X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

A LOST AND WORDLESS FEELING by Becca Yenser

March 8, 2021 · Fiction

for Abby Vasquez

All of our friends are dying but they are the ones to blame, so we shut up about it and sit outside at their old favorite bars, drinking set-ups until we puke. The bars are named after animals or phrases: Red Fox, Crow Bar, Haymaker, Lost and Found.

Our friends shot themselves in one-room apartments, jumped from bridges, hung themselves from garage ropes. They had dark hair, shiny hair, green eyes, red beards, brown eyes, dimples, scars, cellulite. They stooped when they walked, or danced on bikes, or wore layered sweatshirts instead of coats. They played drums, drank beer, bagged groceries, sat houses, or watched other people’s children.

Our friends killed themselves but told us about it first, for too long, first in the winters, then in the summers. Winter: bleak but soon over. Summer: swimming and cheap beer and too many Fourth of July parties. We listened, didn’t listen, stopped calling, called all the time.

Our friends had ideas. They liked Marx, they liked Beauvoir, they hated Ayn Rand or loved her. They liked Beavis and Butt-head and Cake and were in love with sad, sexy singers like Karen O. They spit when they talked, they had bad breath, they wore Gold Toe socks from Sears and Roebuck, or maybe just Sears.

One of our friends stepped off the St. Johns bridge but wore her red cape so that she looked like a capital A going down. Everyone tried to rescue her, or no one did, and we kept swimming, or stopped, or held our breaths, or breathed too much, or went silent, or said, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus when we heard the news, that all of our friends were dead.

Crow Jonah Norlander

DUCK, DUCK, OWL by Michelle Ross

March 5, 2021 · Fiction

The ducks are a pair—Mallards from the pond in the nearby park. Every evening, they claim the shallow end of the swimming pool, float in languid circles. They’re not threatened by the woman watching them from the canvas chair. They don’t even startle when she goes inside the house to pour more prosecco.

The woman is a divorcée—she’s lived alone in this house twelve years. Her grown daughters transplanted thousands of miles away. Boyfriends have spent the night from time to time, but there’s no boyfriend now.

The woman notes the elegant (pompous?) curve of the ducks’ breasts and necks. The male duck, with his gaudy, iridescent green head that seems snatched from another body, looks like an Egyptian god. The female, with that snippet of blue sash peeking from her wing: a beauty contestant.

The woman imagines the ducks are her daughters. Some instinct they don’t understand draws them home each evening.

Of course, even if this were true, as ducks, they wouldn’t recognize this as home; they wouldn’t recognize the woman as their mother. Ducks know nothing of filial obligations, and this is to be expected. This is an acceptable trait for a duck.

But: duck shit. In the water. On the cement around the pool. The woman worries about diseases.

Also, on the phone, when her younger daughter calls to say she can’t visit that summer (she offers up excuses like items she’s trying to pawn to pay off an overdue bill—How much for this? How much for that?), she tells stories of duck multiplication. Two becomes fifteen then fifty. When the woman’s older daughter calls to reprimand her for the candy the woman sends her grandchildren in the mail, she says of the ducks, “You’re not doing them any favors, you know. The chlorine is bad for their skin. They’d be better off if you scared them away.”

The owl is plastic—made in China. It doesn’t even weigh a pound. But when the woman walks out the sliding glass door, the owl in her outstretched arms, the ducks fly away before she is even certain she wants them to.

That night, and for many days and nights after, the woman’s only company is the plastic owl. Even after she hides the owl in the cabinet with the fire extinguisher, she feels its eyes always. They never leave her.

Crow Jonah Norlander

AND WHAT’S MORE IMPORTANT by Francine Witte

March 4, 2021 · Fiction

First time I met my brother, he was a hum in my mother’s swelling belly.

***

When he was 10 and me 14, we’d mock our parents’ arguments. We’d sneak up to the attic. He’d put on Dad’s soggy fedora and kick my bottom hard. When I flinched, he’d say, “hey, that’s how Dad does it.”

***

I remember the first dead rabbit. It was the winter it wouldn’t stop raining. Always on the edge of snow, but not. My father scowled at my brother, who was something like 11. “What’d you go and do that for?” He shook the dead fluffy thing at my brother over the dinner plates. “If you wanted to be useful, you could have killed a chicken.”

