X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

DEADBOLT by Kami Westhoff

March 31, 2020 · Fiction

In her dreams, she can walk. She unclips the cord that connects her to the Emergency switch, swings her bloated-log legs from the bed until her feet find her one-in-a-million prints in her purple slippers. Though it’s been over a year since she’s stood unassisted, her legs neither quake nor collapse. Her wheelchair sits next to her nightstand, a foam donut pillow the color of bile positioned just-right by her caregiver.

She thrusts her foot forward. It meets the earth as though it’s the ice she and her first husband carved into arcs and spirals, tufts of ice fluffing the pond’s surface. She shivers at the wind blowing from the north valley, her feet numbing through slippers. Her husband navigates the ice like a first language, bending to steady wind-milling children, scooping the fallen into his arms. Something clenches inside her when he lifts a fallen girl, and their plum-sized baby in utero flexes fingers into fists.

Her roommate’s bed has not been remade since she was relocated. She lifts the afghan, fluffs it until it lays flat on the bed. The wall above the dresser is decorated with photos of children, grandchildren, siblings, spouses, some might be her own, but she doesn’t stop to wonder. She’s had to make certain sacrifices to walk.

The hallway is an illuminated labyrinth. She smells a uric twinge, nothing like the tang of the cotton diapers of her daughter. It’s ranked by haloperidol, clozapine, memantine, valium. Her hands flutter and clench, roll and gather as she changes the soiled sheets from her daughter’s bed. The world was too much for her daughter, her body determined to starve her before her first birthday. The doctor once called her “tiny on the inside,” urethra too narrow, uterus too petite, wrists too delicate for the heavy-hold, ankles unsteady, even on friendly terrain. Her daughter had been trying to sky since birth, while her mother, heavy in all the wrong ways, was born to burrow.

A strip of light slashes the carpet’s taupe. The room it comes from belongs to “Dante Simpson.” The “D” drags her to Dad, who is only allowed one function in her memory: he must save her. She’d read that a parent saves their child’s life an average of forty-five times before the age of two. This saving is a last-second lift from the neighbor’s German Shepherd, Bode—her father tells her this story every time her fingertips navigate the zigzag scars on his calf. Her own scars are like fissures beneath the earth of subcutaneous tissue. The scar from her daughter intersects the one from the hysterectomy. Sometimes she wakes too early from the anesthesia, and the doctor behind the shocked-white barrier sheet, nothing but a strip of eyes between scrub mask and hat, says something that sounds like a prayer, and she’s back in the hallway.

Above her, higher than the second floor where people are in early stages, the third floor, where caregivers smoke and gulp coffee to get through weeks of doubles, is an August sky she hasn’t seen in two years. Stars spatter pinpricks of gas and dust people mistake for light, which is to say, for life. Sky is no longer sky for her. If she were to punch #3194# into the number pad at the front door, drift from the exhalation of the all-but-dead, the thrust of last words love ones carve into tongue, throat, gut to try and fail to translate later, beyond the streetlamps that pale the night, and if she were to look up, she’d see the storm of black and violet erupting on her cheek, her lip stitched with tiny black crosses, blackhole thumbprints twinned on her bone-bright throat.

Something somewhere cries: maybe a fussy hinge, or a northern mockingbird, and she lifts her newborn from its crib. The effort cricks her—the baby’s shoulders nearly split her into one only days earlier. Her breasts throb with the rush of milk that pricks like something barbed. And there is that fence on their property line that plucked tiny bulbs of raspberry blood on her back when she didn’t crouch deep. It’s hard to hold onto a baby sometimes, no matter how hard you try, and everything around you says let go. He’s there again, his voice a bomb in her kitchen, the baby a lit fuse against her chest. She believes him when he says he’s not fucking around, promises to forget it ever happened, what she thought she saw.

Laughter scatters across the hallway, but it’s trenched before she can ride its wave. It’s maybe what she misses most, laughter so expansive it cannot gather sound. Like a scream underwater, or into pillow, or in the woods past the barbed wire fence the night she thought he was too drunk to notice her slink from their bed, the baby’s grunt and whimper, the clunk of the backdoor deadbolt.

In this place, all hallways lead exactly where you started, though it always feels like the first time. Her room is as she left it—all at once her childhood bedroom, the room where he reminded her he could take anything he wanted whenever he wanted it, the room her second husband moved her bed into when he couldn’t stand the trench her body caused the mattress, the room where she pressed her mouth to her baby’s ear, voice a steady hot hush of Shhhh, palm a cradle beneath its moist diaper, the room where she lay, feet, pale and useless as fish in a fistfight, hands in a constant flurry of fuss, heart refusing to untether her body from the stubborn habit of beat.

