X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

LIKE HUMMINGBIRDS by Shome Dasgupta

July 31, 2020 · Fiction

Like when we sat on the sun and watched the world simmer in our heads, brother—remember that time? And how you were so furious and the words from your mouth smoldered, drifting towards every star, making sure there was no void. The pain. The pain you felt became ashes in my own body, and I’m so sorry, brother. I was helpless. And as much as I felt your pain, there was nothing I could do to take it away from you. Your skull vibrated as the smoke left through every pore of your body, and I just wanted to hold you, even if it meant I’d burn, but you wouldn’t let. You knew. You recognized, despite all that was happening, that you loved me and didn’t want to hurt me. Remember in that brief gleam of light, before you or I left, how the sun diminished and we floated in space no longer knowing if the world existed or cared if it did or not, and we hovered around like the hummingbirds in our backyard, trying not to bump into stars. We had so much fun and for that endless second you found peace as you took my hand and guided me around, much like you did in life. You loved those hummingbirds.

Brother, I fucked up so much, I’m so sorry.

And like before it all happened, when you were there we would be on our hands and knees, crawling in the ditch, pretending to be raccoons because there were no more raccoons left to feed. They went away just like you or me. But when we were playing, I cut my leg and cried so loud. You picked me up to take me home but I flailed so much we tumbled over, and the world was before us as we were on our backs. My pain went away as we tried to count all the birds in the sky.

And brother, I don’t know—I don’t know if I had the chance to do it all over again if I would change any of it. Including all the times I fucked up and all the times you had to pull on my arm while I was sinking. I don’t know if I would change it all up because look at who we became—I honestly think our parents would be so proud of us. How we made it through even though we weren’t meant to—I know who we are now, but if I could go back and change all the ways I needed to change, I don’t know who we would become.

You’d be so proud of me now, brother. I’m sorry. I’m glad you no longer feel any pain. I feel it every now and then but then it all goes away when it’s just us, floating around in space, drifting this way and that, toward every star, and every now and then a hummingbird appears, glowing and holy, fluttering its wings to let us know that we’re here. How you loved those hummingbirds, brother, I will never forget, even with closed eyes, I will never forget.

And this might be the last time we can speak—I don’t know if you can hear me—I’m not sure how all of this goes, but I love you, brother. Thanks for always being there.

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APEX PREDATORS by Nicole VanderLinden

July 30, 2020 · Fiction

Jessa hears a bear. Only it’s not a bear. It’s the wind nudging against the nylon of our tent, but my new wife has never camped on a grassy bald in the Smoky Mountains. So when she elbows me, whispers, is that a snout? where the fabric pushes in against her sleeping bag, I say, probably. I say, you didn’t bring in a candy bar, did you? She knows this story, that tent walls aren’t really walls and that a bear can slice right through them, drag you away for a bit of chocolate.

Next to me, I feel her go still so as not to provoke the bear-that-isn’t-there. She steadies her breathing, in and out, and soon she’s as calm as a corpse, also afraid and very alive.

I’ve told her other things, some true and mostly not. Bears smell fear, I say. You’re not bleeding, are you? Imagine, I tell her, if our tent was invisible, what we’d look like to them—other animals, too. Lonely pink babies under the cold Tennessee sky.

We don’t pass many thru-hikers, and the ones we do have trail names: Rock-n-Roll, Jumpy Cat. Men whose necks have furred and, once, an old woman with two filthy Pomeranians. Bear snacks, I whisper. We share tortillas and pouches of peanut butter. We muse on the weather, what it might become—I predict lightning and gusts that will blow over trees. When we ask for the hikers’ real names, they laugh and say, those names don’t count out here.

See? I say to her later. We sit alone on a fallen yellow birch. I breathe in the musk of her unwashed clothes—fires put out and canvas grown damp—her botanical smells long gone and scrubbed clean. In a nearby tree, a rat snake catches an errant ray of sun. Your name doesn’t count out here.

She carries a green backpack. She likes to blend in, and she packs it each morning, the sleeping bag then the tent poles then the bear canister then the snacks, in order of what she most wants to keep dry. I’m an apex predator, she says, big with her backpack. Maybe that’s my name, she says, and I say, you sure about that?

And then, on the last day, we do see a bear.

It’s foraging along the French Broad River. It’s midday, and the river’s swollen with rain; the rush of it leaves me dizzy. The bear. She shrinks into that green backpack, rigid as the hills. The bear, the bear. For a moment I think we’ve conjured it. It’s a few yards away and can smell us, I know, the memory of cooked meat still clinging to our hair, whiskey on our breath. Somewhere, a dead branch cracks to the ground.

The bear sniffs and then huffs, its mouth a cave. Her fingers curl around my fingers, and I feel her pulse, or maybe it’s mine, a heartbeat between our hands. We are small and we are nobody. But then the bear turns away and ambles on, no reason why or why not.

He’ll be back for you, I say, though she knows this isn’t true. We’re spending the night in Hot Springs, in a cabin, in a place where bears can’t go, and she will be Jessa once more.

Next year, we’ll visit the sea. We’ll rent a kayak, and it will be her turn to lay me low, to make me forget my name.

