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PEN by Neil Clark

June 24, 2020

They put a bomb in my pen. It’s like that film Speed. In Speed, your man Dennis Hopper puts a bomb in a bus. Tells everyone as soon as the speedometer in the bus goes below 50 miles per hour, the bus goes boom. That’s what they did to my pen. If I stop writing, if ink stops leaving my pen, the pen goes boom. Bombs in buses, they do a lot of damage. Bombs in pens? Maybe not so much. But these days, who knows? I’m fucked if I’m going to stop writing to find out. My wrist is already hurting. Some of the other coffee shop punters are coming up to me and asking if I’m alright. They’re saying I look stressed. Wired. A bit on the deranged side. “Maybe go easy on the coffee,” they’re saying. “I couldn’t drink another one anyway,” I’m saying. “My hands are sort of tied.” “What do you mean?” they’re saying. I’m explaining. Explaining while writing. Explaining about the pen. And the bomb. And the inkometer. Sweat’s now coming off my forehead and my hand is smudging what’s on the page. They seem concerned, these coffee shop punters. Understandable, I suppose. I suppose they’re just like me - they don’t want blown up too. “Who’s ‘they’?” they’re asking. “What?” I’m saying. “Well, you said ‘they’ put a bomb in your pen,” they’re saying. “Who’s ‘they’? And how?” “You think I’m in a place to find that out?” I’m saying. “I’m just here to deal with the problem at hand, like Keanu and like Sandra.” They could do a runner at this point. They could leave me in here alone. Me and my pen and the bomb. That’s what they tell you to do these days. Run. Hide. Tell. I’m saying I’ve got a bomb in my hand. That could arguably be classed as terrorism. “I’m not the Dennis Hopper here.” I’m saying. I’m now finding myself a bit on the self-conscious side. Guantanamo Bay never featured on my list of dream holidays. Re-emphasis of my earlier Keanu and Sandra point is needed. “I’m Sandra fucking Bullock! I’m Keanu fucking Reeves!” This seems to be resonating. Amazing what a ‘fucking’ here and a ‘fucking’ there does. Luckily, they seem to have seen the film and know what I’m on about. “How can we help?” they’re saying. “Words,” I’m saying. “I need words, like Sandra and Keanu needed road.” Now they’re shouting words at me. But the words they’re shouting are some amount of shite and I can’t work like this. It’s all just free association, no sentences. “Pen!” “Bomb!” “Ink!” “Bleeding!” “Bleeding Ink!” “Pen!” “Somebody already said pen!” It’s like a gaggle of hens. I can’t write a gaggle of hens. Buck buck cluck cluck. See? Doesn’t work. “Stop!” I’m saying. My whole arm is seizing up now, but I don’t dare take the nib off the paper to give it a shake and a stretch. Everyone in the coffee shop has left their laptops to gather round my table. Twenty-five, maybe thirty punters. All of them trying to be the hero. “A different approach, please!” I’m saying. “Do the words need to make any sense?” they’re asking. I have no clue. “Better if they make sense,” I’m saying. “Just to be on the safe side.” There’s books. It’s one of those coffee shops where there’s book cases. “We could just read a book to you,” someone is saying.” Good idea. The consensus is that this is a good idea. They grab books. Piles of books are now everywhere around me. They start giving me options, shouting hundreds of titles at me. Fifty Shades of Grey is a popular choice, but I manage to overrule. “Read out one word of that and I’m blowing us all up,” I’m saying. There’s more debate. Debate about what type of book – poetry or prose, fiction or non-fiction. High-brow, low-brow. Some clown is still insisting on Fifty Shades, but common sense prevails, and the clown gets banished from the group and barred from the shop for life. We settle on… The Grapes of Wrath. Some punter is starting to read. “To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows…” “Wait!” I find myself saying. “I’m not sure about this. I think I feel my pen heating up. This is plagiarism. Maybe we can’t do plagiarism. Maybe the pen blows up if we do plagiarism!” “Fuck sake,” someone is saying. “I don’t remember the bomb on the Speed bus having this many rules,” somebody else is saying. “Yeah,” somebody else is chiming in. “That was the beauty of that film - the simplicity of the premise.” They’re all starting to chat among themselves now. They’re discussing Speed 2: Cruise Control and how it wasn’t as good as the first. How it especially suffered from not having Keanu Reeves in it. Now they’re weighing up the merits of Keanu Reeves as an actor. How bad Bram Stoker’s Dracula was. How good John Wick was. How he’s pretty much just doing Ted from the Bill & Ted films in every single role ever. “Can we please focus!” I’m saying. But the crowd is starting to dissipate and pair off and get their phones out to look up Dennis Hopper’s IMDB page. Somebody has brought me a chamomile tea. They’re putting it on my table and patting me on the back. I’m sipping it and admiring the amount of road I’ve just covered. That was a good wee writing session. And in the end, nobody got blown up. Same as in that film Speed.

STILL LIFE, WAYNE COUNTY, IN AUGUST by Aliceanna Stopher

June 24, 2020

Buddy of mine used to have me over before his girl walked out on him. For supper, you know, or cards. Maybe beers, if one of us was going through it. We weren’t usually, back then. More like, we thought we were, but really we weren’t. I’d bring him Dad or Bert, he’d bring me working, or not. We laid it all out, sorted through it.

I ran into him on my way to work, this one night before we was supposed to get together. He cancelled, standing all crooked, thumbs stabbed through his belt loops, and I thought he was joking. I asked him what he’d said to make her run off like she did.

He told her she was ex-wife material. “She didn’t take too kindly.” Go figure.

