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THE SCHWINN by Rob Kaniuk

August 5, 2020

Mike showed up yelling and hollering about "the perfect gift" for Murph’s 40th birthday. He insisted everyone eat dinner and he’d give my dad his gift after we all had cake. Brylcreemed white hair, D.B. Cooper glasses, and one of his teeth, rimmed in gold, that twinkled when he smiled. It was a sly smile that was there whether he was handing me a butterscotch or crushing my hand purple in a handshake. He lived in a cabin, kept goats to maintain his lawn, and always had a paper bag filled with quarter sticks of dynamite.

Mike was nuts, but he was our nut and we loved seeing his white Ranger kicking up dust unannounced.

Since his crazy had been well established, and he talked about this gift very loudly while we all ate, a crowd followed him to the back of his truck.

He pulled out a brown grocery bag.

“Here you are, Murph,” he said, handing it to my dad with a touch of evil in his grin. “Happy birthday, from one Polack to another.”

My dad never said it, but he was afraid of Mike. He held the bag in front of everyone and couldn’t hide the look of inevitable embarrassment.

“Mike, I have my kids here–is it okay?”

“You’re not getting out of this one.”

“Mike, what the hell is it?”

“Take it out, you nervous bastard–it ain’t gonna bite.”

“I can’t see–what is it?”

Mike snatched the bag from my dad and poured it out on the tailgate. The goat’s head popped out first, then all four hooves. Mike roared laughing which made everyone else kinda laugh in support of his insanity. Murph laughed a what-the-fuck laugh, holding the head by a single horn, while my sister and I hid our faces and convulsed in quiet laughter at his inability to hide his discomfort.

“That’s Shoeless Joe. Broke his leg in a damn gopher hole yesterday, so I had to shoot ’im. Perfect timing, really. Saved me a few bucks on a case of Coors.”

“Say it ain’t so, Joe.” Murph backed away from his "perfect gift."

“Robbie, Colleen, I got you something, too–” he said and slid the head aside and threw a hind leg for my dad to catch. He then grunted as he pulled a Schwinn out the back of his truck. The tire knocked the head of the goat on the ground. Mike grabbed it by the horn, put it back on the bloody tailgate.

It was a women’s model Schwinn with the low bar that looked like it survived the scrap drives during The War.

“You two can share this. It’s a damn good machine. Don’t build’m like this anymore.”

We thanked Mike for his gift, and he laughed a Camel-non-filtered laugh and squeezed my hand into submission.

The red clay cliffs at the edge of the campground were 30 to 40 feet above the beach at Elkview Shores. Every drop of rain washed a little bit of that clay into the Elk River. This left large canyons in places where the water funneled. One of the little canyons was right in front of my dad’s trailer. To fill the giant void, people threw large metallic trash items into the chasm. Lawnmowers, refrigerators, steel lawn furniture–anything that promoted rust and filled the hole. Once the trash started to wash down to the beach, they abandoned this approach and decided to grab shovels and go ‘Trailerpark Corps of Engineers" on the problem. All of this trial and error happened before I was born, so by the time Coleen and I were beating around the campgrounds, there were tons of rusted metal trash in the various points of erosion and a four foot mole-hill that ran parallel to the river. The mole-hill ran the whole length of the park and acted as a swale to guide the rainwater from the rest of the park to one area where it would drain through a pipe and into the river below.

I couldn’t tell you about that when I was growing up. All I knew was that we had a half-mile-long mound that was built for two things: laying on our backs at night to get lost in the stars, and for jumping our bikes during the day.

I’d ride the rusty Schwinn up and down that campground and ghost ride it into the bushes so the other kids didn’t think I took my post-war relic seriously. But I did. It was, as Mike said, a damn good machine. Everyone made fun of it, and they tried like hell to break it, but they couldn’t. Colleen and I tried, too. Even the older kids couldn’t break it, and they could break just about anything. Buried in sand, ridden half-submerged, sent riderless, flying over the levee countless times. It was the AK-47 of bicycles.

Crazy Mike’s Schwinn got respect in the end. After everyone else’s Huffys broke and got replaced, the crappy Schwinn was still around. If it was 30 pounds when we got it, it must’ve weighed a hundred when we were done from all the sand that found its way into the frame.

