X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

PLEASE CONSIDER by Jeannetta Craigwell-Graham

January 31, 2022 · Fiction

There is a new woman in your apartment. What happened to the other woman? Tall like you. Blonde like you. I hope you haven’t broken up.

But if you have: please consider, for a split second– Me.

Me and you began the day you moved in. From the balcony of my illegal sixth floor walkup, I peered into your curtainless life. I was tired of onion peeler ads and videos of black men poked into hermit crab positions, playing Jesus in my daughter’s Mary Magdalene roleplay (her chest packed with hormonal mandarins) and my boyfriend’s “Aren’t you concerned about the pimple on the back of your neck?”

I wanted to file myself thick somewhere in the W’s, X’s or Y’s of your life, uncertain if I would fit amongst the eggshell chairs and paper lanterns. I am darker and shorter than the blonde. Think Snow White with doe-colored skin, cornrows and a stopwatch frame. You would need to bend down to kiss me. It might be inconvenient. I winked at Orion’s belt and blew out birthday candles wishing this new brown-haired girl away until I decided love is diligence.

Your self-care routines are just right. The blonde was naturally beautiful like a baby goat. I see the brown-haired girl is more camouflaged. She hides fatigue with incandescent eyeshadows. I have an appropriate pop-level shame about my appearance, an Umbrella-remix you can dance to. Yesterday, I waited at a perfume counter with a steady fever tremble for the long-lashed attendant. Last time I visited the department store a cashier had a stroke. When I explained the incident to the EMT he stared at me and my pile of sixty-four pairs of control briefs and wrote in caps as the cause of incident: “UNIDENTIFIED AND UNREASONABLE EXERTION.” I will try my best not to startle if you come into the bathroom unannounced.

“Boo! It’s just me,” I will say, “no need to be scared.”

You rarely ate dinner together. The blonde ate spelt and weeds from bowls standing up. The brown-haired one is less digestively coy – she nibbles on kitchen paper. I can last on bitter coffee and water spoon-fed from my hand in the bathroom sink. In university there was another brown girl who Zumba’ed the same time I did, the meat of her upper arms picked clean by Cosmo and Vogue. I saw a dog let go of a mournful howl as it went past her photo on the university’s welcome banner and I got the program. I made friends with the salad bar staff who had tattoos in unemployable places. They would ask me “More chicken shug?”

“No,” I said, “on a program.” For which I would receive eyelids engraved with Fuck-blink-That.

You were often headed somewhere. The blonde liked the tease of a black A-line skirt and turtleneck. I can see the brown-haired one prefers garments that resemble fitted sheets before you tuck them into bed corners. I like a bit of theater in my closet. I once skidded across shifty ice clad in intense reflective footwear to go to a melanoma fundraiser at the zoo. The bouncer glanced me over with a no on his tongue but a greeting from my Indian friend changed the equation in his head and we were in. I am like a zero: when added with a larger, or small number, I make no difference.

You were not big cleaners. The blonde protected wasp nests as if they were Charlotte’s Web. The brown-haired one is very sustainable - she reuses any butts or Hostess wrappers she sees on her way home. I view each spill as a new opportunity. I learned cleaning protocols from my grandmother who might have cleaned your mother’s-mother’s house or bagged your grandpa’s adult diapers without a flinch or peep. The Department of Homeland Security once held her for possession of solvents and flammables in her suitcase and for not obeying the flight attendants’ instructions to remain seated during takeoff and landing because she had been cleaning the toilet with abovementioned solvents and flammables. Sometimes you must clean as if a knife could appear at your throat. My heart would wallop against my breast but I would leave no trace and have a steady dusting hand.

You used to kiss, neck each other. The blonde was full of barnyard romance – nudges like a colt and slicks against your cheeks. I can see the brown-haired woman seems satisfied if she brushes past you in the hallway. I believe that affection, love and even sex are very good for a relationship, but not an excessive afternoon’s worth. I have read enough Victorian romance novels pocketed in the brim of my jeans at Walgreens checkout lines to know how things are done. Each time I expected the The Duke Who Loved Me or some other title would bring forth the sharp rap of an alarm or a heavy frisk but no one suspected me of romance. Don’t worry, I’ve worried the buttons on my button-ups so they are easier to rip and can be wanton with just a raise of my eyebrows.

Wait. My boyfriend just told me you are not you. Another couple moved in, quickly, in the twilight of afternoon. The brown-haired one is not a replacement but the original of someone else. But who I wait for. But who am I waiting for? No matter. Leave the window cracked. I will go via balcony.

Crow Jonah Norlander

NAKED by Tim Lane

January 28, 2022 · Fiction

My boys are naked every chance they get and this morning is perfect for it. The light is clear and hot, unmuddled by rain or fog. And they have an excuse — they’ve just eaten ice cream and so made a mess of their clothes. I am here, but I am not seeing them, stupefied by the warmth that comes so rarely this far north. My mind wanders and trips down alleyways of my past, looking for trouble or regret. When my wife left for work this morning, she gave me a look. Truth be told, she’s getting a little tired of me.

By the time I notice what they are doing, the older one, who is four, is already stripped. The younger one is only two and still unable to get his shirt over a head that is much larger than his body would seem to be able to support. He shrieks like he does any time he is met by a problem–from skinned knee to stubborn pistachio nut. The older one comes to help, a good big brother or a torturer, or both, pulling the shirt up in ruthless heave-hos. The younger one is lost inside it, crying all the harder, from pain or darkness, who can tell. Only he stops the very instant he is free.

This did not used to be a problem, the nudity. In fact most of any day that was hot enough, and plenty that weren’t, my boys spent naked. However, the old backyard fence that was there when we moved in had come down in the winter months. Eight feet high at least, gray, rain-loved, and blooming moss and lichen. I noticed it listing to the side one morning as I brought out a bag of trash. I pressed upon it with my palms and it kissed off from the side of the garage, rusted nails letting go, and stooped over the yard. Then I kicked it, partly because I had a vision, sudden and clear, of what we might do with a more open space, and partly because I wanted to see what violence from the end of my foot might look like. The fence fell down and immediately our yard opened up like lungs which had been waiting to take a full breath.

The line of where the fence had stood remained for a few weeks. A strip of thin, pale grass like the first skin after a wound. Soon, though, weeds took over. The thin, leggy kind with delicate, pink flowers.

Having no fence created a problem I hadn’t, in my rush, considered. Our yard, which abutted a narrow lane that led to the back parkinglot of an apartment complex, was now exposed to anyone from that building walking by. Dog walkers, couples, kids on bikes, a pale, young smoker with a collection of animal onesies she wore baggy and ironically. My wife was concerned that without the fence, thieves would relieve us of our tricycles and tomato starts. Perverts would haunt our back windows.

“The fence was rotten,” I told her. “If the perverts wanted to get in, it wasn’t stopping them.”

“The fence did more than we probably know,” she said. “Just the idea of it.”

“OK, but it came down,” I said. “So, what was I supposed to do?”

“Listen,” I told my boys now. “Those bodies aren’t for everyone.”

Their bowed little legs, plump bellies, uncircumsized penises with the tiny, fleshy bit at the end.

“It’s only OK for our family, so let's put on our undies at least.”

“Every day, all the time?” the older one said. “We used to be naked in our yard. It’s our bodies! It’s our choice if we want to be naked!”

“Yeah,” the younger one chimed, the sycophant, the pugilist. “If you don’t let us be naked, you’re outta here!”

His scrunched up face, eyelids half-closed, voice pitched downward but unable to hang onto lower registers — it was all, I knew, an imitation of me. And I found it incredibly endearing, fucking cute to be clear, though a little frightening, to think that my face screwed up like an ogre’s in moments of anger. In any event, I relented. One, because they were playing with each other without needing a thing from me, and so giving me a little peace; two because my wife had pointed out recently that I had become stricter the longer I stayed home with the boys; and three, because my mind had turned a corner in its wanderings and met with a thing from my past, fully formed and wriggle-wet. A memory I felt compelled to tangle with.

I had studied abroad in Chile the first half of my senior year of college. I wasn’t a leader, never in my life, but somehow, when I got there, the others looked to me. It was probably because I was the oldest one in the program. I felt the responsibility of it like balancing a broom upright on the tip of my finger. If I put in enough legwork, I could keep it afloat. I practiced the clench of appearing, always, to not care. I didn’t linger, I affected independence, I floated ideas about which bars to go to next, I sang karaoke. It was exhilarating, exhausting. I got better at it.

