X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

RIDING A BIKE THROUGH THE LONELY CONTINUUM OF TIME by Christian Fennell

September 18, 2020 · Excerpt, Fiction

His name was Leonard. He was riding a bike. His arms held out to the sides of him, his mind never trapped by his own self, never buckling under the weight of what he should be, or shouldn’t be, understanding the truth of himself, always, in this world, hard as that was, and of course, in this moment too, riding a bike through the lonely continuum of time. He smiled at his knowing, where others couldn’t—or fucking wouldn’t, and he was right, and knew he was right, and always would be.

He rode on, his arms still there, to the sides of him, and he said, come, cover me. Gliding and dipping and soaring, and we do, going on and on, down a lonely, long road, and free now, or at least so he thought. Free and wanting.

Free and needing.

And who among us would not say, such a person as this.

He turned and smiled, reaching his hands up to the breaking blue sky, and he said, yes yes yes, I am here now.

On either side of the road started to appear large outcroppings of shield rock streaked with black and pink and where alder bushes, raspberry bushes, and trees grew from crevices.

He saw ancient trees grown too tall and heavy for their rocky moorings, having fallen onto their sides, great circular walls of exposed roots and dirt pointing to the sky.

He rode past dark and vacant lakes, and he rode past narrow long stretches of washed-out lowlands, sun-bleached trees still standing, dead and broken.

He was tired, and walking the bike now, the sun not yet down, the moon there, and he looked up to it, and he said, love under a big moon.

Why wouldn’t there be?

Of course there would be.

Probably was and just forgotten.

Probably was.

He stopped and looked around, and he thought, what else might be out there?

Endless possibilities of strange and wonderful things.

On a night such as this.

He looked back up to that everyone’s one big moon. Ain’t that right, moon?

Ain’t it now, said the moon back to him.

Why I’m here.

Always will be.

True enough, and always will be.

And he was happy, walking, a coyote following him high up on the granite ridgeline, stopping, looking too, at that everyone’s one big moon.

On a night such as this.

He came upon a house set back from the road. He dropped the bike and walked up the long gravel driveway.

The house was white stucco, cracked and chipped and stained with dirt. Tall weeds running up the walls.

To the right of the house, a clapboard garage the same color as the house.

He looked for a dog, or any sign of a dog. There wasn’t one. Not that he could tell.

He walked to the garage and stopped and looked back at the house. He reached for the garage door handle and pulled, the door lifting up from the ground toward him, a stack of aluminum folding chairs tipping over. He paused, holding the door handle, two weighted cylinders filled with rocks, one on either side of the door, swaying from thin strands of twisted wire.

A second-story light came on and he let go of the handle to see if the door would stay. It did, and he moved toward the back of the house.

The back light came on, mosquitoes swarming the brightness. An old man wearing pajamas and a frayed striped bathrobe appeared. His grey hair disheveled. His watery, hooded eyes, squinting. A single-barrel shotgun in his hand. Who’s there?

He pushed open the screen door to the hum of the evening heat and the sound of the mosquitoes bouncing off the glass of the small light. Well?

He stepped onto the porch boards, the screen door slapping shut behind him. I won’t ask again.

He walked forward and Leonard stepped out from behind the house, wrapping his left arm around the man’s neck. Shh, he said.

The old man eye’s widening. He didn’t struggle.

Leonard pressed the cold tip of a clip-blade knife to the man's throat. It’s me.

The old man. Who?

The one ya been waitin for, and he ran the knife through the thin, slack skin of the old man's neck.

He looked at the blood, pooling on the broken patio stones. He looked at the closed screen door and the light behind the door.

An old woman called from the house. Horace?

He looked to the second-story window.

Is everything all right?

He stepped over the man bleeding out beneath him and he entered the house.

The old woman appeared at the window, the soft bedroom light behind her highlighting the frailness of her thin frame beneath her long white nightgown. Horace?

Leonard appeared in the window, approaching the woman from behind, the old woman turning, and screaming.

He woke and sat up in the old couple’s bed and looked at the woman beneath the window on the floor, her nightgown soaked in blood, a long stream of it having run from her. He turned on the bed and placed his boots on the well waxed hardwood floor and he lowered his head and closed his eyes and ruffled his hair. He looked up at an antique vanity desk across from the bed.

He sat on the chair and opened a jewelry box and ran his fingers through it, an old broach, a charm bracelet, several pairs of earrings, a pearl necklace and matching pearl earrings. He fisted it all and put it in his coat pocket. He looked back at the old woman and stood and walked to her.

He squatted and took her left hand into his, sizing up her diamond ring and wedding band. He tried to pull them off. They wouldn’t come. He pulled harder. He took his knife out and opened the blade. He folded back the other fingers of her hand and pressed her hand to the floor and pushed the blade through the crunch of bone. He slide the rings off the backside of her freed finger and dropped the finger to the floor. He cleaned the blade on her nightgown and folded the knife closed. He tilted his head, looking at the old woman’s opened eyes, and he wondered, what was in there still?

Anything?

Doubt it.

Would it make a difference?

Probably not.

I bet they’re thankin ya?

Bet they are too.

If they could.

Why wouldn’t they?

She seemed like someone’s nice old grandma.

He stood and pocketed the rings, and he walked down the stairs.

