Creative Nonfiction

SQUAT STANDS by Richie Smith

January 7, 2022

The high school gym was filled with jocks and weight lifters and I didn’t fit in with any of them. People like Irving Ackerman, the strongest Jewish kid in the school.

Irving didn’t know me. I lifted the lowest level of weights, but I resolved to change this. I was going to work out to grow big and strong.

I found a body building program in the back of a comic book.

“Universal Body Building” had the logo of a muscle man hugging a sexy woman and promised to send me weekly lessons which would transform me into a hunk of muscle.

In order to start the program, I needed squat stands.

“Dad, can you buy me squat stands?” I asked the next morning at breakfast.

“Squat stands are expensive,” he said, biting into his English muffin. He drank dark liquid that wasn’t coffee. He didn’t understand the importance of body building, but by the time he finished eating, he realized I was disappointed.

“Maybe you can have squat stands for Hanukah,” he said when he got home later that night. “I’ll see if Dan Lurie has them.”

Dan Lurie was a bodybuilder with a retail store in Canarsie.

“Can we get the stands tonight?” I asked, as if squats were a life-saving intervention.

It was the last night of Hanukah, 6:15 PM on a weeknight and the store closed at seven.

For some reason, perhaps guilt, my father agreed and we sped on the Belt Parkway to Dan Lurie, weaving in and out of lanes at a high speed so I could get squat stands.

Unlike the shining stainless steel squat stands I had seen in various gyms and at school, these squat stands were flat black with square bases that rattled on our uneven basement floor.

I started the Universal Body Building Program, but couldn’t keep up with the lessons or the twelve dollar monthly payments. Even though I had squat stands, I still had weak quads, and soon, I also had a collection agency coming after me.

I did squats for a few more weeks on my own and then moved on to smoking pot instead.

I spent school days getting high, but I still wanted to get strong. I still had a man crush on Irving Ackerman, now a senior and possibly the strongest Jew in the world. He was musclebound from all the furniture he lifted at his father’s store: Ackerman’s Eclectic Antiques, one of the famous high school dozen that could bench press the entire rack. He gave up wrestling to become a body builder.

Sometimes I followed Ackerman in school. I admired his Herculean walk, the wide lats and bulky thighs that never allowed him to bring his arms or legs together. He seemed the perfect person to lift weights with, if only I could get him to notice me.

My only hope to gain favor with Ackerman was a scaly one-eyed kid with a limp named Gallo, who hobbled alongside Ackerman like a pilot fish. Gallo also happened to sell pot, so one day when I was buying a joint, I asked if he ever lifted weights with Ackerman.

Gallo looked at me sideways, compensating for his glass eye. “We lift all the time, man.”

Gallo didn’t seem muscular but he was tough. “You want to lift with me? You’re not going to be able to lift with Irving until you bulk up a little.”

I hesitated, not wanting to be alone with Gallo, but I realized this was probably my only chance.

“I’ll lift with you,” I said. “You have weights?”

“Of course I got weights. I got lots of weights. More than you can ever lift.”

“Should I come over after school?”

“Sure, come the fuck over. If you don’t mind cat piss. I got cat piss all over the basement. That’s where the weights are.”

“I’m allergic to cats,” I said thinking about the horrible smell of cat piss and Gallo actually looked pissed although I couldn’t tell if he was looking at me. He was one of the few people I knew who would actually look better with an eye patch.

“You got weights?” he said finally.

“Yeah, I have weights but I don’t know if there’s enough for you. How much you lift?”

“I lift lots. What you got?”

“I don’t know, maybe one sixty.”

“That’s weak. Smith, you’re pretty fucking weak.”

“I got squat stands.”

“I’ll be over at three,” he said.

After school, Gallo showed up at my house in a leather jacket reeking of pot. His dress shirt underneath was unbuttoned to reveal a gigantic metallic cross. He limped across our foyer in sweatpants without underwear.

I introduced Gallo to my mother and he winked at her with his glass eye.

I showed him the weights in the basement.

“Vinyl weights? That’s so weak, Smith. But I like the squat stands. Fucking Dan Lurie. You know, he was supposed to be Lou Ferrigno’s understudy for the Incredible Hulk.”

“Cool. You ready to lift?”

“I need a ruler,” Gallo said. “I gotta measure the handgrip position and make sure it’s even on both sides.”

“Richid can I speak to you?”

I hated being interrupted by my mother.”

“Mom, do we have a ruler?”

“Richid. Come upstairs.”

I left Gallo behind to set up the weights and went upstairs.

“I don’t like the looks of that kid,” my mother said.

“Mom, stop judging my friends.”

She handed me an envelope. “You also have mail from a collection agency.”

I lifted weights with Gallo for over an hour and we didn’t lift much. After each set we had to wait while he painstakingly measured the distance between hand positions on the bar.

“You don’t want it uneven, otherwise one arm will be stronger than the other,” he said.

I didn’t criticize Gallo, but I had watched Irving Ackerman lift and it only took him a minute between sets. Maybe that’s why Irving was huge and Gallo wasn’t.

