X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

THE CALL WAS COMING FROM INSIDE THE COCKROACH by Maggie Dove

June 21, 2019 · Fiction

“It’s just a Palmetto Bug. I’ll put it outside.”

This could be a more daunting task than relocating, say, a daddy long legs or a lost lizard that found its way into the house. When the humidity is just right in Florida, somewhere around the 90% mark, the Palmetto Bug doesn’t just run away from you. The Palmetto Bug defiantly takes flight, rocketing directly into your face, making even the least squeamish of native Floridians scream in horror as the fwip-fwip-fwip of their wings flutter at all five of your senses.

The Palmetto Bug is a shiny, brown, beastly creature that can grow to over two inches in length, with spindly black antennae that are just as long. Palmetto Bugs are so large that you can hear them chewing something crunchy from the other room like your Uncle Lou going at a tin of peanut brittle, as I unfortunately found out the hard and crunchy way when I interrupted one eating a crouton that had fallen onto the kitchen floor one night.

“It’s just a Palmetto Bug. I’ll put it outside.”

You could smash the Palmetto Bug with a shoe or a newspaper, but they were so large it seemed mean, like you were killing a peer, and if you didn’t angle your smashing instrument just right, it could go Pulp Fiction on you and spray its Dr. Pepper-colored guts four feet across your wall and you’d have to summon Harvey Keitel to come out for the clean-up. It was easier to just put them outside.

Besides, it wasn’t like they were those smaller but more ominous German cockroaches we had in our house, where when you saw one then it meant there were a million more hiding behind your walls. Any time we bug-bombed the house, it was like walking into a German cockroach apocalypse when we returned four hours later; thousands of their small bodies legs-up on the floor, the masses so dense that you had to sweep them out the door like you were cleaning up after an old-timey ticker tape parade.

They would recover their ranks and repopulate the house within a month.

The Palmetto Bug, unlike the armies of German cockroaches, was most often a solo traveler in your Florida home; an unwelcome, weird friend who stopped by unannounced. He wasn’t a symptom of a bigger problem, he was a self-contained local nightmare that you shuffled out the door with a piece of junk mail. Anyone’s mother would (incorrectly) tell you that they didn’t even want to be in the house to begin with; that they lived in the palmettos, hence the name “Palmetto Bug”. They weren’t roaches for Pete’s sake. They were outdoor bugs, like beetles or moths!

Tourists were always eager to tell you about these gigantic, fearsome creatures they found crawling up their Florida motel room walls, and we native Floridians would wave them off with:

“It’s just a Palmetto Bug. We put them outside.”

The only people who were unimpressed were tourists visiting from New York, who bragged that Palmetto Bugs had nothing on New York City cockroaches almost as fiercely as they argued their title of Best Slice or Best Bagel.

In my thirties, on my first trip to New York, I saw a Palmetto Bug crawling up a wall in Times Square. I pointed at it and said, “Hey! You guys have Palmetto Bugs here, too! Maybe I brought him up here on vacation!”

My New Yorker friend stared at me.

I found out that day that the real, scientific term for the Palmetto Bug is the "American Cockroach".

I found out that day that the real, scientific term for the legendary New York cockroach is the "American Cockroach".

They were the same goddamned bug.

And New Yorkers still said theirs were superior.

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BONE RATE by Kristen M. Ploetz

June 20, 2019 · Fiction

The marble lobby smells like old paper and spiders have taken residence in the dark corners of the tooth dentil trim. From behind a framed pane of cheap glass, ten wanted men stare at Naenie. Eight of them are smiling. She glances long enough to know some are dangerous, but all of them are broken.

Of the three windows, the middle is open for business. As Naenie waits her turn, she watches the woman in a red coat. With a gloved hand, the woman slides a small white box toward the clerk and drops three coins into his palm. Naenie cannot hear what the clerk asks before the woman nods. When she turns to leave, Naenie sees the missing eye.

The clerk waves Naenie forward. Inside her coat pocket, her left hand is in a loose fist. Her right hand signs the alphabet over and over at her side.

“Sending first-class?” he asks.

Naenie does not respond.

The wood counter is dipped in the center. A century of hands and wrists have worn it down. Over the shallow bowl, Naenie opens her fist. Six tiny bones fall from her palm. Malleus, incus, and stapes from her right ear, the other three from her left. She scratches at the stitches behind her ears, tucks the hospital bracelet back under the cuff of her silk blouse.

He leans closer to Naenie, mouths the words with precision. “Bone rate?”

She nods.

He pinches the bones one by one and puts them on the scale. Tick tick tick tick tick tick against stainless steel. For Naenie, they fall in silence.

Total weight: 1/1000th of an ounce. She pulls a wrinkled dollar from her pocket and sets it on the scale next to the bones.

With a sable paintbrush he slides them into a small metal tube the size of his finger, pushes a black rubber stopper into the top. From a desk drawer near his knee, he pulls out a padded envelope. Stamped in block letters on the front: FRAGILE-OSSICLES.

