X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

HYDROGEN AND HELIUM by Peter Krumbach

May 10, 2021 · Fiction

I misspell people’s faces. Cup them in my palms, kiss some, give a playful tug on the jowls of others. Good evening. Never better. Burghers of landfills and oak-lined boardrooms, white-collar criminals and donors of kidneys. Calculated together, they equal a mean designed to obscure the edges. I apologize, parties do this to me. The low ceiling track lights, the shag underfoot, the heads bobbing like olives in brine. I could have sworn it was Frank. Dressed as Biff. I bend to greet the elders collapsed in mid-century chairs. Boredom, meet urgency. I bend to your aunt Wilma, who turns out to be your stepfather’s 94-year-old cousin Lou. Forgive me. To regard the room is to learn constellations. The ochre in the white of certain eyes. I’m not the only one bending. Notice Larry–or is it Barry–how he bows to smell the toothpick-pierced prosciutto rolls. Do I need air? Out on the deck, two PhDs and an Anglican dean lighting a blunt. Why did the universe start off with hydrogen and helium? The PhDs chuckle. Way too young for their degrees. The dean holds his breath, then exhales fine haze. Pardon my bladder. On the bathroom mirror, someone wrote N = R × f_p × n_e × f_l × f_i × f_c × L in coral rouge. Stepping out, I hear someone suggest a duel by the pool. A reenactment of Pushkin versus d’Anthès. A thousand dreams that never were. For you, I play Pushkin. It works. I come to supine, you kneeling in the grass, hand on my head. I point at the leaves. Red, white, red, white, the ambulance strobe-lights salsa with the trees.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THE ROAD 2 NOWHERE by KKUURRTT

May 7, 2021 · Fiction

My friend Brian joined a cult. He was always doing stupid shit like that. This one time when we were fifteen he jumped off a bridge cause fucking Mike Langer dared him to. He broke his shinbone when he hit the water and spent the rest of summer in a cast. It wasn’t all bad though. Langer sold weed and gave him a half-ounce for free because he felt terrible about daring him to do it even though we were playing Truth or Dare on a bridge which was dumb on everybody’s part. Honestly, we’re lucky it came up as short as it did on broken bones. We smoked that grass all summer long and had the time of our lives in many respects, so sometimes you come up on the downstroke I guess.

They were called Harmony Home and were based out of—fuck—actually, I don’t know where they were based out of even. I’m not gonna sit here and pretend like I have the facts. I don’t have the facts. I don’t have shit. All I know is they are spread out across the country and Brian got roped into it while living in Seattle trying to write grunge songs even though rock has been dead since before Sonic Youth broke up.

He and I lost touch like most people who went to high school together. Come on, don’t lie to yourself and tell me some bullshit line about how you still have the exact same friends as the ones you grew up with. You totally might still talk to the homies from way back but it’s not the same, is it? Something’s definitely missing, even if you’ve never been able to place exactly what that missing was. With Brian, it was always a whole bunch of weird shit that just didn’t compute. It made a whole hell of a lot more sense when he turned out to be the type of dude to get roped into following a guy named Steven LightSource like he’s the second coming of Christ. Sell his shit and shave his hair and go full steam ahead like other people do with stand-up comedy or Kickstarter campaigns or love.

Like the majority of Brian’s acquaintances, I saw this all go down on Facebook. It went from wow Brian’s posting an awful lot about this, to shit well ok, now he’s signing off permanently to join them in the woods and become one with himself and the universe simultaneously. All right buddy whatever makes your knees knock at night. The real problem was that Brian wasn’t the only one. This wasn’t some isolated incident or anything. Harmony Home has more followers than Jesus. I think I know three or four to be honest.

But now I’m on a bus with his Dad up to central Oregon, heading towards the compound they think he might possibly, theoretically, hopefully be at. Nobody has heard hare nor hide nor hello from him for well over twelve months and they are getting worried that maybe he drank the Kool-Aid or worse, but I don’t know what’s worse. I’m here because Bill asked me to come up with him. Bill was my Basketball coach in middle school and he still plays golf with my Dad. He thinks that since Brian and I have been friends since childhood seeing me will trigger something and make him be all like yeah, let’s fuck this popsicle stand. I’m not so sure about that, but it beats working. If Bill’s gonna pay me the money I’d normally make painting houses for him, fine I’ll be his deprogrammer. I’ll be whatever he wants me to be.

We cross the border and the bus pulls off the highway following a sign for McDonalds. 1.2 Miles says the sign but who’s counting. There’s a Jack in the Box across the street but we stop at McDonalds. Coffee and fuel so when we finally land and are ready to get to work it’s not like shit let’s get a bagel first. I don’t know what Mr. Rollins has planned but I don’t do so hot on an empty stomach.

“You want anything?” I ask the old man. His wearied eyes pour over a book about Harmony House that he took out from the library over by my house. He didn’t sleep a wink all ride. I slept like a baby.

“Bill?”

“Oh, uh…” he says, trying to pretend like he heard me the first time. “Large coffee, cream, two sugars,” he responds as if present and accounted for this whole time. “And I don’t know, an Egg McMuffin or whatever you can get them to leave cheese off of.”

“Roger.”

I hop off the bus, feet hitting pavement simultaneously. Sometimes I imagine myself landing skateboard tricks that I’ve never been brave enough to try in real life.

Fiddle around with the pipe in my pocket as I make my way around back instead of through the entrance like I’m supposed to. Next to a dumpster I sprinkle some green in the thumbprint indent on top of the bowl. I ground this flower up before we left, knowing full well that if I wanted to smoke anything this trip it would have to do it fast and loose. Lips, lighter, and the smoke hits my lungs. Hold it for a five count like I’ve been doing since Brian and I first started back in 2002. I have to be stoned to make it through this weekend. Or maybe it will be just the reminder that Brian needs to help snap his brain back to basics. Get all those cultoids so faded that they’ll be like this shit is wack, man you saved us, and those pretty cult girls will be like show me what a real man fucks like.

An Egg McMuffin hold the American for the old man and the Big Breakfast with Hotcakes for me, two large coffees, all the cream all the sugar. The girl behind the counter is this beautiful girl who couldn’t have been older than seventeen. Too much eyeshadow on, like maybe she was trying to look older but probably really because she listens to punk rock and is too young to have style with it. I want to talk to her about The Misfits or Morrissey but I’m too stoned to sound like a normal human and would probably just seem like I’m hitting on her. Which I guess I sort of would be, but only not really. It’s fun to flirt with teenage girls the same way it is with old ladies, like they love it and it makes them feel special but nothing’s going to come of it, because come on. Man those peepers pop and I could get absolutely lost in them for a lifetime if I didn’t have business to take care of, like literal transactional business.

