X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

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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DOG DENTIST by Stephanie Yu

March 26, 2021 · Fiction

Dog Dentist comes home, takes off his shoes, puts his feet up on the table, and says in a voice too loud, “Man my feet are B-A-R-K-I-N-G, if you know what I mean!” He laughs uproariously to himself. A joke intended only for one.I’m fixing up his favorite: meatloaf and mash. After a day of grinding down dog teeth, he’s only in the mood for food that is barely reconstituted. My meatloaf is a special recipe that’s super moist. More “fudgey” than “cakey” so the enamel faces zero resistance on the way down. I can tell that sometimes Dog Dentist barely chews, just lets the food dissolve a little before swallowing it whole.Dog Dentist started his business by posting flyers around the neighborhood. Super grisly pictures of canine’s canines all rotted out. A crusty black molar against a shock of labial gum line. The flyer didn’t make any sense. It was formatted all crazy so you didn’t know it was advertising for dental hygiene services until the very end (“Ever woken up to put the coffee pot on and water in the dog bowl and when you bent down to pet his furry old head realized that WHEW your dog’s mouth is RANK?”).Somehow, though, calls came in for Dog Dentist. Some were super out there calls. From people who were probably mentally ill, he would say to me. You really start to wonder who is walking outside and sees a flyer and thinks it’s ok to call the number on the paper when there’s no website or any way to confirm this dog dentist is an actual human. But I guess there are some real loonies out there.Business is good and Dog Dentist is happy. One night, he decides to go all out and make me spaghetti and meatballs. He cooks the whole box of Kirkland pasta until they’re way past al dente. Like no more dente left. And he styles the noodles in these two crooked towers with one enormous meatball at the top of each. “What’s the occasion?” I ask. “I’m making money, baby!” he says, wagging around in an apron that says “Trust Me, I’m a Dentist.” He bought it off of Redbubble last week for some reason. “We got funds, we got the goods,” he says as he motions to the bounty of pasta before us.“How’s business, daddy-o?” I’m tapping the table like a stick to a cymbal.“Amazing,” he says. “Never been better. Dogs come in a-howlin’ and leave me a-whistlin’. I’m getting referrals on referrals from people who’ve come in to see me.”I’m about to brave the pasta tower when Dog Dentist leans in and adopts a conspiratorial tone. “I’ll let you in on a little secret.” I set down my fork and knife and crouch low to meet his face. It’s all a big show. I know with his timbre he’s not capable of whispering to anyone. “I put BOTS in their teeth.”Now I’m genuinely surprised. “Bots? What do you mean bots?”“Robots, babe. It’s mind control.” He’s tapping his index and middle finger up against his temple like a loaded gun“Fuck out of here,” I say.“No, for real, babe. This is what’s really gonna make us rich. Like filthy stinkin’ rich. I’m gonna plant all these dogs with bots and when they activate it’s gonna be insane. They’ll run away from their owners and be able to talk to each other. But the GPS is programmed for our place so they’ll show up here first and then I’ll take them on a traveling roadshow. People love dogs who do tricks. And I got the key. The button’s in my pocket and the receptors . . . they’re in their mouths, babe.”I’m sitting there looking at him slurping a strand of spaghetti down. It’s snaking around the spaghetti tower and it’s setting the whole plate spinning like a record player in a cartoon. No way I’m seeing this. No way I’m hearing this.But with Dog Dentist, it’s best to just keep laughing and chum around and be all “That’s amazing, babe.” And he really is in a good mood with his spaghetti—it’s a good sign that he’s cooking anything at all. Much better than the alternative when Dog Dentist doesn’t get out of bed for weeks on end, dour as all hell, basically melting into the bedsheets. When he’s saying he wishes he was dead and had finished human dentistry school instead of being a no-good back alley dog dentist. Better than when he gets a call later from one of his “patients” about their dog spitting something out after dinner, some screwy piece that came out of a hole where a tooth used to be. Better than when the mail comes in from the Better Business Bureau and they’re seeing red and they know he’s been practicing dog dentistry without a license for months. Better than when he’s screaming that he’s going to do it just hit “ACTIVATE” and then the world will see—I’ll see—that he was right all along and his dogs are gonna come running and he’ll sit there on the front porch with his bowl of spaghetti waiting for the call of his hounds because when they show up they’ll answer to he and he alone. They’re gonna stream in like the cavalry and help build his case against the BBB and they’ll publish a story about him in Scientific American oh how amazed the canine science community will be at this feat Dog Dentist accomplished pushing dog dentistry forward by 100 years maybe 150 if you’re really keeping score.