My mother tried to explain we could eat a rabbit. She said she’d put it right into a pot of water that very minute. The rain, a rattle at the window, and Dad throwing the rabbit straight through it, the sudden hole, the shattered glass, and puddle on my mother’s clean linoleum.

***

When my brother was old enough, first thing he did was join the army. He expected Dad would be pissed and was ready for it. Oddly, Dad just sank back into his armchair and fluffed up the newspaper. “It’s good,” Dad said, “you’re good at killing shit.”

My mother said, “There’s plenty to do in the army besides all that. There’s learning responsibility and how to be a good husband.” She stroked my brother’s shoulder. “And what’s more important than that?”

***

My brother didn’t get a military funeral. Deserter, or something. They cremated him, and my mother scattered most of his ashes into an aimless wind. “Now it’s like he’s everywhere,” she said. Dad, on the other hand, couldn’t even say my brother’s name without a snarl. “Best to forget a mess like that,” Dad said and never mentioned him again.

After that, my mother would sit up nightly, quietly, in Dad’s armchair. Dad would be upstairs snoring the whole house into a tremble. My mother would take out a tiny jar where she kept a handful of ashes she’d sneaked home with her. Some nights, I’d find her there, slumped into sleep, one hand on her belly, one hand on the jar, as if there were some way or other she could connect the two.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THAT GIRL by Sarah Freligh

March 1, 2021 · Fiction

we used to laugh at, the girl who walked the hallways head-down, cold-shouldered by lockers, who blistered her fingers twisting Kleenex into flowers for homecoming floats the cool girls would ride on, yeah, that girl

was nobody we knew until she went missing and then we remembered how in first grade she peed a puddle that spread and smelled of cheese and fish and scattered the class until the janitor showed up with a broom and a pail of red dust, remembered the Show and Tell in fifth grade when she shared the broken glass she’d found on the street and swore it was amber, remembered how some guys at our high school spray-painted her name across the stadium bleachers where they used to fuck her and how they laughed at her afterward

that girl

who will be winched-up blue and broken from a lake and live on forever as a yearbook picture on a TV screen, dust of blush, lipstick pinking her mouth, nobody we remember, that girl was nobody we knew.

Crow Jonah Norlander

SEXY REXY’S HOMECOMING FEAST by Steve Gergley

February 26, 2021 · Fiction

For his fortieth birthday, Lance bought himself a red-tailed boa and named it Sexy Rexy. When he returned to his empty apartment, he masturbated to a video on Pornhub called “MASSIVELY JACKED STUD ANNIHILATES SUBMISSIVE TWINK.” Then he turned off his phone and set up Sexy Rexy’s living enclosure, feeding tank, and hide box. For dinner Lance ate an entire chocolate cake and washed it down with half a bottle of champagne. Then he smoked a pack of Marlboro Lights and threw up in the bathroom for half an hour. After a long, hot shower in which he threw up one more time and sobbed for ten straight minutes, Lance fed three mice to Sexy Rexy. The salesman at the exotic pet store had warned Lance not to feed Sexy Rexy more than two mice per week. But this was a special occasion. And besides, Lance thought to himself, rules are made to be broken. Before dropping the first pre-killed mouse into Sexy Rexy’s feeding tank, Lance held it by the tail and looked at its tiny legs dangling in the air. Then he named the mouse after a man he had known in the past.

He named the first mouse after the priest who got him drunk off sacramental wine at age eleven.

He named the second mouse after his father, who pushed his head through a window after walking in on him making out with the running back from the JV football team.

He named the third mouse after his college suitemate who od’d on xannys and vodka, the only man he had ever loved.

Crow Jonah Norlander

CONSIDER YOURSELF HOME by Aimée Keeble

February 25, 2021 · Fiction

You and I at the window with our bandit teeth all exposed. Mine tallow, yours anodizing with the stale gold of nicotine, crap coffee that lives petrified in a jar. I’m your artful baby and I slip into shops first and blast back my chest. Hiya! And you coyote low behind me scoping with your dull sly eyes. Side by side at a counter and you’re velvet and torn at the creases but I’m no better (no worse) and my shirt is soppy and sags, better to stuff the gaps with. We’re proud as we unwrap our sandwiches in front of the clean people behind the counter in their maroon uniforms, blameless and blood dark as cardinals. Why thank you, you pass me bread royally and your beard is tangerine with soap splatter. Have a sip of this fruity soda! And we crack aluminum and toast ourselves, tangling our wrists so we may drink from each other’s cup.