Like they’d lived here a long time.

I guess.

And they might of been happy.

I didn’t put em in my path, someone else done that. And if there’s a reason for that, there’s a reason for me.

No doubt. Everything else is just made up, ain’t it?

True enough, just made up. Heaven or hell. Except I ain’t, and I never will be.

He lifted the kettle from the stove and poured out the water and refilled it. He placed it back on the stove and looked in the fridge. He closed it and walked out the back door.

He stepped back over the dead old man and the patio stone blood and walked toward the garage. He lifted the garage door and looked at the cluttered mess. There wasn’t even a car. Nothing much there at all.

He walked back to the house and up the stairs and walked inside.

He lifted the whistling kettle from the stove and searched through the cupboards until he found a jar of instant coffee. He made a strong mug of black coffee and carried it to the table. He sat and crossed his legs and took a sip. He lit a cigarette, and he smoked, and he drank his coffee.

On a night such as this.

Love under a big moon

That’s what he thought.

Torrents of Our Time: Twenty-Two Stories by Christian Fennell

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MISSING by Brian Brunson

September 16, 2020 · Fiction

Recollection A:He has a distinct memory of being told the story about Uncle Ringo’s missing index finger. More like he remembers that at one point it was a distinct memory. But that was years ago, when he was five or six, and nothing from way back then is distinct. Still, he is sure that his mother, standing in the kitchen, making fried chicken for dinner, told him and his brother that their Uncle Ringo lost his finger when he was sixteen in a meat grinder in the deli he worked at after school

Recollection B:Somewhere, sometime, he is sure that Uncle Ringo told him that a catfish had bitten off his index finger. Which sounds like something an uncle would tell a gullible nephew, but in that case the uncle would probably have said it was a shark or piranha that had eaten it, not just a catfish. His uncle was serious, he is sure of it, even if he can’t remember when he was told this, can’t picture the moment or any details beyond that his finger was eaten by a fish. Probably in a river or creek just outside

the small Missouri town that the family was from. A small town he had never been to. Never even been to Missouri. Probably never will be. Can't even remember the name of the town. Still, he liked Uncle Ringo, the youngest of the three kids, the only boy. The only uncle he had. His father only having an older sister. The missing finger fascinated him. The absence of a finger and the remaining scar was the strangest thing ever, like it had been hastily erased by god. When he first saw his Uncle's hand

he was terrified of it. It was grotesque. That’s how he learned that word, grotesque, at such a young age. It meant monstrous, almost unholy. Uncle Ringo seemed to be a part of the family during his childhood, but he shied away from him and his scary missing finger. The mangled hand

he laughed. To a five-year-old, it was hilarious. He thought it was a gag, some sort of magic trick, and the missing finger would suddenly materialize. But it stayed missing the rare times, a holiday here and there, he saw Uncle Ringo, and he would stare fascinated at the missing finger

that eventually he grew to think of as normal for Uncle Ringo, like it was normal for Grandma Vi to take all the pills she took. And then it was super cool to have an Uncle who had such a gruesome, unique hand. A whole missing finger; brutally ripped off. He told his classmates about it and the girls thought it gross, but the boys didn't think it was awesome like he thought because they didn't believe it at all and he got angry because he couldn't prove it, so he

dreamt about getting his own finger or hand deformed and mangled in some freak accident like the can opener going awry or getting it stuck in his bike chain, and then all the kids would think it was cool and gnarly and gross but of course that never happened. And became jealous of his uncle and his awesome

tried to find a picture of his Uncle Ringo’s hand but they had none, so better yet he’d bring him to school to tell the story about the fish that ate it, but that didn’t seem plausible so he was doomed to be teased about it at school. And it tore him up so much that he started to really resent his uncle and his stupid

missing finger with the gnarly nub of a knuckle at the end, or would it be the beginning, which wiggled just a little bit, creepy and cool all at once and it really gave Uncle Ringo an envious distinction, so he was relieved that at some point, if he remembers correctly, Uncle Ringo

drifted away from the family. He didn’t move far away, they just wouldn’t see him for a while, then they would, but not for long, then he realized he hadn’t seen Uncle Ringo for years. He was forgotten,

was banished from the family for reasons never disclosed, only that he was rarely mentioned, and even then only awkwardly and silently so as if he were listening, but he wasn’t because Uncle Ringo was gone,

which he now knows is often what happens to extended families, even immediate families. The ties loosen throughout the years and things that were once important become just nostalgic details like Uncle Ringo's missing finger that intrigued him so much and to this day is clear as day in his memory.

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MY DOUBLE by Michael Loveday

September 14, 2020 · Fiction

I made a cardboard cutout of me. Clodagh, I called her, and my family took to her well. That first evening at the dinner table, they didn’t register any difference, as they slurped and gnawed, licked their lips, and gorged on their lavish daily meats. At last, I was spared the disgusting sounds of them eating. I spent more time alone in my bedroom, reading tales of the headless Dullahan grinning on his night-black horse, and slowly starving myself, praying that I would one day become invisible.

My parents grew to like that Clodagh endured, without disruption, their long-and-short-of-it stories of misfortune. My brother Aidan liked that Clodagh never ate any of the food set down in front of her, so Aidan could sneak spare chips for himself without any complaint. A cloak of relief settled itself over the house.