“$17.18” she says like we’re talking about anything else. I want to say something clever. Same as you, right? Seventeen? Eighteen? And then she’d smile at me and we’d get out of there and I’d take her under my wing and protect her like Cherie Currie and the Runaways, but after a while with those doe eyes batting at me all the time we’d become something more and go live in Portland where this kind of age gap is not only accepted it’s encouraged. We’d open a coffee-shop/book-store/performance-space where we could live happily ever after and I wouldn’t have to deal with any of this bullshit.

Instead I say, “uhh yeah,” and fish into my pockets for that crumpled twenty I shoved in there on my way out of the house. I accidentally pull the pipe out with the bill and boy do those mascara monsters take in an eyeful like it’s some sort of lost fucking Indiana Jones treasure, but I guess it would be to a girl in East Klamath Falls, Oregon who probably hasn’t even heard of The Melvins yet. My eyes are shifty but we still manage to make contact. I smile uncomfortably, knowing I’ve blown it with the love of my life but it didn’t matter because I’ll never see her again. I pay with a $20 and don’t even wait for the change.

The whole bus is waiting for me after another quick detour to get high again adds an extra five past the time I was supposed to be back. Bill won’t let them leave though like he’s some sort of stand up guy for having my back, but really it’s just that he knows he can’t handle any of this without me. Imagine that! Me being a support system for anything! My therapist would be so proud.

“Thanks Bill.” I hand him the bag and plop my ass into the seat that’s meant for a man about four inches shorter and forty pounds lighter.

“Bus driver says we’re about two hours outside of Bend. We’ll rent a car there and get a hotel for the night. Get our heads screwed on right before we hit the road again.” “Okay.”

Bill sleeps the whole way to Bend and I can’t stop thinking. Funny.

Sitting in this Holiday Inn, I look out the window at a Best Buy across the concrete. The sun is out and Bill is snoring louder than a motorcycle with a fresh muffler testing out its new system at Sturgis. VRZZZZZTT—VRZZZZZZT—VRZZZZZZZT. Poor Guy. Guess I would be tuckered out too if I was dealing with the most stressful thing I’d ever dealt with. The hardest thing I had to do was bury my Mom, but my Dad did most of the work and it was so long ago now that I don’t remember if the pain was really that real or I’m just imagining it now.

I decide to take a stroll through the store and end up in the DVD section looking at the back of The Master hoping to gain some inkling of insight. Hmmm… Philip Seymour Hoffman gone too soon, that’s the best I got. I place it back on the shelf and move up the alphabet to Cheech & Chong: Up in Smoke, which reminds me…

Behind the box store next to the folded boxes, I’m cheefing through a bowl like there’s four or five of us passing it around. But it’s just me. It’s always just me. I don’t know why any of this matters.

When I wake up Bill’s already down having a hotel breakfast. I take a seat with my plate of sausage links and look at my Dad’s friend and not my friend’s Dad. He’s head down in that book again like it’s got the solution to his problems and isn’t just leaving him with a better understanding of why his son left his no-job, no-girlfriend, living-in-his-parents-basement existence behind. I roll the meat tubes around with my fork wondering what really makes this man in front of me tick. Is it really about saving his son? Or is it more about saving face? What if his son already is saved? What if after we get there father and son look each other in the eyes and we just turn around and go home? Nothing needs saving here he’ll say and we’ll take the long ride back to Carlsbad in complete silence. I swear if that happens I won’t say a word.

From Bend we fill up on gas twice, get a cup of coffee each, and I take approximately one piss. When we end up in a town called Burns I know it’s the place before Bill even tells me. It’s just got the vibe.

Turns out Bill never really had too much of a plan, which I find out the hard way after he drives through town and parks somewhere inconspicuous on the outskirts. He turns to me and says: “So what do you got?” Like I’m the one here to save my son.

“Uhh…” I say. “Shit,” he says.

He drops me off at the diner, Frank & Marys, with a vague plan of “finding out information.” I put it in quotes because he did when he said it like there was some sort of extra meaning I wasn’t entirely getting. He tells me that he’d do it if he could but he can’t because he looks like a cop. That he’ll sit in his car and think of next steps while I dig around with the locals. Bill leaves me with a twenty and a boot out the passenger side and tells me to call him if I find anything.

Tuna Melt, Coffee all the milk all the sugar. Sit at the counter and MARY, that’s what her name tag says, can hardly even look at me when she takes my order. Another young person stumbling around Burns looking for the quick and easy path to salvation that Steven LightSource advertised on his YouTube channel. I watched one or two of the videos when Brian first disappeared but it all seemed like metaphysical mumbo jumbo to me with the real truths hidden behind the paywall.

“For 9.99 a month you can have unlimited access to the ‘Source of Eternal Happiness.’ Subscribe here.” No thanks. I’ve got Netflix

Mary drops off my plate and it clatters on the counter like it only can in cartoons. She tops off my coffee letting it steam just like I like it, piping hot, too much to even drink yet. I want to ask if she knows where Harmony House is but know it would become some awkward thing where I have to backtrack and explain myself like no I’m not trying to join—my friend is there and I’m trying to rescue him—I don’t have to explain myself to you MARY.

A girl slides in next to me and orders a bacon cheeseburger and a Coke. She’s pretty in a way directly marketed to me like when you’re talking about a product on the phone and then all of a sudden that exact product is in your Instagram feed. She smiles at me. I turn away.

“Do I know you from somewhere?” she asks.“Yeah yeah.” I say brushing her off.“No seriously,” she continues. “Kurt?”

I mean that’s my name so obviously I turn.

“Oh my God that is you! What are you doing out here?” She says.“I should ask you the same thing.”

I take a look at her face trying to place it. It does look familiar, but my mind has been playing tricks on me lately. The other day I watched an entire movie start to finish before realizing I’d seen it already. The last frame was a total oh shit you’ve seen this moment, but with two whole hours of NOTHING before that.

We eye each other for a long time while she makes faces that she must think will help jog something. They don’t. Finally: “Sam? Samantha Kersaw…”

Still nothing.

