Fiction

RENTAL LEASE APPLICATION by Anna Koltes

August 12, 2025

Name: You almost write his surname in place of your own, a knee jerk response. You slap the mosquito that has landed on the back of your neck to feed. Upon assuming his name, you forgot your own. You grapple with the correct spelling. The vowels squish uncertainly inside your head, the consonants bumping awkwardly like soup dumplings. But this should be the least of your concerns. After so long together, your name isn’t the only possession you’ve left behind. Reason for moving: You can make something up here. It will be simpler. A barbecue fire that got out of control, a raccoon infestation, or neighbors who practiced with their heavy metal band. But surely that’s ridiculous. No one listens to heavy metal anymore. You chew the end of the pen even though it’s plastic and you leave mouse-like teeth marks like the others before you. You finally write something blasé, like work commute. You won’t say the truth because who does. You won’t give him the satisfaction. How long do you want to rent the property for: The last time you moved, it was into a home of your own. You felt grown-up and financially intelligent as you signed the mortgage papers. You took photos holding hands in front of the house. Look at her, look at him. So young yet so responsible. What great taste they have. There was a city skyline view from your kitchen window. You bought knitted placemats together. You invited people over for rosé and tartlets on the deck you built. You were proud. And then later just embarrassed. Look at her. She put so much into that house, just to lose it. Do you have any pets: You got a rabbit during lockdown. As a bunny it was adorable, cartoon-like with its gigantic floppy ears. But the bigger it became, the more it bit, tearing the flesh from your fingers every time you proffered carrot sticks. He watched and snickered when you flinched in pain, enjoying the punishment. Well, you wanted a pet, didn’t you. You brought this on yourself. When the rabbit escaped, you crawled in the dirt on your hands and knees for hours, while he only half-heartedly scanned the rose bushes. You always wondered how the rabbit managed to open the cage door all by itself. Do you have any references: You had friends, before. You were even described as ‘friendly’, on one or two occasions. But when you left his circle, few reached out. When former acquaintances bumped into you, they contracted sudden and debilitating prosopagnosia. They immediately forgot about your existence, as though you only existed in a specific storyline of their invention, in a universe where you were not an individual but a couple. Maybe you should have gone to that pottery workshop and made friends of your own. Instead you relied on him for social sustenance. Now look at you, reluctantly providing the number of an elderly neighbor who once called you ‘a nice young lady’. You don’t know if she will remember you, or if she’s even still alive to answer the phone. Do you have any children: He could never comprehend why you didn’t want to bear his offspring. Come on, now. They would be practically genetic superhumans—with his creative wizardry, his culinary accomplishments, his knife-sharpening skills, his cutting-edge assessment of your flaws. And you…Well, you were strong, built for carrying heavy burdens. Remember that time you pushed the car all the way up the hill? Actually, you can’t remember his exact words. Instead you spent too much time wondering if that was all you truly provided—a sturdy pair of arms and legs, like a well-made table or a shoe cabinet. Have you ever been evicted: You wonder if it counts to be thrown out of your own house. Not physically, he never used his hands. His words were sufficiently sharp enough to peel the skin from your resolve, to fillet the soft and secret parts of your body and turn it into a dish of his choosing; a serving of perfectly seared offal. Your charred innards displayed on a hot plate for all the neighbors to see. You carried your own boxes of possessions to your car because remember, you were strong. You were made for this. At least in the physical sense. Why should we rent to you: You list all the appetizing traits you think they want to hear: you are clean and tidy, you are quiet. Except the inside of your head feels like a burgled home, littered with the debris of your poor choices. You don’t feel like picking up the broken glass or wiping the puddles of your own blood. You fester in the same pair of pumpkin-patterned pajamas. You eat ice cream wriggling with worms. Nobody pays attention to your outbursts of sorrow and rage, or if they do, they politely turn up the television volume. You try to circle back to what you were like before him. You were a good listener. You were kind. Weren’t you? You had slick ironing skills. You could iron wrinkles out of the wrinkliest clothes. Thanks! We’ll get back to you ASAP! Slowly, eventually, you emerge from within yourself and wash your decrepit body and brush your foul mouth. You put on that dress you loved but hid away, that grasshopper-green one he called unflattering. You eat something extraordinarily carbfull. You finally call your sister back, because someone still gives a shit about you. You start to rediscover who you were once and what you liked doing and new cool things, too, like cutting up the socks you stole from his drawer with giant scissors. Then you pick up the key to your new apartment and your boxes are still heavy but you’re strong, remember? Look at you. You can do hard things, even when it sucks.

LUKE by Sam Berman

August 11, 2025

He was known as the best guitar player in the United States.Maybe the world.I didn’t know; I’d never met him.Luke. I had friends who knew him, had seen him play in the French Quarter, or they themselves had jammed with him in one of those hill houses in San Francisco when he was part-timing as a tour guide in Ghirardelli Square. They attested to his skill. His virtuosity.The word “singularity” was used.“Heaven sent,” got thrown around. I was told outside a restaurant that there was a girl in Morocco who was “nearly his equal.”Close in skill. But not better. “It was like watching a new element be created,” said my friend whose band had once opened for Luke at a club in DC, in some little dark bar down a long bright alley in Dupont Circle, where my friend said you could be almost-homeless and eat falafel and mujaddara indefinitely, sleep legally in the park with a blanket and pillow, and somehow see the Washington Monument over the tops of the Magnolia trees, all without the cops hassling you. “Isn’t that America?” my friend said. I pretended to scroll on my phone when he told me these things, and, honestly, stopped inviting that friend over for garden beers because he threw his bottlecaps in the peat soil, which upset the other occupants of my tri-plex—all of whom worked in the garden in the hot part of June and all of whom felt that my friend didn’t respect the effort that went into their dirt work. What surprised me.What really hurt.Was on a less hot day that same June, the new and wonderful girl I’d started dating said she knew Luke. She said they used to hang a bit. A little bit. For a time. She confirmed his irradiant brilliance and said his name only once during our conversation. Just one time. But it was enough to make my eyes tighten, my hands go cold, and my heart––hidden beneath a lidocaine patch because I’d pulled something in my chest while attempting to turn ground in the carrot bed––race with a sense of approaching, or possibly arrived danger. "He played a twelve-string Stratocaster made of driftwood and stolen car parts," she said one night while we lay close but untouching. “It sounded like God getting over something.” Later, she said she could never really pin him down, that he was charming but chaotic. And that she now valued stability and emotional awareness in a partner over all things. Excitement. Spontaneity. Carnal attraction. She told me the end wasn’t bad with Luke.No. He just ran off somewhere absurd like Finland or West Oakland.It was fine.Probably for the best.And she said all this like it would comfort me. Which.It didn’t, of course. No. And neither did her story about the last time she saw him, barefoot in a parking lot, playing "Blackbird" in reverse, which caused the nearby starlings and roof pigeons to fly in strange new ways, which then caused more than a few midair collisions.“He could twist time a little,” she said. “Even the birds got lost.”I laughed because it felt like The Move. But she didn’t laugh back. No. She just looked out the window like the air might still have something he made in it.Time passed from there. Big fat time.In which: I ricocheted off something on my way to work, broke my bike, rebuilt it, planted squash too early, spinach too late, tried a joke I brought with me from California, watched the joke die in a meeting, had another meeting, wherein I pitched Activision a game where all the crops had died and we need to sell-off the farm equipment, the harvester, balers and dozers, the silos and snow movers, the endless braid of irrigation sprinklers that roll over the cornstalk, had everyone in the boardroom staring until I said I had other ideas too, had no other ideas, none, but to make it all better my caring girlfriend had made me my favorite dinner using a newer and healthier and much-raved about recipe on a night when I needed her the most, and needed everything to be old in a non-new way, but she insisted on change. Small change. But still, change. And I wanted to tell her.I wanted to say. That I shoved someone into a wall once.When I was seventeen. My girlfriend. Who’d made me so angry. And I was sorry, but it didn’t matter.And that this wasn’t like that.No.But it wasn’t not like that entirely either. No. She kept Luke’s pick in a velvet pouch in her purse. I found it when she asked me to grab her lipstick. It had teeth marks on the edge like something half-animal had gotten to it. It was a ravaged thing. “Did you love him?” I asked one morning, finally brave. She blinked slow, like it was a question she hadn’t heard in a while. Then she shut her eyes and prayed for a car accident.A bang.Something loud, possibly outside or down the street––something to break up the moment. It didn’t come, so we stayed quiet at the table.After. I learned the bass just to keep up.Joined a band that practiced on Tuesdays and sometimes Sunday but never performed. I wrote her a song.She said it was sweet but asked if it could be more truthful or more honest.Or more of both those things. Then. One night.Months after we stopped talking.I heard this strange music outside my window. Something like thunder politely arguing with itself. Or airplanes kissing. Or mad earth. I went out in my boxers.I went into the garden. And there he was: a shape against the streetlight. Playing something that made me listen. He didn’t look up. No. Just played.And played.Until my body became like a water balloon that he was in charge of. Then.He ended his song. And removed his capo from the 4th fret and dropped it into his proud bindle. He dipped his head to the late night applause: the clapping of the maple leaves and the yard dogs barking rowdily with delight. His long, untamed hair––which held more gray than I’d imagined for a man who I understood to be three years younger than myself––dangled calmly in the dark. He looked like one of the men who fished for trout off the top of the overpass. Or.Like one of those simple types who worked the factories off Hasting Street, stamping out hubcaps and tailgates, hood ornaments and passenger-side doors.He shrugged his shoulders and cracked his neck. With his guitar slung over his back he suddenly looked very obvious. Very normal. Like a normal person.The kind you stand behind in line when waiting to order something. His t-shirt holey and threadbare. Like a rag you’d use to plug a wound or wipe your dog’s paws with.He didn’t look at me.Not really. I was hiding in the garden between the hollyhocks I’d planted and let die. But I could see him. Luke. His eyes: blue, white, housed and brilliant in the almost midnight of my late street. He stood for another moment.Then another moment. And then.Then.He wiped his nose against the collar of his shirt. And he was gone.