“Where to?” He says the words slowly, his black pen suspended above the envelope. He doesn’t break his stare as he waits for her answer.

Naenie slips him a folded square of paper and whispers, “This address please.” She signs no more with her right hand low behind the counter so the clerk cannot see, twists the ends of the stitches behind her left ear as he writes the name of her father.

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ROADRUNNER by Dave Housley

June 19, 2019 · Fiction

Roadrunner can see the arches in the distance. Behind them, the mountains. He is running, moving as always, minding the blur of the desert on either side, the potential for danger in the road ahead. Is that a rock mound or an anvil, the shimmer sun a hundred wicks of dynamite simmering.

He moves up a hill and smells the creature, a whiff and then a beak full of rot, a flash of mottled fur and the coyote is lumbering behind. The beast clutches something in his paw. A detonator or a hand crossbow or the complete Acme Mail Order Catalog.

Roadrunner slows a fraction and turns. “Why are you chasing me?” he shouts into the wind. As always his legs move effortlessly, his body leans slightly forward. His vision blurs as the air rushes around his head.

But the coyote has never endeavored to so much as understand his language and his entreaties will sound like nothing so much as a simple “beep beep” to the animal’s incurious ears.

He runs on. The road dips and rises. The blue horizon remains fixed. The mountains loom ever closer. He feels it before he hears it and before his brain has processed anything the roadrunner finds himself leaning left. Zip! An arrow passes on his right, a few inches from his head. He dips and another arrow flies over his head. He jumps and then watches as another passes under his feet.

He wonders at the coyote, almost respects the animal’s pure drive. After all these years, after each time he crashed into a mountainside or blew himself up or ran smack into a cleverly planted anvil, the coyote continues his pursuit. If Roadrunner weren’t the object of the animal’s murderous objective, he might find the sense of duty admirable.

Roadrunner can hear the coyote’s ragged breath, the lopsided carriage of his claws scrabbling away. He rounds a turn and pauses. A pass, a narrow suspension bridge, a rocky canyon below.

Coyote stops as well. He sucks the air in great, desperate gulps. His rotten breath is like an oppressive heat. Roadrunner wonders if he is going to have a heart attack right here on this road.

“Let us stop this madness,” he says.

Coyote bares his fangs. He swipes his back paws on the road. Roadrunner wonders where he will go to lick his wounds, if there are cubs there to greet him, a partner, a pack. Even as he pities the poor creature, his brain is gauging distances, his muscles coiled and ready. “You do know the definition of madness?” he says.

Coyote wipes drool from his face. He walks a few steps and then he is running, his paws clenched, fangs bent to either side of his face, eyes closed in concentration.

Roadrunner retakes his path with the animal close behind. He allows the coyote to gain until just before the bridge. He stops, darts right, and cuts the ropes. He waits to hear the scream, the crash of the coyote’s body on the canyon floor, but there is nothing but the wind.

He turns his back to the canyon. He runs.

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TRASH DAY by Savannah Slone

June 18, 2019 · Fiction

Driving home from work, Evelyn wonders what would happen if her airbag released, should she be in an accident. Would it vacuum itself back into place like a video playing in reverse? Would she have to put it back in herself? What if she didn’t put it back in right? Wouldn’t putting it back sound the horn? Should she drive into the country, with the steering wheel’s guts resting on her girth, as not to disturb the neighbors with her honking as she put the airbag back where it belongs? Or would she take it into a mechanic? But what if she got in another accident on the way to the mechanic? There would be no airbag to protect her in said accident. What if she were to die in the first accident? Maybe she wouldn’t have to mess with the airbag at all. Maybe the airbag, itself, would do her in. She did sit far too close to the steering wheel, even though she wasn’t really that short and her legs were rather constricted while she drove. But she felt too far away when she was a comfortable distance from her steering wheel.

Evelyn’s car has a dented passenger door from a sideswipe that she never took care of. A sideswipe she didn’t confess to. As she is about to pull into her driveway, her eye is caught by the weekly garbage truck that heaves her neighbors’ trash can into its bulky body. She parks in the street, tosses open her grey can, starts chucking the nonsense she meant to empty before today out of her forest green Ford Taurus and into the can. McDonald’s sacks. An empty Kleenex box. Ginger-tipped Q-Tips.

As the truck approaches, she finishes, pulls into her driveway, and leans her seat back so the collectors can’t see her for the car hoarder she is. Like a child who covers their eyes and thinks no one else can see them. The mechanical arm raises the open can, dumps it, sets it back in place, and moves on. Evelyn’s pale pink cotton shirt sticks to her mole-trodden, sun-spotted body. She wipes the perspiration from her lined forehead, into her short, graying hair, and onto her too blue blue jeans with the fake out pockets and the amplified elastic waistband.

