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THE BEEP by Jason Schwartzman

July 16, 2020

I am his tutor and he is trying to tell me about an unknown variable. About X. But he has forgotten that it’s called X.

“The mysterious thing,” he says, laughing.

I love him for this. I will tell everyone I know about the mysterious thing.

During one session we’re in his apartment and I hear a beep. Just one beep. The microwave, probably.

“I’m really sorry,” he tells me, tensing up.

Sorry for what? It feels like I’m missing something.

“Totally fine!”

On the walk home I wonder why he was so on edge. Then I forget about it, my thoughts about him confined to the tiny sliver of the week we share. In the middle of another session, his mom comes home. She sits next to him, asks how it’s going. He’s taken the wrong test so we’re a little behind.

“I wish I had a baseball bat,” she says, smiling.

I see her smiling, so I automatically smile too, before I process what she might mean. Then she makes another comment, this time about throwing him off the roof. She smiles again.

I don’t know what I can say. Or do. Or if I’m just crazy. So far on the outside of something I can’t really see it. I say it’s not a big deal, the test. Not at all. He is doing well. Very well.

Sometimes I think about the beep. I also think he is okay, but I don’t really know. I’m not his tutor anymore.

THREE QUARTERS by Steve Campbell

July 15, 2020

My uncle lost his leg in a motorbike accident. It wasn’t his whole leg, just half of it. And it wasn't lost either, the doctors cut it off, but that's what everyone whispers: He's lost his leg, and then they cock their heads to one side and sort of smile.

As I’m buying grapes for the hospital visit with my step-mother, the lady at the check-out makes the same head movement. She comments on how much my step-mother and I look alike. When I open my mouth to explain, my step-mother prods me so the lady can't see.

“Oh, I’m not his mother,” she replies. She sniffs and holds her head up as she hands over her money. “His mother left him.”

“Awww." The check-out lady cocks her head and sort of smiles. "He looks like he’s doing well though, doesn’t he?”

When we arrive on the hospital ward, we have to huddle around my uncle’s bed with the rest of our family. We squash together because the curtains have been drawn to give my uncle some privacy. There are twelve of us. Or eleven and a half if I count my uncle properly. No one is speaking. My uncle looks as though he’s asleep with his eyes open. The blanket that covers him is pulled up to his chin and tucked under the mattress on all sides. It’s flat against the bed below one of his knees. I count two times where someone feeds him Lucozade from a plastic cup, and four times where my nan leans him forward, plumps up his pillow, and drops him back against the bed; to make him more comfortable, she says.

Everyone avoids looking at the space where my uncle's leg should be. Instead, they pat the back of his hand and point out how many "get well" cards he has (seven), and swap out the uneaten bags of grapes, for fresh bags of grapes. I stare at the space on the bed and wonder who has the piece that’s missing.

It's a few months before my uncle is allowed to leave the hospital and when he does, it's with a leg made from plastic and metal that he keeps hidden from view beneath his jeans. On the surface it looks like he has a normal leg, but now he limps when he walks. That's when you can see that something isn't quite right.

I watched him take his false leg off to change his dressings, which was a big white sock pulled up over his thigh. The stump of flesh moved up and down like a normal leg but without a knee, shin or foot attached beneath it.

I don’t realize I’m staring until he catches my eye. Then, I cock my head to one side and sort of smile.

DOGWALKER by L Scully

July 15, 2020

Once, when you were still a girl, you loved another person. At the time, they were a girl too and you relished in your mutual girlhood from the roof of the funeral home in which you lived. You stayed in the funeral director’s suite and put up strings of tiny lights and a record player your girlfriend restored from the 70s. You would lay in the park with this friend of yours, heads on each other’s chests, nights spent giggling and intertwined. When they were a girl and you were a girl they were magic. You would crawl out the open window onto the veranda and smoke, looking down at the flowers below, wearing each other’s shirts and admiring the matching tattoos you got on your wrists. There’s a photo of you like that, bare arms snaking around each other, the little shapes in the crease of your wrists identical. Taken on the balcony. There was always music coming from somewhere, usually you. Putting lipstick on in that rosy pink ceramic bathroom and pulling black tights over your legs in the leaning oval mirror. Dancing together, dreaming together, droplets of childlike tears leaking out from the sides of your eyes together. Doing drugs at the Drug Free Zone playground or hopping the cemetery gates at night. You used to dream of their kisses, when you were both girls.

