X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

BOY RACER WILL HAVE HIS REVENGE by Brendan Sheehan

August 19, 2021 · Fiction

Boy Racer fell from the sky, fully formed. He was born a lanky sixteen-year-old with perfect skin and a tricked-out car.

Boy Racer couldn’t remember anything before 1996, the start of his junior year at Santa Carla High. He couldn’t remember buying his car—a purple Maxima with a super wing spoiler, suicide doors, and lime-green underglow. He couldn’t remember choosing his wardrobe—a closet full of wifebeater shirts, Cuban link chains, and Adidas 3-Stripes pants. He couldn’t make sense of why he always smelled of Cool Water cologne or why even after a shower his Caesar cut was still shellacked with gel.

Boy Racer was only capable of swaggering. He tried to walk like regular people, tried to slouch and plod, but Boy Racer’s body rejected everything his mind desired.

He asked his foster father—a police chief who allowed Boy Racer to speed and run stop signs without so much as a warning—what his real name was. His father shrugged. You’re just Boy Racer. When we found you that’s what everybody was already calling you.

***

Santa Carla High’s claim to fame was its absence of sports teams and high percentage of mopey students. The mopey students at Santa Carla High wanted the handsome Boy Racer dead. They’d gotten it into their heads that Boy Racer was too kindhearted, too wealthy, had too many girlfriends in surrounding towns.

Boy Racer worked hard to dispel these rumors. He stopped students in the hallways and told them he was just a myth, the creation of a vindictive person, a megalomaniac with a grudge. He wrote an op-ed for the school paper explaining how he was still a virgin, how he also struggled with sadness and depression. He described in detail his dumpy ranch house with its chipped walls, dead shrubs, and empty aboveground pool.

The mopey students refused to listen, refused to believe. When Boy Racer passed them in the parking lot, they exchanged disgusted whispers. What’s with the hot car and flawless skin? Boy Racer really thinks he owns this school.

Boy Racer coped with his outcast status by driving fast. He sped down Santa Carla’s coast in his Maxima, hugging corners, hopping curbs, drifting, floating, a glowing lime-green ghost that couldn’t convince anyone it was possessed.

***

Boy Racer always ate lunch alone. He sat in the corner of the cafeteria and watched the goths, the mopiest of the mopey students. Boy Racer dreamed. He dreamed he was Keith, the leader of the goths. Keith wore black leather gloves and a black trench coat. Keith didn’t drive a car; he rode a dirt bike. Keith didn’t need gel; his bleach blonde hair swooped back naturally.

Boy Racer wished he had a goth girlfriend like Moon with her studded choker, lips painted Night Bird, pasty legs squeezed into ripped fishnets. He fantasized about going down on her while Bauhaus played on the stereo and a skull candle burned. He imagined Moon tasting like clove cigarettes. He imagined her clawing his hair and screaming out Beelzebub’s name when she climaxed.

The air conditioning in the cafeteria was always turned up high and Boy Racer shivered in his wifebeater. When Keith and the goths bumped into him on purpose, Boy Racer felt their warm skin and wanted to be warm as well.

***

The flyers appeared on Halloween. Santa Carla High was papered with hundreds of Xeroxes of Boy Racer’s face, chin lifted, wise-ass smirk. Printed above his face in bold letters were the words: Victory Begins When You Kill Something Pretty. Boy Racer ran through the halls ripping down the flyers. He wept while all the mopey students chanted. Fake tears! Fake tears!

Boy Racer sat in the front seat of his Maxima, a pile of crumpled flyers on his lap. He wailed, begged God to open the sky and take him back. That’s when he saw Keith in the rearview mirror. The wind split and suspended the tails of his trench coat like ashen wings. A hatred for pristine creatures forced Keith’s mouth into a rictus grin. Walking toward Boy Racer’s car, he waved a homemade blowtorch.

Boy Racer didn’t run. He simply pulled his seatbelt across his chest and locked the doors. As the spoiler ignited and flames engulfed the body of the car, Boy Racer cursed Santa Carla High. He cursed them with happiness, light, Mariah Carey, and a championship football team. His Adidas 3-Stripes melted easily, congealing in globs against the charred skin of his legs. Darkness closed in on Boy Racer. He inhaled the sweet stink of burning Cool Water and glimpsed Moon in the distance, mascara smeared, mouthing what he wanted to believe was I love you.

x-r-a-y magazine

SIMON & SCHUSTER by Marc Tweed

August 18, 2021 · Fiction

Bill Gunderson was more than a coworker to me, in fact I’d gone kayaking with Bill maybe three weeks before they chucked his severed head off the 29th floor of the Pemberton Building. He was our top seller the year before that ordeal, three out of four quarters. The guy was a data security sales machine. It was a windy evening this happened. I remember his head making a sound like an empty coconut when it hit the concrete and bounced twenty feet in the air, coming to rest directly in front of my girlfriend, Veraldine, whose exquisite face elongated soundlessly. We were in shock, of course. We looked at each other like what on God’s green earth? I nudged the head away from her with the toe of my oxford and when it rolled over so we could see the face, I said, “Oh my God, that’s Bill Gunderson.”

This was all over the news. Someone posted footage from a street camera on YouTube and last I checked it had 2.7 million views. You remember this from the news? I haven’t checked the YouTube video for months now. But it shows everything. At least the part about Bill’s head.

How this came about, Veraldine and I happened to be shopping downtown by the Pemberton after having an early dinner on the north side at Hooligans III. Yes, that’s correct, Hooligans III between the check-cashing place and the furniture store that used to be nice. I had a whole thing arranged with the server at Hooligans III; the ring would be at the bottom of a ramekin of ranch dressing.

Do you know Terry? That’s the server with the big curly hair, with a big, broad, beaten face, kind of wide and bovine. A nice guy. Just looks like he’s been compressed somehow, into something impenetrably dense.

Anyway, Veraldine and I were making small talk, catching up about our days and I just felt like she was acting funny, like she was gathering up the courage to say something to me? It was making me nervous. You know me. My mind immediately goes to a dark place. I was wondering if that day of all days was going to be the day she was going to acknowledge I’m really not that impressive of a person. Paranoid, I guess. I tend to feel subpar. So when I saw Terry over her shoulder heading our way with the Lava Hot Spud Skins and ranch I waved him away as nonchalantly as I could. He turned around, thank God.

I needed to know what was what before I went through with this ring business, right?

Well it turned out this was the deal. Veraldine had big news indeed, but nothing to do with me. Whew. She said, “Simon & Schuster is going to publish The Bird With the Prismatic Eyes!” Holy shit, I thought. Simon & Schuster is going to publish The Bird With the Prismatic Eyes!

