Creative Nonfiction

SEISMOLOGY by James Sullivan

July 17, 2020

In 2011 I was in a 3-tatami room.

That means a tall man can lie down only in one direction.

How do we measure a room? A living space? I don’t know the square footage of my Minnesota apartment. Only that it’s the smallest in this building, maybe the smallest anywhere in town. But when my neighbor moved out and my landlord offered me his place (“It’s a lot more spacious, maybe $10 more a month.”), I didn’t even look before deciding against it.

You never know when you’ll need that money. For supplies. For an extra stiff drink to soften the edges. For an emergency ticket out of dodge.

When I moved to Minnesota in 2017, my goal was for everything I brought to make the trip in my Ford Taurus. For the two years before a friend insisted I take his mattress, I slept on a folding cushion about four inches thick topped with a Japanese style futon.

This was an improvement on my previous setup.

Every so often I see a social media post from a woman bemoaning the state of single men’s sleeping situations, insisting no self-respecting woman would sleep with a man so close to the floor.

This is true most of the time.

Which is good enough odds.

What are the odds of dying in a natural disaster? Of a tornado hitting this building that lacks underground shelter? Of a big enough hunk of destiny hurtling through the blackness of space and striking us? Of dying in a flu pandemic? Of falling in a lasting love before one of the other odds hits you?

Some estimates say the odds of the great Cascadia earthquake, which would obliterate much of the Pacific Northwest of the US, are as high as one in three in the next fifty years.

I’ve never heard of quakes in Minnesota.

Other dangers have longer fingers.

How do we measure space in one’s mind? Span of attention? Capacity to remember details? The ability to hold onto three or more emotions about a single time and place? Or maybe the intervals between each nervous refresh of one’s news feed.

What I remember in March 2011: the rocking buildings in downtown Shibuya, Tokyo.

Images of a tsunami sweeping cars, homes, and people out to sea.

Sitting on my bed in Meidaimae, Tokyo, watching a news ticker drip updates, like irradiated fluids into the water supply, on an unfolding power plant catastrophe.

Tick, tick, update: US Military distributing potassium iodide near Yokohama.

Google searches: How far south is Yokohama from Tokyo?

Potassium iodide tablets how many safe?

Flights NRT to OMA

Tick, tick, update: TEPCO president wants to abandon Fukushima plant.

Tick, Tick, update: “Demonic” meltdown chain reaction possible.

Tick, tick, update: That jolt that nearly threw you from your bed was an aftershock. Stay tuned for more. And watch your head—this room is only one tatami wide.

I tracked down the share house where I lived in 2011. It’s under new management. The room is almost the same, new little rug, bed on the opposite side. But they’ve added a new desk: The same IKEA one now in my Minnesota apartment.

I imagine I’m writing at a desk linking these times.

Or maybe I’m under the desk.

Japan knows about earthquake preparedness. Myriad PSAs lectures about what supplies to keep in case of an emergency, how to prevent the fires that devastated Kobe following its 1995 quake, the reasons for opening doors (shifting buildings can cause them to stick shut, trapping you inside) and shielding one’s head under desks. But hiding under desks always reminds me of Cold War era safety drills.

Put your head under your desk (and kiss your ass goodbye).

Always wash your hands.

During a quake in central Japan in 2016, although I opened a door, nobody in my office took cover. Everyone sat in place, stunned as the building rattled.

Even as the floor moves under you, it can be hard to believe it’s really happening.

In February 2020, I started prepping food.

I’m not one of those preppers, stockpiling food and weapons in cellars, training for the post-apocalypse. But I had seen videos emerging from Wuhan, China of men in hazmat suits patrolling streets, armed with semi-automatic rifles.

How do you protect against what you can’t see?

There is an Early Earthquake Warning system in Japan. Your cell phone, normally always on silent mode, quivers against a desktop, announcing in Japanese: “Earthquake, earthquake,” and maybe the shock and your translation to English cost a lengthy moment processing this information, shaving away precious seconds before the earthquake hits.

Near the epicenter there’s no warning.

Too much warning—and too much time to think—are their own kinds of danger.

The worst thinking is about what the air contains. About the delay between filling your lungs and the first onset of malignant symptoms.

Google searches: nuclear meltdown explained

radiation drift how far?

thyroid cancer symptoms of

Panic is a problem. Frightened people hoard supplies, take rash action, flee countries. Information travels more quickly than ever before. But what do we trust? The noise to signal ratio makes understanding impossible in crises where hours, minutes, even seconds can count.

More bad thinking: To prevent panic, are those who know withholding truth?

What could you even do?

Recently supermarkets shelves have been plucked bare. This started the first week in March with cleaning supplies. I took a photo where disinfectant wipes and sprays used to be and posted it to my Facebook with the caption, “Is it starting?” Several people reacted with a laughing emoji. This was my second to last prepping trip before President Trump addressed the nation. I made my last one as soon as the address was announced.

Should I have said something more to warn other people? I wasn’t even sure myself how much credence to lend my paranoia.

Normalcy bias: The psychological tendency for people to believe that events will proceed according to how they have before. Leads to underestimating odds of disaster and severity of consequences.

I wonder how long until fear supplants normalcy. How long the fear from one time period will shape the rest of my life. Will I one day perplex a nurse with my habit of disinfecting groceries? Will they find my baton?

I’ve lost most of my photos from that brief, stressful time when I first tried to move to Tokyo.. The photos left are of my small room in Meidaimae. A tiny folding chair and desk wide enough for a laptop. The bed, the small shelf, the clothing rack where my ill-fitting Goodwill suit hung. The house’s shared kitchen area, the shower room, the toilet. Outside, a narrow alleyway with high, concrete walls. Streets with seemingly infinite twists and turns in which I’d become briefly lost. A sign hung by a playground that reads in Japanese, “If you think it’s suspicious, run away.”

