X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

ONE DRUNKEN M. LEVAR IN RELATION TO SMALL GROUP by Scott Malone

May 16, 2020 · Fiction

To ease elaborations, an assumption will be made for the reader. That, from sober perspectives, stupor-induced antics most commonly associated with alcoholics are the chaotic, frenzied movements of temporarily broken brains; they contain zero scientific insights. This case intends to show Academia why the understanding is incorrect. And that, under objective lenses of scientific method and reason, significant behavioral patterns emerge in those chronically inebriated.

Like moths to light, Drunks are attracted to groups of people. More so, if the group is standing. A strange phenomenon—especially considering a Drunk’s near-constant lack of balance—that’s generated a sort of mythos-cult following in underground psychology. However, regardless of notoriety, no peer-reviewed articles exist concerning correlations between a) size of group and/or b) subject’s inebriation level with c) likelihood of unsolicited intrusion.

Until now.

“One Drunken M. Levar in Relation to Small Group” proudly announces the first documented case of Group-Influenced Drunken Intrusion, or GIDI.

Catalyzation Group size, shockingly small: Amethyst standing beside Trudin and Baco’s booth for drink orders.

Considered the local drunk by the local drunks, Mitch (male, 49, Drunk) was known by Pub’s bartenders as the regular whom under no circumstance should be served liquor, lest ye wanted a gremlin climbing the tar-stained walls, wielding darts, threatening whichever unlucky bastard nearest the jukebox with acupuncture if they dared not play “Behind Blue Eyes” again.

Sidenote: Mitch’s eyes are blue.

After stumbling half-zipped from the men’s room, Mitch shuffled toward Trudin’s booth and managed landing a heavy hand on Amethyst’s shoulder for balance before anyone realized what was unfolding.

“CIGARRETTE,” Mitch announced, limp and slack-jawed.

Labored breathing, its flammable scent, increased agitation flickering behind sunken eyes—all clear evidence that, somewhere throughout the night, Amethyst had made the crucial mistake of serving Mitch the Evil Spirits.

“What?” Trudin asked the Drunk.

Mitch gave a cross-eyed smoking gesture for clarification and Amethyst shook his hand off her shoulder, tipping the belligerent forward, palm-to-table, where he vented halitosis fumes at Trudin with closer proximity.

“A CIGARETTE,” the Drunk elaborated.

Trudin faced Amethyst, avoiding the brunt of vile breath, and said, “Just the tab, Amber-thyst,” before directing full attention toward the GIDI.

“What about a cigarette?” Baco chimed in.

It’s believed Mitch planned on saying, “DO YOU HAVE ONE?” But this is unconfirmed, because the question never aired. His brain was instead forced to make an emergency interruption, updating the body on the severity of its equilibrium crisis. Firing last-ditch messages at the legs, the brain alerted both to spread out: WARNING, GAIN WIDER STANCE IMMEDIATELY.

Unfortunately, brains are also quite susceptible liquor, sadly, and left leg information was accidentally sent to the right. The result: a catastrophic crossing of extremities.

Mitch—legs buckling inward like a full-bladdered schoolboy—was spun a sharp 180° and sent staggering away from the booth, collecting speed while the brain calculated adjustments needed to offset its acute angle with the floor. Feet pigeon-toed, flopping onto locked knees, desperate to stay ahead the leaning tower of drunken mass. Acceleration continued along this trajectory until critical velocity was reached. Then, breaking into a spastic run before feet lost all contact with floor, Mitch was sent free-falling toward the bar, headfirst.

Lacking a proper variable for drunken luck, it’s unknown mathematically how Mitch’s skull missed the bar—forehead grazing the corner’s edge close enough to lift a tuft of thinning hair. And thus, thanks only to probability, damage sustained from the fall was mitigated to a 1/4” gash on Mitch’s chin where he’d caught a barstool’s polished seat and added four wooden legs to his already horizontal two.

Impact with Pub’s floor culminates the first recorded GIDI, concludes “One Drunken M. Levar in Relation to Small Group” on a successful note.

With Mitch’s life-threatening response validating the alternative hypothesis, this groundbreaking case raises many questions, insinuates underlying cause. Chance a deeper meaning lurks within the phenomenon alone warrants future research.

Acknowledgements: There’s no denying the burden placed on those unfortunate enough to have crossed Mitch’s path that night, but it’s Academia that’s truly indebted.

So, here’s to you, Mr. Levar, for all that was sacrificed as tribute to knowledge.

And, in summary, one final commendation is required for the way Mr. Levar concluded the GIDI. Because Mitch didn’t simply prove his case, he rested it with style and grace seldom seen by Science: disproving long-held standings that a Drunk’s actions possess no inherent value while simultaneously paying homage to History’s most iconic science experiment with his very own rendition of Galileo’s “Falling Objects” test.

