X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

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

CALCULUS by Calvin Westra

January 5, 2022 · Fiction

Last to first, his girlfriend dumped him, he did not get the job, his accent sailed out the window of my car, and he sneezed harder than I’d ever seen before.

It was an incredible sneeze, the kind that has you spitting and slobbering over the windshield, catching your breath, feeling like something knocked the wind out of you.

We watched as the accent flapped over the median, through oncoming traffic, and off among the tumbleweeds.

I said, “Is that what I think it is?”

And he said, “Yeah, that’s right. My accent.”

It was a horrible accent and I’d never before heard him speak without it. It was like he was trying to imitate some British politician or celebrity or it was like he was trying to imitate someone who imitated a British politician or celebrity.

If he got too excited it went all over the place. He’d be telling a joke and out of nowhere he was John Cleese on research chemicals.

But I had never heard him speak without it so I had kind of thought it was real.

We pulled to the shoulder and searched for the accent but it was a windy day and it was clearly not coming back.

“That accent is long gone, bro,” I said and he told me he couldn’t do the job interview without it.

I told him the airport Starbucks probably would not care if he didn’t have an accent. I told him he might even be better off without it.

I didn’t have to tell him how important getting this job was because, like me, he had been wiping his ass with old magazine pages for weeks. But I told him anyway and I reminded him that earning a paycheck would mean returning to the world of luxury, of on-demand toilet paper.

He had gotten up early that morning, before the sun had dragged itself out, and he had been slamming all of our vodka and referring to it as “morning vodka.”

He had also smoked the last of our weed, taking massive hits out of the ice cream maker he had fashioned into a bong.

On top of that, we had pooled all of our change and used it to buy almost a gallon of gas.

And here we were, on the side of the highway, considering turning back.

He somehow knew he wouldn’t get the job but I didn’t believe him so I drove him to the interview anyway.

He was right, he didn’t get the job. He swore to me his whole life was over now, without the accent.

Next his girlfriend dumped him.

She called him mid afternoon the next day and told him she wanted to take a break. The last few times she had been at our apartment she had complained about things like how we didn’t have toilet paper or that he smelled pretty bad and wouldn’t ever shower, even when she hinted at it politely. He smelled like old socks (her words), ground beef (my words), and weed (objective).

“It’s the accent,” he told me. His eyes were huge and wet and red. He stared a thousand miles into the future and explained to me that without the accent all he would ever be to people was his stutter, his GED, his greasy hair, his inability to read social nuances, and so on.

He told me that I could not fathom all the things he knew about Calculus, while I sat at the desk we shared, trying to fill out my own job applications.

Hand to God, brother, I know unfa-fa-fathomable things, is exactly what he said and how he said it.

He had this job application on the desk and it had little boxes for your education: where you went, the years you went there, your graduation date, and your major. In hard to read cursive he had written his high school major as Calculus.

In reality, he never finished high school. He had dropped out because “it was just fights and bullshit.” If you didn’t want to eat shit every day you got your GED and that’s what he did.

Since I had first moved in with him, he had spent every afternoon scaring up weed at the park.

It took him all day but he could show up with whatever change he found in the couch cushions and hustle people for stems and seeds, for residue, for whatever. He would huddle over park benches and playground equipment waiting for people to pass him by. As soon as someone neared him a disconnected sentence would shoot from his mouth and straight into the mind of the person.

He could say anything he wanted. He didn’t even know what he was saying. But words slipped past his crooked and broken teeth and fluttered on the breeze, gently rocking and waving through the air until they found the right angle to slip into some bystander’s brain.

And what do you know, sure enough, that person had come to the park specifically to buy whatever stems and bullshit he was trying to sell for ten dollars or they had crossed town specifically to sell him whatever random shit weed excess they might have in a baggy somewhere on their person, for whatever change he was offering.

People served him for whatever pennies and nickels he was holding in his outstretched hand. People bought whatever weed-adjacent garbage he was offering at whatever price he named. He could talk the sun into orbiting the earth, so long as he didn’t think about it too much.

Back at the apartment, we smoked whatever he had scavenged. His fingers always spilling out of his hoodie holding “one last roach” that formed from the dust in his pockets.

“You can’t even fathom all the things I know about Calculus,” he says. He holds accumulated quantities. We smoke the weed his patience buys.

First to last, he explains to me he needs to get his accent back and then he’ll get a job and then he’ll win over his now ex-girlfriend.

He calls her, briefly manic, to tell her how he is going to track the accent down, somehow inhale it back into his being. But she never returns the calls.

He turns depressive, withdraws, sits quietly with the ice cream maker in his lap, inhaling forever and then trying to talk to me about the accent with a lung and a half of smoke tumbling out as he does.

He draws imperceptible lines between how hard he sneezed and the way the hiring manager fixated on his GED. He stuttered too much, he admits, but only because he was nervous, only because he couldn’t stop thinking about his accent jerking around in the breeze like an abandoned bag, like a helium balloon wrestled free of a toddler’s grip.

He explains scientifically how all this bullshit is because of the accent or its absence and if I have questions, he says he isn’t explaining it well, the words just aren’t there. But there is truth, he promises me, to what he is saying.

It’s the accent’s fault or the mad winds that propelled its send off.

Those mad winds or the gods who sent them.

Those gods or maybe us, the bastards who named the gods. If he doesn’t think too hard while he explains, it makes a sense too perfect for me to even write.

Crow Jonah Norlander

STORYTIME by Robyn Blocker

December 31, 2021 · Fiction

What’s up, beautiful people?

So y’all know how when you type the first couple letters of an email address and a list of contacts pops up—all the ones that start with that letter?

