Archives

WHEN I WAS A PAPER GIRL by Sam Payne

March 26, 2020

Nana was always keen on telling me how working hard was important, so when I was thirteen, I took it upon myself to sign up with Turners Newsagents. It wasn't long before a round came up. This pleased Nana. She was enthusiastic about bringing me up in the right way.

"Manners and hard work, that’s all you need, my girl. Don’t let the past become an excuse."

By which she meant the death of my parents when I was nine, but we didn’t talk about them directly.

I delivered the morning papers to all the posh houses on the other side of town whose tree-lined streets had names like Buttercup Drive or Maple Avenue. Every fourth Friday, I was responsible for collecting the bill money and taking it back to Mr Turner, who meticulously counted every penny in front of me. I guess rich people didn’t like to get up early, because most of them left it under the doormat or on the ledge just inside their porch. This was alright by me, because if they didn’t leave their money, I had to knock and ask for it. I didn’t like talking to adults; my face would get all hot, and my mouth clammed up like a purse. When I eventually managed to get my words out, they sounded foolish or moronic.

One house, whose porch was larger than Nana’s kitchen, had walls lined with glass cases. Each case contained a dozen or so moths. Some moths were the color of tree trunks or rotten leaves, but others were so vivid and bright it seemed a crime that they should end this way. I was both fascinated and revolted by the moths. I didn’t understand why someone would display them in this way, and I think a part of me was afraid they might suddenly take flight.

The people who lived there usually left their bill in a plain brown envelope marked paper money, but one Friday, they must have forgot. It wasn’t there. I knocked and waited, and an old man answered the door. He was wearing a striped pajama top, and it took me a moment to realize this was all he was wearing. His legs were skinny and wrinkled and covered with wiry grey hairs. His private parts hung limp, as if dead. ‘Take it," he said.

I felt like one of those moths, encased in glass, a silver pin through the abdomen. It took me a moment to realize he was holding out his hand to me. He dropped the coins one by one into my palm. They were warm and damp like he’d been holding them for a long time. I closed my fist, and thanks him. It was all I could think of to say.

“FACE TOUCHING DURING A PANDEMIC” by Michael Seymour Blake

March 25, 2020

NO EASING INTO IT by Lori Yeghiayan Friedman

March 25, 2020

November 7, 1994: I sat on William and Luke’s bed, listening to the ring, ring in my ear, each ring getting fainter like a distant alarm. I was about to hang up when someone answered—a man.

“Hello,” he said, startled, like maybe I’d woken him up.

“Hi,” I said into the receiver of the beige rotary phone on my lap. I scanned The Yellow Pages opened next to me on the faded maroon bedspread. I checked the ad: Did I get the number right? I looked out their bedroom window and up at the night sky: What should I say? No answer.

“We have a body that needs embalming,” is what came out.

It’s a moment that will take years to unravel. I am still stunned that I used the word “embalming.” I think it’s funny that I made it sound like we’d murdered him: “a body.”

Twenty-five years later, I sympathize with that twenty-three-year-old girl―me―sitting on that bed, rotary phone on her lap, The Yellow Pages open beside her. She’s in way over her head. She tried her best to perform this final task. I even have sympathy for that young man in the next room, not the one whose life was over―he always had my sympathy―but for the one whose life was just beginning. The bonds of our strange union were about to break, and for a long time, I hated him for the pain caused by this avalanche of loss.

My friend is dead. I couldn't bring myself to say it, so I kept it clinical, like I was describing a frog suspended in formaldehyde.

Twenty minutes earlier, I picked up the phone. It was late on a Tuesday night. The call had come and I’d responded like a soldier would to deployment orders: perfunctorily, with resolve. “I’ll be right over,” I said, pulling on my red Keds. I drove the five minutes from my apartment through the empty streets of Hillcrest, past the Gay & Lesbian Center, the post office, Topsy’s Diner―the site of many drunken late-night patty melts.

I parked my Hyundai in front of their apartment like it was just another night, stubbing out my cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. Their place was in a U-shaped collection of five or six low, Pueblo-style cottages the color of sand within a Spanish-style apartment complex typical for San Diego.

I stepped with purpose onto the path that weaved from the sidewalk through the small center courtyard, but I slowed as I reached their front door. Once the door was open, there was no going back. I let the nearest section of landscaping distract me―a sparse and neglected collection of cacti that I noted with surprise retained a few of its blooms: bright red, yellow, and pink against the apartment’s beige stucco—unexpected bursts of color in a place it would be hard to imagine anything would grow.

Near the doorstep, William and I hugged. Above us, the dark sky was lit by an absurd number of stars, like a worldwide fireworks display designed to mock our grief. He broke our silent embrace, turning his head away from me and heading inside. I followed him, expecting to walk together to where Luke lay. Instead, William stopped short and handed the phone book to me.