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IRENE by Sarah MW

May 15, 2020 · Fiction

“Fancy a bite of my banana, Miss?”

Teenage faces have a soft bluntness to them, a button-like quality as they wait to be chiseled out to their full adult contour. Joe’s face was the same, though unlike the others it sported a uniquely impressive beard, far from usual in a fifteen-year-old. He was grisly and monstrous; I heard he’d fucked his way through most of the pretty girls in year ten and eleven. Simpering, gum-chewing girls with clotted mascara and deep-set insecurities. He swung back, all too pleased with himself in his plastic chair, forcibly recumbent, legs wide like a broken easel.

I was a newly anointed high school teacher, fast baptized into the daily ritual of having my boundaries teased, stretched, and overstepped. I thought my greatest power might have been the ability to put on a show of indifference.

“No thanks, Joe.”

The indifference thing didn’t really work. They simply became more inventive in their provocations. An orange once, for instance, just missing the back of my head, hitting the whiteboard with a satisfying smack. Whittled down, waiting each day for the evening bus, I was a totally flimsy and broken thing. Better to wait for the very last one, or else be targeted again, naked by the shelterless stop, cat-called down from the top deck of the school bus.

Each day, disembarking the bus, entering that village, it seemed time at some point had been discontinued. Before starting there, I’d envisaged a forgivably backwards, warm, and well-meaning community: soft, thatched buildings, the post office, a local shop, and sheep. What I met with was the darker heart of a pretty English county, its deprived and neglected inner core. Filthy vehicles lined the pavements, lucky if they were still running. Right-wing vitriol was rampant as union jack flags hung defiantly in front room windows. Then there was the school: a five-story, brutalist nightmare, old-style attitudes cast in concrete.

Time stood uncannily statuary in those breeze-blocked, ascetic walls. I felt it, having turned to senior teachers about the hounding and harassment. My concerns were greeted with laughter from older women in shapeless cardigans who told me they’d be thrilled with such attention. The male counterpart of the staff body offered even less hope; in their mid-fifties, on average, with blackened teeth and overhanging bellies, and a scoring system among them for all new female staff. I’d been forewarned of this by my new manager, as she reassured me between giggles that it was "just a bit of fun."

I first spotted Irene whizzing by down the stone staircase, a ladder of gaping slats through which, four stories up, I’d look down and eye the building’s ever-threatening concrete base. She had no specific classroom of her own, and so stomped by purposefully in her studded heeled boots, up and down, every day. Her smile exposed black holes and golden glints in its crooks that I found simultaneously threatening and charming.

“Lovely day,” she beamed, approaching me during one break time in her extravagant sun hat, weather-beaten face upturned towards the sun's glare. Her bright fuchsia lipstick screamed youthfulness and vitality, and was jarring set against her long, ashtray grey hair. Irene told me she was the union representative for the school—was I a member? A woman’s place is in her union, she laughed. I noticed she had a habit of licking her two front teeth and pouting in the interim of her speaking. She oozed gratitude and ease and really didn’t seem like a teacher at all. More like a carefree member of the public who just happened to pass by. Her gaze probed deep as I asked her what it was that she taught.

“Life,” she announced, smiling, a statement that seemed to me underpinned with limitless profundity. What she meant was Citizenship and Religious Studies, though she had gifted it with a totally endearing rebrand. There was a knowing in her eyes, and I longed to swim in it.

One uncharacteristically shady summer’s night, as I stood wilting as ever by the bus-stop, it seemed like a beautiful, cosmic twist of fate when an aging camper van pulled over. Irene slid the door open from the backseat to let me in.

“I would have offered you a lift before, but Angus can be so unreliable." To this, Angus emitted an incoherent groan of disapproval and went back to wildly eyeballing the road ahead. If I was to deduce correctly—from that all too familiar cat piss stench—I’d passed on the hum-drum reliability of the public bus that evening to be driven home down dark country side-roads by a speed-induced stranger.

Angus was ten years Irene’s senior and bore all the signs of having lived life at full throttle: bald with blotched tattoos, skin like worn-out elastic, the vocal timbre of an old dog choking on its leash.

“Here you are.”

Irene passed me the lidless whisky bottle while she sparked up a spliff. The anesthetic burn of the whisky, coupled with our lively conversation, proved the ultimate salve to whatever had gone on before. His gaze fixed on the road, Angus stretched his arm backwards, signaling for me to pass the bottle to him.

