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SITTING ALONE by D.T. ROBBINS

August 23, 2020

I had a dream about you. I sat in a pew that only had enough room for two people. Its red velvet had faded, its wooden frame splintered.

Someone played piano, sang a song for you, about you. The congregation sent up a crescendo of angel voices, enveloping the atmosphere, like a child wrapped around her father’s leg.

And me? I lost it. I bawled, wailed.

I’d saved that seat next to me for you, but you never came.

The dream-song, a melody I’d never heard before, stayed in my ears after I woke. I considered whether or not to remove the guitar from my wall, excavating the song’s chord structure from my sleep. The tears I wept, hollow-chested and heavy-limbed, cascaded into reality, like watching the ripped remains of matter spewing from the other side of a black hole. Because the truth is, I fucking miss you.

You were the whole of my youth, my adolescence. I would pray like you said to, you would stir my soul with mystery and revelation, wisdom and understanding. The elders prayed over me at 13. Never look to man, they said, because man would always disappoint me. Keep my eyes on you and you alone. They said the devil would shoot fiery arrows at me my whole life, but you’d protect me.

And the devil did speak. From pulpits he decried the extent of your grace and compassion. And I, if I truly believed, was to revile and denounce so-called abominations that the world fell victim to. Despite your freedom, I put on chains. He criticized the expectation of your power and presence. Miracles became blasphemous. Mystery was ignorance. You were the light, but I only saw darkness.

He spoke from behind the desks of those who said they knew you better, were closer to you. As if my relationship with you was a thing to be measured and scrutinized like the subject of a clinical trial. Charisma was favored over personal experience. Could I preach a three-point sermon? Was the inflection in my voice enough to evoke an emotional response? How many bodies could I bring into the room? When was the last time I jerked off? Who was I fantasizing about? Did I touch her before she wore a ring? Was I drinking in public or at home? Did I cause someone to stumble with my secret sins?

My questioning and challenging their teaching, the methodology, blacklisted me. It seems as though you’re a flash in the pan, they told me. This isn’t working out, they said. You’re not a strong enough spiritual leader, she said. Whatever the hell that even meant.

The devil’s voice grew louder, silencing yours. I quit listening to you both. I chose my own voice. Of my anger, my disappointment and disillusionment. You became a distant memory, a nightmare, a gravesite.

I watched as those who believed they knew you better ended up knowing nothing of you and even less of themselves. Their egos crucified their missions. They vacated their callings, falling from their pedestals. Some by choice, others by force. I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t find some restitution in it. One friend, who stood witness to my eventual dismissal of faith, said to me, You were the one they said would go nowhere and do nothing, look where you’re at now, how well you’re doing! And where the fuck are they? Their names are forgotten, reputations buried. Maybe I’m wrong for that. Maybe you reap what you sow. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

But now I can’t shake that song, that dream. I keep seeing that seat I saved for you. I keep wondering if you’ll show. If you’ll remember me like I remember you from the days of my innocence. If you’ll remember my innocence at all. If you’ll remember my voice the way I remember yours. Or if it’s too late. If I’ve become like that pew, faded and splintered.

The seat belongs to you and, whether I like it or not, no one else is capable of occupying that space.

I’ve been sitting here for so long.

I hate sitting alone.

ILLUMINATION by Audra Kerr Brown

August 22, 2020

Three weeks after her miscarriage, Guinevere fell in love with the lightbulb. A 40-watt incandescent globe from the dining room wall sconce. She removed the lampshade in order to stare at the glow of its tungsten filaments, the bare harp sitting above the bulb as a halo.

You are beautiful, Guinevere would say. Absolutely beautiful.

The light had an electrical heartbeat, a faint buzzing, as if bees were trapped inside.

She liked to unscrew the bulb from its socket, marvel at how perfectly it fit in her palm. How warm it felt. How round, how small.

OBIT by Jesse Salvo

August 21, 2020

Published Wed, Jan 13, 11:53 p.m. ET

Jersey City, NJ

This item is dedicated to the living memory of David Graff, a friend of this paper, who passed away this week in a manner very much unexpected to those who knew him well. David, who died Thursday, was born in Michigan to a family of middle income, attended the University of Chicago under dubious circumstances, failed out under less dubious ones, spent two years writing grants for legal nonprofits, discovered no dignity in the work, detested labor, detested snobbery, moved back to Detroit, fell in love, became engaged, took a job cleaning churches, saw the engagement end badly, saw his only love end badly, quit the churches, bought an outbound ticket, spent nearly five years living reckless across the ocean, did steady, unlucrative work in Morocco, bought a dog, gained a small reputation and a byline, broke his foot in Cambodia, got in over his head, saw a child dismembered by a landmine, acted badly and was jailed in Chile, elected finally to come home, took a job in Sioux City, detested phoniness, detested “small talk”, got a girl pregnant, paid for the abortion, buried the dog, quit drinking, broke three stories, learned to live with regret, moved to a major national publication, lived comfortably for two years, disdained politeness, disdained bosses, was bought out and left the paper, was hired and bought out again, cobbled together a National Magazine Award and a mortgage, had a heart attack, pivoted briefly to video, relapsed a year and got sober again, was contacted by and met with the abortion he’d thought he’d helped pay for, moved to New York City for work, got laid off again, sold the mortgage at a loss, reached out to his life’s only love, garnered no response, caught a job with a small paper writing obituaries, always was a joyful presence around the office, never was a burden to anyone, proved unable to shake a childhood loneliness, retired to his apartment one evening, wrote a small note in the parlance of his trade, drank a bottle of bleach sometime just before midnight, sat very still in his chair, thought briefly of all the words we use to explain a life, attained a sort of peace, and regretted only the bad parts.

WHEN THE FIRST HUSBAND DIES YOUNG by Dan Brotzel

August 20, 2020

When your first husband dies young, you feel shock, you feel sick. You hurt, you bruise, you ache, you sting. You feel nothing at all but also everything, way too much. Reality has been swept from under you. There’s a big hole, a gap, where your life should be. Nothing makes sense. You’re trapped in a nightmare that can’t possibly be yours. Everything is panic, anxiety.

You keep running up against the hope that this is all an illusion, that soon you’ll be able to get your head round it, feel differently about it, send it away. You keep thinking you’re in a bad dream, or maybe even just a dream of a dream of a bad dream. You tell yourself you’ll unravel it all eventually and get back to normal.

When the first husband dies young, you feel like your future’s been stolen. You feel like you’ve entered on a chapter that wasn’t even supposed to be there in your book. You had a life, you had a roadmap, you had dreams. You had a sense of where things might go, a direction of travel. You had the shared destiny of each other.

