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

LOW GAS AND A LION IN THE BACKSEAT by Hannah Gregory

July 1, 2021 · Fiction

My hand lives in her belly. That belly has a tumor the size of a banjo. I like to think my hand keeps her company, playing a soothing song on her tumor banjo whenever she cries in pain. I use my one hand to play my non-tumor banjo for her, my actual banjo, like hum-di-bum-hum-di-dee-hum-di-bum-hum-di-dee. No chords because, hello, one hand over here. My girlfriend Tracy is always yelling at me for getting a lion, but Theory: Is it really about the banjo? Tracy refuses to help me with the chords so she just hears me singing in Open G all day. I tell her that every townie who’s been trapped in the town where they grew up deserves to play banjo for a lion they love. Checkmate. Conclusion: Tracy hates banjos.

My lion breathes heavy these days, breathing the breaths of like… really hard breathing. Tracy doesn’t think I’m a biologist, but what about that online course I took? Checkmate. Theory: Tracy is jealous. She says to stop spending all of my money on that lion. Tracy has had to pick me up because my car ran out of gas. More than once. I spend all of my tips from the bar on the lion’s treatments and we barely make rent. Last night, I did donuts in the high school parking lot until my Low Fuel light popped up, blasting Earl Scruggs with the lion in the backseat as a treat in her final days. Tracy says I’m going to have to start paying for my own AAA if I don’t get rid of that lion. Conclusion: Tracy is jealous. She gives me the silent treatment like she knows how to use it, but there’s a button behind her ear. When I press it eight times, she stops giving me the silent treatment. “Stahp. Staaaaaaahp. Quit it. Please. Okay. Stop now. Ha ha. Okay. Ha ha. You really know how to get on my nerves.” It always goes like that and then we make sweet, salty townie love.

I would cry if this car could run on tears and anxiety instead of gasoline. Theory: If my palm sweats the whole way to the vet’s office, I’ll be able to make it there before my tank runs out of gas. My lion can’t get comfortable in the backseat because of the banjo in her belly. Her brain refuses to quit even though her body is trying to kill her. If I run out of gas, I’ll need to put a sign on the window that says: Careful! Lion in the backseat! She bites but be nice to her. She’s dying! I pass by a gas station, but keep driving because I know where I can get gas two cents cheaper. Conclusion: The car coasts into the vet’s parking lot and it shuts off before I can park. Conclusion: Tracy misjudges my thrift.

My body quakes ugly tears and I rest my head on my lion’s. She licks the tears off my face and she has that smile, that desire to keep living, to keep sleeping, to keep waking up, to keep eating her favorite dinner of fresh carcasses and sweaty hands, to keep listening to my one-handed banjo while I sing her a sweet song about love and heartache.

I sit with her until the vet comes out. We all walk inside together and I walk out alone.

Theory: My heart’s going to fall out and never make its way back home. My lion’s name was Bette, by the way. She was young. Only about five years old. I hum Bette’s favorite song until Tracy comes and picks me up. We leave my car stranded in the vet’s parking lot. Conclusion: I’m going to cry until I die.

Crow Jonah Norlander

HAUNTING by Edee James

June 30, 2021 · Creative Nonfiction

A ghost is a boy who always comes back to you.

We were kissing in his car, which he’d initially parked by the side of the road so we could volley insults at each other responsibly. With his breath sweet and warm on my neck, and his tongue darting in and out of my ear, it was easy to momentarily forget why we were fighting.

It was about another girl.

I grew up learning that a man will stray. You shouldn’t kill yourself just because your man is a community penis, my aunt said. All I had to do was pray he didn’t gift me something incurable. My position in his heart was solid if he had a string of female names on his phone, but it was ‘code red’ if he was focusing on one specific girl.

There was one specific girl.

The boy said it was either me or her whenever he was ready for marriage. The fight wasn’t about the fact that he had options. It was because he wouldn’t spell out my position in his list of eligible women. I told him to go and fix his limp dick, and he told me they were selling oils for my receding hairline. Then we were giggling and kissing, mouths and hands everywhere, stray moans escaping throats, goosebumps like we’d been submerged in ice. An army van screeched to a stop in front of us, tires spraying gravel and sand. Three soldiers leaped out with guns slung over their shoulders to buy roasted corn from a roadside seller. It was then I lost control of my bladder.

There was a pool of urine on my seat when the boy dropped me off.

We didn’t talk about me peeing myself. We didn’t talk about the fact that it wasn’t really about the soldiers--my dad was in the army, so I was quite familiar with officers. We didn’t talk at all.

It was about their guns.

The boy dropped me off without a word. We had been on and off for five years. It was clear we were off again. Inside my house, I stepped out of my soiled skirt and flung my bra and wig against the wall. I shivered under the spray of cold water in the shower, but it was alright because it helped dilute my warm tears.

Right then, I knew two things:

1. The boy and I, currently off, would be on again in about a year2. He was never going to marry me

I knew.

I have always known things. My cousin calls me before he bets on football games. My friend won lots of money after I blurted out winning numbers. When I was younger, my mother took me to a prophet because she couldn’t understand it all. A girl working in my mom’s beauty salon noticed how I always turned up right before my mom started eating lunch on her break. No one believed the girl, so she decided to set a trap for me. She bought ice cream and said my mom couldn’t eat it until a certain time. I appeared as my mother swallowed the first scoop.

A ghost is a dearly departed soul who doesn’t know how to return home.

I was drying plates in the kitchen the first time I saw the ghost. It was running up and down, restive. I told it to stop, then wondered if my insomnia was finally catching up with me. The next day it was back, a figure in white floating around the periphery of my vision. Annoyed, I told it I wasn’t responsible for its death.