Like, imagine it’s “D” for Dave, the guy you’re hooking up with. Not Hot Dave with the boat or Quik Lube Dave with the ink, but the Dave whose brother OD’d back in ’99 at the rock pit behind the Big House. Right, Sad Dave. The Dave you send naked pictures to as an inside-joke cue that you want to buy from him. (Rumor alert! It was Pollie Carsen that gave Sad Dave’s brother that heroin!)

Tonight you’re on the edge. You’ve deprived yourself of spontaneous self-destruction for eighty-nine days and can’t take another minute of good choices that only feel good because they’re hard. You ache to raise hell you’re too old for: to bust windows and noses, floor pedals, run reds, blaze bowls, break hearts, tag bridges and burn them and screw in the ashes.

You’re gonna send Sad Dave some spank bank selfies, so you type “D,” but here’s what happens: since you’re always trying to do ten tasks at once to keep your mind off wonderful things that’ll kill you, you somehow get the cursor positioned one contact name below Dave’s, on the email of your daughter, the YouTube influencer who’s gotten big telling stories about her life, her day, her peeps, her fam, her world, and the social injustices in it. People love her for her self-awareness, her willingness to own her flaws, her unending desire to do the painful dirty work of fixing them.

Like Dave, her name starts with D. You were seventeen, still a silly romantic, when you had D’Laynie, and you wanted all your future kids to be D’s just like their daddy. He was not named Dave, but you’ve forbidden yourself from speaking his name ‘cause it’ll make you think of him, and that’ll make you cry. (Rumor alert! Pollie Carsen gave D-Boy herpes and smoked his first two child support checks before he died in a 4-car pileup on I-35!)

You think, Hoooo girl, do NOT send those pics to D’Laynie. Think she hates you now? Just wait. You start to fix your error, to click UP back to Dave’s name. But of all the bad choices you could make right now, he’s the familiar one. What you want is to shut your eyes, squeeze your nose, and cannonball down into a moment whose depth you cannot gauge from this height.

You close your eyes and click a name. Open eyes, but don’t look at who’s getting the pictures. Just SEND.

You’ve maybe just bashed your life out on a new kind of rock bottom, and you feel more alive than you have in months. You sit back, take a selfie, delete it. Habit. (Your grandma Belle-Ruth always asks, “Who you trying to erase, girl?”) Finish your Diet Coke, gargle, go to bed. And before sleep comes, think, There’s 90 days clean again, Pollie Carsen. Aren’t you getting tired of starting over?

Late morning. Wake up. Shit’s hit the fan. Four missed calls from Belle-Ruth. One voicemail. She says, “Pollie, honey, did you… say… something to D’Laynie? She’s gone and made a…You know what? Just come over.”

Heart pounding, you check your inbox. Nothing. For one moment, you think the pics went to Sad Dave after all. You check your Sent mail. Wrong. She got them.

You go to D’Laynie’s YouTube page. She has 100K subscribers and a new profile pic, a dramatic ¾ silhouette of herself on the balcony of the Austin apartment she shares with two friends. Looking good: sunlight glowing on honey-golden skin. Tall and twiggy. Red lips, teeth perfect. Cold-shoulder white blouse and huge, yellow-mirrored shades. Great hair. His hair, his general look. No shit. As if your radioactive redheadedness could have elbowed its way past D-Boy’s black curls. Recessive genes, you think. Recessive. Recede. Back away. Back away from your baby in every way and stay far, far away.

What happened was this: you fucked up bigly. Hid meth in her diapers, left her alone while you partied. Shit like that.

When your mom adopted her and kicked you out, you went on a grand couch-surfing tour of all the drug dens in the county. At some point, you realized, Shit, this is bad! Got clean. Moved in with your grandma Belle-Ruth out in the sticks. Realized, Shit, I’m a mother! Presented sober self to mom and begged to see D’Laynie. Got permission. Freaked out. Showed up high to special arranged lunch. Permission revoked. Got clean again. Finally got lunch with D’Laynie, but by this time she was old enough to give you THE most devastating burns to grace the air this side of the former Mason Dixon Line. (Girl already had a way with words!) Got unclean, the dirtiest of uncleans. Belle-Ruth said, Get clean, darling. You said, Not this time, B.R. Went to your mom’s house, pointed a gun at her in the kitchen and strongly suggested she give you money, not realizing D’Laynie was hiding in the bathroom with the house phone, adding a real doozy to the list of bad moments involving her mess of a mama.

There’s more, but it’s a rinse-and-repeat-for-fifteen-years kind of thing, if you get me?

So look. Here’s where we stand now: When anyone asks, you say you’ve seen, like, three of D’Laynie’s videos. Hey, you’re not some estranged-daughter-stalker weirdo! And hey, who’s got that kind of free time, right? Hah hah!

Straight talk, though? You are that stalker weirdo, you do have that kind of free time, and you’ve watched every woke public service announcement, storytime, and social commentary D’Laynie ever made until you could imagine how it’d be to chill with her on a couch in an alternate reality where you never screwed up: girl-talk, green smoothies, yoga, and a general veneer of intimacy so foreign to you that you can only insert it in your fantasies through symbols: y’all get the same color nail polish by accident; you know when she’s due for a period, an oil change, a new boyfriend, a new girlfriend, another round of under-eye filler (“Storytime: Yes I’m Vain, Yes I’m Working On It, Until Then I No Longer Look Exhausted.”)

Two weeks ago, upon discovering just how much time you spend watching D’Laynie’s videos, Belle-Ruth suggested you take a two-week break from online stalking (“Not healthy, honey.”) Now it occurs to you that the beginning of your D’Laynie withdrawal coincided with the beginning of a steep increase in reckless behavior: skipping brushing. Not checking if you got your house keys before you go out to your car. Unprotected sex with Sad Dave. Sending nudes to your daughter.