***

I called her the next morning and said, “I think I saw him.”And she didn’t ask who. And she didn’t ask how.No.She just whispered, “Yeah.” And then.“He does that.”

OTTERS AND TIGERS by John Jodzio

August 7, 2025

I work part-time at a dry cleaners, but I’m mostly known for posting cute videos of otters that make people smile. Most people thank me for my work by liking and sharing my videos but some people, like two or three a month, ask me to post videos of otters having sex. When I tell them I don’t post lewd otter content, these people usually say mean things about my penis. For instance, how it’s microscopic. Or how it’s bent like a Russian sickle. Or how it smells like pot roast. If I could brush these comments off I would, but sometimes they really mess with my head and I have to take off my pants and double check my penis is not a tiny pot roast scented sickle.Yesterday I was in the bedroom and my girlfriend, Shelly, caught me trying to get my nose near my penis.“Jesus Christ,” she said. “It doesn’t smell like pot roast, it smells like pennies.”Shelly and I have been together for almost two years, but our relationship hasn’t been going very well lately. Shelly used to work as a bank teller and in her free time she would post cute pics and videos of tigers for the entire world to enjoy, but there were some people, like fifty or sixty every day, who begged to see her naked. For a long time she said no way, but these people were relentless and a week ago she said fine, as long as you pay me $79.99 a month.

***

Today I took a break from otter posting and stood outside Shelly’s office. Her door was shut, but I could hear her chatting with someone named Lawrence. I heard some sultry whispering and then some sexy giggling. Then I heard a bikini top being unstrung and tossed erotically onto the floor. You may wonder how I know what a bikini top landing erotically on hardwood sounds like through a closed door, but like most people I have incredible hearing when I’m super jealous. After her session ended, I knocked on her door. Shelly answered it wearing a tightly cinched robe.“When are you going back to posting tigers?” I asked.“Probably never,” she said.I could tell Shelly was annoyed I’d interrupted her again. Since she’d started her new job, I’d been interrupting her about twenty times a day to tell her how much I loved her or to tell her how beautiful she was.“People really loved your tigers,” I told her.“My tits are my tigers now,” Shelly said, tightening her robe and closing the door.

***

I hadn’t taken Shelly on any dates lately because I was saving up all my money for my leg un-lengthening surgery. I’d gotten leg lengthening surgery a year ago because Shelly wanted to wear heels without towering over me. The surgeons snapped my leg bones and screwed in some titanium rods and after my femurs fused back together I was three inches taller. Unfortunately, a few weeks ago, Shelly got drunk and admitted she loved me more when I was shorter.“I’m sorry,” she said, “but your old personality and your new height just don’t match.”I remembered how when I’d woken up from my original leg lengthening surgery, Shelly and my parents were all standing by the side of my hospital bed. I was pretty out of it, so instead of thanking them for being there, I asked my parents why when I was young and they wanted to have sex my dad threw seventy five cents out into the lawn and told me not to come back inside until I found a dollar.“Jesus Christ,” my dad said, “this again?”Fine, I’d brought this topic up a couple of times before, okay maybe like every time I saw my parents I said something about it, and sure, sure the last time I’d brought it up I had compared the quarters in the lawn to less shiny and less valuable blood diamonds which had made my mom cry because she was really against blood diamonds.“You threw those quarters into the lawn like twice a day,” I said. “Sometimes it was freezing out and that one time I got bit by those fire ants.”“Everyone in our neighborhood did that,” my mom said. “Even Pastor Curt’s kids were out there searching for quarters in their lawn.”“It was bad parenting,” I said. “It was an absolute betrayal of trust.”

***

My blood pressure was rising and my heart monitor started beeping faster and faster. Shelly knew where this was headed, so she pressed the button that controlled my pain medicine about 10 times and I drifted off to sleep before things got any more heated.

***

I met up with my friend Calvin for brunch. I told him how Shelly and I were going through a rough patch. Calvin had been against my original leg lengthening surgery and now he was really against my leg unlengthening surgery.“Your body is a unique tapestry and altering it to fit someone else’s desires is totally fucked,” he said.“Of course,” I told him, “but there’s also nothing in the world that says I love you more than having incredibly painful elective surgery. Everyone knows that it works way better than having a baby to save a relationship.”I told Calvin how I’d bought a wig and some sunglasses and a fake mustache and paid for an individual session with Shelly for later that week.“That’s a horrible idea,” he said.“Maybe what she’s doing isn’t as bad as I think,” I told him. “Maybe it is super innocent. Maybe I’ve got nothing to worry about.”“Maybe what she’s doing is way way worse than you’re imagining,” he told me.

***

I had my session with Shelly later that week. I knew I couldn’t be at our house, so I drove over to the grocery store parking lot and put on my disguise.Shelly came on screen, smiling, wearing a tiger print bikini. Unfortunately I had not cleaned out the back window of my car and all the otter stuffed animals I kept there were visible to her.“Ughh,” she said. “Take off the fucking wig and the stupid mustache. I know it’s you.”“I was just curious what you were doing,” I told her. “I just wanted to talk.”“We’ve talked enough,” she said. “I can’t do this anymore.”I started to plead with her, but she clicked off the session and my screen went black.

***

I drove around for a while and when I got home I saw Shelly had chucked some of my things out onto our yard. I gathered all my clothes and books and threw them into my backseat. Then I sat there in my car and cried while I watched all my favorite otter videos, otters swimming around and splashing each other, otters juggling rocks on their chests, otters chowing down on sardines. When I stopped sobbing, I drove over to my parent’s house to see if I could crash there.When I got there I found my two nephews, Kaden and Karl, on their hands and knees, crawling around in my parent’s lawn.“Grandpa threw five bucks into the grass and told us not to come in until we found it,” Kaden told me.While I stood there Kaden found a quarter, held it up to his brother.“Sweet,” Karl said.The two of them were laughing, they looked happy. I looked at my car, filled with all my belongings and then I got down on my hands and knees and helped them search.

JUST ANOTHER FRIDAY by Stefanie K. Yang

August 6, 2025

When Gary died, nobody mourned—not even his siblings. Everyone agreed he lived like a ghost, practically invisible and emerging only when absolutely necessary. He had no children and accomplished very little. He wouldn’t be missed. Like many before him, Gary simply ceased to exist while time and the universe continued on.Yet, for a brief moment, Gary mattered. Gary was murdered. He was killed in his own home in his own bathtub on a Thursday evening between nine- and ten-o’-clock. The most conspicuous evidence was his severed leg. The killer left it in his bathtub in a shallow pool of water which hadn’t properly drained. Gary’s bronze leg lay in the center of the white basin, knee softly bent and brown hairs floating like drifting seaweed.The rest of his body was discarded in a heavy duty trash bag, which was securely fastened and propped against an overflowing bin beside his mailbox. Friday was trash day. So it was a young trash collector named Manuel who would end up discovering Gary the next morning.

***

At approximately 7:15AM, just as Manuel was emptying bins and a couple of school children were boarding a yellow bus, the trash bag containing Gary split open and all of its contents spilled out, mortifying Manuel when a naked body tumbled out onto his right foot. The children stared with hands pressed against the windows. Stanley the bus driver, who was oblivious to what was happening outside his bus, pulled the lever that closes the door, pressed his foot on the accelerator, and shouted for the kids in the back to sit down. He could not hear over his own voice the sound of Manuel frantically calling for his colleagues on the garbage truck to come and help. Trash collectors were just as invisible as bus drivers. That’s why Stanley always had to shout to be heard. As the bus drove away, the children settled down and started lamenting about the upcoming tests of the week. Most of them hadn’t studied.That Friday was indeed a rough day. The traffic was long, the tests were hard, Gary was dead, and Manuel ended up quitting his job. The discovery of the corpse was the straw that broke Manuel’s back. He never wanted to be a trash collector. It paid better than one would think, which was why he took the job, but the pay was not worth the perception that his work belonged on the bottom rungs of society, somewhere between burger flipper and high school janitor. He would later explain to friends and family that he needed to quit; that they, too, would have done so if they, too, spent day after day driving down the same routes collecting what everyone else wanted to discard. How would they feel, he asked, if the dead occupant of 143 Blattodean Road landed on their feet? Would they tolerate the nauseating scent of decay, of blackened banana peels and moldy coffee grounds, while staring in shock at Gary’s sad state? They’d be ‘grossed’ and ‘freaked out’ and ‘fed up,’ too. No, he decided. Life was too short. Gary would have agreed—when the universe surprises you with an earth-shattering moment, you have to act! You need to take what you can and run, or die without having done anything.Those were the thoughts that crossed Manuel’s mind that morning. After cleaning up the contents of Gary’s trash bag, he climbed back onto the garbage truck and proceeded onwards to house number 141 with plans of submitting his resignation as soon as his shift was over.