I was there the day the ghost died. I had swept his skull fragments into a dustpan with my hands after the kidnappers emptied a clip into his head and spilled his brain. He had come to cut my uncle’s hair at home but stuck around because he wanted to help me clean the house. He owned a barbershop in town, and my uncle was one of his VIP clients. That Sunday, he finished his job and got paid, but he insisted on dusting the furniture before leaving. I pried the cleaning rag out of his grip after the police came and took my statement and his body. An officer scribbled something indecipherable as I recounted the event:

a. I was frying plantains when the kidnappers cameb. They took everyone to my uncle’s bedroomc. They asked us all to lie facedownd. They asked for a pen and a piece of papere. One of them asked if I was the maid, and I said yes because of the way his greedy eyes X-rayed my bodyf. They wrote down the number we had to call to pay the ransomg. They killed the barber on their way out because he recognized someone in the gangh. No, they didn't wear masksi. They kidnapped my uncle

I told my aunt about the restless ghost, and she looked at me funny and asked me how I knew. Apparently, some prophet had told her the same thing. We brought people to pray and bless the house.

A ghost is the first love you will never forget.

The boy came back. He glossed over the urine incident now that a year had passed, telling me how I had squirted and almost ruined his car just because of a little kiss on the neck. He suggested therapy when I told him about the dead barber and the kidnappers and the guns.

The boy and I started sexting back and forth until we had chapters of erotica. I’d wake up to the wicked things he was planning to do to me, and I’d reply, threatening something even more delicious. We threatened each other with ice cubes and whips, fire and handcuffs, lace and blindfold. Yet I knew that everything we wrote and did would only help his sex life when he married his specific girl. I was only helping him build a library.

Crow Jonah Norlander

RUSSIAN ADVICE by Joshua Hebburn

June 23, 2021 · Fiction

The only tenderable advice Mom had given him was if a woman threatens to throw a plate at your head, she might, but if she takes her shoes off first, she's going to kill you. Mom said she learned this while reading Turgenev. In college.

He started taking magnesium supplements for better sleep. His therapist recommended it when he mentioned his disturbances in his sleep and insomnia. He Googled magnesium. He learned that magnesium burns especially hot, and that bad people—child pornographers, hackers, drug cartel accountants—used magnesium-based flip-switch ignition setups to melt their hard drives full of illegal information when the men in heavy gear and gas masks stormed in. He learned about nutritional magnesium. He went to Target. His dreams became vivid from the magnesium. The dead and the lost things in his life returned to him in everyday settings, and the famous people—politicians and actors and actresses—all articulated together into nonsense. The people were speaking out of character, sometimes in a language that was almost decipherable. The settings flowed into the wrong next one. They committed unconjoined, sometimes tender, sometimes disgusting acts. These would be disturbing. This isn’t speaking of the objects and other nouns. That is if they weren't, as memories, faint, thin, and rapidly fading. But maybe they wouldn't: they don't wake him up in their progress. He thinks of these as his magnesium dreams. He has magnesium dreams almost every night now. He didn’t dream this much before, either. He likes it even if it makes him feel bad.

The other advice Mom gave was—for instance, only eat cake after thirty if you’re not married, women like plump guys but don't keep them—it was stuff that made only surface sense, made too complete a feeling, was calculated to imply a kind of person, it was like a magazine ad.

He thought of the way she would turn her hand palm up when she talked. She curled her index finger in towards the palm. It alarmed him that he couldn’t think of the hand beyond the gesture. In his mind’s eye it was a smudge, like the limb of one of the figures in the background of a painting, exactly what came into his mind when he thought generically of a “woman’s palm,” or “woman’s index finger.” He could look at his own hand and observe the fold of flesh in the groin between his thumb and his pointer. He wished he could see a picture of the same place on her hand, or, if he could only consult a reference to jar his memory into particulars. He imaged some library that contained volumes of photographs of human hands, human wrists, human arms, and all of the other parts, photographs made in hard light and printed in large format on thick, smooth art book paper. It would be forgotten, the form of any human hand, her hand was going to be forgotten, and even his own hand as it was now because it would be another hand in the future, a hand with different creases.

Nobody's home. He went to her room and applied her makeup from the crowded table. He does it in the same way you might invert your shirt and go bongos on your belly, or sing a song loudly and badly, inserting cusses and slurs, or the way you pretend to be Jim Carrey in The Mask. Hummanahummana! Because you can. First a metallic dusting. Then an outline with a wet black pen. An oyster colored, oyster cool cream on the hands that smells like lavender, and salt. The satisfying twist of the plastic gold tube to raise the ruby worn down by Mom's lips. I'm a glamorita, a glamourpuss. I look divine.

He was occasioned for all of this. He thought while he sat beside his second wife, who he knew he didn't love recently, or maybe never. His hands were folded into his hands. The pew was hard. Everyone wears black. The pastor said the pastor's scripture of love, God, and death. The light passed through the stained glass windows and it filled the enormous room with color.

He thinks of Mom smacking the bottom of the bear shaped bottle of pure clover honey, then looking at Dad at the kitchen table, and moving her hand to the hollowed bear rump, patting and laughing. Later, she would throw something at Dad, and for a reason. He couldn't remember if she was wearing shoes, she often did or didn't inside the house. How did she feel?

Like a duel, he supposed, you make a commitment and do it out of some idea that you will feel some way after you've gone through. They say, go through with it. You go to the dentist. You go to the funeral. You snort cocaine. You divorce a wife. You say Jesus Christ.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THREE MICROS by Carolyn Oliver

June 14, 2021 · Fiction

Sunrise House

In the sunrise house walking on stilts, the snake-filled water rises. It’s Sunday morning. I am old, very old, my joints as conspicuous among my limbs as the lead strips between stained glass. I’ve lost my glasses. It’s not my house, but the house of a friend. You are not so concerned about what kind of friend he is to me because you are fixed on the snakes. They are not venomous, not large, not hungry, and though I have lost my glasses I can see the lovely bands of red and black and gold roiling through the water that slips up against the breakfront, the wicker rocker, the pine sides of the bookshelf. I am still afraid, you know. I’ve lost my glasses. We have been here a long time, well supplied, because no one is coming to save us. No one can catch a house on stilts. The air rushing through the windows is warm, the water—more alive than water ought to be—is cool, it’s a washcloth in the feverous night. I’ve lost my glasses and of course we are not in love and there’s nowhere we should be but here, this Sunday morning in the sunrise house.