D’Laynie’s posted four new videos since the last time you lurked: “I’m a Feminist but I’m Trying to Get Thicc;” “Storytime: My Indian Trip Showed Me I Was a Materialistic Brat”; “Storytime: I Adopted a Rescue Dog!;” and “Storytime: My Mother.”

Your heart: one half plummets with shame, the other soars with unexpected hope. You’ve thrown an explosive at your daughter, and if nothing else, it’s blasted a hole in your irrelevance to her.

Pace. Breathe. Push play on “Storytime: My Mother,” and there’s your girl frowning at her lap in devastating silence, face scrubbed, eyelids naked and pallid, hair wrapped in a green silk scarf. Night face. Vulnerability face. God, you’ve missed her face. Voice husky with feeling, she goes: “Yeah, I…don’t even know how to start this one…” and cuts and tries again.

It’s 22.36 minutes long. You watch it all. Belle-Ruth calls you twice. Decline. Decline. All your attention is balanced on this moment. You’re absorbed in the words D’Laynie is choosing for your story: “Small town, infamous juvenile delinquent, teen mother, high school dropout, substance abuse, constantly in jail or rehab, self-destructive, scary, broken promises, a parasite, a liar, a leech on my great-grandmother, pathetic…”

Her anger sings from the screen. She holds nothing back: all your antics and trespasses. But for whatever reason, she’s chosen not to mention the most recent terrible thing you’ve done: your body: her inbox. And she finishes the story with this: I want to forgive her, and I will one day, but not yet. And when I do, it will be for me, not for her.

You try to remind yourself that this is not good. This is a screwup. This is endgame kind of shit, and yet you still have the perverse sense that it’s a beginning. D’Laynie’s either thinking about you right now or trying hard to push you out of her mind. This is more than you’ve had with her since the long-ago days when you could have had everything. Fuck, man, this is something.

Three minutes later, you’re rounding off onto the gravel drive of the Big House, a red brick testament to old money that finds its way to you only in the conditional drops and driblets that Belle-Ruth’s good sense allows. With more money, you’d be dead. With less, panhandling up in town at the V.A. hospital, the Baptist Church, the Quik Lube, Buck’s BBQ.

A portion of these Carsen driblets finances your pick-up, another portion the single-wide trailer you live in a quarter mile behind the Big House. Your trailer’s next to a cluster of sun-bleached rocks and the lake where, twenty years ago, thirty teenagers drank and smoked and swam for your eighteenth birthday while Sad Dave’s brother laid down in the bed of his F-150 and never woke up.

Belle-Ruth’s sitting up on the balcony that runs the length of the second floor, hand shading eyes, batwing sleeve hanging down to her hips. She’s as skinny as you yet favors voluminous, gauzy tunics that billow, float, and alight on her bones with the deliberation of a butterfly landing on a barbed wire fence. “It’s the Pisces in me,” she always says of her fluttering clothes. To this, you always reply, “You old ho! How’d you fit a Pisces in there?” Gets her every time.

At the kitchen table, you and Belle-Ruth break the silence at the same moment.

You: “So, I watched it.”

Belle-Ruth: “Did you see it?”

“Jinx!” you say.

Belle-Ruth waits for more. When nothing comes, she smacks her little pink lips and sets down her coffee cup. “Pollie, why’d D’Laynie just up and make that out of the blue? What put you on her mind?”

You meet Belle-Ruth’s eyes and shrug. “Beats me. Maybe she saw an Amtrak go off rail and hit a bus and was like, ‘Hey! Speaking of trainwrecks…’”

“Hey, now, none of that,” Belle Ruth says. She fixes her sleeve, which has flopped up inside-out over her elbow like the ear of a hound, and frowns. “You didn’t say anything to her?”

“In response?”

“Beforehand.”

“Nuh-uh.” You take a big sip of coffee to wash down this bullshit. “Maybe she just needed to vent. Maybe the pain was building up in her and went kaboom last night.”

Belle-Ruth’s pink lips pucker into an angry little bubblegum-like wad. “Hell, honey, that pain was at the bottom of her lake. She dredged it up herself for the Internet for some thumbs up.” She shakes her head. “I gotta say, I’m disappointed. First that stupid tattoo, now this.”

You fix breakfast while Belle-Ruth takes her shower. When the food’s on the table, you take out your phone and check the comments on “Storytime: My Mother.” The most recent are:

“Incredible how one of the kindest humans on earth came from a selfish bitch.”

“Your mother is a narcissist.”

“Hugs to you, D’L! You are SO strong! Anytime you forget just remember you ARE NOT LIKE HER.”

“Forget her. Some people are just toxic, and if healthy people try to love them, they get poisoned.”

D’Laynie’s pinned her own comment to the top of the scroll: gratitude for everyone’s kind words and a call on her fans to donate to a substance abuse research institute.

You close the app. Something’s trying to get your attention. It’s in your head, positioned right behind your conscious thoughts at pervy proximity. You know what it is, and that’s why you won’t turn your full attention to it. You take a selfie and delete it. Maybe Belle-Ruth’s right. Maybe your selfies are a thing, like you’re trying to delete more than pictures. Or maybe you’re just trying to see what the universe, your sole and constant audience, sees whenever you pretend to ignore the thing in your head that wants you to look directly at it. The wanting.

In her video “Storytime: How I Learned to Stop Feeling Superior for Being Agnostic,” D’Laynie concluded, “What I believe, and this is just my belief, okay? Is that the universe, God, or whatever you’re called upon to name it, is deaf. It doesn’t hear prayers, thoughts, hopes, or wishes. It only sees the effects of what we do and say to other people on Earth. Get it? Doing and saying are how we petition the universe. So please, leave a comment and tell me: what are you doing on Earth, and why are you doing this?”

What are you doing? You’re digging up the number for D’Laynie you’ve had buried deep in your phone for years—the number you filched once from Belle-Ruth’s handwritten contact book and never dialed.