In any case, two weeks after arriving, my school went on a break. I was going to use the time to head up north, see the Atacama Desert, check off the first item on a list I planned to complete in my time there. My big study abroad. To my surprise, a small group of who I considered to be the coolest in the program rallied around my plan and came with me. Quite by accident, it took on the aura of exclusivity, with me at the center. One guy, Tom, even asked my permission, as if I had it to give, to invite along another student, Howard. Howard lived with a host family next to Tom’s and was brash and often ridiculous. Meaning drunk. Howard had already managed to turn off many in the program with his antics. Only Tom, universally liked, who attended his same college in Washington, still stood with him. I said of course Howard could come along, struck to be considered an authority, and I came off as being quite magnanimous. “You’re a good guy,” Tom said and I said nothing, only nodding, thrilled and protective over what I felt he’d given me.

We spent a night in an apartment in a town I can’t remember now. Only that it looked more beautiful in the guide book than by our eyes. At Howard’s suggestion, we played something called the Elephant Game. Tom knew it. It involved clapping in a rhythm, each assigned an animal, and when your turn came, you had to make the sign of the animal in the space of a clap, and then the sign for someone else’s animal within the next. The lowest animal in the game was the naked mole rat. The sign you did as the mole rat was to grip yourself and shiver. I got to know the action very well as I was constantly stuck in the role. It seemed like a wire sparked and lost the information it carried whenever I tried to remember an animal other than the mole rat. So there I was, shivering the whole night through.

But the game succeeded in getting us all very drunk; and in endearing Howard, to some extent, into the group, which seemed to thrill Tom.

A night later and we were staying in an apartment in a beautiful city by the sea. It had poems graffitied on the walls. If you knew where to look, you could eat a good meal for a few dollars and drink for a few more. We played the Elephant Game until the owner of the apartment pounded on the door and told us to stop; the clapping was too loud.

So we went for a walk. Through streets romantically lit, alongside a marina with boats we had seen earlier, each of us taking pictures in front of their colorful hulls. Now everything was gray and wet. But it was thrilling to be kicked out, to be drunk, to be so far away from our normal lives. This feeling, I believe, led Charlie, a woman with a narrow face and sleepy eyes, to decide that we should all strip down and swim in the water. The idea caught, and first Howard, with his goose-honk laugh, stripped down, and then everyone but me joined in. The group picked their way over large, angular boulders and down to the oily, black water. They screamed; they laughed. I stayed behind, and Charlie, covering her small breasts with her arm, asked me why.

The truth was that I didn’t want to be naked. I was too skinny, I had a scar by my belly button, and moles, like they were an infestation of the animal, dug up all across my chest. And also, I was ashamed of how my penis would look. Uncircumsized, canted-to-the-left. Would it shrink in the cold?

“I just don’t feel comfortable,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, and in her eyes I saw the broom tumble, smack the floor. So I sat on the rocks for a while, uncomfortable with watching the others, a barrier between clothed and not. I walked home alone, counting how many of the streetlights were broken, bulbs gaping mouths with uneven fangs.

Still later and we were in the desert and I had nosebleeds most nights. Howard was desperate to pick up a girl and somehow the entire group, even Charlie, became invested in his quest. But none of the local women were interested in him and finally he insisted that he didn’t care.

“It’s their faces,” he said. “Being in the sun so much kind of fucks up their faces.”

“Jesus, are you an asshole,” Charlie said.

I didn’t agree with Howard. Or, probably, the me at that time knew enough not to admit that I agreed with Howard, but I could see what he was saying. It was an intense, constant glare in the Atacama and I was young. Too young to read codes.

“Maybe he’s just saying what other people really think, deep down,” I said. “But he just doesn’t have a filter. Doesn’t dress it up in what he’s supposed to say.”

Charlie looked at me and shook her head. “It’s racist to say a whole group of people aren’t attractive.”

I stayed quiet, as did everyone else, even Howard, which was so rare as to be eerie. Tom clapped his hands and said we should all check out the Cueca; they were performing soon.

We went to the town square and bought beers. Dancers shuffled around in a big tent waving handkerchiefs in the air. It was admirable and disciplined. My nose began bleeding and I raided the napkin dispenser to staunch the flow, trying to laugh it off, but nobody else seemed to be able to look at me and the mess of my face. It just kept coming. Howard plucked a fresh napkin and tried to join the dance. His arm in the air, fluttering the paper up and down, he approached the dancers who all stayed, tight-lipped, on their steps. My group laughed, even as they ignored me, even as they traded knowing looks of what a dumbass Howard was. Tom yelled in a hoarse voice for him to get the fuck back to the table.

Howard is a kindergarten teacher now, I think. Tom might do something with insurance. Charlie writes for a magazine and lives in Denver.

The older son wants to know if I think it is hot enough for them to fill up the pool and I tell them, yes, sure, nodding my head, reminding myself to be present. Be present — too much is spent outside of this. When I got laid off, I decided to see it as a blessing, as a time to be present with my kids when they are so young. And yet, it’s a constant struggle. So much easier to slide backward into myself, looking for something, I don’t know what. A path out? A choice to a different future?

I go inside and I start to make lunch. Macaroni and cheese. Cut up apples. Peanut butter and celery sticks. My second cup of coffee, what I cling to for the later half of the day, instant. Cherish this, my wife often tells me. What you’re feeling is society’s pressure on you as a male. A breadwinner. You are doing the most important work. The. Most. I have made a mistake, I sometimes find myself thinking when my guard is down. I am stuck in a muddy mistake.

Then I hear the younger one talking in that adorable way he has. Half in this world, half in the other, imagining as he goes, sputtering sound effects, little clippings of phrases, sayings. He is happiest when he is inside his imagination. They are constantly demanding I join in, and I do, sometimes, when I can’t find a way out of it. To me, the practice is exhausting. Pretending to be a raccoon or a T-Rex. I joke with my wife about it. I call it my beautiful sacrifice. If it were up to my boys, we’d never stop pretending we were something else.

I go out on the back porch and see Cal, the man who lives in the apartment complex and survives on god knows what and also cans. He collects them, a huffing, rotund machine with thick eyeglasses and a rubber grin. When he remembers me, he likes to talk to me. He tells me his theories on why the conservatives are having a moment, or how the homeless are lazy and that’s why he gets most of what he wants. His competition, he sneers, would rather sleep. Other times I’ve said hello as we passed, asked him how it was going, and he has looked at me as if frightened, and hustled on.

Cal’s laughing now at something my older son is doing. I remember when they were even younger and we stripped them in parks, on benches, anywhere, to change their diapers. When you are so young, your body is public. It is unformed, unclaimed by even yourself, and so free. The child feels no shame. That changes somewhere along the way. My sons don’t have it yet. And I know I will have to give it to them. Which is also taking something away.

I rush out, my hands still wet, they smell of garlic, and find that my boy is juggling his penis. He finds it hilarious, we all do in my house. Hand over hand, it really does look like juggling. But it shouldn’t be here, it shouldn’t be now.

“Hey,” I say. “You need to get over here and get dressed, both of you.”

“I will throw you in a tree!” the younger one says.

“I don’t like your serious voice,” the older says.

I smile at Cal. I don’t want this to be weird even though I know that later on I’ll fantasize about the terrible things he was trying to elicit from my boys and scheme ways I’d hurt him. An ugly purpose, but a purpose all the same. It’s in line with how sometimes, I’ll read horrible news stories about a recent shooting and imagine myself into the scene, charging the shooter, taking him down, being lauded the hero. For now, though, I don’t want to be rude. Because we see each other all the time and I do believe, deep down, he’s harmless. Maybe he has some kind of condition. On the spectrum. His big, threadbare t-shirts are mostly clean. His glasses are constantly fogging up. My wife gave him my old winter gloves last December. He was just talking, after all, laughing, it was funny, and there is no fence there anymore. What was he supposed to do?

“You need clothes, I keep telling you,” I say once I get the boys inside.

“But we were in our own yard,” the older one says. “And you say it’s our body.”

“It is your body,” I say. “And it’s only for you.”

“But, Daddy.”

“No,” I say, definitely breaking through into Serious Voice territory, into something like yelling. “You put your clothes on or you don’t go outside, do you understand me? I’m trying to keep you safe.”

“You always ruin my day,” the older says.

“You’re being disresponsible!” The younger says.

Cal is striding off, his huge t-shirt tucked into basketball shorts, Ikea bags in each hand.

I have never been in a fight. Not a real one. But there was once, back in Chile, near the end of my time abroad, when I was leaving a bar and two men plucked my hat from off my head. I asked for it back and they laughed at me. One of them pretended like he had a gun, reaching into his coat, so I turned and walked the other way. But they followed me, kicking me and punching me as I went. I was much taller than them, and sloshing drunk, so I hardly felt the blows. Still, they kept adding up inside of me until finally, in an instinct that was quicker than any thought, I reached back, grabbed a foot as it kicked me and pulled up. The man lost his feet, fell onto the sidewalk, the back of his head into the cement like a watermelon dropped in the supermarket. I ran as fast as I could, turning at random streets to lose these men who may or may not have been about to shoot me. When I came across a phone booth, I called Howard, who was dating Charlie by then. He’d often told me of the fights he’d gotten into in the small, spread-wide desert town he’d grown up in, how he didn’t mind them, in fact liked them, was good at them. He answered on the third ring and I told him where I was, what had happened, how I needed his help. I wanted to find those men and fight them. Get my hat back. Beat the shit out of them. But he was sleepy, this was very late, and he asked me if I was alone now. If I was safe. I was, the men were nowhere in sight.