We hip-bump all the little cafes in Piccadilly, vulnerable as soft bovine things all white in the neck. Who would suspect us! As I pass you a chocolate bar right off the counter where the cash is moved around. We steal not because we are poor, or because we are hungry, we need to, as an act of frenzied paddling above this capitalistic floatsum, this accepted inhalation of the little and wild self. How are we to traverse the choke of a system which finger-flicks each vertebra as it commands: work and earn and the toil scrubs itself anew- an ouroboros exfoliation of fat cat/have-not SLAVE TO THE RYTHM (system).

I pop a chocolate-covered peanut into your moving lips and lean into your ear that I’ve got more sugar below my waistband. I re-cross my legs and the hidden jiggles.

When discovered:

Oh! But I thought you—

No, no I’m so sorry, I thought you had—

Our harmonizing laughter, we point at each other and yip. I eye your eye as our throats arch back.

And then we wait to see which weaker one of us today will cough up the money. More often times you, your back half crooked in a Fagan arch turning coins on the counter counting and I against your leg with all the nonchalance of a tiger.

Later, sated on salt and side by side in the cobbled streets, hands in our long coats. We with our swinging heads, sniffing the windows of Berwick Street, Frith Street, past the dancing girls on Great Windmill.

You knick me a novelty pepper shaker from a sex shop, half of the set, a pig on its hind legs reaching—caught mid-coitus now humping empty air. Its hard-pink body in my fist as we prowl on to Seven Dials. I scream at you darling, wait! And move into an astrology shop, coming back to you minutes later (just minutes!) and ask you what part of your kangaroo get-up can hold a star, what folds of you can I squeeze a bit of heaven into? Just a tarot card my love, the sun one. They were loose and I was quick.

London shakes herself and the rain sparks down. A green window, the one we love. The one our eyes pour light into. You hold the door for me and sudden sanctification—my avenging waist, the villain of me clatters as a broken blade. The bookstore, chapel in which we lower our heads. We keep our hands to ourselves here. With reverence, we pet the fatty spines, near exhausted from so many temporary thumbs. Like the rind of something reptilian, red, green, yellow—all unalloyed in their shelves. Lightly we sneak open their pages, careful of their columns. You are hunting but now you are an angel all in metal. I know you are looking for poems to read, aloud, quietly, the words will climax in my hair.

In the middle of the unboastful floor flayed bare by old sunlight I spin slowly. You, older than me by thirteen years, I wait to watch you (as you always do,) pull your own book from some obscure place into a more friendly view. Here, beside the great shuddering monster gullet of Soho, there is no trouble and I wait for you to show me.

Crow Jonah Norlander

BIRDS AREN’T REAL by D.T. ROBBINS

February 24, 2021 · Fiction

My girlfriend tells me something’s off in our relationship. Says we’re missing a spark or magic or whatever she calls it.

I go, Oh, you wanna see magic?

She goes, Yeah, idiot, I just said that.

So, I wrap an old t-shirt around her eyes and lead her out into the field behind our apartment. It’s all a big surprise. The ice chest is full of beers and pastrami sandwiches and the chocolate cookies she baked last month. I put a slice of bread in a Ziplock bag with the cookies to keep them fresh. The cookies stay moist and soft, and the bread gets dry and ugly. Success!

We’re walking for a while when she says her feet hurt. There’s always something to complain about, isn’t there? A little foot pain never killed anyone. Sometimes you’ve gotta pay the price. Magic ain’t free, you know. The hum of electricity gets louder, ricocheting off the clouds the closer we get.

I tell her we’re here and take the shirt off her eyes. See? There they are, I say, pointing. Just look at those things—all perched up on the powerlines without a goddamn care in the world. Dozens of them in rows, twisting their necks and heads, fluttering their wings, cooing, cooing and cawing, cawing.

She goes, The fuck is this?

I go, It’s magic!

Those are just birds.

I drop the ice chest, hear one of the cans spray open inside. Just birds? There’s no way you’re serious. If you’re being serious, you’re out of your mind.

She stares at me, then the birds, then me.

I put my hands on her shoulders, look at her real seriously, and drop the motherfucking truth bomb: Birds aren’t real.

