X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

LUCID FIRE by Cletus Crow

October 21, 2021 · Fiction

I'm dreaming that our bed is engulfed in flames, but in the waking world either your body lies draped across my torso, or I have a fever, or we forgot to turn the oven off, or someone dropped a burning corpse between us, or we have too many sheets, or I can see the future, or our bed really is engulfed in flames, or God came back when we were sleeping, or global warming works faster than they say, or a Republican tweeted, or there was a gas leak, or the neighbors can tell we aren't just friends, or I'm in the Fantastic Four, or a burglar enjoys a Marlboro, or your ex finally did it, or the thermometer broke, or meteorites collided, or war was declared. When I wake up, you're clinging to me like damp hair. I scan the ceiling for burns.

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THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT by David Luntz

October 20, 2021 · Fiction

The weight of light can be measured by my Uncle Kev’s death. But before that, some memories: it’s family dinner and Uncle Kev’s explaining how the bread mashed in his ex-boxer’s sixty-year-old fist represents Pangea and the glass of red wine in his fingers the Tethys Sea. He’s telling us about the earth’s history, Wegener’s theory of continental drift, orogeny, extinct volcanoes, dragonflies in amber, and trilobites. Mom and dad tune him out. So do I. I get enough of that kind of shit at school. But Uncle Kev doesn’t care. He’s relentless, a natural fighter, and won’t stop until he’s educated me properly. Most of his instructing takes place in his car when he’s driving me somewhere. There’s no escaping him there.

When he talks about light, his eyes gleam like wet pebbles. He always smells nice, like Old Spice aftershave. He waves his hands a lot. They’re hairy and tufted, like a coconut. His polished nails blur cyan in the air. One time, he tells me about how light actually dies as it hits our eyes, and says, “Isn’t that beautiful, I mean that light must die so we can see?” I wish I’d really been listening to him, at what he was really trying to tell me, but I thought then that he was just plugging some lame religious metaphor: light is just like Jesus, always sacrificing and always giving, existing in some sublime state of eternal crucifixion and resurrection. And I reply: Maybe light would rather not die. Maybe light doesn’t give a shit about our sight.

It’s the only time I remember him giving me a grieved look. But this was before, and now we’re driving down Route One and Uncle Kev blurts out, “Kinch,” which is what he calls me after reading Ulysses, “Answer me this: How’s the spirit supposed to fecking survive when it’s got to look at this shite every fooking day?” nodding at the strip malls and billboards, a question whose unanswered weight each passing season presses down on me like ten thousand leaves, maybe more, because soon afterward come his limp wrists floating like pale petals in a pink scurf that won't come out of the tiles. And because he still burns and reaches me like light from a dead star, it makes no sense to say he no longer exists, especially when I see him as a child, basking on kilned rocks after swimming in the cold water of Keeley Bay, telling me how much he loves it there, the sunbaked scent of stranded kelp, the wisps of tickling seaweed, and the way light rushes into spaces he never knew about inside him, promising that it will always be there and never leave him. And I wonder too, sometimes, if what he did was his way of giving back the gift, so light could see things it couldn’t otherwise see, and whether somewhere, perhaps not so far off, he still skips up to some sunny attic where he unpacks his sewing machine and stitches a dress from old curtains, hoping that when he hits the streets that night with his new lipstick and pumps, he might get lucky.

(For my uncle who took my education upon himself, since he trusted no school to do it.)

Crow Jonah Norlander

ON BUILDING A NEST by Stella Lei

October 16, 2021 · Fiction

My mother’s house always looked halfway to collapse. She had paid copious amounts of money to build it this way—its perpetually slouching walls, its staircases that jerked into corners before snarling to the next floor. This was because she preferred things that existed between one state and another. Her philosophy was as follows: you cannot determine something’s worth before it is finished, and most everything finished is bad—corrupted by greed, or rust, or the general incompetence of its maker. And so the house lurched across a river like a lopsided Fallingwater, its unending rush lulling her to the edge of sleep. When she awoke, she stood in the middle of one of her precarious staircases, fingers to her lips, surveying the distance between her body and the floor.

As a child, I bumped into buckled walls and tripped over uneven floorboards. Cuts rusted down my legs in slashes of bronze, and my mother wiped them clean, warning me to be careful with the currency of my blood.

“You see this?” She held up the towel, stained through and sour with disinfectant, “You let all this go. Gone. Wasted.” She believed blood was metal metabolized. Gold lining our veins. “That’s why it tastes like pennies,” she said, and I swiped my finger across the wound, bringing it to my lips to check.

Our ancestors thought drinking gold—untarnishable light—could instill them with youth. Their organs would never rust into disuse, polished instead with health. What they didn’t know, my mother said, was that we were born with gold bottled in our veins. She smoothed a Band-Aid across my knee. “So the real secret to youth is to avoid bleeding. To seam your skin and keep the gold inside.”

