X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

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.

admin7EyZHDb8HNC8btr3

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.

admin7EyZHDb8HNC8btr3

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

JONAHS AND THE WHALES by Avra Margariti

November 20, 2021 · Fiction

You tell me your father Jonah was eaten by a whale when you were a boy. Right before your eyes, you say. One moment you were fishing together in your old boat; the next, the beast breached, snatching your father between shadow-thin teeth as if he were bait. You had to row yourself back to shore. Your spindly arms took weeks to regain sensation. Your heart never did. Is there a Jonah here? the delivery person asks as they hand me a loaded speargun wrapped in brown paper. Your name is also Jonah. The junior who will soon outlive the senior. Or so I thought before your online order arrived, the anniversary approached. When you lie next to me in bed, you paddle like a dog in its sleep. You recite lines from Moby Dick, the Hebrew Bible. I’m grateful I hid the speargun and its harpoon in the garden among my sweet peas. When you hold my hand at night, you clutch it tight like a weapon. I won’t let the whale take you, you vow in the morning, but you won’t look me in the eye. It’s not me you see. Over breakfast you play whale song recordings, try to decipher your father’s secret Morse Code, tap-tap-tapping against wet stomach lining. Revenge, you say. You need to get revenge on the whale, rescue your father from its giant gut. It’s been twenty years, you tell me, the milky white of your eyes bloodshot fever-red. His matches must have long since burned to nothing, the minnow-diet shrinking his proud skeleton. His fishing vest a chilled rag, waterlogged. You need to kill the whale, slice its belly open; you need to get him out. While we stroll through the park, a volunteer asks if we’ll sign a petition to end whaling. You knock the clipboard out of their hands. When I watch the Star Trek movie about humpback whales brought back from extinction, you kick the TV in: tinfoil screen, fishing line wires. Women want me, cetaceans fear me, the hat you never part with boasts above the brim. We haven’t touched each other in months. I wake up in the middle of the night to find our bed empty but your side still warm. The speargun gone from my patch of sweet peas, trampled into muddy confetti. Cheery music emanates from the open laptop, a sea-blue aquarium ad playing on repeat. I drive through town, retracing your steps. The aquarium’s chain link fence has been cut open. Security guards sleep slumped one against the other, tranquilizer darts flashing like lures from the side of their necks. In the whale exhibit, the light is blue and oscillating. The ground rumbles with distant bellows. I spot you on the feeding platform, precariously balanced while the stunted orca below breaks the water’s surface. The beast regards you, sluggish, old. Your speargun falls limp in the water. It sinks fast. Impassive, the whale returns to the bottom of its clear-glass prison. You prostrate yourself across the platform. My arms, you cry, I can’t feel my arms. You dissolve into lament: My father, I can’t find my father. I know, I tell you, and think of the broken TV, and the trampled sweet peas, and the nine-year-old boy who had to row his guilt home.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THREE FLASH STORIES by Michael Haller

November 19, 2021 · Fiction

WORK

I answer a phone for the company. I sit behind a desk in a room and answer the telephone when it rings. When the telephone is not ringing I sit in my chair and wait for the phone to ring. When the phone rings I pick up the handset and listen to the voice on the other end, and when the voice is finished saying what it has to say I hang up and try not to think. Then the phone rings and I answer it.

My boss tells me I am doing a splendid job, but I think he is saying this to keep me from thinking that maybe I am not doing a splendid job and that I am, in fact, wasting the company’s money. But because the company has never shown signs of a money shortage, I do not believe it is possible to waste something that cannot be depleted. Therefore my boss is telling the truth. He is an honest man.

At 5:00 the phone stops ringing and it is time to go home. I do not know whether the company turns off the phone so no more calls can get through, or if the callers automatically stop calling every day at 5:00 and then resume calling at 8:00 the next morning.

At 5:00 I leave and go home to my house where there is a phone in the bedroom. This phone rings occasionally, no, seldom, when I am with it. When I do get a call, the voice on the other end often sounds familiar, but I cannot match the voice to a face or a person. I listen, though, and sometimes speak to the voice.