“I don’t know,” he said in response to my questioning look. His blue eyes, deep set on a regular day, were sunken, an ocean after a storm, a calm masking the turbulence below. His wry, crooked smile was gone. The creases around his eyes and mouth were more noticeable with his face slack. He looked older than his twenty-four years.

“Look under ‘F’ for funeral homes?” he said, one corner of his mouth turning up. His Kentucky accent, full-blown under duress, made the o in “homes” sound more like aw.

How odd this was. Seconds after I’d arrived, he handed me the phone book, assigning me a task like I was sent from some agency.

He knows I have to see Luke first, right? I thought. I have to say goodbye.

The hospital bed in the living room of their one-bedroom apartment looked built for a giant with Luke, always petite, now shrunk to child-sized. My mind wandered to an interaction I’d had with a leather-daddy gay I barely knew. We had both been cast in a play and I must have mentioned my friend Luke. Leather Daddy was convinced he knew him, so I described him. He said something like, “Oh, yeah. I know him. Pocket-sized gay, right?” I objected to that phrase, but when I told Luke later, he didn’t seem to mind. Instead, he smiled. It surprised me, then I thought, What do I know about what passes for an insult or an endearment in his world?

Luke’s head lolls to the side. His face―hollow, cheekbones sharp, skin stretched and blue―is turned toward the TV set, the screen blank. I still see the pink-cheeked Luke―delicate features, earnest smile, freckles―and his body, instead of hidden under a hospital gown, adorned in his preferred 1970s style: striped bell bottoms with a shiny, close-fitting, paisley button-down shirt. I expect the real Luke to rise up from this other Luke.

Then an internal collapse; my throat constricted, and my heart beat fast, as if I’d been running. My body was reacting to the horror of what had happened. I think: I knew he would die, but I didn’t know that meant he’d be gone. I’m so stupid, so stupid.

I nearly laughed remembering that I’m so stupid, so stupid are the exact words Shirley Maclaine says as the character Aurora Greenway in Terms of Endearment. It’s right after her daughter, played by Debra Winger, dies. She’s even standing by a hospital bed. It’s the kind of melodrama Luke lived for. Somebody give my daughter the shot! I imagined him screaming, hitting his fists against the table, theatrically miming pulling a cardigan around his shoulders in a mock version of Aurora’s famous hospital tantrum. He would have been perfect as the fierce Southern mama-bear who was willing to rip to shreds anyone who caused her baby pain, in some imagined John Waters version of the film.

There is no easing into it. One minute you’re sure-footed while three of you walk together toward a future hand-in-hand. The person you both love is right there―and here’s you and here’s him and there’s him, right here, right where you all have always been.

Your memories give the illusion that things are as they have always been. There the inevitable end sits, like the edge of the world, visible but distant, a cliff you know you’ll reach―someday. You see it, you believe in its existence, you’re not blind. You’re just busy, doing regular things, like seeing movies, eating loaded potato skins, singing cheesy lyrics, going bowling, painting sets, chatting in a hospital room while eating fries and marveling at how everyone thought that “someday” had come, that you’d reached the edge, but actually you hadn’t, haha, not today.

The step off is a shock, the world one minute full of noise and movement, and then the next quiet; a dizzying nothingness rushes in, taking up all the space, the space where the person―your person―used to be, as he vanishes along with every anchoring thing, and you are catapulted into a slow-motion free fall with no foreseeable end.

I turned away from Luke, dry-eyed and resolute. William had asked me to do it, so I would. I glanced over at him, busy doing who-knows-what in the kitchen and walked toward the bedroom, eyes to the ground, clutching the phone book to my chest like it was the last piece of earth I clung to before I fell.

Some names and identifying place have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

A FAIR FIGHT by Alle C. Hall

March 23, 2020

The boat didn’t launch until 10PM. Allia and the three Swedish men she found herself with settled into the hold of the 25-foot cargo vessel ferrying supplies between Indonesian islands. They must have hit rough seas, because Allia woke in the dark to find the boat tipping right then left, as if God were running big fingers up and down the keys of a piano. There was rain and there were rats. When the boat tipped right, the travelers and the rats rolled to the right; when the boat tipped left, they rolled left. Without an ounce of condescension, the Swedes formed their long bodies into a triangle around Allia, so that most of the rats flew over rather than rolling into her. A few slammed into her, bounced off, scuttled away. As soon as the sun broke, the winds calmed and the rain cleared. The crew invited the white people onto the deck, where each declined the breakfast stew of indefinable meat over rice.

The first rat appeared about what must have been eight o’clock. Allia spotted it on a railing, sitting up like a puppy, its little paws held its lightly moving chest. Allia traveled with a set of nunchucks. She came up quietly behind the rat to flatten its skull. With a second strike, she sent the carcass into the sea.

