X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

LAST WORDS by Jayne Martin

January 25, 2020 · Fiction

There’s usually two of us, but it’s Christmas Eve and I got nowhere to be. Anyway, she’s just a little bit of a thing, barely 90 pounds from the looks of her. I can roll her onto the gurney.

The Super found her after complaints about the smell. I don’t smell nothing no more. Fucking freezing in here.

“No rent. No heat,” he said.

Asshole should be charged with murder. But who’s gonna complain?

Place is neat as a pin. Something my mom used to always say. Neat as a pin. Still don’t know what that means. Mom would have been about her age if the cancer hadn’t gotten her.

Not much in the fridge. Lettuce, brown and wilting. One of those single-serve cups of ice cream in the freezer. Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia. I find a spoon.

“I was a Deadhead,” she says. “Followed them everywhere.”

I dip the spoon into the ice cream, raise it to my lips. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Oh heaven’s no. No reason for it to go to waste,” she says. “Sorry to inconvenience you on Christmas Eve. I thought I’d be found before this.”

People who say those that have passed are “dead and gone” don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.

“Where’s your family?” I ask.

“Why, they’re all around. Just waiting. Don’t you see them?”

The room swells with Christmas music as children sing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and dance around a brightly-lit tree. Grownups sip eggnog by a mantel hung with stockings with the names Charlie, Susie, and Mary.

And there in the middle of the room, she stands, looking vibrantly alive, her arms outstretched toward me. “You’re welcome to join us.”

It's not the first time I was made such an offer, and I can’t say I'm not tempted. I toss the empty ice cream container into the garbage and walk over to the lifeless form on the floor.

“I’ll take good care of you,” I say and gently place the sheet over her unseeing clear blue eyes.

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ABOUT DINNER by Veronica Klash

January 24, 2020 · Fiction

You know what it means to have dinner. The meal that satiates before slumber. After the sky is drained of fire and flooded with ink. But what does it mean to have dinner with a man? To sit across from each other at that Thai place that just opened. To look at the menu and not see the words because his hand grazed yours and euphoria dripped from the base of your neck down your spine and he smells like mint and spice and something else that you can’t describe and you rush your inhale so you can breathe him again. If he was on the menu, you’d order him twice, one to eat now and the second to take home to be consumed by the glow of the naked bulb that lights your kitchen. But what does it mean to have dinner with a man and his parents? To fold and refold the napkin on your lap as his mother examines you with narrowed eyes from across the table. You’re smiling and talking about the roses in your garden, but you swear she can see the time you cheated on the spelling quiz in third grade. And if his mother advances an inch forward in her chair she’ll spot the time you let your friend shoplift the Popsicle Pink lipstick even though you knew it was wrong but they were going through something and you wanted to see them smile. Then he squeezes your hand. Your heart remembers its purpose and oxygen reaches your limbs again. But what does it mean to have dinner with a man in silence? To watch as the butter sauce on the fish turns from creamy to congealed. To listen as the clock you picked out during the honeymoon you planned for months chimes undisturbed from the next room. The song is a call and you answer. You push your chair back, stride over to him, hold his face in your hands, whisper I’m sorry, and crush your lips onto his. He pulls you to his lap, folds your bodies into one, and answers I’m sorry too. The boulder in your stomach is reduced to flint, igniting a shivering spark. But what does it mean to have dinner with a man after the kids are gone? To sit around a table too big, in a room too full of emptiness, alone together. To laugh at how silly you both feel now that there’s less laundry to do, less food to cook, and more time. More time than you ever expected. He says he knows how you can spend that time and winks. Euphoria drips from the base of your neck down your spine. You say you’re sure you have no idea what he means, and you smile. But what does it mean to have dinner with a man who’s not there? To look down at your plate and not recognize what you see. To look up and pretend he’s still there. Holding on to memories like they’re the last gasp for air before drowning. Dinner is your favorite, because it satiates before slumber, and when you close your eyes you’re back at that Thai place. It just opened. You know what it means to have dinner.

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ENERGY FROM LIVING THINGS by Laura Eppinger

January 17, 2020 · Fiction

I examine the head of lettuce because he tells me to, but I don’t know what he wants me to see. Broad romaine leaves the color of spring rest outside his canvas shopping bag, sure. Just a few minutes ago, John shouted at me for putting my slicker on the wrong hanger in his coat closet, or through the wrong loop inside the jacket. It’s hard to keep track, since I needed to kick my muddy boots off before stepping through the front door. I thought I was following all the rules, but I missed another one, and this time instead of lecturing, John shouted. Hard to let that go and focus on unpacking groceries now.

