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MOONRAKER by Robert Warf

August 13, 2020

GREENHOUSE

My father's hands are large and calloused with supple jointed thumbs.

I have my mother's hands. I'm a man. Not a man like my father. A man like my mother.

I'd tell you about my mother's hands, but I can only say so much for so long about a good thing.

But I'll tell you about my father.

I'll tell you something.

MOONSHADOW

Oil rig at sea. Drillers drilling. Sweat. Dripping sweat. The moon overhead. Men work under lamplight. Roughnecks with rough hands. Hands of a father. Smoldering filter in dirty fingers. Dirty fingers of my father's dirty work. A flare dropped down a well. A spark from machinery. Not by my father's hands.

They told us father didn't feel a thing when it went up.

Not a thing.

He just went, but not up.

MARSHLAND

Daddy, I've done a lot of acid. I see burning plains. Fire skirting along the horizon, flirting with you, but I can't put it out daddy, I can't put it out.

He holds my hand. Mother’s in another state. Father's woman in the other room. I am with father. Hand in hand.

Son. At some point you've got to come down. My father said this to me and I did this for him. I did this for him, and when I asked him to come down he never did.

MACHINERY

I’ll tell you something else. Something I need to say.

I’ll tell you what I saw when I went up.

I saw you.

We spoke. So here I am talking to you father. You left me with mother and I love mother, but I want to love you. You left me with mother's hands and I don't understand why you left. I don’t understand where you left me, but I want to understand. I want to because I need to.

Let me see you father.

MUSHROOM

When I see you, we sit out along the plains with a bottle of red wine and a cowboy steak we eat with our hands. You smoke a Rothman's how mother told me you smoked Rothman's. You hand me one and we smoke and watch the plains. There's no sea here. There's nothing. We're safe. I tell you this when you panic. I hold your hand then. You ask where we are and I see the sweat on your forehead and I see the veins in your eyes and I know, you need to know. You must.

Where are we?

You don't know father. You aren't meant to.

INCANDESCENCE by Evan Senie

August 12, 2020

We set the fire up in your backyard with only three logs, two on the bottom and one perpendicular across the top. I was quiet around you then, cautious. I’m afraid I still am, forever worried about possible endings. The fire burned for hours once it got started, but initially it was stop-and-go. We fed pages from the phonebook into the empty spaces, watched the flames cause each to curl inward, the ink running down in a purple wave until it burned itself out and was replaced. When the logs caught, it was just their edges, little strands of wood glowing, and I blew on them, softly, tried to protect them from the breeze. The sun wasn’t down yet but the air was cooling. When we were sure the fire would stay lit, that it wouldn’t go out when we turned our backs, we settled into lawn chairs next to each other. I wanted to kiss you but instead I opened the beer I’d taken from your refrigerator. I sipped at it, bitter and metallic and cool.

For a while the logs hummed and clicked in the evening air and the sun sank lower and there was hardly any smoke, only flames licking at the impending dusk. I said that the wood must be dry, cured in this Colorado air, but I was wrong, and soon they started hissing. The smoke came at us in waves and you leaned away but I didn’t, saw no getting around it and so leaned in, taking it into my lungs and my pores until my eyes were dry, until I could smell nothing but the wood burning in my childhood fireplace where I used to sit with my brother and read or watch television, and I thought about how I always wanted to be closer to the fire than he was, afraid he might get burned.

When the sun was gone but there was still enough light to see each other, you asked about him, or maybe I brought him up. I told you what he told me once, that he could only see one end to his life, that if not for me he’d already be gone. I think that’s true. I didn’t look at you while I spoke, instead staring into the fire and letting the smoke be a curtain around me, and for days afterward, in the steaming shower, I would smell it rising up off my hair.

In the darkness we left our chairs and settled again on the bricks around the fire, side by side, close enough to touch the burning logs. We stared with envy at the center, at its moving and changing glow that we could never touch for all that heat. I wanted to heal the fire, preserve it, because every change is a type of loss, but we stayed at the periphery, looked in from the outside. You pointed to a field of glowing crystals, and said that orange is a color only beautiful in its element, always transient and natural and I knew that you were right, that it was the destructive power of combustion that gave off such warmth, projected such beauty, that even the sunset is a type of elegy, and I recognized the ugliness and the desperation in asking for permanence.

