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“FIND THE PATTERNS”: A Review of Chloe N. Clark’s Collective Gravities by James McAdams

July 28, 2020

To lift one particularly apposite description of a character in “Like the Desert Dark,” Chloe N. Clark “likes thinking about 'ifs.’” Collective Gravities, her third collection (The Science of Unvanishing Objects, Finishing Line Press; Your Strange Fortune, Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), posits a world replete with paranormality. Like a symphony, these stories repeatedly touch upon the same subjects, explored, revealed, and experienced from a diverse variety of narrative perspectives. We can represent the frequency and range of this symphonic collection numerically.

Subjects (admittedly subjective):	# Stories these subjects occur in:
astronauts/paranormal investigation	6
undiagnosed illness/epidemics	6
near-death/no-death phenomena	4
mental illness	4
floods	5
magic/card tricks	4
jumping off bridges	5
dreams	7
ecological disaster	4
The horrors of online dating	1 (!)

There’s something oddly soothing about this thematic accretion. As you read further into the collection, you continually confront these motifs, creating a limpid “repetition with a difference” feeling. It’s subtle, but it works. It’s like wading into a pool, stepping slowly, freezing at first, and then once you're immersed in it, the swimming is captivating and you forget for a second what it was like to be back on the shore, dry.

For example, the collection is bookended by two pieces about astronauts convening at a memorial for a deceased member of their operation team (“Balancing Beams,” and “Between the Axis and the Stars,” respectively). Both memorials stress the significance of remembering and storytelling as a way to deal with death. The second story foregoes an actual traditional memorial, instead placing the characters in a room with the grieving Mom of their friend, where they simply tell stories about the deceased. “Between the Axis and the Stars” (and the collection as a whole) ends here, in a country field in Iowa:

“After, I walked outside to find Peter. He was sitting in the grass, staring up at the night sky.

'We don’t have stars like this in Boston.'

I sat down beside him, laughing. 'You’ve literally been to the stars, why do you need to see them from so far away?'

'I can see them all at once like this. Find the patterns.'”

My two favorite stories, both concerning the power of referentless words, are quiet pieces of flash, published initially in Noble/Glass Quarterly and Bartleby Snopes (R.I.P.!!). In “This is the Color of Your Eyes in the Dark,” the narrator, informed of the sudden death of a girl she was briefly friends with in middle school, remembers:

“When we went to Mindy’s house, we always took long walks in the trees behind her house instead of going inside. She’d tell me the names of each tree. Not like the scientific names, but the names she’d given them. I asked her why she named them and she answered me, as if it was the silliest question in the world, ‘don’t you like to say the names of your friends’? Her favorite was a pine that had been struck by lightning. An arc of scarring went down one side of it. She would put her hand against the mark and just hold it there, eyes closed, as if she was trying to heal it.”

Meanwhile, in “Topographical Cartography,” a woman’s boyfriend begins to suffer from a vague, ill-defined disease (see above) whose symptoms are the appearance of an X-axis along his back, and then the appearance along the axis of “words and symbols. Under each dash: ‘sugar,’ ‘Oak,’ ‘fine,’ a picture of an eclipse, more and more words without context.” Then, after he dies, the narrator awakens to find a similar pattern of words and symbols on her back, only this time as a Y-axis. This is a numinous description of love. I mean if I know anything about love from watching TV: one person’s X fitting into another person’s Y.

Paranormality probably isn’t a good description of Collective Gravities, since it sounds like X-Files fanfiction. Magical realism doesn’t work, because the stories here are too realistic, too detailed (in a good way); neither does surrealism work, since the plots and narratives are tightly controlled and cogent. If we wanted to coin a term for the “slanted truth” nature of this collection, that term could be pulled from the collection’s first story. The narrator describes a painting hanging on the wall. “The colors were slightly off,” she writes, “leaves a blue-green and bark a red-brown that wouldn’t exist in nature.” The characters discuss what’s wrong with the painter, suggesting she’s color blind among other things. Ultimately, they determine the word for it, and for Collective Gravities, is “Almreal...almost real, not quite, not surreal.”

Furthermore, it works organically, meaning it doesn’t feel like marketing agenda or strategic little phrased inserted in pre-publication to make the collection seem “whole” or “novel-like,” like those collections marketed as “inter-linked short stories” with the same character(s) or place. Those are mostly bullshit excuses to make something look like a novel.

Possibly Irrelevant Addendum I Couldn’t Fit Into the Review: Two cool facts I learned while researching Chloe Clark and word west press. 1) Chloe, part of the editorial triumvirate of Cotton Xenomorph with Tea and Hanna, has designed a class on the literature of space. Enrollment is open, check it out here. 2) word west press, in recognition of Chloe’s affection for space, actually bought her a star. That’s awesome. Great work Chloe and word west press!

Pick up a copy of Chloe Clark's Collective Gravities here!

