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KILLING PLANTS by Aaron Kreuter

June 30, 2020

It was during Fletcher's third week at the new job that he noticed Colleen's plant didn't look so hot. The plant's big green leaves were sagging, nearly touching the desk. Nobody had asked him to take care of the plant during his ten-month contract, filling in for Colleen while she was on mat leave, but the plant was obviously thirsty. Fletcher filled up his coffee mug with water and poured it into the off-white pot, the soil quickly sucking it up. Just to be safe, he tipped in a second mugful; this time, a half-inch of water remained sitting on top of the dirt. More than enough. It already seemed perkier.

When he came back after the long weekend—Saturday night spent worrying about the plant, whose health Fletcher had convinced himself would determine if he was hired on full time upon Colleen's return—the plant was dead. It was unmistakable: the leaves were brown and crispy, there wasn't a speck of green, not a hint of life. Fletcher panicked. A dead plant in the office did not scream collegiality. He had to get rid of it. But he couldn't just throw it out in the office garbage—it was Colleen's plant! The janitor would for sure notice.

He stuffed the plant into his knapsack, the leaves crunching, and took the stairs to the floor below, where he deposited it in the washroom garbage under the paper towel dispenser. Washing his hands, the peaked garbage lid still swinging on its hinges, a toilet flushed. Fletcher froze, looked up at the stall he had assumed was empty in the mirror. The door creaked open, and out came Brenda. “Fletch, how ya doing?! We were all really impressed with how you handled last week’s scheduling snafu.” She was rigorously washing her hands. At least six-five, shaved head, white shirt with a short black tie, Brenda was Fletcher's boss.

Fletcher stood there, dumbfounded. Did she know what he had done? “You seem to be fitting in great. Keep it up!” Brenda smacked Fletcher on the back—hard—and vacated the bathroom.

Back at his desk, Fletcher couldn't focus. There was a lot of work to do, unending work, but for the rest of the day Fletcher barely got through what normally would take him half an hour.

The plant's absence grew in his mind like a pimple. Every night he worried that the following morning he'd be called into the board room, and Brenda and Brenda's bosses—and even, sometimes, Colleen herself, a month-old baby latched onto her breast—would be sitting there. “Fletcher, we need to talk.” “Fletcher, we know what you did.” “Fletcher... you're fired.” A week after he threw the plant out he went back to the washroom to see if it was still in the garbage. It wasn't. He told himself it didn't matter, everything was okay, it was just a plant, right?

But no matter what he did, he couldn't shake that fucking plant. He booked an appointment at his therapist, whom he hadn't seen in years. The therapist had grown his hair out, was drinking coffee from a large travel mug. The office reeked like greasy farts. Fletcher wasn't perturbed; he unloaded on his therapist about the plant, the dread, the guilt, the dreams of getting fired. “How much longer can this go on?” he said to the therapist, who took a long, loud sip before launching into techniques to deal with intrusive thoughts.

Afterwards, Fletcher felt better, but that night the dream was back: the board room, the higher-ups, their knowledge of what he did to Colleen's plant. Fletcher back in his office, packing up his scant belongings.

So went the days, the weeks, the months. Some nights, worry for the plant would fester into more generalized worries, blisters of hot searing guilt. Fletcher as a bad roommate at nineteen. Fletcher running out of his pills three weeks after society collapsed. Fletcher, a young boy, laughing when he accidentally closed the elevator door on an old man, the geezer flailing his arms and legs as the soft doors hit him repeatedly. So went the days, weeks, months, the plant by now no more than dust salting a seagull's breakfast at some suburban landfill.

Finally, Colleen's mat leave was over, and Fletcher was interviewed for a permanent position. The interview with Brenda was light, chatty. A breeze. Still, he couldn't help feeling that any moment now, the ax would fall.

The day he was offered the job, in Colleen's office with Colleen and Brenda, Fletcher told them what happened with the plant, and they all had a good laugh. “Why didn't you just buy a new plant if you were so worried?” said Brenda, slapping her knee. “That plant was here when I got my promotion,” Colleen said, “it wasn't even mine!” She was laughing so hard Fletcher watched milk stains blossom under her blouse.

Fletcher went back to his desk. An enormous weight had been lifted. He was free of the plant. He had a good government job with good government benefits and a good government pension. He started working with that rare elation that comes, what, three, four times in a life, if you're lucky. As usual, He had a backlog, but he was so buoyant he didn't care. The work would get done. The cargo would be concentrated in central, confined centers. The cargo would be packed onto trains and delivered to the processing plant. The cargo would be processed. It always was.