The second rat was almost squirrel-like, with perky ears and a rounded back. The third and fourth seemed regularly gross in the way of city rats. When she sent the fourth, bloody, into the sea, one of the Indonesian crewmen said, “Don’t. Sharks.”

Allia could not stop now. They were coming. The next was bigger and mean, the way Allia imagined the rat from 1984 would be. He put up a good fight, dodging Allia’s sticks and taking whacks to his solid sides without flinching. It took more than three minutes of battle to crack its skull. Even then, the old bastard didn’t die. His skull was not completely broken when Allia’s last swoop sent him overboard. Sure enough, he met in the water a shark.

“Mako,” said the crewman. The big rat’s screams evidenced the short, furious fight he gave before a shriek choked off half-way through.

More rats were coming. They were wearing her out. Allia climbed to the crow’s nest. Slowly, steadily, rats followed her, strung out as evenly as Christmas lights. They appeared to have all the time there was. The Swedes and Indonesians retreated to the hold. In a gathering rush, the rodents pulled at Allia with their scratchy paws and threw her into the sea. They tossed her nunchucks after her, to make it more of a fair fight.

MIDGE by Tara Campbell

March 21, 2020

“I remember sailing in a ship.” Skipper’s voice fills the musty darkness of the drawer. “I mean, it was a small ship, more like a boat, I guess, and we were just floating, really, which maybe some people wouldn’t call sailing, but anyhow, I liked it.” Her tone brightens with the details. “It was a warm day but cool down by the water. The girl had taken us down there—”

“What was the girl’s name?” I ask.

I hear Skipper’s intake of breath, the way the memory catches in her throat, even though she technically doesn’t have one anymore, meaning a throat, seeing as how she’s now just a head in a junk drawer, like all of us, lying on top of lost buttons, rusty screws, used twist ties, expired coupons, and a broken pair of scissors. Waiting for someone to come save us.

“I don’t remember,” she says. “You’re so mean, Midge. I never remember, why do you keep badgering me?”

“Shh, shh, it’s okay,” says Francie. “She was just asking.”

But Skipper’s right. I am mean, always have been. I think. I don’t remember going on any sailing trips. What I do remember is that the girl who played with us always reached for me last, and then had me argue with everyone else. I don’t know why she picked me to be the mean one. Maybe it was my name: Midge—that sounds like someone who starts arguments. I just can’t remember what we argued about. And the longer I’m in this drawer, the less I remember.

Christie interjects: “Skipper, sweetie.”

I roll as everyone shifts around me, and I assume it’s Skipper trying to face her, a habit we haven’t completely unlearned since being in the drawer.

“Sweetie, Midge is only trying to help.”

“Whatever,” I say. “If you want to just lie around here the rest of your life…”

“What does that mean?” says Skipper, voice trembling. “The rest of m—”

“Ignore her,” says Francie. “She’s just trying to scare you.”

Francie’s right. I am trying to scare her, just like I did with Tutti and Todd before her, and Kelly before them, firing questions at them until they cried. To hell with comforting new arrivals; they might still have enough information to save us, if I can just pull it out of them.

“Don’t ignore me,” I say. “I’m the only one—"

The drawer lurches below me. A crack of light appears like a raised horizon, then widens to encompass the whole sky. The brightness hurts even through closed eyelids. Without arms, I can’t shield my face.

Something hard and heavy grazes my cheek as it falls into our drawer. Then, as quickly as the light blinded me, I’m jostled and plunge into darkness again.

“That bitch,” says the new arrival. The voice is deep, masculine.

“Holy shit,” someone blurts. “It’s Ken!”

“Ladies?” says Christie. “A little help?”

As my eyes adjust, I notice that a sliver of light still shines through a crack, with a blot of darkness against in it. A few of us roll over bent nails and loose batteries to get closer to the blot. It’s Christie, and her hair has gotten stuck in the top of the drawer.

“Hang on,” says Skipper. “We’ll pull you out.”

Christie shifts. “No, don’t pull me back into the drawer. This is our way out of it!”

“You bet your sweet ass it is.” Ken rolls from side to side, as though testing his new range of movement, then tells us to watch out. He tumbles toward the front of the drawer, banging himself below the crack of light again and again, until he finally gives up and rolls, panting, into a back corner.

The drawer hasn’t moved at all. The horizon hasn’t gotten any brighter.

“You done?” says Christie.

Her tone is uncharacteristically rude, but no one tells her to be nicer, which I find gratifying. But then, I’m Mean Midge.

The corner remains quiet.

“Ken. The girl’s name is Mackenzie,” Christie says. “Mackenzie.”

“Oh,” gasps a doll named Stacey. “Oh oh oh, and she has red hair just like me.”