Then there are the photos of food.

Sushi

Tuna mayo rice ball

Menchi katsu sandwich

Mitsuya Cider

Curry bread

Asahi Super Dry beer

This was the kind of junk I ate, and even if I had felt comfortable cooking in the shared kitchen, I didn’t really know much about cooking, especially working from local Japanese ingredients. This hadn’t been an issue when I first moved in. Daily trips to the center of town to buy a few items were part of my routine, orienting myself to Tokyo. After the earthquake, store shelves were empty. Everyone was panicked, and I was perhaps the least prepared person in the whole city to know which items to acquire and how.

The other night, not knowing what else to do, I inventoried every scrap of nourishment in my cupboards and fridge. It all fit on one note card.

Google searches: hydroxychloroquine

N95 masks

Ibuprofen safe?

Sound of dry cough

In a thread on items to stockpile, I learn that “deens” is prepper slang for sardines.

But I don’t buy any deens.

I have many reasons for gratitude. I can work, at least for another month, from home, which is warm and, at least for now, not shaking. There is food, and internet, and a steady supply of power. There is a lock on my door.

If I weren’t alone in this room, the other person and I could keep six feet between us with our backs against the wall.

Tick, tick, update: A stay at home order starts tonight. I’m way ahead of the game.

Update: I was, am, and will continue to be socially distanced.

Update: I’m at the desk in Meidaimae.

Update: I’m at the desk in Minnesota.

Update: I’m under the desk.

THE BEEP by Jason Schwartzman

July 16, 2020

I am his tutor and he is trying to tell me about an unknown variable. About X. But he has forgotten that it’s called X.

“The mysterious thing,” he says, laughing.

I love him for this. I will tell everyone I know about the mysterious thing.

During one session we’re in his apartment and I hear a beep. Just one beep. The microwave, probably.

“I’m really sorry,” he tells me, tensing up.

Sorry for what? It feels like I’m missing something.

“Totally fine!”

On the walk home I wonder why he was so on edge. Then I forget about it, my thoughts about him confined to the tiny sliver of the week we share. In the middle of another session, his mom comes home. She sits next to him, asks how it’s going. He’s taken the wrong test so we’re a little behind.

“I wish I had a baseball bat,” she says, smiling.

I see her smiling, so I automatically smile too, before I process what she might mean. Then she makes another comment, this time about throwing him off the roof. She smiles again.

I don’t know what I can say. Or do. Or if I’m just crazy. So far on the outside of something I can’t really see it. I say it’s not a big deal, the test. Not at all. He is doing well. Very well.

Sometimes I think about the beep. I also think he is okay, but I don’t really know. I’m not his tutor anymore.

DOGWALKER by L Scully

July 15, 2020

Once, when you were still a girl, you loved another person. At the time, they were a girl too and you relished in your mutual girlhood from the roof of the funeral home in which you lived. You stayed in the funeral director’s suite and put up strings of tiny lights and a record player your girlfriend restored from the 70s. You would lay in the park with this friend of yours, heads on each other’s chests, nights spent giggling and intertwined. When they were a girl and you were a girl they were magic. You would crawl out the open window onto the veranda and smoke, looking down at the flowers below, wearing each other’s shirts and admiring the matching tattoos you got on your wrists. There’s a photo of you like that, bare arms snaking around each other, the little shapes in the crease of your wrists identical. Taken on the balcony. There was always music coming from somewhere, usually you. Putting lipstick on in that rosy pink ceramic bathroom and pulling black tights over your legs in the leaning oval mirror. Dancing together, dreaming together, droplets of childlike tears leaking out from the sides of your eyes together. Doing drugs at the Drug Free Zone playground or hopping the cemetery gates at night. You used to dream of their kisses, when you were both girls.

When you close your eyes you see the house in ruins, overgrown with ferns. You see the veranda on the second floor and the chiseled stone emblem that says Funeral No Parking.

Some nights you hear a sound in the basement and walk down the steps slowly, holding a kitchen knife. There is a suit jacket in the wardrobe on the third floor that you keep for yourself, and an army bag and a series of strange brass rings. There’s the creaky bed where your best friend kissed your house guest. And the kitchen, which is the most haunted room in the house. You forget who told you that. The one perfect finished room in the carriage house where a professor used to live. Tiny and yellow. The garden that always smells a little sticky like sangria and the fallen leaves you dutifully rake. Down the hall there’s a bathroom at the front of the house, a cool grey where you bathe when the owners aren’t visiting. Sometimes you look through the drawers and find lube or intricate lighters or old jewelry. Sometimes you climb out on the roof with your best friend and light up while you watch the sunset and almost put your lips together. There’s an art expert around the corner who could change your life but you’re only good enough to walk his dog. You try not to close your eyes too often.

THREE QUARTERS by Steve Campbell

July 15, 2020

My uncle lost his leg in a motorbike accident. It wasn’t his whole leg, just half of it. And it wasn't lost either, the doctors cut it off, but that's what everyone whispers: He's lost his leg, and then they cock their heads to one side and sort of smile.

As I’m buying grapes for the hospital visit with my step-mother, the lady at the check-out makes the same head movement. She comments on how much my step-mother and I look alike. When I open my mouth to explain, my step-mother prods me so the lady can't see.

“Oh, I’m not his mother,” she replies. She sniffs and holds her head up as she hands over her money. “His mother left him.”

“Awww." The check-out lady cocks her head and sort of smiles. "He looks like he’s doing well though, doesn’t he?”

