Creative Nonfiction

WHEELS by D. T. Robbins

June 22, 2020

Fat-boy Brad, the same Brad who went, Hey, Cheese Factory!, to me on the bus because my teeth are a little yellow, stood in the middle of the street with Chris, the same Chris who almost drowned me in his pool last summer showing me what a washing machine was (you flip someone over and over and over and over until they can’t catch their breath and they start to cry and someone’s mom comes out and yells, What the hell are you doing to that boy?), looking at my bike, telling me how fucking gay it is because it’s white and only queers have white bikes, and am I a queer? I tell them my dad says I’m getting a new bike soon, maybe for my tenth birthday coming up, a Mongoose BMX bike with pegs, so Parker can ride on the back and we can jump the ramps we made in the woods behind his house. I look at Parker, he looks away. Brad and Chris go, if you’re getting a new bike you should just fuck this one up. I ask what they mean and they say they’ll show me. Chris stands on the back wheel while fat-boy Brad stands on the other. They start jumping and the wheels start bending and Parker starts laughing so I laugh too because Parker and I are fourth graders and Brad and Chris are seventh graders and that’s just how it works. Like that, they say. I get to walking my bike back to my house on the other side of the neighborhood but then I think dad’s going to be pissed so I start crying as I’m walking. Sure enough, dad sees the bike and flips out and starts asking what happened and I say it wasn’t me but I don’t want to say who did it because Chris already almost killed me once and who knows if he’ll try again? But I end up telling dad and we get in the car and dad’s driving around the neighborhood looking for fat-boy Brad and Chris and when we find them dad hops out the car and gets in their faces and asks what the hell is their problem doing that to a boy’s bike? They say I told them they could and dad says he doesn’t care if I said they could or not, it doesn’t give them the right to destroy someone else’s property. Dad tells them if they ever come near me or my bike again he’ll…and I don’t really hear or understand that part very well. Dad drives us back home but the whole time he’s hollering at me and telling me I shouldn’t let boys like that pick on me and I need to stand up for myself and act like a man. We get in the house and mom asks what happened but dad ignores her and gets his belt instead. I don’t get the Mongoose BMX bike for my birthday.

***

I know dad only bought me this Jeep—an ’89 Suzuki Samurai—to keep me from starting any more shit. Guess he got tired of me calling the cops every time he shoved me down the hallway after I told him my little brother and I want to leave shithole Mississippi and go back to California to live with mom, that I called him a deadbeat dad since he didn’t pay child support (because fuck your kids, right?) and that’s the only reason mom couldn’t afford to fly down to Louisiana for the court hearing and that’s the only reason he got custody of us instead of her. He thinks buying me this Jeep is going to keep me happy and quiet because that’s what keeps every sixteen-year-old happy and quiet. Except he’s wrong. All it’ll do is keep me away from him and the stepmother. Well, seeing as how it’s the first day of spring break, I decide to get the hell out of the house and go somewhere, anywhere. The Jeep is parked in the garage because dad wanted it out of the driveway this morning when he was washing and waxing that turd green Camry he’s trying to sell. He and the stepmother left for work so I’m alone and there’s only so many times I can jerk off and, besides, there’s a girl who’ll let me touch her tits so I think I’m going to see her. I grab my keys and throw the Jeep in reverse and haul ass. At first, the crunch of metal on metal is muffled by the Jeep’s exhaust but when I back out further I see the whole side of the Camry torn to shit—dents six inches deep, black lines and scratches like the striking surface of a matchbox, the side mirror dangling by a single wire. I start screaming, oh fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, and jump out the Jeep to see the damage. I’m dead and I know it. I call the girl who lets me touch her tits and she doesn’t know what to do so I call the stepmother. I tell her dad is going to kill me and I’m really sorry, I should’ve looked behind me when I went in reverse, can she please talk to dad because I’m afraid of what he’ll do to me.

Dad and the stepmother pull up in her truck and dad steps out and starts inspecting the Camry. I look at the stepmother and she raises her hand like, calm down it’s okay. Dad looks at her, then me. You’re grounded for a month, he says and walks into the house.

***

The judge says I’m old enough to choose who I want to live with.

Dad sits up in his bed. The stepmother pulls the blanket over her face. It’s cold. It’s always fucking cold in this house. He asks, what’re you going to do? I’m going back to California, I say. He tells me I’m making a mistake, says the Jeep stays with him.

***

The car mom’s been letting me use to get to my job at the movie theater just got repossessed and she says if I want a new one then I can call dad and ask him for the money because she doesn’t have it. I don’t want to fucking call him. It’s not that it’s been three years since I’ve been back in California or that he never came to my high school graduation or that he’s still trying to get custody of my little brother. What I don’t want to tell him is that we’d just been homeless for the past six months or so because mom got us evicted from our house in Ontario. Mom says she couldn’t pay the rent because dad wasn’t paying child support but somehow she could afford to pay for the new furniture, somehow she could afford to take that trip up north to see that guy she’s been talking to. I don’t want to call dad because I want to talk to someone about all of this but I sure as shit don’t want that someone to be him. Fuck. I still need a car and I still have no one else to ask for help. The movie theater pays shit and most of my money goes to helping with groceries or the cell phone bill we’re behind on. When he answers, he sounds tired. His voice is softer. Not a whisper, but close. I ask what he’s doing, he says he’s feeding a bottle to my new baby sister, Grace. We talk about that, how she’s doing. He says everything’s great, they’re all great. I say, good. He says, I’m sorry, son. If I had the money, I’d give it to you, I really would. He says he wants to help me. I say I know he does, and I mean it. After we hang up, I get in bed and cry into my pillow for a really long time.

***

I just wired you five thousand dollars your grandma wanted you to have when she passed, dad says. I ask how things have been since she died. Someone finally ended up buying her house, so that’s a weight off his shoulders. We talk about my brother and sister, Grace and Graham—how smart Grace is, how she’s kicking ass in all these speech debates at her high school. Graham is Graham, loves his video games. He asks how my kids are. He wants to see them one day, says maybe the kids and I and my fiancé should visit Mississippi next Thanksgiving or something. He asks if things have gotten easier with my ex-wife, if we’re getting along. I tell him that things are better, getting better, there’s good days and bad days. It’ll all work out, he says. He thinks I should put the five grand toward a new car.

GIRLHOOD by Jodi Aleshire

June 21, 2020

A body washes ashore in the recommended section of my Spotify podcast radar. This isn’t the first or the fifth or the third time it’s happened and I’ve long since lost track of the tallies meant to keep them in check. Their faces have become nothing more than the black censored bars used with relish by shitty live television and their bodies, marionette pieces, hocks of meat articulated in a mockery of form. The podcast entices me to listen—a flashy title, a well-made header, a snappy byline—offer a glimpse into an abjection of innocence, voyeurism without the guilty intent. They tell me, words blinking in bright pink neon, THIS COULD BE YOU. This body is every body and everybody is just an accident waiting to happen, a crime scene waiting to happen, a byline on the nightly news just waiting to happen, a catchy warning to stay sexy and don’t get murdered just waiting to happen. Silly, stupid girl. Didn’t anyone ever tell you to carry your keys between your fingers?

