X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

THE WOODHOUSES, THE MARITAL BED IS LAVA, SLEEPWALKING by Ariel Clark-Semyck

December 4, 2021 · Fiction

the woodhouses

"greensleeves" floats through the halls of the high-rise & stops in for the showing. the new tenants are young & comely. they pay no mind to the plea of the piano or the hospital stretcher rounding the corner. the woman’s blonde hair curls inward at the ends, teasing the tip of her heart-shaped face. the man wears a powder blue linen suit & slaps her ass while the realtor isn’t looking. they each excrete a gasp when they see the living room. they make a show of admiring the antiques, the burgundy drapes. they take a thoughtful glance at the writing desk. i can tell they can’t wait to paint everything white. maybe yellow as an accent color. their first night in the apartment, they peel their clothes off in silence & couple on the bare floor. smoke reaches through the keyhole of the closet & threads its needle through my eye. it’s nice to have company.

the marital bed is lava

i watch the occultists sit down to roast beef & mashed potatoes served on fine china. they swirl their glasses & playfully bicker about the pope. it’s chocolate mousse for dessert. one wife notices the funny undertaste but eats it anyway. smoke trails from the armchairs, through the parlor room, to the kitchen where the women wash dishes in rubber gloves. back in their own bedroom, the husband sits five inches away from a televised boxing match while his wife unhooks her garters & comments on the other couple’s dining habits. her body collapses to the floor & turns into a slinky. he picks her up, an end in each hand. her coils stretch & condense from palm to palm as she whispers baby names in the dark until morning. andy or jenny, andy or jenny, andy or jenny suckle at my heartstrings. romance is feeding each other grapes for twenty years while our voiceovers pop off.

sleepwalking

sadism is not a good replacement for self-fulfillment is the kind of shit she says to herself as she wipes the blade on her hem & exits stage left. the hallway tonight is drenched with thick black air. it gets stuck in her hair. it wears her body like a dress as she paces back and forth, the hands grabbing at one another like two animals in heat. one hand mounts the other hand & rubs & rubs. is watching it die the same thing as taking its life? she caught a cricket under a glass once & waited until morning. she caught herself under a crumbling pedestal & waited for years. this little hand. she takes her hand to her nose & then takes it in her mouth. this little hand. she sucks on the knuckle of her index finger. the air watches this, its appetite sharpened. it sops from her hair down to her face & sucks. she thinks goodbye would be like going to the grocery store & picking up a pound of ground chuck or a gallon of milk. the air turns her head over & over on its tongue. is watching him swim further out to sea the same thing as watching him drown? she thinks goodbye would be like sitting on the shore with the sun in her eyes, like taking a photograph of the sunset so she could look back on it fondly whenever she liked. one hand mounts the other hand. the air has whittled her down to an echo of the sound of him at the end of the hallway. he is grabbing another beer from the fridge.

Crow Jonah Norlander

ACTIVE SHOOTER TRAINING by Jason Peck

December 3, 2021 · Fiction

We’ve attended such lessons before, briefings that point us to hiding places and escape routes, drills that teach us quick action and suspicion toward our coworkers. But this seminar is different. This is the best workplace shooter training this company has ever had. People who attended the first sessions this morning still recall them with awe on their coffee and smoke breaks.

Life-changing, they say. An eye-opener, they say. But mostly—very good.

We can already see their transformations. They walk straighter, talk bolder. Evelyn in accounting says she will hear the training again. Roberta from legal holds her calls in preparation. And Max from IT—a joker, typically—remains unusually silent. When it comes to Max and such matters….well, we must be sensitive. He knows firsthand of survival, and his past haunts him.

It’s not something I talk about, Max says, his head down. (He actually talks often of how little he likes to talk, but we remain polite).

Your life will be changed, Evelyn tells him.

Max nods. He very much wants his life to be changed.

The conference room is full for the final session. The speaker is not from the Marines or a SEAL like last year’s speaker. More than one of us finds his potbelly and unkempt moustache disappointing. But he is commanding and serious, even when making a joke. (You know how you prevent laugh lines? he asks. Don’t laugh.) We know he means business by the way he holds attention like a center of gravity, by the alertness in his eyes and the tension to his stance.

The speaker taps his microphone once, twice.

Surely you know about this shooting, the speaker says. In his right hand, he clicks a mouse that changes the image on his projector screen. We nod our heads—of course, we recognize this particular shooting. He clicks again to another shooting; this one we identify from the shopping mall where it occurred. This next one too, by its near-iconic Pulitzer photo. And so on with the next. And the one after that. Roberta wishes for a comforting hand on her shoulder. Max’s eyes dart toward the exits. Evelyn notes that the slides this afternoon show different shootings than the training this morning.

He keeps us on our toes, she whispers with approval.

There is only one person who can stop a workplace shooting, the speaker says. (His voice, a measured baritone, defies his unassuming figure.) The police are too slow to help you, he says. Security is incapable. And yet you would rely on those people, would you not? Even with the gunman upon you, you would assume the best, wouldn’t you?

Max laughs once, loudly enough that our eyes turn to him. The instructor raises an eyebrow and addresses Max directly.

And with the gunman directly above you, you would sit there immobile, wouldn’t you? The instructor asks. You, with no clue how to react. Even with a gun in your face, you would sit there like a coward and accept your fate?

Max raises his hand in objection. Then he coughs and lowers it.

No more police, the instructor says to gasps. No more security guards. From here on, only one person can save you.

He gathers his breath and points and Roberta swears that he points at her, and Max swears he points at him, but Evelyn, who attended earlier, smiles because of course he points to us all.

You, the speaker says. You are the only person who can stop your shooter.

He enunciates the word with gravity like a revelation. Perhaps it is. Roberta’s heart swells with sudden responsibility. Max brings his hand to his stomach, where a new sensation begins stirring.

Your shoe can be used as a weapon, the speaker continues. The human eyes are weak points. Throw your shoes at his eyes. He sees someone in management drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup, nods his approval (the instructor himself drinks coffee). Your coffee too can be thrown at the gunman’s eyes, the instructor says. Once something has been thrown at his eyes, he can be distracted. Once distracted, he can be subdued. But fight only when you cannot flee. This is most important.

He walks to Roberta and kneels to face her, armed with his authority.