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TO TEACH by Tyler Barton

March 30, 2020 · Fiction

Whenever she passes a picture she’s in, Jewell closes her eyes. She laughs. Jewell’s earlobes are drippingly long, and her granddaughter Tanny would like to see them pierced nine, maybe ten times. This makes Jewell laugh. Jewell has been convinced by friends to join the poetry club, because, they say, Jewell is always finishing their sentences with a slant rhyme, and damnit they want the real thing! Jewell laughs at them. The poetry teacher is a bear of a man at a pottery wheel until Jewell is told he is the pottery teacher. Jewell laughs through her apology. The poetry teacher is twirling with joy at something Lucille Clifton said. “That woman is a loon,” a poet in a wheelchair whispers. Laughing, Jewell watches the poetry teacher teach, but then she sees that the poetry teacher walked out of her apartment that morning and screamed a mean thing because she saw a ticket on her windshield, but then—and this is what tickles Jewell—when she saw that it was only a papery yellow ginkgo leaf, the poetry teacher screamed an even meaner thing. Jewell discovers this moment in the poetry teacher like a crumb in a man’s beard. As the poetry teacher speaks of inspiration and fearlessness and squeezing the muse’s two cheeks, Jewell sees through to the room where both screams started, small as pepper seeds. Jewell’s hand is up. The poetry teacher says, “Yes, you?” Jewell slides down out of her chair and crawls across the carpet toward her. “Here,” she says. “It’s a haiku.” Jewell doesn’t listen to her classmates’ gasps as she peels a leaf from the woman’s shoe. The yellowness turns to orange in her mouth. Then, blue. She can’t laugh while she chews or she’ll puke.

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SEVEN IS A HOLY NUMBER by Jen Julian

March 28, 2020 · Fiction

And yes, that is how many children she has, and I’m talking of course about Mrs. Goth, who every year selects one of her children to be her favorite in a ceremony she performs for us: a blessed clique of friends and neighbors. She lines the children up on the lawn in white folding chairs, and we like to watch their faces brighten with tension, their shoulders rigid, and we like the springy carnal heat of late June, which makes us feel pagan. Mrs. Goth is not intentionally pagan. The truth is, she schedules the ceremony while her husband is away at a yearly business conference. He doesn’t know about any of this.

Supposedly, this ceremony started as a joke, though now Mrs. Goth and the children take it deadly serious. Angelina, the eldest at nineteen, came all the way back from her college in California to participate, even though she hasn’t been favorite in ten years. The current favorite is Jacob, who’s eleven. He took the honor from Margo, thirteen, the previous year, and yes, any observer might think Mrs. Goth is transferring the title in a sequence, from oldest to youngest and back again, or that she’s otherwise appeasing all of her children with a soft and predictable pattern, as Mrs. Goth, who never so much as squeaks a word at community council meetings, gives the impression of being a soft and predictable lady. But this is not the case when it comes to her children. Margo was the favorite four years ago when the honor went to Emma, Jacob’s twin, only to jump back to Margo the following year. We knew from the look of shock on the children’s faces—and the specific look of shameful pleasure on the face of Margo—that Mrs. Goth’s choice was unexpected. We knew intimately the demon grin of Oliver, the second eldest, who was favorite two years in a row before finally seeing the title passed along again to Charlotte, the third eldest, who once snatched it so gleefully from the baby she was scolded by her mother in front of us and went to bed early for the shame. The baby is Wanda. Along with Angelina before her, Wanda hasn’t received the title since.

This year, on this evening, the dayglow wanes and the lightning bugs come out. Mrs. Goth has set up a table of pinwheel sandwiches and expensive cheese, which we peck fretfully, and a crystal bowl of boozy punch, which drowns the lightning bugs and makes our conversation sparkle. The children, still stiff in their lawn chairs, are dressed in church clothes. Their feet root to the ground like dandelions. Their mother is a kind and obsequious hostess, but when she’s making her choice, she tucks her hand behind her back like a decorated general. Yes, in the past, we have put money in a pot, though that’s not the point. We have never tried to persuade Mrs. Goth to choose one child over another. The point is that it’s not anyone’s choice but hers, because we don’t know what elegant criterial chart Mrs. Goth goes by, and we have decided that any one of her children are average enough be the favorite at any time, that they are all equal parts charming and irritating, intelligent and stupid, and they vary almost meaninglessly when it comes to their creativity, sense of humor, athletic prowess, political awareness, and physical grace and style. By now, all have made neighborhood contributions they can be proud of—Jacob’s YouTube videos and Charlotte’s paper craft and Oliver’s volunteer campaign work for the county warden—though Emma’s newspaper-worthy success last year with amateur theater told us that measurable accomplishments are not the deciding factor for Mrs. Goth. Or, maybe, Mrs. Goth thought Emma’s performance in The Gondoliers wasn’t any good, and who are we to argue with that.