I said, “Honey, that is fantastic!” and I took her hands in mine and it occurred to me I better not steal her thunder with my whole deal about wanting to spend the rest of my life with her. I figured I should delay that whole extravaganza for a least an hour. So I said hold that thought I want to hear all about Simon & Schuster but let me use the bathroom first.

I found Terry in the hallway between the kitchen and the bathrooms and I said, “Let’s fish that ring out of the ranch dressing and you can put it in the tiramisu later.”

He nodded seriously. I can always count on Terry.

So back at the table Veraldine and I were in a celebratory mood.

I mean, I’m so proud, right? She’s so creative. She let me read multiple drafts of this thing before she ever sent it out and I have to tell you it is really good! Like each time I couldn’t put it down. It’s about a man with a kind of kaleidoscope vision who sees people as tightly interlocking puzzles of individual molecules and each molecule is kind of its own entity with even smaller molecules and so on. The guy is a detective and he uses his kaleidoscope power to solve mysteries but he has a mystery of his own: the mystery of his personal origins. His parents, in other words. That’s the main thrust of the book. All he knows is someone left him on a church doorstep in a cardboard box with this strange little bird figurine. So he’s obsessed with that.

Simon & Schuster!

Anyway, I was proud of her because for the year and a half we’d been dating she’d worked on this manuscript feverishly every day while still somehow making time for me. I don’t think she sleeps.

There was an easiness between us. People noticed it. And I’m a big reader.

So we were finishing a second round of cocktails and beaming at each other in a kind of speechless delirium when Terry brought out the Lava Hot Spud Skins, sans ring. I was trying not to screw things up, trying to make sure she knew how happy I was for her. And I really was. Am, in fact. I always will be proud of Veraldine, I swear it as I sit staring at rows and rows of bottles in the manner of a crumbling statue.

I was figuring dessert was going to come at exactly the right time. We made it through the appetizer and another drink, laughing, and split a Caesar salad after that. Got cozier and cozier. And I’m high on all the love and spirits, thinking the rest of my life begins at dessert. Then I saw Terry coming our way shaking his head and I said to myself fuck.

Not only were they out of tiramisu, they were out of the only other dessert Veraldine and I like, which is peach cobbler. So I was going to have to explain to her why I was ordering us the coconut cream pie, which neither of us cared for too much. Too gelatinous. Weird flecks of something chewy.

“I think I’ll just skip dessert,” she said in her high, hoarse patter.

I told her I’d have her for dessert and she giggled and coughed into a fist.

I said, “Let’s drive downtown, look at the decorations.”

The lights were up for the holidays and the shops were open and I said I wouldn’t mind stopping into Swenfield’s to try on some slacks I saw online.

She was in a fine mood and said, “You read my mind.”

She’s like that. We were like that. Everyone said we were like psychic twins.

Terry slipped the ring back to me when I paid and wished me luck. Under his breath, of course.

Veraldine and I drove downtown. It took forever to park but the lights were magic. I had an idea on the way over. I was thinking, they put up a huge Christmas tree in Swenfield’s every year and I figured it would be pretty classy to get down on one knee in front of it. It’s twenty-five feet tall, right there in the middle of the store, under a big domed skylight. Everyone knows the spot.

I was sweating bullets at this point. I felt completely out of control. The ring-in-the-ranch-dressing plan had been rehearsed in my head (and, honestly, recited to Terry) over and over for weeks and there I was improvising. As Veraldine and I strolled, arm in arm under the downtown Christmas lights I thanked God for those three drinks we had at dinner.

We were two blocks from Swenfield’s when this little old man called out to us. He was bent over and bald in a dirty plaid suit and I was thinking he looked sort of like an urban leprechaun as he scuttled over to us in front of an upscale furniture store on the first floor of the Pemberton Building.

He said, “This is the best block” and swept his spiny little arms around without moving his head, like an arthritic tour guide.

Veraldine smiled at him, her teeth bright against the dark plum lipstick that drives me wild with longing even now when I see her across a packed bar with a large group of people I don’t know. I mean who are these people? Are these people from work? New friends from some literary cabal?

So I said to the old man, “We’ll take your word for it but you’re right, it’s pretty fancy, sir.”

He pointed at Veraldine and said, “Not as fancy as this one.”

I said, “She’s a famous author, too!” and we all had a laugh.

It would be weeks before I’d wake up in the middle of the night and remember what Bill Gunderson said after we’d demolished a case of Bud and he seemed like someone else. His face leered out of the darkness, the campfire written crazily across his sweaty forehead.

“Sometimes you just take what’s yours. You don’t wait for someone to realize it’s yours and give it to you. You tell them with your actions,” he said.

So Veraldine and I parted ways with the little man in front of the furniture store and started walking in the direction of Swenfield’s, electricity and a thousand little lights singing in the sharp evening air. I felt the ring in my pocket. I couldn’t stop running my fingers over it. Over and over and over. This was the single most important thing I was ever going to do and no god damn missing dessert…nothing was going to stop me. And I’m sorry if I’m getting emotional. I just miss Veraldine. I miss her so much.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THE WHALES WILL THANK HER by Julie Chen

August 17, 2021 · Fiction

She seeks to save water when using the toilet. If it's yellow, let it mellow, though she knows that can lead to malodor, so she makes sure to flush before she goes out or to bed, or if she hasn’t hydrated well and her pee is a deep autumnal mustard, like her favorite sweater.

When she goes grocery shopping, she uses tote bags, of which she has many. The real challenge is to also bring those plastic bags in which one weighs produce. One can avoid them with fruits like bananas, whose peels are thick enough to shield from germs, but grapes are a different matter.

But sometimes she forgets even a tote. Or when she does bring a tote, she forgets to ask the cashier to refrain from giving her a plastic bag, so she just extricates her things in front of them, avoiding their gaze, surely offended as she rejects their gift.

And sometimes she doesn’t have the courage to do this so she just takes the wasteful plastic bag, feeling like the scum of the earth. When she gets home, she stashes it in the cupboard in which she hides her other shameful plastic bags, and swears this is the last of her cowardice.

She supposes she has a reason for all this scrupulousness and self-loathing: to be good. The whales will thank her. In heaven, she’ll swim through the air and nuzzle them. Also sea lions, serpentine mammals with warm blood and smooth skin, no sharp creases or ashy elbows like on her own craggy body.

Her lover is petite and hairless, with legs barer than her own. When he is on top, she grabs him by his narrow shoulders and pulls him close, so she feels his ribs, small, smooth nubs, bury in her large, useless breasts. He feels so delicate she wants to smother him.

Postcoital, he falls right asleep while she pulls out her phone. She plays Tetris and Candy Crush, games where the goal is to disappear things. She keeps the volume on, the bleep bloops flitting above his heavy snores.

