Crow Jonah Norlander, Author at X-R-A-Y

LOVEBIRD by Tex Gresham

September 3, 2021 · Fiction

Most people have no idea what goes on in retirement communities. They don’t care to know. When your kids dropped you off at Del Largo Sueño a few years go, they made tearful promises to visit, but you never saw a tear fall. They faked guilt to hide the happiness that they wouldn’t have to watch you die. Your son, Clifford, and his new wife didn’t stay long enough for you to unpack and hang your sweaters. Your daughter waited around, and then she asked for “gas money.” She’d been biting her cheek all day, her eyes sunken like little pits from whatever drug she’d decided to date that month. Gas money...like you’re too old and stupid to know the truth.

But the currency of their false guilt didn’t amount to much considering you haven’t seen your son or daughter since that day. You’ve forgotten about them, mostly. This place makes it easy. And they’ve likely forgotten about you too. A whole life lived, seeds planted so that an existence can be remembered, and it’s all forgotten like a fart in a high wind.

And you’re not going to talk about your ex-wife. She died trying to throw a toaster in your bathwater. She doesn’t deserve the headspace. None of this is about them anyway. This is about your life at seventy-nine, when you finally found something worth living for.

You’re cruising in Hank Hubbert’s E-Z Go that’s done up to look like a seafoam green ‘57 Chevy BelAir. He’s got the pedal down, the wind flapping the six hairs you have left. It feels like you’re going 80mph, but you’re probably going about 10mph. Hank passes you a joint of Birdbrain OG Kush. You take a drag, even though the doctor told you to stick to edibles. Golf clubs rattle in bags in the back. Hank’s got a shotgun in his golf bag for skeet shoot.

As you pass a group of women finishing up a game of bocce ball, Hank says, “I got a nine-iron they can use. Guaranteed to give ‘em a hole in one.”

Laughing rattles the emphysema in your lungs, but who cares?

Hank points to one of the ladies you’ve never seen. Must be new. What you do notice are the gloves on Hank’s hands. He’s been wearing them lately. You haven’t seen him without them for the past week or so. “That’s Marion Chapel. New broad. She’s got all the boys under a spell around here.”

You say, “I can see why.” Even though you can’t. She’s nothing special.

Hank says, “Maybe. But boy, does she have a daughter I’d give away the rest of my pension for.”

You say, “Does she?” and Hank laughs. But you really want to know: does she?

Men like Hank––and this place is all Hanks––usually get at women in the community as a way to get closer to their daughters. And sometimes sons, if that’s their boat. These Hanks think that these daughters desire them just as much. You’ve never had an interest in them. The younger they are, the more you’re aware of how hopeless they are. They believe the world is tailored to the young. It’s not. The world isn’t even a place for people. Not anymore. You see the young ones, the ones that Hank and all the Hanks go for, and you feel sad.

There is someone in the community that has you wholly unable to look at any woman, young or old. Not even Hank knows about her.

Sun City, AZ is a place that wouldn’t exist if not for the Almost Dead. And Del Largo Sueño is its capital. You have everything here. Whole Foods, AMC theaters, two Greg Norman-designed T-National golf courses, a wildlife refuge with any animal you can imagine, six marijuana dispensaries, twenty-one restaurants that stay open late––for those who eat dinner after 6pm––and a four-story recreation center.

After midnight, the top floor of the rec center transforms into a gambling den to rival any casino in Vegas. There’s no blackjack or Texas Hold ‘Em. People don’t bet on horse races or football games. No thirty-large on hard eight. No slot handles. People put money on the death pool. Everyone’s name and odds on a blackboard, behind the makeshift bar. You’re sitting at 30-to-1 to die within the year. Suicide voids all bets. You put five-large against yourself. Other than that, you don’t play the games anymore.

You sit alone at a table near the back of the room. You sip on seltzer water with a twist of lime, even though you’re not thirsty. The light in the room’s dim and the music––the Jerry Lee Lewis version of “Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On”––coming out of the speakers is loud enough so those who left their hearing aids at home can hear it. You scan the room, playing the part of yourself very well.

In an adjacent soundproofed room, men and women play Russian roulette. They handle the gun with maddeningly calm smiles. A table next to yours plays Guess the Pill. They slam hundreds into a pile on the table. There’s a line of crushed pill next to an unlabeled orange bottle.

“Two hundred on that being a klonopin,” says someone whose name you’ll never remember.

“Double that it’s a proto-pumper,” says another whose name is just as lost.

The one betting two hundred snorts the powdery line. You get up from the table, make your way across the room. In the time it takes you to get to the fight studio, Two Hundred clutches his chest and drops dead. Everyone scrambles to the bar to collect on the death pool.

You pass a table where Marion Chapel sits at the center of a group of Hanks that look like babies begging for their mother’s tit. Another Hank joins the table, bows as he hands Marion a drink. She’s eating up the attention, laughing like a broad right out of a Bogart movie. A candle on the table casts a moving light on the underside of her face, and the effect is unsettling. Her eyes break away from the attention and meet yours. They’re serious eyes, and you can’t hold onto them very long.

The only game that interested you here was the Fight. In the studio where, during the day, women shuffle through arthritic Zumba, some of the former boxing coaches have set up a makeshift fight. Men don’t fight here. Animals do. Mostly ostriches. Taken from the wildlife refuge. Hopped up on Viagra and Vicodin, the old veterinarians and one retired zookeeper usually haul the birds back here on their flatbed E-Z gos. You used to join them.

The setup is simple: two enter, one leaves. Anyone who’s never seen ostriches fight, it’s terrible. They kick the hell out of each other with taloned feet until gaping wounds and blood loss results in one victory and one death. You used to have a sure bet: a big strong alpha male. He’d never lose a fight––until he did. And with that one, you lost a lot of money. But that’s not why you stopped.

It was because of Rati.

There she is. Standing in the sun rays of a new, cloudless day. Birds sing overhead, a soundtrack of everyday magic. This moment is just for you and her.

You know she’s seen you by the way she drops down to her knees, wings spread, feathers shaking. Her head lolls back and forth, neck puffed out. Even though her head’s moving like one of those inflatable men at car dealerships, her eyes stay primally focused on you. Your eyes never leave hers. You haven’t taken Cialis today, but the pressure in your groin is a liberation from the weight of Time and Death.

Rati chirps and growls, pulling deep within that struthio body to let you know how she feels. You run your fingers along the letters etched into the wood of her corral gate: R-A-T-I. Rati. A gorgeous word. Ra-Ti...the tongue taking a trip two steps down the palate to tap, at two, on the teeth...One of the first things you’ve ever said to her. But you forget where you heard it originally.

Love has never been in your DNA. You cared for people in your life. Shared laughter and sadness. But you never loved, nor did you feel loved. Your children are just waiting for the moment they don’t have to think of you and realize you’re still someone on this earth––not in it. You never loved your job, despite keeping it for forty years. Who in the hell would ever say they love being a maintenance technician for a cheap airline.

But the love you feel down to your essence for Rati is so pure. More than any lust or longing you’ve ever had. It is true. Her dance tells you she feels the same. Her feet tap out the word: L-O-V-E. Never did you think those letters would come together into a recognizable shape.

You know some would say you’re just playing into loneliness. Being abandoned by your children hurts, but it doesn’t hurt enough to be lonely. Maybe Rati’s doing the same, given that her lifemate was killed in the ring sometime last year. But what is love but a way to prove loneliness wrong?

She comes closer to the fence and you can smell her. The way her feet crunch the grass, thud heavy against the earth, you find comfort in that power. The new male they brought in after Rati’s mate was killed stands in the middle of the field, watching her come to you. You can tell he doesn’t like you, that he believes she’s his. She isn’t. She’s mine.

You don’t know what Rati would do if she knew that her lifemate was your sure thing, your big alpha male. You made more money on his fights than you ever did working a real job. You also wonder what she would do if she knew you had bet against her mate before his last match. You knew he wasn’t a sure thing anymore. A part of you hides the fact––even from yourself––that you didn’t want him to be a sure thing, not after you saw Rati for the first time. You wanted him gone. And she doesn’t need to know these things. That chapter in your life is over now. Unconnected to the one you’re in now. Together. Besides, you don’t play the games anymore. She doesn’t need to know anything other than your love.

Rati leans her head over the railing. You slide a hand along her face, around the back of her head. You cradle her like this, slowly pulling her face toward yours. You kiss.

You move to her ear and whisper, “I want you to come home with me.”

She shakes, her beak making this clacking sound. You reach over and slip the latch from the gate, which swings open silently. She eases out of her pen. You take her by the wing and the two of you walk.

“And you’re still taking the levodopa and carbidopa twice a day?”

“Yes.” You are.

“And the donepezil and galantamine?”

“Of course.” But you’re not.

Dr. Kosinski’s office always makes you want to lie. He’s got a face like a baby pushing out a big poop. The way he looks at you, at all of the Almost Deads, it’s obvious he hates his life because of how useless his practice has become. Why waste time on the Almost Dead?

“And how’s the diet?”

“I have bacon sometimes.”

“You shouldn’t be doing that. You know, and I know you know this because I’ve said it but I’ll repeat it: eggs are an important part of this diet. The omega-3 reacts positively with donepezil and will rejuvenate brain function. Bacon throws that off.”

“I remember you saying something about that.”

Dr. Kosinski flips through your chart, though you’re sure that’s theatrics. There’s no way, after all this time, he doesn’t have your chart memorized. “Your drug test didn’t come back. Your urine ate through the plastic cup, but so did everyone else’s so what can I do?”

He looks at you with raised eyebrows, expecting you to bow your head like a shamed child. You run your tongue over your dentures, feeling stray pieces of bacon. He looks down at your chart again.

“What brings you in today?”

You say, “My testicles have been tingling. They hurt. And I’ve been having dreams about having children.”

“You don’t have testicles. After the cancer.”

“But these dreams feel real. And it’s not like I have one or two kids. I’ve got like fifteen. Maybe twenty.”

“That’s a side effect of the galantamine.”

Again, you don’t tell him you’ve stopped taking that months ago. Instead, you say, “And what about the tingling? In my testicles.”

“Describe the tingling.”

“It’s this fullness. Pressure. I can’t say it’s unpleasant. I feel stronger sometimes.”

“That’s a good thing, yes?”

You shrug.

“Other than that, are you noticing anything different with your body? Your penis? Fingers? Mouth?”

“Different how?”

Dr. Kosinski closes your chart. “Some of the other more sexually active residents have complained about recent changes to their body. Like within the last week or so.”

“Changes.”

“One came to me complaining of jock itch. I checked him and his entire groin area looked like cooled lava. Marbled skin. Open sores. Another patient...had it in his mouth. Really terrible stuff. ”

“My jock itch is jock itch.”

“There’s been more. And there’s a common thread. Now I’m not supposed to name names, but you never remember half of this stuff, right?”

“Who are you again?”

“Have you come into contact with Marion Chapel?”

“Never.”

“Are you sexually active here?”