He painted pictures of the future. He had it all scoped out. The vision–a lot of it came from him. But you went along with it. There was a certain muscularity to his mapping out of things. You liked this, at first. It involved you and only you, it made you feel that you’d been specially selected. You were part of a plan. You existed for something, for someone. Now he is gone, and you’re not sure where you are either.

When the first husband dies young, you notice how keen everyone else is to grieve on your behalf. From the outside it’s a story they can really get their heads around, a formulaic film plot: love’s young dream crushed, the brave one taken too young, a future stolen. To them, it all seems so clear, what’s happened and how bad it all is, where it all begins and ends. Whereas for you, it’s just a mess, it’s not even a feeling, it’s just a color that’s drained from the world. You wouldn’t even know where to start, how to define it, what box to put it in. You are the box.

People seem so taken with the exquisite agony of it all, they keep telling you how they feel your pain. But how can you? you think. I don’t even know how to feel it myself.

When the first husband dies young, you find that people have a part for you to play: the inconsolable young widow. And they want you to play it forever. They love it. They want you to wear black–well not literally, at least not all of them. They want you to turn your existence into a living shrine. They want you to relate everything you say to some cherished moment with him. They want your every action to have meaning only when held up against the lens of his tragedy, your tragedy.

They like you tragic, they like the look.

When the first husband dies young, you’re not thinking about moving on. But slowly you start to see that you’re suspended now in a solution of suffering, floating like a dissected rabbit in a formaldehyde tank for the world to pity. It’s a fate worse than death, you hear yourself think. Maybe you don’t want to be anything else right now, but you’d like to know you could try if you wanted. Otherwise you might as well be dead too.

When the first husband dies young, you quickly realize that you can never really say anything to anyone to suggest that things were ever less than perfect. Yet there are little things you start to remember, little niggles and judgments and tensions and frictions, things you don’t have in your life now.

Sometimes, when in-laws or relatives or friends of the deceased sing the praises of your late husband, you don’t quite recognize him. Or, when they call to mind a famous evening or memorable event with him, you recall something extra that they never saw: the row you had before the party, the resentment you carried all night, the savage alcoholic catch in his voice, the sullen resentful slurs, the punitive silences–yours and his–on the drive home. So now you have to nod and smile past your memory, as everyone looks to you to validate theirs.

When the first husband dies young, you find you can put clothes on and not have to wait for the inevitable assessment of your outfit. You can make a spontaneous plan to see someone that evening and not have to explain who they are and how you know them, or what time you’ll be back. You can do nothing–you don’t even have to say that you don’t feel like doing anything–you can just not do anything. You can mooch, you can putter, you can forget to get dressed or do your hair. You can browse Netflix or arrange your wardrobe or read a book or flick through some crappy celeb mag or plant some herbs out on the balcony or spend three hours making an onion soup, with some disposable plastic pop turned up loud that he would have hated.

There are occasions, on your own, never to be said to anyone else, in the darkest corners of the night or the quietest folds of a solitary day, when you dare to think that you prefer it like this.

When the first husband dies young, you realize he didn’t like you very much. It’s not really his fault; he probably didn't like himself very much either. (His dad was no different.) He was, to use a phrase that he loved, “a man of the world,” whereas, you–poor sweet, dear you–you were so naive and hopeless that you needed saving from yourself. You had to have things explained to you, he explained–which was handy, because he liked nothing more than to explain things. He knew stuff, he was clever, and he was capable in many ways. But there was a price.

He liked everything his way. He knew what was best for you, much better than you ever could. He expected your tastes to be his tastes. He expected you to defer to him in the big decisions–he didn’t want you to go back to college, didn’t want you to carry on with that job, let alone go for that promotion. He was happy to go along with you being you, so far as that didn’t conflict with you being his. But he wasn’t really very kind and, contrary to all his assumptions, he wasn’t very funny.

You realize that you were afraid of him. You thank God that you never had any kids.

When the first husband dies young, you blame yourself. You survived him, and now–with no right of reply–you judge him. But you know you never wished him dead; you had this silly optimistic belief that everything would right itself in the end, that you would both find a way back to the early days when everything was perfect and hopeful.

When the first husband dies young, you find one day you are free to think your own thoughts and free to stop worrying about how others expect you to be. And you see at last your first husband’s great gift to you: the realization that there need never be a second.

SAN ANTONIO by Saul Lemerond

August 19, 2020

The piglet was pink, but not the regular pink that you expect piglets to be. This was the sort of glowing, warm pink that only exists in Disney movies. God, the little animal was so cute Yancy wanted to squeeze the thing to death. Wanted to squeeze it ‘til its head popped off its precious little body.

Yancy’s friends Tim and John think this too. He is so lucky, they think as they stand beside him wishing they could also have one. They’d all been on their way to the Riverwalk but now no longer care.

Yancy reaches out a hand and pets the piglet on its snout, which offers a high-pitched oink. This is right. Rightly right. He names the piglet Normand. Normand smiles. Normand’s smile is a demon’s smile. There is an air of danger about Normand, which only makes Yancy desire him more.

Yancy picks up Normand, thinking, My mother will like this piglet.

He looks over to his friend Tim who is tall and reminds Yancy of the bronze cowboys on the Riverwalk, the Briscoe. Stetson hatted. Rugged and loving life. There is a piglet that has appeared at his feet.

John, who is dashingly handsome and reminds Yancy of a younger version of himself, also looks down to find one.

This is strange. Yes, they admit that, but, their libidos are excited. They know a good thing when they see it, and they brace themselves, psychically, for what promises to be a considerable amount of sexual attention. Yancy looks at Tim. Tim looks at Yancy. They smile at one another. The attention, it seems, is already here.

How beauteous these piglets are. Oh, brave new world, Tim thinks, that has such creatures in it.

They take pictures and record videos of the piglets and post this on their many profiles. Tim names his piglet Worthington. Worthington, like Normand, has the grin of a hungry hobgoblin.

***

Yancy’s mother is a starchy woman who likes index funds, has a drooping heart, an aching soul, and a mood in constant need of cheering. Her name is Mildred.

“What a cute little piglet!” Mildred shouts when she sees Normand. She tries, very hard, to hide her jealousy which is a very ugly part of her that she rarely acknowledges.

Oh, and will you look at that. Mildred didn’t notice at first, but she has a piglet standing next to her as well, sniffing at her fern-green flats.

“Where did this little guy come from?” Mildred asks. “This is the cutest thing I have ever seen in my adult life. I will name him Weatherford. It looks like a Weatherford, don’t you think?” She, like Yancy and his friends, is also excited about the attention this will afford her, sexual and otherwise.

Mildred sends a picture of Weatherford to her friend, Francene. Francene sends Mildred a picture of her piglet, Hamlet. Hamlet, like Weatherford, is adorable yet also menacing.