In the mid-twentieth century, it wasn’t uncommon to pull bodies from peat bogs, mummified in the swampy murk. A glimpse into a world we hardly know, into barbarianism we think ourselves past. I find myself entranced by these bodies and their buried history and I’ve fallen in love with the Windeby Girl. Her skin mottled, ancient browns and aged like leather. Her hair shorn close to her skull, a blindfold over her eyes, hands bound. I’ve memorized the planes of her face. She’s beautiful, a bug trapped in amber, a tragedy frozen in time. They thought she’d been killed as punishment for adultery, the archaeologists who scoured her remains for a story; murdered. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen and I too once couldn’t have been older sixteen but that time is gone and I wish now that I could have been there in the muck and the cold and taken her hand, promised that things would be alright. I wish I could have been there as this woman-girl-child weighed down by planks and rocks, died. The memory of her murder is sour on my tongue and I wonder if anyone in the incensed masses thought to remember they were once children too.

A lifetime ago, I stood in the Chicago Art Institute, shifting my posture to mirror the stance of one of Degas’s thousands of dancers. She was a delicate, towering statue of bronze, her fabric tutu aged and weathered brown, his little dancer. My feet, turned to fourth position, lodged me in my place as I longed to touch her, to stroke my fingers over the cast of her hair. I pray she had a better life than the one history has written for the petit rats in the Parisian ballet. Men lurking in the wings with unburdened bodies and propositions. Girls, poised and bleeding, hungry. The sordid back halls of the Palais Garnier float, arabesque and haunting, through tunnels of memories that aren’t my own but I understand them, don’t we all understand them? What haven’t we all sacrificed to let the show go on? What haven’t we sacrificed to survive? I read once that Degas crafted multiples of his sculptures, built body after body until he was satisfied with the way her legs curled, her face quirked, her arms beckoned. This girl, this child in a world she was not meant for, is frozen in time and I cannot shake the feeling I would have loved her too, something desperate and open. How many versions of her were touched by unwanted hands; how many versions were thrown away?

I remember, still, the day I learned Marie Antoinette had only been a child when set onto the path that would kill her. Powder pale, throat bared for the bite of a blade. She was nothing more than another child-bride, nothing more than another lamb sent to the slaughter, her own body the meal and the means of making. Ribs split open on a rack, lock-picked open and apart. I wonder, some days when I feel only able for glutton, would we have been friends? Her and I, two children without childhoods, taken before we’re given a chance to taste anything more. Just wrist bones and knocked knees and butterfly lashes. We lavish her name with acts of treason without proof, qu'ils mangent de la brioche, but it’s bitter in my mouth. Did she ever have a chance to eat with her hands, unscrupled and unwatched, a girl once again? I think of her now in soft shades of periwinkle, robin’s egg, blue, in the fierce glint of a blade splitting the time between then and this, childhood and all that is left. Did she ever have a chance to know better? I try to remember her whole.

As a child, barely girl but not nearly woman, a decade or a century or a second ago, I remember tiptoeing down the hall of my best friend’s creaking farmhouse. I felt like I’d walked over someone’s grave. As we laid together, sprawled on his bed, he told me about the ghosts in the walls and the pain sunken into the bones of the house. His sister’s tragedy in the next room salting the earth and tainting the home. A child too. She never told their parents, because that wasn’t what good girls did, was it? In the present now, only a tightrope’s fall from the girl then, I think of all the women, the bones building up my exquisite corpse, all gone mad, robbed of something beating and vital. A rabbit quick pulse and magpie longing, girlhood is a fever-pitched dream. A poison. A butcher’s knife. A scalpel. A series of rungs on a ladder rotting under your hands. Flashpoint tragedies pinned, stigmata, linked through time. One day you’ll choke on everything you should have been, broken from the bell jar, thrown from the water. We were never given a chance.

NO, YEAH. by Erin Gallagher

June 16, 2020

“You can play games or you can end it and move on.”

Lit by twinkly string lights atop a shiny marble counter, apparently we’re not fucking around anymore. Soft pink and blue bulbs create a calm ambiance, steam rises from big porcelain mugs of herbal tea, and we are sparing no emotional expense. Play games: win, lose, flip your phone upside-down and wait two hours, three hours, reciprocate every unit of time you’ve ever waited, multiplied by three. We’re not talking about me (this time), and my advice is out of character, it’s...hopeful:

“Yeah, no, maybe just act as you normally would. Don’t do anything impulsively when you’re frustrated. You won’t get what you’re looking for, and it will make you feel worse.” I nod, take a sip of sparkling water, as a mature, well-adjusted adult does. I guess I never found it necessary to...give myself the same advice. Overthinking? I’m not familiar. The constant need to get in the last word? I’ve never heard of it.

In the winter, sufficiently settled into my new home, the sky began to darken earlier and earlier, and I started going on first dates. Many dates. How many cocktail bars are in New York City? Waves rose up and crashed, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, all booked. Reprieve of quiet for a few weeks followed, while the pack narrowed and we allowed ourselves to lean into the mortifying reality of being known, before inevitably, turning into nothing: wisps of air, almost like a ghost. But not technically ghosting,

“I didn’t technically ghost him,” I clutch a vodka soda under my arm, my focus remaining on the glowing screen before me.

“You did, and you should feel bad. Every time someone ghosts, the world becomes a worse place.” I’m being scolded at Brooklyn Bowl, surrounded by tie-dye T-shirts, she goes on, “We’re hurting each other and not thinking about it. Each time, we make it normal, and it shouldn’t be.”

I shift my focus to my vodka soda. I’ve been making excuses for myself. A wave crashes upon me and I struggle because I feel too much. But yet, after I find my footing, I continue on as though I’m still underwater. I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t. I see stars in my periphery, wipe a loose piece of cheap glitter out of my eyelashes. My tab is still open at the bar. In the back of my mind I dream of telepathically closing it, from inside of the backseat of a taxi. I could bypass the crowd and go straight outside, ask the driver if it’s possible to take me back to two weeks ago, when I handled something poorly. The band starts to play. In a few hours, karma will make its way back around and I’ll be hurt the same way I hurt someone else. What would Co-Star say about this?