When you close your eyes you see the house in ruins, overgrown with ferns. You see the veranda on the second floor and the chiseled stone emblem that says Funeral No Parking.

Some nights you hear a sound in the basement and walk down the steps slowly, holding a kitchen knife. There is a suit jacket in the wardrobe on the third floor that you keep for yourself, and an army bag and a series of strange brass rings. There’s the creaky bed where your best friend kissed your house guest. And the kitchen, which is the most haunted room in the house. You forget who told you that. The one perfect finished room in the carriage house where a professor used to live. Tiny and yellow. The garden that always smells a little sticky like sangria and the fallen leaves you dutifully rake. Down the hall there’s a bathroom at the front of the house, a cool grey where you bathe when the owners aren’t visiting. Sometimes you look through the drawers and find lube or intricate lighters or old jewelry. Sometimes you climb out on the roof with your best friend and light up while you watch the sunset and almost put your lips together. There’s an art expert around the corner who could change your life but you’re only good enough to walk his dog. You try not to close your eyes too often.

TO THE RESIDENTS OF NINETEEN-SOMETHING WEST NELSON by MK Sturdevant

July 8, 2020

To the Residents of Nineteen-Something West Nelson,

I had sex in your living room. At the time, it was a fetus of a room, a zygote of a house. Your living room had just been set on its paved frames and caissons like a mother hen about to lay some furnishings. You know those tall, narrow windows trending in the new builds around ’07? The streetlamp light was gushing in, there was no glass, just these wings of Tyvek flapping like a slack sail at midnight on the open sea.

We had gone for sushi in Bucktown. We were both nervous types, easily made brave by unconscionable amounts of sake. We chilled out, warmed up, got ideas. ‘Ah now,’ he said. When he said ‘now’ it sounded like ‘nigh.’ ‘It’s my first project, like.’ He said it and made dimples on his cheek. Then he put his cup down. ‘Come on then. Let’s have a look.’

We had sex in your living room, and even though I haven’t gotten to that part yet, I want you to know about it. Right away. I was the first. To have sex in your house. Before you did, I did. Right there in the living room, where you may be sitting now, with heavy, non-modular furniture, wishing you were having sex with him, too. His family were all farmers, and when he was about seven he got his leg caught in a combine and nearly died. Years later he could run again, he even ran a marathon. We went running together. Once my shoes were dirty and I was banging them on the sidewalk to knock the mud cakes off before I went up to ring the bell at his apartment. He came out and said, ‘I thought some eejit was out here knocking. But it was just you, clattering the bejeezus out of your runners.’

Well, the sex in your living room was great. We weren’t comfortable, but the situation had a feeling of surprise and sexy special circumstances. I think this is what sex requires. It was on a palette of drywall. We were directly in the middle of your main room, maybe a bit towards the east wall, heads to the south.

It wasn’t just the ambiance of the Tyvek wrap and the drywall, though. We had been talking at dinner about whole cities burning down. We were enthusiastic about this bond we shared, the Great Chicago Fire and the Burning of Cork, and despite it not being 1871 or 1920, we were having a passionate historical discussion about devastation and pride and human triumph, while drinking, so.

The stairs weren’t done while we were in there ripping our clothes off. Just these pits and gaps, marked everywhere with yellow tape. We walked all over your house afterwards. He told me how it wasn’t supposed to have four bathrooms, just a master, a regular, and a powder, but you wanted another powder in the basement. So you got it.

Do you gasp for pleasure while looking at your ceiling? I did. Above and behind your ceiling there are these planks with spray-painted instructions about electrical lines. You know this on a theoretical level maybe, but you haven’t seen them, the raw planks on a Friday night, beached whale bones organized into a grid, a luminous ribcage in the dark, exposed to the open air and city lights.

