X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

TWO TIMES BELOW by Ben Segal

June 3, 2020 · Fiction

For once I was leaving well enough alone. The rain was harder than average. My sweater was coming apart at the sleeves. This was when I was officed by the Pacific and could walk in the waves during lunch. This was when my colleagues wondered at the afternoon damp at my ankles, at the slight briny scent that came from below my desk.

I placed a huge jellyfish over my head. It slipped on wet against my scalp and face and dangled plant-like to the edge of my collarbone.

I thought of words like tendril and vine. My bald patch soothed beneath the creature’s moist insides.

When I walked back to work, I was thoroughly soaked from the rain. The jellyfish gave everything a cloudy look. The world appeared viscous, smudged. My office was cold, as always, so I wrapped my body in the patterned wool blanket I stored in the filing cabinet and poked my hands out to reach my keyboard. There were reports to complete.

No one saw or spoke to me. I drafted a report and then another. The sun sank and an electric light turned on automatically above my head. The jellyfish had started to flow downward. It was thinning at the top and gathering mass at its lower points, like glass sped up a thousand times. I removed it with care so it flipped inside-out but remained intact. Then I took the inverted invertebrate and left it spilling out of the small wicker basket in which our snacks were stocked.

I drafted and sent another report. I drove an old car the long way home.

In my troubling younger years, I’d have danced jelly-headed in the reception area. I’d have sung loudly and flung its body at a slim and gym-toned client. Mine was a history of soft assaults and early dismissals.

These days the seas are overfilled with jellyfish. They breed well in the warmer water and have started to crowd out most other kinds of life. A whale stores the carbon of a whole small forest, I heard, but a jellyfish? They bob and refract the light. They mass on the water surface and are nearly as wet - an uncanny colony, a shifting almost-film.

The one I grabbed discorporated over Cheezit bags.

The work I did was likewise vaguely disgusting. It was difficult to discern its purpose. What I mean has something to do with rot and discarding.

Two years later, I removed myself to a prairie suburb. The city it helped ring was industrial, fading. I took on another job there, a mortgage. I purchased a membership to the community pool and wore no creatures. Kids in the drought year danced in terrible parody. My soft spot for the grotesque had firmed into a tight knot of self-contempt. I held a broken stick in their direction. Another couple of years passed far from waves and salted pleats. I carved divining rods on weekends.

I had learned, that is, to look for enchantment in folkways and ridiculed rituals. I had abandoned rupture, or at least novelty. I followed my gnarled rods over gentle glacier-carved hills that were dewy when the sun rose. I used phrases like “dewy when the sun rose” and stalked between the moraines with my old wool blanket around my shoulders.

This was not better or worse than any other choice, for me or in general, except the obvious advantages of exercise and fresh air. My legs grew strong and I smelled often of sweat. A neighbor built a house of concentric circles with rooves of wavering heights. Another neighbor died and was replaced by his sullen adult child. My job permitted me to work remotely, and I performed a task that remotely resembled work.

I carved a rod and followed it to water.

Miracles are easy in a region of lakes.

Freshwater jellyfish are tiny and translucent and beautiful. I scooped them with my hand from the pond bottom, lay down half in the water, and released them over my closed eyes. I felt them wash and trail against me. Some died, no doubt, from the trauma. I am so often both ambivalent and wet.

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DEER by Jack Wildern

June 1, 2020 · Fiction

The petrol station has a toilet but no window. Behind the door, a song that she has heard before plays. Or maybe she hasn't. It's muffled. The speakers' range only extends to the shop with its packet sandwiches and cheap mobile phone accessories.

She exits and catches a glimpse of him in the convex mirror above the window. His body morphs into a giant insect. A bloated beetle in jeans.

"Are you listening?" He taps a finger on the counter. "I said pass me one of those cans...no not that one, that one." He snatches the drink and fumbles a note from his pocket. "You're useless, you know that? Go and wait outside."