He pouts his thin lips at me, pale eyes seeking confirmation.

“The roots,” he says, and then I recognize a clump of brown beneath the while neck of the bunch.

“That’s sad,” I say. I’m sad, still waiting for an apology I know won’t come.

“Do you think it’s alive?” John asks, running one long finger over a single hair of root. “Should we plant it in the alley?”

Just behind his left shoulder, the blades of his knife collection catch a rare ray of sunlight. John has sensitive eyes so the apartment windows are smothered by blackout curtains, though sometimes a spear of light pokes through. I’ve been scolded for slicing back and forth with a paring knife, or using a ribbed one to make smooth drops with the blade.

Serrated, this task. I pick a knife and sever the roots from the leaves in a few jabs more than necessary. Have to justify my knife selection after all.

“Thank you,” John says. “I still hate that we need to take energy from living things to survive.”

He cradles the leaves in his bluish-white hands and nurses them all the way to the fridge, where they will live in the crisp-keeping box, which is always positioned on the second shelf, no exceptions. I tuck the clump of roots into the composter under the sink, using my left hand as a bib to catch any microbe of dirt that might try to fight free. Nothing will fight free, not in this apartment.

The loose oat (reusable) bag is stuffed into the grain tin and the agave syrup is tucked into the shelf, exactly where its predecessor sat.

John will now decompress from errands with episodes of anime I never get to pick but always have to watch, because being apart from him makes him worried I’m angry at him. My body sits in its usual spot in the knobby couch but my brain doesn’t come along this time.

If I could see my sister, privately, I’d crow to her that John treats the fucking lettuce gentler than he treats me. What’d you expect, she’d say, dating a lifelong vegan. We’d freeze our tits off under puffy down jackets—yeah, it’s mean to the ducks to use their body parts, but I like being warm too sometimes—and will each cigarette to last just another drag longer. We’d be in the mall parking lot, wasting the few minutes between our appointments for pedis.

There’s no good reason I can’t see her. It’s just that John will never entertain, it’s too overwhelming to have invaders over the apartment who don’t understand his systems. It takes too long to explain up-front; I’ve been here six months and I still make mistakes every day. He’s not too keen on me leaving all that much either. Of course I’m allowed to leave, but what if I wake up before his alarm goes off and my stirring interrupts his sleep cycle? What if our appetites or meal schedules get out of synch? No way could two separate dishes get cooked out of this kitchen too close to one another—it takes too long to clear the clean dishes from the drying rack, first inspecting them for any food or soap remnants, scrub the counters to disinfect them, select the proper utensils, gather the ingredients, explain the plan of attack to each other, and then get started on the actual cooking. Then cleaning before eating. Then the eating and the cleaning up after eating.

That’s not even to mention the orienting of the dining room before the meal is served. The place-mats must be aligned optimally, and the cushions! The cushions on the wooden chairs could leave behind their filmy glue, so they are removed when no one is sitting upon them but laid out over the chairs before either of us could sit down to dine.

It’s really only logical that I don’t see anyone but John and John doesn’t see anyone but me.

John yells at me now, all the time. Sometimes it’s a short snap he claims he can’t remember an hour later. Sometimes it’s over the phone, involving three breaks to suck up new breath, when I text him that I researched talk therapy and found my work insurance will cover it. He screams to me that he doesn’t need counseling. He screams that I exaggerate, he never yells.

He screams and then he begs me not to leave, because he has trust issues from that messy childhood. All that grief from watching his mother die. He’s trying to be a good person, he’s trying to eat in a way that causes no harm, he needs me to see how good he is being. Routine soothes him. Routine is good. I eat so healthy since I moved in, cut out drinking and ciggs—much to be grateful for.

So I feed the compost under the sink, all our little veggie scraps. The stems from bell peppers, banana peels, used tea bags—it’s a joy to squish up and squeal a little as I stuff them down with my open palm. I try to choke the life out of them, to hasten their ecstatic decomposition. Free up their nutrients so they can nourish something else. Isn’t that the noblest course? Releasing all the best parts from inside us, to be a feast for others instead.

I turn the black humus we’ve saved from this waste-free kitchen. I tell John I leave out the scraps for the cooperative compost pickup service, and that’s not a lie. I just don’t donate all of it, just yet. Ever since I found the hunk of roots sprouting new lettuce leaves on top, I felt hope for the first time in a long time. I didn’t let my mind wander like when John plants me in my spot so he can watch his favorite childhood cartoons again; my face points at the screen but none of the colors or shapes sink in. No, my mind was turned on this time, and even in the dim light enforced by the curtains, my eyes registered a tiny little life. All those saved scraps made it happen. Sacrifice does pay off.