School night after school night, we drove home in Irene’s van. Every night I was excited by the endless countryside hills that made my belly flop, by the dubious mechanics of the van, the questionable noises it made, its axles like bones threatening to snap at any moment. With every speed-bump, we’d come to a gasping halt, the van’s metalwork would shudder, and the window panes would violently smack at their frames. I loved how the unpredictability of the country roads would have us arc and sway in the backseat, taking care to balance the booze between us: sometimes whisky, sometimes wine in any old dirty glass. As we took yet another winding bend, my body lifted and careered into the window, while her sparrow-like legs would momentarily crush mine.

“International Women’s Day!” Angus yelled once jubilantly, as we bundled in, procuring three bottles of cheap white wine from between his legs. We stopped halfway at an off-license for tobacco, where there was a beautiful Bullmastiff on a walk on the road opposite. Majestic as anything, flexing its thick, taut sinew with each stride. Irene turned to me.

“He looks just like my Rocco. My Rocco, I lost him."

That night I visited Irene’s house for the first time. They lived a few villages west of the school; village, again, a term strikingly incongruous with the thing it designated. All around were characterless squares of ill-furnished prefabs and happy reprobates pulling wheelies at oncoming traffic. A cavernous hole had been left at the core of the place after the coal mines were shut down in the nineties.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Irene pointed out as we hopped out the van, “but this place is beautiful. I love our village. Look at this ancient woodland all around. This is the one place in a hundred miles’ radius you’ll hear a skylark’s call.”

Irene told me there was an open door policy all around the village. On entering her home I registered a cluster of growling gents in anoraks, proliferating all about the dining table and kitchen benches like a kind of algae. The whole place itself gave off airs of an unattended to spare room and seemed crooked at every angle. Angus thrust a warm can of Scrumpy Jack into my hand and invited me to roll myself a spliff from his Tupperware supply. From this point on, the night twirled all around me in a heady carousel of space cakes, roll-ups, more Scrumpy’s, more spliffs. The door remained open, and a little girl named Star came in and fussed about me, braiding my hair, dancing as if around a maypole.

At some point, Irene stole me away to the quiet of the garden. Angus and his clan—those hungry jackals—continued to congregate excitedly about the platter of intoxicants on offer in the dining room table. With all I’d ingested, I had to focus hard on tuning out the relentless physiological interference as Irene spoke to me in grave and weighty tones. I learned she just turned sixteen when they were married. On their wedding night, he’d chased her round the house with an axe, having regretted it all. The following decades brought four kids who took turns hanging off the pram as she marched to the community library day after day, pursuing three different masters degrees. "Shakespeare, the working class hero" was the thesis of which she’d been most proud.

The picture she painted of Angus’s own very separate history saw him elevated to the level of folkloric legend.

“He’s a man unto himself. All the women in this village have either wanted to have him or have had him. His cock, I am telling you, is like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

I wondered if it was as wiry and strangled looking as his wrinkled old neck. She told me he let her have her fun too. On her fortieth birthday, he passed her a condom and gave his permission to fuck whomsoever she wanted. Irene had reached that point of inebriety where the urge to share was all-consuming. Next she told me she was a lesbian, could only ever come when thinking about women. The receptors in my brain were straining to compute the flurry of information, to disentangle the scrambled signal, the fuzz that infiltrated my mind.

“I want to tell you something I’ve never told anyone.”

It made sense that she would have been assured by then of my sheer unshockability.

“You know my Rocco I told you about? Well my Rocco and I, we were in a relationship,” she said and paused. “But I promise you it was totally consensual. He would always be the one to initiate."

I nodded, not sure what else to do. All the while I imagined it: Angus fucking his way around the village with his monster cock, whilst Irene sought comfort with her Bullmastiff Rocco. I pictured the power of his strong hind legs, the curvature of his rippling muscle in all its urgent sexuality, her dainty frame curled neatly beneath.

Slipping back into the house, I took to mounting the steep staircase to the bathroom, using my arms to straddle the wall and banister. On my way, I caught an old picture of Irene. I was stunned by the blackness of her hair, as well as her overall startling beauty; here was the original image of which I’d only ever encountered the negative. Was she Rocco’s girl back then? After, as I was pissing, I noted the absence of any type of hygiene product about—no soap, no shampoo, nothing. I remembered how Irene told me she takes a bath every morning, that she never showered, and so must have spent each morning stewing in the brine of yesterday’s filth.

I tried to get back downstairs, and that’s when I fucked up. I tumbled from the very first step.

***

I woke up to the gentle thrum of Radio 4 and the cold wind that set the window off rattling on the hinge holding it ajar. I was laid, fully-clothed, in their sheetless marital bed, nestled between the pair of them like a fledgling bird. My cracked ribs made it impossible to move, so I lay there immovable for some time after.

***

Irene and I shared goodbyes that were drawn out and insubstantial. I moved schools soon after, and we texted a couple of times. The last I heard from her was a phone call to tell me she’d had a stroke and that she wasn’t teaching Life anymore.