I decided this would be the last time we would lift together but Gallo called me the next night and the night after and every day asked if we would lift after school. My mother continued to complain that he was a creepy kid and a bad influence, and despite all the lifting I never got any bigger because we spent most of the time measuring our hand positions. I was afraid to tell Gallo to stop calling me, so I went along with it until one night when he called, instead of asking me to lift, he asked if I wanted to go to a party.

I said yes but made the mistake of telling my parents.

“You’re not going to a party with that kid,” my mother said at the dinner table.

My father grabbed another lamb chop. “Which kid?”

“The kid with the weights,” said my mother.

“You mean the kid that comes over every day? The kid with the cross and the glass eye who refuses to wear a jock strap?”

“Yeah. That kid.”

“That kid means trouble. Forget about it.”

“That kid is best friends with Irving Ackerman,” I said.

Everyone knew Irving. At least everyone Jewish did.

“Irving’s huge,” said my father.

“That gentile kid doesn’t look like an athlete,” said my mother.

“Irving’s an athlete,” said my father. “He’s a wrestler. He doesn’t have collection agencies coming after him. I don’t want you going to any parties. Have the party here.”

“No way,” I said and stormed away from the table.

But, I thought about it. If I had a party, Irving Ackerman would most certainly come, and he would see my squat stands. Hopefully he would be impressed.

“I’m having the party at my place,” I told Gallo the next day. We were on the exit ramp where the cool people in school smoked cigarettes. I didn’t smoke cigarettes but speaking with Gallo gave me an excuse to hang out there.

“You think people will come?” I asked, but I was really referring to Irving Ackerman.

Gallo blew smoke out of his mouth sideways, in the opposite direction of his drifting glass eye. “People might come,” he said. “Will your parents be home?”

“Of course not,” I said, preparing for the argument with my parents.

“We have to be home,” said my father. “Otherwise it’s illegal for you to have a party.”

I knew this wasn’t true.

“We promise not to bother you,” said my mother.

“I just have to warn you,” I said. “Some of the kids smoke cigarettes, and there may be beer there.”

“We weren’t born yesterday,” said my father. “Just use common sense.”

Unlike the parties these kids were used to, I presumed my house was different. I had “a finished basement.” They were used to sitting around on bridge chairs next to an oil burner.

I set up the stereo I earned as a gift after my Bar Mitzvah, with the turntable on top and the 8-track cassette player.

My mother wanted to hang crepe paper decorations. I nixed that.

“It’s a party for cool people,” I said. “Not a sweet-sixteen.”

I was delighted to see how quickly the tough kids swarmed in. Soon it was smoky, loud and crowded.

At the peak of the party, and fashionably late, Irving Ackerman arrived with Gallo limping down the stairs behind him.

Irving Ackerman saw everyone guzzling Rolling Rock and Miller light. He saw the bucket of Alabama Slammers I mixed in a garbage can as well as Theresa Milliken vomiting into a paper bag in the corner of my basement. Immediately he smiled.

Gallo pointed at my squat stands and Irving nodded his approval.

I handed Irving a beer and he shook my hand.

I blasted Emerson Lake and Palmer.

“Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. We’re so glad you could attend come inside come inside.”

Joey, the biggest burnout in the class, asked Gallo to watch his beer while he was taking a pee.

Gallo nodded, placing the bottle on the table next to him. “Yeah, I’ll keep my eye on it,” he said with a laugh, and reached to yank out his glass eye—but Irving stopped him.

Doors slammed.

People made out. Everyone smoked weed. There were joints and pipes and even a bong.

Joey switched on Black Sabbath, sandwiching his head with my Bar Mitzvah speakers blasting Iron Man into each ear.

Things spiraled out of control.

The smell of pot drifted up through our wilting ceiling.

People fought to get into the small basement bathroom pounding on the aluminum shower and it sounded like thunder.

In the laundry room, someone made a torch out of a can of Wizard toilet spray, singeing my mother’s negligee.

Kids carved their initials in the bathroom door. Someone shellacked my father’s college pennant. Foam rubber torn from our couch rained like confetti.

Out of desperation, I went upstairs to seek advice from my parents.

“What the hell’s going on down there?” asked my father. “Are people smoking marijuana?”

“I’m not sure,” I lied. “Maybe.”

“Everyone has to leave now.”

“I can’t just ask everyone to split,” I said. “It’s the middle of a party.”

“They’re destroying our house.”

Ending the party seemed very uncool, but I knew my parents were right.

“If you don’t ask them to leave,” my father said, “I will.”

My mother shrugged. “Just tell them someone called the police.”

“Yes,” said my father, “the cops are on the way.”

I spread the word.

“The pigs are onto us,” said Gallo. “Party’s over.” He and Irving were the first to leave.

Eventually everyone was gone, except for Tomlinson, a short, shy kid still hiding in our cedar closet. My mother dragged him out by the ears.

The basement simmered like a crater after a mortar blast.