The children, if they know their mother’s criteria, have said nothing about it to the other neighborhood children, or maybe they have, and everyone involved is sworn to keep it secret from us grown-ups, the same way we’re sworn to keep the ceremony secret from Mr. Goth. But we wouldn’t want to know the criteria, even if we knew how to find out, because we like to think the favorite is more divined than selected, because we have talked about it over drinks on back porches, around fire pits and masonry ovens, and in the shallows of our swimming pools: this is our I Ching, this is the primal blood-spill of chicken entrails, this is our peek through the door of the celestial house. Neither we nor the children have the power to control this outcome and nothing can prepare us for it, but that is where power is, and here in this neighborhood power spirals its infinite coil into the secret mind of Mrs. Goth.

We watch her children, seated with calm and anxious dignity, sweaty hands folded in their laps. Their toes recoil like worms in their sandals as their mother strides by again. She’s still deciding. We watch and hold our breaths as she bends down and opens the ceremonial bin, brings out the dried laurel crown, silk ribbons dangling. Every year, we smell its delicate bay scent spicing the lawn, hanging over the heads of the children. But which head? Whose perfect head? We lean forward to hear Mrs. Goth’s whispers: Who is it this time? Who is it? We think: How long can we hold this ecstatic breath? We think: how will the universe have realigned when Mr. Goth comes back home?

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GLAD YOU’RE HERE by Dan Shiffman

March 27, 2020 · Fiction

You are the one who goes back for the remaining Christmas presents while the rest of the family hugs in puffy coats by the doorway. The straps on the duffel bags pulled from the trunk of the car are rough and chilled. When you come inside, everyone is already seated around the fireplace or in the kitchen.

They ask a smiling question or two, then the conversation floats to the other side of the room. The dog—it’s a golden retriever; it used to be a Schnauzer—stretches and walks over looking for attention and reassurance. You pour a glass of Coke, then sit back and listen. When you stop petting the dog’s head, it strokes sharp nails against your knee and looks you in the eye until you start petting it again. No one exactly blames you for moving to another continent.

It’s really great that you get to see so much of the world, they often say to you. Can you get peanut butter there? What about taxes? You do like your quiet routines in foreign places, the picnics by the river when your small, glassy apartment gets too hot. One of your favorite things to do wherever you find yourself is walk around and look at stuff; Spazierengehen the Germans call it. It’s hard to explain precisely, and you’ve stopped trying. Much of what you do is seen as nice and interesting in a mild, ill-defined way.

And yet they keep wondering why France or Lebanon doesn’t have one of their own who can do what you do. And maybe you programmed wind turbine software in Hokkaido for a year, but Hokkaido doesn’t fully exist until your in-laws’ wealthy, adventurous friends visit there and write a long Facebook post about it. No one goes where they go. That’s the consensus in the room.

When you had an appendectomy in Ankara, you spent one night in the hospital. The air conditioning was broken and the grandson of the jaundiced man sleeping next to you fanned him with a bath towel. You remember the flutter, snap, and air reaching you. When your sister or her neighbor or your aunt had an appendectomy in Akron, she got some kind of allergic rash where they stuck her with the IV and the doctors couldn’t figure it out. They had never seen anything quite like it and wanted to keep her in the hospital for another night but the insurance company was being a pain in the ass, so she had to call them herself for approval and they put her on hold for an hour. There is a chattering urgency about their lives that always seems to be in the process of being reported. This kind of detail is no longer available to you—at least not when you’re here.

When your mother dies, you live farthest away and grief mixes with jet lag throughout your week back in Baltimore or Pocatello. The other mourners standing around platters at the reception form tight circles, and for a few seconds, you look at the blouses and jackets of your siblings or cousins. You walk to the circle and place your hand on the back of an elbow that, for a moment, neither pulls away nor moves to let you enter.

When you help put an extra leaf on the sturdy oak dining room table before the meal, your in-law or cousin or uncle finds the latch under the table before you do. You know where it is, you just needed a moment to find it, like the moment it takes to locate the wiper control on the rental car before you pull away from the airport after a long-haul flight and drive here, passing your old high school and the new movie theater before turning off the state highway.