Evelyn didn’t have the patience for zippers anymore. Half the time, the zipper would be just out of reach, tucked, hiding from her. When she forgot to do laundry and was left pantyless, the zipper once got jammed on her salt and pepper pubic hair. Evelyn had to scissor herself free. She pushed the jeans into the overflowing trash can under the sink and growled, “Fuck it.” She wore pajama pants to her nearby superstore, bought new zipperless jeans, and donated her old ones to the Salvation Army, even though they hated gay people like her. Goodwill was too far of a drive.

Evelyn exits her car. She goes inside to retrieve the overflowing trash bag she forgot to take out. She had put another wax melt cube into her Scentsy burner because the one that was in there had lost its mojo. There it dripped onto her rental house’s oatmeal-tinted carpet, left on overnight.

“Shit.” She runs, tripping over her own feet, looking like she’s trying to get into a lunge position for the first time. She shuts off the wax burner and goes for a grocery sack and some oven mitts. Evelyn’s have owls on them because she wants to be quirky. The owls have been charred a few times too many and have rust and ebony marks all over.

Evelyn had only meant to go out to fetch a Redbox movie from the parking lot of her local Safeway, but when she pulled up, this older man was walking up at the same time and insisted, “No, I insist. You go first.” She had wanted to borrow Carol again. What if this guy looked over her shoulder? What if he was attracted to her and that’s why he let her go first? What if he was a Republican? What if he got angry? She didn’t know him. Evelyn tried on a tight, teeth-baring smile and inhaled her nerves through her diastema and other tiny oral spaces. Transaction uncompleted, Evelyn scurried to her car. She didn’t look back to see if his facial expression read confused or amused or however else she might have affected him. If she had affected him. She locked her door and bit her lip as she reversed, then sped forward. She pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street, almost getting T-boned by a car, whose headlights weren’t turned on, despite it being nearly 9 PM. She hit the brakes, stopping perpendicular to the lane she should be in. The car honked, driving up onto the sidewalk to pass her. Her jaw clenched and her body vibrated with anxiety. She didn’t want to go home. She drove to the school where she worked as a business manager and parked in her usual parking spot. No one else was in the lot and that comforted her. She was always overwhelmed by the swarming congestion of it all.

She twisted her keys out of the ignition and wanted a break. A break from her repetitive evening monotony. A break from her debilitating loneliness. A break from her apprehensions that consumed her. A city bus pulled around the corner, entering stage left in her plane of vision. Her body moved for her, telling her what to do, before she knew. A handful of people got off, as she walked up. She ascended the steps and entered coins. No one else was left on the bus. She couldn’t fathom the complexity of humans coexisting unless it was passing her by. Slides on a projector. Boys grabbing butts. Teen girls cracking up, as they walked down the street. A homeless couple and their small child. An old man pushing a stroller with a Pomeranian inside. A woman in a motorized wheelchair close behind him. Someone entering a convenience store. A car pulling into their driveway. A wayward youth scrolling on an iPhone. A curbside-sitter listening to music. An oceanic pulse of leaves and tango and blue and red flashing lights. A choreographed existence, being constantly toyed with—rewritten. Hazy mirrored doubled back reflections. A second bus, headed the opposite direction, too close. Brief eye contact with a woman who looked like the woman she loved. What she might have looked like, if she could have still known her.“Last stop,” the bus driver bellowed, as they slowed to a halt for the final time. She got off and walked for two hours back to her car. She slept, with the seat reclined, setting the alarm on her cell phone for five minutes before other employees would begin arriving. She always liked to be the first to arrive. Evelyn goes into work. She has a normal day. Afterward, she drives home. She takes out the trash.

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WAKE, ZIPLINE by Angelo Maneage

June 1, 2019 · Fiction

The waters are synchronized. There is a decanter of coffee fuming. Grandma is sad.

Eating pizza, strangely. Songs are playing, strangely, and I catch one directly above the table we are at in this separate room (but all the doors were open, so it was more like a section of a bigger room, like a house is a room with sections of itself). My grandma, aunt, grandpa, my Uncle Bobby are all sitting here, with a few other people and pastries that are covered that I’m told to eat but confused to because they are not eaten.

Pizza boxes were stacked sort of like one row was pepperoni and one wasn’t. They were both cheese. There are eight ounce waters next to them, in a square, being taken in a diagonal. This feels like it means something. Uncle Bobby asks if he could have a pop, but we told him no.

She tells me this exactly that way: “Grandma is sad.” She shows me houses on her phone, ones that she looked at because my grandpa wants to move, Aunt Chrissy shows me a house too. 20 pizza boxes are behind us; Uncle Bobby looks as if he might take the empty ones. The pastor’s wife, I forget her name (I’m not sure if that is rude or not because she remembers mine), talks with my grandma while I’m looking at her phone.