You are walking toward the elevator, he says. A man enters the front door with a gun. What action do you take?

I will throw my shoe at him, Roberta says. But hesitation makes it sound like a question instead.

No, the instructor says. He points his finger at her head, cocks it with his other hand. Bang, you are dead, he says. You have the opportunity to flee, thus fighting back is the invalid response.

This stings Roberta. The speaker approaches Evelyn.

You are by the printer, he says. Not more than ten feet away, the perpetrator opens fire. What do you do?

I don’t know. Evelyn says with a wink. (She knows the answer, but plays along) I will grab my coffee and throw it at him? And then subdue him? She grabs her cane, hoists it overhead like a weapon.

No, the instructor says. Bang, you are dead. In this scenario, the nearest secured room is fifty feet away, a dash of mere seconds. You could run and barricade yourself, rather than fight.

The instructor stands again, and some force everyone can sense brings him to Max at the far corner of the room. Maybe it’s because of their earlier confrontation, maybe he senses the way Max avoids his gaze, fleeing from challenge. Maybe our host can look into his individual audience and see something in need of resolution. The instructor kneels to face Max, and we know nothing can stop this collision, this moment of truth.

You are working at your desk, the instructor says to Max. A man starts shooting. Two cubicles over, perhaps—in the moment you cannot be sure. Soon he will reach you.

I should have thrown my shoe, Max says, almost to himself. I should have thrown my coffee. All those years ago, I did not act. I accepted my fate.

It’s OK, Evelyn says. Her hand rests on his shoulder, comforting him.

No it is not OK, the instructor barks, without pity. That was then. This is now. In crisis, you have no time to decide.

Max finally looks up from his lap and faces the instructor with a resolve we have never seen. He gulps and draws himself to his full height, the true leader now, and we know we will soon witness the measure of a man.

What do you do? The instructor repeats.

This time, I will fight this shooter, Max says.

The instructor points his finger to Max’s head, slaps the bottom with his other hand as though reloading an automatic. But that finger rocks back and forth, unsteady. Max takes a breath.

I will throw my shoe, Max says. I will throw my coffee.

Your final answer? The instructor asks.

I will no longer be frightened, Max says. My stapler could stun him. The loose pages of my reports would distract him. He takes a deep breath. I swear I will find something I can throw.

The instructor nods, and his hand slowly turns to a thumbs-up.

Correct, the instructor says. Unlike these other two people, you could not run. With no choice, your attack is therefore valid. You live.

The host will continue speaking. He will play more videos. Many more things can be thrown at the gunman—did we know the chemicals of a fire extinguisher can blind? That a loud noise can distract? Our lives hinge on details we never imagined. Those who fail today’s tests will understand why they would die, those who pass will grasp their survival. Through him, we will learn structure out of chaos, the predictable patterns of a gunman’s mind, the natural progression of a crisis. The host clicks his mouse and another image flashes, and we wait for his words to flow again.

Crow Jonah Norlander

POLICING HEAVEN by Fred Pierre

December 2, 2021 · Fiction

To worship the leader is to worship our god, say cult members before they’re arrested. How does religion make you feel? Certain death, stake chips on the hereafter, or spin earth for a sunrise tomorrow? Truth is, you’ve been duped by your broker and hoodwinked by your minister out of your promised immortal treasures.

“You’ll see your whole family in heaven, my friend,” said the minister as he lay dying. Certainty grows when we parrot dogma. To get into heaven, the test is quite simple: Choose kindness before your self-interest. Only one in ten makes it. So many sublets in heaven they can’t even charge rent. In perfection, complaining is frowned on.

Here on Earth, assholes figure they’re going to heaven. Always got their way. Why not paradise? They’ll find where to purchase the next revelation, the next rung to climb the holy ladder. So you shot the last tiger, huh? Put its head on your wall, then fuck on its fur by the fire. Pay the church, pray to Jesus’ mother. Wash, rinse and repeat. Now you’re ready to knock at the gate.

Sad to say, they don’t allow assholes like you into heaven. It’s not paradise if you’re never happy. “They didn’t try half hard enough. Three out of five stars. Did you see the way that angel looked at me?”

For you, they’ve reserved a place away from the others, because to you, your pain feels like a comfort.

You anticipate finer things and old friends, but in the afterlife your family has choices. That’s why they aren’t here to greet you. At the end of the tunnel you see the white light, but those blobs become alien creatures. You’re being stroked by their tentacles. They need your soul for a cosmic experiment.

Say you do get in, how long before the T-cells of heaven reject you? When you cut someone off on your flying carpet, or flip the bird at one of God’s angels? The third time you complain? Because you can’t be depressed. It drags other souls down from the aether.

The dead infest caverns locked deep in the earth, along rivers of underground memory, but it's too dark there, so we raised the skyline, making gravity fully negotiable. You can fly like in Quidditch, but without all the brooms. Just think it and then you are there. Why limit your vision? Free yourself from the doctrines of others.

Do crushed dreams ice your cocktail? That is your shadow rising. What is heaven if you can’t enjoy it? “Pleasure is the first step on the long slide to Hell,” is what they told you when you felt desire, until you wanted nothing but to tear it all down. Burn Earth for a ticket to heaven.

Get on board the train. The conductor is restless. The train passes into a tunnel. The tunnel gets tighter and tighter around you. You’re expelled from the tunnel, aka the canal, in a burst of light.

Meet your new family.

Crow Jonah Norlander

CATGUT by M.W. Brooke

December 1, 2021 · Fiction

Most days your mother languishes on your couch watching reruns of Law & Order. Doctors can’t explain what’s wrong with her brain. You drive her to appointment after appointment between harp lessons—a merry-go-round of CAT scans, MRIs, acupuncture, marijuana, experimental doses of ketamine, prescriptions for epileptics. Nothing calms the tension behind her eye sockets, like a harp string constricting under the chill of night.

During rehearsals in third grade, your fourth octave C string snapped from the tuning pin and whipped across your eye. The harp yowled in your arms, a feral cat too close to human hands. Harp strings are more likely to snap when you aren't playing them, your teacher said, indifferent, swiveling on her heel to correct the posture of the student beside you. A few girls set their harps on the floor and stared, mouths agape as a red line marked your swelling cheek like a jellyfish sting. The quiver of Mormon girls giggled into their skinny collarbones.