Courting Disaster

The trick is to offer the unexpected: a drive to the market, an hour on the lake, saint-like conviction. Avoid ostentatious gifts. Bring fragile tokens: orchids, eggs, joy. He might need some time. While you plan, keep your mind occupied with the long game. Save for the ring. Name your children. And then, when he’s done waiting to happen, maybe tomorrow, or a good year, or some quiet heat-hazed afternoon in your hometown, he’ll accept your proposal. There’s the striking smile, then the settling: his face bland as a sugar cookie, ordinary as summer ice melting before you have a chance to drink.

Cross My Ocean

After we outgrew the hollow circle and the taste for falling together safely, we learned to lock our limbs into lines, face off equal across the blacktop. Bolder than whisperers,

some kid picks, and they call for you—come over, come over—either to break through their arms, bash fingers into fists, slam brick and skim tar, free—or to spring

back between ranks, belly full of ache, claimed.

come over, come over, come over, come over, come over, come over, come over, come

Now schoolyard sharks circle, don’t eat. They turn tender arms and fingers fronds to catch and keep. No one falls. They play until the sea’s all anemone and teeth.

Crow Jonah Norlander

HUNGER PAINS by Lindy Biller

June 3, 2021 · Fiction

Eating nacho-flavored cauliflower chips is like eating the crisp skeletons of dead leaves. Still, there are far worse things I could be doing with my mouth. I sit at a drop-leaf table, grinding the so-called chips between my teeth, and you streak around our apartment, rabbit-like. You’re terrible at acting cool, aloof, whatever you want to call it, and I will always love this about you. You are tender to the bone. “Why am I doing this, what if I fuck the whole thing up?” you say, although you’re not really asking.

I stand up, ignoring the subtle aftertaste of nail polish remover. “What are you looking for?”

You drag a hand through your melting chocolate hair. I want to dip into you like a strawberry. “The cord,” you say. “The good one.”

We have two power cords for your amp and only one of them works. I stand stone-still in the middle of the apartment, mentally retracing our steps. Then I go to the coat closet and dig through the pile of mittens and scarves we threw there a few weeks ago, after the last cold snap.

“Here,” I say, holding out the tangled-up cord.

You grab me and kiss me on the mouth, without warning, and don’t seem to mind the cheese dust on my lips. You taste like organic bison jerky and coconut oil chapstick. The idea that anyone could enjoy that combination makes no sense, but oh god do I want a bite of you. I curl my fingernails into the soft fur at the nape of your neck.

“You’ll be great,” I tell you and I mean it. Also, I am ready to go to the venue, where there will be witnesses.

You stow the cord in your bag. I grab my purse, which I have crammed full of foods that supposedly nourish. Raw almonds, plantain chips, two small, armored clementines. What I want is a brownie, what I want is an entire pizza, a sheet cake sagging under clouds of buttercream, a bag of salt and vinegar potato chips, what I really want is none of those things. But I’ve read that when you consume all your calories from sugar, your stomach empties fast. You end up hungrier than before.

Your fingers slip between mine, unsuspecting. I carry your bag of tangled wires out to the car and sneak a dried fig between my lips while you drive.

The show is pretty good. You are amazing, and sexy as hell. I stand toward the front, drinking whiskey sours, smelling the dinner menus and deodorant preferences and body odor of all the people sardined around me. It’s a full house. I’m proud of you, even though the crowd isn’t here for you, exactly. Most of them are here to see the girl who plays the synths and sings with a voice like whipped cream, sweet and smooth and swirled on top of something more substantial. This morning, her bass player apparently woke up with food poisoning from an all-you-can-eat sushi buffet and the whipped-cream girl texted you. Wanna sub in tonight? She included a string of suggestive emojis, peaches and eggplants and drops of water and winking faces, which I noticed before you thought to angle your phone away from me. I can’t remember what her band is called. There are fliers everywhere but I didn’t read any of them. I know it’s something sultry and weird. Foxblush or Labial Wine, maybe. Her music is all airy keys and airy vocals; things floating, ghostlike. It makes me feel a little lost. I need music I can feel between my teeth. At home, you slam chords into the old piano, you sing with a voice like browned butter. I dig through my purse. What was I thinking. Clementines. Plantain chips. None of this will do. I go up to the bar and ask for another whiskey and two full-size Snickers bars, figuring the bartender won’t judge me, and if he does, fuck him.

It takes 75% of the emergency chocolate, peanuts collapsing between my stiff jaws, caramel sticking to the flats of my molars, to feel better. I stuff the remaining half into my purse and sip my whiskey blank-faced, like a good hipster girlfriend of the band. On stage, the girl with the creamy voice says something to you, and you laugh and say something back, leaning close so she can hear, and I lick the chocolate off my teeth.

After the show, you are glowing. You can’t believe how well it went. I help you wind up your cord, the one that still works, and the guitar player invites us out for drinks.

“I want to get home,” I say. “You go ahead.”

“Nah. I want to be with you.”

How sweet you are. Layers upon layers of flaky devotion. Not boring, though. Not uncomplicated. You did angle your phone away from me, you did shoot a furtive glance at my face to see if I’d noticed, and that only makes you more enticing. A slivered almond crust. A hint of cayenne, just enough to burn the back of my throat. You could’ve gone out tonight with that airy dollop of whipped cream and I’m sure she would’ve fucked you, if you wanted. Maybe she would’ve done more. Not because of her sultry band name, or the plunging neckline that showed her sternum, sugar-spun, pressing through milky skin. I’m not trying to stereotype anyone. It’s just, the way she looked at you. I squeeze your hand.

“I need a smoke,” I say. “Meet you at the car?”

You nod, still glowing. “Love you, babe.”

I love you too. That’s why I can’t have you in small plates, unhurried sips, delicate bites at the end of a cocktail fork. Not like the others. I’ll wait and wait until you’re ready for my hunger, until you’re prepared to be swallowed whole and your bones spit back up in random order. I’ll wait if it takes forever. But I hope it doesn’t, because there are only so many ways to trick your body into believing it’s full.