It’s a profoundly joyous time, and they make sure to post this on their many profiles.

There are many questions about where the piglets came from and why they are here. These questions seem important but not as important as, say, actually having a piglet. The piglets are a mystery to be sure. Everyone agrees. They will investigate, of course. Of course they will. Later.

Then the message: Arbuckle just ate John!

Yancy looks at his phone and wonders if this is a typo. If instead of ate, they meant @. ‘@John!’ makes more sense than ‘ate John’, but no. A photo is shared with a little adorable Arbuckle chewing on John’s foot, still in its classic western boot.

Everyone at John’s funeral who doesn’t have a piglet finds a piglet there. They are dangerous, these piglets, it cannot be denied, if only slightly, which just adds to their titillation. The funeral is like most funerals only more so in that it serves as both a celebration of life and a fracture in their interpersonal happiness along with flowers, drinks, and old friends.

The occasion is emotionally wrought. Everyone loves their piglet, but at the same time, they do not know if they can trust them. Tim looks at Yancy. Yancy looks at Tim. The death of their good friend has brought them closer than ever.

During the funeral, Hamlet attacks Yancy’s mother’s friend, Francene.

At first, Hamlet leaps up to Francene’s neck and takes a fleshy chunk out of her neck, right around where the carotid artery probably is.

The other piglets, seeing this, jump aboard this flesh lunch wagon and take what they can get. Muscle, bone, tendons, and teeth. When they are finished, there is nothing left. Everyone posts this on their many personal profiles.

Mildred takes out her phone and reports this to several organizations who make it their business to keep data on such things.

It seems to the mourners as if time stops and the whole scene freezes in tableau.

Yancy looks at Tim. Tim looks back. Suspended between them is an aerosol of terror, disgust, and desire.

The horror sharpens slowly, like the point of an icicle in early springtime, then everything begins to move again.

Tim pukes in the large clay pot of a Ficus benjamina. Several others join him. Many fear they will be eaten next. They inspect their piglets who oink at them dismissively, so dangerous and yet so cute.

***

Later, when they are still alive and uneaten, it becomes clear to everyone that their piglets will either eat them or they won’t.

Yancy could not get rid of Normand even if he wanted to. He puts him in a box outside at night and finds the piglet in his bed moments later. He leaves him hundreds of miles away in the Chihuahuan Desert and returns home to find Normand waiting on his porch.

Yancy sits down and reflects on these uncertain times. He wonders if he is in love with Tim. Tim does not wonder. Tim knows.

The two of them sit and drink coffee together.

“I want that piglet!” A voice shouts. It is strange to Yancy and Tim. People do not care that the piglets are dangerous. People, it seems, have complicated relationships with danger.

Yancy and Tim hold Worthington and Normand close. Across the street, there’s a group of people with no piglets and a single man who has one.

Yancy and Tim think there might be violence. You never can tell these days.

A drove of piglets runs up from off of E. César E. Chávez Blvd. Now, there are exactly enough piglets for everyone. Tim kneels down in front of Yancy.

Yancy calls his mother, Mildred, to see if she is still alive and unchewed.

Her smiling face appears on his phone with Weatherford in the background.

He is adorable. The threat of him, Yancy thinks, somehow adds to his appeal. He tells his mother that Tim has proposed. Life is too short, he says. He wants a Texas wedding.

Across the street, one of the new piglet owners is being devoured by his adoptive little pink package of joy.

Several of the other piglets join in on the meat buffet and blood sprays everywhere. The shock and smell of the wet, naked viscera send several observers to vomit into the gutter lining their side of the street.

Yancy turns his phone around so that his mother can watch. Mildred sends this information to the appropriate data collection agencies, then she congratulates Yancy and Tim. What a good couple they make.

The drift of piglets lets out a long whine. High pitched, like a host of porcine cicadas.

Tim records all of this on his phone, livestreaming to followers with similar interests.

Oh, how cute, they’re singing, Yancy thinks. Is there no end to their precious benefits?

These are interesting times. Uncertain, yes—destabilizing and frightening, of course—but interesting to be sure.

Another piglet begins to eat its new keeper. It starts at the leg. The screams that follow are uncanny.

“Yancy,” Mildred says, and Yancy turns his phone to face his mother. “I’m so happy,” she says, “for you, and that my Weatherford is a kind and gentle creature.”

“My Normand, too,” Yancy says, lifting the singing piglet up to nuzzle his neck. He is happy to be with Tim and Worthington.

“I cannot believe how many people have joined my livestream.”

“We should take one of those Lollipop carriages downtown.”

The gutter runs thick with retch and gore.

DARLING by Suzanne Grove

August 18, 2020

We were fifteen, our bodies slick with baby oil, as we tanned on her lawn in old beach chairs rusting at the edges. I was pouring flavored sugar down my throat when Julia told me the devil seduced my parents. The candy’s raspberry tang hit my soft palate, and I coughed a fine blue dust that tasted like medicine.

I knew her parents were evangelicals or born again or fundamentalists, all words I could say but didn’t understand. Her father wore jeans to church. The faded denim Wranglers rode high up his waist and tugged at his crotch. His leather belt with a fat buckle was two-toned, gold and silver with a vacant-eyed Longhorn steer carved into the middle. He was an alcoholic until Jesus saved him, or that’s what people said. I spent a lot of time thinking about him. I spent a lot of time thinking about that belt.

My parents were getting a divorce.

“It’s the devil.” Julia removed the wrapping from a package of single-slice cheese. “My father said so.”

The waxy yellow square melted as she nibbled on it. We were starving. We were always starving at Julia’s house. Her mother had a pork shoulder locked away in the pressure cooker, but the refrigerator was nearly empty. A jug of iced tea and container of potato salad. Some salami and the cheese. A box of her mother’s Pinot Grigio dripping onto the glass shelf.

“Let’s go to my house,” I said. It was July, the middle of a stagnant afternoon in Ohio, gnats floating around our faces and flies landing on our forearms and toes, rubbing their legs together with no sense of urgency.

“Can’t,” Julia said. “Not allowed.”

I ripped open two more paper straws of the candy, felt my mouth go hot and dry. Julia slid off her chair to take a drink of hose water. She was lean, all pale limbs with a pointy chin and something sly glinting at the edges of her eyes. I left without saying goodbye.

My mother had already moved to Massachusetts, where she had a new apartment on Beacon Street near Boston Common and a new husband named Rob. I was supposed to fly there at the end of August and start school at a private academy. Until then, I belonged to my dad, who worked as a prep cook at a nice restaurant in Toledo. He came home exhausted and reeking of the lemons and limes he sliced for the bar.