She looks down at her shoes, swilling them gently in a shallow puddle of water and petrol. A tiny rainbow soaking her laces black. When she looks up, a deer is standing motionless next to the car, its nose twitching, sniffing at the air. Its head swings toward the sound of the glass door.

"The next time I ask you, get out of here!"

The deer springs toward the road. Brakes scream as it misses the bumper of a hatchback. It bounds into the field beyond, disappearing into the grass, turning a muddy brown in the afternoon light.

"Fucking things are everywhere. I hate this place. Why didn't you scare it off?"

"I—"

"Just get in the car. We're late."

She measures time by the motorway floodlights. Counting them in her head as he listens to whatever he wants on the radio. Carole King sings, as day and night melts into a gray pattern of sleep.

In her dream, Mummy tells her that Daddy was moving furniture. That's how the cardboard wall of her dollhouse got ripped. That's how Mummy's face got the scratch. But it's okay because Daddy fixed the wall with tape, and Mummy used ice. And for a while there is silence. Silence until the tape on the wall turns yellow and the furniture scrapes across the floor.

She wakes with a start. Now her father sits next to her. Her father, in a cheap leather jacket and receding hair, taking her to places she does not want to go. His hands choke the steering wheel. The skin is dry and red. A flake breaks away from a tight knuckle. It floats gently, like a tiny snowflake, toward the recess of the gear stick, where it settles on a landscape of cracked black leather.

He speaks through a mouthful of drink. "See, that's the problem with you right there, you don't listen. You—"

She switches off and looks at the oncoming cars, their headlamps sinking into the gloom. A light rain starts to fall. He flicks the windscreen wipers on, and they smear a film of grease across the glass.

"And that's just the start of it, you wait until—"

The can, half crushed by his grip, vibrates its way toward the edge of the dashboard. It falls into his lap.

"Fuck!"

The car starts to veer as he brushes at his crotch. Ahead, two glassy eyes walk out into the road. She checks her seat belt and doesn't bother to warn him.

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FACT: HANNAH AND HER HUSBAND USED TO BE HAPPY by Jennifer Todhunter

May 31, 2020 · Fiction

Hannah passes out with the lights on again, the room as bright as day. Her phone is almost dead from staying up late sexting, slipped underneath the pillow on a bed that’s not hers—a bed she borrowed so she can sort her life, a bed too short for long legs, bent like figure fours on unfamiliar sheets. Hannah preset an alarm (and a backup and a backup for the backup), but she wakes when the alcohol abandons her system instead, her stomach pinched with unease, her brain brimming with a laundry list of what-ifs, always landing on the worst-case:

What if we divorce?

or:

What if we stay together?

On Hannah’s way to work, the train and bus are filled with people wearing face masks, the hysteria surrounding the epidemic-almost-pandemic a fever pitch. The thought of putting something over her nose and/or mouth, the thought of breathing in her own breath despite having brushed her teeth three times since rising, recycling the fumes from last night, the wine and clams and fries and garlic, makes her want to barf.

Hannah and her husband married on the edge of a river, fifty feet from the spot they’d chosen, and neither one of them noticed they were in the wrong place.

Hannah and her husband honeymooned on Tenerife, the largest of Spain’s Canary Islands, and spent the whole time shitfaced.

Hannah and her husband both know the Spanish flu is the worst pandemic to-date, killing over 100 million people, yet they’re planning a return trip despite this other flu taking hold—a trip with their kids, so their kids can swim in turquoise water and gorge on calamares a la romana and patatas bravas, while Hannah and her husband revisit the place they first fucked when married to see if it jolts something inside.

Fact: The odds of being struck by lightning are 1 in 3000.

Fact: The odds of being struck by lightning twice are 1 in 9 million.

Hannah knows in the base of her being, the crunch of her heart—she’s not going to be struck back into anything.

Fact: Hannah’s husband hasn't struck her, but he's struck the wall next to her head and that was close enough.

