X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

WHEN WILL MY RAPIST’S CLOSET BE CLEANED? by Meg Tuite

April 15, 2021 · Fiction

“Hysteria comes from the Greek root hystera, meaning ‘uterus’. Originally, it was believed that hysteria and hysterical symptoms were caused by a defect in the womb, and thus, only women could become hysterical.” –Shalome Sine

Vivid and startled, blood spits out a song, a sigh, signals a stale rustle of corruption. A pulse rouses itself from the uterus. And those subterranean tubes palpate the last fumes of incessant weather before swirling the rays of dusk down the toilet. I am a girl of fugitive parts. Cut with a straight knife. Glue fists the slit where loot, diced and unkempt, is hacked out bit by bit.

Welcome to the trail guide for hysterectomy. I am a girl whose inner wilderness is cohabiting with feral beasts. They attach to my uterus. My surgery is a uterectomy. There is no hysteria to remove.

Predarectomies: removal of the predator. It’s a goopy, ugly, long procedure. No one visits and flowers do not arrive. There’s so much to remove.

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DENOUEMENT by S.S. Mandani

April 14, 2021 · Fiction

“Sure, I’ve eaten cookies well into adulthood. Some days all I eat is one cookie. I break little bite-sized pieces off and revel in the ‘gasm that is sugar, butter, salt, flour, chocolate, pecans, jam, or what have you. I eat chocolate chip cookies, of course, but lace cookies are my current obsession. My taste buds ride a buttery, crispy wave, cresting into a smile. I have disliked certain cookies. Usually, though, I get over myself, and find a redeeming quality. Growing up, I hated those jam cookies served with chai. You know the ones? But one day the light hit a certain way. The jam sat glossy; a sphere in the middle. The soft white light of the clouds refracting off the glistening surface coaxed a bite from me. Through the shortbread, to the center, I kept at it until the whole tin was empty. What are they called again? Not jammie dodgers. Not cave cookies. Butter drop raspberry jam cookies, that’s it."

I consulted my list of “Untried Cookies.”

"I’d like to try a millionaire’s shortbread. In Scotland they just call it a millionaire. Nice to be able to eat a millionaire for $5.99 USD. Maybe I’ll poop money. That would solve everything. The credit card debt. The mortgage. The money owed to family, friends, friends of friends, anyone I could convince, really. The guy with the torn baseball hat and trench coat at the cardroom. Roy, I think his name was. I owed him a couple hundred bucks. And just like that, I owed everyone something. Even people I didn’t know at all. The internet’s a wild thing. Online applications for credit with the government stamp and all. Anyone that would help, really.”

The guy collecting my house and everything in it to pay my debts, or at least a portion of them, was listening good. His eyes in a crinkle, his mouth pursed in a pity smile. His face was empathetic. In the end, he just asked me, “Where do you want these?” And I said, “I get to keep them?” He nodded. I didn’t know if they were worthless or he felt bad. Maybe both.

In my recently vacated three bedroom, two bathroom house of 2,200 square feet, all I had left was me in front of a pantry filled from floor to ceiling with cookies from around the world. The places we had visited. Coyotas from a woman outside of a mezcaleria in Puebla. A box of empire biscuits from a quaint shop in Inverness. A case of authentic fig rolls from a street side hawker in an open-air bazaar in Cairo. Fortune cookies from Wo Hop in the Lower East Side. Macarons and macaroons from Ladurée in Madeleine, Paris. We had 'em all. Really we did. Well, it was just me. Zafira had gone. The kids were grown and gone. They were all perfectly fine. Everyone just had their own lives. And I had my cookies. Each with a memory from when life was golden and time was slow like honey.

So I took all the cookies and moved into the woods out back. There was a cabin no one knew about. Not even the collectors. It wasn’t listed on any papers. A place high up where I could keep an eye on the house that wasn’t mine anymore. I just wanted to know that someone would move in and act appropriately. Cherish it. Build a family, maybe. But they didn’t have to. They could just enjoy the house alone, too. Long as they maintained it. Two months later someone did and I moved further into the woods to another invisible cabin. I couldn’t see the house anymore. I just had a few cookies left. Eventually, I fed them to a rabbit. The rabbit was happy for a few days. Then I ate the rabbit, and I was happy. That rabbit taught me all about hunting and foraging and how to live in the woods. I became self-sufficient. A woodsman. I was officially off the grid and every night I cooked with fire. I didn’t have to explain myself and hardly ever talked aloud. I hummed songs from my childhood. I became the person I was supposed to be. And eventually the cookies, all of them, became a funny memory of a time when I owed everyone something and had a family.

One early morning there were flurries. Outside of my cabin door, sitting in a tuft of freshly laid snowfall, there was a blush box with a ribbon white as snow, as if it had been born from the ground itself, along with a note. The note was from my family and a few old friends. A happy intervention on paper. The words didn’t ask me to come back. They wished me well. I opened the box and those butter drop raspberry jam cookies fell out one by one, cinematically, onto the snow. The red jelly centers charmed me. I salvaged them before they got soggy, brushed the snow off, and put the blush box on the makeshift wood mantle above the fireplace.