“Then just go to bed,” he told me.

When I got home, I undressed in my bedroom and looked at my body in the mirror. I had purple and green bruises up and down my legs. They would be worse in the morning.

Maybe I will tell my wife about this later, when she is home from the real world, and maybe it will hold her attention better than my stories about the boys refusing to put on their clothes, or making a mess of things, or the tiny, fierce joy of taking a nap, my arm under each of their necks, heavy and breathing in the same rhythm.

But when she gets home, I don’t tell her any of it because by then, the story seems meaningless, just like most of these days. Instead, she has her life to tell me about, the one she enters daily, leaving us behind. A world of real push and pull. Boss and coworkers. Drama. And I tell her my opinions, strategies, thoughts on what she should do out there.

A few weeks later, I go for a walk, leaving the boys practicing magic tricks with my wife. They are disappearing crayons, quarters, stuffed rabbits. They are pulling gauzy scarves from empty tubes, toothpicks from empty palms. I was having a hard time acting shocked by their antics. My wife said I should leave, take some time to myself.

It is a beautiful day again and I am trying to take my mind off the spinning, gentle haunt of a life lived any kind of way. I circle the block, and then the next. I know all of these places and yet, even after three years here, I notice new things just put up or invisible to me before. A slackline between two dying trees. A small fairy kingdom built in the hollow of an enormous oak that has released its pollen and bulged my eyes. A doll dressed half as a devil, half an angel, nailed onto the pillar of someone’s porch.

On my way home, I see a man in the courtyard of the apartments, lying with his shirt off and his pants down, close to his knees. He is having a hard time breathing. Each intake whistles and stuffs. I am afraid, seeing this, and I look around, but there is nobody else here. Then I recognize him. It’s Cal, having some kind of emergency.

“Cal?” I say.

“Are you OK?” I edge nearer.

“Can you hear me?”

I call 911. I hear ambulances far off. I’ve checked his pulse, I’ve elevated his head. And then, though it is hard and takes all the grip I can manage in my fingers, I push his shorts back up, over his pale, pocked, yogurt-pour flesh. His crisp, white underpants. The shy stub of his penis almost lost in a wiry nest of hair.

“Let me just get you situated, man,” I say.

Cal is breathing, and maybe he sees me, and maybe he’s already gone. Soon there is a collection of busy men and women applying devices and counts and hands to his failing body. But then I see from the way the activities of the workers, paramedics and firepeople suddenly slacken, that he is dead now, and his body doesn’t matter one bit to him anymore.

And I think, a small complete thing formed instantly in the front of my brain: I have a broken heart.

I go home and hold this all within until the boys are in bed. Then I tell my wife. She doesn’t remember, at first, who Cal is. But after I describe him, his trundling walk, his cans, his cold, naked hands in the winter, the gloves she gave him, she remembers and is sad in a new way. She is crying.

I tell her of the time I was walking and the boys were ahead of me, tiny blurs on those three-wheel scooters, and he came out from his apartment and told them to stop, to wait for me. When I got to him, I apologized.

“I have sons of my own,” he said. “The instinct never goes away, to protect them, just like the day they were born.”

Crow Jonah Norlander

HALF-SISTERS by Kristen M. Ploetz

January 26, 2022 · Fiction

red + blue

Her birthstone is amethyst and she has his blue eyes. At the fair, he buys her a purple balloon; when it slips from her grip, he buys her another and ties it to her wrist, winks as he promises, this one will always stay. When he reads to her at night he points to the lupine in Miss Rumphius and tells her about the importance of family. On sunny days he holds her hand as they meander through rocky tide pools where they look for the purple arms of sea stars under shimmering water. She steps barefoot on an urchin and he wipes away her tears. When she is eight, he walks her from house to house on Halloween, a wizard dressed in purple and gold who still believes in magic and forever. A week later, in the wake of a November hurricane that gives birth to a lilac sky, he tells her he’s leaving and not coming back. Her veins purple with sorrow, her breath uneven and shallow as she waits and waits for things to go back to the way they were. Each night she dots lavender oil on her temples and wrists to coax slumber, to quiet the heartpound in her ears. Her mother buys her an orchid for the south-facing sill in her room and still tucks grape BubbleYum in her lunches, but everything remains irrevocable and broken.

Years pass. She finally musters the nerve to visit on Christmas. Over runny pie and under the heavyweight safety of her hoodie she discovers devotion doesn’t come with a lifetime guarantee. She texts her mother from the bathroom: can u pick me up? total waste of time, wipes her eyes on her sleeve as she strides past the table.

He drives her to her first year at the university, an offer her mother forces her to accept because he has the truck and she can’t get the day off. They ride in silence except when he nods toward the hills and says, That’s where the grapes grow. It is the last time she’ll ever be within arm’s reach, confirms the magic of him withered on the vine too long ago. She tacks her course schedule to the cork board above her desk and sets a cup of pencils under the box store lamp, drops a sharpener in the top drawer. Her lavender bunny with the missing ear and folded belly leans against her pillow just like it has since she was a toddler. She vows to sketch out her own life from this new beginning, to study only beautiful things. In art class she discovers violet is a spectral color with its own wavelength, that purple is similar to the eye but a fundamental difference exists—just like him before and after. She is seduced by Claude’s violettomania and Vincent’s ear, doesn’t think either of them were mad but bruised somewhere deep inside like her. She draws on the warm backs of friends, plants iris and crocus between valleys of scapulae, and soon drops out to apprentice and hone her craft where a neon tube hangs in the dirty bay of a street level window, the periwinkle argon glow of Tattoo City a beacon for those who seek something that lasts. Her first client pays her in tears and a fistful of tens, bares her shoulder and talks about how heliotrope is a flower of devotion, once the permissible color of half-mourning after weeks of wearing black, talks about how she buried her sister five weeks ago. Dots of blood trail the needle. She thinks of the urchin that pierced the sole of her foot that one summer. Her attention breaks when the woman says, Do you have any sisters? She draws pale purple ink into her needle and thinks about how November is drawing near, how it will soon be time to buy another orchid for her window sill.

yellow + blue

Her birthstone is emerald and she has his blue eyes. On her first birthday, he ties a green balloon to the back of her high chair, watches it shrink and pucker over a few days before he tucks the cool flap of latex into a memory box at the back of the closet. He doesn’t want to forget this time. He reads her The Wizard of Oz, points to the Emerald City and alludes to the importance of home; her eyes are heavy with sleep when his lies of omission come easy. On sunny days, he holds her hand along the rocky tide pools where they look for sea lettuce under the shimmering water, where he guides her to pockets of soft sand and smooth, algae-coated stone so her flesh remains unbroken. He shields his eyes from the glare bouncing off the water, averts his gaze from a purple constellation of sea stars. On Halloween night he walks her from house to house; she is Tinkerbell and waves her wand as she says, I love you, Daddy, effortlessly beguiling him with her captive magic.

One Christmas—the one when she gets the parakeet she names Limey Lime—a teenage girl comes for dessert wearing an oversized hoodie in a clearance rack shade of purple. Her mother is silent when she sets down the festive green plates runny with apple filling and whipped cream, “Holly Jolly Christmas” bleating from the living room stereo. There is something familiar about the girl, something in her frowning profile. After two bites of pie, the girl spends a long time in the bathroom. Her father throws his napkin on his chair and knocks on the bathroom door, comes back a few minutes later with his lips pressed into a thin, angry line. The girl emerges while the plates are being cleared and a horn beeps out front. The girl doesn’t say goodbye, doesn’t ever come back.

He shows her the world, gives her every spare moment: quetzals of Guatemala and grassy Irish coasts and malachite beads being strung onto necklaces by Kenyan women and the undulating green of the Northern Lights, every summer endless and carefree in that verdant filter of childhood. Hears about her first kiss near the back nine of the country club, helps heal the heartbreak with a week of mint chip double scoops he picks up on the way home from work. When he drops her off at college, he slides the edge of an American Express under the heirloom Emeralite lamp she plucked from his home office, says he’ll text her later that day. She studies botany, presses her cheeks against woodland mosses during field studies, mounts ferns onto large pages in the university herbarium late into the night, talks for hours with her father when he calls every Sunday. With a loan he never actually wants her to pay back, she opens a small flower shop in a trendy pocket of Knoxville, watches him hang the palm frond wallpaper and dig holes for young gingkos in the sidewalk planter and paint the potting bench Kermit green. Friday nights on her veranda she sips absinthe cocktails with friends in their own private l’heure verte where she tells them—every time—This was Van Gogh’s green muse before they talk about the virtue of being loved by so many, how it comes so easy. The business blooms and she can’t believe her luck at selling succulents and air plants to the Instagram masses, has a four-leaf clover etched onto her hip as Ink Street hums with a green krypton glow outside the picture window. She watches the needle drag across her skin and rests her hand above her still-taut belly as she watches, imagines the day her blue-eyed child will bounce on her father’s knee, wonders whatever happened to that girl that one Christmas, if she is happier now, happy like her.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THREE SELECTIONS FROM MORE ANIMIST BABBLE (A WIP) by Bram Riddlebarger

January 24, 2022 · Fiction

The Hornworm and the Green Tomato

The hornworm had eaten the better part of the upper reaches of the tomato plant.