HAP’S by Wilson Koewing

July 26, 2020

Harry and Al were at the bar when I showed for my six o’clock at Hap’s. A young couple smoked in the back booth; a bluish cloud hovered over them. Four roughs fresh off a rig huddled around bottles at a tall table. Decent crowd all told.

I prefer showing at six instead of four. It’s hard on Huck since I’m here until two, but the four to twelve loses late-night tips and four to six isn’t money anyway.

That time of evening the sun cuts sharp angles across the bar so bad you can’t sit some places. I ducked and moved around bullet trails of sunlight staying busy.

“Claire, what’s Huck up to?” Al asked.

“Watching the baby and his shows.”

“Whatever happened to that college boy used to come in carrying on about you?” Harry said. “Seemed awfully smitten.”

“Just another barking at the tree, Harry.”

“You didn’t seem to mind.”

“Anyone can look and say what they think about what they see,” I said. “Free country, still.”

“I’m not so sure,” Harry said.

Harry wasn’t long divorced. Al was long since. Can’t imagine the friendship helped either. Those two aren’t all bad, but the women they get in with all are.

I remembered the college boy. Corn fed, blonde mop. Somewhere Midwest raised. Football player at UT Permian Basin, so not much good at it. I was flattered, but Huck and I been together ages, plus the youngin’.

I set sights on wiping glasses clear and Harry and Al hunkered down to discuss things that had been and could of.

The sun settled and the night crept calm until Kenneth showed up the same time the young couple was leaving. He watched them go with their hands in each other’s back pockets, buzzed, and making no attempt to hide what they’d be embarking upon next.

“Always the same sad fucks in here,” Kenneth said, dropping a duffel bag on the bar with a clank.

Kenneth lost work at the refinery about six months now. Each time in it’s worse.

“How you making out, Kenneth?” Harry asked.

“Hell is it to you, old man?”

“You little piss ant—,” Al said.

Harry grabbed Al’s arm.

“Fuck’d you say, old man river?”

“Let it go, Kenneth,” Harry said. “He’s a drunk.”

Kenneth and Al stared each other down.

“Double whiskey, beer, Claire,” Kenneth said.

I slid a double whiskey and a Lone Star. Kenneth killed the whiskey then hurt the Lone Star.

Around the same time, a fella wandered in who appeared lost. Noticed the emblem on his jacket—West Texas Wind—and hoped Kenneth didn’t.

“You ain’t even gotta say it, fella,” Kenneth said, noticing.

“What’ll it be, hon’?” I asked the wind man.

“Tequila and a beer, ma’am.”

“You here about the wind?” Kenneth asked.

“Ah hell, Kenneth,” Al said. “Leave him alone.”

“I said you here about the wind, boy?”

Kenneth got close enough to kiss him and poked a stiff finger into the wind emblem.

“Yeah, you are.”

“Kenneth, don’t you have anything better to do than harass people just trying to take a load off?” Harry asked.

“No, Harry, I don’t,” Kenneth returned to staring at the wind man.

“We still putting this on grandma Margie’s tab, Kenneth?” I asked.

A hush fell over the bar and it felt awfully like I shouldn’t have said it. But I can’t very well let Kenneth make everyone uncomfortable because he’s on the low and has been.

“Huck know you got stones to talk to men that way?” Kenneth said. “Out here making money for a baby he can’t support?”

Harry held Al back.

“What are you going to do, old man?” Kenneth said. “Besides make me mad?”

“Kenneth, you never heard of a man staying at home with a baby, and a woman making the money to support it?” I said. “Attitude like that might be the reason you’ve got woman troubles.”

“You’re right, Claire, I’m sorry.” Kenneth said after a moment. “That was out of line.”

“He ain’t sorry,” Al grumbled.

I poured Kenneth another double hoping to make peace.

“Best get control of this old son of a bitch,” Kenneth said.

I pushed a tequila and a frothy draft in front of the wind man. The others watched like I was the momma and him the favorite. He sipped the tequila. I knew he was in for it.

“Jesus, you fuck that way, too, boy?” Kenneth said. “You drink like a damn baby. You probably spew in a second.”

Kenneth killed his whiskey in a gulp.

“Miss, I believe I’ll settle up,” the wind man said.

“He ain’t paying yet,” Kenneth said, slamming his fist on the bar.

“He can pay if he wants,” I said.

“He ain’t fuckin’ leavin’.”

Kenneth watched me slide the bill over, watched him sign and slide it back.

“Leave, I’ll shoot you dead, wind man,” Kenneth said.

The wind man fell blank as a simple one. All the air in my lungs rushed out at once and I couldn’t figure out how to let any more in. Harry and Al stared at their bottles.

Kenneth finished his Lone Star and addressed his terrified audience.

“I’m sure ya’ll know Carrie left don’t ya?”

“I’d heard,” Harry said.

“Who could blame her?” Al said.

Harry stared at Al with eyes big as a couple planets.

“You’re lucky I like you, Al,” Kenneth said.

“I like you, too, Kenneth,” Al said.