“And she likes milk and cookies after school,” Skipper adds. “Even though she usually gets carrot sticks and, gag, celery—I mean, who likes celery—and crackers with that weird chickpea paste on it? I mean, have you guys smelled that stuff? And she has to sneak the cookies, which isn’t hard because her parents keep all kinds of junk food in the house, but then she feels bad about it afterward, because she looks in that stupid mirror and thinks she’s fat. She’s only ten for Christ’s sake, and she thinks she’s fat. Can you believe it? I mean, isn’t that horrible?”

After a moment, I break the silence. “Christie, what’s the plan?”

We all whisper, bubbling with ideas, and we decide to wait until the world outside the drawer is dark and quiet. The one thing we agree upon is that we can’t let our captors discover the gap and close the opportunity before we figure out how to use it.

When night falls, we try out our ideas: we push against Christie to wedge more of her hair into the opening; we stuff our own hair into the opening alongside hers; we roll ourselves around and around, twisting our hair into tight, fat bundles meant to pry the opening wider. Nothing works.

Skipper spins, unwinding her hair, and looks into the back corner of the drawer. Ken is lying somewhere over there in the darkness. He hasn’t spoken or moved since he rolled back there. It hits me then that none of my nice, helpful companions have gone back to check on him.

“I’m going to try something,” Skipper says. What little light is left reveals her eyes, narrowed, and her mouth set in a hard line. “Please promise, though: don’t judge me.”

Skipper rolls out of the scant light toward the blackness in the corner. I cringe at the thought of being that close to him in the dark. Cornered. We wait, listen. Hear things. Things that sound like the rip of silicone. When she rolls back to us, there’s a bulge in her cheek.

“Skipper?”

“What did you do?”

Skipper doesn’t answer, merely rolls up the pile of our heads and goes to work on the opening, burrowing and shimmying, creating some pretty nasty tangles in our hair, but also opening the split wide enough for us to forgive her.

“Hand me the scissors,” she says to no one in particular.

Everyone gasps. I don’t like being bossed, but Skipper seems to have a plan; so I untangle myself and push the broken scissors up the pile of heads, laughing when I think about “handing” them off with no arms.

Stacy starts to cry, but no one asks why, probably because we can all now remember the time Mackenzie tried giving her bangs. We all told Stacy she looked great, but she cried for weeks. We visited her almost every day on the top shelf of the bookcase, where Mackenzie hid her so she wouldn’t have to look at her botched bangs, and we all acted as though nothing had happened.

Just like now, when we don’t talk about how Mackenzie will never come save us.

And now, when we don’t talk about dark corners and Ken.

Skipper tells Stacy to stop crying, she’s not a little girl anymore, and the words cut through me like a blade. “I’m not a little girl anymore.” That was the last thing Mackenzie said to me before she put me in here. The same thing I heard her say to every new head that has tumbled in since.

Skipper doesn’t try to give anyone bangs. Together, she and I set the scissors along one side of the drawer and wedge the tips out of the crack, then lever and wriggle until the crack opens even further. The others get the hint and disentangle themselves to set up two teams, pushing the handles in opposite directions, widening our horizon a little more with each heave-ho.

We leave the scissors wedged there, then slide a ruler into place as a ramp to the outside. Wordlessly, we back away. Skipper has earned the first taste of freedom.

I watch my sisters roll out into the world after Skipper, each of them holding a nail or pin or sewing needle between her teeth, and I notice that none of them turns back to look for Ken. Not one. But I look back, and I remember everything, including why I’m so mean. It has nothing to do with my name.

I clench a nail between my teeth. Darkness swirls around me as I tumble after my sisters up the ramp into a new world, one with no room for anyone but us.

IF WE MISS THIS ONE by Abbie Barker

March 20, 2020

The morning sun highlights imperfections—the cigarette burn at the edge of my seat, the dust on the dash, the dried blood hugging the edges of Grant’s thumbnail. He’s disheveled, unshaven, his black hair kinked from a restless sleep. I want to slide my hand over his cowlick and smooth it down. I want to talk about last night.

“Is there a later meeting if we miss this one?” I say.

“We can still make it.”

Multi-family homes flash by in tones of gray, in varying states of disrepair. We pass a park with an overgrown baseball diamond and a playground where no children are playing. A woman in a faded purple sweatshirt sits slumped on a bench, her head rocking side to side. What’s it like to wake up wishing you could disappear? And once there, can you ever fully return?

“We’re close,” Grant says. He grazes my thigh with his knuckles. “I remember this pink house.” The three-story building is the color of Pepto Bismol.

“Did you want me to stay?” I say.

Grant parts his lips, but no sound comes out.

“Last night. Should I have stayed at Sadie’s?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

As Sadie’s party thinned, I left him on the arm of a teal couch, sipping a Miller Lite. “It’s pretty much water,” he said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

He took another sip. “But you were thinking it.”

I don’t know what I was thinking. I was tired and wanted to leave. I’ve always been able to drink or not drink. What’s one Miller Lite on a couch?