I go out into the alley behind the building, where bands load and unload through a dented garage door, and I light a cigarette, and wait for the creamy voiced girl to come out with her keyboard. There’s no one else around. This is a local show. She doesn’t have roadies or adoring fans or even a friend with her. When she sees me, we recognize each other immediately, even though we’ve never met. I ask her, and she nods, and oh god she’s so good going down, the mouthfeel silkier than expected, the flavor malty and rich. I make a mental list so I can recreate parts of her later, in our tiny galley kitchen, and feed her to you. There are notes of sweet cream, as expected, and salted caramel and tart cherry and raw hazelnut and cold brew coffee. Thankfully, there is no trace of cauliflower. When I’ve had my fill, she takes a turn, and it hurts, the way she cleans her teeth with my rib bones, and I surrender to it. I wonder what she tastes in me. I wonder, if you ever end up fucking her, if you’ll taste it, too.

After she’s finished, I put my bones back together, mostly how they were before. We share a cigarette and go our separate ways. You’re waiting at the car and you hold the door open for me. I can smell your warmth, like bread baking. I can hear your rabbit’s heart. But my lips still taste of sweet cream, and it’s enough to get me home without biting, without even showing my teeth.

Crow Jonah Norlander

SALAD GIRLS by CK Kane

May 28, 2021 · Fiction

I don’t want my mom to die not because I like her, but because she’ll be the nastiest ghost. Unrelenting in death. I just know it. I pull her boots off like always. Using both hands, I make an ugly face and lean my body trying to pull. She moans like always. Whenever she’s not on a horse she’s in this bed. Crumbs of caked mud and crap get on the white sheets as the second boot finally gives and I almost fly across the room. Still in her breeches and a turtleneck, she pulls the covers over her save for a long black braid. The lived-in covers smell like dandruff.

A bell sound rattles sharp metallic through my bedroom. Our doorbell almost never rings, so I don’t get up right away, I just freeze with my hand stuffed down my jeans, distracted from my drawing.

Downstairs in the doorway, she looks like one of the paper cut-out puppets I used to make. Just a dark shape. I recognize her but I don’t know if I should act like it.

“Karl,” says her mouth, like those wax lips we used to get at Halloween that weren’t exactly candy. She smells like the smoking section. Hi Auntie Deb, I say to her grin. A force allows me to stand a certain distance away from her, like the back of a magnet. It almost tickles when I step closer. She hears my mom wailing from upstairs through the walls and her down comforter. I don’t notice until she does.

Outside the bedroom the groaning is unbearable.

Auntie Deb leans in: “Ever since your father, huh.”

I nod, but I don’t remember.

I’m glad I don’t feel much. There’s no room in this house for anyone else’s feelings.

Auntie Deb click-clacks into my mother’s room, chattering.

Lydia, what did you take.

Lydia, this boy must be close to six feet already.

Her fingernail is a shade of red I’ve never seen before, almost brown, almost purple. It faintly scratches along the grain of the sheets: “My God, these cost more than my whole life and you wear your barn clothes to sleep?”

I remember a party a few years ago in a different town in Connecticut, one that seemed like the black & white version of our town. After the party I asked my mom if we were filthy rich. And she grabbed my face so hard and shook it and said, “Who taught you how to speak like that? Someone said that, you haven’t heard that in this house, who said that, who taught you that?”

I felt extra dumb. That was the last time I’d seen Auntie Deb until now.

The phone makes its wild sound to remind us it’s off the hook, its cord of tired curls swinging like a noose in waning lopes. My mom keeps it that way. Auntie Deb unplugs the phone from the wall and hangs it up, hard. She sits on the bed and rubs my mom’s back and I watch from the doorway, feeling the magnet feeling but also an upset. Like ticklish surgery.

The fingernail traces my mom like chalk through the dandruff horse shit covers.

“So skinny, Lydia. How do you stay so thin?”

My mom rolls her eyes, I’m not sure if it’s voluntary.

Coke and toast, I say.

Auntie Deb looks at me.

I tell her she only eats Coke and toast. Real Coke, not diet. White toast, I clean up the crumbs. With butter.

I think about my mom’s deliberate, aggressive cracking of a can of Coke. Almost violent. A sound I try to flee the room before I have to hear. The craziest burps, too. You’d never think such a skinny lady would have these Homer Simpson burps. But when I burped she told me I was disgusting and she hated me. I don’t burp around her anymore.

Auntie Deb in my room is awkward like Herman Munster, like she’s going to break something even though nothing is really breakable.

“How old are you, thirteen? You have the room of an old man.”

Her eyeballs swirl around like she’s worried about stalactites threatening to fall from the ceiling and impale her.

What if I am an old man, I reply to the back of her head.

Pepsi is the scraggly cat who paces around Auntie Deb’s porch. I call to him with a Psst psst psst. He glances at me before I go inside. Auntie Deb gets off the phone in her kitchen and tells me my mom is doing ok. The kitchen is yellow, everything. I hand her a refrigerator magnet. I stole it from a gift shop at Schiphol airport last summer when I visited Oma and Opa. It’s a small pair of wooden clogs. I guess I thought I might give it to someone at school. They hadn’t seen me in years. Oma was so upset by how much I resemble my dad she wouldn’t look at me. Opa and I would take walks through Oud-Zuid and return to their creaky house on Amstelveenseweg with something new every day: art supplies, a travel chess set, a little dinosaur sculpture, or just some still-warm bread.

“Aren’t you sweet,” her hand grasps the clogs and the fingernail presses them onto the fridge.

“What’s this for?”

I tell her, you know, for watching me or whatever.

I chop a fat golden onion on the cutting board like she tells me to. Stinging drips pour from my nose and I slip.

Blood squirts from my fingertip in weird beats and I wonder if I’ll need a stitch, I think so. Auntie Deb click-clacks over, standing worriedly behind me. I smell the smoking section and also her rose perfume, “Because people to whom the Virgin Mother has appeared, you know, they all report smelling roses first. An overwhelming aroma of rose. Rhapsodic.” The fingernails pinch my blood-finger and lift it to the wax Halloween lips like mini hors d’oeuvres.

And then she sucks.

The living room is like a garage sale. I do my homework and Pepsi stares at me through the window’s lacy curtain. My finger is starting to peel from where Auntie Deb filled it with superglue. She always has this cha-cha music playing and I guess it’s supposed to be cheerful but it’s so, so sad. It’s loud enough to hear above all else but also it fades into the carpet fluff like snowfall. I let Pepsi inside and he mews around my legs. Auntie Deb click-clacks out of the kitchen in an apron that she double-tied around her waist, pleased.