Hannah stands outside her office building in an inappropriate jacket and casual shoes because living between two places is a bitch and one rarely has what one wants. She watches rain run off the bridge overhead, opens her mouth and feels it fall against the scum on her teeth. She wishes the rain were mucus slipping inside her, pandemic-flavored mucus, the slip more of a twist and a thrust like she told the guy she was sexting last night, and maybe she’ll get infected after all and Spain will be off the table.

Fact: Hannah’s husband is sober but wasn’t always sober.

Fact: Hannah drinks now but didn’t always drink drink.

Every Tuesday, Hannah and her husband carpool home from work so they can both watch their son play hockey, and they always pre-agree not to talk about anything meaningful or difficult in terms of their relationship on this weekly ride. (Fact: Months pass quickly when counted by weeks.) Hannah always buys each of them a coffee—espresso, milk, honey—before they start on the long drive to different homes in the same community, veering in and out of gridlocked traffic.

Fact: Hannah would prefer to be on the bus or train, but there’s the damned epidemic-almost-pandemic, and she can’t bear to bring sickness home to the kids she sees only three-and-a-half-days-a-week, so here she is, in a car with her sort-of-husband. Again.

Fact: Kids under five are more susceptible to the flu.

Fact: Only 30% of women have more than two children.

Fact: Hannah had two back-to-back babies and was done forever.

Before Hannah’s husband stopped drinking, he liked to explode her friendships. To this day, Hannah isn’t sure whether this was something he did on purpose, a control mechanism, or the booze telling him to act like an asshole.

This is what keeps Hannah up at night when the booze isn’t.

Fact: Hannah is aware of the irony.

After this week’s hockey game, Hannah and her husband will sit at the dining room table, listening to their kids talk excitedly about Spain, about its sunshine and seafood, about the novelty of going together. Hannah will sip a glass of wine, consider what it means to move on, how moving on is just taking up space in a different moment, moment after moment, and how all these moments equate to a lifetime.

Fact: Hannah and her husband have one life each of indeterminate length.

Fact: A life has a start and an end.

Fact: Marriages, however joyful, have a start and an end, too.

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DISPATCHES…FROM THE NALTREX-ZONE by James McAdams

May 30, 2020 · Fiction

Sadonna was always my last visit that summer before she died.

At Derek Jeter Rehab Center-Delray, we dispensed meds between 1900 and 2100. I’d start with the early sleepers at the sober house on 999 Swinton, then swoosh on Freaky Fred’s moped through the back alleys and garbage docks behind the strip mall to the sober houses on 9th and 10th streets, between the head shops and the Amscot. I dispensed Suboxone, SSRIs, SNRIs, B-Vitamins, and retrovirals for the former needle users. On a PRN basis, I distributed: hemorrhoid cream, Midol, hydrocortisone, aloe vera for suntan relief, dimethicone for chapped lips, and Immodium A-D.

We didn’t all take this route. Abdaliz drove the facility Astrovan the other way on Swinton to her complex, Sea Oak, on the fake lake with the sad ducks. She’d put her babygirl to bed and then get high and grub McDonald’s with her cousins.

Freaky Fred hit the NA/AA circuits in Delray to recruit new clients. He had business cards with QR codes, fake sobriety chips, addiction stories stolen from Reddit or Discord. He gushed about finding sobriety at Derek Jeter-Delray. He’d normally return with one or two new clients a week. We secretly called them “Coins,” as in cryptocurrency, untraceable cash. We split $5,000 between us for each client, Abdaliz, me, and Freaky Fred; the rest went to our employer, a Big Pharma consortium that owned hundreds of sober houses across Florida and Arizona and got rich on unregulated urine tests, patient brokering, and what one Florida congressman called the “lethal cycle of intentional failure.”

Those were the good days. They’d chain-smoke under the carport where everyone watched COPS while we verified their insurance. Whenever we brought in someone new, we had to kick out someone old. That’s math. When he recruited Sadonna, it was my responsibility to get rid of Tara.

Sadonna sat lotus-positioned on a deflated air mattress stricken with claw marks when I finally came in at 2105, finished for the day. Always. It was her time to meditate, which involved listening to old Howard Stern in the background. She’d moved into the vacant room after Tara’s overdose.