That Monday after the party I was kind of popular at school. I had trashed my entire basement and supposedly the cops visited. Apparently this met the very definition of a cool party.

I hung out with the smokers on the exit ramp between periods and some of the cool people even acknowledged me.

A car screeched in the distance, tires shredding over asphalt and Gallo pulled up in his souped up Camaro. The passenger window lowered and Irving Ackerman waved me over, tan and handsome in sunglasses. Up close, the leather of his jacket was soft and grainy, a much higher quality than Gallo’s. He was drinking a beer.

“Great party, Smith,” he said.

A compliment from Irving Ackerman.

“Thanks for coming,” I said. “It was a cool time.”

“Very cool,” said Ackerman. “Here,” he said. “Finish the beer. We should lift sometime.”

“That would be great,” I said holding the beer as the car screeched away and for the first time in a while, I felt oddly victorious, even invincible.

But fifteen minutes later I was suspended for the possession of alcohol on school property; suspended for holding a beer handed to me by the one kid I truly idolized.

And three months after that, Gallo was on the local news, arrested for trying to steal a safe from our elementary school.

I never lifted with Ackerman. A year later I left for college and my parents gave away the squat stands.

HOT SAUCE GLOW by Jody Rae

January 3, 2022

Is it true we’ll spend the next nine months across worn-down Neapolitan-chocolate-brown carpet that we tell ourselves we’ll cover with a rug, but never do? The cinder block walls are painted dried vanilla ice cream on warm pavement. Like a wound that won’t heal, the thick drapes won’t close all the way and they bleed a strawberry sunset over Wide Open Spaces, an autumn-tinged campus and the regal-yet-defunct Boise train depot.

For a split second, I think you are giving me the cold shoulder when I come home from class and you are asleep with your eyes open and, yes, it is creepy. We never get enough sleep. Like a toxic love affair, we fight sleep and we crave it and we wrestle it and we yearn for it and we abandon it, and when we succumb to its gentle arms we never want to leave it again.

How many nights will we spend under this popcorn asbestos ceiling that we drove thumb tacks into to secure our twinkle lights, talking late and vowing to hold each other fiercely accountable for the lives we want? Powerless to the sparkle lurking between shadows, we will go astray, wander into intersections and stumble into gutters, eventually finding our way back to what we wanted all along.

Will we remember the wall-mounted phone with the spiral cord you deformed while twisting it around your fingers, drunk-dialing your crushes and defending your Scottish name in a rapidly fading Canadian accent. Grayg? Trayv?

There is a long line of boys outside our door for you, but before you go out on weekends, you leave sticky notes for yourself on the phone: Don’t Call [Current Crush]. And when you come home from the parties, you rip off the sticky note and crumple it in your hand while dialing.

Will you ever remember taking the trash out? There is a garbage shoot down the hall, and I think, seven floors high, what a ride. We are very bad at taking out the trash, but we’ll get much, much better.

You eat tacos from the top-down as opposed to coming in from the side. While earnestly and sincerely discussing angels and ghost theology, there is Jack in the Box hot sauce staining the corners of your mouth in an upward arc. While you speak, leaning close to my face, I think of the Joker. Years from now, I’ll learn about the Black Dahlia murder, and I’ll know exactly what a Glasgow smile looks like. Well, you are Scottish, after all. I’ll recognize the description of the image without needing to look it up online (don’t Google it). It’s Jack in the Box hot sauce without a napkin.

While I neatly arrange items on my desk like a still life painting, your desk displays unfolded laundered underwear, a case of diet coke, stray spiral notebooks and highlighters, Kraft Easy Mac dinners, and text books that never move all semester (they don’t need to). You wake before dawn to run stadiums with your soccer team, then come home to write a Women's Studies paper the night before it’s due. You’ll get an A.

We’ll tell each other a lot of things, but one thing I never tell you is that time I saw your crush at a party, cornered him on the beer-slick stairway, and threatened: “Heyyyyy, so good to see you, [Redacted]. Hey, listen if you ever Steal Her Sunshine I swear to god I’ll [redacted] and your mother will cry when she sees what I’ve done to you,” and his face went slack and, yes, it was creepy of me, but y’all hooked up anyway, and as far as I know he had zero power to steal your sunshine so, as far as I know, he remains intact to this day.

One night, religious visitors three doors down come in to stage what looks like an intervention for our friend in the next room. They speak quietly, kneeling on the Neapolitan chocolate carpet, while we strain to listen over our homework. You twist your hair between your fingers, sigh, and open a package of Oreos. “Should I do it?” you ask. I nod, not knowing what “it” might be, but knowing you should absolutely do whatever “it” is. You scrape Oreo cream onto your fingers and step into the other room where our friend is being held hostage by prayer warriors. With a straight face and steady voice, you hold out your hand and say to our friend, “Um. Josh stopped by to say hi, and wanted to give you this.”

