x-r-a-y magazine, Author at X-R-A-Y

CHASE by Frankie McMillan

October 25, 2021 · Fiction

Mr Whippy here and there, up the street, down the street, swerving his pink and cream van to avoid a dog, Mr Whippy his face emperor white, hunched over the wheel wondering what dogs want with Mr Whippy.

Mr Whippy glancing in the rear vision mirror, kids still chasing him on bikes, their heads ducked under the handlebars, a mother jogging with a baby on her hip, ice cream, ice cream but Mr Whippy is wrecked, days leaning out his window, handing out cones with the perfect pointy top, pulling on levers, eyes squinting in the bright sun. his ears ringing.

Mr Whippy turning off his ice cream shaped speakers because Green Sleeves isn’t what he wants to hear right now. He turns into a leafy suburb, checks in the mirror again, sighs with relief. Mr Whippy parks under a tree, eases himself into the back of the van, pours sacks of skim milk into the machine, fondly pats the metal side, re stocks cones, wipes the sticky window sill, tugs on his ear again.

Mrs Whippy shining a torch down his ear canal, slush in his ear she laughs, a cul de sac of sprinkles and Mr Whippy, tired though he is clamps a pale hand on her thigh. Mrs Whippy wriggles loose. Mr Whippy rises.

Out the bedroom door, down the hall, out into the night. Mrs Whippy runs smooth and light as a girl and Mr Whippy follows, his legs pumping, dogs barking, the whole street cheering him on.

x-r-a-y magazine

KERNEL PANIC by Rebecca Rubenstein

October 1, 2021 · Fiction

When his mind went blank, Benno walked to the water store. Smack-dab in the middle of a strip mall a block downhill from his apartment, it was the kind of place that didn’t pull punches. It sold water, and vessels with which to hold water, and that was it.

Water cooler jugs lined the walls on one side, and empty aquariums formed a barricade on the other, and the floors teemed with pallets of imported bottled water—glacier runoff from Iceland and Switzerland and all the lands. Metallic shelving flanked each side of the store, and on those shelves sat sturdy, eco-friendly water bottles, rows and rows of them in bright, cloying colors. Shocking pink and neon-yellow and toxic-sludge-green and orange the shade of emergency road cones. No blue, though.

“We used to sell blue,” Azazel, one of the two brothers who owned the store, told Benno once. “But they drew a bad element, so we stopped.”

The store always seemed empty whenever Benno dropped by or passed it on his way to do laundry next door, so he asked Azazel would he please be more specific? As far as Benno could tell, there was a good chance he was the brothers’ only customer. Azazel dropped his voice to a whisper and put his hand to his chest, as though he’d been wearing a wire and wanted to convey he was sorry, he wasn’t really a snitch, this information would be for Benno’s ears only.

“Techie scum,” Azazel said. “They’re fucking everywhere these days, ruining the neighborhood.”

A handful of odd jobs filled Benno’s time, and one day, while he was trying to create a series of crosswords for the local alt-weekly, his mind shut down completely. The puzzle was movie-themed, but he couldn’t remember which Bergman was the director and which was the actress, and before he knew it, a thick fog had settled in without intent to leave. This was happening with some frequency, and Benno thought maybe, if he had good health insurance, something other than what the state provided for low- to no-income people like him, this would be the kind of thing to get checked out by a specialist. But just the prospect was laughable; these were penny-pinching times and he could barely even afford a 10-for-$20 frozen pizza deal at Safeway after all his bills were paid up. Instead of just googling what he needed to know, Benno exited his crossword-making app, turned off his computer, and headed downhill.

Edgar, the other brother who owned the water store, was sitting behind the cash register when Benno arrived. The little bell on the rim of the door jangled, but Edgar didn’t look up from the detective novel he was reading. Even when Benno cleared his throat, the bushy-browed man kept his eyes on the paperback, sucking a slushy through a long red straw.

“Hey, Edge.” This was the nickname Azazel liked to use, and Benno thought it might snap his brother out of it. “Earth to Edge?”

Edgar stuck his index finger in the air, a swift and sharp gesture that gave Benno pause. “If you’re going to interrupt me while I’m mid-paragraph,” the man sneered, “you can take your ass elsewhere.”

It was almost 2 p.m., the golden hour when the brothers usually traded shifts. Azazel was better to shoot the shit with. He kept current on the news and knew more about what was going on in the neighborhood. During their chats, he usually filled Benno in on who’d been cited for public urination the night before, or, more seriously, whose shop was being offered a buyout by the local real estate sharks dead-set on gentrifying their corner of the city. There were already condos going up on either end of the main thoroughfare, and there was chatter about a pilates studio taking over the space where a bookstore had sat for nearly thirty years, before it shuttered suddenly due to an egregious rent hike.

Edgar, on the other hand, lived in an alternate universe: men wore trench coats, called women dames and broads, smoked cigarettes like they provided nutrients. In Edgar’s world, the organized criminals still walked around with feathered fedoras and tommy guns, not low-foam lattes and realtor business cards.

“Have you ever considered selling something other than water? Maybe get some tropical fish for these?” Benno tapped on the glass of one of the aquariums like there were already some beauties of the sea swimming inside. He had never been to Hawaii or Fiji or the Bahamas, but he’d seen photos of snorkelers in pristine pools, their faces surrounded by candy-striped fins and iridescent fins and gauzy green fins you might mistake for seaweed.

Edgar sighed. “Don’t you have somewhere better to be? Someone else you can bug today?”

He still didn’t take his eyes off his book, and to Benno it looked like he was talking to it, like Edgar was scolding one of its characters instead of him. One of the lowlifes. One of the floozies.

“I could help you get some,” Benno offered. “I know a guy who knows a guy.”

Edgar snorted. “Benno, how long have you been coming in here? Two years? Three? You can’t pull one on me. The only fish you have access to are the ones that live in your freezer.”

It was true: Benno liked fish sticks a lot. They were affordable and filling. But in this moment, he regretted mentioning it to the brothers only to have the information used against him. It was the type of sabotage that reminded him of childhood. In the third grade, Benno made a terrible miscalculation about the secrecy of eight-year-olds. During a sleepover with his best friend—a wisp of a boy who called himself Jo-Jo, even though his name was Aleksandr—Benno revealed something deep and dark that had been plaguing him for months. Any night now, Benno warned Jo-Jo, ants were going to crawl into his eye sockets while he slept and create a worker colony in his brain. Benno couldn’t shake the thought. It was part of why he’d opted to stay home from sleep-away camp that summer, why he refused to visit his cousins in the Upper Peninsula. All it took was one fatal brush with the wrong log. The closer Benno was to nature, he reasoned, the more likely the ants would come. Jo-Jo listened with that glistening, rapturous stare of his, nodded when Benno said he was terrified. Then Jo-Jo hugged his friend and declared he would protect him, and they even spat into their palms and shook on it, Jo-Jo swearing on his parents’ antique rattan furniture that he would never, ever, ever tell.