For years, I was careful not to bleed. I tiptoed around corners and walls. Climbed the stairs while gripping the banister, unpainted wood strangled in my fist. I weaned my legs off running, teaching them to slide slowly across the floor’s hardwood swells.

My mother said the world was a pipe bomb, people just fuses ready to light. When she was young, her father exploded in her face—fists clenched to grenades—and left her blue as the sea. That was why I was forbidden from going out alone, my flash-paper bones too easily expended into smoke. And so I stayed home, insulated from flames and men, replacing school with the encyclopedias lining the office shelves.

I worked my way through the books in alphabetical order, repeating each word to myself, sculpting my breath against the sound. A for aviation. B for beak. C for critical period: the period of time in which young animals are most likely to acquire learned behavior; when imprinting occurs.

The period of time in which a baby bird’s song crystallizes like rust on steel, its voice molding to that of its parents. The period beyond which the bird can no longer learn to sing, its notes fracturing like a face in warped glass.

I was twelve when the bleeding started. It woke me in a pool of sour warmth, wet against my legs, sticky in my joints. I shouted for my mother, certain my tissues were dissolving, my organs churning to pulp. She scowled as she changed the sheets and soaked them in cold water, but told me I wasn’t dying. What had happened, she said, was I became too close to fully formed—transitioning into a woman who could eventually smoke, and drink, and leave her behind. The solution was to regress to my halfway point. To freeze my body in time so gold would lie snugly in my veins, youth unable to escape.

That evening, when I asked about dinner, she told me if I went long enough without food, I could shrink my stomach into a fist. Exorcise the years from my body, leave only purity. Bone. Calcium scaffolding my shins like pillars of salt. How I could reverse my flesh within myself, surviving off nothing but smooth planes of skin.

From then on, she fed me only feathers so my years could take flight and leave me clean. She boiled them soft and piled them on my plate in quivering puffs of down.

“The body follows a clock of its own,” she said, “You just have to wind it in reverse. Close the hourglass’s waist. Look at each bird through its mouth.”

When I told her I didn’t know what she meant, that all the birds I’d seen were mouthless, roasted in the oven or strewn across my plate in ragged plumes, she pointed out the window and said “Those birds, there. See how each note matures in their throat before they sing it? That’s where it all starts. The throat.”

I flipped through the T encyclopedia until I got to throat. Esophagus. Trachea. Larynx. I traced my finger down the diagrams and taught the page to swallow. Air digested into air.

In the bathroom, I opened my mouth in the mirror and peered inside. My throat was a cavern of darkness rippled with heat—something pulsing and alive. I clawed my fingers in to see if I could retrieve the half-formed notes in my vocal cords, cup their soft vibration in my palms. I retched into the sink, but my stomach had hardened to a pit, too empty to expel anything but breath. Feathers clotted against my teeth.

The bleeding eventually stopped, my uterus rewound into a state that didn’t know time, years resorbed into my body. When I looked in the mirror, my collarbones were arrowheads grafted to skin.

In place of blood, cold permeated through me like a haunting on loop. I wrapped myself in sweaters and coats—molted in reverse—and stood with my mother at the staircase’s head. We held hands and peered down the house’s narrow throat, too scared to fly.

My mother’s New Year’s gift to me was a music box, gilded gold, a lark perched on its crown. An heirloom passed down by her mother by her mother by hers, carried through generations like our coarse hair and heat-shriveled eyes. She wrapped my hands in her own and showed me how to wind it up. How to coax a bird to sing. We cranked the key as far as it would go, the lark shuddering in the anticipation of dance. I tightened my fingers around the knob as it pushed against my palm, fighting to unspool its song—to fly free. The notes stuttered out, slow, splintered into shards.

Crow Jonah Norlander

FULL OF HOLES by Luz Rosales

October 15, 2021 · Fiction

Kylie fingers Martina under the bleachers after school. Martina is warm, and moist, and slippery, and when she cums against Kylie’s palm, she moans so loudly that Kylie thinks everyone on campus must have heard. She hopes this is true.

“I’m so proud of myself,” she says, and Martina laughs her scratchy laugh.

Martina doesn’t come to school the next day, doesn’t answer Kylie’s texts. The day after that, she’s found floating down a river in pieces.

***

Several of their classmates attend her funeral. They crowd together in the church, sniffling, and holding each other, and pretending to cry. None of them were friends with Martina. Some had been the very ones who bullied her and Kylie. They stalked them in the halls, pelted them with water balloons and milk cartons, hurled insults such as “dykes” and “lesbos.”

Kylie hates them all.

She sits near the back, sandwiched between her parents. Her father keeps his hand on her shoulder, though the effect is more suffocating than comforting. She feels like she’s breaking, splintering. The casket is closed. She can’t comprehend that her best friend’s body is in there, wants to demand that they open it so that everyone can see it isn’t Martina, it’s a doll, it’s an impostor.