For years you played pretentious recitals in ball gowns a hopeful size too small, back straight, elbows out, bouncing ringlets from too-tight rollers your mother forced you into the night before. Now you heave your harps up and down flights of stairs in yoga pants, your spine aching. You know the shape of each harp better than your own body, how each one travels, how to angle them into your Subaru Outback. Your students don't understand how fragile your harps are. Or maybe they don't care, too busy fluttering between controlling parents or abusive boyfriends. But they insist on dragging your harps along with them all the same, those downy notes softening the razor's edge of existence. You teach scales and glissandi and arpeggios and “Aura Lee” to children who hold back tears when their mothers’ cars pull into your driveway.

You lost one of your rental fleet once—an expensive lever loaned to a student who fixated on her fingers whenever a black eye bullied past layers of concealer. She skipped town with your harp, and the police contacted you six months later to tell you she had been found dead in her apartment. “You don't want the harp back,” they said. Its porous wood had breathed in months of human decay.

When you were fifteen, your mother drove you home from a recital in a freak blizzard in May, her knuckles like knobs of white coral against the steering wheel as snow piled on the windshield between each scrape of the wipers. A few miles from home, she pulled over to the shoulder and breathed out like air let out of a tire. Car still running and blinker clicking away, she opened the door and shuffled in front of the headlights. She lifted her arms to the sky and started to twirl, snow fluttering around her like TV static. Isn't it beautiful? she said. You shrunk into the crook of the passenger seat and yelled at her to come back inside, embarrassed and scared of how much you loved her.

Now your mother sleeps in the guest room, fetal and withering. Her muscles atrophy and her belly sags like a bird nest built on the lip of an eave. You're awake in the dark, arranging in your head a shitty pop song your ten-year-old student insists on learning. Crickets saw their legs together outside your window—the same, maddening refrain. And then you hear it: downstairs, a wooden crack like a rotting bough giving way to gravity’s pull. It's sharp and urgent and hollow. You slip out of bed and touch the strings in the dark until you find the empty space like a missing tooth. The string’s nowhere to be found, impossibly unmoored from the soundboard and tuning pin. You imagine the harp string unfurling on its own and shooting somewhere between the couch cushions or behind the piano. You could search for it. You could make a game out of it with your mother tomorrow if her brain doesn't rebel. Or maybe you'll find it months from now, coiled on the windowsill like a shed snakeskin. Maybe you'll never find it, another secret kept between the catgut, the woodgrain, the levers and pedals.

Crow Jonah Norlander

PLUCKED by Faye Brinsmead

November 29, 2021 · Fiction

The firebird came with excellent references.

Polite. Super-tidy. Throws herself into housework. Mows the lawn like she’s skinning a wolf.

Plus, there was the exoticism. Her shimmering plumage trailed over my Ikea shelving and hand-me-down brown velour sofa. Evenings, as we slurped insta-noodles and binged on Netflix, she fanned out her tail until the dim room was full of jeweled eyes.

She didn’t know if she belonged to the peacock clan. Maybe. Her golden beak hooked the last gluggy spiral. Her family wasn’t big on that.

On what? I asked.

Um, family. I’m kinda on my own. Of course, there’ve been loads of princes, golden apples, magic stallions and whatnot.

We went clubbing. Men. One glance, and they went up in smoke. We scooted from roller-disco raves to deep rap moan-athons, pursued by smoke alarms and singed buzz cuts.

No matter how late we teetered home, she’d spring up at dawn and scrub, scrub, scrub. Whatever needed scrubbing. The bathroom sterile as an operating theater.

On Netflix nights, I got the feeling there were fewer iridescent eyes.

Driving to Ikea for a laptop table, we had a tire blowout.

Keep calm, she said. Ease off the gas. Hazard lights on.

As she bent to change the tire, I saw holes in her rump like cigarette burns. A heart-shaped patch, bare of feathers. She felt me looking, angled it away.

I got serious about a guy I met at a sauna party.

You’re leaving me to wing it alone? she asked.

I wanted to protect her from combusting men, but, you know, hand-holding and strawberry candles and fluffy duck cocktails in the bath.

She came skittering home at 6 am, whammed the bathroom door. Sauna guy and I were still awake.

She’s been in there for, like, an hour, he said.

I hoped I was hallucinating the trail of red specks.

But the feather. Its bloody quill scribbling on ashen floorboards.

She couldn’t hear me knocking. What with all the scrubbing.

I got a ladder, climbed in the window. Peeled the rubber gloves off her blood-streaked claws, swabbed her wounds.

Why? I asked her three remaining tail feathers.

Nothing. Everything. All the wanting in their eyes.

We washed her plucked feathers and hung them on the clothesline. Lay on the wet grass beneath them, wondering how to stitch them back on.

Crow Jonah Norlander

DIRTY LAUNDRY by Lisa Johnson Mitchell

November 28, 2021 · Fiction

I pour bleach over the mound, purging, once again, the family secret: Daddy’s arrest—indecent exposure. Socks fall in. Slipped them off right before having sex with my husband, during which I thought of Benjamin, high school lover.

Will Mom die today? Bed sore as big as a baseball. Not eating or drinking. Been seven days. Hampton Gardens is five minutes away, thank Christ. Flannel nightgown, shove it in, hope I don’t have another nightmare where I’m digging into my giant thigh with a knife, the insides like a Christmas ham.

I told Mom I loved her, that she was the best Mama in the whole world, then I put Chapstick on her faded lips and kissed her papery forehead. New jeans, squeezed my watermelon-ass into them. I’m starving, that Three-Day Cabbage Diet didn’t work. For better, for worse, you said. T-shirt from Beverly Hills, all the famous people don’t smell or fart. Their parents never die.

Daddy, Mama will see you soon. Dishrag smells like ripe lady parts, salmon was a bust, stupid Martha Stewart. Mama screamed and clawed my wrist, ‘please help me, please help me’ so I ran and got the nurse who gave her a drop of morphine. Please God, take me instead, I did have that affair. Next: bath towel, the expensive one from Peacock Alley. The plush speaks to my skin and says I will go on living.

Squirt, squirt. Liquid detergent syrups the clothes, in goes the whitening pod that never works, but I’m an optimist, damn it. Phone rings.