This house is a ranch, it’s red and long. There is a lake by it; grandma loves the lake, she always gets a pass to the one at the city every year. I went with her once and there was a dead bird in the water.

The house is sold.

A voice plays over all of our thoughts. The pastor’s wife is behind me so I give grandma her phone back; I don’t want the wife to touch my head, but she might.

Her voice is sloshy. Sincere about markets, or catering, death, something about money in a donation. Something in or on her eyes that I’m not sure I like; exhaustion in her voice and she always has a limp, but her lids seem to character act. I really might be angry because my mom’s fiancé is tall so his legs have nowhere to go but down while he’s driving; I spilled coffee on my pants I’d just picked up from the tailor.

There is a setting up of a camera. Two voices but mostly one. It’s a bit sloshy. That one starts to talk. It’s definitely Gary. I want to see this. I want to hear it. Everybody is talking; nobody is even eating pizza. Aunt Chrissy tells me this is Gary, but I already knew that. I listen, staring; I get up and push the way to the section where its watched.

—

A large room; the Gospel House. You can see the pipes or vents, whatever they are, from the ceiling from the floor. Carpeted. Very beige. This is a church that is for ex-mafia men in the local area, and their wives and families; it is very warming.

Pictures of Gary are in stations every 14 steps, I counted. In a collage, not making a larger Gary, but something of that. Like if he were a square, which he wasn’t; he’d smoked in a funeral several times before, jumped in the pool, drank in the car immediately after without putting a towel down.

He always looked old, I’d noticed. Youthful wrinkles, strangely. In a way he never looked healthy, but there was something confusing that with his beam. He would pick you up and put you on his shoulders if you were a certain height and weight, and carry you around, and you would be in the pool, somehow, he would be on your shoulders then, fighting a stranger you’d never seen, laughing, the stranger too, with another stranger you’d might have seen before holding the other up. Splashing in every picture, there’s something hinting at a Hawaiian shirt.

It isn’t really a traditional church or clergy, so I thought maybe that they would have left his body out of our site. And it didn’t feel too good to see him immediately; it felt like I was invading or like I wasn’t prepared, as prepared as he was. I’d never been that close to death, I don’t think. Or influence.

His daughters, crying, congratulated me for graduating college; I’d met them before in younger cases. Congratulations, you.

Wearing my cap, I hugged them, individually. I met a cousin I’d met before, also waiting in line. She’s older, crying. She uses Facebook to look at me, she mentions; she congratulates me.

My mom’s fiancé says he heard about 30 properties the family is keeping and how expensive that is, money, money, people, pool boy, and admiring that reality.

Gary is surrounded by flowers.

The video projected above a piano on four screens. A still silence, near movement, near the end. One man clapped once, but after that first contact understood that nobody will and began to warm his hands up.

Picture dark, grainy curtains. This is heaven, he says.

—

I realized my pants were unzipped in the hallway with all the people I’d just met with; at the last funeral I was at, my pants ripped as my grandpa and I lowered his mother’s urn into the ground. I zip them up.

My mom wants to go home. She had been crying for a few years, today especially; I had been weird all day too. She talked about how she’d gotten him an autographed football and how it was displayed on the shrine, I saw, and how good it made her feel. This made me feel good; this made me feel like we’d all missed a point.

I hadn’t been told that they were going to do this, but everybody brought bags of sand and began to fill the room with them. Each section, water is shot in from Pat and firemen outside with hoses. The whole fire department is here. Everybody is here. Even people my aunt works with, and her customers. Dons, city workers; everybody is cheering, dancing in the middle while the filler is poured. An inflated ball is in the crowd. Another. A volley ball net.

We are at the beach. Gary is dead.

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JUDGMENTAL CAT ON A WINDOWSILL by C. M. Lindley

May 29, 2019 · Fiction

On their second date, he will wear a shirt half tucked in, un-ironed, rolled up to the elbows. She’ll see the various tattoos on his arms but the one of a peony will be the one that confirms where she goes that night. “I went home w/ W,” she will text a friend, but the message will not go through, and so the next morning, she will imagine she might have imagined the whole thing. He will take them back to his house on J Street. He will still smell of saffron and garlic. Her family will still not want her around. There will be a judgmental cat on the windowsill, staring through her like it knows her biggest baddest secret, and she will say, trying to hide fear, Is that thing yours? I’m allergic. He will reply, No, dear, it’s the neighbors, and he will give her a look like she’s the only item in the pantry, the human equivalent of a half-eaten saltine sleeve, and she will squint her eyes at him and think, oh no, and become embarrassed for the both of them. She will have already been there too long, shown too much, promised the incorrect amount. But she will have been taught no way out other than through. So when Will unbuttons the top of his shirt she will scoot closer, keep an iron hand on her trembling thighs to quell them, lick her lips in that way she learned, reach for his belt, take a deep breath and—wait. Never mind. He will only want to watch a movie.