***

141 Blattodean Road is the dilapidated bungalow of Mr. and Mrs. Withers. The couple lived in the same house for over a quarter of a century. It was where Mr. and Mrs. Withers once raised their children, but those children eventually grew up and moved away. With their human babies gone, they now devoted their resources to a Miniature Schnauzer, two Persians, and some chickens.Gary hated chickens, cats, and dogs, and the Withers probably hated Gary. It seemed inevitable that they’d be contentious neighbors, but because Gary often kept to himself and never once tried to cross paths with them, they were able to coexist without incident.On the night of Gary’s murder, the Withers were walking past his property with their Mini Schnauz named Percy. All evening, Percy had been pacing—wound up and restless, like he knew something extraordinary was about to happen. He needed a walk. So although the Withers didn’t usually stroll during hours they considered unsafe, the stars were out, the moon was full, and dinner had been indulgent. The rustling leaves outside beckoned them, so they walked their dog. And it was mostly nice. That is, until Percy started barking just steps away from returning home.Mr. Withers hissed, ‘Percy! For Chrissake, quit yer yappin’!’ to which Mrs. Withers asked whatever was the matter with him. ‘The hell I know!’ Mr. Withers replied, ‘He’s your damn dog!’ In times like these, Percy was never Mr. Withers’s dog.Poor Percy. If only he could speak human. If only the two most important people in his world stopped to listen sometimes. They might’ve understood him.‘Someone inside that house is screaming,’ Percy barked. ‘I hear screaming! Someone is screaming! We need to find out what’s causing that screaming!’‘I don’t understand what’s wrong with him these days,’ Mrs. Withers sighed as she watched her husband tug at Percy’s leash. ‘Maybe he’s getting senile.’Mr. Withers grumbled. He was hating the incessant barking, but he hated the idea of their dog developing dementia even more. Then as if remembering—‘What day is it today?’ And as if his wife could read his mind—‘Did you take the trash out? Tomorrow’s trash day.’Mr. Withers scowled. When he wasn’t able to calm Percy, he reached down, scooped the dog into his arm, and marched the rest of the way home. His wife followed suit, stopping briefly at her front porch to glance at the shadowy movements behind her neighbor’s drawn curtains. The wind rustled the leaves. Mrs. Withers hugged her arms for warmth, then went inside. She needed to make sure her husband hadn’t forgotten the trash again.

***

For the rest of that night, Blattodean Road was quiet. The Withers got their dog under control and the killer proceeded to kill Gary, emerging two hours later with a trash bag containing his stiffened corpse. The bag would sit all night against the curbside in wait for an unassuming trash collector named Manuel, who couldn’t have imagined that in just a few short moments, he would be shaken to his core at what would land on his shoe.But in the grand scheme of things, none of it would matter. Gary dies. Nobody cares. It’s just another Friday.And the woman who killed him with a broom slept through most of it on Gary’s bed, hungover from a night of wine and phone calls about what she had totally—like, ewww—done, and dreaming about a tussle in the tub and striking something over and over again.

PRAYER BREAKFAST by Emma Ensley

July 30, 2025

I knew that downloading music was illegal, but my dad was the one who showed me how to do it, so I didn’t worry too much. I still prayed at night for God to forgive me, just in case.

***

The Australian's username was koala_rocks47 and he was thirty-two, though I didn't know that yet.I was eleven and three-quarters. I'd found the John Mayer fan forum through a Google search after Drew read the lyrics to "Why Georgia" in Literature class, during our poetry unit."am I living it right?" over and over again, while his hands shook.I wasn't living at all, not really. Not until I heard that song.

***

koala_rocks47: hey Why_GeorgiaGurl! saw ur post about wanting the Melbourne bootleg. I've got the whole show, soundboard quality. want me to upload it for you?Why_GeorgiaGurl: omg yes please!!! I only have the first 4 songs from limewire and they keep cutting outkoala_rocks47: no worries, mate. us hardcore fans gotta stick together. btw love your username - georgia's my favorite track too. how old are you?Why_GeorgiaGurl: 16

***

On Wednesday mornings, Pastor Jim drove the Presbyterian middle schoolers to Bojangles on Cleveland Highway. We called it Prayer Breakfast. At Bojangles I would order a cinnamon biscuit, a buttered biscuit, and a Mr. Pibb. I’d watch Drew across the restaurant while Jim asked us about our “faith journeys.” “Anyone want to share what God's been doing in their lives this week?”I could’ve shared that I'd stayed up until 3 AM downloading bootlegs with someone named koala_rocks47, who thinks I am in high school. Instead, I said nothing and watched Drew's headphones settle around his neck, wondering what holy music played through them.Last week on the bus, his batteries died and he asked to share mine. We listened to a live John Mayer show from Melbourne together. During “Comfortable” our arms touched and stayed touching for three whole songs.“Where do you find all these?” he asked.“The internet,” I said.

***

The next Wednesday his batteries worked but he asked to share headphones anyway. This time he played me Damien Rice and said "this will make you cry" and I pretended it did even though I was mostly thinking about how to make our arms touch again.

***

On the forum, I tell people I've been to twelve John Mayer concerts. I say my favorite was Atlanta because that's the closest city people would recognize. I talk about the acoustics at the Fox Theatre even though I've only seen pictures online. koala_rocks47: which was your favorite show of all the ones you've been to?Why_GeorgiaGurl: probably the one at eddie's attic. he played this unreleased song called “in your atmosphere” and everyone was dead silentI downloaded another bootleg. Hartford, 2002. The crowd noise sounded like prayers or waves or static between radio stations.

***

I burned Drew a mix CD and almost called it “Songs for Bojangles” but at the last second I wrote “Songs for Wednesday Mornings”. I included the Melbourne "Why Georgia," some Damien Rice, and other songs I thought sounded appropriately deep and romantic. Songs about longing and roads and being older than we were.

***

koala_rocks47: what's winter like there?In Georgia, winter meant maybe putting on a fleece. Maybe frost on car windows that melted by 9 AM. In Brisbane it was summer. Upside-down seasons.Why_GeorgiaGurl: cold sometimesI opened a new browser and googled the distance between Brisbane and Atlanta which was 9,272 miles.

***

Drew's mix CD got scratched. The Damien Rice track skipped on “still a little bit” over and over.“Still a little bit still a little bit still a little…”

***

That night I prayed. “Dear God, forgive me for lying about my age. And for downloading. And for the way I feel when Drew's arm touches mine during 'Comfortable.’”

***

Some girls hang out in Pastor Jim's office after school, taking photos on flip phones and listening to emo music that almost sounds like worship songs. I don't go because I don't get asked but also because when I mentioned it to my mom she furrowed her brow and said "I don't know about that."I rolled my eyes and told her it was perfectly fine and she said that it didn’t matter. That it was a bad look. I mentioned this to Drew, like can you believe this, and he kind of shrugged. He said, “I mean yeah, he never has the guys in his office.”

***

I asked koala_rox47 if he believed in God and he typed for a really long time before just saying “no”.

***

At Prayer Breakfast, Pastor Jim always sat next to whoever was newest. This week it was Anna from sixth grade. He asked her about her "walk with Christ" while his hand rested on her back.My Mr. Pibb tasted flat. I couldn’t finish my second biscuit. When Drew played me an unreleased Damien Rice song on the bus, I could barely pay attention to the words. I stared out the window watching the cars fly past us on Cleveland Highway and letting my mind go blank.

***

My mom asked me again about Pastor Jim and I said I hadn’t noticed anything. She stared at me for a long time. I added this to my list of lies needing forgiveness.

***

koala_rocks47 messaged me less and less. Or was it me who was messaging him less and less?

***

I started praying with just the beginnings. Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, Dear God.

