Fiction

OUT OF JOINT by Miranda González

February 17, 2021

Edgar was a man with a peculiar malady. It wasn’t just that he had a voracious appetite for all things internet and a quick temper. No, it was that when he read something online that upset him, his nose became, quite literally, out of joint. Each time he furiously disagreed with a news article or a post from an opinionated relative, the cartilage of his nose would turn ever so slightly—imperceptibly—counter-clockwise.

The phenomenon seemed to begin following a particularly distressing piece of journalism about an out-of-state investor buying up his favorite Texas burger joint. (He could never enjoy his patty melt now, knowing that some suit in Chicago was profiting.) Over the course of the next several months, irritating digital content nudged Edgar’s nose along in its rotation: newspaper op-eds by unqualified authors, videos of senators pounding the table about the debt ceiling, and a downright unreasonable number of pet and baby photos.

The overall change had been so gradual that he, and even those in his neighborhood and the software development company where he worked, didn’t notice. Nobody had the habit of looking Edgar directly in the face, but some did observe that he sneezed more often and more loudly than the average person, especially if someone turned on a dusty ceiling fan. To his credit, he always carried a handkerchief and remembered to cover his blowholes when a fit struck.

Then, one day, just as mysteriously as it had begun, the nasal movement stopped. It could have been the article about the Iranian gasoline export to Venezuela—or the one on opera singers performing to an audience of plants. It might have been both. But whatever the case, Edgar’s nose locked in at a one-hundred-and-eighty degree angle from its congenital placement. There it inexplicably stayed, nostrils pointed at the sky. In the months that followed, the nose never again resumed its axial migration, no matter how many times his cousin Lily spammed his newsfeed with inflammatory Paul Rudd memes.

Edgar did notice that he was constantly battling sinus infections, but he could have sworn he had always suffered from them—particularly around cedar and oak season. It was his damned allergies to blame, of that he was sure, even though the skin prick test at the allergist had come out negative. So he found himself again and again at his general practitioners’ office.

Eventually, after prescribing yet another round of penicillin, Dr. Galgani spoke up.

“Listen, Edgar,” he said. “Your sinus problems could be solved by a rhinoplasty.”

Edgar nearly choked on his mucous backflow. “Are you suggesting I get a nose job, Doctor?”

The doctor squinted. “You do realize your nose has a, let’s call it, unusual orientation?”

“Unusual orientation!” Edgar shouted. He snatched the prescription from the doctor’s hand, stormed out, and drove to the pharmacy, snorting all the way. There he bought some overpriced yogurt and ate it sitting at the blood pressure machine while waiting for his medication. (The antibiotics always did a number on his intestines.)

At last, he made it home, orange bottle in hand. After dropping his keys on the hallway table, he flicked on the bathroom light. From every possible angle, he examined his nose in the mirror. It looked perhaps a little red, he thought. Shrugging, he grabbed a glass of water and swallowed his pills.

BURN THE SHIPS by John Darcy

February 12, 2021

The first scam was parking outside the bank, mobile-depositing a check, running inside to cash it with the teller. He dubbed it The Double Derring-Do. Loopholes find fault in failures of imagination. It’s about outsmarting, round-abouting.

Okay, he did end up with two years for wire fraud.

Watching a scumbag stoner conman movie, he whispers, “That’s not what it’s like.” On his computer are two hundred years of pirated movie soundtracks. He’s working his way through them. Also the first two acts of a five-act play, stellar dialogue but lacks compelling conflict. Policies in triplicate because it never hurts to be over-insured. A scanned draft of his last will and testament, the first line of which reads: I sure made a mess of this, didn’t I?

Never has he ever flown on airplane, seen ocean, met-cute, punched wall in heartbroke anger. Personal goals are fingers pointed at the moon. Mostly these days he feels recycled, amalgamed, trauma-tinged.

Lately he’s got this ache in his head like a cold front. He guesses the trouble began with his mother. Don’t even get him started on reincarnation.

He wants to get into the burning-down buildings for money business. There’s a word for it. His plan is to bring in a companion, accomplice, compatriot. Good listening skills are a must.

First interview:

“Name?”

“Man.”

“Pardon?”

“My name is Man.”

“Any interest in becoming partners in crime?”