But the next week at school, when Benno accidentally ate his whole chocolate chip cookie at lunch, even though he’d promised to share it with his best friend, Jo-Jo went ballistic. On the playground at recess, he pushed Benno to the ground. He grabbed a fistful of Benno’s hair and pulled hard. He slapped Benno clean across the mouth and called him a liar. “You don’t know what a promise is!” Jo-Jo screamed. He slapped Benno again, and again, each hit harder, forcing Benno’s lips into the ridges of his teeth and drawing blood.

And then Jo-Jo told everyone within earshot what Benno had told him. It didn’t matter that there were only a few kids around—by the end of the day, their entire class would know, maybe even the whole third grade. That’s how things worked.

“You’re a big weirdo baby!” Jo-Jo cried. “I hope the ants crawl into your brain! I hope they eat you from the inside out!” Then Jo-Jo began chanting Antsy Nancy.

At first, the other kids didn’t know what to do. They looked at one another inquisitively. Did Benno deserve this? What, truly, was his crime? But then another kid joined the chant. And another. Soon, it was all Benno could hear, a droning choral arrangement not unlike the ones that filled his ears on Sundays at church. Antsy Nancy. Antsy Nancy. The name stuck hard, like gum pressed against a stucco wall. Benno was Antsy Nancy for years, until junior high, when his parents got divorced and his mom moved them away from everything: that one-trick town, those unforgiving kids, that shitty excuse for a best friend.

That was probably when Benno should have figured he wasn’t cut out for the world, that he was doomed to be a weirdo forever. But he kept soldiering on, kept telling himself life was bound to get better once he became a grownup.

And then he became a grownup and life did not get better, no sir. Benno just shifted into a more permanent state of hopelessness. Far as he could tell, the only things he had going for him were his rent-controlled studio and a loosely-defined friendship with two guys who ran a store that was, in all likelihood, a front for drugs or money laundering or both.

The overhead light in the water store flickered for a moment, and Benno wondered if the bulb was about to pop.

“Where’s Azazel?” he said.

Edgar shifted in his chair. “He’s coming in later today. His laptop keeps crashing, so he’s getting it fixed.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

Edgar sighed, and for the first time since Benno had entered the store, the man looked up from his novel. “I don’t know,” he said slowly, enunciating every word. “Something called ‘canal panic,’ I think? You’ll have to ask Az when he shows. I don’t know shit about computers.”

Benno left. Edgar knew he wouldn’t buy anything, and it was only a matter of minutes before the man would really lose his mind. Benno had seen it happen. It wasn’t pretty. Sometimes the brothers got into it, and the screaming and insults would peak until Azazel threatened to enroll his brother in anger management classes and Edgar threatened to kick his brother’s ass until there was no more ass left to kick. Only once did a knife appear, and Benno remembered this moment often: the way Azazel put up his hands, saying, “Be cool, be cool,” and Edgar shouting, “Give me a fucking reason to be cool,” and the long, tense few minutes when it seemed like anything might happen, even murder. Benno had left that day thinking maybe he shouldn’t come back anymore, maybe the store would be a crime scene next time, where instead of water there’d be nothing but pools of blood. But he couldn’t stay away forever, not until the store became another real estate casualty and was gone for good.

At home, Benno’s fridge didn’t have much in it that wasn’t expired, so he opened the cabinet above the stove and took out a tin of baked beans. During those awful Antsy Nancy years, he’d developed a habit of coming home after school and eating Chef Boyardee straight from the can. He didn’t mind that the tomato sauce wasn’t heated through, or that the ground meat bits in the center of the ravioli were cold. He just wanted something that tasted familiar. He figured he might not have any friends, or any social consistency, but at least he could depend on the predictable comfort of processed pasta. Now, as an adult, Benno did the same with baked beans. Plunging his fork in, he stirred to unstick and loosen the beans, and the sweetness of the brown sugar in the sauce and the salty, nubbed texture of the bacon pleased him.

On the couch, Benno opened his laptop. Between mouthfuls of beans, he searched for “canal panic” and scrolled, but all he got was a plethora of articles about swans attacking tourists and buildings in Venice threatening to collapse. Then he noticed the prompt: did he mean to type “kernel panic”?

Kernel panic, he learned, was an unrecoverable system error. The heart of a computer’s operating system is called a “kernel” and when something goes wrong—say, the code of the operating system is subtly corrupted, or on a larger scale, the memory the operating system uses can’t be read from or written to—the computer shuts down. It feels random, Benno read, but the computer effectively jumps ship to protect itself from more damage. Almost as if to say: “I can’t trust myself to go on without further harming my most integral parts.”

Was the same thing happening to Benno? Was this why his memory kept shifting in and out? His fear of the ant colony had never subsided, not really—had they finally found their way in? Had they set up shop inside his brain and were they now busy chipping away at it? Ants can carry massive amounts of weight—were they rearranging his gray matter, carting pieces to and fro, reorganizing his pathways? Maybe, Benno thought, his memory issues were his brain’s way of fighting against the ants. It knew something was wrong, and by shutting off from time to time, the most critical part of him was defending itself from certain doom.

The fizziness in Benno’s mind had swelled, and his workday, he knew, was over. So he finished his beans, popped a CBD gummy, and let sleep overwhelm him.

Several hours passed, and when Benno finally woke, the sky had grown dark. His phone assured him it wasn’t as late as he thought, and he wondered if he could catch Azazel before the man closed up shop for the evening. It would be nice to see a friendly face. And maybe Azazel would know what to do about his worsening memory problem. Benno threw on a hoodie and his sneakers and walked back down the hill.

When he arrived at the water store, Azazel and Edgar were both behind the register. The two were eating a sub they’d split down the middle. Breadcrumbs dotted the counter, and Edgar had mayo splotched on his stubbled chin. It looked like something else, like he’d been doing a whole lot of something else, and for a hot minute Benno thought maybe he should keep walking, do a lap around the block, grab a $1 hot dog from 7-11, and head home. But Azazel saw him and waved, and it felt like a waste to not even say hi.

“Twice in one day. To what do we owe the pleasure?” Edgar smirked, and Benno almost turned right back around, but Azazel punched his brother in the shoulder and said, “Edge, don’t be an asshole. B, you know you can come in here whenever you want.”

Benno sucked his teeth, stifling a grin. “How’s your laptop?” he asked.

Azazel shook his head. “They’re keeping it overnight. Like it’s a sick animal.”

“They might have to put it down,” Edgar interjected, then pitched his voice up, “Did you have time to say goodbye, Az? Give it a good pet?” He nudged his brother, cackling, but Azazel didn’t take the bait. Edgar’s sense of humor was almost as out-of-touch as all those old books he loved to read.

