X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

PIERCED by Charles Duffie

June 26, 2019 · Fiction

Each evening, I remove the band-aid, pinch the tweezers’ silver teeth, and draw the splinter from my thumb. I faithfully clean the small wound. By morning my private stigmata will be partially healed. The body is a determined machine.

The sliver of pine is only half an inch long and thin as a needle, but against my brown palm it glows like a cosmic shard. I dip a cotton ball in peroxide, touch the splinter, disinfectant cold as river water, then place the baptized thorn in the hollow of a contact lens case and click the lid. The click always makes me flinch.

I was walking to the bus for more firewood. Maybe half mile down the trail.

That’s when you first heard the shots?

Can you turn off the lights?

What?

The cruiser lights. The flashing, it’s… I think I’m going to be sick again.

Of course. Sorry. Hold on.

Father God…

So you were half a mile away when you heard the shots?

I didn’t know what it was. It didn’t sound like gunfire.

A lot of people say that. A lot of people say it sounds like—

Shake my head, one quick jerk to return from the synaptic detour of memory.

Light an incense cone so my hotel room will smell like the forest. Fill the diffuser so the air will feel damp as that night two months ago. Turn on the sound machine so crickets and frogs will surround me again. Tap the desktop planetarium projector so the ceiling over my bed fills with stars. Then I kneel on a carpet countless feet have flattened into soft concrete and I pray.

“Father God. Set me free. See how I resurrect my pain. See how I fuel my dreams. I can’t let go. Forgive me for surviving. I hate myself for still being alive.”

When the words taste like salt, I sputter “Amen” and squeeze into bed.

Michael, would you say a few words?

Thank you, pastor. I don’t know how to do this. I wish I had died that night. That must offend you. But it’s how I feel. I wish my spirit was looking down with Nala and your sons and daughters. All of us together. Looking down on someone else standing here, someone with better words. I was going to ask Nala to marry me. I was going to attend nine high school graduations. Now I walk around with this hole in my chest, this this this hatred so constant I wear it like my own skin—

Shake my head to collapse the memory bridges. Lying on my back, tucked hotel sheets holding me down, I listen to the crickets and frogs, watch the stars, breathe the damp air, summon the dream, repeating “forest” over and over, clucking my tongue like wet gunshots. Eyes stutter. There’s the glow. I hear the voices. The trees part like curtains…

NINE HIGH SCHOOL KIDS CROUCH AROUND THE CAMPFIRE STACKING S’MORES OUT OF BROKEN GRAHAM CRACKERS CHOCOLATE CHUNKS BLACKENED MARSHMALLOWS / NALA LEADS THEM IN SONG STRUMMING “WE ARE ONE IN THE SPIRIT WE ARE ONE IN THE LORD” THE SAFEST PLACE IN THE WORLD GOD’S OWN CATHEDRAL / TWO MEN DRIFT OUT OF THE DARK LIKE FOG DRESSED IN WHITE CAMO PANTS JACKETS HOODS / THE SHOTS SOUND LIKE HANDS CLAPPING LIKE PLATES HITTING A TILE FLOOR LIKE HOLES PUNCHED THROUGH A GUITAR’S BUZZING CHEST / I CRAWL BETWEEN FACES NIGHT SHRILL FROGS CHANTING INSECTS CRYING BILE IN MY THROAT BRAIN FERAL HEART COLLAPSED LIKE A BLACK HOLE LEAVING NOTHING NOTHING BUT THE SOFT MARBLE OF THEIR WRISTS / I SEE NALA’S BODY SINKING INTO PINE NEEDLES THE DECADES OF SENSATIONS SHE WILL NEVER HAVE CONCENTRATING NOW IN THESE LAST MOMENTS / SHE FEELS ANIMALS BREATHING IN THE SHADOWS AND SEES THE SOULS OF LOVED ONES LONG PASSED TEARS PULSE OUT OF HER EYES AND STEAM IN THE COLD AIR / THE STARS DESCEND BEYOND THE NIGHT-BIRDS AND CRICKETS AND FROGS SHE DETECTS THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES BUT DOESN’T WANT TO LEAVE THIS IS HOME THIS HUMAN PLACE PLEASE SHE SAYS / I HEAR RUNNING AND TURN TO SEE MYSELF STUMBLE INTO THE CLEARING—

I wake, as I do every night, like someone brought back from drowning. The dream is so physical. It’s still shouting through me like a freight train rushing past an open window. I chew three orange Motrin tablets and lean against the wallpaper.