I nearly pee myself. The prayer warriors think we’re on crack, that’s how hard we’re laughing. You fasten a bra over your eyes, blinding yourself, and hop like a cricket through the hallway, knocking the wall-mounted phone off the wall. “WE’RE NOT ON CRACK!” you yell. The prayer warriors leave soon after, tiptoeing past as we wheeze and writhe over the chocolate ice cream floor. Our friend comes over to our side and says, “You’re dead for that,” and snags an Oreo.

These will be the happiest nights of my first eighteen years of life — this pocket of acceptance I can come home to, in between classes and meals and study labs. You say you love my red Hurley hoodie, so I’ll ship it to you someday. I’ll sip hot cocoa in a navy waffle knit maxi-skirt, rolled low at my belly, and in that moment you’ll startle and say that I remind you of a beloved Aunt. I will wish for time travel again and again over the next decade, if only to go back to that dingy, cozy laugh haven.

At a toga party, we wear matching sheets covered in blue and gray stars over jeans and tshirts, and a stocky football player mistakes us for junior highers. “Fuck you! Fuck you!” you yell at the offensive lineman who will be accused of rape soon. I laugh hysterically because I can’t fathom becoming an adult, plus my mouth is filled with braces and my hair is braided. Let’s go, girls.

Spring break that year, you come home with me to Santa Cruz. My mom drives us all over, and we wind up in Carmel-by-the-Sea, where we shriek at $1500 tshirts and then pretend we already own one. At a drugstore, we wait in line to buy Advil or something when you sigh and ask me, “When does Daddy want the Jag back?”. I say five. It is 4:50. A smartly-dressed, gray-haired woman ushers us to the front of the line so we won’t get in trouble with our fake father. We quickly pay and race to the parking lot, ducking in our seats while yelling for my mom to “just drive” her Toyota Tercel like a getaway car. That night, we watch “Brokedown Palace”, and I, for shit and all glory, would one hundred percent sell myself out to release you from a Thai prison, no matter the charge or sentence. Later, my mom says, “She’s just so witty”. How does one become so witty?

This was your idea: We’re with Holly in the drive-thru line at a flagship JBX, remember that bullshit?. Boise is such a hot drive-thru market, we warrant a hipster analog Jack in the Box, I’m so sure. Yet here we are, waiting so long, creeping toward the speaker box like a car full of would-be “SAW” victims. “How many tacos? Hello? Hello!” You’re out cold, sound asleep, a serene smile plastered across your glowing face.

Is it true that I won’t laugh this hard for another eight years? Yes.

You always wanted to have two little girls. You have their names picked out. I always wanted to read a newspaper in my writer’s bungalow among mature trees, with eclectic throw pillows and a large hanging star lantern.

We are very good at manifesting.

TELL ME YOU’RE A HOT MESS WITHOUT TELLING ME YOU’RE A HOT MESS by D.E. Hardy

December 21, 2021

I should have known it was a bad time to have a friend over. I was 15. My parents were divorcing, the house divided into a his/hers venn diagram, the kitchen being the overlapping space.

I should have foregone the offer of a snack, and led my friend straight to my room that was squarely situated on the her-side of the floorplan. Better, I could have suggested my friend and I walk to her house where we could have eaten whatever we wanted. Even in before-times, my family rarely had anything good in the fridge.

I should have shut the fridge door when I saw our side of the fridge contained a half-eaten jar of pickles and a deflated bag of bread with two end pieces in it, while my dad’s side was fully stocked with grapes and mozzarella sticks, a pack of cinnamon buns and half a pie.

I should have lied and told my friend she could help herself, that there were no sides of the fridge, I should have pretended there would be no consequences for taking my dad’s food, that there wouldn’t be a scene, that he wouldn’t penalize my mom by deducting the cost of whatever my friend might take—some juice, a glass of milk—from my mom’s next support payment, that she wouldn’t yell at me for being selfish, for making things harder than they already were.

But I didn’t have any of that kind of sense, and so I just stood there, confused, in front of the fridge that hung open like a cracked rib cage, watching my friend’s expression evolve, her eyes widening then darkening, as she realized I thought my family was normal, how in watching her reaction, I was only now learning it wasn’t.

DESPERATELY SEEKING ARISTOTLE’S FRIENDSHIP OF VIRTUE by Chris Kelso

December 20, 2021

Let’s argue that reality is plural: the solipsistic loneliness of individual perception becomes our first hurdle. We try to get over that by sharing some kind of rudimentary interior with others—where common goals and grammars can unite and define us as joint proprietors of a greater cognitive space. So how do you deal with people not liking you? What strategies can you call upon when you reach out for connection only to find an opposing electrical charge exerting its repulsive force against you? It seems strange to imagine that in the age of social-media anyone would reject this idea of a cognitive space of mutual connection, but it’s harder to attain than you might think. Well, it’s harder for me at least.

It sounds cynical but sometimes, no matter how many ways you attack this complex endeavour with reasoning there is simply no way in. Some people just don’t want to share an interior with you. In truth, most people don’t. Which means that even if reality is plural, our experience of it is doomed to be paradoxically solitary and singular. Knowing that truth doesn’t make the problem any easier to live with. So, is this just the end of friendship for Chris Kelso? The optimist in me says ‘no’. The other voices say ‘mmm, well…maybe’.