Fletcher looked around his office, a smile on his face.

Maybe he'd buy himself a plant.

TIME TRAVELING ANTIQUE DEALER by Travis Dahlke

June 29, 2020

The owner of Beachman's eBay store had it bad for my best friend Gedaliah. I didn't trust him because his eyeballs were made three times smaller by his glasses and it was rumored he kept a time machine in his stockroom used for poaching antiques. The eBay thing was just a front and a former ketchup plant kept the whole operation mostly hidden from public view. Gedaliah paid nine hundred dollars for her walnut pembroke table but the bureau that Beachman sold me was a reproduction with drilled-in wormholes. Gedaliah's table reeked of tea bags close up. The nails piecing it together were oily when you cupped your hand underneath. Its edges had barely softened.

“Come back with me for the set. Please. You'll learn to love him,” she told me in the car outside his shop. Gedaliah's first husband was cut down from lead paint and her second was eaten by a piano. For the in-between times there was me. For her third husband we had parked between great vats of crystallized ketchup and a yard sign that said Fast Cash 4 UR Stash.

“Five minutes. My chaperone days are through,” I told her.

Small talk burbled up easily in between Beachman and Gedaliah. No problem doing that with no customers. I couldn't handle the flirting and so I excused myself down a path carved through sewing machines and mirror glass framed by cherubs. Their wings were more like parrot wings. I followed an extension cord to where it lead under a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. SERIOUSLY, DON'T COME IN. Most likely a stunt to keep the time machine rumors moist. I considered throwing a pineapple shaped cookie jar to the ground until Gedaliah told me that we were all meeting at the Mystic Steak Loft for brandies.

We waited in the bar for hours. “Don't do this,” I told her.

“Oh stop. You don't see it?”

“See what?”

“He knows me. And he's so handsome. His face narrows in a familiar way like one of those gray movie actors,” she said finishing our third bowl of olives.

When Beachman finally showed up, draping his trench coat on a stool, I was drunk and I told him he was full of shit.

“It's not a perfect machine,” Beachman claimed. “It can only return eighty-three years.”

“So invest in stocks,” I said.

He looked right at my best friend, collected her tiny hands in his and said, “I'm drawn to what is rare.”

Familiarity is easily confused with love you shithead, but under the table Gedaliah was already exploring his shin with her foot which meant soon I'd be alone.

Throughout their engagement Gedaliah wrote me emails. At first they were joyous and typeset with magenta. She'd describe which TV programs they watched together or how skillfully Beachman could apply nail polish to her little toe without getting any on the cuticle. He often returned from his excursions with special gifts. An engagement ring stolen from a major Vegemite proprietor or a toy rocking horse with its sales tag still intact, just like the one she had when she was five.

And then her emails turned black. She wrote how Beachman had become short tempered. Money was getting tight. Young couples no longer desired real woodwork for which to decorate their homes with. Young couples aren't even buying homes. His antique poaching also came with side effects like nightmares and weight gain. He started skipping the spaghetti dinners Gedaliah cooked and spent every night on an elliptical in their basement. No more TV programs. It seemed as though, she wrote, that Beachman was tired of her.

Gedaliah became stricken by cramps that began as glass in her stomach before working their way up to her memory. In a final email she had come to realize that she knew Beachman from somewhere else. A man that cleaned her parent's house or a faceless flannel coat splitting up bread for ducks at her teenage hangout. Always watching. Mashing toxic paint chips into powder. Familiar cramps are easily confused with love.

A year after her emails turned white, Beachman's eBay store went up in flames. They found a body. They found several other bodies which might've been manikins. The cologne from ancient baseball cards, dinnerware melded into velvet paintings of Garth Brooks, brass sows, and rugs embedded with hair. Windsor-style armchairs, Pandora beads, postcards, VHS tapes, real pearl, fake pearl, young adult novels about teachers who were really aliens, bronze babies bred from tropical fowl, ottomans, wood paneled digital alarm clocks, luggage, electric guitars, bureaus with forbidden love letters still stashed within their hidden compartments, samurai swords, Christmas ornaments, Penthouses and coin collections all unified in the afterlife. Gedaliah had soaked them from inside. She entered with a jar of nail polish remover and escaped through the time machine before it too was destroyed.

Now behind the ketchup plant is only emptiness. I think they won't do anything with the space. In Gedaliah's first email she had said through Comic Sans, “it all tastes exactly like sweet lint.” I think of her now living among the heirlooms where they are all brand new.