HAUNT ATTACK: DENNIS COOPER AND ZAC FARLEY ON ‘ROOM TEMPERATURE’ by Jack Skelley

July 29, 2025

Room Temperature is the latest film collaboration by Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley. It focuses on a family-run, amateur haunted house and was shot on location in Southern California. The film recently screened at San Francisco’s Frameline film festival, and before that at Los Angeles Festival of Movies. It will soon show in Europe. Although the concept of co-directing a film is unusual, the rapport between Cooper and Farley is natural… as evidenced by how they often finish each other’s thoughts in this QA with Jack Skelley. And this reflects in the quietly supernatural vibe of Room Temperature, which is spare and cool, but with deep emotional undercurrents. Jack: Can you describe the division of labor between the two of you? Dennis, one would assume that you’re responsible for the script and Zac is more responsible for directing camera angles, blocking, and those kinds of things. Is that true?Dennis: I’m not completely responsible for the text. I do the vast majority of that work, but everything is in consultation with Zac. He has lots of ideas that I can’t implement textually because I’m not as visually inclined as he is. But we talk about everything. And we’re so in sync about what we want that I trust him. Occasionally, I do question some visual decisions, but on the set, Zac is directing and I’m mostly there working with the actors and conferring with Zac. But as it’s being written, I’m basically the guy at the computer.Zac: The films are complete collaborations. We decide what we want to do and how to do it together. Neither Dennis nor I are classically trained filmmakers, so I guess neither one of us really knows how other directors make their films, but our collaborations feel both more complex and fluid than one does words and the other makes images. But yes, Dennis is a writer, a really great one, so I know better than to mess with his intuitions on that front. But we make all the decisions together. We do the casting together, for example.Dennis: And decisions about choosing locations are all completely mutual. But he is stronger in that area. So it divides up a little bit, but it’s always a back-and-forth.Jack: How often do these decisions happen on the set, in real time?Dennis: Oh, quite a lot.Zac: The goal on set is to be really attuned and responsive to what’s going on. We plan meticulously ahead of time so that we can feel free to react to a change in circumstances outside our control and to embrace happy accidents. There’s nothing more thrilling than something unexpected happening on set that supersedes our expectations, and to a certain extent we bet on and hope for happy accidents as part of the process. Both Dennis and I are particularly excited with working with the performers. Because we’re working mostly with non-professional actors, we cast people for what they can bring to the projects and welcome their own senses of intuition and insights into their characters. The film is really the result of a collaboration with the cast and crew that participated in bringing it to life. Dennis: When we’re shooting, it’s very common that a line we thought would work isn’t working. So we’ll cut the line or change the words. The same is true with the visuals: Yes, the films are storyboarded. But on set, we’ll realize a scene will be better if we change the POV.Jack: It was very interesting to compare the screenplay with the final product. A lot of dialog was cut. Now, having two directors is fairly unusual, right? Are there any models for this sort of dual relationship?Dennis: Well, there are the Coen brothers, Straub-Huillet, the Wachowskis … It’s not completely unprecedented. There’s never any confusion about that: We know what the other is capable of, and often one of us will back off and let the other person do what they need to do.Jack: Both of you are based in Paris, while Room Temperature was filmed in Southern California. It seems like a lot of effort to pick-up and relocate from your home base to California to do this.Dennis: We just set up camp at my Los Angeles apartment. We have the advantage of knowing a lot of people in Los Angeles. All kinds of friends to lean on. Our casting director Erin Cassidy and our main on-the-ground producer Luka Fisher for example, were based there. Zac: We made our two previous films in France, which was wonderful in that we could finance them in part with public grants. But to be eligible the films have to be shot in majority in the French language. Early on, we tried making Room Temperature in France, but it quickly became clear that this had to be shot in the United States and in English. Home-haunts unfortunately don’t yet exist in France, and while we had always envisioned Permanent Green Light (our previous film) as a French film, we wrote this one in a way where translating it into French would have done real damage. It was a challenge to shoot the film in the United States, but it was absolutely the right thing to do and we got to collaborate with some incredibly talented people. Jack: The collaboration between you is unusual and often feels seamless: The dialog is lean and punctuated by pregnant pauses. So is the visual framing with its own kinds of pauses. There are long, wide shots and slow pans. In this way, the film says more by saying less. Thoughts?Dennis: We have a really strong sense of the rhythm we want the film to have and how that will work. The dialogue is spare, but it has a lot of weight on its shoulders and the visuals are as important as the dialogue. Some of our favorite filmmakers such as James Benning make films with almost no dialogue to provide breathing room. Our films are poetic and formally surprising, but they provide time for the audience to settle-in to the pacing and commune with the characters.Zac: In a way, the rhythm and the pacing act as the glue that allows us to have sometimes wildly divergent tones coexist in the film. In a weird way while the film can feel somewhat slow at times, it’s actually incredibly dense.Dennis: This approach worked well with our Southern California desert location. It’s shot in the middle of nowhere with a family who is very isolated. They don’t have cameras or cell phones or computers, as far as we know. Not even a car. They live in a very closed-off world. So having all that space and silence reinforces the emptiness of the world they live in.Jack: Let’s talk about the differences between writing on the page and screenwriting: Writing on the page depends on the reader to provide some interpretation of the text’s dialog and imagery, while film, being more concrete and visual, presents the image more straightforwardly and the viewer is a less “active” participant in the experience as a work of art. Do you agree with how I pose this?Dennis: Yes, that’s obviously the way I think about writing. The novels don’t create such a solid world that the readers feel like they’re just an observer, right? They participate. And what’s interesting about film is it’s the exact opposite. Because the film is very solid, it does take all the responsibility. We try to open that up, so that the film is obviously a carefully made object, but at the same time it feels very translucent. It’s not so locked down that the audience is casually observing. They have to pay a lot of attention. We just saw the new Wes Anderson film. I love his films, but they are the most extremely fascistically visualized films. There’s no way our films are so completely locked up. But I feel a certain kinship with what he does. We do angle for images and shots that are very highly composed. So it’s weird.Jack: What is the origin of Room Temperature’s setting of a family-made haunted house? Dennis, knowing your obsession with neighborhood haunted houses, it must come from you. You even make Halloween pilgrimages to Southern California to visit many haunted houses.Dennis: Both of us are massive fans of them, and we think of it as an art form. On the surface level it’s just a family having fun and trying to do something cool and make their haunted house better than the neighbors’. But they put so much effort into something that is always a failure on some level… because they don’t have enough funds or because it’s just them and their kids playing with the concept of a haunted house. I love the amateurism of that. All of our films so far have been about people who can’t achieve what they want to achieve. We tried to capture that in this case using the setting of a haunted house whose aspirations are higher than the family’s imaginations and budget can realize.Zac: Yeah. It’s a shared fantasy that the characters have. But it’s also the individual fantasy of each family member. One kid will be really into the acting and theatrical part of it, while another member of the family will be into the architecture and fog machines. In terms of narrative structure, home-haunts are daring and experimental by default. You enter the first room and there’s a pretty classic introduction video explaining the premise of the haunt, but then you go walk into the second room and somebody was obviously just really obsessed with the animatronic ghoul they saw at the Halloween store, so they bought five and decided to operate them out of synch, and it doesn’t really fit with the surface logic of the haunted house, but the conflagration of the two is really generative. The visitor going through this haunted house can project narrative meaning onto something that wasn’t necessarily built to accommodate it, at least not in any literal way, and that creates the kind of openness that we’re seeking to have in our films. Haunted houses are like films in that they use acting, writing, music, architecture... In Room Temperature the house is a setting and a character, but it’s also a kind of analog for the film. Jack: In fact, there’s much discussion among the characters about whether the haunted house is succeeding. One of the first lines in the film is an outside character asking, “What’s wrong with your house!”Dennis: Then he says, “I’m not against it.”Jack This seems like a statement on not just the artistic abilities of the families. It’s an observation that can extend to the father character, who is like the creative director. And there’s definitely something very “wrong” with him. Now, in addition to haunted houses, you two share an obsession with theme parks. Symbolically, thematically, what connects these two art forms?Dennis: In a dark ride, the experience is out of your control. The car is devising your pace and each passenger sees exactly the same thing. Whereas in a haunted house you can hang around or go look at details that intrigue you. It’s not like everybody’s constantly being propelled forward, but there is a unifying quality that makes it a haunted house. You know, the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland in California is not completely dissimilar. In an earlier version of our script there was a point where people got in a little car and experienced a section of the house that way. It was impractical and overly expensive to realize, but we were very excited by that concept.Zac: There used to be a haunted house called Mystic Motel that had a ride-through component. It was created by a 14- or 15-year-old kid who was obviously very ambitious and excited about the mechanics of dark rides. He used one of those electrified shopping carts designed for disabled people to navigate giant grocery stores. He had it follow a track in his basement and built a remote-control system so he could decide when it would stop and go, controlling your rhythm. Dennis: Some of the big cities in Europe, such as London or Amsterdam, have the London Dungeon or the Amsterdam Dungeon. That’s kind of a combo because you walk through it, and it’s obviously much more professional than a family haunted house. For instance, in the Amsterdam Dungeon, at the end you get on a roller coaster that takes you through the final section of experience.Jack: Dennis, you are familiar with Sabrina Tarasoff’s concept for her “Beyond Baroque” walk-through haunted house – in the “Made in L.A. 2020” biennial at the Huntington Museum in Los Angeles. It focused on your writing and mine and others from 1980s Los Angeles. And originally it was to be a dark ride. Sabrina wanted something close to what you were saying, Zac, where you get in a little car that follows a track. And later, she and I wrote a piece for your blog, Dennis, about theme parks where we discuss Disney’s invention of the Omnimover: a shell-like, encased ride vehicle that directs your experience. This is unlike, say, dark rides such as Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride where you can look all around. The Omnimover points and targets your vision and experience.Dennis: The Haunted Mansion uses those, right?Jack: Yes. They are named Doom Buggies. Now Disney and other theme parks have more sophisticated versions of this. I don’t know where I’m going with this question: I just want to use the word “Omnimover!”Zac: It’s a really good word.Jack: So, what are your feelings in retrospect about making Room Temperature?Dennis: It was an absolute and utter joy to make. Yes, it was exhausting. Sometimes on the set you were going until 5 o’clock in the morning. And it was often freezing cold. But we’re both very happy with the film. It’s not unlike what we hoped it would be when we wrote it. And the editing was a joy.Zac: Every time Dennis and I start a project, we set the level of ambition to a high point which we may or may not be able to achieve. This was much more ambitious than our previous films. And it was harder to produce for those reasons. But I think we managed to do what we set out to do.Jack: Another exciting yet subdued component of Room Temperature is the music. It is even more spare than the dialog. It appears only in very rare scenes. Who is the composer?Dennis: The music is by Puce Mary. In fact, the only pieces of music in Room Temperature are the sounds of the haunted house, created by Puce Mary, plus one song the character Andre (played by Charlie Nelson Jacobs) sings as part of the action. There is no music in the film other than that one song, the haunted house soundscapes by Puce Mary, and the end credits music.Zac: Dennis and I have been huge fans and admirers of Puce Mary forever. We have seen her perform live several times. She was our first collaborator on this film. She started drafting pieces of music – including the ghost sounds – maybe six years before we shot a single image. The song performed by Andre in the middle of the film is written and composed by Chris Olsen, who plays Paul the janitor. And the end credits music is a piece titled “Angel Shaving (L.A.S.E.R.)” by 7038634357, a really brilliant musician. Dennis: It’s important to our films that we don’t use music unless the characters hear the music as part of the action. That’s why there’s not a lot of music in them. It’s not because we don’t like music. We just believe scores are often manipulative. We are not going to dress-up the experience to make it more dramatic or sad or weird than it actually is for the characters.Jack: This certainly fits the vibe of the film. What’s next? Is there another collaboration in the works?Dennis: We are writing our next film right now. We have a meeting about it tomorrow. Jack: Yeah?Dennis: Yeah, and it’s good!

