X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

FROG CIGARETTES by Brendan Gillen

May 6, 2021 · Fiction

Two at a time, take the steps ’til I’m out of breath. Mom doesn’t know. Attic stiff with heat. Cobwebs like lightning. Know I’m after something important, just haven’t found it yet. Up here there’s a tool chest by the mannequin. Been around long as I’ve been sneaking up. Since I was seven maybe. The years feel like gym class. Around and around and leave me dizzy. The dust is thick and my eyes itch.

Not supposed to be up here because it’s where Dad used to come and hide. Maybe Mom thinks part of him is still up here and that I’ll find it. Plus, it’s dangerous. Least that’s what she thinks. Ladder is rotted, creaky, and there are nails and stuff. I even found a dead frog one time, buried it in the backyard with my baseball cards.

All kinds of junk. Typewriter with keys like busted teeth, switch knife with a comb for a blade, empty birdcage from when Nell and Coffee were alive. Mom keeps saying she’s going to clear it all out, sell some of it, but she never does, just sits and reads magazines and drinks her iced tea. Who’d want to buy this crap, anyway? Besides, I’d never let her.

There are splinters. Got one underneath my thumb skin once two years ago. Hurt real bad and I tried to fish it out with a pin from an old sewing kit, but I only jammed it in more and made it bleed. I didn’t tell Mom until a week later because my thumb started looking like a grape. She took me to Doctor Aimes who used little pliers to take it out and drain the pus. I only cried a little, I swear.

Mom took me for ice cream after and then she spanked me at home in the kitchen with the metal spatula. Almost hurt as much as the splinter, but I didn’t cry because I knew what to expect by then. Mom would start off hitting pretty hard, but by the fifth or sixth whack, her heart wasn’t in it anymore and I could tell she just wanted to go back to the magazines and iced tea. When she hits me now, she looks a little scared like she thinks one day I might start to hit back.

In the corner where the slanted roof meets the floor, there’s a TV with a hole punched through it. I’m glad it doesn’t work. TV makes people stop talking to each other. Like when Dad was still around, he and Mom would leave me the dishes in the sink and then go watch Wheel of Fortune and pretend they didn’t hate each other’s guts.

Once I even asked Mom did she hate Dad’s guts and all she said was, “Of course, but he hates mine too, so we’re even.”

Then I asked her did she hate my guts, and she smiled and said, “Not yet.”

I find a rumpled pack of cigarettes I can’t believe I never saw before in an old shoebox behind the busted TV. The pack is green and I open it up. There’s two left and one of ‘em is pretty squished. I take that one out and smell it. Smells different than when you smoke it. This was the kind Dad used to like. Or probably he still likes them, I don’t know.

I think about eating the cigarette, just something about it, but instead I tear it open and all the brown leaves sprinkle on the floor. But then I get nervous because what if another frog comes up and eats the leaves and he dies too? I make the leaves into a neat little pile and lick my fingers so the leaves stick to my fingers and I put them in my mouth. It’s gross and tastes like spoiled dirt, but I swallow it down so at least the frogs will be safe.

I go over to the mannequin and sit on the floor and pull my knees up and think about how I wish it wasn’t the first day of summer break. Summer just means trying to find things to do that aren’t the two of us pretending like Mom isn’t still sad about Dad being gone. I hate school but at least it’s something to do. That’s why I like when Mom goes out for more iced tea so I can come up here. I’ve never shown this place to anyone.

There’s a girl I like in my grade, her name is Katie Wray. She wears braids and doesn’t know I like her. It’s better that way because if I told her and she doesn’t like me back it would all be ruined. I think about bringing her up here someday. I’d tell her to watch her head for the slanting roof and be careful touching the beams because of splinters. I’d tell her I got one in my thumb a few years back and that it hurt pretty bad, but no way I’d tell her about the crying or getting spanked.

I think she’d like it up here. Who wouldn’t? I know she likes books because she’s always raising her hand to read in Mr. Foley’s class. I like hearing her read. She’s got a voice that would be nice to listen to on the phone. There are some books up here I could show her. There’s one about gardening, and a real beat up one called Find Your True Calling, and one about the birds of the Southeast. I set aside the bird one because it seems like the kind of thing Katie would like.

I stand up and stoop so I don’t bang my head. My gut gurgles and lurches to the left.

Uh oh.

I burp and taste old dirt and my stomach feels like going over a dip in the car. If I hurl up here, Mom will find out and I’ll never get to come back up again. I get a lot of spit in my mouth like when Mom makes hamburgers, except I’ve never been less hungry in my whole life and the thought of burgers makes me burp again. I pick up the bird book and take it with me and make my way backwards down the ladder.

There’s a bubble in my head and I run downstairs and through the kitchen and out into the backyard just in time because I bend over and spew right there in the grass near the birdfeeder. My eyes burn and my nose runs. I breathe and breathe until my stomach finally stops being pissed.

I sit there in the grass and start to cry because this day is nothing and summer only just started and I got spew on my t-shirt. Mom will see it when she does the wash so I think about chucking it, but then she’ll notice it’s gone because it’s the Braves one I wear all the time and if I tell her I traded it to Jasper Nicks down the street, she’ll either smack me for lying or smack me for trading away a good shirt. I feel like a dummy for crying, and that only makes me cry more.

I see something move in the grass by my shoe. It moves again and the grass sort of twitches and I see what it is. A frog.

“Hey buddy,” I say real soft and it hops closer to my foot. I want to hold it, so I move really, really slowly and carefully and don’t even dry my face. I lean over so carefully and the frog doesn’t move. He lets me pick him right up in my palm. His eyes slide around like he’s not so sure about this and his throat is moving real fast, so I say, “Hey, it’s okay, I got you.”

He’s heavier than I thought, the weight of a baseball maybe, and he feels a little like the way an orange out the fridge feels. I really want to pet him with my other hand, but I’m afraid to scare him, so instead I think about how I’m going to tell Katie about him when school starts up again in August. It’s a long way away, but I’ll remember. I’ll tell her the frog liked being in my hand because he trusted me.

There’s the pop and crunch of gravel, the sound of Mom turning into the driveway. I’ll tell her about my t-shirt because I don’t care anymore and she’ll get the spatula anyway, but for now I lower my hand and before I even get to the ground, the frog knows what to do and hops off into the grass. I lose him for a second, but then he hops again and again and off into the summer, like he’s telling me something as big as love, Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Crow Jonah Norlander

A VIEW FROM THE CITY by Elliot Alpern

May 3, 2021 · Fiction

I see the backs of your shoulders—there you are, right there—on a bench by the harbor, where it’s windy, and where there’s a nice clear view of the monster ambling toward the city.

“Hello,” I call out. You look each way, left and then right and then left again, but not behind, and so I jog lightly to your bench, take the seat beside you.

“Hello,” I say again, this time a bit breathlessly.

“Oh,” you say, “hey, I thought I heard your voice.”

You look the same. And that’s with some years, a different haircut, a sort of quiet glow that didn’t use to be there. But all of that’s garnish—you look exactly, exactly the same.