I kept turning it over. Guess I’m still turning it over. What did it mean to feel into the future? To have a certainty the person you loved was going to break you, to see someday-pain wrapped up inside that somebody; know inch by bloody inch that pain would birth itself out. Know that cost and decide to risk it anyway.

He’d said ex-wife. Wife comes with that, too, but I guess it’d been hard for her to hear it.

Smack between coming and going, all I said was, “You’re a dumbass.” I didn’t have anything to offer. I didn’t know much about risk, or love.

Bert would call and check in, not just on me, but on dad through me. I must have been easier to talk to.

Those days I let her burrow in. I loved it when she’d tell me, “Don’t should all over yourself.” All that wisdom don’t ring true anymore.

The cracks started small. Before everything else, there was this day I was talking up this redhead in line at the post office. Real cute, had that Whitesville look about her, but a sweet smile, not a thing wrong with her teeth; trying my hand at charming, telling her I had to get my dad a sheet of one-cent stamps because they’d upped the price of postage again. He was always forgetting and melting down when his letters–all cramped chicken scratch–took their time coming back to him, undelivered.

“Kind of you,” she’d said. She fiddled with her purse strap, readjusted it on her shoulder. I was next in line.

“Ain’t kindness,” I said. “I should do it, so I do.”

She seemed disappointed then, or bored. “Well now,” she said, “don’t should all over yourself,” so I excused myself quick because it felt all the sudden like I was talking up my own sister. People make a lot of cracks about West Virginia. You know, and I shouldn't have to say. I loved Bertie–I love Bertie. The normal amount in normal ways. You know what I’m getting at.

Forgot the stamps entirely. Called Bert and asked, straight out, where she’d gotten all that phone-call wisdom from and she said, “NA. What’d you think? Does it matter?”

Like that, air out of a balloon. I wasn’t sure why it mattered—only that it did.

After Bert got divorced she moved back to Wayne County, in with Dad. Not ideal. She’d been living out on the coast a long time, maybe too long to come home. When she was married she was always saying it was easier to stay clean up where she was. I don’t know about all that. Her husband had some money. That’s always the way of it.

They were doing all right, Bertie and Dad, for a while. Making coffee, leaving enough in the pot for the other, that kind of thing. Bertie took over stamp duty.

I spent more time on the job, or alone in my apartment, or walking the road ditches up the mountain, failing to take risks.

Everything was fine, but it wasn’t just the bedbugs that spoiled it. Yes, I should’ve told her, but there were a lot of things I should’ve done. I knew that, even then. I knew my sister and our father didn’t see eye to eye on many things. I knew how hard it was to try to know a man who doesn’t, most days, without the right pills, really know himself. God, I knew that. Likewise it had to have been tough on him being around her, feeling like maybe the way things had all shook out in her life were a little bit his fault. Maybe more than a little bit.

It was a bright afternoon.

That I remember.

I walked in, could smell coffee on and thought, good sign. Up the stairs and there was Dad, squat in front of the TV watching Judge Mablean.

“Shouldn’t you be working?” he asked, “It’s the middle of the day.”

“Shouldn’t you be–”

That’s when I heard Bertie stomping somewhere nearby, tap-steps, rapid-like. Then, hollering. God-awful. Like she was being stabbed all over.

Dad hopped up and I followed behind, waited like a bloodhound as he eased open one of the bedroom doors. There she was, slapping at herself, her hair big, thin arms flailing, screaming, “They’re crawling all over me, get ’em off,” over and over.

Big moon eyes, body—a knot of baby snakes.

Up close, my fists clamped around her wrists, and I still didn’t see any bugs. If I were a better brother I would’ve known that didn’t matter, known she could feel them, known that was enough. I just held her there, her hollering tongue a limp fish, fixating on the raw patches on her arms, her neck, her cheeks.

She moved in with an old friend from high school not long after that.

Then, there was all what came next.

THE STRAY SHAR-PEIS OF OHIO CITY by Meghan Louise Wagner

June 23, 2020

Every party we went to in the summer of 1999 was lit up red. Red drapes fell over windows. Red vinyl chairs sat in kitchens next to red retro tables. Red walls vibrated with red Belle and Sebastian. Red wine gushed from boxes on countertops. Red signs glowed in dive bars. Red Schwinn bikes got stolen off our friends’ porches. Red hair dye spotted our shower mats. Red Chuck Taylors tapped in bathroom stalls.

We were only babies when we heard about the stray shar-peis of Ohio City. Mara, a thirty-something veteran of the scene who claimed to have once been a runway model in New York City, told us about them. She held court around a glass coffee table covered in ash trays and coffee mugs of merlot. A long, white Virginia Slim extended from her long white fingers. Smoke curled around her visage, giving her the sheen of a once faded runway model from New York City.

“They travel in a pack,” Mara said, “and roam the streets. They come out late, late at night. They only show themselves to the desperate, the lost, the delirious.”

We didn’t believe her. We laughed. We bombarded her with questions. Refutations. Challenges.

“Shar-peis aren’t street dogs.”

“They’d get eaten by other animals.”

“But where did they come from?”

“People breed shar-peis on purpose, they wouldn’t just let them roam.”

Mara crumpled her Virginia Slim into the ashtray and we competed to light the next one for her. We held the flames of Bic lighters out to her and she kissed her cigarette to each of them as if she were anointing us. We basked in our own glow. We wanted to hear more. We didn’t believe her but we wanted more.