Crow Jonah Norlander

HARDING’S REFLEX by Kira Homsher

March 25, 2021 · Fiction

It’s an involuntary reflex, like how looking at the sun can make some people sneeze. Whenever Harding drives past a 7-Eleven, he has to turn around and buy a pack of cigarettes. To be clear, he is not a smoker. He buys a cheap pack of whatever color looks most appealing in the moment, regardless of brand, then smokes exactly one cigarette in the parking lot before stuffing the pack in the glove compartment and driving to his destination. He particularly likes packs in yellow. And sea-foam green, because they look clean and soapy. If he had to explain it, he’d pin it on the parking lots. There’s something about the 7-Eleven parking lots that makes him want to pause and tether himself to the landscape. But Harding is not a teenager anymore and needs an excuse to loiter. Cigarettes are the obvious choice, because they give him the appearance of having a habit.Harding is not a man of habits and this makes him very difficult to latch onto and describe. A man should have one or two habits so that he can be known by them. A man could play poker or refurbish guitars. A man could take evening walks around the neighborhood. A man could stretch, habitually.But Harding is not a man of habits, and so he must simulate them. How does a man pass his days without habits? That’s for him to know.Today, Harding is smoking blue. Because they were out of seafoam and yellow. He was on his way to visit his sister when he saw the 7-Eleven sign and had to pull over. His sister is dying a slow and discerning death. The nearness of her death has given her an uncanny sweetness; her words are full of import. Harding does not like to be around it. It makes him feel threadbare and immaterial. She has always been more substantial than he.Harding has many dreams for a man with no habits. Last night he dreamt the world was a campground and everyone he knew lived next to each other in little tents, each zipped up and doing important research on screens that glowed and buzzed. Having nothing to research, he passed from tent to tent, making sad little visits of himself. One tent had a lava lamp inside. Another had a baby and some posters. When he woke, Harding tried but could not remember the images on the posters. Those sorts of things never make it out of dreams. Harding is smoking blue, halfway to his dying sister and her menacing wisdom. He tries taking deep yogic breaths through the cigarette, then looks down at the shrinking butt between his fingers, a wet heat settling beneath the skin around his eyes. He drops it, steps on it, returns to his car. It takes him 17 minutes to arrive at the house where his sister is dying. Her room is full of flowers Harding can’t identify. She’s propped up in bed, wearing an expression he refuses to identify.Harding attempts conversation: —What are you dying of again?She smiles the infuriatingly patient smile of the near-death. —5G.—Be reasonable. —All right. An infection, then. —Right. What do you want done with the, with your body?—Cremation, please. It’s all written down somewhere. Did you know that the cremation chamber is called a retort? She laughs at her own remark. Harding tries not to cling to the sound of her laughter. Her cheerfulness is an insult. It’s easy to laugh when the burdens of life and loss have turned to vapor. —What will you do when I’m all gone?Harding considers telling her about his dream; the lava lamp, the baby. This is his final offering.—I hadn’t really thought about it. I had this dream…She interrupts.—I still remember our first phone number. —It had too many zeros. They agree about the zeros. His sister looks tired now, and possibly a little bored. Healthy people never imagine their dying words will be wasted in this way, tossed absently about without catching on anything. Her breaths grow shallow and dissembled. Harding stares at his boots and contemplates his dream, passing in his mind from tent to tent, never bothering to zip them up again when he departs. Of his sister, his last referent on earth, he has made another sad little visit. Maybe it is rude to inflict your dreams on a dying person; maybe they are supposed to become the dream. He takes her hand in his and administers the lightest pressure. She squeezes back. And just like that, Harding zips his sister closed.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THREE HOOKERS AT THE HOT DOG STAND by E. Nolan