I got older and abandoned it by the bath house for someone else. It belonged to childhood, not me. It belonged to laughter and Elkview Shores and reckless abandon. It belonged to another kid like me who needed that Schwinn as an escape from an alcoholic parent. I was old enough to escape in other ways. Old enough to fight back if I had to.

I like to think there’s still a kid riding it down the boat ramp into the water and he’s laughing. He and his friends can't stop laughing about the rusty old women's bike they found in the woods where the weirdos hang out. And they’ll never admit how damn cool that bike is. But they know.

LIGHTNING STRIKES by Emily Livingstone

August 4, 2020

Once upon a time, something truly devastating lanced out of the sky and struck the protagonist, turning him into a tragic hero. He was dead and born again in an instant, a demigod with a one-line history of having killed his whole family in a madness borne of squabbles between gods. He went on to perform twelve labors beyond human capability. He married a new wife and ascended to Mt. Olympus, a god-immortal.

Or, once upon a time, there was a woman whom the earth swallowed. In fact, it may have swallowed a whole town, but then she climbed out of the chasm, and was awakened, a goddess all along, just asleep before, needed by the world in her new, better, more powerful form. And what of the town that fell into the chasm? It is only the backstory.

When suffering scraped me raw, did it empty me of something? Did golden, liquid power pour in to displace what was there? Did wings spring from my back, spreading wide from telephone pole to telephone pole, ready to bear me off on a quest? Did I become a weapon?

On our search for salvation, a psychic told us about Michael the Archangel. I knew about him, but had never really considered him before. We could call him Mike, she said, and talk to him anytime, driving in the car or wherever. I see him now, in a flash of lightning, brandishing his sword aloft, illuminated in the darkness—muscular chest and wings outspread, a face full of confidence and potency. Whenever he appears, an 80s power ballad plays—maybe “Holding Out for a Hero” or “Livin’ on a Prayer”—and other angels roll their eyes, but they secretly like it, and he has the goods to back it up. And maybe, now, I’m beside him, glowing golden with my own set of wings, filled with a power I only half recognize.

She also told us we’d live near the ocean one day. Maybe we will.

When the scans were bad—when each one, despite everything, showed a growing tumor, our current house seemed to me like it might be cursed.

Later, when he could get up from the couch without his legs giving out, when he was feeling better, it seemed to teem with life. Each garlic clove I bought from the supermarket sprouted immediately. The crocuses and paperwhites outside pushed through the stony ground ahead of schedule. I felt possibility running through all of us. I wondered if the green insistence of it would pulse within me and give us a miracle child. The child would be all our love, hope, and persistence—our future made manifest, a middle finger to cancer and all that came with it. What a terrible burden for a baby. But, no, it would not be that. It would be joyous. A whole life placed between us and death. A whole person more to love. The little person we dreamed of before, and have not quite given up.

I have dreams for us, but he is not back to normal, and life is not normal. The days are long and sometimes they require of me so much that there is nothing left at the end. My body is numb to feeling and touch. In the “Sleeping Beauty” story, when the whole kingdom went to sleep together, waiting for the prince, was it really a curse? Wouldn’t a shared sleep—one finally long enough to make up for the all the sleep that was eaten away by stress, children, and illness—wouldn’t it heal? It seems to me that if I could have a sleep like that—a long one, with all my loved ones asleep too—I might feel better.

Peace and danger are still at war in my life, and only a thin wall separates them. Things are better, but with any ping of my phone, with any change in medication, with a change in the cells of the brain, with a shift in scar tissue, a sudden swelling, with an illness caught by chance, with a tree falling through the night, with a car that slams into us without notice, the chasm could engulf our entire existence, and I don’t know who or what could crawl from the pit after that.

The apocalypse is happening around us all the time. Someone’s life, as they know it, is ending. With the spread of a virus that has hushed the world, many people are being swallowed by whales, now. The asteroids have fallen indiscriminately, the oceans have risen angrily, and the sun has died. I still feel the fear, and sometimes, it tightens around me like a boa constrictor, but I’ve had practice living with it. Sometimes, this seems like a superpower, and sometimes, it seems like a festering wound. I pray, and my prayers are not just for my family. The prayers are articulate hope, spoken against inarticulate dread.