A hawk circles above us. It swoops down, grabs a rat or snake or something, flies off with it into the blue picture screen above us.

Wait, she says. You mean, like, we’re living in a simulation—the Matrix or something?

I shake my head no, gulping one of the beers that busted open in the ice chest. Not at all, I tell her. People who think shit like that are just weird. I mean the birds aren’t real.

She reaches in the ice chest, grabs the Ziplock bag of cookies, and walks back toward our apartment. So much for magic, I yell.

I’m six or seven beers deep, watching the birds chill on the powerlines, watching the clouds pass, listening to the wind and the electricity intertwine and envelop me in my own little cocoon.

One of the birds asks, What’s your problem, dude?

I sit up, swig my beer. I don’t have a problem, I say.

Thirty or so of them all turn their heads to me like the ticking of the long hand on a clock.

The powerlines stop humming.

They go, Oh yeah? Then why’d you tell her we’re not real? All their beaks move, one voice, stereo, super cool. What’s your angle, friend? We’re as real as you.

Horse shit! I’m flesh and blood. My heart beats like a steady drum. There’s poison in my veins. When I sleep, I dream, I nightmare. You, you’re a fraud. And you know it. You’re an illusion of the mind. And you can’t convince me otherwise.

The birds levitate from the wires, fly in a furious circle. Their feathers fling from their bodies, become liquid, like hot magma, forming an ooey-gooey black blanket, snuffing out the sun. They cover me, a big bubble of darkness and energy. It sort of reminds me of that Pauly Shore movie, Bio-Dome, but better. A hologram of my girlfriend rises beneath me. She looks super pissed. Very realistic. Her hips start shaking and her eyes roll into the back of her head, shine bright neon pink. I’m into it.

Dance with me, she says.

I throw my hands in the air, I don’t even care. My legs move this way and that, shaking my shit like I know what to do with it.

She smiles wide, wide, wider. Birds with wings of fire fly out from behind her teeth, straight at me like bullets. I duck and cover. The echo of their screeching—radio static. I look up at my hologram girlfriend. She flaps her arms, flies away.

I stand there, not knowing who I like better: my hologram girlfriend or my real girlfriend. My feet are warm. I look down, I’m standing on a powerline. It sizzles like a plate of fajitas. My tennis shoes are melting. The skin around my toes goes drip, drip, drip. I watch it fall into the abyss below. A tornado of birds surrounds me, screaming: It’s not real. You’re not real. They’re not real. It’s so not, not! We’re not real. What is real? Are you really surely real? Who, then? For reals?

One of the birds comes and sits on my shoulder. It’s heavy. Like, weighs-as-much-as-I-weigh kind of heavy. I can’t hold my balance, slip, and fall into the abyss. I land on a giant slice of white bread, sink inside. A giant hand reaches for me, grabs a giant cookie, retracts. I’m in the Ziplock bag. Light expands and I see my real girlfriend sitting at our white IKEA kitchen table, crying, with chocolate smeared at the corners of her mouth. I never noticed how messy of an eater she is. I shout her name. She doesn’t hear me. My insides shrivel, dry out. My tongue turns to crust. I am dry, dead bread. Her hand reaches in, grabs me. Our kitchen walls scroll by like a movie in fast-forward, then I’m falling down, down, down. I reach the bottom of the trashcan. The lid closes and it’s back to black.

I can’t open my eyes because one of the birds crapped on my face. It smells like a nursing home or a bar right after closing. I wipe it away with the shirt my girlfriend left before she went back to the apartment. The ice chest is upside down, ice spilled over and melted. Empty beer cans everywhere, suds on the lips. Sandwiches gone. The powerlines hum quietly. Stars shine down on the wet grass. And those fucking birds? They’re still there. I pick up my things, head home.

There’s a note on the counter. It says, I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry. There’s leftovers in the fridge. Take care of yourself.

I crumple the note, throw it in the trash, next to the rotten piece of bread. And there I am.

x-r-a-y magazine

WE THOUGHT YOU MIGHT LIKE TO KNOW by Jamy Bond

February 22, 2021 · Fiction

That your mother is dying alone in a room at St. Francis. The stale sighs of a ventilator echo through the hallways, pumping one last moment of life into her over and over and over. There’s a sad sliver of hope in the sound of it, and in the silence that follows.