ANTS by Mary Mattingly

June 28, 2020

There’s an ant infestation in my bathroom.

They are relentless. Everyday, more squirming black dots swarm the sink, the countertops. Me, I’m fearless. I launch attacks on them with a safe-for-pets Ant and Roach Killer spray, twisting the green cap counterclockwise to cock it, holding it close to the sink to use the pesticide since at some point, the useless aluminum bottle broke and it no longer sprays confidently, just reluctantly pisses spray out. Still, it’s satisfying to watch the ants slow as the chemicals hit them. They drown in poisonous pools. I work methodically, chasing them to their home behind the counter, from which they’re inevitably swarming.

But no matter how many I kill, they keep coming back.

***

The first time I fell into obsessive depression, I was 16. I met him at a party on New Year’s Eve. I was immediately taken with his thick swoopy blonde hair and mismatched eyes, his full lips soft, softer than I ever thought a boy’s lips could be. We spent two weeks making out on and off in each other’s basements until finally he texted me during choir class, told me he wasn’t over his ex-girlfriend, a pretty and popular girl in my biology class. I told him it was fine but continued for months to spend every hour wondering what went wrong, replaying our various rendezvous in my mind and wondering why not me, what was wrong with me. It was remarkable the first day I woke up to realize he hadn’t been my first thought. It had been almost a year at that point. But, I was only seventeen. It’s normal for girls to be dramatic at that age. I wasn’t aware yet that I shouldn’t want to possess a person this way. To chase things denied to me simply because they are denied to me.

He and I went on like that for a while.

***

I suspect the ants have a queen and she’s fat behind the sink counter. She controls all their collective motions, sends them out scouting for food to bring back to the nest. And they obey, bowing to that thick, segmented mass. All she needs to do is say the word and they go out in the world in patterns that serve her needs.

I will kill her once I find her.

***

The first time I took a razor blade to the inner punchy flesh of my left arm, I was wrapped up in another obsession, over another boy. A musician (of course) with ropy tattooed arms and zero interest in being my boyfriend. I sat on my couch several vodka waters deep and used the blade I stole from his apartment. Instead of gliding through the tape that seals packages shut, I traced straight lines, which first appeared white, then thready with blood. I felt nothing thanks to the heavy cloak of alcohol I lay underneath. I realize all this information makes me sound hysterical, a scorned woman from a book with a heaving bosom on the cover. I cried as I did this, wishing that instead I was laying next to him in his purple-sheeted bed, knowing full well he wouldn’t wrap me up in his arms or rest his inked fingers on my hip. I knew then I was afflicted with something, but the only cure I could think of was at the tail end of a clear bottle.

***

My poor roommate doesn’t know what to do with the ants in our kitchen. It falls to me, then, to come up with some kind of plan. He complains, infrequently, wondering why the ants have migrated from the kitchen to the bathroom sink. It’s not like there’s anything in there for them to eat, he says. What is it they’re looking for?

***

I don’t like my mind. It shouts unfair things at me, heightens my awareness of my place in the world and how minuscule it is, my past failures, points out all the things people likely don’t like about me. My crooked nose and my not-flat stomach and that time I said the wrong thing at the wrong time. I don’t know how else to get it to shut up. So I drink.

***

To my roommate’s point, I’m not sure what it is the ants eat in the bathroom or how they stay alive. I wonder what I look like to them gazing up from their tiny bodies. Some easily ignorable entity, some blurry giant. They see me and they don’t scatter. I scare me more than I scare them.

***

The first time alcohol becomes the opposite of a friend is when it starts keeping me company when I’m bored. Sobriety scares me. Since I was eighteen, I’ve stayed high on something - weed from the college dealers on my undergraduate’s campus, hydrocodone stolen from my parents’ medicine cabinet, booze, psychedelics, molly, nicotine. But it’s not like I’m doing heroin. Or meth. Only then would I really have a problem. Only then will I have lost control.

***

The first time my impulse decisions start to pull me down, I’m living in South Florida, one hundred dollars away from penniless and my father is telling me over the phone I need to come home. I make decisions recklessly and they’ve come at a cost. Yes, I have a problem with spending. But, deep down, I know purchasing this or that one thing is going to turn it all around for me.

That’s how I ended up with a cat.