When we arrive on the hospital ward, we have to huddle around my uncle’s bed with the rest of our family. We squash together because the curtains have been drawn to give my uncle some privacy. There are twelve of us. Or eleven and a half if I count my uncle properly. No one is speaking. My uncle looks as though he’s asleep with his eyes open. The blanket that covers him is pulled up to his chin and tucked under the mattress on all sides. It’s flat against the bed below one of his knees. I count two times where someone feeds him Lucozade from a plastic cup, and four times where my nan leans him forward, plumps up his pillow, and drops him back against the bed; to make him more comfortable, she says.

Everyone avoids looking at the space where my uncle's leg should be. Instead, they pat the back of his hand and point out how many "get well" cards he has (seven), and swap out the uneaten bags of grapes, for fresh bags of grapes. I stare at the space on the bed and wonder who has the piece that’s missing.

It's a few months before my uncle is allowed to leave the hospital and when he does, it's with a leg made from plastic and metal that he keeps hidden from view beneath his jeans. On the surface it looks like he has a normal leg, but now he limps when he walks. That's when you can see that something isn't quite right.

I watched him take his false leg off to change his dressings, which was a big white sock pulled up over his thigh. The stump of flesh moved up and down like a normal leg but without a knee, shin or foot attached beneath it.

I don’t realize I’m staring until he catches my eye. Then, I cock my head to one side and sort of smile.

TO THE RESIDENTS OF NINETEEN-SOMETHING WEST NELSON by MK Sturdevant

July 8, 2020

To the Residents of Nineteen-Something West Nelson,

I had sex in your living room. At the time, it was a fetus of a room, a zygote of a house. Your living room had just been set on its paved frames and caissons like a mother hen about to lay some furnishings. You know those tall, narrow windows trending in the new builds around ’07? The streetlamp light was gushing in, there was no glass, just these wings of Tyvek flapping like a slack sail at midnight on the open sea.

We had gone for sushi in Bucktown. We were both nervous types, easily made brave by unconscionable amounts of sake. We chilled out, warmed up, got ideas. ‘Ah now,’ he said. When he said ‘now’ it sounded like ‘nigh.’ ‘It’s my first project, like.’ He said it and made dimples on his cheek. Then he put his cup down. ‘Come on then. Let’s have a look.’

We had sex in your living room, and even though I haven’t gotten to that part yet, I want you to know about it. Right away. I was the first. To have sex in your house. Before you did, I did. Right there in the living room, where you may be sitting now, with heavy, non-modular furniture, wishing you were having sex with him, too. His family were all farmers, and when he was about seven he got his leg caught in a combine and nearly died. Years later he could run again, he even ran a marathon. We went running together. Once my shoes were dirty and I was banging them on the sidewalk to knock the mud cakes off before I went up to ring the bell at his apartment. He came out and said, ‘I thought some eejit was out here knocking. But it was just you, clattering the bejeezus out of your runners.’

Well, the sex in your living room was great. We weren’t comfortable, but the situation had a feeling of surprise and sexy special circumstances. I think this is what sex requires. It was on a palette of drywall. We were directly in the middle of your main room, maybe a bit towards the east wall, heads to the south.

It wasn’t just the ambiance of the Tyvek wrap and the drywall, though. We had been talking at dinner about whole cities burning down. We were enthusiastic about this bond we shared, the Great Chicago Fire and the Burning of Cork, and despite it not being 1871 or 1920, we were having a passionate historical discussion about devastation and pride and human triumph, while drinking, so.

The stairs weren’t done while we were in there ripping our clothes off. Just these pits and gaps, marked everywhere with yellow tape. We walked all over your house afterwards. He told me how it wasn’t supposed to have four bathrooms, just a master, a regular, and a powder, but you wanted another powder in the basement. So you got it.

Do you gasp for pleasure while looking at your ceiling? I did. Above and behind your ceiling there are these planks with spray-painted instructions about electrical lines. You know this on a theoretical level maybe, but you haven’t seen them, the raw planks on a Friday night, beached whale bones organized into a grid, a luminous ribcage in the dark, exposed to the open air and city lights.

I saw your specs about the kitchen countertops by the way, christ jeezus. Not long after he built your house, our apartments got too expensive. I had to move farther north, and after the crash of ’08 he moved back ‘over home,’ he called it. There’s nothing affordable. They say soon there won’t be sushi, either, you know that? Different reasons. Sort of.

If you put this down a second and walk over to your fireplace and run your hand along the wall behind the mantel, there’s a beam back there where it says m & m 2007! xoxo, and, no new fires!

After we capped the giant Sharpies and put on our shirts, we jumped out of your plywood front door onto the dirt where your steps would be laid. He said he just hoped you really lived in it and stayed there awhile. Then showed me his name printed on the permit tied to the fence out front.

Don’t move out. Don’t keep moving. Use the fecking fireplace then, he said to you when you weren’t there. And use the walk-out over the garage. He was totally knackered after putting the fecker in. To spec, even. Might’n put him over budget, he added.

Think of you in it, think of us gone. Don’t let it rust away; go out there to your magazine roof and have sex and get high or call your mother or something big like that. Invite underpaid people to live with you. Deliver a baby up there. You know, Live, like.

ANTS by Mary Mattingly

June 28, 2020

There’s an ant infestation in my bathroom.

They are relentless. Everyday, more squirming black dots swarm the sink, the countertops. Me, I’m fearless. I launch attacks on them with a safe-for-pets Ant and Roach Killer spray, twisting the green cap counterclockwise to cock it, holding it close to the sink to use the pesticide since at some point, the useless aluminum bottle broke and it no longer sprays confidently, just reluctantly pisses spray out. Still, it’s satisfying to watch the ants slow as the chemicals hit them. They drown in poisonous pools. I work methodically, chasing them to their home behind the counter, from which they’re inevitably swarming.

