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STUMBLING ON CONCRETE by Mileva Anastasiadou

January 15, 2020

I was overweight when I started the diet, but eating less didn’t help much. I lost some weight, yet I still feel heavy. I told him last night. My husband eyed me up and down, checking for excess fat, then said I look fine, but I don’t feel fine at all. I should move to Mars, perhaps, where gravitational forces feel less powerful, I said jokingly, or turn into a bird, I thought, only I didn’t say that aloud. He suggested exercise and I shrugged. I’m not certain exercise will help take the burden off of me, but I could give it a try.

We climb and climb, and we’re now at the top of the hill when he says I look young while staring at me, and I nod for I was made for youth and daydreaming and future plans, only I’m violently present now, blissfully dizzy, feeling his hand, not a word or gesture goes unattended, and I don’t miss the young me, the dreamer, this time it’s now that I already miss, the excruciating bliss of present tense, for it’s all downhill from now on and he says that’s maturity, only I know it’s him, he’s the peak of the mountain I climb, my future happening now, the cliff I’ll stand on before the fall. And I can see me hitting the ground, gravity calling, again and again, like a repetitive stumble on concrete sound effect, like wood falling, hitting the floor, only woodcutters have been hiding in fairy tales, or movies, or songs, and I wish I could hide in a story as well and never be found and never fall.

The end of the world is near, says the man on the TV. My husband watches silently, eating a burger, while I only drink water to fool my empty stomach, for I want to lose more weight, to evaporate, to go back to the beginning. I was born light as a feather. A tabula rasa, a clean slate, empty of experience, ideas and emotions. I spent most of my younger years hungry. Hungry for food and knowledge and life. I’d eat more and more as I grew older, I thought, for I’d always grow bigger and wiser, and mom said I needed food to grow. So now, I’m heavy. Now, I’m full. Eternal growth is malignant, like cancer, says my husband, while watching the documentary on climate change, while I step on the scale, counting calories, for I want to go minimal, escape flesh and bone and feelings, stop growth and immobilize time, turn into an everlasting imaginary friend or ghost.

I thought I was born empty, crystal clear, but I’m not sure now. I was born a baby, the way people are born, yet I was not empty at all. I carried the world inside me, for I have lived before I was born. Half of me watched my mother’s life. I watched her first steps, her first kiss, her heartaches. Half the half of me watched my grandmother’s life, her struggles, her path. The pain inside isn’t just my pain. It’s the pain of the world. A piece of me has lived forever, I think, I tell him and he looks at me like I’m crazy and perhaps I am, yet all my pain cannot be justified by one life only. A tiny piece of me has been here since the beginning of time. People get strong with time, they say, only I get weak instead. The pain threshold falls. After a certain age, you’re either too cynical or too soft, he tells me. Only the cynical can move on like nothing happened. Happiness is obstructed by experience and fear, decluttering the mind becomes a necessity. I want to empty the disc, to be a dot in space, I tell him, like in The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the poem, the movie, only you can’t really erase anything. I drip seriousness and profanity and I dust tiny bits of sacredness still left upon me. I throw up all dirty knowledge, a futile attempt at unlearning the world, to clear my mind. Accumulated pain is the reason for aging and death, I tell him. You live on and on until your head bursts in pain and glory.

He turns off the TV and caresses my cheek. He then pulls me close, climbs onto me and his weight on my body is a comforting weight, accumulated joy is the reason for life, he claims, and I don’t mind heaviness now, heaviness keeps me grounded, here, alive. Heaviness gives a sense of belonging in exchange for freedom. Until you hear the chains and learn to carry them along. But I keep thinking how tiring life is. Almost like plate spinning. It’s only a matter of time before it all crashes down, before gravity calls, yet I keep at it, for there’s no choice. Until all motion seems overwhelming and the burden seems unbearable. And it’s all a simple equation; when pain exceeds joy life gives up in a reverse big bang, an implosion that ends the world, instead of starting it.

CHAMP by Emma Hodson

January 14, 2020

The man smells like smoke. He is moving into a new apartment on a street that used to be a bustling thoroughfare, but now is just another grey road. That is, the apartment is new to him, but not to this world. It’s close to his old spot, just a few blocks, but it’s noticeably more decayed. A beige building shoved in between a Thai place and pay-per-hour motel, a single tarnished mini van parked in the driveway most days. The apartment was built in 1973 when mom-and-pop shops dotted the street, bubbly hand-painted signs, and women doing their grocery shopping with babies in tow. People walked more back then. Now there is a hardware store and a forsaken donut shop, glaze hardening and cracking untouched under glass while the owner watches the Mega Lotto with a toothpick hanging out of his sour mouth. After the move, the man’s hands are shaky and he reaches for the drawer.