They had been friends since the first grade, back when they were shy little girls who felt comfortable only around each other, and they grew into awkward teenagers together. They’d known each other for so long their identities had become intertwined. Kylie can’t imagine a Martina-less world, nor can she imagine a Martina-less Kylie. Who is she now? What is she supposed to do?

Martina’s mother, Ms. Aguilar, finds her after the service. She’s scowling, and Kylie is reminded of the last time she stayed at Martina’s house, how they hid under the blankets and tried to block out the sounds of her parents fighting.

“This is your fault,” her mother spits. “I wanted her to stop hanging out with you.”

“How is it my fault?” Kylie demands. It’s the fault of whoever killed her, they deserve to rot in Hell, except no one knows who did it. The medical examiner said it didn’t look like the work of a human, nor that of an animal.There were no wounds at all, no blood, it was as if her body unraveled spontaneously, as if she simply couldn’t stay in one piece anymore.

Within a few weeks Ms. Aguilar will be gone, moved to another city.

***

At night Kylie tries to hold onto everything she can remember about Martina: her voice, the smoothness of her skin, the texture of the scar on her arm, the way her tongue felt between her legs. She sucks on her fingers and pretends she can still taste Martina’s wetness, then rubs the part of her shoulder where Martina had given her a hickey once.

In the morning she finds a tiny, pinprick-sized hole on her shoulder. Her mother doesn’t see any hole, says she must be imagining it, but Kylie knows it’s real. She can’t stop thinking about the hole, can’t stop touching it, rubbing and rubbing until it’s wide enough for her to insert the tip of her finger. When she does the pain is so intense she almost screams, but there’s something satisfying about it.

Eventually a gray fluid starts leaking from the hole.

Eventually, other holes appear.

***

Kylie comes to school covered in seeping black holes. Everyone stares at her. They’re shocked, disgusted, even enraged that she showed up like this and is forcing them all to see it.

In class, she does nothing but touch her holes. She leaves stains on the floor and on her desk.

The teacher asks her to leave. “You’re distracting the other students,” he says. He looks at her the way you’d look at a bug. She definitely feels less than human as she plods out of the room. Why is she so heavy all of a sudden? She can barely keep herself upright.

During nutrition she’s accosted by a group of girls who say they want to know more about her. They’ve never seen anything like that, they say, meaning her holes. She tells them to fuck off, but they grab her arms, and the next thing she knows they’re shoving their fingers into her, prying her open further. It hurts so bad. She screams and screams and thrashes and suddenly they let her go. Their mouths are wide open, they’re backing away from her.

Kylie doesn’t know what they’re reacting to. She doesn’t care.

She turns around and runs.

***

She heads to Martina’s house, climbs in through the window. It’s not Martina’s house anymore, she knows, though a part of her still expects that she’ll come if she cries loud enough.

The walls are bare. There is no furniture, no remnants of the people who used to live here. Still she goes to what used to be Martina’s room and collapses.

Time goes by. It could be minutes, it could be hours. She spends it all on her side, lying in a puddle of her own filth. She’s mostly hole now. It’s almost peaceful. She could live like this, she thinks, as a giant hole, no longer a girl.

Right after she has this thought, her hand moves on its own, forming a fist. A few seconds later she’s clawing herself violently, she’s shaking, and crying, and bleeding, and she keeps saying, “Martina,” saying it like a prayer.

Then.

It stops.

Everything stops.

There is darkness and silence, a black void. This lasts only an instant.

Once it’s over, she’s back in Martina’s bedroom. She feels different now, stronger but heavier. Slowly she stands and realizes something is attached to her shin.

She reaches down and touches it: there’s hair, and … is that a nose? Are those eyes?

“I…”

That voice. It can’t be.

“Martina?”

It is.

Martina is back, and she’s alive, and her head is a part of Kylie now, fused to her leg.

“Kylie,” Martina whispers.

Hearing her say her name brings tears to Kylie’s eyes. “What is it?”

“I feel fantastic.”

Crow Jonah Norlander

SPEECH CAPABLE by Elias Chen

October 14, 2021 · Fiction

Changliu and her sister were huddled over the kitchen counter. Between them lay an unopened bowl of instant ramen, shrink wrap intact, the container propped upright on a folded kitchen towel. Changliu and her sister looked directly into the smiling face of the man printed on the lid. The image was animate, blinking, shifting his shoulders, his lips parting now and again like he was about to speak but waiting for a cue. It was their idol, Xiao Tan.