FOREVER by Spencer Lee

July 25, 2025

I’m sitting at the pool with the boys, listening to the gardener trim the hedges. The world right now is loud and whirring. When the gauze comes off, everything will be graceful and good. My surgeon’s a short man with steroid face–large, skeletal nostrils–but he has great taste in women’s faces. My face feels taut and ready for anything. Underneath the bandages, I swear that I’m smiling down at the boys. I lower my feet into the lukewarm water. The sun is injecting undulating crystals of white that look like ominous little spirits. Or Xanaxs. I wonder what my husband’s doing at work, likely sitting somewhere too: at a desk, a toilet. The boys are yelling, splashing each other, crying out. I get up and towel off my feet, before alerting the nanny to go make them a snack. Heading upstairs to reapply SPF to my limbs, I swallow myself up in the blunt white surfaces of my house. Avoiding the sun makes me feel a little purer, like I’m a kidnapped woman. Peace, quiet, and skincare.The gardener moves right under my window, whirring underneath me. I hear him stumble. The trimmer turns off, and he’s singing to himself. I think to myself that he must be drunk. Last month, there was an incident at the country club. I overheard ladies talking about it at the smoothie bar–a worker killed himself, accidentally, in some sort of construction accident, some sort of falling or impaling or crushing. One of the ladies said that she thought he was probably drunk, and that alcoholism is a disease and it is more omnipresent than we think. Her friends were not necessarily having it, so I went over and agreed with her. It’s actually an area of vulnerability for me. The hedge trimmer turns back on as I lay myself down onto my bed, bunions hurting. Against my will, I think of my parents' liquor cabinet, the largest one you’d ever seen, with the wood sanded down where it rubbed together on opening or slamming shut. I close my eyes and laugh to myself, pop an Ativan for the pain. I look inward. I let myself recount the story of my life through identities: plain schoolgirl, shy debutante, wife, Hollywood actress, wife again, mother. And then I think about my little sports-stars, little Nikes on, splashing away in the pool, and I think about the scalpel that nicked their heads during my C-section. The nanny raises her voice out the window–and I’m reminded of last week, when I got a call from the boys’ teacher, Miss Pappajohn. She had a lot to say. They don’t listen, they don’t relax. They’re doing things. To other kids, to small animals. They’re headstrong, they’re troubled, they’re suspended. When I look at the boys, all I see is a curious innocence. I have the wisdom to know that everything that they do wrong comes from the innocence of not knowing between right and wrong. But of course Miss Pappajohn can’t see that. She’s the one who creeps me out. She’s about my age and I haven’t heard her ever mention a family, or friends. She’s rude, always emailing at odd hours. I can tell her hair has never touched a lick of conditioner. Sometimes, Miss Pappajohn’s face pops up when I see chicken skin at the grocery store. I feel bad for the boys. They have to sit and watch her all day. I bet she keeps whiskey and limes in her dusty little desk drawer. She’s not a good girl. My boys are the innocent ones. Which is funny because of my thought, just now, that I was never really innocent–certainly not as an actress, no matter how approachable and commercial I was always told I looked. You know, that girl-next-door face can be stifling, especially when you’re sitting at home in your own living room and an agent comes by and tells you that you are actually next-door. But that’s what they want. And that’s why I got popular. They don’t want character actresses. They want you to be relatable. But now I’m not. I’m not that innocent girl. Yesterday, I went into my husband’s home office and shredded the letter I got from my mother. The stationary had these cartoon drawings of plump strawberries and yellow happy faces. She was asking for money, I think. She was not innocent either. At the present moment, I have a hard time seeing my parents’ faces; their disapproving features are dwarfed by our distance in space, in time. The mom was short and the dad was tall. Not rich, not poor. They hated me for leaving. I can only imagine them in motion, in fuzzy nonexistent home videos. They’re eating large ears of corn in these home videos. The corn gets in the way of precise detail. I saw on Instagram that hurt people hurt people. I thought it was stupid at first. But lying here alone, I don’t feel like I’m the real cause of anything bad. I guess maybe I can be innocent if I think hard enough. Everyone can be. All the men, too, even. Silent rooms filled with them, black bow ties and woody cologne. That’s not even what they wore or smelled like, but it’s how I picture them.#MeToo has supposedly changed the industry. Now, it’s young men who have to watch out for the gay power-players. I was glad to take this work hiatus to gather my bearings, get in touch with myself, with truth, and now even with my own innocence. Maybe I’m a good girl with good bones when it comes down to it. I notice a pinstripe of sunlight feeling up the walls, then, I watch it disappear as I close the gap in the curtains. The gardener looks up mysteriously at me as I do it. I know I need to deal with him. Suddenly, footsteps. I turn around. “Mommy?” the boys ask. They’ve padded behind me to my room, dripping all over the floors like twin slugs. “Hello,” I reply, slipping the little orange bottle from my palm to my bathrobe pocket.“He’s mad at you.” One points to the other. “Mad?” “He doesn’t want your face to change. He wants you to stay the same and never die.”“Oh, sweetie,” I look at the boys, who are both averting eye contact. “Me too. This is all to make sure that I look the same forever.” The boys liven up, imagining this world I’ve created where mothers don’t age. Smiling, they say that they’ll stop eating so they can never age too. I smile back. Their minds are cute little uncooked hamburgers that only I know how to handle correctly. They’ve known me to get Botox before, and they always hate it because I look different. I’ve misled them in my way, but that’s what mothers are there to do: keep up the illusion of Santa, of no ‘bad guys’ who come out in the night, of a world that’s going to keep running smoothly for the next 100 years, just for them. What they don’t know is that I have to do it. What they don’t know is that looking different can sometimes be the only way to stay the same. If I posture just right, I can make it seem like I always looked like this. Because my new face isn’t stalling for anyone, not even the boys. My new face will not be plain, because plainness invites people to think that you are just like them, when you are not. My new face will not be aged, because looking in the mirror at a wrinkly face fishes out the bloated, drowned corpse of the past and turns it over into the future, which you also do not want. It’ll be that unique kind of beauty that you can’t forget. Which is to say that I will look fake.I’m finally ready to admit that I’ve always been fake. That’s what people don’t get–I’ve always been fake. Things roll off of me. I’ve schemed my way through life. And I’ve proudly worn blinders, because seeing everything in great detail makes everything strange and sad. I don’t want to be sad. But it's all okay now. This new face will let me rest my heavy little mind. It'll get me in touch with innocence. I’ll be on the outside what I’ve always felt like on the inside and it will be my repentance. Lately, I’ve been even considering trying my hand at acting again. This time, I could really disappear—line by line, frame by frame, into a good role. Be ruined and dramatic for a bit. Cry and beg for my babies back. Give a real smile when they do come back. No more Hallmark. I take the boys back downstairs. The gardener is packing up–and a strange feeling that I could have been unaware of something makes me nervous, realizing that something curious about this image does not come together correctly. I’m shocked to feel as though I’m sinking and the world around me is enlarging like a bright ballooning tumour. I gather myself. I approach the gardener, ask if he needs anything–water, a snack. While he answers, I inspect his face for puffiness, yellowing, and I inspect his eyes, too, for wandering. He looks back at me, blankly, as I take my time. He looks fine. I’m glad to see it. Now, I don’t have to do anything anymore. I don’t want to. So, I’m sitting at the pool with the boys, watching the gardener exit stage left. The sun is shining. The boys are screaming, with joy, and the adhesive under my bandages has never felt so tight and secure. Emboldened, I raise my face to the sun in satisfaction. My life is intact and good.

SWIMMERS by Tobi Pledger

July 24, 2025

Doc Raeford lifted the tail and stepped back to avoid the torrent of steaming bull shit. After the last wink of the bull’s anus, he leaned forward and pushed the electroejaculator probe into the rectum, completing the docking maneuver.“Bull’s eye.” Mike would never have imagined that he’d enjoy helping a veterinarian anally penetrate a two-thousand-pound Angus bull, but he did.Raeford shrugged. “It’s a gift.”The bull resisted the intrusion, lunging forward, shoving his chest against the gate of the squeeze chute with a jolt. His nostrils flared, flecks of foamy mucus blowing out on the exhale. The Texas sun heated the black hide, releasing its animal scent.“How’s your wife?” Mike asked.“Good. She’s meeting her sister for a spa day. They’re doing goat yoga, then getting massaged with hot rocks.”“I’ve heard of the down dog, but not—”“This isn’t a position. It’s baby goats standing on your back. Supposed to be relaxing.”Raeford flicked the switch and the bull froze, legs locked straight, the only movement a twitch of skin over his shoulders.“Have you hired a new assistant for the clinic yet?” Sweat dripped from Mike’s chin onto the front of his khaki twill prison-issue shirt. He watched Raeford out of the corner of his eye.The bull sucked breath into his massive lungs and held it for almost five seconds, before releasing it in a snort as his abdominal muscles spasmed, and he ejaculated. Mike was right there with the collection tube.“Yep. He’s starting next week.” “Oh.” Mike tasted something metallic, bitter as an unripened persimmon. “Good deal.” It had been stupid to hope for anything different.Raeford pulled the ejaculator probe out of the bull. Mike removed the loving cup from the end of the collection tube and placed it carefully on the workbench.After pipetting a drop of semen onto a glass slide and studying it under the microscope for a couple of minutes, Doc Raeford said, “Morphology eighty percent, motility seventy percent.”Mike wrote the figures on the bull’s breeding soundness evaluation form. “He’s a keeper.”“Yep. Lots of swimmers.”“So, Doc, I’m getting out in three weeks. I’m going to miss working with you.”“I can speak with the parole board. They may argue for you to stay if I tell them what a big help you are.”“Oh, hell no. No, way.”“I’m messing with you, son.”Mike received the maximum sentence for being in possession of a smidge over two ounces of marijuana, likely because he’d refused to say who’d sold it to him. He smiled wistfully.Raeford palpated the bull’s scrotum and measured its circumference. He wrote the measurement down and gave a thumbs up to Mike, who pulled the lever releasing the head gate. The bull trotted out and was herded from the area by two trustees on horseback.The next bull had a higher body condition score but his sperm were sluggish, resulting in a motility score of only twenty percent. Despite being a handsome animal, he would not be kept for breeding. After the last of the bulls had been examined, Mike tidied the work area. He wiped off the electroejaculator and packed it, and the microscope, in their cases.Raeford sorted the evaluation forms by the bulls’ ear tag numbers. “That was a good day’s work. What do we have for next week?”“We’ll have several new litters of piglets needing iron shots, ear notching, and tail docking. And a batch of male piglets ready for castration.“The whole enchilada. That’ll keep us busy. Thanks for giving me a hand today.”“Yes, sir. Always happy to help.”