To drown the dread, I go to the beach where my grandparents used to have a house overlooking the ocean. The cold wind climbs down my lungs. Now it’s the wall between me and my grandparents that feels paper-thin, and I sense them on the other side, can almost hear them, touch them. The ocean is there, and the sand. Something inside me loosens and warms, even in the cold. I can remember sleeping downstairs in their house, listening to the continuous speech of the waves and feeling comforted and afraid at the same time because of the imagination of childhood, that opens doors without being sure of closing them.

I take a pebble from the beach: smooth and cold in my palm. I bring it home to add to other talismans I’ve collected. I perform all the discreet magic I can to keep my family alive. We all do.

AT THE ANIMAL LEVEL by L Mari Harris

August 3, 2020

I was not born with this rage.

I don’t remember when it first entered me. (Yes, you do.)

Nor do I remember when I first realized everything I saw was faintly veiled in red: the city streets, the faces of people I passed by every day, my reflection in the mirror as I brushed my teeth. (Are you sure about that?)

Now, I drape this red rage over me like a hooded cape made of velvet and ermine. If I tuck my head just right inside the hood, I cannot see the trim of white that once scampered along a winter’s day. Isn’t that the point—to hide from pain and suffering? Me, I mean. Others, too. How red is tied to beginning, middle, and end: my birth, my shoe in the middle of a street, people gathered at a shocked distance, hands clasped over mouths, those same mouths that the night before tore at a medium rare steak on their plates (a death, but not my own).

***

Here’s more red for you, born of pain (the rage came later): The corner of Washington & 17th, July, year of our Lord 1993. You are silky soft, lapin-eyed, still smelling of country-girl little bluestem, cornstalk buildings cleaving clouds when you tilt your tender little head and sniff these city smells, concrete seizing heat you feel through new city-girl shoes. Even the grackles and Blue Jays are softer here, trounced by the grinding of delivery trucks and SUVs. This city is too new. Too much. Too, too, too many people panting mad in the heat. Noses twitching like alley rats. This city is too hot in its fur. This day’s dawn, a fabrication, rubicund, but this moment still honeyed, still pure as a cottontail. Until a predator—say a coyote or a man—appears from downwind. Run in those new city-girl shoes as fast as you can. Until you trip, and a tempest rolls in, hovering, heavy, smelling of rot, of sweat, of bile. Kick and claw and bite, throw out all you have. You have tried. No one can accuse you of not trying. Later, after you clean yourself up, relief. It could have been so much worse, such a deeper red.

(Reader, did you see distance is still needed in the retelling, all these years later?)

***

I will reframe my rage, tuck it between the pages of a book, bury it under a pillow, wrap it in a blanket, in another round of drinks. If depression is rage turned inward, what, then, do I call the simmering of avoidance? Is this why we’re attracted to fairy tales—because we understand what red signifies? —A forest, a copse of trees, a house with a plume of smoke drifting up from the chimney, an open door where more red is waiting to eat us up?

***

Let’s look at what is red:

Passion. Power. Hunger. Fear. Pain. Shame. Anger.

Life Force (see: above).

STOP.

I now see I forgot Love, but I’m not sure where it belongs.

***

For this one I will remain in first person. (I must own this one as my own doing.)

A July weekend, year of my Lord 2000 (what is it with July?—I have concluded it’s red heat, red fireworks, a hand on a boiling pot not watched). A pleasant man sits next to me. We introduce ourselves, talk of books and art, knock back a few shots with barbaric yawps that make the bartender laugh. Here’s red again, a warm flush head to toe (see: Passion, Hunger). A red truck I jump into (STOP). The bartender’s name is Leo. I’m sure red-truck guy told me his name, too, but all I see is Red Means GO. We drive deep into the forest, up the mountainside. I know this terrain well. We pull off onto a dirt service road I’ve passed many times but have never wandered down. It descends steeply, stops abruptly at a stream. My first thought is How beautiful. My second thought is Bears live here. The third thought doesn’t come until the next morning, after I’ve popped my sixth ibuprofen and prayed over the toilet. It doesn’t matter that red-truck guy was a lovely man. It doesn’t matter that I enjoyed this small moment of my life. What matters is the heat I feel rising in my veins (see: Shame, Anger). I’m smarter than this, knowing to always keep myself out of a scent trail.

And yet.

Days later, one of the local station’s lead stories—video shot in the dappled afternoon light of a patch of tall grass near a stream. Two deputies stand over a blanketed lump, bones of what appears to have once been a foot peeking out. In the background I see a boulder with a peace sign spray painted in blue on it.