Which is worse: sitting down and writing about how I’m feeling in a meaningful way, or going on a first date and using self-deprecating humor as a defense mechanism, while I get drunk in the middle of the week, all in the name of pursuing monogamy? I don’t want a boyfriend, but I do want to be a writer, I’ll go on one more date. It’s a new year, but I never said what that would mean. Speak what into existence? I want whichever cocktail has gin. It comes in a jar? Sure, fine. These are pictures of my dog, these are stories about the years I traveled the world, these are brief silences. This isn’t it. We part ways after one drink, and once he crosses the street, I go back inside, have another round and give my phone number to the bartender. It’s for my writing.

Blue (sometimes green) and grey bubbles carry my mood up and down, waves roll onto the shore and retreat into the sea. You’ll have more time to focus on your life when you’re no longer checking the views on your Instagram story. We share our anecdotes and we overhear them all the same, over glasses of wine, coffee, the boys behind me in the bubble tea shop, the girls next to me on the subway. As I write these words, a girl at the counter in the cafe speaks about a guy who is a “bad texter.” My friends and I exchange knowing glances. I bite my lip. Who do you know who is a “good texter?” We tell each other “you’re too good for this,” we type it, we speak it, we scrawl it across walls that we’ve built up around ourselves. I say it confidently to the people in my life. To myself I know it to be true, but sometimes I waver and I don’t know why. I wake up in the morning to messages I sent to a friend, after walking with her to her apartment in the middle of the night,

“...You’re one of the best people I know...Please don’t sleep on the floor...”

One ghost will haunt me a little more than the rest. At low points, I’ll look for attention in the wrong places, but I won’t act on it, I don’t believe in ghosts. (But can you be afraid of something you don’t believe in?) I used to live in a flat that was haunted, on the twelfth floor of a mint green building in Hong Kong. We banned ghost talk inside the apartment because we were scared of angering her. This ghost had a feminine energy. I can’t explain it. I tell this story on a third date, in a cash-only dive bar on my block that has a name I can’t remember or maybe I’ve never learned. I can see in his eyes, he thinks that I’m naive. He’s looking down at my chest, maybe he’s not as interested in ghost stories.

We drink natural wine at a dimly lit countertop. I wore this same top on a different first date two months earlier. It snowed that earlier night, and I walked to the bar, wishing I could just glide past the adorned windows and continue to venture through the cold. I pulled a second tiny straw from behind the counter, because one tiny straw is not sufficient to absorb a gin and tonic, and he asked if I needed to drink faster to deal with being around him. This isn’t it. I drew a heart in the snow on a car window outside, spent the rest night thinking of the falafel wrap I would buy on my way home. This time, the mood is lighter. My paisley blouse is under a spring jacket, the uncharacteristically warmer weather is discombobulating. It’s still winter, and I’m still booking myself too busy. He knows more about natural wine than I do. I don’t know anything about natural wine. I make a mental note to bring my friends here, to this place; we’ll tell the same kinds of stories and I’ll remember the idea of someone sitting with me in front of the natural wine and oysters, someone who I’ll never see again. I’ve never liked oysters.

It’s all fun, until one morning, or one evening, or one moment, it’s not. How well do we really know anyone? I feel clear-headed and calm, the peace that comes from having the upper hand. I don’t play games, but I don’t want to lose. The peace descends into chaos, circles that I’ve talked my way around and around; I don’t want to spend any more time trying to figure him out, but inevitably, I will and I do. Friends I’ve known my whole life still surprise me. Everyone we know will either be there forever, in our life, or, they won’t. This will last or it will end. It’s simple. It’s simple.

Low expectations, or disappointment? Delete the number, or never save it in the first place? These things come in waves. These things are all fun and games. I feel relieved. I don’t feel anything. I feel rejected. I feel neglected. I feel foolish. I’m smiling in the back of an Uber, going over the Williamsburg Bridge. I’m crying on the street on a rainy Tuesday morning. How much of the feeling is the drama? How much do you like the attention? What have you learned about yourself?

“You’re saying you don’t?,” I ask across a small table, fingers tapping on an almost-empty bottle of beer.

He shakes his head, “I do. I said, ‘no, yeah,’ but I don’t think you heard the 'yeah.’”

SCURRY by Vanessa Chan

June 8, 2020

As a killer pandemic swept through the world, my mother died from cancer, alone in a Minnesotan hospice facility. A thousand miles away, also alone in my Brooklyn apartment, I held my breath as my heart caved into itself, salted with guilt.

A week later, I encountered my first common New York house centipede. He winked at me from the white walls of my apartment, wobbling on his many legs. “HELP ME,” I scream-texted at friends, paramours, anyone who would listen.

The centipede began dashing madly up my wall, pausing as if to catch his breath, then continuing his ascent. I envied him, exempt from social distancing, able to sneak into dark crevices, able to run everywhere unmasked, able to be with other centipedes he might love. No one in our family could be with my mother during her final weeks; the pandemic robbed us of the last decency of death, the comfort of each other.

I took photos of the centipede, then videos, one sound-on to capture my cussing, and one sound-off to capture the abject loneliness of the encounter. Sitting on my floor with my centipede content, I was reminded that bug removal, whether smacking a mosquito that landed on a child’s fleshy arm, or prying a flea off a fleshy family dog, was a distinctly matriarchal domain in our Malaysian home. “Only the boys are scared,” my mom would say, gesturing at my father and brother, legs curled off the floor in fear of a scurrying insect. “Not us.” I was also reminded that my mother, who usually received my photographic mundanity, and who laughed at all my jokes, was gone.

As I glowered at the centipede and contemplated all modes of murder, he sprinted—balancing precariously on the right-angle that separates wall from ceiling—straight into a spider’s web coiled on the corner of my windowsill. He struggled, tangled himself further into the strings, then tipped upside down, his many legs scratching the air, the futile dance of the already doomed.

People kept saying, “Maybe it’s for the best. Your mom wouldn’t want you to see her this way. Remember her the way she was.” But now my memories are darkened by bitterness; there’s no peace in wondering if she stared quietly at the ceiling alone, or if she clawed at the sheets, the air.

If I were a centipede, I wouldn’t stop to catch my breath on walls or run mindlessly into a predator’s web. I’d rush across state lines, hold my mother’s hand, tell her I loved her. I’d remind her how, in fact, it was she who first told me the difference between a millipede and a centipede—that the millipede, common to Malaysia, was not venomous, but that most centipedes are in fact venomous, and to stay away from them.

But Mom, I would protest, my group-text friends say New York house centipedes are the good guys—they eat other bugs, and don’t bite unless provoked. In fact, the internet says what centipedes do isn’t biting, because they aren’t using their mouths or teeth. What they’re doing is poking you with one of their many legs, a sharp kick, so you get out of the way.

“Well then, get out of the way!” my mother would say. “No need to pick a fight.”

As though listening, my multi-legged menace tugged through the webby mess and inexplicably, miraculously, freed himself! Resuming speed, the centipede scurried up and down my wall, a dance of the victorious. He paused right at my eye level, as though proud of his achievements.