One day I made a tape recording of my voice and brought it to a nearby phone booth. I dialed my home, set the mouthpiece next to the tape recorder, rushed home, and answered my phone in time to hear my voice on the other end speaking to me. It was a limited conversation but one that I have cherished because I knew who was talking to me. I would like to meet this person from the phone booth, but because of time constraints we will be unable to get together.

THE TOURNAMENT

It was after the billiards tournament I had won. We were standing around the table talking; I was talking about the last shot I made. Hands recently removed from nearby pockets were grabbing my right one and shaking it in congratulations. One of the hands felt like a tongue. There were camera flashes and questions from a reporter. I had won. Then the men took me by the arms and laid me on the pool table, splayed like an X. Two pock-faced men unbuttoned my shirt. A heavyset man wearing tinted glasses took a penknife out of his pocket and stuck it into my chest just above the left nipple. While holding the knife in place with his right index finger, he removed a handkerchief from his pants with his left hand and blew his nose. He then made an incision in my chest that cut in a rising half arc to my right nipple, around and down to a spot midway between sternum and navel, then straight down to my beltline. He rolled back the flap of skin, in the same way one might open a tin of sardines. He sloshed his hands in the opening, then tugged on something that gave with a snap. It slipped out of his hands and made the sound a cow liver would make if it were dropped on the ground. Then they put the skin back in place, stitched me, picked up my fallen organ, and left. A minute later one of the men returned and read me a note: “In order to facilitate recuperation the patient must remain supine for seven days. If the patient attempts to ambulate before the seventh day, it is possible he or she will agitate the part of the body that is healing and tear loose the stitching.”

DOMESTIC

I live in the fear that someone will assassinate me. I will walk out of my house one morning to get my newspaper, and when I turn to wave to my next-door neighbor (who is also getting his paper) a gunman in a passing car will open fire with a machine gun. I will do a writhing death dance in my front yard, similar to the one Warren Beatty performed at the end of Bonnie & Clyde, blood spewing from my wounds like geysers.

I do not understand why anyone would want to assassinate me.

I am not a politician, and to remove any suspicion about my involvement in politics I have stopped voting. Nor am I a religious figure. I have closed the church’s doors to myself and have stopped thinking about God. Politicians and preachers are the usual targets of the assassin’s bullet, and by removing myself from the sphere of the hunted I think I will be safe.

Yet I wake at night and see shadows moving in the dark, hear feet shifting in the carpet...windows conspiring against me.

I will hire bodyguards to protect me at all times and I will wear a bulletproof suit. The protection will cost money but if it saves my life it will be worth it.

Crow Jonah Norlander

GOTTERDAMMERUNG by Howie Good

November 18, 2021 · Fiction

Welcome to the Age of Autonomous Machines, where the brown bears of Kamchatka are cold, ragged, and hungry, and under perpetual ban, and rivers brim with jizz and blood, and fish have the twisted mouths of stroke victims, where saints travel incognito on New York City subways and God speaks to them in a gravelly two-packs-a-day voice, where a peeling billboard declares it’s time to look ahead to the past, when the public gallows stood silhouetted at dusk against a sky of faded red plush.

Blinking like a sick mole against the harsh white light of the desert, the last of the angels steps out of his winged chariot onto the hot tarmac. Little girls in braids present him with bouquets. Jeers erupt somewhere among the hundreds of people solemnly watching the ceremonies from behind a security fence. The plainclothesmen mixing with the crowd pepper-spray everyone within range. On the tarmac, meanwhile, a military band strikes up a brassy tune that has long been a favorite of dictators around the world. Birds hum along.