I’m in South Florida because I quit my job to pursue an MFA in fiction writing, left stability behind to move across the country, convinced I have a special something unlike anything my new professors have ever seen. Surely, I’d graduate with some kind of prestige, a book deal at least. My undergraduate music degree had been a farce, see, no, writing, like Anaïs Nin or Jeffrey Eugenides, writing, that’s where my artistry really shines.

Instead, I spend so much time at the local bar they learn my drink order and at first, I have fun. I meet new people, other writers, from all over the country and we get into spirited debates about teaching, about politics, tell stories. I talk too much and too fast, but I am devastatingly happy. I’m the fearless one, following an unconventional life path to the land of sunshine and overabundance. While my friends back home are forming dull meaningful relationships with partners and settling into gray careers and 401Ks, I’m following my dreams.

It doesn’t matter that, well, I’m not really writing, and it doesn’t matter that I’m spending every dollar I have on a vacation to the Keys, clear drinks, my old vices. In my mind, I’m a star. And celebrities don’t pay bills. After one semester, four months, I’ve used up all my savings, owe the federal government thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes and fines, and have to cash bonds my grandparents bought once-promising, infantile me to pay my rent.

Oops.

***

Some days, I consider not killing the ants. Maybe they’ve already won.

***

I’m sitting in a psychiatrist’s office in Boca Raton. I’ve told her I’ve come in for an assessment. I had previously gone to another psychiatrist's office on the hunt for the cure of being me, but all I know was that place scared me, with its mildewy smell of aging concrete walls and unwashed humans, wandering, doped-up bodies propped up by endless amounts of chemicals, both natural and prescribed.

This psych’s office is much nicer. It plays irritating, soothing music in the waiting room, where I jiggle on a white cushioned chair and wait to be called in. I have started taking Lexapro for depression, hurriedly prescribed during my ten-minute meeting with the previous psych and thus far the daily five milligrams has done nothing for me. I still obsess over people, wake up at odd hours and can’t find the motivation to finish my schoolwork.

But I’m not always like that.

I tell the psych, a kind woman with concerned brown eyes, that I don’t get good days, I get good weeks, where energy and excitement thrum through me. It’s like being high. I yearn for those months. I can control a room, make people laugh, make them feel good about themselves. I start writing short stories, books, bang out half-conceived songs on my teetering Yamaha keyboard, attempt comedic screenplays. Nothing gets done. Then comes the inevitable, drinking too much, blowing through every dollar on random, much-needed fixations like ounces of CBD or two hundred dollar speakers, sleeping with strangers I otherwise wouldn’t. Snapping at my roommate over a coffee mug left in the sink. Crying. Pouring myself another glass of vodka.

“Do you have any family members who are bipolar?” she asks.

I blink. It’s not something I’ve ever considered.

“I don’t know,” I reply.

I just know I’m tired of scaring my parents, myself. I’m tired of my temper tantrums, the times I get so frustrated over being unable to accomplish everyday tasks, it escalates to me screaming at myself, pacing through my house and shouting about how stupid I am.

I’m just tired.

***

Can ants think? Or do they just react in patterns? Do they have plans to take over my entire house? Will they chew through the foundation, termite-like, until it snaps? Will I lay back and let them?

***

It seems like everyone is bipolar these days. I see Tweets on social media, people noting with a nodding wink that they’re having a depressive episode or posting blurred memes representative of being manic. I do it myself. Proudly announce my diagnosis. Mood disorder. Such a catchy hashtag. I read articles detailing why the millennial generation struggles with mental health. It seems like everyone wants a clinical reason for why they feel the way they feel.

We all want to be special. Rather than be a little sad, we’re depressed. Rather than being nervous, we’re having a mixed episode. I familiarize myself with new terms: “hypomania,” “psych ward,” “anti-psychotic.” I see the rise in the discourse over mental health and I start to doubt myself. Am I really sick or am I playing into the allure of mental illness Instagram? I wonder how much of my problems are manufactured. Is taking medication a conspiracy by Big Pharma, convincing us that normal human emotions are unnatural, that there’s a pill to treat this and that? My friend has been on medication as long as I have and he says he doesn’t feel any different. I think I do. I think? I don’t know myself well enough to tell.

***

I will have control. I finally go to the store and buy traps for the ants. It’s a big step, one I’ve been putting off, but one that needs to be done. Plus, I’m almost out of spray.

***

These days, my brain and I continue to fight. But it’s easier now not to let it do me in. “You really have to take all those medications everyday?” My mother asks, reminding me that they’ll make me gain weight. And I don’t have an answer. Now I embrace society instead of rejecting it. At least for now. It scares me though, what the almighty brain can say. Veer into traffic. Swan dive off the top of the fifth floor of your friend’s apartment building. Stock up on your anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication and take them all at once. Just to see what happens.