You’re hitting Call on the number, and you’re waiting and shaking. The third ring gives way to an electronic screech and an out of service notice.

Now what are you doing? You’re starting an email to Sad Dave. (No texts on days he’s got his kid.) Lifting your shirt, unclasping your bra, taking a pic of your boobs.

Why are you doing this? Because the gravity is strong around the old rabbit hole.

You never send the email because a clatter of rolling thumps and a scream comes from the direction of the stairs. You run for the sound, and there’s poor little Belle-Ruth sprawled on the landing, groaning terribly, face twisted in pain, ankle fractured.

Standing outside the open door of Belle-Ruth’s hospital room, you overhear your mom advise her to recover in a nursing home, where she’ll be taken care of by “good, trained people who know what they’re doing.”

Belle-Ruth will have none of that. “Pollie will do just fine, thank you.”

“Pollie?” your mom’s voice brays in a tone suggesting they aren’t talking about the same person. “Pollie will cook? Clean?” She lowers her voice. “Not steal your painkillers?”

A blue-scrubbed nurse walks by in the corridor where you’re lurking. You recognize her from high school, and judging from her uh-oh look, she obviously recognizes you—the “most likely” for all unprintable yearbookisms.

“Hey, how you doing?” you say.

She shakes her head and keeps walking.

When Belle-Ruth gets discharged, you move into the Big House with her. Note to self, you think on your first night. Don’t steal painkillers.

You first shacked up here at seventeen, after your dad threw a suitcase at you while your mom swung a bawling D’Laynie up on her hip and screamed, “Go break your grandmother’s heart now that you’re done with ours!”

Back then, you chose the bedroom at the very end of the hall so that Belle-Ruth wouldn’t smell your cigarettes. And if she ever got the inclination to eavesdrop on your phone calls, it’d be a lonnnnng walk from her room to yours—plenty of time for her to rethink her lack of trust in you. But now, this room reminds you too much of things that’ll ruin your life since you spent so much time here thinking of them, and this reminding immediately leads to a reflexive wanting. So this time, you choose the room that was your mom’s when she was a kid. The one you never entered, since it made you think of her.

You’re lying in your bed in this clean, safe space one afternoon, taking and erasing selfies and debating whether or not to start re-stalking D’Laynie, when you hear the crunch of tires on gravel. You step out on the balcony and glimpse a blue hybrid wending through the tree-lined drive.

Outside, you start down the sidewalk, passing rose trellis, birdbath, pissing-boy fountain, and the rusted remains of your childhood swimming pool—a repurposed cattle trough.

One rear door of the visitor’s car is open. A shadow moves in the backseat. At your approach, the shadow backs out and becomes a leggy girl in mom jeans and a vintage college-logo sweatshirt. She bends to flick a grasshopper off her leg, and you see that one side of her head is shaved to display a tiny tattoo of the words “Nothing but the Truth” on the scalp above her ear.

“D’Laynie,” you say.

She turns to you, and your own reflection, fishbowl-distorted, peers out from the lenses of her yellow-mirrored sunglasses.

Right when normal people would hug, you and your daughter square off and face each other across seven feet of deaf, watchful universe, kicking the silence back and forth with stony game faces. The spring air is neither hot nor cold, the sun’s effect a treat for Texans: blinding bright but not hot. “Yankee Sunshine,” Belle-Ruth calls it. You never notice weather unless it’s extreme, but today, in this charged silence, the neutrality is screaming.

D’Laynie finally tilts her head back. “’Sup, Pollie?” she says with an ironic I-don’t-really-say-words like ‘sup’ intonation.

“Hey,” you croak. “Why aren’t you in school?”

D’Laynie winces and looks up at the sky, like Sky, can you believe this idiot? “Spring break?” she says. “Hello?”

“Ah, right. Well, what you doing way out here, girl?”

“I want to say hi to GG. Plus, Destiny needs to stretch her legs.”

Destiny needs to…Are you supposed to know what that means? Is it an allusion to your past, some poetic way to call a truce? You stare. D’Laynie gestures to the backseat. You look inside. Huddled on the floor as far from the open door as possible is a small white mop of a dog with an orange ribbon stuck to the front of its collar.

“Hi, fwuffbucket!” you coo. The dog raises sad, guilty eyes, trembles, whimpers, tries to turn and bops her head against the door. You step away, look at D’Laynie, twist your body into an apology.

D’Laynie takes off her sunglasses, rolls her eyes, and says, “Nah, it’s fine. Everything scares her. That’s her thing.”

It takes D’Laynie a while to coax Destiny from the car. The trick is accomplished with a strategic combination of treats and ignoring.

Entering the Big House is a blur in your memory. While D’Laynie and Belle-Ruth hug and greet, you step back and recede from the scene like a Victorian servant.

By the time D’Laynie is next to Belle-Ruth on the pull-out in the downstairs living room, telling her about the rescuing of dogs, you’re cross-legged on the floor getting sniffed up by Destiny.

“And like, obviously, my followers are super supportive and motivating,” D’Laynie says. She frowns and scratches her head. “Wow. Okay. So I’m suddenly hearing how creepy that sounds. ‘My followers.’”

“It sure does,” Belle-Ruth says, “but it’s not your fault that’s what they’re called, honey.”

D’Laynie takes out her phone and starts typing. “Sorry, gimme a sec. Want to make a note about that.”

“What’s the orange ribbon for on the collar?” asks Belle-Ruth.

D’Laynie glances from her screen over to Destiny. “Oh,” she says, still typing, “that’s for awareness of at-risk-animals. She’s had so much trauma. Her first owners were these assholes who would hit her and kick her and stuff.” She finishes typing and puts the phone down. “Sorry, rude,” she says. “Yeah, then she had puppies, and they separated her from them too soon, and she got super anxious and would pee everywhere. Then she went to this guy who’s, like, all about rehabbing traumatized dogs. She got comfortable with him, but his boyfriend moved in, and Destiny was like ‘yeah nah, you suck’ and bit him when he was giving her food.”