I witnessed something bad click in Kenneth as Two Tickets to Paradise by Eddie Money came on the jukebox. He and Carrie danced to it in Hap’s one night must have been eight months. Only two dancing at first. By the second time the chorus hit, whole bar was dancing.

“Ya’ll know what happened?” Kenneth asked.

No one seemed hot to answer.

“Give me another,” he yelled in no particular direction.

“He’s had enough, Claire,” Harry said.

The wind man remained still.

I poured Kenneth another and promised myself it’d be the last.

“Carrie’s staying at the Royal Inn with a new fella,” Kenneth said. “A Mexican.”

“Maybe it’s time to move on, Kenneth,” Harry said.

“No, Harry, I don’t believe it is,” Kenneth said.

“Seems clear she doesn’t want you around,” Al said. “Ought to respect a woman’s wishes.”

“Yeah, well maybe her new fella isn’t supposed to be in America at all,” Kenneth said.

Kenneth dug in his duffel and pulled out a pistol.

Until then, I hadn’t a clue what I believed Kenneth capable of. In the moment, I couldn’t be sure of what I believed him not.

“Now, Kenneth, listen–,” Al said.

“Al, I do like you,” Kenneth said, “But you need to learn when to shut up.”

Kenneth pushed Harry aside and pistol-whipped Al. He crumbled to the floor. The wind man blew right out the door running.

I wrapped ice in a towel and hustled around the bar.

The oil men stood at the commotion. A bar chair crashed to the floor.

Then Kenneth pulled out an AR-15 and spun it to sit the oil men down.

“I’m going to that fucking motel,” Kenneth said. “Who wants to stop me?”

No heroes among us.

Kenneth lowered the rifle, tossed the duffel over his shoulder and pushed open the door. The darkness outside consumed him.

I dialed 911 and said what happened.

“He’s going to get himself killed,” Harry said.

“I hope he does,” Al said. “Tired of him ruining my drinking.”

***

When I got home, the news was on every channel. Huck scooped me up and squeezed so tight I remembered feeling. You see love when someone’s face betrays that they’ve been thinking how much they’d miss you.

Kenneth was dead. Shot by police. Killed Carrie, her lover and six others. Stalked the second-floor balcony executing whoever came out. I wouldn’t have believed it if you told me.

I went in the nursery. The youngin’ was sleeping sound. I kissed her tiny head. It still felt fuzzy and smelled new. She rustled just a touch. I sensed Huck watching from the doorway.

“Let’s go to bed,” Huck said.

We spooned in the silent darkness of our little bedroom in our little house. He ain’t nothing but sweet. I turned over and we got to kissing. Then my clothes were sliding off just like perfection. I figure if we’re living in a world this confusing and full of hate, nothing I can witness will stop me from making love.

BACKFLASH by Rebecca Portela

July 25, 2020

There it is. That particular tone that wakes me up from a dead sleep. Primal, sometimes guttural. Almost inhuman. Or so very human, more human than people ever dare to be. I feel for my phone in the dark. Corner of the nightstand. Lamp. Glasses. Phone. I get out of bed with less urgency than the last time and even less than the time before that. I flick on the lights and watch her for just a second. Hair in her face. Fists clenched. Body convulsing. I check the foam padding I put on the side of her nightstand from when she hit her head the first time. I look at my phone to hit record.

We didn’t always capture the flashbacks. It used to be a novel thing where I would jump out of bed, heart pounding, trying to be her hero. I thought about all the ways I’d seen people snap out of it in the movies. You yell at her and remind her who she is and who you are. And your firm grasp on her shoulders, your skin on hers tells her she's safe. Maybe if I just love more, with more intensity. I pinned her down and pried her eyelids open so she could see me. Her trembling eyes stared right through me, as she continued to kick and fight me off like I was him. I finally understood what a flashback truly was. She wasn’t here. She was gone, far away, back to the place, back to the time, back to the moment, back to a little girl’s fearful present.

So here I sit on the edge of the bed, holding my phone while it records the girl biting down on the pillow, bearing the gruesome scene so later she can view it herself even though it will play out just the same as all the other ones, her quivering body always facing down to the right side in the same way with her hands held wide open and shaking out in front of her face like she’s desperately trying to push something away. Her quick shrieks now fully grown sobs and wails, the kind where you swear you can actually hear the heart breaking over and over again, forced to accept the impossible as truth. I can almost see him on top of her, like someone photoshopped him out of the picture and left only her, maneuvering, fighting, pleading, screaming things like “Please, please no!” and “I can’t! I can’t! I can’t!” and eventually her body goes slack and surrenders. Her voice is far away and lost. No words, just little humming sounds. Rhythmic, distressed humming sounds as I see her body jolt forward again and again. Her eyes open wide and empty. Now she is truly gone.

I continue sitting and recording and waiting until I recognize her face again. Her eyes finally familiar and soft, still searching for a fully formed reality.

“You back?” I ask, knowing she’s back.

She stares straight ahead, crawling away from memories, the thrown pillows, the thrashed sheets, and nods a small but heavy nod. Her unsteady hand reaches out for water. And more water.