I didn’t agree with Julia’s father. Even at fifteen, I noticed a new weightlessness to my parents’ interactions, a buoyancy that arrived after they’d decided to separate. I could hear dad chuckling during his calls with my mother, a beer warming in his hand. He spoke kindly to her. They seemed happy again.

On the following Friday, Julia and I went to the pool. I rolled a beach towel and change of clothes into my backpack, zipped away all the accessories of womanhood I’d wanted until they arrived: tampons and pain killers; deodorant and blemish cream that burned my skin. We kicked and dove until our bodies ached with sun and sore muscles. We shared heaps of French fries Julia soaked in salt and vinegar. I phoned my dad to tell him I’d be spending the night as we walked back to Julia’s house. Our flip-flops kicked up dust from the gravel that hurt the soles of our feet.

Julia told me she loved me.

“As a friend,” she said. We were propped up against her twin bed, reading the movie times in the newspaper. Her parents didn’t allow television in the bedroom. “You’re the only person I can stand.”

Later, when I came back from her kitchen with two fudge pops and potato chips, she was leaning awkwardly against her closet. She kept chewing on her cheek and scrunching her toes together. I moved past her to fetch the pajamas in my backpack. Despite the heat, we opened the windows in her bedroom and watched pixelated movies on my phone using the neighbor’s Wi-Fi. We let the insects sing us to sleep.

On Saturday my father knocked on the bathroom door. I was going to a matinee with Julia. A horror film.

But my father canceled my plans.

“You’re coming with me, kiddo.” His arms were crossed, thick and hairy in a white t-shirt. He’d recently shaved. “Get dressed for the track.”

All of dad’s friends were gamblers. On weekends, they brunched and played twenty-one and bet on the horses at the casino two counties away. He’d never taken me with him until that humid afternoon, sweat pooling in the creases of my elbows.

“I don’t think you’re ready for Boston,” he said. His friends were luxuriating in the air-conditioning, but my father sat me down on the outdoor bleachers, the aluminum scorching my thighs. Everything reeked of manure and alcohol. “Tell me these are some sort of prescription I don’t know about.”

From his pocket he pulled a bag with four blue pills inside.

“I found them in your backpack,” he said.

They weren’t mine, but I knew immediately how they’d fallen into my possession.

An hour later, circling the food court, we saw Julia’s father. He was eating a hot dog, drinking from a plastic cup of clear liquid. Two limes. I told dad about Mr. Richardson’s comment. About the devil and the divorce.

“The man’s a hypocrite.” He moved his face like he might laugh, but didn’t.

On my way to the bathroom, Mr. Richardson found me. He called me darling and told me to forget about seeing him. For Julia’s sake. I thought about his daughter telling me she loved me, and imagined her slim fingers fidgeting inside my backpack.

“Are we clear?” Mr. Richardson asked.

He was wearing his belt buckle.

From his neck lifted the sweet smell of sweat, and booze.

In that slim, carpeted hallway, a swirl of blue patterns spiraling beneath me, Mr. Richardson leaned his body toward me, shifted to take a step.

I didn't know what to say or where to move, so I just kept looking at his belt. The steer would not to return my gaze, its empty eyes refusing to bear witness.

HEAVENLY LAKE by Kristen Loesch

August 17, 2020

It might be June, or it might be July. I can no longer keep track of the days. It’s that halfway point of a Hong Kong summer, when the heat turns everything soupy. The days and nights run together, and the usual strictures of time and space begin to crumble. How long have I been with my British boyfriend? Long enough for him to have bought a new camera. He’s an avid photographer, one who’s always itching for a worthy subject to capture. One day he finds one: Let’s go off the beaten track, to Xinjiang, China’s westernmost province, to a remote lake called Tianchi, he says. He tells me what Tianchi means, but the way he pronounces it, it means something else. I don’t correct him. Maybe he knows my own tongue better than me. Maybe that’s why he often speaks for me.

My boyfriend hopes that Tianchi is so high in the mountains that nobody can breathe up there, that there won’t be any tourists. He dislikes an audience, and he never takes pictures of people with his expensive cameras, though he’s taken plenty of me. I am slightly less of a person than other people. One evening I tell him I’ve heard about a recent flare-up of violence in Xinjiang between members of its two main ethnic groups, Uyghurs and Han Chinese. Riots are breaking out. If things get bad, military will be called in. My boyfriend laughs. Maybe I’m being funny. Nothing to worry about, he says, and he should know. He wears suits to work and keeps Bloomberg blaring as he showers; he’s up-to-date. I like history and old houses. He is firmly in the present, while I am half in the past. Maybe I am his shadow. Maybe I should just stay close.

On our way to Xinjiang we have a layover in Guangdong. My boyfriend corners another couple to ask directions and they struggle to respond in English. I finally step in to help. I’m sorry, sometimes I forget that I have a voice, I say, and they smile. I’m being funny again. They warn us not to travel to Xinjiang, but when I translate this message for my boyfriend, he shakes it off like light rain. My parents ring my mobile as we wait for our connecting flight. Come home, please, don’t go with him, they beg me. I ask if they’ve heard about the unrest, the riots. They have not. The humidity in the airport is high. I lean my head on my boyfriend’s shoulder, feeling sweaty, slippery. Maybe I am melting into him. Maybe I am disappearing.

We land in Xinjiang’s capital city. We take a taxi to the hotel. Large groups of men prowl the streets, armed with bats and clubs and what look like chair legs. At the entrance to our hotel the staff is standing guard. We eat in the restaurant and I overhear guests at the next table whispering that there’s no Internet access, that the phone lines will be cut off. The food is buffet-style. Mostly noodles. The chef is busy guarding one of the doors with a knife. Later my boyfriend takes pictures from our room, panoramas of a suddenly silent city. Outside, it remains quiet for days and days, but inside, it is loud: The television volume on high. The shouting. The cursing. The breaking. And other times, his laughing. Maybe I’m just too funny. Maybe it is all my fault.

At last the tanks of the People’s Liberation Army roll into town. A curfew is imposed. Our lockdown ends. My boyfriend hates the idea of martial law, but I don’t mind. I don’t know what I’d do if I were completely free anyway. In fact, I can’t even remember what life was like before everything went quiet. My boyfriend and I make our way up to Tianchi, but there are plenty of tourists, large groups snapping pictures and hats flying off in the wind and old men hawking bottled water. My boyfriend is so frustrated that he cracks his own camera lens, but I’m glad we came. The lake is clear as a mirror. There are no waves, not even a ripple. But this is only what people can see; there must be life beneath. I tell myself that maybe later it will show on the surface.