“We’ll never make it out of this alive.”

“You mean life?” he asks Man. “I was under the impression that was part of the deal.”

Man looks lived-in, city-dwelled. Hair that’s airplane-mode yellow. Caution-tape eyes. Second thought it could be jaundice.

“Well, Man, the job is yours, man.”

“Anything else?”

“You wouldn’t happen to have anyone you could set me up with, would you?”

He wants to do stand-up comedy, open his tight-five with something along the lines of: What’s the deal with dads, am I right? See, my old man only had one hand. I know, right? He’d say, Well, on the one hand...

Still workshopping it.

The actual story is all dark and stormy night. The year is 1974, the sun a faded smile behind the clouds. Adopted Father is at his workbench, trying to construct a crib, thinking that if he builds said crib the universe will have to assent, agree, sort of just let him have a win for once. Upon hearing his wife yell through the house that, yes, no, seriously, this was it, the adoption had been approved, Adopted Father cuts his left hand off with a table saw. The amount of blood is simply tremendous. Looks more like low-budget slasher movie blood than hardcore realism blood. It spurts from his open wrist to the beat of his beating heart. His hand is inches from his forearm, the distance so small and simple that it crunches his brain. Adopted Father is reminded of the boardwalk carnival trick where a person’s hand and a prop hand are separated by a curtain as someone strokes the real hand with a feather, then comes down on the fake one with a hammer or mallet, and the game’s participant flinches and winces and retracts even though no contact was made with the real thing. Adopted Father is already getting phantom feelings. Woozy go the lights, the workbench and his body like a different body as a grayness comes over him, the fainting and the floor, and the pain begins a courtship with his limb, and sleep.

He draws up a contract for Man to keep things above board.

He says, “I did that New Year screw up on your contract. Earth to me, it’s not 2018 anymore.”

Man answers, “Life is attachment. Attachment is suffering. Life is suffering”

“But the food isn’t half bad.”

“Pointless bodies on a pointless rock, convinced we matter. Birth is a terminal disease.”

“Ever thought about therapy?” he asks. Man doesn’t answer. “Anyway, I did a strikethrough and initial. You’re supposed to on official things.”

Man says, “I want to burn something down.”

“Did you get a chance to read my play yet?”

“There’s a lot working but I want to know more about the main character.”

Meaning Man wants to know more about himself. The play being as it were autobiographical. A lip-smacking development.

They stroll the streets together. He tells himself take it easy or you’ll scare him off. The sun circles a Miller Lite sky, clouds made of gout and gauze and dust. He tells himself take it easy or you’ll scare him off.

He asks, “Do you want to be best friends?”

“I don’t see why not,” Man says.

“Cool. Yeah.”

Is there a word for something beyond happiness?

Man says, “Joy, rapture, bliss, death.”

They watch the fire all glue-eyed, the fall of Rome from nosebleed seats. First job for the duo came from the insurance company. Burn down abandoned warehouse before the owner does, please. Use lots of accelerant to prompt investigation, if you would. Pay out claim denied.

He asks Man, “Where do you see yourself in five years?”

The blaze sounds like a brass band. A crackling roll of popping joints. Boards of flame lick the walls outside, falling upward. Heat. Very smoky, very true.

“In this exact spot,” Man says. “Returning as a meditation on the flatness of time.”

“Me too,” he says. “I was going to say the exact same thing.”

“We’re really in it now,” Man says.

A brightly dark night, gray stars and the moon. The fire makes his headache go away like a cure.

“I meant to ask,” he says to Man, “do you have any hobbies?”

“Postponing my suicide.”

“Been thinking of getting into model airplanes myself.”

They move in together, balance the TV on a stack of pizza boxes. He says to Man, ‘I can’t help but notice you don’t have a bed.’

“I sleep in a coffin,” Man says. “As a reminder.”

“Don’t forget it’s your turn to do the dishes.”

“Where will we go from here?” Man asks.

He thinks about saying, well, we could soften up, find our way to the straight and hallowed narrow. We could throw on a movie, shovel down ice cream like the freezer’s busted. Start a band, get into birding, walk the streets and catcall catcallers. One hundred eighty degree ourselves. Decide to something or other, dust that hard-to-reach place. Floss more. Colorize our lives and come to a conclusion. Maybe this whole thing just isn’t for us. Or maybe we got the world we deserve.