Shark, she’ll whisper from behind as we paddle into the blue, our boat like a toy bobbing in the swells. I see a fin, she’ll say, over there, on the horizon. I’ll get the shiver; my nerves will bloom. That means he’s hunting, she’ll say.

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PLEASE FORGIVE ME, MIDNIGHT ANGEL by Timothy Boudreau

July 30, 2020 · Fiction

That morning Cristina’s husband Charley brings her breakfast from the Diner, gray hair tufting from under his ball cap as he hands her the bag with an egg and cheese sandwich.

“Why aren’t you coming again?” she asks as she unwraps it.

“Off to provide another goddamn eight hours of superior customer service,” he says. That's been his life: jobs with name tags and aprons, jobs where the dickhead customer’s always right.

“Make sure you eat before you leave,” he goes on. “Give my best to her family.”

“Not sure who’s even left.”

“Wasn’t for staffing issues, I’d be there.” He hands her napkins from his jacket pocket.

“With everything she went through, I guess it all makes sense.” Cristina’s sigh holds him beside the door. “I’d just like to see her again, you know?”

He kisses her forehead. “See you tonight Babe.”

Cristina bites the sandwich, tastes her breath, rinses her mouth with OJ. “Holy fuck Sammi,” she says.

Sammi: freckles and tomato hair, her curls like spaghetti tinsel. “Speckled Sammi,” the mean girls called her. All curves and softness, like a pillow, but when she hugged you, she meant it, she squeezed. Back then it was Cristina and Sammi, hip to hip through the halls of Daleborough High. Nicotine hair and Newports tucked in their jean jackets.

Cristina brings her phone outside where they have reception. The tire swing in the neighbor’s yard is like the one they rode at Sammi’s while they waited for the bus: overjoyed, legs splayed, after wine coolers for breakfast; their moms absent, September sky like a musty blanket.

Her hands tremble as she makes the call.

“Yes, one PM,” Mr. Herman says. “Light refreshments after. The information’s on the website.”

“Will there be a viewing? Can you tell me that?”

“There will not. The family chose cremation.”

While Cristina pulls on her best blouse and jeans, slicks back her hair, Pandora plays Quarterflash, Heart, The Pretenders. She arranges her nips on the bureau, hums along, punches the air to punctuate the choruses. Imagines Sammi’s ashes crossing the country in a jet, limo transporting the urn from Logan with a police escort. Blue lights, music blasting.

Music was Sammi’s wine cooler buzz, pink fog fizz. They rode with “Shadows of the Night” on the radio, Sammi’s voice cracking at the top of her range, stubby arms waving as if commanding a back seat band; Cristina, the better drunk driver, behind the wheel. “Midnight angel, won’t you say you will?” All night Sammi was thinking of Matty Cryans, her cheeks red, forehead glistening, everything in her mind with a heart scrawled across it, “Sammi loves Matty.”

Matty was skinny, long eyelashes over moist blue eyes. Gawky, shy, thick shag of blond.

“He's my number-two pencil," Sammi told everyone, “long and straight. Girls think he's dumb because he’s quiet, but he’s always observing. He saves his thoughts for nighttime and brings them home to me.”

Were they twenty-three when it started? One Friday Cristina invited Matty over for supper, while Sammi worked a double and Charley was away. When Cristina pulled him onto the bed Matty’s wet eyes filled with questions, but he hardened as soon as she unzipped him.

“But what about Sammi?” he said, as she mouthed his dick. “What about Sammi?” as she climbed on top, settled onto him, “But Sammi,” wincing first until she bounced, bounced, and shoot made sure he came inside before she fell off (he was crying now) and went to wash his mess out of her.

Cristina’s jacket smells like cigarettes, its inside pockets packed with nips. While she waits for the taxi she slips into her neighbor’s garden and breaks off four lilies, wraps them in tissue.

The taxi drops her at the corner of Crawford and Elm, next to the building where Sammi lived after everything blew up. Cristina slides the lilies in her pocket, pats her hair, remembers visiting before Sammi ditched them all and moved out West.

“Just listen Sammi,” Cristina told her.In the doorway Sammi blew cigarette smoke in Cristina’s face, her fist on her hip. “Why.”

“We need to talk.”

“Matty’s not here anymore.” She turned, flipped the butt off Cristina’s shoulder. “Leave me alone you greasy bitch.”

In the back row at Herman’s Funeral Home Cristina looks at the program, Sammi Cryans, 1967-2018, with a Psalm printed inside.

There’s a lectern, flowers and two big pictures up front: Sammi in lopsided pigtails, riding a tricycle; forty-something Sammi with some guy beside a Christmas tree, flannel shirt, curls chopped, pupils pinned, high as fuck.

After the hometown bridges have been neglected, burned, bombed, what’s left are aunties, a lonely cousin, a drunk former friend in the back corner. Three speakers: the pastor; Aunt Ellen, trembling; a former coworker. Stories about kid Sammi gobbling graham crackers; smoke breaks at her old job.

Finally Cristina can’t stand anymore. She stumbles out, lilies in her fist, past a lady in a hairnet beside the door crying into a napkin.