“Not at the moment.” You don’t tell him about Rati, mostly because she technically isn’t part of the community.

“Good. Until I figure this out, don’t. I suspect a kind of STD. All you old-timers grew up in the nuclear age. Who the hell knows what you’ve got going on inside you. I’m going to send some blood samples out for testing. In the meantime, no sex.”

“Is that all?” You interrupt his self-talk. You understand what he means about the radiation. No one knows what all that nuclear testing did to the air. But if it had changed anything, it would have long ago. This is something else––if it’s even real at all. A part of you thinks Dr. Kosinski’s just pulling both your legs.

This thing with Rati, it’s got nothing to do with radiation. You know that in your heart. It’s real, not a side effect.

Dr. Kosinski snaps on a latex glove. “Actually, I’d like to check your prostate. Make sure this pressure you’re feeling isn’t cancer.” He lubes his finger. “You know the drill.”

You do.

“Whoa! Christ, what am I seeing here?”

Hank moves away from you and Rati, hands covering his face in a way that reminds you of Dracula being shown a crucifix. Embarrassment could be a thing right now if you were interested in feeling embarrassed. Hank barged in without knocking. This is now his problem, not yours. The record player spins and Spanky and Our Gang continue to belt out “Lazy Day.”

The way Rati pushes against your naked body reintroduces you to your soul. Which helps you ignore the way Hank’s half-hidden face twists in disgust. He doesn’t know what this is like. Never will.

“I...I...don’t want to know…” Hank backs out of the room, but he doesn’t leave. He’s not wearing the gloves. The finger he points at you looks like marbled, melted skin. A boil on the tip of his finger threatens to pop and squirt at you. He stands on the other side of the doorway.

“What do you want, Hank?” With your body and mind in a warm bath of relaxation––a feeling similar to what it must be like to die––you talk without anger. It doesn’t sound like your voice.

“What am I seeing?”

“It’s exactly what you think it is.”

“You’re...doing that...with an ostrich.”

“Her name’s Rati.”

“I know what the thing’s name is.” Hank finishes with a fist against the wall. You’re sure he’d rather kick something, but Hank can barely lift his diabetic legs. He shuffles when he walks. “It’s an ostrich.”

“Yes, she is.” You know he can’t imagine what it’s like. The feeling of her beak. That when two birds make love it’s called cloaca kisses––you looked that up. It’s a beautiful phrase. Tender. Sensual. Hank can’t imagine what it’s like. It’s all just fucking to him.

“Why are you doing this?”

A part of you wants to answer: love. But it’s something else he wouldn’t understand. He doesn’t have a Rati. You especially don’t want to tell him that you and Rati married each other the night before. You feel it boiling on the tip of your tongue, like your tongue’s got one of those boils that’re all over Hank’s fingers.

You say, “She makes me feel good.”

“Christ….Are you still taking your meds?”

“Are you?”

“No, but I’m not in bed with an ostrich.”

“Is that what you came here for?”

“I came here to tell you someone called the community center asking for you. Someone named Dianne.”

Daughter-in-law Dianne. Only one you know who wouldn’t know enough to call your direct number. Your son married a flapjack from Seattle who appraises damaged houses in Middle-America caught in Tornado Alley. The one time you met her she said things like Clutched the damn deal and Suckers aren’t born every minute...they die every second. You don’t know much about her, but you know enough to know you’re glad about how little you know. The reasons why she would call and not your son are all not good.

“Did she leave a number?” You move to get up and put clothes on, but Rati reaches over and engulfs you with her wing. It’s warm, so you stay with her.

“She did.” Then, after a beat, “I can’t believe you’re in there with that thing.”

“Get over it, Hank. When you’ve been worshipping at the church of Marion Chapel, I didn’t say anything.”

“Marion is a human being. She’s real.”

“Real enough to make your hand like that, right Hank?”

Nothing from Hank. You can picture him on the other side of the wall, looking at his fingertips, their little lips pursing at him.

You say, “Leave the number. I’ll call later.”

You can hear Hank move, rustle some papers, write the number. He’s probably got the little mouths whispering the number to him. He can’t remember anything. You doubt if he’ll remember this, but you know he will. He’s talking to himself, or the little mouths. For the first time since you met him, he sounds like the classic grumpy old man everyone believes old men become. You supposed both of you are. Except he doesn’t have a Rati.

He says, “Here’s the number. But listen: you’re not...This thing, it isn’t going to last. You and that thing together.”

“This thing is my wife.” When you say it, Rati shivers, lets out a purring sound. Her beak nuzzles against your neck. You look down at her feet and notice how tense her claws are. She could pounce on Hank and it’d be over for him in a breath.

Hank sighs. “You need help.”

“You need something, Hank. You’re a lonely man.”

“Like an ostrich?”

“Like an ostrich.”

Hank leaves without saying anything. Rati pulls at you and you roll over. Your hip cracks. It’s usually followed by a pain you have to grit your teeth to get through, but right now doesn’t hurt. Right now, you fall into each other for the fourth or fifth time today. Dianne can wait. Bad news always has a shelf life of forever. It’s not as important as this moment.

You reach over and place your hand on Rati’s stomach, the eggs inside already bloating her body. Eggs. Plural. You forget that about birds.

They say a comedy ends with a wedding and a tragedy with a funeral. Life is neither, so you usually get both.

When you call Dianne, she can barely form a sentence. Hysterical is the word you’re not supposed to use, but that’s exactly what it is. She doesn’t have to say anything. You already know.

But eventually, she gets it out.

Your son, Clifford, had a thing for public pools. Being in public pools while elderly women did their aerobics. Putting his genitals against the water jets during this time. What he didn’t know is that the water has to go somewhere. It went up, inside. His bladder exploded. What you think happened is that he confused his bladder popping for some intense sexual gratification and he went about the day, stunned and confused. He bled from the inside and the damage was too much.

Dianne says this, more or less. You can tell she’s trying to leave out details, so you piece the rest together. She doesn’t seem to care about this oddity in Clifford’s life. She’s more interested in transforming his death into her tragedy.

You say, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

She says, “Thank you.” And nothing else. You wonder if she’s forgotten that Clifford’s your son. You’ve forgotten, Clifford did too. So it’s not out of reach. Before you can say anything else, she hangs up.

You want more than anything to be back in Rati’s arms. But when you turn around to leave, Marion Chapel’s there. So is Hank. And about ten other residents of Del Largo Sueño. A mob with canes and hearing aids instead of pitchforks and burning torches.

Marion Chapel says, “Hank tells me some disturbing things about you.” The skin on her neck has that cooled lava look.

Hank says, “Where is it?”

You say, “Where’s what?”

“The bird.”

“She flew away.”

You want to run, but you can’t. And even if you could shuffle out of this, there are men in this mob who can shuffle faster than you. Hank comes close to you. He’s trying to get friendly.

He whispers, “Listen: just let this be over. I don’t want them to do this to you.”

You don’t think about it. You rear back and slam your fist against Hank’s nose. Every bone in your hand shatters like tortilla chips. Hank stumbles back, blood splooshing from his nose. He’s shocked, desperate. He screams.

And the mob descends on you like a bad dream.

“No, you can’t do this!”

You’ve already tried to overpower Hank, but you’re on the ground now. He stands over you. Something cracked when you hit the rec center’s unkind floor. You can’t feel the pain yet. You try to stand, but your legs are too loose.

“Stay down, you old bastard.” Hank’s got his wrinkled hands balled into fists. “I told you this thing wouldn’t last.”

Other people in the mob mumble similar things. Someone laughs. Someone says Poor sonofabitch is over the edge.

You can’t stay down. The way men in the mob have Rati by the neck, the way her head trashes. You rage. The two old-timers who run the death pool hold the door open to the Zumba studio. “Turn Turn Turn” by The Byrds spills out of the studio, casting a twisted optimism over everything. Inside, the male ostrich waits, feathers fluffed, its chest puffed. Its big legs step in place, massive talons clacking against the polished wood floor. Two of the stronger residents stand behind the safety of a raised DJ booth and hold the male ostrich back with a long leash. Hank takes Rati and shoves her toward the door.

“Stop, goddammit. That’s my wife!”

Everyone laughs. You push yourself up. Your hand slips and your face cracks against the floor. Your dentures clatter out of your mouth. The skin on your chin splits and blood runs freely. You haven’t been taking your coagulant.

“This is horrible. I can’t look at him,” says Marion Chapel. She’s at the front of the mob gathered for the upcoming fight. The men who surround her are all disfigured from the Marion Chapel Disease. They’ve all got a sedated, awestruck glaze to their faces.

Hank says, “You should’ve just gotten together with Marion. Or one of the nice human women here.”

Someone in the crowd says, “Or men.”

Marion says, “I would’ve never been with him.”

Hank says, “There are plenty of people who need someone in their lives. Not this bird.”

Hank almost has her all the way in the Zumba studio.

You shout, “Wait.”

Hank stops, giving you a chance to look Rati in the eyes. You two hold the look, connect like you always did at her pen. You say to her, “I’m sorry.” Then you turn to Hank and say, “Let me fight instead.”

Hank’s face drops. Rati freezes, eyes go wide. No one speaks. Everyone starts trading looks that say Now this could be something different.

Marion says, “He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

Hank says, “That thing in there’ll kill you in a second.”

You say, “Maybe. But that means it won’t kill her. Or my children.”

A collective, “Your what?”

You say, “I’ve got pretty good odds on the death pool there. I’m not killing myself. I will fight. Let me do this.”

One of the guys who runs the death pool hurries out of the studio and starts collecting bets from the mob. He keeps shouting odds that change with every bet made. Hank pulls some money out of his pocket and slips it into the bookie’s palm. He looks back at you and the two of you share a smile like you’re friends again.

You say, “Against me.”

He says, “A sure thing.”

“I’ve got money on the death pool. Give it to my wife when this is over.”

Hank nods. “Sure. I can do that. Whatever you need.”

But you can’t imagine Hank bringing the money to Rati in her pen, or turning that money into something Rati might need––or that your children will need. You can’t imagine that Hank won’t make Rati fight anymore, or that your children won’t grow up to fight for the entertainment of the next rotation of residents of Del Largo Sueño. What you can imagine is Hank taking the cash, buying himself a new E-Z Go, taking Marion Chapel out for a high-dollar early bird. You know he’s just saying yes so you’ll get in there and die quick.

Someone shouts from the mob, “Let the man take a cane or something.”

Someone answers, “If he does, change the odds.”

Hank helps you up. Whatever cracked in your hip isn’t keeping you from taking small steps toward the studio. You shuffle past Rati and she cranes her neck in front of your face. You slide your hand down her beak to the side of her face. Her eyes are wet. A tear falls. You try and catch it, but you’re too slow. You try to say I love you but without your dentures it comes out as an all-gums I thopff eww. She looks around, pecking absently at things in the way ostriches do. She pecks at your hand, then at your shirt. She picks up a pill that’s fallen onto the floor and shakes it down her throat.

Hank shoves you through the door. You stay on your feet, but it hurts to do so.