But sometimes, the same or another in-law or cousin or uncle lets you briefly into the tension he has with someone else in the house today. He sighs, tilts his head, mutters, “She really should think about that the next time she. . .” Ancient radiators ping against the muffled laughter of a story being told in another room. You know better than to take sides, and, besides, you no longer have the right to take sides. Even showing concern feels like a violation of some kind of agreement you should have accepted when you decided to renew your contract in Norway or Hong Kong. The revelation closes, and the table pinches against the added leaf. He doesn’t say anything else. It’s only a little while longer to dinner.

You aren’t the black sheep, the troublemaker, the failure. You aren’t a scapegoat exactly. Animated feelings are directed toward these people. These uncles and sisters don’t even need to show up to have these emotions aimed at them. Listen, they are being talked about right now. You genuinely try to show up at least once a year.

You didn’t mean to be condescending about their overscheduling, helicopter parenting, multiple cars, politics or whatever. Different versions of the same things, you’ve discovered, happen in most places anyway. And, if you brought any of this up or tried to clarify further what you were really trying to say, they might even agree with you, then tell you about a plan that has already been made: We are going out for ice cream! Save the date for the wedding! We’ve rented a cabin; maybe you can come this summer.

You scoot forward on the couch and clear your throat. You might have something to say, something that would surprise them because it is neither exotic nor judgmental. It’s really quite ordinary. Maybe an ailment or complaint about telemarketers—yes, they have these over there too—but the dog, their damned dog, wedges its muzzle between your knees.

The thing is you don’t really have something to say, just a jello-ish, passing desire to do so. You bite on a cheese covered Triscuit and slouch back silently against the couch. You’ve left some crumbs on the dog’s slightly oily muzzle, but no one else has noticed, including the dog. She’s just glad that you’re here.

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GLASS by Ross McMeekin

March 26, 2020 · Fiction

My neighbor wants to know about the fish tank, whether it still holds water. I want to know the same about the river running along the highway. There’s a lot of agriculture upstream, a lot of fields to irrigate. It’s midsummer, the sun is merciless, and the snowpack is gone.

He rubs his finger on the glass, looks at it, and wipes his jeans. I need more money than I can make from this yard sale, and I think he knows it.

“So what did you keep in the tank?” he asks.

“A better place than this.” I kept tropical fish—a huge waste of money—but the tank was beautiful, and my job at the distributor didn’t have an end date. I grew coral and had LED lights that made them glow. It drew your eyes from across the room.

He nods to the hose against the siding of the house. “Do you mind?”

“Be my guest.” The man wears his jeans like a rancher, but his T-shirt is a size too large. The giveaway is his hair—it has the kind of sheen and lay that you can only pay for. He’s playing local. He has land that gets the water from the river. I know it. He heads over and turns on the water and starts filling up the tank, all the way until it spills over the side. He could have believed me, that the tank was fine, but I understand. A leak can appear from nowhere, at any time, and before you can mend it, everything inside is gone.

He comes back, the tank dripping. “Checks out,” he says. “You leaving town?”

“Greener pastures,” I say.

The things we all say are the things that have all been said. Any conversation is confined to the form, like how a river may swirl and eddy, but it’s always beholden to the banks.

“You and everyone.” He nods to my cell phone in my hand. I’m waiting on calls for some jobs I applied to in the city. There’s no job here that deserves me; I hope never to have to reconsider that comment.

“You know,” he says, “I was talking to a guy at Albertson’s the other day, and he told me that if your cell phone drops in the water, all you need to do is put it in a bag of rice for an hour, and poof, all of the moisture is gone. That simple.”

“I’ve heard that,” I say, and it’s true. I’ve heard it before a dozen times. What makes the comment surprising to people isn’t that rice will soak up moisture—that’s what rice does—it’s that it will soak it up even from a piece of technology.

“So what are you going to use it for?” I ask, nodding to the tank.

“A snake.” He laughs. “I know. But once you capture it in glass, it’s easier to believe it loves you back.”

“It’s a shame, isn’t it?” I say. He looks at me like he’s lost. We’re more alike than he’s pretending we are. “I tell you what,” I say. “How about you name your price and we’ll go up from there?"

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WHEN I WAS A PAPER GIRL by Sam Payne

March 26, 2020 · Fiction

Nana was always keen on telling me how working hard was important, so when I was thirteen, I took it upon myself to sign up with Turners Newsagents. It wasn't long before a round came up. This pleased Nana. She was enthusiastic about bringing me up in the right way.