Destiny is sitting now, gazing up at you. You think to her, Is this true? Do you bite the hands of the people who feed you?

“Then she went to this lady who takes in lots of rescues,” D’Laynie goes on, “but they never accepted her in their pack for some reason, and she got really depressed and anxious and started nipping and destroying stuff, so back to the shelter. She got good again, but, you know, a lot of people aren’t comfortable adopting a dog with that kind of history. When I got her, she was on the Kill List.”

You cock your head at Destiny, think to her, Kill List sucks, don’t it, baby girl? She puts a paw on your knee, like Girl, don’t I know it?

“Is that how she got her name?” Belle-Ruth asks. “‘Destiny?’”

“Ugh. I know,” D’Laynie says. “It sounds like a stripper name. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But that’s the name she knows, so I kept it. Hah. Not that it’s getting me any points. She’s never even jumped in my lap, dude. Not once. And she’s a lap dog. Sometimes she won’t even eat when I’m in the same room as her.”

“Aw, give it more time,” Belle-Ruth says. “What’s it been? A month?”

D’Laynie nods and frowns. “Yeah. Whatever, you know? My friend’s dog didn’t warm up to him for like, a year.”

You pipe up from your corner: “I was this close to naming you ‘Destiny.’”

Everyone turns to you, even Destiny herself, who’d been engaged in a butt-scratch. You’re holding one hand up, index finger and thumb nearly touching. “Heads D’Laynie,” you say, “tails Destiny.”

Belle-Ruth squawks a laugh.

D’Laynie yells, “Dude, no! I would never forgive you!”

“It actually came up tails,” you add, “but I like to give fate a run for its money.”

D’Laynie pulls a pillow over her head, falls forward, face-plants into it charmingly, and gives a muffled scream. Destiny does not like that shit at all. She yelps and runs from the room like there’s a fire under her furry little ass.

Lemme just say: the Big House is not the kind of place where you want to lose a tiny, freaked-out dog. Lotsa ins. Lotsa unders.

Destiny’s not in the downstairs bathroom; not under the kitchen, dining room, or pool tables, in the music room under the piano, in your late grandpa’s old office, or the laundry room.

“Upstairs, then,” you say, and D’Laynie’s expression darkens.

“I forgot how huge this place is,” she says, following you up, adding in a softer voice, “You know, considering there are people in Hong Kong literally living in cages, it’s almost obscene.”

You have no clue what to say to this. “Destiny!” you call out.

Destiny’s not under Belle-Ruth’s bed, the table with her sewing machine, or in the piles of wispy Piscean fabrics in the corner. Not in the attached bath, any of the bedrooms or closets on the back-facing side of the house, or the room that was yours twenty years ago, its carpet still littered with cigarette burns. You’re bending, stooping, crawling on all fours, craning neck. You’re invested. Not since hide-and-seek with your cousins have you searched so hard for something wholesome. An adventure—just you and D’Laynie! Today, you’re going to be by her side at the happy moment she finds her lost dog. From now on, every memory of the relief she’s about to feel will be associated with you. You’re shaking with giddiness, one dog away from bursting into laughter.

What’s weird is how D’Laynie talks nonstop as you search, remarking on even the unremarkable with the blasé fluency of a real estate agent high on cough syrup. “This room’s pretty except, ugh, drapes and ruffles everywhere, come on, GG, let’s exit the ‘80s, and ah, a bathroom that smells like Chanel No. 5 and ancient rolls of toilet paper. Leaving ruffles, we find ourselves in oh, look, it’s a Mad Men set.”

At one point, she stops and interrupts this syrupy tour with an exclamation: “Where is she? This is seriously annoying!” It becomes plain as day to you that you’re the sole explorer on this mommy/daughter quest—your companion was never feeling it.

As you and D’Laynie enter your bedroom, the final unturned stone, you see what has happened and what will happen: your distracted ass left the balcony door ajar earlier. D’Laynie will find Destiny out there, gather her up, and leave. And nothing will be changed. Something epic was supposed to happen on this dog search but didn’t. Maybe it needed more time. Maybe one of you missed a cue, dropped a line. Or maybe one of you, sensing a portal to connection, bricked it up with words.

Following D’Laynie out the balcony door, you think, Please, God, give me more time with her. The universe doesn’t hear prayers, though; it only sees what we do. What you do as you walk onto the balcony is turn the inside lock when pulling the door shut. You haven’t touched that lock in years. You don’t ask yourself which direction locks and which unlocks, don’t pause to test it. Maybe you’ll be lucky. Don’t pause to wonder whether locked or unlocked is lucky.

Destiny’s sitting on the far edge of the balcony, gazing at the pastures beyond like she’s considering buying the place. When D’Laynie approaches, she raises her hackles and growls.

“Whoa. Okay, baby girl,” D’Laynie says. But her eyes don’t say okay baby girl to you. They say, Well fuck you, too, dog. “Gonna get her treats,” she says, and heads for the door.

You put your hands on the rail, shut your eyes, flinch when you hear the clunk of the unyielding handle behind you. The sound reminds you of being handcuffed—not in the fun way. You wonder what is wrong with you, what possessed you, what did you expect?

“Uh. Pollie?” D’Laynie says.

You try the handle yourself as if there’s some trick to it, then try the doors of the other two front-facing bedrooms. All locked.

So we’re waiting, right? And D’Laynie’s pacing at wedding procession speed. Step . . . swing arms . . . step. This gives her plenty of time at non-talking-distance from you. Eventually, at the opposite end of the balcony, she starts her favorite yoga flow from that video she uploaded last winter with her fitness friend. You watch from the other end, mirror neurons firing hard. You’ve followed along to that workout a million times.

