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BROWN RECLUSE by Cody Pease

April 30, 2020

Their arrival to the reception is further delayed when he sees a spider on the tongue of his boot. Both men refuse to wear the boot now. The taller man traps the spider beneath a glass, as his partner tries to decipher what kind of spider it is. A brown recluse. The two men debate on how to dispose of it. The taller man offers to throw the glass far from the house. To let it sit in the snow and melt when spring comes. The shorter man is too kind and stubborn; he does not want the spider to freeze. He wishes he had the ability to cure the spider of its nature. To let it live in a dark corner of their house. Another pet. The taller man protests, then points to the neighbor’s porch. The neighbor’s windows are drawn shut. The shorter man finds an alcove beneath the porch, where it’s dark and warm. He shakes the glass but the spider remains still. He names the spider. This makes him feel better if the spider is meant to freeze. He leaves the glass sitting on the stone slab.

ASSIGNATION by Joshua Hebburn

April 29, 2020

He bought flowers at the grocery store and put them in a wine bottle with a little water and an aspirin. He put them on the nightstand. There, for her, so the room wouldn't smell of him.

He took the ingredients from the plastic bag that said, Thank You, Thank You, Thank You in red block font on the side. He took out the butcher block. He smashed, peeled, and chopped the garlic. He halved, skinned, sliced, and chopped the onions. He blinked, he blinked, he blinked. He put the onions in a bowl. He put the onion bowl where it wouldn’t bite his eyes. He quartered the brussels sprouts and put them in a bowl. He put the big pan on the range and swirled olive oil supposedly from Tuscany on it. He salted and peppered the steak. He ate a raw brussels leaf.

She didn't arrive. From the kitchen, through the living room, he went. He sat on the bed. He took the flowers from the bottle and drank the aspirin and flower water. It didn't really make him feel anything, but it was something different to do. It forced him to make a face. He’d found, but would never acknowledge, that he could do almost anything if he was alone and he stopped imagining somebody.

A little while later, he put the flowers back in a bottle with water, this time, for himself.

FISHSPLAINING BAUDRILLARD by Faye Brinsmead

April 28, 2020

The robo-guppy came in a tank with LED lighting, soothing ocean sounds, and coral reef background wallpaper. Proven stress-buster, Bernie said, handing me the box. There was some study in some journal. After 10 weeks of fish-watching, 75 percent of the subjects flushed their anxiety meds down the john.

I took this as a hint he didn’t want to hear any more about writer’s block, impostor syndrome, the library’s overdue loans policy, or anything else connected with my PhD on Baudrillard.

He looks sinister, I said. Those mean little eyes. Must be in on the techno-gadget revenge plot. I took Baudrillard literally in those days.

After christening the guppy Jean, I ignored him. Maybe it was ingratitude that drove Bernie away. There were other sources of discontent: the hyperreal hair clump in the shower drain, my preference for synthetic food.

When we finally had the we have to talk talk, his reasons surprised me. I feel like the you I knew has been mummified in layers of French philosophy. Nothing you say is your own words anymore. Just some quote from some dead dude.

Given his fondness for citing scientific publications whose names he couldn’t remember, I found this ironic. Plus, it amused me to think of myself as a postmodernist quote-machine simulating Bernie’s girlfriend.

I let him have the TV, bed, couch, table, fridge, ironing board, and vacuum cleaner. Simulations like Jean and me are low-maintenance, I said. He declined the pop art poster of Baudrillard, saying he felt unworthy of Saint Gizmo. It saddened me to think his prolonged and free education had been a waste of my time.

I rented a room above a pub with a fine view of overflowing rubbish skips. Relax, it’s only simulacrum trash, I joked to Jean on putrid summer evenings. I was getting into the habit of throwing witty little squibs at him. It made me feel better about my post-nearly-everything condition.

At night, Jean and I juddered to the cover-band beats of Eagle Rock and Highway to Hell. I started talking (yelling, actually) while I typed. It helped with focus, and created the illusion of an audience.

The hypermarket turns every theory (including the theory of the hypermarket) into dentures more viscerally real, more horrifyingly alive, than the mouth that contains them.

Like a tent revivalist preacher, I was high on my own rhetoric. The less it meant, the more wasted I got.

One night, in a lull between Beds are Burning and Scarred for Life, Jean said, quietly but distinctly: You don’t understand the role of the technological object in the transition from modernity to postmodernity.

Wowsers! I don’t know why I kept up the bantering tone. Why don’t you explain it to me? Go on, fishsplain it.

Jean delivered a mini-lecture on Baudrillard’s position and my failure to grasp it. He sounded like a toothless person talking through a snorkel in a cyclone, but his analysis was relentlessly clear. I was crafting a jokey compliment when he added, Forget Baudrillard.