Somewhere, my mom laughed.

THINGS TO SHIP TO AMERICA by Jessica Evans

May 21, 2020

Is heaven a proper noun?

Here, I learned to love myself. To love the thick full shimmy of thighs against one another; to appreciate the height of my traps compared to the valley of my clavicle. I fell in love with butter churned from cream produced by cows who live only a few kilometers away.

I learned to seek out the salted rotisserie chicken, its skin crispy and shimmering after hours on a spit. As much to bite into something with savage need as because there's ownership that comes from eating simply to eat. But chicken is only good when washed down with room temperature fest beer, brewed like their ancestors and consumed within modernity in overcrowded but not too autophobic beer tents where everyone knew everyone else, except for us because here we are, moored inside something that looks like expat living but is actually attempts to recreate America whenever possible.

Our circle within a circle confuses even us. We drive roundabouts and autobahns and pay tolls on roadways, deposit euro coins into bathroom vending stalls so we can enter and not be able to tell the attendant there's no soap, the water is too cold. We recede into the background if we're not on post.

Or.

We become obnoxiously loud and boisterous, the kinds of Americans who boast about a war that ended seventy-five years ago, who consistently remind the local populace that had it not been for us, the entire world would look different, feel different, be different. Well. That's so consumable and true and entirely false that the congruencies between understanding now and then becomes complex and altered so it's easier to reach for another warming beer.

We travel, we rove, we move, searching for something that feels like home but gives us enough space to learn to grow. I take moments for myself, carve out instances in which I can identify as myself and not (just a) spouse, my own person, my own truth, my own evocation:

Mornings when the moon is bright, and there's no one else in the forest so I can turn off the headlights and pretend I'm a real forest witch.

When half my drive has no cell signal, so I'm forced to sit in silence, contemplative, and settled.

Looking for the quiet markers of age—the creasing of an elbow joint, the slow upstart of lifting from a chair, I settle into this time-space, being the preemptive feelings of being nostalgic before it's time.

And in nostalgia for here comes past-longing for forms of then, tangible or esoteric, the kinds of memories that come unbidden:

Dima buying a bedroom set, Ken buying an air mattress, his aging skin that looked like leather from a distance and felt even more snakish next to mine. The first two airmen I slept with, their introductions into my life only a half-week away from one another. The expectation that eventually, I would find myself grown, polished, and with a family to support.

A mother, two toddlers, and an infant strapped to her chest, EPT test in hand as she sets down birthday candles, plastic party favors, sweets and treats onto the conveyor belt, her hand clutched around her wallet, head constantly evaluating her two small humans, looking for relief and answers and silence. And I watch her watch that which she's produced and clearly her womb isn't hollow, her tribe is continuing to grow, (though I sense that she gleefully accepts the silken luxury of sitting in a bath in solitude, or spending a morning reading and drinking coffee, luxuries that she's never going to be able to afford, not now, not with her progeny continuing to propagate and just once), I want the openness that might come from being able to reproduce; mitosis at its very core, a concept that has both alarmed and paralyzed me, left me bereft with longing and sighing with relief.

Whisk(e)ys we like

Bushmills Original only in basement Irish bars watching soccer and listening to 90s "classic rock" while we're both recuperating from the walking and the sleeping outside of our schedule, the constant seeking of something that we're certain, if we just keep traveling, we're going to find. In these basement bars, we avoid serious discussions, like what's going to happen when we never have children, and how should we deal with deployment, or our next concrete steps after the army, after uniform, after boots. Instead, we talk about the better band and I toss out suggestions, none of which are ever, ever better than Nirvana. The light is low, which hides the shimmer strands of grey that color both of our heads, our lines from lack of sleep, hollow nights lost to wonder and worry.

Glenfiddich, good for dessert cheese plates when we're feeling fancy and pretending like we were born fluent in sophistication, though communism and generational poverty rarely suggest a fluency in anything but loss and longing.

Paddy and Red Breast for those nights when we've finally made forever friends and we can just be loose but that would require us to be in a place longer than a tour and we're both so hard to get to know that ultimately, we learn to lean into our own patterns, create tradition that can exist outside the need for friends

and finally

Querceto Chianti that's a little overpriced paired with Italian food that a chef didn't prepare but we're hungry and trying because it's been a long weekend full of unknowns because we're on the way to listen to a symphony, something purchased well-ahead of time, that Sunday morning when we planned the trip to Salzburg; when it felt wrong not to include a small dip into the sort of chords that make each of us whole.

So tonight—

I'm sitting in a 17th century palace where Mozart first performed, watching a small group of students play a selection of winter music. Two whiskeys and two wines in and the viola player looks exactly like a powerlifter I used to fuck but can't remember his name. Exactly like him, even down to the shape of his nose, the way it meets the beginnings of his lip because I used to think it was so endearing that his youth meant he couldn't grow a beard (and even in those endearing moments I used to find a slight smidge of pleasure at knowing even at my age, I could still pull one so young; but that was always accompanied by the idea that at my age, I shouldn't need to pull because I should be settled, which would revolve like glass doors of emotions that shouldn't be examined or even seen during the middle of a little better than average sex) so in the palace, for the next 90 minutes I focus in and out of trying to remember what his name might have been, studying this Austrian's face for similarities to the Ohioan kid, but now I'm thinking maybe he was from somewhere north in Ohio where they're committed and focused on OSU football because their small towns are devoid of industry and therefore absent culture or other events. I can remember his numbers; he was a beast on bench, pushing with ease and his youth made it so he could easily shed weight before a competition or put big gains on the bar without really struggling and I always wondered what someone so objectively physically gorgeous was doing with an old lady like me, until I realized from his perspective that I was the one who had my shit together; early thirties graduate student who could afford an off campus rental that came with a driveway and a basement, two gym memberships because I was just that serious about making myself into what I wanted to see. One day, he came over, residually stoned and hiccupping about not being prepared for his next day and all I could think was how delightfully not serious it must've been to just exist for one single day.

At the palace, I'm flanked on either side by two pregnant women and their presence makes my womb ache in ways that feel hollow, mountainous, bereft.

I watch my husband watch a promising Virtuosos whose hair reaches her hips and whose lace cuffs land delicately on violinists' wrists. He leans in, whispering between Vivaldi's notes, that our daughter should play, too.

And I want to tell him that we're both getting old, geriatric for conception, so maybe that very pressing desire needs to be butterfly-fleeting, the way spring sunlight can't be captured, the way trills and scales feel real and immediate in the moment but whose notes eventually, ultimately, finally, fade away.

The Heart of Joy premier vegan but we're starving and don't look at the menu because it's snow-raining and we're more attuned to fashion and photos.