You plan to do this full time?

I’ve taken a sabbatical from the university.

And what do you hope to accomplish?

I’m joining families from Columbine and Las Vegas, Sandy Hook and Orlando, Virginia Tech and Aurora and Parkland. There’s hundreds of us now. We’ll march on foot from California to D.C., adding marchers and gaining support as we go. We’re spending every cent we have to feed and house the caravan. We hope to inspire pilgrimages from all directions. We want to be five million strong by the time we hit Washington. But we won’t pray with politicians. We won’t debate NRA spokesmodels. We’re going to make demands. Because we deny the American alchemy that transforms victims into accomplices. We reject the lie that the only way to stop mass shootings is to amass more weapons. We claim the right of—

Shake my head. Stare into the flat dark until dawn separates the curtain from the wall.

I scrape a match, hold a needle to the flame, reopen the wound in my thumb. The pain is quick, sharp, like an animal biting my flesh from the inside.

We’re in New Mexico this morning. Speaking at two colleges, gathering signatures for an amendment to ban assault weapons on a county-by-county basis, hoping to grow like grass under the feet of Washington’s lobbyists. This is my public penance. No one notices the band-aid on my thumb.

I was too late that night. By the time I got back to the campfire, everyone was gone. But it’s not too late to stop the next tragedy. That’s why we’re here today. Because the Pine Mountain shooters were two 15-year-old boys who attended the same high school as their victims. Because other shooters are arming themselves right now. Because a mass shooting is defined as four or more dead or wounded and by that definition Pine Mountain was number 71. Because in the two months since, there have been 42 more mass shootings in America. Because last year there were over 300 and because there were over 300 the year before that and because—

Another shake of the head.

Pop open the contact lens case. Steadying the tweezers, I push the splinter back into my thumb. In that snap of pain, I see what only I saw, what only I know. I wasn’t walking back to the bus. I was sitting on the opposite edge of the campfire. I see the two men in white, the black Xs of rifle straps over their chests like their hearts have been crossed out. I see Nala lunge to pull a high school girl down. I see my own view turn and run, ducking low, fingers scrambling in the dirt, stumbling down the narrow path, down into the huge night as hands clap and plates shatter and holes punch, my vision flashing like strobe lights, choke of blood in the back of my throat, running faster, wilder, until my right hand, as if the better part of me, slams against a rough pine, another, another, dragging on me like an anchor until I stop, sobbing under that swath of stars and like a man waking from a dream turn and run back to the fire. I won’t find the splinter until two days later.

Running saved my life. I would have died too, cut down in seconds. I know that. But what I know can’t save me. I was god to those kids. And it’s not just me. Everywhere I go I see gods running, abandoning our children and grandchildren to the shooters, to poverty and sickness and dystopian tidal waves stacking on the horizon. Maybe we’re all broken. I don’t know how else to understand it. All driven by hungers we can’t sate, fears we can’t control, guilt we hide in our bodies. Maybe we’re all walking around pierced, our wounds the engine of the world.

You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead—

Shake.

My name is Michael Washington and I’m a survivor of the 71st—

Shake.

Two students who survived Parkland have committed suicide. What’s your—

Shake.

Nala stares up at me, waiting. I lean back so she can see the stars—

Knock on the door. A voice calls from the other side, asking if I’m ready.

x-r-a-y magazine

AT NIGHT by Craig Rodgers

June 25, 2019 · Fiction

The clock reads 2:04. The bedroom door is closed. He stares. He closes his eyes.

He opens his eyes. The clock reads 2:09. The bedroom door is open. He closes his eyes. He opens them. He stands and reaches out and he closes the door. He gets back into bed. The clock reads 2:11. He closes his eyes.

He opens his eyes. The clock reads 2:36. The bedroom door is open. He stands and pads his slow way through blue dark to a bathroom at hall’s end. He urinates with eyes closed. He returns to the bedroom, one hand shutting the door behind him. He closes his eyes.

He opens his eyes. The clock reads 2:43. The bedroom door is open. He stares. Brow furrows. He leans and reaches and without getting up he pushes closed the door. He stares another moment. He closes his eyes.