One night, she plays games into the morning light. At breakfast, she drinks three cups of coffee. Her body feels flipped inside out, each heartbeat rippling the surface of her skin like a stone skipping across a pond. She looks at her lover’s face across the table and imagines his right eyebrow rotating clockwise 90 degrees and sliding down to meet the top of his right nostril—no, it would actually be neater if it were rotated counterclockwise, the focus of the parabola tangent to the nostril flare. Take the other eyebrow too, and make it symmetric, a hyperbola. Shift the lips up, omitting the philtrum, its insipid indentation; now more than ever, either commit or disappear! Everything clicks into place and flashes white and—

She blinks and his face returns to normal.

They break up. They have different values. He works at a tech company that supplies him unlimited individually packaged foods: drinks, yogurts, granola bars, pickles. He is addicted to sparkling water. When they went on walks, he’d stop at bodegas to buy it even when she offered him her reusable bottle, which she refilled in bathroom sinks.

They hadn’t lived together, which was how she’d gotten away with the yellow-mellow trick. Still, the space in her home feels extraneous now. So she goes to the library during the day and works there, remote copy-editing, adding and deleting commas to the rhythms of students whispering and old men coughing into their borrowed newspapers.

Unlike at the coffee shop, at the library she can bring her travel mug and Tupperwared snacks and can use the bathroom whenever she wants, not once or twice per purchase—baked goods only, to avoid single-use cups—or whatever the etiquette is. Today, the last person to use toilet hadn't flushed. They were moderately hydrated, not clear, but not unhealthily dark either. She wonders if she should flush before she pees but judges that the walls of the toilet bowl are sufficiently deep such that it is unlikely that her pee stream would splash drops of the old pee onto her genitals. She had looked it up, pee isn't actually sterile, plus it’s gross to touch someone else’s and she isn't crazy. She’ll only save water by peeing into someone else’s pee under special circumstances.

Crow Jonah Norlander

STRAWBERRY by James Jacob Hatfield

August 12, 2021 · Fiction

It’s not because I have Alzheimer’s, I’ve always been like this. The most fun I get nowadays is when I find things I lost.

But I do remember her journal is underneath the couch. Before I’d never think to read her journal. But now that she’s gone I’d better retrieve it or else I’d forget about her completely.

Reaching under our couch is like sticking your hand into that ominous hole in the wall of a cave. Feeling for a lever. Pencils. Dog toys. Remotes. Items that are sorely missed only when they’re needed. And are treasured only for the moments after they’re found and used. Then start their journey on being lost again. My hand grazes the profile edge of a gun trigger and my heart makes an excited lurch into my sinuses.

Henry appears and says there’s some strawberries in the kitchen. My lips get cold.

Henry is on the opposite side of the island in the kitchen that we’re standing in now. He looks at me and rolls his lips in and tries to smile.

Henry holds the pseudosmile. Points to his lips.

I hear a noise resembling a yawn and realize it’s my own voice going “Huh?”

“You have something on your lips.” Henry says.

One lick and my tongue detects strawberries. I’m allergic, I think. Something happens when I eat something. Pretty sure it’s strawberries.

My hand keeps sending food to my mouth.

“What are you doing here, Henry?” I ask.

Henry leans his lower back against the counter. Presses his palms down to push up his shoulders and does that little head shake that says “I dunno.”

Henry, he hasn’t aged a day since we left for college. Dresses the same too. Tight black hoodie. One time right before graduation I almost killed him. I think it’s what galvanized our friendship. If you go down Lake Wheeler Road, past some of the old monstrous farmer estates, you’ll see an enormous oak tree with a huge patch of bark damaged like a gorilla is covered with hair except its chest. A blemish made by Henry and me. My Volkswagen Golf got wrapped around it. It was a manual. Diesel. I guess I got distracted. Didn’t keep my eyes on the road. Because I couldn’t. Mainly because it wouldn’t stop moving. God, I loved that car.

“I don’t remember what I did today.” I tell Henry in my kitchen.

“Funeral.” Henry says.

“Whose?”

“Don’t know. Didn’t go. But you seemed real upset about it.” Henry says.

I’m trying to forget something that’s begging to be remembered, from some other realm or reality. I know when I’m forgetting because my mind goes blank and all I see is a dream of a silhouette. There’s shape and there’s sound but nothing distinct. I pull up my hand and see the bottom of the strawberry I was eating.

Strawberries … are yummy … it’s a green hat with the pale, uneatable part of the berry pinched between my fingers. It looks like bloodstained brain matter on the back of the head of someone who swallowed the business end of a revolver.

I feel self-conscious and look up to see if Henry notices I’m taking too long and acting weird.

“Wait. Hey Henry, did you say funeral?” I shout.

My heart horse-kicks my ribs and there’s a heat of color funneling behind my eyes. I erupt from within. As if pixelated light was exploding out of my body. That’s why the gun felt so delicious. There’s an electric freedom in knowing I don’t have to stay alive if I don’t want to.

“What?” Henry says as he came out of the downstairs bathroom.

My fight-or-flight senses tear out the back of my head, like a bunch of wires unplugged in one violent yank. I suddenly have no needs.

The birds chime in the wind while watching the unique angle of the sun this good Earth gives us every single day … man, this is how I should have spent all my time … God, I feel weird. Is this what it is to be present? Am I dying? I can’t remember what my wife Irene looked like but … or was it Iris? Irene-Iris. Ireneiris. Yeah. That was her name. She was my wife. This is getting worse really quick. If I don’t get a hold of my thoughts I’ll forget about her forever. The microwave clock says it’s two on the dot. How many more hours until I can go to bed and not feel worried? Where’s Ireneiris? Where’s Henry?

“Henry!”

“What? I’m right here.”

It sounds as if he is saying it right into my ear, but he’s standing at the back of the property. I spot him as a dot through the window above the kitchen sink. I still feel weird. I need my ears to pop. It’s two forty-seven on the microwave.

“Let’s walk.” Henry says. His words tickle and vibrate my ear bones.

It’s still the afternoon, but grey storm clouds have formed. The temperature drops a couple. The wind is stale and humid. I touch the back of my head and feel nothing. Henry’s been quiet while we’ve been walking. I want to ask if we took drugs but won’t. Because if he says no that would mean I’m actually going crazy. Bad thought. Bad thought.

Calm down. Breath normal. You’re not going to feel like this forever.

Henry pivots right on Lake Wheeler Road. He looks like he’s wearing eye shadow.

“Henry, have you been eating?” I ask.

“No, man.” Henry whispers. Then folds his arms and shivers. He sounds irritated like I should have already known that. Like I forgot something.