Soon it was clear that my family actively preferred the cardboard me. I let them drag Clodagh to the park and the shops when there was an outing. My Aunt’s Cath’s birthday, Easter Sunday Mass, a bank holiday at Skerries—Clodagh took my place on all these occasions.

I wouldn’t have suffered except Clodagh seemed increasingly perfected, her smile ever more winsome, her clothes pristine, her hair now tidily combed, a smart-arse gleam appearing in her eye instead of the dopey expression my parents always chided me for. I was never this brilliant, never this lovable.

I wanted to no longer be part of my family, but I wanted to be missed at the same time. This was not how it was meant to be.

Baffled, I began to deface her, the picture-postcard version of me. Something compelled me to snick at her skin with a Swiss Army knife. I ripped the edges of her fingers where they pointed absurdly at whatever was in view. I graffitied vile abuse across her forearms. I yearned to rip her goddamn dazzling head off.

Slowly Clodagh was disfigured until finally my family could see the inevitable path that they set all their children walking down. Both of us, cutout and I, faced a ravaged future. We were no more than scrap ready to be thrown on the fire. Ash amongst ash, we could keep each other company through the long Dublin winter.

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FREAK DEATHS by Aishwarya Mishra

September 9, 2020 · Fiction

Lasya transfers to our school in the peak of summer when the heat makes us more mirage than matter. Our mothers warn us against going out, but we want to see that translucence that makes us inquire after her surname.

“That house is Lord Krishna’s mouth,” our mothers say, “containing the entire universe within it.”

The air-conditioners are dismantled first. The first time we step inside their house, we find it throbbing like the angry vein we sometimes see on our fathers’ foreheads. Lasya’s Ma gives us watermelon juice to cool our stomachs and tells us of the family that went to sleep in the icy coldness of the air-conditioner which later became heat and debris and death.

We try not to look at their bruises. They are livid like their house.

Days later, the perfumes go too. Lasya smells of sandalwood-lemon-rose water as she tells us of a newly wedded wife who spritzed on something her husband liked and went into the kitchen. We cry for the husband, who will now love her forever, for no fault of his.

Our mothers mumble on the terrace as they lay out the pickles to dry.

“You cannot save your children from everything,” they say, their hands bright red from the pickle oils.

We think of Lasya’s bruise.

In the monsoons, we stare at the house until its stillness becomes bright green needles inside our heads. We hear of a man who got electrocuted in an ATM nearby. Our mothers shake their heads as they restock the refrigerators, even as we stick our fingers in the air, looking for sockets, for something a bright electric blue, like her bruise. We shudder at the mute violets and pinks that streak the skies. Our mothers tell us about lightning that strikes elsewhere. We see her looking at us from her room, the windows both her eyes and skin.

We think of that bare house, now swollen with the rains and anticipation, that lushness of nothing. We sleep to the thickening of crickets and want to ask her what drowns out the night in her house?

We have trouble sleeping. We wake up to the pricking absence of a knife, or to the moon-mothball hidden inside the clouds to keep the darkness fresh. We want to ask Lasya if this is her Ma’s doing.

In autumn, we meet Lasya and her banked fire of a bruise. It holds colours that the fall has never shown us. We shuffle leaves with our feet as she tells us the stairs are being removed in the house. Something about someone having broken their neck in another house.

These things happen, she says.

Our mothers tug at their sarees and wring the necks of banisters when we tell them.

These things happen, they say.

Winter brings with it bright rich soups and frenzied dancing. Lasya tells us the meaning of her name, and that she prefers Tandava, that dance of rage to Lasya, that dance of grace. We struggle to keep ourselves warm. She tells us her Ma read about the dancing plague that began with a girl like her. Bread can get fungi, fungi brings madness, she says quietly. We wonder at all the things that ferment. We wonder how we will live without bread or rice. We wonder at the rage that household grains can cause.

Ferment. Foment. We fail to grasp how something that relieves inflammation then becomes the cause of rage. Lasya tells us the story of a tyrant who catches fever. A blanket soaked in distilled spirits is sewn on to him. Then he dies once it catches fire. Do you choose the fever or the flames?, we want to ask her.

Next summer, the pregnant elephant dies first. We hear it from the villagers who come into town for the weekend markets. We stroke our stomachs as they tell us of her having ingested a pineapple filled with firecrackers and then having gone into the water to stand silently for three days as life fizzled out of her.

We who grew up on stories of mad elephants terrorizing entire villages do not understand this. We run to our mothers, who soothe us and nod silently. Do they understand this? We know rage as pineapples bursting with firecrackers; they know rage as the gently laughing ulcers in the womb. Is that what a child does to you?, we want to know.

Lasya’s Pa dies a few weeks later. Cardiac arrest, the doctor says. All of us, and our mothers, gather at the house. It is buzzing in a way that is almost disrespectful to death. We see new furniture, new utensils, new appliances. Our mothers smile softly at their presence. We stare silently at the absence of their bruises.