When her phone rings, D’Laynie leaps out of warrior pose and answers it.

“Billy Reese!” Belle-Ruth, breathless, triumphant, announces over speaker. “Just got to the feed store over in town but’ll swing by here on his way home. Hot damn, I’m good. Second person I called!”

“How long?” D’Laynie asks.

“Oh. An hour, maybe?”

D’Laynie raises her head to the balcony roof and groans. “Dude, there’s nobody close?”

A pause.

“You . . . are . . . welcome,” Belle-Ruth says, and oh shit, you hear it—tension, compaction, the mama-bear-in-the-box winding up.

D’Laynie laughs. “Sorry. Thank you! It’s just what are we supposed to do out here for an hour?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Belle-Ruth answers in a sarcastic little tune. “Maybe chat? It’s not like you and your mother don’t have anything to talk about.”

“That’s interesting,” D’Laynie says, examining her fingernails. “And just what are we supposed to talk about?”

“She saw the video, honey. Storytime. And believe me, I get it. She has not been an angel.”

“Oh my God,” D’Laynie mouths, rolling her eyes.

“But your mother’s trying to turn her life around, and putting the worst parts of her out there for the world like that so total strangers can kick her? Nuh-uh. Completely uncalled for.”

“GG, you ‘re cutting out,” says D’Laynie, her voice tight. “Can’t hear you. Call you back later.” She ends the call, tilts her head back, crosses her arms, and gives you a vinegary grin. “Uncalled for, huh?”

“I know,” you say. “I know.”

“For the record, I have nothing to say to you, there’s nothing I want to hear from you, and I’m not sorry for the video.”

“I know. You shouldn’t be. I deserved it.”

She makes an exasperated sound and flips her palm up. “It wasn’t for you. It wasn’t some punishment. It had nothing to do with you. It just happened to be about you.”

You nod. “I know.”

“Would you stop saying that?”

Destiny is zig-zagging across the balcony, button nose glued to the concrete. You sit in a deck chair and watch her stubby tail bloop back and forth in enjoyment of invisible ecstacies. “I just want you to know—” you begin.

D’Laynie claps loudly, and Destiny flinches. “Nope. Not happening,” she says. Her eyes are wide and locked to yours, mouth alternating between a grin and a grimace. The clap, you realize, was for you. You feel an anger you don’t have the right to feel, so you drop it and stomp it into ashes.

“What’s not happening?” you ask.

“You and I are not talking.”

“So why did you come today?” you ask. “You knew I was here, right?”

D’Laynie looks like she’s trying to keep the lid on a wild laugh. “Yesssss, Pollie, yesssss. And that is the point. You really think people can trust you? Like people can just believe you’re not, like, I don’t know, getting high and trashing the house and begging GG not to say anything about it?”

You’re offended, but you can’t be, so you’re not. You’re disappointed in your daughter’s meanness to you, but you can’t be, so you’re not. You’re sad that her on-screen persona is for everybody but you, sad you don’t count as an audience. Sad that the decisions you’ve made, even the ones you had no say in, have rendered you voiceless. You can be sad. Nobody minds you feeling sad. What you can’t do (because you did it too many times before, exploited it, manipulated and gaslit with it) is allow yourself the luxury of crying.

So you just nod and say, “Okay, well, that’s understandable. That’s fair.”

Then this happens: Destiny zips past D’Laynie, jumps into your lap, and starts spinning out a comfy spot on your thighs.

“Oh, come on!” D’Laynie says. “Seriously?” She puts her hands under Destiny’s belly and starts to lift (which you can tell right away is a big, big mistake, but you say nothing because your brain’s too busy learning what it feels like to be trusted this much). Destiny snarls and growls, flailing, enraged, squirming like she’s caught on a hook. D’Laynie, stunned by the reaction, holds her at arm’s length until Destiny manages one good twist that brings her jaws within snapping distance of D’Laynie’s skin.

D’Laynie screams, drops Destiny back into your lap, and slaps the dog’s rump hard. Destiny’s response is a cry so angry, offended, and disappointed that you can almost feel it resonating in your own throat, a proxy for your disallowed feelings.

Destiny scrambles up your body, climbing like you’re a cliff wall, claws scratching your chest. You don’t mind. You welcome it. This is the pain chain: You hurt D’Laynie, so D’Laynie hurt Destiny, so Destiny hurts you.

When Destiny’s muzzle is next to your ear, you stroke her fur and tell her it’s okay. Her orange ribbon is coming loose. Don’t fix it. Let D’Laynie notice it and see it as symbolic and feel punished by it.

D’Laynie has backed away. She breathes fast in choppy bursts. “I am so sorry,” she whispers. “I don’t know why I did that. I swear I have never, ever done that.”

You raise your eyebrows, and D’Laynie shakes her head as if the brows had spoken. She raises her arms up over her head, guilty hands open wide, eyes pouring. “How could I do that? What is wrong with me? Why did I do that?”

There I am in her, you think. You want to wound her, just a little.

“Because you’ve done everything right,” you say, “everything you were supposed to, but she still doesn’t like you, and that pisses you off.”

“No,” D’Laynie says. There’s more fight in this word than is warranted, and you know that you were right. She has been punished.

Speak her language, you think now. You can do it, you’ve seen every upload. You know exactly who she wants to be. “You’re not used to not being liked,” you say, “because you’re an honest-to-God amazing person who gets treated like one most of the time. But this dog’s giving you insane shade that probably feels pretty personal, so it’s screwing with your self-esteem and your mental health.”

For a second, she looks like she’s about to tell you you’re an idiot, but instead drops to the ground and buries her face in her hands. “Oh my God,” she says. She cries a little, then laughs a little about the crying. She raises her head, wipes her face, says, “You’re actually right, dude. How are you actually right? Like, how did you know that?”