My thoughts, they fritter around my head like swarms of ants. Everyday, they surface from behind the sink, make a beeline for me on the orders of their queen. And everyday, I take small pills, white circles, green and white ovals, to beat them back, a spray, a little trap of poison. I am doing better. My obsessions are still there, my circular thoughts still trap me sometimes. Some days, my brain might not want me here. But I want to be here.

That counts for something.

THE FAMILY THAT SKIS TOGETHER by Kim Magowan

June 27, 2020

“The family that plays together stays together,” Carol's father used to say, though even at the time Carol had felt skeptical about that assessment, given her mother's aversion to all forms of competition and her brother’s more specific aversion to losing. Oh, the way Alec's skin would mottle, the way he would say, under his breath so their parents couldn't hear, “Well, fuck you,” when Carol would knock his croquet ball into the trees. (And Carol would feel both elated and ashamed, or more precisely, ashamed because elated, and sorry for herself for having a brother who was such a dickhead.)

Now that she’s forty-three, her father’s unconvincing jingle keeps bending through her brain, as Carol perches at the top of a mountain, willing herself to go down. “The family that skis together...”— what? The blinding snow is a blank she tries to fill.

“Flees together”? Far down the slope is her husband Jack, his parka a receding blue spot, his poles as small as thorns.

“Pleas together”? Her daughter Maureen, slower but more graceful than Jack, turns in neat bobby-pins. A year ago Carol wouldn't have considered sending Maureen to boarding school—she'd have missed her too much—but then a year ago, Maureen wouldn't have begged to go. Like her father, Maureen is adept at being both sweet and convincing when she wants something.

Let her go already, Carol thinks wearily. So what? Can she even blame Maureen for wanting to flee Dodge? The kid's no fool; their house crackles with tension. Carol would run off to boarding school herself if she could. Fuck Jack and his ridiculous infatuation with absurd Erica Chan (Carol won't dignify it as “love”), his dithering, his one-foot-out. Fuck trying to be a good sport, jumping like a silky-eared cocker spaniel at his mere suggestion, “Let's do some family bonding.”

Doesn’t Jack remember she’s never liked skiing? What thrills Jack and Maureen only menaces Carol. She can't shake away the picture of careening into a pine, the breadstick snap of bones. The snow has a forbidding skin of ice: shiny, reflective. Now Carol has to strain her eyes to see her husband and daughter, so far below her. She must will herself even to try to catch them.

ADULT-ORIENTED by Kala Frances Wahl

June 26, 2020

I was seventeen with braces, bright pink rubber bands looped around the brackets in my mouth, when God appeared to me in a dream. He told me it was my destiny to be a porn star. I was peroxide blonde, big-breasted and flexible. I readily accepted God’s proposal. Once without direction, my life now had purpose, meaning, something tangible that I could grip onto and ride like a mechanical bull. The horns felt good in my hands.

I attended Catholic school, but I didn’t believe in God. I wasn’t sure what I believed in. I wanted to believe I was edgy or rebellious, a flamingo in a flock of pigeons, or a loud tornado gliding over a quiet Midwestern town. I wandered the hallways aimlessly with no shorts beneath my plaid kilt and a fresh tongue piercing; I spoke with a lisp for a month as my swollen tongue healed. My history teacher caught on that I wasn’t speaking correctly. He promised not to give me a detention for my new body modification, even though school policy insisted he should, but he did warn me about potential gum decay from having a metal ball in my mouth. I appreciated his concern; that teacher always rooted for me. I think he was the only one.

Teetering on a jagged line between searching for meaning in life and being too cool to search for meaning in life, I sat on the floor of my bedroom and waited for someone to tell me what to do. I was open to suggestions from anyone. God just happened to be the first one to tell me exactly what it was I needed to do.

When I told my mother about my vocational calling, we were in the car on the way home from school, a black Ford Escape that glistened in the sunlight like a damp forehead. My mother was also blonde, platinum. She always wore capris and oversized t-shirts with various logos on them. Some were for local fundraisers she never participated in and others were for tractor supply companies or breweries. Those shirts were amassed in her closet from various thrift stores and flea markets. Comfort was her thing, not fashion. I admired that about her. My mother gripped the steering wheel and called my dream ridiculous. I reminded her that God only appeared to important people, like prophets and virgins. She ignored me and asked if I’d taken out the trash in my room. Apparently it stunk in there; I hadn’t noticed.