She walks outside, head swimming. She already knows how it’ll end. Read The Lord is my shepherd, hallowed art thy name. Claim it was Sammi’s favorite scripture, as if she fucking had a favorite. Talk about her “troubles,” say something about God’s wisdom; describe a peaceful rest, free of pain. No mention of tire swings or Matty Cryans or her fierce, ragged heart.

How long has it taken her to walk home? Her face is flushed, jacket loose, thistle sticking to her jeans after she plunges through the brush into the driveway to find Charley standing outside with his phone, ball cap pulled low.

“It was a mistake,” she says, “the whole day was a farce,” she says, “it’s not fair, we’re too young,” shivering as Charley wraps his arm around her and Sammi’s lilies and helps her inside.

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THE SURPRISE by Aisha Hassan

July 28, 2020 · Fiction

The funeral prayer was almost over but I didn’t care, and Safia needed me here, and since she’s the one who did the dying, her word is as good as God’s. I stood at the back so the rows of hunched women would ignore me for now. The mosque was bloated with hot air and I could smell sweat blooming beneath white prayer robes. Rotting hearts, too. I imagined Syed’s heart, fleshy and dark, emitting the stench of a hammered mouse, thumping inside his hairy chest. He was on the other side of the partition where an Imam’s voice sang for all the men to see and all the women to listen.

Everyone lifted their hands in a holy salute and bent down in prostration. I followed instinctively but was, as always, a beat too late. When I sank to my knees and touched my head to the ground, I pressed my face to the heel of God’s boot and said a little prayer: “Forgive me, sister.”

The women wouldn’t come near me as we walked to the cemetery. Still, I could hear the low hum of their voices and tried to hold my head high. Up ahead in the ant trail of people trudging behind the coffin, Mother kept bumping into those around her, stepping aimlessly, blinded by grief. She didn't know I was here yet. But Mother has always been unseeing about her daughters no matter what happened to them. Even when the village and its birds seemed to know. Like her, they turned away.

Mother didn’t even look at me the day I tried to say goodbye. Didn’t even twitch when Syed, only thirteen then, stumbled in, took stock, and hissed, “Father was right about you,” before bolting out the door.

That day, Safia took my hands the way she did on those deep mornings when rising from bed made me feel more dead than alive. She promised never to abandon me while clutching my fingers tight.

“Don’t,” she had said.

“Sister, please,” I begged. “You can come.” We could have survived together.

Safia looked at me with moon-wide eyes that caught the light just as her head shook the quietest No. She glanced at Mother then turned back to keep her gaze on me. “You need to leave before Father gets home,” Safia had said. “Syed is already running to get him.”

Last Spring, exactly five years to the day I left, Safia finally called and told me Father died. We cried because he was gone at last and we had missed each other deeply and often. I cried because the fear of Father dragging me home fell out of my bruised insides and Safia’s voice sounded like forgiveness. I let myself imagine, for the first time since I ran out of the dusty village, the bougainvilleas in full bloom, our rickety house unloved and pathetic behind me—I let myself imagine Safia and I could be together again.

Just last week she told me that Syed, who carried Father’s shadow inside him like a ghost, was joining the military this month.

"I’ll come visit you when he leaves,” Safia said. “Mother won’t stop me.”

"I can’t wait to see you,” I told her.

“Me neither,” she had said. Her voice was pregnant with hope.

And here we were, together again, as they lay her down beside our Father.

I grabbed a handful of dirt and threw it into the newly dug grave. The others were already leaving. I stood my ground and thought of Safia’s fresh body. In Islam, the funeral must happen as soon as possible. It spares the soul the pain of being trapped in a vessel that is no longer home.

“It’s her fault,” Syed’s voice chimed as the crowd moved past me. “But Safia was a silly girl to take a road she’s never travelled before, especially in the dark.”

A memory curdled in my brain of Syed’s small head staring from the doorway when Father beat Safia and I, and all the different ways his eyeballs said: Silly, Stupid, Girls.

I looked up and Syed sneered at me with a face sickeningly like mine, both our soul skins roasted to the same shade of ochre beneath the punishing sun. Syed nudged the old uncle he was speaking to and both men looked at me with narrowed eyes.

"God will discipline the person responsible,” Syed said loudly.

I wanted to strangle Syed’s slimy voice. It was the same voice that told me two days ago Safia was gone and if I didn’t come home, he would leave Mother to fend for herself. “Safia was going to see you,” Syed said when he called. “Didn’t you know?”

The police unlocked Safia’s phone after the collision and my number was the only one she ever dialled. Syed guessed it was me, but wanted to make sure I knew the details.

“Farah,” Mother said, just as I was about to act. I felt Syed watching as I turned to the frail woman who pulled up beside me. Mother gently took my hands. “I didn’t think you would come,” she whispered, glassy eyes melting. She ogled me as if unearthing something precious.

“I’m sorry.” It was all I could say.

Mother nodded absentmindedly and started walking towards our house. “You are not the reason,” she said with her back to me. “You and Safia are the same, always blaming yourself.” Mother’s brittle fingers tightened around mine.