“Come on. We dated for a little at ASU. I sold mushrooms.”FUCK I had dated this girl. I think. Pretty sure I broke up with her over text. “Oh shit! How’ve you been?” I say, trying to deflect years of built-up anxiety in the turn of a friendly phrase.

“Great, Kurt. I’ve been really great.” She says before jumping right into it like she’s got no shame whatsoever about being in a cult. Because I guess to her it’s not a cult. It just is. “Have you heard of Harmony Home?”

What utter convenience, right? Travel 700 miles just to run into a girl I used to fuck in college. Or did we ever? It’s not that surprising though, not really. Harmony Home has a tendency to target former or current drug abusers like Brian, Sam and myself. It’s part of their ‘thing’ according to that New York Times exposé that Bill read out loud from on the first leg of our trip. And plus, the world is a minuscule place full of happenstance and coincidence. Synchronicity is as universal as any other thing that happens regularly.

“It’s the um—” I want to say cult I want to say cult I want to say cult—“religious organization that I see on the news all the time.”

“Exactly! My husband and I run the Oregon chapter. It’s a dream come true really. I was so lost when you knew me back in college. Tune in, turn on, drop out was right. Just had the wrong turn on.”

Is she talking about me?

Mary scoffs as she delivers Sam’s order with the same level of spite she had with mine. Cartoon Clatter 2: The Animated Adventures of Platey and Cuppy. “Cheeseburger and Coke,” she says through gritted teeth, staring Samantha down like they’re old enemies who have had this confrontation many many times before. “You people aren’t welcome here anymore.”

“Please be reasona—”

Mary turns away, without filling me up even though I could clearly use it. My eye stays on the coffee swirling behind the glass. “Come on, let’s take a booth,” Samantha says to me. “Catch up.”

I see Mary making eye contact like don’t do it man but I can’t help myself. We pull into the stretched red leather of the booth. Classic diner fare. She barely gives me a moment to breathe before rocketing right back in.

“So, what’s the real reason you’re all the way out here in the middle of nowhere? You’re interested, right? Came to see what all the fuss is about? I can sense it on you.” I pause.

For what feels like forever.

And maybe it was.

Maybe it was 2 and 1/2 minutes.

Maybe it was eternity and she aged a thousand generations right in front of my face. Maybe it was 2 and a 1/2 seconds.

We’ll never know.

After that I say the only thing I can think to say: “You smoke?”

She doesn’t look over her shoulder, doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t look me in the eyes and tell me that every decision I’ve ever made has been wrong and I need to give up such filthy habits. No. She says, “Yeah, sure.”

I drop the twenty and we get the fuck out of there.

We smoke that bowl and then another one on the drive to Harmony Home. We pass the pipe back and forth in silence as her Jeep bounces on dirt roads that will probably never be paved. If Bill were smart he’d be following us right now, but I refuse to look over my shoulder and check. Fact of the matter is he’s not very smart. He’s probably sitting in a supermarket parking lot crying into his phone about how badly he’s failed as a father. I heard him doing that once to his girlfriend so I can only assume it's what he does every time I’m out of earshot. Maybe he’s got his finger hovering over my name in his phone, too afraid to find out what I’ve found. He never calls.

Sam rests a hand on my thigh and I feel something for the first time in a long time. It’s a familiar touch, but if I’m being completely honest, it’s not one I totally recognize. I remember a girl selling mushrooms and I remember this face, but I don’t really remember being with her in that kind of way. Life was a blur back then, Xanned out more often than not. What the fuck is wrong with me? This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife, how did I get here? Fuck, I’m high.

Windows down as we roll up to our destination and I’m greeted by a chorus of friendliness in a clearing cut out of the woods just for us. A giant mansion stands behind them like they even make houses this big? Step out of the car and both feet land at the same time like it’s some sort of compulsion. I swear it’s not. I pass through a gauntlet of smiles that look like they’ve been tipped off and waiting for my arrival. “Hi, welcome to Harmony Home, I’m Jennifer.”

“Oh, he’s got such a beautiful aura. Where did he come from?”“Once in a Lifetime, brother. Same as it ever was.”

“Anything you need just let me know, I’m your guy. Glad to have you here with us.” At the end of this hallway of humans I see a guy I know. Hey, I know that guy! “Welcome, my friend,” Brian says as I approach. His head is shaved, with a smile planted far further than ear to ear. I wonder if it connects in the back of his head or what. I don’t think I’ve ever seen his eyes as lit up and alive as they are right now. Nothing needs saving here. Turn around and go home. Brian pecks Samantha on the cheek and I slowly but surely connect the dots to who exactly is married to whom. Now, that’s fucking happenstance.

Arm on my back, Brian draws me nearer to the house. Samantha and the thirty-some others follow behind. No processional, no pomp, none of that shit. No overly excitable people asking if I’d ever heard of their lord and savior. These weren’t brainwashed monkeys. No. They are people, just regular guys and gals splitting off into casual conversations that have nothing to do with saving my soul.

I had expectations and these weren’t them.

Turns out that the ‘Source of Eternal Happiness’ isn’t anything we didn’t already have inside of us this whole time. We are in control of our own destiny. Harmony Home simply provides daily affirmations and necessities to those who seek to live a life in peace and with purpose. For $9.99 a month. Not so bad if you ask me.

I wonder how long Bill ended up waiting before he went home.

Crow Jonah Norlander

FROG CIGARETTES by Brendan Gillen

May 6, 2021 · Fiction

Two at a time, take the steps ’til I’m out of breath. Mom doesn’t know. Attic stiff with heat. Cobwebs like lightning. Know I’m after something important, just haven’t found it yet. Up here there’s a tool chest by the mannequin. Been around long as I’ve been sneaking up. Since I was seven maybe. The years feel like gym class. Around and around and leave me dizzy. The dust is thick and my eyes itch.

Not supposed to be up here because it’s where Dad used to come and hide. Maybe Mom thinks part of him is still up here and that I’ll find it. Plus, it’s dangerous. Least that’s what she thinks. Ladder is rotted, creaky, and there are nails and stuff. I even found a dead frog one time, buried it in the backyard with my baseball cards.

All kinds of junk. Typewriter with keys like busted teeth, switch knife with a comb for a blade, empty birdcage from when Nell and Coffee were alive. Mom keeps saying she’s going to clear it all out, sell some of it, but she never does, just sits and reads magazines and drinks her iced tea. Who’d want to buy this crap, anyway? Besides, I’d never let her.