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HORSESHOES by Mary Alice Stewart

September 8, 2020 · Fiction

She says it big and like a threat and smiling, horseshoe in hand, “I don’t like losing,” and she swings, lets go, and hits the stake head on. A ringer—iron rings against iron and I hold my drink up and shout for her. The game is alive again. Kayla plays inconsistent. It’s sometimes hard to watch, some bad throws, can’t even get one close, then she gets pissed off and you can see in her face that she’s decided it’s over for her and she’s just going through the motions. It’s awful playing her when she gets all fixed like that. But other times, she’s full of fight, and makes these huge comebacks, and turns nights into something full of suspense. Tonight, she’s playing against Friend and is wearing his Sublime t-shirt, which hangs past her shorts so it looks like she’s wearing nothing else. She’s behind a little but she’s got that sharp look in her eye and it suits her. Her nose and cheeks are pink from the sun and her freckles are at their deepest across her knees. Her hair is wispy from sweat, and her curls flicker red when she moves. Friend and her are together again, the same way me and Lee are together again. Our rhythm of returning, constantly returning, like a tennis ball against a wall and back again.

Next, Friend gets his first one pretty close and as he sets up for his second, right before the horseshoe leaves his hand, Kayla lifts up her shirt and flashes him. Her tits stun. One of her nipples is pierced. I was there and held her hand when it happened. It bled, stained the shirt she wore that day. I look at Lee and see where his eyes are at and of course they are on her and he catches me in the corner of his eye watching him stare so he looks up at the sky and studies it as though he is innocently and curiously bird watching. I think about how he looks at me topless—plainly, like familiar architecture. Friend misses bad and curses, spits into the dirt, but not seriously. “You play dirty,” he says, and she shrugs, her eyes ablaze. She grabs the horseshoes from the grass and moves herself into position. Her face turns serious, dark even. Her light brows scrunch up, and she sucks air in and brings her lips together like she’s about to jump deep underwater. The shoe turns in the air and hits the stake straight—dead on. Nobody talks because she would have our ass about it. She picks up her second shoe, no ounce of celebration in her body. I am breathless despite it being common, days like this. Something about seeing her get close to winning gets me tense and emotional. And I always feel proud to know that I knew it was in her this whole time. Kayla brings the horseshoe up to her chest, large against her small frame, pulls her arm back, and lets go. It turns in the air; and though this one looks like it was thrown with a little too much arm, looks like it’s about to fly right over the stake, the shoe turns again just so and it hits, and spins all the way down. Kayla throws her fists up and punches the air and we all cheer. She comes over to me, and I get up off the cooler, and she pulls herself out a tall Twisted Tea, cracks it and gulps. “I like that feeling of coming back. I wish you could feel some of that every day,” she says and Friend comes up behind her and spanks her. Kayla has always lived in the trailer beside mine. Our windows look into each other’s. Sometimes when I turn my head to the side when Lee is fucking me, I can see Friend fucking Kayla. Sometimes on accident we make eye contact and it makes us laugh.

A winter came once when the snow fell hard at an angle for days and days and we were too young to be wary of our roofs being warped under too much weight. Kayla was sick from withdrawals. A peace came after weeks of it, and we were tear stung, and she said, “We need each other,” and I knew that was true, and always had been. Before we met each other even, something further back. I said back to her, “Thank God."Kayla and I are outside sprawled out on the couch facing the woods. We watch Friend and Lee walk off, thick clouds trailing behind them from their vapes, so much it makes a new weather. They are taking their guns to go shoot at cans. Kayla is rolling her face with a glittering rock. “It’s a rose quartz roller. It makes your under-eye circles go away and rose quartz corresponds to your heart chakra…” she trails off, leaving me to assume I knew what that meant. She shoplifted it yesterday and didn’t have to. She is searching for new ways to feel good again. She brings my head into her lap and rolls my face all over. Muscles in my jaw—I had never noticed before—were tight as a drum, and the rock over my cheek felt like the first careful steps onto a recently frozen over lake. Kayla is on again about the duplexes they are putting in across town. How nice they seem, how big and new. How they are set back from the road so you wouldn’t hear cars pass. Her hope is to move in one with me right there on the other side of the wall. I like when Kayla talks like this, accelerated and dreaming. And I like the idea of life, right beside her. But on my side of the wall?—I am not sure Lee loves me or has ever loved me or will someday love me. I can’t count on it. I’m surprised I don’t care. I imagine a large, blue rug, thick and plush, that I can lay on like a cat. I imagine Kayla coming over for dinner. There are things I can see perfectly.

The soft wind tangles our hair together. Here—the smell of the air is two different things, coming at each other from different sides when the breeze lifts lightly across the yard. From one side, it is ocean, from the other, it is the smell of cow shit coming from Thibodeau’s. The way it can hit you can feel strange—no cows in sight, no waves, no immediate sounds to match the smell of things—and it can make this place feel like a mirage, a place that can ripple and disappear like one of those holographic school folders that change animals depending on how you hold it.

Once, Kayla and I decided we wanted to die together and we set a date. We walked to the edge of a cliff and we leaned over. We decided against it. We decided on going somewhere else.

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THE MILK BOTTLE LEGS OF THE HIGH WIRE WOMAN by Frankie McMillan

September 7, 2020 · Fiction

When I look at her legs I see upturned milk bottles, and I’m talking here of the glass bottles that milk used to come in and I love the shape of those legs, I could stay out all night on the frosty grass looking up at the wire and Miss Tatyana walking the wire in silence, only the guy ropes creaking and the twang of the metal pulley, and you know, those legs get my score, those legs belonging to Miss Tatyana all the way from Russia where they didn’t have glass milk bottles, only Mr Stalin, his mouth a hard line, his eyebrows a nest of ideologies that to tell you the truth wouldn’t suit a man like myself, a man who needs the freedom to pour his love into a vessel of his own choosing.