PENNY-UP by Daniel Fraser

August 16, 2020

On Tuesday afternoons I would go down to the garages with Sam and Jason to throw coins at a wall. Derek would come and bring a twelve-pack or a slab and we'd stay there past dark. Penny-up can't be explained, you just have to play it. Like life. The summers were the best. Big sun falling behind the tower block, kids running under the washing lines, screaming and fighting on the open grass, the chimneys and smoke-blackened brick stretching back into the hills, and us with nothing to do but roll.

“Watch me,” said Derek. We watched him land a soft rebound. It was warm, muggy. The sky was swirls of grey and milk, somewhere far off crept little bits of blue.

“Not bad, not bad,” said Jason. I told Derek he might make the championships.

We called it rolling but really it's a flick. You throw just like a decision but here it's not heads or tails, win or lose—it's all how well you handle the distance.

I cracked open a beer, listening to air escape. That sound like sea being sucked beneath a stone. Foam curled out above the mouth. I drank.

“Did you see that horror film?” said Derek, “the one with all the cameras.”

“I did,” I said, “I like anything where people are being watched.”

“Is there a film where everyone is Michael Caine?” said Jason, “I want to see that.” He wiped his hands on his overalls.

“Guy Ritchie doesn't make those anymore,” said Sam. Sam sliced his flick wide—“fuck it.”

We grew up in a place no one ever never really leaves. None of us broke the mold either, slowly aging into versions of our fathers. Toned down and diluted into something we could bear. Jason and his dad landscaped gardens for rival firms operated by two half-brothers. Derek was a lifeguard with a wrestling ring in his back garden made from broken gym equipment. His Dad looked like Bill Oddie but was some kind of karate grandmaster. Me and Sam worked removals, furniture mostly. Both of our dads went missing, so we knew about taking stuff away. We moved furniture from one place to another, room to room or town to town. With work distance didn't matter, only care. We were good. Sam could drive a van and I could judge the width of an object just by looking.

The light was paler now. Some kids were shouting, calling out a cheat. Jason made two in a row and took the pot.

“Who is this man?” said Jason, looking round, grinning, pointing at himself. An imaginary crowd roared. Derek kicked at rough edges of the tarmac. I cracked open another beer, feeling happy and small, like an insect, embedded safely in some forgotten fabric, left to chew its little square of dust. That's the good feeling, the penny-up feeling, like one small glory is just enough. Some people don't get it. I brought Amy down once. She stayed twelve minutes and told me to meet her in the pub. Amy had a hole in her throat from birth and we'd been in love for nearly as long—same street, same school. She ignored the game and shuffled inside her coat. The valley was colder then. Her hair caught up with brown leaves blowing from a sycamore outside the cinema.

“It's just throwing time away,” she said, sipping bitter. I made a joke about time being money. She looked at her hand and kissed my arm and told me on Tuesdays not to call her before nine.

Derek looked at a pigeon and said the word “sandwich.” He pulled a sandwich from inside his coat. After three bites he got distracted and dropped the sandwich. I imagined the bread growing legs and crawling up the tower into the sky. I'd already sold the script for Spider Sandwich and started shooting by the time someone said, “you're up.” I flicked a scrape right down the wall; it ended millimeters from the edge. A winner.

“Sick,” said Sam. We bumped cans in celebration. Just then I was king of penny-up, grandmaster, lord of the garages. Sam got a hip flask of whiskey from the van and we swigged it, shoulder to shoulder, the liquid warm and burning in a way that didn't need to last.

Sam's been living with me for four years. Our brick house is an end terrace rented from someone else's aunt. Three rooms under a low slate roof: separate bedrooms, and a downstairs that's just one big space. In the garden, old paving stones frame a swimming pool of lawn. “We can grow things here,” Sam said early on, but neither of us ever really did. Most nights, Amy would come round and I'd cook dinner. The first few times Sam told me she was frosty until we discovered Helicopter Police. Amy liked anything with cops that fly. Once we found a channel with repeats and watched it for six hours straight. The police would fly around and shout and look down on people doing criminal things.

“Night vision,” Amy said when everything turned green.

“Oh fuck,” said Sam, “run!” They ran. The cops read out confusing radio signals and codes. It didn't seem to make much difference, they just flew hard into the night. Sometimes the camera was black and white, sometimes it was red.

“Heat sensors,” said Amy, “they're done for.” She dipped a chip in mayonnaise and shuffled forward in her seat. Everyone cheered when the criminals got away.

It was close to sunset. Clouds were glowing low behind the empty mills and scattered clumps of wood.

“I want to meet someone,” said Derek, “a girlfriend.”

“You need to be more romantic,” said Sam, he flipped a coin and caught it, then wrote poetry on the air. He picked imaginary roses and gave the wrapped bouquet to Jason.

“I'm romantic,” said Derek. Derek opened a can, a puff of lager fizz hissed into his face. He wiped his sleeve across his mouth. Derek kicked off the next round, betting high and almost making it. Sam took it in the end, on the last roll. Derek smiled and shivered and leaned against a garage door, the metal bending inward, before popping out without a dent. Even after, when he was injecting, Derek still made Tuesday though his hands were mostly too shaky to win by then.

Dark was scrolling through the hills. Derek looked at his watch, his neck woozy and soft. He put his hand in his pocket and brought out a new roll of coins.

“No more for me,” I said, “I'm quitting while I'm ahead.” Derek looked away toward the wall. Sam drank up and burped and crushed the empty can into his hand.

“Ready to go?” he said.

“Yeah,” I told him. We hugged Jason and Derek in turn.

“Got a full house in the morning,” said Sam, turning. I nodded and followed on behind. We got to the van door, and I heard Derek shouting, “Practice round, practice round!” We drove home, stopping to pick up frozen bags of fish fingers and nuggets, leaving Jason and Derek in the thickened moonlight, Jason shouting over the garages, “Come on then, just us two now.”

I called Amy. She picked up and told me about her day. “Nuggets,” I said.

“Police Helicopters,” she said. Behind me, Sam said, “You know it,” and started making siren sounds. A wind ruffled through the van, we hung our mouths out of the window like dogs. I smoked while Sam drove. The van climbed above the factories and the old estate. Summer fog came and covered up the stars. The rest of the week stretched out ahead of us. It didn't matter. Just then nothing was big and frightening: the world was just a web of tiny movements, round lumps shifting, bumping into things, moving closer or further away.

GOD VISITED ME IN BALDWIN, NEW YORK by Ryan Norman

August 15, 2020

A sad poem picked me up at the train station. I missed my stop and he was annoyed that I wasn’t paying attention. It was my first time traveling alone. The day was long. I traveled two hours into Grand Central Station and had to get to Penn Station to catch the LIRR. This was before Waze and Google Maps. I was lost before I started, but there I was. Eighteen, standing in front of someone I met at college orientation. I melted in his eyes—already a puddle from five hours of train travel—making connections, walking in the summer subway halls, tile lined, the floors covered in hot piss. Finally, with a poem, torqued verse twisting my emotions. He connected his iPod to the car radio and serenaded me with, “Dirty Little Secret” by The All-American Rejects. It was 2005, can we fault him for his opening number? Later I would come to find out he meant it. “Who has to know?” A lyric to deflate my confidence.