There are splinters. Got one underneath my thumb skin once two years ago. Hurt real bad and I tried to fish it out with a pin from an old sewing kit, but I only jammed it in more and made it bleed. I didn’t tell Mom until a week later because my thumb started looking like a grape. She took me to Doctor Aimes who used little pliers to take it out and drain the pus. I only cried a little, I swear.

Mom took me for ice cream after and then she spanked me at home in the kitchen with the metal spatula. Almost hurt as much as the splinter, but I didn’t cry because I knew what to expect by then. Mom would start off hitting pretty hard, but by the fifth or sixth whack, her heart wasn’t in it anymore and I could tell she just wanted to go back to the magazines and iced tea. When she hits me now, she looks a little scared like she thinks one day I might start to hit back.

In the corner where the slanted roof meets the floor, there’s a TV with a hole punched through it. I’m glad it doesn’t work. TV makes people stop talking to each other. Like when Dad was still around, he and Mom would leave me the dishes in the sink and then go watch Wheel of Fortune and pretend they didn’t hate each other’s guts.

Once I even asked Mom did she hate Dad’s guts and all she said was, “Of course, but he hates mine too, so we’re even.”

Then I asked her did she hate my guts, and she smiled and said, “Not yet.”

I find a rumpled pack of cigarettes I can’t believe I never saw before in an old shoebox behind the busted TV. The pack is green and I open it up. There’s two left and one of ‘em is pretty squished. I take that one out and smell it. Smells different than when you smoke it. This was the kind Dad used to like. Or probably he still likes them, I don’t know.

I think about eating the cigarette, just something about it, but instead I tear it open and all the brown leaves sprinkle on the floor. But then I get nervous because what if another frog comes up and eats the leaves and he dies too? I make the leaves into a neat little pile and lick my fingers so the leaves stick to my fingers and I put them in my mouth. It’s gross and tastes like spoiled dirt, but I swallow it down so at least the frogs will be safe.

I go over to the mannequin and sit on the floor and pull my knees up and think about how I wish it wasn’t the first day of summer break. Summer just means trying to find things to do that aren’t the two of us pretending like Mom isn’t still sad about Dad being gone. I hate school but at least it’s something to do. That’s why I like when Mom goes out for more iced tea so I can come up here. I’ve never shown this place to anyone.

There’s a girl I like in my grade, her name is Katie Wray. She wears braids and doesn’t know I like her. It’s better that way because if I told her and she doesn’t like me back it would all be ruined. I think about bringing her up here someday. I’d tell her to watch her head for the slanting roof and be careful touching the beams because of splinters. I’d tell her I got one in my thumb a few years back and that it hurt pretty bad, but no way I’d tell her about the crying or getting spanked.

I think she’d like it up here. Who wouldn’t? I know she likes books because she’s always raising her hand to read in Mr. Foley’s class. I like hearing her read. She’s got a voice that would be nice to listen to on the phone. There are some books up here I could show her. There’s one about gardening, and a real beat up one called Find Your True Calling, and one about the birds of the Southeast. I set aside the bird one because it seems like the kind of thing Katie would like.

I stand up and stoop so I don’t bang my head. My gut gurgles and lurches to the left.

Uh oh.

I burp and taste old dirt and my stomach feels like going over a dip in the car. If I hurl up here, Mom will find out and I’ll never get to come back up again. I get a lot of spit in my mouth like when Mom makes hamburgers, except I’ve never been less hungry in my whole life and the thought of burgers makes me burp again. I pick up the bird book and take it with me and make my way backwards down the ladder.

There’s a bubble in my head and I run downstairs and through the kitchen and out into the backyard just in time because I bend over and spew right there in the grass near the birdfeeder. My eyes burn and my nose runs. I breathe and breathe until my stomach finally stops being pissed.

I sit there in the grass and start to cry because this day is nothing and summer only just started and I got spew on my t-shirt. Mom will see it when she does the wash so I think about chucking it, but then she’ll notice it’s gone because it’s the Braves one I wear all the time and if I tell her I traded it to Jasper Nicks down the street, she’ll either smack me for lying or smack me for trading away a good shirt. I feel like a dummy for crying, and that only makes me cry more.

I see something move in the grass by my shoe. It moves again and the grass sort of twitches and I see what it is. A frog.

“Hey buddy,” I say real soft and it hops closer to my foot. I want to hold it, so I move really, really slowly and carefully and don’t even dry my face. I lean over so carefully and the frog doesn’t move. He lets me pick him right up in my palm. His eyes slide around like he’s not so sure about this and his throat is moving real fast, so I say, “Hey, it’s okay, I got you.”

He’s heavier than I thought, the weight of a baseball maybe, and he feels a little like the way an orange out the fridge feels. I really want to pet him with my other hand, but I’m afraid to scare him, so instead I think about how I’m going to tell Katie about him when school starts up again in August. It’s a long way away, but I’ll remember. I’ll tell her the frog liked being in my hand because he trusted me.

There’s the pop and crunch of gravel, the sound of Mom turning into the driveway. I’ll tell her about my t-shirt because I don’t care anymore and she’ll get the spatula anyway, but for now I lower my hand and before I even get to the ground, the frog knows what to do and hops off into the grass. I lose him for a second, but then he hops again and again and off into the summer, like he’s telling me something as big as love, Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Crow Jonah Norlander

A VIEW FROM THE CITY by Elliot Alpern

May 3, 2021 · Fiction

I see the backs of your shoulders—there you are, right there—on a bench by the harbor, where it’s windy, and where there’s a nice clear view of the monster ambling toward the city.

“Hello,” I call out. You look each way, left and then right and then left again, but not behind, and so I jog lightly to your bench, take the seat beside you.

“Hello,” I say again, this time a bit breathlessly.

“Oh,” you say, “hey, I thought I heard your voice.”

You look the same. And that’s with some years, a different haircut, a sort of quiet glow that didn’t use to be there. But all of that’s garnish—you look exactly, exactly the same.

“It’s crazy,” I say, and then I look out at the water, so you can’t see yourself in my eyes. “They’re saying he’ll make landfall next month.”

“I heard that too! Yeah. I guess we’ll see. How’s your parents?”

“Fine.”