Later that winter there was a severe snowstorm. The radio said there would be feet upon feet of snow. I surely didn’t have time to plan for dinner, but I did have the cookies. I sat on the tattered maroon leather armchair by the fireplace and savored each one, leaving all the centers until the very end. I stacked all of them up and held the jam jellies between my thumb and index finger, like I used to do as a kid. Forming a roll of lifesavers, I placed them in my mouth to enjoy, dreamt of a cup of chai, and leaned back to close my eyes for a long winter sleep.

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THE MARRIAGE TEST by Bailey Bujnosek

April 12, 2021 · Fiction

In a long-forgotten society, there was a test people had to pass to get married. The test had one question. The question was multiple choice. If you were a woman, the question was: You have one plank of wood. Do you:

Affix it to the wall to support your husband’s golf trophies?
Burn it to provide warmth for you and your family?
Ask your husband what he wants to do with the wood?

You know from other records that the question and answer choices were different for men. You also know that there was a correct answer that, if circled, would allow the test-taker to get married. However, since no answer key or specific records of the test survive, you are left to hypothesize the answer.

The marriage test was discovered fifty years ago. No one’s taken as much of an interest in it as you. You dream about the test. You can’t hear the alphabet without thinking of A, B, and C, golf, fire, deferment.Your husband does not care for the history of marriage law. You try to engage him during dinner by passing him a handwritten version of the test and he almost chokes on his shrimp scampi, laughing. You frown, your face the color of the shrimp on your plate. Upon noticing this, he calms himself and skims the paper.“Who would have thought they had golf back then?” he says with a smile.You explain that this is a loose translation of a sport closer to croquet than golf.“Why don’t they just translate it as croquet?”You’ve wondered this yourself, though you don’t admit it. You shrug. Say, “Maybe they thought it would be more understandable because it’s more popular.”Get no response, not even a hmm. Return to your food.

He, the man you married, wakes you up in the middle of the night. You feel uncertain of your shape. You are both veiled by darkness. How do you know you’re not changing, disfiguring?“C’mon,” your husband says, and his voice is like snow falling. “What’s the right answer?”“To what?”You roll over. Press your palms against your ribs. Nothing suddenly sharp or absent. You’re still whole, full of caged organs.“You know what,” he says.“There isn’t one we know of.”“You’re kidding.”You pull your hands out from under your shirt and breathe. You tell him you’re not kidding. Wait for the next question, the one you hoped he’d ask at dinner. What do you think the correct answer is? He snores like waves against rocks. It is worse than silence.

Your research into the marriage test hasn’t won you any grants or awards. You can’t yet call yourself doctor. You tell yourself you aren’t in it for those reasons, but seeing Dr. Jeff dance around the library celebrating his second grant of the month isn’t a joyride. You wish you could chuck him out of the archives room. He sweats on all the rare books.You mention this, the sweating, to the librarian one day. She gives you a stare like your fly is down. You hope she will not tell Jeff.Jeff’s area of study is marital fashion. His numerous grants of late are due to his writings on corsetry. He’s working on a book about how all wedding dresses are metaphorical or literal shackles and bonds. You know this because he has run his grant proposals by you numerous times. He claims you have a good ear for arrogance and aren’t afraid to call him out on it. You have yet to find a nice way of explaining how hard it is to sound arrogant when you’re begging people for money.

If you would’ve had to take the marriage test, would you have failed? This question haunts the back of your throat. You blurt it out to the cashier at the grocery store.The cashier says if he had to take the test, he wouldn’t care if he passed or failed. He is scanning the third bag of shrimp when you realize you didn’t grab anything else. On the way home, you pick up cheesesteak sandwiches.“I’m sure you’d pass,” your husband says that night, when you voice the question to him. “You’d figure out the right answer.” He does not say what he thinks the right answer is.The cheesesteak is a bloated sponge in your hand. Too much cheese. You choke and your husband watches you give yourself the Heimlich maneuver over the back of your chair. He tells you you’re very brave for saving yourself.You think if he took the test, he’d fail, and you think of a singledom full of cats and baths, of soap operas and saving yourself from all kinds of pitiful near-death experiences. But, you think, he would not take the test. He would just get married. Jeff, too. They’d simply be unable to comprehend why anyone had the power to control their lives like that.