“Best thing about the air mattress is you can balance your phone on the creases to watch stuff,” she explained, blinking her eyes and flinging her wrists around. She was trying to be positive.

We sat on the mattress together as I got out her EZ-pack and whatever fast food I’d picked up on the way. She identified her meds and signed her initials, a forensic S K, and then we made out for a while until our hips and elbows speared the floor through the flat mattress. We always just fooled around like middle school, even though we were both almost 40.

I balanced a plastic table over the deflated mattress as she separated the burritos, rice, and Mountain Dew from plastic containers into two bowls, two plates, and two glasses, which she called her “good China.” We gripped plastic utensils stolen from Taco Hell. I closed the windows against the sound of people kicking vending machines and ravaged calls for Naltrexone! Naltrexone!

“What did you learn about yourself today?” I asked. I was joking, she knew, but it was also a part of the script, which I later figured out she knew as well. The routine was an important part of our relationship.

“I learned what you did to the girl here before me.”

Sadonna and I still talk even in here, the private prison operated by the GEO group. They busted me as the first violator of Florida Bill 807, which criminalizes patient brokering, in addition to more obvious charges like manslaughter, pharmaceutical fraud, and online solicitation. Body Brokers, Zombie Hunters, Junkie Flunkies, Naltrex-Heads: whatever you call us, the other inmates despise us. Therefore, I stay inside my cell 24/7 reading memoirs Sadonna scans into my brain—Herr’s Dispatches, Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Karr’s The Art of Memoir—to prepare me to write my confessions about The Florida Shuffle, so her death will have meaning, she says.

She hovers in the corner of my cell, still wearing the It’s Always Sunny in Philly hoodie she overdosed in. Just like old times, she asks: “What did you learn today, honey?”

“Mary Karr says good memoirs are vivid and detail-driven.” I notice I project my voice toward her hovering form.

“I miss details, everything’s so blurry when you’re dead,” she rues, looking down at me not with love but something like a new emotion.

We just look at each other until I ask what’s the matter.

“You still haven’t confessed,” she reminds me.

And I say, like I always do: “I’m afraid if I do you’ll never come back.”

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BOLD NEW ‘DO by James R. Gapinski

May 29, 2020 · Fiction

The hairdresser takes too much off the top. Whoops, sorry! she says, holding out a piece of scalp for me to see. I take the little hand-mirror and inspect the damage. A swath of skin pulls away from my brow and wraps around, like a halo. I take the scissors and plunge it into the hairdresser’s leg. Whoops, sorry! I say. She laughs and smears the blood around her leg. It’s red and vibrant. She is liquid inside. There is a glossy sheen brighter than the brightest no-smudge, stay-on, fire-engine-red lipstick. The hairdresser smiles and says I think we should go for it. Just take the rest off. Make a statement. Be bold. Bold. Bold! She keeps repeating her mantra, ripped off the cover of those magazines in the lounge area—everything is billed as bold and new, but I think this is the first time a stylist has meant it. Bold!

She slices away more scalp, and she pulls on my earlobes like she’s popping open an aluminum can. She peels and yanks downward. Between cuts, she works on herself. She plunges the scissors deeper into her leg and draws the blade away from its origin point. She goes back to work on my neck. Then she uses the electric trimmer, whittling down my shoulders. She turns the trimmers on herself, chipping into her clavicles. She takes away a piece of my lip. What do you think? she asks. In the little hand-mirror, I see my teeth through translucent bits of leftover skin. I smile, and I’m amazed how white they look in this lighting, like I’ve just returned from the dentist. More! I say. Be bold!

The hairdresser retrieves a paper slicer from the back office for more expeditious work. She chops off anything that has the slightest elasticity to it. She chops and chops until there is nothing but the hardest muscles and cartilage. I think I see bone. A woman sitting across the room says I’ll have what she’s having and thinks its clever.

