Fiction

A PRAYER FOR THE FISH IN THE TUB by Zoë Rose

October 16, 2025

With just enough water in the tub to sluice through its gills as it thumps its caudal fin and arches its spine the carp could stay there for far longer than it will take to prepare the vegetables for the stock which the carp’s head and bones and skin and any parts not reserved will be joining the next morning. Its jelly eye fixes on the water stained ceiling which it doesn’t see as anything but part of what is above because the carp has never seen water stain or been even wet before the tub. When its head seizes up it catches the silver of the drain the carp knows as the moon because the moon controls the tides of the river where it lived as the drain controls the water into the tub. A ring of reddish soap scum circles the drain and if the carp could turn a bit it would see the same ring lining the upper third of the tub but the carp has never been on its side or front or back or anything because until the tub it wasn’t even but in the tub it is now the carp in the tub. All of this the carp tells the boy in the plaid pajama set. In his bed under the itchy wool blanket layered over the duvet over the kicked down flat sheet the boy thinks he is awake because he can hear the carp’s ceaseless thumping. He is awake because the carp is in the tub and would be awake even if the tub was far away like Hackensack or Ontario. Cocooned in the itchy wool blanket he creeps to the bathroom. It is dark except for the moon silvering everything inside. The carp thumps.Water slaps against the sides of the tub and beads across its scales.The boy places a finger on its side, retreating at the feel of its twitch. The carp thumps, unregistering.He places his finger again, stroking its dorsal fin. It is smooth against the pad of his index. He moves to put his palm on its abdomen, feeling the flex and roll of its muscles. Thump. Thump. Thump.Tomorrow they will use a rolling pin. Slit its gills to bleed and become water. The boy in the plaid pajama set feels the itchy wool blanket start to slip off his shoulders. One of his hands is white knuckled on the edge of the tub. The other wet on the carp. The blanket puddles on the ground.The carp’s thumping up and down a prayer to the tub and the water and the moon and the hands that plucked it from the water and the hands that placed it and the hands that will kill it. He presses, feels its bones. He will have to help pick them out of the meat tomorrow before they grind it.The carp has not known pressure like this. And it won’t. Because to know it it has to exist on the other side of it and the carp won’t. The pressure is now and so is the carp and when the pressure is gone the carp will not feel absence. The carp is where it is and takes no meaning from it. It is drowning and it is tight but as soon as it is not it won’t be.The edge of the tub is cold on his cheek. He wants to sleep but he is crying now.He doesn’t think the carp is sad. Or scared. But it is thumping in the tub because of him. In five years he will become a Bar-Mitzvah and with every step towards the Bimah he will think, Blessed are You, Adonai, our God, Ruler of the Universe may the fire alarm go off before I get to the Torah. Blessed are You, Adonai, our God, Ruler of the Universe may the ceiling fall before I get to the Torah. Blessed are You, Adonai, our God, Ruler of the Universe may Aunt Harriet have a heart attack before I get to the Torah. But God will let him get up on the Bimah and let his voice crack during his parshah and so he will learn lesson one: God is a bullshit artist.