He opens his eyes. The bedroom door is open. He sits up in bed, throws legs over the side. His feet touch cold floor. He stares. He pushes the door closed. He waits. The clock reads 2:49. The clock reads 2:50. The bedroom door is closed. He curls his form back into bed. He stares. The clock reads 2:53. His eyes fall closed.

He opens his eyes. The bedroom door is open. The clock reads 2:59. He stares. He stares. The clock reads 3:01. He pushes closed the door. He stares. The clock reads 3:05. The clock reads 3:08. He stares. The bedroom door is closed. He stares. The clock reads 3:15. He stares. The clock reads 3:30. The bedroom door is closed. He stares. He stares.

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THE BALLAD OF BOBBLEHEAD LERN by Anthony Sabourin

June 24, 2019 · Fiction

ILern Dobronski woke up to find that his head had grown gigantic overnight. He could feel the weight of it. As he touched it with his hands, surprised fingers prodding the growth, he panicked. He had to almost fully extend his arms in order to feel the hair on top of his head. It was like one of those cheap rubber toys that soaked in water and doubled or tripled in size, except it wasn’t a toy, it was Lern’s head. He scrambled towards his bathroom to get to a mirror, hyperventilating with big-headed panic.He used to look at his reflection in that mirror, pushing his hair back and inspecting his hairline, wondering if it was receding. He’d really study it, worrying over imperceptible changes, afraid of one day waking up bald. He looked in the mirror now and saw his oversized head, which had grown in proportion to itself but not his body, and thought, I didn’t know I had to worry about this too. He decided that he should go to the hospital, but tiny humiliations kept getting in the way. He went to put on a shirt but nothing would fit over his big head. He had to resort to this wrinkled oxford button-down, his one dress shirt, stained red with tomato sauce. While scrounging around for change for the bus, he kept bumping into things in his apartment that he had never before considered. The new geometry of his head made ducking under desks and tables very difficult. He started crying as he ate his cereal, realizing that he would have to go out in public to get to the hospital. The weight of his head threw him off-balance as he tossed back the last sip of his morning coffee. He decided to cover up his head before going outside. This was how Lern ended up riding the bus with his head in a pillow case. He had cut eye and mouth holes into the pillow case for the occasion, and people gave Lern a wide berth.On the bus he imagined good news. A doctor saying this happens all of the time, just a routine case of head gigantism. He would poke Lern’s head with a needle and air would rush out in a big fart, his head deflating to its normal size. Or the doctor would talk about twenty-four hour giant syndrome and give Lern a fast-acting pill so that his body would grow in size to match his head. For a day he would be able to pick up cars over his head, juggle his enemies, or open any jar in the world. This is great, Lern thought. Some jars are super hard to open.He entered the hospital and was directed to the emergency room. He could hear the room go silent, nurses looking up at him wide-eyed, a guy with a skate sticking out of his head looked at Lern with an expression of deep concern, but overall Lern was optimistic about his potential diagnosis. This optimism was unfounded.Dr. Paschek was an old woman with an unworried face. She took measurements of the diameter of Lern’s head and subjected him to x-rays. Many other doctors gathered around to look at the x-rays. “We don’t know what this is,” they said about Lern’s head. “Yeah, it looks okay in there though,” said a doctor with a clipboard. “Is it because I’ve been eating too much sodium?” Lern asked, trying to be helpful.“No probably not.”“Oh.” Lern paused. He was sitting on a hospital bed holding the weight of his head in his hands, wearing a crinkly paper robe. He felt dumb. “Hey, if my head is so big, does that mean I’m smarter?”“Lord no,” Dr. Paschek said, answering very quickly. Man, Lern thought, that was a really immediate answer. “Hey,” she said, “We could try running you through our Big Metal Machine.” The other doctors started murmuring in positive tones about the Big Metal Machine. They strapped him into the Big Metal Machine and spun it around a few times but it did not yield further answers. Eight hours later they were ready to send Lern home. “Yeah, it’s fine,” Dr. Paschek was saying. “Will I ever get better?” Lern asked.“Who’s to say what’s better?” the doctor said, making air quotes with her fingers as she said the word ‘better’.“I mean some of us have regular heads though,” Lern said. “Is there any medicine you can give me?”The doctor narrowed her eyes into an expression that looked thoughtful and reached into the pocket of her white doctor coat and handed Lern a plastic baggy full of thick gelatinous multicoloured blobs.“What are these?” Lern asked.“Oh, these are jujubes. They are a tasty snack, except for the black ones. Eat them as a special treat.”“That’s it?”“Oh, and this pamphlet of neck exercises. You should do neck exercises.”Lern took the pamphlet and left for home.The journey home did not go well. Lern lost his pillow case in the hospital, and sitting on the bus he felt exposed. People loved staring at a giant head. It was like seeing a normal-sized head, but way bigger. He could feel the attention of everyone on the bus, and could no longer entertain himself with notions of his head being shrunk by modern pharmaceuticals. Instead he was thinking about the carnival. Elephant shit and popcorn and gape-mouthed plastic horses with wild eyes spinning in circles. He was specifically thinking about the freaks at the carnival - the mutants, the bearded ladies, strong-men, cyclopses, the chicken-head-eating geeks, and of course the big-headed Lern Dobronski’s. He’d have to ride in a convoy of trucks with de-constructed and rusty carnival rides from city to podunk city. They’d arrive in a new town and he’d have to set up his own cage; have to endure the gawking of strangers before returning to the temporary reprieve of the companionship of his new freak friends. But maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe society would be accepting of his new deformity. He looked around at the people on the bus and saw a young family with a sleeping infant, an elderly couple holding hands, two teenagers tagging their seat with permanent marker, two more awkwardly trying to kiss, groups of university students and coworkers, an old man reading a book - why couldn’t Lern fit in amongst all of this mundane life? Lern sat back and felt at peace. Then a kid with wiry red hair and freckles pointed at Lern and shouted out “Bobblehead!” The bus erupted with the sounds of laughter.It was at this moment that Lern decided to commit suicide.