***

The truth, though, is that we forgot about the stray shar-peis of Ohio City. We stopped being babies out of a mixture of impatience and necessity. We got bus passes and coffee shop jobs. We sold plasma for beer money and rent. We left bars with the wrong men. We got stranded in the Flats and had to call friends from pay phones. We wiped blood from the backs of our boyfriends’ heads when they passed out on our living room floors. We begged our parents in the suburbs to just write another check. We broke down sobbing in brightly lit hot dog shops at three a.m. We screamed at each other from second story windows to come back inside and stay the night. We blew off work to feed our hangovers. We skipped classes to drink vodka and Sprites on backyard patios. We got called groupies and sluts and dumb-drunk-lushes. We borrowed our parents’ cars to drive each other to job interviews and abortions and airports. We shoplifted cigarettes and sugar-free Kool-Ade packets. We flirted with lazy eyed doormen to let us into five-dollar shows for free. We went out looking for madness. We went out looking for more.

***

Some of us learned better than others. Some of us settled down in suburban duplexes and office jobs. Some of us stopped sneaking into concerts on weeknights. Some of us gained weight from having kids instead of guzzling happy hour margaritas. Some of us moved to New York City for grad school or graphic design jobs. Some of us stayed and slinked around parties, waiting for someone to light our cigarettes.

***

It was a couple winters later. The sides of I-90 were covered in snow but the road was clear. The travel coffee mugs in our cars were filled with Black Velvet and Diet Coke. People used to mistake us for teetotalers at shows because we always carried those mugs.

“It’s so cool,” sensible men used to say, “that you don’t drink like all these other wasteoids.”

Inevitably, something we would say or do would shatter the illusion for them. We’d spray verbal venom mixed with cheap whiskey, trip on our high heels, try to make out with other girls’ boyfriends in basement bathrooms. We would earn our reputations.

But it was on one of those cold nights in the early 2000’s, when lavender clouds streaked the sky above the highway, that we sat at a stoplight on a side street in Ohio City near the I-90 on-ramp. We felt drunk and defeated from another night that didn’t go our way. We waited for the light to change, to be able to go back to our only comfortable state, which was in-motion. Onto the next thing. We needed something else because what we had was never going to be alright enough.

There were no other cars on the road. No reasons not to just go. The streetlamps cast an amber haze over the intersection. It felt like a cloak of invisibility. Because maybe that’s all we were this whole time. Invisible. We reached for our travel mugs, we cracked the windows, we lit our own cigarettes.

From the right hand side of the car, a brownish blob wiggled off the curb. We thought nothing of it. It was just some stray dog crossing the street.

We stopped.

We jerked our heads and saw four more wrinkled dogs, all tottering along. Their hides were tan and smooth, not chubby like regular household shar-peis. Their strong legs looked more like those of a pit-bull’s. They glided in a regal line and pranced over the snow crusted curb, glittering in the sodium glow of the highway entrance.

Green light flashed across the windshield. It was finally our turn to go.

But we sat. We sat and watched the stray shar-peis.

WHEELS by D. T. Robbins

June 22, 2020

Fat-boy Brad, the same Brad who went, Hey, Cheese Factory!, to me on the bus because my teeth are a little yellow, stood in the middle of the street with Chris, the same Chris who almost drowned me in his pool last summer showing me what a washing machine was (you flip someone over and over and over and over until they can’t catch their breath and they start to cry and someone’s mom comes out and yells, What the hell are you doing to that boy?), looking at my bike, telling me how fucking gay it is because it’s white and only queers have white bikes, and am I a queer? I tell them my dad says I’m getting a new bike soon, maybe for my tenth birthday coming up, a Mongoose BMX bike with pegs, so Parker can ride on the back and we can jump the ramps we made in the woods behind his house. I look at Parker, he looks away. Brad and Chris go, if you’re getting a new bike you should just fuck this one up. I ask what they mean and they say they’ll show me. Chris stands on the back wheel while fat-boy Brad stands on the other. They start jumping and the wheels start bending and Parker starts laughing so I laugh too because Parker and I are fourth graders and Brad and Chris are seventh graders and that’s just how it works. Like that, they say. I get to walking my bike back to my house on the other side of the neighborhood but then I think dad’s going to be pissed so I start crying as I’m walking. Sure enough, dad sees the bike and flips out and starts asking what happened and I say it wasn’t me but I don’t want to say who did it because Chris already almost killed me once and who knows if he’ll try again? But I end up telling dad and we get in the car and dad’s driving around the neighborhood looking for fat-boy Brad and Chris and when we find them dad hops out the car and gets in their faces and asks what the hell is their problem doing that to a boy’s bike? They say I told them they could and dad says he doesn’t care if I said they could or not, it doesn’t give them the right to destroy someone else’s property. Dad tells them if they ever come near me or my bike again he’ll…and I don’t really hear or understand that part very well. Dad drives us back home but the whole time he’s hollering at me and telling me I shouldn’t let boys like that pick on me and I need to stand up for myself and act like a man. We get in the house and mom asks what happened but dad ignores her and gets his belt instead. I don’t get the Mongoose BMX bike for my birthday.

***

I know dad only bought me this Jeep—an ’89 Suzuki Samurai—to keep me from starting any more shit. Guess he got tired of me calling the cops every time he shoved me down the hallway after I told him my little brother and I want to leave shithole Mississippi and go back to California to live with mom, that I called him a deadbeat dad since he didn’t pay child support (because fuck your kids, right?) and that’s the only reason mom couldn’t afford to fly down to Louisiana for the court hearing and that’s the only reason he got custody of us instead of her. He thinks buying me this Jeep is going to keep me happy and quiet because that’s what keeps every sixteen-year-old happy and quiet. Except he’s wrong. All it’ll do is keep me away from him and the stepmother. Well, seeing as how it’s the first day of spring break, I decide to get the hell out of the house and go somewhere, anywhere. The Jeep is parked in the garage because dad wanted it out of the driveway this morning when he was washing and waxing that turd green Camry he’s trying to sell. He and the stepmother left for work so I’m alone and there’s only so many times I can jerk off and, besides, there’s a girl who’ll let me touch her tits so I think I’m going to see her. I grab my keys and throw the Jeep in reverse and haul ass. At first, the crunch of metal on metal is muffled by the Jeep’s exhaust but when I back out further I see the whole side of the Camry torn to shit—dents six inches deep, black lines and scratches like the striking surface of a matchbox, the side mirror dangling by a single wire. I start screaming, oh fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, and jump out the Jeep to see the damage. I’m dead and I know it. I call the girl who lets me touch her tits and she doesn’t know what to do so I call the stepmother. I tell her dad is going to kill me and I’m really sorry, I should’ve looked behind me when I went in reverse, can she please talk to dad because I’m afraid of what he’ll do to me.