A city nestled against the water’s edge, the American River, God’s River, some call it. Not her, though. She hates the river because it connects her new neighborhood to her old. In her new neighborhood, there’s a pool. For weeks she has spent every day at the pool, her body a sponge of chlorine, other people’s urine, small black hairs, water to drown tiny ears. Three boys are at the opposite end of the pool. One of the boys, turned up-nose, patchy neck, lies all the way down on the ground, while the others count how long his stomach can make contact with the hot pavement before he pussies out. The word pussy echoes, sits behinds her on the plastic chase lounge—

—bending in the middle.

Hey, aren’t you that one girl? She turns around to see a fourth boy, Scout Nelson, son of Jerry, known for being the youngest person in her previous town to stay the night at a mental institution because he refused to stop wearing a racist Halloween costume to school. It was only a matter of time before someone recognized her. The past is the present is the past just pretending to be something it’s not. Pussy pussy pussy.

She lost her mind when, at age seven, she ran over her cat’s tail in a radio flyer wagon three times. First as an accident, second on purpose, and third as an accident no one believed was an accident. She was not much of a people person or an animal person or a defendable person and she had within her, a delicate flower wilting at an alarming rate and a penchant for laughing at violent images on television. When the cat was hit its third and final time, she placed it’s then severed tail in an egg-yolk yellow pillowcase and ran out to the river in a panic. She jumped in feet first, even though she had sensitive feet and was not a good swimmer. As she struggled, the current began to ruin her brand new shoes and her nicely plaited hair. Paradoxically, the deeper she went into the river, the shallower she got. She could not go back, tried to not go back, but three policemen found her while fishing off duty, and returned her home, safely. Weeks later, the pillowcase bubbled to the surface of the river like a young coconut and a man, Benjamin Weaver, father of Samuel, was getting in his daily dip when he came across a strange object in the middle of the water. When he opened the pillowcase he found nothing in it, and so, somewhere in the American river, there remains a floating tail. And elsewhere, an imbalanced cat on someone else’s windowsill, cocking its head, forever waiting, just waiting for you.

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SARAH W. by T.S.J. Harling

May 28, 2019 · Fiction

There is not yet a ghost in this place, but there will be. A long time ago there was a school, then another school, and then different offices. I lived in a house with an upstairs and a downstairs, a basement and an attic. We were a family. I was a girl. This is what I remember, not what I imagine. Although nothing can be verified without a living body, here with me, to speak and either object or affirm.Then, I was always in an act. Of laughing, talking, dancing. There were others around me, other girls, and we made up our own music. One of us was often upset about something. I was there, I was real, I was one of them. We drew breath. Then I became someone else. I live here now. The other girls live in their own houses. We can only communicate telepathically and in silence. I listen not to their voices but to the drumbeats of my neighbours around me on each side, which both hem me in and keep me alive. I think I would stop breathing if they quietly left, one by one. For now, each day and night they come and go; footsteps back and forth, submerged voices, TVs going on and off, doors opening and closing. Meanwhile I cling to the floor for dear life. Don’t leave me, I say. Don’t leave me. I am still here. I live. Feels like I can feel the circulation of the earth, a slowed sensation, ever turning away. Gravity isn’t strong enough. Not like it used to be. While they sleep or when they go out I have to listen for other noises to keep me in the room. The low hum of the fridge. The click of the boiler resetting. Air moving in and out of my nose. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, the rain falls against the window, or a dog will bark. I am in all parts of this home. In the corners of the ceiling, when I can’t get back down, scratching the walls. Behind the door. In the corridor. Standing on the rug in the centre of the room, smiling as you walk in. I’m here, I know I am, don’t say I am not. I have opened the doors of the cupboards in the kitchen. I have pulled the chair up to eat at the table. I have slept on the sofa. I have run the taps in the bathroom. I have looked out of the window, waiting for him to come home. I have tidied, cleaned and put away. I have hung my coat on the hooks by the front door. You don’t believe in ghosts. You will be ok.

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D-O-D-E-C-A-P-H-O-N-I-C by Bryce Jones

May 27, 2019 · Fiction

The composer used his Guggenheim and several other grants for the purchase of twelve children. Pitching for conditioned octave he specified three teens with tinsel, flinty, and flintiest timbres, five prepubescent boys whose vocal chords had rashes of uniquely layered crackle, and four soprano toddlers of separately valued screech. His house’s twelve TV rooms were built for private occupancy. In one the tube was empty and the toddler hit the screen. Enacted blurs of violence against the reflective surface. Posing afterwards flexed muscles, elbows out-crotched biceps straining. Kissing a mirage of Barbie while she lasted hand-lined in the air. The screen was beat-up, the toddler’d been tough and had seen it was good. Still an icon of themselves that dissipate to unreflected flesh. The toddler took the screws out and peeled back the TV’s carriage. Crawled inside and stayed there. Scheduled variegated winks that shadow mask their vision, splotched phosphenes on the screen’s inside and elide them with the medium.