“That’s a shame,” Benno said. “I hope they can fix it.”

“You and me both. Having to buy a new one would murder my finances.”

Azazel had the most remarkable way of phrasing his woes, and Benno was about to say as much when Edgar rammed his fist against the counter.

“What the hell, man?” Azazel looked at his brother like Edgar had just tried to pop him in the jaw. “What is wrong with you today?”

Edgar shrugged. “There was an ant.”

“You don’t need to crush it like it’s a goddamn cockroach. Do you want to break our fucking countertop again?”

A few months before, during one of their fights, Edgar had cracked the glass. In the midst of an outburst, he’d slammed his fist down with such force, the surface had splintered, webbing as though a bullet, not bone, had found its way through. The faintest of shards had embedded in his knuckles, causing the skin to glisten for days, until Azazel finally removed them with a pair of tweezers. Sometimes, Benno envisioned Edgar’s home and how it must have walls full of holes the size and shape of his fists. Benno couldn’t imagine living with that kind of anger—what it must do to the mind, eating the raw parts whole.

Azazel wiped up the bug’s body, smearing it with a napkin. Benno noticed a few more on the counter, idling near the register, and hoped Edgar wouldn’t see. But the man’s eyes weren’t downcast. Benno realized they were fixed on him.

“What is that?” Edgar’s eyes had suddenly gone wide, the same way Benno’s had as a kid, when Jo-Jo had wailed on him on the playground and all their classmates had waited around nervously to see what would happen next. The terror in those eyes. The uncertainty.

“Sorry?” Benno looked behind him, and all around, but all he saw were the same pallets, the same jugs, the same empty aquariums that were always there.

“No, no.” Edgar shook his head and pointed. “That. What the hell just came out of your mouth?”

Benno pawed at his lips. Had he felt something before? A slight tingling, perhaps? But then his lips were often chapped, often buzzing with discomfort. At first Benno’s fingers looked like they always did: slightly pruned, the cuticles ragged from years of nail-biting. But then he saw what Edgar saw: small black ants crawling around, crossing his nail beds, punctuating his fingertips like errant commas.

Azazel had his hand on his chest, like that time he told Benno about the blue bottles. “What in the world? B, are you okay?”

Benno wanted to say yes, of course, there was absolutely nothing to worry about. He liked to steal sugar packets from the coffee shop down the street—maybe one had ripped open in his hoodie pocket and attracted a few of the critters. But when he looked down, Benno saw a swarm of ants marching down the front of his hoodie. There were maybe fifty of them, and they seemed to come out of nowhere. They certainly weren’t crawling out of his pockets. The lot of them crossed at a diagonal, an insect sash clean across his chest.

After that, it didn’t take long for an entire army to descend. It happened in what felt like seconds. At first Benno thought they were only emerging from his mouth, but then he felt a tickle in his nostrils and his ear canals, and he knew the ants were finding their way out of those holes, too. He had no idea what to do. He couldn’t keep them in. They just kept coming.

And then he began to vomit.

Wads of ants fell from his mouth. If Benno had seen it in a movie, he would not have been able to suspend his disbelief. They were rounded and gnarled—like hairballs but alive.

It was around the time that Benno coughed up the fifth or sixth antball that Azazel called 911. There were ants everywhere. On the floor. On the pallets. Hugging the rims of the fancy glacier runoff water bottles. Benno could tell Edgar was screaming at him, because his mouth was moving and his face had morphed into the kind of red that skin takes on when you are either irate or asphyxiating. But Benno could barely hear him; the ants had blocked up his ears completely.

Benno swung his arms around, as though it would help. He swung his hips and his ass and the brute stretch of his legs. As though making his body seismic would create a quake so severe, the rattle would rupture the ants’ hearts and they would just die on the spot. But they didn’t die. They kept coming. They kept coming and coming and clinging to every single part of him, and in his mounting panic, Benno wished his body would just shut itself down. Maybe that would end the nightmare: if his body jumped ship. But that’s the problem with the body—it does what it wants, when it wants. It’s animal like that. Benno understood full well you couldn’t will yourself into a coma, just like you couldn’t will people to be your friends, just like you couldn’t will friends to keep your secrets, just like you couldn’t will secrets back into the dark so your life would turn out differently. Would turn out better. Some things, Benno understood with clarity now, are beyond one’s control.

And so the ants kept coming. They didn’t stop. They wouldn’t stop, Benno knew, they were as permanent as the parts of him he loved and the parts of him he despised. They would keep coming until, somehow, Benno burst, and all that remained would be piles and piles of ants, surrounded by water that could very well drown them.

x-r-a-y magazine

TELOGEN EFFLUVIUM by Brooke Middlebrook

September 29, 2021 · Creative Nonfiction

Is when your hair falls out from stress. Your hair’s heading for the exits but the name rolls off the tongue.

Perhaps it’s because I take scalding showers, or I eat too much Annie’s Macaroni & Cheese. Sure, it’s organic, but nothing good for you comes as a powder. The best part is the bunny tail you press to open the box.

External forces cause follicles to enter a sleep cycle. Hair loss, when inherited, is called alopecia. The old nature vs. nurture question, like we’re not all tired of that debate.

Someone I know is laying in an ICU bed tethered with oxygen, someone not quite family or friend but another vector that relates us to each other beyond these simple terms. Our lives act on each other’s in ways not easily catalogued, the forces underneath similar enough, moving in generally the same direction, but sometimes, like now, shearing against each other, and underneath my concern for this person is a selfish wish to know in which direction my arrow will point now. I don’t know how this works; I failed physics.

Like hair, I go through phases. Sometimes I don’t listen to song lyrics, or I mishear them, and then many years pass and at the exact right moment I come to understand. Two decades after the song is released, while separating egg whites from yolks over the kitchen sink, I realize that her placenta falls to the floor.

Thirty-eight and eleven-twelfths years of age doesn’t seem like a good enough fulcrum from which the rest of my life slides down, hairless.

I failed physics because I spent the class wetting cotton balls and throwing them at the ceiling when the teacher’s back was turned. One might call it my rebellious phase.

Someone was telling me there are seventeen-year cicadas about to emerge from the ground. I misheard and thought they said seventy, as if any length of time living in the dark is not an achievement.

One afternoon in my college dorm, I was alone in the girls’ bathroom, washing my hair in the last shower of the row. I heard a drunk boy enter and shuffle towards the sound of water, his can frisking along the tile. Then there was silence, until he tore my curtain open, and I was certain this is it, this is how it happens, in flip flops. But he stood there looking, and laughed. I must have misheard that particular lyric.

At least once a day my elbow is tickled by what I’m sure is a bug but is only a fallen hair, stuck to the fabric of my sleeve.