ONLY THE SCAMMERS LOVE SAM by Jon Steinhagen

October 13, 2025

“That’s wonderful, Sam,” the voice says, cooing. “May I call you Sam?”The voice is low, mellow, musical. The English it speaks is careful, cultured, unhurried, seductive (or so Sam thinks; he’s become a connoisseur over the years). Its tone is polite and comforting with just an edge of anticipation. Normally, this voice has rarely been given the freedom to speak so much, to reel off so many carefully-edited chunks of information. It senses an ultimate victory.“Sam, or Sammy,” Sam says.“That’s wonderful, Sam,” the voice repeats. “Now, all you have to do—”“My mother used to call me Sammy,” Sam says. “And both my grandmothers. But not my grandfather on my mother’s side: he called me Ig, short for Iggy, I dunno why. My grandfather on my father’s side didn’t call me anything. He croaked long before I was born. I didn’t know him, obviously. Although I did dream of him, once. I recognized him from the old Polaroids, and in my dream he sort of had a static, faded appearance, and he approached me while I was in a library, the first library I remember, torn down long ago, he just sort of slowly came my way between the stacks, walking like he was in a swimming pool, and he called me Nathan, which is my father’s name, and I told him so, and boy was grandpa confused, he was in the wrong dream, which is absurd, but I don’t look anything much like my father, so I don’t know why grandpa called me Nathan, but then again I suppose because he never met me he didn’t know I’m Sam, and I felt very sorry for him, it must have taken a lot of effort to show up in a dream only to discover you’ve screwed up, that you’re in the wrong damn dream. My father, by the way, calls me Samuel.”A moment as the voice realizes Sam has finished.“That’s wonderful, Sam,” the voice says a third time, hesitant but pushing forward. “Now, all I need you to do is send the two hundred and eighty-five dollars to the address I’m about to give you, and once we’ve received it…”Sam, calm, listens, writes, nods. He worries about the dead grandfather he never met, worries that his grandfather is still wandering from dream to dream, looking for his son and never finding him.Sam sends the money.The next time he orders a bacon cheeseburger, Sam asks that the pickles and lettuce be left off. This is the first time he has done this, rather than pick off the pickles and lettuce later. “I don’t seem to be digesting them properly,” he tells the kid taking his order. “I love them, but now they don’t love me. It’s like I haven’t even eaten them. They just slide through me, and it’s disgusting. Same goes for the fried mushrooms. Next morning they’re there, swimming in the bowl, shorn of breading, otherwise intact. I don’t understand. Anyway, the burger comes with fries, right?”Sam calls his doctor, makes an appointment. He goes to the appointment, is early, brings a stool sample, pisses in a cup, opens his veins for an armada of blood tests.He follows up with a dietician, buys over-the-counter probiotics on his own initiative. He switches from table salt to sea salt. He avoids milk. He buys four bottles of sparkling Moscato D’Asti because it’s cheaper to do so in bulk with his CVS rewards membership, and is carded at the register. “I’m forty-six,” Sam tells the checkout lady. “No, you’re not,” she says, looking at his ID, “you’re forty-four.” Even though he is taken aback by this—who in their right mind goes around thinking they’re older?—Sam laughs and says, “Well, I’m thinking ahead,” and gets the hell out of there, bottles clanking in the inadequate plastic bag which is only seconds away from breaking.“Now, what this means,” the voice says, rolling right along, “is you are not charged a single penny for the first two months, and after that it’s only a nominal weekly charge, and you won’t be bothered by reminders, it’s all done automatically. With me so far, Mr. Riboste?” This voice is strong, clear, aware of its teeth, exudes confidence and knowledge. The voice hasn’t asked him if it’s all right to call him Sam, although Sam has been waiting to give permission.Sam nods, with no one to see him. “Still with me, Mr. Riposte?” the voice says.“One hundred and ten percent,” Sam says, “although I know there can’t be more than a hundred percent of anything, unless I’ve been misled. I’ll never forget the way Mr. Klebber, my fifth grade teacher, tried to prepare us for fractions. You sound just like him, only without the smoker’s rasp. A couple years ago I saw him at the bar of a strip club which is now a Burger King. I remember that he sat at the bar, his back to the strippers, nursing some tall drink in a frosted glass, and I never understood why anybody would go to a strip joint and not look at the strippers, but then I saw that the wall behind the bar was nothing but mirror, so you could see the action, only in reverse and a trifle warped. I said hello to him, but he didn’t know me, and when I reminded him that I had been his student back in the day, he only made one of those ‘pffft’ sounds when I mentioned the school, and he didn’t have anything further to say to me, just went back to clutching his drink, which had an umbrella and cherries on a spear, and watching the reflection of the stripper who, at the time, was my Aunt Patti on my mother’s side and was only ever invited to the big yard parties, nothing intimate like Christmas. She’s still around, although she’s not stripping anymore, which is probably all for the best, considering she’s north of seventy.”“That’s great, Mr. Riboste—”“Call me Sam.”Sam learns there is nothing wrong with him, but his doctor suggests he might be under a lot of stress or might be developing an ulcer. Sam doesn’t respond. His doctor presses the point. “I’m under no stress at all,” Sam says. His doctor says okay and hurries off to be late for his next patient.Sam’s sister asks him what happened with Uncle Herman’s electric trains because she wants them for her son, Toby, who hasn’t been born yet. Sam says, “Ask mom.” His sister tells him that Mom was the first person she asked and that Mom said Sam had taken them when he moved out. Sam denies this. “Where would I put all that junk?” Sam asks. His sister has never visited him; she has no idea of the cramped dimensions of his dump. “All that stuff is probably still in the basement,” Sam says. His sister says if the trains were still in the basement, Mom would have told her. “Go over and look anyway,” Sam says. His sister says he should go over and look, he’s closer. Sam reminds her once again that be that as it may, that yes he is closer to them, distance-wise, he is no longer closer to them, emotional-wise, even though he’s still closer than his sister, and besides, all those trains that Uncle Herman left behind were from the early Fifties, and that her future son, if ultimately desirous of fun in the form of scale-model trains that ran around in a loop, would probably want the latest models and not a pile of heavy junk that was so old its machinery growled whenever they were pressed into action. His sister says she doesn’t know why she calls; she can’t talk to him.“Everything you’re doing is perfect, Sam,” the voice says, aggressive and bright. “Now just go ahead and click on the link I just sent you.”Sam does as he’s told. “And now?” he asks.“Do you see the attachment, Sam?”“Yup.”“Go ahead and download the attachment, Sam.”Sam downloads, waits. A rainbow wheel spins. He and the voice wait for the wheel to disappear.“I hope you aren’t feeling pressured in any way, Sam,” says the voice. Bright, aggressive, but not bullying. The voice of the younger brother Sam always wanted.“I’ve always been good at following directions,” Sam says, “except for this one time when I just couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to put up a pup tent, and I think that was because it required two people to put it together and there was only me. This was at a camping trip, my first, I was really young, during college, I think junior year, a bunch of us drove across the state to a place just along the river, the camp sites high up, you had to drive a long, curving road that wound its way up, and I had to drive separate because my friends and their girlfriends had loaded up the van with all sorts of stuff, and they were busy putting up their tent, a real deluxe thing, it slept six, but they had suggested I not bunk in with them because, well, at some point they were going to get intimate and they didn’t think I’d want to suffer through something like that, so there I was with this little tent I’d picked up last minute, cheap, couldn’t figure it out, and the little hammer that was included wasn’t much better than, like, a jeweler’s hammer, tink-tink-tink, not doing much of anything, they were all laughing at me, tink-tink-tink, then they weren’t laughing because, as you can imagine, it got to be annoying, and then later there was this big storm, you could hear it coming through the trees before it hit, a great whooshing, and my tent blew away, I ended up sleeping in my car.”“You didn’t deserve that, Sam,” the voice says. “Now go ahead and open that attachment.”Sam sees her when he was certain he would never see her again. She is there, handling plates, telling a young salesperson that she’s just looking. She hasn’t seen Sam.Sam considers making his presence known to her. “Well, this is a nice surprise,” he imagines himself saying. To which he imagines her saying, “Oh my God, I’ve been thinking of you,” while Sam says, “You have?” while she says, “Quite a lot, actually,” while Sam says, “Good things, I hope,” while she says, “There are no bad things,” and then he imagines them telling each other how they’ve been for the past eighteen years, what they’ve been doing, how each other hasn’t changed at all, and she says, “You know, I’ve always wanted to tell you that I made a mistake,” while he says nothing, not maliciously, but he hopes he knows what’s coming, and she goes on, “The thing is, Sam, you’re the love of my life, and I didn’t know it then, or I did know it but was too afraid of my feelings, they were that strong, so I ran, and I really, really hope you can forgive me.”None of this happens. Sam watches her pick up a box of stemless wineglasses, tuck it under her arm, and head for the closest register. As she passes, she sees Sam, but there is no recognition in her eyes, he could be one of the displays, she’s on her way, no doubt to the man she told him, long ago, that she was going to marry, the man that wasn’t even there to lug her wineglasses.“You need to act quickly, Sam,” the voice says. This voice reminds him of the elder pastor from his church who baptized him and who later, when Sam was fresh out of college, listened to Sam’s ongoing concerns about life and love and trauma without giving so much as spiritual advice before hastening off to a Stewardship Committee Meeting. “But you’ve been so good at acting quickly,” the voice continues. “I don’t want you to feel pressured, however, Sam.”“I’m good,” Sam says.“Love it. I know it sounds too good to be true, Sam, or maybe you think it’s too true to be good, ha ha ha.”“When I was little boy,” Sam says, “First Grade, I went out during recess and I went on the slide, but my foot got caught in the side rail, my left foot, I was wearing blue sneakers with white laces, I can remember it like yesterday, and the kid behind decided to slide down anyway and I went over the side, I was dangling by my left leg, looking straight down at the asphalt, nobody noticed, and I don’t know why I didn’t call out, maybe I was certain that I was seconds away from my skull busting open like a ripe melon, but this other kid, Brady Sorrentino, was suddenly below me with his arms outstretched, telling me he’d catch me, he was a bigger kid, he’d been held back a year, not the brightest kid but real sweet, very handsome, the girls all had crushes on him at one time or another over the years, and there I was swinging from that slide like a piñata, certain that Brady wouldn’t catch me but hoping he would, and still nobody, none of the teachers, none of the other kids, had noticed my peril, but there was Brady’s sincere, trusting face, Brady reaching up to me, and I didn’t fall, I hauled myself back up onto the slide, slid down, got up, walked away as best I could, and by ‘best I could’ I mean limping, and I never went back on that slide, and when I turned to thank Brady for the help he had offered, he was already off kicking a ball across the playground, and I never thanked him, not properly, not at all, because he hadn’t saved me, and I didn’t want to embarrass him in front of the other kids by thanking him for being so brave and coming to my rescue. Years later I heard that Brady had gone to jail for something, I don’t know if I ever heard for what, and he might still be in jail, but I don’t know.”“You can pay with gift cards or cryptocurrency, Sam,” the voice says, “and I, for one, am so glad you didn’t take a header off that slide.”“It sucks, after nineteen years,” Sam’s boss tells him, “but what can you do?”“Twenty-one,” Sam says.“Twenty-one what?”“Years.”“Is that so? Huh. Well, it doesn’t matter, because we, as you know, don’t have a severance package, although in certain cases leadership will decide to maybe throw in a month’s pay, even two months’ pay.”“What’s leadership giving me?”“I said in certain cases, Jim.”“Sam.”“Huh? Oh, yeah. Sam. I always got that wrong, it sounds so much like Jim. The things our minds do, right? I just need you to sign there at the bottom, and you can just leave your badge on my desk.”“How was your day, Sam?” the voice asks. Sam is almost certain he’s heard this voice before. It is like satin. It is like sunshine. He tells the voice how his day was.“Did you sleep okay, Sam?” Sam says he assumes he did because he felt rested, if not refreshed, when he woke up.“What did you eat for dinner, Sam?” Sam says he wasn’t hungry, but he’d had a can of smoked oysters and a bag of raisins for lunch.“I love talking to you, Sam,” says the voice. “I love talking to you even more than I loved talking about my husband, who died, if you remember me mentioning it. I love the fact that you were so sorry to hear that even when you didn’t know the man. I love that you’re sincerely interested in my child, in my child’s health and welfare, and that you think that my child going to school in another country was a smart move even considering our little problem right now. I love that you’re here for me, Sam, or there for me, and I’m here for you, Sam. I don’t have anyone, Sam, no relatives, no friends. Just you, Sam. You listen, you tell me such wonderful things about yourself, you make me feel like you’re right here in the room with you, Sam.”Sam feels warm, despite the heat being shut off. He doesn’t just feel warm; he feels engulfed in radiance. He listens to the voice and feels himself looking up at a small boy hanging from his left foot from a slide, he feels himself smiling, a forced smile of encouragement; no, a genuine smile of responsibility, a smile encouraging trust, the small boy so close Sam can almost reach him and release him, take him away in his arms.