Dead animals, eggs, Buddha, a repeat loop of some Kundalini style retreat, servers dressed all in white, heads covered, I can practically hear tables repeating Bhajan's words

We need meat

A runners' body, the server's face

Falls

YOU’RE LUCKY YOU CAME IN TONIGHT by Susanna Baird

April 12, 2020

Pickleball is a fun sport that combines many elements of tennis, badminton and Ping-pong, according to the USA Pickleball Association. Kids and teenagers play it. Seniors, too.

I am middle-aged, but anyway, I play pickleball. According to me, pickleball is an okay sport you play with a paddle and a Wiffle ball.

I play pickleball with my aunt in Arizona, the day before I fly home. She is a senior. She falls.

***

The registrar in the emergency room looks like her name should be Gail, and she says You are lucky you came in tonight. Last night, 40 ambulances. Tonight, nothing. Seems like your aunt maybe broke her hip. I hope I'm wrong.

You're lucky you came in tonight.

***

My aunt has cracked her pelvis. I change my flight.

***

My aunt's roommate is sad and annoying and confused and petulant and friendly and annoying, which I said before, but she is.

First I am polite. Then I pretend I can't hear her. Then I hide behind the curtain separating her bed from my aunt's. She asks my aunt to pull the curtain back so she can see me. She says My name is Kitty.

***

The first day, a physical therapist moves my aunt's legs and it hurts. My aunt says I might swear. The physical therapist says My wife went to Catholic school and didn't know anything about swears. Now we like to sit in the car and swear for five minutes at a stretch.

***

Two signs are outside the door of the room my aunt and Kitty share. The signs say Catch a Falling Star. My aunt and Kitty are Falling Stars. They are not supposed to walk without help.

Other rooms have other signs. One says Stop Call, Don't Fall. One says Wake me up to see if I'm breathing.

***

In the hospital, the elevator doors are decorated with life-size pictures of hospital staff. I study the elevator people while I wait to go up or down. Always, they look cheery.

A lab director is pasted on the elevator doors by the Joint Academy. His hands are on his hipster eyeglasses and he is happy, maybe because the glasses are new, or maybe because he's just been accepted to the Joint Academy.

***

The second day, a physical therapist helps my aunt stand up and sit down. My aunt says it hurts.

***

When I am bored I pretend I am in an episode of Nurse Jackie. I find Jackie and Thor but I can't find Zoe. I love Zoe.

***

Kitty is always forgetting she is a Falling Star. She rips out the oxygen tubes running into her nose and shuffles to the bathroom.

At first, I report Kitty to the nurses. Eventually, I only say Kitty you are going to get me in trouble and I watch her shuffle. In my head, I start to call her Fucking Kitty. When she returns, I say Kitty put those tubes back. Sometimes, I pull her covers up and tuck her in.

***

The elevator doors by the Cool Beans coffee shop are decorated with a life-size poster of a nurse. She has one hand out low and one hand out high, maybe because she wants to high five and low five at the same time, or maybe because she just said ta-da!

***

I make a Five-Minute Friend on the elevator. We discuss the life-size cheery elevator poster people. I say I wonder what the photographer said to them right before taking their pictures. My friend says I wonder if they are just naturally like that.

***

The chaplain visits and prays for Kitty. I write my aunt a note that says Shut your eyes and pretend to be asleep. When the chaplain comes to my aunt, I whisper She's sleeping and we talk about pickleball.

***

On the third day, my aunt takes 10 steps. She says it hurts.

***

A Five-Minute Friend rings up my lunch, which totals $5.55 and would be a bargain in Massachusetts where I am from. She says 555 and Did you know the lottery is at 212 million? I did not know. We agree I should put those fives into play.

***

When I am bored I spy on the nurses. One afternoon, they get angry. They tell each other they are having to do jobs the assistant nurses should be doing. Not that they mind, they tell each other, but still.

***

My aunt moves to a single room. I do not miss Kitty and I go visit her. She says How is your aunt today, and I say Just fine how are you, and I think Fucking Kitty you are all right.

***

On the fourth day, my aunt takes 40 steps. She says it hurts. On a scale of one to ten, it's a ten.

***

A Five-Minute Friend looks like Jimmy Buffet and has just the one kid. The kid's all right now, but he had a hard time with the reading. They wanted to hold him back but Jimmy Buffet went to school and helped his kid and a few others with the reading. And you know what, it worked.

***

When I am bored I read Lila by Marilynn Robinson. This book is the loveliest thing that happens to me at the hospital.

The saddest thing that happens to me at the hospital is a body being rolled out through the sliding front doors. That thing is the saddest, but it doesn't make me ache like Lila by Marilynn Robinson does.

***

On the last day, my aunt rides in a wheelchair down the hall, to the elevator, to the lobby, to the sliding doors, to a van that will take her to rehab. Behind her, I walk. The floor is wet and my shoes are rubber. I slip and land on my ankle, my knee. I say it hurts. On a scale of one to ten, it's a seven. Tomorrow, I will fly home.

JEWEL OF THE DELTA by Noemi Martinez

April 2, 2020

Once called the jewel of the delta, Delta Lake is a tiny man made reservoir where poor families would go and eat in the 80s, claim a table to have lunch or a picnic on the sand and have Easter Sunday cookouts. You’d get there by driving out towards Edcouch, a lonely stretch of a curvy road, tiny and desolate as far as roads go down here. Mom would take us some weekends when the truck was working and there was gas in the tank. As a treat, she’d say, “Pack the cheese sandwiches.”

***

I couldn’t drive on expressways on my own until I was 25. I had this fear my car would veer off the side. It was the 281 exit going towards Edinburg I couldn’t bring myself to get on, no matter how hard I tried. I was superstitious about it. I couldn’t try on Sundays. I couldn't try with the radio on. I couldn’t try because someone did a hex on me. I couldn’t do it because I had a susto when I was 17, driving to Florida with my mom. Her dad was dying and I helped drive. I took the wheel while she slept and it was the rainy season. Now I sometimes wake up from dreams where I’ve fallen off tiny roads, and off I go, towards nothingness. The curves of roads in my dreams never change, they get tiny and nothingness overflows.

***

One Sunday after church, we packed the sandwiches and she said, "Let’s go to the lake." We didn’t tell our dad, he never wanted to go with us anyways. It was mundano, too worldly I guess to want to be out when sinners who were also enjoying themselves under the hot sweaty sun. My mom turned on her Motown classic tape on the deck, which my dad definitely thought was mundane. Hell, if we're winning, let's go all the way.

This one Sunday, the road kept curving and curving and it seemed like we got lost. The more she drove, the tinier the road got. I wished maybe we’d be transmuted to another world. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d wish, in driving, we’d be found in salvation.

***

This one is different. In this dream, I am mad, but then I become water and disintegrate. I cease to exist and crash into waves of water, right there on the chair.