The hairdresser sits me in front of the salon’s largest mirror for last-looks. The hairdresser takes pictures for her style-portfolio-thingy. She says this will become a hot new craze, and she wants photographic evidence that she thought of it first. She Tweets and posts on Facebook. My phone lights up. I think we’re already trending.

I inspect the polish on my reddened insides, the fullness of the color. I look at the hairdresser as she continues to snap photos. She is the same. She is slick with blood too. Her bones ache between the barely visible layers of flesh that remain. I feel like I’ve seen her before. I think she is my sister, though I cannot be sure.

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AN ALLEGORY by Dan Crawley

May 28, 2020 · Fiction

Take your brother to the orange grove, and do not let your friends throw rotten fruit at his head, or any other part of his body. Take your brother to Stop-N-Go, and do not spend these dimes on anything else but candy bars for you and him. Take your brother up to bed, and do not hide in the closet and scare him. Take your brother outside to play street football, and do not let your friends tackle him on the asphalt. Take your brother to school, and do not let him gawk and gag at all the dog poop on the lawns. And if he does, please, please, this time do not let him go into his classroom with the front of his shirt covered in his own spew.

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¿CÓMO ESTÁ TU MADRE? by Phebe Jewell

May 24, 2020 · Fiction

Every morning Mom digs in the garden plot behind our house, dressed in a faded red shirt and ripped jeans. She refuses to wear black. “I’m done mourning,” she says. “I’ve been grieving since the day he enlisted.”

Kneeling in the dirt, Mom turns the soil with a hand spade. It’s a small plot, maybe five by seven. She says she’s putting it to bed for the winter. No cover crop seeds yet, so there’s nothing to bury, just dark loamy soil she churns and churns.

She’s still there in the afternoon when I open my Spanish workbook at the kitchen table, trying to remember the difference between estar and ser. My book tells me one expresses temporary feelings, the other, permanent being. What does that mean? I look out the window. Mom wipes mud from her face before plunging the tip of the spade back into the dirt. I stare down at the page and answer the question ¿Cómo está tu madre hoy? (How is your mother today?) with Ella está triste (She is sad). I leave the question ¿Y tu hermano? (And your brother?) blank.

Dad starts dinner, pulling out an onion from the pantry. When we were little, Mom used to entertain us by tugging on swim goggles before cutting onions, transformed into a bulging-eyed alien, a human-sized fly. Dad dices the onion at the counter, tears streaming down his unprotected face.

When dinner is ready I go out back to get Mom. Even in afternoon rain, the plot looks like the same mound of dark earth as this morning and the day before and the day before that.

Mom shivers at the table, a damp towel around her shoulders while Dad coaxes her into taking small bites. They face each other knee to knee. “Open up.” He guides the spoon toward her mouth like when I was little. Once in a while her mouth goes slack and food streams from her mouth. He wipes her face with a dishcloth before repeating “Open up,” his voice a hand cupped under the spoon. ¿Cómo está tu padre? (How is your father?). Él está cansado. (He is tired). “Good job,” Dad says as the spoon slips between her open lips.

After dinner Mom gets ready for bed, and I fill the sink with warm soapy water. Dad says spring will come, and Mom will get better, but scrubbing the pan, I know she’s not coming back. Setting the last bowl in the drainer to dry, I sit back at the table and take out my homework. I erase Ella está triste and write Ella es triste, sure my homework will be handed back with a red circle isolating es and a note to review the difference between feeling and being.

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A TRANSVERSE PROGRESSION by Alyssa Jordan

May 23, 2020 · Fiction

iv. Late one night, Fred acted on a whim. She reached out to the one friend who still took her calls.

Together they stood, poised on a street corner with coffee cups in hand. The Friend was tall and blonde and intrigued. Red lipstick lined her mouth, wet like a bloody smear. She held a cigarette in her other hand, taking demure drags that did nothing to distract Fred from the pink smoke that curled around her shoulders.

“How about them?” The Friend asked.

When she squinted at the couple heading toward the bus stop, Fred was met with a charged, acrid tangle of color. The varying shades of yellow and green made her recoil.