Lern had to figure out how to tie a knot. Then he had to figure out where to hang it. He was worried about the weight of his head being too great. He could picture the noose giving way, and then he’d just be a guy who jumped from a chair to the floor with a piece of rope around his neck. Once he was satisfied with the rope situation, he moved on to writing his suicide note. He would start to write, “I love you all,” and then he would stop and crumple up the note and start again. Something about the note felt more real than the rope. All told it was two in the morning and Lern was still writing when his suicide attempt was interrupted by the physicists. They opened the door to his apartment and found Lern sitting at a desk with a noose in his arms, looking over a stack of papers. Lern looked up from his desk and saw three thin bald men in lab coats. They looked like variations on the same person. Lern said “I’m busy right now.”“You must stop,” said the first physicist. “Please, listen to us,” said the second physicist.“We are physicists,” said the third physicist. They all had the same voice. Lern hated the physicists.“Ugh, how did you guys even get in here?” Lern said. “The universe is this big hologram so doors don’t really exist,” said the first physicist.“If you can understand the math it’s actually pretty trivial to travel without boundaries through this plane of reality,” said the second physicist.“You left your door unlocked too,” said the third physicist. “But we have pressing matters to discuss with you, regarding your new giant head.” Lern made fists with his hands around the noose. “What, can you guys fix it?”“Hahaha, oh, of course not,” said the first physicist. “No we can’t and we wouldn’t want to.” “Lern,” said the second physicist, “We intercepted hospital readings from the Big Metal Machine, and we believe that your head now houses a potential space-time singularity.” “A what?” Lern said.“A singularity,” said the third physicist. “You know? The start of the Big Bang? The inside of a black hole?”“Singularities,” said the first physicist, “Could be really good or really bad.”“We’ve done all of the calculations and we still don’t know,” said the second physicist. “This is so exciting!”“I mean, we know everything,” said the third physicist, “So having a new unknown is really great. The inside of your head could house the secret to the infinite!”Lern could picture the physicists looking at his head and seeing nothing but a giant italicized x of a math equation. He tried to remember high school physics but all he could picture was the smell of weed and the cover to Dark Side of the Moon. “What do you narcs even want?” he said. “To run tests, of course,” said the first physicist. “Yes, and to activate the singularity,” said the second physicist.“We have to know what happens,” said the third physicist.Lern crumpled up his note and threw the rope on the floor. He stood up and told the physicists “GET OUT OF HERE YOU BUMS! NOBODY UNDERSTANDS WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT ANYWAY. HOLOGRAMS?? SINGUWHATEVERS?? YOU’RE JUST A BUNCH OF FAKE MATH PHILOSOPHERS!”The physicists stood quiet and dumbfounded at the entrance of Lern’s apartment. Their faces reflected a look of hurt, but also defiance. It didn’t look like they were leaving so Lern kept on shouting “OUT! GET OUT YOU GODDAMN QUANTUM NOBODIES!”A neighbour’s voice came muffled through the wall: “Is everything okay in there?”“NO HAL, I GOT PHYSICISTS IN MY APARTMENT.”“Those cockroaches,” said the neighbour through the wall. “Stay right there, I’m getting my shotgun.”The physicists hurried to leave, dodging a shoe thrown by Lern as they left. Word had spread quickly throughout the apartment building, and they were heckled and pelted with fruits and vegetables as they ran through the street.Lern looked out his window at a particular flying zucchini and felt ashamed that moments earlier he had been trying to end his life. He took his noose and walked to his floor’s garbage chute. He placed the rope inside and closed the chute. The sound of the rope clattering down the chute was pleasing to Lern. That night he dreamt of the cosmos. IIIIn the morning Lern woke up and did not go to work. It was hard to go to work when your head was gigantic and your couch was comfortable. There was so much he was not ready to do. He didn’t want to tell his mom or his dad, or any of his three sisters. He ate cereal until it turned soggy and watched TV until there was nothing but infomercials. Eventually he forced himself to go for a walk outside. Walking through his building’s hallways, with their oatmeal coloured walls and ticking fluorescent lights, felt like leaving the comfort of hibernation. The street outside was covered with smeared produce. He looked up at the sun and it felt like a spotlight. He knew where he wanted to go, and took deserted side streets to get to a small, nondescript rectangle of sand nestled amongst a busy road and a heavily polluted stretch of river. It was his favourite beach.It was early