I was on a 6 train headed uptown at a time in my life when much was in flux, and the book I was reading asked, How much uncertainty are you willing to tolerate? and in that exact moment the question was comforting, like a warm bowl of noodles.

At the nymph stage, young cicadas survive all those years underground by sipping root sap.

One night at a bar in Emmetsburg, Iowa, I was picking songs on the jukebox when a cellophane-wrapped chicken ’n cheese sandwich fell on my head. There could be no arc or trajectory, it simply dropped from the smooth ceiling. I have since lived my life secure in that moment’s reality and impossibility.

But how do cicadas know it’s time to tunnel up to air in synchrony? Some phases begin without us realizing, not until later recognizing the border behind us, not until the nymphs are molting and walking on soft legs.

My friend Frank, a pediatric geneticist, was called to testify in the trial of a mother accused of poisoning her child with salt. The defense claimed Frank’s assessment failed to identify some rare metabolic disorder as the cause of her child’s ill health. I asked him what it was like to be part of such a sensational trial, a case of nature vs. (disordered) nurture. Can you believe it? he said. They made me sound like I was bad at my job.

In physics, forces were always moving towards or away from each other with those arrows, confident, announcing their direction. I failed because I saw little use in naming forces if they could be canceled out.

Losses can still tickle quite a long time after the fact.

Distinctions matter. All those cotton balls hanging over my head, bunny tails, speech bubbles containing the words, ‘I don’t know’. The slope I climbed up was fragile; the slope I’m rolling down is always changing. So many things have roots.

x-r-a-y magazine

HOW TO PRONOUNCE BON IVER by Holden Tyler Wright

September 27, 2021 · Creative Nonfiction

The day after New Year’s, my neighbor—who strummed his guitar at 2 in the morning singing tone-deaf Beatles covers—asked me for a ride. My other neighbor, Isaac, kept the TV on 24/7, just loud enough to be heard in the corner I pressed my bed into, peppering my nights with laugh tracks. Beyond him, Ruth stayed up knitting. I knew this because she made me an endearingly hideous hat and a too-short scarf. We were all insomniacs. I was the only student among us, and saw my living situation as a stepping stone into something greater. I wondered how the other three got locked into crappy efficiency apartments in their middle age. “We look out for each other, here,” Ruth had told me with a wink, watching me pull on her lopsided beanie.

So, I gave my neighbor the ride. I couldn’t tell you his name, because he’d never told me, and at that point I was embarrassed to ask. “I got to pick up my car from the shop,” he deadpanned to the passenger window. “I ran someone over. That’s how I wrecked it. She died. The other guy was okay though.”

I had no appropriate response. “That’s terrible,” I managed, “any way you slice it.”

“It was raining,” he excused himself. “I didn’t see them. Nobody’s pressing charges or anything.” He aimed a finger across the street. “Can we stop at CVS first? My stomach’s been hurting. Doctor’s don’t know why.”

I waited in the car listening to Bon Iver while my neighbor got his prescription. It was a gray day, the streets still glossy from an earlier shower.

Bon Iver reminded me of my sister’s shitty ex-boyfriend, who scoffed at my mispronunciation: Bawn Eye-vur. The boyfriend played basketball but was too short to make the local community college team and became assistant manager instead. When my sister brought Muggsy—as he called himself—home, he talked sports with my father, complimented my mother’s cooking, distributed animal crackers to the kids, ran thin fingers through his coiffed blonde hair. Muggsy was white and Mormon, like us, which made him “safe” in my parents’ eyes. Though by the time they broke up, it was clear to each of us that he was anything but safe.

“It’s French,” Muggsy explained, unveiling his dentist’s-son teeth. “Bon hiver. It means ‘good winter.’” Now I say it wrong on purpose.

The sign at the car garage said, “Closed Weekends,” but my neighbor summoned someone by rattling the door. The guy wore basketball shorts and a scowl fierce enough to fend off the cold. After some conversation, my neighbor got back into the car. “They don’t have it here,” he told me. “I’m gonna have to figure this out.” He closed his eyes, sighed as if this were the thing that might do him in. Down the street stood a billboard for a funeral home that featured a leering young woman draped in white fur and holding a lap dog. “Happy Holidays!” it read.

My neighbor didn’t buckle up on the drive home, and every thirty seconds my car chimed a wordless warning. Each iteration felt louder and longer than the last.

He cleaned his glasses and nodded at the car stereo. “This Peter Gabriel?” he asked.

“Bon Iver,” I told him.

I worried my neighbor might interpret the alarm as a serious problem, a precursor to the hood suddenly jackknifing open or the tires going ragged. Worse, he might think something was wrong with me for ignoring the noise. If my neighbor met another person who listened to Bon Iver, he might think I was an idiot for mispronouncing their name. Maybe he blamed me for the racket my car was making. Maybe he gripped his armrest, afraid I might go slicing through a red light and into oncoming traffic.

The alarm sounded again and again. Each slick intersection held its watery double. I didn’t know how to tell my neighbor it was his fault.

x-r-a-y magazine

YOU WANT TO HEAR A LOVE STORY by Ashton Russell

September 24, 2021 · Creative Nonfiction

He flirted with you at work. You were 16 and he was 23. He would hold his hands behind his back to mimic how you walked away from the server board in the kitchen. Because you were uncomfortable in your own body. Your ass felt too big, the way you walked too bouncy. Sitting at the bar at work eating before the doors opened, he sat down beside you and pushed his hand up your thigh not saying anything. He followed you out to the parking lot up the hill where staff parked. He asked if he could drive your Volkswagen. He had never been in one before. You felt like you might throw up if you said yes. But you did anyway.

You drove around together a few times after work, riding in the dark along old dirt roads outside of town. The lights from the dashboard illuminating both your faces. He invited you over to his parents’ house where he was staying temporarily but you couldn’t go inside. He told you he hated it. He was used to being on his own, but he had to figure some things out right now. He walked you to your car parked on the street out front after talking to each other for hours. And he kissed you. You didn’t know what to do with your hands, if you should close your eyes.

Walking around the block at his parents’ house, hiding because a bug spray truck came by blasting fumes for mosquitoes. Sitting in the driveway on the back of a truck bed. He leaned in to kiss you and reached his hands up under your shirt. The first time his fingers grazed the outside of your underwear. You felt light, like floating. You noticed his shorts, how he was hard against his leg. You had never seen that before.

The drives you would take together. Making out and listening to music. How you danced in the street in his parent’s neighborhood. Kissing and swinging in the backyard. Always together at night, always in secret. He didn’t want you telling people at work or friends that you knew him. He gave you a piece of art the size of a bookmark that he had made. He was moving soon. He wrote on the back, to my friend - July 2003 my mom's birthday.