When you write books about critter-states, child murderers and psychosexual trauma, it might seem like other people’s opinions aren’t all that important to you in the first place. But that’s not true. I write to exorcise my sadness and put some distance between my day-to-day self and those grim fascinations. Writing is to be a friend of wisdom. The books are rarely ever an expression of how I feel or what I enjoy. In fact, I have yearned after stable conventions since I was a young boy. Sure (at my lowest ebb, when I felt it had eluded me) I battled against conventional structures, but always in the secret hope that it would eventually come to me of its own accord. Like a jilted lover hell-bent on retribution. An arsenal of mind-games and denial at my disposal. But I want(ed) friendship. I always wanted a good job and the status that brought. I wanted a place in society. Self-fucking-actualisation. And Maslow was right when he outlined his tenets in the hierarchy of needs (although having critical ‘needs’ will make you inherently ‘needy’, and this is also unattractive). I want to believe in goodness and an afterlife. I want to believe in romance and meaningful connection. Alas, this is the loneliest I have ever felt. All these conventions continue to allude me and I need to make peace with another harsh truth: my own undesirable status as a fundamentally needy soul navigating the morgue of human indifference. Losing the optimist soul. Accepting the void.

And that’s what this is, I suppose—this, right here. I’m trying to articulate something so I can connect with someone out there in the great collective abyss. Shine a light on it all. But dark matter only consumes; it neither reflects nor absorbs the light. Only eats it.

Aristotle defined friendship as reciprocated goodwill.

‘In poverty as well as in other misfortunes, people suppose that friends are their only refuge.’

Goodwill certainly seems to be in abundance on a superficial level, but does it have genuine truth or is it some kind of trivial social camouflage? If it did then surely connection would be simpler and would occur on a more regular basis. I’m also aware that the materiality of our reality conditions the connection of everything with everything else. I know we are cosmically bound, like the milling atoms of a crystal—interdependent particles oscillating together in the quest for structural integrity. And as I step into a new profession with demanding and stressful challenges, friendships become more important, yet somehow less accidental and more intentional, albeit still fate-pending. Friendship becomes about utility, survival. The kind where there is no real reciprocal affection. Two cold bodies clutching hold of each other in a superficial embrace as they spiral into apathy together. These are usually temporary relationships and these are where I find myself dwelling of late. And usually it’s me who needs more. I often try to break this shallow barrier with sincere acts and a giving nature. Because I need the friendship of virtue in my life. Unfortunately, no one has the patience required. My ‘needs’ appear ‘needy’. And my overtures of friendship deflect off chitinous eyes and ears. My gifts of connection pass through transparent hands and crash hopelessly to the floor.

I am lucky to have love in my life. I have a fiancé who connects with me. She represents the world of reciprocity that I craved. But what of fraternity? That’s been a different story entirely. But so what? An optimist resides inside my heart, muted but present. I’ll just have to wrestle with undesirable status until the black soup of dark matter takes me beneath its well. B.R Yeager once told me that ‘humanity sees the void as a vacuum/an absence only because we aren’t tuned to perceive what resides there, and as conscious entities we put consciousness on a pedestal.’ So, this struggle to elevate consciousness through connection and shared experience is perhaps folly. Dying alone doesn’t frighten Yeager because, as he says, ‘I imagine my consciousness will just disappear, become other energy, scatter, etc. I won’t be aware of it or its ramifications, and that’s strangely comforting.’

Maybe there will be something beyond. In the dark matter we can’t see. A new world of simple connection and reciprocity. But that’s the optimist talking…

THE MELT by Jennifer Todhunter

November 25, 2021

My son doesn't turn from solid to liquid or liquid to gas when the melt occurs. He remains in the same state physically, but mentally there is a shift. Heat has been applied in the form of my disappearing from his line of sight, or heading to the bonfire for a beer, or talking to a friend who is a guy who is not his dad, my ex. There is a fusion when the melt occurs, his person to my person, a shadow that follows me wherever I go, that demands we leave this instant, that cries as if I've died right there, in front of him.

The attachment is not cute like the therapist suggested it might be when I explained my son's behaviour to her. It is not the same as when he'd wake with nap-flushed cheeks as a toddler and wobble around the house after me, leaving behind a trail of goldfish crackers and blueberries. Suffocation is such an ugly word, she said, and I nodded, but that's how it feels, I said, when he melts, it feels like he's sitting on my chest and I can't breathe.

When my son was five, his dad taught him Newton's laws of motion, and seven years later he can still ramble them off at the ready, his favourite being the third law: For every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. Sometimes, when the melt occurs, so does the leaving. The leaving is the equal reaction—equal as being of similar strength, not equal as being fair or just. The leaving is running down unfamiliar lanes at night, unaware of cars racing around corners. It's stomping down streets filled with loaded semi trucks speeding toward the port. It's walking along dirt roads in bear country, a mess of snot and tears, screaming why doesn't anybody love me.