I fall asleep to music, wake up to the barking of Soviet space dogs. We are apparently closer than I realized to the border of a bygone era. “Better call a repairman,” I whisper to my wife, who is standing on tiptoes, peering over my shoulder. By the time the repairman arrives, it is four in the afternoon and the sky has a long, black crack running down the middle. As he unpacks his tools, he volunteers that he has a titanium plate in his head. I nod numbly. Death, when it finally comes, will have his phlegmy eyes.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THREE MICRO FICTION PIECES by Cressida Blake Roe

November 15, 2021 · Fiction

Apocalypse Needs a More Exciting Plural Form

Proposition One:

The plural form of apocalypse isn’t nuclear fallout, environmental degradation, contagions, Horseman, acts of God, or St John’s Revelations. Instead, it sounds more like a woman fleeing in broken counterpoint to the screech of subway brakes and takes the shape of a fist slamming through a wall two inches from a child’s head: finales too small for the tabloid headlines, too colossal for folding away between pages, out of sight.

***

The train didn’t stop in time. They said she didn’t mean to die. Her husband thought, in front-page letters three inches high, that she always seemed perfectly happy. He didn’t know her nightmares, when she drowned in sealed vessels feeling less afraid of the water’s weight than the sharps of the sky. The sky strikes down, opened hand/closed hand. Nobody asked how many times the hand struck before. The child dreams of his father’s eyes staring out from the hollows of gun barrels, and the bullets whiz toward him, too slow for mercy.

Proposition Two:

The plural form of apocalypse is a paradox, implying a multiplicity of ends to worlds that can only end once. Only so many parallel universes can exist. Discarded cataclysms shake hands, murmuring with low voices in the slush pile of the gods. They were not violent, heartrending, pyrotechnic, pretty enough to make the cut. Better luck next time. But only so many worlds demand obliteration.

***

The moon crawled out of the mountain just after midnight, and the first people who had awoken pointed up at the slanted horizon.

“What dread god had arisen?” we asked ourselves. “What power comes to glare down with its cold eye?”

No one has answers. We drown our faces in the pond to drink its milky excrescence and punish the river that shatters its shadow. We open our wrists and drain the blood so that the land runs red and silver, loving this newly minted god the way the rain loves the soil.

Proposition Three:

The plural form of apocalypse invites destruction déjà vu, wearing the mask of innovation: a banality of hatred opening the same chambers and igniting the old fires. Leviathans press at the surface and leer, flooding the womb and crunching the sun in their teeth. In these days that are ending, each forged beginning chokes its hold and calls this gasping silence gratitude.

***

We unhinged our jaws to their fullest extent so that we could devour those who had and those who fed themselves on those who had not. We filled up the gaps in what had burned. If the world insists on forgetting our bodies, shoring up structures of good that would not otherwise remain, then perhaps it will overlook the traces of blood left behind, the bone shards, the tears of children in empty schools and parking lots, the mothers who lost their mothers, those who were no longer able to breathe.

Spooky Action at a Distance

And for now we are, indeed, here: six hours from sunrise.

The wheels rattle on towards tomorrow, and arrival. Until then, we sit in the lamplight glare and reflect on the meaning of terror, white-masked and waiting just behind us, a little out of sight. Perhaps the railroad ties will contradict the past, rushing away in the dark. Once, I asked you for a cigarette, but the smoke, wreathing in new patterns, intercepted the message. Six hours from sunrise, but nothing ever changes. Once, you asked to feel my edges, torn and fibrous from too much handling by those less considerate, used into an illusion of comfort. Have I said how I hate the presumption of nostalgia, wielded by old women? You cannot respond, weeping iron tears that do not fall. Six hours from sunrise, and nothing will ever change. No, you say at last, understanding the futility of this rattling, toward a destination that neither hell nor heaven can declare. Curling memories lie damp all around, rotting with the slow ceremony of forgiveness. I wished I could touch you in return—you, who I address as though such a distinction could alter this journey. But my absent face cannot communicate these desires, and they slip between the lines of light, lost. Terror watches through broken eyes and considers. Outside, in the rattling dark, we are six hours from sunrise.

And for now, we are, indeed here.