He left for grad school in the summer. The first time he called you and left a message, Hey it’s J—. My number is 9xx-xxx-xxxx. You missed it because you were out eating with your parents. You didn’t like the cell phone and kept forgetting to take it with you. How he called randomly, every few weeks. Always leaving you excited and confused. He told you about school and about his work. You were so nervous on the phone, shaking from the excitement. But you never had anything interesting to say. You were still in high school, still a kid living in a sad small town. He told you about how he used to love watching you walk away at the restaurant. The white skirt you wore was see through. The thong underneath drove him crazy.

You took Polaroids when you were 17, posing in a mini skirt. Sitting on the counter at a laundromat eating a banana, your legs angled in a way to show off your underwear. Standing in front of a window in your friend’s apartment, topless, turning to look back at the camera with a smile. Mailing them to him as a gift. You knew he probably had other girls. But were they young with perfect tits like you? Getting into the bathtub when he would call, the sounds the water made as your naked body gently moved around. Innocent.

He came home that Christmas and showed up at the restaurant. Sat down beside you but acted like he was talking to old coworkers. Got invited to a party that everyone was going to. He said he wouldn’t be able to come. Telling you the way you feel about me is the way I feel about someone else. Then showing up to the party and kissing you on Christmas Day. He said, damn girl you trying to kill me? How it took less than a week for him to call you again. But he kept playing, telling you that you were too young. That he has someone else. But you still heard from him every few weeks. He still wanted you, he said. But it was time and space. It was age.

Six months later you would be together. He came home and called you to meet up at a park. Sitting on a swing while he stood over you with his hands in his pockets, he asked you if you were still a virgin. He wasn’t mad but he said he wanted to be your first. He would take you camping in Virginia your first weekend of college and you would finally have sex with him in a tent in the woods. He made you banana and peanut butter sandwiches and sat at the picnic table playing his guitar. It was cool in the mornings, nothing like where you were from. And he wore a long sleeve thermal shirt over his t-shirt and shorts.

The first year — “Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy” playing as you drove down sunny streets in Chapel Hill in his green ford explorer. Shows at the Cat's Cradle. Eighteen and seeing Arcade Fire on their first tour. Parties where you were the only one under 21. How he didn’t want you telling people how old you were. Just say in college. Keep it simple. But one of his roommates didn’t like you. She knew you were young.

The smell of his art studio. Like plaster and paint and a sweet fruit mixed together. The room had no windows, like a white cinderblock cage. The giant desktop computer in the lab all the grad students used. You standing in the background waiting while he checks his emails. He didn’t have a computer at home. The Fedora hat you bought him that he lost and wasn’t really sorry about.

Telling you, don’t eat fast food. Don’t eat meat. You are going to leave me one day for a younger guy. The band he had, “Tennis”. How he sang “I only called you to hear myself talking to you”.

The first trip to NYC. Hand jobs in a taxicab. Doing lines of coke in a bathroom at a bar you were too young to get into. Having sex, you on top, when your friend walked in on you both. You went to the MOMA but felt overwhelmed after six floors of art. The sound of the high school bands practicing for the Thanksgiving Day parade at 3 am. Right outside the window of the apartment you were both in. How small the kitchen was, how groceries could be delivered to you.

He wrote you a letter and sent it in the mail saying, one day we can say the things we both know each other feel. Then shortly after he said I love you in person and for some reason it took you months to say it back. You wanted to but each time the moment seemed right your voice was gone. Coming down weekends from college to stay with him in his house in Carrboro that he shared with two other grad students. The perfectly rectangular window in the living room with no shades covering it, the green lawn and shady trees. They didn’t have a TV and they all acted like this was a statement. The one piece of art you remember, a photograph of a stack of towels pinned directly above the toilet in the shared bathroom.

His bed was on the floor and he had no comforter. There were nights when you would wake to him rubbing up against you, your naked body moving with his, both of you half asleep and not speaking. Getting up in the morning wondering if that was a dream. The first few months those weekend visits would involve so much sex you would come back to school sore, moving stiffly while your friends all made fun of you. But you always faked it with him. And you started to think other girls lied about sex too.

He made you dinners and you listened to “Iron and Wine” while he cooked. He liked to go to Weaver Street Market with the dog, get coffee and hang out on the lawn with the crowds. But you felt shy and uncomfortable. You had never seen a grocery store like this one, where milk was served in glass bottles that you had to bring back. Where food was from the farm in town and people were around outside playing music and making spontaneous art. He took you to art shows, sometimes he was in them and sometimes he wasn’t. But he always wanted you to have an opinion, to share your thoughts. But all you thought about was how could some of these things be called art? Pencil drawings on torn off pieces of paper. For sale for fifty dollars?

His thesis show that spring before he graduated. His parents came up and it felt awkward. Everyone knew you were the young girl he hung out with. The one who was in high school. But his mother was cold when she gave you a distracted side hug. They bought him an Apple laptop - the solid white MacBook. But he still didn’t have a cell phone.

Living with him the summer after sophomore year. His duplex in Durham. When you came to stay — bags packed in the trunk of your bug — you walked in to see he had flowers on the counter and Hey Ash written in bright colored magnetic letters on the old white fridge. The overgrown backyard that you never went into. Standing on the side porch steps, watching his dog do his business. The perfectly sunny kitchen with the Formica round countertop. The walls painted white over so many years the paint was peeling off in thick layers. Taking a nap on a sunny afternoon and the buzzer for the dryer going off. He got up confused and turned off the bathroom light. How you laughed about it for days. The time he reached up to turn off the overhead light on the spinning ceiling fan and as the light went out the globe crashed around you.

Going to Baltimore for a week-long art festival. You helped sell the merch for his art collective. But it was hot, and you hated it. The city was dirty, and it scared you to see so many people living on the street. You had to sleep on the floor in a room full of other artists because everyone was broke, and no one could get a hotel. All people he called friends but many you had never met before. He bought you a handmade wallet, it was a vintage green pattern with a few buttons sewn on it. Everyone went to dinner at a place that claimed to be a favorite of John Waters, it had a giant mural of constellations on the wall and you tried mussels for the first time.

Back in Durham you got a job serving ice cream at a Ben and Jerry’s next door to the Whole Foods. He made fun of the job but loved that you came home smelling like cake batter every night. You didn’t have friends and you spent a lot of time alone. He said, you watch too much TV, you don’t try to meet people. He took you to shows, CD release parties, Art exhibits and museums but you always felt like an imposter. You weren’t an artist; you weren’t in a band. You were just the cool guy's girlfriend.

He moved into a house with a guy who wasn’t an artist in Raleigh your junior and senior years. He liked baseball and was getting an MBA. He wore a top hat unironically. And you both laughed at him behind his back. Did he really need the top hot and the pipe to get laid? Did he think he was an intellectual?

Having an awkward conversation in the bedroom, his bedroom, the thin wall not much distance from the top hat roommate. Sitting on the chair in the corner of the room and him asking you if you ever got off during sex. You worried the roommate might hear you both speaking. You were a bad liar so you told him maybe you just couldn’t, maybe something was wrong with your body. But sometimes his mouth worked, just not always.