COME HERE, I WANT TO TELL YOU SOMETHING by Jamy Bond

July 24, 2020

Sometimes, I would catch her peering through a crack in my bedroom door as I changed, watching me with those blue dagger eyes. “Do you think you need some new bras?” she might say later, “those no longer seem to fit.” A way of letting me know what she’d seen.

Locks were not allowed in our house, not even in the bathroom, and sometimes she would stand outside of the door while I bathed, chatting away like we were friends. She’d rattle the doorknob, just to let me know she could come in if she wanted to.

Come here, I want to tell you something, she’d say. It always made my stomach drop, my throat freeze, a strong metallic taste creep into mouth. “Your dad has some disease. But he wants me to touch it anyway. He wants me to put it in my mouth.”

I was 12 and had kissed a boy once under the strobe lights at the roller rink. He pressed his tongue between my lips. He tasted like root beer and ripe bananas.

Sometimes she would press up close to my friend, Rick, when he came to see me. “You’re too young for boyfriends,” she’d say. One time she gave Rick a Coke and sat on the porch in her black miniskirt, talking nonstop while he watched her crossing and uncrossing her legs.

Come here, I want to tell you something. “My father used to beat my mother. But I was always on his side. She complained too much. She whined all the time. She deserved it.”

Sometimes, she’d call me into the bathroom to keep her company while she bathed, the shower curtain wide open so I could see her rubbing her breasts with soap. “Don’t forget our secret,” she’d say. “A girl stays loyal to her mother. Always.”

Once, I took a knife from the kitchen and crawled under my bed, pressed the sharp blade against my arm until the skin split, bloody and warm. If I were to cut her open what would I find inside? No pulsing organs. No human meat. A yellow, waxy slime.

Sometimes I hid in the closet, beneath a pile of old blankets that smelled like mold, and tried to merge with the quiet and the darkness. I tried to melt into nothing, into non-matter, into liquid that evaporates, into dust that scatters, into rising ash.

Come here, I want to tell you something. “Lie down with me. Hold me close. Consider yourself lucky. You have me to take care of you,” she’d say. “When I was a little girl, I had no one.”

NEANDERTHAL by Noa Covo

July 23, 2020

Two months after we get married, my husband tells me he is the last Neanderthal on Earth. We are nestled together on the couch when he says it, and I can tell he is serious. I do not laugh. I ask him how long he’s known. He says he first found out when he was a teenager. An archaeologist came to his school, as part of an attempt to encourage rural Americans to get into science. After the assembly, my husband was called to the principal’s office.

I imagine my husband on his way to the office, his shoulders hunched and his arms swinging like pendulums. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s never gotten in trouble for anything. I ask him if he was chewing gum, and my husband shakes his head and continues.

The archaeologist was waiting for him in the office. He’d seen him at the assembly and wanted a closer look. He ran his large, white hands over my husband’s head and asked him questions about his family he did not know how to answer. In the end, he turned to my husband and told him he was probably the last Neanderthal on Earth. I knew he was right, my husband says, because I’ve always felt different, not quite human, I’m too short, my head is too big. I trace my husband’s jawline as he tells me this. I wonder what he told the archaeologist about his family, if he told him that he was found on the steps of a church as an infant, with nothing but a blanket wrapped around his pale body. I do not ask him that. Instead, I ask him if he thinks his biological parents were Neanderthals, too.

My husband gets up off the couch and goes to the kitchen. Maybe, he says, arms swinging. Maybe they wanted me to live a better life. I picture his family living in the cave behind the strip mall, where high-schoolers go to drink cheap beer. I imagine them scavenging berries and eating Doritos crumbs, I imagine them giving up their little Neanderthal baby to Homo sapiens, so that he’d have a future in this fast moving world. After that evening, he doesn’t bring it up again, and neither do I.

A few months later, my parents take us to a museum. I don’t want to go, but my husband does. He loves my parents, or rather their stability, so unlike his Neanderthal biological parents or his dead adopted ones. My parents are two old people that get excited over television reruns and travelling exhibits, and for my husband, they are everything.

We step into a hall full of ancient pottery. My parents stick close to the walls, leaning in to read the signs full of small print. My husband and I walk together, hand in hand, away from the glass. I pause to look at one of the pieces, a pot cracked down the side but miraculously intact. I feel my husband drift off with the flow of visitors. I wonder what ended up cracking this pot, preserved for thousands of years, if it was found cracked or if some intern ruined it, a careless action becoming a dark secret. When I look up, my husband is gone. I walk past the pots until I find him at the beginning of a new exhibit. He is staring at a drawing of a reconstructed face, a Neanderthal woman with kind, brown eyes, smiling down at the two of us.

My husband begins to cry under her soft gaze. I run my hands over his enlarged skull, over his swinging arms, I stare up at the wise Neanderthal woman. I wish she could come to life and embrace my husband like a mother, that she could tell me some ancient wisdom, that she could teach me to heal his pain. Instead, she just smiles, unaware that she has left the last of her species all alone.