I had leaned on that boulder to slip my boots back on.

(How do you wrap your head around this?) If you ever figure it out, let me know.

***

I hate to use the word “lucky” to describe how incredibly stupid I still feel for cornering myself with a strange man on a deserted mountain road, but lucky I am (putting the onus on my shoulders yet again).

Why do my actions matter? Because we have made it so. And I hate that about this world.

***

Some say rage can only be absolved by forgiveness. My reply is this—I doubt they’ve ever truly experienced rage, then.

Forgiveness is a shade of yellow I've never allowed to color my walls.

SELF-LOATHING WALKS THE TOWN by Amy L. Freeman

August 1, 2020

Despite the early morning’s scorching heat, Self-Loathing strides down the street in Anytown, USA, slapping mosquitoes from his neck. He reaches his first house, the leaves of its magnificent oak tree motionless in the heavy air. With a quick sidelong glance to ensure no one is watching, Self-Loathing shimmies up the tree and leans forward to peek into a second-story window.

Wearing just boxer shorts, fourteen-year-old Richie is leaning over his bed, scrubbing at his sheets with a damp green hand-towel. He’s using his other fist to pound his thigh as he tries to also scrub away the image of the new boy's lazy smile while he swings his lacrosse stick back and forth, a metronome. Self-Loathing decides he doesn’t need to intervene further, today. He smiles and drops lightly to the ground, then circles around to the back of the house.

Self-Loathing looks through the window at Richie’s father sitting at an old wooden desk, a spinning bamboo ceiling fan rustling the pages of a yellow legal pad. Every few moments, he reaches toward a Bible, flicks through pages, then returns to writing. Standing on tiptoes, Self-Loathing sends a gentle breath toward the Bible, fluttering its pages until it lands open on Leviticus 18:22. Richie’s father peers at the page, taps his pen against his teeth, and nods.

He resumes writing. The Bible tells us, “You shall not lie with a man as with a woman; it is an abomination.” His pen flies across the page. The sins of the flesh can bring down even the most righteous person. He knows that all too well.

He’ll have Sunday’s sermon ready. He always does. And after last week’s little round of hooky, he’d better see Richie scrubbed clean and sitting in the front pew.

Self-Loathing has a spring in his step as he heads to his next house. Sixteen-year-old Dillon’s room is on the ground floor in the back, and she never closes her drapes. Self-Loathing only has to hide behind a tool shed to watch her.

Even though she hasn’t even brushed her teeth, Dillon’s on her iPad. Self-Loathing’s eagle eyes can see that she’s surfing a wellness website, bookmarking pages touting the benefits of burpees and lean protein. Self-Loathing frowns. This won’t do.

He’d long ago hacked into her Wi-Fi, installing a nifty little program that lets him feed ads and other content of his choosing to her screen. He taps a few buttons, then folds his arms and stands back, waiting.

It’s only minutes, really, before he sees her poke a finger into her soft belly. She swipes at the screen again. Then she pinches a roll of her flesh between her thumb and pointer. Self-loathing sends her a few more images. Dillon abruptly shoves her iPad aside, stands, and walks out of the room.

When she returns, she’s cradling something wrapped in a navy towel. She shoves a chair under her doorknob and goes to her bathroom to pour a glass of water. Then she unfurls the towel, tears open the loaf of white bread, and starts to stuff slices into her mouth, guzzling water to force the food down her throat.

Self-Loathing debates sticking around to hear her puking, but he’s already running late on his rounds. Another day.

A woman pushing a stroller is on the sidewalk, maybe fifty feet away, coming toward him. She’s cooing into the stroller. Babies are tricky because they can’t yet absorb what he offers.

The mothers are another story; so easy to plant those seeds. “I’ve read that not all beautiful chubby babies grow up to be fat kids.” Or, “I wouldn’t worry about the size of her ears. Most babies’ proportions even out over time.” He’s been at this long enough to witness the mothers transplant those seedlings into their children.

The baby gurgles, a pure, joyous sound. Something about the laughter’s timbre jars loose a distant childhood memory, one Self-Loathing can’t quite bring into focus.

When was the last time he felt pure joy?

Easier to remember its opposite. Like on the school playground, when the bullies came for him. Or at the dinners, when his mother stayed silent while his father shamed him. Or the dates he never went on, the job interviews he flubbed, and the endless nights alone.