The Christmas party they had, 2007. It was an ugly sweater party which you had never heard of before. The first-place prize was a VHS tape of Oprah. His band played from one of the rooms in the house. They used it as a workspace/studio/band room. It had brown paneled walls, the kind with random round black circles that from a distance looked like roaches. There was a new bass player, his name was Kyle and you couldn’t stop looking at him. Did he have to be so cute, so young and tall and lean? Shows with the band at The Cave, being uncomfortable around all the older people. Sitting at the merch table to help sell the album they recorded a few years before. The stickers he drew of two tennis rackets stuck together.

Going to the beach for Spring Break senior year. It was cold and you didn’t like the town. It was lonesome and boring and nothing like the beaches you grew up around in Florida. He asked you to marry him after dinner in the hotel room. You were laying on your side, uncomfortable after the food. He said he was going to ask on the beach, but he was scared he would drop the ring. You didn’t wear it much; told him you weren’t crazy about jewelry and you didn’t want to lose it. He got mad that it took you a week to tell anyone about the engagement.

The time his roommate brought a girl home at two a.m., woke you up fucking her in the room next door. Her moans so loud and overdone. You imagined him naked but his top hat still on while he took her from behind. You had an early flight to NYC again. Your 21st birthday. The bedroom door opened, and a naked woman stood in silhouette. She was lost, she said. You had him get up and check the house, you were scared. The next morning, early showers and packing. There was a blood trail from the bedroom to the backdoor and out onto the brick stairs leading to the grass. She had cut her foot wandering around the house in the dark, but no one explained what it was cut on. The city didn’t feel the same the second time. The first step on the subway, trying to get to your hotel. A homeless guy was shouting about all the years he had been arrested, taking off one piece of clothing for each year he was locked up. You had a headache and just wanted to get to the room. But it was a disappointment, the window looked out to a brick wall and the bathroom was shared with everyone else on the floor.

Your best friend bought a bottle of Dom Perignon and made you a dinner of gnocchi that she learned in culinary school the week before. You took polaroid’s of drinking and eating at her apartment. The one you still have; he’s bent over with you on his back. You’re laughing but looking away. And he is looking at the floor.

Getting tattoos together. He drew both. One on his arm, an outline of the state you were both from. And yours on your wrist, the state with the state flower. Now you forever have his artwork on you. With you.

Moving in finally after graduation but feeling like you were totally lost. Working at NC State for a Christmas tree genetics department. Watering, planting, and killing Christmas trees all summer long. The professor went somewhere in South Asia and brought you back an evil eye charm. It rests on your bookshelf today. Listening to the Bob Dylan song “I’ll Keep It with Mine”, the only thing that would calm the constant anxiety. How the sky looked too big, how it hurt to see the clouds. You would drive around with the visor down every day, just to hide the sky. You felt you might float away into it the way a balloon does when you let it go.

Feeling pressure from your parents to pick a dress, a place. Order invitations. Who will be the bridesmaids? But did you even want a wedding? Thinking of walking in front of all those people made your hands start to sweat.

Moving to a small town closer to his community college job but somehow it was your fault. Because you were the one who was always scared of the city. But the apartment was too new, too white and you both didn’t seem to fit in it right. Getting let go from NC State and being unemployed. It was 2008 and no one was hiring. Drinking all the time but trying to hide it.

Going to the college reunion in the fall and sleeping with an old professor in the back seat of your car. He told you were a great writer, he wanted to help you with your career, he said. He put his hand on your knee when he drove you to the store for cigarettes. Because you had too many white wines at the gala. The dress was an ugly yellow and black mini. The sex was drunk and clumsy. And he said he didn’t want to get you pregnant. The professor had a wife and kid already.

You came home the next morning hungover and on your period. He was waiting in the living room with the apartment perfectly clean. He said he missed you and you ran into the bathroom. You said you didn’t feel good through the door. He wanted to help, and you wanted to throw up. You said, you don’t want to marry me. And it felt like a line someone else said.

How he wrote fuck you in jelly on an orange peel one morning after you made breakfast. How he never laughed at any of your jokes but always laughed at his own. When you left, he cried, lying in bed calling you names as you packed your bag at 6 am. He was a nasty crier and it was the first time he had cried in almost ten years.

He emailed you to say he had your camera charger and how he had to take a one-time prescription for anxiety, that you represent a bad time in his life. You drove up to get the rest of your things on New Year’s. He wanted to get a few drinks and you did, but you ended up crying. He wanted to know who was texting you, why are you checking your phone so much, is it a guy? He said you would get married in a year, be pregnant with babies and living back at home. He wanted to sleep together one more time, but you said no. He said this would be the last time you would see each other. And he was right.

But it wouldn’t be the last time you spoke, the last time he would reach out to you. Or you would reach out to him, desperate for his approval but never understanding why. And those times he would email or message, it would feel like he was standing right in the room. Even 13 years later – when he said he went to “Kill Devil Hills”, the last time I was there was with you. Him messaging you while vacationing with his wife and kid. You are driving to daycare to pick up your own two boys. States away, decades away.

x-r-a-y magazine

ALBTRAUM by Corey Miller

September 22, 2021 · Fiction

I coax Mother’s wheelchair through Newark terminal to our United gate. I pray she knows where she is—where she is going.

I can’t understand her anymore; sensing death she no longer speaks in English. She dreams of her hometown, Essen, Germany. Unaccustomed mother tongue, I download Duolingo on my iPhone to learn Deutsche. To decipher her code.

Returning Mother to her homeland, I use all of my sick days from work, expecting to catch a bug at some point throughout the year. I’ve never traveled outside of America. My passport on the verge of expiring.

Mother’s lips are as tight as a treasure chest when it’s time for her medicine. The airport terminal eyes us foreign. Vacationers ready for a good time, not to witness the end of the line. I force her to consume healing capsules. The army of tablets are protection, so she won’t panic in public, believing she teleported there.

Duolingo is good at teaching single words and building up to sentences.

Good day. Guten Tag. Goodbye. Auf Wiedersehen.

I am a man. Ich bin ein Mann.

I am a strong man. Ich bin ein stark Mann.

Meine Mutter hasn’t been back to Deutschland since she was twenty, arriving in America with unborn me. She recalls stories of riding her Westphalian horse through the town center as a Mädchen. She raised me by herself in America. She would always talk about how much of the world she experienced growing up, how much of the world I missed by tending her needs.

On the plane, meine Mutter doesn’t speak—she screams. Her body is a guitar string, wound tight and vibrating. The other passengers all look the same to me as I pan between them, restraining my final family member. The crew is bilingual. They say Mother cries of foals and mares. They watch me force the pills down her throat like I want her to throw up. An inflight map depicts a plane surrounded by water.