Her breathing is ragged, shallow, her heart rate has dropped. Come now.

Crow Jonah Norlander

ANGRY GNOMES by Sarp Sozdinler

November 27, 2021 · Fiction

“What can you do?” The hot dog vendor sighs from behind the mist of steam. He fishes for a stick of sausage and then plops it on the sliced bread. “New York is a falling city.”

Never before has June given the street talk any credit, that New York is this kind of place or that. The signs have been following her since she moved downtown over a year ago, but she often chooses to look the other way. Avoid it or not, those cream and mustard stains in the vicinity of hot dog carts and ice cream trucks aren’t merely the tokens of gastronomic success: New Yorkers entertain a habit of dropping mass. Soles and heels recycle the tossed plastic wraps and saucy droplets every day and leave their permanent marks on the concrete.

“Now, will you look at that,” a customer points his ring-clad finger up and past June.

With a delay, June raises her gaze from the ketchup stains near her feet to yet another mass ready to fall: black, brown, yellow men and women of the white-collar variety, blessed with long hair, short hair, no hair, all kinds of it, with their lips cutting their faces in countless different shapes that can be interpreted anywhere between relief and despair. Unlike their chain-smoking colleagues on the sidewalk, they laugh, chat away, and hold hands on the roof of a thirty-story plaza that looks like a gift box against the 9/11 Memorial. They don’t seem to need the sun to brighten their mood, even on this Monday afternoon.

United, the mass steps into the air with the respectful silence of those who walk into a library or a sacred tomb. They dive through the sky at sixty vertical miles per hour. Each looks blue from afar, pink from nearby, and blends with the blacktop after the landing.

Eleven try and die.

“There will be more jumpers than newborns in a hundred years,” says the hot dog vendor, the only eyewitness who isn’t shaking in a mile’s radius, and no one hears his words other than June. “New York is a falling city.”

June, like others in the crowd, opens her mouth as if she’s about to cry, though she can’t cry; it’s the conscience of a city wailing through its alarms and honks, capsuled in a terror only its citizens can comprehend. Nothing moves other than the teary eyes flickering to rewind the snapshots of the past few seconds as if they could reassemble the bones, wash the blood, glue the meat, and raise the dead with the intent of their gaze.

Instead, the clouds huddle together like angry gnomes and paint the sky into a darker pink. They growl and split in two as if to wash away all the sorrow below. With the first raindrop, the soupy bites of June's hot dog flood out of her mouth like unintelligible words and colorize the vendor’s handwritten banner on the cart: a dog for heightened pleasures and the hot beyond.

Crow Jonah Norlander

WILD RELEASE by Evan James Sheldon

November 26, 2021 · Fiction

The ballroom was empty except for stacks of chairs along the walls and the man staring at the ceiling. With no one around him in that large space he looked very small.

I waved my arms over my head but the man didn’t notice and kept on staring at the ceiling. He was off in his own world. I pulled out my weed pen, which most people mistook for a flash drive. Even though weed was now legal, I was still secretive. Learned furtive behavior from all my high school friends having misdemeanors for possession.

The Toy Voyager conference was still going on in the adjacent area, but I had sneaked away. All the too-bright smiles and handwritten name tags and coffee breath. Everyone was holding a toy, speaking of exotic destinations—Borneo, Florence, Kyoto, Melbourne—but then again everywhere felt exotic compared to the gray carpet and fluorescent lighting of the Denver hotel.

I hadn’t come for the conference but I hadn’t not come for it either. Once every couple of months I rented a room at the Longmore Hotel in downtown Denver, and pretended I was someone else—a Trevor, a Curtis, a Sylvester—with a random job and I drifted around the lobby and hotel bar, drinking, chatting with people in town on business, or occasionally, people in for a conference. My day job consisted of testing websites and I made a bit of extra money on the side filling out online surveys. These little holidays at the Longmore were my main social interactions.

Spending a weekend as someone else started as a joke with myself, but then I didn’t stop. It's not that I was unhappy with my life, but maybe I was bored. You start doing a thing, in my case testing websites, and before you know it, it has grown and occupied more space than you ever intended. You become a "Website Tester" like this defines you, and to some degree it did, and it was oddly freeing pretending to be someone else. To imagine myself a life with more mystery than a computer screen, to build out a character who made more sense to me, as me. Isn't this the goal of all us modern folk, a perceived, whether correct or not, self-actualization?

This time, when I booked my normal room, I saw Toy Voyagers were going to be using Ballroom C, so on a whim I bought a semi-rare, and unopened, Big-Bird headed Pez dispenser. The plastic wrapping crinkled in my pants pocket when I shifted. Maybe that was what finally drew the man’s attention. With just the two of us in Ballroom A, his voice echoed and reverberated all around me.

If the mass of a thing is less than the volume of the atmosphere it displaces, that thing will float, he said. If this room was filled with Radon, whales could fly, there’s certainly enough room. Wouldn’t that be something? He looked over at me, smiling. But then, of course, we’d be dead.

He came over and held out his hand. My name is Rufus, he said. I went to shake his hand but was still holding my weed pen, so I awkwardly held it out on my palm. He took a drag and handed it back, glanced at my name tag. Thanks Colton. Terrible weed though. I’m a gummy man myself, though I prefer a drink over both. I didn’t say anything. Can’t you just imagine them swimming through the air in here? Two Blues and a Humpback at least.

He patted my shoulder and left the room.

I spent the remainder of the evening as I normally did during my hotel escapades. I was Colton, a dairy farmer who struck it big when Skittles bought my farm at an outrageous price to build a packaging plant. I chatted with a couple businesswomen in from Atlanta, a man wearing a pencil mustache heading to Aspen the following morning, three ladies who I quickly realized were not into me, but rather each other. I bought us all Butter Baby shots, and moved along. No one doubted my story despite its outlandishness, and no one seemed that interested either, and maybe that was what led me back to the bar top alone and then to my room for an early night.

I spotted Rufus the next morning, milling among the Toy Voyagers, which surprised me. It shouldn’t have, based on our interaction before. What kind of person wonders about flying whales? That kind of eccentricity seemed a perfect fit for this conference. He was holding something small and colorful in one hand and talking to a woman with a massive plush rabbit in her arms. She held it the way a child might, both arms wrapped around its middle while its head lolled to one side. With the size of the bunny, and the fact that Rufus and the woman were roughly the same height, they both looked like children. He winked at me when he saw me looking.