FOLLOWING THE HEARSE by Carleton Whaley

October 10, 2025

Driving through the Detroit suburbs, cutting through traffic, honking and cursing at other drivers, the brothers make their way to the crematorium. It is difficult to keep up with the long hearse. Traffic seems to move automatically for it just as it blocks the brothers’ car.“I know,” the older says to the younger.“Yeah?” the younger asks. They are still navigating the void which now defines their relationship—the change from middle-and-youngest to older-and-younger.“I was just agreeing that I probably shouldn’t have told Nana to shut the fuck up.”“Coulda been handled better,” the younger says.They pass a Big Boy, but the large, cherubic statue of the eponymous boy is nowhere to be seen.“He could be anywhere.”“If she just,” the older brother continues, “—she wouldn’t stop talking about how hard it was to put on her bra this morning. We’re closing the coffin and that’s what you’re talking about?”“You know how she is. Besides, it was sorta funny,” the younger says.Sirens wail from behind them, and the car lurches onto the shoulder along with the rest of traffic, trying to avoid the glittering pieces of glass and shattered reflectors ground into the curbside. A police cruiser passes, black and emotionless. A few minutes later, more sirens, and another cruiser—this one tailing an ambulance—passes before speeding off to the right through the next intersection. “Nice blinker, asshole,” the older brother shouts, gunning the engine to catch the hearse again. They have the address for the crematorium. It is printed in embossed letters on nondescript business cards in each of their breast pockets. Neither reaches for theirs. Instead, they weave through traffic—cutting off HVAC trucks, minivans ferrying children to soccer games, classic cars taken out for the beautiful weather—unable to bear the thought of the hearse leaving their sight. They have to remain together for the final trip.“I thought you were going to get arrested,” the younger brother says.“It’s fine, those cops were driving worse than me.”“No, I mean a few days ago. When the cops came, after—you know.”“I just don’t see why they need to be involved. It was hospice, not a fucking crime scene.”The younger brother lets silence hang in the air. They both need it, have been entertaining aunts and uncles, cousins they’ve only met once before, friends and acquaintances of tenuous and forgettable relation. It is what they are supposed to do, and maybe if they make themselves useful, they can forget everything else. Like how, as children, the boys used to fight over who got to die first – which of the three in their war games, their cops and robbers, would make the sacrifice so the others could live another day. It always devolved into the two others pulling the dead one up, changing the rules at the last minute—no, you didn’t die, it’s my turn—until they fell on each other in a hilarity of fists and dying breaths, swoons and skinned knees. And always, always they were on the same team, all robbers and rebels, the cops and enemy soldiers hiding in the tall wheatgrass, shadows conjured by the darting eye.At the crematorium, the funeral director reiterates that, per Michigan law, someone must accompany and identify the body before cremation. She says there were issues in the past where people were given anonymous ashes—usually from horses. After all, she tells them—her hands open and upturned as if trying to prove she has nothing to hide—a person just doesn’t leave that much ash. People always expect more. Nothing up this sleeve or that.They follow her into the back room. It is not difficult to identify their brother. They’d just seen him. And then they are ushered out by the director and an attendant, asked to wait for a few minutes please.The brothers make coffee in the waiting room. It is every waiting room, every doctor’s/dentist’s/attorney’s. The magazines and pamphlets differ only in content, not form. Navigating the Steps of Grief. How to Ask for Help. Mourning a Loved One. The younger brother points out that the front of the building doesn’t even say crematorium—just Services. The older brother says that the steps of grief were actually developed for hospice patients, were meant to help people accept their own deaths and not others’, which should be obvious because only the dying have assurance that their grief will end.Then they make more coffee, because really, there’s nothing else to do. Then the younger brother says something that cracks the older one up, sets them both laughing and laughing so hard someone comes from a side room to check in because they must be mistaken, it must be keening cries and not laughter, or perhaps the two men in charcoal suits were tricked by the sign and don’t know where they are, but they assure her it is their brother in the long cardboard box in the back being packed away for a final delivery, and it is ok because they are still laughing, cannot take their minds off of the joke, whatever it was, because then they will think about how the younger brother reached into the casket to trim his brother’s beard before the ceremony, how the older one had screamed at the cops to get their hands off, can’t a man even fucking die, how their little fists had grown into hands that still sought one another, wanting to pull each other up and say no, you didn’t die this time, it’s my turn, how this is the last time their three bodies will be in the same building and then the director comes from the back room saying they’re ready, and of course they thank the man who is waiting for them beside the furnace, not simply because they are supposed to, in fact they really mean it, are deathly serious when they ask how his day has been while he points at the cardboard box on the conveyor belt, instructs them to say their goodbyes and to press the small green button, and the older brother says it’s a shame that it’s a button and not a lever, that this moment should have some more memorable tactile input than a button, and the younger one points out that it’s not even a button, just an image of a button on a touch screen, all signs and simulacra play pretend make believe and then the conveyor is going and the box trundles past with its awful lightness its terrible weightlessness reminding them how easy it was to lift him that last time so light the box must be empty because how could they not expect more not expect the ashes to escape somewhere beyond sight or touch or representation and what was the joke again how did it go?

TWO SHORT PIECES by Ellie Powell

October 9, 2025

In which Kazuo Ishiguro runs a dating hotline on the radio like in Sleepless in Seattle

MEHello? KAZUO ISHIGUROHello, you’ve reached the Kazuo Ishiguro Dating Hotline. My name is Kazuo Ishiguro. How can I help you tonight? MEOh, wow. I didn’t think you’d actually pick up. I’m Ellie. I loved The Buried Giant. KAZUO ISHIGUROEveryone loves The Buried Giant. We’ll see what Guillermo does with it. Are you dating, Ellie? MENo, but it’s all a bit more complicated than that, don’t you think? KAZUO ISHIGURONo, not really. KAZUO ISHIGURO hangs up the phone. It’s a really bad dating hotline.It’s a pretty good dating hotline.

In which Statler and Waldorf review Bridge Over Troubled Water

STATLERMore like “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wrong”! WALDORFWhere is this bridge over troubled water? I’d like to jump off it!They laugh. STATLERThe only living boy in New York? Not after I get my hands on you! WALDORF“Why Don’t You Write Me”? Why don’t you write some better songs! STATLER“I’m begging you please” to stop singing!They laugh. The air feels tight.