A Brief Treatise on the Unreliability of Memory

You taught me to speak of myself in the third-person, as though life were a story that could be rewritten.¹ Anonymity lifts the weight of four letters branded across her breasts: SLUT, bullet syllable shot back and forth across her battlefield body and never reaching anywhere,² when the dismembered diagnosis of language bears no resemblance to the possibility of a cure.³ In the third-person, she wrote a poem.⁴ In the second-person, you write a letter.⁵ In the first-person, I am still trying to understand why hope feels like such an indefinable burden to carry.⁶

¹He seduces her, in one version. In another, tree roots no longer scar the ground & she suffocates on dreams

²deep in sleep’s ivory box, where her mother tongue suggests how lucky it was that he was such a good guy.

³Symptoms remain untreatable except by passing apologies in counterfeit coin, love honed on an edge pure enough to cut men away.

⁴The poem is a life that never ends. What sounds true only becomes a lie about somebody else

⁵addressed to a ghost that refuses to exist in a post-trauma reality. She never learned how not to ask for justification,

⁶sexless & obscure, taken from strangers with the same imperfect excuses.

Crow Jonah Norlander

YOU’RE INVITED TO MY MENOPAUSE BALL by Susan Hatters Friedman

November 14, 2021 · Fiction

The Debut Ball for Invisibility

The family of _____________ (enter name of menopausal woman here) __

request the honour of your company at the Menopause Ball, in honour of her 51st birthday, to celebrate the “next phase” of her life.

You attended her Debutante Ball when she was “coming out” to be pursued. Now, in Grandest Blue-Blood Tradition of the Magnificent Menopause Balls of yore—for the next rite of passage, she is “going back in.”

Help ___________ celebrate this glorious time in her life, when she no longer needs birth control, Tampax, or responses to cat-calls. Join us as we fondly bid farewell to her: endogenous estrogen production, waistline, vaginal moisture, memory, stable mood, body temperature control, restful nights, and hair (except for witchy black chin hairs).

Let’s bid adieu to her marriageable years and debut her ceremonial cloak to symbolise her invisibility! The invisibility cloak will render her invisible to men on the street, men at the grocery store when she needs something from a high shelf—and let’s face it—men in the bedroom. However, she will be valued for her wisdom… if anyone can figure out where exactly she is.

The Soirée will take place on: Friday the 13th at Five Thirty P.M. (Biological clocks are ticking!)

Location: Shangri-La Hotel Grand Ballroom

Attire: Formal. The guest of honour will wear a white gown (with no worries, the one positive!)

____________ will be presented by two gentlemen, as is traditional for debut. Her escorts will be her husband _______ and Fireman Nathan (a.k.a. Mr. July in the Firefighter calendar—in case she experiences any hot flashes during the event).

N.B. In order to best represent the climacteric, the ballroom’s thermostat will be going all over the place. If the guest-of-honour asks, “Is it hot in here,” please reply that it “must just be you” in the grandest party game tradition.

The choreographed Climacteric Dance Finale will go all night—to symbolize difficulty sleeping.

With Music Including: “Hot Hot Hot” by the Cure

“The Heat is On” by Glenn Frey

“Ice-Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice

“The Heat of the Moment” by Asia

“Hot Blooded” by Foreigner

and “Some Like it Hot” followed by “I’ve Seen Better Days (and the Bottom Drops Out)…” by Citizen King

All the crème de la crème will be there. The glamourous few presiding over the event, chosen by Le Distinguished Committee, will include those actresses in their 50s who can somehow still play women in their 30s: Jennifer Aniston, Nicole Kidman, and Robin Wright.

With man-splaining speeches expected from ________________(the guy from work who shares tips for menopause from when his mom went through it).

Valet parking tickets will be validated by ______at the entrance. (Sometimes the guest of honour wishes she herself were a parking ticket.)

Gift bags upon departure will include fancy-fans, tweezers, vaginal jelly, hair dye, and eggshell calcium tablets (for the rest of your life).

R.S.V.P.:

M___________________________

___ happily accepts

___ will be there in spirit

___ will be there in spirit, and realises that they will probably never again notice the newly-invisible guest of honour

Crow Jonah Norlander

« Previous 1…42 434445 46…119 Next »