“It’s crazy,” I say, and then I look out at the water, so you can’t see yourself in my eyes. “They’re saying he’ll make landfall next month.”

“I heard that too! Yeah. I guess we’ll see. How’s your parents?”

“Fine.”

I think you do genuinely want to know how my parents are holding up, or at least my mom; I know you’d been close. Maybe closer than we were, me and you, maybe even me and Mom. But, I’m sure you understand—I can’t give you everything here.

“Good,” you say.

Maybe two, maybe three miles out into the ocean, the monster attracts a looney-tune halo of seagulls, and he walks slowly—no more than a few steps per day—but he does not rest. His is a beeline path, an inevitability by all accounts, straight for the busy heart of the city.

“I quit smoking weed,” I tell you, and immediately, I want to snatch the words back out of the air, stuff them right back down my stupid throat.

“That’s great,” you say with a smile, nodding, “that’s fantastic.”

“Did you—”

“I always hoped, you know. I just think that’s really, that’s just, great.”

“Right,” I say.

A helicopter buzzes out over the harbor, banking sharply out toward the big guy. There’s always so many on this side of the city, now—they like to keep tabs on him, I guess, or maybe they just don’t want him to get too lonely out there.

“Did you and, uh, Mark, did you guys figure out what you’re doing?” I ask. This is the hot new question of the summer. Do you know what you’re gonna do? And, do you? Does anyone?

“We’re leaving,” you say, only you say it with a weight, and an anchored rhythm, like you tried to say “I love him” and spoke the wrong language.

“Why?”

“Well we can’t stay,” you say, “obviously.” You look out at the monster in the harbor, and I look out at the monster in the harbor, and he keeps walking. He always keeps walking.

“And Mark says he’s not worried about finding something, even if it’s just running, you know, IT somewhere.”

“I’m sure.”

I am. Mark was nice the one time we met, and unfortunately rather sharp, and I remember most that he possessed a deep interest in curling. I couldn’t point you to the nearest rink.

“Do you think he’ll keep going?” I ask.

“Where?”

“Past the city. Through it, just, keep on walking. Right on through the heartlands.”

You sigh. I’m sure you tell yourself, this is why, right here, this is it. This is what you couldn’t take any longer.

“I don’t know,” you say. “Who knows. Maybe he’ll hang out on the beach.”

“Yeah. Anyway I hope it goes well,” I say. “Moving sucks. But, on to better things, which is always good.”

“Mhmm.”

You look like you want to say something else, and you do, you open your mouth to tell me, but the monster makes that sound—that annoying, lonely yelp, pitching up after a short while, like some stupid question, always the same one, over and over again. The monster so absolutely, impossibly immense, that we can hear it all these miles away, here in the city. All of us, we can all hear it getting louder, every day.

You and I could’ve left it there, on that note, in the unanswered silence.

But.

You can’t.

“And I’m due in the fall,” you say, eyes glittering. Which, of course, you didn’t have to tell me. I could have found it out on Instagram, or Facebook, like people normally do now, or through my mom, obviously, or I could have lived my whole life not knowing, could have died not knowing. Just fine.

“Whoa,” I say. “Congratulations—that’s amazing, I, uh, I’m sure. That’ll be wonderful.”

A pause, the only time I remember wanting that monster to ask its dumb fucking question again, but it won’t, and so we have to sit in this quiet, and the breeze. Since I can’t possibly say more about that.

Another helicopter buzzes past, this time inbound, a long fat day of monster-watching, I’m sure. There used to be birds in this park, quite a lot of them, but I don’t think they like the down-wash.

“I’m gonna have to get going,” you say eventually. “Do you want to walk back, grab coffee on the way? Do you have anywhere to be?”

“Nah, you go ahead,” I say. “Tell Mark I said hi. And, you know, hope the move is smooth. Hire movers.”

“Oh we will,” you say. “Be well!”

I’ll be well. She’ll be well. I don’t particularly think we’ll see each other again, and that’s alright. And she’ll have a nice full family at Christmas, now, and that’s alright. And the monster is going to walk right over this city, asking its question to bleeding ears, and I don’t think I have an answer for him, really, I don’t think anyone will. And that’s just alright by me.

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SONATA by Daisuke Shen

April 30, 2021 · Fiction

For a long time now, all sound has been damp. Wrapped in mildew, white-fleeced, everyone’s voices turned to mist. I am the only one not contained within this quiet—me, who has always wished to be, more so than anyone else; me, the girl who could never stop singing.

I had tried all of the tricks, of course: stuffed my mouth with lagan scrounged from sea beds, weaned off of proteins and greens, hoping to become weaker. Yet the avalanche of notes poured out of my mouth like sludge; my crazed melodies frenetic and pinched as sand fleas.

The silence started two years ago at that strange rehearsal, where a man wearing a blue silk scarf played a piece on the piano outside of M. Franco’s cake shop. None of us had ever seen him before, nor seen a piano that size. We held our breath as he positioned himself on the bench, his fingers stretched and hovering above the keys. Perhaps this was the one we had been waiting for. Because of my incessant singing, I stood toward the back of the audience as I always did.

He began to play a symphony familiar to all of us, though there was something sinister to it, I realized—he had ripped away its flesh, plunged his fingers into its insides to rearrange the notes. Why did no one else think the mastication of this piece to be sinister? But everyone was amazed, unable to look away.

Even through my warbling, I heard the piano cry out as the man wrung its felt throat dry; its strained screams contorted in his hands into the softest lavender.

Long after he had strapped the piano onto his back and taken his leave, everyone continued clapping until the world was wrapped in static. Even their bodies became muffled, less opaque, dipping into one another’s on the street.

I, however, absorbed the piano’s grief. If people regarded me with contempt before, they now term me traitor to this town and its silence. I reside in a grey room in a grey building they have built underneath the ground, with just enough light that I can see the pen with which I write this letter, the only comfort that damned sonata that I sing again and again, as if I can be the one to save it.

Crow Jonah Norlander

SOMETHING IS KNOCKING by Sean Ennis

April 29, 2021 · Fiction

Grace and Gabe, after saying something very cutting—Grace, not Gabe—have gone to visit her parents and I am home with the dogs, in the shower, flooded with the memory of a woman I once slept with who kept demanding, “Look at me! Look at me!” It’s not, like, eudaemonic.

Then the dogs are going crazy. Something is knocking. They get very protective of the house when I'm in the shower. I don’t hurry.

And let’s be real clear: the dogs we rescued from the shelter? Did not rescue us. We do the nice, expensive things, and they basically hang out with their small, furry demands.

And let’s be clearer still: what Grace said about the séance I hosted being “poorly attended”? I was not alone.

I decided to wear the Yves Saint Laurent La Nuit De L’homme. Recently, I’ve been favoring the John Varvatos Vintage, but the Saint Laurent is Grace’s favorite and I miss her. Her friend, Colleen, once told me, “You don’t talk much, but you always smell good.”