“Something about green…it doesn’t feel right.”

Fred shifted her weight back and forth. She still wasn’t sure why The Friend had taken this turn of events so well.

“What does mine look like?” The Friend asked.

“It’s very pink.”

“Oh, good. I always liked pink,” The Friend said and took another drag.

ii. One day, Fred drowned. She coughed up an entire ocean after a woman cracked her ribs and convinced her heart to beat again.

When Fred opened her eyes, she was met with a curious sight.

Dense fog hung around the woman’s face. It carried at least a dozen shades of blue, the kind Fred wanted to pet and touch. Strangest of all was the grey film that masked her hair. It encased each strand like a second skin.

Back then, she hadn’t known what that meant.

iii. Fred stayed indoors for the first few months. She was still coming to terms with drowning. And, if Fred was being honest with herself, she had been holding out hope that the woman was a fluke. The lack of oxygen could have scrambled her brain.

A walk to the corner store proved her wrong. She felt as if she saw the world through the bizarre lens of a kaleidoscope.

After a while, Fred came to understand that everyone was different. Some people had dim auras, like reedy threads of smoke, or diffused splotches of fog. Others seemed to fill up the space around them, struck by saturated colors that burst behind her eyes, keeping Fred bedridden for days at a time.

She decided to buy an old T-bird. The rusty hood and layers of decomposing trash were the least of her problems. It got her from one highway to the next, and that was all that mattered.

Fred spent her days driving, constantly heading toward the water, and late at night she would return to her apartment, avoiding people at all costs.

v. “Why not face this head on?” The Friend asked after another day riding highways. Her roommate waved Fred inside with a toss of his head and a faint bluish-glow that made her shiver.

“Clearly running isn’t working. You still have the headaches, don’t you?”

When she nodded, The Friend smiled knowingly. “So stop running and face it. Do your worst.”

vi. At the height of summer, Fred drove to a different beach every week. Miles of crowded seashore motivated her. In the water, a chill would cut to her bone; then, a telltale burn swelled in her lungs.

She always swam closer to shore.

Once she was in view, Fred would jerk her arms and inhale the sea. From below, it looked as if sun-shaped flowers danced along the surface, which were so pretty she almost regretted disturbing them.

Fred drowned three more times before The Friend followed her. Cigarette in hand, shrouded in pink, she took a drag as the latest good Samaritan pumped Fred’s chest. Her fluttery rib cage bruised in shades of sunrise.

“It’s still there.”

Fred wanted to say that after she opened her eyes. Instead, water shot from her mouth in great, hacking coughs. The Samaritan—a man this time—lunged to flip her over. Powder-blue wisps clung to his arms, his hips. On the delicate arch of his foot, gold sizzled like hot oil.

“Dry drowning is a thing, you know.” The Friend peeked over the man’s shoulder. Her silhouette blotted out the sun. She tapped a cigarette against her sparkly phone case. “Wikipedia says people confuse it with secondary drowning. That’s a thing, too.”

Trying to talk just made her cough harder. Fred gestured from herself to the man.

The Friend sighed. “This isn’t what I meant.”

When the man reared back, staring at her in disbelief, The Friend only smiled. She flicked her cigarette into a gust of salty wind.

vii. Fred’s car broke down in July. More than once, she boarded the bus soaking wet, dribbling seawater onto the floor (her jeans were never the same). She must have looked extra pitiful in gritty denim—the bus driver usually let her stay.

In August, a nasty cough took root. The Friend tutted about Wikipedia entries every time she joined Fred. Sometimes, she smoked; sometimes, she sucked down margaritas with tobacco-stained fingers, spilling lime and tequila in the sand.

Fred always noticed after a near-drowning. She spent a lot of time in the sand, too.

viii. On the best days, a dull throb bloomed behind her eyelids. She tried to enact her near-drownings more and more often. It would work, eventually. Everything would go back to the way it was.

“Want one?”