A while later, months maybe, the drawer starts to fill up with empties again and the bills keep coming and the donut shop is gone and its owner and his Mega Lotto toothpicks are gone. In its place is a Juice Shoppe where everyone can go to feel better, thank fuckin’ God. The man laughs darkly to himself and honks his deluged nose into a tissue as he walks towards Ol’ Yeller Lounge.

He’s been going to Ol’ Yeller for 36 years. The outside is fashioned from large stones cobbled together, like a liquor castle, no windows so it can be properly dark inside. The sign is yellow neon and it flashes, beckoning, above the rounded doorway. Inside is what you’d rightly expect from a dive. The bar is long with peeling stools lining it all the way to the dimly lit back wall, illuminated mostly by a clutter of arcade games. A jukebox with a handwritten sign taped to it: QUARTERS ONLY! WE ARE SERIOUS!! There are a few booths with wooden tables to the right, but you can’t get a good look at the TVs from there, so the man avoids them.

He sits on his stool, the same one he always sits in, and nods to the bartender who adds a Jack n Coke to his tab on the regulars chalkboard that hangs behind the bar. Most of the regulars are gone nowadays. Big Jim disappeared after one too many visits to detox. They say Paula got sober, and maybe it’s finally true this time—he hasn’t seen her in months. Ralphie moved down South when the rent got too high, and his new neighbors started complaining about his cats and their cat smells. Bogus, he had said sipping on his G&T. Absolutely fuckin’ goddamned bogus. Roberta’s still around, and so is Doug, but they won’t come in for another hour or so. It’s just the man and a bunch of kids huddled in the corner booth.

The man watches them while he waits for his drink. The boys (and they are boys, really, hardly men) wear clear-framed glasses and ludicrous sock caps, tiny ones, that they tuck behind their ears with their cigarettes. They smile white smiles at the girls who wear pants that don’t flatter their pretty faces. The boys order beers, the expensive kind that Ol’ Yeller has only started offering in the past few years. They sip them and laugh and a girl reaches out and puts her hand on the skinny tattooed arm of the boy next to her. The man wonders if he was ever like them, once upon a time, but immediately scoffs at the thought. His laugh comes out in short gurgly croaks. He imagines himself, back on the docks, unloading heavy boxes of grapes from the ship's belly, his ears burning from the crisp morning air under his hardhat. He remembers standing, arms locked with his crew in the picket line, his sock cap, wool and itchy, covering his ears. No, he was never like them. Not even close.

Truthfully, he doesn’t mind the kids all too much. They come in and buy their expensive beers and the bar stays open, and the man can play his pinball game in the back. He’s had the highest score for as long as he can remember. Someone got close once, but it never happened. After his second Jack, he strolls over to the games, expertly flicks the dial to send the ball soaring into a land of flashing crystal balls and genies. The whiskey is warm in his throat and the heat flows through him, his hands finally steady, as he racks up dings and dongs and the points tally higher and higher.

When he finally heads back to the bar, Roberta is there, early today, and sitting next to his usual spot. Her hand covers his seat. Eighty-two years old, sharp as a needle, and tattoos covering every last square inch of her large, worn body. Roberta has been coming to Ol' Yeller ever since the last of the lesbian bars closed down—Sally's and The Fur Pelt, leather vests and cigarettes, tender kisses in the corner. Red lipstick permanently stains her glass.

“Pinball again, you old bastard?” she says.

“Sure as eggs is eggs!”

The bartender nods his head to his stool. “Speaking of which, we figured it was about time we did something about those scores of yours,” he says.

The man approaches his seat, and sees that they’ve switched it out with a brand new stool, cherry red, upon which they’ve sewn large white letters, like a high school varsity jacket: CHAMP.

The snake tattoo that curls down Roberta’s wrinkled arm seems to slither as she laughs, one of the best laughs the man has ever heard. “Some things never change,” she says.

WE COULD BE ANYONE by Alicia Bones

January 13, 2020

I knew I should feel sympathy for Laura, but her fire-bright face in the Abernathy-Smythe backyard unsettled me. She was telling me the details of her life, the really private, personal ones, though we’d only met a few times at parties hosted by shared acquaintances.