The woman blows kisses at the baby. Self-Loathing straightens and walks toward her. He scans her face, body, and demeanor, weighing her split ends, baby-weight, and acne scars. He splays his hands wide as if he means no harm.

“Morning! Can I have a peek at your baby?”

X-R-A-Y LITERARY MAGAZINE | COLLECTION I | SUMMER EDITION

July 31, 2020

LIKE HUMMINGBIRDS by Shome Dasgupta

July 31, 2020

Like when we sat on the sun and watched the world simmer in our heads, brother—remember that time? And how you were so furious and the words from your mouth smoldered, drifting towards every star, making sure there was no void. The pain. The pain you felt became ashes in my own body, and I’m so sorry, brother. I was helpless. And as much as I felt your pain, there was nothing I could do to take it away from you. Your skull vibrated as the smoke left through every pore of your body, and I just wanted to hold you, even if it meant I’d burn, but you wouldn’t let. You knew. You recognized, despite all that was happening, that you loved me and didn’t want to hurt me. Remember in that brief gleam of light, before you or I left, how the sun diminished and we floated in space no longer knowing if the world existed or cared if it did or not, and we hovered around like the hummingbirds in our backyard, trying not to bump into stars. We had so much fun and for that endless second you found peace as you took my hand and guided me around, much like you did in life. You loved those hummingbirds.

Brother, I fucked up so much, I’m so sorry.

And like before it all happened, when you were there we would be on our hands and knees, crawling in the ditch, pretending to be raccoons because there were no more raccoons left to feed. They went away just like you or me. But when we were playing, I cut my leg and cried so loud. You picked me up to take me home but I flailed so much we tumbled over, and the world was before us as we were on our backs. My pain went away as we tried to count all the birds in the sky.

And brother, I don’t know—I don’t know if I had the chance to do it all over again if I would change any of it. Including all the times I fucked up and all the times you had to pull on my arm while I was sinking. I don’t know if I would change it all up because look at who we became—I honestly think our parents would be so proud of us. How we made it through even though we weren’t meant to—I know who we are now, but if I could go back and change all the ways I needed to change, I don’t know who we would become.

You’d be so proud of me now, brother. I’m sorry. I’m glad you no longer feel any pain. I feel it every now and then but then it all goes away when it’s just us, floating around in space, drifting this way and that, toward every star, and every now and then a hummingbird appears, glowing and holy, fluttering its wings to let us know that we’re here. How you loved those hummingbirds, brother, I will never forget, even with closed eyes, I will never forget.

And this might be the last time we can speak—I don’t know if you can hear me—I’m not sure how all of this goes, but I love you, brother. Thanks for always being there.

PLEASE FORGIVE ME, MIDNIGHT ANGEL by Timothy Boudreau

July 30, 2020

That morning Cristina’s husband Charley brings her breakfast from the Diner, gray hair tufting from under his ball cap as he hands her the bag with an egg and cheese sandwich.

“Why aren’t you coming again?” she asks as she unwraps it.

“Off to provide another goddamn eight hours of superior customer service,” he says. That's been his life: jobs with name tags and aprons, jobs where the dickhead customer’s always right.

“Make sure you eat before you leave,” he goes on. “Give my best to her family.”

“Not sure who’s even left.”

“Wasn’t for staffing issues, I’d be there.” He hands her napkins from his jacket pocket.

“With everything she went through, I guess it all makes sense.” Cristina’s sigh holds him beside the door. “I’d just like to see her again, you know?”

He kisses her forehead. “See you tonight Babe.”

Cristina bites the sandwich, tastes her breath, rinses her mouth with OJ. “Holy fuck Sammi,” she says.

Sammi: freckles and tomato hair, her curls like spaghetti tinsel. “Speckled Sammi,” the mean girls called her. All curves and softness, like a pillow, but when she hugged you, she meant it, she squeezed. Back then it was Cristina and Sammi, hip to hip through the halls of Daleborough High. Nicotine hair and Newports tucked in their jean jackets.

Cristina brings her phone outside where they have reception. The tire swing in the neighbor’s yard is like the one they rode at Sammi’s while they waited for the bus: overjoyed, legs splayed, after wine coolers for breakfast; their moms absent, September sky like a musty blanket.

Her hands tremble as she makes the call.

“Yes, one PM,” Mr. Herman says. “Light refreshments after. The information’s on the website.”