I saw your specs about the kitchen countertops by the way, christ jeezus. Not long after he built your house, our apartments got too expensive. I had to move farther north, and after the crash of ’08 he moved back ‘over home,’ he called it. There’s nothing affordable. They say soon there won’t be sushi, either, you know that? Different reasons. Sort of.

If you put this down a second and walk over to your fireplace and run your hand along the wall behind the mantel, there’s a beam back there where it says m & m 2007! xoxo, and, no new fires!

After we capped the giant Sharpies and put on our shirts, we jumped out of your plywood front door onto the dirt where your steps would be laid. He said he just hoped you really lived in it and stayed there awhile. Then showed me his name printed on the permit tied to the fence out front.

Don’t move out. Don’t keep moving. Use the fecking fireplace then, he said to you when you weren’t there. And use the walk-out over the garage. He was totally knackered after putting the fecker in. To spec, even. Might’n put him over budget, he added.

Think of you in it, think of us gone. Don’t let it rust away; go out there to your magazine roof and have sex and get high or call your mother or something big like that. Invite underpaid people to live with you. Deliver a baby up there. You know, Live, like.

OFF COME THE MASKS by Mitchell Waldman

July 7, 2020

I'm driving down 104, out in the thinning herd of metal vehicles in pursuit of essentials, my mask on the seat beside me, right next to the miniature bottle of hand sanitizer and the pack of Marlboros, when I see him standing on the corner of 104 and Lake with his thin frame, long white beard, and the sign thrust up in the air "Prepare to Meet Your God!" I don’t know what comes over me, I slam on the brakes, the car behind almost smashing right into me, bleating its horn. I get out of the vehicle, and walk up to the figure, my heart pounding, fist clenched. I want to smash him in the face, get up close, closer, as I raise and cock my arm, ready to propel the clenched fist into his stupid face, when he looks right at me, a blankness, no expression in the eyes, like a zombie gone gone gone. The Gandhi on my shoulder whispers "Violence is not the answer," so I drop the arm, just stare at the man, his breath right on me now, his sign still held up high, high to the heavens. I turn and walk back to my metal vehicle, hearing the horns honking, seeing the face of an angry driver mouthing silent words, not sure if he's cursing me or the zombie. Across the intersection on the opposite corner stands a second specter with a sign which says "Jesus Is Coming Soon!" thrust high up in the air. I open the car door, sink back in my seat, stare at the mask on the passenger seat, my hands shaking on the wheel and sit, just sit there for a minute. Then I pull back out into the traffic herd, just another desperate human out on the hunt for essentials: meat, toilet paper, and a shred of the sanity I lost somewhere back when this all started.

UPHOLSTERY by Corey Farrenkopf

July 6, 2020

Silva left the tacks on the floor. Rick said to. Sweep up after, it saves time. The upholstery shop smelled of pulled cotton, dry foam, and whatever scent the furniture carried from its original home. Sometimes it was garlic, sometimes mothballs and wine. The plaid wingback chair propped before Silva held an odd copper aroma. He pried rusted staples from the armrest with a pronged screwdriver, tapping its steel end with a rubber mallet. Sometimes the metal was so old it turned to dust beneath Silva’s blows. Just leave them. I’ll cut them out later, Rick would say from behind the bench where he sewed throw pillows with a foot-pedaled Singer.

Occasionally, Rick would remove a nail gun hanging from the wall to tack wayward cloth in place, sometimes he’d go out back to smoke.

It was Silva’s first reliable job and he wanted to avoid doing anything wrong, hence the constant questioning of Rick, who’d been dissecting antique furniture for fifty years. Glen needed the money. His father passed away three years before and his mother’s bookkeeping business barely kept the lights on. Rick paid eighteen an hour, far beyond minimum wage, enough to save, keeping bank accounts stable.

Rick’s hands were notched and carved from stray nails and scissors, scars thick and winding over his knuckles. Rick knew Silva’s grandfather, decided nineteen was an ideal age for apprenticeship. Silva liked the work, liked the fact his boss let him listen to music while he peeled fabric off couches from the eighteen hundreds, ottomans riddled with cigarette burns. Strip the old skin, restitch the new, Rick said.