For the short time, when Mom was in hospice after I found her, I’d have dreams I was so angry that I couldn’t speak. I’d wake up with my heart racing, my blood boiling, my throat a hot stone. My anger boiling and seeping into the night.

That night I told Mom it was fine, she could leave. It rained so hard and violently, a cold front had come into the valley the night before driving the temperature close to freezing. The wind shook my car across the expressway and I inched my way back home. The wind and rain crashed down, and I knew. I knew. I had stayed as long as I could. The roads by then were lonely. It was almost Thanksgiving break. I never saw another car out there. It's like those times when you're driving by yourself and the world seems eerily empty and still. The earth was not still that night.

I had played Mom’s favorite Aretha songs. I had touched her legs. I held her hands more than I had ever in all my life. The day she left, the earth shook and the heavens brought down the rain. Maybe, I like to think, her Despedida surrounded by water was like her arrival surrounded by water.

DOING IT IN PUBLIC by Angela Miyuki Mackintosh

April 1, 2020

Joey likes to do it in public. Other guys prefer the privacy of a locked door, a secluded bedroom, drawn curtains. Joey likes to do it that way too, in the bedroom or the kitchen or the hallway, pushed up against a wall or shoved into the carpet, but he’s not afraid to do it in front of an audience.

The first time he did it outside of our apartment was at a party, after he caught me looking at another guy. He said, “You want to fuck him, don’t you?” I guess it made him really hot, got him going and whatnot. We went at it on the concrete stairway outside—my ass against the railing, then on the steps, my fingernails digging into his flesh, moaning and screaming. We were so loud that everyone in the party came out to watch. I felt a deep sense of shame while he was doing me that first time.

The second time he did it, I felt my shame start to evaporate. It was in the parking lot, after a nice dinner at Angelo’s and Vinci’s, and I’d ran into the only guy I’d dated prior to Joey and hugged him. I guess knowing that there was someone before him made him want to do it. He did me on the hood of my Honda, and then on the yellow painted lines of pavement, our takeout pasta spilling onto the sidewalk.

After the third time he did it, the shame disappeared and I felt nothing at all. We were at Lake Havasu on spring break getting fucked up on piss warm Tecates and tequila, a sea of boats docked side-by-side in Copper Canyon, me in a neon thong, Joey showing off his newest tattoo of a lion with skulls intertwined in its mane, and he wanted to do it in front of everyone. I guess me deciding to dive topless off Jump Rock—heck, it was tradition—and the fact that our friend Sean slapped my ass, made him want to do me right there. Sean even tried to get involved, so did strangers on nearby boats. It was a real show.

Most of the time, Joey liked to do it at band practice. He was a drummer and I sang backup vocals. Our band performed covers of Rolling Stones songs at parties, the occasional Black Sabbath cover, and we always had a jam session. Joey liked to show off by doing drum rolls. He kept a real steady beat—you can imagine how this came in handy—his muscles flexing, the tightness of his neck, his strong hands, him pounding me—bam, bam, bam. I was always sore the next day.

After a year of doing it in public, the last time he did it was after we split up. Our group of friends would go to Magnolia’s Peach on Thursday nights after band practice for Reggae Night because they’d let us in without IDs. I had just slipped by the bouncer when I saw Joey out of the corner of my eye on the side of the line. “Hey!” he yelled. “She’s not twenty-one. You let her in and not me, what the hell!” I was glad he didn’t get in. We had a rough breakup, I swallowed a bunch of pills, and the police were involved. I wanted to forget all that.

Magnolia’s Peach served Budweiser long necks, and to save money I’d stash some in a cooler in my car, go out the side entrance, and sneak them back in again. But I wasn’t going out for a beer that time; I was going out for a cigarette. The sun was just setting, the sky filled with orange and purples, fading like a bruise into grainy grey dusk. I opened a new pack of Camel Lights and lit one, feeling the smooth burn against the back of my throat. Right as I exhaled, Joey walked up. “I saw you dancing with that black guy,” he said. My body tensed because I knew what he wanted to do. It was the same song, every time. Before I could turn back towards the side door, he grabbed me and threw me against the brick wall, pushed his body against mine and lowered his voice. “You want to fuck him, don’t you. You whore.”

I looked around to see if anyone was watching, but they weren’t. A row of empty black metal tables on the side of the building, shaded by large palm trees, the spotlights under them buzzing then flicking on. My nerves were ramping up, my skin now slick, wet. “Yes. I want to fuck him. That’s exactly what I want,” I said. The next thing I felt was my cigarette going into the side of my neck like the hot sting of an angry bee. Then a blow to my left cheekbone. My ears ringing like the feedback from an amp, the world spinning around me. I fell to the concrete, struggling to find footing in my heels. He pulled me up by my long brown hair as I screamed, grasping at his hand, a clump of hair coming loose in his fist. With all my ninety-six pounds of strength, I pushed him away and started to run. He caught me mid-air and hurled me back against the wall, clutched my neck with one hand, and ran his sharp fingernails down the front of my face with his other, forehead to chin, dragging my flesh with it. Then there were people there, watching the show, trying to get involved as always. A man confronted Joey, told him to stay away from me. A woman called the police. Joey ran. The police arrived.

I was sore the next day, as always.

This isn’t a love story.

Never said it was about sex.

Joey’s version of doing it in public was a black eye, a scratched face, a cigarette burn, and the ever-present fingerprint marks around my arm. Other times it was a cluster of purple bruises around my neck and a hard lump to the back of my head. That’s how Joey liked to do it.

I’d like to say that the incident at Magnolia’s Peach was the last time Joey did it in public with anyone, but it wasn’t. Twenty-something years later, I look up his full name on Google and find his mug shot. It says that the 45-year-old, 5 ft 11 in, 200-pound male was arrested in Colorado for the Felony Crimes of Domestic Violence: Coercion, Assault, and Strangulation. Apparently, Joey still likes to do it in public. He just does it with other girls now.

BLACK HOODED NUN by Caroljean Gavin

March 29, 2020

Stunned, I took the subway and rattled off to work at the Starbucks on 51st and Broadway. My brain’s way of assimilating my mother’s news was to take customers’ orders while imagining plunging a knife into their chests. Would I have to struggle to penetrate their clothing? Would there be a slurp of suction when I tried to yank the weapon back out of their flesh and muscle to repeat? Would they fight? Would they be angry? Surprised? Terrified? What would they say? What would their eyes look like? What would it feel like to not turn back? To go for blood? To go for death? And when death came would I know it right away? And when I knew it, what would I know?

I knew I would probably feel alone.

I mean, customers would call the police. Co-workers would restrain me. I would be physically surrounded. I may even be physically assaulted. If any of those people liked me before, they wouldn’t now. They wouldn’t know who the hell I was. Their eyes would drain of all recognition. Fill up with something else.