They say anything you love, anything of value is bound to make a break for freedom.

Some nights I’m afraid I will lose Miss Tatyana. She’ll move on from the wire. Trapeze, maybe. Or maybe it’ll be the persuasion of a baby. In my dreams I throw her over my shoulder, gallop away with her on a horse. We get married in Porto, at night she wraps her milk bottle legs around my throat. When I wake she’s gone. My breath curdles into silence.

I wait for Miss Tatyana by her caravan. Under a cool mackerel sky, only the fin of a moon peeking out. She moves between the tents and down the alleyway. I catch a glimpse of her legs as she walks past. And here’s the thing. She knows I’m there waiting for her and she knows that I know she knows this and that’s why I remain hidden in the grass. And she sits, smoking on the steps and I’m lying spreadeagled on my back, useless like something poured out. Smoke drifts over me, I close my eyes and I swallow and I swallow.

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AFTER SHRINKING by Hannah Cajandig-Taylor

September 6, 2020 · Fiction

We lived in a pale blue dollhouse with three stories & a basement. Obsessed over hot air balloons & weather blimps. Collected snowglobes & birdcages & convinced our giant neighbors to order countless pizzas by jumping on the remote buttons until a commercial with extra-large pepperoni flashed across their TV screen. Until we snuck enough triangular pizza box tables to furnish the place. Grew make-believe green beans & perennials on the roof. Protected our cardboard porch with Venus flytraps. A drawbridge. Toothpick mailbox. The works. Repainted our plastic appliances with glittering silver nail polish. Sharpie’d our heights on the wall, our grip clenched tight as we struggled to lift the permanent marker, shoes digging into the ground. Took three of us just to carry the marker back to the attic. Summer came. We were placed in the untamed backyard. When the crows moved in, our sky tarred & feathered, all we could think was to close our lopsided windows & send hope to our neighbors with chocolate coins in gold foil & tooth fairy kisses & after the birds abandoned our balcony view, the blue became a smiling child in a turquoise t-shirt, cutting little blankets from a washcloth to leave beside our front door.

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EXCERPTS FROM THE NOVEL VENICE by T.J. Larkey

September 4, 2020 · Fiction

Tough

I’m lying on my floor, next to my bed.

My bed is this big padded mat that rolls up and can be moved very easily.

It’s comfortable, but I like the floor better.

I believe that lying on the floor for a few hours a day will toughen me up.

I was a spoiled kid, very soft, so I’m always looking for things to toughen me up.

That’s how I got here.

I got it in my head that moving to a big city I’d seen in movies and television, where I didn’t know anybody, would somehow make me a tougher and overall better human. I was coasting around, not sure about anything other than wanting to live somewhere like that, when I lucked out and found the apartment online. It was cheap for being so close to the ocean and, even though I don't care about things such as close proximity to bodies of water or the correlating price of living in such places, I put down a deposit without even looking inside first.

I was on my way to becoming a tough guy.

It felt so badass.

For about a minute.

Then it transformed into panic.

A panic that remained all the way up until moving day.

I walked in to my new place with a laptop in one hand, a trash bag full of clothes in the other, and my bed/mat rolled up and tucked under my arm, hoping for the best. Hoping for a little more luck. Hoping for a place that would help me become… (something).

First, I looked at the kitchen/living room.

It had a microwave, a mini fridge, a sink, and a small couch that took up about thirty percent of the room. It was beautiful. I realized very quickly there was no bathroom (which I couldn’t remember being mentioned online) and that was beautiful too. I felt stupid for panicking. I thought to myself, this is the essentials, this is beautiful.

Then I looked at the bedroom. It had old brick walls, little bits of it breaking off on to the creaking wood floors, and in the corner of the room the ceiling slanted down because it was right under the stairs. I could hear people’s footsteps all day and night.

Then I noticed something very unusual.

The floor was wrong. It was crooked. If you put a pencil down it would roll to the other side of the room and disappear into the cracks between the brick wall. If I put myself down on the floor, however, no such luck.

At first, I thought the building was poorly constructed on uneven ground-- the first floor is street-level on one side of the building but not the other side. But later one of my neighbors told me that because of the age of the building, and the number of earthquakes it had endured, parts of the foundation had shifted over the years.

A building that could collapse at any moment.

My new home.

I threw my bed/mat onto the crooked floor and laid down next to it, like I’m lying down now, and thought, am I tough yet?

Mouse

I’m in my kitchen.

It’s very dark.

The rest of the city is asleep and all I can hear is my own footsteps.

It’s usually my favorite.

The best time to be alive.

But tonight it reminds me of when I was kid.

I was afraid of the dark.

I remember looking into the darkest part of my room, restless and almost paralyzed, and picturing the worst things possible. I remember knowing that it was all in my head and nothing was happening other than my inability to stop imagining my own demise, but still I’d look in to those dark crevices and think, okay, just, kill me quickly please.

Then remembering that reminds me I’m still afraid of the dark.