I pictured Safia staring into the darkness as Mother led me back home.

“Yes,” I said. “We’re the same after all.”

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HE FINDS AN ACORN WEARING A BONNET by Katie Piper

July 28, 2020 · Fiction

Leaves look like they were almost autumn for a moment. Most are pocked with black scars, as if cigarettes have been stubbed out and the ash has coagulated in their papery veins.

My fingers feel gritty–that’s what they said to me last time, ‘your placenta is gritty’ –and so I felt the shame of geriatric pregnancy, as if I had a rheumatoid uterus, or bulbous eggs at 40.

My own brutality has come out of season, and , I keep searching, even though I won’t find what I’m looking for. It’s one of those days, and I can only see the ordinaries, so I know this acorn won’t turn up for me, and I do nothing in rhythm on these days. An off- kilter state has to be accepted, or ridden on until sleep comes.

I sit on the bench in the main street. I’ve forgotten where I am in my scavenging. He is still in the coffee shop queue. I can just make him out through the foggy door. I look up and down the street for a clue of something better, but there’s nothing or at least nothing my eyes are willing to see. Then I realize I’m cold, mostly my peripheries–my pelvis is hot, though. My pad feels like an iron that’s cooling with elements of hot and cold. It will be heavy and sodden when we walk back because it will be past capacity, unable to catch all from the split seam. I haven’t told him yet.

We will walk back up the street, arms linked, and he will have a lift in his step because he sees the season of preparation. Preparing to nest, to go inwards with our bundle, to be rid of what we don’t need so we can nurture our newborn. He doesn’t see the ordinaries yet, and I want to stave them off, for him, for a little longer.

Until he trudges back down the street toward me, with an acorn wearing a bonnet. I know you love these, he says.

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HAP’S by Wilson Koewing

July 26, 2020 · Fiction

Harry and Al were at the bar when I showed for my six o’clock at Hap’s. A young couple smoked in the back booth; a bluish cloud hovered over them. Four roughs fresh off a rig huddled around bottles at a tall table. Decent crowd all told.

I prefer showing at six instead of four. It’s hard on Huck since I’m here until two, but the four to twelve loses late-night tips and four to six isn’t money anyway.

That time of evening the sun cuts sharp angles across the bar so bad you can’t sit some places. I ducked and moved around bullet trails of sunlight staying busy.

“Claire, what’s Huck up to?” Al asked.

“Watching the baby and his shows.”

“Whatever happened to that college boy used to come in carrying on about you?” Harry said. “Seemed awfully smitten.”

“Just another barking at the tree, Harry.”

“You didn’t seem to mind.”

“Anyone can look and say what they think about what they see,” I said. “Free country, still.”

“I’m not so sure,” Harry said.

Harry wasn’t long divorced. Al was long since. Can’t imagine the friendship helped either. Those two aren’t all bad, but the women they get in with all are.

I remembered the college boy. Corn fed, blonde mop. Somewhere Midwest raised. Football player at UT Permian Basin, so not much good at it. I was flattered, but Huck and I been together ages, plus the youngin’.

I set sights on wiping glasses clear and Harry and Al hunkered down to discuss things that had been and could of.

The sun settled and the night crept calm until Kenneth showed up the same time the young couple was leaving. He watched them go with their hands in each other’s back pockets, buzzed, and making no attempt to hide what they’d be embarking upon next.

“Always the same sad fucks in here,” Kenneth said, dropping a duffel bag on the bar with a clank.

Kenneth lost work at the refinery about six months now. Each time in it’s worse.

“How you making out, Kenneth?” Harry asked.

“Hell is it to you, old man?”

“You little piss ant—,” Al said.

Harry grabbed Al’s arm.

“Fuck’d you say, old man river?”

“Let it go, Kenneth,” Harry said. “He’s a drunk.”

Kenneth and Al stared each other down.

“Double whiskey, beer, Claire,” Kenneth said.

I slid a double whiskey and a Lone Star. Kenneth killed the whiskey then hurt the Lone Star.

Around the same time, a fella wandered in who appeared lost. Noticed the emblem on his jacket—West Texas Wind—and hoped Kenneth didn’t.

“You ain’t even gotta say it, fella,” Kenneth said, noticing.

“What’ll it be, hon’?” I asked the wind man.

“Tequila and a beer, ma’am.”

“You here about the wind?” Kenneth asked.

“Ah hell, Kenneth,” Al said. “Leave him alone.”

“I said you here about the wind, boy?”

Kenneth got close enough to kiss him and poked a stiff finger into the wind emblem.

“Yeah, you are.”

“Kenneth, don’t you have anything better to do than harass people just trying to take a load off?” Harry asked.

“No, Harry, I don’t,” Kenneth returned to staring at the wind man.

“We still putting this on grandma Margie’s tab, Kenneth?” I asked.

A hush fell over the bar and it felt awfully like I shouldn’t have said it. But I can’t very well let Kenneth make everyone uncomfortable because he’s on the low and has been.

“Huck know you got stones to talk to men that way?” Kenneth said. “Out here making money for a baby he can’t support?”

Harry held Al back.