There’s a critique of Baudrillard called that, I said. I reference it in my thesis.

He gurgled impatiently. That isn’t a quote. Well, it is, but it exceeds the function of quotation. It’s a command. Forget Baudrillard. I’ve outBaudrillarded him. There’s a Linux PC in my brain cavity. A hydraulic pump moves my tail. If you’d bothered to unpack the remote control, you could manipulate me from 10 meters away.

The whole pub was screaming Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again. Or maybe they were lip-syncing to synthesized screaming.

I looked up to Saint Gizmo for guidance. Forget Baudrillard, mouthed the pop art Baudrillard.

AT LEAST IT WASN’T ME by Andy Spain

April 27, 2020

George arches his back and reaches for the ceiling, fingers fully splayed in morning praise pose. His wife lumbers around him with a groggy scowl. “Great, gonna be late again,” she mumbles and bangs her leg on the bed frame, cursing softly as she clutches her shin.

George winces and edges past her. “At least it wasn’t me,” he thinks.

Strolling into the kitchen, George rubs his eyes and smiles at his two sons as they scurry around the breakfast table. The younger one waves hello, over-pouring milk into a glass. White cascades race down the cabinet edges and splash on the hardwood. The older boy bends over to help wipe it up and smacks his head on the edge of the counter, upending a dish of dry cat food as he staggers and collapses. He clutches his temples and whines softly.

George shakes his head and presses his palms to his face. “At least it wasn’t me,” he says, and zips up his windbreaker.

As he opens the front door, he sees his daughter drop to her knees on the lawn and scream, “Wait!” Her shoulders wrench with heavy sobs. A rust-streaked school bus putters down the street and rumbles around the corner. She twirls her backpack overhead and slings it at the house in a high arc. George chuckles as she stomps past, vigorously wiping tears from her cheeks.

“At least it wasn’t me,” he whispers.

Frank next door slams the hood of his sedan with both fists. The car sputters and lurches an inch backward, rocking gently. “Damn thing won’t move! Gears are stripped, maybe the transmission fluid’s low or something,” Frank shouts. “Like I have time for this in the morning.” He throws his hands up and kicks the bumper.

“At least it wasn’t me,” George says under his breath. The garage door hums open behind him and he steps to the side, waving to his wife as she reverses down the driveway. Dazed and distracted, she stomps the gas instead of the brake and blasts into the street. A hulking garbage truck plows into the driver’s side door in a screeching barrage of glass, steel, and smoke. The twisted wreckage whirligigs across the asphalt and wraps around a maple tree before barrel rolling down an embankment into a storm-water pond.

“At least it wasn’t me,” George says as he wipes his forehead and trots to the curb, whistling.

He scoops up the newspaper and flips it open. The front page headlines read “10,000 Dead, 20,000 Missing After Explosion” and “Poisoned Water Supply Responsible for Untold Calamity.” George closes his eyes and exhales sharply. Like a mantra, he repeats, “At least it wasn’t me. At least it wasn’t me.”

The garbage truck driver jumps out, chest heaving. He snaps his fingers at George and shouts, “Hey, buddy, you gotta—”

Frank’s car suddenly revs up and skids through the yard with a mechanical growl, clipping the garbage man and corkscrewing his legs underneath the rear wheel. Both ankles are shattered as he’s drug into the street. His jumpsuit, lacerated across the thigh, reveals shorn skin and pulpy flesh around exposed bone.

George hugs his arms to his chest. “Ooh, boy. At least it wasn’t me,” he says.

Neighbors stumble over their lawns to survey the damage, hands at mouths, bathrobes hanging loose. Dorris from across the street tiptoes to the sidewalk with a half-peeled banana in her hand. One glance at the garbage truck driver and she shields her eyes. George steps into the road waving both arms and calls out, “Hey, at least it wasn’t me!” just before an ambulance swerves to a squealing stop and pins him against Frank’s car. The siren blasts a single belated wail. George howls like an animal and paws at the grill.

An EMT appears at his side and kicks away some debris; another races to the stormwater pond. George looks down at his torso and grins feebly as he imagines hot butter smeared on toast. He caresses his cracked ribs and whimpers a mélange of unintelligible gibberish. The EMT tries to listen but discerns nothing. He lowers George to the ground and cradles his head.

I drift up from the body as it writhes and curls into a spent husk. The natural colors drain from the scene, rendering monochrome earth and desaturated clumps of blood and gristle. The chrome fenders blur and lose their shine; prolonged screams stretch further and diminish into a single resonance. The body’s final exhalation barely upsets two blades of grass.