“They have me re-cover that one every five years,” Rick said, as Silva began to fold back the chair’s fabric. Unlike most of the furniture Silva worked on, there was a second layer beneath, not the typical mesh of cotton and foam. The material was badly stained, the copper smell swelling with removal.

“What the hell,” Silva said as the fabric fell away between nail taps.

“Just ignore it. Those people pay three times our rate to leave the base layer. Get the rest off and I’ll take it from there,” Rick said.

“But, I don’t…” Silva stammered.

The majority of the fabric lay curled over the chair’s arm like discarded skin. Beneath, the outline of a body had been pressed into the material, a dark brown fading to crimson around the edges. It looked like a man who’d been reduced to the contents of his veins, as if a body had bled out and dissolved into the cushions.

“You don’t what? You’re going to see weird stuff if you stick around. Objects that shouldn’t be stuck beneath seat cushions. Notes left in pockets that were never meant to be read. You’ll see,” Rick replied, the pedal of the Singer whirring, needle never faltering as he stitched the final raised seam.

“Someone literally died in this chair. We’re destroying evidence. Shouldn’t we call the cops?”

“If I was going to do that, I would have done so thirty years ago. And we’re preserving it if anything. Some cultures leave bodies of loved ones propped in their living rooms until the decay really sets in. I think of it as more of a remembrance, someone holding on to someone they miss.”

Silva fought down his revulsion, tugging loose another dozen nails, their tarnished points singing off the linoleum floor, allowing the second skin to slip to the ground. He needed to see the image in its entirety. The outline of a man’s body was unmistakable, down to the folds in his pants, the press of his fingers into the armrest. The silhouette almost looked burnt, seared into the seat.

“Now get the underside,” Rick said.

The doorway to the shop pulled at Silva’s naval, the urge to flee tugging at his insides. His face had grown warm, sweat clawing at his armpits.

“I can’t. This is messed up. I need a couple hours of sick time or...” Silva said.

“No, you don’t. It will take ten minutes, then it’s over. I’ll do the rest and you won’t see this chair again for another five years. You’ll forget. The money’s good. A little unease is worth it.”

Silva’s best friend Chuck made nine-fifty stocking shelves at the local market. His girlfriend, Beth, pulled in just over eleven cleaning bathrooms at the hotel on 6A. Most of the older adults in his life were barely making above twenty, and they’d been at their jobs for decades. Eighteen was unheard of for starting pay. Rick promised he’d earn more than 50K when he graduated from apprentice, nearly fifteen grand more than his mother made a year.

Opportunity was rare. Silva couldn’t let it wither.

“Ten minutes isn’t much,” he said, sweeping a cluster of tacks from the base of the chair, clearing a spot where he could kneel to get at the layer of underlining draped beneath the seat. “I can do ten minutes.”

SPREE by Meg Tuite

July 6, 2020

Mom has an entire fortress of pillows that she readjusts around her body.

“Barricading my skin against bedsores. Stay in one place for too long and you’ll have to order another ass from Walgreens.” Amber prescription bottles layer her bedside table. She marks the empties with a black X, doesn’t throw them away until a refill has been secured.

Rustling toes mow through bed sheets as Mom drags up another mini-vodka with her feet. The bottomless cascade of that clear liquid is her Niagara Falls. She is queen of the mini-island. Bottles are stashed away in pockets, beds, pillows, shoes, drawers, seat cushions. She buys tiny airplane-size bottles and layers the counter with them at the Walgreens every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

“I’m not a weekender,” she tells the clerk. “The Friday cattle who line up here are absurd, like accountants and flags.” No matter who’s behind the register, Mom is told that the larger bottles are much cheaper. She’s not an idiot. She loads up her empty purse with them, holds her hand up to her mouth as though it’s a secret and whispers to the clerk, “Hide the evidence. You get it, right?” Every time they laugh as though this is some kind of code that every customer, whether living in a cardboard box or a three-story house with kids doesn’t access.

“Elvirus, I’ve been calling you,” she says, as though I can’t hear the wheels of her guttural, somnolent chant, rutting over and over in my head.