“Will there be a viewing? Can you tell me that?”

“There will not. The family chose cremation.”

While Cristina pulls on her best blouse and jeans, slicks back her hair, Pandora plays Quarterflash, Heart, The Pretenders. She arranges her nips on the bureau, hums along, punches the air to punctuate the choruses. Imagines Sammi’s ashes crossing the country in a jet, limo transporting the urn from Logan with a police escort. Blue lights, music blasting.

Music was Sammi’s wine cooler buzz, pink fog fizz. They rode with “Shadows of the Night” on the radio, Sammi’s voice cracking at the top of her range, stubby arms waving as if commanding a back seat band; Cristina, the better drunk driver, behind the wheel. “Midnight angel, won’t you say you will?” All night Sammi was thinking of Matty Cryans, her cheeks red, forehead glistening, everything in her mind with a heart scrawled across it, “Sammi loves Matty.”

Matty was skinny, long eyelashes over moist blue eyes. Gawky, shy, thick shag of blond.

“He's my number-two pencil," Sammi told everyone, “long and straight. Girls think he's dumb because he’s quiet, but he’s always observing. He saves his thoughts for nighttime and brings them home to me.”

Were they twenty-three when it started? One Friday Cristina invited Matty over for supper, while Sammi worked a double and Charley was away. When Cristina pulled him onto the bed Matty’s wet eyes filled with questions, but he hardened as soon as she unzipped him.

“But what about Sammi?” he said, as she mouthed his dick. “What about Sammi?” as she climbed on top, settled onto him, “But Sammi,” wincing first until she bounced, bounced, and shoot made sure he came inside before she fell off (he was crying now) and went to wash his mess out of her.

Cristina’s jacket smells like cigarettes, its inside pockets packed with nips. While she waits for the taxi she slips into her neighbor’s garden and breaks off four lilies, wraps them in tissue.

The taxi drops her at the corner of Crawford and Elm, next to the building where Sammi lived after everything blew up. Cristina slides the lilies in her pocket, pats her hair, remembers visiting before Sammi ditched them all and moved out West.

“Just listen Sammi,” Cristina told her.In the doorway Sammi blew cigarette smoke in Cristina’s face, her fist on her hip. “Why.”

“We need to talk.”

“Matty’s not here anymore.” She turned, flipped the butt off Cristina’s shoulder. “Leave me alone you greasy bitch.”

In the back row at Herman’s Funeral Home Cristina looks at the program, Sammi Cryans, 1967-2018, with a Psalm printed inside.

There’s a lectern, flowers and two big pictures up front: Sammi in lopsided pigtails, riding a tricycle; forty-something Sammi with some guy beside a Christmas tree, flannel shirt, curls chopped, pupils pinned, high as fuck.

After the hometown bridges have been neglected, burned, bombed, what’s left are aunties, a lonely cousin, a drunk former friend in the back corner. Three speakers: the pastor; Aunt Ellen, trembling; a former coworker. Stories about kid Sammi gobbling graham crackers; smoke breaks at her old job.

Finally Cristina can’t stand anymore. She stumbles out, lilies in her fist, past a lady in a hairnet beside the door crying into a napkin.

She walks outside, head swimming. She already knows how it’ll end. Read The Lord is my shepherd, hallowed art thy name. Claim it was Sammi’s favorite scripture, as if she fucking had a favorite. Talk about her “troubles,” say something about God’s wisdom; describe a peaceful rest, free of pain. No mention of tire swings or Matty Cryans or her fierce, ragged heart.

How long has it taken her to walk home? Her face is flushed, jacket loose, thistle sticking to her jeans after she plunges through the brush into the driveway to find Charley standing outside with his phone, ball cap pulled low.

“It was a mistake,” she says, “the whole day was a farce,” she says, “it’s not fair, we’re too young,” shivering as Charley wraps his arm around her and Sammi’s lilies and helps her inside.

APEX PREDATORS by Nicole VanderLinden

July 30, 2020

Jessa hears a bear. Only it’s not a bear. It’s the wind nudging against the nylon of our tent, but my new wife has never camped on a grassy bald in the Smoky Mountains. So when she elbows me, whispers, is that a snout? where the fabric pushes in against her sleeping bag, I say, probably. I say, you didn’t bring in a candy bar, did you? She knows this story, that tent walls aren’t really walls and that a bear can slice right through them, drag you away for a bit of chocolate.