Rocco <3

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COLLABORATION by Parker Young

May 14, 2020 · Fiction

I was writing a fantastic tale about two little sheep who have nowhere to go but up. The main question that animates the whole story is, will the sheep go up? It seems that they should—they have no reason not to. Certainly, they can’t go any further down. We all have limits.

Anyway, that was the story I was writing, and the writing was going quite well until my wife began changing the words of the story at night, when I wasn’t looking. I’ve got no proof, of course, it’s only a feeling I have, but a strong one. For example, one of the two sheep is now a female sheep. I can’t remember writing a female sheep into the story at all, but there it is, and its name is Tina. On the other hand, I was never dead-set on writing a story about two male sheep, so I suppose it’s possible that I was the one who made one of the sheep male and the other female and named the female one Tina. There’s nothing wrong with a sheep named Tina, and I would never claim otherwise. But it’s suspicious. But from there it gets worse because my wife’s name is Tina and my name is Colin, and can you guess what the male sheep’s name is?

I should ask Tina what’s going on.

***

A new development. The sheep are no longer sheep—now they are people. People who walk upright and spend lots of time watching tennis. This is troubling because I would never write about tennis. I love to watch tennis myself and spend an embarrassing amount of time doing so, but I would never go so far as to write it into a story of mine, especially not a story about two people like Tina and Colin. Yes, I’m a tennis-watching type of person through and through, but I’m determined to hide such proclivities from the world for as long as possible, and so I can’t help but suspect that my wife is interfering with my story and changing the words all around at night, when I’m not looking. This is a serious charge because I barely ever sleep. Therefore, in order for her to change the words of my story all around, she would have to spend hours pretending to sleep, waiting attentively for the precise moment when I’ve actually drifted off for my 45 minutes or so. Then and only then would she be able to strike, affecting change in my story about Tina and Colin, who used to be sheep and had nowhere to go but up. Writing all about the time they spend watching professional tennis, which I would never, ever do. The writing about it, that is.

I think I should ask Tina what’s going on.

***

The final straw. The Colin character has disappeared completely from my story, which is now a Tina story about Tina things. Tina alone in restaurants, Tina alone on the train, Tina, who used to be a sheep with nowhere to go but up, watching professional tennis and drinking too much. It’s my personal opinion that in the story she drinks too much, but the narrative never acknowledges the possibility. Whoever wrote the narrative never even suggests that Tina might have a problem with drinking too much. A real problem. But a problem that has nothing to do with the story’s original question, which was, if my memory serves me: these sheep who have nowhere to go but up, will they go up? Or not? It seems that they should.

I decide to throw the story away because I don’t want to read about Tina any more, certainly not if she’s going to go on drinking gin and watching tennis for god only knows how many more pages. Making eyes at strangers. Maybe she is actually enjoying herself, come to think of it, but no, I can’t go on reading it or writing it or whatever.

Tina, I say, can I ask you something?

But she’s drunk. Tina rarely drinks, and so it only takes a few hours out with friends to render her inoperable. I decide to ask later. Until such a time as I can ask her what is going on, I’ll postpone throwing away the document, a story about two little sheep who have nowhere to go but down, although it seems they should go up.

Wait a second. How can it be that they have nowhere to go but down when I have this feeling, a powerful feeling, that they should go up? I suppose that could be the very dynamic that brings the story to life. Or brought it to life. It’s a moot point now, because, if my memory serves, it’s now a story about Tina who watches tennis and drinks deadly quantities of alcohol. Nothing like my Tina. Not really.

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NEIGHBORS by Will Cordeiro

May 12, 2020 · Fiction

It was an in-service day at school, and the bus dropped me off at home three hours earlier than usual. The doors were locked. The extra key was gone. I tried to wedge a screen-window open. The neighbor saw me trying to break into my house. He invited me over. Reluctantly, I said okay.

My neighbor had me sit on a big velvet chair and handed me some chocolate milk and a plate of vanilla wafers. After I’d eaten them, he said he wanted to show me something. He opened a door to what looked like a closet. He entered a narrow vestibule, a corridor of some sort. He waved back at me. I followed him along the length of a gently sloping hallway by focusing on the bald spot at the top of his head. Otherwise, he almost vanished down in the darkness. Just when I thought I’d lost him, a light snapped on; a row of glass cases glared back at me.

I was blinded, squinted, stared while grimacing at distorted faces half dissolved in the sterile halogen radiance—at my own face multiplied and floating in the mirroring glass until my eyes adjusted. “My collection,” he said, sweeping an open palm around the room.

He had been living in the house next door for as long as anyone remembered. My father rarely exchanged more than a couple words with him, though. My father distrusted most people, especially after mother died. Consequently, I didn’t know my neighbor’s name.