He says, “See you on the other side.”

It occurs to you that if there is somewhere after this, it’s a place where Hank will be as well. You want to say I hope not, but you know it’ll come out sounding like a wet sneeze. So you give him a middle finger that’s bordering on arthritic.

From the mob, you hear someone say, “They make huge omelets. Lots of omegas.”

Hank shuts the door. Locks it. The Byrds keep singing turn turn turn, but everything here stays the same.

This is where it ends. Standing in the studio. Joints made of sand. Dentures gone, all gums. Prostate feeling like a hot rock. Every ounce of you bloody and fragile. The male ostrich is twice your height, its body like an idling train. Massive. Ready to do damage. It stomps the floor. The vibration rings through your bones, makes your hip whine. You try and stand a little straighter.

You look over at the window, at all the ravenous faces ready to watch you die. Impatient for the small time between now and then. There isn’t an ounce of sadness or awareness. Your eyes stop on Rati. She pecks at the window, the space between the two of you so little but impossible to cross.

You slip ahead in time. To a future where you and Rati have a home that’s somewhere not here. Rati’s in your backyard, laying your children in a shallow hole, returning to that hole twice a day to turn your children so they don’t spoil. You’re in the house, still healing from the fight. When she comes inside, you will make a joke about her head in the sand. She will peck at you playfully. You two will sleep together every night, comfortable and warm. Loved. She will lift you both physically and emotionally. She knows exactly who you are. You know everything she can be. You both are in a place where people don’t point, where your love isn’t cursed. And eventually, your children join. Dozens of perfect little ones, better than you could ever be. Each time they beat their wings, your name will be the wind that lifts them. It all seems real. A place where you are strong and possible, where your children are happy and loved.

Crow Jonah Norlander

JUST GIVE ME A FUNERAL by Greg Gerke

August 27, 2021 · Fiction

On Thanksgiving, the southbound 1 train stopped at 96th Street and, to the surprise of the few people in the last car, an older woman with a sunbaked face in a big-brimmed gardening hat blocked the doors with a fold-up shopping cart and started to load four large bags of possessions into the space. She balanced the rectangular cart front wheels in and back out, over the gap between the car and platform, to jam the doors while hefting the bags around it and safely inside. Where did this rail-thin woman, probably 5’4”, get the strength? a young man on his way to his Aunt’s loft in Tribeca for Thanksgiving dinner asked himself. She struggled but squeezed the first one over, though it ripped on the cart and newspapers splayed across the floor like the emptying of a fishing net’s haul. The operator yelled for the doors in the rear to be unblocked. The woman waved with a storied nonchalance and, proceeding to bag two, hummed some tune popular when everyone smoked and legions loved to dance. A couple shook their heads understandingly, but then moored them in something like impatience; they didn’t want to be late for their short-fused family on this pregnant day. A lonesome man who had been just like her ten years ago, but now had an SRO that he was on his way to after an early free Thanksgiving dinner at a homeless organization, faintly recognized the striking presence and called the name he thought her parents had christened her—she did not answer. Bag two was wider than one and she had to angle the cart more. Whistling a crescendo, she parked the ripped one at the very back of the car, then slowly gathered bag two and pasted it on top, a sculptor's addition. She waited for the clenched doors to open to go out and get the rest. Someone near the front of the car yelled for her to hurry up and someone else Fuck you’d him. The conductor chided again, adding, Two seconds and I call the police...one-two. Okay. I know who you are. The woman kept her head down and continued with bag three and the young man and the ex-homeless man sprinted to help her and they got everything in and the doors closed and the train powered on to 86th street. A reminder, ladies and gentlemen, please do not block...

The woman sat in the corner, her hand roosting in the bag atop the ripped one, while the two others lived on the seats facing her with the cart wedged against them, a bungee cord tied to the right side wheels. Her articles carried a reek, but a temperate one—mold, not body odor. She once owned an array of expensive soaps and cleansers during her early years, continuing into her first marriage to the heir of a manufacturing magnate in Western Massachusetts, a fat man who kept her cooped until his early demise after five years of hell. The two other bags were full of clothes, books, papers, miscellany, and about a dozen cell phones she’d found in the last year. She wore a large threadbare coat over a sweater, a cardigan, a long-sleeved puce pajama top, and a three-year-old tee-shirt from the city’s marathon. Over her black long johns was a colorful but marred dress she’d found in a Hell’s Kitchen dumpster—a piece made in Mexico that the previous owner wore once for Cinco de Mayo at her job as a hostess. That its new owner spoke Spanish was lost on the dress. She spoke French, too. She’d actually been a governess, spending a year in Paris with a family who lived off money from past sales of Impressionist paintings. A non-practicing Jew, she closed her eyes and wrote something on her hand with a cheap pen. It was a question about the fitness of her heart, more an approbation, and though she’d had health scares, her heart was unencumbered. The ex-homeless man called her name again and this time she tendered annoyance and announced, without looking, You might have my name, but you don’t have my numbers. I’m just trying to be nice, he said. Don’t you remember me? At Stuy Cove, years ago. Night of that wind storm. I got an apartment. I’m working in an electronics store. You got to get off the street. Let them help you. She heard his words, but desiring them to have no meaning, they didn’t. I’m looking through you, she said. Yeah, he said. Happy Thanksgiving to you.

The young man, who’d gone back to sexting with some fashion designer in San Francisco, peered at the woman, wanting to understand her story, her fall, but in a choose-your-own-adventure type of equation where he could play it out as a video game, taking on the role of a vampire that swoops in and sucks the life out of her without having to talk it out, downloading her story through her blood, now his. He certainly didn’t want to smell her, though she looked okay for a homeless woman, like she’d had a cute face in her twenties, even forties, and carried an aristocratic air, like she was from Paris or—no, Paris. But shouldn’t he treat her with a little respect? Like she lived on the street. The street. All she had was in these bags, so double fuck for her. He turned his music back on. The girl from San Francisco sexted back in quaggy San Franciscan fashion, My cunt is singing, I will survive...

She had grown out of her name—she’d told herself this so many times it was true. Names only confused the issue. As a child, what did she care about her name? She just wanted to be and she’d gotten that at last, aside from the interfering governmental and police forces. She lived without time, gladly and free. When tired, she slept. When she had to, she peed. When relaxed, she ate. Nothing mattered except the minute she was in. And because of her age and gender, she was constantly given things, even from other homeless people. Still, she used a hip pocket psychology to explain what she’d become, forever erasing what brought her there.

The 1 train would terminate in a destination appealing to her kind. People were allowed to sit all night in the Staten Island Ferry terminal, though they needed to clear every two hours for a security check. Battery Park? A designated tourist and rat zone only, even locals weren’t encouraged to be there—could someone who didn’t know better have a picnic next to those species, the fresh-faced throngs headed to Lady Liberty and Ellis Island, and the not-too-good abstract art projects? But it was at Franklin she would exit. Stash her stuff, as she knew the rotating station agents, and go to Moore Street, where this abandoned building marked for demolition miraculously still stood. She’d gotten the gate combination from another castaway who’d picked it and set two old mattresses on the second story a hundred yards away from each other, adding bright neon tape to outline enormous holes in the floor. This embittered man, who didn’t like the human race, except her, had gone to New Jersey for the holiday and wouldn’t be back till Saturday. She didn’t listen to all he said, too used to his jibes and weak come-ons, but when he let something important slip, she recorded it at once.

In the black of the day’s new darkness, she kicked at a fat rat’s shadow and went to her mattress, at the head of which stood a rickety chair whose back spindles were broken. She reclined on the droopy bed, using a wool sweater as a mattress liner, and unpeeled the paper-top off a tin full of linguini that someone placed on her cart last night sometime after ten. She finger-picked a noodle. The sauce’s rich butter and cream pulled her up, reminding her she hadn’t eaten all day, and she crossed her legs, removed a stolen restaurant fork from her jacket, wiped it with a napkin, and began to eat.

The wind picked up and whooshed through the gaps and holes on her floor and down from those above her. At least she didn’t have to fend off gawkers, outreach, police, and the ever-present deviants who would fuck a woman if she had no head. A fire engine from Ladder 8 on Varick blared and she tested the air but only came away with herself, the coagulated food, vermin, and muck. The man said they might have a month’s more reprieve because some insider who supported the squat told him the funding for construction had some hiccup. Maybe till the 15th, maybe the New Year. You’ll know when you get here, he said.

The wind roiled some newspapers to lift off the ground like flashing kites in the dusky light. She chewed the gelatinous noodles by rote, like her stomach just had to be plugged into food. She had few opinions about gastronomy—she’d once taught her charges that word—and ate things she never used to, like eggplant and tofu. A shaking spotted hand raised an unwieldy Evian bottle refilled hundreds of times since she’d found it in August. If she cared about anything it was drinking water. It held off disease and sickness and assured her body function. Once she’d carried a Campari bottle for months, proud of it not breaking, until she dropped it on her socked foot one night, leaving a dark Rorschach blot of pain she limped on for three months.

A magnificent crash around the corner. Another piece of the ceiling must have collapsed. She closed the food, put it back in its bag, and tied it up. With a toothpick, she combed her teeth, glazed eyes darting across the room with half their usual alertness. She slept best right after the initial dark—the later lonelier hours, the hour of the wolf and of hounds, had too many demons to gain peace. With the energy of the holiday depopulating the city, tonight was different—she had little cause in the reprieve. Everything had darkened and she brought out a small taper, affixing it atop a cheap chrome candle holder. Then she lit it with a moan after dusting the area of rat and mice pellets, something she had first put off out of greed for the new pure solitude, her last great gift. She lay back, musing at the flicking shadows. She powered on a small music thingamajig she’d found, using one earphone to hear a jazz album.

Many decades ago she’d lived in Amsterdam with her second husband, a high diplomat and attaché, during a year of Kennedy. She had so much rare and expensive jewelry to warrant special insurance—what a fuss. They lived in the redoubtable Willemspark neighborhood near the large rectangular evergreening Vondelpark, filled with softly still waterways and many Dutch Red Chestnuts and birches. A small mansion of intricate brickwork. Three stories, with a housekeeper and a cook, a piano room, a painting by Mondrian. The year she ruled there, she became a quasi French Lieutenant’s Woman, having two miscarriages on top of the two before (to cement her childless life), a surprising affair, and a widening expansion of her consciousness (she’d again chosen a man who needed to control her—never again!) as her sheltered years in New England fell away like brittle discolored leaves she once could not shed. As weapons turned the world inside out, other rumblings fractured the cultural and psychic bedrock. She’d matured away from her country and she came to accommodate something she had no control over—her fate. Fate had given her the type of beauty and intelligence easily coveted and she interchanged it for what she fancied—not so much experience as a kind of electricity that should never be thought vain, but parsimonious in not obviously having to whet every appetite she developed. As much as she thought life could instruct, it did not obviate her from experiencing any splendor. Again and again, she kept getting what she probably wanted, freely accepting attention, adulation, and a minor fame—and then she kept getting more of it, as her stuffy husband would view her askance over Eggs Benedict, watching as the beautiful bird transformed and rose higher into something clearly not meant for him. With no child and no connection beyond the name, his title suffered some as he became known as the husband of her, the American who speaks like Katherine Hepburn, but looks like Garbo. Who could be in Vogue and would be except for his position in the government. She—whom everyone wanted, pitying him his certain loss of her.