One boiling day in the archives, Jeff theorizes that the correct answer is C. His justification is that deferment to a husband is probably what was expected, “back in those days.” “Only it wasn’t like that in all cultures,” you say. “Maybe it’s B because a wife should check her husband’s wants against the family’s needs.”“But what if you take the test in the summer?” Jeff asks. “Then there’s no point in a fire for warmth.” He’s sweating more than usual. His nose is soggy like a dog’s. You lean over your half of the textbook between you to protect its pages.“It’s symbolic,” you say. “You’re not letting the husband have the wood.”“What if you choose C knowing your husband will burn the wood?”You don’t know. To change the subject, you point at a picture on his side of the page. The picture shows a woman in a dress made of canary feathers, popular in the weddings of a now-extinct tribe.“That’s pretty,” you say.Jeff says the feathers were plucked from live birds, says the dress had to be stitched by the bride’s father, says if the feathers weren’t the right shade of yellow it was grounds for canceling the ceremony. You’re jealous of his answers. You pine for a textbook on the marriage test. Maybe when you pass out from heat exhaustion, you’ll dream one up.

Your husband stages an intervention after the fifth shrimp dinner of the week.“Why are you so out of it lately?” he says. He doesn’t realize that:

You’re actually as ‘into it’ as you’ve ever been, which is to say you never cared much for shaking up dinner and just got careless this week.
Because being out of it is equivalent to finally finding something you’re truly passionate about, even if no one else is, even if it never amounts to anything, because you care. You care so much.
Ask your husband what he thinks.

You choose C.“You’re blaming me now? What did I do?”You repeat yourself: “What do you think?”Your husband sleeps on the couch. Neither of you clears your plates from the table or washes the dishes. In the morning the fetid smell greets you like a slap.Your husband is gone. He left a note: Going to my brother’s for a few days.

You take a dry erase marker and on the fridge you write out the marriage test. Swap out golf for croquet. Run your hands through your hair. Pace. Wonder what Jeff has won today. Tell yourself not to care, but care anyways. Someone knocks on the door. It’s your landlord looking for the rent check. He follows you into the kitchen, reads the refrigerator while you scurry to the bedroom and find the check in your husband’s sock drawer.“What’s with the piece of wood?” he asks, pointing towards the question on the fridge. You fumble something about lumber being a useful resource.“Still don’t get it,” he says. You hand him the check. When he leaves, you wipe the test off the fridge with your sleeve.

Your husband comes back unshaven, closer than ever to a wild animal. He holds a plank of wood in his hand. Drops it on the kitchen floor with a dull thud.Your husband does not play golf or croquet. It is hotter today than it has ever been in your life. You know deferring to him again is useless. This is your choice.You pick up the plank of wood and drop it in the kitchen trash. You ask him if he will cook dinner for the both of you. He says yes.

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VALUATION by Kayleigh Shoen

April 9, 2021 · Fiction

My mom used to say if you don’t own anything worth stealing, you never need to lock your doors. In our neighborhood, the breeze at night could travel the entire length of the street in and out through the screen doors of unlocked houses. It was that kind of place.

There were three thefts that summer before the police would even file a report. They kept saying it was probably a misunderstanding; what thief leaves cash to cover the object they stole? And if anything, the amount left was probably too much: $50 for the Zeiglers’ oinking cookie jar, $25 for the Sweeneys’ moth-eaten throw, $13 for an ashtray one of the Thompson kids stole from a diner on vacation.

But as the thefts continued into the fall, the items became more personal. Beth Smyk found an envelope with $7 in exchange for her hairbrush, still full of hair. Cal Washington got $9 for his lucky socks. Greg Tsu reported a stolen baseball cap to the police. But then a week later he found the cap in his trunk and realized his wedding album was gone.

The most distressing thefts were the unidentified ones. Some victims spent months searching their homes, and memories, for the missing item whose value matched the money in the envelope. Figures like $3, $15, and $42 took on new mysterious significance to the neighbors we watched through their windows opening cupboards, pulling out drawers, perplexed.

Even after all that my parents never locked our doors. It had only been a year since my sister succumbed to cancer, and maybe they thought this larger loss exempted them from petty theft. They didn’t seem to believe that the crimes that affected our neighbors could touch them, too.

Meanwhile, new signs were cropping up on the neighbors’ lawns, advertising their new “securely monitored” status. One day the Kimballs brought home a dog with sharp ears and a metal collar. The Johnsons sold their house to an older couple who built a wood slat fence and kept behind it. The neighborhood was becoming a different kind of place.

I never told my parents about the envelope I found in our front hallway. I still remember the feel of the morning sun on my neck as I weighed the stack of bills in my hand, both too heavy and too light. I thought about all the cheap, priceless objects that still cluttered my sister’s bedroom down the hall. Without counting it, I put the cash back in the envelope and buried it in the trash.

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BUSINESSMAN by Jim Windolf

April 8, 2021 · Fiction

My father told me, when I was fourteen, that business was a language anyone could learn. I never got fluent. So there I stood, a thirty-six-year-old man with not much in the bank, at the side of a hole in the ground as they lowered the coffin that contained his body.

He had run a small empire in our New Jersey town. His main business was an insurance agency. There was also a travel bureau, a movie theater, and a restaurant. Of all his businesses, I probably liked the travel bureau best.