HEIR APPARENT by Jack Lennon

October 7, 2025

Your wife was overjoyed when your uncle drowned in three inches of water at the bottom of a cave. It meant your family would inherit his house. Although you both wished it wasn’t in such tragic circumstances. That’s what you kept saying to people. Not that you had any strong feelings about him or his death. You barely knew him. Was spelunking in Chile a normal pastime of his? Nobody knew him well enough to tell you. Not at the funeral, not during the will reading, nor when you took his place in his very respectable neighbourhood. They would say he was a strange man. An eccentric, one elderly lady had said kindly, more kindly than was necessary. While your wife ripped everything in your uncle’s dingy house out to start again, you took a strange, small set of stairs down to the piss room. That’s what you’d both end up calling it later. It wasn’t quite in the basement, but also wasn’t on ground level. It was as if your uncle had specifically requested the room be created, on its own separate level. Inside, it was a perfect square, lined with shelves which were, in turn, lined with jars of piss. All in the same type of jar, large and wide, which distorted the wall behind in varying shades of yellow. All were labelled with numbers you could discern no meaning from. Some were so aged the piss had turned dark and rusty inside, winking metallically at you, standing outside the piss room door.

Ten years later, the piss jars stood, immovable. Your wife had wanted to get rid of them as quickly as possible. She thought them disgusting, a reminder of a sad old man, not well and not liked. The more you’d learned about your uncle, gleaned through the stacks of papers found throughout the house, the more the two of you understood him to be a bad man. Not just an unkind or cold man, but a man who actively worked to disparage and ruin those around him. There was a time where your wife even believed the jars of piss to have played a role in his evil deeds. Maybe they were cursed, she’d whisper to you in the night. You didn’t know any more than she did. Despite the overwhelming physical evidence, you secretly believed your uncle to be misunderstood. You fought to keep those jars. Not only to preserve them, but to live alongside them. At first you could say it was because of the difficulties of moving so many heavy jars up into the daylight surface of the house, not to mention the horrors of accidentally dropping one. But now, with your wife ten years tired and your children ten years grown, arguing to keep the piss room feels futile. But every time you’d looked at it and thought how much more sensible it would be for you to use this room for storage, or a home gym, or a man cave, visions of your uncle, choking to death in an inch of stagnant water sprang into your mind.

Your uncle had started spelunking late in life. Like almost everything else, he did it alone. The drowning seemed to be a long-overdue inevitability. There were many letters from his old instructor begging him to take a buddy next time. One of these days he wouldn’t come home. The last day you saw your kids, you got a letter from your father. It spoke of the day you were born, and the hopes your father had had for your future. It apologised for how hard things had been when you were younger. It told stories of your uncle when he was a young man, the paths he chose that led him to this end. He loved his brother, but he was a troubled soul, your father told you. He needed things others didn’t. After that letter, more came. Official documents from your wife’s solicitor. Late payment notices for the electric company, complaints from the HOA. Then, one handwritten and yellowed, from your uncle. It detailed his plan to reach out, just when he knew your resolve would be close to giving out. He told you not to listen to your wife or your father. They had a vested interest in this plan going wrong. He knew you’d be up for the challenges this lifestyle would demand of you. He knew there was something different in you from the first day he saw you. You would be the one to hold this heavy burden. Not just for yourself, but for all of mankind. None of this surprised you. You have left the fear and uncertainty of earlier years behind you. You are chosen. You are capable. You are not going to die face down in a puddle and you are not going to become your father. You are the guardian of the piss and you are going to live forever. You slot both letters into the piles of yellowed papers in your office. The piss jars glitter at you in the darkness and you linger for a moment before you close the door.

PORTRAIT OF YOU IN FIVE PSYCHICS by Kirsti MacKenzie

October 6, 2025

First guy says: you’re gonna see a UFO. Like, BOOM. He lays this on me. Right now you’re probably thinking well, if that doesn’t torpedo the whole thing for you. But it didn’t. Okay? It didn’t. I sat there and let him tell me I was gonna see a UFO because sometimes you’re in the middle of a divorce and sometimes staring down the barrel of your life and sometimes you’d pay someone, anyone, to tell you that you’re not completely fucked. “Where do I go with this,” he says. “Do you believe?”“In UFOs?” I ask. “Sure, what the hell.”“You’re gonna have some kind of experience,” he says. “Very abnormal.”Buddy led me into a room in the back of a woo shop three blocks from our apartment. The room was dark but for a salt lamp. Took my hands into his. Told me he was blind from birth, that he sees things. Takes someone’s hand and sees flashes, impressions. Big life events. Traumas, he calls them, both good and bad. His hands smelled of menthol.“Looks like a spaceship,” he says. “With an octopus on it.”“Feels a little on the nose,” I say.“You will have trouble believing it,” he says. “And even more trouble convincing other people.”“No shit,” I say.When he was a kid this guy took the hand of a school teacher and told her she lost her ring, and that she’d find it in the couch cushions. Sure enough. My problem is that I am prone to believing these things. I am, as my ex says, suggestible. Open-minded at best, gullible at worst. I sit down and say hit me, motherfucker. “It’s not gonna hurt me, right,” I say. “Mm,” he says, unconvinced.“I don’t care if I see it,” I say. “Just don’t hurt me.”You might not believe this, but there’s logic to it. People visit psychics and card readers for control. To know everything is gonna turn out okay. Like if I only know what’s coming, I can prepare. The bad will hurt less. The good will sustain me. But nothing prepares you for a fucking UFO, and nothing prepared me for what he said next. “Have you ever had a kiss, like, BANG,” he says. “Fireworks.”“No,” I say.“Not yet,” he says.“With the alien?” I ask, helplessly.

***

Nobody tells you you’re going to get divorced while snorkelling with sea turtles in Maui. Not right that second, not exactly. But maybe one day you’ll be on a tourist boat cannonballing along the broad side of a crater into water so blue it makes you seize up, like you’d drown happy. There isn’t a word for how blue the water is. Around you there will be other sweaty tourists flapping in the water, huffing through masks, pointing and waving at sea turtles. Your husband kicks gently toward them and as you watch him hover above, giving them space, just curious, not an intrusive jackass like the others, you will see him engulfed in the blue and your first thought will be oh, no. Maybe, I mean. Not exactly like that. But something like it. There’s always a moment. The first in a long line of them which leads you to lawyers, and long talks with family, and whispered goodbyes to his back in the middle of the night, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I love you, I’m sorry.

***

In the middle of the reading, menthol guy goes to blow his nose. I record the reading so I can remember everything and the part that I keep coming back to is the part where he leaves to blow his nose. I whisper what the fuck just barely loud enough for the audio. I remember that what the fuck because it felt like being knocked out. One haymaker after another, sitting there, being told all these, I don’t know—things—about you.“I like this one,” he says. “You go to take hands and dance. He puts his hand on your back, like—and I can see you through his eyes. He really treats you like a lady.”“Oh?” I say.“There are rings involved,” he says. “You pick them out together.”“Oh,” I whisper.He turns a little bit red in the face.“You really enjoy undressing him,” he says. “You waste no time, girl.”“OH,” I cried, belting laughter. There were other things, more specific things. I wanted to know everything about you. I wanted to know but was struck too dumb to ask anything useful. All I did was repeat, oh, okay when he found a new memory, or future, or whatever it was he was seeing, all these beautiful scraps of you, and when I did finally get the courage to ask what you looked like I inhaled sharply—the sound of it, a hiss on the recording—because the big dumb asshole he described looked exactly like the one I’d asked for when I stood in front of god.

***

When I left the woo shop we went to the grocery store. We were still living together. We gave ourselves a year and it was okay, because we were still best friends, still needed each other. Made shopping lists and fed the cat and hollered at our sports team. But I couldn’t tell him about the psychic because he doesn’t believe in them. Fair play to him. He’s very studied in science and medicine. Things that you can prove, things that don’t need wild faith or willing delusion.So I stood in the toilet paper aisle feeling tilted. Like I’d been knocked off an axis. The lights were screaming fluorescent. Carts and people flowing around me. If this were a movie there would be some kind of excellent soundtrack, something profound playing while I had my little spiritual crisis, but this is hot stupid life and so I stood there stunned while Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” droned on around me like my own personal Vietnam.No proof, but possibility. You are a possibility, now. Something I can’t unknow.