I open the mini fridge.

What seems like blinding light pours into the room and I see something small move quickly away from it. Then I hear little scratching noises. It’s coming from behind the fridge and then it’s coming from behind the sink.

I make myself completely still. I tell myself it’s in my head. But the sound gets louder and I move closer, silently, tip-toeing, so quiet that I start to scare myself, always scared, so scared that whatever is making the sound will pop out and systematically list all of my worst moments in chronological order, starting from age five, then murder me.

I open the cabinets below my sink and find the source.

A little family of mice looking up at me, terrified.

“Hello,” I say.

“Don’t be afraid,” I say.

“Let’s be friends,” I say.

Then I reach over in to the fridge.

There’s beer, eggs, a plastic bottle of vodka, and processed cheese I get from the convenience store across the street. I pinch off a piece of the cheese and set it down in front of the mice family, then I eat the rest of it in front of them so they know it can be trusted.

“My cheese is your cheese,” I tell them. “Go on.”

But they seem skeptical.

I leave it and walk back to bed.

I open my laptop, put in a DVD, and hit play.

As the intro credits start, I’m distracted by another creature darting away from the light coming from the screen.

I look over and see the little guy hiding in the corner of the room, between the cracks of the brick wall and partially hidden by my bed.

“Hello,” I say, “You with them?”

I point to the sink.

The mouse looks at me for a moment, then runs away, up the crooked floor and back to the rest of his family.

“Nice to meet you,” I say, and lie back down.

I watch the movie without any further interruptions.

I close my laptop.

I pull my blanket up to my nose.

I shut my eyes.

I whisper good night to my new roommates.

Then after imagining myself dying horrifically in an earthquake for an indeterminable amount of time, I force myself to fall asleep.

***

In the morning I wake up to something tickling my leg.

It’s terrifying.

But it’s nice to have things going on.

Distractions.

I lift the blanket over my head and see my new roommate burrowed under my knee. The same little guy that was near my bed the night before. He looks identical to the rest of his family, but I can tell it’s him. Something about his movements.

“Hello,” I say. “Good morning.”

I want him to tell me everything is going to be okay.

Everything is fine, now that he’s here.

But he doesn’t respond.

Just runs out from under the blanket and back into the kitchen and behind the fridge.

Still friendless.

I sit up.

I get this cold sensation through my body and my left hand is asleep.

Then as I roll of the bed I feel something small like crumbs underneath me and it’s terrifying.

Always terrified.

I yank the blankets completely off, wiggling like a little child, and see a dozen hard little brown pellets, about the size of a mouse’s asshole.

It’s right there.

Wasn’t there last night.

But now it’s there.

A declaration.

A black flag.

War.

I get up and check behind the sink cabinets but all I see are pipes, more mouse shit, and the cheese I left last night, untouched.

It’s too much.

Shit on my bed all you want, but refusing my hospitality is a capital offense.

As I get dressed angrily, punching my arms through the holes of my shirt and kicking wildly into my jeans, I decide that’s the rule, my one and only rule. I repeat it over and over in my head like a mantra, then walk out the door and into the convenience store across the street.

“Mouse traps?” I say. “They broke the one rule.”

The clerk points me in the right direction.

I march down the aisle until I find what I’m looking for.

They have the non-lethal, sticky trap device, but I don’t see the good stuff.

Give me the big bad lethal stuff baby.

I see the tag—Tomcat Metal Mousetrap—and the space where it should be.

But no mousetraps.

“Where’s the good stuff!?”

“Huh?” the clerk says.

“The Tomcat?”

“Oh. We’re out. But the Glue Traps work just as good.”

“Hah!” I say. “If you knew the kind of mice I was dealing with, you would be singing a very different tune my friend!”

“Kay.”

I buy the glue traps and head home.

I stick one behind the fridge, and one under the sink and wait, checking every half-hour while sipping beer and watching old Humphrey Bogart movies (a 4-in-1 DVD collection, to toughen myself up) that I’d bought a few days before.

But nothing happens.

***

A few days go by before I see him again.

He’s back in the corner where I had first found him.

“You!” I snarl. “Where’s the rest of them?”

He crawls up on my bed, staring.

There hadn’t been any more shit in the sink cabinet and the traps remained empty.

He seems lonely.

I look into his sinister little eyes, his little whiskers twitching, and I can’t help it.

“You may stay,” I declare. “But if you poop my bed again, I’ll buy the good stuff. Tomcat. Metal. Very Lethal.”

Get your copy here.

Art by Zoe Blair Schlagenhauf @tndrnss_vrywh

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WELCOME TO THE RECKONING by Omar Hussain

September 3, 2020 · Fiction

Your family’s old brown and blue station wagon pulls up to the house. It’s not your house. It’s never yours. At three-years-old, you’ve already lived in four dodgy houses, a mobile home, month-to-month condos and rent-controlled apartments. This is your grandfather’s house. He tells you and your parents that you’re welcome to stay for as long as you’d like, but you’ve heard that one before.

The wagon comes to a stop. The gears slam into park. Your dad is screaming about something—the latest rage attack. He gets out of the car, paces around the hood. To the passenger side door. Your way too pregnant mom is half-way out the car when your dad—still barking and hissing with venom in a way that makes his black mustache transform into the devil’s handlebars—grabs the door and slams it on her. She falls in the space between the car and the curb, sobbing out of fright, but mainly out of shame because you saw it.