But no matter how many I kill, they keep coming back.

***

The first time I fell into obsessive depression, I was 16. I met him at a party on New Year’s Eve. I was immediately taken with his thick swoopy blonde hair and mismatched eyes, his full lips soft, softer than I ever thought a boy’s lips could be. We spent two weeks making out on and off in each other’s basements until finally he texted me during choir class, told me he wasn’t over his ex-girlfriend, a pretty and popular girl in my biology class. I told him it was fine but continued for months to spend every hour wondering what went wrong, replaying our various rendezvous in my mind and wondering why not me, what was wrong with me. It was remarkable the first day I woke up to realize he hadn’t been my first thought. It had been almost a year at that point. But, I was only seventeen. It’s normal for girls to be dramatic at that age. I wasn’t aware yet that I shouldn’t want to possess a person this way. To chase things denied to me simply because they are denied to me.

He and I went on like that for a while.

***

I suspect the ants have a queen and she’s fat behind the sink counter. She controls all their collective motions, sends them out scouting for food to bring back to the nest. And they obey, bowing to that thick, segmented mass. All she needs to do is say the word and they go out in the world in patterns that serve her needs.

I will kill her once I find her.

***

The first time I took a razor blade to the inner punchy flesh of my left arm, I was wrapped up in another obsession, over another boy. A musician (of course) with ropy tattooed arms and zero interest in being my boyfriend. I sat on my couch several vodka waters deep and used the blade I stole from his apartment. Instead of gliding through the tape that seals packages shut, I traced straight lines, which first appeared white, then thready with blood. I felt nothing thanks to the heavy cloak of alcohol I lay underneath. I realize all this information makes me sound hysterical, a scorned woman from a book with a heaving bosom on the cover. I cried as I did this, wishing that instead I was laying next to him in his purple-sheeted bed, knowing full well he wouldn’t wrap me up in his arms or rest his inked fingers on my hip. I knew then I was afflicted with something, but the only cure I could think of was at the tail end of a clear bottle.

***

My poor roommate doesn’t know what to do with the ants in our kitchen. It falls to me, then, to come up with some kind of plan. He complains, infrequently, wondering why the ants have migrated from the kitchen to the bathroom sink. It’s not like there’s anything in there for them to eat, he says. What is it they’re looking for?

***

I don’t like my mind. It shouts unfair things at me, heightens my awareness of my place in the world and how minuscule it is, my past failures, points out all the things people likely don’t like about me. My crooked nose and my not-flat stomach and that time I said the wrong thing at the wrong time. I don’t know how else to get it to shut up. So I drink.

***

To my roommate’s point, I’m not sure what it is the ants eat in the bathroom or how they stay alive. I wonder what I look like to them gazing up from their tiny bodies. Some easily ignorable entity, some blurry giant. They see me and they don’t scatter. I scare me more than I scare them.

***

The first time alcohol becomes the opposite of a friend is when it starts keeping me company when I’m bored. Sobriety scares me. Since I was eighteen, I’ve stayed high on something - weed from the college dealers on my undergraduate’s campus, hydrocodone stolen from my parents’ medicine cabinet, booze, psychedelics, molly, nicotine. But it’s not like I’m doing heroin. Or meth. Only then would I really have a problem. Only then will I have lost control.

***

The first time my impulse decisions start to pull me down, I’m living in South Florida, one hundred dollars away from penniless and my father is telling me over the phone I need to come home. I make decisions recklessly and they’ve come at a cost. Yes, I have a problem with spending. But, deep down, I know purchasing this or that one thing is going to turn it all around for me.

That’s how I ended up with a cat.

I’m in South Florida because I quit my job to pursue an MFA in fiction writing, left stability behind to move across the country, convinced I have a special something unlike anything my new professors have ever seen. Surely, I’d graduate with some kind of prestige, a book deal at least. My undergraduate music degree had been a farce, see, no, writing, like Anaïs Nin or Jeffrey Eugenides, writing, that’s where my artistry really shines.

Instead, I spend so much time at the local bar they learn my drink order and at first, I have fun. I meet new people, other writers, from all over the country and we get into spirited debates about teaching, about politics, tell stories. I talk too much and too fast, but I am devastatingly happy. I’m the fearless one, following an unconventional life path to the land of sunshine and overabundance. While my friends back home are forming dull meaningful relationships with partners and settling into gray careers and 401Ks, I’m following my dreams.

It doesn’t matter that, well, I’m not really writing, and it doesn’t matter that I’m spending every dollar I have on a vacation to the Keys, clear drinks, my old vices. In my mind, I’m a star. And celebrities don’t pay bills. After one semester, four months, I’ve used up all my savings, owe the federal government thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes and fines, and have to cash bonds my grandparents bought once-promising, infantile me to pay my rent.

Oops.

***

Some days, I consider not killing the ants. Maybe they’ve already won.

***

I’m sitting in a psychiatrist’s office in Boca Raton. I’ve told her I’ve come in for an assessment. I had previously gone to another psychiatrist's office on the hunt for the cure of being me, but all I know was that place scared me, with its mildewy smell of aging concrete walls and unwashed humans, wandering, doped-up bodies propped up by endless amounts of chemicals, both natural and prescribed.

This psych’s office is much nicer. It plays irritating, soothing music in the waiting room, where I jiggle on a white cushioned chair and wait to be called in. I have started taking Lexapro for depression, hurriedly prescribed during my ten-minute meeting with the previous psych and thus far the daily five milligrams has done nothing for me. I still obsess over people, wake up at odd hours and can’t find the motivation to finish my schoolwork.

But I’m not always like that.