A middle-aged man held out an orange. He unearthed another from his weathered saddlebag. Over his head, buttermilk clouds pulsed with murky green. Fred wanted to close her eyes.

“No, thanks.”

“You sure?” Smiling, he shook the saddlebag. Green tendrils began to grow over his arms.

She laid her head against the window.

ix. In autumn, the man from the bus saved Fred’s life.

She had waited too long beneath the current. By the time she surfaced and flailed, few people remained on the beach. Even fewer left their towels or plastic chairs. As the sea filled her mouth, Fred vaguely wondered if someone would call the police.

Water rose over her head. For a moment, she plunged beneath the waves, slipping into the cool calm as her body sunk. A sense of longing dragged her down, down, down.

When Fred opened her eyes, she was lying on the beach. Water expelled from her aching lungs. The violent, rhythmic motions surged, storming her body. Green flickered in Fred’s peripheral vision. It strung the man’s neck like a noose. Inside his bag of oranges, the dancing flamingos on her wallet swayed with every step.

She limped to the nearest pay phone. Around her, people milled through narrow, winding roads, veiled under shrouds of pink and green and gold. Occasionally, purple or blue would split the churning haze.

It felt as if a tiny heart thumped in her skull.

Palming some coins from the gutter, Fred leaned against the payphone and stared at her reflection. In the blurry metal, bloodless fingers touched her face. A nearby store window showed the same girl.

“You did it again.” The Friend said after she answered her phone. It sounded more like a sigh. “Why do you keep doing this?”

Fred looked away from the window. “I’m trying to put things back. Like they were before.”

“Oh, babe.”

She could easily picture her lighting a cigarette, heedless of the pink wisps trailing her every move, settling on the wing of her shoulder blade. They were like a wound no one else could see.

“You know,” The Friend said. “Some things are more beautiful after breaking.”

i. One day, Fred stood at the edge of the ocean. Waves skinned the top of her feet for hours. They sunk after each press of the water, tingling from lack of movement. Soon they were no longer visible to the naked eye.

With every year, Fred thought she disappeared a little more.

She remembered loving sun flowers and 80s movies and swimming at night. Back then, she had been so proud of the medals she won. The degree hanging in her mother’s kitchen. The missions she completed.

These things now boiled down to a checklist in her head.

Fred kept reaching further back in time. She tried to assume who she was at 30, 25, or even 20, only to realize those women were already gone. All that remained was the distinct impression of earlier years.

Most of her summers had been spent in the ocean. Fred could still feel her mother’s hands on her back, large and steady as they kept her afloat. So many times they had returned so she could learn the mechanics of swimming. When to push and pull. How to tread water or drop deeper.

Every time she went under, Fred felt okay again. Like she was weightless, her arms outstretched, legs gently pumping, safe and whole in the dark.

Fred bent to gather stones for her pockets. This time, she needed to be heavy.

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SALT IN THE BODY by Kelsey Ipsen

May 22, 2020 · Fiction

Ghosts do not come to me because I grew up by the ocean and my body is still full of salt.

Girl; all limbs, all eyes and sudden fearlessness, dared the waves to become bigger and they did. And of course she was sucked under, tossed about, close enough to death. Of course she was rag-doll, rag-doll, rag-doll. Remember when your body was your body but now it is not. The feeling is like this. I know my body is other things, is waves, is salt. Is once a house/a host/a body with another body’s cells in it. The other body’s cells are still inside me, touching my own cells, and we will be like this forever. An adult body contains 250g of salt meaning I am a walking mix of salt and you. Meaning I was right all along while I was under the waves thinking this is it, thinking this is what I really am. Women understand that ownership of the body is an untruth. I think men only discover this when they are dying.

If I have one piece of advice it is this: if you have not yet learned to be terrified of the ocean you should learn to be terrified of the ocean.

I have heard a needle inside me break through to water like an explosion. I have heard shells chaotic over each other as the ocean breathes out. We are all crashing against each other. We are all life trapped in flesh gods trying. We are only meant to be born screaming. I only wanted your loudest sound.