One December evening they went as guests of the embassy to a strange midnight concert to hear the rhythms of their countrymen. She’d not heard much jazz, not been exposed, though music had passed many of her hours. She’d played piano from an early age without distinction and then had some jaundiced years on the flute. Excitable, but out of love with him, she accompanied. Performance by the most grand musicians could throw off the tourniquet she always imagined pinioned on her soul. So much could go wrong up there, but it never did. Performers seemed to be filmed and not present, outside the realm of fallibility—she could not fathom how they crisply, expertly burst out, blood pulsing, while others watched or listened or both, waiting for triumph and disaster. The great conductors: Bernstein in New York, von Karajan in Berlin, Sir Colin Davis in London, were gods. Motion pictures were intriguing and she had her favorites. But Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster weren’t people magically in her space—they were distant and magnified on the silver screen, distorted. They spoke catchy words, but their manner was a little cold, a little unreal. Music had no antecedent, no story, it impressed by degrees, in the awing conceptions enfranchised notes spurred on sound; time in music didn’t govern, it shook the body into primordial understanding. She’d easily fallen in love with her husband because music did something for him as well, though he didn’t view it in such a spiritual manner as she, rather in some patriotic vein, where it uplifted and made one’s capacity for moral living larger. He’d mentioned jazz off-handedly, after seeing acts in DC semi-regularly by himself.

Why such a late concert? It was the second of two and to be up late on a Saturday instilled some chicness onto those who weren’t, except for their money and status, both false markers. Not everyone respected such a time but the band began playing early before everyone had been seated and after one peppy piece with simply too many notes, the saxophone leader went into his rendition of a tune she knew well. Hearing his hornbreath blow the words, she checked herself because even if it was on some level gimmicky, it seemed miraculous. This burly black: full face, full suit, pressing and pressing, fulminating in a way that Oscar Hammerstein and certainly goody goody Julie Andrews had no purchase on—exhorting? She didn’t know the word, but felt it. Do you like it? her husband asked. Sssh, yes. The long version of the short song went on and a stoic part of her started to despise it: the dissonance, the down and dirty, the unbridled quality, the racial swing. She felt disturbed. Long periods of sound in the other pieces held no meaning for her and felt hardly structured—yet, they did engage because she was mentally fleeing, upset. If she didn’t care she’d be asleep, eyes open. She couldn’t leave. On and on, the unseemly flow attacked, blasting through the detritus she fruitlessly threw back, leaving the notes to clash, their subsequent syncopation always freshly re-conjured. Where could this go? How could it even continue to thrive? Why would they be rewarded for it with money? She separately focused on each of the quartet’s members and then went back to the main man. Some pillar Michelangelo might have sculpted, an enormous rock vividly alive in more than its allotted space—dead at forty of cancer and drugs. She wanted to kiss the giant lips making that terrible beauty.

Halfway into the third song, she told herself the music was foolish. He might be a genius, but his music would only drive one to vice and after a few more measures of that song, which she’d later find out was “Mr. P.C.,” she felt sickened by her life of lies.

She could still hear the man’s music some fifty years later. Deep, dark, but incredibly clear. Its matrix carried more and more and she ultimately defined it as tender and fully compassionate, yet cooly uncalculated—round and whole, even if pain did exist. It still extracted an unmistakable flavor, like the boiling of bones.

Everything comprising her life then had ended, but she had this—a moment that made time miraculous. Something millions wished they could have experienced. The tame jazz in her earphone eventually crept back. She had to resume her life, which as lives went was difficult, but not intolerable. Everybody would want the story of how she lost it all and how she ended up here, in an abandoned building with whatever other indelicacies ready to be heaped on her. She didn’t like stories. They weren’t as valuable as people thought—only experience. Stories were simply antecedents of the real—travel, work, meeting people. So many lived by aperçus, as if they were all wannabe French philosophers, people she never read anyway. She had nothing to say, no advice and no hope for her future. She couldn’t live with people, but some remaining seed hopelessly yearned for companionship. At least someone she could look at without wanting to tear his heart from his chest, who didn’t tamp her urge to complain—he’d already be well attuned to the stalactites deposited about her perceptions.

After months and months of lengthened days, the nights had precedence, stretching more and more, as the earth rounded the sun, bodies ruling human time. There. Something still weighed. Didn’t that prove she did have a part in society? If she had someone to recount what befell her and what she thought about it—but she couldn’t help it. This was how she’d changed in her life, from a mouse to a lion, and finally a raccoon. A few gun-shy people were concerned but mostly to massage their own egos. They gave her things and listened to the litanies with cloistered, embarrassed ears. They didn’t know the moment they became uninterested, something keenly perceived at once, would singe her. But what else could she speak of? Her life, a constant battle—how could she not complain? Bitterness forever tinting her bright green eyes a shade darker. Just give me a funeral, she said to one of these people, a woman who worked at a CVS on the Upper West Side near her frequent staging ground. A thirty-two-year-old who commuted from the Bronx, she wanted to go back to school for nursing, but could never get the applications together on time. A slightly overweight woman who smiled often and told her that she herself had been homeless for a summer after a boyfriend beat her up and kicked her out of their Orlando apartment. This woman baked her things, cakes and homemade bread—she made double portions of her lunches during the week, some delicacy placed in a rescued Chinese takeout container and a brown bag, with a folded napkin and a plastic fork or spoon. On each occasion she said, Thank you, my dear, thinking about the giver’s own mother and wondering if they still had a relationship, though she never asked. And just last week, after the first freezing night of the winter (her feet still felt cold at nine in the morning, to remain chilled till late afternoon), she received what turned out to be shepherd's pie with a little less enthusiasm. Awake through hours of bitter cold, it suddenly didn’t surprise her that she could just die. Not that she should, but she could finally latch onto the honorable finale instead of another long subway trip, another night frozen. Fuck this world, fuck life. Thoughts she would never let into her public lexicon. And that cloudy morning, still fogged with cold, the young woman peered, waiting for the gracious phrase and wink she usually bestowed following the hand-off, but the old woman trembled inside because she was aware of her complicity, her involvement in another’s emotional well being. Just give me a funeral...she said quietly. Then uttered the very passive-aggressive New York type of plea again, with more seriousness. Just give me a funeral. A gloss on her own mother’s, You’ll miss me when I’m gone. Even with no sun in her eyes, she shaded them to see the youth in front of her—Jasmine, she came to learn was her name. I’ll be alright, dear. Don’t mind my little jokes. You get to work now, but Theresa wouldn’t move because she sensed a lie.

Really, dear, really. It’s frustration.

Jasmine then delivered what she’d turned over many times before, during her days at the register and at home on the couch, seeing a homeless person appear comet-like on her television shows. You can stay with me, Emma, adding her name in a loving, pitying way. You can have a couch. Stay for a few weeks, you can.

No, dear, please.

Jasmine hesitated. Wet-eyed, she said, I have to make sure. I can’t let something—Don’t hurt yourself, don’t.

No, no, and she patted Jasmine on her back. I won’t, I won’t.

Do you promise?

Yes, I promise you. Go on now, it’s after nine.

In Tribeca, she sat up cross-legged, again working a pick through every crevice of her teeth. Things which would remain. Maybe she’d spend the next weeks accepting death. Her bluster would eventually fail her. The end would be on its way, not because she had no one but because she had nothing left to accomplish.

The building creaked in the wind and she remembered her parents, briefly. Small, silent people who never wanted to be a bother. Whatever did they want for her? She wasn’t interested in the answer. In the end, it had all been enough. From the high to the low, or was it the other way? Had she arrived at one or the other?

Crow Jonah Norlander

SPLENDOR IN THE CORN by Kate Jayroe

August 24, 2021 · Fiction

I am such a hot, sad wraith. Open-mouthed, I sob in the park on quarantine walks. I listen to ‘Til Tuesday. I ramble as far as possible from every other person there. Fuck the Frisbee golfers. I’m processing the three most harrowing break ups of my life. I’d been with none of the people involved, save myself. One is the man I’d been sleeping with. A hot, aging punk with a scarred nipple from self-piercing as a teen in his parents’ kitchen. I liked to squeeze the scar tissue in bed between two digits, other hand busy down below. It ended because he does not fall in love. A sort of policy. It ended because he called me “Carolyn” on Friday the 13th, his own swollen digits inside me. It ended because I cried watching him sleep, knowing it was a mistake to have let it last as long as it had. Another, a best gal pal whom I called “wife” for years. Wifed me as well. A mutual She/They connection. You know. Nowadays. We slept together or not all over town and the world. Drank together. Gymed together. Bathed together. Ate salads with fried chicken. Ate ass and watched the Criterion Channel. Snorted ketamine. It ended because I began sleeping with the punk and she began sleeping with his best friend, a surfing therapist who named his dog after himself and brought crab dip to potluck type gatherings. The third: a kindly Midwesterner who did basically nothing. Once a year, he traveled across state lines for an annual event where I likewise was present and had crossed state lines in preparation. He sits crisscross applesauce all the other days in a cornfield, until his wife calls him home for supper. He sighs, looks around one last time. Then he gets up, dusts off his khakis, and crosses the threshold to a warm hearth. Some would call him spiritually touched. A holy man of modern times who cares not for wages or liquor. He leaves his marriage bed cold. But the cornfield! Warm with his breath. His tight, little buttocks. In a hungry vision in the park, the angel Gabriel tells me to go to the cornfield via tractor and seduce the man within. Gabriel says: Do not be afraid of the Frisbee golfers. In general, they are socially distancing at a proficient level. Intercourse among the corn is how you heal. Ride a John Deere for your journey. Enjoy the slow sights of a cursed nation. Nothing runs like a Deere. I understand you two have sporadically dry humped for several years while both attending an annual event which holds sentimental value in terms of content and locale. If you bag the final one, they’ll all be done. Mark my words. Gabriel’s haircut looks a lot like Aimee Mann’s haircut in the “Voices Carry” music video. The angel dissipates into a cruel, clear sky. Publicly visible menstrual blood dots my grey yoga pants. A consecrated mark upon my miserable flesh. I see Kansas. I see cows. I see COVID, dancing in the very air. Salome, before the silver platter. I see outdoor church services with The Word of God booming all around, nourishing the grass and torturing bees. I hear the tractor’s slow death as I approach Ohio’s edge. I ask Gabriel to help me make my country mission. The tractor goes kaput at the outskirts of my silken destination. Each ear has such girth. Morning dew smooched each tip. All these blooming cobs are tall sex incarnate and I feel something dropping deep in the deepest goddamned pit of me. Immersed in a labyrinthine patina of gold and green, I don’t know where to go. How long may I live off corn? Grilled. Creamed. Pops. Pop Secret. It has been hours or half of one. I lie down and nap, under the dumb watch of a caftan-wearing scarecrow. I awaken! The heat of the day. Shall I perish in this maze of desire? I’ve all but left hope, when I hear a rustle. A school of greasy teens emerge. I call out: Youths! Please help. I’m looking for the man who does nothing. It’s paramount we rut among the corn. They laugh in demon song. Good luck with that, says the one in front. You’re not far. Keep along this path. We see him each week and bring offerings. He wants nothing of our joy. The youths did not lead me astray. I shortly see khaki out the corner of my eye. His eyes, mouth closed. He breathes in the way we are instructed to breathe for optimal health. He is surrounded by offerings of the youths. Brazzers DVDs, Wild Turkey 101, whippets, fidget spinners, pop sockets, magnum condoms, greeting cards, wild flowers, a cheeseburger. Gingerly, I mimic his sitting and face him. Slow as a cat, he opens his eyes. He bares teeth. Well! He says. Well, well. Well. I stroke his face. He sucks my pinky. We nuzzle as old horses might. I kiss his lips. He gently puts a hand up. You’re great, he says. I can’t. This isn’t across state lines. Corn won’t allow it. Besides, you know there’s someone I love very much in a nearby warm home. You’ve made me ill with unresolved desire! I’m shouting. The angel Gabriel brought me here! We must rut! Please, give me your spirit. At least a 69. Here, he says. He slides a Brazzers DVD my way. An ear of this stuff is bigger than me anyways. If you’d like, I can sit here with my eyes closed while you bring yourself to climax. I think there’s a portable DVD player, nearby. Gabriel will understand. I cum so hard, I see Gabriel’s smile. My heartbreak rushes out of me. Silken waterfall. What now? I ask. We sit here, he says. Then, we go home. Corn, for dinner.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THROUGH THE LAUNDROMAT WINDOW by Rachel L.E. Klammer