Dad and the stepmother pull up in her truck and dad steps out and starts inspecting the Camry. I look at the stepmother and she raises her hand like, calm down it’s okay. Dad looks at her, then me. You’re grounded for a month, he says and walks into the house.

***

The judge says I’m old enough to choose who I want to live with.

Dad sits up in his bed. The stepmother pulls the blanket over her face. It’s cold. It’s always fucking cold in this house. He asks, what’re you going to do? I’m going back to California, I say. He tells me I’m making a mistake, says the Jeep stays with him.

***

The car mom’s been letting me use to get to my job at the movie theater just got repossessed and she says if I want a new one then I can call dad and ask him for the money because she doesn’t have it. I don’t want to fucking call him. It’s not that it’s been three years since I’ve been back in California or that he never came to my high school graduation or that he’s still trying to get custody of my little brother. What I don’t want to tell him is that we’d just been homeless for the past six months or so because mom got us evicted from our house in Ontario. Mom says she couldn’t pay the rent because dad wasn’t paying child support but somehow she could afford to pay for the new furniture, somehow she could afford to take that trip up north to see that guy she’s been talking to. I don’t want to call dad because I want to talk to someone about all of this but I sure as shit don’t want that someone to be him. Fuck. I still need a car and I still have no one else to ask for help. The movie theater pays shit and most of my money goes to helping with groceries or the cell phone bill we’re behind on. When he answers, he sounds tired. His voice is softer. Not a whisper, but close. I ask what he’s doing, he says he’s feeding a bottle to my new baby sister, Grace. We talk about that, how she’s doing. He says everything’s great, they’re all great. I say, good. He says, I’m sorry, son. If I had the money, I’d give it to you, I really would. He says he wants to help me. I say I know he does, and I mean it. After we hang up, I get in bed and cry into my pillow for a really long time.

***

I just wired you five thousand dollars your grandma wanted you to have when she passed, dad says. I ask how things have been since she died. Someone finally ended up buying her house, so that’s a weight off his shoulders. We talk about my brother and sister, Grace and Graham—how smart Grace is, how she’s kicking ass in all these speech debates at her high school. Graham is Graham, loves his video games. He asks how my kids are. He wants to see them one day, says maybe the kids and I and my fiancé should visit Mississippi next Thanksgiving or something. He asks if things have gotten easier with my ex-wife, if we’re getting along. I tell him that things are better, getting better, there’s good days and bad days. It’ll all work out, he says. He thinks I should put the five grand toward a new car.

GIRLHOOD by Jodi Aleshire

June 21, 2020

A body washes ashore in the recommended section of my Spotify podcast radar. This isn’t the first or the fifth or the third time it’s happened and I’ve long since lost track of the tallies meant to keep them in check. Their faces have become nothing more than the black censored bars used with relish by shitty live television and their bodies, marionette pieces, hocks of meat articulated in a mockery of form. The podcast entices me to listen—a flashy title, a well-made header, a snappy byline—offer a glimpse into an abjection of innocence, voyeurism without the guilty intent. They tell me, words blinking in bright pink neon, THIS COULD BE YOU. This body is every body and everybody is just an accident waiting to happen, a crime scene waiting to happen, a byline on the nightly news just waiting to happen, a catchy warning to stay sexy and don’t get murdered just waiting to happen. Silly, stupid girl. Didn’t anyone ever tell you to carry your keys between your fingers?

In the mid-twentieth century, it wasn’t uncommon to pull bodies from peat bogs, mummified in the swampy murk. A glimpse into a world we hardly know, into barbarianism we think ourselves past. I find myself entranced by these bodies and their buried history and I’ve fallen in love with the Windeby Girl. Her skin mottled, ancient browns and aged like leather. Her hair shorn close to her skull, a blindfold over her eyes, hands bound. I’ve memorized the planes of her face. She’s beautiful, a bug trapped in amber, a tragedy frozen in time. They thought she’d been killed as punishment for adultery, the archaeologists who scoured her remains for a story; murdered. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen and I too once couldn’t have been older sixteen but that time is gone and I wish now that I could have been there in the muck and the cold and taken her hand, promised that things would be alright. I wish I could have been there as this woman-girl-child weighed down by planks and rocks, died. The memory of her murder is sour on my tongue and I wonder if anyone in the incensed masses thought to remember they were once children too.

A lifetime ago, I stood in the Chicago Art Institute, shifting my posture to mirror the stance of one of Degas’s thousands of dancers. She was a delicate, towering statue of bronze, her fabric tutu aged and weathered brown, his little dancer. My feet, turned to fourth position, lodged me in my place as I longed to touch her, to stroke my fingers over the cast of her hair. I pray she had a better life than the one history has written for the petit rats in the Parisian ballet. Men lurking in the wings with unburdened bodies and propositions. Girls, poised and bleeding, hungry. The sordid back halls of the Palais Garnier float, arabesque and haunting, through tunnels of memories that aren’t my own but I understand them, don’t we all understand them? What haven’t we all sacrificed to let the show go on? What haven’t we sacrificed to survive? I read once that Degas crafted multiples of his sculptures, built body after body until he was satisfied with the way her legs curled, her face quirked, her arms beckoned. This girl, this child in a world she was not meant for, is frozen in time and I cannot shake the feeling I would have loved her too, something desperate and open. How many versions of her were touched by unwanted hands; how many versions were thrown away?