The green tomato was petrified. It was already late in the season and now this.

“YOU BETTER NOT EAT ME,” screamed the green tomato as the hornworm cast glances its way.

“I’m so fucking horny,” said the hornworm. Its rear horn rigid.

“I’ll BE RED IN A FEW DAYS,” negotiated/bargained/pleaded the green tomato with a faint blush.

“You’ll be red-y now,” leered the worm. It ashed a cigarette as tobacco worms did. The cherry burned.

The hornworm bit deeply. The sexual juices of the green tomato grew into flight.

Fern

“Nobody loves me,” said the fern.

The water of the pond reflected a gray sky.

“I hate this fucking job,” said the fern.

The wind blew across the cubicle of the earth.

“There’s no future,” said the fern. “No hope for a better life.”

The western fires had all died.

But they would return.

“It’s cold out here. I’m freezing to death!” said the fern.

The sun set on the ridgeline.

“Even Job was better off than me,” said the fern. Its fronds covered its face.

The fern swayed as the cold settled in from on high.

“Boy, you sure are a sensitive fella aren’t you?” asked the sedge grasses grown brown and brittle. “What kinda fern are you anyway?”

The fern’s nose cleared with the change in season.

“A sensitive fern,” said the fern.

The sedge fashioned a casket for the fern.

The first frost set in.

The Bumblebee and the Stink Bug

for Graham

The bumblebee sat exhausted on the large green leaf of a delicata squash plant overtaking the beans. The bumblebee was covered head to toe in orange pollen. It had been up since 4am. It barely slept at all.

“Fucking shit,” the bumblebee cursed. It combed the pollen to fly.

A stink bug watched from the next row of beans.

“God, I’d murder someone to be carefree,” said the bumblebee taking longer than the regulated 15 minute break.

“That’s not pollen, baby,” said the stink bug. “It’s just my sexual juices.”

Crow Jonah Norlander

IS IT OK IF WE DISCUSS YOUR SISTER? by Mitchell Duran

January 21, 2022 · Fiction

On the day of her funeral, twisted roots and ashen rocks jutted from the edges of the concrete vault. I had never seen a grave before. I had never seen a casket. I had never seen Earth displaced with that kind care and disregard.

After carrying her, side by side with the family, our fingers stiff from the cold of morning, we placed her final bed on the mechanical lowering-device. A part of me wanted to do it myself. The impulse felt foreign, but close. A part of another part. After, I was told the help always did it, that we were allowed to carry her but not lower. I didn’t ask why.

All I remember is feeling ungrateful.

We stepped back onto the grass, wet from a light mist. Northern fog always rolled over the mountains at that time. Some of us went to stand underneath the provided tent. I stayed close, with the scattered leaves off the dry limbs of the trees spinning around my feet. In the distance, I saw a pile of dirt that would later be used to cover her forever—soon, the debris and rubble, the sticks, and stones would be as much a part of her as we once were.

And as old friends stood next to fresh wreaths and held burning candles near her waxy smiling portrait, I finally saw what everyone else saw, I finally felt what everyone else felt. Against my own will, I had become like them.

Where was she?

Why did she go?

Would she ever meet me on the other side of the river?

I was sitting in my parent’s Prius, the windows rolled up, when my cell phone rang. The shock of sound jolted me. For a second, total silence provided an inkling of peace. A seagull had shit on the corner of the windshield. I didn’t bother cleaning it up. I could barely put up a fight.

"Please grab flowers after you’re done with your appointment,” Mom said.

“Ok.”

“I don’t want to go to the store before we go tomorrow.”

Mom. She was crying. I looked at my eyes in the rear-view mirror. Nothing. Blank. Give her something bastard, I told myself. Nothing.

"Make sure about the flowers," Mom repeated. “Your clothes are ready in the laundry room too, for tomorrow. Remember the flowers, ok?”

Mom’s voice wavered the way sunlight does across moving water.

“Yes,” I said. “I got it.”

I hung up or she did.

It didn’t matter.

I slid my phone back into my pocket and opened the driver side door.

About a year after everything, I started seeing a psychiatrist about repetition. I’d deemed them ‘Psych’ for short. In the throes of death names no longer mattered. During our visits, Psych felt more like an entity than a person. People were fallible, vulnerable, and easily taken. Sometimes Psych was faceless, a blotch sitting in a chair asking me questions, trying to get answers out of me that I couldn’t give reason to. They consistently brought up the word “cycle”.

"Everything is repeated," I insisted.

"Life is a cycle," Psych disagreed. They did this to get me talking.

"Can cycles be identical?" I asked.

"Technically not. Some cycles are extremely similar, but no two cycles are exactly the same. Are two people's lives ever exactly the same?"

"I wouldn't know. I don't know that many people. Maybe."

"You’re seventeen. You know lots of people, like your friends and family.”

“They don’t count.”

Psych clicked their pen out and in, out and in. I hated that. It was a nervous habit that humanized them. I didn’t like that. It made me resent them, a trick forcing my mind to recognize their life. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to get that close.

"The word cycle is used by people too ignorant and afraid to use the word repetition,” I said. “They are scared of the truth that everything is repeated for the next generation, the next group, the next of the next of the next. We shift things around, give things to one another to tilt life to make it look different, but things remain the same. Everything contains the same primal function from the beginning of time, only now, there’s more distance due to our own creation out of fear. Music is still music, words are still words, paintings are still paintings, love is still love, and death is still death. These ‘differences’ in rituals are degrees of separation that end up confusing people and strays them from the truth. All this is going to end one day for them, completely out of their control, suddenly, whether they like it or not.”

Psych looked up from their pad of paper. It was the first time all day. I could see their annoyance from our lack of progress. Let them feel it. Their failure had nothing to do with me.

“Can I tell you something?” they asked.

“Aren’t you supposed to ask stuff?”

“Your mother informed me about your sister,” they said, ignoring my quip. “Which is why you are here Camden. Is it ok if I ask you some questions about her?"

I leaned forward on the couch with my hands clasped between my legs. There was a dot of sweat on their hairline. Again, I tried to ignore any physical reaction to the moment we were in, but it was hard, nearly impossible. On top of that, they saw that I was staring. Nonchalantly, they took out a thin white napkin, dabbed the sweat, then threw it away without a thought.

“Can I have some water?” I asked.

They motioned to the paper cups and pitcher beside me.

“So," Psych maintained, "would it be alright if we discussed your sister?”

The water, after I dumped it onto my head, as it ran through my hair, over my face, and onto my shirt, was colder than I expected. Psych’s eyes reminded me of what my Mom's eyes looked like at Ally’s funeral: defeated and bewildered. I remembered my father’s eyes: hate, anger, and the need to lash out at God but everyone knows that you can’t reach Him.

"Sure," I answered. "Let's talk about my sister."

The priest cleared his throat and squeezed the podium so I could see the whites of his knuckles before he began.

"To lose a child is the hardest trial a parent can be asked by God to endure. We are born, we are raised, and we live as well as we can until the Lord beckons us back to his kingdom."

The crowd was dressed in black. The long, wooden pews were worn and scratched. We sat inside a large stone church, still and quiet as the priest spoke. Before entering, I felt a light rain on my cheeks and forehead. Immediately, I imagined her, Ally, my baby sister, somewhere above us crying, wishing she could be there with us.

My seat was uncomfortable and tight. Mom and Dad were beside me, silent. Ever since the divorce, I hadn’t seen them sit so close together. Mom dabbed her handkerchief to her eye as she cried. Dad gripped his hands until they shook. Mine were flat in my lap.

"And when we are faced with such trials,” the priest continued, “we must go to God for guidance. Some may be reluctant to do so because of one's anger but, I ask you to remember, that anger and hatred were blessed to us by Him. Without God, we would have nothing.”

I hadn’t been allowed to see Ally's body yet. I looked up at the ceiling and imagined what Ally saw laying in the coffin, but realized her eyes were closed and would never open again. I felt so young, so stupid, and naïve. In a violent gust of wind that rattled the church doors, I could hear life laughing at me.