CUTTING ROOM by Tex Gresham

February 10, 2021

The woods stopped being an enchanted place where the sound of animals scurrying through undiscovered territory felt light and natural. Sunlight blocked, trees strangling the brassy tones into a steel-tinged umber. A fluorescence coated every surface, something we’d walked into, a transition from scene to setting. Maybe it was the deer that brought this change––maybe it was something else. Limp and drained, the deer’s face was a shocked mask of deadness. Blood spumed out its crooked mouth like seafoam on the surf of a slaughterhouse floor.

I was a boy out hunting with his dad and uncle in the humid forests near the Gulf. Water alive with the exhalations of hidden gators, trees swaying with the weight of varmints. And the deer.

My uncle wrangled one off the four-wheeler, grunting from somewhere deep inside his rock-biting interior. The deer’s flesh slammed onto the ground, resonating up my legs. My dad stood behind me, his hands on my shoulder.

My uncle hunched down, pulled a six-foot knife from his pack. He looked back at me, a hideously hydrocephalic troll guarding its last desperate meal. His eyes rang like a hollow bell, inside them the history of Hell experienced on battlefields in tropical forests against unseen foreign boys. Fire gurgled from this deep place, ran the engine inside his hunter heart.

He said, “Come closer. Watch. This is how you do it.”

I shook my head. My dad gripped my shoulders tighter.

Before I could turn away, my uncle plunged the saw-toothed knife deep into the deer’s still-warm chest. Steam erupted like a hot pan under cold water. He jerked the knife down the deer’s chest and stomach. Not a surgeon’s incisions, but a demon’s jagged strike to kill the last victim before the end credits. The deer’s innards hissed and popped, tires over gravel. Hearty, long farting noises vibrated out of the messy slit my uncle carved in the deer’s skin. A charred-crimson mist refracting rainbow light rose from the cavity in the deer’s body, snaking its way up to my uncle’s nostrils. He breathed it in, dilating every cell in his body.

He said, “All the way to the asshole.”

And with a final tug, he ripped the knife through the asshole. Still-throbbing guts spilled out like groceries from a weak shopping bag. The innards were marbled with a white-pink oil that pulsed in time with my heartbeat.

My dad’s grip on my shoulders loosened. He turned away. I couldn’t.

My uncle plunged his hand into the cavity, sliding elbow deep, digging around with the sloppy, silly attitude of a drunk sailor. He smiled and yanked his hand out with a clothy rip. In his hand: the deer’s twitching heart. His gaping maw of a trash compactor mouth stretched open, jagged yellow teeth like crumbling tombstones stamped in his purple gums. And like a starved and stark-mad animal, he took a tearing bite out of the deer’s heart. Before chewing, another bite. A mouth full of bloody, tough flesh. Chewing, gnashing. Tendinous goo oozed down his chin.

From around the chewed up heart, he said, “Normalize killing your enemy.”

I turned to look back at my dad, but all I saw was his cowardly fleeting feet, his hunched back. Over the sound of my uncle’s smacking lips, I could hear my dad’s fearful, infantile breaths.

My uncle saw this and jumped up. His face pinched inward, eyes casting red rays that targeted my dad. He screamed, “Cowards will be punished and cleansed in blood.”

The rifle was in his hands, materialized by his surge of atavistic rage. Rooted out from his flesh like a tumorous appendage. The barrel focused on my fleeing father.

This is where the film skips, where the missing footage was spliced together with the footage still coded in my brain data.

The deer was no longer there. Maybe never was. In its place—in the stain of blood seeping into layers of fallen pine needles and loose sour dirt—was my dad’s body. My uncle tugged at the final remains of skin still clinging to the sinew and gristle and muscle of my dad’s body. The head a rotten pumpkin deflated under the rot of time, blown out. The white-pink oil coated the muscular flesh and fat that looked more like spread butter than body insulation. A whisper, carried by the fluorescences, by the oil, seeped into my brain. A scream of both the deer and my dad, of all the voices of those killed at the hands of my uncle––who tugged the remaining skin off my dad’s body with a primal grunt.