He took me there now and then on summer mornings when I was six or seven. The place had a smell of paper and perfume. I would sit on a swivel chair at an unoccupied desk, tapping at a computer keyboard, watching the green letters jump across the dark screen, while my dad spent time in an interior office going over things with the mustached man who was the travel bureau’s president. A pair of sisters who worked there would put their faces close to mine. They also gave me candy from their desks, sour balls and Mary Janes, and they teased me about my curly hair, saying it was wasted on a boy.

After college, with the idea of eventually moving up in my father’s organization, I went to work in the warehouse that supplied his various businesses. But it turned out I was only ever good—unusually good, that is—at two things, sports and sex, and I have ended up making my small living at both.

I fell into sex work nearly ten years ago, during a cruise-ship vacation I took with my parents, my sister, and our baby brother, who had just finished high school.

It was the first time we had gone on an extended family trip as adults. I couldn’t shake the feeling we were trying to re-create our vacations of years earlier, although we must have been aware we had lost the old everyday mix of conflict and ease that animates families when they are young. So instead of playing hide-and-seek in a churchyard near a shingled seaside rental, or finding ourselves in the silence of nature as night fell and the blood thrummed in our veins, my siblings and I would put ourselves through three-hour dinners, sometimes at the captain’s table—meals that started with cocktails and crystal dishes filled with puckered olives and radish slices flavored with olive oil and flaked salt.

The ship was pushing through the northern Atlantic at one in the morning when I looked up from a craps table and into the eyes of a woman who must have been twenty or twenty-five years older than me. I was the last member of my family in the little casino, and she might have assumed I was alone in the world. I wasn’t surprised when I ended up in her cabin for what remained of the night, but it did catch me off guard, in the morning, when she lifted her head and aimed a glance at a stack of bills on the black coffee table. I took the cash as if I had done it before, and by the end of the next cruise, which I had booked solo, I found I had made more than I had spent.

After three years at sea, I knew the major ports and hated my morning reflection. When I heard about a job opening at my old school, I decided to apply.

***

My father, still firm, with a senator’s handsomeness, died of a mysterious illness in his seventy-third year, a week after undergoing hip surgery in October 2019. Six months later, while under quarantine aboard a small ship in the Mediterranean, I couldn’t help wondering if he had contracted an early case of Covid-19.

The memorial service took place on a crisp morning, with sharply outlined clouds parading across a marine blue sky. I didn’t see anyone crying at the grave site. He had been too large a presence for that. We felt like a mountain had been blown off the earth. The next day I went back to the high school where I had been employed six years — the same school where I had set records, since broken, as a member of the cross-country, basketball, and baseball teams.

The 7:45 a.m. faculty meeting was the usual mix of administrative talk and rank gossip about troublesome students and their parents. I got nods of concern from colleagues between the P.E. classes I ran. At 3:15 I drove the rowdy cross-country boys in an Econoline van to South Mountain Reservation for another practice. I felt like an orphan, now that I had no father, but I also felt the same.

The routine that had kept me in line since I had left the ships remained in force until the Monday morning when I got an email from the principal inviting me to see her in her office. We had not spoken in the weeks since the death of my father, and the first thing she said was, “I was so sorry to hear about your loss.”

I knew something else was up when her grave expression didn’t fade as we arranged ourselves in the deep leather chairs. She took a large smartphone from a blazer pocket and held it to my face. I saw screen shots of certain text messages between me and the mother of a boy on the cross-country team.

“I think this is a private thing,” I said.

“I'm not so sure about that. We received a batch of similar texts and emails going back roughly to the start of your employment.”

I wondered how my correspondence with the moms had ended up in a single file. I tried to figure out who would have sent it to my boss, and why.

“How would you like to do this?” the principal said.

“Do what?”

“I can accept your resignation. Or the school can terminate your contract.”

***

When I was a teenager, sort of as a joke, I started calling my mother “Ma.” She said she hated it and gave me light punches to the shoulder whenever I used that word. I stuck with it, though, and I think it helped set our relationship apart from the ones she had with my siblings. And so when, more than a month after Dad’s death, I told her I had lost my job and was going away, she insisted on seeing me off. I’m not so sure she would have done the same for my brother or my sister.

“I wonder if I’ll ever see you again,” she said.

“Don’t be dramatic, Ma.”

At sixty-seven, she was still a good driver, able to zip her Audi from lane to lane of traffic-clotted Route 3 and sneak between the rival buses, trucks, and cars on the helix that led to the mouths of the Lincoln Tunnel. Just as I had done as a child on drives to Manhattan, I kept an eye out, as we pushed through the rightmost of the three Lincoln Tunnel tubes, for the painted tiles marking the border between New Jersey and New York.

“I don’t understand how a person loses their job and then goes on a cruise. What will you do for money?”

“I’ll be all right.”

“I don’t understand where you got this wanderlust.”