Mr. Jones here, the woman said as I drew near enough to hear, he’s spent a lot of time in Alaska, King Salmon primarily. I like to say that Mr. Jones is a cold weather rabbit.

They both laughed.

This is my friend, Rufus said without gesturing. He could have been talking about either of us. The toy in his hand turned out to be an old, primary-colored helicopter, made of wood and equipped with a pull-string. It was chipped and clunky, a nostalgic relic. Something people save not because they need it or it works or it does anything for them, but because they’ve attached some emotional value to it. I’m sure there was a great backstory; his grandfather left it for him before the war and he was flying it the day they heard the news that Pappy wouldn’t be coming back. Its propellers spun and spun as the tears, proud though they were, ran down his face. He’d never flown it so high before and never so after. Or something like that.

Tell me. What do you think Mr. Jones has seen on his journeys? Rufus asked.

I nearly excused myself then, as I had already heard so many stories about the wonders these toys had experienced. Crystal waterfalls in the moonlight, a campfire on the open Serengeti, strange rituals guessed at because of some smudge on the toy’s arm. It was all too much.

Oh! The woman’s whole body lit up. I like to imagine his adventures as a series of interlinked moments, small wonders he holds close to his heart. Things that, when they’re spoken out into the world are diminished, the words won’t ever quite add up. But he’s brimming with them. I can feel it. She squeezed Mr. Jones then. I bet she didn’t even know she was doing it. Anyway, I’m just a host, the toys are the real adventurers.

I had learned that most toys were sent on to other hosts who then documented the journey and sent the toy out again. If you sent a toy somewhere other than a designated host, it was called a “wild release,” a much more risky venture.

I tried not to make a face. I had become quite good at masking my thoughts. You had to at these kinds of things talking with people like this. Give a polite nod, smile convincingly and excuse yourself. Rufus, however, seemed actually moved by the woman’s philosophy.

But before he could respond we were interrupted by a man holding a replica of Mr. Jones, though the man’s bunny was pink instead of sky blue. They erupted into laughter that out of all the toys they might have the same ones at the same conference.

Small world. I did my best to smile, and disengaged. Rufus followed.

Want to get out of here? he asked.

I looked around the conference room: the table displaying where notable hosts lived, a tall, thin man showing a group how to properly arrange a GoPro no matter how odd the toy’s shape, the podium where a speaker was due at any moment to lecture on proper shipping methods. I nodded and led the way, even though I didn’t know where I was going.

I wandered out of the entrance and headed to my right. Less than a block away I found a bar, Cloud 9, that claimed to feature live music. We sat at a booth with a good view of the entrance. It was dim except for the unadorned single light-bulbs hanging over the couple of booths and hightops. They were the kind that emphasized the filament, brand new but trying to look old. A few people sat at the bar and a guy with an acoustic guitar was tuning it quietly in the corner.

Rufus set his toy helicopter on the table. Cloud 9 specialized in champagne and mimosas. He went to the bar and got us a carafe of something green and bubbly. Two glasses. Did you know that one flute of champagne can hold up to twenty million bubbles? Rufus asked as he filled the champagne flutes.

I laughed and shook my head. He smiled.

No it’s true. Champagne has so much CO2 that you have to release up to eighty percent of it when bottling, or else the pressure will cause the bottles to burst.

The guitarist announced he would begin playing soon, thanked us all for coming, like he was the draw. The mimosa tasted like kiwi and melon and something grassy I couldn’t place.

So what toy did you bring to send away? he asked.

I pulled the Pez dispenser out of my pocket and set it on the table, embarrassed though I didn’t know why.

Ah. You’re not really a Toy Voyager then are you? That’s okay. It is fun to watch everyone get all whimsical about sending toys on vacation. I get it. I’ll keep playing along. He took a drink from his green flute and winked at me.

I’d never been called out before. Most people just accepted what I told them, because 1) why would I lie 2) I was good at it 3) and my least favorite, but often the most probable, they didn’t care enough to wonder if I was lying.

I debated diving deeper into my persona, maybe storming out, but a part of me wanted to know how he’d figured me out.

A group of toy voyagers came in and went straight to the bar top. A man waved the bartender down to order a Mai Tai for his Donatello action figure. They all laughed and began debating whether Donatello would like a Mai Tai or if he was more of a Coors Light kind of ninja turtle.

What makes you say that? I asked.

That’s not the kind of toy you send to see the world. Plus, I see the way you look at them. He gestured to the Toy Voyagers. It’s not a look of understanding, of community. You don’t like these people or what they’re into.

I don’t have to like everyone in a group to still find their actions interesting and fulfilling.

He nodded, but I could tell he didn’t believe me.

What about you? Why are you here? You don’t seem like you belong either?

What makes you say that? he asked, smiling as though he enjoyed repeating me.

Well, you keep sneaking off for one. And you don’t seem like you’re interested.

It turned out Rufus was one of the original organizers of Toy Voyagers and an ex high school science teacher. We had quite a bit in common; we were both in our thirties and lived alone, maybe similarly bored, we both liked pulpy western novels, listened to poppy, British rock.

But when I asked about the Toy Voyagers, that’s where the similarities stopped. Six years ago his wife had gotten sick, and all of the sudden she couldn’t leave the house. They’d loved to travel so he started sending out stuffed animals to make her happy, a kind of vicarious journey. He wanted her to have something concrete to imagine in a far off place, something to venture where they no longer could. People heard about what he was doing and it grew from there. The local news had even done a feel-good feature on them. He made a website, started holding conferences.

The guitarist began his set: lounge-y covers of Beach Boys songs. We listened for a minute as he sang “Good Vibrations” like he was Sinatra. He had a great voice.

Did it work? I asked.

What work? Rufus’ eyes were on the guitarist.

Did sending the toys out make your wife happy?