I stared at the glowing crystals until finally whatever held this structure together succumbed to the pressures buried inside and the whole thing shifted. I didn’t know yet what was coming, the breakup and the reunion, standing with you in an oasis in the middle of a desert, crying on my bed, watching the sun set over the rocks on a beach in California, waking up next to you and wanting, for the first time, to be exactly where I was.

Together we remembered the beginning, when sparks ate words off the page, but it was long gone, so we settled for watching tiny fires that bubbled up through the ash, light in places we thought had already burned to nothing. We listened to the crackling and popping and huddled together until we were touching, knees, shoulders, almost hands, and despite our gaze the fire finally became only embers, and it was after that that I kissed you, for the first time, there in your kitchen, and I mourned the loss of everything that exists, the very nature of heat itself, even before it left my lips.

SCARAB by Jihoon Park

August 11, 2020

I see a scarab beetle on the sidewalk on my walk home from the bar. Instead of stepping on it, I scoop it up with the Yellow Pages on the driveway and place it on the ficus tree next to the garage door.

I’m very nice when I’m drunk. I fall into bed next to Janine. She is awake but she does not want to talk to me. She probably wants me to shower and get the whisky smell off, but I still have some dignity left. I am my own man and tonight I want to sleep in my jacket and jeans.

In the morning, I see Janine smile for the first time since our son died. She has made pancakes. A stack of three pancakes for her, and a stack of three pancakes for the scarab beetle.

“I see you brought the bug in,” I say.

“Sorry there’s only one pancake left,” Janine says. “Scabby was starving. Maybe you can wake up earlier next time.”

So she’s given it a name. That’s fine. My childhood dog’s name was Scrappy, and I wonder if Janine is playing a trick on me. Do those names even sound alike? I try not to think about it.

My hangover gets worse on the drive to work and so I pull over on the freeway to throw up the single pancake I ate. I gargle with the mouthwash I keep in the glove compartment.

Janine spends more and more time with Scabby, who grows bigger every day. She takes it to the play structures in the park. She takes it to the mall and looks at the stuffed animals in the Build-A-Bear Workshop.

One day I come home to find them watching Wheel of Fortune. Scabby is now the size of a large Doberman. “Can you get groceries tonight?” she says, patting Scabby’s little armored head. “Scabby ate all the frozen chicken. I left a list.”

I decide to have a few drinks at Ralph’s Tavern before grocery shopping. At Ralph’s, I run into Hector. He has just sued his employer after spraining his ankle getting off a forklift, so we celebrate. After last call, we smoke two joints inside his van. We drive out to the soccer field and skid out donuts in the parking lot, like in the old days.

I come back home past 2:00 AM. Janine is waiting for me at the dining table reading The Metamorphosis.

“Did you at least get the groceries?” she asks without looking up.

“Forgot.”

We start to argue. Janine wants me to stop drinking, to be a better role model for Scabby. We start arguing, but Janine stops. She doesn’t want to wake Scabby in his room.

“His room?” I ask.

Janine tiptoes down the hall and opens Dave’s room, the room we never go into since he died. Scabby is asleep in Dave’s bed. I begin yelling. I hate seeing that thing in my son’s bed. I throw the desk lamp and shatter the window. I pick up Dave’s old hockey stick and bash down the closet mirror. I topple over Dave’s drawers. Janine grabs Scabby, cradles him in her arms and yells that she is staying at her friend what’s-her-face's for the night.

My feet are bloody from stepping on broken glass, so I wrap them up with gauze. I make three Long Islands in the kitchen and gulp them down. My hands shake. My feet hurt too much to sleep so I go and get groceries.

Janine does not come back for a while. I sweep up the glass in Dave’s room and fix up his drawer with some old two-by-fours in the garage. I straighten out his trophies. I want the room to look nice.

I try removing the bloodstains in the carpet with shampoo, but it doesn't work. I search Google and it tells me to use ammonia instead. The internet warns me not to mix ammonia with bleach, since the fumes will kill me.