As my silent and numb ascension accelerates, tugged upward or outward or elsewhere by a celestial summons, I take one last pitiless glance at the empty, ashen remains and think, “At least it wasn’t me.”

BODY BETRAYAL by Crow Jonah Norlander

April 26, 2020

When I reached the age at which my older friends started to complain about their bodies falling apart, mine really did. My infant son picked up a smooth piece and used it to soothe his gums. My wife palmed another, soft for warmth and whispers. Mom grabbed some with more defined edges to help set up her printer, while one other bit of me barely holding its shape looked on as dad skated around backwards. My boss’s part sat around ignored, waiting to get fired. The chunk of me attending to the Executive Board made the motion to call the question, voted in favor of the decision to rename ourselves the Steering Committee. We were unanimous in our desire to dispense with hierarchy. There’s some left to be claimed if anyone’s interested, if someone can think of something to do with it.

DINNER by Christopher Linforth

April 25, 2020

At that time in our lives, we rose at dusk for the feeding shift. Still in our underwear, we crept downstairs and into the kitchen. Shiny black bugs skittered across the tile floor. The lazy cockroaches remained on the counter and in the tinfoil containers stinking of rotten noodles; a few silvery beetles disappeared into the seal of the refrigerator. In the living room our mother railed at the television, at the caregiver exiting the house. We heard calls for dinner, thuds on the floor, shouts for our dead father. We rubbed crust from our eyes, then surveyed the leftovers on the floor: the cartons of moldy coleslaw, the potatoes sitting in an old washing machine drum. Our mother wanted something to ease the eternal pain in her stomach. She cried about it every evening, said it was caused by our father’s death. His coronary was our fault, she claimed. Even now, we could hear her saying that he had despised us, that raising twins had broken his spirit. He had spiraled into his own world; he desired food, every bit of it in the house, and she now carried on his legacy. We pawed through the cabinets, then the refrigerator. We slapped a slab of raw chicken on a plate, sprinkled blue crystal salts onto the pinkish skin. We slipped into the living room, saw our mother’s bulbous silhouette. The television flashed commercials: fat burgers and buttered shrimp. She jabbed at the remote control. The volume ramped up. The bass rumbled through her chairside buckets of seed packets, the fruit crates stuffed with newspapers and women’s magazines. Dolls toppled off the bookshelves. Her possessions were part of her, she enjoyed saying, but we were not. She yelled for us to hurry. We looked at the slimy chicken breast again, second-guessed the blue crystals. Our mother’s favorite gameshow came on the television and she roared for her food. We’d had enough. We sneaked closer to her. Ammonia stung our noses. Beside the foot of her recliner sat a line of soda bottles filled with urine. A string of Christmas lights lay around the bottles, around the skirt of her chair. We cooed: Mamma, Mamma, Mamma. We offered her the plate and she snatched it from us. Leave, she said. I want to enjoy this. She used to say she was a proud mother. She used to look to see what she was eating.

AFTER AUSCHWITZ by Howie Good

April 24, 2020

To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. – Theodor W. Adorno

We were taken off the train at night. “What are those bonfires?” I asked. A sarcastic male voice said from out of the dark, “You’ll find out, child.” It felt like I was on a bridge and there were two or three heavy trucks and the bridge was rocking—but there were no trucks. Even cows wondered what was happening. At one point we seemed to be following Beethoven’s footsteps through Vienna. Although democracy was dead, women and young girls were smashing jars of blood on the sidewalk in a ritual protest. Temporary deities would later tell us many other horrible things while machine guns swept the streets.

“Last name?” the woman behind the counter asks, eyes on the computer screen, hands poised on the keyboard. “Good,” I say. She hesitates for half a second, then asks, “How do you spell that?” My body trembles like it’s not under my jurisdiction anymore. Meanwhile, Marlene is resting at home with a beer and the dude that shot her whose nickname is Rabbit. It has nothing to do with forgiveness. It’s simply that one person in six has never heard of the Holocaust. Freud said dreams are the day’s residue. I think of it sometimes when I see Nazis marching into Poland on the History Channel.

All day and all night the air is thick with smoke that smells like burning hair. The men in authority, when confronted, can’t explain it. They don’t even try; they just gesticulate in front of the cameras. You live in fear of losing a crap job and never finding another near as good. I’m watching an emerald-throated hummingbird at the feeder so I don’t have to deal with all the bullshit. I don’t want to make this sound worse than it is, but there isn’t a lot else happening, just these assorted crises, each at a different point of unfolding. It’s an intricate universe. Heartache is everybody’s neighbor.