He laughed. God no. She hated it, but I didn’t realize it. I was just trying to give her an aspect of her old life she no longer had access to, but she wasn’t interested in her old life. She didn’t say anything and by the time she told me, it was too late. All these different people loved it. People all over the world. I couldn’t take it away from them. He downed the rest of his drink and refilled it. Now it’s what I do. I make enough money to just do this. I don’t really even need to be here. The whole thing practically runs itself. He paused and looked at me for a long moment. I expected some sort of scientific ramble about the connectedness of people, or a statistic about the number of countries involved. Instead, he said, Did you know that Dr. Seuss cheated on his wife while she was dying of cancer? I didn’t say anything. Excuse me for a sec, he said.

He got up with his helicopter and walked to the guitarist, who was in between songs. Rufus dropped some cash into the open guitar case on the floor and set the helicopter in there as well, leaned over and spoke to the guitarist, who nodded.

Rufus returned as the guitarist started speaking. This next one goes out to those wild kids at the bar top with the toys. Not sure what I’m going to do with this helicopter though.

Send it far away, yelled the man with the Mai Tai and Donatello figurine. The guitarist began playing “I Get Around” and Rufus raised his drink toward the Toy Voyagers. I’d never seen a group of people more elated.

The conference ended and I went back to clicking on things on the internet, but over the next few months Rufus and I kept in contact. We would text each other about new bands or terrible stick-‘em-up lines from whatever we were reading. Sometimes I would look up odd facts and make some up too. He normally found me out.

At some point, apparently he marked me down as a host on the website. I began to receive stuffed animals of all sorts—my favorites were the dinosaurs—and I made up stories about them, what they did in the Mile-Hi City. It was a joke between us, a tongue-in-cheek participation in something neither of us believed in. Or not really. I did bring one sort of alien thing with light-up tentacles camping up in Rocky Mountain National Park and took pictures of it like it was running through the trees, escaping the terrible humans coming for it.

I looked forward to our back and forth. I don’t know what he got out of it. Maybe it felt good being able to talk about the thing he created and be able to make fun of it at the same time?

When the toys kept coming, I began taking them out to restaurants and bars. I got a few snickers, many sad smiles, but on the whole people seemed genuinely interested. Once I explained the situation, sometimes together we’d make up a bizarre story about the stuffed Koala’s night out, sometimes they’d invite me and the toy to the bathroom for a couple of lines, sometimes an after party, another bar, another experience. I told Rufus’s story over and over, leaving out how his wife really didn’t like the idea and the odd thing he said about Dr. Seuss, and people ate it up.

And all of it I relayed to Rufus. I don’t know if he liked how involved I became or if it was some odd joke to him. Maybe it was both. If I had learned anything from Toy Voyaging it was that a person could be totally sincere and playing around at the same time.

One day, he let slip that he was living in Cheyenne, Wyoming, just a few hour’s drive north from Denver. Once I found out how close we were, I bugged him to come down, but he refused, said he was more of a stay-at-home kind of guy these days, but I could come up if I wanted. It was kind of a brush off, but I had just received a plush whale named Ernest and thought it might be funny to bring Ernest to Cheyenne and maybe rig something with some clear fishing line so it looked like it was flying. Rufus seemed to be withdrawing, responding slower and slower to my messages, sometimes not at all, and I thought a joke based on when we first met might cheer him up. Plus, it was now fall and the leaves were changing. It would be a beautiful drive and I could snag a couple lovely pics of Ernest along the way.

I got into Cheyenne on Saturday afternoon. Rufus lived in a two-bedroom townhome in the Fox Farms subdivision. When I pulled up he was standing, smoking on the second level patio that overlooked the parking lot and a drab playground filled with tan plastic slides and pea gravel. No one was playing there. After a couple minutes, he came down to greet me.

He looked terrible, like he hadn’t been sleeping, like he’d definitely been drinking. His hair, which in Denver was cropped close to his head, had grown out but without apparent intent. He was wearing a hoodie and sweatpants and he waved me in.

Boxes, opened and unopened, sat against the wall and on the counter a few bags of Taco Grande with crumpled up, sauced wrappers were slowly hardening next to a half-eaten pan of cornbread. No empty bottles but I guessed he hadn’t really expected me to come and had rushed to clean what he found most damning.

We sat on his grey, corduroy-upholstered couch on opposite ends so we had to turn just a bit to see one another. There were no other chairs I could see.

He asked about my drive, how I was doing, work, etc. I asked similar questions, but he would only answer with good while nodding and looking at his clasped hands in his lap. No winking. He finally asked if I wanted a drink and I said sure and he got us two Natural Lights from the fridge. He sunk just a bit further into the couch and finally really looked at me.

Hey. Do you remember what I said about Dr. Seuss, in that bar in Denver?

I told him I did, though I wasn’t exactly sure why he’d told me.

You’re not dumb. You figured it out.

I told him I had guesses for sure.

Ha. Guesses. When Emily was really sick, right at her worst, that’s when I did it. No big story. A random hookup. We met at a bar and went back to her place. Rachel. Rachel was her name. She had short blonde hair.

I didn’t say anything. We both drank for a second. He rolled the can back and forth between his palms like he was trying to warm it up.

I was drunk and when I woke up the next morning she was gone. Left me in her apartment by myself. That was back in Boston of course.

Boston?

Yeah. Before I moved out here, I just picked a random place and came out after.

After your wife died?

Rufus sat up straighter with a confused, almost irritated look on his face. Died? She didn’t die. Emily made a full recovery. I left, or she kicked me out, it doesn’t really matter. And it didn’t matter where I went, I just couldn’t stay there. Not after all I put her through. She remarried this summer during that conference in Denver. Some guy named Torrance. He took a big pull from his beer. What kind of name is Torrance?

I asked if I could smoke and he told me he was only renting so we went out on the patio. Leaves were starting to fall and a cold breeze swept a whirling group of reds and golds and browns noisily across the asphalt of the parking lot. Rufus leaned on the white metal railing with his arms crossed.

Do you remember that helicopter I dropped into the guitar case at the mimosa joint? I saw one of the Toy Voyagers buy it from him before we left. Do you think they sent it on?

I have no idea, maybe they kept it as a memento. I said. Hang on. I ran downstairs and grabbed Ernest.

When I brought it back onto the patio and passed it to him, Rufus started crying. I didn’t say anything, just let him cry.

Holding the whale in his arms, he looked big, the biggest I’d ever seen him. I waited in silence until he finished crying and when he held it out for me to take it back, I waved him off.