Growing up, Mother would tell me I was gifted when the other boys called me names at baseball practice. She would tell me I was strong and I’d accomplish greatness. What if that’s a mantra mothers are required to preach? A page from The Mother’s Playbook. I didn’t have time for friends when my mother required all of my love. Now I cook softer foods, my opinion of makeup turned into application, I accompany her up and down each step.

My mind is a freezer thawing. Memories sitting in ice trays, warming back into water and evaporating. Did meine Mutter dye these thoughts different colors? Grün, blau, und rot cubes containing the times we cantered the horses bareback through open fields of clover. Bits of purple memories kicked into my backside, the shape of a horseshoe.

We fly into Dusseldorf because the airport in Essen is classified as a minor unscheduled facility. “Essen” in Deutsche means “to eat.” A town made of food, I think. A whole gingerbread village where everyone can be a cookie-cutter friend. The little I know isn’t enough to save me here.

Pushing her wheelchair across cobblestones through the treeless Altstadt to the train station is like pushing against a wall. The resistance ist stark. Ich bin stark.

In Deutschland, you count starting with your thumb as if everything is A-OK. Four is spelled “vier” but is pronounced “fear.” Ich bin ein stark Mann.

Mutter peers at statues, mouth agape. I learn of a German word that doesn’t translate into English well: Gemütlichkeit. It’s a feeling of warmth usually associated with having close friends present.

The city smells like it’s been here since the start of time. Aromatic honey and barley overflow from the shops and the peddlers manage raw food with their bare hands. “Hell” means “bright.” The sun is hell, berating my doubt and casting shadows of those who stand tall.

I hesitate translating the train system. Lists and screens and platforms — I don’t want to go the wrong way.

The stories she told me always ended with how her Westphalian died of colic. Pferde can’t vomit because their esophagus contains muscles shoving in one direction, the inability to vomit can tangle their insides.

We board the train with assistance from the conductor; he lowers a bridge to mind the gap and wheel aboard. The towns come and go, divided by farmland large enough to home a cow for each resident. Shelter is necessary for livestock, but I wonder if, like humans, there’s such thing as too much. I ask Mother if she knows where she is. “Wo sind wir?” She smiles as she collapses out of her wheelchair, crumbling onto the floor. The doors slide open, the conductor announces Essen, next stop Bochum. I see banners hung in the station that I cannot read, yet, it feels like the vertebrae in my spine have realigned. Pictures of horses jumping obstacles and pulling plows for Equitana, one of the largest horse festivals. Meine Mutter smiles, not looking outside. She locks eyes with me and I can see the years she’s bartered for this final moment of clarity — for the pair of us.

x-r-a-y magazine

OTTERS AT THE ZOO by Christopher Allen

September 13, 2021 · Fiction

My imaginary son is learning about otters in imaginary third grade. He has to write a report. I think he’s a bit young for reports, but his imaginary teacher, Mrs. Florida, thinks otherwise. Two hundred words. Due Monday.

So I plan a trip to the imaginary zoo though my imaginary son says the fastest way to learn about otters is the Internet. He spends all his internet time reading about sea otters. He’s an official member of the Otter Appreciation Society.

Did you know, he says, that otters can talk? He whistles, growls, says he’s learning Otterish, says he doesn’t have time for a zoo when he’s got 42,689 search results to get through for “All Things Otter.”

But the fresh air, I say. The snake house. Churros.

Nah, he says.

There’ll be imaginary sea otters, I say. Real ones.

He’s already in the car.

My imaginary son is just big enough to sit in the front without his imaginary car seat. He buckles up, smiles like that click is the most adult thing in the world. And maybe it is. He asks how far the imaginary zoo is, and I say it’s seven carrot sticks and that tuna fish sandwich in his imaginary backpack. He tucks into the sandwich.

My imaginary son’s obsession with sea otters is nothing new. Ever since he hatched from my thigh he’s been a little otter fellow. I allow it. A boy needs a hobby. I collected stamps.

Did you know, he munches, that ninety percent of sea otters live on the coast of Alaska?

I didn’t, I say, and he says, We live in Delaware.

A shame, I say. Where do the other ten percent live?

Did you know, he says, they store food in their armpits?

That’s gross, I say.

Super gross, he says like super gross is the best thing ever.

The imaginary zoo is hopping today. It’s the birth of Wen, the imaginary panda. It’s been all over the news. We’re waiting to enter the imaginary panda pavilion when I spot the churros cart. I’m starving, and we’ve been waiting in the queue for what seems like a million carrot sticks, so I tell my imaginary son to hold our place while I grab us churros. I return with the most aromatic imaginary confection to the same queue, the same panda pavilion, but no imaginary son.

Have you seen a kid? Have you seen a kid? I say to the parents in the queue.

This is a zoo, someone says. It’s an ocean of kids.

He’s eight, I say, looks like a miniature me. Like this, I say, and squish my cheeks up into my imaginary son’s goofy face.

You left your kid? someone says, For churros?

I run up and down the queue—Have you seen my kid?—getting only judgmental glares for taking my eyes off him for four seconds, but then I hear him beyond a cobblestone path. He’s jumping up and down squealing Otterish on a platform made for kids so they can traumatize the sea otters below.

He settles when he sees me, knows I’m not the kind of dad who’d haul off or why I oughta. He knows I’m just grateful for every moment he decides to stay. Did you know, he says, that otter mothers leave their babies floating on the water when they look for food? He takes a churro from the bag, and it may be the cinnamon and sugar dusting the air between us, but I feel a breeze of something real, something unfamiliar like, I don’t know, but that’s just it, isn’t it? I don’t know.

Why is that? I ask.

Their fur’s too thick, he says. They can’t swim under water. But they float great. He smiles and throws an imaginary fish to the otters below.

x-r-a-y magazine

EXPERIENCERS by Emily Costa

September 6, 2021 · Fiction

Your girlfriend believes that at some point during the last year or so her father has been abducted by aliens and replaced with a human-like shell. She believes visits still happen, routinely and systematically, that they must pull him up there with that classic tractor beam, or else he meets them somewhere in the woods, and they do tests and probe him and check on his progress. Progress with what, you wonder, but she’s still talking. She says they return him dead-eyed. She’s got it all laid out. She keeps a little journal by her bed to jot down the nights, to keep track of his behavior. She says on Mondays and Thursdays he leaves in the middle of the night. The front light’s on motion detector and shines into her window. She hears his tires crunch driveway gravel. Then, he’s there again at cereal time, normal.

She’s telling you this because she trusts you, she says, finally she trusts you.