The skin whipped like clothes freshly wet from the washer. He swung my father’s husk around his head, flinging crimson, iron-smelling blood over the trees, the dirt, and me. He screamed, laughed. And his eyes targeted mine, his stare piercing my soul with a toxic heat. The skin flung back, wrapped around my uncle’s back. A shawl, a trophy. The footage skips again, spliced to reject the moments I cannot find in the cutting room floor of the mind.

Light fallen, the fluorescence oozing through the air, a grounded aurora giving everything a radiated glow. A bonfire roared, flames licking trunks, forming the faces of demons on the other side of some thin layer of reality, burning through this world, opening a portal, letting more of the fluorescence through. My uncle danced around the fire, naked but for my dad’s skin draped around him. Where my uncle’s bouncy, limp penis should’ve been was a gaping, oozing wound. He chewed on a handful of my dad’s teeth as he howled, his hollow eyes never severing their attachment to my soul, now eternally trapped in the void.

I looked into the abysmal dark outside the reach of the fire’s hellish glow. The fluorescence throbbed, oil slithering slickly on water’s surface. And on the other side, anything better than right here––if there was an other side. Maybe this is all there is. Maybe I live now in that place on the other side of the fire. Maybe there is no escape. Never was.

MOMENT by Chad Redden

February 8, 2021

A little raccoon, more sponsor than mascot, came with the moment, came down the tree. We waited below the tree, Ryan and me. Waited for the racoon that came with the moment, but it was a tall tree, it took some time. For the racoon. For the tree to grow that tall, how many years I cannot speculate. I cannot look at a tree and say how much time it took for a tree to grow. It took some time for the racoon to reach the ground. After a while Ryan had to leave, before the racoon could reach the ground. Ryan could not wait, he was due at work. The bakery department at the grocery store. “Those doughnuts aren’t going to pull themselves out of the freezer. Aren’t going to thaw themselves. Aren’t going to decorate themselves,” Ryan said. "It’s fine," I told him. "I’ll let the racoon know." I did. The racoon understood. I gave the racoon a little pink glass rock from an aquarium I had in my pocket. I stopped by an aquarium earlier in the day. It was on the sidewalk for free. All I took was a little pink glass rock. The racoon was thankful, spun the little pink glass rock around in their little racoon hands. Like a little cloud of cotton candy but shiny, glassy. I said, “I wish Ryan were here to see this, it’s joyful. Guys thawing out doughnuts don’t get a lot of joyful moments, they’re too busy decorating them.” Then I said to the racoon, “I don’t know if you know about doughnuts, but they tend to bring joy to the person eating them.” The racoon dropped the little pink glass rock, then picked it up, spun it around in their little racoon hands again. I said, “That’s alright, it’s fine, it’s yours, try again.”

SCAFFOLDING by Zac Smith

February 5, 2021

I went golfing. I hit the ball. It landed in the hole (=hole in one). I walked 227 yards to the green place where the hole was that the ball went in. I looked in the... the golf hole, the hole where the ball goes, where mine went. But I didn't see my ball. It was dark in the ball hole. I lay down on the green stuff around the ball hole, on my stomach, and put my face up to the hole. I thought maybe it was just really deep or something and I could reach in up to my elbow and get it. I remembered that was a thing some places, ball holes that were like a foot and a half deep for some reason. Someone was telling me about that once, at like a party in college maybe. I remember he leaned back and arced his hand up and then down in front of him with his eyes wide in a look of concentration, like he was reaching into a deep ball hole for his ball. I was thinking about his eyes when I saw a pair of eyes looking up at me from the golf hole. They seemed like a man's eyes, like a human man, not a racoon or anything, so, like, there was a guy was under the green zone, looking up at me through the ball hole. I could hear him breathing. We were really close to each other. It felt good but I was confused. I thought it was all dirt and rocks underneath the green stuff but I guessed I didn’t really have any good reason to believe that. I imagined a series of intricate tunnels, like, what's that stuff...with the railings... like outside of buildings under construction, or in space ships, like in tv shows... like, rails and platforms and stuff.. made of metal... I don’t know, that stuff, lots of it, like a facility under the green stuff, with guys walking around. I thought about him walking on these like sci-fi pathway things under the golf course, and thought, like, maybe the ball holes were vents, or something. It seemed really complex and I felt tired. He said something but I couldn't really hear. It sounded like "front edges", or something, but that didn't make any sense. I said, "What," and he said it again at the same volume. I was confused. I thought, Runt cages? Brunt ledges? I said "what" again, but he just sighed and slid this, like, little shutter or something over the bottom of the ball hole. The hole looked normal then, like small and normal. I wasn't sure whether to worry about my ball or not, if it was ok to leave it there, with the guy or whatever. I thought it was probably ok because I had other balls with me in my briefcase. I stood up and I realized the green zone was really wet. My shirt was completely soaked through.