What was supposed to happen? After they opened the package, Xiao Tan was supposed to launch into a ninety-second monologue from the lid of the ramen bowl. Something along these generic cadences: thanks for buying, felicitations, please enjoy your meal. But most importantly, after that, you could talk to him freeform during the final thirty seconds. You’d ask questions and the tiny, animate Xiao Tan would respond, provided the answer wasn’t explicitly NSFW. In order to do this, to answer your questions, the print Xiao Tan was imbued with a bare-bones version of the living Xiao Tan’s personality. Even more crucial, this simulated personality held a selection of the person’s real memories. It knew what Xiao Tan knew.

Changliu held her phone over the packaged ramen. Several pop-up windows flashed on the screen, glowing windows superimposed over the live camera image of Xiao Tan on the lid. There were rapidly changing rows of letters, numbers, lines, and numerals. Changliu’s first task was to override Xiao Tan’s initial ninety-second dialogue, and then she’d ease the parameters of his Q&A script. All this made it possible for her sister to spend two entire minutes just asking him questions.

Now here was a specific endeavor. Changliu, her sister, and hundreds of other sisters all around the country had bought every single ramen bowl in this particular batch just to do this exact procedure with every one of them. Citing production errors, the manufacturer had issued a recall, but between when the announcement was made and when supermarkets had begun to pull stock from the shelves, someone had figured out this hack. It was a miracle. In less than twelve hours, the sisters had mobilized, and they’d bought almost every unit of the defective batch before they were confiscated.

After consulting the experts among themselves, the sisters had collectively engineered the most straightforward way to jailbreak the ramen bowls in order to ask Xiao Tan their questions. The questioning would be done in pairs or in groups, with one sister responsible for jailbreaking the bowls and another sister responsible for asking the questions. The entire session would be recorded for later transcription and analysis.

The questions had been workshopped. Each group of sisters was responsible for asking a specific set of questions, so none of their efforts were redundant. The goal of this vast endeavor was a common, vital, sisterly interest. Changliu and her sisters were going to figure out whether their ship, a pairing of the male idol actors Xiao Tan / Gang Yinbo—They were going to figure out whether it was real.

“Are you ready?” her sister asked.

“Thirty seconds,” replied Changliu.

Changliu tapped the screen of her phone. The shifting rows of letters and numbers began to cohere into legible sequences. They flickered once and then they stopped. On the lid of the bowl, Xiao Tan’s pupils froze in their sockets.

“Five seconds,” said Changliu. She, her sister, and Xiao Tan all blinked in unison, and then her sister tore the shrink wrap away from the bowl. She started asking their questions.

Were you in X place at Y time? Were all the actors housed on the same floor of the hotel when you shot Z drama? How often would you eat dinner with your co-star, Gang Yinbo? Did you become familiar with your co-star’s eating habits? How familiar were you with your co-star’s personal behaviors? Were you generally aware of how much he slept? When he went to bed? Did he prefer the room bright or dark? What was the first thing he did upon waking up?

Xiao Tan answered with the direct concision of a student getting quizzed out loud. But as he spoke, Changliu felt cold dismay settle in her stomach. His replies were single words or phrases, and while knowing the answers was good, the constellation of information they formed seemed almost incoherent. There were any number of reasons why Xiao Tan might know that Gang Yinbo ate one slice of whole grain toast and a hard-boiled egg every morning. When Xiao Tan professed not to know his co-star’s sleeping habits, Changliu remembered an interview where Xiao Tan had said their chaotic filming schedule meant that almost no one slept regular hours. It’d be incredible, delicious, and incendiary if he did know when, where, and how Gang Yinbo slept, but that he didn’t know meant very little. There was no conclusion to draw.

Changliu tried to imagine. Summer in Hengdian, where the drama was filmed, the air stifling and close, the heat of the season undissipated even long after midnight. The hotel’s air conditioning would stick clothes to damp skin, the sharp chill only getting worse between the lobby and the elevator.

“Comrade Gang,” Xiao Tan might say, slouching against the elevator’s chrome handrail, staring at Gang Yinbo with vaguely bloodshot eyes. “I know it’s already two, but we’re not filming until later tomorrow. You only have that interview around lunch, so how about coming to my room to look over the script now? We could practice our lines before bed.”

Changliu imagined Gang Yinbo leaning back, one hand raised to push the hair out of his eyes. She imagined him asking, brows lifted: “Are you sure?”

He’d rake his fingers through his hair. Xiao Tan would grin, and then—

Changliu realized the kitchen was silent. Her sister was looking at her, tense and slightly lost. She was done asking their assigned questions. Changliu glanced at the timer. There were twenty seconds left.

The animate Xiao Tan looked at them with pleasant expectation. Acutely aware of the effort they’d gone through, of the moments sliding past, a single question rushed out of Changliu’s mouth: “You—Do you love Gang Yinbo?”

For the first time, Xiao Tan smiled. Changliu’s scalp went numb, and sweat broke out on her temples.