Next to me, I feel her go still so as not to provoke the bear-that-isn’t-there. She steadies her breathing, in and out, and soon she’s as calm as a corpse, also afraid and very alive.

I’ve told her other things, some true and mostly not. Bears smell fear, I say. You’re not bleeding, are you? Imagine, I tell her, if our tent was invisible, what we’d look like to them—other animals, too. Lonely pink babies under the cold Tennessee sky.

We don’t pass many thru-hikers, and the ones we do have trail names: Rock-n-Roll, Jumpy Cat. Men whose necks have furred and, once, an old woman with two filthy Pomeranians. Bear snacks, I whisper. We share tortillas and pouches of peanut butter. We muse on the weather, what it might become—I predict lightning and gusts that will blow over trees. When we ask for the hikers’ real names, they laugh and say, those names don’t count out here.

See? I say to her later. We sit alone on a fallen yellow birch. I breathe in the musk of her unwashed clothes—fires put out and canvas grown damp—her botanical smells long gone and scrubbed clean. In a nearby tree, a rat snake catches an errant ray of sun. Your name doesn’t count out here.

She carries a green backpack. She likes to blend in, and she packs it each morning, the sleeping bag then the tent poles then the bear canister then the snacks, in order of what she most wants to keep dry. I’m an apex predator, she says, big with her backpack. Maybe that’s my name, she says, and I say, you sure about that?

And then, on the last day, we do see a bear.

It’s foraging along the French Broad River. It’s midday, and the river’s swollen with rain; the rush of it leaves me dizzy. The bear. She shrinks into that green backpack, rigid as the hills. The bear, the bear. For a moment I think we’ve conjured it. It’s a few yards away and can smell us, I know, the memory of cooked meat still clinging to our hair, whiskey on our breath. Somewhere, a dead branch cracks to the ground.

The bear sniffs and then huffs, its mouth a cave. Her fingers curl around my fingers, and I feel her pulse, or maybe it’s mine, a heartbeat between our hands. We are small and we are nobody. But then the bear turns away and ambles on, no reason why or why not.

He’ll be back for you, I say, though she knows this isn’t true. We’re spending the night in Hot Springs, in a cabin, in a place where bears can’t go, and she will be Jessa once more.

Next year, we’ll visit the sea. We’ll rent a kayak, and it will be her turn to lay me low, to make me forget my name.

Shark, she’ll whisper from behind as we paddle into the blue, our boat like a toy bobbing in the swells. I see a fin, she’ll say, over there, on the horizon. I’ll get the shiver; my nerves will bloom. That means he’s hunting, she’ll say.

HE FINDS AN ACORN WEARING A BONNET by Katie Piper

July 28, 2020

Leaves look like they were almost autumn for a moment. Most are pocked with black scars, as if cigarettes have been stubbed out and the ash has coagulated in their papery veins.

My fingers feel gritty–that’s what they said to me last time, ‘your placenta is gritty’ –and so I felt the shame of geriatric pregnancy, as if I had a rheumatoid uterus, or bulbous eggs at 40.

My own brutality has come out of season, and , I keep searching, even though I won’t find what I’m looking for. It’s one of those days, and I can only see the ordinaries, so I know this acorn won’t turn up for me, and I do nothing in rhythm on these days. An off- kilter state has to be accepted, or ridden on until sleep comes.

I sit on the bench in the main street. I’ve forgotten where I am in my scavenging. He is still in the coffee shop queue. I can just make him out through the foggy door. I look up and down the street for a clue of something better, but there’s nothing or at least nothing my eyes are willing to see. Then I realize I’m cold, mostly my peripheries–my pelvis is hot, though. My pad feels like an iron that’s cooling with elements of hot and cold. It will be heavy and sodden when we walk back because it will be past capacity, unable to catch all from the split seam. I haven’t told him yet.

We will walk back up the street, arms linked, and he will have a lift in his step because he sees the season of preparation. Preparing to nest, to go inwards with our bundle, to be rid of what we don’t need so we can nurture our newborn. He doesn’t see the ordinaries yet, and I want to stave them off, for him, for a little longer.

Until he trudges back down the street toward me, with an acorn wearing a bonnet. I know you love these, he says.