A man crouched up a mountain. Or watched a woman take a bath. Or grew ficuses from out of his head. The boy couldn’t tell. But he wanted the man to see himself back to the bath.

One teen watched a GIF of their face turning “pretty” – resuming back to “ugly” – back to “pretty.” One teen watched a GIF of their sperm turning moldy. One teen watched a GIF of everything they ever wanted.

A different toddler learned the functionality of language as taught to them by webinar – stroke of paredoliac light moving “mouth’s” of data – that removed the T/V schema of deitic utterance. Said there is no you or your or me when speech has taken over. What there is instead’s a mucus-y infection of slurred out individuals. Try unsyntaxed antimeria so separate from coresense for freedom.

All twelve children were formed of isolate abstractions.

The composer rotate soloists, duos, trios, quartets. Made two sextets (unfixed members) and a sole dodecatet.

Tonal clusters of antiphonal collapse.

Movement 1:

[The toddler speaks from the grille of their degut tv]

– I just hum [humming]. It fills me up and empties me if I don’t move the hum. Just float out of breath on an unchanging tone. Though there is rhythm of my choosing underneath the surface. If I want. I don’t always. Or usually. I just hum. When it’s desealed from my lungs completely I still hear it in the TV. We cancel each other out. The TV and me [humming].

Movement 26:

[The three teens]

– I can’t air myself out. Like open up a window maybe open up my mouth ma – You two need to be stuck somewhere else, somewhere not with me, okay? Be – uchs seem nice. I’m a couch potato, couch protector – different if it’s on the inside on the outside’s worse – I was talking. I can’t believe I’m blabbed out. I liv – We’re dimorphs of pretty and ugl – rncob me? Thank u, next – dden in virginity or something taking over?

Movement 53:

[A toddler who watched Skinemax, the one known boy so far, the second teen, a boy who watched laparoscopic footage]

– Detective Moist Mackintosh made the scene – Yes, generic, better – Hostage situation: a female sex-addict overtook the volleyball team – I’ve forced the impulses of arousal to signify disgust – He should have dual the footage and let audiences vote: a scribbled hillbilly or naked woman – vomit’s not as gross as mold – Mack goes in. A pro – The focus on exteriors is tautological. A kino eye should roam inside – A masterful retcon: Mack gets horny.

Movement 94:

[The toddler taught through webinar, a boy who stared at static and one who saw 24 Hour Psycho, a toddler who watched AI created music videos, and a boy who saw slideshows of clickbait]

– “Put on your doll faces” – paraorganed throughin musical.ly – Every star visits this denture doctor – Bad biddence childisms – I’m numb – “In paradise” – Debunked claimant: Had he been kissed by God his face would have vanished – We shed the varnish of our body with every movement – “I’m a human being” – Spillish of (d)ef(f)ecting communicants – I stay nicely numb – Deblooded – Where there is no temperature.

Movement 151:

[Together]

WJHKDSFMJKSDFAISDHIFDFBTQLKSEO

HJHKDSF IDFFSDFASFSFSFSI E DFSDFD

AFEFEZSI GDFGDFGRSFGDFHFDHZCXI

TEEVSDF HDFIMLESSEDVVDSFSDFVAI

ESADEHII TBYZXCMASS0DKSSFKFSDM

ZLKOSRBFBFHNJKNLINOISEASCZSFSDI

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MOTHERS by Melanie Czerwinski

May 26, 2019 · Fiction

Liv’s mother called, but Liv’s mother always called. I imagined her eggshell sheets on what would soon be her deathbed, the waxy fake ferns in the corner of the nursing home room. I imagined her bloated face on her dead body, as waxy as the fake plants. Disgusting.

The aides were the ones who actually called. They would hold the phone up to her mother’s cheek, and she’d huff into the receiver about how she missed her daughter and how she should come visit. She was always out of breath. Liv would listen to the messages, then delete them without calling back. She’d go back to clacking away at her laptop keyboard, pronounced taps when she hit the spacebar, as if nothing had happened, as if her mother wasn’t on hospice.

Months ago, Liv’s mother was biding her time in the nursing home simply because she was overweight. Immobility due to obesity, the doctors told her. It pissed her off. I could understand some of her anger. Her father, a spindly man, spent his last days caring for her, wiping her ass, all of that. He had a heart attack and dropped dead at her bedside and she only bothered to call 911 after he was still for half an hour. She admitted to this, for some reason.

She had a custom-built wheelchair to accommodate her size, but I don’t think it got much use. Probably only to transfer to the toilet and shower. It wasn’t cheap, since it was outside of what insurance would cover, and Liv always regretted getting it. She should just squeeze into a normal one, she would say under her breath. She cursed her mother’s otherwise good health as those who she deemed more worthy of living passed away one by one. It just isn’t fair, she said, she doesn’t even try. I wondered if all those curses were what made the cancer suddenly sprout in her mother’s uterus. Liv nearly sounded happy when she received the news, and I swear I saw a devil’s smile pulling at her lips as she held the phone to her ear. She figuratively swatted Satan’s hands away from her mouth and forced a frown.