I remember, still, the day I learned Marie Antoinette had only been a child when set onto the path that would kill her. Powder pale, throat bared for the bite of a blade. She was nothing more than another child-bride, nothing more than another lamb sent to the slaughter, her own body the meal and the means of making. Ribs split open on a rack, lock-picked open and apart. I wonder, some days when I feel only able for glutton, would we have been friends? Her and I, two children without childhoods, taken before we’re given a chance to taste anything more. Just wrist bones and knocked knees and butterfly lashes. We lavish her name with acts of treason without proof, qu'ils mangent de la brioche, but it’s bitter in my mouth. Did she ever have a chance to eat with her hands, unscrupled and unwatched, a girl once again? I think of her now in soft shades of periwinkle, robin’s egg, blue, in the fierce glint of a blade splitting the time between then and this, childhood and all that is left. Did she ever have a chance to know better? I try to remember her whole.

As a child, barely girl but not nearly woman, a decade or a century or a second ago, I remember tiptoeing down the hall of my best friend’s creaking farmhouse. I felt like I’d walked over someone’s grave. As we laid together, sprawled on his bed, he told me about the ghosts in the walls and the pain sunken into the bones of the house. His sister’s tragedy in the next room salting the earth and tainting the home. A child too. She never told their parents, because that wasn’t what good girls did, was it? In the present now, only a tightrope’s fall from the girl then, I think of all the women, the bones building up my exquisite corpse, all gone mad, robbed of something beating and vital. A rabbit quick pulse and magpie longing, girlhood is a fever-pitched dream. A poison. A butcher’s knife. A scalpel. A series of rungs on a ladder rotting under your hands. Flashpoint tragedies pinned, stigmata, linked through time. One day you’ll choke on everything you should have been, broken from the bell jar, thrown from the water. We were never given a chance.

CHALK by R. J. Patteson

June 20, 2020

Look at a man’s shoes, would you look? You can tell a lot, they say. People look at your feet and see the left toe of your boot scuffed black and they don’t know that you do it for the wind, man. That you kick the shift up, up, up, man, you kick it. And for what?

You say, “The wind, man, I do it for the wind.”

And you scare your mother and other people’s mothers when you ride by, and maybe you get too close or you get too loud. They look at their sons through the mirrors of their station wagons as you ride too close and tell them to never get a tattoo and to never date a girl with a tattoo and to never get a motorbike or else they’ll die all gruesome.

So why, man, why? It’s the mothers, man.

And people don’t understand when the work gets slow and the money gets less and you can pick only one, man. You live in a place where the leaves change colors and the snow falls and you sell the one with heated seats and keep the one with half as many wheels. For what? That’s what they say and you just smile back and tell them you plan to take the bus.

They look at you like you’ve got a mental disability, man.

The snow turns to slush and the slush turns to rain and the rain turns to sun and people waiting in line at the bus stop go from boots to running shoes to socks-in-sandals to just sandals. You give your cousin a call and he says he’s at work but the garage isn’t locked, man, and you open your cousin’s garage and take the greased bedsheet and throw it to the floor and sit on the tattered seat and grip the bars and lift the steel with your legs, man. You lift it.

Then you grow your hair a little too long and you ride through the country and you scare the cows and you race the horses and the whole time you’re thinking about how you don’t get what people don’t get. They look at you all confused, man, and they always say to ride safe and wear your helmet and ask if you’ve signed up as an organ donor yet.

“I knew a guy whose brother died in a motorcycle accident,” they tell you. “Why are you single? You should have a wife of your own. You should have kids.”

So you swipe right one day and she swipes right and her profile says that she teaches kindergarten classes and you ask her if she’d like to meet up for coffee and she looks through your profile and says yes. She says yes, man. And you’re drinking orange pekoe, man, when you tell her you were only half-truthful that you owned a car and she smiles a fake smile and looks at her hands for a while.

But she doesn’t leave, man.

She asks if you can take her out and the next day you squeeze her head into your spare helmet and the two of you scare the cows and race the horses and she digs her nails into your chest so she doesn’t fly off the back, man. And when you get to your apartment, she pushes you on your back, man, and she undoes your belt and pulls off your shirt and digs her nails into your chest, man.

But you’re just the notch because she doesn’t call you back and she even blocks your number, man. She blocks it. Now she can make her father angry and she can wear a Harley Davidson T-shirt around her friends and wait for them to mention it so she can tell them about the time she dug her nails into a man with long hair—that’s you, man.

Now the road is lonely and the air bites and the leaves fall down, down man, they fall and your cousin calls to ask if you need to use his garage again.

You’re not paying attention, man. You’re not.

Your phone is buzzing and you’re thinking it’s your cousin when you should be thinking about some important information that was told to you by your motorcycle instructor when you were seventeen. When your instructor stood in front of a chalkboard and said, “Hey gang, how’s everyone doing today? We’ll break in an hour, for about an hour, and there’s a sandwich place across the street just so you know. But first, let’s talk about something that’s so important, gang. Let me see a show of hands on who can tell me how many beers you can have before riding? How many beers, gang? The real answer is zero, gang. Zero beers, because a motorbike isn’t like a car or a truck, gang, there’s no seatbelts or airbags and requires your full attention.”

It requires your full attention, man.