August 20, 2021 · Fiction

Jane watches the world from across the laundromat. Her apartment window affords a view of the parking lot and inside the laundromat. Jane watches a plump and elderly man wash horse blankets for the third time that month. A sign near his machine says ‘please do not wash horse blankets.’

Jane has been watching the laundromat for three months, ever since she first moved to town during the ever-clinging winter. It is April now, and still snow and melting icicles crawl over building roofs. There will be snow lumped in the edges of some valleys and higher altitudes of the park into July.

Jane watches for Dale. She had not started by watching for Dale, but now it takes up much of her time. The window is foggy—the cold creeps in from under the edges and there is a draft, so Jane stuffs damp towels against the cracks so that she does not grow so cold at the window. Dale does not come, though the falling sun shines starbursts against her eyes in stinging heat, and leaves there dappled, dark, soft things. On the street below a man with a beer gut talks to another man, and the road could be one large slab of sidewalk with how rarely cars come by. One of the men holds a rake, and Jane wonders what they could be raking, as there are no leaves on the pavement. Do people rake pavement?

Jane passes the time by working on her art. She cuts shapes from the broad bodies of leaves like one might carve a linoleum block. She had pressed her desk against the window in her living room so that she could work and watch at the same time. She cuts patterns in leaves—intricate, delicate things, like birds with their hollow bones. Sometimes she carves poems, but other times she cuts animals or scenes. No one had wanted her leaves for a very long time, but now she is meant to be working—for a small gallery in Boston, thousands of miles away. Her aunt had given her the keys to a Gardiner apartment (the one with the west-facing window that looked out over the last block of town, and Yellowstone National Park behind it), because that was the thing artists did—retreat somewhere to work, like you put in one thing and out comes another thing.

Jane’s leaves are not right for cutting, because they have grown too dry since the fall, so she has to soak them in tubs of water in the fridge, and sometimes they are too sludgy and they tear. Jane does not leave her apartment so much anymore. The stretch of the pavement is not such a flat thing, and it rears often in front of Jane if she steps outside, spins her the way children spin, sick after carnival rides.

Jane is wiping at the leaves, trying to clean the sludge from their surface when Dale’s van pulls up. Jane jumps from her seat and grabs her camera from where it perches on the back of her couch.

Dale steps out of a grey-paneled van, one with curtains over the back windows and rust creeping up the bumper. Jane hadn’t known who Dale was at first—a man or a woman, and so had named them Dale, though it is so obvious now that Jane knows how to look. She had taught herself (had been taught) to appreciate the boundaries of things which were Dale the same way she had learned to appreciate modernism in art school.

Dale looks like the people at Jane’s art school on the west coast, with bleached hair half-shaved but long on top, and a tank top ripped so low Jane can see the sharp protrusion of ribs through binoculars. Dale wears a new tank top today, not one of the repurposed band tees that Jane usually sees (singers she has always heard of, but never heard)—but instead it is black and reads ‘fuck off’ in faint grey lettering, like one had dragged paintbrush bristles, jagged and stiff over still-wet cloth. Jane snaps a picture.

Dale has one laundry bag, always: an old pillowcase with stains on the bottom, faint rings of grey. Dale showers sometimes in the small stalls at the back of the laundromat, and they have a separate pillowcase for that for clean clothing and soap. That pillowcase has more stains where soap bottles had burst during the mountain climb, too much pressure or too little, as Dale’s van drove in and out of the park. Jane thinks Dale has come from lower places, where deer and coyote lope shambling, in smaller valleys that do not freeze, but suspend, always, in hanging humidity.

Jane presses the round of the binoculars to her eyes until cold metal fades to hot sting. Dale does not shower this time, butwashes their laundry on delicate with powdery detergent from a Ziploc bag. They tumble dry only half of it, laying out socks and base layers on the bench outside in the sun. Jane can see the fuzz of the wool, the pill of it, the wet imprints it leaves behind on wood, the way the dark damp seeps into the texture of the grain and creeps there, beyond the boundaries of the sock. Dale sits at the table near the window where they can watch the bench. The table is an old rusted thing taken from the local coffee shop when they had left it on the curb. One of Dale’s feet is propped up on the sill across from them, and Jane can see the cut of their boots, hard, old, and chapping, with mud-dried laces. Dale has strings, earbuds, hanging from their ears. Jane couldn’t see them before she had bought the binoculars from the woman at the E.L.K. Shop, but now she sees them clearly: white cord aged yellow and brittle.

Jane watches for a long while at the empty spaces until Dale finally gathers all their laundry, bundles it into their van, and drives away. Jane can see, still, the pile of dirt their shoes left on the windowsill, and the drying patches of wet in the sun. That night, when she lays in bed and the lights from the windows cast shadows past the leaves she has hung there, she thinks of her first night in Gardiner.

Jane had met a man at the bar that first night, still sweaty from moving boxes despite the dry air and cheeks just starting to peel. Her bangs hung low over her eyes, and she’d always meant to trim them but kept stalling before the barber door like a pinwheel turning over and over in the breeze. The bar is easier, dark and dank, lit by dust-covered neon and half-burnt bulbs. Rocko worked in the park, and she’d thought he was such a kind old man if not a little leery, but then weren’t they all like that? Wasn’t that the price one paid for their conversation and their beer, slid over harmlessly before one even knew they had entered the transaction?

Rocko had tried to fuck Jane on the street outside the laundromat—had first invited her over, and then had grabbed her arm and covered her mouth with his own, and Jane had closed her eyes and tried to think of how not to hurt his feelings, of how still to be good. Jane had tried to wait until he was finished, to explain, to tell him, no I’m sorry, you’re very sweet, but I have a boyfriend, a father, a brother. But Rocko hadn’t finished, had trailed the wet surface of his tongue down her face and neck and the start of her chest and left patches of sticky, pimpling skin, had reached his hand down the front of her jeans to scratch at underwear that still needed changing after the trip and Jane thought of old, crusty discharge catching against his fingers and lodging under his nails.

I’m sorry, Jane had said, I need to shower. I’m not very clean. I’m very tired. I’m sorry, I’ll be right back down, I just need to change, I’m sorry.

Jane sat in front of the window in her apartment and watched him until he left, and wondered what she might say to him if she saw him again.

———

Jane likes to make jarred oatmeal for breakfast. he mixes oats and milk in mason jars before she goes to bed because that is what people in videos do: five-minute Facebook recipes that scroll through her feed betweens ads and classmates who seem less familiar than they are. Jane doesn’t sleep much, so when she pads from bed in the morning, shaking with cold and low blood sugar, with eyes that burn with the effort to focus, the oats are still chewy and gummy. She sits and eats them by the window, wrapped still in her comforter, stomach aching, acid, with each bite.

Jane does not see Dale that morning because nobody does laundry two days in a row unless you are the old woman who lives in the cabin three blocks away. The goat woman comes every morning at 6:30, the same time the younger woman (a night waiter at the bar where Jane met Rocko) unlocks the door. The waiter has two young children, Jane thinks. That is why the waiter works two jobs, but sometimes people work two jobs even without children, so maybe the woman has no children. Maybe the woman is working off college loans, or maybe she just likes laundromats like Jane does.

Jane thinks the goat woman has to do laundry every morning because she lives with goats in her cabin, and Jane does not think goats can be potty trained, so the woman washes linens often, and Jane wonders if it might not be better for her to get her own washing machine. She wonders, if the woman really does have a cabin, she must also have a yard, and a place for a wash bin and clothesline. She wonders if the goats prefer the indoors, the feel of couch fiber and carpet, if they chew at siding and cords, or if they would rather be outdoors, fenced in her yard and munching on weeds.

Jane watches when the goat woman leaves an hour later, carrying big piles of fabric, bunched under and beneath and around the overhang of her breasts, the wedge of her stomach. Jane checks her email for messages from her mom, even though they have not emailed in a long while. There are emails from JoAnn Fabric telling her there is a sale on winter patterns, but nothing from anyone else. Sometimes, Jane pretends that JoAnn is an old woman, like a grandmother who is invested in fabric deals and doesn’t know she shouldn’t email so much, or that there are no fabric stores for miles.

Jane has a friend in the park, Jack, old enough to be her father, who she met that first week in the line at the grocery store. Jane hadn’t made eye contact with him, had stared at the way his shoes ghosted over cracks and gouged linoleum, but still he had talked to her and asked her where she was from. Jack had bought her coffee and she had taken it because she did not know how not to. He had been kind, and funny. He had asked about her life before, in Boston. He had asked about her art. Jane wanted him to like her. Jane wants him to like her.

Jane texts Jack things she finds funny throughout the day. Things like ‘horse blanket man is washing horse blankets again’ and ‘here's a picture of a nuthatch that is building a nest on my windowsill.’ He responds sometimes, with his own quip or something about the park, but most of the time he doesn’t and Jane works on her leaves and thinks about how, in a few short years, they’ll crumble to dust.