That weak sprout could use the carbon dioxide, I reasoned, so I whispered to it that day.

Hi.

It was hard to think of what to say to a being that wasn’t John; I’m always trying to think of the right thing to say to John, though sometimes it makes him mad at me anyway. I like that this little bud can’t talk back.

It’s nice you’re here.

And now I linger in the kitchen after every meal, saying nice things to the lettuce.

I like you a lot.

You look great.

And today, No one should ever yell at you.

I’m flushing under my cardigan, checking one more time that I have the red-handled kitchen scissors in my hand and not the black-handled office scissors. Sure you can wash them with soap and water, but John does not want them mixed up.

It’s my turn to show him roots under lettuce, my turn to say Look, Look.

“It grew under the sink, in the compost bin,” I say, tripping over some of the words because I am talking too fast. “Let’s mix it in the salad too.”

John turns his head toward the leaves pulled from the composter and then tilts back to the scissors in my hand. I shake as much dark not-quite-soil back into the bin, making sure not one single speck hits the floor or the countertop. I selected the smallest cutting board to work over, which must be the right choice.

I want to meet John’s aquamarine eyes but he’s stepped out of the kitchen; he doesn’t like when I leave a room without warning, so it’s odd he’d do this now. In a flash I feel him behind me, tall and reedy. A jolt strikes me as John pulls my hair over my head as if making a high ponytail. A kiss? We haven’t touched in weeks. I close my eyes to savor this surprise.

A hear a whine of scissors opening their legs—did I have the desk scissors after all? A cold peck at my neck tells me a breakdown is coming.

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THE YEAR I WAS MOST HUNGRY by Shane Cashman

January 16, 2020 · Fiction

When I wear my long, dark peacoat, I look like I’m about to betray my country; I instigate assassinations; I have affairs in 1964; I fly first class.

When ex-presidents die, the whole nation wears peacoats and flags at half-mast. We all of a sudden show a strange love for someone we used to curse––it’s that kind of love people only show once someone’s gone. We only truly love you once we’ve thrown you in your casket––we’re a culture of goddamned necrophiliacs.

The length of my coat reminds me I’m just over six feet tall; my height equals the common depth of a grave. If you plant me down there feet first, I’ll be eye level with the feet of those who come to visit.

When I wear my long, dark peacoat I tell myself I could murder without consequence over anything––even five dollars. My boss steals a five-dollar tip that was meant for me. A customer gave it to him to give to me––for loading couches in his van. My boss folds the cash in half and slips it into his back pocket. A few months later, my boss goes bankrupt and has to sell the business. I lose my job of eight years. I apply to be a potato sorter, a truck driver, a background actor, a webcam guy, a cemetery manager, an assassin, and a professor.

On my way out the door of my job for the last time, I wear my long, dark peacoat. The coworker I hated second-most stops me. I think she’s going to hug me. She pulls open her filing cabinet and finds a can of soup. “Here,” she says, “in case you get hungry.” Everyone at work thinks I’m going to live in a car.

When I wear my long, dark peacoat, no one knows that I don’t drive an Audi.

When I wear my long, dark peacoat I think maybe this should all be a novel––that this string of events sounds too ridiculous for one day: A horse I know died, and I hoped he left me his skeleton in his will; I lost my job; I get an email that says: How To Be Happier At Work, I barely had enough money to pay for gas to get home; I jumped on someone else’s trampoline.

When I wear my long dark peacoat, I appraise the sun moving through overcast skies like a rat down a python’s neck.

I wear my coat when I pretend to be a professor at a real college. Whenever a student calls me a professor I wonder if they’re mocking me, or if they’re mistaken, or if they just can’t tell the difference. One of my students left for a week to bury his father in Maine. When he returns we have class in the small chapel with the glass roof on the edge of campus. I ask the student how he’s holding up. He asks if I’d ever seen the catacombs beneath the chapel. I follow him outside. He lifts open the bilco doors that lead down damp steps, into damp earth, and there they are. Catacombs. Empty catacombs. But catacombs. We stare into each one. He sees an impression of his father. I see an impression of the future.

I wear my peacoat at the diner with Nancy in Rockland as Notre-Dame burns up in Paris, and we all feel the flames hot against our faces from the kitchen.