I tell the psych, a kind woman with concerned brown eyes, that I don’t get good days, I get good weeks, where energy and excitement thrum through me. It’s like being high. I yearn for those months. I can control a room, make people laugh, make them feel good about themselves. I start writing short stories, books, bang out half-conceived songs on my teetering Yamaha keyboard, attempt comedic screenplays. Nothing gets done. Then comes the inevitable, drinking too much, blowing through every dollar on random, much-needed fixations like ounces of CBD or two hundred dollar speakers, sleeping with strangers I otherwise wouldn’t. Snapping at my roommate over a coffee mug left in the sink. Crying. Pouring myself another glass of vodka.

“Do you have any family members who are bipolar?” she asks.

I blink. It’s not something I’ve ever considered.

“I don’t know,” I reply.

I just know I’m tired of scaring my parents, myself. I’m tired of my temper tantrums, the times I get so frustrated over being unable to accomplish everyday tasks, it escalates to me screaming at myself, pacing through my house and shouting about how stupid I am.

I’m just tired.

***

Can ants think? Or do they just react in patterns? Do they have plans to take over my entire house? Will they chew through the foundation, termite-like, until it snaps? Will I lay back and let them?

***

It seems like everyone is bipolar these days. I see Tweets on social media, people noting with a nodding wink that they’re having a depressive episode or posting blurred memes representative of being manic. I do it myself. Proudly announce my diagnosis. Mood disorder. Such a catchy hashtag. I read articles detailing why the millennial generation struggles with mental health. It seems like everyone wants a clinical reason for why they feel the way they feel.

We all want to be special. Rather than be a little sad, we’re depressed. Rather than being nervous, we’re having a mixed episode. I familiarize myself with new terms: “hypomania,” “psych ward,” “anti-psychotic.” I see the rise in the discourse over mental health and I start to doubt myself. Am I really sick or am I playing into the allure of mental illness Instagram? I wonder how much of my problems are manufactured. Is taking medication a conspiracy by Big Pharma, convincing us that normal human emotions are unnatural, that there’s a pill to treat this and that? My friend has been on medication as long as I have and he says he doesn’t feel any different. I think I do. I think? I don’t know myself well enough to tell.

***

I will have control. I finally go to the store and buy traps for the ants. It’s a big step, one I’ve been putting off, but one that needs to be done. Plus, I’m almost out of spray.

***

These days, my brain and I continue to fight. But it’s easier now not to let it do me in. “You really have to take all those medications everyday?” My mother asks, reminding me that they’ll make me gain weight. And I don’t have an answer. Now I embrace society instead of rejecting it. At least for now. It scares me though, what the almighty brain can say. Veer into traffic. Swan dive off the top of the fifth floor of your friend’s apartment building. Stock up on your anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication and take them all at once. Just to see what happens.

My thoughts, they fritter around my head like swarms of ants. Everyday, they surface from behind the sink, make a beeline for me on the orders of their queen. And everyday, I take small pills, white circles, green and white ovals, to beat them back, a spray, a little trap of poison. I am doing better. My obsessions are still there, my circular thoughts still trap me sometimes. Some days, my brain might not want me here. But I want to be here.

That counts for something.

ALWAYS AND ONLY JUST ALMOST by Felicia Rosemary Urso

June 26, 2020

Strangers came by to give you gifts: a fresh fish on ice in a styrofoam cooler, metal frying pans, a machete, two bottles of rum, a bunch of bananas the size of my torso. At night, we played gin rummy, shared liters of Kava and waited for a full moon. In the daylight, you showed me the jungle and explained every root or plant I could use for sunscreen or gelatin shampoo. I woke up picking my scabs, legs stuck to the leather couch on your porch. Nineteen and sick for you.

You were two hours late when you pulled up to the Kona airport, perched in the bed of a white pick-up truck. It had been a year since we had seen each other. We talked on AIM every day for seven years but hadn’t spent more than a few days in person since we met. I went nowhere new without sending you a postcard.

You used your EBT card to buy us raw fish with rice we ate in parking lots and green melon ice pops we ate on the side of the road. You picked me passion fruit when we’d pass a tree. We walked or hitchhiked to long stretches of flat land, black sand beaches with naked families smoking joints, both of us wearing only your boxers, swimming as a shower in turquoise coves filled with unforgiving coral. Places I can see when I sleep but not on a map. Places I only see through you.

Living alone, and with so little, I didn’t understand how you weren’t lonely or why you couldn’t seem to miss me. No electricity, no heat, no running water. The field surrounding your plywood house that sat on stilts was filled with a fruit the texture and color of chicken-fat, with a vomit aftertaste. The first three nights on the farm I dreamed that you stabbed me, my stomach as easy to push through as a pillow.

You lifted me onto the counter, pushed up my dress and licked at my core, like it was a pinkness you had never seen.

You told me about the purple cottage with a flower and vegetable garden you’d build for us, for our children, who would be as gorgeous as you are, and I believed you. While watching a white owl float over the dark field, you talked about your daughter who died when she was three days old. You heard her at night, howling. You heard her during thunderstorms and felt her there on your lap. Felt her between us under the navy sheet, while shoveling the earth, while collecting guava and avocados off trees, while walking through the jungle’s wetness to fill up your giant jug with drinking water for the week.

The gauze covering the light, the motes in my eyes. How much more could I have proved? Whittled down, your little flute.

I made you cum with your pants buttoned up but even then, I couldn’t feel you. I brought up my father and you pointed out a crimson flower. I saw a blood orange and you saw god. The ocean’s red seaweed stuck in the hollows of my crotch and thighs, like tiny clotted miscarriages. Looking up at an ancient Banyan tree you said, “That’s us.” Two trunks with branches reaching out and coiling into each other. Stuck, together.