We drove to the nursing home. Things weren’t looking so good, according to the doctor. It was the beginning of March, but it was 76 degrees out with a slight breeze. Birds were tweeting, little frogs were peeping. But there were no bright flowers or green leaves, just empty branches and tan, dead grass. None of it added up.

My mother had a story for days like this, when people enthusiastically rolled down their windows and hung their arms out of their cars.

“When I was in high school, I was on the bus,” she would start, “and it was a totally normal day. There was this guy in front of us in a Cadillac with his arm out the window. He swerved too close to the other lane, and the car coming the opposite way took his arm clean off. I remember all the blood and his arm laying on the pavement.”

I never believed the story, and I had heard it since I was in middle school.

“Never put your arm out the window,” she always ended the story with, wagging her finger. Once I got my own car, I did it just to spite her.

I would have been more comfortable if Liv were preemptively mourning her mother. She had a quiet excitement around her. This was her first time visiting since her mother’s diagnosis; they only ever talked on the phone because of Liv’s compromised immune system. She was risking getting sick just so she could see her mother with tubes hooked up to her, her eyes barely opened.

I dropped Liv off and drove to a nearby Starbucks to wait. Indie pop was flowing from the hidden speakers. The inside smelled astringent, like it had just been cleaned top to bottom with assorted chemicals after a murder. I ordered a caramel macchiato and sat. The woman to my left was wearing a taffy pink sweater, the same color as my compact of birth control from high school. The vent behind her legs rattled. Caramel sauce snuck onto my upper lip when I tipped the cup to take a sip.

I scrolled through my phone, smiling at something on my feed then actively stopping myself. I was trying to blend in. I thought about Liv’s dying mother, and the smile easily went away, hiding, like thinking of unsightly things to kill an erection.

“If it goes any further, I would call the police,” the taffy woman said to one of her friends. Their conversation then shifted to whispers so I wouldn’t hear, but I strained my ears anyway. Something about an elementary school child divulging a story of abuse to a guidance counselor, but that could have been an unrelated story. Despite the temperature, the heat was still on, and the small of my back was starting to sweat. I was thankful when my phone rang.

“Come get me,” Liv said, sniffling. She was crying. I had no idea why she was crying. Was it because her mother hadn’t died yet?

I walked out of the Starbucks and paused when I got to the parking lot. The frogs had gotten louder as the sun began to set. There was a chill in the air now, and I briefly remembered scrolling past the weather report saying that temperatures were going to be dropping. I suddenly felt aware of my place in the world, an arresting feeling. My place was equally as important as Liv’s mother and the people who passed who she viewed as more important. I wanted to tell her about my epiphany, but as I plopped myself into the driver’s seat, I realized she wouldn’t want to hear it. Hearing that her mother had an important place in the world would infuriate her. I muted the radio and drove.

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THE PASSENGER by Anthony Dragonetti

May 24, 2019 · Fiction

When I can’t think of what to do, I have no choice but to go fast. I grab my car keys from under a pile of crumpled receipts by the door. I’d throw them out, but what if I need them someday? I could be audited. I could need an alibi. I focus back on the keys. It’s important to avoid rabbit holes. I can feel my tongue in my mouth. It’s time to go.

I get in my car and fly out of my condo development’s parking lot in reverse and swing forward towards the ramp to I-295. It’s a little after midnight, 25 degrees out, and I love New Jersey. I should open the windows. The cold air might straighten me out a bit. My instincts are taking me to the Turnpike. Okay, I tell my instincts, that is where we will go.

I’m cruising up 295, but not too fast, not yet. The cops have nothing to do and they like to sit on the median. I think I see a cop car up ahead and glide over into the right lane, slowing down, signal on like I’m preparing to exit. Good evening, officer. I’m on my way home from work. Late shift, you know how it is. Newborn at home. Me and the little lady haven’t been sleeping much, as you can imagine. You got kids? I’m still working out the script when I roll by the shadow that I thought was a cruiser. I say goodbye to my new wife and child.

Fate is funny. I mean like a joke. The shadow cop sends me towards the offramp where my headlights catch a stoned looking teenager on the side of the road with a thumb sticking out half-assed. He isn’t even looking in the direction of traffic. For a second, I think this is part two of my imagining things, but he is quite real as he jumps out of the way after I almost bump him with my fender. I roll to a stop alongside him.

He vaguely looks pissed, more confused. I lean over towards the passenger side window to talk to him.

Man, what are you doing out here? Who even hitchhikes anymore? It’s the middle of the night.

He tries to focus on my face and process my words. He says he got into a fight with his girlfriend and she kicked him out. He’s seriously fucked up and can’t get himself home. His phone is dead, and he’s broke. I tell him to get in before he freezes to death or someone decides to chop him up.