TREES by Mordecai Martin

February 4, 2021

Sometimes the world falls away. Oh well! So long, World! I have a small house, though not so small that we would call it tiny. It's just a quiet little place where no one but the bank can throw us out, and where we can play host to some friends in need. I look outside my window at the tree shaking in the wind, and I think about it falling down, crashing through my door. I suppose this is what I am most afraid of in a world that has gone wild: that it will intrude upon the small, calm place I call home. The world's cruel sanity will come for my gentle madness.

Madness rules the day here. We stack the dishes willy nilly, and the glasses don't match—my wife insists on washing all the jam and pickle jars. We could drink out of them, she says. So we drink out of them, Baruch Hashem, there's still plenty to drink. We had some trouble with the water bill, but it's all cleared up now, I think. The liquor store doesn't deliver, a sensible if inconvenient policy, so we wander down the street and pick up our bottles and put them down when they are empty. It keeps the pain down if we keep our liquor down.

The other day a friend dropped by and said he wanted to talk about Jewish writing. Very well then, I said, what is there to talk about Jewish writing? I was suspicious because I've known this friend some time, I know when he's hot under the collar about something, and that day, I could have put a kettle on his collarbone and gotten a nice cup of tea going. Well, you're a Jewish writer, he said. Well, I'm a Jew and a writer, I demurred.

Cut the bullshit, Joe, he said, you're a Jewish writer and so am I and what are we going to do about all this?

All what, I asked, innocently enough, but with a sinking feeling that my tree had collapsed.

Cut the bullshit, Joe, all this! He pointed out the window, and I suppose, in a gesture he considered sweeping, to the wide world of horrors.

I shrugged. I can't deny that something needs to be done. But what should we do? I asked my friend. What can we do but write?

But we're JEWISH writers, he insisted. And how are we going to write about this?

I gave it some thought.

Eventually, I spoke up and said, there's a story Rebbe Nachman of Breslau wrote about the son of a sage who can't walk but can stand. That is, the son can't walk but can stand. The sage—

Joe, my friend said, with a less than patient air.

No, listen, I said. The sage is dying. He gathers the son who can't walk but can stand and his brothers and tells them, on his deathbed, that they must water all trees, all the days of their life, whatever else they do. So the brothers go out, they send money back home to their disabled brother. I mean, the story says "crippled" but I don't like that word.

Joe, c'mon, I'm trying to ask for your thoughts.

I looked at my friend a while. He can be impatient with stories from my yeshiva days, like a lot of the friends I have. They'll say, Joe, you're preaching, talk to me, don't preach. And they have a point.

Okay, I shrug. The point is, this son who can't walk, he goes on some adventures. These adventures are difficult to hold in my head, I always think of them as details, mystical details. But ultimately he finds a magical tree in a land of demons. The demons are an allegory for humanity, they squabble and fight. Eventually, the demons distract everyone from watering the magic tree. The world collapses, everyone's killed, and the tree gets watered. Do you see what I'm saying?

My friend was annoyed. Joe, I came over here to talk about the responsibilities of the Jewish writer in these times.

I said, I know, and that's why I told you that story. You know what the responsibility of the Jewish writer is? It is to remember the mystical details. It is to make strange prophecies from the deathbed of sages. It's to squabble and fight and fill time until the world collapses, at which point, it won't matter what we did.

We argued late into the night, but eventually my friend got an answer he liked and left, out into the sour darkness. I looked at my reflection in the dark square of my window and thought about a tree crashing through it. One day the world’s cruel sanity will come for my gentle madness. And the tree gets watered all the same.