I worry my son learned the melt from my ex. That these behaviours have been condoned because they mirror behaviours my ex exhibited when we were together. This is what I ask the therapist during another session. Why is it cute when my son does it and unnerving when it's my ex? and she pauses, asks me, why do you think that is? I look at the perfectly-trimmed bonsai tree on her desk, the plate of sand holding a tiny rake. I don’t think it’s cute, I say, and she smiles.

My son and I inevitably reach an equilibrium after each melt. We are exhausted and hesitant and confused. We pile onto the grass or the couch or the hood of the car and stare at each other. I think about Newton's first law: an object will not change its motion unless a force acts on it, and think: that is me, I am the force, this will change, but I don't always believe that, don’t always believe myself. I sit with the pressure on my chest, pull at my collar and breathe until the breaths come steady again, until my son’s tears have dried, until we reach our base state. I love you, I say as we hug, because I do—I do love him—and I take the worry that this love will change because of the melts and squish it down one more time.

EULOGY by Dan Melling

November 22, 2021

Derek came in sad-faced because Alastair’d died, said, Alastair’s dead, but I’ve not worked in seven months because the pub’s been closed, so I said, Who’s Alastair? Derek’s face got sadder, said Big Alastair, with the jewelry and I remembered him. He was a dickhead. I said, Oh yeah, and got Shelly over to talk to Derek, but Shelly wouldn’t care either. Alastair was a dickhead who always wore two watches and two thick gold chains and a ring on each finger and whistled when he wanted a pint and one time slapped a girl’s arse as she walked past. The girl was young. First-job-out-of-school young and she was shaking after he did it. Only a joke, hen, he’d said, a wee skelp. Alastair was the colour of kidney failure. He went from yellow to green to purple to a reddish-brown in the space of one face. I used to think he looked like a bloated corpse from the Battle of the Somme. I used to picture him, urea-pigmented, bulging out of the mud and sludge and shell craters. I’d close my eyes and see him leering at me from the middle panel of an Otto Dix triptych. But Derek was sad and because we couldn’t serve beer indoors he went out into the beer garden and because it was May and snowing he was one of only three people out there and he drank and shivered and mourned. Derek was working hard on the pints, going two at a time, and I brought him two out and said, Some fucking day, ay? and Derek said I ken he was a dickhead but I’ve kenned him since school. I said, He wasn’t that bad, and Derek said, Nah, he was, and I could see in the way he wrinkled his brow, he was wondering where the sadness was coming from. I thought I could see him trying not to recognise the answer. How desperately he didn’t want to know that death is everywhere and that it’s always chomping its way towards us. It was like he didn’t want to know that even if death worked fairly, even if it moved sequentially, working through linear generations, he’d be getting right towards the top of its list and because he’s poor and because of where he was born and who he’s worked for there’s no way to postpone it. So Derek stayed confused and he drank his pints two at a time and then added a whiskey to each order. He shivered and watched his breath dissipate and pulled his sleeves up over his hands so that only enough finger was showing to bet on the horses on his phone and he probably remembered what Alastair was like in school and how different the uniforms were then and how different the area was and he probably remembered them being teenagers and fucking lasses and fighting lads and when they worked on the trains and when the trains got privatised and then he probably remembered retirement and all of the time they’d spent in this pub and all of its landlords and all the hundreds of people who’d had my job and the pints and pints and pints and he watched the snow falling and instantly melting while he mourned a dickhead.

THE FLIGHT PATH by Megan Peck Shub

November 17, 2021

The morning my friend passed away—not a euphemism here, for passing is just what she did, through her protracted process, a slow shifting from life to whatever it is that is not life—some engineers launched a rocket at the Cape.

I’d flown down from New York at 4 AM, but I arrived too close to the end for me to cut in, so I stayed at my parents’ house, waiting for the call.

That night, in someone’s backyard, my other friends and I, we stood there, conscious of our collective remaining behind. It was one of those suburban Florida backyards, one in a long, identical row, the ground half dirt/half Saint Augustine grass, primly fenced off from the neighbors. Some of us were drinking vodka, yes. I didn’t partake in the cigarettes because I’d quit, and I figured my friend—since she died of cancer, and here it feels better to say died—wouldn’t want me to smoke. It is not logical to do things for the dead, but we do them anyway, because what we’re doing is actually for ourselves, obviously.

That part of town sits in an airport flight path; when I think of it, I think of watching the bellies of low-flying aircraft, their landing gear reaching out like talons.

One of my friends looked up at the sky.

“She had the best seat in the house for the rocket launch,” this living friend said, her finger stuck toward the sky; some wet-eyed laughter all around the group. A nice thought, but I could not agree. The truth is that I didn’t think it was the truth.

Years ago, when I was 24, I worked at Newark airport with a middle-aged colleague who—unbeknownst to him, absorbed as he was in our rigmarole, in our planes, in the pallid mounting of his days—taught me a lot about pain. The context is gone, but one day he asked me, “Have you lost a friend yet?”