And small rocks pull your tires and you go down, down man, you go sideways. “Eighty-feet,” said your instructor all those years ago as he ate his ham sandwich for about an hour. A man can slide on the road for eighty-feet when he goes down, man. That’s you, man. Your body slides and the road eats through your denim before it eats through your skin before it eats through your fatty layer of flesh before it eats through your muscle before it eats through your bone.

Somewhere there’s an instructor who’s telling his class how your body painted a line on the road like red chalk. You wish he was telling them how you did it for the wind, man, but he’s not. He’s showing your helmet, how it’s worn flat on one side like lipstick, how if you hadn’t been wearing it your head would have looked like the perfect cross-section of the human brain that you see in textbooks. He’s blaming you for the increase in his motorcycle insurance.

FAILURE TO BREATHE by Emily Withnall

June 17, 2020

The diaphragm wheezed and gasped. It was a broken accordion and with each push, the squeaking and squawking that emerged were evidence that it should surrender. There was no hope and what’s more, the attempts were painful—and embarrassing.

The diaphragm felt defeated. This was an old, familiar feeling. It had never lived up to its full capacity, but over the years, awkward swimming lessons and less awkward singing lessons had strengthened it. The diaphragm knew what it was like to be useful and strong and to provide the satisfying, deep inhale and long sustained exhale. It was capable and even when it didn’t live up to its full potential, its self-esteem was always growing.

The diaphragm had never liked roller coasters but it had to admit that the roller coaster was the best metaphor for its trajectory. Roller coasters were clichés though, so the diaphragm felt it had to reconsider this framing. Maybe it was like hiking a mountain. It had done well with hikes, but not with hikes over 10,000 feet. Pumping air through asthmatic lungs was a tall order. Still, the diaphragm had done the best it could. What had all appeared like an uphill path, leading past the stars and to the very edges of the ever-expanding universe, was just like everyone else’s path. A lovely, if arduous, ascent… but with nowhere left to go but down.

The diaphragm felt guilt in admitting defeat. What would happen to the body if it just laid down and took a forever nap? Would it be accused of murder? It had never heard of a diaphragm being accused of murder, but there was a first for everything. An accusation would surely lead to conviction. A life behind bars. That wouldn’t do the body any good, but the criminal justice system further breaks what is already broken, so such an outcome would be in keeping with history.

The diaphragm was glum at this point and wanted to rewind time, but time was like a cassette tape with all the ribbon hanging out and knotted. Even if the diaphragm could untangle the ribbon and find a pencil to slowly wind it back in, would reliving the pain be worth it for the joy? Especially if it turned out that the tape was Alanis Morissette. It would even be worth caterwauling to “You Oughta Know” if the diaphragm could just fix some things. If it could go back and choose not to self-sabotage. If it could go back and do deeper therapy.

The diaphragm had been rendered a sad, flat balloon because the body was wracked with grief. Love, the kind that seeps in and stays, had alchemized between the body it belonged to and the body containing another diaphragm. The other diaphragm was even weaker and rarely provided its body with a full breath. There were sad reasons for this but also hope for breathing at full capacity. The two bodies felt promise and possibility and a love with family in it—a new feeling for both of the bodies. Together, both diaphragms experienced breathing that was deeper than ever before. The future was full of the richest oxygen.

Then, the other body walked away. The love stayed behind because it was too late to get it out. Love had spread everywhere and filled spaces not occupied by organs. Love blocked the middle of the chest like a bandage applied so tight the wound festers and skin dies at the edges.

The diaphragm supposed that it should blame love, or the chest, or the lungs. Or maybe it should blame the air, so filled with coal dust and exhaust and micro-plastics. Maybe, in not trying, it was actually saving itself.

NO, YEAH. by Erin Gallagher

June 16, 2020

“You can play games or you can end it and move on.”

Lit by twinkly string lights atop a shiny marble counter, apparently we’re not fucking around anymore. Soft pink and blue bulbs create a calm ambiance, steam rises from big porcelain mugs of herbal tea, and we are sparing no emotional expense. Play games: win, lose, flip your phone upside-down and wait two hours, three hours, reciprocate every unit of time you’ve ever waited, multiplied by three. We’re not talking about me (this time), and my advice is out of character, it’s...hopeful:

“Yeah, no, maybe just act as you normally would. Don’t do anything impulsively when you’re frustrated. You won’t get what you’re looking for, and it will make you feel worse.” I nod, take a sip of sparkling water, as a mature, well-adjusted adult does. I guess I never found it necessary to...give myself the same advice. Overthinking? I’m not familiar. The constant need to get in the last word? I’ve never heard of it.

In the winter, sufficiently settled into my new home, the sky began to darken earlier and earlier, and I started going on first dates. Many dates. How many cocktail bars are in New York City? Waves rose up and crashed, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, all booked. Reprieve of quiet for a few weeks followed, while the pack narrowed and we allowed ourselves to lean into the mortifying reality of being known, before inevitably, turning into nothing: wisps of air, almost like a ghost. But not technically ghosting,

“I didn’t technically ghost him,” I clutch a vodka soda under my arm, my focus remaining on the glowing screen before me.

“You did, and you should feel bad. Every time someone ghosts, the world becomes a worse place.” I’m being scolded at Brooklyn Bowl, surrounded by tie-dye T-shirts, she goes on, “We’re hurting each other and not thinking about it. Each time, we make it normal, and it shouldn’t be.”

I shift my focus to my vodka soda. I’ve been making excuses for myself. A wave crashes upon me and I struggle because I feel too much. But yet, after I find my footing, I continue on as though I’m still underwater. I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t. I see stars in my periphery, wipe a loose piece of cheap glitter out of my eyelashes. My tab is still open at the bar. In the back of my mind I dream of telepathically closing it, from inside of the backseat of a taxi. I could bypass the crowd and go straight outside, ask the driver if it’s possible to take me back to two weeks ago, when I handled something poorly. The band starts to play. In a few hours, karma will make its way back around and I’ll be hurt the same way I hurt someone else. What would Co-Star say about this?

