’s really quite ordinary. Maybe an ailment or complaint about telemarketers—yes, they have these over there too—but the dog, their damned dog, wedges its muzzle between your knees.

The thing is you don’t really have something to say, just a jello-ish, passing desire to do so. You bite on a cheese covered Triscuit and slouch back silently against the couch. You’ve left some crumbs on the dog’s slightly oily muzzle, but no one else has noticed, including the dog. She’s just glad that you’re here.