We went to a tattoo parlor on a Saturday morning, a nice one with a fake chandelier and large fish tank in the lobby. The fish swam back and forth like they were running from something, but I couldn’t tell what. I identified with that. I told my mom we were there because I wanted to reinvent myself. She nodded and said to consider it an early birthday gift. I lay on my back while a man, who looked to be in his late 30s with a tattoo of a sphinx on his upper left arm, pushed a needle through the top of my belly button. I winced and wondered if he’d ever been to Egypt, or if he’d like to take me. The belly button gem was light blue and sparkling. It made me look edible, like candy. I looked at my piercer and smiled.

At home, in the mirror of my vanity, I pursed my glossy lips into an O and moaned. Taped along the golden frame were pictures of my dog, friends and makeup tips cut out from the pages of Cosmopolitan. They surrounded my face and torso like an attentive audience waiting for the next song, and I was going to give it to them. I was going to give it to everyone one day. I slid my tongue over my braces, feeling the rough grooves of metal before grabbing my bare breasts and squeezing. I moaned again. I practiced, and then I practiced some more. I slipped my fingers in between my lips and sucked. It wasn’t enough, though. Nothing was ever enough, and I threw a fit. I needed actual practice; I needed a boy.

So I found one and agreed to meet at a campsite twenty minutes from my house where he would take my virginity. Inside a tent, the classmate from third period Current Events flipped me onto my back on top of a sleeping bag. His penis was inside of me as he knelt over my naked body. We were two wrestlers tangled up in one another, oiled with each other’s sweat and grunting with every slight movement. My pussy bled from the pressure, the blood smeared along my inner thighs and coating his dick, but I told him to keep going. It was all so dirty and rough, and I liked it. He slammed his eyes shut and whimpered, and I told him I felt like I was in a porno or something. He didn’t say anything but instead panted like he was going to cum.

I looked up at him and said, “Did you know that I want to be in pornos?”

***

I began to spray-tan. I used those cans from the drugstore. I’d baptize myself with the orange spray as I leaned my naked body against the walls of my shower. My mother complained it stained the white porcelain; I complained she spent too much time drinking on cruise ships with male suitor number five, or six or seven. I lost count.

My naturally curly hair became fried beneath the tongs of my flatiron as I straightened it stiff, and I wore heavy eyeliner, thick and black like the ink of a King-Size Sharpie.

“If I wouldn’t pose for Playboy in it, I don’t leave the house,” I told my friends on the school track as we stretched our legs before practice.

I then lifted my arms upwards over my head, reaching and reaching until my shirt rode up enough for my belly button piercing to show. The girls stared and asked me about it.

Coach yelled at us, “Stop talking and run!”

And I did run—away from home in the black Ford Escape. I drove on the highway barefoot, my dirty sneakers tossed into the backseat along with a duffle bag. All it held were four half-empty bottles of nail polish and a few pairs of dirty underwear I found beneath my bed, because I hadn’t done my laundry in a while. I drove fast, but I shouldn’t have. I didn’t actually know where I was going; the whole thing sounded better in my head. With each slam of the brake, my toes pressing down hard on the pedal and the tires screeching, I yelled expletives out of the half-open window. My mom asked via text where I took the car, and I responded, my fingers thumping angrily against the keyboard, “Fuck you.” She could use her company car. I drove for thirty minutes before getting off on Exit 31. I went to my friend’s house and ended up staying with her for a week. When she asked why I left home, I told her it was my mom or something like that: “She’s fucking wack, dude.”

During my stay, my friend and I went to different malls and shoplifted. We drove to our local mall, then to the mall in the next town, and then to one in the town over. I would drop frilly G-strings from display counters at Victoria’s Secret into my purse. I ducked behind scantily clad mannequins in bridal lingerie and threw more panties into my bag. I accidentally swiped a pair that said, “I Do,” on the butt in shiny rhinestones. But the muffled sounds of the mall cops’ walkie-talkies in the distance scared me, so I tugged at my friend’s sleeve and we left.