It’s Meredith at the door, the woman who tried to kill Gabe. That’s not fair. The accident was three weeks ago, and he has stopped complaining about his bruised spleen. The hood of her car is still dented, and she is holding a plate of cinnamon buns, my favorite. She says, “I knew you were home.”

In the living room, I’m rethinking her. She has the familiar, submissive demeanor of someone trying to get off drugs. The logo of her jeans is outlined in rhinestone, and good God, they are bootcut. She sits inexplicably in the chair possessed by Grace’s dead grandmother.

“Did your family leave you?” she says.

“Permanently? No.” I say. “Or rather, none of your business.”

“You have pretty eyes,” she says. “Are they real?”

Notice, she does not apologize.

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LIZARD BLOOD by Alisha Wexler

April 28, 2021 · Fiction

Tuesday I wake up damp with a clenched jaw. Dirty towels on the ground reeking of mildew. Why do people record their dreams? Dreams are trout in bare hands—let them slip free! Mine are so generic anyway. I pluck out my teeth one-by-one like daisy petals. He loves me, I say with blood pouring down my hand, he loves me not. I move on. I weasel out of New York lease. I get out of bed. I go into the bathroom. I put on the clammy moist bikini hanging over the shower rod. I lay by the kidney-shaped pool in the backyard.

I’m still in Arizona—the McMansion in the Sonoran Desert. It’s the house I grew up in that my dead mother left to me. I’ve been here a month. By now, I should have renovated the house. I should have listed it on the market. But for who to buy? The houses in the neighborhood are still boarded up and owned by banks. Occupied by squatters. No one’s moving in. I should have signed the deed over to my stepdad, Neil. But I’ve done nothing except lay by the pool.

My friend in New York texts me: WHAT is even in the Southwest suburbs?

I reply: Pools.

This pool is where I had my first kiss. It’s where the Mormon girls in my neighborhood baptized me by holding my head underwater until I felt the walls of my lungs vacuum seal together.

I lay across slabs of sandstone, basking in the sun. Lizards join me: geckos and horny-toads.

When my dead boyfriend was alive, he called me reptilian—an ongoing joke that I hated. He first mentioned it when he saw how freakishly long my tongue was, then in passive aggressive jest about my short attention span. Sometimes he mentioned it when he heard my croaky morning voice, and once when he noticed the yellowish green of my eyes. Mostly, he said it when I was cold. I resented this. Being called ectothermic—associated with cold-bloodedness.

In the Sonoran Desert, the children are playing in the cul-de-sac and the teenagers are overdosing on Fentanyl. I take a deep breath of air polluted with endocrine disruptors. Yesterday I parked behind the drug store and watched a malnourished coyote lap up roadkill. Today I see the sun glittering like chrome sparks off the pool’s little wakes. Everyday, I get up and drive twenty minutes to the nearest Starbucks just to hear someone tell me “good morning” and remind me I exist.

***

Wednesday I wake up, put on the damp bikini, lay by the pool.

At noon, Neil comes over to check the chlorine levels, filters, and pumps. He circles the perimeter, skimming out leaves and drowned moths. “The Little Guy is broken,” he tells me. The Little Guy is what he calls the suction scooter that scours the pool like a bottom-feeder.

The older he gets, the deeper his voice becomes. I now hear the Oklahoma drawl he suppressed for years. Though, he’s not “old” per se. He’s only sixteen years older than me. I run the numbers in my head. Married my mother when he was 24, she was 47, I was 8. Oddly, the older he gets, the younger he looks. Maybe it’s the relief of my nutcase mother being in the ground, maybe it’s his even tan, or just the glow of new sobriety. He’s got those angular lower abs that gesture toward his dick. Had he always had those? I can’t believe my mom made me call him Daddy.

I dog-paddle to the narrow part of the kidney and rest my elbows on the lip of the pool, letting water dribble out of my mouth.

“Neil,” I say, “the jackrabbits are committing suicide.”

“I don’t blame them.”

“I’ve run over several on the road underneath the arroyo. They hop out into the middle and just sit there. I swerve, they leap in the same direction. Splat!”

“Don’t swerve. Jackrabbits seek thrill. They play chicken. You just go straight at ‘em and they’ll jump out of the way.”

I think about games of chicken. Two fighters racing toward each other only to surrender at the exact same time, pull out in the exact same direction, collide anyway. Two cowards who die without dignity.

That night I wrote a letter to my dead boyfriend.

Are you one of those people who see animal instincts as omens or warnings? You know, how in apocalypse/natural disaster movies the first sign of things taking a turn for the worst is always strange animal behavior? I’m one of those people.

This is why I left Arizona years ago. There were animals—animals everywhere. I’d walk out my front door and see roadrunners darting down the sidewalk. I saw coyotes sniffing through the garbage. Late at night, I’d pull into the driveway, headlights beaming onto cottontail families as they scurried out of the lawns. Their habitats: the sage, saguaros, and brier, were being torn out and scorched to the ground to lay down concrete. New roads paved. The foundation to build bigger but weaker houses; ugly houses with confused architectural styles. This isn’t to say that the animals “sensed” an economic crash, but it was a sign (more literal than symbolic) that something was about to change.

I wish you could smell my skin now: coconut and chlorine. Maybe I don’t shower enough. I am so tired and sun-drunk and regular drunk. I drank a lot of tequila. I ate a lot of Xanax. Perhaps I’ll see you in Hell very soon.

Until we meet again,

***

Thursday I wake up, put on the damp bikini, lay by the pool.

Another friend texts me: Damn the desert’s a VIBE

I reply hell yaaa and swat a wasp away from my thigh.

U working on anything out there?

No. Just vibing.

When the sun sets I drive to Starbucks and take the road under the arroyo. A jackrabbit is there, as always. I charge straight at it, as Neil advised. It doesn’t jump away. My heart swishes around my chest like a squid in a small net when I feel the crunch under my tire.

At night, Neil calls to tell me that my yard is infested with scorpions. It’s nice of him to help out as much as he does, I think, considering he’s a gold digger who didn’t get the inheritance he married for. I feel an odd responsibility to take care of my dead mom’s cowboy gigolo widower. I’ll give him money, but I’ll never give him this piece of shit house.

I go outside with a blacklight. He was right. I see scorpions glowing fluorescent blue—too many to count—they’re crawling on the ground and wriggling up the walls. People who don’t believe that there is pure horror in this world have never done this: gone into the desert night with a blacklight.

***

Friday I wake up, put on the damp bikini, lay by the pool.

The least serene day of the week: band practice. A death metal band plays in a garage up the street. There are guttural shrieks and heavy base. Boys squealing like injured pigs—various patterns of the words:

GUT

FUCK

CUM

SLUT

CUNT

PUNCH

It ends with them repeating:

INSIDIOUS

I roll over onto my stomach and untie my bikini. A lizard is back. He doesn’t flinch. He holds his head regally high toward the sun.

I jump into the pool and hold my breath. I wonder if I can stay down long enough to feel the walls of my lungs kiss like they did the time I was baptized.