Which is worse: sitting down and writing about how I’m feeling in a meaningful way, or going on a first date and using self-deprecating humor as a defense mechanism, while I get drunk in the middle of the week, all in the name of pursuing monogamy? I don’t want a boyfriend, but I do want to be a writer, I’ll go on one more date. It’s a new year, but I never said what that would mean. Speak what into existence? I want whichever cocktail has gin. It comes in a jar? Sure, fine. These are pictures of my dog, these are stories about the years I traveled the world, these are brief silences. This isn’t it. We part ways after one drink, and once he crosses the street, I go back inside, have another round and give my phone number to the bartender. It’s for my writing.

Blue (sometimes green) and grey bubbles carry my mood up and down, waves roll onto the shore and retreat into the sea. You’ll have more time to focus on your life when you’re no longer checking the views on your Instagram story. We share our anecdotes and we overhear them all the same, over glasses of wine, coffee, the boys behind me in the bubble tea shop, the girls next to me on the subway. As I write these words, a girl at the counter in the cafe speaks about a guy who is a “bad texter.” My friends and I exchange knowing glances. I bite my lip. Who do you know who is a “good texter?” We tell each other “you’re too good for this,” we type it, we speak it, we scrawl it across walls that we’ve built up around ourselves. I say it confidently to the people in my life. To myself I know it to be true, but sometimes I waver and I don’t know why. I wake up in the morning to messages I sent to a friend, after walking with her to her apartment in the middle of the night,

“...You’re one of the best people I know...Please don’t sleep on the floor...”

One ghost will haunt me a little more than the rest. At low points, I’ll look for attention in the wrong places, but I won’t act on it, I don’t believe in ghosts. (But can you be afraid of something you don’t believe in?) I used to live in a flat that was haunted, on the twelfth floor of a mint green building in Hong Kong. We banned ghost talk inside the apartment because we were scared of angering her. This ghost had a feminine energy. I can’t explain it. I tell this story on a third date, in a cash-only dive bar on my block that has a name I can’t remember or maybe I’ve never learned. I can see in his eyes, he thinks that I’m naive. He’s looking down at my chest, maybe he’s not as interested in ghost stories.

We drink natural wine at a dimly lit countertop. I wore this same top on a different first date two months earlier. It snowed that earlier night, and I walked to the bar, wishing I could just glide past the adorned windows and continue to venture through the cold. I pulled a second tiny straw from behind the counter, because one tiny straw is not sufficient to absorb a gin and tonic, and he asked if I needed to drink faster to deal with being around him. This isn’t it. I drew a heart in the snow on a car window outside, spent the rest night thinking of the falafel wrap I would buy on my way home. This time, the mood is lighter. My paisley blouse is under a spring jacket, the uncharacteristically warmer weather is discombobulating. It’s still winter, and I’m still booking myself too busy. He knows more about natural wine than I do. I don’t know anything about natural wine. I make a mental note to bring my friends here, to this place; we’ll tell the same kinds of stories and I’ll remember the idea of someone sitting with me in front of the natural wine and oysters, someone who I’ll never see again. I’ve never liked oysters.

It’s all fun, until one morning, or one evening, or one moment, it’s not. How well do we really know anyone? I feel clear-headed and calm, the peace that comes from having the upper hand. I don’t play games, but I don’t want to lose. The peace descends into chaos, circles that I’ve talked my way around and around; I don’t want to spend any more time trying to figure him out, but inevitably, I will and I do. Friends I’ve known my whole life still surprise me. Everyone we know will either be there forever, in our life, or, they won’t. This will last or it will end. It’s simple. It’s simple.

Low expectations, or disappointment? Delete the number, or never save it in the first place? These things come in waves. These things are all fun and games. I feel relieved. I don’t feel anything. I feel rejected. I feel neglected. I feel foolish. I’m smiling in the back of an Uber, going over the Williamsburg Bridge. I’m crying on the street on a rainy Tuesday morning. How much of the feeling is the drama? How much do you like the attention? What have you learned about yourself?

“You’re saying you don’t?,” I ask across a small table, fingers tapping on an almost-empty bottle of beer.

He shakes his head, “I do. I said, ‘no, yeah,’ but I don’t think you heard the 'yeah.’”

PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION by Zac Smith

June 15, 2020

Emo Phillips stands on a train. He thinks about all the fucked-up people he knows and wonders if people think he’s as fucked-up as he thinks other people are. The train conductor/engineer/driver person clicks on the intercom and thanks everyone for riding the train. Emo Phillips feels like he has never been thanked for riding public transportation.

“Hey, am I fucked-up?” Emo Phillips asks.

“What,” says Dan Brown. Dan Brown is looking at an advertisement for furniture. The train conductor/engineer/driver person clicks on the intercom and apologizes for the slow pace of the train. Emo Phillips takes off his mittens. The advertisements for furniture are very sexually explicit–in one advertisement, there is a picture of two men having passionate sex on top of a dresser–and Dan Brown feels incredibly unloved. He doesn’t want to be on the train anymore.

“Like, am I weird, I guess,” Emo Phillips says. “Like, is there stuff weird about me. To people”

“Yeah, dude, uh…I guess. Or not,” says Don Brown (easier to type than Dan Brown). The furniture advertisement seems really fucked up. “But yeah, probably.” He imagines himself making love on top of a dresser for a photoshoot. He imagines himself being paid $7,000 in twenty-dollar bills for the photoshoot. He imagines not telling his lover about the photoshoot and using some of the money to buy a new dresser because of how good it was to be fucked on that kind of dresser during the photoshoot.