March 24, 2021 · Fiction

This guy, Bobby, called asking for money. He was with three hookers at the hot dog stand and they needed to be paid. He had enough to buy them each a hot dog, but that would only hold them off for so long. Soon they were going to find out that he was broke. The skinny one was almost done with hers, he was telling me, and, lowering his voice to a whisper, he said he knew she wasn’t going to ask for another one. She ate as if she had other things on her mind, like where’s my goddamn money, stuff like that. Even if she did want another one he didn’t have the cash for it, the three dogs had wiped him out. He was lucky to have enough for those three, he said. He was lucky.I paced around the dark apartment, phone to my ear. I could see how he was lucky.Playing off my silence, he mumbled some more into the receiver, fast talking, while I was trying to figure out how to react. He said he met them online. He had been under the impression that they liked him for who he was. After all, he confided with me, he had been a little famous. He said he didn’t know they were hookers and now he owed them for the entire night. Actually, maybe, he said that again—maybe—he didn’t need to pay all three of them. The skinny one was totally his type and, he could be wrong, but maybe there was something there. Something real. She looked French, and it had always been a dream of his to have a French girlfriend. He starting talking about this TV show they’d watch in French class back in middle school about a Parisian family with a beautiful teenage daughter, and he had been floored by how she looked so at ease with her boyfriend as they’d stroll down the street in spring and discuss going to the boulangerie or the supermarché and buy some fucking pomplemousse, the entire time while she wore a sweater with no bra underneath. They’d hang out with her little sister and help her with her homework, not giving a rat’s ass about who’s getting stoned without them in the Genovese parking lot. The show was so wholesome that it was pornographic, filthy, foreign propaganda and his adolescent brain was confused about whether he should buy it or not. The part of his mind that dreams, or maybe it was his heart, invested in the girl, big time, and it tore him apart. Each episode was a new way to desire her, to fall madly in love with her, but also a new way to understand that he was trapped in his blue-collar pain cave, growing up out on the island, smoking stolen women’s cigarettes on the playground, giving kids wet willies and purple nurples for looking too pensive. He had forgotten about it until just tonight, had completely buried it in the scuzziest corner of his soul, until right now, talking to me, but he realized that his love for her had been there all this time, propelling him forward in life, yanking him backwards, closing doors while opening up others, kicking him to this dirty curb, right here. The shit we learn in school, you know what I mean? But it’s not too late, right? For a French girlfriend? He just turned forty-five, he reminded me.The poor guy had the wrong number. I didn’t know who he was. Before I could speak up he was off again.Ah, bitch finished her hot dog, he said. It’s now or never. Maybe it would be safer just to have all the money. What did I think? He was asking me for three thousand dollars. Three thousand or two. My choice.A desperation had creeped into his phrasing and it seemed to throw him off. He must’ve sensed I wasn’t who he thought I was. I sat on my couch, then got right up. I blurted out the first thing that came to my mind. It was one of those moments where the act of speaking was more important than what words you chose. Say anything just to keep him talking. “Let’s play it safe, Bobby. Three thousand.” My voice didn’t match whoever’s he thought he was talking to. He let out a knowing groan, like he got a punch to the gut. “I fucked up again,” he said. I stayed on the line and walked around a little, waiting for him to hang up.But he just breathed into the phone. Heavy, middle-aged breaths. A half a life’s worth of heartbreak pushed those breaths out of his inner organs. “Dans ces affaires . . .” he said to himself, recovering from his bout of nostalgia. During our conversation I had paced around my entire apartment trying to picture a world full of famous people and hookers and hot dogs, midnight playground dates with middle-aged Frenchmen smoking stogies. My mind was getting spun around. It was late and I was up only because of a text I received from my friend, Jay, claiming that he had met an old high school acquaintance of mine, who turned out to be someone I didn’t remember. He remembers you, Jay wrote. He reenacted your jump shot from memory. Right outside 7-11. And he nailed it bro. A moment passed, maybe while he sipped from a Big Gulp, then one more message. Looked so pure. Unsettled by the compliment and reunited with dead memories, I dug in my closet and found a videotape that I knew was there, the only remaining recorded proof that I had once played ball, saved for future children that might never appear, and I reconnected my VCR. There was a rumor that the team manager had a crush on me so he had zoomed in on my ass for most of the game. Between the auto-zooming in and out, his nervous hands, and the fact that it had been recorded by an ancient camcorder on low batteries, there were streaks everywhere, as if we all played while on acid. The artifacts overrode the facts. The tape had transformed into shit. When the phone rang I had paused it precisely at the height of my jump, the ball ready to be released by my fingertips. My head streaked like a comet. Bobby was still on the line. I stood in front of the TV again, staring again at my fiery face. “What are you doing, Bobby? Watching them eat their hot dogs?”“Yeah.”I backed away and turned the thing off. Black dots sparkled my vision and I rubbed my eyes, giving up, letting go. “Tell me about the girls. They beautiful?”He dismissed my question with a snort. I could almost hear him shaking his head on the other end of the line. I got it. He had been answering that question the entire time. All of it. Everything he told me was about the beauty of the three hovering hookers.“I was duped,” he said. “I thought I was back, you know what I mean? I thought I was back.”I already had my coat on and was heading out the door, my cell phone cradled next to my head. I patted my pockets to locate my car keys. I didn’t have three thousand dollars in the bank, but I had something.