***

I didn’t mean to go to more psychics. I swear. But it became something like an experiment. The idea was to cross-reference the data. Like if someone could tell me, again, what you looked like, or about the slow dance, or the rings, or the tearing your clothes off—maybe I could believe it for real. This was how I found myself in some grandma’s garage on a hot July day, an hour and a half out of town in a suburb. You don’t want to know what the Uber bill was. “Oh,” she says. “Oh, honey. He’s a mess.”“Uh,” I say.“Does he cry a lot?” she asks. “I get the feeling he cries a lot.”We had a couple of iced teas between us, sweating in the humidity. Her husband had half the garage, some kind of snarling muscle car with her guts falling out all over. The other half was decorated with plants and crystals and stone buddhas and wall hangings that highlighted rainbow chakra points. This lady used to have a call in show on local cable. She had been in the paper. She sat before me in a bathing suit, fanning herself with a handful of junkmail.“I just want to squeeze him,” she says. “He’s a real turkey.”“What does he look like,” I ask. She considers.“You know,” she says, “my youngest daughter is about to get engaged.”“Congrats,” I say. “I called my son-in-law the day he bought the ring, knowing without knowing, and told him he’d better size that thing down. He called me a spooky old bitch.”She took a big gulp of her iced tea and drummed her nails against her forehead, frowning. Her grandbabies were in the pool out back. Screams and splashing over a steady cicada buzz. Heat rose in waves on her freshly paved driveway. “He’s in a relationship,” she says. “He’s not ready to leave yet.”“Oh,” I say.“He’s sad all the time,” she says. “Feels like he has to see it through.”“Oh,” I say. “His eyes, though,” she says. “Goddamn.”“Oh?” I ask.“Bluest you’ve ever seen,” she says. “Like you’d drown happy.”

***

When the divorce was done I took a trip out west. Found myself in the tourist part of a California town. Mexican restaurants and breweries and things. Thumping baseballs at a place near the beach, a batting cage. They weren’t coming fast enough. I turned the speed up, up, up. Each crack of the bat a release I didn’t know I needed. Step in, hips before hands, follow through on that swing. My hands hurt, after. I found the third one because what the hell, I was on vacation with money to blow and there is not a single thing anyone could tell me that would surprise me anymore. She had a little shop at the end of the pier, a real tourist trap. I was probably better off firing money into those old Zoltar machines. The lady was dressed all in black, like you’d expect these people would be. She had some kind of accent that felt Romanian but was more likely fake. She looked haunted as shit. “You have aura,” she says. “Psychic aura.”“Oh,” I say. “Okay.”“It’s purple,” she says. “Tinged with white.”Something that might interest you to know is that I didn’t bring you up to any of these people. The psychics, I mean. Part of rolling in there like hit me, motherfucker is daring a stranger to tell you about yourself without giving anything away. The trouble is that people are predictable. They want the holy trinity of prediction: love, wealth, health. So you could say that about anyone, the love thing. I could use a good word about health or wealth but I never get it because all they ever tell me about is you.“There’s this man,” she says. “Jesus,” I say. “Again?”“He’s going to be in the palm of your hand,” she says. She held her palm out. Without warning, she brought her other one down on it with a sharp SMACK. It made me jump.“He’s scared to get crushed,” she says.“I’ll hold my applause,” I say.

***

There is a lady I see sometimes, on a Zoom call. I found her online. She has a big thundering laugh and platinum blonde hair and very thin eyebrows. She swears a lot and calls me hun and tells me I am not crazy; that you do, in fact, exist. You were the first thing she saw about me. I frowned at my laptop and stonewalled her. “He’s in your energy, hun,” she says. “Ohhh, he’s coming.”“But my wealth,” I say.“Hm,” she says. “You’re going to get a promotion. In about two months.”Sure enough. “But my health,” I say.“Fix your guts,” she says. “Jesus Christ.”Sure enough.She describes you exactly like the first guy did, and then some. Tells me what you look like—That hair! That build! That smile!—how sweet and funny you are, how you talk and talk and talk. Tells me about your big goofy feet and your kind eyes. How I’ll know you anywhere, when you finally get here. She lights up when she talks about you. Says one day I will email her with a picture, and she will get to say a big fat fucking I TOLD YOU SO. “When,” I say.“Soon enough,” she says. “These things happen in perfect time.”She takes my money, keeps the faith. I pay her when I want to visit you. You’re not just data, now. You’re a composite sketch, someone I could describe to a police department (are you a criminal? Nobody ever says anything bad about you.) I wonder if you are just someone that everyone wants to hear about—the sweet, the funny, the eyes. Love stories recycled for a fool. “Big feet,” she says, cackling. “Lucky girl.”

***

Two years after the divorce, I took a trip out east. I ate slices of pizza dripping with grease and bummed around the East Village until I found a tiny shop. Hole in the wall with a big obvious sign. No bigger than a closet. Two chairs, a big blanket covering the wall with a zodiac wheel on it. Incense smell. Told myself it would be the last time, though, of course, it never is. The guy draped himself over his chair and pulled tarot cards. He told me the wrong interpretations. I know, because I pull them myself. “Oh,” he says. “There’s a man.” “Bullshit,” I say.“There’s always a man,” he says.Logically, I know that he is a grifter. Most of them probably are. But I’m compelled, now. It’s like I can’t stop. Love stories are a drug I can’t quit; just one more fix, one more fix. I’m a sucker for a future that may never come.“He hasn’t shown up yet,” he says, “because you have a block.”“Oh,” I say.“I can help you get rid of it,” he says.“Oh,” I say. “Oh, I’m sure.”“There’s a darkness in your heart,” he says. “You’re faithless.”I’m tempted to believe him. It’s easier to think that it’s my fault, somehow. That I am undeserving of the love I want. The stupid part about this psychic thing, about playing chicken with fate, is that you’re living in the anticlimax. That if these things ever come—the bad you prepared for, the good that sustained you—you will only say, oh, okay. And if they don’t come—well, it doesn’t matter, does it? You survive just the same.“Five hundred,” he says.“No,” I say, and leave.

***

The day I sat my ex down and told him I wanted a divorce was like any other. There wasn’t anything special about it. It was just a day. We went to work and came home and I told him. I don’t remember the weather. March, it was March. So the weather could have been anything, really. I don’t remember what I ate. I don’t remember feeling much of anything. Except sad, I think. I was really sad.“Why,” he asked.“We’re not in love anymore,” I said.“Oh,” he said.He didn’t fight me on it. There was the love thing, and then the kids thing. The hard stop. The way he deserves them, if anyone on earth deserves them it’s him and I was never going to be the one to give that to him. We loved each other enough to let go. “What do you want,” he said.I almost choked on it. It felt too big an ask.“I want fucking fireworks,” I said.He considered for a moment.“Does that even exist?” he asked.I don’t know who I felt more sorry for. Him, for not believing. Or me, for wanting to. But I said that six whole months before seeing that first guy, the menthol guy. And buddy took my hands and, without knowing a single thing about me, told me one day I’d have them—the fireworks. Maybe you think I am stupid, or naïve. But maybe you could forgive me, too, for needing to know I had good reason to make my life go BOOM.

***

There is about as much chance of me getting that fireworks kiss as seeing a UFO. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to say. That I’m rooting for it. The alien, I mean. I want to stare that octopus motherfucker down and know, somewhere, somehow, that you do exist. That one day you’ll light up the night sky, too.