“What are you going to do, old man?” Kenneth said. “Besides make me mad?”

“Kenneth, you never heard of a man staying at home with a baby, and a woman making the money to support it?” I said. “Attitude like that might be the reason you’ve got woman troubles.”

“You’re right, Claire, I’m sorry.” Kenneth said after a moment. “That was out of line.”

“He ain’t sorry,” Al grumbled.

I poured Kenneth another double hoping to make peace.

“Best get control of this old son of a bitch,” Kenneth said.

I pushed a tequila and a frothy draft in front of the wind man. The others watched like I was the momma and him the favorite. He sipped the tequila. I knew he was in for it.

“Jesus, you fuck that way, too, boy?” Kenneth said. “You drink like a damn baby. You probably spew in a second.”

Kenneth killed his whiskey in a gulp.

“Miss, I believe I’ll settle up,” the wind man said.

“He ain’t paying yet,” Kenneth said, slamming his fist on the bar.

“He can pay if he wants,” I said.

“He ain’t fuckin’ leavin’.”

Kenneth watched me slide the bill over, watched him sign and slide it back.

“Leave, I’ll shoot you dead, wind man,” Kenneth said.

The wind man fell blank as a simple one. All the air in my lungs rushed out at once and I couldn’t figure out how to let any more in. Harry and Al stared at their bottles.

Kenneth finished his Lone Star and addressed his terrified audience.

“I’m sure ya’ll know Carrie left don’t ya?”

“I’d heard,” Harry said.

“Who could blame her?” Al said.

Harry stared at Al with eyes big as a couple planets.

“You’re lucky I like you, Al,” Kenneth said.

“I like you, too, Kenneth,” Al said.

I witnessed something bad click in Kenneth as Two Tickets to Paradise by Eddie Money came on the jukebox. He and Carrie danced to it in Hap’s one night must have been eight months. Only two dancing at first. By the second time the chorus hit, whole bar was dancing.

“Ya’ll know what happened?” Kenneth asked.

No one seemed hot to answer.

“Give me another,” he yelled in no particular direction.

“He’s had enough, Claire,” Harry said.

The wind man remained still.

I poured Kenneth another and promised myself it’d be the last.

“Carrie’s staying at the Royal Inn with a new fella,” Kenneth said. “A Mexican.”

“Maybe it’s time to move on, Kenneth,” Harry said.

“No, Harry, I don’t believe it is,” Kenneth said.

“Seems clear she doesn’t want you around,” Al said. “Ought to respect a woman’s wishes.”

“Yeah, well maybe her new fella isn’t supposed to be in America at all,” Kenneth said.

Kenneth dug in his duffel and pulled out a pistol.

Until then, I hadn’t a clue what I believed Kenneth capable of. In the moment, I couldn’t be sure of what I believed him not.

“Now, Kenneth, listen–,” Al said.

“Al, I do like you,” Kenneth said, “But you need to learn when to shut up.”

Kenneth pushed Harry aside and pistol-whipped Al. He crumbled to the floor. The wind man blew right out the door running.

I wrapped ice in a towel and hustled around the bar.

The oil men stood at the commotion. A bar chair crashed to the floor.

Then Kenneth pulled out an AR-15 and spun it to sit the oil men down.

“I’m going to that fucking motel,” Kenneth said. “Who wants to stop me?”

No heroes among us.

Kenneth lowered the rifle, tossed the duffel over his shoulder and pushed open the door. The darkness outside consumed him.

I dialed 911 and said what happened.

“He’s going to get himself killed,” Harry said.

“I hope he does,” Al said. “Tired of him ruining my drinking.”

***

When I got home, the news was on every channel. Huck scooped me up and squeezed so tight I remembered feeling. You see love when someone’s face betrays that they’ve been thinking how much they’d miss you.

Kenneth was dead. Shot by police. Killed Carrie, her lover and six others. Stalked the second-floor balcony executing whoever came out. I wouldn’t have believed it if you told me.

I went in the nursery. The youngin’ was sleeping sound. I kissed her tiny head. It still felt fuzzy and smelled new. She rustled just a touch. I sensed Huck watching from the doorway.

“Let’s go to bed,” Huck said.

We spooned in the silent darkness of our little bedroom in our little house. He ain’t nothing but sweet. I turned over and we got to kissing. Then my clothes were sliding off just like perfection. I figure if we’re living in a world this confusing and full of hate, nothing I can witness will stop me from making love.

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COME HERE, I WANT TO TELL YOU SOMETHING by Jamy Bond

July 24, 2020 · Fiction

Sometimes, I would catch her peering through a crack in my bedroom door as I changed, watching me with those blue dagger eyes. “Do you think you need some new bras?” she might say later, “those no longer seem to fit.” A way of letting me know what she’d seen.

Locks were not allowed in our house, not even in the bathroom, and sometimes she would stand outside of the door while I bathed, chatting away like we were friends. She’d rattle the doorknob, just to let me know she could come in if she wanted to.

Come here, I want to tell you something, she’d say. It always made my stomach drop, my throat freeze, a strong metallic taste creep into mouth. “Your dad has some disease. But he wants me to touch it anyway. He wants me to put it in my mouth.”