***

The truth is, I was my own dirty little secret. I had only come out to friends at this point in my life. My cover story was going to Long Island to stay with a friend I met only a month earlier to visit the beaches. It was seen through, of course. I later came to find out that my behavior was written off as a phase.

***

I remember sitting in a pizza place making small talk. He was kind enough to feed me. My stomach was full of electric butterflies. Eating wasn’t my priority; I wanted to be alone with him as he whispered sonnets directly into my heart. Somewhere we could be ourselves without ears signaling into our conversation. We had known a lot about each other. He went to a Catholic Prep school and played lacrosse. I had made all my sacraments up to that point and was on the rowing team. That’s not a lot, but for Queer folk, someone always feels some kind of way about the Church. I felt guilt. He did what felt right. We left lunch behind and headed to his home.

***

In Sunday School when I was eleven or twelve, the Church curriculum included sexual education. Sex is an act to be performed between men and women. My teacher had said that the Church wanted her to tell us that using condoms is sinful, because sex is meant to produce children. She leaned in and told us that if we are ever going to have sex, that we should use a condom. It was her way of being responsible and spreading the safe message. In my secular high school, years later, I would receive a much more thorough education on sex. But that was the word of the Lord. Amen.

***

We drove back to his house listening to all the best from Warped Tour. We were, after all, just a couple of Punk Rock Princesses. The house was lived in. It was nothing I was used to seeing growing up and visiting friends’ homes in spotless rooms. I met his parents and sister; they were all very nice. His mother offered me a spare bedroom, but this poem that crawls into your soul and sits there lied and said I’d be sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag. I guess he wasn’t lying about keeping me his dirty little secret. We went to his room and staged sleeping bags on the floor. I was then complicit in the lie.

***

My church wasn’t openly homophobic. It was not something the priest or deacons talked about while reading from the Bible. Or if they did, it was when I was young, and I have no memory of it. But that sly wording in Sunday School sexual education made it pretty clear. Some of the kids I went to Sunday School with would bully me, mostly outside of church and in school. I know now that they learned it from their families. So, at the parishioner level, homophobia existed. But I persisted quietly along the walls avoiding attention.

***

We touched briefly, exploring new clothed bodies in an embrace. The butterflies were back, and they electrocuted every inch of my skin. It was going to be dark in a few hours, and we had plans to go to Jones Beach. We left the safety of a bedroom locked with a WrestleMania XX folding chair jammed under the doorknob. I changed my clothes. He didn’t look away.

The car ride was more of the same. Music. Touching. Lights lined the highway in a rhythmic pattern of spotlight glow and the dark space between, the car passing through checkpoints like a video game. When we got to the beach, the sun had already set. The ocean rolled in a silver-white shimmer tonguing the shore. We walked, fingers woven, along the crashing waves. The surf licked my heels. Together we climbed a lifeguard’s abandoned post and sat close for warmth, as the sea breeze wet our lips. He gently grabbed my face and kissed me. “I’ve never done this before,” I said. The moon illuminated my first kiss and pulled me closer to a poem that unfurls in your heart.

I sat awed and tingling. No one was around to see us trespassing on a beach at night, as a memory built under the moon. We drove back to his childhood home and kissed some more. Eventually, we fell asleep, but something woke me. Light filled the room and I shook. I pressed my nakedness against his, and he pulled me close. Two crescents waxing full. My tears evaporated on his flushed skin. God visited me in Baldwin, New York, as I lay naked in a bed with some guy I met at college orientation.

Nothing was said. Just a light floating at the foot of the bed watching me. I don’t know if it was a warning or a blessing. But I laid there against a poem to warm a cold night, silently crying. The guilt got to me, but it felt so right.

TENDERNESS by Anthony Sabourin

August 14, 2020

The Doomsayer is at work.

He takes a sip of black coffee from a styrofoam cup. He mumbles to himself and barks like a dog and screams into his elbow as one would muffle a cough. He takes another sip of coffee, gargling it and spitting it into the street; wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Across the street the train is stopping, and soon the morning rush will be streaming by on the stretch of street before him, walking in their harried steps, a tension in the inconvenience of being a person around other people, already impatient to hasten the day’s end before it’s begun. The Doomsayer adjusts his pants and trench coat, picks up his cardboard sign, and steps upon his milk crate. He shouts the words on his sign.

“The end is nigh!”

Faces look up to see.

“The world is almost over!”

***

The Doomsayer worked early and all day, taking lunch at 10 am and as many bathroom breaks as he could finagle out of the decrepit Subway across the street, where he was engaged in a bitter feud with the manager, a weaselly man named Laramie. He would be home in time for dinner with his wife, a sturdy and freckled woman who stunk from her work at the smelting plant, whom he loved completely.

It was a good life, and the Doomsayer found joy in his work. He was passionate about the end of the world, and while he was aware that his message was difficult to accept, for a long time he lived for even the most tacit acknowledgement of the words that he raggedly shouted to the idiot faces of the people who worked in glass and steel buildings. Even the most furtive of glances would satisfy him for weeks.

He remembered with great fondness one particular day when a car broke down in front of his preaching stoop. —his cracked yelps painting a picture of the end, of how the resolute corporate leaders of the past were long dead, and how their doughy and cow-eyed offspring could only lead us more swiftly to our certain doom; that unchecked plague had emaciated the horses and left the goats vomiting in the city’s neighboring fields, and how more and more these days the rain was actually just acid that left the asphalt smoking after a storm. He supplemented his arguments with credible first-hand analysis of various religious texts. And with the tow truck loaded and ready to leave, as the Doomsayer asked out of professional courtesy if this mother and her child would at least acknowledge if they, on the basis of the case the Doomsayer had presented to them, thought that the world would end, was it not true that their heads, as the truck jerked and pulled away, bobbed in a manner that was markedly similar to a nod? For so long this had been the highlight of the Doomsayer’s career, so much so that yearly his wife made him a rum cake to mark the anniversary of the occasion.

—after the black clouds of the chemical factory had intermingled with and covered the skyscrapers with soot, and all was darkness except for the fires from neighboring cities—that crowds began to form. Only now—as the syphilitic ramblings of the city’s mayor failed to placate them—that the crowds gathered to listen to the Doomsayer.

“Have we passed the point of no return?” he asked the crowd.

“Yes!” the crowd shouted back at him.