I see him stumble. And it starts to rain. And he does this performance dance piece: falls, then gets up halfway, then slips, then repeat. I pull him up by the shoulders. And his tight black hoodie unanchored from his body which was no longer there. In the distance I hear the sounds of metallic bone-folding chaos drenched in diesel. There’s my Golf. Bad thought. Manual. Bad thought. Two door. Slouched like a wet towel around the tree’s trunk. Bad thought. Police car. Bad thought. Paramedics run right past me like I’m not even there. I remember this.

Past and present tense became one another like water washes water. I’m witnessing my own memories.

I try to peek over and see what my younger self looked like but my mind can’t process it. The area where my face should be is a warped blind spot. I see the EMTs moving a crash test dummy with a wig with hair styled like Henry’s. The cop takes the crash test dummy and puts it in the trunk of his squad car and leaves. Henry emerged from behind the tree when everyone else left. He waved me over as he turned around.

Everything past the tree is desolate. Lifetimes pass. Parched and exhausted, I’m following Henry on my hands and knees crawling through the desert. I see a mirage of a tiny dancing city appearing out of red canyons in the distance. Henry ventured forward. I give up and collapse.

I shout at Henry, but he doesn’t hear me. As he walks away his footprints immediately filled in with red desert sand. My insides wretch at the thought of open casket funerals. Ireneiris requested no cosmetic changes to her appearance for her funeral. The further the distance between Henry and me grew, the more I felt a separation not unlike a spirit and a body divorcing. Either he or I were fading away. The elusive Other being forgotten. I must be hallucinating, or dying.

With my knees in the sand and the figure of the figment of Henry eroding in the blowing curtain of sand. I only felt brief relief in knowing what is impossible. Lost in the transiency of spirits who are everactive. Now I desire only clarity.

I need to be with her again in some form. I need to go home.

I turn toward the tiny dancing oasis in the sunset, away from Henry. The city on the dune turned out to be a bunch of whack jobs living in tents in the middle of the desert. And what they drew from their wells may look like water, but last time I checked water shouldn’t smell like mangy rotten dog dick and have an iridescent shimmer. The first time I drank it I passed out. Then I shot myself in a scary dream and woke up feeling selfish. So I drank it a second time.

And I dreamt I was back in my childhood backyard. It was the time of day where the bottom of the sky was a rosy peach neon exploding up above faint magenta. My favorite weather. Paradise.

And I felt a soft voice taze me: Enter through! The door of the morning mist to the afterbirth of defined things. This is where you go. A cold wet field damp with sky.

And I whip around. The voice chimes and sparkles with dew. And I whip around. The memory of the cold dew is sharp on my feet. Standing still, I let my body heat melt the water which allows me to acclimate to this terrestrial plain. That excitement of combing an expensive rug with your toes. Borderline orgasm; euphoria. The world compresses into a tube-like shape that I am ushered through. It’s as if I’m walking through the shoot of a playground slide, as if my world is forming around me each step and Longleaf Pines start springing out of the sand dunes until desert and forest are one. I remember this city. I have a house here with my wife.

Oh God. Irene? … Iris? … I really … I miss her more than I can handle. The moment she left this world I could feel my life being sucked away. And as if that thought was a magic spell, I’m in my living room with feet freezing cold and clammy.

I feel lost in my own house.

I shuffle, barely lifting my feet on the carpet.

It’s like her spirit disintegrated into every corner of every wall in this house. Every blemish, every unfolded blanket, every mismatched coffee mug. Everything.

I don’t know how I can live like this. All freedom curdles into a demand for sacrifice. It feels like someone else’s bad thoughts got planted in my head.

I reach underneath the couch. Feel for something heavy.

With the gun in my hand, I roll my wrist like I’m opening a book to point it at my face. Look down.

And I realize what I’m really holding on to.

I let the pages of her journal fall open into my hands. There are words written across the middle in her script. Damn. She’s good.

It says “Keep going.”

And it all clicks. I was never alive and never will

be dead. I do not exist but I feel like I do. And I

disassemble at an atomic level clearing the

psychic real estate required to lay back

and suffer the natural exitance of my natural flesh. It was

an honor and a privilege to love you.

x-r-a-y magazine

SIMPLE ANSWERS TO ESSENCE QUESTIONS AT THE INTERNATIONAL PAPERWEIGHT FESTIVAL by Pat Foran

August 10, 2021 · Fiction

Long before the wildness of fire engulfed their town, and well after self-winding watches had become a thing, the townspeople thought of themselves as a simple people who enjoyed simple pleasures.

They saw light in paper moons and love in the soft ridges of the infinite arrowing of the universal “recycling” logo. They believed in paper planes and in the notion of shared paper routes. They spent their evenings pressing paper roses between the pages of 1959 Buick Le Sabre brochures.

The townspeople took particular pride in the International Paperweight Festival they hosted each summer in the paper mill parking lot. The pigs-in-blankets delivered to festival goers via origami blimp. The newspaper-hatted fortune teller who told onion-skin truths in songs she composed on the spot. All those paperweight appreciators. All those paperweights. In one place.

Then things, doing what things do, got hard.

Demand for the printed word declined precipitously. Publishers stopped buying paper. The paper mill lost customers. The townspeople lost jobs. Homes. Pets. Spouses.

It even got hard to put themselves in current context. Their self-winding watches got cute and played tricks with time. In addition to being a literal question, What time is it? became a symbolic one.

It got hard, very hard, for the townspeople to continue to see themselves as a simple people. To enjoy their simple pleasures.

It got hard, very hard, for them to see light. Or love. Or to believe.

And when the fingers of fire touched their crepe-paper town, reaching and then curling around the papier-mâché Ferris wheel spinning in the paper mill parking lot, the townspeople felt like giving up. They also had questions.

What is happening? said the town rumor control czar.

Where even are we? said the town cartographer.

Who even are we? said the town cryer.

What time is it? said the town horologist.

You’re asking me? the fortune teller asked-sang-said, hustling to her festival booth near the smoldering Ferris wheel. Okay, the Soothsayer, as they say, is REAL in.

The townspeople tagged along. The evening sun did, too. The sky pulled up a chair. The wild fire, sitting in a gondola atop the now-not-spinning wheel, lent an ear. The fortune teller cleared her throat and began to sing:

What in hell is happening, you say,Like Donald Sutherland says in that anything-but-simple 'Ordinary People' wayWhat's happening NOW, like Raj and Rerun say,Is the next beginning, the next new day.

Cheering, the evening sun slid on the spectrum from red-yellow to yellow-green. The townspeople leaned in for a closer listen.