She forgives the insolence, the years you spent overseas and never called, the sporadic letters full of vacancy, even your cold indifference to her cancer diagnosis. She has mostly forgotten your teenage shenanigans: the time you snuck bourbon into your lunch box and drank it at school, nights you slipped from your window to smoke joints in the woods with your fast friends, the sign you nailed to her door that said 10 Bucks a Blowjob Here.

She understands your abortion at 19. And again at 22.

Do you forgive the way she pushed you into that closet and locked the door, left you whimpering in the darkness, touched you in a place that makes you shiver still? Have you mostly forgotten her unhinged delight at your discomfort: describing what your father liked to do to her in bed, seducing your boyfriends, raging that you weren’t good enough for them?

Do you understand why she intercepted the letters your father wrote to you after he’d left, and burned the t-shirts you slept in because they smelled of him?

She wants to see you. She wants you to take her vein-roped hand in your own, stare down at her cratered face, the fading blue of her eyes, and listen as air snakes its way into the hollow blackness of her mouth.

You are not supposed to feel this way; to long for the rattle of death. A leaf unfurling in your open palm, the rise of a spring sun and the green earth blooming beneath it.

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THE PURPLE TREE by Alienor Bombarde

February 21, 2021 · Fiction

It was not her favorite tree. It was simply where the children met. The tree was tall, its purple leaves like curtains, shielding its trunk. It was where, when she was four years old, she first saw Pasang.

Pasang was the first and only newcomer the children ever knew. His father had come to work on construction plans. Pasang had a round face and a soft pink mouth. Even before she knew that people could use mouths for anything other than eating and drinking, she liked the look of it, its softness and slight downward turn.

Those were the days, this was the place, where no one was excluded from village games. It was the summer, when children roamed the furthest over the rolling hills. As far as the next village, almost.

Pasang joined in while his parents were still unpacking. When Pasang caught her, he did not pull her hair, or kick or slam her hard against the rough earth. Pasang tapped her arm and ran away.

She decided that, should she ever need a prince, she would choose Pasang. In the stories her mother told, all heroines had princes or pet bears. They seemed a necessary accessory.

When she told Pasang she loved him, he blinked his large, quiet eyes. She imagined he did not know what love was. He said he loved her, too. She accepted it as the appropriate response. For two autumns, Pasang was her prince. Naturally, she made sure he knew his place. Princes should never get too ahead of themselves, or of their Princesses.

One day in December, they went to the river together. She dared him to go in, so he took off his shoes and dipped his toes in the icy water, his jaw clenched. Pasang did not cry out. She took off her shoes, tied her dress around her shoulders, let the water sting her thighs. When he got out of the water, they both knew she had won.

She told him nothing could hurt her. It was January, the air cold and smelling of the cookies his mother was baking. Pasang said she was lying. So she insisted. No one had killed her so far, she said, so it must be impossible for her to die. Her neck was special, she told him.

Pasang reached, curious. He wrapped his fingers around her neck and pressed, gently at first, and then harder, wondering how long she would resist.

“See! See!” she cried, defiantly, determined not to be the first to give in. “It doesn’t hurt.”

Pasang let go. He said he had to go to Goba’s house. Goba was the teacher’s son. He was spoilt and liked no one, except Pasang, who was the only one he did not consider beneath him. When Goba played with Pasang, she would follow the older girls around. These playtimes were interesting, but older girls were scary to copy.

The older girls had invented a game. One had to place a leg inside passageways and slam the door as hard as one could. The girls showed off their bruises. She had never seen any of them shed a tear.

The little girl tried it one day after school. On her own, in case it hurt and she cried. She picked the school’s heaviest door for the bruises. She was small for her age and half the size of the older girls. She still had a lot to prove.

When the door swung shut on her foot, she screamed so loud grown-ups came running. Goba’s mother found her and carried her home.

When the older girls, and Goba and Pasang, came round to look at her swollen, bandaged foot, they looked at her with fascination and grudging respect. Pasang’s mother baked her cookies. Sometimes Pasang would come and draw beside her. Goba and his mother came too, with books and games, but Goba scowled at her and begged Pasang to play outside.

When her foot healed and she could play tag again, Pasang never chased her, though she was one of the smallest and the easiest to catch. This infuriated Goba, who took it as a sign of Pasang’s affection. Goba had a tantrum every time he saw her.