“Do the penguins now slide into the muddy ocean from the floes of our own garbage?”

“Surely!” they cried.

“What happened to all of the good animals? The noble giraffe? The whimsical flying squirrel?”

“All of the good animals are extinct!” the crowd said.

“And what of the new animals humankind discovers? Those weird fangy monstrosities they fish out of the bottom of the ocean? With their glowing eyes and spiked, skeletal bodies - what do we make of mother nature’s nightmares?”

“Only abominations remain!” the crowd cheered.

“No!” the crowd chanted in ecstasy.

“And what of our neighbors? Can we depend on the slack-jawed inbreds to the east and west of us for salvation in our hour of need?”

“Our neighbors can only be depended on for war and death!” the voices boomed.

“What have we done to our planet?” he would shout at their faces.

“We’ve wasted it!” the crowd would wail.

It was a true golden age.

Yet, after years of plying his trade in obscurity, the Doomsayer felt a sense of emptiness in his newfound success. The work came to him easily now, and he longed for the days when convincing people that the world was ending was a challenge. He had taken to rolling in the garbage in the alley by the Subway, thinking the rank juices dripping from his trench coat would make his message less sensible, but still, the crowds grew.

Only a seasoned observer would have been able to tell that his rheumy eyes were sad and not sick, his voice still full of fury but devoid of passion, his malaise not directed at the end of all things, but at himself and his lack of joy in this—his moment of triumph. The closest thing the Doomsayer had to such an observer was the dreaded Laramie, who mistook these changes as sure signs of the imminent death of his rival. Over a sandwich made for the Doomsayer with open contempt, they conversed:

“Is your death near?” the scoundrel Laramie asked him.

“Is yours?” he spat at his enemy.

“I am a picture of health,” Laramie said, and the Doomsayer did acknowledge to himself that Laramie’s long neck, bulbous head, and tiny limbs still wriggled about the vandalized sandwich counter with the ease of a younger man.

“But you—” Laramie continued. “Your new friends out there may not notice the change, but I have seen how your voice falters, how your eyes have turned splotchy, and your gestures uncertain. I have seen your skin grow pale and your body rebel with stink as it rots from the inside. I want you to know that I relish it!”

“If I appear ill,” the Doomsayer said, “it is no doubt from the stagnant meatballs and moldy cheese I ingest from this, the foulest of the Subways.” He took a bite of the sandwich and chewed it slowly. “But I want you to know, Laramie, that this food is the small dose of poison that grants me the immunity I need to endure your presence, and upon your demise I will lead your family to this failed enterprise to celebrate my ultimate victory.”

It would take another half hour of negotiations before the Doomsayer could use the bathroom.

After facing an afternoon of the cheering crowds, there was little relief for the Doomsayer among his own kind, for even at the Lazy Susan—where the drink special of a free rotisserie chicken with the purchase of a pilsner openly courted the castoffs of society—the company of his fellow harbingers, soapbox criers, suspected deities, and lesser prophets greeted him as a celebrity.

He drifted about in the whorl of voices with his pilsner and a drumstick—

Majestic tirade out there—buy you a drink you’ve earned it—the voice it’s his voice how he uses it he can—goes to show that hard work pays off in the—did you see the garbage he rolls in a stroke of genius—Kevin, I’m—it adds so much resonance you know he’s the garbage we’re the garbage we’ve wasted it—used to be humble too good to drink with the Kevins now—I think it’s his sign you need the right message—location is the key—no, I’m not Kevin I’m Carl you know, the conspiracy of dust that’s mine—all hard work that’s the key—The end!—It will never end it can’t—so proud of him I taught him the ropes and he—buy you a beer whatever you want —is nigh!—such persistence, it couldn’t have happened to a better guy he’s—

—running his fingers along the arches spine of Susan IV, the tavern cat about on her rounds—

It’s really him he comes here—yeah of course the end of the world—eat the rich that’s my thing I pass out pamphlets—where did you get that cloak it’s really thick—when he bellows it shakes the earth—they eat out the palm of his hand how articulate—the geese there are too many of them that’s my thing—K-E-V-I-N, I’m the second coming get you the right cloak—the end is nigh!—I found out they all huddle together close to the lake and I try to convince them to drown but the geese don’t ever—the end is nigh!—No I’m Carl the dust it—listen—you’re a Kevin I’m a Kevin—THE END IS NIGH!—oh every night this chant—THE END IS NIGH!—they never listen—THE END IS NIGH!—the rich you gotta eat them I hand out recipes—THE END!—dust building never stopping—IS!—the voice it’s—NIGH!—can’t hear you these chants—THE END IS NIGH!—the dust builds and it can’t - no listen –THE END IS NIGH!—it builds—THE END IS NIGH!—THE END IS NIGH!—THE END IS !

—looking out at still more expectant faces, the bedraggled and cloaked and rag-covered fellow cranks, he never knew what to tell them. He had nothing to say. He lifted up his beer to his fellow colleagues in a gesture of goodwill, chugged it down, and left to more cheering.

Outside he was accosted by one of the newer criers, a weathered boy who carried pamphlets of recipes for how to eat the rich, which he distributed to the university students downtown.

“Wait!” he said, grabbing the Doomsayer’s arm.

“Eat the rich! How is that going?”

“The University guards and their truncheons do not support cannibalism but I can still outrun them,” the boy said.

“Ah that’s good. You may want to use your pamphlets as padding, if they ever do catch you.”

"I appreciate the wisdom, sir. And, I apologize for grabbing you just now but please, do you have a moment to discuss the end? I feel like there must be something more to it. I have to know what is next.”

“Next?”

“Don’t pretend. These people, they look to you now because you knew, and because you knew, surely you must know what happens next. There must be something. Please, I beg of you— help me out here, I mean I’m just starting and even with just a nugget of your foresight I could build a whole new-”

“There is no next.”

“What?”

“The end is it. One day it will all be over with and done and that’s it. That’s the end of it all.”

The boy fell silent and his shoulders dropped into a slump. “Oh,” he said. The Doomsayer left him by the neon lights of the Lazy Susan, and walked home to his wife.

Home and seated for dinner, the Doomsayer realized it was the day of the cake. The Doomsayer had forgotten, but now here it was, his wife bringing it into the dining room and setting it out on the table. The rum cake is a glistening oversized donut shape from the bundt pan, with two candles representing the woman and her teenage child from that halcyon day years past.

He tried to make a happy face.

“What’s that, all of those things your face is doing?” his wife asked.

“I am just so moved by this gesture. The rum cake, I appreciate it so much I just.” The Doomsayer blew out the candles to keep from crying. He cut two pieces of rum cake and set them onto plates as listless smoke filled the room.