“This is it,” he says, pointing to the glass door of a single-story brick building. There’s an undersized bronze cross stuck to the peak of the roof. We’ve arrived at a church, but it can’t be the one pinned on my phone. “I think there’s parking around back.”

“You’ve been here before?” I say.

Grant shrugs. “Once or twice.”

I wonder if this is how it will always be, the two of us searching for separate things and not knowing it.

***

In the parking lot, a man helps a girl down from the cab of a black truck. She wears a pink dress made of tulle and satin—the kind normally reserved for Easter Sundays. He grabs her hand and they hurry to the back entrance, the heels of her shiny shoes clicking on the pavement.

“Should I come in?” I say.

“Isn’t that why you came?”

We trail the pair inside and down a carpeted hallway that smells of stewed tomatoes. Grant directs me through double metal doors propped open by two artificial palm plants. Music plays, heavy on the synthesizer.

The room reminds me of my elementary school’s cafetorium: cement walls painted a pale high-gloss, rectangular panels of fluorescent lights—misshapen gym with retractable basketball hoops. Magenta streamers hang from the orange rims, twisted and taped in uneven arcs. There are folding tables spanning one sideline, topped with an array of mayonnaise-based side salads and aluminum pans of baked ziti. I count ten people in the room, including the man and the girl from the truck.

“Can I help you?” the man says.

Grant’s hands are in his pockets, his eyes directed at the phlegm-colored linoleum.

“We’re looking for an AA meeting?” I say.

“I’ve rented the room for my daughter’s birthday.”

Grant combs his fingers through his hair. This makes it stick out more. He says a few words that shouldn’t be said in a church.

The man’s eyes flicker with understanding. “In twenty minutes, this place will be overrun with kids, but we have plenty of food.”

“We should probably go.” I say.

“My brother is in the program,” the man says. He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand.

I expect Grant to craft an excuse, to drag us out of this child’s party we have no business crashing. Instead, he kneels, so he’s eye-level with the tulle-wrapped girl. “How old are you turning? Seventeen?”

The girl squints and holds up six fingers.

“Six? No way. You look so grown up.”

She lets out a musical giggle, revealing her missing front teeth, and skips to a pyramid of presents. Is it terrible that I’m craving a giant glass of Chardonnay? That all I want is to disappear?

The man pats Grant on the back. “I have to grab a few things from the truck.”

“I’ll help,” Grant says.

They walk through the open doors, deserting me in this drafty, multipurpose room with only my phone to swipe. With a few quick taps, I could reactivate my Match account and summon an Uber to whisk me away. Tomorrow there will be another meeting at another church on some other side of town, but missing this one feels too much like standing still.

RIGHT BEFORE WE FALL APART by Elizabeth Crowder

March 19, 2020

We sit in cooling sand. You reach out a gritty palm. I don’t move closer. Eight years ago, on this same stretch of beach, with our swelling son arching your back like a comma, we vowed to love each other forever.

“Let’s play a game.” You twist kinky hair around a dark brown finger.

The last game we played was at your parents’ Christmas party. There, in your three-bedroom, one-bathroom childhood home with the red door, you unclenched. Your voice became salty and slippery, an oyster shucked from its shell. You loosened, darkened, said the n-word with a soft “er.” My mouth soured at your pantomime.

I started it. I usually do. You escalated it. You usually do.

We sat at the dining room table waiting for your mother’s “famous greens” to finish cooking. They bubbled in chicken stock and pork fat on the stovetop, shimmering with delight at the thought of stopping my Caucasian heart halfway to a beat.

“Let’s play a game,” you said.

“Okay.”

“Tell me something I don’t know about you.”

“My mother, for all her flaws—” I started to say.

“Racist tendencies,” you interrupt, which is a part of our problem.

“At least she doesn’t cook with salt,.” I said.

“For all her flaws, at least my mother does.”

That night, you got whiskey drunk and whiskey mean. You whispered, “You ruined my life,” as you fell asleep in the twin bed next to mine. Sentiments shouted in anger can be amended, forgiven, washed away. Sentiments whispered in anger are written in stone.

Back on the beach, the sun opens its veins in the capillary waves.

“Let’s play a game,” you say again.

“Okay.” I indulge, which is a part of our problem.

“Tell me something I don’t know about you,” you say.

I don’t remember my brother’s face. Only the dark brown cowlick on the back of his head that I wanted to press down with a spit-dampened palm as we exited the school bus. Only that he was the same age then as my son is now. Only that the truck that separated him from his shoes on that dusty stretch of Lincoln Highway didn’t even stop. Only that we never found the person who killed him. In a world so ephemeral, the concept of forever makes me feel claustrophobic.

“You know everything about me,” I say.

You flush burgundy like pink skin slapped. Your frown comes quick, a herald for your tears.

“I’ll go first, then,” you say. “I never spell the word poignant right on the first try.” Your smile is a quivering olive branch. It’s toothy. It doesn’t reach your eyes.