The priest paused and the immense silence that followed brought on a sensation to weep. It began in the middle of my chest, near my heart and lungs; a shaking panic. My throat tightened, my eyes watered, and my breath felt like it had been stripped from me. I couldn't breathe. Was I dying to keep Ally company, wherever she was? My throat released and the choking sobs brought on a fever of hysteria mixed with rage. The fact that life had forced this pain upon me was incomprehensible. I wanted it out of my mind. It felt like a bullet ricocheting around in my skull. Mom’s hand touched my shoulder, but there was no comfort in it, only a disdainful, broken acceptance. The helplessness curled up inside of me and did not release.

Outside, I heard a dog barking in the distance, angry at something.

Later, when this moment became a faded picture too hazy to be a memory but too real to be imagined, I would feel guilty about my lack of control. I’d recall the suddenness of that reaction, the crisp, sharp spontaneity of feeling that eternal sorrow for the very first time.

"Life does not give us any wishes," the priest said, "for we are the wishes of God. Only God can wish. We are his dreams. We must strive to make his glory a reality on this plane. Ally is with Him now and, if you have faith and believe in our Lord, then you are with him too.”

The priest looked down at our fractured family, his face solemn and heavy.

“If you are with Him and Ally is with Him then, in a way, you are together through His good graces. When you leave this holy place, walk with her in the afternoon. Walk with her in the light of the moon. Walk with her always. Let her never leave you.”

When we were asked to rise and say goodbye, I hesitated to look down at Ally’s body. Like a child, I was afraid. So, I stared at her tiny feet in shoes I didn’t recognize, then her stiff legs, her delicate hands in thin white gloves she would never wear if she were alive. When I got to her face, I didn’t recognize it. There was no blood in her cheeks, her lips. Her life had been taken somewhere else. Ally was no longer there. I understood then what people meant about our bodies being shells for who we really were. Everything was imagined. Built up over time. We were nothing but carriers of the effects of our experiences. Ally had been allowed so little.

As we carried her out of the church, down the stairs and over dry, fallen leaves that cracked and broke underneath our feet, the sun did not come through the thick clouds overhead like it did in the movies, signifying some new beginning.

It was plain: she was not there. She was gone. We were left without her. This was what life would be like now.

All of it.

After the funeral, after the wake, after everyone went home, I walked a small dirt path along a hiking trail close to Mom’s house. There was a little bridge we used to cross that Ally was afraid to walk over. It always bugged me the way she forced me to hold her hand. She feared how fast the river moved beneath us. I remember feeling embarrassed guiding her along, even though no one else was ever there. As I crossed the bridge, wanting nothing more than to help her again, I recalled walking along that same river, together.

“So, what are you learning in school?” Ally asked me.

I hesitated. “I don’t know. Sophomore year stuff?”

"I’m learning about geology." Ally paused. “Lots to do with rocks."

"Rocks?" I stammered, not remembering a time when I learned about rocks in school. “That’s kind of a dumb thing to be excited about.”

"I don't know," she grinned. "There are so many different kinds. They give you all these books and I read them all.”

Ally loved information in whatever form it took. Mom and Dad loved that about her. It seemed that her entire life was about acing tests, playing on the best sports teams, and surrounding herself with an endless number of friends. Her parent teacher conferences were like an award show. Her whole life seemed to be effortless. Nothing could hurt her.

Ally moved to the edge of the river and crouched to observe the rippling water.

“I can almost see myself in the water, Cam,” Ally said. “Like I’m looking in a mirror.”

The brown blackish surface was so smooth it looked like marble or the brass casing of a bullet. I couldn’t tell how fast the water was going. The rain hit hard that Fall. I’d never seen the river so deep that I couldn’t see the rocks at the bottom. Across from us was a large hill that escaped upward as if leading all the way to the light blue sky. There were no clouds, only bird’s wings spread gliding between the trees. Ally bent down, her bare knees in the dirt, and looked at her reflection in the water.

“Did you like it when Mom and Dad were together or not together?”

“Geez,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s different.”

“I wish I remembered more. I’m scared to talk to them about it. I feel like they’d get mad.”

“Why?”

“Maybe they’d think I was blaming them?”

“Have you thought about this a lot?”

“Haven’t you?”

I shrugged. “What can I do?”

“Nothing I guess.”

I had the impulse to comfort her but realized I didn’t know how.

Ally dipped her fingers in and fluttered them, creating tiny droplets in the air that quickly fell and dissolved. I stepped away, half to get some space from her and her question, half to walk further up the trail. I bent down to pick up a stick to fling into the brush, when I heard something fall into the river.

I turned to find Ally gone. I hadn’t been there. Ally, my sister, my sister, my little sister.

Tiny pebbles dug into my skin as I dove for the riverbank. Ally’s hand reached out and I managed to grab her before dipping back under. I pulled as I pushed myself back in the dirt, trying to be both strong and gentle as I got over the edge and dragged us away from the current. She was on her back, crying, soaked to the bone. I brought her up onto my chest and held her close to stop the shivering.

“It’s ok,” I tried to tell her. “I’m here. I’m sorry. I’m here. I’m here.”

I thought of that moment as I threw myself in at the same exact spot. My body, shocked by the cold, was immediately pulled under. I let it. This is what I deserve, I thought. This is my punishment. As my breath thinned, the current shifted downriver, sending me into a sandy embankment. The river spit me out like rotted meat. Who was I to decide what to do with my life? I managed to crawl onto the path with no one to keep me from shivering but myself. Up in the night sky, the stars were bright and far away.

"Jump!" I screamed at Ally. She was tip toeing on my favorite jumping rock, the one I always dove from whenever we visited the big river up north. “It’ll be fine!”

Dad took us up one weekend. Since he and Mom divorced, Dad needed company. They had been married since they were sixteen. I didn’t know what that was like. I could only see the effects: the absence at the dinner table, the nights of him coming home drunk, the breakfasts Ally or I would make for each other because he couldn’t get out of bed. The loss of love left Dad sick and neither of us knew how to make him feel better.

Ally shivering on top of the rock. In the water, my skin felt like it was in that mixed state of warm and numb, almost like my head was the only thing attached to my body. Everything from the rippling river to the cars careening on the road that day was moving to its own music.

"If you jump in," I said, holding myself still with the tips of my toes, “you won't be cold anymore. You gotta' jump in."

"I was freezing swimming over here! How do you know that?"

"Because I feel fine!" I yelled. "Look at me. I'm not shivering at all."

"You're lying again. I can tell!"

She stutter-stepped to the edge, looked over, shook her head, and backed away.

"The fall will only last a second and then you'll be in the water. I promise.”

"You promise?" Ally’s eyes were big and scared, but I knew she could do it.

"Promise," I said as I dove under the surface of the water, heading toward the rock. I heard a distant splash and knew Ally had finally jumped. I smiled, letting the river water run into my mouth and through my teeth. I kicked my legs and reached out my arms, propelling myself to the shore ahead.

Popping out of the water, I stopped and looked up into the forest. The road was twenty feet away from the river and I could hear cars and trucks rushing by. I listened to the river and felt the sun and saw the leaves rattling in the trees. I rushed up the slick surface of the dark green and black rock, gripping tight on the one hold there was, and pushed myself up with my legs. The floor was wet from Ally’s hesitation. I laughed and called out to her.

"You almost made a lake up here, Ally!" I shouted scanning the river.

I couldn’t see her. I looked on the other side of the bank. There were broken branches and debris. She wasn't where I had been swimming. I looked downriver, thinking maybe I’d see her bobbing along towards Dad. She wasn't there. I only saw the water, its tiny white ripples folding over one another, brown and dark blue, white rays of sunlight streaking over it. A slow tingle started around my temples and my eyes began to water. My hands started to shake, and my chest tightened. If I took a breath, if I did anything, my fear might become a reality.

"Ally," I yelled. “Ally! Where are you?"

I looked upriver, thinking maybe she had accidentally gone the wrong way. She was small. She was young. She didn't know left from right or down from up, why would she know which way to go? Maybe the river had taken her downstream and I couldn’t see her? She must have been so scared. I thought maybe she was playing a trick on me. I looked across the river into the brush to see if she was hiding behind a tree or down in the leaves. She wasn't there. She couldn't have gotten herself across the river that fast anyways. The tingling stopped, and breath burst back into my lungs. I looked downriver and saw nothing. I saw the bridge with its two large arches, the sun bright against the stone. I couldn't see Dad.

Where was Ally?

I dove into the river, scraping the tip of my nose along the rocks. Why was the water suddenly so shallow? It hadn’t been when I had jumped in feet first. Had I convinced myself it was deep to get Ally to jump? I felt stones and sand mix together and the grittiness rub against my skin as I thrashed around, spinning in circles, trying to see everywhere at once. The birds that had been flying from branch to branch had stopped. A wind blew over the river, stinging my eyes. I watched small, inch high ripples begin, peak, and melt.