And where are we now? It’s not where we were—it’s not where we will be or even where we ARE, the fortune teller sang, adding something mostly inaudible about paper moons, gift-wrapped stars and pigs-in-blankets. If anything, where we are is no-where, children, she sang.

Laughing, the sky unearthed the “Welcome to Our Town” sign and presented it to the town cartographer as if it were a paper rose.

The fortune teller unfolded her newspaper hat and rapped the news:

Who even are we? Who even, even?

This self-examined life? Who even, even?

Light and love and logos, even?

Recycle what? Recycle this

Infinite what? Infinite this

Get off it, get with it, get over yourselves

Put paper-pressed evenings back on the shelves

(next to the urns containing Ferris wheel ashes, of course)

Swooping down from the motionless spinning wheel, the wild fire high-fived the fortune teller, who didn’t miss a beat:

What time is it, what time it is

Anything more is all show biz

Ditch your self-winding watches

Ditch your Le Sabre swatches

Ditch your pretty-to-think-so simple pleasures

Hug something a bit harder to measure

Hug this regenerative burnHug these songs you’ve learned

Hug the possible, the *if* ‘til its eyes fillEmbrace this moment now or you never will

The townspeople turned to watch the wild fire, which had spread to the paper mill and the International Paperweight Festival museum. All those paperweights, imperiled. In danger of not being appreciated.

Embrace what now? cried the town cryer.

Embrace ‘next’! Don’t let these paperweights hold you down! the fortune teller trilled. Let them go! And let yourselves go. Let this moment lift you—up, like those popsters sing, where we belong.

Hey—don’t spread THAT one around, said the town rumor control czar.

As the festival museum burned, the paperweights paraded, single file, toward the next town. Leaving their pigs-in-blankets behind, the origami blimps navigated the confettied sky. Paper planes carrying self-winding watches sailed into the evening sun. Under a paper moon, the wild fire celebrated the swirl of infinity and the possibility of resurrected love in the soft ridges of ruin.

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PLUCKERS by Amanda Anderson

August 9, 2021 · Fiction

I was in the bathroom that fateful day, my butt cheek hoisted up in one hand, tweezers zeroing in on the mole with the other, when my boyfriend walked in. His eyebrows pinched together in disapproval. He asked me what I was doing. I stuttered, searching for a more attractive explanation, then finally told him I was plucking the hair out of the mole on my ass. He asked cheerfully if he could step in and take over. I handed him the tweezers, glad he wasn’t repulsed, only to see a sizable boner emerge in his pants.

And so a monthly trend was born. But it wasn’t that many months before the sizable boner went floppy noodle and the boyfriend began bemoaning the boredom of his life and our relationship. He suggested we were lacking another dimension. Life was short, he said. People are dead. Who? I asked. People, he said. We couldn’t spend what little time we had like this. Like this? Like just waking up and doing shit and going to bed. Being under the impression that this man was my last chance for love, I agreed with a sultry, ok.

This agreement resulted in a number of surprises. First, the new dimension was not a woman, but a man. Second, that man was there for a hair-plucking session. Obviously I was hesitant. I’d been plucking that thing alone in bathrooms for years because it was disgusting. To now find it a point of sexual interest was more than a little disconcerting. But to be embarrassed is not particularly sexy, so I smiled coyly and bent over the edge of the bed.

Eventually, the plucker changed and changed and changed again, and we began to charge a fee. I was accustomed to it by this time, and able to reduce my other job hours. It was a specialized fetish, the sort of thing for which you can charge a lot of money. A rather large waiting list formed. So long in fact, that after a time, the pluckers were asked to submit applications. We received up to 200 applications a month which included age, first name, occupation, hobbies (my boyfriend’s request). Referrals were preferred. So, once a month a lucky candidate was allowed to pluck the single dark hair out of the mole on my ass.

Then my boyfriend took off with a cowboy from Vermont whose hobbies included drinking milk and bringing joy to those around him. He did not provide any references. I didn’t think there were cowboys in Vermont. Which is why I thought we chose him—wasn’t this man funny and interesting, saying he brought joy, drank milk and was a cowboy from Vermont. But it was true. He was a cowboy, and he lived in Vermont. I also didn’t know that this was what my boyfriend had been looking for all his life.

Now I was left alone with my only means of support being a stranger entering my home under potentially dangerous circumstances. But I didn’t care. I was hopeless. In despair. The kind of despair that happens when the boyfriend you thought was your last chance for love and life is gone. So the first choice I made alone was the most dangerous I could muster: a doctor. Anyone who claimed to be a doctor was not a doctor, but someone who daydreams of death and dying, of perfecting a particular kind of violence.

The doctor arrived in a white lab coat with a black bag, the kind of bag doctors carried when they came to the sick at their homes. Had my boyfriend been there, he would have requested the doctor leave the bag outside. The doctor was rather handsome. Which had historically been a bad sign. Handsome men, it seems, believe their handsomeness puts an acceptable shine on savagery. A voice in my head strongly advised against letting him in. It doesn’t matter how much you hate your life, it said (I heard the low chime of fear which warmed my head), you don’t want to be sliced up and thrown in a dumpster with your head and hands in a different bag from your legs. But I’d received a postcard that day from the boyfriend. A cartoon skeleton wearing a wide-brimmed sombrero sat at the base of a cactus, his elbow resting on his knee. But It’s A Dry Heat, the arching caption said, ARIZONA. The boyfriend’s handwriting, appearing as crowded cuneiform marks, overran the open space on the back—across and over, up and around, cleaving the edges of the card. The doctor and his bag were welcomed inside with a kind yet sensuous smile.

He started in right away. Sighed as he put his bag down, slumped into the living room chair uninvited. He asked for water. Sighed again. I tipped my ass in his direction, asked him in a low voice if he was ready to get started. He took in a seven second breath before telling me things have really been hard for him lately. So many people sick and dying. Men his age are jumping off buildings. Brand new buildings that were meant to be architectural wonders now tainted reminders of mortality. Every day he drove by on his way to work and cursed the man who jumped to his death. Then pitied him. Then cursed him. He finished his water, held up the glass for me to take away and began to cry. Then he pounded his fist on the coffee table. I would understand, he said, once I was his age and your balls and chin start to sag and everyone is jumping off buildings and not inviting you to parties. He let out a low, pitiful noise and put his head in his hands. Then screamed at me to get him a drink. I brought him another glass of water. He looked up at me with a jutted jaw. A drink, he said.

I brought him a whiskey which he gripped like a candle in a church vigil. While he continued whining with his eyes closed I went into the hallway and opened his bag. There were six pairs of socks and a candy bar. I had no idea what this man wanted.