DEAR SOPHIE by Emma Brankin

July 22, 2020

Dear Sophie,

Congratulations on the happiness.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

You look so in love. I love the dress, love the shoes, love the veil! I wish you a lifetime of love.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

How did you lose so much weight? I thought you were off coke. I have collarbone envy.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

Your pictures are deluding me into believing there is a Prince Charming out there for each of us.

I want what you have. Seriously.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

I’m typing this from the comfort of my crumb-strewn sofa, wondering what you are up to right now. I keep checking my Instagram feed but nobody’s uploaded anything for thirty minutes. Are you mid-first dance, gazing into his eyes, underscored by a simpering Ed Sheeran track?

It does not pass me by that you are swirling around in a haze of romance while I sit on my sofa bleeding into an industrial-sized nappy.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

Finally, somebody posted the cake cutting photo! The braids, the nude lipstick, the downcast eyes… this demure bride vibe is really working for you. You could never tell you were a couple who met at a Barrowlands rave.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

Living vicariously through you is all I have.

Colin has fallen asleep after his third beer, so I’ve paused the true-crime documentary about bank-robbing priests he wanted to watch. I’m definitely not buying his insistence that he’s here because “this is happening to both of us”. He’s just here so he can say he was here if anyone ever finds out.

“Happening to both of us.”

It certainly didn’t feel like that when I was the one wheeled down a hospital corridor as he waved me off with a copy of Private Eye in one hand and a breakfast burrito in the other. Although, how much sympathy can you demand from your ex-boyfriend as you reunite for one last hurrah in the abortion clinic? I might write in to Dear Deirdre.Maybe, as it’s “happening to both of us,” I’ll ask Colin to also wear a nappy before he fucks off back to his new girlfriend. He’s so insistent on coming across as sincere during his attempt at bedside “support” that he’d probably put it on. And I’d probably still stay in love with him.

I am the worst. Well, second worst. After Colin obviously.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

I will send this email this time.

I am going to get the congratulatory tone bang on. I will focus on the sacred, beautiful bond of marriage and not talk about how I cried in the recovery room thinking about how the only thing left tying me to Colin is gone.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

Colin looks so peaceful. It’s so pathetic. I just want to mold my body into his and pretend nothing has happened. Not his cheating. Not the break-up. Not the endless “what should we do?” conversations. I want to go back to blissful delusion about the strength of our relationship.

Actually, now that I’ve been staring at him for so long, he’s starting to look less peaceful and more… smug. Fuck, he really is smug, isn’t he? With his stupid, smug, asleep face. I bet that whatever dream he’s having right now, he’s being a proper bell-end in it.

How have you willingly chosen to spend a lifetime with an actual human man?

Good fucking luck.

Love,

Amy

Delete

Dear Sophie,

I have always liked your Ally. He might be a druggie but he’s kind and he adores you. I’m guessing in his toast he told the story about how he knew you were the one when you took his cat on a walk with a lead?

But, tonight is not the night for me to listen to heartfelt declarations of love. Tonight is the night for me to delve into the Netflix documentary that nobody’s talking about. I really think these priests might pull this heist off, you know.

Help.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,I’m going to do it. I’m going to explain. I’m going to tell you that you are a wonderful friend, a wonderful bride and are now going to be a wonderful wife. I’m going to be better than this.

But first, I’m going to go take a tramadol. Maybe two.Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

I am so sorry your marriage has been the stick with which I have mercilessly flogged myself this evening.

I want to be happy for you.

You have always been there for me. Who else do I know who can fashion a bra out of toilet paper during a low-hanging nipple emergency at the club? Who else would get us invited and then disinvited to a Drake afterparty? (I think Drake secretly loved your attempt to twerk a path into his private booth). And who else would demand an autograph from the cloakroom attendant you insisted was “that wee Krankie boy?” In fact, it’s impressive how often you misidentify people as “that wee Krankie boy” whether drunk or sober.

But I couldn’t be there for you today. This unscheduled impregnation has been a real inconvenience to my body, my sanity, and my relationship with you.

I know I should have spoken to you about not attending. Sending a text was cowardly. And I should have been honest about the reason I’m not there. I guess I wanted to spare you my 83rd tired recital of “I know you told me Colin was bad news but…”

I want to be honest with you now. Colin cheated on me. And when he got caught out, he just shrugged and trotted off to the problem-free other woman (the definition of problem-free being that she doesn’t know she’s the other woman). And I then, of course, fertilized whatever sperm of his was left inside me to give our relationship the muddled, depressing ending it truly deserved.

When I look back, I see what you saw. How his every “I love you” was painfully extracted and only offered to pacify and placate me. How he would be distant and cold whenever something was important to me. How his flat was approaching serial-killer level tidy.

But I also still see all the times we laughed.

Sophie, when I told him I was pregnant he cried. He said he was sorry for the way he had treated me. He sat with me for hours. In a horrible way, it was everything I had ever wanted. I do wonder if I agreed to the operation because I care more about making him happy than I care about making myself sad.