I was 12 and had kissed a boy once under the strobe lights at the roller rink. He pressed his tongue between my lips. He tasted like root beer and ripe bananas.

Sometimes she would press up close to my friend, Rick, when he came to see me. “You’re too young for boyfriends,” she’d say. One time she gave Rick a Coke and sat on the porch in her black miniskirt, talking nonstop while he watched her crossing and uncrossing her legs.

Come here, I want to tell you something. “My father used to beat my mother. But I was always on his side. She complained too much. She whined all the time. She deserved it.”

Sometimes, she’d call me into the bathroom to keep her company while she bathed, the shower curtain wide open so I could see her rubbing her breasts with soap. “Don’t forget our secret,” she’d say. “A girl stays loyal to her mother. Always.”

Once, I took a knife from the kitchen and crawled under my bed, pressed the sharp blade against my arm until the skin split, bloody and warm. If I were to cut her open what would I find inside? No pulsing organs. No human meat. A yellow, waxy slime.

Sometimes I hid in the closet, beneath a pile of old blankets that smelled like mold, and tried to merge with the quiet and the darkness. I tried to melt into nothing, into non-matter, into liquid that evaporates, into dust that scatters, into rising ash.

Come here, I want to tell you something. “Lie down with me. Hold me close. Consider yourself lucky. You have me to take care of you,” she’d say. “When I was a little girl, I had no one.”

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NEANDERTHAL by Noa Covo

July 23, 2020 · Fiction

Two months after we get married, my husband tells me he is the last Neanderthal on Earth. We are nestled together on the couch when he says it, and I can tell he is serious. I do not laugh. I ask him how long he’s known. He says he first found out when he was a teenager. An archaeologist came to his school, as part of an attempt to encourage rural Americans to get into science. After the assembly, my husband was called to the principal’s office.

I imagine my husband on his way to the office, his shoulders hunched and his arms swinging like pendulums. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s never gotten in trouble for anything. I ask him if he was chewing gum, and my husband shakes his head and continues.

The archaeologist was waiting for him in the office. He’d seen him at the assembly and wanted a closer look. He ran his large, white hands over my husband’s head and asked him questions about his family he did not know how to answer. In the end, he turned to my husband and told him he was probably the last Neanderthal on Earth. I knew he was right, my husband says, because I’ve always felt different, not quite human, I’m too short, my head is too big. I trace my husband’s jawline as he tells me this. I wonder what he told the archaeologist about his family, if he told him that he was found on the steps of a church as an infant, with nothing but a blanket wrapped around his pale body. I do not ask him that. Instead, I ask him if he thinks his biological parents were Neanderthals, too.

My husband gets up off the couch and goes to the kitchen. Maybe, he says, arms swinging. Maybe they wanted me to live a better life. I picture his family living in the cave behind the strip mall, where high-schoolers go to drink cheap beer. I imagine them scavenging berries and eating Doritos crumbs, I imagine them giving up their little Neanderthal baby to Homo sapiens, so that he’d have a future in this fast moving world. After that evening, he doesn’t bring it up again, and neither do I.

A few months later, my parents take us to a museum. I don’t want to go, but my husband does. He loves my parents, or rather their stability, so unlike his Neanderthal biological parents or his dead adopted ones. My parents are two old people that get excited over television reruns and travelling exhibits, and for my husband, they are everything.

We step into a hall full of ancient pottery. My parents stick close to the walls, leaning in to read the signs full of small print. My husband and I walk together, hand in hand, away from the glass. I pause to look at one of the pieces, a pot cracked down the side but miraculously intact. I feel my husband drift off with the flow of visitors. I wonder what ended up cracking this pot, preserved for thousands of years, if it was found cracked or if some intern ruined it, a careless action becoming a dark secret. When I look up, my husband is gone. I walk past the pots until I find him at the beginning of a new exhibit. He is staring at a drawing of a reconstructed face, a Neanderthal woman with kind, brown eyes, smiling down at the two of us.

My husband begins to cry under her soft gaze. I run my hands over his enlarged skull, over his swinging arms, I stare up at the wise Neanderthal woman. I wish she could come to life and embrace my husband like a mother, that she could tell me some ancient wisdom, that she could teach me to heal his pain. Instead, she just smiles, unaware that she has left the last of her species all alone.

x-r-a-y magazine

DEAR SOPHIE by Emma Brankin

July 22, 2020 · Fiction

Dear Sophie,

Congratulations on the happiness.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

You look so in love. I love the dress, love the shoes, love the veil! I wish you a lifetime of love.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

How did you lose so much weight? I thought you were off coke. I have collarbone envy.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

Your pictures are deluding me into believing there is a Prince Charming out there for each of us.

I want what you have. Seriously.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

I’m typing this from the comfort of my crumb-strewn sofa, wondering what you are up to right now. I keep checking my Instagram feed but nobody’s uploaded anything for thirty minutes. Are you mid-first dance, gazing into his eyes, underscored by a simpering Ed Sheeran track?