“Oh, so we will eat the cake in this very sad manner,” his wife said.

“No, I am happy, I love this delicious cake,” the Doomsayer said with a full mouth, chewing as his eyes began to water.

The Doomsayer’s eyes said that nothing was wrong, only this was unconvincing, because they were spilling tears, and suddenly he was breathing heavily and having a panic attack while still trying to eat the cake. His wife went into the kitchen to pour him a glass of water, and throughout the Doomsayer was trying to comport himself as though he were not having a panic attack, his body shaking as he swallowed cake between gasps of air, all of it becoming increasingly ridiculous. With his full mouth he sobbed “I no longer love what I do.”

His wife laid the water on the table and held him. She cooed into his ear: “Ah so what you love has turned into work, eh? Woe unto the prophet now that his obscure and cool new future is the common present. Shush, my idiot baby. You think I do not see this at the smelting plant? Some people stare at the glowing ore until it takes their minds away. You just need to take a vacation.”

“A vacation,” the Doomsayer said with wonder. The very concept seemed alien to the Doomsayer, but immediately his panic faced relaxed and his eyes brightened, and he again seemed at peace. They went back to eating their cake, which was very strong, and it led naturally to their lovemaking, their cries frightening the squirrels who had overtaken and were developing complex structures with the garbage they were collecting in the field beyond the Doomsayer’s home.

In the morning he purchased a plane ticket and packed his bag, soon finding himself on a propeller plane rocketing in its arc towards the Republic of Vronsk, a coastal city known for its decommissioned oil rigs, incomplete skyscrapers, and beautiful beaches, with sand as white as the Doomsayer’s knuckles as he experienced a screeching stop on the ramshackle landing strip of the Vronsk airport.

Vronsk was beautiful. The Doomsayer wandered around the city in a Hawaiian shirt and dollar store sandals, marveling at a sky that wasn’t grey-black. He fed beef jerky to the mongrel dogs, who began to follow him around.

He gazed up at an unfinished condo, whose main level was ransacked, and whose upper levels gave way from glass and concrete to upright metal beams that stabbed at nothing, razed manmade exclamation marks surprised that this was their end. As he walked up another block to see another interrupted building, he heard the familiar sound of a voice yelling in the street. Feeling the pangs of homesickness, he walked to the source of the shouting.

“It’s over!” the voice cried out. It was a Vronskian woman with a shaved head, wearing a metallic bouffant dress. She was gesturing to the great and unfinished skyscraper above her, which the Doomsayer had to admit was a nice touch. A crowd was forming.

“The sun shines weaker every day and the ocean rises ever more swiftly to swallow up Vronsk!” she shouted. “Our street dogs outnumber our children! And in their canniness they slip into our houses and lie in their beds!”

Voices murmured in agreement.

"Our leaders have been rendered fetus-like from inbreeding! Drought has crippled our farms and clouds of locusts rattle against our windows in the night! The word is ending!” she shouted. The Doomsayer found the material to be very strong, and he enjoyed being present in the throng of people who shouted in recognition.

“The world is ending!” he heard the woman say. All around the Doomsayer was a sense of good cheer. The woman basked in the jubilation for a moment, but she cut the crowd short. “It is ending! But is this enough?” she asked the crowd.

“No!” They shouted back.

“No!” the woman said. “For the end is not coming soon enough. We must act!” she preached. Members of the crowd raised their fists in the air.

“We must destroy!” she shouted. “We must waste! More garbage! More fires! The end is in our hands and we must never waver!” she screamed. “We must be resolute! The end is now!” The crowd was rapturous. The glass in the skyscraper was mirrored like the back of a bar, and reflected in that mirror the Doomsayer saw an old man in a Hawaiian shirt. He felt as though he were in a foreign church. The dogs followed him as he left the crowd.

The Doomsayer meandered beachward, stopping to buy postcards at a souvenir shop. On the back of a postcard featuring art depicting a more optimistic Vronsk, with the sun setting and playing off of completed skyscrapers, he wrote a series of threats addressed to Laramie. Then, on a postcard depicting a series of minerals native to Vronsk he addressed to his wife a poem of longing. He continued on, mailing the postcards and, at a corner store, buying a jug of brackish wine which was described to him as a local delicacy.

From the beach looking towards the ocean, the decommissioned oil rigs lounged in the distance like ugly mechanical swans. The Doomsayer laid on a towel in the sand with his dogs and an open package of beef jerky. He was sharing the jug of wine with a couple who had seated themselves next to him. They were honeymooning in Vronsk, which was very affordable, and they overlapped against each other like sunning seals, languid curves supine and happy. They reminded the Doomsayer of earlier days with his wife, and he radiated happiness and goodwill towards the loving couple, and refrained from mentioning the imminent end of all things.

They watched people in swimsuits splash in the waves; the new wife and husband periodically wading into the water, and as the jug emptied the afternoon passed in the lazy and relaxed way that beach days pass when the sun is out. Bony birds circled overhead, and shade from the palm trees retreated to the street.

A commotion arose in the water. From people-watching and the overheard snatches of conversation, it became clear that a woman playing in the waves had lost her wedding ring. She lay sobbing hunched over herself in the sand, and an improvised search party was formed, with bodies launching themselves headfirst into the surf, legs akimbo, looking in the sand underneath the waves for the lost ring. The newlywed couple next to the Doomsayer were recruited into the search, and the Doomsayer offered to stay behind to watch over their things. He threw beef jerky to the dogs and watched the futile pattern of the people in the waves, as over and over legs would appear out of the water, and would wriggle about in the air until submerging, and after a beat, like a magic trick, an apologetic face would emerge.

Suddenly a siren wailed from the beach, and a fissure of water erupted from one of the oil rigs in the distance. The Doomsayer watched as the rig furthest to the left began its collapse, metal sweeping into the water, the rig’s mast dipping at a dangerous angle and toppling into the adjacent rig. The shriek of metal-on-metal reverberated with the siren in the air. Waves grew larger and crashed to the shore and people retreated to the sand. The search was over.

Eventually the newlywed couple returned to the Doomsayer, where they admitted that the ring was likely lost for good. The Doomsayer stayed on the beach though, watching as the rigs toppled like slow motion dominoes into the greedy sea. The sound they made was mournful. The sun dipped below the horizon, disappearing into a blood-red wink.

Alone with the mongrel dogs on the beach, the Doomsayer turned around to face the street, and he noticed how the people were moving in the moonlight like pallbearers in search of a body. Everywhere there was garbage. He returned to the view of the lapping waves, and he found himself wading into the water, and his head disappeared into the sea.

The dogs watched the waves.

A pair of pale legs popped upright into the air, calm and balanced despite the waves.

The conspiracy of dust carried on unabated.