When I got back to where he was sitting he looked at me with bloodshot eyes and asked if I knew what he was saying. I nodded. He shook the empty glass at me, asked me to get him a pair of fresh socks from his bag before asking if I knew what it was like to go through life as a man with overly sweaty feet. I shook my head. He nestled deeper into the chair.

He eventually requested the candy bar and a third pair of socks. After I handed the candy to him he asked if I knew what it was like to go through life as a man who gets faint from low blood sugar. I shook my head. He frowned, then informed me through his teeth that some people think getting tired from low blood sugar isn’t very manly. I told him that sounded very difficult. He nodded and tore into the candy like his life depended on it.

After a few hours, I found the courage to tap on my wrist, apologize, and tell him our time was up. He got up quicker than a drunk man normally would. Melted chocolate ringed his mouth. I stood my ground. He reached into his back pocket. Then pulled out an enormous roll of money, licked his finger and peeled off the bills, licked his finger again for the tip. By far the most money I’d ever made on a visit.

I locked the door behind him and went to the bathroom and threw up. The mole hair turned gray shortly after. Then I bought a scalpel and removed the thing myself.

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NOVELS_IM_GOING_TO_WRITE.DOCX by Aatif Rashid

August 6, 2021 · Fiction

Space Battles (1999)
- Like Star Wars, but from the perspective of a ten-year-old kid. He has a sword and a laser gun, and he and his friend save the galaxy from a group of evil aliens.
Space Battles II (2000)
- Sequel to Space Battles I. The kid is now eleven, and he saves the galaxy again from an even bigger group of aliens.
Space Battles III (2001)
- Sequel to Space Battles I and Space Battles II. The kid is now twelve, and he and his friend have a falling out. The first group of aliens comes back, though, so they reconcile in order to save the galaxy again.
The Lord of the Scepter (2002)
- An epic fantasy set in a Lord of the Rings style world where Dwarves, Elves, Humans, and Wizards battle over a magical scepter. The main character is a fourteen-year-old elf who’s secretly the son of the Elf king and will one day inherit the throne.
Sacrifices (2004)
- A dark dystopian novel set in a world where humans are regularly sacrificed by a tyrannical government to keep the population stable, and about a group of teenage revolutionaries who try to overthrow the system. The main character is a fifteen-year-old guy who leads the group. There’s a girl in the group too, and he’s in love with her but doesn’t want to admit it.
A World of Kingdoms (2005)
- A dark, epic fantasy novel set on a continent of warring kingdoms, about a group of children whose parents are killed and who have to make their way through the dangerous world. The main character is the oldest in the family, a sixteen-year-old who’s studying to be a mage. At one point, he meets a girl, the daughter of one of the kings, and they fall in love even though she’s engaged to another prince.
Untitled High School Coming of Age Story (2007)
- A nerdy high school kid in a small suburban town falls in with a new group of friends and experiences the wonders of drugs, sex, and partying. He also falls in love with a girl in his grade, a dark-haired, half-Asian girl, super smart, into literature and art like him, but they break up after she decides to go to college in New York instead of U.C. Berkeley, where he’s going. When this happens, it’s late at night, and they’re sitting in a car in the Safeway parking lot, and he feels like crying but tries his hardest not to. They try to have sex one last time in the backseat, but it’s awkward and he doesn’t feel like it, and so they just lie in each other’s arms on the felt seat, and he listens to her heartbeat, and he wonders if he’ll ever feel this way about someone again.
Untitled Edgy College Novel (2010)
- An experimental novel about a kid from a suburb who comes to college and finds a new group of cool artsy friends. Make sure it has a cool, hipster vibe, everyone saying ironic things, drinking PBR, smoking European cigarettes, talking about Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault.
- The novel shouldn’t really have a plot, but maybe make it center on a romance between the main guy and a girl—a cool, blonde girl who studies French and Art History and wants to be a writer too. They have lots of sex, but then get bored of each other and wander into increasingly separate, dissolute pursuits, and maybe after a few years, after they’ve been humbled in some way and feel low and down, they meet each other again on the quad in Berkeley, maybe she’s smoking a cigarette and he’s holding a Thomas Pynchon novel under his arm, and they reminisce about the good times they had and how it had been a lot of fun and how they miss those days, before saying goodbye and never seeing each other again.
The Postmodern Prometheus (2011)
- A novel about a twenty-two-year-old guy who’s just graduated college and is traveling through Asia on some money he’s saved up. Each chapter should be set in a different city, and instead of focusing on plot, make it more about the vibe, the people he meets, the bars he drinks at, the clubs he goes to, the women he sleeps with, interspersed with his reflections on art and history.
- He’s also a writer, so maybe make the frame of the book a novel he’s writing (maybe make super meta so it’s the book we’re reading). Ultimately, it should be about the main character finding himself and feeling a sense of fulfillment.
The Boomerang Generation (2013)
- After failing to find a job, a young man moves back in with his parents in the California suburb where he grew up. He reconnects with old high school friends, all of whom are likewise unemployed and depressed, and they drink a lot at the town’s one bar, or else play old video games (mainly Super Smash Brothers on N64) in one of their basements. Make it about generational listlessness, and have the main character reflect on the socioeconomic forces that have led him to become such a failure.
- The style should be terse, with short sentences, and a spare, Hemingway rhythm to match the lifelessness he feels inside.
Untitled Multigenerational Family Saga (2014)
- A novel about three generations of a Pakistani-American family. Start with grandfather’s generation in British India: they’re part of the nationalist movement, they witness Partition, etc. Then move on to parents’ generation: born into an independent Pakistan, immigrate to America, struggle, work hard, become doctors and engineers, etc. Finally, my generation: ungrateful, shitty kids who fail to live up to their parents’ expectations and fail to make anything of themselves in America. End with the eldest son of the family living at home after college, twenty-five years old and working as a waiter for minimum wage.
- Make it all an ironic commentary on the American Dream and subvert the tropes of the optimistic American immigrant story.
Untitled Campus Novel Satire (2016)
- A novel set at a low-ranked creative writing MFA program that follows a group of fiction writers struggling to make Art (make sure to capitalize it whenever they say it). Satirize their pretensions by highlighting the massive gap between their literary ideals (David Foster Wallace, etc.) and their own work, which is middling and subpar. Also, make fun of the teachers, who don’t really seem happy either. Above all, try and get at the feeling that literary success is impossible in late capitalism, that no one reads books anymore, and that these fiction writers are like easel painters or classical musicians trying to work with outdated forms.
- At some point, the main character should have a meeting with an agent in New York. The meeting doesn’t go well—he’s out of his depth, fails to make an impression, and thus loses what he feels like was his one chance.
Untitled Millennial Love Story (2018)
- A novel about two young people living in New York who meet at a party and start dating. He’s a twenty-nine-year-old (unpublished) writer and a part-time bartender, and she’s a twenty-four-year-old actress trying to make it in theater. They fall in love and grow close, but after a few years, they start to drift apart, mostly because he’s very depressed about his writing, how it’s not going anywhere, and how the dreams he had in childhood seem so far away now. Every day he wakes up and feels like a failure, and this rubs off on her, because she’s a little younger than him and still optimistic about things and doesn’t share his exhausting nihilism. Eventually, she leaves for Paris to be in a friend’s indie movie, and he gets an email a few weeks later saying they should break up and that she’s been seeing Emile (the indie director friend) for about a month now. He’s sitting in their shared apartment, a tiny studio in Queens, and when he hears the news, he throws his laptop at the wall and then goes out and buys a bottle of whiskey and drinks it from a paper bag while walking around the city, before returning home, masturbating to some porn (something demeaning probably, like a man getting choked and slapped and maybe even pissed on), and then passing out on his couch.
The Solitary City (2019)
- A first-person, autofiction novel about a failed thirty-year-old writer living by himself in New York City. Aside from working as a bartender to try and make ends meet, he takes long walks, reflects on the city’s buildings and history, occasionally sees art shows and readings put on by his friends, smokes and drinks a lot, sits in cafes and tries to write. He’s estranged from his parents, who tell him he has to get a real job and get his life together, and his attempts at relationships always go nowhere, as he feels no connection at all with the people he meets. He starts to resent his own generation, and he wishes he lived in an earlier time, in the 1960s, or the 1920s, or the 1890s, when people still read books and the world was still exciting.
Confessions (2020)
- As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps across the world, a thirty-one-year-old man comes down with symptoms and is admitted to the hospital. Even though he’s young, he’s smoked and drank a lot throughout his short life, so he’s not in great health, and the virus affects him severely. He has to be hooked up to a ventilator, and he feels pain all over his body, his chest, his arms, his back, and especially his head. Worst of all, his vision gets so blurry that he can’t read books—the text gets jumbled and he can’t make sense of it, as if he’s dyslexic. He tries listening to audiobooks, but the sound from his headphones makes his headache unbearable. And so he finds himself in a literature-less state. It may be the first time since he was a child that he hasn’t been reading a book. When he is lucid, he spends his hours thinking, about his life and what it meant and whether he accomplished the things he wanted. He contacts his parents, but they’re not allowed to come and see him for fear of contamination, so he has to talk to them on Zoom. His mother is crying, and while his father tries to smile and keep things optimistic and talk to him about books and “what he’s been writing,” he can see even in his eyes despair hiding behind the cheery disposition. He texts his ex-girlfriend, and she sends her condolences, and they even chat once over Zoom. She’s no longer seeing Emile the director, and she’s living in New York again, and he feels a sense of pain in his chest when he sees her face on the screen lit up by light from a window behind her, like the one in their old apartment. It might be COVID-induced synesthesia, but he feels like he can smell her hair again, feel her skin against his, her body through the sheets whenever he would wake up in the morning, the taste of coffee on her lips when he kissed her in their kitchen. Eventually, he’s left to himself, in the darkening hospital room, the beeping of machines of the older patients nearby, the distant sound of a nurse sighing in the hallway. He thinks about his failed writing career, all those novels he wanted to write but never finished. He imagines one final novel, something earnest and authentic that could justify his existence. He doesn’t know what style he’d write it in—postmodern, realist, dystopian, autoficion—and he doesn’t even know which events it would include, who the characters would be, how the plot would unfold. Still, he has a profound sense of it, a burning presence at the edges of his vision, and he knows that if he could write it, it would be absolutely perfect—everything he’d sought to capture since he first came up with Space Battles back in 1999, a representation that solved the riddle of literary mimesis, a document, ultimately, of what it had meant to him to be alive. The last scene before he dies would be him reaching out at something with his aching hand.