GATSBY EFFECT by Erika Veurink

April 23, 2020

The first time I had pneumonia, I wanted it to be seismic. I wanted it to almost kill me. Being fatalistic felt grown up. I laid in the West Village, drank gin from a jar and stared at where the wall hit the ceiling, the cross-like convergence, forever.

“There are crosses everywhere.” That’s what my basketball coach told me once before a game. If I was nervous or worried about a freethrow, I would look for a cross--in the rafters, the painted lines of the court, the referee’s stripes. And salvation meant something.

The first time I had pneumonia, when I was twenty, I said this, “I have pneumonia and a double lung infection.” I kept saying it, in emails, in person, on a slip of paper I passed to the boy in my film class I had a crush on. “You know they’re the same thing, right?” said the crush. “They’re not,” I said, indignant in a pleated skirt, “and how would you know? You’ve never even had it.”

No one had ever had pneumonia before I did. No one had ever been in love with the wrong person. No one had walked past a garden party on a Saturday afternoon and felt as lonely as I had, etc.

Pneumonia concerns the inflammation of white blood cells swarming the infected lungs. Only scientists understand anything on a cellular level. Cells divide, swell and split too fast to comprehend. So I was right in a sense. I was an expert on my own individuality, not alveoli.

As treatment, I watched old movies with no plots to prove I could. I watched them on a plastic chair that cost less than a sandwich and repeated to myself, “You are enjoying this.” I had plain bagels delivered. I imagined being hungry. I resumed Metropolis.

Bored, lungs on fire, I tried to study Socrates for a quiz on Monday. “One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.” I wore reading glasses until they gave me a headache. My sandpaper breath and inability to relate distracted me.

Breathing with pneumonia made me feel like a martyr. I dedicated each inhale to someone I loved, each exhale to something I wanted.

This time around, I’m twenty-three. I’m less sensational. I broke up with a flimsy man. I chose perfect gifts for my family that fit in my suitcase. I donated part of my bonus to a small magazine. I read a novel the entire flight back to Iowa, no breaks. And I still got sick.

To me, Iowa is a slow motion memory foam lava lamp drip. I could float there like an embryo for eternity. It makes me feel like I can’t breathe and I love it so much.

I made my brother leave Christmas mass because I was having a hot flash. That was pneumonia, not menopause. I emailed someone I shouldn’t have a poem that night and he replied he wished it was a picture of myself. I ignored it and slept. That was pneumonia.

The day after Christmas, I lay in front of the fireplace in a parka and a blanket wrapped like a skirt. “I can’t warm up,” I told my mom. She laid other quilts on top of me and scheduled an appointment. I cried. She held my freezing hand under the blanket mound. Her love makes me feel on fire.

Then the bright doctor’s office and x rays and “please take this seriously” and I was back in bed. The person I sent the poem to emailed me that he was worried for my health. He was worried the pneumonia discredited the poem.

A teacher once told me I had a “Gatsby Effect.” I thought a Gatsby Effect was something about projecting opulence. He explained it as making someone feel like the only person in the room. I blushed. “See, you just did it,” he said.

Sickness has a Gatsby Effect, then. My dad, riddled with cancer, made everyone feel like the only person in the room. His Socratic questioning and charisma outshone his dissolving life. The dozens of orchids that sprouted from our kitchen, despite the strictly stated “No Flowers” in the death announcement, were proof. That was the Gatsby Effect. When we shoved his button ups into rubber tubs to donate, we could have launched them from the banister. That would have been my idea of the Gatsby Effect.

So I was Jay Gatsby in my basement bedroom and I wanted to shine my infected lungs on someone. It happened to be the email guy. As I drafted a response to him, I felt the steroids shake to life. The gravel coughing, the untangling of the headphone cord, the smooth dip from my hip bone across my goosebumped stomach--my Green Light.

People are only supposed to get pneumonia once in their lives. The first time, I talked on the phone with email guy for hours. I made it about him and cut my hair with kitchen scissors. I wanted company and I wanted layers. This time wasn’t even supposed to happen. My actions were all transposed to the key of hypothetical.

On the phone, I heard a twist, the filling of something. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Getting a glass of water,” email guy said. I resented that he needed anything in the green dreamscape of my attention. I slept for fourteen hours. I awoke with the clarity of missing a sun cycle.

Really, I woke up to the sound of my brother on his rowing machine--the swirling hiss of water. I deleted the emails, the call. I signed a contract with myself in my journal. I laid back, looked for a cross somewhere in the textured ceiling of my childhood bedroom. I settled on one formed in the middle of the window. I made it feel like it was the only cross in the room.