“We’re going shopping. Light Mom a cigarette and get her a glass of ice for her vodka.” She doesn’t call me by my chosen name and speaks in third person after a few drinks. “Don’t forget her lemon, Elvine,” she thrums through a bloom of smoke.

By the time I get back with her glass, she’s dressed in one of her slinky 70s dresses.

This mimicry exhibits all the features of someone’s mom, but not mine. My mom only goes out for liquor. Her hair is combed. She isn’t wearing her shredding nylon nightgown, with coffee-splotched stains and cigarette holes anymore.

I stare in the mirror. I still look like her kid. My bangs are crooked and I wear stagnant knock-offs with shoulder pads, budding breasts polyp through Mom’s darts, pleated jean skirts and shiny pink, green and red blouses with moving motifs of lava lamp patterns, fringe and bell-bottoms from the pioneer days of Mom’s closet. I have a gift for reassembling the backwash material with scissors and safety pins.

“Do we need to lock the door?” Mom searches her purse for a key she doesn’t possess, as we walk out into infested air, thick with all the lives before it.

Mom and I slog through Harwood Avenue to catch a bus five blocks away. She wavers on a slight incline with her head and upper torso two steps ahead of the rest of her. She doesn’t drive anymore. I was eleven when I drove us home after Mom had one of her panic attacks, slammed over a curb into the yard of someone’s rummage sale. She didn’t hit anybody, but faces unhinged from the broken-down armoire, bicycles, toolsets, clothes, toys and astrology books they’d been rummaging through.

Mom’s hands were claws. Too much white hovered around the persecuted gray of her eyes. I had to unclench her fingers from the steering wheel and sit on top of her. When we got home, she shut the door to her room and didn’t come out for a few days. Dad whispered, ‘menopause’, but I knew this was no kind of pause.

We got off the bus in front of the "old bag" second-hand store.

“These clothes are married to a history you can feel. They didn’t come from cheap labor in China. Check the labels,” Mom says.

I’m fourteen, don’t check labels. I rake through racks to find something normal that will fit me. Some lady with a skin-rippled overlip keeps threading silent eye-pong accusations in my direction as she folds sweaters and talks to the woman behind the counter. They have the exact same haircut. “A mutt is a mutt,” she says. “You don’t have any idea what you’re getting. You remember that guy who had the same mutt for like ten years and they find him mauled in his backyard. I mean, that’s the chance you take when you go to one of those shelters. With a pedigree, you can check out the parents of the litter and know what you’re bringing home.” The other lady looked bored like she’d heard this shit before. Overlip glanced over at me. “You can only take six items in the dressing room, honey. Six.” She held up six ringed fingers.

Mom was already in a dressing room. I could see the maxi dresses looped over the door. It was either nightgowns or slinky dresses and I loved when she dressed up even when she wasn’t going anywhere. That meant Mom was back in the world with us.

This place wasn’t an easy score. The women were checking my every move. “Here, honey, let me help you. What size are you? Six?” So much for a free one. Mom never helped. She wasn’t the Mom who talked with women. She could care less what transpired between us. Her universe placated one being. Mom bought me a pair of jeans and some sandals and said yes to all the dresses. After we got back on the bus walked the few blocks to get home, Mom unzipped the dress she was wearing and had two more on underneath. She ripped them off. “That feels much better. I was getting hot. Honey, can you get me a few lemons?”

“You stole those dresses?”

“No one else could have pulled these dresses off, Elvatross, let’s be definitive. I was saving the ladies a few hangers.”

DOG TRACING by Mike Andrelczyk

July 5, 2020

I just remembered a maintenance man I used to work with who said he liked to get drunk and trace his dog on big sheets of paper and his garden was lined with pieces of broken hotel sinks. I just remembered this. Out of nowhere. When things come into your mind from out of nowhere it’s like looking at the outline of a dog on a piece of paper. The dog is gone, but its shape is there. This is a memory.

Imagine one of those shitty video dissolving effects now.

….

…. OK.