I invite Hector to crash on the couch for a few nights. He brings over four bottles of Johnnie Walker, which he bought with his settlement money. We drink and smoke and watch reruns of Cheers.

Janine comes back with Scabby after a month. Scabby is all grown up now and much taller than me. He is dressed in a nice three-piece suit. Janine says she is back to collect her things, and that Scabby will take care of her from now on. He has found a nice job at that legal firm with the nighttime television commercials, Johnson & Perkins or something like that.

I beg her to stay. She hands me a business card. One of her old college friends is an addiction counselor and has agreed to see me pro-bono. I get angry. I don’t need anyone’s charity. I rip the card into tiny little pieces and toss them down on the doormat.

“It’s all your fault, I should have crushed you when I had the chance.” I leap at Scabby and throw punches, trying to bust his jaw or mandible or whatever you call it, but his exoskeleton protects him. I expect him to fight back, to rip me apart with his 100-times-stronger-relative-to-his-body-weight strength, but he just waits until I tire myself out. I collapse on the front steps of the house.

“I’m sorry,” says Janine, staring down at me. She grabs hold of Scabby, who opens up his back to reveal his glistening, golden wings. I watch them fly away, Scabby’s wings booming like a helicopter, until they disappear as a little dot in the blue sky.

FOREIGNER by Rachel Laverdiere

August 10, 2020

When the cockroach and I lock eyes, I’m almost relieved. You’ve half convinced me that I’m neurotic. You say I imagine the scrutiny of the old ajumas at the outdoor markets, the side-eyed stares on the train to Kimje, the personalized attack by the orangutan at the Taegu Zoo. Yet, I’ve caught these glossy black orbs peering at me from above the window overlooking the hall. A hand’s-breadth from the closed classroom door. My only means of escape. I twist the pinching wedding bands your mother had made for me when we came back to Korea to exhibit our newborn son. She’d tried to convince me that her son and grandson belonged in this country, with her. It didn’t seem to matter where I belonged.

At last, I have proof that I’m being watched, but I hardly feel vindicated.

Your metred baritone penetrates the wall between our classrooms. The machine-gun clatter of children’s laughter and then a lull. Soon, the hall will fill with the youngest yuchiwon kids. If I don’t make my move now, I’ll have to wait for “Jake-teacher” to settle his next kindergarten class. I ease my chair away from the half-finished reports. I keep my eyes on the giant cockroach while I edge toward the door.

Once I make it into the hallway, your voice booms. I glance into the window, watch the kids smother you. Black ants on honey. When I rap at the windowpane, the furrow dividing your angular brow crosses concern with annoyance. I raise my eyebrows and mime helplessness. This cannot wait.

You brush off the children and line them up at the door. Soon, they screech toward the office to meet the piano teacher.

Rather than explain, which would likely lead you to dismiss the cockroach as another over-dramatization and judgement of Korea, I say, “Just come. Please.” You glance at your watch but follow.

Entering my classroom, I point out the intruder, still perched near the ceiling. You glance at your watch again, sigh and remove your polished shoe and climb atop a student desk. Thwack! As your shoe smacks the wall, the cockroach soars across the room and lands on my desk. You topple to the ground, your shoeless hand protecting your face.

I choke back my laughter but cannot conceal my grin as this tragedy becomes comedy.

“It’s a foreigner!” You spit the bitter words before you crush the cockroach between your shoe and my reports.

My smirk melts from my lips. Twisting my wedding bands, I ask, “But how can you tell?”

“Native cockroaches don’t fly.” You force your foot into its shoe and yank the shoelaces so hard I’m surprised they don’t snap. Your gaze hooks into mine, and you add, “Foreigners can’t be trusted to stay put.”

The heat of your words stings my cheeks. The door thuds behind you.

As I scrub cockroach remains from my reports, I picture the hefty white envelope at the bottom of my teaching bag. It’s stacked with enough won to pay back my student loans. Almost enough to get our son and I settled back in Canada. I set my teeth, determined to leave before I, too, am squashed.