You know how, but you don’t tell her—not then, at least. You know because Destiny’s a creature in stories, and so are you, and there’s nothing more enraging than a difficult character who doesn’t understand they burned out the audience long ago—that it’s time to end happy now so that everyone who rooted and fought for them through all that drama gets the warm fuzzies they deserve.

Instead of answering, you say, “You should give her to somebody else.”

“I can’t,” she answers into the back of her hand. “She’s been dicked around too much already.”

“Hey, if this is how it is between you two, keeping her may be dicking her around, too.”

“But I can’t just tell everybody, ‘Oh, I’m gonna adopt this dog. This is the right thing to do, and I’m gonna do it,’ and then say, ‘Oh, never mind! It sucked. It was too hard.’ Do you have any idea how that would look? Like, what kind of message would that send to everybody?” She rubs a hand through her hair slowly, thinking, and adds, “Plus, like, that poor dog.”

You’re about to ask, Who is ‘everybody?’ Who’s looking? but then remember there are thousands of everybodies for D’Laynie, countless souls who get off on watching her be an amazing human being.

Out on the road ahead, the red pick-up truck of Billy Reese, your rescuer, is moving toward the Big House turn-in.

“I’ll tell you what you do,” you say.

The sun just set. D’Laynie still has an hour-long drive ahead, but she had to charge her cell. Now she’s walking around Belle-Ruth’s kitchen positioning items, reconsidering, shifting them an inch to the left or right: Destiny’s leash and harness heaped nonchalantly on the kitchen table (but not so nonchalantly that you couldn’t recognize them for what they are in a single glance); bag of dog food in a corner of Belle-Ruth’s pantry, label conveniently smoothed out and readable; Destiny in her plush bed in the middle of the kitchen floor—obviously not the bed’s forever-space, but suitable for the opening montage of what needs to be D’Laynie’s most powerful, transcendent, realest storytime ever—the live-streamed tale of how two scared, struggling, at-risk souls found comfort and courage in each other, and how, without even trying to, they showed the world they belonged together.

You wheel Belle-Ruth over to a spot that will be off-camera. “Sure you wanna do this?” she asks. She’s looking at you, but it’s D’Laynie who answers:

“Oh, absolutely. It’s best when the feels are still steaming.” She unplugs her phone from the charger, licks her lips. “Ready, P?” she asks—voice encouraging, eyes a little worried. Maybe she knew Belle-Ruth was talking to you and didn’t want you to have time to consider take-backs.

You nod. “Ready.”

She counts down from three and hits Record. You and Belle-Ruth stay hidden as D’Laynie walks softly around the kitchen, silent, camera taking in everything dog-related. Good stuff. You can feel the mystery already.

When she’s got it all, D’Laynie sets the phone on top of a coffee can, sits at the kitchen table, smiles, waves with both hands, and says,

“What is up, my beautiful people? What you just saw is not my kitchen, but yes, that is my dog, Destiny. You guys will not believe what has happened! I . . . have got a story . . . for you. Where do I even start? Um, okay. First, you guys know it’s spring break . . .”

While D’Laynie goes on, you start thinking about stories, how people always fuss about finding the true one. As if every situation’s got one real version out there the universe accepts as gospel. As if there aren’t different interpretations, different storytellers, villains becoming heroes and funny parts becoming sad parts with a single switch of perspective.

As if the universe listens to stories at all and doesn’t just stare at our hands and hearts, like, Hey, creature, what are you doing, and why?

“ . . . and then I got locked on a balcony in the middle of nowhere for an hour and a half with Destiny and Pollie. Y’all already know Destiny. Well, this . . . is Pollie.”

On cue, you walk into the shot, sit down next to D’Laynie, and wave. But your heart sinks: you barely recognize yourself. You look no different than usual, yet you look so wrong on your daughter’s screen. Why are you next to her? What did you do? What the hell is this? Whatever it is, you can’t hold onto it. Too much. Too soon. Something in you will fuck this up or die trying. You need the familiar, a return to status quo, despite the horrors that live there.

In the last moments before your story begins, you know exactly what you’ll do when you finish telling it: text Dave some skin.

It’s okay. Maybe you won’t open the bag. Maybe you’ll just hold it.

You’d never just hold it.

Oh, no. Are you doing this again? You’re gonna do this again.

Please, please, please, universe, leave me a comment and tell me not to do this again.

“Pollie!” D’Laynie says, turning to you, sparkling with forgiveness. “What do you want to say to all the beautiful people out there?”

Crow Jonah Norlander

THE DOGS WENT BACK ON ALL FOURS by Evelyn Winters

December 29, 2021 · Fiction

The man went out to get the mail. He opened the mailbox and looked inside. There were envelopes and a magazine. The magazine was Gourmet. It was a monthly for his wife, but his wife was dead. The periodical people probably didn’t know she died. If they do find out will they cancel her subscription? he wondered.

The night’s air was brisk and clear. Walking weather. The street was quiet.

He was one of those sad men you see walking around with their eyes on the pavement. Trudged in the rain. Trudged under the sun. Dragging his feet. But now that his wife was dead he held his head high constantly alert, on the lookout for her whereabouts. There were times he swore he saw her sitting in a tree or hang-gliding above in the open sky, but it always turned out to be various breeds of birds: ravens, owls, songbirds, woodpeckers, vultures.

The man had an urge to bring the magazine to his wife, even if she turned out to be a bird. He crossed the street, straight ahead to the sidewalk. The street lamps gave intermittent light. Enough for him to read a few sentences. It was a cooking magazine. His wife used to cook the most amazing meals: Boeuf Bourguignon, Bouillabaisse, Crêpes Suzette, and always with gobbles of red wine.