Jane gets angry, sometimes. Sometimes, Jane gets angry and punches herself, slams her arms against countertops and then gets angrier that she is too weak to do much damage, punches the drywall like a child punching through a pillow. Sometimes Jane can watch burst blood vessels bloom like mulberries buried beneath her skin, but never real bruises. She wonders what people would say about real bruises, what people would say if Rocko had fucked her there on the street against the hard surface of the brick wall.

Jane wants to write ‘look, I fell in the shower :(’ and send a picture of her mottled arm. Instead she says ‘I think the nuthatch had babies :).’ Jack texts back a smiley face.

That night, Jane dreams of women’s bodies, the way she drew them in art school—the smooth expanse of them, where pores and nipples and hair and mouth were rubbed out to nothing. She dreams of them, scrawled like boneless things, without muscle or sinew, on the surface of her bed, staring up or down or anywhere. She dreams her hands sink in when she touches them, that flesh falls away to bone—not bone, marrow—until she is them and they are her.

———

Dale does not come back the next day, because nobody does laundry every other day. Jane wonders what they are doing—if they live, always in the van, or if there is some place, some town somewhere, that contains Dale the way a pitcher holds water—how Dale pours. If Dale fills or is filled.

Jane is running out of oats, so she does not eat breakfast. Jane wonders if she could offer enough money to have the grocery store bring the groceries to her door, but the thought of dialing the phone makes her hands shake. They only have two employees, she thinks—one to stock shelves and another to work the register. One employee must come early, to squeeze guacamole from bags in the back room, to cut fruit and fry chicken.

Jane sits at her desk and works on her leaves, but they are too dry now and crumble beneath her fingers. She will not be able to get more, and the thought sits with her, hollow. She thinks of art galleries in Boston, bricked walls and cigarette butts. Jane checks her email and her phone. Jane looks at the mailbox from the top of the stairs. Jane sits by her window and watches the passing cars.

Jane feels her thoughts like one feels water, the rush of it around body—does it move, flow, or is it still? Does she move around it? Does it move around her?

As the sun disappears behind the swell of the mountains, she sees a paneled van.

Jane’s breath catches—the snap of surface tension when raindrop meets pond. Dale parks, always paralleled, wheels mashing against curb. A horn honks, once, twice, three times—a man leans out a truck window. He yells at Dale as Dale steps out of their van, mud splattered up the front of their pants, and flips him off.

Jane watches Dale walk inside, trailing dirt. Jane watches Dale’s hands, the red scrape of them, hanging thin patches of white skin and crusting blood dragging over the rip in a jean. Jane watches Dale strip to underwear in front of the machines, watches as their skin drags muddy dapples forward and back across the surface of their ribs with each turn, sports bra and boxer shorts and uneven, creeping tan, splotchy and browned.

Jane thinks they must know that she watches them, and the feeling excites her, makes her want to peel back the glass of her window like Saran from dough. Dale showers in the stalls that line the back wall—tall doors with no finish that are gouged over and crept in mold, and as she waits she remembers.

Jane remembers Rocko against the brick wall outside, remembers her cousin’s body years before, bracketed around her, pinning her to the wall behind his bed, remembers her own body, limp and brassy like a doll, the taste of her cousin’s mouth like nothing, the feel of nothing but wet and soft like the inside of a gourd before one had pulled the guts out for baking, the wet snap of it between fingers and caught beneath nails.

Jane watches Dale leave, watches them wrest on clothing still damp from the dryer, watches them spread damp towels over the dashboard of their van before driving around the corner and north—the only road out of town. Jane wonders where they sleep, if it is beneath trees or parked somewhere covered over in headlights, curtains pulled shut in the back.

Jane thinks of them, of breasts that aren’t mounds, that don’t erupt violently from skin like burgeoning pustules, but instead rise gently, sitting low enough to be nothing but a suggestion. She thinks of women, slung over in mud with hair that is not hair, but tangled, matted, bare feet and chipped nails. She thinks of women, not smoothed or planed, but rough, hewn over like sandpaper, the sting of them, the cut of their skin, and hers.

———

Jane talks to herself like her parents used to talk to her. Calls herself stupid when she thinks of a trip to the grocery store where she couldn’t manage to get the cashier to smile back at her. She thinks of the texts she sends to Jack and almost blocks his number, thinks of Dale, of their eyes meeting through the double windows and starts to cry. Later, when she cuts at leaves too soggy to tear, she tells herself she’s invisible, that she could fade out to almost nothing, take the apartment with her and live forever on the second floor of the building across from the laundromat—unrecognizable. How wonderful it would be, to be unobservable, to be unable to talk or act or do anything. A self-contained ecosystem, thought with no reaction. She thinks of following Dale’s van, grows uncomfortable at the idea that it could exist anywhere else besides the laundromat, that it doesn't simply fade away when it turns the corner of the block.

When Jane dreams, she dreams of Dale, crawling over the cold of her body. She dreams of swells, pushed together until they hurt, of flat chests and hair where it shouldn't be. She thinks of smooth plastic, the things that should be beneath her jeans, underwear and then—?

The not real Jane—the dream Jane—asks Dale if they love her.

Dale says no.

Crow Jonah Norlander

SIMON & SCHUSTER by Marc Tweed

August 18, 2021 · Fiction

Bill Gunderson was more than a coworker to me, in fact I’d gone kayaking with Bill maybe three weeks before they chucked his severed head off the 29th floor of the Pemberton Building. He was our top seller the year before that ordeal, three out of four quarters. The guy was a data security sales machine. It was a windy evening this happened. I remember his head making a sound like an empty coconut when it hit the concrete and bounced twenty feet in the air, coming to rest directly in front of my girlfriend, Veraldine, whose exquisite face elongated soundlessly. We were in shock, of course. We looked at each other like what on God’s green earth? I nudged the head away from her with the toe of my oxford and when it rolled over so we could see the face, I said, “Oh my God, that’s Bill Gunderson.”

This was all over the news. Someone posted footage from a street camera on YouTube and last I checked it had 2.7 million views. You remember this from the news? I haven’t checked the YouTube video for months now. But it shows everything. At least the part about Bill’s head.

How this came about, Veraldine and I happened to be shopping downtown by the Pemberton after having an early dinner on the north side at Hooligans III. Yes, that’s correct, Hooligans III between the check-cashing place and the furniture store that used to be nice. I had a whole thing arranged with the server at Hooligans III; the ring would be at the bottom of a ramekin of ranch dressing.

Do you know Terry? That’s the server with the big curly hair, with a big, broad, beaten face, kind of wide and bovine. A nice guy. Just looks like he’s been compressed somehow, into something impenetrably dense.

Anyway, Veraldine and I were making small talk, catching up about our days and I just felt like she was acting funny, like she was gathering up the courage to say something to me? It was making me nervous. You know me. My mind immediately goes to a dark place. I was wondering if that day of all days was going to be the day she was going to acknowledge I’m really not that impressive of a person. Paranoid, I guess. I tend to feel subpar. So when I saw Terry over her shoulder heading our way with the Lava Hot Spud Skins and ranch I waved him away as nonchalantly as I could. He turned around, thank God.

I needed to know what was what before I went through with this ring business, right?

Well it turned out this was the deal. Veraldine had big news indeed, but nothing to do with me. Whew. She said, “Simon & Schuster is going to publish The Bird With the Prismatic Eyes!” Holy shit, I thought. Simon & Schuster is going to publish The Bird With the Prismatic Eyes!

I said, “Honey, that is fantastic!” and I took her hands in mine and it occurred to me I better not steal her thunder with my whole deal about wanting to spend the rest of my life with her. I figured I should delay that whole extravaganza for a least an hour. So I said hold that thought I want to hear all about Simon & Schuster but let me use the bathroom first.

I found Terry in the hallway between the kitchen and the bathrooms and I said, “Let’s fish that ring out of the ranch dressing and you can put it in the tiramisu later.”

He nodded seriously. I can always count on Terry.

So back at the table Veraldine and I were in a celebratory mood.

I mean, I’m so proud, right? She’s so creative. She let me read multiple drafts of this thing before she ever sent it out and I have to tell you it is really good! Like each time I couldn’t put it down. It’s about a man with a kind of kaleidoscope vision who sees people as tightly interlocking puzzles of individual molecules and each molecule is kind of its own entity with even smaller molecules and so on. The guy is a detective and he uses his kaleidoscope power to solve mysteries but he has a mystery of his own: the mystery of his personal origins. His parents, in other words. That’s the main thrust of the book. All he knows is someone left him on a church doorstep in a cardboard box with this strange little bird figurine. So he’s obsessed with that.

Simon & Schuster!

Anyway, I was proud of her because for the year and a half we’d been dating she’d worked on this manuscript feverishly every day while still somehow making time for me. I don’t think she sleeps.

There was an easiness between us. People noticed it. And I’m a big reader.

So we were finishing a second round of cocktails and beaming at each other in a kind of speechless delirium when Terry brought out the Lava Hot Spud Skins, sans ring. I was trying not to screw things up, trying to make sure she knew how happy I was for her. And I really was. Am, in fact. I always will be proud of Veraldine, I swear it as I sit staring at rows and rows of bottles in the manner of a crumbling statue.

I was figuring dessert was going to come at exactly the right time. We made it through the appetizer and another drink, laughing, and split a Caesar salad after that. Got cozier and cozier. And I’m high on all the love and spirits, thinking the rest of my life begins at dessert. Then I saw Terry coming our way shaking his head and I said to myself fuck.

Not only were they out of tiramisu, they were out of the only other dessert Veraldine and I like, which is peach cobbler. So I was going to have to explain to her why I was ordering us the coconut cream pie, which neither of us cared for too much. Too gelatinous. Weird flecks of something chewy.

“I think I’ll just skip dessert,” she said in her high, hoarse patter.

I told her I’d have her for dessert and she giggled and coughed into a fist.

I said, “Let’s drive downtown, look at the decorations.”

The lights were up for the holidays and the shops were open and I said I wouldn’t mind stopping into Swenfield’s to try on some slacks I saw online.

She was in a fine mood and said, “You read my mind.”

She’s like that. We were like that. Everyone said we were like psychic twins.

Terry slipped the ring back to me when I paid and wished me luck. Under his breath, of course.

Veraldine and I drove downtown. It took forever to park but the lights were magic. I had an idea on the way over. I was thinking, they put up a huge Christmas tree in Swenfield’s every year and I figured it would be pretty classy to get down on one knee in front of it. It’s twenty-five feet tall, right there in the middle of the store, under a big domed skylight. Everyone knows the spot.

I was sweating bullets at this point. I felt completely out of control. The ring-in-the-ranch-dressing plan had been rehearsed in my head (and, honestly, recited to Terry) over and over for weeks and there I was improvising. As Veraldine and I strolled, arm in arm under the downtown Christmas lights I thanked God for those three drinks we had at dinner.

We were two blocks from Swenfield’s when this little old man called out to us. He was bent over and bald in a dirty plaid suit and I was thinking he looked sort of like an urban leprechaun as he scuttled over to us in front of an upscale furniture store on the first floor of the Pemberton Building.