“What do you think?” the man asked, smiling. He ran his fingers through a wispy tuft of hair, pushing it over his bald spot. He leaned in toward me, and his eyes disappeared behind the milky luster reflected in his pinched-looking wireframes. He breathed out an odor of sourdough and ripe mayonnaise.

I concentrated on my environment: on the gallery-white walls, on the close musty air. I turned to gaze at the surrounding cases. Inside them, I could now see, were little mousetraps of every description, coil-loaded ones and glue traps and ones that captured the rodent alive. Strangest of all, each one was baited with cheese or peanut-butter, set and ready to spring at any moment.

Disoriented as I was, I suspected I must be standing directly beneath my own house. In fact, underneath my own room, if my sense of direction could be trusted. I heard footfalls, muffled shouts from above. I thought I heard my pull-string robot, its voice repeating, There’s a snake in my boot! Someone’s poisoned the waterhole. Reach for the sky!

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ANOTHER ROAD TRIP STORY by DS Levy

May 11, 2020 · Fiction

Two months ago, after flirting with a handsome Ojibwa who poured stiff Margaritinas, Fonda tottered over to the slots and maxed out her credit card, setting her back two grand. Which is why, heading south on I-31 after an afternoon wine-tasting in Traverse City, I’m surprised when she tells us from the back seat that her inner voice just whispered: Twenty bucks will move your spirit toward prosperity.

Since her heart bypass last year, Fonda’s been on speaking terms with her gut. “You know that ‘feeling?’” she says. “Well, I’m finally listening.”

“Did your gut mention how long you’ll have to play?” Bets wants to know. “’Cause I can’t afford to call in sick tomorrow.”

“Twenty bucks,” Fonda promises.

***

The giant marquee in front of the Little River Casino & Resort advertises “Only Tonight! Bitty KISS!” Bitty looks exactly like Gene Simmons—shiny black Brillo pad of hair, dark sunglasses, plumped up lips—except he and his sidekicks are little people.

“Could be interesting,” Bets says, snapping her gum. She and I can’t afford to gamble. We like to joke that our monthly Social Security checks barely cover our ass-ettes. Sure, Bets works part-time at Lowe’s “making do,” and I get a chunk of my husband’s life insurance, but still, we’re pinching retirement pennies.

Fonda can’t afford to gamble either, but she doesn’t let that stop her. She’s been on disability for twenty years since she and her former boyfriend, who turned out to be “another manic phase,” dumped his Harley in the UP. She’s got a steal rod in her thigh, but it doesn’t interfere with her pulling the one-armed bandits.

Fonda walks ten steps ahead of us, the smell of easy money and cafeteria grease wafting through the electronic doors along with a gush of stale AC. For her, this Neon Oz with binkety-dinkety computerized sirens is her idea of heaven, enough buzz and bling to seduce the most tone-deaf sinner. After she pays to play, she waves adios amigas and wanders across the casino looking for a hot machine with a cushy seat.

Bets and I wander off, weaving around gamblers with fanny packs and credit cards tethered to lanyards, dependable oxygen tanks pushed aside. Though penny-pinchers, we’re not above being hypocrites and agree to splurge on All-You-Can-Eat Crab Legs and Prime Rib buffet for $29.99. But before we track the scent, we pass a dark, quiet bar. We’re on our third snake bites, watching a big-screen of the floor, when all hell breaks loose. Lights flash, bells ring. Someone’s hit the Big One.

“Come on,” says Bets.

We slither off our stools and stumble out onto the floor where a crowd has gathered.

A guy shouts, “It’s letting go of 300 grand!”

“Quick, what do you call a group of gamblers watching someone hit a jackpot?” a grizzled guy with a leather Hell’s Angels vest asks me. Before I can guess, he answers, “Jealous.”

An old man with a flannel shirt scratches his gray beard. “Man, I just played that machine.”

Bets and I pray that when folks part like the Red Sea it’ll be Fonda sitting there in a stream of gold coins. She’s been struggling to pay her monthly trailer rent and has hinted she might get bounced soon.

But when we push through the gawkers, all we see is a dazed gambler with outstretched hands, coins spilling out of an ecstatic machine into an overflowing plastic pail, a strobe light flickering, rapturing the winner to the Almighty Slot Machine in the Sky. And when the winner turns around, she has pink bangs and an “I Went to Vegas and This Is All I Got” T-shirt—definitely not Fonda.

***

We find our Fonda in the snack lounge with a chocolate soft-serve ice cream cone. Turns out she blew ten dollars before her gut spoke up, told her she was wasting her time and money, and that it was hungry. She stares at the overhead flat-screen TVs—kickboxing, Canadian curling, the World Poker Tour. A skinny guy on one screen jumps up and kicks his opponent square in the jaw.