“I’m skinnier than your mom, now.”

Her mouth is a purple hole in her face from drinking wine. She notices Pepsi after a while and the purple hole contorts:

“Get him out of here or I’ll break that cat’s neck so fast your head’ll spin, don’t think I won’t do it.”

I carry Pepsi outside and remember my mom used to follow threats with so fast your head’ll spin when she still said things to me, and it always seemed so ghoulish.

The corduroy chair swallows me. Its coils are spent, its dimensions cartoonish. Auntie Deb sips from a chipped crystal cup on the floral couch and taps through the channels as the glow of the TV illuminates the purple hole. She asks if I remember my dad and if so can I still hear his voice saying things, because she can, and she wonders if they’re the same things. I tell her they’re not the same things because he didn’t speak in English to me, which bothered my mom. The purple hole smiles.

“God forbid Lydia feel excluded.”

An audience looms around us. Saint relics and porcelain figurines of poodles, butterflies and Siamese cats peek from their shelves, dead-eyed.

“He liked—” the purple hole corrects itself in a tone even lower in its gravel throat. “He wanted me, your father.”

I join her on the couch, entering her ticklish force field. She palms my skull. Her fingernails sift through my hair, letting it fall back into place like she’s flipping through pages in a book. Roses. Rhapsodic. She holds her cup to my face and my teeth clank the crystal when I gulp down her wine.

After my dad died a guy started coming over to tune the baby grand piano. He was balding and had drawn on a widow’s peak with black crayon, it looked like. My mom was awfully friendly to him, it wasn’t like her, she was drinking. My stomach flipped clunkily and I told Widow’s Peak about my dead dad while he tapped the same key over and over. My mom dragged me into the pantry and pinned my shoulders to the floor with her knees and gripped my little neck and said through her big square teeth that if I ever embarrassed her like that again she’d kill me, she’d fucking kill. me. Her eyes burned like the nostrils of one of her horses as a big glob of spit dangled from her mouth to my forehead. It splat right between my eyes and it smelled like her breath and her sobs. When she slammed the door, dry pasta rained on me.

Auntie Deb watches me eat while she puffs a cigarette, her eyes warming while I tell her bad stories about my mom like she asks me to. The kitchen yellow is bright and sick. Ash dances near my pancake but I still eat it. When I’m done, she tightens the belt on her robe and takes my plate away and says:

“Do you know what our mother did to us? Women are evil, you know. Rotten. Sick.”

The bathwater splashes up and down, up and down until I explode. Auntie Deb says I’ll get an infection, I’ll get backed up, if she doesn’t milk me. I can do it myself but her house, her rules. I stare at the same spot of tile grout when it happens. After the bath, I grab a towel and cover up quick. She is a scarecrow blocking the doorway. I tell her I haven’t had a headache in a while but she insists, it’s preventative, it’s better absorbed this way. I put one foot on the closed toilet seat and dig my toes into the carpet material seat cover. Through a rubber glove I feel the fingernail press the tablets inside of me as I try not to clench.

In bed, I picture an agonized, ancient tree trunk stuck inside another tree trunk at the bottom of the sea.

You don’t have to prove your feelings if you don’t have them.

You don’t have to have feelings.

In the dark things are easier.

That’s what I say.

When the cha-cha music isn’t playing, I can play whatever I want. Auntie Deb tries to like it.

“I used to be a backup singer for a rock’n’roller. With one or two other gals. We did our hair like a bunch of lettuce on top of our heads and wore lots of rouge on the apples of our cheeks. We started calling ourselves the salad girls.”

The bathroom door handle jiggles open. Her house her rules.

The fingernail pokes my stomach hard through the water splashing on every syllable. “Some-times-I-think-you’re-a-fag-got.”

When she slams the door, a brass ring from around the handle shimmies around and around before wobbling to a stop on the tile, sealing the quiet.

Charcoal scribbles hard like someone else is moving my hand for me and when I look up the art teacher looks away quickly and the other kids are already leaving. The guidance counselor’s voice, a phony pleading KARL, yanks me like bad entertainment off a stage into his office.

I tell him it’s art, it doesn’t mean anything. He says art always means something. Well, mine doesn’t. I sling my backpack over one shoulder and put my hair behind my ears on the way out.

The Janitor squeaks a wheeled bucket down the hall. He has deep eye sockets that make him look like an old picture. The soapy water sloshes floral and sweet and I’m nauseous as I run by his sunken face to get out. He might have said something to me or maybe his mouth just moved the way people missing teeth churn their face around their empty mouths.

Pepsi makes little snacking sounds when I give him the rest of my chicken dinner. The wind crackles through his parched fur the way it would move through dried grass and he’s happy I think. I focus on that.

“WHO THE FUCK IS IN MY BED?”

A dull punch to the throat wakes me. Coughing and gasping, there’s a blur, a frustrated ape straddling me, bopping the mattress beneath us. A gold chain grazes my eyes and I hear the swooshing of a windbreaker. Sour cologne and crunchy hair gel. Auntie Deb materializes in a talcum whirl and breaks it up. He’s still swinging. Straining between labored breaths, Auntie Deb introduces us.

“Karl, this is my son. Ronnie.”

I ask her if she means my cousin Ronnie.

Heaving, with his mother’s arms locking his by the elbows, Ronnie says, “I don’t got any cousins.”

I remind him our moms are sisters, that makes us cousins.

“I DON’T GOT. ANY COUSINS.”

Ronnie sleeps off his episode on the floral couch in an angel white tracksuit. His big wet eyes make his Disney-long lashes cling in damp spikes. His buttony nose is like a child with a cold’s or one of those Precious Moments figures you get for your first holy communion. I imagine a little ceramic statue of Ronnie, on his knees in his white tracksuit clasping a gold chain rosary. On the shelf of a Hallmark. A laugh I didn’t know I had falls out of me, bounces off my chin and down my chest like a spat-out mouthful of Cheerios. Auntie Deb looks at him from the yellow kitchen table, I can’t tell if she’s sad or embarrassed or both. She tells me that Ronnie’s dad worked in a crematorium.