PILE DRIVE ME INTO THE EARTH by Thora Dahlke

September 19, 2025

Althea Downs spends all summer break in her bedroom. Through the pivot roof window, the sun deep fries her no matter where she sits. She drinks berry-kale smoothies and listens to macabre podcasts that give her strange dreams about swimming pools full of blood. She showers at midnight and sweats through the entire night, wakes up cocooned in sheets so soaked you’d think the scale would finally plunge below 100. It does not. She thinks about killing herself, but only casually. This is her tenderest hobby, lazy and indulgent, she spoils it like a rescue. It’s not really death she craves so much as unbirthing herself. She’d like to root out each trace of her existence and unbecome. But dying doesn’t do that, nothing does, once you’ve been alive you can’t escape that fact, so suicide is only a recreational pastime, a little romantic reverie that softens the worst edges of her existential ennui. She would like to be transported out of her body and into something grand, but she’s scared of going into the real world. She hates her knees. She hates the bumps on her skin, the length of her fingers, how her body smells. Summer, which should be stunning and memorable, sneaks away into the night and her heart atrophies. In September, she moves into her college dorm and meets Pilvi. Pilvi is from Finland but speaks with no trace of a foreign accent. She adds liquorice-infused honey to her liquorice tea and eats salmiakki pastilles out of a black and white chequered paperboard box. Althea isn’t sure if she’s satirising her Finnish identity through exaggeration or if this is all genuine. She also isn’t sure if a potential distinction would even matter. She has tightly permed blonde hair and a half sleeve of tattoos. Right above her elbow are two black birds mid-flight, which she explains to be ravens from Norse mythology. On the other side of her arm, there’s Moomintroll surrounded by flowers. She’s reading a book about healing your inner child. The cover is pale green with a border of daisies. It feels ironic to read this book before you’re even done with college. Althea still feels like a child, outside as much as inside. But maybe if she does as the book instructs, her body will catch up and finally grow some tits.‘How is it?’ Althea asks.Pilvi looks towards her and, after Althea nods at the book, says, ‘Readable.’ ‘Does your inner child need a lot of healing?’ ‘My childhood was staggeringly non-traumatic,’ she says. ‘The worst thing that happened was when I saw a lynx eat a fox in our garden.’‘That sounds gory.’‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘But that’s nature.’ Pilvi is studying economy psychology and isn’t going to be a therapist, but Althea imagines her as one anyway. She’d either be awful or really quite good, all depending on whether patients would feel judged enough to change their behaviour. Althea’s childhood was offensively non-traumatic as well. Guiltily, she sometimes daydreams that something awful happened to her—her softball coach, who always paid special attention to her, grooming her or some creepy stranger pushing her into a cinema restroom stall to molest her or her parents’ old Toyota somersaulting off a gravel road and tattooing the seatbelt to her chest. But everything was stable and safe and she did well in school and wasn’t the first or last to get her period and yet she feels wrong and scared and disgusting and sometimes it’d be nice if she could say she feels all of those things because of X. ‘I find pop psychology interesting,’ Pilvi says. ‘That’s why I’m reading it.’ Sunday night of their first week, they agree that they want college to be unforgettable, so they make bucket lists for the first year. Althea stares at the lined page in her journal for two minutes before she grabs her phone and starts googling bucket list ideas and what to put on bucket list and bucket list 100 items. A lot of the suggestions are very stupid: dye your hair, be a bridesmaid, make soap. Making soap cannot seriously be a life goal. Practise yoga, learn to surf, eat frog legs. Yuck. And Althea doesn’t think she really wants to learn to surf, nor bungee jump, snorkel, skydive, rock climb, or one of the other extreme sports that are apparently mandatory bucket list additions. Everyone wants to write a book and see the Northern Lights. The wedding industry also makes frequent contributions. She recognises that this—looking at what other people want to engender her own wants—disrupts the entire point. The fact that she can’t by herself think of anything specific that she wants is depressing. And it’s not that she wants nothing. She regrets that she wasted this summer, feels like that’s what she’s done with her entire life, and she wants to do better now. That’s why they’re making these lists. But does she really want to go vegan for a month or did she just see it on someone else’s bucket list? Does she actually want to go to Disney World? She doesn’t even remember watching Disney movies as a kid. Have sex, she finally writes. This desire is born more from a need to fill a void than for wanting the thing itself. Sex will probably be fine, decent, but more importantly, she will no longer be a virgin, which feels embarrassing in a deep, absolute way. Like Cain’s mark, her own failure smeared across her forehead. Other than that, she can only think of vague shit like: stop being a loser and do something cool. Pilvi has fifteen points on her list. She wants to ace all her classes, get an eyebrow piercing, and do molly. ‘Have you ever?’ she asks. Her expression, when she looks at Althea, is impressively blank. She sucks on a salmiak liquorice. ‘No,’ Althea says. She has not done any drugs, not even weed. She adds molly to her own list because it seems romantic and adventurous, even though she has no idea how she’d acquire it.‘What else is on yours?’ Pilvi asks. ‘Have sex,’ she says. ‘Dress up for Halloween.’ That sounds lame when she says it. ‘Like—something hot, you know?’ ‘Oh yeah. Like a playboy bunny?’ ‘Something like that,’ she says. She imagines herself in something appallingly slutty, fishnet tights and a glitter leotard with a plunging V-neck, sleek heels and hot pink lipstick. In the fantasy, she gets gloriously drunk and she’s so charming, so funny, everyone likes her and she’s not afraid of anything, no longer the girl who locked herself in her bedroom all summer, no, she’s alluring, she’s hot, she’s so fuckable and nothing hurts and she loses her virginity in a threesome and life is finally happening, life is finally larger than her loneliness and dread, life is finally—here.

***

Five weeks into the autumn term, Pilvi buys MDMA from a junior named Kyle. Google says it can trigger extremely high fevers, liver failure, kidney failure, heart failure, convulsions, cardiac arrest, and more. Now there’s a bucket list, Althea thinks darkly. Google also says it has proven successful in treating PTSD, so how’s that for healing your inner child? She puts on make-up in preparation, even though they’re going to get high in their dorm room. She wears a dark red lipstick and brown mascara. Pilvi changes into black sweatshorts and a matching sports bra before she crosses her legs on the carpeted floor. Her socks have little pizza slices on them. Sharing the first pill feels religious. Althea puts one half on Pilvi’s tongue and Pilvi feeds her the other half. Then they both have a long sip of the same can of cherry blossom LaCroix through green straws. Pilvi closes her eyes and lies down on the floor. The effects crawl closer until they’re suddenly just there, blaring through Althea’s nervous system. Strangely, she feels her mouth move into the shape of a big smile. Everything in the room—the scratched-wood single beds and decorative pillows, the storage boxes and paper bin, the neat row of liquorice boxes on Pilvi’s side of the desk—suddenly has an aura. All of it glows faintly. When Althea looks at Pilvi, she’s kind of glowing too. She wishes they’d gone out for this—outside, the world must be so beautiful: all the fallen leaves crisp and the colour of old pennies and gingerbread cookies, girls in knee socks and miniskirts, fuzzy candyfloss clouds on the jammy sunset sky. And everyone is beautiful and lovely, everyone is worthy of attention, Althea wants to talk to them and touch their hands and smile, smile the way she’s smiling now, her heart satiated and overripe. She puts her hand on Pilvi’s knee and it feels weirdly good; her palm tingles and she wants to touch her harder, dig in her fingertips and leave a mark. She wants Pilvi to also touch her. Maybe with her mouth. Pilvi has been talking about one of her professors, Oonagh Bartlett, nursing her own obsessive crush for weeks. She lectures with nearly mechanical precision, smells like shea butter, wears her box braids in a top bun, and is happily married. Pilvi wants to have sex with her anyway; she’s even added it to her bucket list. Althea asked if this had anything to do with some unhealed inner child trauma, and Pilvi laughed. Pilvi’s laugh is very nice, it has a glow to it as well. It always bursts out of her like a champagne cork. Althea doesn’t have any professors she would like to have sex with. She also has no classmates she’d like to have sex with, so progress on her bucket list has been slow. But now they’re high on molly (so she can tick that off) and she’s thinking about foxes and lynxes and Pilvi’s mouth (which is beautiful). Her fears have been sandpapered into a small, smooth pebble which she can easily ignore. Her awe is wide, her hope so raw. Her hand moves up Pilvi’s thigh and Pilvi blinks slowly at her, her glowy eyelashes flutter against her cheekbones, her glowy collarbones are begging to be touched just like everything in Althea’s body is begging to be touched. She remembers that she could die from this and it’s okay. She wants to tell Pilvi that she is so beautiful but she just kisses her instead. Pilvi melts further into the floor and kisses her back, fingers tangled loosely at the back of her nape. This is what Althea should’ve been doing all summer: ridden her bike to the beach and gone to house parties and flirted with everyone. She should’ve been kissing every single girl that looked at her, spritzed herself with a new perfume sample every day, waded waist-deep into the cold water, hotboxed a shed with her best friend and shotgunned weed, but she didn’t have a best friend, she didn’t even have a close-enough friend, she was too afraid to talk to anyone who could see her. She would’ve made such a good ghost. Maybe one day. Her tongue moves lazily in Pilvi’s mouth; she bites her lower lip. She licks against her teeth. Pilvi breathes out this little hurt-animal sound and rocks upwards, sweatshorts bunching between their bodies, and it feels so good and gorgeous. Althea touches her belly, her waist, and keeps kissing her. If the MDMA in her bloodstream curdles now and paralyses her heart, it really wouldn’t be the worst thing to happen.