“Maybe you and Dad shouldn’t have taken me on the cruise that time. Or maybe it was the travel bureau. I always liked it there.”

“I would think you’d want to do something a little more useful.”

“I’ll be useful.”

She found a metered spot on West Forty-Second Street between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, and we walked under a gray sky toward the Hudson. I used my left hand to steer the boxy rolling suitcase that trailed me and my right to carry the soft hanging bag that contained the three suits I had bought online, not to mention the tux I'd worn on formal nights during my earlier years at sea.

“Got your passport?”

“Got it.”

“Can I wave to you from shore? Like people did in the old days?”

“You might have to wait for me to go through the safety thing, with everybody sitting in an auditorium, wearing life preservers.”

“I’d forgotten about that.”

Near the spot where the U.S.S. Intrepid was docked, we waited for the white walking man to show up on the sign before crossing the West Side Highway.

We turned right. Now coming into our view, partly obscured by a concrete structure, was the ocean liner and the great ropes that held it to the city. It seemed strange to me that no else was walking toward it.

“What’s the first stop?”

“Bar Harbor. Then Greenland.”

“How long till you make St. Petersburg?”

“About three weeks.”

“Will there be Russians on board?”

“Let’s hope.”

She gave me a light punch on the shoulder, the way she used to, which somehow made me want to cry, and she said, “I really don’t see how you can afford this kind of thing.” I didn’t reply but imagined myself saying, “I’m what they used to call a gigolo,” and I pictured her bursting out in laughter, and I heard her laughter die as her eyes took on a sudden look of clarity, and I saw myself moving closer to her, saying, “It’s just business, Ma. I’m a businessman, too.”

Our farewell hug lasted a few seconds longer than I had expected. I believed she was sending me a telepathic message to tell me that she knew, that she understood, that she thought my way of life was not ideal, but that it was all right, given my particular skills and weaknesses, traits unsuited to running a business but sufficient for getting a person through the days more or less unharmed.

“If you can wait here, I’ll wave from the deck."

“I’d like that.”

"It won’t be like the old days, when everybody waved handkerchiefs as the ship pulled away, but it’ll be close enough.”

"That's O.K."

It turned out I was the last passenger to sign in and step through security. A crew member told me I would have to go through the safety session with the other stragglers. I nodded and moved on to the gangplank.

The horn sounded, and from the top deck I saw my mother, thirty or forty feet below, holding her hands to her ears. I leaned over the rail and waved as the ship started to move, and she waved back with a wild hand. I remembered something, the white handkerchief in my jacket pocket, and I waved it with an old-time flourish, and I saw her laughing in a way that seemed to say she loved me, even if I didn't measure up.

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THAT WAS THE YEAR WE by Eric Scot Tryon

April 7, 2021 · Fiction

That was the year we went to Colombia to visit her parents. Her mom had just had surgery on her hand and couldn’t cook, so we spent a month eating empanadas from the little market on the corner, the one with the blind dog that always lay across the open door. Perfect golden-brown crescents, we devoured them on the small white plastic table outside with a cold beer or we ate them as we walked around the town square. She would tell me the history of the church or about the protests that happened there when she was a kid.

That was also the year she got pregnant. We loved to think it happened on that trip, maybe one of the nights we were away in Anapoima. One of the nights we walked to the tiny bar atop the hill. The bar that was just six poles, an aluminum roof and a large ice cooler. Walls and windows and doors are not always necessary. Yes, maybe it happened one of the nights we got drunk there and chatted to the locals until the darkest hour of the night. She, already talking in cursive, would translate their stories back to me, and we all laughed as if speaking the same language. One of the nights we stumbled back to the tiny four-room hotel with paper thin drapes that blew into the room like ghosts.

But that was also the year she got unpregnant. That’s what we decided to call it. She lay in bed for weeks, often FaceTiming her mom, longing to be back in a place where she had childhood stories, back in a place where the soil and the trees and the drunk locals with missing teeth all spoke her native tongue. I didn’t always feel welcome during those calls and that was fine. Some things shouldn’t be translated. Instead I spent those days on YouTube, in the kitchen, flour dotting my forehead, watching videos on how to make empanadas. Perfect golden-brown crescents. The kind that crisp when you bite into them, a little bit of heaven wafting out with the steam.

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HOW TO TELL A SCARY STORY by Sara Hills

April 5, 2021 · Fiction

Start with setting

Think about someplace you know. A lonely walk to school, the back alleyways downtown, the dark crevices under the high school bleachers, a house from your childhood. Remember the sodium-yellow haze over the empty parking lot that time in college when a rugby player refused to get out of your car, and decide, instead, to catch the reader off-guard. Think about places that should be more comforting and familiar—a clean ribbon of asphalt under a cloudless sky, the upstairs bathroom at a family Christmas party, a sleepover at your best friend’s house, a city bus.