I’m looking forward to the slow and painful process of re-growing my backbone.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

I will cope with this on my own. Grief and pain have no business intruding on your wedding day. And it’s important for me to become more self-sufficient anyway. You won’t always be able to come around and criticize my 3 a.m. ASOS panic orders. Recently it’s taken you days to reply when I send new Chris Hemsworth surfing photos. Pretty soon you’ll only be attending drag queen karaoke every other month.

I need to get used to not always turning to you in a crisis.

Hopefully, I’ve hit my crisis-limit anyway. I’ve lost a baby, a boyfriend, what was left of my dignity and, now, I’m sort of losing you too.I think I’ll be OK.Although, you better keep contributing memes to our Love Island Whatsapp group.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

There’s one final thing I won’t tell you. I’ll never tell you. The operation didn’t have to be today. I chose it. I chose to miss your wedding. I chose to be that person who could not look you in the eye and say “congratulations.” I couldn’t do it. Not when I was failing so spectacularly at the fundamental basics of life.

I chose to suck.

You know when we went to France and you ended up making out with that hideously sweaty ex-soap actor? In the morning your voice cracked as you admitted how lonely you were and I promised that I’d comfort you after I threw up. I didn’t throw up. I sat on the toilet, staring at my phone, wondering why Colin had not replied to my texts for two days. Then I came out and pretended I was fine.

You met Ally one month later. I’m still pretending. I’ll keep pretending.I won’t send this.

Sorry.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

Congratulations! I am so sad I couldn’t be there. I can’t wait to hear all about it when you get back from the honeymoon.

Love,

Amy

LETTER TO MY FORMER SELF ON THE 20th ANNIVERSARY OF RECOVERY by Elizabeth Muller

July 21, 2020

Letter to My Former Self on the 20th Anniversary of Recovery:

Hey, kid. Yes, you. You don't think this term applies to you anymore—you're fifteen, after all—but believe me, it does. I wish you knew how much.

You're about to leave the dusty hellscape you've called home for the last two months, relearning how to eat so that your weight can go from 85 to 90 to 100. It cost $80,000 and your father won't let you forget it. You'll feel much better about the barbed wire fence once it's behind you. You'll keep a little barbed wire in your heart.

You'll marry the boy who's been writing to you since March. You won't be happy. One day, in the dead of winter, when you’re nursing a six-month-old baby and ten pounds of postpartum weight, he will drop a pair of running shoes at your feet.

"Just a suggestion."

You'll learn to run.

You'll try so hard to do everything right and the stress will break you. Bell's Palsy will turn your face into a Picasso painting. Your smile will never be the same.

When you eventually serve him the divorce papers, he will accuse you of running from the marriage. You will laugh at the irony.

You'll keep on running.

You'll speak into a microphone when a judge asks for your name. Your mouth will go dry as a desert when she orders you to speak up. When you get home, newly divorced, two kids waiting for you in the living room, your father will not hug you.

Someday you’ll board a plane to Paris on your own. You’ll sip champagne at take-off because you’re scared, you’ll cry during My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 because you’re a cheap drunk and a bleeding heart. You’ll tip-toe through a French graveyard finding headstones of writers you admire. You'll stand in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.

You'll stand in the shadow of your insecurities and wonder if you'll ever find the sun.

Your body will crack open a total of three times to bear children. Each time you will marvel at your strength. Each time you will forget the pain and your ability to bear it.

You'll keep running, not because you’re good at it, but because you won’t have a choice. Your ass will become tiger-striped with stretch marks and sometimes you’ll feel like your body is composed of melting wax. You’ll do all that you can to hold the wax together.

You'll go down to the basement and board the rickety elliptical you get for free off Craigslist. You'll hold back tears as you push your tired body forward and nowhere, in the company of dirty clothes and spiders. One will toil a web just in front of you, its legs spinning furious with purpose.

Each bead of sweat on your body will be an offering into the coffer, a double sided coin. One side says, "you've earned this." The other says you will never be enough.

You’ll check your watch to see how much time has passed to serve your sentence and realize it's been twenty years. The spider will swing closer to your face. You’ll twist your finger in the gossamer and pull it down.

You'll both begin again tomorrow.

FOR OUR OWN PROTECTION by Kara Oakleaf

July 21, 2020

After the white-hot blast flashed across the sky, after the air turned toxic and we all zipped ourselves up inside government-issued suits like garbage bags, our breath misting on the clear plastic squares that let us see through our hoods, I started watching Jay.

He’s always been across the street, as much a fixture as the maples lining the sidewalks before the flash, before everything burned and the trees became charred silhouettes. After school, Jay used to push the mower in neat rows across the front yard while I sat on the porch with my homework. That boy walking toward me and away from me over and over again, steady as a metronome. On the hottest days, he’d yank off his t-shirt and wrap it around his head, the fabric collapsing down on his shoulders like a waterfall.