The train conductor/engineer/driver person clicks on the intercom and suggests that more people should get off at the next stop so the train can go faster, because of the weight of the people. Almost everyone on the train checks to see what the next stop is.

“What?” asks Emo Philips (one l, spell check seems cool with this). He is looking at the advertisement. The man penetrating the other man in the advertisement has an Emo Philips tattoo on his right shoulder. The man being penetrated has his head flat on top of the dresser, looking away from the camera.

Emo Philips feels worried. He remembers that the furniture store from the advertisement is at the next stop.

don brown (no caps) clarifies that he doesn’t know what Emo is asking. They are lovers, and they are on the train, and The train conductor/engineer/driver person clicks on the intercom (copy pasting this now) and begins to cry into the microphone thing, pleading for everyone to leave.

EVERYTHING ELSE IS JUST EXPOSITION by Gauraa Shekhar

June 14, 2020

Carefully coded a fake Myspace account for Joel Madden—copied the URL from his skull-and-crossbones profile, pasted it into a Layout Stealer, added Steve Aoki and Junior Sanchez to my Top 8
Sent myself love letters from the account
Showed off love letters from “Joel Madden” at band practice
Threw some antihistamine pills from the medicine cabinet into a zip-lock bag. Kept the pills in the back of my school locker to feel beautiful and bad like Winona Ryder and the disaster girls on TV
Once, during a middle school lunchbreak, made an elaborate display of secretly spooning a home-cooked meal into the trash, so the other kids would get off my case about being fat
Had “Joel Madden” message my friends about the dangers of my eating disorder
Drank only cappuccinos for meals to get cast as Christine in the high school production of Phantom of the Opera
Made a display of slowly nibbling at baby carrots backstage so the English teacher slash director would get off my case about looking a little too thin
On the night of graduation, after my dad’s friend handed me a going-away gift, told everyone the tucked lavender note in the jewelry box only said love, henry
At the end of an above-average date, on the drive back home, when “The Boys of Summer” came on, and as my date drummed his fingers passionately on the steering wheel, loudly proclaimed: “when did Don Henley cover The Ataris?”
Hung out with Nick Ramirez freshman year only because he had a poster of Nico’s Chelsea Girls taped to his wall and I liked sneaking 2 AM cigarettes with him in the boys’ shower room
Once, after chain-smoking Marlboros in the boys’ shower room: scribbled a menacing note in glitter gel and snuck it under an ex’s door with Nick Ramirez
Abstained from correcting the professor’s pronunciation of my name
Intentionally mispronounced my name for efficiency on the phone to customer service
Kept myself from ascribing names to any first-person narrator I write
Smoked the second cigarette only as excuse to stage a casual run-in with the author after a reading
Knew that getting drinks with my ex’s best-friend’s wife’s mentally unstable ex-best friend was probably a bad idea but I was craving crisis
Lost twenty bucks playing chess in Union Square
Told friends I won twenty bucks playing chess in Union Square
Twice, at a karaoke bar in Chinatown: kissed the same pilot in exchange for my tab
Dropped a blanched broccoli rabe on the kitchen floor next to the mouse trap and bent down with my fork to eat it straight off the ground
Masturbated ten hours after finding out my childhood home was robbed
Couldn’t finish because Bella Donna was on and it was impossible to think about anything besides the white cockatoo resting on the delicate slant of Stevie Nicks’ fingers
On a drunk afternoon in Alphabet City, with an unrequited lover, borrowed a line from a CW show for tragedy points: “I think I could set myself on fire and nobody would notice”
Set my bangs on fire while smudging the apartment with sage; no one was home to notice
Wanted to sleep with someone from the band but instead fell into bed with the sound pretengineer
Double-texted him
Studied the senseless succession of blue text balloons on my phone screen
Semi-confidently, and over fourteen-dollar spicy brunch margaritas: “I make forty-six a year”
Spent too long surveying tattoos on the backs of strangers
Sleepwalked to the kitchen and came to in the refrigerator light, the soft leathery warmth of leftover pasta clumps on my tongue
Took a year off to write a book about boy bands
Spent most of it listening to One Direction
Wrote bad poetry on July 4th: and the fireworks looked like cupcake sprinkles
Had sex while both the dogs were still in the bedroom
Didn’t do laundry all of that September because I relished an excuse to not wear pants
Spent my last two dollars on gas station caramel iced coffee
Only volunteered at the event for the free food that came after
Invited all New York exes to the same party because the rest of the week had been uneventful
Left New York
Missed New York
Wrote about New York in honeyed inflections, first as prophet then as fool: unfinished apartments, creative class appalachian towns in the middle of a city. memories- good and bad and all mine
Half-watched John Cusack films under white linens and fell into soft, three-hundred-thread count naps on embezzled Xanax
“Freelancer” rolled easier off the tongue than “basically unemployed”
Ritually painted my face every unemployed morning to softly make-believe I had somewhere to be after
Moved back to New York
Got a job working the front desk at Gizmodo
Asked if I looked bigger than the woman on TV only when I knew the answer was no
Lied to a boyfriend about liking Radiohead’s Ok Computer
Slept with someone from the bar, someone who didn’t like Radiohead, while boyfriend was in Stockholm
Told the truth a little too truthfully
Whenever a car blasting reggae music trailed along the block, thought: I could be a person who drinks daytime beer
Stuck a note on the desktop to tell my boss I quit
Stuck a note goodbye on boyfriend’s fridge
Read the news but didn’t throw out my Ryan Adams records when everyone else did
Let the call go to voicemail because
I never really liked my coffee black; it just had fewer calories