Add in the sounds—the cheering crowd, the seventeenth rendition of Jingle Bells pounded on the piano by your niece, a sharp inhale through a cigarette, a coffined silence, the steady drip from a leaky tap; the smells—pine toilet cleaner, car exhaust, whiskey and vomit, buttered popcorn—know you’ll come back to these details later and wonder which ones are worth telling.

Choose a protagonist

Pick someone likable, sympathetic; or not. A small girl whose yellow sundress tickles the tops of her knees, a teenager in ripped jeans on her way home late from school. Make her 32, a spinster, a mother. Make her thin as a mint Girl Scout cookie. Make her fat with thighs that rub together under her skirt. Give her glasses or a briefcase, let her clothes inform the time period—a chunky bow in her hair says 1983, a Holly Hobby lunchbox says 1979, a flannel shirt and ripped jeans says grunge, 1992. Make her proud or shy, make her a cookie-baking grandmother of four, or a boy with gapped teeth and a hole in his heart. A widower with three children at home. Make them hungry, unsuspecting, naive. Make them a little bit like you. Make them kind to kittens and afraid of breaking the rules. Or not.

Craft a villain

Surprise the reader; make them nonthreatening, approachable. Make them a teacher with a drawer full of snacks, a benevolent uncle, the older brother of your best friend. Remember drunk teenage boys in dark houses, fathers addicted to pills, neighbors with a new game to play. Pluck them out of thin air. Give them a uniform—a police officer, a postman, a soldier, a doctor, a nurse. Think about the possibility of female villains. Controlling mothers who can reduce a child to the size of a tick with one glance, ready to pop you if they hear one more distasteful word. Angry teachers who make you call them ‘Miss’ and send you to sit in the hallway for being helpful. Decide it could be any one of them.

Choose a weapon

Start with what you know. Remember your mother’s pinched face and her open palm, your brother’s fists, your dad’s loaded pistol in the bedside table. Remember the boy who chased you home from school with a big stick, how fast you ran. Think legendary weapons—Thor with his mighty hammer, Medusa’s eyes, Midas’s touch—and wonder about touch as a weapon. Remember all the times your blood felt like it had stopped, clotted to stone, how your legs didn’t move—couldn’t. Think of celebrities’ accusers, think of girls in alleyways behind dumpsters, think of machetes and acid and knife attacks and bombs, and think how easy it would be to go quickly. Think of an unexpected weapon, the thing most villains have in common. Write ‘penis.’

Employ rising action. Quicken the pace.

Let your mind rest on the crocheted doll on the back of the toilet, her plastic smile, the exploded lunchbox with the blue thermos rolling into the bushes, the white-and-pink globs of bubble gum pressed under the bleachers, the empty beer cans, chocolate wrappers, the posters of boy bands on the walls. Recall the smells, you always do, the sound of laughter, disparaging remarks. Try not to cry.

The denouement

After, let your protagonist live. Fasten the memory like a tiny shadow tucked inside a heart, a womb, until it gnaws its way out. Let them tell no one what happened, or let them tell everyone. Have them whisper it to their diary, their best friend, their mother. Try to remember how the shards of words can catch in a throat; seeing yourself reflected in your mother’s eyes when you told her—how distorted you felt, how dirty, how broken—and make your protagonist look away. Crimson their skin with shame until it feels bruised. Let them pray for help, for forgiveness, for death, for justice that never ever comes.

Let no one believe them.

Let it happen again.

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ELMO GLICK by Matt Mitchell

April 2, 2021 · Fiction

It was 1966, late winter, when a mild western breeze combed across the Pacific Coast. Elmo Glick, in a velvet tracksuit colored beige, sagged himself over the railing of his second-floor balcony. He wasn’t going to kill himself, no. He was more interested in testing whether or not he could accurately spit a clump of saliva into his treble-clef-shaped in-ground pool from there. The blob of grey cannonballing out of Glick’s mouth and then buoying in the clear-blue water and then thinly dissolving into strings of bubbly DNA. I haven’t had a real hit since 1962, Glick thought to himself. As he always did, every night. Glick was never known for being hip with the times, as he had spent the last number of weeks trying to write a chart-topper that involved a line about shaking your tailfeather. But it was that lack of hipness that put him on his second-story balcony, hurling spit-wads into chlorine-tinged waters.

He peeked into the bedroom to see Gaby still awake, reading from her copy of Goodbye, Columbus. May I have just one Coors, Glick asked her. No, your heart, she responded quickly, not even considering anything but that. Gaby didn’t want him drinking anymore, not after the thing with his ticker and all the outbursts. Bad heart, the doctor said. But Glick did keep a lone can of Coors in the way back of his garage fridge, behind a shelf full of Coke bottles bottom-marked Memphis, because Gaby liked the way Coke tasted where Elvis lived, much more than California Coke, so she used a portion of her Kiss Me Deadly earnings to ship them, by the case, cross-country from Tennessee. God gave you a wonky heart, so you better not fuss with it, Gaby told him from the bed.