Welcome to keeping a secret.

It’s five years later now and you’re all grown up because you are eight years old. It’s Friday night, which means your mom took you and your little brother to Blockbuster after school. You rented Beethoven—the dumb movie about a slobbering Saint Bernard. Your dad doesn’t get home until after ten because he works the late shift and you’re the only one who is a night owl like him so you stay up and start the movie together. He’s cold and short because he probably had a shitty day. At some point, the bad guys steal Beethoven and you begin to tear up. Start to sob. Your dad mocks you for it and in a split-second of dumbass kid compulsion, you turn and swat at his leg.

That was the mistake. That simple.

He lurches at you—grabs the hair on the back of your head, pulling and pushing you until he’s taken the reins. He shoves you to the ground, your palms and kneecaps your supports. His hand slaps your face west, then east, but you just count. One. Two. Three strikes. You count because it stunts the fear. It displaces the pain. Five. Six. A closed fist this time. He sends you to your room. Pulls the mattress off the bed and tells you to lay on the bed boards. You do as you’re told. Your body radiates from its wounds. You think it’s over.

But it’s not.

Twenty minutes later, he’s back. Seven. Eight. He drags you by the arm, burning carpet against your back, into the living room hazed with cigarette smoke. He tells you you’re a lowlife. That you have no respect. He repeats these statements several times and you start to believe them. You melt. He hits you so hard with an open palm between the shoulder blades that you hear it before you feel it. You don’t stop counting until the sun comes up and he falls asleep.

Welcome to waiting for your turn.

Twenty years have passed. He’s long dead. Cancer the ever-avenging disease. Sometimes if you slick your black hair back, let your stubble become more of a beard, you can see him.

You move the cursor on Google street-level view further down your block. You stop at a navy house with white trim. Freshly built porch. In the image, there is a red pickup truck in the driveway. You’ve done this with every house leading to this one—because you’re looking for something.

Kali Linux, the hacker’s utility belt, fires up on your computer, its twisting dragon icon filling the screen. You’ve found an exploit within that house. A way in through the beautiful world of internet insecurity. The world that lets you peek into any window or room you want. You remotely access the father’s PC and activate the microphone on his computer to listen in. This digital stakeout lasts days. And then, on a Friday, you hear it. The unmistakable sounds of a child screaming. A man stomping around wooden floors, a belt crackling with glee. A woman pleads until a loud thud against a wall or fireplace silences her. The child never stops screaming.

Welcome to the reckoning.

It’s two, maybe three in the morning. The night, your friend. The darkness, your armor. You circle the side of the house. The sliding glass door to the back is left open. The ski mask gets pulled down, the condensation against your mouth instant. Everyone is asleep or faking it. The lights are off but for one room alive with blue and white hues—ghosts from the television dancing on the walls.

You find him passed out in his recliner. Rotund, balding piece of shit. Crushed beer can by his feet. Wife beater, blue boxer shorts, socks still on. Your hand grips the brass knuckles so tight it squeaks. He wakes up with a pathetic expression of shock. His eyes beg, motion for mercy.

Motion denied.

You strike him in the forehead—his skull bouncing off the recliner like a basketball. You dribble it some more. A left hook across the cheekbone. A straight right to the nose. He grunts and rolls off the chair, crawling into the kitchen, dripping blood along the way. One soccer punt to his ribs and he collapses. You grab his throat. Lift his head.

“Do you understand why this happened?” you hiss.

He doesn’t respond. You grab a framed family photo off the breakfast nook and wave it in front of him.

“This is why.”

He chokes and pinches his eyes shut. Turns his head away.

“Nod if you understand. Nod if you understand what will happen if you do it again.”

Tears crawl out of his eyes. He nods. You watch droplets of his blood fall from his face, listen as they pitter-patter against the wooden floor. A surge of energy ignites a growing inferno within your chest—your lungs and heart the kindle.

You leave him there.

You head back home.

Drink some coffee.

Get back on the computer.

Move the cursor to the next house on the block.

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THE LIFE CYCLE OF TEMPORAL BIOMATTER ATTACHMENTS by Jemimah Wei

September 1, 2020 · Fiction

This is completely unsexual, but ever since the ex left, Jennie has gotten into the habit of sticking her hand down her pajama pants and cupping herself to sleep. It started in week five or six of the lockdown. One day, she woke up and her hands were in her pants. Both hands, under her pants, resting on top of her underwear. This happened occasionally, even before the ex moved out. Usually around the middle of the month, when she could feel her body beginning to slush. Whenever it happened, Jennie would periodically stick her finger into the folds of her vagina, to check if her period had come early. This time, too, she brought her hand to her nose and sniffed, expecting the scraping smell of pre-blood. But, nothing. If anything, her fingers smelled a bit like Cheetos.

The next day, she woke up in the same position. And the day after that. After four successive days of waking like this, she started sliding one hand into her underwear before falling asleep, letting it rest there all night. Jennie did wonder if her body was trying to tell her something, and once or twice, pushed her fingers further in, to see if her body would respond. It didn’t. Jennie’s sex drive had evaporated in the last year, and the ex leaving hadn’t changed anything. After awhile, she stopped thinking about it, and it has since become a nightly routine for her to cup her vagina to sleep with her right hand, like a baby with a blanket.