We’re riding up 295 in awkward silence for a bit. I realize I forgot to ask him where he’s headed, and it doesn’t seem to dawn on him he should be asking where I’m going.

Uh, where should I be taking you? Your parents live nearby or something?

“No, I don’t live with my parents. I’ve got a friend a few miles up the road I can crash with, if he’s home. Got to get off at 36.”

Providing that information seems to have used up his brain reserves and he slips back into half-consciousness. We’ve got a little time together and sitting in silence with another person in close quarters makes me nervous. I turn on a playlist of classic hardcore to keep my energy up. GBH kicks on and my mood stabilizes while the opening chords of Sick Boy scream out of dying speakers. I feel electric again, licking my lips.

My passenger rouses out of his stupor, agitated by the metallic noise. He’s looking closer to being part of this universe.

“Come on, dude. Can’t you put on something chill? I’m dying here.”

Hey, I’m the one giving you a ride out of the goodness of my own heart. You’d still be standing out there in the cold or a cop would have picked you up by now. Then where would you be?

“I’ve been arrested before. Who cares? They throw you in rehab. Juvenile records are sealed. At least I could sleep there.”

I lower the music as a compromise because now I feel bad, but I need to keep it on to maintain. My cortisol is on a steady drip. The road is empty ahead, so I take the kid in all sullen, skinny, and hooded. Painfully typical and therefore someone I want to protect. I ask him what his name is, and he says Tommy.

Tommy, Tommy, I say.

“Yeah, man. What’s yours?”

So, I tell him.

Then we sit quietly again until he blurts out that he wants to die. I turn the music off completely and ask him what he said. He repeats his wish. My brain is white lightning.

I say Tommy. Tommy, you can’t think like that. You’re just a kid. Shit isn’t even bad, yet.

“You don’t know anything about me. My parents are fucked up. I don’t talk to them. School sucks. I’m failing. I just ruined things with my girlfriend, who is basically the only thing in my life that isn’t trash. I make things worse for everybody. Seriously. Who would want to deal with me? I don’t blame her.”

“Okay, that sounds bad. But that doesn’t mean things will stay bad. You can turn it around. You seem like a smart guy.”

“Dude, I’m stupid. Smart guy. I wish I was dead. I’m so sick of this.”

You don’t.

“I do.”

Are you absolutely sure of this, says the heat rising in my chest.

He nods at me.

If you say so, man. And then I floor it.

We’re hurtling down a dark 295. There are a few cars on the road, but they stay away from the left lane when they see me coming. I look briefly over at the kid and notice traces of concern. I decide to commit. The engine is trying to kick back but forget it. The machine will hold up because I need it to. I’ve never needed anything so badly. Tommy squeaks.

“36 is coming up!”

I peel over across 2 lanes and brake tightly to make the offramp. The kid’s holding onto the dashboard.

“What are you doing!”

I know this whole area. I know every backroad. This entire state is mine. Everything you see is mine. We’re flying through the streets. I’m getting lucky with the lights. No one is out around here at this hour and I know where the cops usually wait. The elementary school isn’t too far now.

“Please, stop! We’re going to crash. Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. Please, dude.”

I ignore him. It’s hard, I won’t lie. I must stay the course now. We reach the school. It’s one of those long straightaways into a parking lot deep in the property. The lot is empty. Perfect. The car hits the entrance and we’re flying straight towards the school building.

“No! You’re going to kill us! Stop the car!”

Yes. That’s the idea.

“No stop stop please don’t kill me please don’t. I don’t want to die.”

I slam on the brakes and spin the wheel. The tires scream loud enough to shatter glass, I would think, but nothing seems to explode. We’re spinning. I’ve done all I can. It’s luck now, so I close my eyes.

The car stops maybe three feet from the building, facing away from it. I’m so wired I can’t feel my arms. I turn to Tommy and give him a triumphant grin. He starts screaming what aren’t even words. Well, they might be words, but they aren’t forming meaning for me right now. I speak calmly, but loudly, to try to get through to him.

Tommy, you have to understand what I did was for your own good. I believe fate brought us together on this night. You reached a crisis point and I was guided to you by forces that I, frankly, can’t explain. I was brought into your life the moment you needed me most. What are the chances? What are the odds? I did what I had to do. I had to show you that you didn’t really want to die. If I could, I’d show you how your death would affect the world. Unfortunately, my powers are limited. I hope you understand. You have to keep living, Tommy. There is so much more to do. I hope you wake up tomorrow with a new lease on life and cherish this second chance that you have been given.

He’s already left the car by this point, disappearing into the night, a speck that I can still make out at the edges of my headlights. When I crash later, for real, I don’t know if I’ll remember every detail of this. My only hope is that Tommy knows, deep down, I am his friend and I honestly meant everything I said.

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