We made our way to the riverside. A flickering light bulb surrounded by giant moths guided us to an adult-oriented store called Southern Secrets. We got in without being carded, which I took as a compliment. I must have looked mature for my age, or fuckable, so I covered my braces with my lips. Reaching my sticky palms out towards the shelves of erotic merchandise, nipple clamps and cock rings manifested in the bottom of my bag like a spreading wildfire. I’d been bad. I needed to be spanked, and I wanted the guy from the piercing shop to do it—the one with the sphinx on his arm. I’d ask him to call me a slut. The thought excited me, but no one was calling me a slut. My mom just called me “crazy” over a three-minute voicemail. She wanted me back at the house. I didn’t want to go, so I didn’t.

My phone, however, buzzed all night in the back pocket of my denim shorts. It was my mom again, “You need to come home. And bring the car with you, obviously.” I ignored her.

I ignored her until I stumbled back into the house on a school night. I wasn’t drunk or anything; I stumbled because I was careless, misbalanced and unaware of how to put one foot in front of the other anymore. My friend said she needed space or whatever, so there I was. I slammed the front door behind me and watched as the ceramic candleholders on the end tables shook. I liked the rattling noise they made as they shivered against one another.

“Talk to me,” my mom said as she emerged from the dimly lit kitchen. Duffle bag dangling from my shoulder and resting against my hip, I held the car keys. I held them firmly in case I decided to recoil back to the Escape and drive to Kentucky or maybe Canada.

“Talk to you about what?”

“About what’s going on,” she said.

“I was with a friend.”

“I knew where you were.”

Rolling my eyes far back enough to where I could see all of the pink, squishy stuff inside my head, I tossed the car keys onto the table and headed towards my bedroom. My mom stayed in the kitchen, which disappointed me. I wanted to be followed. I wanted to be chased and grabbed and tackled to the ground, because any kind of attention was good attention, at least that’s what I thought; I thought it consciously. But instead of running after me, my mom called in a relaxed tone, her voice cool and collected as always, “I knew where you were, but I didn’t know where you were going, or what you were doing, or why you were even doing the things you were doing. I was scared.”

“Me too,” I said to the door of my bedroom. I ran my fingers over the brass knob before entering, “Me too.” I lay in bed that night and thought about my destiny.

I was seventeen with scrapes and bruises on my knees from falling so much on the ground beneath me. I was good at that—falling. I would even do it on purpose and like it. The wounds were self-inflicted, and each time I found myself lying on the ground, fewer people were around to offer me kisses or gauze. But some still tried. I’d sit across from my therapist in tight mini-dresses or graphic t-shirts that’d say things like, “I’m Not Listening,” or “Buy Me Things and I’ll Be Nicer,” and she’d ask me to elaborate on my dream. She wanted to know more about what God was like, what he was wearing, if he said anything else or why I even listened to him if I wasn’t a believer. Her questions annoyed me. Batting my black-shadowed lids and crusty, coated eyelashes, long and thin like a bug’s legs, I shrugged and said, “I think you’re just jealous God didn’t appear to you.”

ALWAYS AND ONLY JUST ALMOST by Felicia Rosemary Urso

June 26, 2020

Strangers came by to give you gifts: a fresh fish on ice in a styrofoam cooler, metal frying pans, a machete, two bottles of rum, a bunch of bananas the size of my torso. At night, we played gin rummy, shared liters of Kava and waited for a full moon. In the daylight, you showed me the jungle and explained every root or plant I could use for sunscreen or gelatin shampoo. I woke up picking my scabs, legs stuck to the leather couch on your porch. Nineteen and sick for you.

You were two hours late when you pulled up to the Kona airport, perched in the bed of a white pick-up truck. It had been a year since we had seen each other. We talked on AIM every day for seven years but hadn’t spent more than a few days in person since we met. I went nowhere new without sending you a postcard.

You used your EBT card to buy us raw fish with rice we ate in parking lots and green melon ice pops we ate on the side of the road. You picked me passion fruit when we’d pass a tree. We walked or hitchhiked to long stretches of flat land, black sand beaches with naked families smoking joints, both of us wearing only your boxers, swimming as a shower in turquoise coves filled with unforgiving coral. Places I can see when I sleep but not on a map. Places I only see through you.

Living alone, and with so little, I didn’t understand how you weren’t lonely or why you couldn’t seem to miss me. No electricity, no heat, no running water. The field surrounding your plywood house that sat on stilts was filled with a fruit the texture and color of chicken-fat, with a vomit aftertaste. The first three nights on the farm I dreamed that you stabbed me, my stomach as easy to push through as a pillow.

You lifted me onto the counter, pushed up my dress and licked at my core, like it was a pinkness you had never seen.