"Manners and hard work, that’s all you need, my girl. Don’t let the past become an excuse."

By which she meant the death of my parents when I was nine, but we didn’t talk about them directly.

I delivered the morning papers to all the posh houses on the other side of town whose tree-lined streets had names like Buttercup Drive or Maple Avenue. Every fourth Friday, I was responsible for collecting the bill money and taking it back to Mr Turner, who meticulously counted every penny in front of me. I guess rich people didn’t like to get up early, because most of them left it under the doormat or on the ledge just inside their porch. This was alright by me, because if they didn’t leave their money, I had to knock and ask for it. I didn’t like talking to adults; my face would get all hot, and my mouth clammed up like a purse. When I eventually managed to get my words out, they sounded foolish or moronic.

One house, whose porch was larger than Nana’s kitchen, had walls lined with glass cases. Each case contained a dozen or so moths. Some moths were the color of tree trunks or rotten leaves, but others were so vivid and bright it seemed a crime that they should end this way. I was both fascinated and revolted by the moths. I didn’t understand why someone would display them in this way, and I think a part of me was afraid they might suddenly take flight.

The people who lived there usually left their bill in a plain brown envelope marked paper money, but one Friday, they must have forgot. It wasn’t there. I knocked and waited, and an old man answered the door. He was wearing a striped pajama top, and it took me a moment to realize this was all he was wearing. His legs were skinny and wrinkled and covered with wiry grey hairs. His private parts hung limp, as if dead. ‘Take it," he said.

I felt like one of those moths, encased in glass, a silver pin through the abdomen. It took me a moment to realize he was holding out his hand to me. He dropped the coins one by one into my palm. They were warm and damp like he’d been holding them for a long time. I closed my fist, and thanks him. It was all I could think of to say.

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A FAIR FIGHT by Alle C. Hall

March 23, 2020 · Fiction

The boat didn’t launch until 10PM. Allia and the three Swedish men she found herself with settled into the hold of the 25-foot cargo vessel ferrying supplies between Indonesian islands. They must have hit rough seas, because Allia woke in the dark to find the boat tipping right then left, as if God were running big fingers up and down the keys of a piano. There was rain and there were rats. When the boat tipped right, the travelers and the rats rolled to the right; when the boat tipped left, they rolled left. Without an ounce of condescension, the Swedes formed their long bodies into a triangle around Allia, so that most of the rats flew over rather than rolling into her. A few slammed into her, bounced off, scuttled away. As soon as the sun broke, the winds calmed and the rain cleared. The crew invited the white people onto the deck, where each declined the breakfast stew of indefinable meat over rice.

The first rat appeared about what must have been eight o’clock. Allia spotted it on a railing, sitting up like a puppy, its little paws held its lightly moving chest. Allia traveled with a set of nunchucks. She came up quietly behind the rat to flatten its skull. With a second strike, she sent the carcass into the sea.

The second rat was almost squirrel-like, with perky ears and a rounded back. The third and fourth seemed regularly gross in the way of city rats. When she sent the fourth, bloody, into the sea, one of the Indonesian crewmen said, “Don’t. Sharks.”

Allia could not stop now. They were coming. The next was bigger and mean, the way Allia imagined the rat from 1984 would be. He put up a good fight, dodging Allia’s sticks and taking whacks to his solid sides without flinching. It took more than three minutes of battle to crack its skull. Even then, the old bastard didn’t die. His skull was not completely broken when Allia’s last swoop sent him overboard. Sure enough, he met in the water a shark.

“Mako,” said the crewman. The big rat’s screams evidenced the short, furious fight he gave before a shriek choked off half-way through.

More rats were coming. They were wearing her out. Allia climbed to the crow’s nest. Slowly, steadily, rats followed her, strung out as evenly as Christmas lights. They appeared to have all the time there was. The Swedes and Indonesians retreated to the hold. In a gathering rush, the rodents pulled at Allia with their scratchy paws and threw her into the sea. They tossed her nunchucks after her, to make it more of a fair fight.

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MIDGE by Tara Campbell

March 21, 2020 · Fiction

“I remember sailing in a ship.” Skipper’s voice fills the musty darkness of the drawer. “I mean, it was a small ship, more like a boat, I guess, and we were just floating, really, which maybe some people wouldn’t call sailing, but anyhow, I liked it.” Her tone brightens with the details. “It was a warm day but cool down by the water. The girl had taken us down there—”

“What was the girl’s name?” I ask.