afternoon when Lern arrived, and everyone on the sparsely populated beach turned and looked at him. Lern tried to ignore this and found a solitary spot of sand where he could sit alone. He sheepishly took off his shoes and socks, rolled up his pants, and sat cross-legged, looking out at the water and people. Eventually they looked away. Lern felt hot but not from the sun. More people arrived at the beach as the day stretched on, and Lern continued to sit in the sand, getting used to the activity, getting used to the glares of people, and getting sunburnt. He noticed two teenage girls approaching, one with her face obscured by sunglasses and another forcefully chewing gum. They were talking and looking at their phones. They stopped short of Lern and snapped open a towel and Lern could feel the air. He winced and felt his eyes water. He didn’t want the company, but the two girls sat next to him. “Hey wow, you look like a big red baby,” said the girl with the gum.“Lisa, Jesus you can’t just fucking say that,” said the girl with the sunglasses.“Ugh, why? Hey dude, what happened to your head?”Lern rubbed his eyes and said “I woke up like this yesterday,” “No way.”“Yeah it just happened. The doctor’s don’t know why and some physicists said maybe there’s a thing in my head. I hate physicists, who can understand them.”“Man, physicists gets on my nerves,” Lisa said. “Like if you are so good at physics why don’t you just do straight math. Hey, do you want sunscreen for your big red baby head? I’m Lisa by the way.” Lisa held out the sunscreen. Lern reached out a hand.“I’m Lern.”“I’m Deborah,” said Deborah. “Hi Deborah,” said Lern.“Well Lern, we are going to eat sandwiches and listen to music in your general area so I hope that’s cool. Don’t worry about your head, Deborah has a peanut-shaped one and we all still like her.”“Lisa that is big talk for someone with an outie bellybutton.”“Ahh! Ahh! How can you even see that with your lazy eye?!”It didn’t look to Lern like Deborah had a lazy eye, and Lern continued to listen to Lisa and Deborah pick apart real and imagined imperfections until they both burst into laughter. Lern laughed too, in spite of himself, his whole head lolling back and forth. “You are the first people I’ve talked to all day,” he told them. Lern decided to stay at the beach. Lisa took Deborah’s phone and put on a song that sounded to Lern like a colourful and apocalyptic future. The girls broke out sandwiches but decided they weren’t hungry, so they fed them to gathering seagulls, in willful ignorance of the ‘DO NOT FEED THE BIRDS’ signs posted nearby. A seagull grabbed a piece of sandwich bigger than its head and choked it down in big gulps. It turned towards the rolling tide and started screeching. A second gull landed, stood beside the first one, and started screeching too. It made sense to Lern. He thanked the girls for the sunscreen and left as the birds continued to shriek by the incoming waves of brown water and garbage.As Lern was walking home, he caught the glint of an alto saxophone in a shop window, dying sunlight reflecting off of polished brass, and he bought it on sight. The neck strap didn’t fit, and the cashier tried to talk him out of it, but Lern couldn’t be helped. He smiled the whole walk home. In his apartment Lern took the saxophone out of its case. He set up the reed and mouthpiece, attaching them together with the ligature, which took a couple of tries to get right. When it was done he attached it to the neck of the saxophone, and attached the neck to the body. He said “What am I going to do with a saxophone?” out loud to the empty room. He set it on the chair across from his at the kitchen table and looked at it while he ate spaghetti. He laughed at himself. The saxophone made the rest of his apartment look dull.Now that there was nothing else to do but play the saxophone, Lern found that he could not. He thought of blowing into the saxophone with all of his strength, red-faced, neck muscles bulging, and no sound coming out. He pictured the saxophone falling apart in his arms. The failure felt too big to imagine. He sighed, did his neck exercises, and fell asleep in his bed while the saxophone sat in the kitchen. In his dream, Lern was a big red baby, floating lost through empty space. Suddenly, he was engulfed in a bright light— Lern’s eyes snapped open and, still in his boxers, he grabbed the saxophone and left for the roof of the apartment building. Lern ducked his head under the door and was met with open air and the quiet of a sleeping city. He wedged the door open and set foot on the gravel surface of the roof. He looked out towards the grey brutalism of the new government buildings, then past them towards the gothic revival style of older government buildings, which were in turn surrounded by modest downtown skyscrapers. He held the saxophone steady and placed his hands over the keys. He took a deep breath. He felt ready.He blew into the instrument and no sound came out. The calm of the city was indifferent. Then Lern remembered embouchure, the