You wonder if this means you can move on from spending the night in her bed just making out, from jerking off in your room when you get home. You hate that you think that, especially considering what you’re doing now: driving down route 63 with her, tailing her dad’s BMW, trying to find what she’s calling an “entry point.” Your crappy Toyota is having some issue with acceleration—it’s stuttering, slow—but you need to maintain distance anyway. Your girlfriend is biting the sides of her fingernails. She is messing with the radio. She is telling you hang back and speed up.

Your girlfriend’s mom is at home, zonked on Valium. You’d left your own father similarly zonked, head back, on the couch. Something in his nightly regimen knocks him out but you’re not sure which pill. You make a mental note to ask the doctor. Maybe you could even ask the nurse at treatment while he dozes and you’re stuck in the sticky chair next to him, flipping through a book, unable to focus on the words. Maybe it’s the disease itself. But you try not to think about that, and your girlfriend is saying are you listening? and you are and you aren’t.

Because the thing is you know where her dad goes. It’s easy to infer, even though you’ve only met the guy once. The way he smiles, the over-cheer in his voice. Like he’s making up for something. But your girlfriend doesn’t see it. Or, she doesn’t want to see it. And you can’t just come out and tell her the warm thing her father’s enveloped in isn’t some human-sized test-tube filled with space goo. So you’re just waiting for the thing to happen. And it’ll happen tonight: you’ll follow the father all the way to the other woman’s house. There will be no object in the sky, no abduction, no jump in the clock. Just a split-level with its porch light on. The door will open. You’ll both catch a glimpse of her as she pulls him inside. Your girlfriend will look at you in a way you’ll never forget, and you won’t be sure how to make your face look, how to mirror surprise.

But before that, you’re driving, and you know, and she doesn’t, and you can’t tell her, and it’s all hanging there in the air, and you start to wonder if you’re a bad person—your most frequent thought—because you want the thing to happen already, to get it over with, to end up on the other side of it, but you don’t want to say the words. You can barely even think them.

x-r-a-y magazine

“I’M TELLING YOU YOU’RE GONNA LOVE IT” by Eros Livieratos

September 1, 2021 · Fiction

“I’m telling you, you’re gonna love it.”“There is absolutely no way I’m going to like it.” “Come on, it won’t be that bad.”“It sounds awful.”“So?”

James was always trying to get me to do shit. The first time I ate glass, they were there, egging me on. They posted a clip of it on their story while I was picking at my gums. I remember them saying,

“If Lucas Abela¹ can do it, why can’t you?”

So, I swallowed some. We kept on hanging out. What else would I do? Their suggestions kept getting a little riskier, a bit more reckless. When they convinced me to try robbing a grave, I declined. I wasn’t into it. My ma would hate me for it. So, James said,

“You’ll never be an R.L. Stine² character.”

And for whatever reason, that really did it. I dug up a grave, but it turns out, they lock some coffins so all I took were the ghosts.

I haven’t been sleeping right. I thought this thing with James wasn’t going to work out. Their hot pink leather pants and infected stick-n-pokes couldn’t be in my life any longer. I was going to break it off. I thought maybe I’d text them and this would all be settled. They were already at my door.

“Have you tried salvia³ before?”

“No. No James, I’m done. I’m tired. I kind of just want to get a job.”

James looked at me for a moment. They looked me up and down, they lingered on the down. Their red-heart earring dangled like a pendulum. Their eyes intent, staring into my hips for what felt like an eternity.

“No. Nope. I don’t think we should keep hanging out. I don’t think we’re good for each other—”

James’ lips moved up and down, slowly, mocking me. They patted their bald head and rubbed their flat stomach and began screeching. Howling.

“Do you remember that time Hanatarash⁴ bulldozed that club?”

“No. What? I wasn’t alive. Wasn’t that in the 80s?”

“What if I told you, I could get us a bulldozer?” Their green eyes lit up with what my ma would call, “the devil’s passion.” I know this, it isn’t going to happen again.

“James, I’m done. I haven’t slept in months. I think I need to get exorcised?”

“Jen, you will never ever be a moderately well-known but still largely obscure harsh-noise artist if you don’t do this. Like, nobody will like you.” I finally heard it. The teeth still left in their mouth clicked with each syllable and everything was clarity. I wasn’t going to fall for it.

“Where would you even work, anyway? Nobody’s hiring.” James’ shoulders dropped. It felt like I was talking to someone else. They weren’t interested in trying to bulldoze a basement gig anymore.

“I don’t know, I really don’t want to but like rent’s coming up and—”

“What?”

“I was just going to start delivering packages, like just for a few weeks or something”

“I still have this bag of salvia.”

“I really don’t—”

“I’m telling you, you’re gonna love it.”

“There is absolutely no way I’m going to like it.”

Lucas Abela is an Australian harsh noise musician known for creating and playing an instrument comprised of glass and contact microphones. The instrument is played by mouth and by hand.
That guy who wrote Goosebumps.
A mistake.
Japanese harsh noise band from the 80s that pioneered the genre and received notoriety from being banned from several countries after bulldozing a club as one of their performances.

x-r-a-y magazine

TECHNO SHOW by Lucy Zhou

August 31, 2021 · Fiction

In a post-Covid world, we joke, the first thing we’ll do is go to a techno show. Yeah, like the kind in someone’s basement that smells of bathwater or underneath a freeway pass for better acoustics—remember that last show we went to? Where we had to slink ungracefully through a doggy door in the fence and squish through ferns that tickled our palms before we came across the path, illuminated by Carla’s bright-pink hair. There will be a Halloween-store fog machine, a drumline of clanging pots and pans, and those little umbrellas in everyone’s red Solo cup. Most people are just huffing down straight gin. Your ex’s new girlfriend is the one DJing, and you suddenly feel very petty and small, even though this is the ex who inhaled paint thinner and said your calves were horsey when he was high. But still—you look around for his signature shaved head and are relieved that he’s not here. And if he is, you couldn’t care less. So yeah, at this techno show, everyone is wearing a slick black mask in some intersection between goth and UX designer. In the bright darkness, we k-hole as if we aren’t terrified of being near stranger bodies, wrapped in tender-damp heat, after almost two years of only talking to low-res avatars on a screen. We suddenly have nothing to say. No one brings up how Jay would have been the first one shuffling up a storm, except his parents took him off the ventilator a month ago. None of us could go to the family-only funeral. Or how Tony has to sit down for most of the set after getting sick in the first wave. But we sit down with him in the middle of the dance floor, watch the crowd bob nervously and grow old. We leave after an hour. On the way home, Carla drives because she’s doing some alcohol detox, and we mouth off about how the music was whack, no, the people, no, it was the general vibe and like, what the heck was up with those little umbrellas? It’s all very predictable, you know, this idea of an after, as easy as getting used to a ghost. And Jay laughs at this like a donkey in heat from the backseat, as if to remind us that he’s still here, still kicking. By the time we turn back to make sure, he’s already gone.

x-r-a-y magazine

« Previous 123 4…66 Next »