WRITING PROMPTS AND CHANGING VIEWS by Sabrina Hicks

August 9, 2020

At a time when real life is crushed into an acronym, IRL, to accommodate social media, texts, curated accounts, all I crave is something real, someone to talk to, my father’s voice, my mother’s strength. Dani was annoyed that her father sent her a text asking how she was doing, as if the weight of their collective damage could be written with thumbs. Knowing he won’t answer your phone call, you text back fine not explaining how you got fired for taking too many days off, caring for a woman he once loved.

A strong memory of color. I’m driving to the hospital to visit my mother with Hey Jude playing on the radio so that when I enter the lobby of broken people my head is filled with begging: Jude, don’t be afraid, Jude, don’t let me down, Jude, take a sad song and make it better, and I think for a second I’ll let her into my heart so it can beat for two, like all those years before, but I don’t go to her. Instead, I pretend I’m there to see someone else. I say to the front desk, Maternity ward, please. My sister just gave birth. And somehow, I end up staring at babies fresh from the womb, bound in white hospital blankets, striped pink and blue and yellow, brushstrokes of blood and cream-colored mucus still streaked across their brow, and I wonder what it’s like to be that new, to open my eyes and see the world for the first time, to recognize my mother through static. I blink in the rich colors of life, until I’m kicked out and treated like a baby thief, like death visiting.

A time of anger or fear. She sits up, tubes scattered about, says, Dani, don’t be angry. But Dani cannot help herself. She vacillates between sympathy and disgust, looking at the slices across her mother’s veins, the dissection of life and death like the tree that fell on the roof of Dani’s childhood home, nearly missing her, her mother and father on one side, she on the other, and how her mother’s voice was a bridge cutting through wind and rain. Her friends console her, tell her she’s stronger than her mother, implying her mother is fragile and weak, not made for this world, but she doesn’t believe any of those words or explanations, only that some things cannot be explained, which is to say, everything human.

A ladybug crawls across your chest . . . Its wings, tucked underneath its brightly dotted shell, spill out, like her shirt you brought from home, coming through the zipper of her pants as you and the nurse get her dressed, before she is released from the hospital with a stack of papers on suicide prevention, group therapy, interventions, substance abuse hotlines, and bills to add to the bills you haven’t paid. She will not let you fuss over her anymore she says, but the shirt coming out of her front zipper is a bookmark you save for later when your eyes are heavy, humming Hey Jude, coming undone, the speckled night crawling across your chest.

A man asleep in a car. Make it funny! Make it scary! But all you see is a reckoning, a knife placed squarely in his chest and the taste of blood waking inside you. You write about the twist. You write about your father leaving you both, leaving you caretaker, littering your childhood with each curve of road. You rip it all up and write fantasy, a Lord of the Rings knockoff where you are the hero, your father is the villain, and your mother the damsel to be saved. But how do you save someone from themself? You forget about salvation, make the car drive off a cliff, a man asleep at the wheel, a daughter looking over the edge, a mother who becomes her own hero.

A time when you were desperate or diseased.

A time when you were grateful and knew love.

A time when all the triggers buried in your chest did not require a key.

VISION QUEST by Joe Cary

August 8, 2020

Nestled in his sleeping bag, Randy had fallen asleep alone under the desert stars, but here is stirred by a slithering along his naked thigh and a rattle under his armpit. Half asleep, he imagines he’s dreaming, but a Stone Age part of him wrings his spine and cascades adrenaline. The rattlesnake brushes Randy’s ankle and traces halfway up his ribs, so smooth and cold he wouldn’t have placed it but for the harrowing sound. A collision of fear and logic keeps him rabbit-still. The slick, thick thing slides across the old bruise left by Phil’s wingtips and curls around Randy’s heel, then brushes the arch of his foot. It tickles, goddamn it, and his foot jerks. A radio-static rattle as the diamondback roils against the bag.

“No please God no,” Randy whispers.

He spies his iPhone ten feet away, beside a saguaro, and pictures his F-150 at the trailhead.

Maybe it’ll leave on its own.

He sniffles the cold snot in his nostrils, senses the chill in his earlobes too, and it hits him: his bag is the warmest spot around. The snake isn’t leaving. Warm panic simmers in his chest and he laughs morosely. “Exactly what you want.”