Crow Jonah Norlander

BAD CAT by Anthony Varallo

March 22, 2021 · Fiction

Yesterday I met the bad cat. He was lying on our neighbor’s driveway, sunning himself in the last of the day’s warmth. He had gray fur, slightly mottled with black, and white paws. His eyes were closed, restful. When my family and I walked past, the cat yawned and stretched his tongue the way cats sometimes do. The cat blinked at us for a moment, curiously—pleasantly, I thought.“Here kitty-kitty!” I said. “Psst-psst!”“Dad,” my daughter said, “don’t do that.”“Do what?” I said. “Cats love that sound.”“Please, Dad,” my daughter said. “It’s embarrassing.”“Plus,” my son said, “I think there’s something wrong with that cat.”“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, and lowered my hand to the ground, as if I were cradling food, a trick from my childhood that had never failed to lure our cat, Pumpkin, out from beneath my bed. “Psst-psst! Here kitty! Hungry for a little snack?”The cat blinked his eyes once more at me, and stood. Interested.“Dad,” my daughter said, “don’t trick him.”“It’s not a trick,” I said. “He thinks you have food,” my son said. “He’s not going to be happy,” my daughter said.“The kids have a point,” my wife said. She’d been checking out her new iPhone for the past few minutes. The walk had been her idea: we’d take a nice selfie of us walking in the neighborhood and then post it when we got home. This time of evening, the light was soft, perfect. “That cat looks a little scraggly.”“He’s not scraggly,” I said. I crouched to the ground and made eye contact with the cat. “Psst-psst! Here kitty!” But the moment I said it, I noticed the weeds and sticks and briars clinging to the cat’s underbelly. “Dad,” my daughter said.“Honey,” my wife said. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”“You guys are being ridiculous,” I said. But, as the cat clicked closer—one of his rear legs tapered to a wooden peg that clicked atop the asphalt—I saw that his teeth were preternaturally large and that his left ear was held together by what seemed to be industrial staples and barbed wire. “Dad, don’t,” my son said. But I wouldn’t let up. I made the “psst-psst” sound even louder, and pretended to dip one hand into the other, then place something presumably yummy into my mouth. That had always worked with Pumpkin. Do that with Pumpkin, and ten seconds later he’d be purring at your feet, only too glad to have you pet him with your not-actually-holding-food hand.“Honey,” my wife said. “I think that might be a bad cat.”“He’s not a bad cat,” I said, as the cat approached. Up close, I could see that his fur wasn’t actually black and gray: the black was really a little leather jacket studded with rivets, from which something I would soon learn was a switchblade bulged. The cat was smoking a tiny cigarette, which sent smoke into his crusted, bloodshot eyes.“Here kitty-kitty,” I said. “Dad,” my daughter said.When the cat nudged my hand with his nose ring, I opened my fingers to show him that there was nothing inside.“Ta-da!” I said. There was a moment I would like to dwell upon here, if I might. A moment when the cat looked at me with genuine surprise and perhaps even more genuine disappointment, before everything else unfolded. I felt, in that moment, as fleeting as it was, that the cat understood something about me, about my lonely childhood, those long summer days playing umpteen bazillion games of hide and seek with Pumpkin, or persuading Pumpkin to watch cartoons with me on the family room sectional, or me reading all of my old Hardy Boys books to Pumpkin, who often needed me to point out the clues. It was, I would like to think, a special moment, one I know I won’t long forget.And then the moment passed.The first cuts of the switchblade weren’t too bad; it was the nunchucks that really smarted. What with the way the bad cat struck them expertly against our ankles, to get the most pain. He was good at working them with one paw while thrusting the switchblade with the other. When the bad cat bit my hand while simultaneously stabbing and nunchucking the rest of my family, I knew I should have been angry, but I couldn’t help it: I felt a little proud.

Crow Jonah Norlander

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