“These slots are so tight,” Fonda says, “they squeak.”

Bets asks her if she’s seen the handsome Ojibwa bartender. Fonda shakes her head. “Has the night off.”

***

On our way out, we pass the crowded auditorium where the Bitty KISS concert is just getting started.

“C’mon,” I say. “We’re so late, we’ve got plenty of time.”

Bitty and his band come on stage. Not only does he sing, he raps and thrusts out his red salamander tongue. If he wasn’t so darn cute—if you could imagine him taller—he could almost pass for the real deal.

There’s only a handful of people in the crowd, so we move down to the front row and watch as Bitty dances over to the edge of the stage singing “I Was Made for Loving You.” He bends down and stretches out his tiny hand. Bets reaches out, and he starts singing to her. Up close, under the lights, he looks 110-years-old.

I stare. It’s wrong to stare. Yet it feels wrong not to. Bitty pumps his bulbous fists, spits into the hot mic, thrusts his bantam hips.

When the song’s over, I poke Bets and Fonda: “Taxi’s leaving.”

***

We stroll past indoor ponds with fake lily pads, our ears thrumming from the music. Outside, a silent gray dawn is just starting its show.

Fonda and Bets worry I’ll fall asleep driving and make a big deal about keeping me awake. But as soon as we hit the road, they’re both out, heads slung back, snoring.

Wide awake, I keep thinking about Bitty. How we all sang along, our mouths moving without our hearts’ concern. I feel bad I watched the show with the same enthusiasm I’d watch a car wreck. The whole evening seemed strained—Bets and I tossing back shots, Fonda wanting so damn bad for those machines to cough out cash. This is our life now, I think. Holy hell.

I scan the highway. Up here, if it’s not suicidal venison, it’s crazy wolves or raucous raccoons.

We’ve got the road to ourselves. If I push it a little, we should make it back in time so Bets can get to her job at Walmart.

This retired life. It’s having time without money, or money without time. It’s watching days fly by like the birch and fir trees along this highway. It’s friendship and sadness and what-ifs and maybe-nots and who-knows. It’s a bad poker hand on a hot table, or a cold slot machine that suddenly sizzles.

Up ahead, three sets of green eyes glow from the dark forest. I slow down, not because I my gut says I should, but because I know how it feels to be hit hard.

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HUNGER by Tyler Dempsey

May 10, 2020 · Fiction

Robbed.

The ski-masked man squeezed my biceps.

“Easy,” I said.

He went, “Get in, fucks,” and nodded toward a black SUV, gun under Eddie’s throat. “Don’t even think about it.”

Eddie called shotgun.

That was yesterday.

Eddie’s my roommate. I’m 34. Too old for a roommate.

I fucked up.

Eddie’s on the couch. You could say “living” there. Old vomit, pink—like brain blended with Monster energy drink—arced but didn’t clear the cushions. My cat’s purring caked in matter needing chemicals to remove.

Ed’s stomach jiggles from a tank top. A hairy muffin hidden for later. Pink on his cheek, he loads a pipe with drugs.

“You know. We’re broke. After the robbery. Where’d you get this? Sure, thanks. Robbed. Never thought you’d be here is the thing. The couch needs cleaned. Maybe you could get off a few months? Actually, I’m selling it. Do you like cats?”

He “salvaged” what we’re smoking from the cushions, he says, as if defending it. It vaguely resembles something I smoked a week ago.

“I have an idea.”

“If it’s moving out, to a shelter or a new house, I’m ears.”

“I’m hungry.”

I look at his cheek.

“I’m listening.”

“Saw this movie. Guys burglarize a neighborhood, taking only shit they find in freezers. Like ham the wife bought ‘cause it was five bucks, now hard as a dick. Not even the husband cares if it goes missing. We hit a few. Food for a month.”

“I’m listening.”

Eddie could afford something like rent this way.

“This might work, I was gonna sell plasma for my aunt, who needs plasma. I’m not clear how plasma works. Let’s do it. How are we gonna walk with hams? I’ll be at load-capacity quick.”

“I got a car.”

How long had he been up?

“Shotgun.”

It’s a limo. I fucked up.

Ed parks on a hydrant; a stream catching sunlight, surges forth.

“I fucked up, Ed. Can I have back? I’ll never see inside a limo again.”

“Nah. Sit here with me. I get distracted, alone.”

Eddie’s a drag.

“This is badass.”

In gear, he creeps to the next house, considers the sidewalk, but instead eases on Ron’s grass.

“My neighbor.”

In the side-mirror, two girls laugh at the hydrant liberally hosing April’s air. Ron—neighbor who shuffles his driveway each morning, waving. He’s an asshole as far as I’m concerned.