I think you do genuinely want to know how my parents are holding up, or at least my mom; I know you’d been close. Maybe closer than we were, me and you, maybe even me and Mom. But, I’m sure you understand—I can’t give you everything here.

“Good,” you say.

Maybe two, maybe three miles out into the ocean, the monster attracts a looney-tune halo of seagulls, and he walks slowly—no more than a few steps per day—but he does not rest. His is a beeline path, an inevitability by all accounts, straight for the busy heart of the city.

“I quit smoking weed,” I tell you, and immediately, I want to snatch the words back out of the air, stuff them right back down my stupid throat.

“That’s great,” you say with a smile, nodding, “that’s fantastic.”

“Did you—”

“I always hoped, you know. I just think that’s really, that’s just, great.”

“Right,” I say.

A helicopter buzzes out over the harbor, banking sharply out toward the big guy. There’s always so many on this side of the city, now—they like to keep tabs on him, I guess, or maybe they just don’t want him to get too lonely out there.

“Did you and, uh, Mark, did you guys figure out what you’re doing?” I ask. This is the hot new question of the summer. Do you know what you’re gonna do? And, do you? Does anyone?

“We’re leaving,” you say, only you say it with a weight, and an anchored rhythm, like you tried to say “I love him” and spoke the wrong language.

“Why?”

“Well we can’t stay,” you say, “obviously.” You look out at the monster in the harbor, and I look out at the monster in the harbor, and he keeps walking. He always keeps walking.

“And Mark says he’s not worried about finding something, even if it’s just running, you know, IT somewhere.”

“I’m sure.”

I am. Mark was nice the one time we met, and unfortunately rather sharp, and I remember most that he possessed a deep interest in curling. I couldn’t point you to the nearest rink.

“Do you think he’ll keep going?” I ask.

“Where?”

“Past the city. Through it, just, keep on walking. Right on through the heartlands.”

You sigh. I’m sure you tell yourself, this is why, right here, this is it. This is what you couldn’t take any longer.

“I don’t know,” you say. “Who knows. Maybe he’ll hang out on the beach.”

“Yeah. Anyway I hope it goes well,” I say. “Moving sucks. But, on to better things, which is always good.”

“Mhmm.”

You look like you want to say something else, and you do, you open your mouth to tell me, but the monster makes that sound—that annoying, lonely yelp, pitching up after a short while, like some stupid question, always the same one, over and over again. The monster so absolutely, impossibly immense, that we can hear it all these miles away, here in the city. All of us, we can all hear it getting louder, every day.

You and I could’ve left it there, on that note, in the unanswered silence.

But.

You can’t.

“And I’m due in the fall,” you say, eyes glittering. Which, of course, you didn’t have to tell me. I could have found it out on Instagram, or Facebook, like people normally do now, or through my mom, obviously, or I could have lived my whole life not knowing, could have died not knowing. Just fine.

“Whoa,” I say. “Congratulations—that’s amazing, I, uh, I’m sure. That’ll be wonderful.”

A pause, the only time I remember wanting that monster to ask its dumb fucking question again, but it won’t, and so we have to sit in this quiet, and the breeze. Since I can’t possibly say more about that.

Another helicopter buzzes past, this time inbound, a long fat day of monster-watching, I’m sure. There used to be birds in this park, quite a lot of them, but I don’t think they like the down-wash.

“I’m gonna have to get going,” you say eventually. “Do you want to walk back, grab coffee on the way? Do you have anywhere to be?”

“Nah, you go ahead,” I say. “Tell Mark I said hi. And, you know, hope the move is smooth. Hire movers.”

“Oh we will,” you say. “Be well!”

I’ll be well. She’ll be well. I don’t particularly think we’ll see each other again, and that’s alright. And she’ll have a nice full family at Christmas, now, and that’s alright. And the monster is going to walk right over this city, asking its question to bleeding ears, and I don’t think I have an answer for him, really, I don’t think anyone will. And that’s just alright by me.

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SONATA by Daisuke Shen

April 30, 2021 · Fiction

For a long time now, all sound has been damp. Wrapped in mildew, white-fleeced, everyone’s voices turned to mist. I am the only one not contained within this quiet—me, who has always wished to be, more so than anyone else; me, the girl who could never stop singing.

I had tried all of the tricks, of course: stuffed my mouth with lagan scrounged from sea beds, weaned off of proteins and greens, hoping to become weaker. Yet the avalanche of notes poured out of my mouth like sludge; my crazed melodies frenetic and pinched as sand fleas.

The silence started two years ago at that strange rehearsal, where a man wearing a blue silk scarf played a piece on the piano outside of M. Franco’s cake shop. None of us had ever seen him before, nor seen a piano that size. We held our breath as he positioned himself on the bench, his fingers stretched and hovering above the keys. Perhaps this was the one we had been waiting for. Because of my incessant singing, I stood toward the back of the audience as I always did.

He began to play a symphony familiar to all of us, though there was something sinister to it, I realized—he had ripped away its flesh, plunged his fingers into its insides to rearrange the notes. Why did no one else think the mastication of this piece to be sinister? But everyone was amazed, unable to look away.

Even through my warbling, I heard the piano cry out as the man wrung its felt throat dry; its strained screams contorted in his hands into the softest lavender.

Long after he had strapped the piano onto his back and taken his leave, everyone continued clapping until the world was wrapped in static. Even their bodies became muffled, less opaque, dipping into one another’s on the street.

I, however, absorbed the piano’s grief. If people regarded me with contempt before, they now term me traitor to this town and its silence. I reside in a grey room in a grey building they have built underneath the ground, with just enough light that I can see the pen with which I write this letter, the only comfort that damned sonata that I sing again and again, as if I can be the one to save it.

Crow Jonah Norlander

SOMETHING IS KNOCKING by Sean Ennis

April 29, 2021 · Fiction

Grace and Gabe, after saying something very cutting—Grace, not Gabe—have gone to visit her parents and I am home with the dogs, in the shower, flooded with the memory of a woman I once slept with who kept demanding, “Look at me! Look at me!” It’s not, like, eudaemonic.

Then the dogs are going crazy. Something is knocking. They get very protective of the house when I'm in the shower. I don’t hurry.

And let’s be real clear: the dogs we rescued from the shelter? Did not rescue us. We do the nice, expensive things, and they basically hang out with their small, furry demands.

And let’s be clearer still: what Grace said about the séance I hosted being “poorly attended”? I was not alone.