Yet. Yet. What a tag it was—yet. There are words that sound like their meaning. Crash. Bang. This felt like that. Yet: something brutal, inevitable.

I remembered his words, standing in that backyard, looking up at the roving dots, what I imagined were satellites, slung around and around and around our orbit by gravity. The memory played as if released by a needle sliding into a record’s wax groove. “Hit it,” I could hear my friend say, snapping her fingers. This part was imaginary, of course.

The next day I flew back to New York. Every time I leave Florida, I feel like it’s spitting me out, like I’m some kind of flayed pit, hurtling.

This was three years ago. I still hear her ringing laughter, clear as ever, perhaps even clearer than before she left—and here it feels most apt to say she left. I feel her shrugging, somewhere, maybe in my own shoulders, when, from time to time, I smoke a cigarette.

For Jessey

TANKERS by Mackenzie Moore

November 11, 2021

I thought my grief would come out like my mother dumps out her purse.

If you’ve ever seen that woman turn over her tote bag, it’s like the Niagara of tidbits. You need a poncho just to block the crumbs. Everything comes spilling out into a big old pile: Armani lipstick that costs more than my phone bill; floss picks, Altoids, crinkled napkins with phone numbers of networking colleagues; one wooden “eco spork” used, but wiped clean on one of the aforementioned crinkled napkins.

It’s an absolute mess but my god what a sight to see.

That’s not what happened. I did not dump. I did not turn out my pockets. I partitioned — sectioning off the sadness like an oil tanker. I remember learning in grade school about how those massive ships don’t sink when they hit ice — they just seal off the flooded compartment, and re-distribute the weight. Capitalism and Midwest values have a way of encouraging one to cordon off the wound and deal with it later, in the privacy of loneliness.

I redistributed by lying on the knotty wooden floor of my apartment most nights, letting the sadness settle — like waiting for the foam to burn off a beer poured too quickly. In the quiet darkness, I let the cataclysmic waves wash over me. Once the sloshing stopped, I stood up.

Sometimes the system failed, and things came leaking out. I could make you a map of all the unfortunate corners of New York where my grief boiled over: the “stamps only” line at the Cooper Union post office; under the ancient hand dryers of 721 Broadway; the Staten Island ferry as it docked in Battery Park; crumbling corners of my ex’s Astoria apartment.

The blindsiding waves eventually grew less frequent. I stopped grieving on a daily basis. Or at least, I made it less obvious, especially to myself. But even so, the ghost of something, much to be desired, still lingers. Perhaps it’s just the ache for a specific feeling — one of turning yourself completely inside out. Of dumping out the dusty corners and making sure the light hits them, at least to acknowledge they exist.

MOZZARELLA by Megan Navarro Conley

November 6, 2021

After they drown and bloat with water, white people look like mozzarella cheese. Not the shredded kind in resealable bags, but the smooth spherical cheese in the little wet bags near the deli counter. Sometimes I buy this cheese from Trader Joe’s because plucking it off the refrigerated shelf makes me feel fancy. I like to turn it over in my hands, cup it in my palm while waiting in line.

I learn this fact about white people and cheese while standing in a river. I am nineteen, and I still think I’m going to be a doctor. The director of my honors program tells us that we need leadership positions if we want to apply to med school, so I am standing in this river wearing a neon green hat that shouts Volunteer Team Leader. Behind me, on the shore, are ten other college kids looking to fill lines on their resumes. It’s 9am, and we are all cold and tired and hungover, but because I am the team leader, the park ranger hands me rubber pants and boots to wade into the water.

It rained the night before, but the tree lying halfway across the river clearly fell a long time ago. It’s caught litter in its branches, a matted solid clump of chip bags, soda cans, plastic bags, anything unnaturally dyed and saturated that immediately draws the eye. My friend stands on top of the tree, dry and holding open a garbage bag.

I’ve picked up most of it. At the top of the ravine, I can feel the park ranger staring at me while the other students pick around the shore, poking into bushes, around tree roots. I am wondering if his job is always this cushy, when my friend pinches her nose.

“It smells like shit.”

“Really? I have a bad sense of smell.”

“It smells like something’s died.”

I try sweeping the leaves downriver, fishing through the grey-brown muck. I think I’m almost done with this area, ready to wade out of the water and step out of these rubber boots which will stand up even when I’m not in them.

“There’s this big thing against the tree,” I say, and my friend crouches down above me to get a better look.

Not that we can see anything in particular, but I can feel the weight of it, pressing both my hands against its squishy mass, it’s at least half the length of the tree trunk. I start thinking out loud about what it could be: “I think it’s a waterlogged pillow. It’s so squishy and heavy because it’s all weighed down, but this is definitely cloth.” My fingers search for the edges of it, manage to grip parts of the fabric, and this is when I begin to pull.

My friend slaps her hand over her mouth, and I hear someone else scramble up the ravine, shouting to the park ranger.

“It’s just a mannequin,” I tell my friend, but she begins laughing and shaking her head, on hands and knees as she crawls along the tree trunk.