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SHAGGING FLIES IN BALLARD by Alexandrine Ogundimu

August 5, 2021 · Fiction

I resolve to confess my feelings on Saturday. You take me to the batting cage up in Mountlake Terrace but the machines are so awful they eat our tokens and give us nothing back, no high-arching softballs or baseball bullets. I would never say anything because I am meek and unmasculine but you get a refund because you are handsome and friendly and always get what you want and I am jealous—of your confidence and looks and talents and physicality and how much sex you have.

There’s a bucket of baseballs in your trunk so we drive to a park in Ballard and grab the bats and bucket and I’m way out of shape and can’t pitch for shit. You whack more than a few out into the home run range and we shag them together and take turns, pitcher and hitter, the innuendo not lost on me though you are oblivious to it, as I admire your form and feel a certain kind of carefree peace and joy, just two guys hitting baseballs, and it makes me wish you were my boyfriend in a way I find embarrassing, and I will tell you, hyper-straight you, college-baseball-player you, writer you, talented-in-more-than-every-way you.

This isn’t the right moment to say anything because it’s too perfect, as if I have already gotten exactly what I want, and having had it, there is no reason for me to seek it.

We catch the Mariners game at a pizza place and you drink a beer while I drink a Diet Coke because I’m scared of what comes out of me while I’m drunk. You ask me how the date with that guy went and I say Fine when it wasn’t fine because he wasn’t you, and I don’t care unless I care and you make me care in spite of myself.

We lock eyes as you say Yeah, just fine? And your voice is so warm and your eyes are crystal, your Henley revealing just a bit of your chest and I am an animal, my higher functions suspended even as I can feel your thoughts move, and I realize that this is my moment, my time to confess, and as I prepare the words Zunino blasts one and the bar goes wild and we high-five and really is it worth it to complicate a friendship when it’s so much easier to let your heart break.

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EVERY DAY IMAGINE DROWNING by Melanie Carlstad

August 4, 2021 · Fiction

I was at work holding onto a trowel and my father wasn’t dead. I argued this point to my colleague, Mary Anne, who was afraid of worms.

Here’s the gist, Mary Anne, I said. We are at work. We are gardening. You are afraid of the worms writhing between your fingers, and on top of that, my dad isn’t dead.

Mary Anne screamed. There was nothing else to do but scream about the ringed pink flesh of the worms.

Everything was drippy from yesterday’s rain. The juniper bush and the ivy leaves strangling it dripped on us. Our feet sank in the wet dirt. We had long hours, so we filled them with talk.

My parents are in an unhappy marriage, but they’re alive and well, Mary Anne said.

Mine aren’t like that, I said. They’re in a happy marriage and ailing slowly.Your dad is all done ailing, said Mary Anne. He’s dead.

I laughed and laughed. The juniper bush dripped, and I deadheaded the agapanthus. We talked about parking lots, hungry children with shiny eyes, and how the sun drowned every evening when it set over the bay. We could see it gasping above the waterline from the hill where we gardened.