“Of course I do,” Xiao Tan replied. “I also love Rei-brand Ramen! Remember, just add water, wait two minutes, and it’s ready to enjoy. Thanks for buying! I look forward to seeing you soon~”

With that, Xiao Tan settled back into print, the fine-grain twitches of his animation slowing down until he was an image on the lid. His mouth still curved with the trace of a smile.

Changliu and her sister looked at each other. Without speaking, her sister went over and turned on the kettle. She unsealed the ramen, and once the water was boiled, she poured it inside. They waited two minutes, just like Xiao Tan had said. Afterwards, sharing the same bowl, they ate together in deep, persistent silence.

Once they finished, Changliu indicated that if she wanted, her sister could drink the broth. Her sister raised the bowl to her lips. A trickle of soup leaked out of her mouth, dripping down to stain her collar with a vivid, orangey bloom.

Changliu’s sister slammed the bowl onto the table. She coughed twice, eyes watering, and yelled, “Surely this life is cursed! What the hell did he mean?”

“I know,” said Changliu. “I know.”

Crow Jonah Norlander

Monologue of a pirate ship that doesn’t have a figurehead, or maybe it did, long ago, but it’s hard to tell now because its bow is encrusted with these ossified clam shells and barnacles, which, during a storm, scuttle about and open up and scream, as though they had mouths. by Jiaqi Kang

October 13, 2021 · Fiction

I only ever wanted to know how it felt to have the wind beneath your feet, eager to hoist you up to where you needed to be, hands outstretched, palms faced upwards and fingers laced together, inviting. As a sapling I watched children do that, paid special attention to the one at the bottom who was always getting a faceful of leg, ass, and hand as his friends used him to clamber over the wall. I was friends with the wall. My roots were entwined with the bricks at its foundation. We’d come up around the same time, the wall erected where before there was only common. When the time came for me to leave, it was difficult for them to cut me down. Like the wall was holding on to me, trying to keep me there. They had to smash some of the stone to tear me out, and dig their heels into the mud and pull and pull.

Afterwards, they stripped my bark and made me smooth. Made me bend and curve the way they wanted. The wall stayed put and did its job, which was to enclose, and forgot me. Part of me became the holster for a sail, and when the wind blew across the water and filled my puffed-out cheeks I learned that nothing is as good as you think it’ll be when you’re lying on your back on a common that no longer exists while your mother rubs your belly in comforting circles. I learned that you can miss stomachaches, and the sky when it’s placid, and children who snap your branches and tuck their garbage into the crooks of your trunk. I learned that you can be seasick.

The sea was so wide, the first time. The sky was empty. I crossed them and crossed them and didn’t leave so much as a mark. The water held no imprint. It took me years to realise that the waves lapping against me wanted nothing from me, and had nothing to say to me either.

My captain sings to me when he thinks only I can hear. My captain shares his rum with me and sometimes falls out of his bed so I can feel his skin. My captain saw my run-down husk and replaced each and every one of my planks, some himself, some by others under his orders. When I first met my captain he was only a child. He reminded me of myself at that age: supple, wicked, with conniving thoughts. I watched him shed his skirts and cut his hair. I watched him kill his masters with a cleaver he pocketed from the kitchens. I was there when he lost his leg and I gave him a part of me to use as peg, and it was like how he used to run a finger across the coarse grain of my body to see if I’d splinter him; that hiss of pain and prick of blood always such a thrill, as though in that moment he understood me. The splinters always pushed themselves out some days later but when he received the peg, it was mine for him to keep. His.

My name is Shen. It means deep. It means God. It means aunt. It means that I live in the gap beneath your bed and only come out to call you down to mealtimes. No, it doesn’t. My kidnappers only thought it would be an easy name to use for when they needed me to wade into the water on their behalf. Sometimes, I drop my anchor into the sands in the dark and wonder if I’ll fall in love with whatever I find next. There was a particular ripple that passed through me once and made me wonder whether that’s what it feels like, when it happens—as though something has moved through you, has made use of you in that moment as some kind of transit or vessel, and now all you want to do is to follow it wherever it goes so that it may use you again. I think it was made of sound, the ripple, though I don’t know what it sounds like.

Here’s what I do know: I know that aunts are meant to look like dads, all square faces and round eyes, lips clicking around pistachio shells. I know the sound of my captain’s footsteps, the drag of him across the floor. I know that the color purple exists, though I have never seen it. I know that the common is gone. I know that my captain’s parrot did not die of an accident, that the first mate poisoned it, that he will use the same poison to kill my captain. I know that I will not let them throw my captain’s body into the ocean after they kill him. I will not even let them touch his body, which only I have felt, his breasts tucked between his chest and the straw mattress when he sleeps, his scarred and mottled arms, the snail that lives in his hair, he sound of his snoring. I would sooner sink myself and every soul that has carved a space for itself inside my brig than let my captain’s crew dispose of him like some aging widow too old to sweep an alehouse floor.