I hear Skipper’s intake of breath, the way the memory catches in her throat, even though she technically doesn’t have one anymore, meaning a throat, seeing as how she’s now just a head in a junk drawer, like all of us, lying on top of lost buttons, rusty screws, used twist ties, expired coupons, and a broken pair of scissors. Waiting for someone to come save us.

“I don’t remember,” she says. “You’re so mean, Midge. I never remember, why do you keep badgering me?”

“Shh, shh, it’s okay,” says Francie. “She was just asking.”

But Skipper’s right. I am mean, always have been. I think. I don’t remember going on any sailing trips. What I do remember is that the girl who played with us always reached for me last, and then had me argue with everyone else. I don’t know why she picked me to be the mean one. Maybe it was my name: Midge—that sounds like someone who starts arguments. I just can’t remember what we argued about. And the longer I’m in this drawer, the less I remember.

Christie interjects: “Skipper, sweetie.”

I roll as everyone shifts around me, and I assume it’s Skipper trying to face her, a habit we haven’t completely unlearned since being in the drawer.

“Sweetie, Midge is only trying to help.”

“Whatever,” I say. “If you want to just lie around here the rest of your life…”

“What does that mean?” says Skipper, voice trembling. “The rest of m—”

“Ignore her,” says Francie. “She’s just trying to scare you.”

Francie’s right. I am trying to scare her, just like I did with Tutti and Todd before her, and Kelly before them, firing questions at them until they cried. To hell with comforting new arrivals; they might still have enough information to save us, if I can just pull it out of them.

“Don’t ignore me,” I say. “I’m the only one—"

The drawer lurches below me. A crack of light appears like a raised horizon, then widens to encompass the whole sky. The brightness hurts even through closed eyelids. Without arms, I can’t shield my face.

Something hard and heavy grazes my cheek as it falls into our drawer. Then, as quickly as the light blinded me, I’m jostled and plunge into darkness again.

“That bitch,” says the new arrival. The voice is deep, masculine.

“Holy shit,” someone blurts. “It’s Ken!”

“Ladies?” says Christie. “A little help?”

As my eyes adjust, I notice that a sliver of light still shines through a crack, with a blot of darkness against in it. A few of us roll over bent nails and loose batteries to get closer to the blot. It’s Christie, and her hair has gotten stuck in the top of the drawer.

“Hang on,” says Skipper. “We’ll pull you out.”

Christie shifts. “No, don’t pull me back into the drawer. This is our way out of it!”

“You bet your sweet ass it is.” Ken rolls from side to side, as though testing his new range of movement, then tells us to watch out. He tumbles toward the front of the drawer, banging himself below the crack of light again and again, until he finally gives up and rolls, panting, into a back corner.

The drawer hasn’t moved at all. The horizon hasn’t gotten any brighter.

“You done?” says Christie.

Her tone is uncharacteristically rude, but no one tells her to be nicer, which I find gratifying. But then, I’m Mean Midge.

The corner remains quiet.

“Ken. The girl’s name is Mackenzie,” Christie says. “Mackenzie.”

“Oh,” gasps a doll named Stacey. “Oh oh oh, and she has red hair just like me.”

“And she likes milk and cookies after school,” Skipper adds. “Even though she usually gets carrot sticks and, gag, celery—I mean, who likes celery—and crackers with that weird chickpea paste on it? I mean, have you guys smelled that stuff? And she has to sneak the cookies, which isn’t hard because her parents keep all kinds of junk food in the house, but then she feels bad about it afterward, because she looks in that stupid mirror and thinks she’s fat. She’s only ten for Christ’s sake, and she thinks she’s fat. Can you believe it? I mean, isn’t that horrible?”

After a moment, I break the silence. “Christie, what’s the plan?”

We all whisper, bubbling with ideas, and we decide to wait until the world outside the drawer is dark and quiet. The one thing we agree upon is that we can’t let our captors discover the gap and close the opportunity before we figure out how to use it.

When night falls, we try out our ideas: we push against Christie to wedge more of her hair into the opening; we stuff our own hair into the opening alongside hers; we roll ourselves around and around, twisting our hair into tight, fat bundles meant to pry the opening wider. Nothing works.

Skipper spins, unwinding her hair, and looks into the back corner of the drawer. Ken is lying somewhere over there in the darkness. He hasn’t spoken or moved since he rolled back there. It hits me then that none of my nice, helpful companions have gone back to check on him.

“I’m going to try something,” Skipper says. What little light is left reveals her eyes, narrowed, and her mouth set in a hard line. “Please promise, though: don’t judge me.”