“It’s no good for a person, to breathe death all day, it does something to them.” Her voice sounds like it’s asking me permission, like she wants forgiveness for living the way she has and birthing the couch angel.

Auntie Deb click-clacks down the hallway through clusters of students and their parents whispering over cookies and juice. There’s an invisible forest fire that follows her and once she passes everyone seems wilted, perplexed. Being at the school in the evening feels vulgar. The art teacher raises his eyebrows as he ushers her into his classroom, closing the door behind them, making me wait in the hall.

A group of classmates laugh and stare from afar. One of them, a girl, leaves the group and walks towards me purposefully, like she’s doing something brazen and wants to seem cool about it. Like she does badass spooky shit all the time. Like it wasn’t a dare. She tells me she thinks I’m good at drawing and that she might go to Europe in the summer and if she goes to Amsterdam can I teach her a word in Dutch maybe? I say misschien which means maybe. She adds that she doesn’t believe the things she’s heard about me—that I torture animals or that I left a kid in a coma at my last school.

A chair screeches, Auntie Deb is yelling at the art teacher. I open the door. “He’s not zany”, she mocks, “he’s-just-a-fag-got,” whacking the art teacher’s desk with my rolled-up grades on each sound. He winces as she raises the roll like she’s gonna hit him, a warning. She click-clacks right towards me and stops.

“Call his mother all you want. She’s unwell. I’m in charge now.”

The fingernails clamp my arm and she glares at the girl I was talking to and asks me, on our way through the spiritless juice and cookie crowd, “Who was that little tramp?”

Ronnie slurps stew in the yellow chair across from me. Each time Auntie Deb says something to me he slurps louder. The fingernails walk up my leg under the yellow table. I ask how my mom is and the fingernails stop and dig. “She’s home. She’s been home, Karl. She doesn’t want to see you. She doesn’t care.”

“WHAT THE FUCK MOM?”

Ronnie pulls the hand away from my leg.

“Oh God forgive ya, Ronnie, for using that language with me,” barks Auntie Deb, cradling her lonely hand.

His Precious Moments face reddens when he asks what was that about. She tells him my mother is very disturbed so I need kindness, as much of it as I can get. Ronnie slams his fist on the table in front of me, rattling the salt and pepper shakers.

“SHE LOVES ME MORE,” he spews in my face. He gets up and backs away. The loaded slingshot pull of the screen door spring is like held breath behind him when he stops to announce, “YOU’RE NEVER GONNA SEE PEPSI AGAIN” before he stomps towards his car.

The fingernails rub my shoulders as I finish my stew, ripping off pieces of a dinner roll and dunking them in the remains. I’m entitled. She asks me do I want to kill my mommy and that she would help me and we would get away with it. I shake my head no and stuff more stew-soaked dinner roll into my mouth calmly. She yanks her hands away, disgusted by my serenity.

The house is warm, but it’s not mine.

I kick a twig down the road on my walk back to Auntie Deb’s. The sun’s exit behind me creates a monstrous silhouette. It reminds me of when Auntie Deb showed up at our door that time. And her shape projected through the foyer, eating it up like black smoke. Consumed. I realize I forgot my sketchbook.

I try two different doors before I find one unlocked and the school’s so empty even my shadow echoes. The locker room lights buzz and then dip, buzz and dip. When I see the janitor, his dopey stance is sheepish like I busted him doing something wrong. Maybe it’s the jumpsuit making him a bow-legged toddler with a sagging diaper. He asks me what I’ve got there and I tell him some drawings but he walks over my words and says filth. He waddles towards me and says it again.

“Filth.”

His homeless mouth makes the shape of filth this time with no sound. He tugs at himself. I become rubber cement all clumsy and stuck. His hand forces mine to feel him get bigger through the jumpsuit.

The toilet tank lid is in clunky pieces next to him. The blood smells like something you shouldn’t. I don’t remember. I look away and think when I look back this won’t be real but there it is, a flesh-filled jumpsuit slumped and stuck to the floor. A wet teabag. This has to be a dream. I’m dreaming. Pressure fills the space around my body and I shake ‘cause Auntie Deb is gonna be so pissed I’m taking so long. Supper is important.

I stand right over him, his entire face caved in now, a collapsed building. A discarded Halloween mask on a paved street. His ghost eyes are milky blue hard-boiled eggs splayed in different directions like a gorilla’s tits. Spit fills my mouth and seeps from the corners. I poke the body with a pen and it’s so crazy, I stab him with the pen all over, each time: does that hurt, does that hurt, does that hurt? I step back, my shoes peeling off the floor with sticky syrup sounds. I take a running jump and land on his chest, clunk, I think I broke his ribs. He’s surprisingly sturdy. I jump up and down until I almost lose my balance on his squishy gut. I imagine his organs are water balloons and I’m popping them. Like bubble wrap. I lift up his arm and drop it, thunk. My jeans and sweater and shoes are spattered.

I sit down on a changing bench and flip through my sketchbook, showing him my drawings and explaining them. I marvel at the sound of my voice. I pause, feeling truly heard, and I giggle. Almost ecstatically. And then I draw him.

My syrup feet make Band-Aid rip sounds all the way through the school parking lot. I’ll walk all night until I get to Mom’s house.

Crow Jonah Norlander

SMALL SMALL GOAT OR 羊鬼泡面 by Emily Lu

May 27, 2021 · Fiction

I was the most vocal opponent of article 94.1, a new hospital by-law permitting employees to outsource labour to ghosts. I wrote to the department head an ostentatious but sincere email defending the sanctity of patient care. They referred me to another committee, started a new subcommittee, requested further submissions of appendices, etc. The next day, I went to find the ghosts.

When I remembered the small small goat, it was a month later. I opened the fridge expecting death. It was standing on a side dish where I last saw it, unaffected by the cold. Its eyes unblinking. My immense relief sat horizontal in my chest, teetering, solid.

I had been blamed immediately for it. All of my roommates believed I had something to do with its appearance.

Easy, there were loads of ghosts around the hospital these days. I found a team on lunchbreak in the east stairwell. Their leader was a resident doctor which was for the best because they all loved to please, even after death. I e-transferred five ghosts to start immediately.