I decided to wear the Yves Saint Laurent La Nuit De L’homme. Recently, I’ve been favoring the John Varvatos Vintage, but the Saint Laurent is Grace’s favorite and I miss her. Her friend, Colleen, once told me, “You don’t talk much, but you always smell good.”

It’s Meredith at the door, the woman who tried to kill Gabe. That’s not fair. The accident was three weeks ago, and he has stopped complaining about his bruised spleen. The hood of her car is still dented, and she is holding a plate of cinnamon buns, my favorite. She says, “I knew you were home.”

In the living room, I’m rethinking her. She has the familiar, submissive demeanor of someone trying to get off drugs. The logo of her jeans is outlined in rhinestone, and good God, they are bootcut. She sits inexplicably in the chair possessed by Grace’s dead grandmother.

“Did your family leave you?” she says.

“Permanently? No.” I say. “Or rather, none of your business.”

“You have pretty eyes,” she says. “Are they real?”

Notice, she does not apologize.

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LIZARD BLOOD by Alisha Wexler

April 28, 2021 · Fiction

Tuesday I wake up damp with a clenched jaw. Dirty towels on the ground reeking of mildew. Why do people record their dreams? Dreams are trout in bare hands—let them slip free! Mine are so generic anyway. I pluck out my teeth one-by-one like daisy petals. He loves me, I say with blood pouring down my hand, he loves me not. I move on. I weasel out of New York lease. I get out of bed. I go into the bathroom. I put on the clammy moist bikini hanging over the shower rod. I lay by the kidney-shaped pool in the backyard.

I’m still in Arizona—the McMansion in the Sonoran Desert. It’s the house I grew up in that my dead mother left to me. I’ve been here a month. By now, I should have renovated the house. I should have listed it on the market. But for who to buy? The houses in the neighborhood are still boarded up and owned by banks. Occupied by squatters. No one’s moving in. I should have signed the deed over to my stepdad, Neil. But I’ve done nothing except lay by the pool.

My friend in New York texts me: WHAT is even in the Southwest suburbs?

I reply: Pools.

This pool is where I had my first kiss. It’s where the Mormon girls in my neighborhood baptized me by holding my head underwater until I felt the walls of my lungs vacuum seal together.

I lay across slabs of sandstone, basking in the sun. Lizards join me: geckos and horny-toads.

When my dead boyfriend was alive, he called me reptilian—an ongoing joke that I hated. He first mentioned it when he saw how freakishly long my tongue was, then in passive aggressive jest about my short attention span. Sometimes he mentioned it when he heard my croaky morning voice, and once when he noticed the yellowish green of my eyes. Mostly, he said it when I was cold. I resented this. Being called ectothermic—associated with cold-bloodedness.

In the Sonoran Desert, the children are playing in the cul-de-sac and the teenagers are overdosing on Fentanyl. I take a deep breath of air polluted with endocrine disruptors. Yesterday I parked behind the drug store and watched a malnourished coyote lap up roadkill. Today I see the sun glittering like chrome sparks off the pool’s little wakes. Everyday, I get up and drive twenty minutes to the nearest Starbucks just to hear someone tell me “good morning” and remind me I exist.

***

Wednesday I wake up, put on the damp bikini, lay by the pool.

At noon, Neil comes over to check the chlorine levels, filters, and pumps. He circles the perimeter, skimming out leaves and drowned moths. “The Little Guy is broken,” he tells me. The Little Guy is what he calls the suction scooter that scours the pool like a bottom-feeder.

The older he gets, the deeper his voice becomes. I now hear the Oklahoma drawl he suppressed for years. Though, he’s not “old” per se. He’s only sixteen years older than me. I run the numbers in my head. Married my mother when he was 24, she was 47, I was 8. Oddly, the older he gets, the younger he looks. Maybe it’s the relief of my nutcase mother being in the ground, maybe it’s his even tan, or just the glow of new sobriety. He’s got those angular lower abs that gesture toward his dick. Had he always had those? I can’t believe my mom made me call him Daddy.

I dog-paddle to the narrow part of the kidney and rest my elbows on the lip of the pool, letting water dribble out of my mouth.

“Neil,” I say, “the jackrabbits are committing suicide.”

“I don’t blame them.”

“I’ve run over several on the road underneath the arroyo. They hop out into the middle and just sit there. I swerve, they leap in the same direction. Splat!”

“Don’t swerve. Jackrabbits seek thrill. They play chicken. You just go straight at ‘em and they’ll jump out of the way.”

I think about games of chicken. Two fighters racing toward each other only to surrender at the exact same time, pull out in the exact same direction, collide anyway. Two cowards who die without dignity.

That night I wrote a letter to my dead boyfriend.

Are you one of those people who see animal instincts as omens or warnings? You know, how in apocalypse/natural disaster movies the first sign of things taking a turn for the worst is always strange animal behavior? I’m one of those people.

This is why I left Arizona years ago. There were animals—animals everywhere. I’d walk out my front door and see roadrunners darting down the sidewalk. I saw coyotes sniffing through the garbage. Late at night, I’d pull into the driveway, headlights beaming onto cottontail families as they scurried out of the lawns. Their habitats: the sage, saguaros, and brier, were being torn out and scorched to the ground to lay down concrete. New roads paved. The foundation to build bigger but weaker houses; ugly houses with confused architectural styles. This isn’t to say that the animals “sensed” an economic crash, but it was a sign (more literal than symbolic) that something was about to change.

I wish you could smell my skin now: coconut and chlorine. Maybe I don’t shower enough. I am so tired and sun-drunk and regular drunk. I drank a lot of tequila. I ate a lot of Xanax. Perhaps I’ll see you in Hell very soon.

Until we meet again,

***

Thursday I wake up, put on the damp bikini, lay by the pool.

Another friend texts me: Damn the desert’s a VIBE

I reply hell yaaa and swat a wasp away from my thigh.

U working on anything out there?

No. Just vibing.

When the sun sets I drive to Starbucks and take the road under the arroyo. A jackrabbit is there, as always. I charge straight at it, as Neil advised. It doesn’t jump away. My heart swishes around my chest like a squid in a small net when I feel the crunch under my tire.

At night, Neil calls to tell me that my yard is infested with scorpions. It’s nice of him to help out as much as he does, I think, considering he’s a gold digger who didn’t get the inheritance he married for. I feel an odd responsibility to take care of my dead mom’s cowboy gigolo widower. I’ll give him money, but I’ll never give him this piece of shit house.