Sometimes they would sit beneath the purple tree, just so Goba wouldn’t see them. They watched the grass shudder in the breeze and held each other’s hand. Once, they kissed each other on the lips. They promised to keep it a secret.

When she was six, and Pasang seven, the construction plans were finished, and Pasang’s father had to move away. He needed to help another village plan. The village children were sad. Their parents said roads were being built all over the country, like the one which would soon allow them to get to the city.

“Once I am sixteen," she told Pasang beneath the purple tree, "I will come to find you."

“Once I am a grown-up, I will come back here and marry you.”

It seemed like an appropriate adventure for a Princess. Pasang gave her a necklace, a gold heart on a chain. It was just the kind of heart-shape she liked. She swore she would never take it off.

After Pasang left, Goba no longer had Pasang to impress, and his hatred of her intensified. He bullied her. Goba was taller and stronger than the other boys, so that they were obliged to bully her, too.

She understood this, for she had known them their whole lives. Likewise, when she bit them until they cried, they understood, too, and never showed their mothers the marks she left.

Roads were built across the country. Grown-ups talked about property value, and the mayor asked some people to sell their land and houses and move away. People had never had money, they had always had homes instead, but they welcomed this change as an inevitability. When she was eight years old, her parents packed all their belongings into boxes. They moved hundreds of miles away, leaving behind the river and trees, green valleys and orange sunrises with streaks of pink. Her school walk became a bus ride. Around her, grey streets and a grey school so tall you could barely see the heavy, grey sky. But she was happy. She never had to bite anyone again.

The city took her in, and soon she forgot the village and Goba and the countryside.

Decades later, one day in April, she was driving, her husband and children in the car. Her husband was a man of the city, his childhood was nothing like hers.

"I used to live here," she said.

She peered out of the window at the harvested land. No one could live here. Not now. The valleys had turned into factories and farms. Everything else was replaced, deserted. Only the church remained, and its cemetery. The river flowed across the valley, still.

She stopped the car to take her children to see. They walked up the hill where she had played. A figure stood beneath a tree, leaning against the trunk and staring at the dried-out grass. The tree’s leaves were purple, veiling the slope.

The stranger saw the family coming. He moved as if to leave, and affected polite embarrassment. Then he stopped in his tracks, his eyes widened and his mouth hung open.

"Lotus?" he called.

She looked at him, bewildered, trying to place this bearded man. How did she know him? Lotus took in his round face, his quiet eyes, and the soft, pink mouth. Love flooded through her.

"Pasang?"

They began to laugh and struggled to stop. They went towards each other and hugged each other’s new and grown up bodies. They collapsed against each other in one long, shocked, unstoppable giggle. He kissed her cheek, then went to shake her husband's hand.

"My, you're all very tall," he said to her children. They blushed, knowing they weren’t tall at all.

Lotus looked at the tree, at the grass. She wanted to talk to Pasang about all that happened since their childhood. She touched the necklace she had always worn, that chain with a gold heart. Pasang saw it and smiled. They both looked back at the tree.

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THE BLUE ANGEL by Austin Farber

February 19, 2021 · Fiction

She was cooking dinner when I walked in the door. She had worked all night at the hospital, slept the whole day while I was at work, and was about to leave for another shift after dinner. I usually was relieved when she left, but tonight she looked unusually chipper. When she greeted me, she was dicing up a full rotisserie chicken. She kissed me.

“How was your day, honey?” She asked.

“Good,” I said. “How was your night?”

“Oh, it was something,” she said, stripping the meat. “We had a code blue in ICU. A real stiff.”

“Oh wow,” I said, reaching for the stack of mail.

“I heard he was brought in from some nursing home about a week ago. Some old timer on hospice care or something,” she said. “Well, he coded last night. Alone.”

“Oh,” I said, looking toward the living room. “What made of him?”

“Well, we got the Code Blue call and all hands were on deck. It was an extremely slow night. I mean, nothing much happened besides routine bed checks and some suicidal guy we had to watch, but when the Code Blue hit the intercom, everyone rushed into that old man’s room. Someone said there was no DNR paperwork, so the doctor said to go at him and all. Alright, bring him back. Those were his exact words. The doctors. And he left the room,” she said. “Will you want a breast?”