It feels like a betrayal, then, when she wakes one day to find it sore. There is a mild but insistent throbbing, and when Jennie runs her fingers over the surface of her skin, she finds a slightly inflamed bump on the inner folds of her labia. Jennie prods it tenderly, then gets out of bed and tries to get a look at it by sitting pantless with her legs wide open, in front of her mirror. But the bump is too far back and she goes cross-eyed trying to twist herself into a proper viewing position. She uses her phone’s front camera to take a picture, so she can see what she’s dealing with, but even with the flash on, the picture comes out a blur of skin and hair.

Jennie goes online and orders a handheld mirror for two dollars, then wonders if this is the ex’s doing, if he’s left her some kind of venereal disease as a parting gift. She wants to ask, but he hasn’t called in days, and won’t pick up when she does. The last they’d spoken was the last time he’d called, a week prior. The ex rang often, to work through the break up. He was almost done processing it. “The important thing is not to focus on the six years we had together,” he had said, “but to be thankful it didn’t turn into sixty.” Jennie thinks about this as she turns on her computer and fiddles with the settings on her Netflix account. Half an hour later, the phone rings.

“Did you put an age lock on my profile?”

“What? Let me see,” She taps at her computer keys randomly, the phone pressed to her face, his breathing in her ear. “Oh, sorry. Must have been an accident.”

She can almost hear him rolling his eyes. “Jen,” he says. He hangs up.

The mirror arrives three days later. Jennie can’t stop touching the bump, even though it hurts. She’s completely given up on wearing pants at home, and there is very little stopping her from fingering it, when she’s working, watching TV, or stalking the ex. It’s gotten a little swollen and the pain hasn’t let up.

Jennie sits cross legged on her bed and angles the mirror under her bum. It's the first time she’s seen her lower landscape in such clear detail: the darkened inner thighs, the hairs on her butt, the wrinkled frown of her vagina. And the bump. She takes it between her thumb and forefinger, and squeezes lightly, wincing despite having expected the pain. A sharp white blot strains against the surface of her skin, and she increases the pressure, watching her skin stretch and threaten to split. Ah, a pimple. Jennie burns in shame as she puts the mirror away. She cannot help but feel like this is a personal failing, of sorts.

The phone rings again. She knows what it’s about even before she picks up.

“Is there something wrong with your Netflix?”

“No, why?”

“Now I’m logged out. Can’t seem to sign in. Can you check?”

“Alright, hold on.” Jennie puts him on loudspeaker and googles “vagina bumps.” It’s apparently super common. She makes it through two pages of search results before the line cuts.

The best thing to do would be to leave the spot alone. All the websites—be they dermatologist sites, online magazines, or beauty blogs—concur that no matter what, one mustn't pop it. If it really bothers you, Women’s Health Online says, you can visit a trusted dermatologist and have it safely lanced. Teenage Magazine is more assertive. Under NO circumstances should you deal with it on your own. You will make it WORSE. Jennie reads this with one hand on the bump, rolling the little spot of pain between her fingers, squeezing occasionally but never pressing down firmly.

The next time he calls, she starts talking first. “Sorry babe,” she says, trying to sound as perplexed as possible, “it looks fine on my end.”

“I still can’t get in. Jesus. Jen. If this is some passive aggressive bullshit you’re pulling—”

It is, of course. “It’s not.”

“It’s not like I can’t pay for my own. You know that. It’s just that the algorithm is already stored in that account. Six years of preferences. I’d have to start all over again.”

“I know.”

He exhales violently against the mouthpiece. “Okay, can you please just look into it, please.”

Jennie sends him a text after, saying that she’s reset the password, can he try it again and let her know? He never replies to her texts, something to do with drawing boundaries. He doesn’t reply now either. But she can see that he’s posted a new status on Facebook. Takes a special kind of crazy to withhold netflix from a person during a GLOBAL QUARANTINE. There’s a comment under that, from a new Facebook friend Jennie doesn’t recognize, a Chelsea. Ugh, the new Chelsea says, what a MONSTER. She looks at the comment for a long time, hovers over the like button but doesn’t click.

In her email inbox, there is a reply from a dermatologist she’s written to. Look, the dermatologist says, you can come in after the lockdown lifts, if you want. But I’ll be honest with you. If you leave it alone, it’s likely to go away on its own. She looks for a second opinion, but they’re all the same. A skincare blogger attempts to analogize: Haven’t you had a pimple before? Think of the pimple as your skin trying to heal. You might feel like you’re getting the gunk out, but what you’re really doing is interfering with the healing process!

The phone is ringing again. She counts the rings—one, two. The most she’s let it get to is eight. She watches his name vibrate aggressively before her, then flips her gaze down to the bump. She’s given up on wearing underwear too. She applies a little bit of pressure, watches the white tip reappear. What would it be like, she thinks, to be the sort of person who could press down? Three, four. She squeezes and watches the skin redden, then blanch, the white becoming ever more insistent. Five, six. The pain makes her gasp, she’s never come this close to breaking before. There are tears in her eyes. Seven. Come on, she thinks. Come on. Eight.

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