I was standing in the sun outside of the parking garage. There was a square of sunlight on the ground and I was standing in the center of it. I was avoiding doing any work for a few minutes and I was standing in the center of a square of sunlight. This was a good thing to do while avoiding loading luggage onto bellman carts and wheeling it around the hotel and unloading it.

Javier came out of the parking garage with a box of empties. The sunlight hit the bottles and it looked like Javier was carrying a box of light to the dumpster. This was good too. Throwing light into the dumpster.

“I’ll get it dude,” I said and lifted up the lid to the dumpster. “Dump ’em baby.”

Javier smiled. “I’m doing these bottles one at a time.”

He took out an empty bottle of Barcardi rum and threw it into the mouth of the dumpster. There was a great smashing sound. The great smash. The sound was like the sun smashing to pieces.

Javier selected another bottle from the box. A green bottle. He handed it to me. Like a suave gentleman extending an offer of a cigarette. Would you care for a smash, my friend?

I accepted. “Smashing,” I said in an English accent. I looped the bottle end over end and it shattered at the bottom of the empty dumpster. Terrific. Success.

Javier smiled at me. Success. Javier didn’t talk much. He was from Brazil. He had distant family that still lived in the jungle he told me once. He seemed to have a lot of girlfriends too.

“Hey, what the fuck are y’all doin!?” It was Jesse. The maintenance man. Maintaining. He was yelling at us in a pretend way like we were suddenly caught mid-smash and in big trouble. Jesse seemed to always appear out of nowhere. Especially when I was throwing stuff in the dumpster. He was like a fly. Attracted to trash and refuse.

“Jesse, what the fuck. You’re interrupting a perfectly good smashing session,” I said.

Javier the Gentleman simply extended an empty Grey Goose bottle to Jesse. A peace offering. An invitation to share in the destruction.

Jesse inspected the bottle. He really looked at it lovingly. The man simply loved trash.

“Jesse, throw the bottle in the dumpster dude,” I said. “Have a nice smash man. Take a smash break. Be a smash bro.” (I am an idiot.)

“I ain’t ‘bout to. Ima take this home,” he said.

We were obviously stupid rubes for smashing perfectly good liquor bottles. Jesse knew the secret. Never throw anything away. Don’t abandon your trash. It’s only trash if you let it be trash. Never refuse. He told me once that he would take the broken porcelain sinks and toilets home from the hotel and smash them up until he had pebble-sized pieces and he would use those for his Russian wife’s Japanese-style zen rock garden.

He was the maintenance man. He knew all the secrets of the hotel. The ins as well as the outs. He was maintaining the order of things.

I said the last thing out loud. About maintaining the order.

“Huh?” Jesse looked at me cockeyed. “See, what I like to do is buy some Jacquin’s then I fill up these bottles and there ya go. Ya got Grey Goose. Don’t nobody know the difference.”

I laughed. “What? Damn Jesse, you’re a genius.”

He smiled. Because he knew he was a genius.

“Sheet,” he said. “See what I like to do is have a few drinks then I get my dog on the floor.”

In the few seconds before Jesse continued my mind was filled with horrific visions of drunken bestiality. Then Jesse hit us with the tenderness.

“I got her trained so she just lay on these sheets of paper. And then I trace her. I make silhouettes and then I decorate my walls with all the pictures of my dogs. Been doing it for years. First was Delly. She was a good girl. Then was New Delly. Then Dolly. Now Jasmine. All labs. They’re my sweethearts and I love ’em,” Jesse paused. A moment of silence for his dogs. “Thanks for the bottle motherfucker.” He punched Javier in the ribs, but not hard. Javier only smiled.

Jesse walked off. Cradling his bottle like a baby. A baby bottle. A jewel. He moved towards the elevator shaft and disappeared into the stairwell. A silhouette is the shape of a ghost.

Some silence occurred then. Not much, but a little. Enough for it to be called a silence.

Javier looked at me.

“He draw his dogs?”

“Haha. Shit. He traces ’em. Outlines.” I mimed outlining a dog on the ground. I made the shape of a dog. I briefly imagined like that would be all you had to do to make a dog – just make the shape of a dog and it existed. In a way it was true.