But what god wanted and what god intended were two different things, and Glick thought, maybe, giving Presley a ring would change his mood. Ask him to come to Red Bird Records, Glick thought. Him and Presley always made hits together. Though, he knew Presley was probably near comatose, under heaps of satin bedsheets with Priscilla, rehearsing his lines for Clambake. Those were the Bill Bixby days. The Bill Bixby long before Bill Bixby was David Bruce Banner days. And Glick knew Presley would never abandon RCA, what with all the luxuries of putting out mediocre country-pop for salary pay and royalty checks. And Glick couldn’t offer that to anyone with Red Bird, because the label was barely breaking even off The Shangri-Las alone.

It was something of an anomaly, his songwriting. The weight of “Hound Dog,” how everyone thought of Presley and not Glick when it came on the radio. Seismic in legacy, for months you couldn’t walk past a store-window television set and see anything but the King shaking his hips while lip-syncing the tune, though maybe you couldn’t tell he was shaking his hips, because they were intentionally placed just off-screen. The way Glick surely regretted writing such a mammoth hit on his first go. It was he who discovered The Shangri-Las, and he who produced their first hit record. And then the next, and also the ones after that, too. But his credit on all those songs, much like his on “Hound Dog,” had been long forgotten, because his name was always smaller than the artist’s. And he couldn’t sing, a vacant quality Gaby reminded him about, from time to time, citing she would have married a bird if she wanted to bed a singer.

So Glick stood there, on his balcony, admiring the California cityscape beyond him. An arm’s length, it seemed. A whole world away, it was. Yes, he considered jumping, but couldn’t commit to it, because he was worried he’d miss the concrete and land in the pool, or, even worse, embarrassingly sky-dive into the deep-end diving board. He took a step back and glanced at the moonlight, a moonlight that somehow cut through the shuttering farm of clouds. There was a way about its glow, a way that turned the front part of his body blue. And it reminded him of that particular way nighttime broke into the church and onto Gaby’s face, as they danced their first holy-matrimonied dance. The way it turned her into a moon, a moon he longingly held in his tuxedoed arms.

But, as was customary at that time of night, what with morning beginning to inch its way up the coast, Glick left the glow behind, tiptoed through his bedroom, where Gaby was now asleep with Goodbye, Columbus tented on her chest. He inched down the spiral staircase, through the kitchen, and out into the garage. He opened the fridge door slowly and snaked his hand around the cavalry of Coke bottles, careful not to make any jagged noise by accidentally pushing two of them against each other. He grabbed the can and quietly sulked over towards a toolbox where he kept a spare can opener. As Glick always did, and maybe did too much, he pondered over which end to open, but chose the top, like always. He took a swig, feeling the frosted hops glide down his burn-swallowed throat. This must be what moonlight tastes like, he jokingly thought to himself, until he opened a cabinet by his Buick and fished around for the rest of the six-pack, and then considered that maybe every other can held the taste of moonlight, too.

Glick, with an armful of Coors, then backpedaled into his home, adjourning back up the spiral staircase and into his study, where all his achievements hung. There was a vacant shelf he had built above the fireplace for his Grammy awards, even though he hadn’t won any yet. A picture of him and Phil Spector rested on the wall behind his desk. Their friendship, Glick and Spector’s, had long fizzled out, but Glick kept the picture hanging to serve as a reminder that he is the man who made Spector. That when you think about the Wall of Sound, you better think of Elmo Glick, too. And it was Glick, that night, who stood before his wall of gold records, gazing for a particularly long time at the frame holding “She’s Not You.” His middle-aged face reflected off the brandished shine. From across the hallway, Gaby, awake now, groggily called him into their bedroom. But he told her no. Told her, I think I might write a song tonight. She hummed in half-conscience affirmation, knowing all too well the violence he inflicted on himself while not writing, before drifting back down into her pillow.

He closed his study door, played “I Wanna Love Him So Bad” by The Jelly Beans from his jukebox, a Rock-Ola he had personally installed and only filled with songs he’d written or produced, and kept writing the word “midnight” over and over again, like some kind of Wallace Stevens imposter, until he had written “Moonlight in My Arms” so big at the top of the paper he could barely fit any lyrics beneath it. So he put his pen down, drank another can of Coors that glided down his throat, and called it a day, because it had been so long since he’d even come up with a good title.

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SEALED by Kathleen Gullion

March 31, 2021 · Fiction

The day of my baptism, I wear a neon orange swimsuit underneath my white dress. What was I supposed to do, go naked and let everybody see my brand-new nipples? As I wait by the river, bullfrogs jumping from bank to bank and croaking like a choir, the swimsuit keeps finding its way up my butt crack, giving me what Paw-Paw would call the “cowboy’s hello,” a term he coined for what happens to underwear on a saddle. “That’s why cowboys go commando, Darlene,” he always said.