I am still pulling on it, using all my weight to try to dislodge it from the tree, but it only rocks back and forth in the water, cresting small waves against my waist. I can hear the park ranger speaking into static, the other volunteers buzzing with excitement, but I keep standing in the river, and I keep pulling, and even now, I don’t know why I did this. Maybe because I am nineteen, and I want to be a leader, and I want to be a lot of things that, deep down, I know I am not. Maybe I keep pulling because I don’t want to accept what it is, because if I have to accept what it is, then I have to accept what I am, and I have to accept that I am holding someone, I am holding an unfortunate someone the same way I refuse to be held. If I have to accept what is in front of me, I have to accept all the rest too, and I can’t do that because I am weak, so I keep pulling. If I keep pulling, this will be something else, this will be happening to somebody else, and I need that to be true, even if it’s wrong, even if it’s disgusting and horrible to think this way. If I can make myself into what I am not, then this isn’t allowed to be someone’s body, and I will keep pulling until it isn’t.

Years later, I’m going to learn what the word dissociating means. I will think that the word is too soft to mean what it does, this violent expulsion from the body to protect the mind from further harm.

It turns over in the water, suddenly, revealing a smooth, creamy surface. I press a fingertip into it, the way you press a sunburn to see the lightbulb left behind, but all I leave behind is an indent, deep enough to fill with water. I pull again, and then his arm pops free—a doughy wrist, a ballooned hand. Looking back on it now, I should’ve held it right there in the water, until the police arrived.

TELOGEN EFFLUVIUM by Brooke Middlebrook

September 29, 2021

Is when your hair falls out from stress. Your hair’s heading for the exits but the name rolls off the tongue.

Perhaps it’s because I take scalding showers, or I eat too much Annie’s Macaroni & Cheese. Sure, it’s organic, but nothing good for you comes as a powder. The best part is the bunny tail you press to open the box.

External forces cause follicles to enter a sleep cycle. Hair loss, when inherited, is called alopecia. The old nature vs. nurture question, like we’re not all tired of that debate.

Someone I know is laying in an ICU bed tethered with oxygen, someone not quite family or friend but another vector that relates us to each other beyond these simple terms. Our lives act on each other’s in ways not easily catalogued, the forces underneath similar enough, moving in generally the same direction, but sometimes, like now, shearing against each other, and underneath my concern for this person is a selfish wish to know in which direction my arrow will point now. I don’t know how this works; I failed physics.

Like hair, I go through phases. Sometimes I don’t listen to song lyrics, or I mishear them, and then many years pass and at the exact right moment I come to understand. Two decades after the song is released, while separating egg whites from yolks over the kitchen sink, I realize that her placenta falls to the floor.

Thirty-eight and eleven-twelfths years of age doesn’t seem like a good enough fulcrum from which the rest of my life slides down, hairless.

I failed physics because I spent the class wetting cotton balls and throwing them at the ceiling when the teacher’s back was turned. One might call it my rebellious phase.

Someone was telling me there are seventeen-year cicadas about to emerge from the ground. I misheard and thought they said seventy, as if any length of time living in the dark is not an achievement.

One afternoon in my college dorm, I was alone in the girls’ bathroom, washing my hair in the last shower of the row. I heard a drunk boy enter and shuffle towards the sound of water, his can frisking along the tile. Then there was silence, until he tore my curtain open, and I was certain this is it, this is how it happens, in flip flops. But he stood there looking, and laughed. I must have misheard that particular lyric.

At least once a day my elbow is tickled by what I’m sure is a bug but is only a fallen hair, stuck to the fabric of my sleeve.

I was on a 6 train headed uptown at a time in my life when much was in flux, and the book I was reading asked, How much uncertainty are you willing to tolerate? and in that exact moment the question was comforting, like a warm bowl of noodles.

At the nymph stage, young cicadas survive all those years underground by sipping root sap.

One night at a bar in Emmetsburg, Iowa, I was picking songs on the jukebox when a cellophane-wrapped chicken ’n cheese sandwich fell on my head. There could be no arc or trajectory, it simply dropped from the smooth ceiling. I have since lived my life secure in that moment’s reality and impossibility.

But how do cicadas know it’s time to tunnel up to air in synchrony? Some phases begin without us realizing, not until later recognizing the border behind us, not until the nymphs are molting and walking on soft legs.

My friend Frank, a pediatric geneticist, was called to testify in the trial of a mother accused of poisoning her child with salt. The defense claimed Frank’s assessment failed to identify some rare metabolic disorder as the cause of her child’s ill health. I asked him what it was like to be part of such a sensational trial, a case of nature vs. (disordered) nurture. Can you believe it? he said. They made me sound like I was bad at my job.

In physics, forces were always moving towards or away from each other with those arrows, confident, announcing their direction. I failed because I saw little use in naming forces if they could be canceled out.

Losses can still tickle quite a long time after the fact.

Distinctions matter. All those cotton balls hanging over my head, bunny tails, speech bubbles containing the words, ‘I don’t know’. The slope I climbed up was fragile; the slope I’m rolling down is always changing. So many things have roots.