“My father is a drunk, and my mother is sociopath,” Laura said, staring off into the fire.

Jesus Christ, was all I could think as I twisted up my fingers. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t even think of what I should say. I was well-adjusted, a truth about myself that had bothered me for years. My parents had always been appropriately-boundaried, so how could I relate?

“When my mother forgot my high school graduation, I cried for days,” Laura said with stage-direction movements: look left slim-lipped, look right.

I stopped myself from rolling my eyes. The confessions kept coming in cliched absurdity. They weren’t fireside dredging of deep-dark memories, either; Laura had told me the high school story twice before.

“I’ll never forget how our cat looked,” she went on, “after my sister ran over him with her car.”

I looked at her in alarm. I’d drifted for a second—and now a dead cat? Laura hadn’t asked me for my compassion. I’d planned for an easy night of talking about The Bachelor and Harold’s trip to Mexico. Instead, she’d foisted her dead cat onto me.

She was too much, no matter how polite and self-loathing I was, so I said, “I’ve got to pee.” I went inside and didn’t plan on coming back. Laura would forget I was gone; the night was chilly and someone else would sit next to her. That person would be as good a confessional as I had been.

I angrily poured myself another drink. Self-involvement was an epidemic.

Laura had exhausted me, but I had to make myself aggressively cheerful. This was a party, after all, a beginning-of-summer party thrown by Melinda and Janet Abernathy-Smythe. They were the first of my friends to buy a house with a backyard; most of us still rented. I wasn’t anywhere close to buying property, but I served my purpose at social functions anyway: providing amusing anecdotes about my hapless dating life.

Inside, party-goers held drinks and stood in corners. These were the friends I’d cobbled together in my childless, partner-free twenties for my childless, partner-free thirties. They weren’t the friends I’d wanted, but they were the friends I had. Here they were, speaking passionately about a television show, effusively commenting on the Abernathy-Smythes’ new cabinets, cooing over photos of Helen’s new dog. Without them, I would never receive compliments on my new haircuts or shoes; I would exclusively rely on my own judgment.

I glanced at the fire through the open door to the back patio. Laura was talking to someone else. I was sure she was telling them exactly what she’d told me. I hoped they could think of reasonable ways to respond to her.

I headed toward the ficus in the living room to chat with solitary Harold about Mexico. He’d liked the beaches and warm water and the food. Did he actually want to tell me, “The food was spicier than I thought it’d be!” or did he feel obligated to say it? I couldn’t tell. I asked him how much his trip to the Yucatan had cost, and he said, “Cheap!” I didn’t know how to make him tell the truth, but his daughter was starting college in the fall, so maybe he was mourning.

Sam joined us, and Harold asked her about her new house. I told her I was hoping to buy in her neighborhood. She looked with me with derision because she’d purchased the home with her husband, and I had no husband. She scoffed, “Good luck!” though she also smiled, like I was a pathetic child with an impossible wish. In fact, I had no strong feelings about her neighborhood and remained unsure if I had ever visited it.

Later, three drinks in and pouring myself a fourth, I talked to a new person in our group, a rare friend of a friend. For some reason, I told her about my nerves about commitment, about how I feared my life twenty years from now would look the same as it did now.

“Life always changes, whether you want it to or not,” Tammy said, making sincere eye contact. I felt real empathy from her and was surprised.

I was grateful that my sister had never killed our cat or that I’d never had the impulse to lie that she had. “If you say so,” I laughed.

Behind Tammy, I saw Laura through the kitchen window. She was talking to someone, maybe even a third person, though I could only see the back of their head. I should have been angry about the anonymous way Laura collected her self-aggrandizement, emptied her mind onto a held-captive acquaintance. Why could only some people have authentic exchanges; why did only some people want to?

I suddenly realized I had no idea which type of person I was.

In a moment of compassion, fueled by drink and goodwill towards Tammy, I felt sorry for Laura’s isolation, which was even more impenetrable than my own. Secrets were stand-ins for authenticity, but Laura didn’t understand that. She didn’t know why she failed to connect. My stomach lurched in customary empathy, but I suspected my feelings were only habitual, a knee-jerk reaction to a stimulus that could have come from anywhere.