Then, I saw her face down, silhouetted against the light blue water.

I swam as hard as I could, my skin no longer numb but burning.

When I reached her, I turned her over, held her body in my arms, looked at her smooth, small face, and knew she was dead.

I held a tiny Dixie cup of water in my hand. Psych had moved the pitcher of water and a stack of five or six cups on the coffee table next to them.

"Camden, how are you feeling after last week?" Psych asked.

"Refreshed," I said.

"Do you feel you've made any progress with what you're able to share?”

I took a sip of my water and looked out the window, noticing the cars on the road. Trees stood unwavering and naked. If I had turned around when I got out of the water rather than stopping to look up into that stupid forest and listen to those stupid trucks rushing past, I might have been able to save her. The nibbled edge of the cup I chewed on fell away from my lips and rested on my knee. It wouldn't have made a lick of a difference anyway. She was dead when I got to her. I couldn’t have done anything.

"She broke her neck," I said.

The words mirrored the cold reality I felt but had yet to articulate. I had no idea if the truth should have given me some kind of catharsis. All I could do was continue.

"She dove in head first because I told her it was deep enough for any kind of jump. She was young. I was trying to get her to come with me. We..." I stammered, feeling that same choke I felt when I couldn't find her. I looked out the window again. A woman glided along the sidewalk with her dog.

Psych nodded.

"And, I had her little body in my arms and her eyes were open, and she was looking at me, not breathing or anything, but staring up at me blankly, unable to say or show me anything. I couldn't help her. She was gone and the river was pushing me because my legs had started to shake and my arms…I’d grown so weak all of a sudden. Maybe it was from being in the water for so long, but I couldn't hold her up, so I let the river take some of her, her weight, I mean. I let the river take us both down the small rapids where the trout would rest in the shallow pools, where the sun would shine all day, making the water warm. I never figured out why the trout would sit in that specific spot like that, but now I see they must like it there because of the heat. It's funny, because I always thought fish were such cold things and I only figured it out because as we floated down and passed through that warm spot it wasn't warm, it was hot, like boiled water. It surprised me. Then, I remembered Ally couldn't feel anything that I was feeling. She would never be able to feel anything ever again. Maybe in another way, in a way that no living person knows how, but the way we felt things…that was finished for her.”

Psych put their pad of paper and pen down.

"You must understand Camden, Ally's death was an accident. There was nothing you could have done about it. Some people, people you will perhaps talk with later in life, may call it an act of God or a freak accident or other things, but these labels are only there to make you feel better about what happened or give it reason."

I said nothing.

"It’s a very hard thing to understand and live with Camden, things happening without reason. It’s extremely close to the idea of chaos. If there is no reason for the death of someone you love, then how can you live day-to-day and not go crazy?”

"I don't know.”

"You are innocent,” Psych told me. “Know that.”

I shifted and turned to the pitcher of water and poured myself another glass.

"How do you see yourself dealing with this event over the next four or five years? I imagine you are going to college soon. How do you think you will handle it there?"

"How will I handle it?" An image of Ally reading her science books at her desk with only her overhead lamplight flashed across my mind. All was quiet around her.

"Yes," Psych said.

"Miss her. Think of her. See her in anything I think is beautiful. Know that she is gone and accept it in a sort of melancholy fact of life that everyone you know, and love, will one day have to be buried. Some later, some sooner. Some now, some hundreds of years from now. Always remembering that she had more time than others and that I am grateful for the time that I had with her. Live for her. Love for her. Grow and feel everything doubly as much because she never had the chance. Never let her go. Keep her picture by my bed. Let her walk with me when I walk alone.” I exhaled. “That maybe one day I'll see her on the other side of the river and have the courage to go to her, take her hand, and walk with her.”

"I think that is a very good start, Camden."

“Yeah,” I sighed, rubbing the sting out my eyes. “It’s something.”

One night, I had a dream. I was alone walking along a river’s edge. Tiny pebbles and sand fell into the water as I walked on loose dirt. How I had come to be there, I didn't know. I realized it was the same river Ally had fallen into, the one I threw myself in, the one who denied me.

The air was still and cold, with my breath visible moving through the still scene. I came to a junction that led to a hill where the path crested and then descended, a path I had been up and over many times, but in the dream I couldn’t remember what lay past it. Two large redwood trees stood on either side of the hill’s arch, seeming to grow right up into the sky. I went to walk toward the hill, but then heard Ally's voice behind me.

"I want to go home.”

I turned to face her. She looked the same: small, with her brown hair to her shoulders; her almond eyes reflecting the sun; those tiny lips that barely parted when she spoke. She was at least ten feet away from me, but I could still smell the lemon sun-tan lotion Mom would put on her whenever we would go out walking. I felt so grateful and full of love. I begged my mind to accept this was real, fearing the acknowledgement I was in a dream would force me to wake up.

I stopped and looked into her eyes. They were wet, on the verge of crying. There was nothing I could do.

We walked up the hill and down into a valley. Thin scattered trees stretched up into the sky, standing like toothpicks, swaying back and forth. No sunlight broke through their leaves—

it was like we’d walked into a room with the light switched off. We reached another river. Ally went ahead and dipped the tip of her pointer finger into the water and whirled it around. I was coming up behind her when she told me she couldn't see her reflection. I looked over her shoulder and couldn't see mine either.

I stepped back as Ally stood and turned to me. Her face was so clear. She smiled. The sound of the river trickled behind her and the sun shining down through the leaves of the trees cast her in an impenetrable white light. I lost sight of her like I had at the river. Out of that same panic, I reached for her, desperately wanting to feel her tiny hand in mine, but the light dimmed. The sound of the current lessened, the sun grew fainter, and the ground that had been moist and loose became hard and brittle.

Ally was gone.

I was by myself again.

When I woke, my hands were clenched so tight it took a few minutes before my fingers relaxed. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and looked across the hall into Ally's old room, feeling that same choke in the center of my chest. I thought I saw an outline of her hunched over her desk, a pencil in-between her fingers. I blinked and it became what it really was: a desk with an empty chair. The tightness in my chest relaxed.

“You still dream of her,” I told myself. “She's still there.”

I got up and looked out my window. It was a new day. Ally was with me and far away. She was always like that - close but distant. That was our kind of love.

The thin river behind our house moved slowly over the stones, down the tiny waterfall, and into the drainpipe that led to the hiking path. I listened to the crows chattering. There was a gang of them perched in the trees. Their jet-black feathers clashed with the light blue sky and olive-green leaves. They showed up en masse whenever the bugs were buzzing around. Ally always hated those crows.

Crow Jonah Norlander

COURT MANDATED THERAPY by Sage Tyrtle

January 19, 2022 · Fiction

Bill is not having flashbacks to Vietnam. Even though the shiny-haired psychiatrist says there's no doubt at all, even though the list of symptoms looks like his autobiography. Bill sits on the burnt orange couch. He looks at the palm frond wallpaper. He says in his most even tone, "No, I believe you're mistaken," and he's being careful because if the psychiatrist decides that he's a danger to himself or others then he could end up a Thorazine zombie like Harry Alessi up at the sanitarium. Bill clears his throat and makes himself look into the psychiatrist's eyes. Makes himself say, "But let's explore it further."

Bill is not having flashbacks to Vietnam. Yesterday, when Bill was kneeling on the floor at the local Goodwill, keening, he wasn't hearing gunfire. He couldn't feel socks that had been wet for so long they were disintegrating. His hands weren't dripping in blood. Bill didn't feel the horror the psychiatrist is telling him he felt, and avoiding places that remind him of the war won't help. When Bill was on the floor, shaking his head in response to the Goodwill manager who was pleading with him to leave, he was holding a Holly Hobby doll.

Bill is not having flashbacks to Vietnam. Yesterday, curled into a ball on the floor in the Goodwill, he was also in 1971, he was also back at the house in Munroe Falls. He was ripping his draft notice into a hundred pieces and flushing those pieces down the toilet. He was stuffing clothes into a duffel bag. He was emptying the Green Giant Frozen Peas box of his mother's pin money with a muttered apology. He was walking backwards on the highway, sticking out his thumb, muttering, "North, just north," to the drivers. He was thinking of his Canadian wife who bounced out of bed at 5 AM, who made up silly songs whenever she saw a bumblebee, who never existed. The tiny apartment they never shared in Montreal and their imaginary little girl named Judy. Who pointed at the picture in the book he was reading and said, "I am Sylvester and you are the Magic Pebble, okay?" He is mourning his nineteen-year-old self, his gentleness in the years before he reported for duty, Sir.

Bill is not having flashbacks to Vietnam. But he nods and nods and tries to remember how to grin in a way that is convincing. He shakes the psychiatrist's hand and promises to fill that prescription, doctor, and when he makes it outside he sits on a park bench where a pigeon flies over and looks up at him with bright eyes. He rips the prescription into a hundred pieces. He lets the wind take them.