way the guy at the music store said you needed to shape your mouth to direct the tunnel of air from your lungs to the saxophone. He tried again, resting his upper teeth on the mouthpiece while the reed rested on his bottom lip, which was curled over his lower teeth. He took another deep breath and closed his eyes. He felt his swollen head spinning in the pressure of the Big Metal Machine. A crowd of people leering at him and chanting bobblehead. A crumpled note next to a thick knot. He blew into the saxophone and felt the instrument vibrate, heard a noise disturb the air.IVAs his fingers started moving with unknown purpose along the keys, a huge, immense sound emptied itself out of Lern. Screeching, mournful wailing - geese squeaking at the earth as they fell like bowling pins out of the sky; dive-bombing in straight lines out of immense grey clouds.As Lern continued to play, his body powering a deep thrum of squawking bellows, he saw the white light of his dream; he saw infinity, a nothingness beyond comprehension. Out of that void came a sensation like the colour red, and out of that sensation Lern could see the red expand into the solid brick walls of a tiny bar, vibrating to the music of a group of thrashing punks. He saw a man with his oversized head bobbing at the back of the club, singing along with the refrain of a song that goes: You will always, be a loser! You will always, be a loser!The man with the big head collides into a tall woman with striking black hair - spilt drinks and future laundry. They make eye contact as the singer continues: Aaand that’s Okay! They find themselves singing along, and they start to laugh. They eat pizza slices in the cold November air after the show. Lern’s whole body shifted with the saxophone, as he continued to burst forth with sound and vision. He saw the inky blackness of stars spit out of a black hole. He saw dark hair flowing out the window of a rented camper van driving through the desert. The man with the large head lies in the back of the van. They set up camp and eat hotdogs that split and curl over themselves in the heat of an open fire. They sit by copper gorges of earth cut down by water that doesn’t exist anymore, watch the sky dance and the sun set over the dessert. Stars swirling like water circling a drain around the density of a blue giant.A jubilant cacophony ripped through the air above the street and Lern saw everything at once: a gurney ripping through hospital hallways. The milky way in an expanding whorl. A hand gripping his. The woman with the dark hair screaming as she gives birth. Crowning. A cold dead sun suddenly flaring. The woman with the dark hair holding new life - an infant crying as she learns to breathe. Planets spat back into orbit. A tiny life swathed in cotton. More and more in a torrent Lern can’t control - hands and feet clambering over his head as the child treats her father as an obstacle course. Living in the basement of an old box home given to veterans after the war. First steps and first words. The weary feeling of parenting, stealing sleep by the glow of televisions, in front of open books, the comforting feeling of that head of dark hair fitting like a puzzle piece in the crook of Lern’s neck. A wealth of seasons - rain, heat, autumn leaves and white snow. Planets circled a vibrant sun. Pencil marks along the edge of a wall as an infant ran screaming, the marks creeping upwards as she turns into a three year old. These marks twinned by another child. Colouring crayons and a tiny blue dress. Soccer balls and dance shoes. A calm and even universe. The man with the big head and his saxophone settled into an exuberant groove but there is still more.Faster and faster - images that Lern can’t make sense of - stars losing sense of themselves and turning into primordial clouds, boxes of pamphlets, city council signs with giant heads on them, hand shaking, so many strange faces, so many loved ones, sleek black caskets and dead parents, new nieces, new nephews, new cousins, clouds shedding atoms, and a frantic tone on the saxophone now. And more and too much; dark hair turning grey beautifully, gracefully; a house of textbooks, dumb boys, okay ones, scratched cars and university tours, canoes like matchsticks in a great river, atoms falling apart, subatomic particles freezing, a cold beyond imagining. An elegiac saxophone slows as Lern sees the end – a cabin, a still lake, grandchildren by a gnarled willow tree - and stops playing, a wetness on his face drying in the warm glow of morning.VAn old man with a giant head drifts slowly away from the laughter in the cabin. A young voice calls for him so he waves a hand. In the darkness, the man walks along a dirt path from the cabin to a great undisturbed lake. He finds comfort in the stillness, the stars, the vast geography. He sits at the base of a tall, gnarled tree and takes a last look at the cabin, its happy sounds and warm glow. The man closes his eyes and rests.When his head splits open, the stunning light of the infinite bursts out.