I yank the suit out of my crevice. Mom, perched up on dry land, yells out, “Darlene, God is watching you!” I want to yell back, God gets wedgies too, but before I can, the pastor arrives.

He wades into the water, his eyes bulging from the cold. It’s only April, and the river flows with leftover winter water. He turns to face us, waist-deep, robe billowing up around him like a tutu. There are six of us getting baptized today, including Phoebe, who always makes a big show of praying with her eyes closed in church and saying Amen when she is done. Once I asked her what she prayed about. She said world peace. I pinched her arm and asked what she really prayed for. She cried and said that is what she really prayed for. Then her mama called my mama and I had to stick my nose in the corner of the wall for two hours.

I pray for normal things like chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, to see a butterfly cracking open a chrysalis, and to have my little nasty brother to shrivel up like a prune and get turned into prune juice that will be served at the old folks’ home where Paw-Paw lives.

I stick my tongue out at Phoebe, that goody-goody. She gasps as if she hasn’t ever seen my red tongue wiggling at her and turns away, blushing like a bride.

“Morning, my children,” the pastor says to us, and I can smell fish sticks and liquor on his breath. “Today is the day of your Baptism, the day you accept Christ into your little hearts. When you become submerged in the river, your original sin will be washed away – all that sin that causes lyin’, cheatin’, stealin’, covetin’, and adulterin’ washed downstream to the sea. When you emerge from the cleansing waters, you will be purified, cleansed, chock full of the Holy Spirit.”

I don’t know about all that. But before I can even say Holy Spirit who? I’m yanked by the pastor and hoisted up into the air like a trophy. “Darlene Harvey, do you take the Lord Jesus Christ into your heart, with love and devotion, in order to be cleansed of original sin?” Without pausing for my answer, he dunks me. The ice water feels like a slap. The pastor’s hands dig into my shoulders, keeping me down, making sure I’m getting my cleansing. Soon, I’ll pop back up and be purified, a good girl, a child of God.

But I like being a grimy thing. I do the only thing I can think of. I bite the pastor’s arm. His hands fly off me and I take my chance at escape, kicking my legs as fast as I can and pulling my body forward with a scooping motion of my arms. I feel movement behind me, but I don’t dare look back. I can swim faster than the pastor can wade. The fabric of my white dress has grown heavy, so I wriggle out of it and it floats up to the surface, translucent as a ghost. Just me and my orange swimsuit now. Without the dress’s weight, I can swim even faster, so I keep going, swimming farther and farther away from the bank where the congregation is gathered.

Feet fluttering, I follow the current, away from those cursed cleansing waters and Phoebe’s prayers for peace and the pastor’s stank breath. Something brushes my foot and my heart jumps. It must be the Holy Spirit, coming to get me. But it’s not a spirit. It’s a catfish. It swims in front of me and looks me in the eyes. Its skin is smooth and perfect, no blemishes or bumps. The sun refracting through the water catches its whiskers, illuminating each one like a pin light. I reach out my hand and scratch it beneath its chin, like I do with the cats that live under our porch. It leans into my hand, letting me scritch-scratch just like one of those kit-kats. My chest starts to feel tight, but I don’t want to go back up to the surface and be a member of the church and listen to the pastor’s thous and thines and be expected to pray for things that will never happen. I just want to stay down here with this radiant critter. I keep scratching it real good and it purrs, both of us free from damnation and deliverance, enjoying the sharp sting of April river water.

I’ve already been under for a few minutes now. I just need one breath, and I can go back under. I resolve to be amphibian. I grab the critter around the middle and propel upwards. I break through the surface of the water and the pale air stings my face. A breath forces itself into my lungs, but the air feels clogged compared to the cool water below. I take another deep breath and prepare to dip back under, then I realize there is no catfish in my hand. What purred at me was a sneaker. A white one caked in pond scum. The whiskers: untied laces. I let the shoe go, let it sink back to the bottom of the river, and swim back to the bank, a child of God, cleansed and alone.

Crow Jonah Norlander

TWO MICROS by Caleb Lyons

March 29, 2021 · Fiction

It Was Clouds

On my way to his house in Malibu, a song about life and death in Los Angeles played on the radio. At the house, the artist carefully signed his work and handed it to me. I wrapped it in glassine and told him his show in New York looked good in the pictures. He gave me a bag to gather avocados from his trees. We talked about how great Chicago is and why we left.

3 years later, when the artist died, I went back to the house in Malibu to pick up his final piece. It was clouds. Have a nice day was the wrong thing to say to his partner.

Dog Food Man

I loaded the mold of the man made of dog food into my van and drove it to the wolf sanctuary. To gain their trust I had to let the wolves smell and lick my face. They ate the dog food man while the artist videotaped. The owner of the sanctuary wanted to be clear that while she appreciated the financial donation, this was not the wolf image she was trying to promote—wolves eating men, wolves eating dog food, wolves eating dog food men.

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