On a single lane dirt road, laying in the back of a stranger’s pick-up truck, you used your arms to keep mine warm, hitting pause. There was no light, no apparent life, we could have been the only people the dead dark trees had seen. The volcano had erupted a few weeks prior—was still gushing through some open holes, you showed me where—its wake scratched fields into blank black. When we woke up, our toes and eyelashes touched. Pure by morning, you retold my dreams to me.

I thought nothing bad could happen in August, but out of all the men who could have had me but wouldn’t, it was you who the drunk driver hit. It was you, who lost all feeling in every limb except for your left hand. You, who had never been able to touch me but never stopped making me squirm. Once stable enough, you were flown from Hawaii to a Philly hospital. I didn’t take the bus from New York to visit you. I couldn’t bear to see you need me.

You never slept in this bed, but I tell myself I smell your deep-green scent on my pillowcase, and so I do. In the downtown Brooklyn hotel room years later, your skin hung onto the mineral dust smell that tortured my pussy for a decade. The sweat that made me want to climb you where we lay, on top of the sheets, both of us still as meat.

I brought you to the roof. The seatbelt on your wheelchair wasn’t done on, the wheels caught on the lip of the door, you fell forward and couldn’t reach out. Once back in your chair, I put the straw to your mouth and we drank. I put the blunt to your lips and we smoked. For a few hours before check-out I slept curled into your armpit, again, unsure.

When I first met you, and when I meet you again, I’ll think I was sent for you. Can you remember? Your friends said the day you met me, you repeated my name like a chant as you fell into our dreams.

Before our warm January, before we touched anyone, before the drugs we had to do: the grass, the lake, my bunk bed. I want to watch how your lips tell it, the summer we met—drowsy New Hampshire dusks, quiet pines vibrating in dry heat. Capturing each others flags, watching each other bite granola bars, blushing…

Two twelve-year-olds in black converse—conspiring, shoulder to shoulder, pinkie to pinkie—always, and only, just almost.

ADULT-ORIENTED by Kala Frances Wahl

June 26, 2020

I was seventeen with braces, bright pink rubber bands looped around the brackets in my mouth, when God appeared to me in a dream. He told me it was my destiny to be a porn star. I was peroxide blonde, big-breasted and flexible. I readily accepted God’s proposal. Once without direction, my life now had purpose, meaning, something tangible that I could grip onto and ride like a mechanical bull. The horns felt good in my hands.

I attended Catholic school, but I didn’t believe in God. I wasn’t sure what I believed in. I wanted to believe I was edgy or rebellious, a flamingo in a flock of pigeons, or a loud tornado gliding over a quiet Midwestern town. I wandered the hallways aimlessly with no shorts beneath my plaid kilt and a fresh tongue piercing; I spoke with a lisp for a month as my swollen tongue healed. My history teacher caught on that I wasn’t speaking correctly. He promised not to give me a detention for my new body modification, even though school policy insisted he should, but he did warn me about potential gum decay from having a metal ball in my mouth. I appreciated his concern; that teacher always rooted for me. I think he was the only one.

Teetering on a jagged line between searching for meaning in life and being too cool to search for meaning in life, I sat on the floor of my bedroom and waited for someone to tell me what to do. I was open to suggestions from anyone. God just happened to be the first one to tell me exactly what it was I needed to do.

When I told my mother about my vocational calling, we were in the car on the way home from school, a black Ford Escape that glistened in the sunlight like a damp forehead. My mother was also blonde, platinum. She always wore capris and oversized t-shirts with various logos on them. Some were for local fundraisers she never participated in and others were for tractor supply companies or breweries. Those shirts were amassed in her closet from various thrift stores and flea markets. Comfort was her thing, not fashion. I admired that about her. My mother gripped the steering wheel and called my dream ridiculous. I reminded her that God only appeared to important people, like prophets and virgins. She ignored me and asked if I’d taken out the trash in my room. Apparently it stunk in there; I hadn’t noticed.

We went to a tattoo parlor on a Saturday morning, a nice one with a fake chandelier and large fish tank in the lobby. The fish swam back and forth like they were running from something, but I couldn’t tell what. I identified with that. I told my mom we were there because I wanted to reinvent myself. She nodded and said to consider it an early birthday gift. I lay on my back while a man, who looked to be in his late 30s with a tattoo of a sphinx on his upper left arm, pushed a needle through the top of my belly button. I winced and wondered if he’d ever been to Egypt, or if he’d like to take me. The belly button gem was light blue and sparkling. It made me look edible, like candy. I looked at my piercer and smiled.

At home, in the mirror of my vanity, I pursed my glossy lips into an O and moaned. Taped along the golden frame were pictures of my dog, friends and makeup tips cut out from the pages of Cosmopolitan. They surrounded my face and torso like an attentive audience waiting for the next song, and I was going to give it to them. I was going to give it to everyone one day. I slid my tongue over my braces, feeling the rough grooves of metal before grabbing my bare breasts and squeezing. I moaned again. I practiced, and then I practiced some more. I slipped my fingers in between my lips and sucked. It wasn’t enough, though. Nothing was ever enough, and I threw a fit. I needed actual practice; I needed a boy.

So I found one and agreed to meet at a campsite twenty minutes from my house where he would take my virginity. Inside a tent, the classmate from third period Current Events flipped me onto my back on top of a sleeping bag. His penis was inside of me as he knelt over my naked body. We were two wrestlers tangled up in one another, oiled with each other’s sweat and grunting with every slight movement. My pussy bled from the pressure, the blood smeared along my inner thighs and coating his dick, but I told him to keep going. It was all so dirty and rough, and I liked it. He slammed his eyes shut and whimpered, and I told him I felt like I was in a porno or something. He didn’t say anything but instead panted like he was going to cum.