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THE PITS by Christopher X. Ryan

June 23, 2019 · Fiction

It was all over the news. Skull fragments got discovered on Jimmy Wallace’s land during a septic dig. Just a few chips turned up, no bigger than the tokens Jimmy dishes out at the carousel he runs, but rumors cantered across town faster than you could say ex-wife.

The cops quashed the rumors though, saying it was probably a native skull, an archaeological or anthropological thing. They cordoned off Jimmy’s property with yellow tape and erected floodlights and stood with their thumbs hooked in their belts and their feet splayed like sentries at the portal to some savage place in our distant past.

If true they were native skull bits, it would be a ginormous relief to me and Carl Clancy. He and I had in fact interred a body back there, a kid we’d killed by accident one time when were high as banners. Carl was at the wheel—ka-thump—kid on a kick-scooter went under us. You wouldn’t expect the jeep to lurch and list on such a tiny body, but that soft skin and rich blood nearly diverted our trajectory into the oak at the bend of Rattlecan Corner. It happened the night of the fireworks and traffic vehicular and bodily was heavy, so we tarped up the boy and stuck him temporarily in the vast expanse of dirt between Jimmy’s garage and the marsh, a soft place with decades of old leaves and centuries of bent nails and eons of broken-up roots. Six months later, after the hubbub of the boy’s disappearance died down, we dragged the body to the cliffs and tossed it into the sea for the birds and fishes to particularize. Whether we spilled some head parts I don’t know but it seems like a true possibility if I get to pondering it. That was three years back.

Now, after two days of drinking and furious puking of the sort that makes your brow feel like it’s been substituting for a rock sledge, I slink down to the carousel where Jimmy works and strike up a friendly chat to get the lay of the land, almost literally.

Despite the notion that unsettled souls are haunting his land, he’s doing fine, distracted by business. The carousel downright hops all summer on account of the horses having real hair and being the oldest in the country. Look in them horses’ eyes and you’ll see gems and figurines and such but the carousel animals don’t bounce, just whirl in a lazy circle. Catch that brass ring though, you get a free ride. People love it, being simpletons and lovers of glimmering novelty, and Jimmy makes a killing running the place for some overseas consortium. Also, they’s got lots of arcade games in the annex.

“Now they’re thinkin’ there’s a whole village deep down,” Jimmy says, rocking on the heels of his ugly but comfortable looking shoes while jiggling the two pounds of change he keeps in his pockets. I don’t full-on hate the guy, but there’s something about him that makes me wonder if he ever got laid in his life. He’s that tense and under-socialized.

“A village, you say.”

He snorts his wet, god-awful snort, indicating he thinks something idiotic just been said. “Either a horde of natives got kill’t or someone’s been a-dumpin’ bodies there for years.”

“Huh—that’s—a thing to contemplate about.”

“Yup.”