But if I was by myself? Say it was just me, and the dead woman who raised me, rent open on her bed with her violet patterned sheets, her down alternative comforter that had comforted me when I was young, and scared, and overtaken with the flu? If it was just me and a sudden silence? No burbling? No screaming? No pleading? No labored inhalations. Excruciating exhalations. Just me and the darkness, and the curtain blowing over the window where I had left it open after I crawled inside? What would it feel like then? With only myself and this thing I did? This bad, bad, bad, bad thing? Would I feel horrified at myself? Regretful? Or proud? Satisfied? Hopeful?

They say he did it for the money she wrote him in her will.

Two years before the killing the killer told me he was scared of birds.

The killer wasn’t a killer when I met him in San Francisco in that shitty old car full of my shitty old relatives and my mom’s friend Becky, who wasn’t old or shitty, but hot in a 1980’s way: hairspray, lip gloss, frosted hair. The killer was still a kid. A teenager. On drugs, sure. A high school dropout, sure. But he was still a kid, a teen, a young man, a person with positive potential.

I shared the backseat with him and my mom’s cousin who was the type of woman to carry a purse big enough to fit her full size salad dressing bottle and leave enough room to spare to shovel in more free samples of dog treats from Petco than was reasonably appropriate. Like, the employees side-eyed her and hated her with every fiber of their polo shirts. I could tell. They weren’t happy with me either. My mother’s cousin, Jackie, introduced me to the killer, “He was my job after you,” she said.

She knew us when we had tiny faces and giant eyes. Before we learned how to wash our hands.

I’m not sure why the killer went on the crazy lady outing. Maybe he was bored. Maybe it was about the free food. Maybe it was Becky and the vanilla perfume she wore.

I wanted the free food and the ride to the pet store. I was in the process of replacing my boyfriend. I had already bought a vibrator and was currently on step two: companionship. I wanted a bird. Something beaked and winged that had the potential to fly to wherever the hell it wanted and start a beautiful life in the tree of its own choosing. Something that could poke the eye out of anyone who tried to stop it. I wanted a metaphor for my spirit (the irony, cruelty of this, totally lost on me at the time) and I wanted something to make sounds in the night to distract the ghosts that played mean tricks on my dreams.

While Mom’s cousin was shoving “free” pet food crap in her purse, I looked at the birds, the killer orbited around me, hands in his pockets.

When I found the black hooded nun finches, I knew I had found my bird. The auburn body, the waxy blue beak erupting from a jet-black head. Unconventional. Goth. Tiny. The employee I fetched was not wild about having to do what he was about to do. I overheard him talking to a coworker, “Last time we did this, all of the fuckers got out. Some of them are still up there,” he pointed to the beams beyond the lights.

The black hooded nuns bolted into all corners when the employee stuck his hand inside the cage. So much frantic flapping and fluttering. A bird was caught. Dropped into a box handed to me.

“I don’t like birds,” the killer said. He hadn’t left my side. He watched the whole thing.

“Why?” I said, the small brown box in my hand. It was so light. It could have been empty.

“Scared of them,” he muttered. I probably made an understanding face, but I thought how stupid, tough guy, scared of birds. Really I wanted to laugh at him so hard.

The box with the bird was so light.

I didn’t laugh at the killer because I gave a shit about his feelings, but because the box was so light.

I didn’t laugh at the killer because I wanted to shake the box.

I wanted to shake the box so badly. I had to breathe slowly as I carried it to the register.

I was scared of myself, shaking that damned box.

Knowing and feeling are totally different things.

I knew there was a living creature in that box. I knew shaking the box would be bad for the creature living in that box.

Feeling is a body knowing.

It felt like there was nothing in that box. My body just wanted to check. My body just wanted to know.

Maybe the killer’s killing had nothing to do with money.

Maybe he didn’t even hate the woman who raised him?

Maybe he didn’t even want to hurt her?

Maybe there was just something he wanted to know?

Maybe I’m just full of shit.

The customers I didn’t hack up and kill got their delicious lattes or Frappuccinos or whatever the hell and they left, going on with their day, and if they thought of me at all, they probably thought I was nice, or awkward, or cute, or wasting my life, but they probably didn’t think of me, and they certainly wouldn’t have imagined that I was thinking about where best to stab their particular body, and with how much force.

Sometimes, those days, walking around New York City, I’d be walking behind a group of young women in skirts that lifted up above their knees, exposing that soft place of skin behind, and I wanted so badly to lean in and touch them there. Just this small little trespass. Just this one little thing. Who could that hurt?

I just wanted to give the box the littlest jostle.

Something people seem to believe is there is only good or evil, only person or monster. People are good. Monsters are bad. Supernaturally bad. Demonic. Diabolical. People are superior to the monsters. No empathy for the devil. ‘Cause once you start empathizing with the killers, what does that make you? A monster yourself? An accomplice? A devil with a Fast Past to an afterlife of somehow very painful horrors? And fire? Lots and lots of fire.

Writers know that to make a believable character, a human being, you mix the good with the bad. The NICU nurse shoplifts candy bars. The arsonist brings flowers to the nursing home.

The killer wasn’t always a killer. Once the killer was a baby, born drug dependent because of his mother’s choices. Once he was a toddler learning how to walk. Once he was a little boy laughing, milk dribbling down his chin. Once he was so small with shining eyes that still trusted the big people around him. Once he was innocent.

I named the black hooded nun finch Quiver. The thing I didn’t kill, I caged, fed, and played classical music for. Eventually I gave him away to a nice lady on Craigslist. I moved to the other side of the country. Found out that troubled kid my mom’s cousin loved so much brutally murdered his mother, and I couldn’t understand how someone could do something so grisly, so heartless, so willfully violent. I could get how someone would want to do it. How someone could think of doing it. How someone could imagine doing it and plan doing it, but how do you actually do it? How do you push a knife into someone, and hurt them, cause them horror and pain, and not throw up, not throw your body into a shock of seizures to stop you from doing this thing?

I didn’t try to empathize with the killer to understand him. I wasn’t trying to excuse what he did. I wasn’t trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. I was asking the monster in me how far it would go. I was asking myself what was I really capable of.

How do any of us actually know what we’re capable of?

I was a terrible bird mom. I had no idea what I was doing. I named my black hooded nun finch Quiver because it seemed scared all the time and of course it did. I was this huge lumbering thing that trapped it.

When I’d slip my hand in the cage for feeding or cleaning, Quiver would freak out, flap in a frenzy.

I didn’t know finches weren’t supposed to be alone, without other finches that they could die from loneliness. I tried to get him a friend, but no one else would sell me just one.

When I bought the bird it did not matter to me that I probably wouldn’t be living in San Francisco much longer and that I wouldn’t be able to take a pet with me when I left.