I left later that day and drove back to Denver. I tried emailing him over the next few weeks but he didn’t respond. I let it drop, thinking he would reach out at some point, from somewhere. I wondered then how long we’d keep in touch, how long he’d stay in Cheyenne. Boston was far, a whole country away, but I doubted it was far enough. Not for him, and not like this.

A few months later I went back to the Longmore. I didn't really want to pretend to be someone else, and I remembered how I felt during my weekends there, but it was hazy, the loneliness dampened by time. I think a part of me had become nostalgic for my former self. Or imagined that previous life as more than it was. Whatever it was, I skipped the room and just went straight to the bar.

I ordered a mezcal Old Fashioned and spun around on my stool so I could survey the room. A group of men in suits laughed at one of their crew with an animated expression on his face. A woman read a book and drank a glass of white wine, but she kept looking up, searching for something or someone. Three people still in ski gear sipped hot toddies and recounted their day. A mother scolded a child who had been trying to escape her while the father ordered several drinks at once. No one knew me. I could have been anybody from anywhere, with wild stories, adventures beyond the humdrum of all these little daily tragedies. I gulped down the rest of my drink and got up to leave when I felt someone at my elbow. It was the Mai Tai/Donatello guy.

Didn’t I see you at the last conference? he asked. He was in a suit, no action figure present.

I debated for a moment, but he seemed so genuine, so grateful to have found another Toy Voyager, I relented. Yeah. I actually think I saw you over at Cloud 9, I said.

He shook his head, embarrassed and amused. Damn. We got messed up that night. All the toys got mixed up if you know what I mean.

I had no clue, but I didn’t want to tell him that, and I felt myself slipping into my old way, searching for the most probable persona. He flagged the bartender down and ordered two more of what I was having without asking what it was.

Anyway, terrible about what happened. Is that why you’re back? A few more of us were supposed to come by. He looked at his watch.

Wait. What happened? Did prices go up on shipping? I asked. He laughed but it was closer to a scoff than a demonstration of real amusement.

No. About Rufus. He died.

He went on to give too many details, but when he got to the part about how they found him hanging from his balcony, my mind glossed over. I heard what he said but the words slid past me without registering meaning.

I thought about how when Aldous Huxley was on his deathbed dying of cancer, he asked his wife for LSD. He died tripping. I don’t know why I thought of that, except that maybe he saw the world as Dr. Seuss drew it–full of Sneetches and Foo Foo the Snoo–and I wondered what Rufus saw at the end. I kept picturing the empty playground and cold leaves rattling.

I interrupted him to ask about Rufus’s toy helicopter, if he knew where it was.

I sent it on, he said. I’m sure that’s what he would have wanted.

A few more Toy Voyagers arrived and when introduced I was surprised that I gave my actual name.

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LOVERS by Michael Farfel

November 23, 2021 · Fiction

The two of them live in a small house that overlooks a somehow smaller lake. He has family money and neither of them have to work, but he finds meaning in his work (development—of what? we're not quite sure) and she writes poems. The house is ancient and the rooms are cold. They often lay in bed until long past midmorning, even sometimes past noon. They argue about who will make coffee, always finally decided by who has to pee first. It's usually her.

The house, which the locals say is as old as bones, is older. It is rickety and clicks and clacks and wheezes with every movement. When they make breakfast and he cracks the eggs, he cracks them ever so carefully so as not to upset the balance of the floorboards. When they fuck, in their small bedroom, on their nearly invisible bed, it is a cautious practice—albiet lurid, albiet lecherous. Any wrong breath or wrong leaning, any bad attitudes or misremembered lovers, and the house could crumble and fold them up between rotted joists and rust. Anything and that dear dwelling could diminish, tenfold. So they take precautions. And when he scrambles eggs he does so with loving kindness and when she pours coffee she does so slowly and they both take it black.

She’s known she wanted to be a poet since long before she knew anything. When she was a baby she almost never stopped crying. Her mother said in the first two years she was sure she had cried enough to fill an ocean. The only thing that helped, and her mother tried near everything, were books. The forests her father worked were always moving and there were rarely ever libraries nearby. So her mother reread their small collection. No children’s books. In fact, the one that did the best, not only kept her from wailing but helped her and her mother sleep on nights when her father took to drinking was War and Peace.

She's never read it herself, but did inherit her mother’s copy. Now when she has writer’s block, which is nearly always, she sleeps with it in their bed. Her husband found it endearing at first, but grew to hate it. Their bed is already so small.

She remembers very little of the story. It may not have even been Tolstoy that her mother had read to her when she was a child, rather some other’s opus. She swears she remembers endless wars and no small amount of confused young lovers, but couldn’t that be any work of art—any book ever written, whether stretched to its limit or condensed into some opaque metaphor?

She often tried to explain to her husband why she needed to sleep with the book. It was always a rambling mess—a jostling of non-philosophies and inclinations. Something about the beauty of brevity and how over time, the novel, War and Peace in this case, becomes less a literary object and more an interpretation of itself. And because of that, it's not so much the reading of a book that's important but the proximity one has to books—her argument always had kernels of clarity, but was mostly quite confusing. Always near the end of her tirade she would become flustered and swear off poetry and all things literary. To which her husband would say something like, “What about your poem about the frog? I really like that one.”

pale, little frog

on a lily pad

when I

looked up

you

were gone.

Occasionally he would peel the book out of her hands as she slept. Its corners often bumped into him as he tried to adjust. And on nights when she was under the full control of nightmares they’d both wake up with papercuts. She often woke up with a bruise the shape of the book against her chest. A blue-purple nightscape below her collar bone. A bad look, he’d say. Unhealthy. Whenever he got the chance, after she had fully succumbed to sleep, he’d pull back each finger—pinky, ring, birdie, pointer, thumb—and carefully unwrap Tolstoy’s tome and place it quietly on the bedside table.

Even if she just read the damned thing, he thought. To think of the book as just an object taking up room in their small house eventually drove him mad. There were days when it was all he could think about. During his morning coffee and his commute to work he’d picture it. The version she had, and often held, was old. The corners were all worn, nearly to the bone, and each page feathered at its ends. It was once lusterful, but now mostly gray and the words on the cover were blurred and in some places, completely erased. The thin paper was so translucent that it couldn’t even burn, he thought. Not even a spark.