Something dislocates inside of me. You and I slipped from nothing into something into nothing while I was looking the other way. She felt like a choice. Her pale hair, her widow’s peak, her arched pout. I’m sure she could spell the word “poignant” on the first try.

I think: I’m in love with someone who isn’t you.

I think: I’m in love with someone because she isn’t you. Because I recognize myself in her. Because her mother also doesn’t cook with salt. Because she doesn’t whisper “You ruined my life.”

I say: “It’s getting dark. We should head back in.”

We sit in silence until the sand grows cold around us, until we slip back into nothing.

1978. BATH, OHIO by Sean Williamson

March 18, 2020

He was driving drunk, a cigarette ripping hot, filter crushed between his fingers. Around a faraway corner headlights, beams reflected faint through the windshield, through his Kmart but that’s ok glasses. Tiny embers spit, excited by wind from the open window.

He put out the cigarette, stuffed it into the ashtray blossom, grabbed a pack of Camel Menthols off the passenger seat, popped the top, flicked and flicked until a filtered end rose, then pulled it out slow between tight teeth. He pushed in the lighter.

Headlights down the way grew at him, flare swelling in his smudged up glasses, exposing fingerprints and crud. He had been drinking all day, spent most days drinking alone, all day, since graduation. His mother had moved with his brother to Wisconsin. His father was staying at a Red Roof Inn but that's ok. His father had said, “Jeff, the house is yours, for now.”

Black trash bags rippled on the seat behind him. He looked. They moved, wet with moonlight. The lighter popped out, and in that moment of distraction, the warbling of the loop, the car swerved over the centerline, just over.

Eyes back on the road, car back in it’s lane. Pressed the Camel into the red coil, smoke blossomed from his hand like a magic trick. Headlights slowed and passed, slugging over like an old boat, night filled the space. A hallway of trees lead an easy, relaxing ride to the dump.

Straight shot. The bags rippled in the back seat, crinkling in his ear.

Suddenly whirring. Red and blue spinning lights. Oncoming headlights turned cop lights. The cop would pass him, hustling to stop some crime, but no. But that’s ok, that’s ok, that’s ok. Smoke moved down his throat, hot and dirty in his nose. Hands to the wheel, to the shoulder of the road, both cars stopped.

At the flip of the key his engine whirred to a stop. He rested his cigarette hand, fat ember billowing, on the open window ledge. Cop lights: long ray of fanning red, long ray of fanning blue, one after the other after the other, moved across the cracks in the road. The cop door opened and closed. Shadows of feet moved within the rays. Cop stopped and flashed his light.

You crossed the centerline back there.

I know. Sorry. I dropped something.

Cop again shined his fucking light. What’s in the bags?

He paused, only for a second.

I forgot to drop of my family’s garbage this morning. So I thought I’d do it now.

At night?

Nothing else to do.

Cop shrugged. Please step out of the car.

He touched his finger to his nose, walked heel to toe in a straight line, said the alphabet backwards but that’s ok. Started drinking at 14. He passed the tests, of course. Cop, young then, would be much older the next time they met, wrote a ticket, back in his fuckingcopcar and whooshed away. The road was lonely, they came and went.

Weeks back, Steve held his thumb out. Hop on in, drink some beers at my place, listen to some records, then I’ll drive you to the concert. But after a few hours, practically no time, Steve needed to go, as others, further in the unseen loop, needed to go. So the dumbbell, record still spinning, empty beer cans on the floors, and loneliness again.

Fuckingcopcar all the way out of sight, heat of the night. He decided not to go to the dump after all. He did not know then, where the loop started or ended. Instead he went straight home. In the driveway, he smashed the plastic bags with a sledge hammer, took the bags to the woods behind the house and scattered their insides.

SNOWBANK by Frances Badgett

March 17, 2020

The night comes on so quietly, a hush riding each flake to the ground. The snowman slumps against the brambles, overwhelmed, the new snow wet, heavy. The quiet is unsettling, and all Mara can hear is the hiss of tinnitus in her left ear. She pops in headphones and listens to a meditation, the brain’s static between the breaths. The pressure of trying to relax wakes her up, agitates her. Paul’s on the porch, muffled thumps and the creak of the front door. She opens her iPad and checks to see the constellation overhead. Hydra, a favorite of hers from a childhood book on Greek myths. Removing an acid-spitting head, Hydra will grow two in its place. Survivor until Hercules and his nephew, Iolaus, strike her down. Hercules with the sword, Iolaus with a flaming torch. She turns off the iPad and closes her eyes to the meditation, the sound between the bells a swish of anxiety. Something with rain or waves, maybe. Something with wind. Nothing works.