It does not pass me by that you are swirling around in a haze of romance while I sit on my sofa bleeding into an industrial-sized nappy.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

Finally, somebody posted the cake cutting photo! The braids, the nude lipstick, the downcast eyes… this demure bride vibe is really working for you. You could never tell you were a couple who met at a Barrowlands rave.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

Living vicariously through you is all I have.

Colin has fallen asleep after his third beer, so I’ve paused the true-crime documentary about bank-robbing priests he wanted to watch. I’m definitely not buying his insistence that he’s here because “this is happening to both of us”. He’s just here so he can say he was here if anyone ever finds out.

“Happening to both of us.”

It certainly didn’t feel like that when I was the one wheeled down a hospital corridor as he waved me off with a copy of Private Eye in one hand and a breakfast burrito in the other. Although, how much sympathy can you demand from your ex-boyfriend as you reunite for one last hurrah in the abortion clinic? I might write in to Dear Deirdre.Maybe, as it’s “happening to both of us,” I’ll ask Colin to also wear a nappy before he fucks off back to his new girlfriend. He’s so insistent on coming across as sincere during his attempt at bedside “support” that he’d probably put it on. And I’d probably still stay in love with him.

I am the worst. Well, second worst. After Colin obviously.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

I will send this email this time.

I am going to get the congratulatory tone bang on. I will focus on the sacred, beautiful bond of marriage and not talk about how I cried in the recovery room thinking about how the only thing left tying me to Colin is gone.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

Colin looks so peaceful. It’s so pathetic. I just want to mold my body into his and pretend nothing has happened. Not his cheating. Not the break-up. Not the endless “what should we do?” conversations. I want to go back to blissful delusion about the strength of our relationship.

Actually, now that I’ve been staring at him for so long, he’s starting to look less peaceful and more… smug. Fuck, he really is smug, isn’t he? With his stupid, smug, asleep face. I bet that whatever dream he’s having right now, he’s being a proper bell-end in it.

How have you willingly chosen to spend a lifetime with an actual human man?

Good fucking luck.

Love,

Amy

Delete

Dear Sophie,

I have always liked your Ally. He might be a druggie but he’s kind and he adores you. I’m guessing in his toast he told the story about how he knew you were the one when you took his cat on a walk with a lead?

But, tonight is not the night for me to listen to heartfelt declarations of love. Tonight is the night for me to delve into the Netflix documentary that nobody’s talking about. I really think these priests might pull this heist off, you know.

Help.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,I’m going to do it. I’m going to explain. I’m going to tell you that you are a wonderful friend, a wonderful bride and are now going to be a wonderful wife. I’m going to be better than this.

But first, I’m going to go take a tramadol. Maybe two.Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

I am so sorry your marriage has been the stick with which I have mercilessly flogged myself this evening.

I want to be happy for you.

You have always been there for me. Who else do I know who can fashion a bra out of toilet paper during a low-hanging nipple emergency at the club? Who else would get us invited and then disinvited to a Drake afterparty? (I think Drake secretly loved your attempt to twerk a path into his private booth). And who else would demand an autograph from the cloakroom attendant you insisted was “that wee Krankie boy?” In fact, it’s impressive how often you misidentify people as “that wee Krankie boy” whether drunk or sober.

But I couldn’t be there for you today. This unscheduled impregnation has been a real inconvenience to my body, my sanity, and my relationship with you.

I know I should have spoken to you about not attending. Sending a text was cowardly. And I should have been honest about the reason I’m not there. I guess I wanted to spare you my 83rd tired recital of “I know you told me Colin was bad news but…”

I want to be honest with you now. Colin cheated on me. And when he got caught out, he just shrugged and trotted off to the problem-free other woman (the definition of problem-free being that she doesn’t know she’s the other woman). And I then, of course, fertilized whatever sperm of his was left inside me to give our relationship the muddled, depressing ending it truly deserved.

When I look back, I see what you saw. How his every “I love you” was painfully extracted and only offered to pacify and placate me. How he would be distant and cold whenever something was important to me. How his flat was approaching serial-killer level tidy.

But I also still see all the times we laughed.

Sophie, when I told him I was pregnant he cried. He said he was sorry for the way he had treated me. He sat with me for hours. In a horrible way, it was everything I had ever wanted. I do wonder if I agreed to the operation because I care more about making him happy than I care about making myself sad.

I’m looking forward to the slow and painful process of re-growing my backbone.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

I will cope with this on my own. Grief and pain have no business intruding on your wedding day. And it’s important for me to become more self-sufficient anyway. You won’t always be able to come around and criticize my 3 a.m. ASOS panic orders. Recently it’s taken you days to reply when I send new Chris Hemsworth surfing photos. Pretty soon you’ll only be attending drag queen karaoke every other month.

I need to get used to not always turning to you in a crisis.

Hopefully, I’ve hit my crisis-limit anyway. I’ve lost a baby, a boyfriend, what was left of my dignity and, now, I’m sort of losing you too.I think I’ll be OK.Although, you better keep contributing memes to our Love Island Whatsapp group.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

There’s one final thing I won’t tell you. I’ll never tell you. The operation didn’t have to be today. I chose it. I chose to miss your wedding. I chose to be that person who could not look you in the eye and say “congratulations.” I couldn’t do it. Not when I was failing so spectacularly at the fundamental basics of life.