“Do we have to hit Ron? He’s not bad.”

Ed looks at the limo, still idling, like, I was hoping to not be long.

Inside, Ed grabs Ron.

“Hi, Ron.”

In Eddie’s hand, Ron’s head slams the corner separating the kitchen from the living room. I don’t think he hears me over the screams.

On a black walnut table, in Ron’s spotless-year-round living room—carpet and furniture exceedingly white—is a Monster energy drink.

“It’s Monster,” I say, pointing.

Ron’s head is soft, where there’s head at all—pumpkin innards reluctant to release seeds. Pink, with flecks of Ron’s skull here and there, circle the spot where a head would be.

“Fuck, Ed.”

I think, This is good. We can eat yogurt while we wait for ham to thaw, certain Eddie hadn’t thought of that.

Ed’s scraping a T-bone coated in decades of frost with a butcher knife under scalding water; the frost withdraws revealing rotten treasures.

I spread lasagna from a Pyrex on the countertop.

We dive in.

I’m so hungry.

Ed tongues tidbits while I grab a tray of eclairs. Down in the sink next to where he’s scrubbing it goes; sopping hands raise piles, cheeks bulge, pastry drips from lips. I use my hand as a shovel to plumb chocolate from corners of the pan softened from dishwater.

“Yummm.” Ed grins.

His neck muscles strain working the T-bone, reminding me of a bald eagle’s leg I saw in a museum.

I feel bad for Ron. He looks like an old mop you let kids tie-die.

Partially-frozen steak resists Eddie’s teeth. Something about everything, the whiteness of Ron’s living room, his green lawn. Makes you unbelievably hungry.

I go to the window. The girls from earlier are peeling out in the limo. Grass and mud spray Ron’s lawn. Red and blue reflect back and forth in the hydrant’s geyser.

I hear sirens.

I run to the fridge.

Green bean casserole going soft on top comes out. We descend. He mops dregs of curdled sauce and beans with bread. I explode a bag of Doritos. Ed laughs. Chips rain down. “There’s never enough in the bag,” I say.

Crawling in the crumbs, I hear a knock.

“It’s the police.”

“No thanks!”

I look at Ed struggling to get turkeys from the freezer in Ron’s garage. It’ll work if he drops one.

“Ed.” I remember raccoons dying in a situation like this.

Ed. Not a bad guy.

“We’re breaking down the door.”

I fucked up. Not my day.

“One, two—”

My day will come.

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JAKE’S DÉTOURNEMENT by Ben Robinson

May 6, 2020 · Fiction

The concrete slab lies resting at the centre of a clear perspex bowl that had until just now been full to the brim of cake mixture, a potential Victoria sponge whose life is suddenly cut short. As of mere seconds ago, the sugar, eggs, flour, and butter are splattered all over the tabletop and kitchen walls, the encounter played out in a split second flash of joyous rage and violence. The boy’s name is Jake. He was raised in an all-female household with four elder sisters whose relationship with him could best be described as fractious. Ever teased and chided over his ginger hair and awkward demeanour, bitterness has long since taken a hold.

“Ginger nut fell in the cut and frightened all the fishes

A fish came up and ate him up,

And that was the end of ginger nut.”

It’s his sisters Lotte and Helena doing the baking, joint champions of the annual village competition five years in succession with a sequence of unanimous victories. Their winning recipes are closely guarded and their time at the kitchen worktop is mapped out with the utmost precision. It’s this picture of control that Jake is determined to upset. To aid him in this objective, an off-cut of building materials from the garden patio has been smuggled into this chamber of baking excellence. The slab sits in wait silently beneath the worktop on the mezzanine level above the kitchen. The girls have been working on this cake since early morning and Jake’s anger is righteous. His act will represent, in accordance with Debord's theory, "the integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu."

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SENIORS ON THE MOVE by Mike Itaya

May 2, 2020 · Fiction

I’m Old Boy.

In the assisted living, they give me the journal, for a doodling. I write camphor, cancer. Camphor, cancer. I don’t give a shit. I’m Old Boy.

It’s Tuesday. And right off, things go bad.

Somebody swiped Rundy’s anxiety candle.

“Who’s fucking with my aromatherapy?” He wants to know.

I used to drink. I don’t have the mind for it. My back’s fucked. I sleep out in the banquet hall, like a plank, waiting on them lunch ladies. I flash peepers and spot Rundy beneath the salad bar—guzzling stuff—working up to frenzy. He monograms his onesie with ranch dressing, and banishes a spare bottle to the nebulous domain of his nethers. He’s big into spiritual growth and looking to boogie. I double-up on Depends, in case he tries to slip me the big banana.