FIRST KISS AT THE END OF THE WORLD by Chelsea Voulgares

April 22, 2020

Convinced they were the only people alive in their shit California town, Opal and Matt sat together in a coffin in the basement of the funeral home Matt’s family owned. They planned to get as drunk as possible on the top shelf whiskey they’d looted the week before. “Give me the chips. I’m starving,” Opal said. When Matt handed them to her, she caressed his fingertips. He stared at her and scratched his nose.

First came the droughts and then the fires. The air had crisped up. All that was nothing compared to what happened to the water, which in the beginning was hard to find. Eventually, even what got shipped in tasted greasy. Polluted. Chemically poisoned. They watched their moms and dads and sisters die. Their classmates. Opal’s dog. But for some reason, even though the water made their pee orange, they survived it.

Opal scooted across the coffin’s satin lining. She acted more wasted than she felt and blinked at him through half-closed eyes. Through the smell of liquor and sweat, the apple-y tang of the fabric softener on his shirt came through. She wondered if his mom had washed it last, or if she got too sick in the end and he did it himself. Opal put her head on his shoulder and let her breath go slow and deep.

She’d been in love with him since third grade when they got stuck together during a project on the gold rush. They bought aluminum pie tins, poked holes in them, and convinced their dads to drive them out to a muddy old creek. Despite the fact they got a C, they were inseparable after that class.

He usually dated girls with giant boobs, and even though Opal ran the fastest mile in school, she was desperately and relentlessly flat-chested. His taste in the opposite sex was tacky and shallow, but she liked him anyway. As they lounged in the coffin, with probably every large-breasted teenager in town dead and death coming for them soon too, her opportunity arrived.

She sat up and ate the chips. Some salt fell on her neck and glistened there. She heard a rumble outside and mistakenly thought it was an earthquake. Her throat was dry. They needed to go out and find more water soon.

***

Matt knew Opal wanted him to kiss her. He wanted it too, because he’d seen Gina Thomas barf blood a month ago, and he always cared more about Opal than any other girl anyways. Besides, stuff like will we still be friends after didn’t mean much anymore. There wasn’t going to be an after, and if there was, they wouldn’t have anyone but each other.

He stroked her hair, leaned his cheek against the top of her head, and breathed. Her curls were warm and dry against his face. They smelled like the ocean, which was weird, because neither of them had been bathing much.

As kids, they’d played dolls. He controlled the He-Men. She orchestrated the Barbies. Sometimes, if left alone for long enough, they made the figures bump and grind, smooth tan plastic parts clacking together. His favorite had always been Skeletor, and it never seemed strange then to see that yellow skull of a face under Skipper as she thrashed up and down, side to side.

Opal pulled away from him in a coughing fit. He grabbed her elbow to steady her, put a bottle of Gatorade in her hand. She took a swig, smiled. “Much better,” she said.

He grinned back, rubbed her shoulder, and looked into her eyes. His groin twitched.

As he moved his hand to the back of her head and his face toward hers, he didn't notice the ground around them vibrating.

***

Outside, one of two things was happening. The first: a cavalcade of army green Humvees pulled into the funeral home parking lot filled with antibiotics, high-tech water purifiers, and rescuers (most of them young and nubile women, more beautiful than Opal and also immune). The second: a dust storm, rolling grey and brown dirt, charged toward them to destroy any remaining drop of fresh water, to bury the door of this building, trapping Opal and Matt inside. Either way, their lips, their mouths, their tongues touched.

MANDALA by Vallie Lynn Watson

April 21, 2020

He always walked me to my car when I left his house after sex, so stealing his albums was tricky. Not stealing. Borrowing. I started in month two, initially one album at a time, always only the record itself. He’d have to excuse himself to the restroom five or six times an evening, and I’d barefoot across his new carpet to just outside his bedroom, where the shelves began. I would slip an album out of the cover and into my messenger bag, take them home until our next engagement—he usually asked me back within a week—and after sex, put it back in its cover, fetch a fresh one. By month three I was exchanging ten at a time, and by month six, eighteen, the most I could carry in my bag. He never mentioned any missing, and he certainly hadn’t noticed the condition I returned them in. He said he’d not played music since the summer, but I was scared that he didn’t want me around for the music. I always made the short drive home in silence.

I missed him, in the in-between. Sometimes there were phone calls, about our day, about our faraway families. He did most of the talking while I painted on his records, repeating dots, lines, and swirls, starting around the center label and fanning out, playing the record backwards, pulling fine-tipped brushes over the surface of the grooved vinyl, until side A was nothing but a kaleidoscope of color. I bought a kid’s turntable and let the B-sides play wavily, lifted by the uneven, dried paint beneath, while I slept.