They think because I am an aged, creaking thing, because I am ugly and damp, that I cannot fight back. What they don’t know is that my captain loves me for what he sees of me. I’d always hoped I’d die by fire, but if I am to drown, for my captain, I’d be glad, I’d be honored, I wouldn’t cry. Let the breeze take the pieces of me to some faraway shore, with enough wood to start anew.

Crow Jonah Norlander

MISSIONS by Ali Raz

October 12, 2021 · Fiction

Mission 1

We weren’t in any particularly good place, just a parking lot without any cars. Part of the lot had been flooded and now resembled a pond. It was only a matter of time until A, high on soda, stripped out of his clothes and plunged in. The others encouraged him with maniacal hoots of laughter. I ducked over to untie my shoelaces, squeezed a tube of explosives from inside of one, and proceeded to attach it to the underside of A’s Toyota.

I waited for two hours to be out of sight before I dialed The Number from a phone booth. Two hours beforehand, A had started his car and burned to a crisp.

“It’s done,” I said into the payphone. This was difficult; the most difficult part of the whole operation. Each of us were questioned by the police, but nothing came of it. Of course it didn’t. They were incompetent fools.

***

Surveillance structures in Looptown (not a name; a homonym) are designed with sightlines in mind. This sounds obvious when thus stated, yet one would be surprised by how commonly it is overlooked—in other cities. The whole of Looptown is the work of a single architect. This has given the township a coherence of design rare in modern cities. Looptown is distinctive in other senses, too, being the brainchild of bureaucrats who gathered in parliament one afternoon and decided en masse that a new city was necessary. The king was pleased. Preparations began forthwith. An engineering competition was launched—anyway, not to go on. The point is, there was a point in Looptown’s emergence. Unlike the mass of historical cities, it was not formed through the step-wise action of historical time. It burst upon the planet all at once, complete and fully formed, much like Mr. Bean’s fall from the sky (for the careful observer, that show—and no other—has predicted the future in other ways, too).

***

Of all of Looptown’s many noteworthy architectural features, none is more immediately striking than the design of its surveillance structures: police station, prison, courthouse, post office, grocery store, and bank. Observed from aerial view, Looptown is a cube. Each structure is situated in a way that allows it complete and unobstructed sightlines over each of the cube’s six faces. The task was impossible—which is exactly why I had been given it; I, and not my dear eliminated A, had been the intended eliminee. In executing the mission, I had evaded my own death, switching it out with A’s. Would it matter? I hoped that it would not. Which is why, filled with hope, I made the circuitous trek out of the police station and walked with my back to their expanding glass wall, always aware of the 100 eyes upon my back, until the moment I occupied the vertex where the domain of the police station ends and the post office begins. It wasn’t a blind spot. It was an interference zone. Policemen and postal workers dried out their eyes in staring contests as I, meanwhile, picked up the receiver and dialed The Infernal Number.

Mission 2

Men have no regard for each other.

For example:

In Wes Craven’s B-movie extravaganza The Hills Have Eyes, two families have a stand-off. One is a normal family. One is a cannibal family. The Normals bust a tire and run out of gas in the middle of an endless desert. Soft sand and dry heat form mountains of grit that run a ring around the horizon. These hills have iron in them. The iron scuppers the radio reception, meaning they’re good and truly stuck. Really cooked—as both families know. Have known, each independent of the other, from the moment they stopped at a gas station and encountered a strange old man, saw a bloody handprint on a door, listened to warnings they’d no mind of heeding. Each of the six holds this knowledge within themselves while maintaining a false exterior for the others. They each of them front. Which is why, as families do, they will each of them rot, burn, and lose their minds, sustain bullet wounds and be stabbed to death, in a single night lose everything that they hold dear. The seventh, a baby named Catherine, meanwhile, had no idea any of this was happening, or that she lived with such utter fools.

***

The film doesn’t end. It only stops running. The last frame is of Doug Wood, the golden boy. Unable to pull the wool over his eyes any more, Doug plunges a knife into the cannibal father the way one plunges a clogged toilet bowl. Beneath him, out of frame, the father cannibal experiences ecstatic death. It’s hard growing up in a desert. It’s hard living with animals like an animal. It’s hard being ugly, maimed, malformed. It’s hard to be spurned, scorned, denied, expunged. It’s hard to eat baby Catherine, but it’s easier than the alternative, which is to starve.

Mission 3

Iron has magnetic properties.QQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQA3333 and it will, and it will lead me to the true North.

“Melissa,” I said to the spider, who turned in her web and wagged her face at me. “Do you think it would be wise or unwise for someone—not myself, of course—but someone else, to respond to radio messages not intended for them?”

The coffee pot pinged and I poured a large cup. I drank it in the living room with Melissa.