The small small goat’s hair was stuck up on one side, giving it a stormblown appearance. I offered it what I had on hand: antacids and deluxe instant noodles. After 3 minutes, I lowered the small small goat into the as advertised luxurious six-packet soak. The water level came up to its chin.

I no longer responded to email. The ghost team lead visited to discuss extending our contract. I set down the instant noodle cup. The steam curled in front of her.

If this were a Cdrama, the misunderstanding would last at least ten years. If this were a Kdrama, by episode 16 I’d find out I killed her through some prior oversight. If I were the glowing, oily sheen protagonist. If she told me she only consumes redemption arcs in the afterlife, I’d believe her.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THE SOUND OF VIOLENCE by Ryan Norman

May 26, 2021 · Creative Nonfiction

Usually the orchard was all light, sunburn cooled by a welcome breeze, but not that day. Fog crept up from the river and swallowed every tree in its path, whetting its appetite for the too short grass that cut like blades, soaking the cicadas’ song. I sat on a cold cinder block and watched my boyfriend wash his car, questioning why he would shine it on such a gloomy day, but daring not to say it aloud. His phone rang and I looked at myself in the shiny apple red door. Winked. Shot some finger guns. Fell to the floor.“What are you doing? I have to go do something. Stay here,” he ordered.“I want to come. Where are you going? How long will you be gone?”“A deer’s trapped in a fence in the upper orchard. I have to kill it, or it’ll make a big hole in the fence, or break its neck.”“I’m coming.”

I didn’t know deer screamed until that day. I watched in awe, my eyes wet, standing at a distance from this huge creature, all muscle, as it screamed into the damp air. Thrashing wildly against an almost invisible wire fence, its antlers trapped, entangled with imminent death until finally all went quiet. I touched my forehead and pulled away sticky droplets on my fingertips. That welcome breeze returned, and my heart sank. I had never witnessed death, and never imagined I would. He told me the deer would be skinned, the meat eaten. Nothing would go to waste. But I sat in silence as the truck hurtled past trees into the thick of fog, uncomfortably aware that in the open bed lay a blood-soaked deer, jiggling stiffly with every pebble on the road. I imagined the process of preparing the deer for consumption, sliding a sharp knife between the skin and muscle. I knew some details. The indignity of it all. Hanging it by its hind feet to drain the blood, eyes wide open like black holes. But hadn’t I done the same?

Descending the stairs in a southern New York lab, wearing clothes on top of clothes to keep out the formaldehyde—a sticky stench—entering a room with two dead bodies given to science. We were assigned a cadaver, a trick of the language to distance ourselves from the fact that we would be cutting into dead people with scalpels. Uncovering secrets. Naming muscles, veins, arteries. Draping white cloth for dignity. Digging into intercostal muscles with no breath sounds. A smell that hasn’t left me. And when the draping slipped, an image that hasn’t left me either. All that muscle. Exposed on a stainless-steel table. So much gray. Could I really judge my farmer boyfriend for killing a deer when I cut into a human?

He had been offended by that lab as much as I was saddened by killing a trapped deer. He had told me to stay. Wasn’t it my own fault? But life carried on. Sadness blurred. Judgment faded. We went about our usual things, no hang ups. Trivia on Wednesdays, sunsets on the roof, cider on the porch watching the train rush by. Until we drunkenly ran through the woods one night, searching for a waterfall. We set up camp in a small clearing on the property of the orchard. A tent built for one. We stopped to eat over fire, a hunk of meat thrown onto a cast iron skillet. He fed me a small piece and it was nothing I recognized. I asked him what it was, and he asked, “Remember that deer?” And it tasted of pain and fear. It tasted of violence. I spat it out.

The moon guided us to water, as she is wont to do, and the rushing sound plummeting past wet, slick stone drowned our voices. We left our clothes on the dirt embankment and swam in silver flecked streams, our bodies glowing green underwater and star white on top. I watched him there, standing in a warrior’s pose on an outcropping of rocks among the frothy water, drunk on apples, and admired every inch of his marble-carved body. Maybe I was drunk on apples, too. Everything began to wobble, so we went back to his tent. He laid down, just another naked body in the summer night, his skin still cold from the green river. The moon cast his skin gray as he laid there on a slab of earth, no modesty, just the thin floor of his tent. I covered his face with my palm, his breath heavy, fog caught in my lifeline, obscuring love, and lust; my tongue a scalpel plunging deep into him. I wondered at his muscles quaking with each scream, stealing the silence of the night until I was full.

Crow Jonah Norlander

REWIND by Amy Wang

May 24, 2021 · Fiction

This is before the bed at my new apartment feels especially wide and I wake up crying over things I barely remember; before the two years during which every night I hear the tell-tale groaning of a broken stairway as it is about to collapse under the weight of ashes and a leaping fire in the second after I fall asleep; this is before I have to start going to therapy in order to keep from crying every time I pass the cafe where you used to buy me peppermint lattes, before I begin reminding myself that it is my fault, my words that manifested into fire and brimstone and inferno and consumed everything I had once loved. This is before they show me your body, or what’s left of it, before they tell me that you were trapped under a fallen beam, your spine melting into the burgundy corduroy of our sofa cushions as your eyelashes turned into dust. This is before I wait on the sidewalk, cold despite the heat of the flames that still roar above my head, waiting, waiting for you to appear, for your head to pop out from the doorway; this is before the moment that I realize that you weren’t going to, before the moment I knew that you couldn’t. This is before the roof collapses and buries you under it, before that first fire and before the final one; this is before I stumble down a rickety flight of steps as soon as the alarm sounds, at the first sign of smoke, before too many first-hand experiences acclimate me to the dangers of heat.

This is before I make you sleep on the couch, before I shut the door of our bedroom without even giving you a blanket. This is before the argument that even led to that fire in the first place. This is before I get sick of the way you laugh, before you burn the edges of the painting my mom had given me for my twenty-sixth birthday and I scream at you for doing it. This is before the coiled heat of irritability begins lacing itself every weekday night, before we lose our ability to have conversations without our words melting into the barrel of a gun primed to explode.