COAGULOID by Hank O’Neill

September 17, 2025

It tastes so god I can’t hav another bite I say — and the hole of evrybody jus shuts up like oh is she about to stop? Loud one second and then gasping like is this reel? I hear somone literallay go holy fuk is that the end of Mis Plasteek? They’re holding out ther phone recording as they say, Guys I can’t beleev I’m catching this on video, plees like and subscribe.Meenwile I see the Produser behind the curtain mouthing to me: okay nice, now milk it. Which is jus wat we rehursed. The guy with the phone is holding it for a selfee so he can be in the shot. Guys this is reel, this is monewmental, He says. Though some person next to him yaps, Hey I din’t buy tikets so ur dumass could blok my vew with a camra. And so on.The Produser’s noding his hed in reel satisfakshun. I giv him a wink like oh yah we totallay get each other. We kno wats happenin.He offen says to me, Sweethar, make them go wow this is reelly happenin and/or I din’t buy first row tikets for nothing, like it’s the experieuns of a liftime, etsetra etsetra.Well, this is wat I do rite about then: I hold the las bit of plastek up to my mouth and bulg out my cheeks like nope I’m dun. Maybe I burp a litle. Maybe I wip some reel blod from my mouth but don’t bothr to cleen it. I look ofstage and say, Sir I don’t think I can do this anymor, even as the Produser's givin me the thumbs up from behin the curtan. He yells somthin loud then, or makes the dogs bark. People go, Did you hear that? Is she bein forsed to do this?But of corse what the Produser said/did was jus nonsens, jus part of the show. And thos dogs by the way arn’t mad at all.It’s arond heer I shake a litle. Like I’m scared. Like I’m gonna brake or apolagize to the audiunse — Hey sorre folks, I been so rite up til now, but I jus can’t do this anymor. With reel teers in my eyes. Ha ha. Jk.I remembr one time durin this part a guy tride to hop on stage saying to me, I’m Dad! I’m ur Dad! And it throwed me jus for a sec. Like my chest went hollo. I din’t kno this guy. I new that. But he got up to me. He was rite in fron of my fase, lookin in my eyes. He hopped over the fens and burs up onstage. Then he grabed my arm and said, Look at what they dun to u. For a momen I din’t kno ware I was.My litl sweehar, He said, holding my hand. I wasn’t evn breething. It was the way he said it, like in a dreem.I’ll tak u away, He said.Then the securty delt with him, carreed him away. I don’t kno wat I wud hav don. I jus sat ther, not evn moving. The Produser whisper-yelld over to me, Hey! Remember las bite!Wat? I thoght. I din’t evn kno ware I was. Oxigen! The Produser yelld. And I took a deep breath and coffed it bak out. It felt like the air got stuk insid me. I was liteheded. Teers wer fillin my eyes.Wat is hapnin? I herd someon say.I jus couldn stop my eyes from waterin. My wrist was throbin. Everythin was spinnin around. Then the lites cut and nobody coud see a thing.Or maybe my eyes were shut. I don’t kno. I remembr bein in the makeup room with the Produser whisper-yellin somethin I couldn heer. Aparenly they weeled me ofstage and had to run the defribrilator. I droold all over my shirt.Someon yelled from ouside I stil love you, Mis Plasteek! Do you kno ware you are? The Produser kept askin me, Do you kno? Then I herd the Produser’s ring and him going Helo as he answrd a call. He stepped away. I reely was in the makeup room—I saw this as I opend my eys. But wat? I kep thinking. The plastek was still on the plate in fron of me. I neerly brought it up to my mouth, looking at my fork, but I stopped because I smelled burnt sugar in the air. A cake was sittin on the counter with burnt waxy sparklers sunk in the top. The Produser was already eatin a slice with his fingers, lickin it off the tips.And the door was wide open. Not like open-open—craked—like a mouth almos don chewin, breething a litl thru the lips. I stared at it.The Produser was still talkin on the phone. His ring was buzzin again but he din’t pick up. He was sayin things like no she’s fine, no I got it, etsetra etsetra.Meenwile my head felt as tho someon was slamin it in the door—empty and bam, bam, bam. Like my skul was craking and my body was froze up, all pumped ful like a mannekin, and all I could feel everythin pushin around inside me.But I was on the other side of the door alredy. Throwin it all out of my mouth, moovin down the hall, not in my mind.And my hands were on the weels. The cold air was bushin pas my cheeks. I herd him call from behin me-–Hey! Com back heer! But I was far.My face nevr looked like it had befor, tryin to hold back my excitemen.Because that’s when the walls of the hallway backdrop lift, all the furnitur gets pushed off by the crew, and evryon remembrs I’m stil on stage. Then the Produser weels me center—my body tips.And the audiunse lets loose my favorite part.