You told me about the purple cottage with a flower and vegetable garden you’d build for us, for our children, who would be as gorgeous as you are, and I believed you. While watching a white owl float over the dark field, you talked about your daughter who died when she was three days old. You heard her at night, howling. You heard her during thunderstorms and felt her there on your lap. Felt her between us under the navy sheet, while shoveling the earth, while collecting guava and avocados off trees, while walking through the jungle’s wetness to fill up your giant jug with drinking water for the week.

The gauze covering the light, the motes in my eyes. How much more could I have proved? Whittled down, your little flute.

I made you cum with your pants buttoned up but even then, I couldn’t feel you. I brought up my father and you pointed out a crimson flower. I saw a blood orange and you saw god. The ocean’s red seaweed stuck in the hollows of my crotch and thighs, like tiny clotted miscarriages. Looking up at an ancient Banyan tree you said, “That’s us.” Two trunks with branches reaching out and coiling into each other. Stuck, together.

On a single lane dirt road, laying in the back of a stranger’s pick-up truck, you used your arms to keep mine warm, hitting pause. There was no light, no apparent life, we could have been the only people the dead dark trees had seen. The volcano had erupted a few weeks prior—was still gushing through some open holes, you showed me where—its wake scratched fields into blank black. When we woke up, our toes and eyelashes touched. Pure by morning, you retold my dreams to me.

I thought nothing bad could happen in August, but out of all the men who could have had me but wouldn’t, it was you who the drunk driver hit. It was you, who lost all feeling in every limb except for your left hand. You, who had never been able to touch me but never stopped making me squirm. Once stable enough, you were flown from Hawaii to a Philly hospital. I didn’t take the bus from New York to visit you. I couldn’t bear to see you need me.

You never slept in this bed, but I tell myself I smell your deep-green scent on my pillowcase, and so I do. In the downtown Brooklyn hotel room years later, your skin hung onto the mineral dust smell that tortured my pussy for a decade. The sweat that made me want to climb you where we lay, on top of the sheets, both of us still as meat.

I brought you to the roof. The seatbelt on your wheelchair wasn’t done on, the wheels caught on the lip of the door, you fell forward and couldn’t reach out. Once back in your chair, I put the straw to your mouth and we drank. I put the blunt to your lips and we smoked. For a few hours before check-out I slept curled into your armpit, again, unsure.

When I first met you, and when I meet you again, I’ll think I was sent for you. Can you remember? Your friends said the day you met me, you repeated my name like a chant as you fell into our dreams.

Before our warm January, before we touched anyone, before the drugs we had to do: the grass, the lake, my bunk bed. I want to watch how your lips tell it, the summer we met—drowsy New Hampshire dusks, quiet pines vibrating in dry heat. Capturing each others flags, watching each other bite granola bars, blushing…

Two twelve-year-olds in black converse—conspiring, shoulder to shoulder, pinkie to pinkie—always, and only, just almost.

IN-BETWEEN SIRENS by Davon Loeb

June 25, 2020

The in-betweens are like waiting for something to happen, like flashes of red and blue sirens pulsing through my car, while searching for the police officer about to step to my window. And I watched from the rearview mirror, and would say and act exactly how my mother told me—to call him or her sir or ma’am, to be polite, to keep my hands on the steering wheel, to have my paperwork ready. And that my stomach was buoyant, and that my eyes blurred from tracking the sirens, and that I felt the spotlight sizzle on the back of my neck—but I kept the speed limit, and my seatbelt was fastened, and I used my right blinker when pulling over to the side of the road, and that my vehicle was in good-standing; and even though I had three friends in the car, none of us had been drinking—none of us smoked or did much of anything that night besides driving back to campus from dinner. And when the police officer knocked on my window, I lowered it, and he instructed for me to step outside the vehicle—to exit slow, to keep my hands where he could see them. And another police officer, around the rear, with his flashlight, inspected the rest of my car—targeted it on my friends in the backseat—asked them their names; one said Mike, and the police officer said Miguel, and Mike said—no, Mike. And while I was outside the car, I handed the other police officer my license, and he examined it with his flashlight, checked my face to match, and then told me to sit back, and I did, resting on my hood. He studied my license longer, and though I wanted to ask him what I did wrong—that I wasn’t swerving, that I didn’t run a stop-sign, that I didn’t commit any traffic violations—I said nothing, and stood stone-still knowing it really didn’t matter—knowing exactly why he pulled me over—and that when he said there was a string of burglaries in the neighborhood and we looked suspicious, I wasn’t a bit surprised.

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.