Skipper rolls out of the scant light toward the blackness in the corner. I cringe at the thought of being that close to him in the dark. Cornered. We wait, listen. Hear things. Things that sound like the rip of silicone. When she rolls back to us, there’s a bulge in her cheek.

“Skipper?”

“What did you do?”

Skipper doesn’t answer, merely rolls up the pile of our heads and goes to work on the opening, burrowing and shimmying, creating some pretty nasty tangles in our hair, but also opening the split wide enough for us to forgive her.

“Hand me the scissors,” she says to no one in particular.

Everyone gasps. I don’t like being bossed, but Skipper seems to have a plan; so I untangle myself and push the broken scissors up the pile of heads, laughing when I think about “handing” them off with no arms.

Stacy starts to cry, but no one asks why, probably because we can all now remember the time Mackenzie tried giving her bangs. We all told Stacy she looked great, but she cried for weeks. We visited her almost every day on the top shelf of the bookcase, where Mackenzie hid her so she wouldn’t have to look at her botched bangs, and we all acted as though nothing had happened.

Just like now, when we don’t talk about how Mackenzie will never come save us.

And now, when we don’t talk about dark corners and Ken.

Skipper tells Stacy to stop crying, she’s not a little girl anymore, and the words cut through me like a blade. “I’m not a little girl anymore.” That was the last thing Mackenzie said to me before she put me in here. The same thing I heard her say to every new head that has tumbled in since.

Skipper doesn’t try to give anyone bangs. Together, she and I set the scissors along one side of the drawer and wedge the tips out of the crack, then lever and wriggle until the crack opens even further. The others get the hint and disentangle themselves to set up two teams, pushing the handles in opposite directions, widening our horizon a little more with each heave-ho.

We leave the scissors wedged there, then slide a ruler into place as a ramp to the outside. Wordlessly, we back away. Skipper has earned the first taste of freedom.

I watch my sisters roll out into the world after Skipper, each of them holding a nail or pin or sewing needle between her teeth, and I notice that none of them turns back to look for Ken. Not one. But I look back, and I remember everything, including why I’m so mean. It has nothing to do with my name.

I clench a nail between my teeth. Darkness swirls around me as I tumble after my sisters up the ramp into a new world, one with no room for anyone but us.

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IF WE MISS THIS ONE by Abbie Barker

March 20, 2020 · Fiction

The morning sun highlights imperfections—the cigarette burn at the edge of my seat, the dust on the dash, the dried blood hugging the edges of Grant’s thumbnail. He’s disheveled, unshaven, his black hair kinked from a restless sleep. I want to slide my hand over his cowlick and smooth it down. I want to talk about last night.

“Is there a later meeting if we miss this one?” I say.

“We can still make it.”

Multi-family homes flash by in tones of gray, in varying states of disrepair. We pass a park with an overgrown baseball diamond and a playground where no children are playing. A woman in a faded purple sweatshirt sits slumped on a bench, her head rocking side to side. What’s it like to wake up wishing you could disappear? And once there, can you ever fully return?

“We’re close,” Grant says. He grazes my thigh with his knuckles. “I remember this pink house.” The three-story building is the color of Pepto Bismol.

“Did you want me to stay?” I say.

Grant parts his lips, but no sound comes out.

“Last night. Should I have stayed at Sadie’s?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

As Sadie’s party thinned, I left him on the arm of a teal couch, sipping a Miller Lite. “It’s pretty much water,” he said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

He took another sip. “But you were thinking it.”

I don’t know what I was thinking. I was tired and wanted to leave. I’ve always been able to drink or not drink. What’s one Miller Lite on a couch?

“This is it,” he says, pointing to the glass door of a single-story brick building. There’s an undersized bronze cross stuck to the peak of the roof. We’ve arrived at a church, but it can’t be the one pinned on my phone. “I think there’s parking around back.”

“You’ve been here before?” I say.

Grant shrugs. “Once or twice.”

I wonder if this is how it will always be, the two of us searching for separate things and not knowing it.

***

In the parking lot, a man helps a girl down from the cab of a black truck. She wears a pink dress made of tulle and satin—the kind normally reserved for Easter Sundays. He grabs her hand and they hurry to the back entrance, the heels of her shiny shoes clicking on the pavement.

“Should I come in?” I say.

“Isn’t that why you came?”

We trail the pair inside and down a carpeted hallway that smells of stewed tomatoes. Grant directs me through double metal doors propped open by two artificial palm plants. Music plays, heavy on the synthesizer.