GIVING SPEECHES IN YOUR UNDERWEAR by Roslyn James

January 12, 2020

You are stirring onions, slowly caramelizing them. You can't believe you’re married again. He’s in the other room, well not the other room. The long galley kitchen you’re standing in is attached to the living room. You can see him, sitting on the couch with his football game on, the volume turned way up, waiting for his dinner. He will not appreciate these onions you are laboring so long over. His favorite meals are ground beef tacos or chili. Two dishes you’ve grown to despise.

Later that week, you come home for lunch because he asked you to. He's not ready to go when you arrive. Maybe his part-time teaching job at the university down the road allows him to get high and nap all day, but you only have an hour for lunch. There are endless convenient restaurant options nearby, but he hasn’t given a thought to where he wants to eat. Your only request is, "no Vietnamese today." You had it yesterday for lunch. He can’t seem to come up with any place he wants to go to aside from the pho place down the street. You give in, besides half your lunch break is over, you don’t have time to argue about pho.

He wants you to have sex with his friends. He thinks you're kinky because when you first started hooking up with him, you were also dating a woman, and seeing another guy on and off who would visit but still lived in your hometown.

Your husband has swinger friends, they are a very nice couple and you like them, but you don’t like-like them. Before you came along, he used to be their third and they’d often add in another female friend or sometimes two. They all have great hopes for you. You’ve only had a threesome with two guys before, and only once, when you were in college. You were drunk and high on hash in Germany, and you knew that if you wanted to you could never see those two guys again, but you enjoyed yourself. Well, there was that one other time, in high school when you and your girlfriend did it with your boyfriends next to each other in the same bed. The guys were buddies and, of course, had thought up the whole idea. It seemed silly to you. It didn’t leave you feeling bad but it wasn’t at all interesting or sexy. You kind of blocked it out, except for that moment when you and your girlfriend gave each other a goofy look for one second in the beginning as if to say, what the hell were we thinking? You don’t even remember if you all were completely undressed or not. You were young then, maybe it could be fun now that you are grown up and with a man who loves you.

You give it a try with your husband and his friends. It isn’t fun. It reminds you of giving a speech, except the audience wants to spend the night and you have to have breakfast with them the next morning. You hate public speaking. You try to give your best performance, memorize your lines, get up behind the podium, and then you look down at all those expectant faces waiting for you to impress them. You rush through it all, fumbling your index cards—you could swear some of them are out of order—you resort to ad-libbing. When it’s finally over you can’t remember much of it, but everyone seems satisfied and praises you, then they start making plans for the next time. Maybe a little weekend getaway, they say. Perhaps a cabin somewhere with a hot tub and a fireplace.

He'd also really like it if you would bring your best friend over to have sex with him. You can join in, of course. In fact, he'd like it better that way. He doesn't seem to understand your friend isn't interested in him, not that you've asked her. Nor are you interested in sleeping with her, she's not your type, and even if she was, you wouldn't share her with him.

An old friend from high school calls you at work out of the blue. A mutual friend told him you both live in the same new city now. He asks you to go out for an after-work beer. You agree and soon you find yourself sitting across from him at the pub, feeling a little tipsy and immensely enjoying his company, something you didn't expect. Before you walked into the bar, you took off your wedding ring and slipped it into your pants pocket. You weren’t sure why you did it at the time, but when your hometown friend grabs your gesticulating hands midair, holds them in his, and looks deep into your eyes, you understand. He asks if you want to go back to his place and you do.

In his bedroom, he puts on 80s music, turns the lights down low, and asks you to dance. You let him wrap his arms around your waist and you rest your cheek against his chest. He smells of some familiar cologne. It feels like old times like you’re back in seventh grade again at a school dance, except this time the boy is taller than you. He asks if he can kiss you and when you say yes, he bends down to press his soft lips to yours and sparks fly. You want him. You almost forgot what it’s like to feel that kind of deep-down desire.

You don’t tell the husband when you get home, except to say that you ran into an old friend and had a couple of beers. To lie well, it’s always best to stick close to the truth. You suggest that your old friend might be down for a threesome though you admit it’s hard to say at this point. It will require further investigation on your part. Your husband seems excited about this news like maybe he’s finally got you on board, but you don’t plan to include him. Your friend has no idea you even have a husband. It just didn’t come up.

THE DUMPSTER GAME by Rachel Mans McKenny

January 11, 2020

The Hu Palace had a classy buffet, with slippery chopsticks that went into the dishwasher not the break-apart kind. Baxter raised himself on the lid of Hu’s dumpster, hanging off it with forearms and elbows as anchor. The graying cabbage landscape and jagged Styrofoam iceberg looked the same as yesterday. Then a faint scratching. Something was alive, a small something.