Imagine drowning every day! Mary Anne said. We were crouched around the birdbath, hunting for crabgrass. With the rain, it had inched its way through networks of other plants, infiltrating their systems. I had to extract the crabgrass but not the poppies. I didn’t like poppies very much, but we had to preserve them. Our supervisor came out to check on us sometimes.

There’s a dead possum in the green bin, she said when she came out. Please take care of it.

I went to the green bin and kicked it onto its side. Dirty water dribbled out of the corner, wadded-up bundles of weeds slumped at the mouth of the bin, and underneath them I saw a beady eyeball surrounded by fur. I retreated, walking backwards while staring at the eye.

Mary Anne was still under the bird bath. I was starting to resent her for moving so slowly. She picked at crabgrass with a sense of leisure and twirled ivy like long hair when she ripped it out of the juniper.

There’s no dead possum in the green bin, I told her. There’s a possum in there alright, but it’s alive and well, just playing dead until it can make its getaway.

It had better go quick, Mary Anne said. She wrapped her hand around the neck of an invasive plant and yanked it out of the ground. She saw the worms intertwined with the torn roots and flung them away, sending specks of dirt onto my eyelids and cheeks. The sun was getting ready to drown, which meant we had to fill the green bin and clean up. The juniper still dripped on us while we tossed piles of weeds into the bin, which had no possum anymore but was full of new dead things.

This story was published in print only with the title “Worms” in Pratt’s literary magazine, Ubiquitous, in 2018.

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THE OPENER by Marissa Higgins

August 3, 2021 · Fiction

Bobby tossed the stuffed chihuahua between his bare hands, Suboxone in his right coat pocket and a picture of Alyssa at two months in his left. Should have worn gloves, he knew. Cape Cod winters tug the cold out of bones. The bus depot, of course, wasn’t heated. What if I can’t find you in the parking lot, he said over the phone when they arranged the meeting. Just stay in one place, Alyssa’s grandmother said, and then she named it. Sharon added: You’ll recognize your blood.

The call went clipped like that: Yeah, he was still at the halfway house, working, wanting to see Alyssa. No, he wasn’t paid on the books or sure about child support. He didn’t have any other kids. Yeah, he was sure.

Sharon and his kid pulled up and Bobby tightened his stomach lips colon toes fingers throat knees jaw. He put the stuffed animal behind his back. He watched Sharon get out and fiddle with the backseat. When Alyssa dropped her feet into the snow, Bobby dropped the chihuahua. He said, Oh, shit. Then Alyssa was upon him.

She said, Hey. They did not hug. As he shook the snow from the toy, he watched her watch him.

This is for you, Bobby said. And hey, yourself.

I’m not allowed to have a dog, she said, brown eyes a story in themselves. Bobby knew better than to point it out, but the kid really looked nothing like him. Carved from clouds, not smoke.

This one is good, he said all slow. Because it’s not real, you know?

Yeah, she said, solemn. I know.

Father and daughter didn’t talk again until the three of them were seated in a booth. The place was packed for lunch hour, all pop radio and pitchy kids. Sharon chatted for them; she caught Bobby up on Alyssa’s flute lessons, three times a week, which Bobby thought sounded like a lot, but shit if he knew.

Bobby nodded nodded nodded and sat straight straight straight. His posture was a knot, he admitted it, but he wanted Sharon to see him as different than the last time. He had been fucked up, yeah. He and Alyssa’s mom were screaming pretty bad. Some shit got broken. Neighbors were pissed about the noise and all, and Bobby couldn’t even tell them to fuck off, on account of them being right. Spine straight, Bobby housed his pizza and was glad to see Alyssa ate like him, big bites, teeth worked as weapons, oil all over the damn place. And why not, he thought, watching his kid suck grease from each of her ten fingers. Why not.

She’s a busy girl, Sharon said. Almost a young lady.

Bobby got her point. He crumpled a napkin, cleared his diet Pepsi, asked if they wanted refills. Sharon said no thank you and Alyssa eyed her cup, almost drained. At the drink fountain, he was small, cramped. He knew, but did he? Last he’d seen Alyssa, she was in diapers, drinking milk. He gambled. He filled hers to the top with cherry Coke and plenty of ice.

Under Sharon’s gaze, Alyssa mumbled thanks and gulped gulped gulped. Soda drizzled down her chin and onto her lap napkins. She and Bobby shared a look. Happy, happy.

Back in the parking lot, Bobby considered what they hadn’t talked about. Visitation, supervised or not. Alyssa’s mom—if she was dating anybody or if she was still working at the diner by the bay. If Alyssa was gonna be allowed to come over his apartment, once he got one, once he finished up the program. Holiday photos would be cool, he’d been thinking. Family portraits, the kind they take at the mall. Corny, he thought, but shit. Why not.

To Sharon, he said, Thank you. She didn’t ask him what for, which he appreciated. Later, in his bunk, Bobby would think about what he owed her, and how the debt made him feel weak and also relieved. Ever since Sharon became Alyssa’s guardian, he knew his daughter was good. He trusted she went to school and had enough to eat. That her hair was clean. That she wore socks under her boots. That she didn’t miss him much, because why would she? He only recently started to miss himself.

With Alyssa, he held out the chihuahua, mostly dry from sitting on a heater in the back of the restaurant. Its glass eyes were warmer than he expected when he rooted through the discount bin at the outlet across town. That’s special, he thought.

Alyssa said, Thank you, and took the dog. Against her pink puffer, the chihuahua looked cozy. She asked if Bobby would bring her a real dog next time.

That’s up to your grandma, he said. Around them, crows convened low, indifferent. If Sharon said sure, bring the girl a dog? Bobby would steal one, he guessed. He’d make it work.

Alyssa rolled her eyes, letting Bobby know grandma was the big no in the game. She asked if he wanted a hug goodbye.

When he stooped to her level, Bobby thought his back would splinter. Hamstrings were fists. Knees shuddered. His case worker told him he had to let go of his rage, that he couldn’t carry stress around the way he did. Bobby wanted to put his fear into a box or a closet or a bag. Wouldn’t the sadness open in another place, he wondered? Waiting for him, waiting to find fresh light. Still: He wanted, he wanted.

While they hugged, Bobby noticed a lot. Alyssa’s hair smelled like fruit. Her face was soft, not like skin, but pillows; the nice ones, the department store kind. When she coughed into his shoulder, unabashed, he smelled her breath: all hot cheese and pepperoncini. My kid, he thought. My kid. In his throat, a hummingbird.

"The Opener" previously appeared in Popshot Quarterly Magazine.

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