"A what?” I asked.

“A breast,” she said. “One of the chicken breasts?”

“Sure,” I said.

I looked over at her. She had cleared the chest of the chicken, setting the pieces into a large red bowl. She licked her fingers. “So, anyway. The doctor left us, even the damn interns, to have this old guy. This blue old guy. The male nurse hopped right up on him and started compressions. Didn’t even give us a shot at him he just hopped right up. All I could do was watch. Watch,” she said, detaching a chicken leg. “How are we to learn if we just watch?”

I walked over to the window and looked down from our sixth floor. A couple was walking their dog on the sidewalk. The dog was pulling hard on the man holding the leash. He just smiled at it while the girl looked on across the street. The three of them disappeared behind the pillar holding up our apartment.

“Are you listening,” she asked. “This is a good story, are you paying attention?”

“Yes,” I said, looking up at the sky.

“So anyway. This blue old guy was gone. Just stone dead. The male nurse was at him. Pressing in as deep as he could to bring him back. All the blue old man’s ribs were cracking like a crunched-up bag of chips. One of the nurses called for Epi and I went for it. I went fast but an intern made it and loaded it up. An intern, can you believe it? She plunged it into his line and the male nurse called for a clear and shocked him hard. I didn’t even see him jump off the blue old man, he was so fast. Shocked him and all and still nothing. The old man looked like a train hit him, all sprawled out and limp. It was something,” she said, scraping the meat onto the dinner plates.

A small child appeared on the grass about a block up. He was running around in circles, like he was tracing an infinity sign below his feet. A woman entered the scene and picked him up, hoisting him off the earth and into the air.

“The second shock did it. We had a heartbeat. A wonderful heartbeat. We had him back,” she said, plopping a leg into her plate. “Want any gravy or potatoes or anything? I think there are some leftovers in the fridge.”

“Where was he?” I asked, still looking out the window.

“What?” she asked.

“You said you had him back,” I said. “But he was laying right there in front of you, on the operating table?”

“You don’t have to be so smart,” she said.

“I’m not,” I said. “I just want to know where he was.”

“What are you talking about where he was?” She said.

“To come back means you went somewhere, else,” I said.

“Don’t ask such silly questions like that,” she said. “What matters is we had a pulse, that’s what matters.”

A blue bird flew in and perched itself on the deck. It blinked and flew off. “It is just like if I said I’ll be back soon if I go to the store or something like that,” I said, turning to her. “I just wonder where his old heartbeat was in those minutes it was gone, that’s all.”

“It was just stopped,” she said. “Like if a river dries up during a drought, but then suddenly a big downpour hits and it flows up again. That’s all.” She bit into her chicken leg and waved it at the dinner plates she had placed on the table. “This is going to get cold,” she said, smiling.

I turned away from her and looked back out the window, wishing to go outside. I ran my hand throughout my hair then placed it over my mouth. The blue bird was back on its perch. It looked at me. I took my hand off my mouth and checked my pulse like some physician does during a physical examination. I felt it pump and pump and pump and pump, like some ancient mantra. I felt like it must be the same in the blue bird, too. It bowed its head and flew off.

“What are you looking at honey, dinner is over here,” she said.

I walked over and took her hand. It was warm with life. I tried to feel her pulse on her wrist, too, but I couldn’t quite feel it. I looked down at the carcass she prepared us for dinner. “I’m not hungry,” I said. “I may go run a bath.”

“I’ll be leaving soon, honey,” she said. “I have to be clocked in at seven.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ll heat it up when I’m ready.”

“I’ll box it up for you,” she said, with a slight eye roll.

“Don’t bother,” I said, walking to the bathroom.

I locked the door and started the bath. I undressed and stared at the mirror. I looked fit and healthy with hardly any gut. I imagined myself as someone old, flabby, and blue. I got close to the mirror and looked into my eyes. I hadn’t thought of leaving until today. I’ll pack what I can and leave, I said in my head to my eyes. I opened my mouth and looked and looked. I glanced down at my torso in the mirror and imagined it being thrusted back to life like some dried river with a thunderstorm of strangers pouring down on me. I stepped into the tub with the water still running. I grabbed onto my legs and held them, placing my head on my chin. I’ll leave and not come back, I assured myself, and sank down into the stream.

x-r-a-y magazine

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