His foot found a cardboard box island in the sea of decomposing food. The box took his weight, so he swung the other leg inside, pushing the trash aside with a sneaker.

A chick, brown wings folded under its body.

It pecked Baxter’s hand until it bled. At the bottom of the fire escape, he tucked the chick between shirt and chest, tying the fabric at the bottom so it couldn’t fall out. The bird rattled around against skin, unable to find purchase while he climbed. At the window ledge, Baxter untied his shirt and the chick flopped onto the carpet, stretched his legs, and cheeped in protest.

Baxter’s brother wasn’t home yet. Boy, when he came home! Baxter let the chicken stand on the counter while he wet a dishrag. He knew that cats cleaned themselves and dogs hated baths, but didn’t know the protocol for chickens.

Eddy slammed the door. Baxter tried to scoop the chicken in his hands, but Eddy intercepted it. The chick tried to stand on Eddy’s fleshy palm but tumbled backwards on spindly legs.

“Careful,” Baxter said.

“It smells.”

“I found it in Hu’s dumpster.”

Eddy pondered this, holding the chick up for closer inspection.

“I win? You find anything?”

Eddy shook his head. “You win. Yeah. You win.”

Paul lived in an underwear drawer, its original contents relocated with the pajamas. Baxter poured Paul a shot glass of water. The shot glass said “Margarita Mondays.” He hoped there wasn’t any alcohol left in it, poor bird, but then he remembered the chick lived in a dark drawer for twenty hours a day and hoped maybe there was. Maybe to the chick, the dumpster had been the whole world.

Was that life? Baxter wondered.

The other four hours of the day, Paul wandered the apartment. Between school and dinner and whenever Mom was occupied—he had free range. A chicken ranger. A vigilante, not a chicken at all.

Baxter didn’t play the game anymore. Baxter had Paul. Baxter won, and for once, Eddy had lost.

Until Eddy found the cat.

The creature had half a tail and nicks in its ears like hole punches. “This is Big Paul,” he told Baxter. He set the animal on the bottom bunk, and it hopped off, disappearing under the bed.

“The game was over. And we weren’t looking for animals anyway.”

Eddy just hummed, hand groping under the bed. “I didn’t say it was over.”

Years later, Baxter sat in the car outside his brother’s house, breathing hard. He couldn’t believe that every picture with his brother didn’t have hidden feathers and blood in it like an ISpy. Like Where’s Waldo.

“Where’s Paul?”

Blood, feathers. “Well, don’t blame the cat.”

Baxter didn’t.

DROSOPHILA MELANOGASTER by Hannah Storm

January 10, 2020

The fruit fly shares the same genes as a human. Its Latin name is "Drosophila Melanogaster," which sounds awfully fancy for something attracted to rotten fruit and vegetable. I think about the time you told me I smelt ripe when you forced me onto my back in that room with the torn sheets. Fruit flies breed in drains, empty bottles and waste disposals, relying on a moist layer of material that ferments to grow their families. The adults have brown trunks, black bottoms and crimson eyes and are so small they can creep through windows and doors that aren’t properly covered. I think about the time we met, how I was bruised and broken, how you flew to my side, hovered around me, your tanned arms winged in a false promise. The reproductive potential of a fruit fly is enormous, and given the chance they can lay five hundred eggs. Your first girlfriend had an abortion, you left your second after you boasted how easy it would be for you to get her pregnant. You tell me this as you lie, limp and damp, and I see your eyes turn red with tears. Soon you’re snoring. You don’t hear me creep away to mop up the smell of me, or move to the window above the bins, where I watch their bags spilling into the car park. Your snores sound like the buzz of five hundred flies surfacing from the fetid food when I leave you in your waste.

MY TORNADO by Joshua Bohnsack

January 9, 2020

While I could reach outside my tornado, it was still difficult to hug my date at the end of the night. He never asked me specifically about the tornado, but he did keep asking if I was okay.

I said, “Yeah. Sure. Thanks for asking,” and knocked the saltshaker over.

He took a pinch of salt and threw it over his left shoulder. “For good luck. It fixes it.”

“Ah.” I tried to do the same, but the salt grains got stuck in my tornado and I became reminded of my failure every few seconds, when the salt would wrap around the cyclone into my field of vision.

When I back away at the end-of-date hug, he says, “I had a nice time, at least.”