Slowly, he brings his hands to his collarbones. The bottom of the bag, yellow in the moonlight, undulates and swells as the thing settles around Randy’s feet and lays its weight across his ankles. A quieter rattle, like the trill of cicadas.

It’s not here to bite me.

Randy thinks of his phone and the text messages on it. And the opinions and lives that would be forever changed if those messages were found. How he’d flung his phone from this spot after Phil’s last text at 10:16 p.m.: U ARENT WORTH THE WAIT. If only it were closer now. Phil would know what to do, he’d handle this.

Randy pushes up gently against the bag, exposing his chest to cooler air. A breeze washes the sharp scent of desert sage over his face. He inhales, but then he blinks at something in his eye and his nose tingles; he rubs it and pinches the septum, but blurts a sneeze that quakes his body. The snake writhes and its rattle screams like a whirring fly reel as it lashes Randy’s ankle; Randy pisses himself.

“Please. We’re good.”

A klaxon ringtone blares. Randy cranes to the flashing amber light and knows it’s Phil, and wonders what he has to say for himself. It sounds five, six times in succession and he knows Phil’s drunk again. He’ll think Randy is ignoring him. He’ll get spiteful. Dangerous. A snake without the courtesy of a warning.

But at least Phil is awake.

“Hey Siri.”

No reply.

“Hey Siri!”

“Hey! Fucking Siri!” The snake coils around his right ankle and constricts in pulses like a blood pressure sleeve.

“Oh, that’s your name? Hey Fucking Siri, get outta my bag.” He squeezes his face; this was to be time away from Phil––self-reflection under infinite stars––not a nightmare. Another klaxon and Randy grinds his head into the ground, convulsing at the futility. The rattle sounds like a strong shower.

“Fine, Phil, come,” he says to the sky. “Arroyo trailhead. Two miles east. You can shove me. Kick me. Just. Please hurry.”

A pocket of air billows in his gut and Randy wonders if gas would faze the snake, pictures it flouncing up his chest and tearing across his face, returning to bite him only after the air clears. He’s getting squirrelly and he knows it.

His left foot tingles. It’s falling asleep. Far off, a coyote howls, and Randy senses something, like an ancestral echo: he’s the one who needs to leave. Before both feet go numb. Tick, tock, he’s on his own with this. Alone. He’ll take his time, he decides, the patience of a glacier. The rattle buzzes like his Cannondale’s rear hub, as if the snake agrees.

One tooth at a time he carefully unzips the bag to his hips and digs his elbows in and slowly—slowly—raises his torso. He eases his left foot back, knee bent, and grounds his heel for stability. Pain lances across his instep as his foot awakens. The snake remains coiled around his right ankle. He bends that knee slightly and flexes his foot back and forth repeatedly, rhythmically. When his calf begins to quiver he pleads, “Hey Siri, let me out, and you keep my bag. Promise.”

“You’ll need to unlock your iPhone first,” says the other Siri.

At that, the diamondback uncoils and threads into the spot where Randy’s left foot had been. Randy rises to his palms and cranks out, elbow buckling, wrist searing. He scrambles clear and, stiff and numb, pulls on his Levi’s and boots. Then he lumbers to his phone and uses its flashlight to find a rock, saucepan sized. He grabs it to bludgeon the snake, but a klaxon startles him.

“Go to bed, Phil!”

Rock in one hand, he thumbs to the last text: U better be DEAD.

Randy drops the phone.

The sleeping bag is silent, placid. Randy holds the rock over his phone and considers its cost. The hassle of replacing it. Adjusting the rock’s position, he contemplates upgrading to a better camera and boyfriend and, hell, a new phone number, sloughing it all...and lets go of the rock, not a deliberate action but a refusal to hold on, willful neglect or careless disregard as lawyer Phil might argue. The phone crunches. Randy grunts and jumps on the rock and the phone crack-cracks. Bending, he scoops the scraps and shards and the phone itself—battered and bent, screen crazed—and slips it all into his pocket.