The telephone rang around noon: six hours too late. “You’re too late,” I intoned into the phone. Behind me, Melissa started up her mezzo-soprano scales and I cupped a hand over the mouthpiece to keep my interlocutor from overhearing. “It’s already over.”

Hardly had I said this when a fist pounded on the front door. Melissa’s voice broke on a note. I curled a hand over the pistol in my waistband and moved softly towards the door. The silhouette was a woman’s. I tucked myself flat against the wall and asked the stranger what she wanted.

She told me she needed to make a phone call. Her car had broken down—looking out the kitchen window later, I’d indeed see a Beetle with smoke rising from the hood—and she needed a mechanic. A breathless moment passed. Then I slipped the pistol back into my pants, yanked aside the chain, and welcomed the stranger into my house. Highly irregular behavior from a serviceman, but I had had queasy dreams the night before. Queasy dreams, whenever I have them, make me act queasy until the feeling goes away.

“Would you like some coffee?” I asked her when she had made the call. “Cereal? A sandwich?”

The woman politely declined each of these. She said I was very kind, but she had to be going. At the door she paused, perhaps pitied me, turned to kiss me a little on the lips. Her tongue had darted into my mouth before I had time to react, and then she was gone.

“Wow,” I said aloud, and spat out the pellet she had deposited against the inside of my cheek. When I’d unrolled the tight little paper tube and dried it out, I saw that there was an address on it. The address was my own.

***

“Melissa,” I asked Melissa. “Do you think I ought to take a shower or a bath?”

So I stood under warm flowing water and moved a loofah around me, trying to get clean. Melissa had picked my outfit for the day. She’d gone all out. Lime-green suit, bowler hat, stovepipe socks and brogues. The last time I’d worn all that I’d been getting married.

Which was fitting.

I hid the bomb in the cake. This was easy. A ten-layered wedding cake, to arrive intact at an event, has to be assembled on the premises. A team of bakers ferry the individual layers to the venue in a trademark iced truck and, when the time is right, carefully and with bated breath, stand each layer atop the other. Frosting and icing are added along with decorative bits and bobs.

I hung around the bakers and snatched a moment when their attention was diverted to slide the pipe bomb into the side of the vanilla cake. I covered the point of insertion with icing and, with my work having been accomplished, wandered further into the party. I was enjoying canapes and champagne in a far corner of the garden when the bride and groom cut into the wedding cake and sprayed blood and marzipan all over the place.

“It’s done,” I said into the payphone, and hung up. Then I was on the ground and vomiting, really heaving, my whole gut was in my mouth. The shadow of the man who had poisoned—of course, poisoned!—the precise canape that was served to me fell over the ground, and then I blacked out.

***

Phones were ringing off the hook. One phone would be answered, and another would start ringing and mixed up in it all were the murmurs of male voices. Low and officious—that is how the men sounded, as consciousness slowly returned to me. I couldn’t see the men, and this is how I knew there was a hood over my head. There was no feeling in my hands and feet. My butt was hurting on a hard metal chair. Leather straps kept me pressed to it.

“He’s awake.”

“Light him up.”

A set of floodlights blazed on in my face and the hood was yanked off by a wire. I know that I screamed because there was the taste of blood in my throat; I’d bitten down on my tongue in the shock of the lights. There was a gibbering sound like turkeys at play.

“We have you. F__ Gott__, you are under arrest!” A voice spoke into a mic. I know that he was using a mic because there was a lot of feedback. Especially when he raised his voice and got all excited, and the mic exploded in a chainsaw of artifacts. Someone got him a new one.

He read me out my list of crimes. Everything I’d ever done, and some things that I hadn’t. While they had me, they must have thought, might as well pin some loose ends on me. It was policework, plain and simple. I didn’t hold any grudges on that account.

“Who sold me out?” I asked, when the recitation had ended and my cop captors asked if I’d any questions. A universal tittering went up.

“It was Melissa,” the man boomed into the mic.

Melissa, Melissa, Melissa, the others echoed.

Melissa

Melissa

Melissa

Someone threw the switch and the straps fell off from around me. Immediately, I teetered, lost balance, fell thirty feet into an ice bath of piranhas.

Melissa

Melissa

Melissa

Crow Jonah Norlander

NOSEBLEED WEATHER by Marilyn Hope

October 11, 2021 · Fiction

Twelve-year-old Tibby Wallace takes the winter with him when he dies, but it's an act of rage. Summer scrapes through the valley overnight. Pollens convulse, lakes flood. Hundreds of snowshoe hares wear their December-whites in the sudden verdure; easy prey for owls, foxes, Mazzie Mako's feral cats. Soft, torn bodies everywhere. Tibby evokes eight-foot-tall stalks of hogweed from every ribcage, furious and toxic to the touch. But it's the yarrow that spells murder to me and Cricket.