When I wear my long, dark peacoat it could be lined with pocket watches and bail bonds and mix-tapes and nuclear briefcases and doctor’s notes to get you out of class or work or birthday parties.

In my long, dark peacoat:

I chain-smoke.

I race cars.

I fight wars.

I pull teeth.

I decay.

I default.

I die on the hour.

I struggle with the truth.

I wear rejection with grace.

I’m your earthworm.

Your church bells.

Your sewers in drought.

Your head on a spike.

Your beloved cult leader.

When I wear my long, dark peacoat, I play like I don’t fear I will never be heard; I tell strangers on the street at night walking past me that there’s a big opossum foaming at the mouth just up ahead; I pretend the sunrise is a five-alarm fire no ladder can reach; I catch people leaping from the sky; I dream of my grandfather’s ghost, and we shake hands while everyone rushes to prepare a meal.

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STUMBLING ON CONCRETE by Mileva Anastasiadou

January 15, 2020 · Fiction

I was overweight when I started the diet, but eating less didn’t help much. I lost some weight, yet I still feel heavy. I told him last night. My husband eyed me up and down, checking for excess fat, then said I look fine, but I don’t feel fine at all. I should move to Mars, perhaps, where gravitational forces feel less powerful, I said jokingly, or turn into a bird, I thought, only I didn’t say that aloud. He suggested exercise and I shrugged. I’m not certain exercise will help take the burden off of me, but I could give it a try.

We climb and climb, and we’re now at the top of the hill when he says I look young while staring at me, and I nod for I was made for youth and daydreaming and future plans, only I’m violently present now, blissfully dizzy, feeling his hand, not a word or gesture goes unattended, and I don’t miss the young me, the dreamer, this time it’s now that I already miss, the excruciating bliss of present tense, for it’s all downhill from now on and he says that’s maturity, only I know it’s him, he’s the peak of the mountain I climb, my future happening now, the cliff I’ll stand on before the fall. And I can see me hitting the ground, gravity calling, again and again, like a repetitive stumble on concrete sound effect, like wood falling, hitting the floor, only woodcutters have been hiding in fairy tales, or movies, or songs, and I wish I could hide in a story as well and never be found and never fall.

The end of the world is near, says the man on the TV. My husband watches silently, eating a burger, while I only drink water to fool my empty stomach, for I want to lose more weight, to evaporate, to go back to the beginning. I was born light as a feather. A tabula rasa, a clean slate, empty of experience, ideas and emotions. I spent most of my younger years hungry. Hungry for food and knowledge and life. I’d eat more and more as I grew older, I thought, for I’d always grow bigger and wiser, and mom said I needed food to grow. So now, I’m heavy. Now, I’m full. Eternal growth is malignant, like cancer, says my husband, while watching the documentary on climate change, while I step on the scale, counting calories, for I want to go minimal, escape flesh and bone and feelings, stop growth and immobilize time, turn into an everlasting imaginary friend or ghost.

I thought I was born empty, crystal clear, but I’m not sure now. I was born a baby, the way people are born, yet I was not empty at all. I carried the world inside me, for I have lived before I was born. Half of me watched my mother’s life. I watched her first steps, her first kiss, her heartaches. Half the half of me watched my grandmother’s life, her struggles, her path. The pain inside isn’t just my pain. It’s the pain of the world. A piece of me has lived forever, I think, I tell him and he looks at me like I’m crazy and perhaps I am, yet all my pain cannot be justified by one life only. A tiny piece of me has been here since the beginning of time. People get strong with time, they say, only I get weak instead. The pain threshold falls. After a certain age, you’re either too cynical or too soft, he tells me. Only the cynical can move on like nothing happened. Happiness is obstructed by experience and fear, decluttering the mind becomes a necessity. I want to empty the disc, to be a dot in space, I tell him, like in The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the poem, the movie, only you can’t really erase anything. I drip seriousness and profanity and I dust tiny bits of sacredness still left upon me. I throw up all dirty knowledge, a futile attempt at unlearning the world, to clear my mind. Accumulated pain is the reason for aging and death, I tell him. You live on and on until your head bursts in pain and glory.

He turns off the TV and caresses my cheek. He then pulls me close, climbs onto me and his weight on my body is a comforting weight, accumulated joy is the reason for life, he claims, and I don’t mind heaviness now, heaviness keeps me grounded, here, alive. Heaviness gives a sense of belonging in exchange for freedom. Until you hear the chains and learn to carry them along. But I keep thinking how tiring life is. Almost like plate spinning. It’s only a matter of time before it all crashes down, before gravity calls, yet I keep at it, for there’s no choice. Until all motion seems overwhelming and the burden seems unbearable. And it’s all a simple equation; when pain exceeds joy life gives up in a reverse big bang, an implosion that ends the world, instead of starting it.