These images come back to me now, things I’d barely noticed in all those years of living only a few steps away, but that were so much a part of the beautiful, ordinary before-time that they imprinted themselves into me. Now he’s hidden in that suit, and every small memory of his body shines like a ghost.

The suits didn’t come right away. Only in the weeks after the flash, after they tested us, made us breathe into glass test tubes and swabbed our skin. Just a precaution, they said. We closed the plastic casings around ourselves and listened to the plastic crinkle of our new footsteps.

When the lab results came back three weeks later, they told us the chemicals were a part of us now, stitched into our DNA. They’d watched the poison bloom under microscopes, and when they told us the toxicity grew on contact, that it would spread and strengthen each time we touched each other’s skin, no one was surprised. It didn’t take long, encased in those suits, to learn that everything needs touch to grow, that feeling another person’s fingers on your skin is like taking a breath after long minutes of being under water.

Most days, it’s too hot to sit on the porch. I wait at the windows to see if the singed branches of the maples will push out new buds, but nothing is blossoming here. Outside, heat rises from the sidewalks and makes waves in the air when I stare across the street from the front windows. Even the oxygen is melting, blurring Jay’s house into a kind of mirage. When he comes outside, I try to make out the shape of his body under all the layers that keep us alive.

At the end of our street, they installed sixteen steel showers, where we strip down behind heavy, bolted doors and stand under a rush of cold water. We’re supposed to use standard-issue washcloths that scrape us like sandpaper, but sometimes, I press my fingertips to my stomach, or to the soft spot on my neck where the blood pounds against my skin. The steady hum of a body, a pulse. I don’t know if my bare fingers against my own skin can grow the toxins, if these stolen moments of touch put me in more danger, but I can’t stop.

Inside the steel tube showers, I try to make out my reflection, a pale blur against the gray. It’s been months since I’ve seen myself in a mirror without the white plastic suit covering everything I once knew of myself, and I’m beginning to forget my own body.

And then one day, when I’m zipped back into my suit and step out of the showers back onto the street, I see another figure standing down the block, motionless and facing me. You’d think everyone looks the same in these suits, but I know the way he stands, the space his body takes up in the middle of our wrecked street. And now I know he’s been watching me, too.

It’s the middle of the night when I follow Jay through the neighborhood, toward the showers. In the dark, I can almost believe there was never a flash, that trees are only bare for a season, that the streetlights are only out because of a power surge, something temporary and fixable.

We slide the steel doors closed behind us and the sound of them closing is like the slice of a knife. His face is behind a cloud of breath until he pulls off the hood and then it’s like his skin is glowing and I don’t know if it’s the toxins or just the simple fact of a face, uncovered and inches away from me. It doesn’t matter, because when I’ve let my own suit fall down around me, I reach up and touch it, his cheeks on my palms and then his hands are on my waist and pulling me toward him.

And even though I’d never done this in the before-time, it feels like a memory. This is what skin feels like, this rush of heat, muscles contracting under a surface, a body itself as a kind of landscape, and whatever the flash in the sky has taken away from us, this landscape, these bodies are still here, breathing against each other and pulsing with something, either our own blood or something toxic that’s going to stop our breath sooner than we expect.

I listen for the sound of our own atoms splitting apart and dissolving back into each other because for just this moment, there’s something else white-hot melting and about to consume us, and this flash, this heat is our own making, and maybe something we can survive.

After, Jay turns on the cold water and we stand together shivering, goosebumps popping up on our skin like armor, something to protect against whatever we’ve just done to each other, what I already know, even as I breathe in the new danger that’s grown between us, we’ll do again, and again, and again.

AMERICAN LAKE by Aaron Burch

July 20, 2020

Did you grow up near water? What did you think of when I asked that—lake, river, ocean, pool, other? Do you like to swim? Do you remember learning how? Did your grandmother live not on a lake, but near? Walking distance? Do you have fond memories of going to your grandmother’s house, getting one of the large towels she kept for you in the bathroom, one of the inner tubes she kept in her garage? Do you remember being little and using actual inner tubes on the water, not an inflatable pool float or tube like you might buy from Target or WalMart or Fred Meyer or Meijer or wherever, but an actual rubber doughnut made and perhaps even previously used as the inner part of a car or truck tire? Did you ever get in trouble for using her automatic garage door like a toy—hitting the button so it would retract up and then grabbing the metal lip at the bottom and letting it carry you up in the air, when you were still young and little enough for that to work? Have you ever looked at your own garage door and wondered how one could have ever had enough power to lift you floating up into the air while also at least a little bit wanting to try to again? Do you remember that short walk from your grandmother’s house to the public access trail to the lake? Remember the one house along the way that had rabbits and chickens and goats? Remember how the trail was pretty well hidden, snaking its way between two houses, two private properties, but it was supposed to be for everyone? Remember parents telling you that every lake has to be accessible to the public? Do you think that’s true? Did you still take it for granted that most everything your parents told you must be true, and so you didn’t question it, either the legality of such a claim nor the fact that the lake had a park with a beach and a roped off swim area and lifeguards and boat access a mile or two down the road, and so wouldn’t that count as the lake being accessible to the public? Do you remember the dock at this small beach—not the big one at the park, but the one that felt both public and private, almost like your own little personal beach on the lake? Remember swimming under it? How you could swim under but then come up and wade there, your head above water but under the deck, this little hidden foot or two that seemed like another world? Did you ever do this? Did you also, later in life, have a phase where you loved getting and hanging out on roofs? What do you think it is about certain stages of your life and being under or on top of things—pillow forts, caves, sitting on car hoods or tops, the roof of your house, your local church, school, whatever building had some combination of nearby fence or tree or other accessory that made it possible to get on top of? Have you ever been skinny dipping? Do you remember your first time? Was the idea yours or theirs? When you think of nightswimming, how much do you remember? Was it clear skies? Was the moon out? Have you revisited that lake as an adult? Parked at the end of the cul de sac, next to a “Public Property, No Access” sign right where the trailhead used to be? Did you sit in your car, listening to a playlist of songs from your youth and ask yourself questions about whether you should abide by the sign or not? What did you do next?