THE SURPRISE by Aisha Hassan

July 28, 2020

The funeral prayer was almost over but I didn’t care, and Safia needed me here, and since she’s the one who did the dying, her word is as good as God’s. I stood at the back so the rows of hunched women would ignore me for now. The mosque was bloated with hot air and I could smell sweat blooming beneath white prayer robes. Rotting hearts, too. I imagined Syed’s heart, fleshy and dark, emitting the stench of a hammered mouse, thumping inside his hairy chest. He was on the other side of the partition where an Imam’s voice sang for all the men to see and all the women to listen.

Everyone lifted their hands in a holy salute and bent down in prostration. I followed instinctively but was, as always, a beat too late. When I sank to my knees and touched my head to the ground, I pressed my face to the heel of God’s boot and said a little prayer: “Forgive me, sister.”

The women wouldn’t come near me as we walked to the cemetery. Still, I could hear the low hum of their voices and tried to hold my head high. Up ahead in the ant trail of people trudging behind the coffin, Mother kept bumping into those around her, stepping aimlessly, blinded by grief. She didn't know I was here yet. But Mother has always been unseeing about her daughters no matter what happened to them. Even when the village and its birds seemed to know. Like her, they turned away.

Mother didn’t even look at me the day I tried to say goodbye. Didn’t even twitch when Syed, only thirteen then, stumbled in, took stock, and hissed, “Father was right about you,” before bolting out the door.

That day, Safia took my hands the way she did on those deep mornings when rising from bed made me feel more dead than alive. She promised never to abandon me while clutching my fingers tight.

“Don’t,” she had said.

“Sister, please,” I begged. “You can come.” We could have survived together.

Safia looked at me with moon-wide eyes that caught the light just as her head shook the quietest No. She glanced at Mother then turned back to keep her gaze on me. “You need to leave before Father gets home,” Safia had said. “Syed is already running to get him.”

Last Spring, exactly five years to the day I left, Safia finally called and told me Father died. We cried because he was gone at last and we had missed each other deeply and often. I cried because the fear of Father dragging me home fell out of my bruised insides and Safia’s voice sounded like forgiveness. I let myself imagine, for the first time since I ran out of the dusty village, the bougainvilleas in full bloom, our rickety house unloved and pathetic behind me—I let myself imagine Safia and I could be together again.

Just last week she told me that Syed, who carried Father’s shadow inside him like a ghost, was joining the military this month.

"I’ll come visit you when he leaves,” Safia said. “Mother won’t stop me.”

"I can’t wait to see you,” I told her.

“Me neither,” she had said. Her voice was pregnant with hope.

And here we were, together again, as they lay her down beside our Father.

I grabbed a handful of dirt and threw it into the newly dug grave. The others were already leaving. I stood my ground and thought of Safia’s fresh body. In Islam, the funeral must happen as soon as possible. It spares the soul the pain of being trapped in a vessel that is no longer home.

“It’s her fault,” Syed’s voice chimed as the crowd moved past me. “But Safia was a silly girl to take a road she’s never travelled before, especially in the dark.”

A memory curdled in my brain of Syed’s small head staring from the doorway when Father beat Safia and I, and all the different ways his eyeballs said: Silly, Stupid, Girls.

I looked up and Syed sneered at me with a face sickeningly like mine, both our soul skins roasted to the same shade of ochre beneath the punishing sun. Syed nudged the old uncle he was speaking to and both men looked at me with narrowed eyes.

"God will discipline the person responsible,” Syed said loudly.

I wanted to strangle Syed’s slimy voice. It was the same voice that told me two days ago Safia was gone and if I didn’t come home, he would leave Mother to fend for herself. “Safia was going to see you,” Syed said when he called. “Didn’t you know?”

The police unlocked Safia’s phone after the collision and my number was the only one she ever dialled. Syed guessed it was me, but wanted to make sure I knew the details.

“Farah,” Mother said, just as I was about to act. I felt Syed watching as I turned to the frail woman who pulled up beside me. Mother gently took my hands. “I didn’t think you would come,” she whispered, glassy eyes melting. She ogled me as if unearthing something precious.

“I’m sorry.” It was all I could say.

Mother nodded absentmindedly and started walking towards our house. “You are not the reason,” she said with her back to me. “You and Safia are the same, always blaming yourself.” Mother’s brittle fingers tightened around mine.

I pictured Safia staring into the darkness as Mother led me back home.

“Yes,” I said. “We’re the same after all.”