The man imagined the writer of the articles to be his wife. Every published word was hers. He read as he walked, sometimes sticking his hand out to pull a leaf off a tree or pluck a rose from a rose bush.

Around midnight the neighborhood dogs began to follow him. They were nice, but had that look, as if they could turn into something completely different than Dog, perhaps another species altogether. The dogs spread out from sidewalk to sidewalk.

While walking (now in the middle of the street) he thought about his wife’s flat feet. She liked to put her big feet in the air when making love. He’d hitch her ankles over his shoulders and go to work.

“This is your job,” she’d say. “Fulltime.”

“Could use some benefits,” he’d say. “A 401k.”

“You can have it all!” she’d say, “Direct deposit.”

For mysterious reasons this sort of banter made them climax at the same time, every time.

As a kid the man was known for breaking things: lamps, windows, mirrors. But also other stuff like woodstove pipes, globes, doorknobs, and once he broke a piano key. He kept that key in his underwear drawer. He never got around to telling his wife why he kept it.

The man broke off a branch of a maple tree and busted a mailbox.

“I haven’t broken anything in so long,” said the man. “Feels good.”

Every time a mailbox fell the dogs would yelp.

The man decided to take the On Ramp to the highway. There wasn’t much traffic, but every so often a car would slowly swerve back and forth behind the dogs until ambling off the exit in defeat. The man didn’t care about drivers, he was on a mission to find his dead wife.

“She’s probably swimming in a clear blue ocean,” he said. “She loved to swim.” Then he closed his eyes and pictured her big flippers kicking the water behind her.

The man began walking on all fours.

“When you’re as broken as me you can walk on all fours,” he said. “Mind as well.”

He looked behind him and noticed the dogs up on their hind legs. When the man stood the dogs went back on all fours as if to rebalance the universe.

***

Around two in the morning a woman his height, his build, his exact gait, came beside and matched him stride for stride. Her hair was short like his. She was thin, but wore a yellow sun dress. Her breasts were on the smaller side.

“There you are,” he said. She looked like his cousin, Rosina. “I haven’t seen you since Christmas at Noni’s!”

“You used to look under my dress,” she said.

“It was the point of the game.”

“Those days are long gone,” she said, flicking his earlobe.

“God,” he said. “It’s like looking into the mirror.”

“Should we switch places?” she asked. “Just to see what would happen.”

“I’m in favor. Anyway, it seems like the right time to take a turn.”

The highway veered left. He looked behind him. The dogs’ tongues were out, panting.

At mile marker fifteen they traded clothes. He stepped into her dress and had her tie the string in the back.

“I’ve always wanted help getting in and out of my clothes.”

“It gets old,” said Rosina. “Believe me.”

He admitted (to himself) that the dress felt alright, kinda good at first, but then a little too free? Actually, he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

After Rosina cinched up the leather belt and snapped the brass buckle she took EXIT 115 toward Lewisville.

“So long cuz,” she said. “Till next time.”

***

The man kept on, and at some point during the long journey became Female.

Also, and oddly, when she (the man) looked behind her the dogs had transformed into cats. Or perhaps the dogs gave up and some cats replaced the dogs? It’s impossible to know for sure, he thought.

The woman in the yellow sundress kept on, dead set on finding her wife.

She reached in her back pocket for the magazine but since she didn’t have a pocket she found only the soft curve of her ass. The magazine ended up being rolled up in her cleavage. She didn’t remember having breasts and certainly wouldn’t have thought to place a magazine there, but she pulled it out anyway wondering what else could be in this issue.

Music began to play upon opening the magazine. Big band music, Glen Miller style. When she closed the pages the music cut off.

When the music played the street lamps brightened and hummed as if they were getting turned on, sexually. When she closed it the street lamps grew dim and depressed as if they got their feelings hurt or their balls chopped off.

“Balls?” she said. “Penis and balls and all that man stuff. No thank you.”

She folded the magazine four ways and stuffed it in her panties.

She didn’t hate cats, but was surprised that cats were following her, since she always thought herself a dog person.

“My wife liked cats,” she said to the cats.

“Cats cats cats,” said the cats. But turns out they were little children in cat costumes.

***

Once they reached the end of the world the children giggled no more. She grabbed the chain link fence that served as the last obstacle and gazed out into the black abyss.

The children climbed the fence and leaped in shouting “Cats! Cats! Cats!”

Instead of falling they hovered over the darkness and began to shrink: children to toddlers, toddlers to babies, babies to fetuses, until there was nothing at all. She knew, she just knew, those kids were her unborn children. She began to weep with the realization of the unfair life. Some of her tears dropped and ran down the front of her dress.

After calming herself, she reached into her panties and pulled out the magazine. She read the first recipe: two parts radio, a pinch of Canada, a dash of moon, and a drizzle of lug nuts.

“Oh, I remember that one,” said a pretty voice coming from the abyss. “Delicious.”

“I found you,” said the woman in a yellow dress.

“Remember how I used to put my feet on your shoulders.”

“I miss your big feet.”

“I can see that.”

She looked down and saw her manhood restored and pitching a tent inside the yellow dress. And then from the abyss, a hand reached through the fence and up his dress, grabbing hold. She began to work it back and forth like she did when they were young.

“There it is!” he said. He stretched over the fence and took hold of her left breast.

“You always liked the left one best!” she said.

“I love it all,” but when he went to reach further toward her sweet center (where she liked him to rub just so), he felt her hand grab his wrist.

“If you go there,” she warned, “you’ll never be able to go back.”

He thought about all the things he broke when he was young: eight ball, lawn mower, sky light, hat rack, white chalk, sun flower, and the piano key still stuck in his underwear drawer.

“Where will I go?” he said.

“You’ll see,” she said, and giggled.

Crow Jonah Norlander

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