One night, he decided it was time to get rid of it. Her quiet pale face was outlined and highlighted by the moon and the glow of the lake below. Her lips were held just open and revealed the whites of her teeth. Their criss-cross patterned bedsheets wrapped around her shoulders and her waist. A perfect moment captured, he thought. Beautiful, he whispered. And the book was free. He crept out of bed with it pressed against his stomach.

The lake, he thought, the one below their house that is somehow smaller than the house, somehow smaller even than their small bed, that’s where I’ll get rid of this damned thing. Tie it to a rock and throw it into the sea. He marched in the moonlight, briskly, but not so quickly as to alert the wolves. Just one foot in front of the other until he stood above the moonfull waters.

He had never opened the book before. In all the time they had been married and all the times he had pulled it from her hands, he never once felt compelled. Before he threw it into the water he sat on a black rock that half circled the lake and opened to the middle:

Napoleon...

He slammed it shut. “I’d rather not,” he said and pushed the book as deep into the lake as he could. Once the whole thing was submerged he apologized to the quiet night and laid on the rock and watched the new ripples ripple in the water until none were left. Over his shoulder their house looked so fragile. Its old timbers and forgotten windows shook with every wayward draft.

The next morning she woke up alone and overturned their room looking for the novel. First she took apart her drawers. Every article of clothing was cast across the room. Every small keepsake from her life that she had kept was pushed and rolled aside. Her father’s charms and her mother’s too, chucked. All the while, she called out for her husband. She checked her body for the memories of the book—no papercuts, no imprint on her abdomen. She checked the fridge and on top of every hanging picture and under every hanging plant, even in the percolator.

Have I been betrayed? she wondered. The man who I share with every ounce of blood I can muster? Could he, in his helpful, nasty way, his hopeful, nosey attempts at fixing, have betrayed my trust? Stolen my last connection, last bastion, last pillar? She shook with sorrow. The house was as unsteady now as it had ever been. She barely made it across the kitchen to her writing desk without tripping.

“That bastard threw my book in the lake, I know it,” she said aloud.

It took all her concentration to scribble him a note as the stilts and slats and timbers of the home wavered with her anger.

You,

Just as I was starting to understand it. Just as soon as I was prepared to get rid of it myself.I’m headed down to the lake to fish it out. If, by god, I retrieve it then all is forgiven. If not——I will feel awful for an awfully long time.

yours forever——

As she added the finishing touch to the note, a heart around her name, the house began its descent. At first their bedroom collapsed. Then the kitchen. Fire burst out of the oven and all the windows shattered. She folded the note. The ceramics in the bathroom ruptured and water jettisoned into the light fixtures and there were more flames. She placed the note on her writing desk and put her pen away. As she left and slammed the door the house let out a final, tired groan and ceased to be.

From the road, and perhaps from space, it was a spectacular scene. The house was quite old. Filled with lifetimes of sometimes happy, sometimes angry, sometimes nothing. Once it twisted up completely and its guts were discharged, a plume of blackness and redness erupted in all directions. Flames became a mountainscape and split the sky into stained glass portions. The intensities of the sun melted and reflected and chased each other through the hills. The lake evaporated and the trees wilted and turned to ash. Songbirds circled and mountain goats hid. There was a howling-crying sound that bore up from the earth as it swallowed what was left.

When the earth did finally settle, in place of the house was a greenness with the odd little flower here and there. And the lake, a crater now, had nothing but the book at its center. The smoke gathered into clouds and headed west. On the rock that half-circled the once-lake the husband and wife sat quietly.

An old man, a local, first on the scene after the dust had settled, said he had never seen anything like it. The two of them were shivering and telling jokes—covered from head to toe in dirt and falling pollen. He offered them a blanket and explained to them that they had survived something strange. He told them, and in later years, his grandchildren, that it shouldn’t have happened as it did. That the whole town knew the house would eventually fall, but not like this. He told the two that they shouldn’t have survived, that even the termites and the ants had been cremated. He handed them his canteen and they drank greedily. They thanked him and pointed toward the lake.

He made his way to its center and picked up the book. The cover and spine were nearly gone and most of the bulk of its contents had been melted and reformed into a rock.

“This yours?” he yelled back.

They shrugged and held each other close.

He sat with the object for a while and pondered it. Where it had once been something, it was now no more than a stone. He looked back at the couple, who were, to his mind, in some degree of shock, and waved.

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CLUTCHING by Melanie Maggard

November 21, 2021 · Fiction

Maybe you’re off the highway, cleaning out the deep fryer at a bowling alley in a college town in Virginia, the alleged state for lovers. You’re a boy in jeans and a Fresh Prince t-shirt, a short apron splattered with an eagle rising from a pool of blood. Townies and good ol’ boys order deep-fried chicken wings, burgers, nachos with canned cheese sauce the color of cantaloupes. They heehaw, drunk on Buds and Jim Beam, high on the split they just picked up in the last frame. You cringe with each dropped “g,” but we’re all dying, anyway. You’ve dropped into the gutter of loneliness, after dipping your toe in and realizing it feels just right. Here, now, things make sense, you’ve got orders and tasks. Your manager wants to crawl up your towering body and perch her fat ass on your shoulder like a crow, squawk in your ear while nibbling on crinkle fries. Sometimes while closing, you get lost in the cleaning and think: this could be it, all there is to life, every day an echo reeking of cooked meat and freezer burn. You’re in college, and they tell you the whole world is in front of you, places you will go, things you will see and do. But at 20, with maxed-out credit cards and a grand in engineering textbooks to buy, you keep hunting for the tracks of that dream. Your hands are burlap and chaps from bleach and scalding water. Your head explodes with formulas for lift and drag when all you want to see is space. Some days you sit on the tacky floor of the storage room, cry for the girlfriend studying literature six states away. You wonder if she’ll stay true, if you will. You finger the keys in your pocket and chew on how long it would take you to drive to her. She’s everything you need right now because she sees you as more than who you are today. She’s your best friend and you think of her alone in her apartment, crying while she spoons the pillow you slept on last summer. You breathe deeply and for a moment you smell White Rain strawberry shampoo. The bottom of this hole you’re in is round and smooth, but you devour it, you endure.

Crow Jonah Norlander

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