“Me too,” I tell him. “Right now is just a weird time for me.”

He crosses his arms. “I get it. I’m just a stock character who you’ll remember as ‘The Salt Guy.’ I’ve been on dates before. I know how this goes.”

The salt guy walks away from my front door and calls me a tease. I watch as he disappears off set.

My roommate asks me how the date went, without turning from the reality show she’s watching. She gathers a handful of popcorn from the bowl in her lap.

“He called me a tease before he walked off set.”

On the TV, restaurant employees look for love, mainly among the rest of the staff. I take off my shoes and they start to circulate around my shins until I kick them out of my tornado’s pull.

Through a mouthful of popcorn, my roommate says, “It’s tough out there.”

I don’t say, ‘You wouldn’t know, you’ve been in here for months,’ but I do tell her it was okay. “It’s the same as the last one. He’s fine, but I’m not. Or at least not right now.”

In the reality show a bartender named Harper tells the camera, “I can have any woman I want, but I want Jessica.” It’s romantic, in a way.

Jessica asks the camera, “Why would Harper want me? He can have any woman he wants.” A customer in the background asks for the check and Jessica continues to talk about Harper and his ability to have women.

“He didn’t say anything about my tornado.”

“Oh honey, you can hardly notice it.” She ingests a handful of popcorn. “That’s good though.”

“He did keep asking if I was okay.”

“That’s bad.”

I reach into her bowl and watch Harper pour a martini for a bar patron who says, “I didn’t order this. I ordered a Hamm’s. It’s a beer. They’re different drinks.” Harper winks at Jessica and my roommate says, “Aw. That’s what you need: someone who feels about you the way Harper feels about Jessica.”

I swallow the popcorn. It’s bland and dry, missing something.

“How can I find someone to feel that way about me if I can’t feel that way about myself?”

She shrugs and eats some popcorn. Jessica tells the camera about Harper’s hair and the general manager says, “You have drinks up at the bar.”

Jessica turns to the camera and says, “Harper is always leaving me gifts like this.”

“The customers are angry,” the manager says. “Our Yelp reviews have been plummeting since you all started doing this.”

Jessica picks up the drinks and Harper leans over the service station. He starts to tell her something, but pulls back and looks to the boom operator. “What’s my next line?” he asks.

The camera pans to the boom operator, who shrugs. There’s a silence between the scene and the commercial break. All I can hear is the crunching of my roommate’s popcorn and the whoosh of my tornado.

“This is bland,” I tell her, meaning the popcorn. I put my hand up and grab a handful of air and salt that had been spinning around my head. I throw the salt over the bowl of popcorn and eat some more.

“Better?” my roommate asks.

“Better, but it’ll never be good enough.”

My roommate looks at me for the first time since I came home from my date. In an ad for a nationwide neighborhood grill, the spokesperson asks why millennials don’t love them.

“Our apps are so cheap. We thought you loved apps. Please come back.”

“This is bland, too,” I say. “Everything about this world is bland.” I stand up and my tornado whooshes. “I don’t need love, and I don’t need any of these things the TV is pushing at me.”

“Don’t bring the TV into this. You’re being salty about your date.”

“It’s not just the date.” My tornado roars around me and my roommate’s popcorn gets sucked in the cyclone. “They’re selling us love while they sell us apps.” The remote whirls around my waist like a hula-hoop. “They sell us love while they’re selling us ad space and air time.” My roommate holds onto the couch to avoid getting sucked in while the furniture skids across the floor into my vortex. “I’m salty, but only because I need something of substance. I’m salty because I’ve been out there trying to find a connection like these two,” I say, thrusting my finger towards the encroaching TV screen, “when all I need is myself.”

The winds around me die down and the furniture lands with a thud. “It’s not even Harper or Jessica’s fault. I mean, he can’t even remember his lines.”

We’re quiet in the wreckage around us.

“I’ll grab a broom. Then I’m going for a walk.”

As I leave the living room, I hear Harper say, “Well, yeah, but I usually know my lines.

I KNOW ALL ABOUT COMBUSTION by Allie Marini

January 3, 2020

On the night of your funeral, I stand in front of a raging bonfire licking its way up to the blacked-out stars hidden in the sky above & let the snowstorm the radio says is on its way whip oily lashes of my hair across my cheeks. Drag them like a dirty razor kisses the skin to let something bleed out—you know all about the bleeding. How quietly it leaches into pine straw. How pine straw crackles when you throw it into a bonfire burning in rusted-out washing machine drum in the backwoods of Alachua county. You know all about how something damp & damaged sizzles once it surrenders to ignition.