When I did give Quiver away, I gave him away to the first person who answered my ad. She seemed nice and knowledgeable about birds, but it’s not like I checked, not like I made sure she was going to be good to him and not hurt him, and even though I never shook his box, and even though I never purposely hurt him, I felt like shit about the indirect harm I did.

I made myself imagine inflicting horrible physical violence on my customers, and I could imagine it, and it made me physically ill, hunched over my register shaking.

All there was for me to understand was this.

So if you should ever see me shudder while you’re talking to me and you worry I’m thinking of jabbing you in the eye with the kebab skewer, just know it’s nothing personal, just know I’m probably as harmless as a tiny, tiny bird.

NO EASING INTO IT by Lori Yeghiayan Friedman

March 25, 2020

November 7, 1994: I sat on William and Luke’s bed, listening to the ring, ring in my ear, each ring getting fainter like a distant alarm. I was about to hang up when someone answered—a man.

“Hello,” he said, startled, like maybe I’d woken him up.

“Hi,” I said into the receiver of the beige rotary phone on my lap. I scanned The Yellow Pages opened next to me on the faded maroon bedspread. I checked the ad: Did I get the number right? I looked out their bedroom window and up at the night sky: What should I say? No answer.

“We have a body that needs embalming,” is what came out.

It’s a moment that will take years to unravel. I am still stunned that I used the word “embalming.” I think it’s funny that I made it sound like we’d murdered him: “a body.”

Twenty-five years later, I sympathize with that twenty-three-year-old girl―me―sitting on that bed, rotary phone on her lap, The Yellow Pages open beside her. She’s in way over her head. She tried her best to perform this final task. I even have sympathy for that young man in the next room, not the one whose life was over―he always had my sympathy―but for the one whose life was just beginning. The bonds of our strange union were about to break, and for a long time, I hated him for the pain caused by this avalanche of loss.

My friend is dead. I couldn't bring myself to say it, so I kept it clinical, like I was describing a frog suspended in formaldehyde.

Twenty minutes earlier, I picked up the phone. It was late on a Tuesday night. The call had come and I’d responded like a soldier would to deployment orders: perfunctorily, with resolve. “I’ll be right over,” I said, pulling on my red Keds. I drove the five minutes from my apartment through the empty streets of Hillcrest, past the Gay & Lesbian Center, the post office, Topsy’s Diner―the site of many drunken late-night patty melts.

I parked my Hyundai in front of their apartment like it was just another night, stubbing out my cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. Their place was in a U-shaped collection of five or six low, Pueblo-style cottages the color of sand within a Spanish-style apartment complex typical for San Diego.

I stepped with purpose onto the path that weaved from the sidewalk through the small center courtyard, but I slowed as I reached their front door. Once the door was open, there was no going back. I let the nearest section of landscaping distract me―a sparse and neglected collection of cacti that I noted with surprise retained a few of its blooms: bright red, yellow, and pink against the apartment’s beige stucco—unexpected bursts of color in a place it would be hard to imagine anything would grow.

Near the doorstep, William and I hugged. Above us, the dark sky was lit by an absurd number of stars, like a worldwide fireworks display designed to mock our grief. He broke our silent embrace, turning his head away from me and heading inside. I followed him, expecting to walk together to where Luke lay. Instead, William stopped short and handed the phone book to me.

“I don’t know,” he said in response to my questioning look. His blue eyes, deep set on a regular day, were sunken, an ocean after a storm, a calm masking the turbulence below. His wry, crooked smile was gone. The creases around his eyes and mouth were more noticeable with his face slack. He looked older than his twenty-four years.

“Look under ‘F’ for funeral homes?” he said, one corner of his mouth turning up. His Kentucky accent, full-blown under duress, made the o in “homes” sound more like aw.

How odd this was. Seconds after I’d arrived, he handed me the phone book, assigning me a task like I was sent from some agency.

He knows I have to see Luke first, right? I thought. I have to say goodbye.

The hospital bed in the living room of their one-bedroom apartment looked built for a giant with Luke, always petite, now shrunk to child-sized. My mind wandered to an interaction I’d had with a leather-daddy gay I barely knew. We had both been cast in a play and I must have mentioned my friend Luke. Leather Daddy was convinced he knew him, so I described him. He said something like, “Oh, yeah. I know him. Pocket-sized gay, right?” I objected to that phrase, but when I told Luke later, he didn’t seem to mind. Instead, he smiled. It surprised me, then I thought, What do I know about what passes for an insult or an endearment in his world?

Luke’s head lolls to the side. His face―hollow, cheekbones sharp, skin stretched and blue―is turned toward the TV set, the screen blank. I still see the pink-cheeked Luke―delicate features, earnest smile, freckles―and his body, instead of hidden under a hospital gown, adorned in his preferred 1970s style: striped bell bottoms with a shiny, close-fitting, paisley button-down shirt. I expect the real Luke to rise up from this other Luke.

Then an internal collapse; my throat constricted, and my heart beat fast, as if I’d been running. My body was reacting to the horror of what had happened. I think: I knew he would die, but I didn’t know that meant he’d be gone. I’m so stupid, so stupid.

I nearly laughed remembering that I’m so stupid, so stupid are the exact words Shirley Maclaine says as the character Aurora Greenway in Terms of Endearment. It’s right after her daughter, played by Debra Winger, dies. She’s even standing by a hospital bed. It’s the kind of melodrama Luke lived for. Somebody give my daughter the shot! I imagined him screaming, hitting his fists against the table, theatrically miming pulling a cardigan around his shoulders in a mock version of Aurora’s famous hospital tantrum. He would have been perfect as the fierce Southern mama-bear who was willing to rip to shreds anyone who caused her baby pain, in some imagined John Waters version of the film.

There is no easing into it. One minute you’re sure-footed while three of you walk together toward a future hand-in-hand. The person you both love is right there―and here’s you and here’s him and there’s him, right here, right where you all have always been.

Your memories give the illusion that things are as they have always been. There the inevitable end sits, like the edge of the world, visible but distant, a cliff you know you’ll reach―someday. You see it, you believe in its existence, you’re not blind. You’re just busy, doing regular things, like seeing movies, eating loaded potato skins, singing cheesy lyrics, going bowling, painting sets, chatting in a hospital room while eating fries and marveling at how everyone thought that “someday” had come, that you’d reached the edge, but actually you hadn’t, haha, not today.

The step off is a shock, the world one minute full of noise and movement, and then the next quiet; a dizzying nothingness rushes in, taking up all the space, the space where the person―your person―used to be, as he vanishes along with every anchoring thing, and you are catapulted into a slow-motion free fall with no foreseeable end.

I turned away from Luke, dry-eyed and resolute. William had asked me to do it, so I would. I glanced over at him, busy doing who-knows-what in the kitchen and walked toward the bedroom, eyes to the ground, clutching the phone book to my chest like it was the last piece of earth I clung to before I fell.

Some names and identifying place have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.