I imagined New York, slinking into bed when my boyfriend’s body was still warm. I swung my leg over his leg, braided my knee under his knee, my ankle over his ankle. He said he felt the night’s chill soaked into my skin. His was burning feverishly. We lied there entwined, regulating each other’s body temperatures. Morphing into one another. Yin and yang. The next night an ambulance flashed lights over our unmade bed. Ripples of blanket and sheets looked like the waves of a red hot sea.

I emerge from the water’s surface and gasp. I climb out of the pool and offer myself to the sun. I turn toward it. I indulge in it. It warms my lizard blood, and when the wasps come buzzing, I’ll shoot my lizard tongue twice as far as my height and eat them. Later today, I’ll find a way to numb my lizard brain. And when I no longer like my lizard tail, I will chop it off and it will grow right back.

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TWO-IN-ONE by Genta Nishku

April 26, 2021 · Fiction

That summer, the water in that city ruined my hair. After every wash, the same refrain: clumping and matting. A whole bottle of hair conditioner later, and I was at the dim-lit bar. A man gestured something at me with his eyes, while outside, the awkward artist typed his number in my phone. We’ll meet for lunch, he promised. The warm air made disassociation easier, even if the drinks were weak and the conversation hard to follow. I’d get drunk at home, I decided. Then the traces of the day would fade, present and future melting together, like the sky and sea whenever we’d take the long road to get far away. There are too many nights and not enough conclusions. Nothing ever happens for me, I told him, but what I meant was, I don’t let anything happen. If you remember what I said about your eyes, I’d ask him, please don’t tell anyone. It would betray my reputation. Later, the complaint about the water would become an ice-breaker. Who hadn’t had an experience with unsatisfactory water? All the papers talk about conditions of possibility and I refuse to look up what it means. What’s the use? The conditioner detangled my hair. I kept it wrapped in a towel—color’s up to your imagination—and I stood by the window. A woman at a window makes the story worth reading. It recalls the folktales of our childhood. In one of them, the woman fashions a body, her body, out of rags and hay, with tree branches for limbs. A branch arm sticks out, waving goodbye forever.

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HAZARD by Nicholas Rall

April 23, 2021 · Fiction

Ethel and Edith tried to keep their eyes open, resting in a square of brownish dying grass; an empty lot. There used to be a family who lived there, and I could see the kids play in the driveway from our window, until men with big, yellow machines tore it down and it stayed like that until the girls took me with them. They’d been in the neighborhood for a few hours, walking through about half the state of Florida, staying close to the interstate. Usually they could get a ride but not that night, and it was time to rest.

The area they found themselves in was hidden in the woods next to the interstate; the kind of place you don't remember, until an image of a dozen houses, smothered, overtaken by weeds, comes to your mind later after a bad day at work, a nightmare maybe, lingering residue from a trip through Florida you took a few years earlier.

They were drawn to his truck, a red Ford Ranger from the 1970’s, which was in perfect condition and probably inherited from a recently dead relative. He hadn't had enough time to neglect it, to let it rot into one of the other rusty clumps in the neighborhood—at least not on the outside.

Unknown to him, I'm sure, the girls watched as he walked to the curb and climbed into his truck. They thought they might find something useful in his garage or, at least, a shady place to rest. The garage door was busted, unable to lower all the way, leaving about a foot and a half of space open; just enough for the two of them to squeeze underneath.

Below all the tangles of the Earth, that old house might have had a scabby, reddish brown, rusted roof. Maybe it was painted a pale pink, and a tiny, concrete slab of a “porch” was the last thing your feet would touch before you entered through the ripped screen door. I don't remember.

The girls were disappointed when their eyes adjusted to the light. Only a set of six rusty metal racks lined the walls stacked mostly with empty buckets, car cleaning supplies, some oil, degreaser, and even a few broken garden tools, which had to come from somewhere else; somewhere that could sustain a real garden, not just thick, untamed weeds. The floor was cluttered with pieces of machines, unorganized in damp cardboard boxes—junk and not much else.

Nothing was of much use to them, except a large, navy tarp that was a little dirty but only with dust and leaves. Ethel found it crammed inside a brown bucket, and they’d be able to use it to protect some of their belongings, because it might rain soon. It was just after eight in the morning when they entered the man’s garage; it would rain soon… The tarp was thick, industrial grade, so they figured maybe the man worked in construction or did when he was younger. It certainly was an improvement over their current method of protecting their belongings which was to wrap everything in any plastic bags they could find; sometimes this included trashcan lining from cans inside gas station restrooms.

They sat in the man’s garage to cool off, until the sun finally went down. That summer held a record for years as the hottest in Florida, but even on an average year there was wet heat in the air—the kind usually only produced at dry cleaners, only the pleasant hint of fabric cleaner was absent. Instead, this air smelled like it had expired.

The girls walked all night, and they needed to rest now, for a few hours, until the man came home or until they woke up. They laid on their blanket in the corner of the garage and vanished beneath the skyline of boxes.

“How long do you think he’ll be gone?” asked Edith, “he’s probably at work, huh?”

“Yeah, he’s probably at work, where do you think he works Edie?” Ethel wondered.

Turning from her side, Edith laid flat, staring up into his garage ceiling.

“Bucket Factory,” she replied, “and he’s in charge of those little plastic pieces that go on the metal handles…”

“Yeah,” Ethel replied. “Yeah I think that's right.”

I don’t remember a time before the heat … At first, I thought we didn’t have electricity because of how much I’d sweat, even though the man would crack the windows just a bit. I could hear the hum most then, and sometimes they even got into the house—the bugs. He would kill them, so I always protected them and hid them in my cup.

Maybe the house was air conditioned, but he never turned it on. Anyway, there had to be power coming from somewhere because I do remember watching the TV; a small black square placed on top of his dresser. The room had a light green carpet and a big bed. I remember the bed; it had tall white beams on all four corners and was raised enough to where I needed his help to get on to the top of it. The man had a stack of tapes, a dozen or so, but he never brought home new ones. Every once in a while, I’ll remember when I see an actor from one of the tapes on the TV, but I can never recall their names. I think I dreamt them up now and then, but there’s one I’d always look for that was my favorite … A woman, who was a scientist or vet, and her daughter living in Africa adopted a baby gorilla who was being hunted by poachers. When I can’t sleep I think of that movie; a jungle, and the sounds and smell of the jungle help me sleep. Usually at some point in the night, he’d turn off the tape and that’s when I would use the buzzing hum to fall asleep, which was usually more soothing than the movie.

When the girls awoke, light no longer shone in from the gap of the garage. With no way of telling time, they assumed they had slept for at least twelve hours. After gathering their things, they crawled through the black slit they entered. The man’s truck was back; windows rolled down, the cab was not cluttered like his garage—empty with nothing but a few of his crumbs on the floor.

“Looks like it can’t be too late, everyone’s still up. I hear sitcoms coming from that house, so it’s only about seven o’clock,” Ethel observed, standing in the same spot of dead grass she stood in outside of the man’s house hours ago.

“Yeah, I bet he just got off work, just pulled out his dinner from the microwave,” Edith replied as she walked back towards his house to the front door.

“I’ll ask if we can borrow the keys.”