I know all about combustion, the bonfire whispers. I want to burn, I answer, with my lips twisted into a line so thin it becomes a razor. Taste the smoke & blood of you on my tongue. Decide I’ll tell every single one of your secrets tonight & feed you to the fire. They say a snowstorm is coming in Florida & these things are not supposed to happen. I have buried you, am burying you, will bury you every day for the rest of my life. I am buried alive with you & in this moment I don’t yet know that I’m as dead as you are. I will never be the person I was again & neither will you. The difference is that I will haunt the corners of my own life, sleepwalk through everything, seek out danger & violence & misery because they’re the only things that remind me of you. I will seek out poison & drink it down like I’m dying of thirst & really, who’s to say I’m not?

I know the difference between a casket & a coffin—mainly it’s the shape—so in this distinction, you become a coffin & I am the casket. Because at a funeral service what the mourners see is a casket—what the world sees is me—but you’re the coffin. This unbearable grief is the sepulcher & here, we are ghosts, you & I. This night is an exercise in the improbability of weather, the perils of unmanageable fire & unpredictable cold winds skittering soundless & razor sharp across a sky where the stars are blotted out. How with the proper tools a coffin can become a casket—but never in reverse—without adding two sides & wrecking the beauty of geometry, telemetry, function.

I write a secret with a hollow shaft onto the calamus of a starling feather, add every detail I can remember onto its barbs until the vane sparkles against the glow of the fire. I hold it to the flame & watch as the afterfeather goes up in smoke. Honor the connection that signifies Creator. Destroyer of Worlds, you are free to explore a starless night. Well of starling, feathered breath. The feather becomes a coffin, an inferno, a wisp of hot ash, then nothing at all. I whisper your next secret into the bracts & seed scales of a pinecone. Wonder if the whispering is generative, whether anything will take root & grow. What is the purpose of a pinecone? In this moment I’m as dead as you are. Time just hasn’t caught up to me yet. Dream about a pinecone & instead wake up a terebinth tree—good for nothing except a fool’s errand fueled by misguided strength. I feel my teeth sharpen when I pitch it into the burning drum. I taste our death on my blood-whetted tongue.

I know the difference between a casket & a coffin. You are six-sided & ornate. I am rectangular & serviceable. This unbearable grief is our mausoleum & I have become a ghost to chase you deeper into the starless night. Into a forest of trees that wave as though they’re burning in the rusted-out drum of a washing machine. The telemetry of radio waves. Static & wind turn the weather report into a tinny ghost, calling out over the tops of scrub pines, A snowstorm is coming in Florida, these things should not happen. These things should not happen. Drag lashes of dirty hair like rusty razors down my cheeks & let the bonfire warm away the chill of cadaver. Let it smolder like a secret & unfurl into a thread of ash, a column of smoke. Let the residue of the burning blot out every star in the sky & leach into moonlight obscured. Consider the way scrub pine needles soak up the aftermath of a bloodletting. Have a steady hand before the cut.

Another secret, this time written on the edge of a razor blade & meant to bury you so deep even the cicadas can’t dig you back out. I am not a thing made for feathers. You were not a thing meant for wings. Warp like the rusted-out drum of an old washing machine bending under the weight of a funeral fire burning in a haunted canopy. Send a column of smoke straight up into the starless sky & invert it, call it hell & learn to love perdition. I know all about combustion, the bending drum groans against each thrush of the fire.

Every snowflake, like a coffin, is a six-sided thing. Each point indebted to the way in which it crystallizes, so bend the light around me, hide me in a hexagon until I disappear. In the skies high above, a solitary snowflake is forming. These things should not happen. I have found a dram of poison here & have drunk it down. The funeral tastes of campfire & cadaver. Bract by barb, I construct you like a secret & lay us to rest in this coffin. On the night of our funeral, I stand in front of a raging bonfire stoked on secrets, feathers, pinecones. I dream of a scrub pine & awaken as a terebinth tree. Steady my hand before the cut, lick myself into a ghost.

NEGOTIATIONS by Adrienne Marie Barrios

January 2, 2020

Mar∙riage, /merij/, noun: a series of negotiations.