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CHAMP by Emma Hodson

January 14, 2020 · Fiction

The man smells like smoke. He is moving into a new apartment on a street that used to be a bustling thoroughfare, but now is just another grey road. That is, the apartment is new to him, but not to this world. It’s close to his old spot, just a few blocks, but it’s noticeably more decayed. A beige building shoved in between a Thai place and pay-per-hour motel, a single tarnished mini van parked in the driveway most days. The apartment was built in 1973 when mom-and-pop shops dotted the street, bubbly hand-painted signs, and women doing their grocery shopping with babies in tow. People walked more back then. Now there is a hardware store and a forsaken donut shop, glaze hardening and cracking untouched under glass while the owner watches the Mega Lotto with a toothpick hanging out of his sour mouth. After the move, the man’s hands are shaky and he reaches for the drawer.

A while later, months maybe, the drawer starts to fill up with empties again and the bills keep coming and the donut shop is gone and its owner and his Mega Lotto toothpicks are gone. In its place is a Juice Shoppe where everyone can go to feel better, thank fuckin’ God. The man laughs darkly to himself and honks his deluged nose into a tissue as he walks towards Ol’ Yeller Lounge.

He’s been going to Ol’ Yeller for 36 years. The outside is fashioned from large stones cobbled together, like a liquor castle, no windows so it can be properly dark inside. The sign is yellow neon and it flashes, beckoning, above the rounded doorway. Inside is what you’d rightly expect from a dive. The bar is long with peeling stools lining it all the way to the dimly lit back wall, illuminated mostly by a clutter of arcade games. A jukebox with a handwritten sign taped to it: QUARTERS ONLY! WE ARE SERIOUS!! There are a few booths with wooden tables to the right, but you can’t get a good look at the TVs from there, so the man avoids them.

He sits on his stool, the same one he always sits in, and nods to the bartender who adds a Jack n Coke to his tab on the regulars chalkboard that hangs behind the bar. Most of the regulars are gone nowadays. Big Jim disappeared after one too many visits to detox. They say Paula got sober, and maybe it’s finally true this time—he hasn’t seen her in months. Ralphie moved down South when the rent got too high, and his new neighbors started complaining about his cats and their cat smells. Bogus, he had said sipping on his G&T. Absolutely fuckin’ goddamned bogus. Roberta’s still around, and so is Doug, but they won’t come in for another hour or so. It’s just the man and a bunch of kids huddled in the corner booth.

The man watches them while he waits for his drink. The boys (and they are boys, really, hardly men) wear clear-framed glasses and ludicrous sock caps, tiny ones, that they tuck behind their ears with their cigarettes. They smile white smiles at the girls who wear pants that don’t flatter their pretty faces. The boys order beers, the expensive kind that Ol’ Yeller has only started offering in the past few years. They sip them and laugh and a girl reaches out and puts her hand on the skinny tattooed arm of the boy next to her. The man wonders if he was ever like them, once upon a time, but immediately scoffs at the thought. His laugh comes out in short gurgly croaks. He imagines himself, back on the docks, unloading heavy boxes of grapes from the ship's belly, his ears burning from the crisp morning air under his hardhat. He remembers standing, arms locked with his crew in the picket line, his sock cap, wool and itchy, covering his ears. No, he was never like them. Not even close.

Truthfully, he doesn’t mind the kids all too much. They come in and buy their expensive beers and the bar stays open, and the man can play his pinball game in the back. He’s had the highest score for as long as he can remember. Someone got close once, but it never happened. After his second Jack, he strolls over to the games, expertly flicks the dial to send the ball soaring into a land of flashing crystal balls and genies. The whiskey is warm in his throat and the heat flows through him, his hands finally steady, as he racks up dings and dongs and the points tally higher and higher.

When he finally heads back to the bar, Roberta is there, early today, and sitting next to his usual spot. Her hand covers his seat. Eighty-two years old, sharp as a needle, and tattoos covering every last square inch of her large, worn body. Roberta has been coming to Ol' Yeller ever since the last of the lesbian bars closed down—Sally's and The Fur Pelt, leather vests and cigarettes, tender kisses in the corner. Red lipstick permanently stains her glass.