The room reminds me of my elementary school’s cafetorium: cement walls painted a pale high-gloss, rectangular panels of fluorescent lights—misshapen gym with retractable basketball hoops. Magenta streamers hang from the orange rims, twisted and taped in uneven arcs. There are folding tables spanning one sideline, topped with an array of mayonnaise-based side salads and aluminum pans of baked ziti. I count ten people in the room, including the man and the girl from the truck.

“Can I help you?” the man says.

Grant’s hands are in his pockets, his eyes directed at the phlegm-colored linoleum.

“We’re looking for an AA meeting?” I say.

“I’ve rented the room for my daughter’s birthday.”

Grant combs his fingers through his hair. This makes it stick out more. He says a few words that shouldn’t be said in a church.

The man’s eyes flicker with understanding. “In twenty minutes, this place will be overrun with kids, but we have plenty of food.”

“We should probably go.” I say.

“My brother is in the program,” the man says. He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand.

I expect Grant to craft an excuse, to drag us out of this child’s party we have no business crashing. Instead, he kneels, so he’s eye-level with the tulle-wrapped girl. “How old are you turning? Seventeen?”

The girl squints and holds up six fingers.

“Six? No way. You look so grown up.”

She lets out a musical giggle, revealing her missing front teeth, and skips to a pyramid of presents. Is it terrible that I’m craving a giant glass of Chardonnay? That all I want is to disappear?

The man pats Grant on the back. “I have to grab a few things from the truck.”

“I’ll help,” Grant says.

They walk through the open doors, deserting me in this drafty, multipurpose room with only my phone to swipe. With a few quick taps, I could reactivate my Match account and summon an Uber to whisk me away. Tomorrow there will be another meeting at another church on some other side of town, but missing this one feels too much like standing still.

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RIGHT BEFORE WE FALL APART by Elizabeth Crowder

March 19, 2020 · Fiction

We sit in cooling sand. You reach out a gritty palm. I don’t move closer. Eight years ago, on this same stretch of beach, with our swelling son arching your back like a comma, we vowed to love each other forever.

“Let’s play a game.” You twist kinky hair around a dark brown finger.

The last game we played was at your parents’ Christmas party. There, in your three-bedroom, one-bathroom childhood home with the red door, you unclenched. Your voice became salty and slippery, an oyster shucked from its shell. You loosened, darkened, said the n-word with a soft “er.” My mouth soured at your pantomime.

I started it. I usually do. You escalated it. You usually do.

We sat at the dining room table waiting for your mother’s “famous greens” to finish cooking. They bubbled in chicken stock and pork fat on the stovetop, shimmering with delight at the thought of stopping my Caucasian heart halfway to a beat.

“Let’s play a game,” you said.

“Okay.”

“Tell me something I don’t know about you.”

“My mother, for all her flaws—” I started to say.

“Racist tendencies,” you interrupt, which is a part of our problem.

“At least she doesn’t cook with salt,.” I said.

“For all her flaws, at least my mother does.”

That night, you got whiskey drunk and whiskey mean. You whispered, “You ruined my life,” as you fell asleep in the twin bed next to mine. Sentiments shouted in anger can be amended, forgiven, washed away. Sentiments whispered in anger are written in stone.

Back on the beach, the sun opens its veins in the capillary waves.

“Let’s play a game,” you say again.

“Okay.” I indulge, which is a part of our problem.

“Tell me something I don’t know about you,” you say.

I don’t remember my brother’s face. Only the dark brown cowlick on the back of his head that I wanted to press down with a spit-dampened palm as we exited the school bus. Only that he was the same age then as my son is now. Only that the truck that separated him from his shoes on that dusty stretch of Lincoln Highway didn’t even stop. Only that we never found the person who killed him. In a world so ephemeral, the concept of forever makes me feel claustrophobic.

“You know everything about me,” I say.

You flush burgundy like pink skin slapped. Your frown comes quick, a herald for your tears.

“I’ll go first, then,” you say. “I never spell the word poignant right on the first try.” Your smile is a quivering olive branch. It’s toothy. It doesn’t reach your eyes.

Something dislocates inside of me. You and I slipped from nothing into something into nothing while I was looking the other way. She felt like a choice. Her pale hair, her widow’s peak, her arched pout. I’m sure she could spell the word “poignant” on the first try.

I think: I’m in love with someone who isn’t you.

I think: I’m in love with someone because she isn’t you. Because I recognize myself in her. Because her mother also doesn’t cook with salt. Because she doesn’t whisper “You ruined my life.”

I say: “It’s getting dark. We should head back in.”

We sit in silence until the sand grows cold around us, until we slip back into nothing.

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