At least, inside her head, it was. She had these little rhythmic mantras to keep from fucking it up, like my plate is on the left, or the left tray goes on top. She’d repeat it to herself, over and over again, like someone with OCD stuck in a tick—Left tray goes on the top. Left tray goes on the top. It wouldn’t do to burn one half of the muesli. My plate is on the left. My plate is on the left. It wouldn’t do to give him her sandwich; he hated mayonnaise.

These negotiations, these little balancing acts, like bargaining chips between her stomach and her mind, her feelings and her general day-to-day life. Everything she ever did came down to one of these negotiations. These haggling sessions.

I’ll just take one more scoop of veggies. My plate is on the left.

But then I’ll have more veggies than he does.

I didn’t eat lunch, and he ate his sandwich and apples, like he does every day. My plate is on the left.

But he might notice that my burrito is bigger than his.

Well, I’ll keep my veggies, but he can have the extra piece of bacon. I did make five, after all. My plate is on the left.

Yeah…

Better put a couple bell peppers in his. My plate is on the left.

That’s better.

My plate is on the left.

Always, these negotiations. Always weighing the potential outcomes, sussing out what might happen if she did this or that. If she chose what she wanted. If she put herself first. If, for once, she defied his unspoken demands.

FOREVER by Jennifer London

December 30, 2019

Clara sat on the edge of the tub, smoothing the hem of her dress compulsively. Forever was an awfully long time, she thought. Forever was endless, sprawling, impossible. It was unnatural and unlikely.

But maybe. Perhaps. Forever could be parties and dinners and clinking wine glasses. It could be laughter and snuggles and warm touches in the dark.

For a moment the murmur of voices outside the bathroom door didn’t sound quite so ominous.

But a memory came to her, as sudden and sharp as a slap in the face: her mother and father shouting at each other, a spray of blood on the linoleum floor, the underside of the kitchen table as she shrank into herself to try to disappear.

No. She knew what forever really was. It was bonnets, bassinets, bibs. It was secrets festering in the empty spaces. It was the best years of her life wrapped up in glittering white fabric for other people to write on, twisting and distorting her scenes into acts of look-how-happy-we-are, a parade of we and us and ours.

“Clara?” her grandmother called. “Clara, sweetheart, is everything all right? The ceremony’s about to begin.”

She suddenly couldn’t remember the name of the man perched alongside her on the tiered cake. She remembered his smile, a tender hand running through her hair. But then her father's face swam before her, his lips drawn back in a snarl. You think he'll still want you when he finds out what you really are?

Her breath came in short, quick bursts; her hands shook. Her dress was stifling. With a sharp tug she undid the satin ties going down her back, slipped out of her sparkling straitjacket, and crawled into the empty tub.

Her heels clanked against the porcelain. The tub was icy on her back, a sharp reminder that this was not a nightmare she could wake up from. She hugged her knees to her chest and admired her perfectly manicured toes in their strappy white prisons.

“Clara.” This time it was her father, his voice tight and menacing. “Clara, if you’re not out here in five minutes, so help me, I’ll drag you out myself.” He didn’t need to say and make you regret it.

The only response that came from her mouth was a kind of wail, a sound at once foreign and honest. A tear slid down her face, dragging a clump of mascara with it.

The voices outside seemed to be getting louder, a cacophony of hellos and how-do-you-dos and long-time-no-sees.

You'll screw this up, just like you screw up everything else.

She tried to force herself to get dressed and go back out there to play her part. Her makeup was already on, her costume was waiting for her on the floor, the audience outside was clamoring for the show to start. She mustn’t let them down. So what if some vacuous great aunt had congratulated her on finding "a man just like your father"?

She licked her lips. The tang of salt on her tongue was comforting, its bitterness a truth to hold onto.

Nobody wants damaged goods.

She watched the shadows moving under the door and felt like she might burst with her hatred, her anger at their inconstancy, the way the light played with the dark as if they were lovers, brazen and unafraid. She leaned her head back against the tile wall, and a ripple of cold raced down her neck and her shoulders until it reached her fingertips.

“Clara.” Her father again. Shadows filled the line under the door, driving away the light, and she could almost feel her father’s hot breath on her face, his hands moving between her legs. “Are you coming?”

The roar in her ears was deafening.

She plugged the drain, turned the faucet on, and watched the tub fill with hot water around her. Forever didn't have to be frightening. She closed her eyes. Forever could be the warmth that suffused her limbs as the water rose, the sudden hush as she slid down to plunge her head under the surface. Forever could be quiet and peaceful. Safe.

Forever could be her escape.