A few weeks after her seventeenth birthday, Ethel had inherited some land that a second cousin of hers was impatiently waiting to hand over, and he had just informed her that that if she did not officially claim the land by the end of the month, he’d trade it to a friend of his for cattle. Part of her was fine was this, as something about living steady in Nebraska made her sick. Edith, born in the same hospital room just six months after Ethel though, figured her best friend should be the one to pocket the money from the land. They both liked walking and staying in new places each night, which could only be better with a steady amount of money, so she pushed the two of them through the South.

I heard something that could only be possible in a dream. I have to be dreaming because the man was right beside me, holding me. I felt his chest moving up and down against my back, as his hairy arms wrapped around my stomach … I had never seen anyone else in the house besides the man, but, when the girls walked past the door, I wasn’t scared. I was sure I was asleep. Maybe I should have been scared, but I wasn’t.

A soft buzzing just above my belly began and spread through my body… I knew they’d leave—I wished they’d take me with them. I closed my eyes, focusing on the buzzing outside until Ethel gently rubbed my cheek with her thumb and then lifted a finger to her lips, “Shhh.”

I was small enough then for her to carry easily, my chin sat on Ethel’s shoulders, and with hand over my eye I peeked through as the movie continued on the screen. Edith took the pillow I’d been using and pushed it down onto the man’s face, as the bugs began to hum louder than I'd ever heard before, welcoming me outside into their world.

Ethel, she was the first person I remember who felt real. She was tall, pale, with a thin face and light grey eyes. She and Edith both were frighteningly skinny, with bones showing through that never should.

She sat with me down in the cab of the man’s truck, playing with my hair, which was longer than hers. She pulled her fingers through one greasy, knotted tangle at a time, asking me questions in the same gentle way in which she unraveled my hair, but I had no answers for her, not even a name.

Soon, I heard the front door shut and Edith climbed in the passenger seat, as she vaguely smiled at me, handing me a garbage bag full of a couple of my toys and clothes she could find around the house. I smiled back but her dark, long hair was in her face, covering her eyes. When she wrapped her hair up with a tie she slid off of her wrist, I could see her light blue eyes. Darkness dripped from them, and I was not sure if she was a boy or a girl. I had only seen teenagers in movies.

Ethel drove through the night, as I rested my head against the glass window. I tried to listen to the wind; warm on my face, sneaking through a crack, not uncomfortable but pleasant and calming. We stopped at a gas station for a map. The girls asked me if I’d like to help them find our way. I did. I could not believe the lines and landmarks on the paper turn into real places, and I loved hearing Ethel and Edith talk. I stayed up with them all night just listening and directing a turn when needed, until my eyelids got so heavy they shut down. I woke up to the heavy orange light of the earth and glimpses of cars and trucks of all shapes and sizing speeding past me in every direction.

The truck screeched into the gas station parking lot. Ethel firmly held my hand and led me through the glass, double doors to use the bathroom and find some breakfast. I grabbed a Fruity Pebbles cereal bar, chocolate milk, and some peanuts.

Mesmerized by the blue and grey eyes that seemed to understand everything before them, I could feel their lives overshadowing mine. They didn't act like the teenagers on the tapes.

The concrete beneath his truck was cracked and dry, laid years ago but never maintained. Every few hours they came across long smooth stretches though.

“Do you think this is a good engine?” asked Edith.

“No … I don’t think so, not really,” Ethel replied with both hands gripped around the leather wheel.

“Yeah,” agreed Edith. “It sounds weak ...” She paused for a minute.

“How many days do you think it took to build this whole truck?”

Ethel replied instantly, “Twelve days for the frame.”

“How long do you think it’s gonna take us to get to your cousin's house?” Edith asked, resting her head against the glass.

“About a day, should be there by tomorrow around this time.”

“God I fucking hate him,” Edith groaned.

Ethel smirked. “Maybe he’s not so bad now. We won’t have to stay long.”

I ate on the curb below the pump, while Ethel fed the truck its breakfast. The sun made her hair glow tangerine. She caught me looking and let me know she thought that my hair was pretty and would be even prettier if I let her brush it, but I still did not let her.

The hidden insides of the man's truck were rotten and started to smell. The wheel began to shake in Ethel’s hands, spreading throughout the entire truck. The stink became suffocating. Ethel pulled onto the side of the road along an endless wooden fence. Soon a thick, black smoke rose from the engine, high above us.

A grey-haired, serious woman hauling a horse trailer pulled up, with six noses peeking through the metal grating. She told Ethel how we could scrap the truck. Ethel drove a few more miles and the truck died next to a field with one cow. On the other side of the field a thousand giant plastic tubes were being stored.

The bugs sounded a lot like the ones from where we came; squally and screechy. Edith and I played tag and hide-and-go-seek in the tubes. Focused, as quiet as possible, trying to hold my breath in the darkness of the thick, black plastic, I turned my head towards the opposite end, to scout the other direction, and Edith appeared out of nowhere. I froze, nearly falling off the edge, which had to be a 30-foot drop, but she grabbed me in time. She knew how bad she’d scared me because she held me for a long time before we climbed down.

That night we stayed in a marigold motel that was long and had one wooden door everyone had to come and go through. The inside looked like one long hallway with a thousand doors on each side, each a different shade of rust.

The owners were an older husband and wife, and did not want to rent out a room to Ethel. They said she was too young, but she insisted she was eighteen and eventually, they believed her.

Now I can only imagine them as people, mostly with faces like mine but they had such sluggish attitudes and so they seemed to me to be actual slugs. I can actually remember, once the night attendant checked in, the two of them sliding their way down the hall, passing us as we entered our room, squeezing into a hole at the end of the hall, half the size of their thick, slimy bodies.

The motel sat next to a highway where the air was much drier than where we had come from. I could still hear the bugs, louder actually, and I hoped that they were following somehow.

We walked across the parking lot to a dusty green building that had a plastic man, on its roof, with a mustache and chef’s hat holding a pizza, larger than all three of our bodies combined.

While we sat on the bed, the television showed Kentucky commercials. A man screamed “Sale! Sale! Sale!” in front of a thousand cars. I knew he was nervous.

I took a warm bath, and fell asleep in Ethel’s oversized jacket. When she took the jacket off to wrap me in it, it was like she took off her shell and bones protruded out stretching her skin. I slept at the foot of the bed, curled up into a little ball. I had no trouble falling asleep once the air conditioner began to buzz. As the cool air flooded my nostrils and into my head, I dreamt of Ethel, Edith, and myself in the truck, driving through the night. I followed the truck from high above in the sky, flying with thousands of other round little pink bugs, buzzing…

A knock on our door woke me. Edith didn’t move but Ethel shot up, and, as she saw me looking at the door, she rubbed my head until I fell back asleep.

The next morning, she told us to be very quiet getting ready because a priest had fallen asleep outside our door. She said the owners (the slugs) probably called him because we looked like we needed help. We saw him lying on one of the pillows in the motel lobby. Ethel lifted me over his body into Edith’s arms, and I saw a sliver of his face. His beard was white, thickest at his cheeks, thinning the higher it went. He tried to sleep like I did, in a little ball, but his long body formed a scribble.