YOU TEACH ME HOW TO BE by Emma Burger

September 15, 2025

You’re all so thin and beautiful. I only wanted to be like you. To want for nothing. To live in a gorgeous Tribeca loft. To wear Brunello Cucinelli and Loro Piana like it was nothing. To show up to morning drop-off at P.S. 234 with an expensive blowout and a full Alo set, en route to pilates. You lived the life I thought I deserved. One day. For now, I was supposed to be your yoga teacher. Your guide. I wanted my body to look like all of yours, but I was the reason yours looked the way they did. Well, it was partly me, and partly your private chefs, your nutritionists, your meal delivery services. Your microbiome mojo salad, your yoga bunny breakfast, your metabolism super powder smoothies. You filled my hospital room with flowers. Peonies and white roses. The designer kind that arrived in sturdy gift boxes. The types I’d seen in my Instagram feed to celebrate influencers’ birthdays in Dubai and anniversaries at the Ritz Carlton. I resisted the urge to peel off the EKG patches that dotted my chest. To roll the adhesive residue between my fingertips. Instead, I closed my eyes and listened to the rhythmic beeping, almost soothing in its sterility. I snapped a picture of the boxed white roses and posted it to my story, as if it were a Valentine’s Day gift from my husband and not a sympathy gift from my yoga students. The roses looked so crispy and white and clean in their black box. Their fragrance the antidote to the boxed mashed potatoes and stale urine smell of the hospital. Lying in my hospital bed, I imagine I’m here to deliver a baby. I imagine the roses are a push present, motivation to get me through hours of labor. I picture myself cradling a baby boy in my arms, just like you all have done. They look like you. I’d like to look like you too. Students. It’s strange to call you my students. If anything, I’m yours. You teach me how to be. I ignored the warnings, believing myself to be invincible. Believing the risks to be overblown. Heart attack. Stroke. Sure, okayyy. Maybe if you’re out of shape. Maybe if you’re old. I’m a goddamn yoga sculpt instructor. I’m 23 years old. If I have nothing else to offer, I have my youth. And you, my students, seem to love that about me. I have something you don’t. Had something, anyway, before this self-inflicted heart attack, which is what my doctors are now saying it was. Time. You wanted my youth. I wanted your everything else. I’ve been lying to my care team. I squirm in my bed as they try to discern why an otherwise healthy young woman might be stuck here, in this position. I could tell them I was abusing speed, but I’d rather see if they can figure it out. I first learned about speed on Reddit. It sounded too good to be true. These chronically online bodybuilder types didn’t care about the risks. They were motivated, like me, by the end result. By the optimization of our bodies to look exactly the way we want them to. They taught me to stack ephedrine with caffeine pills and aspirin. Warned me that I’d be carded at CVS for buying the ephedrine from behind the counter, but not stopped. Your bodies were my inspiration. You lived lives that made them possible. Easy, even. You resided in palatial apartments with elevator doors that opened right into your living rooms. I lived in a Chinatown two-bedroom with three other girls, all of us willing to do whatever it took not to go home to Long Island. Early mornings teaching yoga sculpt, late nights working bottle service at Marquee and TAO. I’m only making money when I’m awake, so I try to stay up and up and up. The speed helped with that. It felt too good to be true. This little cocktail allowed me to transcend my need for food. For sleep. I could make money around the clock. I could look like you. I buzzed with manic energy, ran laps up and down the West Side Highway. Vowed never to sit down when I could be moving. Taught more yoga sculpt classes, subbing whenever I could. Picked up more shifts at TAO. Brought home more in tips with my new body. My energy was infectious, one guest told me beneath burning sparklers.My heart pounded as I moved through sun salutations, but I paid it no mind. My chest pounded as I handed out flutes of Dom from the tray balanced precariously on my shoulder. My body shrunk. The packed club felt easy to glide through when I was high. It felt like I could fly over the crowds, straight to VIP. I’m too embarrassed to admit what I’ve done to myself. To be like you. To look like you. I thought I’d found a cheat code. Who cares that it made my thoughts race. Everything race. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do anything else but move fast. I look at the box of flowers you bought me and cringe, filled with shame. I’m not telling anyone what I’ve done. And when I’m all better, I’ll go back to class and teach you how to keep those bodies you already have. Those bodies I so badly want to inhabit.

TWO DAYS AFTER THEIR MOTHER DIES by Kim Magowan

September 10, 2025

Josie uses her key to let herself and her sister Amy into Cora’s apartment. She walks in first, then turns to see Amy standing in the doorway, hand braced against the doorframe. Josie says, impatiently, “Come on.” Finally, Amy enters this apartment their mother lived in for three years, moving here after she injured her knee and at last accepted that it made no sense for an older woman to be living in a house with two sets of stairs. But Amy has never seen it, because she’s so stubborn and unforgiving. Watching her older sister walk slowly into the apartment reminds Josie, painfully, of their mother. After she got sick Cora slowed down too, as if just moving her body hurt.Josie opens the window over the kitchen sink. It’s stuffy, the air stale. The apartment has that unlived-in feeling of coming home after a trip. Cora had been in the hospital for twelve days prior to dying, during which Josie came here only once, to pick up her alpaca shawl and pairs of cozy socks. But it’s very neat. There are three plates and a coffee mug drying in the dish rack. Cora never used her dishwasher—“What’s the point?” she’d say. “It’s just me.”. Now Josie puts the plates and the coffee mug in the cabinet. It’s not a big apartment, all one long floor with the bathroom and the bedroom in the back. Nonetheless it’s pretty. Their mother has great taste.Had. Watching Amy look around, Josie wonders what Amy will want, will claim. The painting over the decorative fireplace is quite valuable, for instance. Amy must remember that painting; their mother bought it years ago. It was inspired by a photograph of a girl sitting in a cornfield with her legs bent behind her. The girl in the photograph was crippled, couldn’t walk, though you can’t tell that from the photograph, or from the painting. At any rate, it’s worth money. There are other things in the apartment worth money. Josie wonders whether Amy is assessing these items—the artwork, the knickknacks on the end table, a ceramic pear, a Murano blown-glass vase—and calculating their value. She studies Amy, in her cowl-neck cashmere sweater. Amy, like Cora, values material objects. Earth signs, both of them. Josie feels her lips tighten and thin into a grimace. Amy pauses by the framed photograph of the three of them on the end table, taken that day they went to Point Reyes and ate three dozen oysters—so many oysters! It’s the one photograph of Amy in the living room, though Josie knows there’s another one by Cora’s bedside table, taken after Amy’s graduation from Smith. The living room photo flatters Amy more than Josie, who is squinting. They used to argue about photos. “Delete that one! I have a double chin!” Watching Amy, Josie hopes she feels bad. The heat of the feeling surprises her, since just yesterday she was telling her friend Bridget “My relationship with Mom was good—well, Mom was complicated, but mostly good. I’m worried that Amy will take her passing much harder than me, because they were estranged.” But now, she wants Amy to feel shitty. To confront her rigidity and selfishness. To brim with impossible regrets.How hard could it have been to visit Cora in the hospital? To make peace? Every time Josie visited her, she saw her mother turn to the door, see her, and a flash of disappointment would slip over her face. Because of course Cora would have hoped that the silver lining of dying is that Amy would want to see her. “Mom is dying.” Josie told Amy that, two weeks ago. The only time Amy had come up in conversation was towards the end, when Josie was holding her mother’s bony hand and Cora looked into her eyes and said, “Tell her—” She never completed the sentence, and after waiting a minute, Josie said, “I will, Mom.” And she will. Someday. At some point Amy might ask, “Did Mom give you any message for me?” and Josie will tell her, because Josie knows perfectly well what Cora meant to say, even if she never in fact said “Amy” or completed her own thought. But Amy will have to ask! She will have to fucking ask.Josie watches Amy pause in front of the loveseat and coffee table—that’s where their mother used to sit and watch TV, her Brit Box detective shows, and do her needlepoint. Her sewing basket is on the coffee table, as always. Amy bends, fishes inside of it, and grabs Cora’s embroidery scissors. She always bought the same kind of scissors, tiny ones shaped like a stork, the upturned beak the blades. The loops you stuck your fingers through were the legs. “I want these,” Amy says, looking at Josie. How they loved those scissors when they were little girls! They always wanted to play with them, to cut out their paper dolls and snowflakes. “They are not a toy,” Cora would say, sternly. Also: “Be careful!” Though Josie understands that she probably meant be careful not to cut yourself, not what she’d assumed then—be careful not to damage my scissors. The sisters regard each other. The scissors are lovely, but not valuable. They probably cost less than forty dollars. Amy isn’t asking permission, Josie thinks. She isn’t saying “May I have these?” She gives permission anyway, as if the scissors are hers to dispense. “Take them,” says Josie, putting peculiar emphasis on the verb.