He said, “This is the best block” and swept his spiny little arms around without moving his head, like an arthritic tour guide.

Veraldine smiled at him, her teeth bright against the dark plum lipstick that drives me wild with longing even now when I see her across a packed bar with a large group of people I don’t know. I mean who are these people? Are these people from work? New friends from some literary cabal?

So I said to the old man, “We’ll take your word for it but you’re right, it’s pretty fancy, sir.”

He pointed at Veraldine and said, “Not as fancy as this one.”

I said, “She’s a famous author, too!” and we all had a laugh.

It would be weeks before I’d wake up in the middle of the night and remember what Bill Gunderson said after we’d demolished a case of Bud and he seemed like someone else. His face leered out of the darkness, the campfire written crazily across his sweaty forehead.

“Sometimes you just take what’s yours. You don’t wait for someone to realize it’s yours and give it to you. You tell them with your actions,” he said.

So Veraldine and I parted ways with the little man in front of the furniture store and started walking in the direction of Swenfield’s, electricity and a thousand little lights singing in the sharp evening air. I felt the ring in my pocket. I couldn’t stop running my fingers over it. Over and over and over. This was the single most important thing I was ever going to do and no god damn missing dessert…nothing was going to stop me. And I’m sorry if I’m getting emotional. I just miss Veraldine. I miss her so much.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THE WHALES WILL THANK HER by Julie Chen

August 17, 2021 · Fiction

She seeks to save water when using the toilet. If it's yellow, let it mellow, though she knows that can lead to malodor, so she makes sure to flush before she goes out or to bed, or if she hasn’t hydrated well and her pee is a deep autumnal mustard, like her favorite sweater.

When she goes grocery shopping, she uses tote bags, of which she has many. The real challenge is to also bring those plastic bags in which one weighs produce. One can avoid them with fruits like bananas, whose peels are thick enough to shield from germs, but grapes are a different matter.

But sometimes she forgets even a tote. Or when she does bring a tote, she forgets to ask the cashier to refrain from giving her a plastic bag, so she just extricates her things in front of them, avoiding their gaze, surely offended as she rejects their gift.

And sometimes she doesn’t have the courage to do this so she just takes the wasteful plastic bag, feeling like the scum of the earth. When she gets home, she stashes it in the cupboard in which she hides her other shameful plastic bags, and swears this is the last of her cowardice.

She supposes she has a reason for all this scrupulousness and self-loathing: to be good. The whales will thank her. In heaven, she’ll swim through the air and nuzzle them. Also sea lions, serpentine mammals with warm blood and smooth skin, no sharp creases or ashy elbows like on her own craggy body.

Her lover is petite and hairless, with legs barer than her own. When he is on top, she grabs him by his narrow shoulders and pulls him close, so she feels his ribs, small, smooth nubs, bury in her large, useless breasts. He feels so delicate she wants to smother him.

Postcoital, he falls right asleep while she pulls out her phone. She plays Tetris and Candy Crush, games where the goal is to disappear things. She keeps the volume on, the bleep bloops flitting above his heavy snores.

One night, she plays games into the morning light. At breakfast, she drinks three cups of coffee. Her body feels flipped inside out, each heartbeat rippling the surface of her skin like a stone skipping across a pond. She looks at her lover’s face across the table and imagines his right eyebrow rotating clockwise 90 degrees and sliding down to meet the top of his right nostril—no, it would actually be neater if it were rotated counterclockwise, the focus of the parabola tangent to the nostril flare. Take the other eyebrow too, and make it symmetric, a hyperbola. Shift the lips up, omitting the philtrum, its insipid indentation; now more than ever, either commit or disappear! Everything clicks into place and flashes white and—

She blinks and his face returns to normal.

They break up. They have different values. He works at a tech company that supplies him unlimited individually packaged foods: drinks, yogurts, granola bars, pickles. He is addicted to sparkling water. When they went on walks, he’d stop at bodegas to buy it even when she offered him her reusable bottle, which she refilled in bathroom sinks.

They hadn’t lived together, which was how she’d gotten away with the yellow-mellow trick. Still, the space in her home feels extraneous now. So she goes to the library during the day and works there, remote copy-editing, adding and deleting commas to the rhythms of students whispering and old men coughing into their borrowed newspapers.

Unlike at the coffee shop, at the library she can bring her travel mug and Tupperwared snacks and can use the bathroom whenever she wants, not once or twice per purchase—baked goods only, to avoid single-use cups—or whatever the etiquette is. Today, the last person to use toilet hadn't flushed. They were moderately hydrated, not clear, but not unhealthily dark either. She wonders if she should flush before she pees but judges that the walls of the toilet bowl are sufficiently deep such that it is unlikely that her pee stream would splash drops of the old pee onto her genitals. She had looked it up, pee isn't actually sterile, plus it’s gross to touch someone else’s and she isn't crazy. She’ll only save water by peeing into someone else’s pee under special circumstances.

Crow Jonah Norlander

CRISP EDGES by Helena Pantsis

July 30, 2021 · Fiction

Bud reached into the chip bag. It crinkled, loud and coarse by the cheap, jagged foil. He dug his hand around the salt-covered potatoes, angling for the perfect one. You never want to start too big. You have to aim for those mid-range chips, the ones the size of a beer bottle’s bottom. He pulled one out, smacked his lips around it, and sucked on the tips of his fingers before going in for another. He couldn’t stop. That’s how they get you, the chip companies, the corporate potato pigs, by drowning their spuds in moreish delicacies that rot your teeth and erode your stomach lining. Bud was a sucker for anything with vinegar on it, anything that made his teeth vibrate, thin and on the verge of shattering. Pulling out another chip, he paused to look at it. It was familiar. He spun it around, tilted it forward, and Jesus Christ, there he was.

Martin Short.

“Jesus Christ, look at this,” Bud spat the crumbs of the half-chewed potato chip from his mouth.

Sitting across the sofa, Denise leaned towards Bud with her eyes half-lidded. She’d had enough of his bullshit.

“What?” she said.

Bud flung the chip closer to her, tilting it upwards so she could see it in better light.

“It’s a potato chip,” she said. “And?”

“That’s Martin Fucking Short.”

“Who?”

Sometimes the age gap between Bud and Denise wasn’t so bad. As long as you didn’t think about the fact that when she was born, he was graduating high school, and when she was applying to universities, he was in the middle of his first divorce. And as long as you didn’t think about the fact she didn’t know who Martin Fucking Short was.

“Martin Short!” he spoke louder, as if the volume would awaken something in her.

“Three Amigos? Father of the Bride? Legend of Saturday Night Live?”

Her face remained blank, unfazed by his manic spiraling into filmography recitation. Bud scoffed, gently placed his chip on the coffee table, and pulled up a photo on his phone.

“Oh!” Denise chimed with recognition. “He was Jack Frost! In the third Santa Clause.”

Bud didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.

“Okay,” he picked up the chip again, holding it alongside his phone. “See?”

Denise stopped for a moment to consider. The salt built up triangular in the middle, emulating what could be a nose, and the chip had burn lines resembling what could be eyes along its top. She supposed it could be him.

“I guess,” she said. “It just looks like a random face.”

Bud was flabbergasted.

“You’re kidding!” he said. “It’s a spitting image.”

“I don’t really see what the big deal is,” Denise went to grab for it, intent on eating it.

“Woah! No way,” Bud placed the chip on the far side of the table, away from her.

“What are you gonna do with it?” she asked, confounded.

“This has gotta be worth something,” Bud spoke confidently, picking the chip up and waving it in the air as he made to leave the room. “Just you see.”

Bud set his chip up in the study. Laying down a crisp, white page of A4 paper where the sun shone. He placed his chip in the middle, positioning it to the ideal angle, and opened the camera on his phone. Bud took a series of photos, all those which best captured the Martin Short of the chip. Bud uploaded the pictures to eBay, setting a starting price for auction at $50.

“You’re fucking kidding,” Denise said upon finding the stagnant bidding war on Bud’s computer. “No one’s gonna pay fifty bucks for a chip.”

“Not just a chip,” Bud said. “An exact fried potato replica of beloved actor Martin Short.” He pointed to the description he’d keyed into the item information.

“I think those are baked,” Denise said.

Bud kept the chip in a ziplock bag tucked in the back of the ice cube drawer in the freezer. They never went in there. The pair of them were accustomed to the summer heat and dealt with it better by removing layers. He’d looked up the best way to preserve a chip—he didn’t want Martin to go stale.

When Marl and Sue came over for drinks and a chat Bud told them about Martin the chip. About how he had put the chip on eBay, and about how you wouldn’t believe the likeness! And here’s the photos to prove it.

“I guess I see it,” Marl said, even though they couldn’t really. “So people actually buy that type of thing?”

“All the time!” Bud’s voice rose in excitement. “It’s practically memorabilia!”

Bud had spent hours staring at the glowing screen of his phone in their bed at night, his back turned to Denise. People were inclined to buy all kinds of things if they were attached to a celebrity. A piece of lint from Lindsay Lohan’s sweater from the 2005 Teen Choice Awards. A leaf in the shape of Javier Bardem’s head. Hair from David Schwimmer found on the set of ER circa 1996. A tile in the shape of an airborne Christina Applegate, if you squinted your eyes hard enough. And here he had Martin Fucking Short. A legend. A comedic genius. A star of stage and screen. Of course it was going to sell.

“Enough about that stupid chip,” Denise groaned, standing up abruptly to refill her guests’ coffee cups.

Sue sat awkwardly between them, gazing back and forth between the pair and then to Marl with her eyebrows raised.

“It’s really okay,” She said. “Um, maybe we could see it.”

“Oh no,” Bud shook his head, ignoring Denise, “I don’t want anything to happen to it.”

“Oh my God, Bud. Give it a rest, it’s a potato.” Denise rolled her eyes, dropping back down into her seat. “You haven’t even got a single bid on it.”

In the weeks after, Bud joined multiple online forums and Facebook groups, and signed up for innumerable newsletters on celebrities and Martin Short and selling memorabilia. He watched auctions on eBay, noting the number of watchers and bidders and starting and selling prices. Bud also stopped making love to Denise entirely.

When his auction ended, unsold, Bud re-uploaded his chip with the tips and tricks he’d learned from his research. He shared the link to his auction across Martin Short fan blogs and Facebook pages on celebrity collectables and subreddits on potatoes with faces. Slowly, starting his Martin chip at a price of $10, severely below retail value, Bud began to get some interest. One bid, then two, then the two going back and forth, then a third, and a forth, and suddenly, over twenty bids. With four days still left on the chip’s sale, the bidding price had skyrocketed to over $400.

Bud considered all the things he’d do with the money. He’d get a full back tattoo. He’d take all his friends out for a meal. He’d drink ’til his skin turned yellow. He’d fix the radio in his car. No, he thought, he’d save it, put it towards moving out of this dump.

Bud approached Denise returning home from work, ecstatic by the new interest in his Martin chip and his newfound wealth. She looked tired, moody, unapproachable. Bud considered for a moment not telling her. She’d probably use it to fix the heater or retile the bathroom. Besides, she’d never believed in him to begin with.