I go outside with a blacklight. He was right. I see scorpions glowing fluorescent blue—too many to count—they’re crawling on the ground and wriggling up the walls. People who don’t believe that there is pure horror in this world have never done this: gone into the desert night with a blacklight.

***

Friday I wake up, put on the damp bikini, lay by the pool.

The least serene day of the week: band practice. A death metal band plays in a garage up the street. There are guttural shrieks and heavy base. Boys squealing like injured pigs—various patterns of the words:

GUT

FUCK

CUM

SLUT

CUNT

PUNCH

It ends with them repeating:

INSIDIOUS

I roll over onto my stomach and untie my bikini. A lizard is back. He doesn’t flinch. He holds his head regally high toward the sun.

I jump into the pool and hold my breath. I wonder if I can stay down long enough to feel the walls of my lungs kiss like they did the time I was baptized.

I imagined New York, slinking into bed when my boyfriend’s body was still warm. I swung my leg over his leg, braided my knee under his knee, my ankle over his ankle. He said he felt the night’s chill soaked into my skin. His was burning feverishly. We lied there entwined, regulating each other’s body temperatures. Morphing into one another. Yin and yang. The next night an ambulance flashed lights over our unmade bed. Ripples of blanket and sheets looked like the waves of a red hot sea.

I emerge from the water’s surface and gasp. I climb out of the pool and offer myself to the sun. I turn toward it. I indulge in it. It warms my lizard blood, and when the wasps come buzzing, I’ll shoot my lizard tongue twice as far as my height and eat them. Later today, I’ll find a way to numb my lizard brain. And when I no longer like my lizard tail, I will chop it off and it will grow right back.

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TWO-IN-ONE by Genta Nishku

April 26, 2021 · Fiction

That summer, the water in that city ruined my hair. After every wash, the same refrain: clumping and matting. A whole bottle of hair conditioner later, and I was at the dim-lit bar. A man gestured something at me with his eyes, while outside, the awkward artist typed his number in my phone. We’ll meet for lunch, he promised. The warm air made disassociation easier, even if the drinks were weak and the conversation hard to follow. I’d get drunk at home, I decided. Then the traces of the day would fade, present and future melting together, like the sky and sea whenever we’d take the long road to get far away. There are too many nights and not enough conclusions. Nothing ever happens for me, I told him, but what I meant was, I don’t let anything happen. If you remember what I said about your eyes, I’d ask him, please don’t tell anyone. It would betray my reputation. Later, the complaint about the water would become an ice-breaker. Who hadn’t had an experience with unsatisfactory water? All the papers talk about conditions of possibility and I refuse to look up what it means. What’s the use? The conditioner detangled my hair. I kept it wrapped in a towel—color’s up to your imagination—and I stood by the window. A woman at a window makes the story worth reading. It recalls the folktales of our childhood. In one of them, the woman fashions a body, her body, out of rags and hay, with tree branches for limbs. A branch arm sticks out, waving goodbye forever.

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THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER by Gabrielle McAree

April 22, 2021 · Fiction

Dad has the emotional range of a runt-sized peanut. He hates the internet, roundabouts, tap water, trash collection, anyone called “Jerry.” He doesn’t trust directions and believes the government is listening in on his conversations. Dad grows a four-inch beard as an act of defiance, because it looks nothing like his driver’s license picture, and swears off technology. His collection of gray hair disappoints him, so he buys an electric blue Camaro.

***

When Dad turns 63, I pick up a cake from the store. Half chocolate, half vanilla to curb his untreated bipolar disorder. I remember to be vigilant, but Dad counts each wax candle with the tenacity of a bored mathematician.

“You’re not good with numbers, Darby,” he says.

He’s joking, but my face turns the color of ripe tomatoes. When I forget a candle, everyone laughs at my dereliction, my stupidity. “I studied theatre,” I object, my voice two sizes too small. But my claim is futile; my siblings have PhDs attached to their names. I don’t.

***

I screw my eyes shut as Dad slams cabinets and drawers, looking for his checkbook, his car keys, his wallet, his readers. We search behind potted plants, between freezer meat, amidst his collection of coffee mugs, below the kitchen sink. His things are nowhere and everywhere, scattered around the house like an expert game of Where’s Waldo.

“I’d lose my head if it wasn’t attached,” he says. His self-hate is camouflaged by Dad Humor, the color of sunshine and imported silk. It is impossible not to love him.

Dad finds his checkbook in his coat pocket. His keys in the cupholder. His wallet in the washer. His readers in the pantry next to the peanut shells. Everyone laughs the same choked, plaintive laugh, but we actively fail Dad as he sinks into an amnesiac-sponsored abyss.

Dad is a renowned surgeon. He’s been saving lives for thirty-plus years—one appendectomy at a time—but he forgets his cellphone on the charger and can’t remember to take the dogs out. Their hoarse barks cut through glass. Why can’t I remember? Dad asks, gluing his leathery hands to his eye sockets, rubbing his skin an unforgiving red. He gives the dogs extra treats to counterpose his laxness. All is forgiven.

I bury myself in books I don’t understand.

“Why can’t Dad remember?” I ask a cashier clerk, the expired tub of animal crackers, oblivion. Surely, there is an answer.

“There’s an answer for everything,” Dad says. “It’s good you’re pretty, Darby.”

I read and read and read.

***

I go local for college and save Dad money by commuting. On Sundays, we sit in matching gray, leather chairs by the fireplace. Dad tells me about his sister, Jenny, who joined the Peace Corps and changed her name to Loki; his favorite dog, Hamish; how he regrets: not joining the Army; not competing in triathlons; not taking Sami Gates to his senior prom.

“Getting old sucks,” he says. “Your regrets look like a grocery list. Cheat age if you can, Darby.” But he doesn’t tell me how.

Dad takes a party platter of vitamins—collagen, crocin, retinol, magnesium—and drinks a glass of red wine before bed, toasting to the vestige of his youth.

I look at myself in the mirror for traces of him and keep the water running so he can’t hear me cry. I am older every day and can’t afford to feel better about my relation to mortality. I don’t have money for distractions.