With the money left from the truck, Ethel said we could buy bus tickets to Nebraska.

We walked for hours to get to the bus station, but I didn’t care. I loved it. I saw things I didn’t know the world had. I hadn’t known there were so many kinds of cars and so many people. Some people were eating hotdogs outside of a big white church and I ate so many I got a stomach ache. We got some bottles of water and marched on to the Hazard Greyhound Station—nothing was wrong with it, that was just the name of the town, a mining town. Edith said her Dad used to watch a funny show about some boys in Hazard but that it was nothing like what we saw.

Maybe the smoke from the man’s dead truck seeped into the sky and made everything in Hazard tinted by a shadow and much worse than TV.

Edith sat with me while Ethel bought the tickets. At first we were the only people in the station, but soon another bus dropped off a load. Some stayed and waited for another to carry them off, but some were supposed to be in Hazard. Ethel came back and told us our bus to Nebraska arrived at 3:00 a.m.

The girls agreed that they’d rather explore the town than sit in the Greyhound station for 16 hours. I was relieved because I wanted to walk more and I was disappointed to be going on the bus already. Edith was very interested in the mountains. They didn’t look how I’d imagine mountains in real life because they were not as tall as I thought they should be. She wanted to go up into them and explore, but Ethel shook her head at the idea. A small second hand store was across the street, and Ethel motioned us there instead.

I had walked off over to the videotape aisle, looking at all of the covers. The man only had about 12 or so tapes I had watched over and over again, so I never knew anymore existed. I was mesmerized by a cover with a plane crashing into the ocean but lost all interest in the tape when a deep voice echoed from the opposite end of the aisle.

It was the priest who had been asleep at our door earlier. Today, he was serious with determination in his voice. He began to walk towards me, so I ran to Ethel, checking out at the front. “You! Just stop, for just one moment please stop, I need to talk with you…’’ he called to us.

I hadn’t had to say anything, so maybe it was on my face or I was holding her wrist too tight, but she knew something was wrong before she even heard his voice.

“I’ll talk to him, okay? I know him… Don’t worry,” said the cashier, whose name tag read “August.”

“Father, what’s the matter? What’s going on here?” August called down the aisle, “Why are you bothering these kids? I have some leftovers … Father, have you eaten lunch? Go wait in the break room for me, I’ll be in in five.”

August scanned Ethel’s final item, “I think he’s just a little hungry.”

When I saw that priest again, alarms went off in every part of my body, but Ethel knew how to turn them off. She calmly finished checking out, and she led me outside where Edith was sitting outside on the curb smoking a cigarette. Ethel gave her a look, just a slight look, and she joined us, as we quickly walked away from the store back toward the mountains…

“You think he’s even a real priest? asked Edith. “Probably,” Ethel replied. “God’s looking for us maybe, maybe he’s trying to take us straight to heaven.” This made them both laugh for a while, and it made me laugh too.

Ethel asked if I’d like to hold her bags, and she said it was my job because she knew I could keep them safe. She had picked out some clothes for me. I walked between them. They looked like opposite sisters. Ethel always wore white, light colors, blonde hair, but not yellow; sort of like dead grass. Edith, dyed her hair black, always wearing dark layers of clothes. She always said that was her real hair color, usually with wide open eyes and her tongue out past her chin because she knew I never believed her.

Ethel said, "We should probably go walk in the woods for a while.”

It must have stopped raining right before we got in because climbing up the hill covered us in mud. When we got up to the top, Edith put a little dollop of mud on my nose. I thought she was being mean until she giggled.

I helped Ethel and Edith set up the tarp from the man’s garage. The air beneath the trees smelled clean and safe... Once we were set up and sitting on the tarp, Ethel and Edith started telling me how much fun the bus would be, how the two of them met on the bus when they were just a little older than me, and how they would walk to their stop together. Every morning, Ethel played with my hair again, and I fell asleep to a mix of their memories and the sounds of all sorts of things moving in the woods. Soon I could hear all the other bugs, waiting for me.

Ethel tried her best not to wake me up, but as soon as I heard the man’s voice I clung to her, unable to look behind me. I pretended to be asleep. I knew the man would take me away; I knew the priest would take me back to the heat, to the expired air. I knew I would somehow end up back in the man’s house, even if he was not there. I would be there alone, in the heat, but this time in silence without even the comfort of the bugs … This priest, I was sure, had already convinced the girls that I was much better off in his care, and I became angry at them for becoming so easily convinced. I began to plan my escape into the woods, until I heard … laughter, comfortable laughter. The three of them were already making light of what was a misunderstanding.

The priest, dropping all sense of authority he tried to present earlier, explained that the reason he had been chasing us around Hazard was to beg us not to move there. He said they just could not take anyone in, that there was a waitlist for jobs for people who were born in the town and there was simply nothing for us there.

Ethel explained our issues: on our way home from spending the summer helping our grandmother on her farm in Florida, Ethel’s faithful truck of 3 years, her first truck, had finally “crapped out” on her, most likely due to the strain put on it at the farm. It was okay because our father had just promised her a new car for her senior year.

My memories of him are mostly from Ethel and Edith keeping them alive. They actually kept in touch with the priest for a few years, giving life updates grounded mostly in truth with the addition of a fictional grandmother in Florida, but he hasn’t written back in about five years. Edith thinks he’s dead but Ethel’s not so sure. Sometimes the idea of taking a family road trip back to Hazard comes up but it just hasn’t worked out yet.

We spent our remaining hours in Hazard under the care of the priest. The inside of his home had a shaggy brown carpet that stretched through all the rooms, bordered by walls, pasted with orange wallpaper with faded brown stripes. In the living room, he had a big box of a TV and a collection of tapes—even more than I had at the man's house. I injected one into the machine about a lamb who wanted nothing more than to be eaten by God.

I watched the lamb travel the world, trying to prove it’s worth to God, sitting between the girls on the priest’s tan, leather couch. It was well worn. It must have been passed down to him. Everything in his home seemed like it had always been there—maybe God had built it for him? I’ve never gone to church, but the man back in Florida used to pray and read me things from the bible. This priest said he had not held a service in over six years because most of the people in Hazard had shifted their faith from God to something else, though he never explained what. Ethel later told me her mama loved God more than her, which is why she left…

The bus station’s light was almost green; unnatural and flickering. Ethel checked us in, and the station was full tonight with a few dozen people who lined the blue plastic coated benches, some greeted the priest by first name. A few people had already boarded; one man looked like he was a professional bus rider. Soon it was time to leave and the girls asked me to pick a seat, so I led them to the middle of the bus, where its engine hummed the loudest.

As we pulled away, the three of us looked out the window. Outside the station, the priest had gathered a handful of people from off of a bus coming from Arizona, begging them to avoid Hazard as a potential place to settle down.

When we finally arrived in Nebraska, we went straight to meet Ethel’s cousin to claim her land. Sometimes in the beginning, he’d come over for dinner, but they never talked much. They could never click, so they stopped trying to.