“What?” she spoke roughly in response to his vague stare, dropping her bag onto the counter.

“Four-hundred dollars,” he blurted out.

“You’re not buying any more blow right now, we can’t afford it.”

Bud hadn’t thought about that in weeks. He shook his head.

“No, I don’t need it. That’s how much the chip’s at. The auction.”

Denise furrowed her brows, sliding her jacket off and removing her shoes.

“What?” she asked, half paying attention.

Bud took his phone out, opening eBay and seeing the bid had risen to $530. He thrust the phone towards Denise. Her mouth fell open and she dropped her shoes so she could hold the phone closer.

“What the fuck?” she gasped, then began laughing. She stomped her feet like a child and threw her arms around Bud. “Five hundred fucking dollars!”

Things were really looking up. Denise let Bud choose the movie at night, and the pair of them would sit laughing at whatever crazy antic Martin Short got himself into. Bud dyed his hair a dusty brown, fixed his front teeth, and began putting on a wonky American accent at times to rise a laugh from Denise. The pair of them had never gotten along so well. Denise kept an eye on Bud’s eBay like it was the stock market, and boy were her shares climbing.

It was nice at first, then she began to speak about it as if the chip was theirs, as if Martin was their inside joke, their little secret. Denise was so happy about it, it made Bud’s skin crawl. She hadn’t even heard of Martin Short, yet now she was beyond ecstatic that this man’s face was making them money in leaps and bounds. She started to shop with less regard for home brand and sale items and began leaving late for work and arriving home before her shift ended. She was the breadwinner of the pair, or at least she was before Martin chip started pitching in.

The price rose: $900, $1000, $1100, $2000. It gave Bud goosebumps mainly, before anything else, because he was right. He knew it and Denise knew it, but the anticipation in her eyes was delight not reluctant resignation. God, why did he want it so bad?

The chip bag crinkled as Bud's hand swan dove to the bottom, him slouching on the living room sofa and gorging on salt as he did routinely. He filled his mouth with palmful after palmful of chips while glued to eBay on his phone. He emitted an auction-and-potato-chip-induced sweat. He stank of salt and chin fat. The price soared beyond anything the pair of them had ever imagined: $3000, $3500, $3900, $4300. He put the phone down, his heartbeat quickening. Denise came rushing in, her own phone glowing.

“Four fucking thousand!” she yelled.

Martin Short was his celebrity, his chip, but the reward was theirs together. He considered the money. It’d be nice to have. He could settle debts. He could pay for the veneers and hair job he’d gotten. He could get that back tat. Sure, the money would be nice. Bud put his phone down and watched the price rise and the countdown drop. He drifted backward towards the refrigerator. Denise called from the other room, relaying information he could see for himself.

Bud bent down, opened the freezer drawer, and pulled the little ice tray drawer where Martin chip lay. He grabbed the ziplock bag, slid the chip out, and stared at it. Martin’s eyes were screaming.

“Five-thousand dollars!” Denise yelled.

Bud held the chip gently. It was cold and crisp as the day he’d found it. Then he laid the chip on his tongue. He felt a chill run through him. The countdown on the auction ended. The price read $5200. Denise came rushing in, eyes wide and smile cracking. Bud closed his mouth and swallowed the chip swiftly without chewing. He felt the potato’s edges scratch the inside of his throat. Denise looked confused, then horrified.

“What the fuck did you do?” she said.

And Bud didn’t know. But he wanted to say, “I told you so.”

Crow Jonah Norlander

X-R-A-Y LITERARY MAGAZINE | COLLECTION V | SUMMER EDITION

July 29, 2021 · Issue

Stories and art by Vi Khi Nao, Daisuke Shen, Alisha Wexler, Rebekah Bergman, Nathaniel Duggan, Sara Hills, Ryan Norman, Danielle Chelosky, and CK Kane.

click the image for the PDF

Crow Jonah Norlander

THE FUNHOUSE by Matt Lee

July 28, 2021 · Fiction

My first and only job during a disastrous year in New York was at the DVD Funhouse. Little storefront on 6th avenue between 21st and 22nd street. Flatiron District.

The place sold bootleg DVDs, Canadian imports mostly, with the ISBN barcodes scratched off. The first floor was for walk-in customers, people coming off the street to peruse the racks.

I worked in the basement. The place stretched on forever. Pallets and pallets of junk. Crates of old Blockbuster rentals. Books on tape. Useless novelties galore.

I was in charge of online sales. I turned the place around. When Victor hired me, there were two sales a week. By the time I finished, we were selling hundreds of units daily.

Every day I took the J train from Bed-Stuy into Manhattan. I’d buy a coffee at a corner stall for a dollar. I’d get to the Funhouse, print packing slips, pull the orders, stuff them into envelopes, and cart everything to the post office around the corner.

I got pretty friendly with the old guy who worked the dock at the post office. Thirty years with USPS, he told me. A few more years and he could retire. Wonder if he made good on his word.

I had a few guys working for me. Eli was a wannabe stand-up comedian. He’d practice his routine. “My buddy’s wife had a miscarriage after they baby-proofed the house. It worked. A baby didn’t get in.” I started wearing headphones.

Then there was Eric. He had a beard. He was a die hard Giants fan. All I remember.

A kid named Jose ran the register upstairs. “New York City is the greatest place on earth,” he’d say. “Cleanest tap water in America.”

Victor’s older brother Mike was the manager. He never did much besides sit in the bathroom playing games on his BlackBerry.

I worked with another guy named Mark Kamins. His apartment had been leveled during 9/11. He got a big settlement check from the government. The money ran out. So he worked for me at the DVD Funhouse.

Victor told me Mark used to be a bigshot in the music industry. I didn’t buy it until I googled his name. Turned out Mark produced Madonna’s first single, “Everybody.” Launched her to fame. The two even used to be a couple.

I asked Mark about Madonna while we were shelving DVDs one day. I wanted to know what she was like in bed. He thought about it for a minute. “Her pussy hairs were like a brillo pad.”

Mark was a terrible employee. Couldn’t do anything right. Didn’t know how to work a computer. He kept fucking up so much I demanded Victor fire him or I’d quit.

I got what I wanted.

I never knew what happened to Mark until I started writing this. He moved to Guadalajara, Mexico. Started teaching. Died 2013. Heart attack. Fifty-seven years old.

In Mark’s obituary, Madonna says, “If it weren't for him, I might not have had a singing career. He was the first DJ to play my demos before I had a record deal. He believed in me before anyone else did. I owe him a lot.”

The Funhouse was full of rats and roaches. Biggest roaches I’ve ever seen. We’d set glue traps and sprinkle green poison pellets along holes in the walls. It got to be like a game, killing roaches. We’d fling discs that were too scratched for sale trying to slice the pests in two. I got pretty good after a while. Joey was the best.

Joey was the only guy I worked with who I had any respect for. He used to make fun of my shoes, a pair of boots that clacked when I walked. He’d laugh and say, “You sound like a chick.”

Joey and I were the same age, about twenty. That’s where the similarities ended. He was an ex-con who’d served time for dealing coke. Nearly died after some punks he’d robbed decided to get even. They jumped him, bashed Joey’s head in with an aluminum baseball bat. He showed me the dent in his shaved head.

He lived in Queens with his father, who was a bus driver. Joey had to share a room with his sister. I always thought that was weird, but Joey didn’t mind. When he wasn’t at the Funhouse, Joey was at the gym. He was always giving me tips about weight lifting. I never listened.

Joey’s dream was to join the Navy. We both knew with his criminal record there was no chance in hell of Joey becoming a sailor. The dream kept him going.

On our lunch break, Joey and I would go to McDonald’s across the street. He loved putting BBQ sauce on his McChicken. “I’m a fast food connoisseur,” he’d say, lips smeared deep red.

Joey was so strong. He’d move whole pallets single-handedly, carry hundred-pound boxes on his shoulders like it was nothing. Sometimes we’d take our rolly chairs from the desks and send each other rocketing down the endless concrete floor. If Joey was the one pushing, you’d always win the race.

I remember his biceps bulging with veins. I remember him chugging protein shakes and energy drinks. I remember him encouraging me to quit smoking. I remember him breaking wooden boards with his bare hands.

I don’t remember Joey’s last name. I can’t look him up, see what he’s done with himself this past decade. I like to imagine he’s on an aircraft carrier somewhere in the Pacific, off the coast of Polynesia maybe, or the Port of Siam. He’s got a chest full of medals and a girl waiting for him back home. He’s asleep in his bunk, dreaming about a ten-story funhouse mirror. He smashes the massive glass monolith with his fist. He laughs, cracks his knuckles, and says, “Punk ass bitch.”

Crow Jonah Norlander

YOUR HOUSE ON ZILLOW by Stephanie King

July 26, 2021 · Fiction

You died on a Wednesday. In the years since, when the anniversary falls on a different day of the week, everything feels off somehow. That dreamy, floaty feeling of a day, like trying to describe what it is to have loved – but not like that – a man who is gone. They say men and women can’t be friends, but it was never a problem.

Now your wife has put the house up for sale. I guess the mortgage was too much to handle on her own. I scroll through the real estate listing like playing the world’s worst first-person shooter game. Click. There’s the accent wall I helped you paint, back before accent walls were passé, the rich maroon color reminds me of your mother’s homemade cranberry sauce on all those Thanksgivings, or Manischewitz at the seders I spent with your family after mine moved away. Click. The nursery I helped fill with absurd baby gifts, retro toys that you already had tattoos of. Click. The rose trellis in the backyard where we snuck out to smoke weed and your wife pretended not to notice, because she didn’t allow smoking in the house, but when we came back in, she had put out a cheese tray or just-microwaved popcorn.

We’d been a pair since you moved down the street from me in the summer of our twelfth year. Our hijinks progressed from slipping salami through the locker slats of our enemies in middle school to the fall break when we were both home from college and took your grandma’s mobility scooter “mountain biking” up on the trails up behind your house. We took nips from a pint of Wild Turkey you’d stolen because we weren’t old enough to buy one. We had to push the scooter home after the battery died, laughing so hard we almost pissed our pants. Your grown-up house is all the way on the other side of town. Someday, whoever buys it might discover the Halloween plastic severed foot we hid between studs when we replaced the drywall after a leak in the upstairs bathroom.

The house pictures don’t capture the sound of your laughter, bouncing off the walls. The living room looks staged, not like the place where I spent the night on the sofa whenever I got too drunk or it snowed too much to go home. The guest room doesn’t mention that it’s the room you died in, downstairs because you got too weak to make it up to your own room, the hospice nurses discussing your care in hushed voices in the hallway while we sat around the kitchen table poking at sandwich trays we were too disheartened to eat. I see you everywhere in the house, looking for your shadow lurking behind the ornate standing lamp in the living room or in ceiling corners like a spirit in a horror movie. Now I am your haunted house, everywhere I go.

Crow Jonah Norlander

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