***

My sister sends her wedding invitation in the mail. She’s marrying a guy from medical school, Mark Something. Mark Something believes Dad has early-onset Alzheimer’s. I’m not asked to be in the wedding party, but my other sister, the dentist, is maid of honor. My brothers, groomsmen. Dad asks why I don’t have a career. He says, “Maybe if you had a career, you’d be in your sister’s wedding.”

Dad pays the wedding tab with his American Express Black Card, but forgets his suit at home, so I drive back in rush-hour traffic to retrieve it. He can’t walk down the aisle in his Notre Dame jersey and orange board shorts.

Dad’s collection of ex-wives sit in the last pew, in chronological order. Throughout the service, he turns around to look at them, the physical representations of his life, decade after decade, each a nod to his impermanence. Gloria, Dakota, Macie, Rebecca, Lorraine. They agree Dad is a good man, he just couldn’t remember things they wanted him to remember. They all signed prenups, so Dad keeps his cabin in the woods, his 13 acres, his Camaro.

***

When I’m nine, I learn that everything dies. Humans, insects, rats, nature, inanimate objects. At first, I don’t accept this. I cry into Dad’s lap, staining his favorite corduroys. He strokes my hair while lecturing me on biology, science, The Lion King. We’re at my sister’s softball practice. Dad lets me sob, hysterically, without shushing me.

He says, “Forever is boring, Darby. Imagine paying taxes forever.”

***

At 66, Dad is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Mark gloats. My siblings strategize at the kitchen table without me. Dad gets a catheter two months later. He wants to drink Irish whiskey and sleep. I listen to his stories. I am all his children, his wives, his friends. I cover him in thick blankets and empty his urine. When Dad dies, he leaves me the electric blue Camaro, the log cabin, everything. My siblings hire an attorney. A letter arrives, postmarked before Dad’s death. It reads: Darby, you were always my favorite.

The next morning, I lose my keys.

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HOW THE WIND DOES BLOW AND BLOW by Kevin Grauke

April 21, 2021 · Fiction

If you’re smart, don’t ever let Claudette Aarons catch you reading anything, not even a magazine, because if she does, she’ll for sure say, “You know what you should be reading instead of that, don’t you? You should be reading Dorothy Scarborough’s The Wind.”

Don’t ask her how come, because she’ll tell you how come for an hour. And don’t lie and say you’ve already read it, because then she’ll expect you to discuss it forevermore. And don’t ignore her, either, because she’ll just take that the same as if you’d asked her how come. Your best bet is to simply cross the street as soon as you see her coming.

Nobody in town, not even Claudette’s own daughter, has ever bothered to read it—mostly out of pure orneriness, probably. Regardless, everyone still knows its story backwards and forwards, since that’s all she’ll fill your ear with whenever the wind happens to kick up, which is pretty much every day that ends with a ‘y.’ Yes, the wind does blow and blow here in Yonder, and it blows because there’s not a goddamn thing big enough to ever slow it down—not any buildings taller than a telephone pole, not any trees that qualify to be called as such, not anything. It’s good for the windmills drawing up water from the aquifer for the stock tanks, and it’s good for the wind farms that’ve turned the land north of 20 into some strange Martian landscape, but it’s not good for much else. In the summer, it huffs and puffs oven-hot up from Mexico (or Old Mexico, as Boyd Pinkston, who probably remembers Pancho Villa, still calls it), and in the winter it screams icebox-cold down from the North Pole. No matter the season, by the end of the day your skin is liable to feel rasped raw. And at night, while you’re waiting for sleep and dreams to come, it just keeps on whistling its lonesome blues beneath your door until the sun finally comes up, usually to roast you alive before you’ve poured your second cup of coffee.

As bad as the wind can be, though, it’s never as bad as Claudette’s favorite book would have you believe. Written in 1925 and set in the 1880s, it tells the story of a young woman named Letty, who was forced to move from the green fields of Virginia to a ranch just west of Sweetwater.

“Can you believe that?” Claudette says, all bug-eyed. “Of all the places that Dorothy Scarborough could’ve moved Letty to! Just west of Sweetwater! Letty even mentions Yonder a few times!”

Some folks say that Claudette’s been like this—just as crazy as a bullbat when it comes to the wind—ever since she was a little girl. Other folks say it’s only been since a tornado south of Archer City flung her fiancé’s truck into a Dairy Queen like so much trash. But even that was a long time ago.

“They made a silent movie based on it, you know,” Claudette will continue. “It was one of the last MGM made. Lillian Gish played Letty. Can you believe that? Lillian Gish!” Everybody except maybe Boyd Pinkston has to pretend to understand why this is a big deal. “They filmed it in the Mojave Desert, though, not here,” Claudette grumbles. “Those Hollywood pinkos couldn’t handle the real thing.”

Letty is eventually driven so insane by the wind, Claudette explains, that she kills a man and then commits suicide by running straight into a dust storm.

“What’d she do, suffocate?” asked Vance Wickersham once. “That seems like a bit of a stretch, don’t you think? She’d’ve really had to work at doing that, seems like. There’s lots easier ways.”

“But it makes sense how that other part could happen,” Claudette shot back. “The killing part, I mean. Because, I swear, sometimes the wind just makes you want to mow everyone down with both barrels.”

Though most folks smile and nod their heads when she talks like this, nobody knows what the hell she means exactly. Sure, when the wind makes the traffic light down on the square rock and creak on its wire late at night, it does have a way of making you feel like a lost and lonely soul, especially if it’s long after everybody else has gone home to bed and you’re standing there all by yourself, but that’s nothing that a few beers can’t usually fix. Regardless, everyone with a lick of sense knows to steer clear of Claudette whenever a dust storm or a blue norther is fixing to howl and churn into town, because it’s a known fact that, thanks to her Daddy, who raised her like a boy since he was cursed with five daughters and no sons, she may be even more of a deadeye shot than Zell Wylie, and that’s saying something. Zell, after all, once shattered a bottle of Pearl with a shot fired from two hundred yards. Kid Gillespie hadn’t even been expecting it. He’d just happened to been drinking in the gravel lot of the domino parlor when Zell decided to take aim at it for no particular reason. Had Claudette been there, she probably would’ve taken the shot from fifty yards further away, seeing as how she’s never been one to shy away from a challenge—and plugged it, too—just as long as Kid held his hand steady, but now he’s got Parkinson’s tremors so bad that he can’t even play 42 anymore, not without scattering dominoes every which way. These days, all he does is stand around and watch, usually with his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his jeans to keep them flapping about like broken-winged doves.

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