This is before you lose your job and we downsize to a shitty apartment two hours away from the house you used to say we would raise our kids in. This is before our two year anniversary, during which you light the entire cake on fire courtesy of cooking oil, because you “thought it was undercooked.” This is before you get diagnosed as a clinical pyromaniac and before I have to go through every room of our house, flipping over sofa cushions in case lighters are hiding underneath. This is before I realize that you have a problem falling in love with things that hurt you, and judging from how long I’ve stayed, so do I. This is before I wake up to find the quilt smoking around me, to your thumb flicking a lighter as your fingers hover gently over flame. This is before we move in together, and my father tells me that you will never make me happy because you have never known stability and I tell him to fuck off. This is before I have to take over making dinner because all too often what you make is burnt black, because you forget to turn off the stove while you’re busy staring at the flames. This is before I ask you why you smoke so much, and you tell me that it’s because you crave warmth.

This is before all of that. It is summer, and the groves of orange trees that we always drove by whenever we went on road trips are laden with ripe fruit. The air is filled with citrus and lies thickly and still and syrupy over the two of us. The sun is always golden and red and dying; the sky is always flame-pink; every oxygen atom in the space around us is perfectly seared salmon. You have yet to break your leg at the construction site where you work, and on Sunday afternoons, you still flip over the chain-link fence, filling your pockets with mandarins and handing them off to the kids that live on our street. On Wednesday afternoons, we go driving in your old Toyota, windows down, heat warnings and fire danger signs wavering in strips of silver, summer mirages slipping over the horizon and through our fingertips as you rewind the CD in the stereo. We are comfortable still, the two of us, caught in the divot between the awkwardness of learning to love and the exhaustion of forgetting how to. I lean in for a kiss, and when our lips touch, your skin is so hot it feels like fire. I think, to myself, that I would give anything, anything to stay in this moment. You are lovely, next to me. Your smile is incandescent.

Crow Jonah Norlander

CAMPARI SODA ISN’T AN AMPHIBIAN by Vi Khi Nao

May 13, 2021 · Fiction

In real life, the girl on the toilet is named KAY. Another girl, Vada, walks in and silently holds a gun to Kay’s head. Without making any demands. She turns to Kay and automatically offers one key to her. Vada takes a look at the key and contemplates whether to kill her or not. Vada pulls the trigger and Kay drops to the ground. She turns to the bathroom door and realizes that there is a key already in the lock. Vada walks towards the bar after exiting the bathroom. And, turns to the bartender and says, “My sex drive is an amphibian. It can go a very long time on water. Or stroll leisurely on land. I wish you could see the radiation beneath your eyelids.” The bartender turns to her and says, “Campari soda isn’t an amphibian, but it will make you drunk enough to feel like you are floating down the Mississippi.”

Vada twirls her fingers in her air and says, “Two of those please.”

The bartender responds, “I am sorry we ran out of Campari.”

“Why did you suggest it then?”

“Because Campari and amphibian share so many vowels and consonants and I wouldn’t want to deprive you of such linguistic liquor.”

“You don’t speak like a bartender.’

“What do I speak like?”

“Like an English teacher.”

“Close.”

“What is it then?”

“I play scrabble competitively.”

“For money?”

“For the education of my ego.”

“Tell me: would you prefer a key or a bullet?”

“Neither.”

“But if you had to choose.”

“A bullet.”

“Right.”

“Truman Capote wrote a book called In Cold Blood. An amphibian is a cold-blooded, ectothermic vertebrate. A bullet is a cold-blooded metal. Do you think if I make you a Bloody Mary – it would be cold-blooded enough?”

“May I have a highball?”

“That is how it ought to be served. However, we just ran out of tomato juice and dill pickle spear.”

“Are you playing with me?”

“One coming right up.”

In real life, the bartender is a bullfighter. He looks like Manolete. His face takes the shape of a thin pentagon. And, his chest hair grows massively, spilling over his clean white shirt and his bow tie, and it extends into the wall like English ivies, invading and gatecrashing into the brick walls and scaling up the old apartment complexes near the bar above the Greek restaurant. He was a bullfighter by day and a scrabble player in the afternoon and in the evening, he bartends.

“Your chest hair is a health hazard.”

“A fire hazard.”

“Has it killed anyone?”

“You mean has it strangled cats, dogs, and homeless folks?”

“I don’t mean it like that.”

“It just clogs up toilet bowls. It snakes into the bottom of the sewage system and whenever I stroll home, I drag home a city worth of tampons and wedding rings. I look like an eschatological version of a Christmas tree.”

“Does your chest hair get in the way of your—”

“You mean—bullfighting.”

“You’re a bullfighter too?”

“Yes, it makes me more of a complex beast. I get full respect from the bull.”

“Doesn’t it get in the way of your speed?”

“My chest hair?”

“What else?”

“It doesn’t. It makes me focus more. This jungle here.” The bartender waves his fingers agilely across his chest and continues, “My footwork must be flawless. It has made me more of a nimble, lithe, dexterous being. Because I always had to compensate for my chest hair—I had to be always on top of my game.”

“It seems like a very tiring life.”

“Hardly, I am clever, you see.”

“How?”

“My infraclavicular virtue makes me so much smarter than men who don’t have any hair. I make better decisions. It’s easier for me to win scrabble games. And, postmenopausal species are so much more attracted to me – especially when I wear a V-neck sweater. And, I could tell that you just killed someone in the bathroom with a bullet.”

“How did you know? You could see through walls?”

“My chest hair has been wet, not like a water wet – which is when the toilet bowl overflows, but wet as in thick – like blood is thicker than water thick – and so I knew the edges of my hair has been feeding secrets about you back to me. You see, I am clever. And, I wouldn’t be clever without the extraordinary circumference of my chest hair. A virtue! Now, the cops will be arriving soon because my chest hair just dialed the police station from meters away using my cellphone. So, while we wait for them to arrive, may I make you a Campari soda?”

“I thought you ran out?”

“My chest hair, again, just strolled to a liquor store a few blocks from here and purchased a couple of bottles for me.”

“It even paid for it using your credit card?”

“How did you know?”

Crow Jonah Norlander

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