TWO BOYS DOWNTOWN AT PLAY by J. Edward Kruft

July 19, 2020

They were to meet at the Ben Bridge clock, as usual. Aaron arrived first, in his Spandau Ballet t-shirt and Levi’s ripped at both knees, last year’s ski-jacket, unzipped as it was a warm day. He stood smoking his Camel as a murder of boys came by. “Fag,” one of them called and they all laughed and looked over their shoulders and pointed and laughed again, and Aaron, he blew smoke from his nose.

He watched Matt approach from 4th Avenue. Matt, with his shoulder-length hair, in his Smiths t-shirt and paint-splattered cords and green Spiewak parka that was torn at the elbow where cotton batting stuck out. “Perfect,” thought Aaron, tossing the Camel butt to the curb.

Matt socked Aaron in the arm. “Look,” he said, pulling his own pack of Camels from his pocket. He opened the box and Aaron smiled at what he saw: the last cigarette in the pack, turned upside down. Matt took it out and lit it, inhaled deeply, held like it was pot, and then let out in a fluid stream. “Oh, that’s good. That’s really good. I’ve wanted a smoke all morning, but when I saw this was the only one left….” He passed the cigarette to Aaron who took his own drag as they began to walk, exchanging the cigarette after each hit. Matt took the last of it, down to the filter, right in front of the main entrance to Nordstrom.

“There’s our luck,” Matt grinned, flicking the butt to the curb.

Inside, they stopped and glanced right, glanced left, and then to each other with a look that was like a wink, and then headed to the up-escalator.

In the men’s department, Aaron went for the dress shirt section while Matt went for the polos. They were pros: they knew to give time to get noticed, to appear on the radar: picking up items, looking guiltily over their shoulders; it didn’t take long.

They arrived at the dressing rooms at the same time. Only one was available, so they went in together, which was better anyway, thought Aaron. Aaron hung his shirts on the hook and as he did, he accidentally brushed Matt’s arm, and then he brushed it again, not by accident. Matt placed his shirts on the bench and then in a motion as fluid as that morning’s smoke, he shifted around and took Aaron’s head in his hands and kissed him, hard: warm, tobacco-y, wet. Pulling back, each grinned: first Aaron, then Matt. “That’s another thing I wanted to do all morning.”

They zipped their coats up to their chins. Matt put up his hood.

They walked with intent: quick but not too quick. Down the down-escalator, through cosmetics and out onto Pine Street.

The man who nabbed them was meaty and sweating in an ill-fitted suit. He put a hand on each of their shoulders and they spun around to face him.

“Nice try, boys! You should know, that’s the oldest one in the book. Alright, off with them.”

“Sir?” asked Matt.

The guard clucked his tongue. Passersby began stopping. The murder of boys jay-walked to see what was up.

“You must think I’m a real fucking idiot, huh? Just some flunky security guard? That what you think, you little shits?”

“But, Sir….”

“Take off your fucking coats ‘fore I rip them off your scrawny little bodies!”

Aaron and Matt looked at each other, earnest as hell, and then slowly lifted their hands to their necks, took hold of the zipper-pull and pulled, slowly, down.

Spandau Ballet.

The Smiths.

The guard’s face turned rosy and then as he chewed for his words, he became crimson. Aaron was certain he would have struck them if not for the crowd. Finally, his arm shot up and a trembling finger pointed to no place particular. “Go! Get the fuck out of my face. Now!” The boys turned and started away. They were all smiles. “And if I ever see you in here again, I will have you immediately arrested for trespassing! Immediately! Spoiled little Bellevue fucks!”

Matt turned and shouted back: “Mercer Island!” The guard lurched as if to pursue and Aaron and Matt broke into a run….

….all the way to I. Magnin, where the dressing rooms were larger and more luxurious and where, Aaron hoped, he might get more than just a kiss.