“Pinball again, you old bastard?” she says.

“Sure as eggs is eggs!”

The bartender nods his head to his stool. “Speaking of which, we figured it was about time we did something about those scores of yours,” he says.

The man approaches his seat, and sees that they’ve switched it out with a brand new stool, cherry red, upon which they’ve sewn large white letters, like a high school varsity jacket: CHAMP.

The snake tattoo that curls down Roberta’s wrinkled arm seems to slither as she laughs, one of the best laughs the man has ever heard. “Some things never change,” she says.

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WE COULD BE ANYONE by Alicia Bones

January 13, 2020 · Fiction

I knew I should feel sympathy for Laura, but her fire-bright face in the Abernathy-Smythe backyard unsettled me. She was telling me the details of her life, the really private, personal ones, though we’d only met a few times at parties hosted by shared acquaintances.

“My father is a drunk, and my mother is sociopath,” Laura said, staring off into the fire.

Jesus Christ, was all I could think as I twisted up my fingers. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t even think of what I should say. I was well-adjusted, a truth about myself that had bothered me for years. My parents had always been appropriately-boundaried, so how could I relate?

“When my mother forgot my high school graduation, I cried for days,” Laura said with stage-direction movements: look left slim-lipped, look right.

I stopped myself from rolling my eyes. The confessions kept coming in cliched absurdity. They weren’t fireside dredging of deep-dark memories, either; Laura had told me the high school story twice before.

“I’ll never forget how our cat looked,” she went on, “after my sister ran over him with her car.”

I looked at her in alarm. I’d drifted for a second—and now a dead cat? Laura hadn’t asked me for my compassion. I’d planned for an easy night of talking about The Bachelor and Harold’s trip to Mexico. Instead, she’d foisted her dead cat onto me.

She was too much, no matter how polite and self-loathing I was, so I said, “I’ve got to pee.” I went inside and didn’t plan on coming back. Laura would forget I was gone; the night was chilly and someone else would sit next to her. That person would be as good a confessional as I had been.

I angrily poured myself another drink. Self-involvement was an epidemic.

Laura had exhausted me, but I had to make myself aggressively cheerful. This was a party, after all, a beginning-of-summer party thrown by Melinda and Janet Abernathy-Smythe. They were the first of my friends to buy a house with a backyard; most of us still rented. I wasn’t anywhere close to buying property, but I served my purpose at social functions anyway: providing amusing anecdotes about my hapless dating life.

Inside, party-goers held drinks and stood in corners. These were the friends I’d cobbled together in my childless, partner-free twenties for my childless, partner-free thirties. They weren’t the friends I’d wanted, but they were the friends I had. Here they were, speaking passionately about a television show, effusively commenting on the Abernathy-Smythes’ new cabinets, cooing over photos of Helen’s new dog. Without them, I would never receive compliments on my new haircuts or shoes; I would exclusively rely on my own judgment.

I glanced at the fire through the open door to the back patio. Laura was talking to someone else. I was sure she was telling them exactly what she’d told me. I hoped they could think of reasonable ways to respond to her.

I headed toward the ficus in the living room to chat with solitary Harold about Mexico. He’d liked the beaches and warm water and the food. Did he actually want to tell me, “The food was spicier than I thought it’d be!” or did he feel obligated to say it? I couldn’t tell. I asked him how much his trip to the Yucatan had cost, and he said, “Cheap!” I didn’t know how to make him tell the truth, but his daughter was starting college in the fall, so maybe he was mourning.

Sam joined us, and Harold asked her about her new house. I told her I was hoping to buy in her neighborhood. She looked with me with derision because she’d purchased the home with her husband, and I had no husband. She scoffed, “Good luck!” though she also smiled, like I was a pathetic child with an impossible wish. In fact, I had no strong feelings about her neighborhood and remained unsure if I had ever visited it.

Later, three drinks in and pouring myself a fourth, I talked to a new person in our group, a rare friend of a friend. For some reason, I told her about my nerves about commitment, about how I feared my life twenty years from now would look the same as it did now.

“Life always changes, whether you want it to or not,” Tammy said, making sincere eye contact. I felt real empathy from her and was surprised.

I was grateful that my sister had never killed our cat or that I’d never had the impulse to lie that she had. “If you say so,” I laughed.

Behind Tammy, I saw Laura through the kitchen window. She was talking to someone, maybe even a third person, though I could only see the back of their head. I should have been angry about the anonymous way Laura collected her self-aggrandizement, emptied her mind onto a held-captive acquaintance. Why could only some people have authentic exchanges; why did only some people want to?