Crow Jonah Norlander

‘BLUE BANJO: THE HIRAM SADLER STORY’ DELETED INTERVIEWS by Bodie Fox

January 17, 2022 · Fiction

HAZEL COX (Hiram’s first wife): I was pregnant with our first the night he played the Russian Roulette. We was in a dive bar after a show in Lubbock, Texas—I’ll never forget the place, neither, ’cause it had a sawdust floor and the piano played itself. He was drunk, of course. Except for that first year we knew each other—from the day he walked into my music store to the night of our wedding—he always had something to sip on, whether it was a bottle of rye or a bit of sippin’ cream.

He lost. But, in a way, he won. He survived. The bullet was only a .22. It went under his skin, ricocheted off his temple, bounced up and around his skull, and tore out behind his right ear.

HANK SADLER (Hiram’s oldest son): Yeah, Pa fought in the World War, the second one, even survived the Battle of the Bulge with nothing more than frostbite in his picking hand, which the docs had to cut out. They took his pointer and bird fingers. Still got em, though. Shoot, ask him about it next time y’all bunch head out to his house. Keeps ‘em up there on the mantle in a TOPS Sweet Snuff tin, all blackened and wrapped in frayed tissue. Likes to take ‘em down anytime he got company over.

“SWEET TOOTH” (convenience store clerk in town where Hiram resides): I coulda done told youins how the ole boy got the Cancer in his throat. After all the business up at the Ryman, after they’d done blackballed him over the lawnmower, he stayed in town more and he drove down here every day for two packs of Winstons. Rain, snow, sleet, hail, he’s here. About twice a week, when I’m just about to leave for home to take my supper, he comes back in, stands on them tiles—those two sticky ones there—and gets him anotheren.

PARSON LYMON (preacher at Hiram’s church home): It’s always a good Sunday to see Hiram strut through those back doors, under the brick arch. Although, he’s late every single Sunday. I can’t recall a time he ever arrived before the hymn that leads into my sermon. We tried to work it out to where he could play backup banjo to the piano sometimes, something to encourage him to come early, but it never worked out.

HARRIET SADLER (Hiram’s eighth daughter): It’s not like he was around anyways, but, yeah, Mom—that’s Erin Massey, his third, dead now—left him. He came in roaring drunk one night and threw turtle stew at me for smarting off, something about how fat he’d got. Luckily he missed, and it splattered on the dresser that Mom kept in the dining room. What they had left, which isn’t much, was over after that.

PARSON LYMON: Rambling man as he was, he always seemed to stay married. I officiated all seven of his weddings, but I think Hiram only counted six. He had one annulled on the grounds of incapacity. However, that argument could probably be made for all his marriages, except the one with Hazel; I know without a doubt that he was sober for the year before they tied the knot.

HUNTER SADLER (Hiram’s fifth son): If I ever wanted to see him, had to go to his shows.

LEE SHARR (former friend of Hiram’s) After that whole mess with the lawnmower on the Ryman stage, he was bored and sitting around with me in the carport most days, chain smoking Winstons, taking pulls off my rye. That’s when I suggested we should make Brunswick stew, give us something to keep busy. That’s the shit that he later jarred, labeled and sold as “Brunswick Blue.” Stole my recipe, the bastard.

HAZEL COX: He won’t admit it to you, but there wouldn’t be no Hiram Sadler without me. Sure, he was good, but he was in a bad place when we met. After they cut off his picking fingers, he about drank himself to death and it didn’t stop until the day he came into my music store, where I showed him a left-handed banjo, the one he bought, the one that made him who he was, the one with the blued head on it. He won’t tell you that I was the one who taught him to play again, play left-handed. He never even told them kids how it happened. Told ‘em that he taught himself to play over again. Bet he said the same thing to y’all folks.

CLAIRE SADLER (Hiram’s second daughter): All of us kids seemed to get different Hirams. A few, like Hank and maybe Steff, say that he was good to them, and I think he tried with me, at least when I was young, but I wish he hadn’t.

There was this one time: my school had a Career Day and I’d begged and begged him to come. I mean, what kid wouldn’t? He was Hiram Sadler, the living Bluegrass legend. When it was my turn, he wasn’t there and I did all I could to not cry in front of everyone.

He was two hours late, but he came, smelling like rye. Mrs. Dubbie only let him talk because she felt bad for me. Didn’t bring no banjo. Didn’t bring no finger picks. Came dressed in his old fatigues and passed around his TOPS Sweet Snuff tin for all the kids to see.

Crow Jonah Norlander

MOVEMENT STUDY by Amelia C. Winter

January 14, 2022 · Fiction

The only way they had was their nakedness. This and this alone delivered them through the many corridors of their pursuit: their innumerable stations of falling over and springing upright.

Their eyes, their pupils, were open, bright, darting: brilliantly black-on-white. They were silent—mutists—but too antic for the soliloquy over the straitjacket. They were turned out of the asylums as quick as they were caught, hopped then over hedges and fences, scattering the hills.

The realm of objects at all times tried to court them; its advances went unrequited. (That is what a prop is, said Marx: a thing that tries to dominate you and fails.) They were slippery as fish, and in time they were common as pigeons, though they never scavenged or roosted or even seemed to perch, and certainly they did not breed.

Some were captured on motion picture cameras—but very few, and only by desperate pursuit. Stories were fitted to this footage at great cost. The dramatic scenes were done by costumed doppelgangers, all of whom later sat abed and drank, copiously—copiously.

When I say that they were naked, I mean that they were clothed, relentlessly and essentially clothed, even the tops of their heads covered with an inalienable hat.

When I say that they were naked, I mean that some of those who saw them also studied them, wrote of them, but one would then be found giving suck to a piglet or taking a wife in legal ceremony and the arguments would fall apart. Even the poems of praise were outdated in weeks.

When I do say that they were naked, I mean that they lacked the impression of weight and volume; one could chase them up, reach out and palpate their necks and yet feel no surer of them as things of real duration.

But their real duration was discovered at last when they vanished. They came all at once, and they went all at once. It seemed they were to be nobody’s sport.

And then:

A man ran for a train and caught it.

A man came into a secret and never told it.

A man kissed another man on the mouth and got the hell slapped out of him. (He never lost his hat.)

A man drove to the detention centre and detonated his bomb, then fled across a heat camera that tracked him. The heat camera tracked him live to a bog into which he waded out, in which he submerged himself, until his signature died. He was never caught. On the shore, by a tree, he left a ratty tramp’s coat.

These were tributes.

Myself: I have spoken to nobody friendly in months. I eat tuna-on-toast in my little brown garret and attempt to write. I spend my evenings laid up in bed, cold-calling people by voice-over-IP, trying to sell them insurance.

When I go running—always by night—I imagine that I’m Eadweard Muybridge, of chronophotography fame, having just killed my wife’s lover. Muybridge was acquitted for that in 1875, but I live in a different time.

When I think, as I run, of my wife’s dead lover—of my finger depressing the gun’s trigger, the bullet piercing his heart, of how he staggered backward into his bookshelf and conducted all his books, knick-knacks, and tchotchkes down onto the floor, on top of him—I know I’ll need to spend my life on the run—running in place against a black background—each minute movement an exquisitely-lit anatomy—a stationary plate of black-and-white impressions.

This, too, I tell myself, is a variety of escape. Just narrowly.

Crow Jonah Norlander

GREAT BLOOD by Zee Carlstrom

January 12, 2022 · Fiction

Every day, during his half-hour lunch break, Horace Median Dahl strolls along the ornamental concrete pathway that cuts through the center of Grace Hill Cemetery. During this restive walk, he eats his usual brown-bag lunch: a snack-sized sack of Doritos and a chicken and cheddar sandwich with BBQ sauce, the way his mama always makes it.

Today, however, Horace strays from the ornamental concrete path and tosses his mama’s lunch into the garbage. Unencumbered by tradition, he strides down a weedy gravel walkway that takes him into a dark corner of the cemetery, devouring a tilapia salad sandwich and a can of ranch-flavored Pringles he purchased from a deli.

He does this, makes these changes, because other things in his life need to change—bigger things than chips or lunchtime walking routes—and Horace believes he can start small and work his way large, hoping decisions are like atomic particles, minuscule molecules that, when combined, create universal shifts. The kinds of shifts that move a thirty-seven-year-old warehouse manager out of his mama’s spare bedroom and into the warm embraces of greater hopes and truer lovers, lovers of a sexual variety, with fascinating private organs and lips that taste, he imagines, nothing like BBQ sauce.

The gravel path crunches beneath his Asics, a comforting sound as he meanders past the crumbling graves, far older and poorer than the grand monuments lining the central pathway. Beneath the yellowing oaks and orangish maples, he pops his Pringles’ top and inhales the new-can smell. Intoxicating and vaguely alluring.