"Never seen anything natural grow in such straight lines," Cricket says, studying the row of rusty blossoms that slit across the town limits like papercuts. "Earth don't plant in processions."

"Speaking of processions," I say, nodding to the single-lane road. Mrs. Wallace is driving back from the cemetery in far-off Stanton in her battered station wagon, heading the autocade at a crawl. Everyone's still got their winter tires on. Wallace rolls down her window, melting snow clinging to the tulle veil of her fascinator: she must've stood graveside for a very long time.

"What's all this?" Wallace asks. "Hemlock?"

"Yarrows," says Cricket. "Also known as 'soldier's woundworts' or 'sanguinaries.'"

"All right, Policegirl Posy. What they mean?"

"Mean he's angry." Cricket's thick black hair hangs heavy with sweat and rain. Tibby has been tantruming short storms and grueling sun in turn across the 5.80 square miles of our town all day. "Mean there's something else he wants us to see."

"Always got to have the final word, my boy," says Wallace. She and Tibby lived in a small house full of fatigue. They were hard-eyed but shy, both of them better hiders than seekers. Mrs. Wallace's hands are all knuckle as she tightens them around the steering wheel, so hard that the old leather cracks. "We following through or not?"

Cricket and I get back into the squad car and hit the siren. We're in haphazard plainclothes for today's mercurial weather. I’m wearing a denim romper and snow boots. Cricket’s in a sage-colored button-down, men's trousers, and a disposable rain poncho. Badges on ball chains circle our necks.

"Seen this before," Cricket tells me, dodging hogweed as we drive. "My neighbor's daughter in Cheongsando went missing one spring. Found the body surrounded by endangered musk deer, the kind that live in the boreal forest, right there in the island green. They died so quickly. Fangs everywhere, like punctuation marks. But for a spell, they brought the taiga with them. Jezo spruce and bog rosemary and fireweed—"

"You know your plants," I say, startled.

"I know everything that's got a place," says Cricket. "And I know a pointed finger when I see one. That girl laid dahurian larch all around the house of the man who killed her. I didn't have the seniority to convict him then, but I've got the numbers and the shadows to back me here. Not that I think Tibby'll have left much for us to fingerprint. If this sun is any indication."

Sweat slips down our temples. Cricket pokes the AC vents open.

"Hell-hot," she says.

By the time we reach the house at the end of the yarrow, tiny red petals have swallowed the doctor entirely—a woman's silhouette tethered to the ground by a net of stems. Cricket and I draw closer on our tiptoes, seesawing as we try not to step on the flowers’ open faces. So many and so close, the copper clusters of florets smell full and peppery, like someone's cooking. Spindly white spider lilies canopy her expression, rising from her eyes and nostrils and mouth, as if in censorship.

Cricket presses one hand to the doctor's wrist for a pulse, then pulls it back with her middle finger raised toward the ceiling.

"Oh, boss, don't pout," I say. "Let the boy have his revenge."

"And what pretty revenge it is," says Cricket, sullen. "Just wish the achillea came with answers."

But it doesn't. Tibby had been back in the phlebotomy chair the last afternoon we spoke. I asked what they were testing for this time, and he replied in that voice of his, dry as dust: “Toxins. The really-hard-to-find ones.”

He liked us—Cricket's terse concern and thin mouth, my cheerful banter, the silly things I could do with my eyebrows. The way we believed him when he said someone was poisoning him. “I wanted to do what you two do”, he said, the doctor tapping gently at his inner elbow. “I wanted to keep listening after everyone else gives up.”

There was nothing we could say to that, his resignation, our failure. I watched the test tubes fill one after the other, his tiny veins bulging with blood. Almost beautiful.

“Like branches,” I said.

“Like roots,” Tibby replied.

Outside, Mrs. Wallace honks her horn twice. She and the funeral cortege are pulling up to see the damage. I can address the grief in her expression—there are enough ways to say "I'm sorry" and "I know you loved him"—but I can think of no acceptable reply to the fury and shame that twist her mouth when she sees where the flowers are leading her.

Cricket and I walk to the front porch and stand shoulder-to-shoulder, shivering. Now that we've found the body, Tibby has released the weather again, fast as a snap of the fingers. Not far beyond the final car, it's beginning to snow, winter creeping up on the mourners like a slow, slender needle.

Crow Jonah Norlander

YANG LIANTING REDUX by Celeste Sea

October 10, 2021 · Fiction

After the first time we fucked, she pissed on me. A whim. It had felt sacred, hot and vicious, and we’d laughed as the piss slid down onto my waiting tongue.

Crow Jonah Norlander

KERNEL PANIC by Rebecca Rubenstein

October 1, 2021 · Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where’s Azazel?” he said.

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

“What’s wrong with it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edgar shrugged. “There was an ant.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then he began to vomit.

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

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

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

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

x-r-a-y magazine

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