***

The following Wednesday, Mike had two tables set up in the farrowing barn, each with a large dog crate on top. One crate held a litter of piglets, the other was empty.Raeford pulled lidocaine, syringes, needles, a V-ear notcher, castration knife, brown glass bottles of iron dextran, and a jug of disinfectant from a black bag.Mike brought out the first piglet, cradling it gently in his calloused hands.“I’m back to square one with the search for an assistant.”Mike blinked and something fluttered in his stomach. “Why?”“The guy never showed up, and he’s not answering his phone. Maybe he got another job and isn’t courteous enough to tell me.” Mike stood mute as Raeford injected iron, punched divots out of the ear margins for identification, and nipped off the end of the piglet’s tail. He hugged the baby piglet to his chest and whispered in its ear before placing it into the empty crate. As he picked up another little one, his mind chewed over this new development. He took a deep breath and spoke fast, before he could change his mind. “Doc, would you consider letting me interview for the job?”Raeford frowned. “I thought you were going back to UPS?”“I’d rather work with animals.”“It probably doesn’t pay as much as UPS, but the job is yours if you want it.”It didn’t feel real. Mike didn’t want to ask but had to. “It’s not a problem, me being an ex-con?”Doc Raeford put down the tail nippers. “You’ve been my assistant for a year and you’re damn good at it. You treat the animals with compassion. I don’t give a good crap about anything else. You hear me?”“Yes, sir. Thank you.”“Now, let’s get going. It’s date night for me and the wife—she’s taking me to goat yoga.”

MUTUAL by Caroline Porter

July 21, 2025

Amelia-Rose followed first. She even had the audacity to message Francis afterwards, as if following real life acquaintances on Tumblr was normal. Hi Francis! It’s nice to see someone else who is as online as me lol. xoxo—AR Francis freaked, of course. She couldn’t picture Amelia-Rose as a fellow Columbiner, not even as one of the fangirls exclusively in it for horny reasons: the ones who posted crime scene photos of Eric’s body captioned idk hes kinda cute without his face, who posted drawings of a shirtless Dylan Klebold, passably rendered in ballpoint pen—not that Francis thought there was any respectability there, with those types of girls. Amelia-Rose’s blog was Lolita models and gifsets of the Sanrio characters and hard-jawed men who were stranded in a meadow of kawaii. Arrayed in tweed, they pinned squirming schoolgirls beneath them, besmirching their mahogany desks with statutory rape. Those posts were hashtagged with TCC.A multipurpose acronym, two types of girl. Read Francis’ way: True Crime Community. Turned on its head: Teacher Crush Community. Francis ignored Amelia-Rose’s message, but clicked the Follow Back! button. And so they were mutuals. A disclosure of degeneracy: I know you, yes, but you know me too.

***

In the hallways they passed each other like strangers. Francis saw Amelia-Rose exclusively through her peripheral vision. Amelia-Rose took on a diffused quality—pinks and yellows, like the kind of sunset Francis saw in the Sunoco parking-lot where she sometimes sat, cross-legged in a fug of cigarette smoke, on the automatic tire pump.What if I talked to her? Francis thought, but she couldn’t withstand the visual: Amelia-Rose, almost six feet tall with her childishly large hairbows; Francis, in a men’s leather trench coat that dragged across the linoleum floors.Despite this, Amelia-Rose liked her reblog of the boys mugging for the camera, liked her selfie in which she wore Eric’s mirror-lensed sunglasses, liked her 1000 word essay, a painfully comprehensive breakdown of a single line from Eric’s journal. What do you think about when you look at the sky at night, when there's no clouds out and you can see all the stars? Francis reblogged a text post: According to autopsy records, Eric’s heart weighed ten grams less than Dylan’s. Alone in her room, she cried. It was Eric she loved best, after all—his verbosity, his skinny limbs in a constant tap dance of agitation. The visibility of his desperation to be loved, like cracks of light shining through the roof of a condemned building. She shut her eyes and held her hands out, trying to feel the weight of a dead boy’s heart. Above her reblog, she added: when i read this, i cried for real.A message appeared in her inbox. Here if you ever want to talk about anything.She imagined telling her, all the trite things Amelia-Rose would say to try to convince her not to. And what advice could that girl offer? A teenage girl in love with her drama teacher. A girl who had answered, unabashed, the anonymous ask Francis had sent her—answered that her wildest fantasy was to be walking home from school in the pouring rain and see the familiar car on the street. To watch as it slowed, as the passenger window rolled down. To see deliberation play across his face, to watch the break in resolve in real time. To be offered a ride.

***

Do I dare disturb the universe? asked a poem Francis studied in AP English. Do I dare? Do I dare? came into her mind often. That intruding, shameful question. Time to turn back and descend the stair.

***

At night she would play through Eric’s Doom WADs. Bricks. KILLER. Hockey.wad. She liked to clear the level of all the demon hordes and then linger there, floating through that labyrinth he had created over twenty years ago. When she tried to sleep she would see the Doom HUD on the back of her eyelids. 50 ammo, 100% health, 0% armor. She dreamt a military-base maze, an endless turning of corners. Eyes shut, the eyeball flicking back and forth underneath the thin skin of her eyelid, searching for someone that was not there.

***

She did theater tech for the spring musical, Little Shop of Horrors. Amelia-Rose was Audrey. Francis watched from high above in the control booth as she sang her solo, a falsetto belt. I’m his December Bride. He’s Father, he knows best. It was a pity, Francis thought, that Amelia-Rose was so talented and still deemed unworthy of love. Francis trained the spotlight down on her, aim steady as Amelia-Rose danced across the stage. Afterwards when she went to smoke she found Amelia-Rose crouched behind the theater, her mascara in wet trails down her cheeks. Francis didn’t know what to say. As she lit up she watched Amelia-Rose out of the corner of her eye. Francis finished her cigarette in silence, crushing the butt under her combat boot.“Do you want to go to the mall?” Amelia-Rose asked suddenly.Francis had never been to the mall. She didn’t have a car and she wouldn’t have wanted to go even if she could get there. Still, she found herself nodding. Found herself saying, “Yeah, okay.”

***

At Southpoint Mall they threaded in and out of stores, compelled to buy nothing, touch nothing, barely speaking. They ended up on a bench behind the mall beside an abandoned fountain.“I guess we should go home,” Amelia-Rose said eventually.Francis nodded. She stared at the fountain. Inside were statues of children, cast in brass. They were disquieting, malformed, their mouths stretched into grimaces meant to be smiles, their teeth individually rendered. They were placed on raised platforms, and underneath them jets of water were supposed to spout up to give the illusion that they were being blasted into the sky, except someone had turned the jets off a long time ago. The fountain was infested with geese; they splashed in the water and leaked white shit through the children’s hair. What if I walked in? Francis thought. What if I did anything at all? The sun came down a parking-lot orange. A tree branch balanced in the open hands of one of the children. It was brittle and five feet tall. The end branched like a forked tongue thrust into the sky. “Do you ever feel scared to do literally anything?” Francis asked Amelia-Rose.“Sometimes it’s good to be scared,” Amelia-Rose said. After a pause, she continued, “It’s like—I made a move on him today. He was helping me do my makeup, blacking out my eye, and his hands were on my face—I grabbed them and held them against my lips. For a second he stayed there, and I thought maybe…” She looked down, fiddling with her bracelets. “He was nice about it—he said he would ignore it this one time.”Francis walked over to the fountain. When she grabbed the stick, it was almost too much sensation: dirt worming beneath her fingernails; the geese’s honks; the slippage of leaves underfoot; the smell of still water. She turned back to Amelia-Rose. She levelled the stick and looked down its barrel, composing the image just so. A face in the crosshairs. “I could kill him for you,” Francis said.Amelia-Rose laughed as if it were a joke. “You wouldn’t dare.”Francis thought: Watch me. Amelia-Rose grabbed the forked end and pulled. The stick cracked like a wishbone between them, the sound dry and startling. Around them the geese screamed, rose into the air, and fled.

LITTLE ARLO by Billy Irving

July 16, 2025

When she found the babe under her woodpile, it was October and already cold on the mountain. Poor thing shivering under the logs with skin blue and veiny. Eyes bulging and pupilless. She scooped it up and swaddled it in a quilt, one long ago rendered by her own knotted hands, and took care to tuck its thin limbs into the folds of the fabric. Thin limbs that twisted like corkscrew worms. She brought the thing into her cottage to warm by the fire and watched as the heat revived it, brought presence to its eyes, a look of health returning to its cheeks. But its skin remained blue. Its skin would remain blue always.She took right away to calling it—him—Little Arlo. Though there were no discernable parts, none that she could find anyway, she felt that the babe was male. She knew men well. And boys. Had been surrounded by them in a past life, a husband and sons. Isn’t that the nature of the world? To be surrounded by a husband, and sons? Men who were always lingering in her effortful recollections, always too high. The tease of a box on a shelf edge. A husband who melted away in startlingly few years, a hoary, coughing soup. And boys. Boys who were also blue, wore blue, wooly blue that became mud caked, and blood soaked. Artillery. Amputation. Consumption. Dry eyes that stared into the sky and would ask for nothing, plucked out by crows, turned to birthing pits for insects. Push that away because here is a child, lovely and innocent. Here is a child, new and yours. Child, who are you? What do you see?Little Arlo had no interest in bread or vegetables, nor what little salted meat there was, but when she opened a jar of rhubarb jam he began to squirm. She scooped it into his triangular mouth, and he sucked the syrup down and cooed. Black tongue wagged, and she obliged, nearly half the jar, and then the boy slipped into a deep sleep. So wonderful to listen to him breathe those long breaths like that. Her own sleep did not come so easily and had not for years. Intervals of unsatisfying beinglessness punctuated by terror, faceless men in the shadows, drumbeat haunts emanating from within the dry air of her cabin. And then, the ringing of church bells, always church bells. Gentle, impossible, far.In the morning, Old Lady Murray sat on the porch and smoked and oscillated on her rocker, swaddled infant in her arms, and watched across the treeless ridge as Mr. Dalton, the postman, trotted in from the direction of Nimbus, giving a loud “Ahoy,” and a “How do you do, Mrs. Murray? I’ve brought you some preserves,” and “What is that you’ve got in your arms there?”“My new babe, Little Arlo.”“Oh? A new babe, then. Little Arlo, then. That’s—how nice I suppose.”“What did you bring me?”“Oh, just some pear and apple preserves, and some bread and—oh, but perhaps I should have a look at Little Arlo? Just to—and where did you say he came from?”“Better to not. Better to just leave the things on the stoop there. And, well I found him outside under the woodpile. He had such a chill, oh, but he’s nearly convalesced now. A terrific appetite for rhubarb jam, and I’m sure he’ll like pear. My boys, you know my boys, how they loved—my boys, oh, oh, and Mr. Dalton, just leave the things on the stoop there, thank you so dearly!”Mr. Dalton obliged, accustomed to the widow’s occasional episodes, and rested the sack of groceries on the rough boards of her porch. Then, giving a little bow, he spun around and trotted back down the mountain path, tut-tutting and shaking his head, and such a shame, really. The woman having completely lost her senses. Changed from the pragmatic schoolteacher of his youth, that formidable manner, and always that soft generosity beneath. And, of course, remembering that day after the meeting in Appomattox, the boys marching back into town and her sons’ not among that procession of shineless eyes. And the supposed babe, just a bundle of straw? Or a bag of flour? Or maybe something, an animal, an injured opossum. I think I saw the swaddle move.