“Indeed.”

After that I hit the paddles on Galaxy War but don’t even come close to beating Fred Sutton’s high score, then head over to the construction site where Carl Clancy gets paid to clean up wayward nails and Tyvek sheets and the other shit the carpenters chuck off the roofs. Soon as Carl sees me coming though, he gets twitchy and his eyeballs do that shaky thing.

“Who else been a-dumpin’ there?” I ask.

“I mean, fuck. Years back my grandpa and Josiah Pundt used to rob the natives of they’s liquor and car parts and sometimes it got ugly.”

“Who else?”

Now Carl is all but dancing but not the kind that’d make a gal jiggly and wet. “Shit, man. Your dad. My dad.”

I rub my jaw. “I suppose that’s a good thing. They call it possible deniability or something like that.”

“It’s just—”

“What?”

His eyeballs take to quivering again, flitting back and forth like a hummingbird on fermented nectar. “Only problem is—”

“Spit it out before I yank it out, Carl.”

“Garrett Simms is on the case.”

At that name my skin prickles. There’s only one person on Earth I hate more than God himself and that’s Garrett Simms. “What in the hell for? He’s just a regular ol’ street pig.”

“Naw, he got up-moted to detective. It was in the newspaper and everything.”

“Goddamn it, Carl.”

“Ain’t my fault.”

“We got to do something about this.”

“Such as what?”

“We got to mess up the dig zone. You still got them deer skulls?”

The next day I call in sick and park my van a short ways from Jimmy’s house and sit there drinking joe after joe until my balls are sore to the touch. I take frequent pisses into a jug but I don’t sleep none and my eyes don’t droop and I watch the pits like it’s my dharma. All the while my mind drifts tither and yon and I think of the times Garrett Simms pulled down my pants in the locker room or pinned me down so kids could slap my calves with wet rags and of course when he full-on grabbed my cock in the group showers.

Around noon a team comes in to sweep at Jimmy’s dirt with toothbrushes and blowers. Sure enough the devil Simms himself pulls up in an unmarked car. It’s nothing fancy but his suit looks tailored. He’s still fit and handsome but you put a turd in a shiny pouch, it’s still fecal and liable to smear everything it touches. He and the other pigs have gridded out the dirt and cordoned it off with yellow tape but them forensic types have only dug a foot deep, or so my binoculars tell me.

News reporters hover. A hearse appears but no one gets in or out and then it leaves.

Garrett and the other cops stand there chatting until evening and Jimmy brings them cold ones. He’s an authority sycophant. A termite with skin. You ever seen what a tire does to a human skull? They’s eyes leap out as if trying to see who just done this. Man, what’d I’d pay to get Jimmy and Garrett laying crown-to-crown in the road.

When dark plummets for good and Jimmy’s acreage goes still for the night, I slide out the back door of the van and wander over and stand at the rim of the pits a good while, thinking about the blacktop that led me to such a moment and the options that could steer me away from it. Then I notice the cooler’s still there, half-filled with ice, and a few of Jimmy’s brewskis are bobbing in it like overboard sailors. His home brew is probably the best in town and after all the coffee I’ve been swilling I get a hankering for something smooth. So I have one, then a second. It doesn’t take long before the happies set in and my limbs start to float. Because my gut is empty things go sideways on the third. The bottle slips from my hand and the pit starts to shift, sliding here and there until it’s all around me and I feel like I’m last in line to receive communion and the whole congregation is staring at me. A second later the air goes cold with a sharp rush of wind. A shovel or something of its ilk ker-klonks me on the brainpan and instantly my knees puss out. My body goes snaky in response and down I go, right into the dig pits.

Things invert a moment. Sound changes, like I’m at the bottom of the swimming hole. My head lolls around of its own accord and when my vision returns I see stars above me, only they’re all spinny, going round and round like the lights above the carousel. Then I see the horses up in the sky. I see myself too but I’m not alone—the kid we killed is on the horse ahead of me and we’re both reaching for the brass ring. He misses it and I feel bad, so I miss it on purpose too and we both lose out on the free ride.

My head bobs in the other direction and I see a figure slinking about in the pits. They’s got on a bandanna and a clever hat so his identity is lost to me. He comes closer, bearing down on me like an ugly angel, jabbing at the soil with the shovel, and each time the blade hits a rock all I can think is that the sparks look like fireflies.

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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.

x-r-a-y magazine

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