I looked up at him and said, “Did you know that I want to be in pornos?”

***

I began to spray-tan. I used those cans from the drugstore. I’d baptize myself with the orange spray as I leaned my naked body against the walls of my shower. My mother complained it stained the white porcelain; I complained she spent too much time drinking on cruise ships with male suitor number five, or six or seven. I lost count.

My naturally curly hair became fried beneath the tongs of my flatiron as I straightened it stiff, and I wore heavy eyeliner, thick and black like the ink of a King-Size Sharpie.

“If I wouldn’t pose for Playboy in it, I don’t leave the house,” I told my friends on the school track as we stretched our legs before practice.

I then lifted my arms upwards over my head, reaching and reaching until my shirt rode up enough for my belly button piercing to show. The girls stared and asked me about it.

Coach yelled at us, “Stop talking and run!”

And I did run—away from home in the black Ford Escape. I drove on the highway barefoot, my dirty sneakers tossed into the backseat along with a duffle bag. All it held were four half-empty bottles of nail polish and a few pairs of dirty underwear I found beneath my bed, because I hadn’t done my laundry in a while. I drove fast, but I shouldn’t have. I didn’t actually know where I was going; the whole thing sounded better in my head. With each slam of the brake, my toes pressing down hard on the pedal and the tires screeching, I yelled expletives out of the half-open window. My mom asked via text where I took the car, and I responded, my fingers thumping angrily against the keyboard, “Fuck you.” She could use her company car. I drove for thirty minutes before getting off on Exit 31. I went to my friend’s house and ended up staying with her for a week. When she asked why I left home, I told her it was my mom or something like that: “She’s fucking wack, dude.”

During my stay, my friend and I went to different malls and shoplifted. We drove to our local mall, then to the mall in the next town, and then to one in the town over. I would drop frilly G-strings from display counters at Victoria’s Secret into my purse. I ducked behind scantily clad mannequins in bridal lingerie and threw more panties into my bag. I accidentally swiped a pair that said, “I Do,” on the butt in shiny rhinestones. But the muffled sounds of the mall cops’ walkie-talkies in the distance scared me, so I tugged at my friend’s sleeve and we left.

We made our way to the riverside. A flickering light bulb surrounded by giant moths guided us to an adult-oriented store called Southern Secrets. We got in without being carded, which I took as a compliment. I must have looked mature for my age, or fuckable, so I covered my braces with my lips. Reaching my sticky palms out towards the shelves of erotic merchandise, nipple clamps and cock rings manifested in the bottom of my bag like a spreading wildfire. I’d been bad. I needed to be spanked, and I wanted the guy from the piercing shop to do it—the one with the sphinx on his arm. I’d ask him to call me a slut. The thought excited me, but no one was calling me a slut. My mom just called me “crazy” over a three-minute voicemail. She wanted me back at the house. I didn’t want to go, so I didn’t.

My phone, however, buzzed all night in the back pocket of my denim shorts. It was my mom again, “You need to come home. And bring the car with you, obviously.” I ignored her.

I ignored her until I stumbled back into the house on a school night. I wasn’t drunk or anything; I stumbled because I was careless, misbalanced and unaware of how to put one foot in front of the other anymore. My friend said she needed space or whatever, so there I was. I slammed the front door behind me and watched as the ceramic candleholders on the end tables shook. I liked the rattling noise they made as they shivered against one another.

“Talk to me,” my mom said as she emerged from the dimly lit kitchen. Duffle bag dangling from my shoulder and resting against my hip, I held the car keys. I held them firmly in case I decided to recoil back to the Escape and drive to Kentucky or maybe Canada.

“Talk to you about what?”

“About what’s going on,” she said.

“I was with a friend.”

“I knew where you were.”

Rolling my eyes far back enough to where I could see all of the pink, squishy stuff inside my head, I tossed the car keys onto the table and headed towards my bedroom. My mom stayed in the kitchen, which disappointed me. I wanted to be followed. I wanted to be chased and grabbed and tackled to the ground, because any kind of attention was good attention, at least that’s what I thought; I thought it consciously. But instead of running after me, my mom called in a relaxed tone, her voice cool and collected as always, “I knew where you were, but I didn’t know where you were going, or what you were doing, or why you were even doing the things you were doing. I was scared.”

“Me too,” I said to the door of my bedroom. I ran my fingers over the brass knob before entering, “Me too.” I lay in bed that night and thought about my destiny.

I was seventeen with scrapes and bruises on my knees from falling so much on the ground beneath me. I was good at that—falling. I would even do it on purpose and like it. The wounds were self-inflicted, and each time I found myself lying on the ground, fewer people were around to offer me kisses or gauze. But some still tried. I’d sit across from my therapist in tight mini-dresses or graphic t-shirts that’d say things like, “I’m Not Listening,” or “Buy Me Things and I’ll Be Nicer,” and she’d ask me to elaborate on my dream. She wanted to know more about what God was like, what he was wearing, if he said anything else or why I even listened to him if I wasn’t a believer. Her questions annoyed me. Batting my black-shadowed lids and crusty, coated eyelashes, long and thin like a bug’s legs, I shrugged and said, “I think you’re just jealous God didn’t appear to you.”