He turns around. “Hey Siri, enjoy the bag.” Then he puts one foot ahead of the other for the two miles back to his pickup and blinks a smile each time the phone scraps rattle in his pocket.

JUST OUTSIDE THE TUNNEL OF LOVE by Francine Witte

August 7, 2020

And Benny Jones telling me about Darlene. In other words, he pulled me through to unlove me.

Something about how love is a crispy pepper one minute, but then it goes wilty and soft. I told him I’m not a goddam pepper and get to the goddam point.

Problem is, I gave Benny Jones my heart too fast. My heart is a bristle I keep in my pocket and I can never wait to give it away.

Benny Jones sat in the boat in the Tunnel of Love, all squirm and tangle of words. Friends, he was saying, and didn’t mean to.

Then he pointed to a pin’s worth of light right there in front of us. “That’s the future,” he said. “It gets bigger and brighter the closer we get. All beautiful and warm.” I told Benny to shut the hell up. If we’re not a thing, we’re not a thing, but don’t go making a movie out of it.

When we did get outside the Tunnel of Love, into the future Benny Jones had promised would be warm and bright, I didn’t see anything. I didn’t feel anything. Just thought back to that summer at my grandma’s house, when her old dog, Punch, got a fever and she was going to shoot him. How I stroked Punch’s tan fur, telling him, it’s okay boy, when I knew damn well it wasn’t. My heart wriggling around in my pocket even then with no damn place for it to go.

BLACK CANYON CITY by Chloe Lauter

August 6, 2020

It is October in Arizona and the desert is dark and merciless when we drive into Black Canyon City. Perhaps it would be safer to keep driving, perhaps it would be safer to drive all night, but your face is shadowy with fatigue. It’s only for the night, you say.

We see the rows of neat trailers as we turn off the highway, surrounded by dust-soaked single-family homes and dirt roads thin like sidewinder tracks. At the end of the main road, the night erupts into screaming fluorescence, the dollar store that is a drugstore and party décor and office supply store all rolled into one, and we are the only car in the parking lot.

You go first, you say.

I walk inside feeling dazzled by the smooth whoosh of the automatic doors and the sterile certainty of buzzing white light bouncing off the white pearlized floor. The store is stripped clean of the desert outside but still smells like wasteland. You follow me, rush up behind me, and my shriek of laughter ricochets off the bright bags of party balloons and skeins of wrapping paper left chalky and untouched. You’re so cute, you whisper in my ear. I buy a box of tampons. You buy a Red Bull. The clerk eyes us suspiciously.

I go to the bathroom, and you promise to wait outside. The bathroom lights flicker and hum like crickets at dusk. Above the sink is blank whitewashed wall. There is no mirror. Maybe there never was one.

We brush our teeth in the parking lot, spitting toothpaste out of the driver’s side door so the clerk won’t see us, and then drive in circles searching in the dark for a safe place to park for the night. We finally rest in the shelter of a tall fence. Crying carries up from the mobile homes on the other side for hours, but we are tired. We sleep curled up in the back of your van.

In the middle of the night, you jerk awake and, still half-dreaming, reach for the handgun hidden in the D pillar. Shh, I whisper, holding you, it’s okay. There is no one outside but coyotes, and they do not speak our language. No one will see us here.

In the morning, you stand coiled in the shade of the open passenger door and pour a bottle of water over your hands and your eyes. There is only one coffee shop in town, and when we walk inside, your arm around my shoulder, the unwelcome hits me like the smell of rot. A man in a leather vest and steel-toed boots hangs over the counter, and a shade of a woman stands in the corner holding a baby carrier, her face is hungry but not for food. We are the only real things in this place.

We take our coffees and emerge blinking into the sun. The air shimmering off the hood of the van smells like bitter almonds. We are the only people breathing for miles.

Don’t worry, you say, you’ll get used to it. I have.

THE SCHWINN by Rob Kaniuk

August 5, 2020

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

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

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

He pulled out a brown grocery bag.

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

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

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

“You’re not getting out of this one.”

“Mike, what the hell is it?”

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

“I can’t see–what is it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIGHTNING STRIKES by Emily Livingstone

August 4, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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