Paul’s quiet footfall is more distracting than if he were stomping, a thing Mara says but can’t explain. He slumps into bed and sighs, wanting to talk. She does not. She turns off the meditation and answers his questions about her day—yes, work was fine; no, she doesn’t want to skip the teachers’ party in March; yes, she will be out of school the second week in April; no, she doesn’t want to go to Miami for a week in June. Paul’s new building is growing bones, walls, is looking like the drawing. Studios above a sprawling gallery, it has a pretentious color name like The Vermilion or The Chartreuse. But what Mara doesn’t say is that the building is the drawing somehow reduced, somehow more plastic. No mature trees, no unidentifiable people out front, no artful sidewalk of squares and no distinctive Paul lines and marks, his signature hatches and swirls, and therefore, somehow more than the building itself, the building a crude rendering of Paul’s spectacular art. She listens as he describes the slate for the fountain, the lights for the plantings.

“The trees?”

“Yes, those, too. All of it lit.”

He is asleep quickly, he falls hard. She drifts on waves of dreams, of Hercules and Hydra, of the way a story can mean something to the Greeks and another to us. It seems unfair, punishing the hero with twelve tasks no one else can handle. She thinks of Jared, her smallest, most gentle student, how the world hurls challenges at him, how he manages to dodge, to remain whole. His mother a drinker, father absent much of the time. She loves the way Jared writes, lightly corrects his spelling. “More,” she tells him. “Keep going.” But Agatha, no. Agatha gets her other self, the demanding teacher, corrective, stern. She twists with anxiety at the thought. Agatha is perfectly fine. Unremarkable. She should be a softer teacher. She replays in her mind all the times she has transgressed, has spoken sharply to this girl who needs more love than the others, who doesn’t ask for too much.

She falls asleep the hour before dawn and wakes exhausted, more tired than she will be all day. Paul is already up, humming over the presspot, plucking bacon from the pan. She slides her binder of lesson plans into her worn tote and yawns.

“I have to go in early. We have a hip hop instructor coming.”

“I want to go to your class,” Paul says, and though he’s been cute and sweet, Mara wants to scream.

“And what would you teach?”

“How to draw people to scale against monumental apartment blocks.”

She imagines Jared, his small, dirty hands clutching colored pencils, hatch mark shadows behind vague outlines suggest people, pets, a few trees. Agatha would draw puffy cats, a dozen or so, and pretend she was following the assignment.

Paul does not come to her class. He flips his leg over his bicycle and glides off into the snowscape of their narrow alley, the street beyond. She drives slowly, the streets clear, the schools on time, children starting their ambles and snowball fights and snow angels on their way, snowbanks dotted with boot prints and lost mittens.

She loves the room like this, empty, quiet, the clock’s tick loud. Planners and binders holding the order of the day. She is concerned about Lily’s reading skills. She wants to like Agatha.

The day is lost to the snow, their eyes and bright cheeks watching every flake drift down, their bodies turned to the windows. They hear some of what she says, but not much. She isn’t worried, today is light. Today is a day she can erase if she needs to. Every day is shaped from air.

Jared calls to say he will be late, midnight late. The children file out after the bell, voices filling the halls with screams and squeals. No school tomorrow. None for the rest of the week.

The next morning, she picks a boring apartment, cold and bright, the light bouncing off the snow outside and into her, filling the windows with glow well after dark. She packs exactly one bag, a neat collection of bundled things, and takes one pair of shoes. The apartment looks like every apartment, beige and mauve, exhausted around the edges, chipped counters and worn handles. She stretches on the floor and feels the vibrations of the neighbors below, the ease and thud of snow off the roof, the muffled quiet of voices in the street. She breathes her own air and opens her own book and reads, sitting on the floor, by the window.

Paul calls and calls again. Remove a head, and another grows in its place.

RAW HAND BURGER by EC Sorenson

March 16, 2020

They’re coming at me all the time now. I want this, I want that. Uppity bunch. In my day, students didn’t act like this.

This lot spends the morning taking selfies. Spends the afternoon posting them places you never even heard of. All that staring into their own eyes—where’s it going to get them?

So, anyway, one of them says I wasn’t using gloves. Okay, I say, talk to management. I say talk to management about why I am the only server here when there’s all of you and you all want your special ingredients and not what it says on the board. The board says hamburger. You know what that is? It’s a hamburger. Meat, bun, tomato, lettuce, ketchup. This is a college cafeteria. You want something fancy? Go downtown.

But that’s how it is now. Before lunch hour I get one five minute break, so I walk the halls. Stretch my legs. You’d think I’d be trying to sit, but no, I look in through the corridor windows at all those kids and some of them are studying and most of them not. Heads down, I wanna yell. One girl has her back to me and I see she’s got her computer open, so the teacher can’t see her screen. She’s got the camera on and she’s all pouty like she’s putting on lipstick and she’s taking a photo. Her own photo. Just like that! In class! So I lean in, press myself up against the glass and glare at her. I’m there in the corner of her computer screen as she goes to take the next shot. She jumps and spins round to look at me. I don’t look away.