Javier smiled. “Traces dogs,” he said. “Jesse.” But the way he said it sounded like Yessy.

Javier handed me another empty bottle. I smashed it. The bottle became hundreds of tiny pebbled-sized pieces. An empty bottle is just a future zen garden.

We finished the smashing. I still had more than an hour to go. This was a shitty shift. Not much action. I’d be lucky to make three dollars in tips.

$$$

I got lucky and carried some bags for a rich asshole guy and his girlfriend. Some rich people were truly cheap. But this guy wanted to show off and he gave me $10. It may have been accidental. He pulled out the bill and we both looked at it and then he handed it to me.

$$$

I stopped at the Food Lion on my way home. I always thought “Food Dog” in my mind because once I drove Javier home and he pointed to the sign and asked if I minded stopping at the Food Dog. The lion on the sign looked like a dog I guess. I mean it was basically like the shape of a dog pretty much. I bought some fried chicken for grandma.

Then I stopped at R&R and bought a fifth of Grey Goose.

I took a small drink as I drove home. The window down. The warm evening air rushing through. I heard a dog barking in the distance. The air made the shape of the dog’s barks. The sound of the dog barking became part of the air. A dog in the sky. Yes, I thought, a dog in the sky.

I decided I would take the bottle to the beach that night and drink it in the dark. I would drink from the bottle until it was empty and I could see in the dark.

AFTER SWITCHING ANTIDEPRESSANTS, THE NIGHT STRETCHES by Matthew Mastricova

July 2, 2020

After switching antidepressants, the night stretches over his body as he lies next to you in bed, thinking about dying again, even though he would never tell you that. He would never tell you that for months it has been creeping out his mouth—his death, his parents’ deaths, his students’ deaths, the death (or non-death) that comes in the after death. When he is lucky, he can find an anchor: a pair of your socks balled hidden under the table or a can of apricot La Croix chilled for days. Leftovers of a from-scratch meal you cooked that he packed for a lunch he may or may not remember to bring. A reminder that you still live here—you still live. In bed he stretches across your body like a hand over a mandolin. His body a compass seeking your warmth, your pulse, your promise that when he wakes up your body will still be singing there with predawn light.

He will watch the night, the next three nights, pass over your body. He will tell you this, his pledge to try again another pill, only after he realizes that watching you, too, is just another way to die. But tonight is still early, or late, enough for him to promise that he will get better, drinking the clotted darkness between you till there is only your body, the sun.

THE TODDLERS ARE PLAYING AIRPORT AGAIN by Tucker Leighty-Phillips

July 1, 2020

They’ve partitioned everything: the slide is the runway, the jungle gym is the terminal, covered in tiny travelers; anything with mulch is part of the operations area. Nobody flies. Nobody ever wants to be pilot. The toddlers love every aspect of the airport except for flight. Tickle always wants to be the rampie, loading freight onto planes with his sandbox bucket. Dasha is the lav agent, as she’s the best at keeping the plane’s bathrooms within regulation. Everyone wants to be Bill Boyer, Jr, CEO. They fight over his stock options until they shove one another and you have to step in and separate them, saying Lacy, you were Bill Boyer Jr. last time, why don’t we let Steve this time? One child reluctantly plays pilot and discusses weather conditions and itinerary changes with a dawdling crew chief, a snotty kid with both shoe strings loose-a-goose. This is most of their game, quiet discussions, loading and unloading bags into mouths of slides. This is the fourth time I’ve been routed through Tampa this week, pilot child groans while the other begins the aircraft’s push back, preparing for takeoff. They bicker over operating the tow motor. When you say, don’t you kids want to fly, just once, don’t you want to fly, they say that’s what everyone thinks on day one, you just come in and fly, no problem, like it’s a breeze, you just fly, but we’ve got an overnighter on a non-movement area and ATC is backed up to Glasgow and I haven’t had a single fruit snack today so forgive me if I’m a little on edge, Mr. Sky Cap, and you step back, remind yourself it’s just their game, babble with the other parents, and think of some great taxi propelling you through the sky, vaulting into the blue-and-white, traversing the mighty somewhere else.