They sat at a rotting wooden table in the grass, in the shadow of a less rotted barn—the barn we lived in for a month before we could afford to build a traditional house—signing what needed to be signed.

I was drawn over to the dirt. Inside of a big plot of dirt surrounded by 20-foot-tall mulberry trees, I could hear something moving beneath; a new kind of buzz.

As I began to dig in the earth, each clump was dense with white worms—more worm than dirt. They were beautiful, not the typical limp earthworm, but these were powerful, fat, white worms. I called the girls over, soon, the three of us were in a trance.

The worms circled through the dirt like dolphins.

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THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER by Gabrielle McAree

April 22, 2021 · Fiction

Dad has the emotional range of a runt-sized peanut. He hates the internet, roundabouts, tap water, trash collection, anyone called “Jerry.” He doesn’t trust directions and believes the government is listening in on his conversations. Dad grows a four-inch beard as an act of defiance, because it looks nothing like his driver’s license picture, and swears off technology. His collection of gray hair disappoints him, so he buys an electric blue Camaro.

***

When Dad turns 63, I pick up a cake from the store. Half chocolate, half vanilla to curb his untreated bipolar disorder. I remember to be vigilant, but Dad counts each wax candle with the tenacity of a bored mathematician.

“You’re not good with numbers, Darby,” he says.

He’s joking, but my face turns the color of ripe tomatoes. When I forget a candle, everyone laughs at my dereliction, my stupidity. “I studied theatre,” I object, my voice two sizes too small. But my claim is futile; my siblings have PhDs attached to their names. I don’t.

***

I screw my eyes shut as Dad slams cabinets and drawers, looking for his checkbook, his car keys, his wallet, his readers. We search behind potted plants, between freezer meat, amidst his collection of coffee mugs, below the kitchen sink. His things are nowhere and everywhere, scattered around the house like an expert game of Where’s Waldo.

“I’d lose my head if it wasn’t attached,” he says. His self-hate is camouflaged by Dad Humor, the color of sunshine and imported silk. It is impossible not to love him.

Dad finds his checkbook in his coat pocket. His keys in the cupholder. His wallet in the washer. His readers in the pantry next to the peanut shells. Everyone laughs the same choked, plaintive laugh, but we actively fail Dad as he sinks into an amnesiac-sponsored abyss.

Dad is a renowned surgeon. He’s been saving lives for thirty-plus years—one appendectomy at a time—but he forgets his cellphone on the charger and can’t remember to take the dogs out. Their hoarse barks cut through glass. Why can’t I remember? Dad asks, gluing his leathery hands to his eye sockets, rubbing his skin an unforgiving red. He gives the dogs extra treats to counterpose his laxness. All is forgiven.

I bury myself in books I don’t understand.

“Why can’t Dad remember?” I ask a cashier clerk, the expired tub of animal crackers, oblivion. Surely, there is an answer.

“There’s an answer for everything,” Dad says. “It’s good you’re pretty, Darby.”

I read and read and read.

***

I go local for college and save Dad money by commuting. On Sundays, we sit in matching gray, leather chairs by the fireplace. Dad tells me about his sister, Jenny, who joined the Peace Corps and changed her name to Loki; his favorite dog, Hamish; how he regrets: not joining the Army; not competing in triathlons; not taking Sami Gates to his senior prom.

“Getting old sucks,” he says. “Your regrets look like a grocery list. Cheat age if you can, Darby.” But he doesn’t tell me how.

Dad takes a party platter of vitamins—collagen, crocin, retinol, magnesium—and drinks a glass of red wine before bed, toasting to the vestige of his youth.

I look at myself in the mirror for traces of him and keep the water running so he can’t hear me cry. I am older every day and can’t afford to feel better about my relation to mortality. I don’t have money for distractions.

***

My sister sends her wedding invitation in the mail. She’s marrying a guy from medical school, Mark Something. Mark Something believes Dad has early-onset Alzheimer’s. I’m not asked to be in the wedding party, but my other sister, the dentist, is maid of honor. My brothers, groomsmen. Dad asks why I don’t have a career. He says, “Maybe if you had a career, you’d be in your sister’s wedding.”

Dad pays the wedding tab with his American Express Black Card, but forgets his suit at home, so I drive back in rush-hour traffic to retrieve it. He can’t walk down the aisle in his Notre Dame jersey and orange board shorts.

Dad’s collection of ex-wives sit in the last pew, in chronological order. Throughout the service, he turns around to look at them, the physical representations of his life, decade after decade, each a nod to his impermanence. Gloria, Dakota, Macie, Rebecca, Lorraine. They agree Dad is a good man, he just couldn’t remember things they wanted him to remember. They all signed prenups, so Dad keeps his cabin in the woods, his 13 acres, his Camaro.

***

When I’m nine, I learn that everything dies. Humans, insects, rats, nature, inanimate objects. At first, I don’t accept this. I cry into Dad’s lap, staining his favorite corduroys. He strokes my hair while lecturing me on biology, science, The Lion King. We’re at my sister’s softball practice. Dad lets me sob, hysterically, without shushing me.

He says, “Forever is boring, Darby. Imagine paying taxes forever.”

***

At 66, Dad is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Mark gloats. My siblings strategize at the kitchen table without me. Dad gets a catheter two months later. He wants to drink Irish whiskey and sleep. I listen to his stories. I am all his children, his wives, his friends. I cover him in thick blankets and empty his urine. When Dad dies, he leaves me the electric blue Camaro, the log cabin, everything. My siblings hire an attorney. A letter arrives, postmarked before Dad’s death. It reads: Darby, you were always my favorite.

The next morning, I lose my keys.

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HOW THE WIND DOES BLOW AND BLOW by Kevin Grauke

April 21, 2021 · Fiction

If you’re smart, don’t ever let Claudette Aarons catch you reading anything, not even a magazine, because if she does, she’ll for sure say, “You know what you should be reading instead of that, don’t you? You should be reading Dorothy Scarborough’s The Wind.”

Don’t ask her how come, because she’ll tell you how come for an hour. And don’t lie and say you’ve already read it, because then she’ll expect you to discuss it forevermore. And don’t ignore her, either, because she’ll just take that the same as if you’d asked her how come. Your best bet is to simply cross the street as soon as you see her coming.

Nobody in town, not even Claudette’s own daughter, has ever bothered to read it—mostly out of pure orneriness, probably. Regardless, everyone still knows its story backwards and forwards, since that’s all she’ll fill your ear with whenever the wind happens to kick up, which is pretty much every day that ends with a ‘y.’ Yes, the wind does blow and blow here in Yonder, and it blows because there’s not a goddamn thing big enough to ever slow it down—not any buildings taller than a telephone pole, not any trees that qualify to be called as such, not anything. It’s good for the windmills drawing up water from the aquifer for the stock tanks, and it’s good for the wind farms that’ve turned the land north of 20 into some strange Martian landscape, but it’s not good for much else. In the summer, it huffs and puffs oven-hot up from Mexico (or Old Mexico, as Boyd Pinkston, who probably remembers Pancho Villa, still calls it), and in the winter it screams icebox-cold down from the North Pole. No matter the season, by the end of the day your skin is liable to feel rasped raw. And at night, while you’re waiting for sleep and dreams to come, it just keeps on whistling its lonesome blues beneath your door until the sun finally comes up, usually to roast you alive before you’ve poured your second cup of coffee.