***

Sad intrigue can spread with epidemic ferocity through small mountain hamlets, especially when carried by the lips of an unabashed gossip. Consider the bed bug, whose colonies can multiply by orders of magnitude on a monthly basis. It was in this way that, over the course of remarkably few days, Mr. Dalton had cultivated a general awareness of Little Arlos’ presence within the town of Nimbus.Gossip. Mr. Dalton felt all right about gossip. He felt that it was his employ and currency, his special talent. Gossip was a little distasteful, yes, but only a little. After all, it was gossip that enabled his charitable visits to the old woman. It was through gossip that, besides a certain prideful, self-serving generosity, shopkeeps justified the handouts they provided on her behalf. Without the extraction, and exchange of gossip, what mail, what food, what human interaction would Mrs. Murray receive? Without gossip, there might be three generations of Little Arlos living in that cabin by now. And frankly, most days there was nothing for Mr. Dalton to report. A remarkably boring person, really, just smoking and rocking in toiled remembrance. A hollowed-out woman in a hollowed-out town, drained of its youth by the undertows of war and industry. Nimbus, the unadaptive. Nimbus, monument to obsolescence. Boom and bust. Vestigial limb of a world whose new language was coal— bituminous and anthracite—was rail, land-rights, incorporation. No space for your people and their bald mountain, their total depletion of hemlock, beech, maple, chestnut, now just black shale and grey sandstone, dramatic, exposed bedrock geometries, brittle cliffs that crumbled away into angular shards, pencil lead thin.The morning was just ending as Mr. Dalton returned to Old Lady Murray’s cottage. He stood for a long time and watched as she teetered forward and back and said nothing. Just a mutual watching. He was struck by the way she held the swaddled object to her chest, her ironic resemblance to the Virgin Mary. “Well, Mrs. Murray, did Little Arlo enjoy his preserves?”“Oh yes! You should have seen him suck it all down. So quick, rabbit quick!”“I’m sure. Say, why don’t you let me hold the wee babe?”“Better to not, Mr. Dalton. He’s asleep in my arms here. Better to let a growing boy sleep, don’t you think?”Mr. Dalton climbed the first steps to the porch, leaning in close. “How about you just pull the swaddle back a bit? I’d be so pleased to have a look at him.”“Don’t come close. You’ll wake the poor thing.”There was a suggestion of embarrassment, a subtle loss of confidence appearing in the wrinkles of his forehead. “Of course, pardon me,” he said, blinking hard. “Goodbye, Mrs. Murray, and take care now. I’ll be seeing you.” Following the mountain path back towards Nimbus, Mr. Dalton crooked his neck around for one last look at the woman. He watched her release a plume of white smoke, which formed a rolling puddle of milk caught in the gentle slope of her awning. Strange mother. Blessed Mother. Recall your own mother, the lines in her face, the way her body had once seemed a landscape. Knees like mountaintops, amazed by the whiteness of the scalp where her black hair parted. Her expansive kindness, without horizon. Her resilience in the face of embarrassing, petulant torments, masculinized rage, the way she protected you with that selfsame body. A body that eroded and became wan, and then just pebbles. Just pebbles and silt. Recall how you found the stony thing that had been your mother at the kitchen table. Recall how you felt relieved.

***

After Sunday worship, during the sharing of joys and concerns, Mr. Dalton stood and reported on certain alarming developments as they pertained to the Little Arlo situation. Most congregants, those vectors of gossip, were already familiar with the story of the so-called new babe, but hearing now how the old woman still clung to the delusion, how she still cared for the mysterious swaddle of indeterminate provenance, this was certainly distressing news. Mr. Dalton listed a number of considerations, chiefly, the health threat—should the swaddle contain an animal, even the carcass of one, the widow could be at risk of injury or infection. Otherwise, say a bag of flour or object of similar inertness, she may incur emotional or spiritual harm, poor woman on the brink as it was.“What if we threw a party?” Suggested Edith Wainbridge, as she often did. If you asked Edith, a party might solve any of life’s problems. “But here, let’s throw a party to celebrate the young babe. All that drink and merrymaking, the dancing, Mrs. Murray would show us. She’d simply have to show us.”It seemed to be a good idea, a way to get many eyes on the swaddle at once. With so many well-meaning supplicants, she’d have to pass the babe around. Right away they began adorning the walls of the adjoining social hall with blue paper streamers, made last minute preparations for cold supper foods and desserts, and diluted the dregs in their liquor bottles. As for the old woman who had not stepped foot in a church since the end of the war, Mr. Dalton tasked himself with relaying the invitation. Once again, climbing the disused summit path, he found her rocking with that swaddled infant in her arms. Sun beams filtered through the trees, then the slats of the awning, then fell upon her face, where a circle of pipe smoke portrayed an almost druidic look.“Oh Arlo, won’t that be fabulous?” She said after Mr. Dalton had disappeared back over the ridgeline. “An entire party in your honor. How befitting, how deserved! My beautiful infant, my wonderful savior.” And there he was, staring at nothing in particular, sphincteric mouth clamping hard around the wooden spoon, the heap of golden apple mush.