I chose to suck.

You know when we went to France and you ended up making out with that hideously sweaty ex-soap actor? In the morning your voice cracked as you admitted how lonely you were and I promised that I’d comfort you after I threw up. I didn’t throw up. I sat on the toilet, staring at my phone, wondering why Colin had not replied to my texts for two days. Then I came out and pretended I was fine.

You met Ally one month later. I’m still pretending. I’ll keep pretending.I won’t send this.

Sorry.

Love,

Amy

Delete.

Dear Sophie,

Congratulations! I am so sad I couldn’t be there. I can’t wait to hear all about it when you get back from the honeymoon.

Love,

Amy

x-r-a-y magazine

FOR OUR OWN PROTECTION by Kara Oakleaf

July 21, 2020 · Fiction

After the white-hot blast flashed across the sky, after the air turned toxic and we all zipped ourselves up inside government-issued suits like garbage bags, our breath misting on the clear plastic squares that let us see through our hoods, I started watching Jay.

He’s always been across the street, as much a fixture as the maples lining the sidewalks before the flash, before everything burned and the trees became charred silhouettes. After school, Jay used to push the mower in neat rows across the front yard while I sat on the porch with my homework. That boy walking toward me and away from me over and over again, steady as a metronome. On the hottest days, he’d yank off his t-shirt and wrap it around his head, the fabric collapsing down on his shoulders like a waterfall.

These images come back to me now, things I’d barely noticed in all those years of living only a few steps away, but that were so much a part of the beautiful, ordinary before-time that they imprinted themselves into me. Now he’s hidden in that suit, and every small memory of his body shines like a ghost.

The suits didn’t come right away. Only in the weeks after the flash, after they tested us, made us breathe into glass test tubes and swabbed our skin. Just a precaution, they said. We closed the plastic casings around ourselves and listened to the plastic crinkle of our new footsteps.

When the lab results came back three weeks later, they told us the chemicals were a part of us now, stitched into our DNA. They’d watched the poison bloom under microscopes, and when they told us the toxicity grew on contact, that it would spread and strengthen each time we touched each other’s skin, no one was surprised. It didn’t take long, encased in those suits, to learn that everything needs touch to grow, that feeling another person’s fingers on your skin is like taking a breath after long minutes of being under water.

Most days, it’s too hot to sit on the porch. I wait at the windows to see if the singed branches of the maples will push out new buds, but nothing is blossoming here. Outside, heat rises from the sidewalks and makes waves in the air when I stare across the street from the front windows. Even the oxygen is melting, blurring Jay’s house into a kind of mirage. When he comes outside, I try to make out the shape of his body under all the layers that keep us alive.

At the end of our street, they installed sixteen steel showers, where we strip down behind heavy, bolted doors and stand under a rush of cold water. We’re supposed to use standard-issue washcloths that scrape us like sandpaper, but sometimes, I press my fingertips to my stomach, or to the soft spot on my neck where the blood pounds against my skin. The steady hum of a body, a pulse. I don’t know if my bare fingers against my own skin can grow the toxins, if these stolen moments of touch put me in more danger, but I can’t stop.

Inside the steel tube showers, I try to make out my reflection, a pale blur against the gray. It’s been months since I’ve seen myself in a mirror without the white plastic suit covering everything I once knew of myself, and I’m beginning to forget my own body.

And then one day, when I’m zipped back into my suit and step out of the showers back onto the street, I see another figure standing down the block, motionless and facing me. You’d think everyone looks the same in these suits, but I know the way he stands, the space his body takes up in the middle of our wrecked street. And now I know he’s been watching me, too.

It’s the middle of the night when I follow Jay through the neighborhood, toward the showers. In the dark, I can almost believe there was never a flash, that trees are only bare for a season, that the streetlights are only out because of a power surge, something temporary and fixable.

We slide the steel doors closed behind us and the sound of them closing is like the slice of a knife. His face is behind a cloud of breath until he pulls off the hood and then it’s like his skin is glowing and I don’t know if it’s the toxins or just the simple fact of a face, uncovered and inches away from me. It doesn’t matter, because when I’ve let my own suit fall down around me, I reach up and touch it, his cheeks on my palms and then his hands are on my waist and pulling me toward him.

And even though I’d never done this in the before-time, it feels like a memory. This is what skin feels like, this rush of heat, muscles contracting under a surface, a body itself as a kind of landscape, and whatever the flash in the sky has taken away from us, this landscape, these bodies are still here, breathing against each other and pulsing with something, either our own blood or something toxic that’s going to stop our breath sooner than we expect.

I listen for the sound of our own atoms splitting apart and dissolving back into each other because for just this moment, there’s something else white-hot melting and about to consume us, and this flash, this heat is our own making, and maybe something we can survive.

After, Jay turns on the cold water and we stand together shivering, goosebumps popping up on our skin like armor, something to protect against whatever we’ve just done to each other, what I already know, even as I breathe in the new danger that’s grown between us, we’ll do again, and again, and again.

x-r-a-y magazine

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