High on ranch-flavored dust and the potentiality of his future, Horace strolls toward a statue—a fat angel with a wreath of dead flowers on its head. Chuckling, he stops and observes the angel, which seems to stare into the place where Horace keeps his secrets. Then, he hears a lustful voice behind him.

“Hey there, big fella.”

Startled, Horace wheels toward the voice. There, on the other side of the path, he finds a middle-aged woman wearing a red-white-and-blue bikini. She’s seated on a gravestone with her arms resting on her knees, her head cocked, and her lips set with a curious smile.

“I assume you’re here cuz of my Craigslist advertisement,” the woman continues. “And if not, then I’m wonderin’ if you’d like to be my baby’s daddy.”

Horace nearly drops his chips but holds fast to the can. He studies the woman. She is not particularly attractive, but still out of the league he has come to accept as his own. Flesh bunches around the edges of her patriotic bikini, and her nose is the size and shape of a parrot’s. And yet, regardless of these and other shortcomings, Horace is drawn to the woman’s countless folds and ripples, and the question of fatherhood echoes in the meager vaults of his masculine mind.

The woman sighs. “Judgin’ by your obvious surprise, I’m gonna take it you haven’t read my Craigslist post. If that’s the deal, please lemme explain—”

She does explain, and Horace listens, nodding and smiling while the woman makes jokes about her father’s death, his kooky last request, his alarming insistence that she preserve their ancient bloodline, their ancestral greatness, the Knights Templar and the Freemasons, Benjamin Franklin and Joan of Arc. She says her first name is Guinevere, her last name is Magdalene, and her father specifically requested she breed a heroic descendant on his grave, taking as her mate an average stranger with poor eyesight and questionable prospects.

“I know it all sounds a little nutty,” Guinevere continues. “But your glasses are pretty thick, and your shirt’s too large, so I’m assumin’ you meet my daddy’s requirements.”

Horace stress-chews a mouthful of Pringles and swallows with difficulty. “I do.”

“Super.” Guinevere smiles—warm yellow teeth—and unties the strings binding her bikini bottom. With a flick of her wrist, she exposes herself.

Mortified, Horace averts his gaze, turning back to the fat angel with the dead flowers on its head.

“Oh my God,” he mutters. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”

“Relax.” The woman lays back on the grave and stares at the sky. “You got this.”

Horace shifts on his feet. He looks up and down the gravel path. Surely, there are hidden cameras in the bushes. Surely, this is not happening to him in real life. But then, it must be. He’s never had a dream before, not even during the day, and this is all too imperfect for fantasy. Too impossible.

“What are you waitin’ for?” murmurs Guinevere. “I’m offerin’ you everything.”

“I’m coming,” Horace whispers, stumbling forward, unzipping his khakis with his non-Pringles hand and wondering what mama would think if she knew he threw away her sandwich, her chips, her kindness.

“There ya go,” Guinevere coos as Horace climbs onto her body. “It’s only weird if we think about it.”

Horace clears his throat and avoids his thoughts. He drops the Pringles can into the grass. He does his best. Long seconds pass, and he tries to breathe through his nose, sparing Guinevere his fish-tinged breath. He moves like the men he’s seen in the videos. He moves like a man worthy of responsibility. He moves like a hero with a future, a house of his own, a life worth living. He grunts and struggles, and Guinevere sniffs and coughs.

“This don’t mean nothin’,” she mutters. “This ain’t for you or me.”

“I know,” Horace gasps, willing his body to cooperate, envisioning his eventual child. A genius, perhaps. A titan of industry. An eminent world leader who will forget his father entirely the way Horace has long tried to forget his own.

“Oh God,” Horace hisses. “Oh God, help us all.”

“Why you cryin’?” Guinevere asks, tenderly, but it’s too late. Lunch break is over. The Pringles are finished. Horace can already feel himself deflating, the great urge dying, the chance passing like time.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THE SHAPELESS by Gregory T. Janetka

January 10, 2022 · Fiction

When they told her how the body had been found thirty feet from the road by prisoners who were scouring the gutter for trash, the only thing she could think to ask was if there was any way to save his sperm. The police did their best to express their regret in broken English but she didn't hear a word, lost as she was in the minute details of DNA harvesting. Months had passed since then, or was it years? Maybe it was yesterday, who could tell? His body's blueprint might be gone from this earth but in its absence came flashes of body parts throughout the apartment: a forearm in the refrigerator, a jaw bone on the nightstand, a left leg—no longer able to support its own weight—crumpled up on the closet floor.

Neither had wanted a baby but the dream of reanimation, of scraping blood from the overgrown grass where he fell, only grew stronger. This life—escaping their country, building something new, traveling unsettled and joyful, burning bright and leaving their bloodlines to die—it was all they ever wanted. Their plans, never codified beyond such romantic ideals, were filled in as the need arose. When there was nowhere to live they bartered for an apartment, when they ran out of money they took the first jobs they were qualified for—he as a courier, her an English teacher. He enjoyed learning the city and surrounding towns on his bike, but hers was a hollow means to a paycheck. None of her coworkers had any higher ambition, any dream, any reason to live here other than survival. But to be fair, inspiration was a useless quality when students wanted nothing beyond a basic proficiency in the language that had come to dominate their own.

“Donorcycle.”

That's what the nurses called it, at least until they learned she was an American. After that, they didn't speak at all.

"Another donorcycle accident..."

She looked up the phrase. It wasn't a mistranslation but slang, a term to denote the propensity of healthy young men with healthy young organs to die riding motorcycles. It was a phrase accompanied by an eye roll that easily wrote off his entire life.

News of his death brought no word from home.

Home.

It was as silly a term as donorcycle. Home was where she came from, where she'd been stuck, like a bus terminal. With nowhere else to go she remained in the one-bedroom apartment, unsure where she'd find the next index finger, shoulder, or vertebrae, while his scent grew weaker and weaker.

Drowning out the silent apartment with an indecipherable TV soap opera, she lit the stove, put oil in the pan, and dropped in a dozen shishito peppers. It was the last thing she expected to find in a market in the Madrid countryside. One in ten was hot, they said, like Russian roulette.

Tossing the plastic bag into the trash she watched it fall on a fresh, pink human kidney that sat precariously atop a pile of torn junk mail and broken egg shells. Thinking nothing of it, she closed the lid as the doorbell rang. Every knock, every noise might be him—they never did let her see the body—but would he appear standing tall, his 6′ 3″ frame looming over her with the comfort and safety it brought? Or would it be the pile of mannequin parts that were left by the roadside?

At the door was neither, but rather a perfect circle that looked as if it were cut out of wax paper, hovering in midair. It moved forward with no deliberate speed, disappearing when it came into contact with her chest. As it hit, she felt the coarse sand of the Jersey shore beneath her toes, smelled the nitrite-rich, overcooked hot dogs of the boardwalk. Nothing else appeared and she closed the door.

The peppers popped and screamed, filling the place with choking black smoke. She removed the pan, turned off the gas, and threw open the small window high above the couch. Despite being hundreds of miles inland, salt air roared into the room. The sand beneath her feet shuddered at the taste and turned to mud, bringing with it the smell of fresh tar baking in suburban sunlight. She fell to the ground and rolled in the substance like a happy baby pig, unaware of its future. As the brown-black mess seeped into her skin she thrashed about, searching the muck for hidden body parts as if on a game show. Finding none, she fell onto her back, exhausted, and listened as the sound of crashing waves filled her ears. A rectangular column of water squeezed through the window like Playdoh, hung suspended for a moment, then rained down. It stank of dead fish and tasted like iced tea. Her belly full, she extracted herself and closed the window.

She stirred the peppers and watched the legs of oil skirt the edges of the pan. Grabbing one by the stem she bit down and her mouth swelled with heat and spice. When her throat hollered for relief she grabbed a second pepper. One by one she made quick work of the dozen, every one hotter than the last. Sweat poured from her forehead, armpits, and under her breasts.

The heat subsided, the smoke dissipated, and the water dried. Seated at the desk she stared past the blank computer screen to the space where a nothingness planted and grew fruit, colorless, tasteless and unsatisfying. She took out her phone and dialed his number—still disconnected. It would be reassigned one day. Feeling her belly, she dialed another number and walked outside. The stars, filled with lightning, pulsed as if in a power surge.

"Hello?"

"Hi mom."

"Dena. What is it?"

"Mom...I'm pregnant."

"Pregnant? What do you mean pregnant? Who could possibly be the father?"

"Everyone. Everyone in the whole world. Everyone who ever was and ever will be. Isn't it grand?"

Before her mother could answer she threw the phone to the sky. As it climbed and climbed she felt her belly again and watched as the phone joined the stars.

Crow Jonah Norlander

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