IN-BETWEEN SIRENS by Davon Loeb

June 25, 2020

The in-betweens are like waiting for something to happen, like flashes of red and blue sirens pulsing through my car, while searching for the police officer about to step to my window. And I watched from the rearview mirror, and would say and act exactly how my mother told me—to call him or her sir or ma’am, to be polite, to keep my hands on the steering wheel, to have my paperwork ready. And that my stomach was buoyant, and that my eyes blurred from tracking the sirens, and that I felt the spotlight sizzle on the back of my neck—but I kept the speed limit, and my seatbelt was fastened, and I used my right blinker when pulling over to the side of the road, and that my vehicle was in good-standing; and even though I had three friends in the car, none of us had been drinking—none of us smoked or did much of anything that night besides driving back to campus from dinner. And when the police officer knocked on my window, I lowered it, and he instructed for me to step outside the vehicle—to exit slow, to keep my hands where he could see them. And another police officer, around the rear, with his flashlight, inspected the rest of my car—targeted it on my friends in the backseat—asked them their names; one said Mike, and the police officer said Miguel, and Mike said—no, Mike. And while I was outside the car, I handed the other police officer my license, and he examined it with his flashlight, checked my face to match, and then told me to sit back, and I did, resting on my hood. He studied my license longer, and though I wanted to ask him what I did wrong—that I wasn’t swerving, that I didn’t run a stop-sign, that I didn’t commit any traffic violations—I said nothing, and stood stone-still knowing it really didn’t matter—knowing exactly why he pulled me over—and that when he said there was a string of burglaries in the neighborhood and we looked suspicious, I wasn’t a bit surprised.

THE STRAY SHAR-PEIS OF OHIO CITY by Meghan Louise Wagner

June 23, 2020

Every party we went to in the summer of 1999 was lit up red. Red drapes fell over windows. Red vinyl chairs sat in kitchens next to red retro tables. Red walls vibrated with red Belle and Sebastian. Red wine gushed from boxes on countertops. Red signs glowed in dive bars. Red Schwinn bikes got stolen off our friends’ porches. Red hair dye spotted our shower mats. Red Chuck Taylors tapped in bathroom stalls.

We were only babies when we heard about the stray shar-peis of Ohio City. Mara, a thirty-something veteran of the scene who claimed to have once been a runway model in New York City, told us about them. She held court around a glass coffee table covered in ash trays and coffee mugs of merlot. A long, white Virginia Slim extended from her long white fingers. Smoke curled around her visage, giving her the sheen of a once faded runway model from New York City.

“They travel in a pack,” Mara said, “and roam the streets. They come out late, late at night. They only show themselves to the desperate, the lost, the delirious.”

We didn’t believe her. We laughed. We bombarded her with questions. Refutations. Challenges.

“Shar-peis aren’t street dogs.”

“They’d get eaten by other animals.”

“But where did they come from?”

“People breed shar-peis on purpose, they wouldn’t just let them roam.”

Mara crumpled her Virginia Slim into the ashtray and we competed to light the next one for her. We held the flames of Bic lighters out to her and she kissed her cigarette to each of them as if she were anointing us. We basked in our own glow. We wanted to hear more. We didn’t believe her but we wanted more.

***

The truth, though, is that we forgot about the stray shar-peis of Ohio City. We stopped being babies out of a mixture of impatience and necessity. We got bus passes and coffee shop jobs. We sold plasma for beer money and rent. We left bars with the wrong men. We got stranded in the Flats and had to call friends from pay phones. We wiped blood from the backs of our boyfriends’ heads when they passed out on our living room floors. We begged our parents in the suburbs to just write another check. We broke down sobbing in brightly lit hot dog shops at three a.m. We screamed at each other from second story windows to come back inside and stay the night. We blew off work to feed our hangovers. We skipped classes to drink vodka and Sprites on backyard patios. We got called groupies and sluts and dumb-drunk-lushes. We borrowed our parents’ cars to drive each other to job interviews and abortions and airports. We shoplifted cigarettes and sugar-free Kool-Ade packets. We flirted with lazy eyed doormen to let us into five-dollar shows for free. We went out looking for madness. We went out looking for more.

***

Some of us learned better than others. Some of us settled down in suburban duplexes and office jobs. Some of us stopped sneaking into concerts on weeknights. Some of us gained weight from having kids instead of guzzling happy hour margaritas. Some of us moved to New York City for grad school or graphic design jobs. Some of us stayed and slinked around parties, waiting for someone to light our cigarettes.

***

It was a couple winters later. The sides of I-90 were covered in snow but the road was clear. The travel coffee mugs in our cars were filled with Black Velvet and Diet Coke. People used to mistake us for teetotalers at shows because we always carried those mugs.

“It’s so cool,” sensible men used to say, “that you don’t drink like all these other wasteoids.”

Inevitably, something we would say or do would shatter the illusion for them. We’d spray verbal venom mixed with cheap whiskey, trip on our high heels, try to make out with other girls’ boyfriends in basement bathrooms. We would earn our reputations.

But it was on one of those cold nights in the early 2000’s, when lavender clouds streaked the sky above the highway, that we sat at a stoplight on a side street in Ohio City near the I-90 on-ramp. We felt drunk and defeated from another night that didn’t go our way. We waited for the light to change, to be able to go back to our only comfortable state, which was in-motion. Onto the next thing. We needed something else because what we had was never going to be alright enough.

There were no other cars on the road. No reasons not to just go. The streetlamps cast an amber haze over the intersection. It felt like a cloak of invisibility. Because maybe that’s all we were this whole time. Invisible. We reached for our travel mugs, we cracked the windows, we lit our own cigarettes.

From the right hand side of the car, a brownish blob wiggled off the curb. We thought nothing of it. It was just some stray dog crossing the street.

We stopped.

We jerked our heads and saw four more wrinkled dogs, all tottering along. Their hides were tan and smooth, not chubby like regular household shar-peis. Their strong legs looked more like those of a pit-bull’s. They glided in a regal line and pranced over the snow crusted curb, glittering in the sodium glow of the highway entrance.

Green light flashed across the windshield. It was finally our turn to go.

But we sat. We sat and watched the stray shar-peis.