As bad as the wind can be, though, it’s never as bad as Claudette’s favorite book would have you believe. Written in 1925 and set in the 1880s, it tells the story of a young woman named Letty, who was forced to move from the green fields of Virginia to a ranch just west of Sweetwater.

“Can you believe that?” Claudette says, all bug-eyed. “Of all the places that Dorothy Scarborough could’ve moved Letty to! Just west of Sweetwater! Letty even mentions Yonder a few times!”

Some folks say that Claudette’s been like this—just as crazy as a bullbat when it comes to the wind—ever since she was a little girl. Other folks say it’s only been since a tornado south of Archer City flung her fiancé’s truck into a Dairy Queen like so much trash. But even that was a long time ago.

“They made a silent movie based on it, you know,” Claudette will continue. “It was one of the last MGM made. Lillian Gish played Letty. Can you believe that? Lillian Gish!” Everybody except maybe Boyd Pinkston has to pretend to understand why this is a big deal. “They filmed it in the Mojave Desert, though, not here,” Claudette grumbles. “Those Hollywood pinkos couldn’t handle the real thing.”

Letty is eventually driven so insane by the wind, Claudette explains, that she kills a man and then commits suicide by running straight into a dust storm.

“What’d she do, suffocate?” asked Vance Wickersham once. “That seems like a bit of a stretch, don’t you think? She’d’ve really had to work at doing that, seems like. There’s lots easier ways.”

“But it makes sense how that other part could happen,” Claudette shot back. “The killing part, I mean. Because, I swear, sometimes the wind just makes you want to mow everyone down with both barrels.”

Though most folks smile and nod their heads when she talks like this, nobody knows what the hell she means exactly. Sure, when the wind makes the traffic light down on the square rock and creak on its wire late at night, it does have a way of making you feel like a lost and lonely soul, especially if it’s long after everybody else has gone home to bed and you’re standing there all by yourself, but that’s nothing that a few beers can’t usually fix. Regardless, everyone with a lick of sense knows to steer clear of Claudette whenever a dust storm or a blue norther is fixing to howl and churn into town, because it’s a known fact that, thanks to her Daddy, who raised her like a boy since he was cursed with five daughters and no sons, she may be even more of a deadeye shot than Zell Wylie, and that’s saying something. Zell, after all, once shattered a bottle of Pearl with a shot fired from two hundred yards. Kid Gillespie hadn’t even been expecting it. He’d just happened to been drinking in the gravel lot of the domino parlor when Zell decided to take aim at it for no particular reason. Had Claudette been there, she probably would’ve taken the shot from fifty yards further away, seeing as how she’s never been one to shy away from a challenge—and plugged it, too—just as long as Kid held his hand steady, but now he’s got Parkinson’s tremors so bad that he can’t even play 42 anymore, not without scattering dominoes every which way. These days, all he does is stand around and watch, usually with his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his jeans to keep them flapping about like broken-winged doves.

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MY MOTHER TOLD ME YOU COULD ONLY KNOW THAT ORANGES WERE GOOD IF THEY SMELLED LIKE FLORIDA by Megan M. Garwood

April 19, 2021 · Fiction

At the grocery store, I am buying whole milk and skim milk because I like to put whole milk in my coffee and I like to use skim milk in my Smacks. I am reaching for a gallon jug when I feel someone grab my butt with a heavy hand. I turn around to see a man with little expression pat my rear. I ask him what does he think he is doing and he smiles and tells me to have a nice day. I am scared but also complimented. I am in the cereal aisle now, and I think I deserve more than just Smacks. The boxes are colorful bounty and I am a robber on lookout. I see a toucan who is sledding into a bowl of colorful donuts. It must be Christmastime. I thought it was summer. I feel a hand on my breast. I look down and see bright pink nails, like claws, with airbrushed flamingos on them. She squeezes again and says, honk! honk! Her smile is big like one of those lawyers on late-night TV. I don’t understand, I say, but I don’t think she hears me and says, thanks for the feel. Normally, I would run away, but where would I go? I suppose that is a question I must answer. Instead, I turn to a familiar face that I haven’t seen in a while: Count Chocula, levitating white marshmallows with his mind. It really must be Christmas. Now I’m in aisle three. I promised myself I would not be in three, but I am here, looking at the chocolate bars. I pass the fancy ones because who needs to pretend to want coconut sugar. It is okay. It is for someone else: she’s probably wonderful, and she probably squeezes her own orange juice and maybe she pours it into little juice glasses for her family, but I am trying to make it to the checkout without dying. There are Santa Clauses filled with whipped peanut butter. I pause. There is a Santa filled with marshmallow. I wonder. There is an angel filled with toffee. I feel a hand again, this time on my upper thigh, like it is guiding me into a yoga pose. I look down. It belongs to a teenage boy, acne like volcanos erupting. Tongue out, he pants like a dog. I think this is illegal, and I worry about cameras. I ask him what he wants, and he barks at me and squeezes the soft flesh under my stretch pants and asks what it’s doing there. Now I am sad. I feel useless, and I politely ask him to remove his paw. I reach for the Santas with peanut butter, the Santa with marshmallow, and the thin angel filled with toffee, and I cry a little on the walk to the checkout. I forgot orange juice and I remember that I will never be someone who juices my own fruit or chooses the coconut sugar over the chemical, and I wonder how people do their makeup every day. I decide I am going to do it, I am going to juice an orange, and when I take an orange to my nose to smell for ripeness, I feel a pull at my hair, and a hand dig to the root to fill its fingers with my uncombed mane. I turn to see the hand belongs to the manager of the store, and he tells me that we can’t smell the fruit before we purchase it. I ask him how, then, does one know if the fruit is good without feeling it or smelling it. I tell him how my mother told me you could only know an orange was good after you smelled its navel and it smelled like Florida. His response is to pull my head back hard until I look up to the industrial beams and iron-looking light fixtures and see a little bird tweeting and it looks like it winked, but I cannot be sure because it is so far away, but I would bet on it. So I go over to the cold section, and I bend down to look at the juice selection and someone hooks their finger into my mouth and pulls at the corner until I snarl. I see it is a man in a suit with a nice gold watch and shiny leather shoes like a banker. His eyes are dreamy, and I think maybe I deserve this, so I cock my head, flutter my eyes, and lick his finger, but he says, gross; you’re too old! And I say, I’m sorry, I thought this was what you wanted. And he says nice try but that it was too late for me, and I agree. When I get to the checkout, I smile at the cashier and ask how her day was and she says, umm okay, and I say that’s great, then I say, guess what? I got fired today for being unlikable by upper management. The cashier says, cool, anarchy, and kind of raises her fist in the air. (more…)

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