I got no man-panties. Nothing to hide a half-master. I seen them old gals in whale drawers, and make for jumping ship. It gives you pause. Each Tuesday. Thursday. Wednesday. You get the whole goddamn picture. I heist contraband from the staff kitchen. Heist a tomato-mayo sammie. Right beneath my gown. Wake up. With a tomato-mayo sammie stuck to my chest.

I hang with Rundy. My roomie. This tragic melon-brain. He traps rats. And makes chess sets. With taxidermied rats. It gives you pause. He’s whiplashed. Too many U-turns underneath the sheets. I whip hell on him, for telling lies on my momma. I’d rather not go into it. We’re the best of friends.

We burned down our lives in Homochitto, Mississippi.

We mess around. We don’t go to “Seniors on the Move.” Melvin, this drowning goon, crapped out during water aerobics. With the floaties. And a Baby Ruth. And an empty wallet. All this for posterity. During the Ouija séance—for Melvin—I make the board say, “Black Jesus,” which really gets the geezers riled and moaning.

They drag me to Dr. Hypnos, who dims the lights and gets “professional.” Talking all slow and sad, like he’s got a line on me. Wanna talk ten years gone. Like I’m some kinda folksy mumba-chumba with my Rascal scooter and my “FAARTS” vanity plate. My ten year plan is to be dead for at least nine of them. He says, “Something’s got to change,” and right now, that something feels a lot like me.

I see now, I got off on the wrong foot here, talking out my buns. Which chafes. ‘Cause if you’re going to say anything, you might as well say the motherfucking truth:

My line is cut.

The cable is buried.

Sickness got me here.

My life is gone.

I came off a spree once, and found my son dead in his room. His big old moon cat sitting on top of him, staring at me. Staring through my shame. I think shame broke my mind.

I burned down my life in Homochitto, Mississippi.

My boy: there was ruin in his face even I could not tell you of.

But I have lived through things that might have killed you. And I have sharpened tooth on stone. I will wait for you behind happiness. I will take you from everything that’s gone wrong.

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SAFE PASSAGE by Sharon Dale Wexler

May 1, 2020 · Fiction

Even though I know where the missing part of the toy gun is, I won’t tell. They haven’t asked. They ask each other but not me. Even if I tell them it’s under the kitchen table, that won't be the end of it; they won't settle down and sit at the table for the meal.

The dog smells like a boy on a camping trip. The breeder promised to deliver at three. Safe passage. Once inside, right away, the dog squatted on the floor.

The boy was only here every other weekend and, therefore, never showered. At first, the dog was supposed to be mine. But because I gave in, reluctantly, going along with the deceit, the dog only is mine when the boy's gone. I was the only one the boy wouldn't miss if I were missing. But before his father would buy the dog, I agreed.

The dog was my garden of Eden. Before Dude arrived, I knew no wrong. I didn't know what badness I was capable of. We are all looking to the dog for comfort we couldn’t find in food, TV, or our body.

The boy went on walks to the sewer, to sneak smokes, where the weeds grew higher than the house. See what you made him do, we'd fight over who cleans the dog’s vomit. We bonded by talking about the dog, worrying about its appearance and health. We had to be home soon because it's almost time to feed the dog.

Dude waits at the door to be able to be let out. I can hear him breathing behind the door, and there seemed to be a special relationship between us. His breathing on the top step and me thinking whether or not he would be safe from the boy let out. I don't mean to infer a relationship that was not there something supernatural unless it was there. For instance, if I said Dude find the leash and the leash was missing from its usual place in the drawer, and I couldn't find it, Dude would push me to the garage where I could find the leather strap hanging on the door opener.

The only noise in the house was from the dog barking to go out.

When the boy is over, I sleep in the room with the dog but cannot fall asleep. The dog can't find a comfortable place to lie down. I tried getting the dog to sleep in the bed. He circled around my side first; the father was sleeping on the other side or sideways with a pillow over his eyes.

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BROWN RECLUSE by Cody Pease

April 30, 2020 · Fiction

Their arrival to the reception is further delayed when he sees a spider on the tongue of his boot. Both men refuse to wear the boot now. The taller man traps the spider beneath a glass, as his partner tries to decipher what kind of spider it is. A brown recluse. The two men debate on how to dispose of it. The taller man offers to throw the glass far from the house. To let it sit in the snow and melt when spring comes. The shorter man is too kind and stubborn; he does not want the spider to freeze. He wishes he had the ability to cure the spider of its nature. To let it live in a dark corner of their house. Another pet. The taller man protests, then points to the neighbor’s porch. The neighbor’s windows are drawn shut. The shorter man finds an alcove beneath the porch, where it’s dark and warm. He shakes the glass but the spider remains still. He names the spider. This makes him feel better if the spider is meant to freeze. He leaves the glass sitting on the stone slab.

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