The teacher catches me and I wave. He sometimes comes and gets the vegetarian pizza, two slices, no eye contact. He waves back and keeps talking, pays no heed to the girl with the camera.

There’s something on the class whiteboard about "re-imagining the self in the tech age." I don’t even know what that means. Seems to me no one here needs too much help with it, what with all their camera filters.

I don’t care, I’m not taking that class anyway. I turn and keep walking the corridor. Today, I’ve got a purpose. Paperwork to hand in.

I’m older and older has to be practical. No time left to take too many wrong turns down streets you just don’t know. The Instagrammers don’t get that. They got born into a world ready to fawn over them like new babies wrapped snug in a pram. Not me. I’m forty-five and I don’t look a day younger and when I walk down a corridor, no one clocks me.

I wear the cafeteria uniform: black shirt, short sleeves, black trousers, hat off. People just assume, corner of their eye, that I’m down this way to collect rogue plates and cups. Like I’m here to put the rubbish in the bin.

At Registration the woman behind the counter is my age. She looks at me. I might’ve wished she hadn’t though, as all the judgement in the world leaps from her side of the counter to mine. “Accounting and Payroll Basics,” she says as she takes my paperwork.

I nod. “I can type,” I say. “I can read." The woman moves her head as though to shut me up. “Oh, I can keep going,” I say, and smile. I stop, though, and she looks relieved.

There’s a pecking order here: it’s office woman vs cafeteria lady. Office woman thinks she’s got it. I tell her, “I just want to rise up from burgers.” She keeps typing. So I go on. “I want to be in an office. I don’t want to be near nineteen-year-olds and their hunger pains five days out of every seven, you know?”

“It’s a full time course,” she says. “You’re aware of that?”

I nod again. “Sure. I can read. Told you that already.”

She does some processing, looks serious for a moment, then finally really looks at me.

“You’ve been accepted,” she says. “The course starts first week of September.”

I feel like she’s waiting for me to back out, like I’m about to say, oh, no, I can’t do it, I’m working. But I don’t.

I say the quietest thanks and I walk away.

***

When my break’s over, I’m back at the counter. There are no gloves anywhere. I pick up a meat patty with my bare hands. Cold hard lump of mince. I doubt it’s even meat. I throw it on the grill and rub my hands on the disinfectant wipes. I grab a spoon and lump some lettuce and tomato onto a bun. One of the young ones catches me, nods at my hands. I wave the spoon at her.

“Not touching anything,” I tell her. “It’s all fine and clean.”

I want to tell her that patty isn’t meat, so nothing to worry about, but that’s just going to get me into trouble.

“You have to use gloves,” she says.

She’s right and I know it, but I haven’t touched anything she’s going to eat with my fake meat hands. It’s right now I wish she was on her phone. Pouting, filtering. I can’t fix this place I want to tell her, looking round for support. There’s no-one else serving, no manager to fetch the new box of gloves from the storeroom.

“I’m using utensils, Miss,” I say.

What else am I supposed to call her? She’s no ma’am.

She looks upset but still waits for her burger while the patty grills. I rinse my hands and I wipe down the boards with a cloth. I get a clean fork and spear the meat and slam it down onto her burger. She's glaring at it. Talk to the management, I want to tell her. They’re making the money here, they’re taking your seven bucks and they’re paying only one person to field you and all your buddies at lunch time. Tell me where that money’s going. Not my pocket, that’s for sure.

They say your brain keeps growing till you’re twenty-three. You see it in these kids. They’re shapeshifters: ready to change their hair or their politics or their style right here in this cafeteria, most days of the week. I feel a little jealous.

I don’t know what this girl in front of me is going through, but when the manager finally comes, she tells him, “That lady, the one behind the counter, she didn’t use gloves.” Conspiratorial, whispery, righteous.

I stare at that girl as she tattles and I don’t look away – I will tell it how it is because I know the manager won’t even care and is just waiting for that young girl to get her rant out of the way before he moves on and so does she.

And so it is. The manager hands me his own gloves and goes back to wherever it is he sits. The girl finds herself a table and I wonder then, if that girl is going to be in my class. If she’ll act stunned to see me there, or friendly. She picks up her phone, like the universe knew she would, like it was some kind of ancient human action, and she snaps herself and her fractious little burger.

She doesn’t turn to look at me so she doesn’t notice that I’ve started to laugh. I laugh as I think about my gloves and about how it’ll feel taking them off in that first class, in front of her, and dropping them in the bin by the door. I have a little chuckle to myself when I think about that class too, and how, when it comes time to work, I will, and how when it comes time to listen, I will. I don’t plan on failing. Done that already.

I get all springy in my step and smiley as I realize that girl won’t even see me when I pass her by.