***

It had passed well into the evening and very perceptibly the time of night when partygoers begin thinking about their own beds. Jaunty music still filled the social hall, plucked out by the fat-fingered hands of John Miller and John MacLeod, but only Edith Wainbridge, by herself, still flatfooting and stomping on the wriggling boards. The few remaining slices of cake were collapsing on the tray, and the watery liquor was very nearly finished. But still, no one had glimpsed the child, Arlo, who was completely swaddled, not a patch exposed. Nothing could breathe in a swaddle like that. There was no stink either, no reek, but a strange odor if you got close. Something botanical, almost bitter. Not entirely unpleasant.Old Lady Murray remained at the center of it all, holding court from her folding wooden chair, humored through the night by the masses. She sat and told meandering, nothing stories that rushed apart and broke, tumbled over cliffs, formed logic eddies, loops of adoration for sons whom she described with increasingly blurry distinction. And still, the kernel of her former self was present tonight, present for the first time in years. That self-sacrificing woman, teacher of a one-room schoolhouse, mother for many. Mrs. Murray, who nourished her students with stories of a world which would never be theirs. One of great kings and prophets, mathematicians, inventors. Students, who would know only the lives of soldiers, the labor of serfs. Where there were gaps in her droning recollection, partygoers took turns descending upon the old woman, asking to hold the babe, to at least have a glimpse beneath the swaddle. “Better to not.” This was her refrain, without variation. Better for his face to be hers alone. His strange features, his blue flesh. To hold his writhing body, to caress his jawless chin, the undulations of the muscles beneath. Gravel through a hopper, a meager but steady stream of attendees bade farewell and departed, hiding their frustration. Mr. Dalton paced. He noticed the spiral of the party, the unspoken, shared desire to end the night. He held onto one final gambit. It had occurred to him days ago, a means to retrieve Little Arlo, to detain and inspect the swaddled object. But a cruel means. Or at least the aesthetic of cruelty, but beneath that it was genuine, kind-hearted concern. Her wellbeing at the forefront of all things. Yes, this was Mr. Dalton’s intention, the old woman’s wellbeing. Good intentions and, in the end, a good outcome. He was counting on a good outcome. Concern for the old woman’s wellbeing. Genuine, real concern. And curiosity? The desire to know? To see? Admit it, how often you think about her all alone in that sad cottage, just memories, and cloying dreams. Phantoms are real in a place like that. You know all about phantoms, don’t you? Recall your own mother, the whispers in the wind that you can still hear. Didn’t you let your own mother down? The surrogate whom you call Old Lady Murray, the care-drive of a son transposed. To help her. To bring her back. To gawk. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? You voyeur, you pervert. No, no. Genuine concern. Care. Righteous intent. These are the things that matter. These are the truths at the root of your being, the goodness there, the generosity and charity. These are the things you know to be true about yourself. You need these things to be true about yourself.The drunken music faltered now and went quiet. Mr. Dalton looked up. The crowd had thinned, only a handful of supplicants remaining, the most zealous disciples of morbid fascination. The candles flickering in their puddled, dwarfed stumps. The waning of the grey light filtering through thick window glass and the weakening definition of the clouds beyond, which had become a single, soft sheet. And Old Lady Murray, clearly on her way out, moving across the boards towards him, curtsying to the well-wishers as she went. “Mr. Dalton, I think it’s about time for me to be headed home. It’s Little Arlo, you see, the babe needs his rest. And I’m feeling a bit tired myself, to tell the truth.”“I see. Well, come then, let’s walk you back.”“Thank you, but there’s no need. We can manage.”“I insist, allow me to walk you.”“Little Arlo and I can get by on our own. Isn’t that right, wee one?”“Ah, but please just wait a second,” Mr. Dalton said. “I was thinking about the war, you see, remember the war? Yes, yes, of course. See, it just occurred to me, it just hit me suddenly, you see—and I hadn’t realized it when you asked before, all those years ago—but actually, I woke up this morning with the pang of a memory that, yes—yes, I did see your boys. I did know them. We were comrades, don’t you see?”“My boys?”“Yes, I remember them, three of them, yes? I remember that they always asked after their mother. They worried about you, Mrs. Murray, and they always said how lucky they were to be your sons.”“Oh—”“And they asked me to take care of her, should anything happen to them. And something did happen to them, didn’t it? To each of them.”“Oh, my boys. My boys—” Old Lady Murray swayed and gazed miles away, out beyond the plastered walls of the social hall. Out to where her boys might be. Three of them. She saw them face down in the mud, no bubbles blown into opaque, grey puddles. No more holding them, no more feeling the weight of their heads in her lap, comforting them on a journey to a place that did not exist. I cannot hold you. I cannot throw a party—no parties for you, ever. No weddings. Boys in their blue uniforms with shining brass buttons, their eyes which had once been the eyes of children. To hold your heads, to feel the weight of you, to see your faces again. Never. Not since their farewell waves from half-opened train car windows. Not since the plumes of black smoke, white steam shooting geyser-like from heavy, sooty locomotive wheels. The cold, awesome machinery that rotated them around and around again.The old woman took on a look of syncope and crumpled into a nearby chair, still holding Little Arlo, pulling the swaddled infant inwards. The few remaining partygoers fluttered paper fans in her face, held tins of diluted whiskey to her lips. “Oh, pass me the child,” said Edith Wainbridge, leaning in beside her. “Give Little Arlo to me, Mrs. Murray, before you drop him.” Her aching arms suddenly unburdened, the swaddled object lifted up out her lap, empty fingers curling around nothing, pale eyes held shut, wet-lidded.Edith brought the bundle up into her own chest and was surprised by the heft of the thing. Certainly not just a roll of fabric. Too heavy, it seemed, for even an opossum. She felt a definitive movement within the swaddle, a subtle throb and an occasional twitch. There was something alive in here. The remaining partygoers closed in around her, many hands outstretched, many eyes wide and searching. It struck Edith now, a stab of frightening consideration, that this may indeed be a child. And then, with haunting clarity, she noticed that she was rocking the swaddle, gently bouncing it against her clavicle. Mr. Dalton met her confused, startled eyes and held his arms out, as if the child were the sphere of Atlas, a titanic burden which he would accept without complaint. She passed—nearly tossed—the babe to him and then took a seat beside Old Lady Murray, almost as pale herself now. The onlookers shifted their focus to Mr. Dalton as he unwrapped the quilted pupa. How strange to peel back so many layers and then to keep going, the fabric growing damper, more yellowed as he approached its center. And then that smell, at once acrid and appealing, it caused a tingling in his sinuses.Outside, the early evening became dusk. Crepuscular animals stirred in the forested valleys below. But up here on the bald mountain carved up like a rotten molar, up here it was stone silent. Up here, twilight seemed to last for hours—darker than midnight, when the moon casts its image upon all things. Up here, where there was no shade. A century from now, dark nights would be rarer still, but by then, Nimbus would be a ghost. Its buildings devoured by the first pioneer species of ecological succession. The families who had nested in its once lamp-lit homes, long since dispersed and integrated into the larger cities of the region: Charleston, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Huntington, Cincinnati. The last few layers of swaddling were oil-slick and stuck to themselves, audibly peeling away from the surface beneath. Mr. Dalton was the first to see the babe, its bald, blue head, elongate and ambiguous. The sphincter of its mouth, clenching and unclenching. Its huge, dark eyes that reflected but did not blink. And arms, delicate arms. A number of thin arms, but which number? More than two. They twisted and reached, one of them winding around Mr. Dalton’s wrist, an immense strength apparent despite how slender, how gentle. “My Lord! Wha—God, what is it?”He dropped the thing to the floor with a wet thud, where it made the first sound anyone had heard from it. A sound like a puppy’s sigh, more a whimper than a whine. And then silence again. Deep silence. The small crowd of supplicants staring dumb-eyed, something breaking within each of them, something long fermenting at the center of it all, suppressed by the decades of politeness and boredom. They shrieked and pointed, some of them fainting. It was in this commotion that Old Lady Murray awoke, slowly habituating to consciousness, and then upon seeing her child on the ground, leaped up with a throaty, glottal yelp. A mother’s yelp. She dove forward and hefted the child over her shoulder, bounding out into the twilight, heavy double doors swinging shut behind her. Then just the crowd standing baffled, lingering with confused, dumb eyes, the terror of a deer on the interstate. Some of them mumbling, some of them shutting their eyes and shaking their heads.What words are there to describe that which cannot exist? Mr. Dalton was the first to capture and transform the horror—the first to reach desperately for rage. For violence. “Get it! Devil! Get—God, stop!” his voice buzzed in a new, tinny register. “Go get her! Stop her! Devil!” He pushed through the herd and pulled an oil lamp from the wall, sprinting out after the old woman, the others following quickly behind. They armed themselves however they could, cutlery, long-handled collection baskets, heavy-bound hymnals, bottles, their own pocketknives. They ran out into the dusty streets after the old woman. Only Edith Wainbridge remained, locked to her seat.

***

Follow her past the tavern and up the slope of the bald summit. The vision-fade of twilight, the lactic burn, the stiff and frightening arthritic pangs. Little Arlo clings to her now, blank eyes full of knowing, mouth opening and closing in mollusk fashion. “Hold onto me child, you won’t be harmed. I will not let them. Lord knows they will not lay a finger upon you.” And the jeering mob closing in behind, the cloud churning up beneath their footfalls, their mean noises. “Hold on, Little Arlo, cling tight to Momma,” her words spitting out between laborious pants. “They are the devils and you, an angel.” She rushes past her cottage and continues to the other side of the summit, where she hears faint bells ringing out in the gloaming. A soft chime and deeper, brassy harmonies.The mob gains and corners her against the mountain’s far-facing flank, just the steep valley beneath. They form a wide line and choke in, no choice for her but to descend the harsh slope. She has trouble with the steepness of it, the breakaway shale beneath her feet. Her gown catches on a pathetic hemlock fledgling and she comes down hard on her knees, cries out, but does not drop Little Arlo. She does not even flinch to catch herself, arms in a firm cradle as she tumbles end-over-end, rolling down the talus until she crashes against a sandstone boulder. A phosphene flash in her vision as something—many somethings—shatter within. The feeling of warmth beneath skin. “Help her!” Shouts Mr. Dalton, “Get away from it!” The mob clamors down the slope, shards of loose stone bunching up in mounds beneath their feet, the talus spilling down and burying her bloodied legs, pebbles bouncing up into her face. And all through the hurt, the old woman smiles at her child. Little Arlo, still unharmed. Little Arlo, still protected. “Take me to them, Little Arlo. Take me away, please, you angel, you divine thing. If my boys are somewhere, please take me to them. Please, you’ve been there, you’ve seen them, I can tell by the look in your eye. If they are nowhere, I’d rather be nowhere. But they are somewhere, aren’t they? What place is it? Tell me, is it the place where you’re from? I’m not your mother, I know that. I’m not your mother, but I could be. I could show you what it is to have a mother, to have brothers, to be held, to be worried. Please. I’m ready now.”The child does not nod, but closes his eyes, becomes a mess of limbs that stretch out and wrap themselves around the woman. Her arms and legs now bound in blue helixes. The crowd watching in gape-mouthed horror as the child encompasses and subsumes her. Kudzu on a maple tree, the union of two beings. The old woman then rises to her feet as Little Arlo stands up on her behalf, walks for her, moves each of her limbs in his own. He turns her around and sprints down the slope at a full gallop.“My God!” cries Mr. Dalton. “My Lord, God Almighty!” He has no other language for this. His ears ring, a tightness at the base of his neck, blood rushing past his temples. He’s heard stories from the war, strange lights in the night, wounded bodies that emit a green glow and are healed, but nothing like this. His head pounds and his body trembles, shaking without his permission—an angry body with a frothing mouth—the reptile inside him cursing and yelling, grieving for itself. And beneath it all, genuine concern. Genuine guilt. An expanding thought loop that would not cease until his death three years later. The distinctions of memory collapsing, subjects losing their referents. There is a gestalt that precipitates from this soup of recollection: the woman who raised him, the woman who taught him, the woman who bore God. His mouth hangs open as he cries out, “Mother!” “Little Arlo,” says Old Lady Murray, her voice weak now. “I’m ready,” and then her body goes limp inside his. She is carried down the mountain at panicked speeds, eyes closed, smiling, listening to the bells that are so much louder now. The same bells she has heard each night for the last forty years, but never so loud, never so clear as this. And something else, too, something so quiet, interpolated over the percussion. Something like the voices of young men. No words. Only meaning. Little Arlo carries the old woman into a small cave, nestled beneath a curving, gable-like syncline that is etched with glimmering veins of quartzite. Nobody watching as mother and child disappear into the mouth of the Earth. Then there is a sharp green flash and a sound like thunder. Stones break and crash down, burying the entrance. No more cave, no trace ever found.

***

Unseen by anyone out in the deep night, out in the forested isolates that pen the river in, there is a heap of refuse where the waters meet a bend and regurgitate their burden. Here, an opossum searches for her meal. It is bleak, hard winter, when the insects are buried, and berries do not fruit. She eats garbage, bones not stripped of their flesh, whatever smaller creatures have congregated here for the same purpose. She must eat well tonight. Her pouch drags against the ground, sagging under the weight of four babes. She must eat well.