I suddenly realized I had no idea which type of person I was.

In a moment of compassion, fueled by drink and goodwill towards Tammy, I felt sorry for Laura’s isolation, which was even more impenetrable than my own. Secrets were stand-ins for authenticity, but Laura didn’t understand that. She didn’t know why she failed to connect. My stomach lurched in customary empathy, but I suspected my feelings were only habitual, a knee-jerk reaction to a stimulus that could have come from anywhere.

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GIVING SPEECHES IN YOUR UNDERWEAR by Roslyn James

January 12, 2020 · Fiction

You are stirring onions, slowly caramelizing them. You can't believe you’re married again. He’s in the other room, well not the other room. The long galley kitchen you’re standing in is attached to the living room. You can see him, sitting on the couch with his football game on, the volume turned way up, waiting for his dinner. He will not appreciate these onions you are laboring so long over. His favorite meals are ground beef tacos or chili. Two dishes you’ve grown to despise.

Later that week, you come home for lunch because he asked you to. He's not ready to go when you arrive. Maybe his part-time teaching job at the university down the road allows him to get high and nap all day, but you only have an hour for lunch. There are endless convenient restaurant options nearby, but he hasn’t given a thought to where he wants to eat. Your only request is, "no Vietnamese today." You had it yesterday for lunch. He can’t seem to come up with any place he wants to go to aside from the pho place down the street. You give in, besides half your lunch break is over, you don’t have time to argue about pho.

He wants you to have sex with his friends. He thinks you're kinky because when you first started hooking up with him, you were also dating a woman, and seeing another guy on and off who would visit but still lived in your hometown.

Your husband has swinger friends, they are a very nice couple and you like them, but you don’t like-like them. Before you came along, he used to be their third and they’d often add in another female friend or sometimes two. They all have great hopes for you. You’ve only had a threesome with two guys before, and only once, when you were in college. You were drunk and high on hash in Germany, and you knew that if you wanted to you could never see those two guys again, but you enjoyed yourself. Well, there was that one other time, in high school when you and your girlfriend did it with your boyfriends next to each other in the same bed. The guys were buddies and, of course, had thought up the whole idea. It seemed silly to you. It didn’t leave you feeling bad but it wasn’t at all interesting or sexy. You kind of blocked it out, except for that moment when you and your girlfriend gave each other a goofy look for one second in the beginning as if to say, what the hell were we thinking? You don’t even remember if you all were completely undressed or not. You were young then, maybe it could be fun now that you are grown up and with a man who loves you.

You give it a try with your husband and his friends. It isn’t fun. It reminds you of giving a speech, except the audience wants to spend the night and you have to have breakfast with them the next morning. You hate public speaking. You try to give your best performance, memorize your lines, get up behind the podium, and then you look down at all those expectant faces waiting for you to impress them. You rush through it all, fumbling your index cards—you could swear some of them are out of order—you resort to ad-libbing. When it’s finally over you can’t remember much of it, but everyone seems satisfied and praises you, then they start making plans for the next time. Maybe a little weekend getaway, they say. Perhaps a cabin somewhere with a hot tub and a fireplace.

He'd also really like it if you would bring your best friend over to have sex with him. You can join in, of course. In fact, he'd like it better that way. He doesn't seem to understand your friend isn't interested in him, not that you've asked her. Nor are you interested in sleeping with her, she's not your type, and even if she was, you wouldn't share her with him.

An old friend from high school calls you at work out of the blue. A mutual friend told him you both live in the same new city now. He asks you to go out for an after-work beer. You agree and soon you find yourself sitting across from him at the pub, feeling a little tipsy and immensely enjoying his company, something you didn't expect. Before you walked into the bar, you took off your wedding ring and slipped it into your pants pocket. You weren’t sure why you did it at the time, but when your hometown friend grabs your gesticulating hands midair, holds them in his, and looks deep into your eyes, you understand. He asks if you want to go back to his place and you do.

In his bedroom, he puts on 80s music, turns the lights down low, and asks you to dance. You let him wrap his arms around your waist and you rest your cheek against his chest. He smells of some familiar cologne. It feels like old times like you’re back in seventh grade again at a school dance, except this time the boy is taller than you. He asks if he can kiss you and when you say yes, he bends down to press his soft lips to yours and sparks fly. You want him. You almost forgot what it’s like to feel that kind of deep-down desire.