Noises in the night can be explained away by morning, but the depths of the ocean will just swallow you whole.

Whispers in my ear are not spiritual phenomena, they are voices from me telling me something I don’t want to hear but need to hear: Don’t forget to breathe. Don’t forget the shape of your abdomen, duneless. Don’t forget the length of arms, you can use them to reach in, to grab someone out of the waves, to make someone bird—forever sky, never drowning.

The depths of the ocean, when explained, are still uninhabitable.

I cannot follow you if you do not scream, baby. Scream. Small kicks can’t sound louder than this. You only ever heard me. You only ever heard me from under water.

Ghosts, when explained, will let the water flow right through them.

I am the ocean and you are the ghost. I am still here without you here. I want to know how to breathe when I can’t breathe. I need to know that the salt in my body will surface me. I need to know that the next wave makes sound. I need to know that the next wave makes something other than this.

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A GROCERY LIST FOR A SAND DUNE by K Chiucarello

May 20, 2020 · Fiction

The grains could never contain me.

I had always been a shape-shifting blurry little thing packed tall behind foundation slabs, their windows blown out with the shutters ringing loose, paint chipping off the front tooth. When the coastline birthed me, I was a miracle of wonder: pretty as a Cadillac slicked straight, my mother said. Daughters of the fishermen ran atop me, ribbons rippling in the breeze, pairs of feet driving down towards my candied belly, full of a momentum that had me wanting the snow. I explained by long way of lecture to the hills what it was like to direct spoonfuls of yourself into the hands of others. There was a neighboring boy I had liked and we traded weather forecasts as pendants of desire. Wind high today, flood lines low tomorrow.

One evening, with all the stars dipped neatly above us, I called my boy over and he came to lay with me. My mother made us chocolate covered strawberries and we barricaded the fruit between our bodies. I slowly confessed to his ear, thigh over thigh, my long-game: I had wanted to be a mountain and I would stop at nothing to become so. I knew there were steps I needed to take to present as a mountain and so I hardened my insides blackening them to licorice. I draped my body on ice, hoping it would freeze over or melt down. It wasn’t until I swallowed a house whole did anyone pause to consider that maybe my consumption lay beyond my spit.

The house I came to first held me spellbound. I lowered myself over its roof, loosening my hands around giving door-frames of wood and rotting glossed varnish. I ravished a bathtub clean in one audacious gulp and next made my way over to the pillars on the front porch that echoed onto the beached landscape. There I would sit for a week or two or three months or nine, hoping my hunger would diminish. I swam laps in my appetite for destruction, reclining, sipping its cherry taste through a straw, my lips tender as foie gras in the summertime. Soft uniforms of breeze had whipped me into a devotion that only the birds now could see, a feeding frenzy gone absolutely rogue.

The townspeople became fascinated with me. Newspaper headlines read I was a virgin daiquiri, all cream, no bite, stretching itself half-baked out in the cracks of walls. That was the last dare I took.

I spilled my way into the next thirty-seven homes rowed up pretty as pigs in a glass showcase, butcher hooks still drooling crooked off of my mouth. I choked down gardens filled with kale, celery, radishes, heirloom tomatoes. I swallowed one girl in my path simply because she had been there and I had little time to spare before someone would catch up with me. The village began to protest, construction workers bulldozing forks blunt into my ambered sides, the mayor frantically binding my chest. I tested this suffocation and stilled, taking time to do up my hair, pinning wisps out of my face. On the fourth day of silence I bubbled through twice as tight, yeast toppling pyramids onto each other.

Everyone evacuated. My mother and the boy ran parallel to me, adjusting themselves in a mirror of rupture. I had no more houses in sight. I stood there plush in the shadow of myself, a town buried under scoops of thawing sweetness. I had done it; I had become my mountain. Once in a blue moon I ruminated on what I needed to do there to get here, on things that needed to capsize for me to stand erect. I took a bottle of port to wash it all down.

It wasn’t until the liquid reached my toes did I feel a shifting beneath me,

a hot magma afterglow for thought.

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