You don’t tell the husband when you get home, except to say that you ran into an old friend and had a couple of beers. To lie well, it’s always best to stick close to the truth. You suggest that your old friend might be down for a threesome though you admit it’s hard to say at this point. It will require further investigation on your part. Your husband seems excited about this news like maybe he’s finally got you on board, but you don’t plan to include him. Your friend has no idea you even have a husband. It just didn’t come up.

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THE DUMPSTER GAME by Rachel Mans McKenny

January 11, 2020 · Fiction

The Hu Palace had a classy buffet, with slippery chopsticks that went into the dishwasher not the break-apart kind. Baxter raised himself on the lid of Hu’s dumpster, hanging off it with forearms and elbows as anchor. The graying cabbage landscape and jagged Styrofoam iceberg looked the same as yesterday. Then a faint scratching. Something was alive, a small something.

His foot found a cardboard box island in the sea of decomposing food. The box took his weight, so he swung the other leg inside, pushing the trash aside with a sneaker.

A chick, brown wings folded under its body.

It pecked Baxter’s hand until it bled. At the bottom of the fire escape, he tucked the chick between shirt and chest, tying the fabric at the bottom so it couldn’t fall out. The bird rattled around against skin, unable to find purchase while he climbed. At the window ledge, Baxter untied his shirt and the chick flopped onto the carpet, stretched his legs, and cheeped in protest.

Baxter’s brother wasn’t home yet. Boy, when he came home! Baxter let the chicken stand on the counter while he wet a dishrag. He knew that cats cleaned themselves and dogs hated baths, but didn’t know the protocol for chickens.

Eddy slammed the door. Baxter tried to scoop the chicken in his hands, but Eddy intercepted it. The chick tried to stand on Eddy’s fleshy palm but tumbled backwards on spindly legs.

“Careful,” Baxter said.

“It smells.”

“I found it in Hu’s dumpster.”

Eddy pondered this, holding the chick up for closer inspection.

“I win? You find anything?”

Eddy shook his head. “You win. Yeah. You win.”

Paul lived in an underwear drawer, its original contents relocated with the pajamas. Baxter poured Paul a shot glass of water. The shot glass said “Margarita Mondays.” He hoped there wasn’t any alcohol left in it, poor bird, but then he remembered the chick lived in a dark drawer for twenty hours a day and hoped maybe there was. Maybe to the chick, the dumpster had been the whole world.

Was that life? Baxter wondered.

The other four hours of the day, Paul wandered the apartment. Between school and dinner and whenever Mom was occupied—he had free range. A chicken ranger. A vigilante, not a chicken at all.

Baxter didn’t play the game anymore. Baxter had Paul. Baxter won, and for once, Eddy had lost.

Until Eddy found the cat.

The creature had half a tail and nicks in its ears like hole punches. “This is Big Paul,” he told Baxter. He set the animal on the bottom bunk, and it hopped off, disappearing under the bed.

“The game was over. And we weren’t looking for animals anyway.”

Eddy just hummed, hand groping under the bed. “I didn’t say it was over.”

Years later, Baxter sat in the car outside his brother’s house, breathing hard. He couldn’t believe that every picture with his brother didn’t have hidden feathers and blood in it like an ISpy. Like Where’s Waldo.

“Where’s Paul?”

Blood, feathers. “Well, don’t blame the cat.”

Baxter didn’t.

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DROSOPHILA MELANOGASTER by Hannah Storm

January 10, 2020 · Fiction

The fruit fly shares the same genes as a human. Its Latin name is "Drosophila Melanogaster," which sounds awfully fancy for something attracted to rotten fruit and vegetable. I think about the time you told me I smelt ripe when you forced me onto my back in that room with the torn sheets. Fruit flies breed in drains, empty bottles and waste disposals, relying on a moist layer of material that ferments to grow their families. The adults have brown trunks, black bottoms and crimson eyes and are so small they can creep through windows and doors that aren’t properly covered. I think about the time we met, how I was bruised and broken, how you flew to my side, hovered around me, your tanned arms winged in a false promise. The reproductive potential of a fruit fly is enormous, and given the chance they can lay five hundred eggs. Your first girlfriend had an abortion, you left your second after you boasted how easy it would be for you to get her pregnant. You tell me this as you lie, limp and damp, and I see your eyes turn red with tears. Soon you’re snoring. You don’t hear me creep away to mop up the smell of me, or move to the window above the bins, where I watch their bags spilling into the car park. Your snores sound like the buzz of five hundred flies surfacing from the fetid food when I leave you in your waste.

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