ADULT CONTENT by Jamie Kahn

February 3, 2021

My tenth grade biology teacher is the first person to ever tell me that I look like [One Specific Porn Star], though he doesn’t really tell me in his own words. Instead, I inquire about his stares to friends in my class to no avail until one boy claims to have seen porn on his laptop during school hours.

“What does that have to do with me?” I ask.

He shows me a video during study hall. The resemblance is undeniable.

That night, I fall into the never-ending black hole of videos featuring [One Specific Porn Star]. I see the resemblance from every angle. Periodically, I stop watching her videos to look at my own face in the mirror and go right back to watching again. I stay up all night like this.

The next morning I am tired but even with the bags under my eyes I see nothing but [One Specific Porn Star] when I look in the mirror. I go to class and when my biology teacher hands back my test I avoid touching his hand. I consider for a moment what would happen if I asked him about the porn on his laptop. Would he break down and cry? Beg for forgiveness? Deny everything? Or try to bend me over his desk?

For the rest of the semester I don’t raise my hand and when he rearranges the seats I get the urge to spit on his shoes when he places me right beside his desk. I don’t study for his class. I get a D and am kicked out of the honors program, though I am sure to know just enough material not to get an F. Re-taking the class would mean seeing him again.

I watch [One Specific Porn Star] so often that she is all I see when I see myself. I am both elated and despairing. What better thing for my teenage self esteem than the knowledge that thousands of people—maybe more—would get off on watching me have sex. But something about it feels imposing. Like a windstorm about to erupt into a tropical rain or a kitchen timer I know will scare me. I try to enjoy being beautiful.

The second time I am told that I look like [One Specific Porn Star] is a bit more direct. I’m nineteen and working at an organic restaurant and juice bar. I’m busy, sweaty, with strawberry and avocado stains drying into the fabric of my shirt.

There is a girl who can’t be much younger than I am and when she gets to the counter to order she pauses in stunned silence for a moment. Her voice stalls like she is studying the menu but her eyes study my body and face instead. “Can I get the blueberry mango smoothie?” Her words sound nervous, like they’re floating on the surface of foaming saltwater.

“Apple or orange juice?”

When I am done blending and hand her the smoothie, she takes a sip and asks quietly, “Is it rude to ask you why you work here?”

“I work here because it’s my job. I need money to live and I like juice.” I try my best to express my confusion but in response I appear to have confused the girl even more.

She whispers a little lower, “Aren’t you [One Specific Porn Star]?” For a moment, I consider saying yes, just to see what it would be like. To see what she would say. “How did you start? Like, what did you do to get into it? Did you know someone?”

When I realize she wants advice I can’t give her, I shake my head and say “Sorry, that’s not me. Good luck, though.” And go back to slicing pineapple on the counter. The juice sticks on my palms, and the girl lingers for a moment. She looks at me like she’s trying to crack my skull open like a walnut. She thinks I am lying. I let her.

The third time I am told that I look like [One Specific Porn Star] it is more like a confessional. I still work at the juice bar, which is where I meet my boyfriend. He comes in all the time, and after we start dating he stops coming in and admits he likes me much more than the juice and the salad wraps. I don’t mind. If given the choice I, too would say I like him more than juice and salad wraps.

He is kind to me. He has light brown hair and a scar on his shoulder from a dog bite. He likes cashews. He has a crystal and rock collection. He likes baseball shirts, though he doesn’t care for baseball.

Together, we wake up early for lake day trips and do Pilates together. We plant hanging tomatoes on the balcony in his apartment because it gets more sunlight than my balcony. We try to make our own red wine blend and it fails miserably. He tells me he enjoys when I wear red lipstick but hates getting it on his face. He teaches me how to drive stick shift. We have sex roughly once a week, sometimes more if the mood calls. We date for seven months.

He is too nice to admit it outright, but I notice that he is bored with our sex life. Some days he is less bored than others, but when things become routine it is sometimes inevitable. This displeases me. I try a few things—blowing him in the middle of the living room, letting him lick whipped cream off my body even though I myself don’t like whipped cream—but they lose their novelty.

One night we are in my bed, swimming in my oatmeal-colored sheets. I kiss his cheek, his neck, his chest. Make my way down. But he grabs by shoulder gently and says, “Hey, can I tell you something?”

“Of course.” I lay back beside him, afraid he is about to break things off with me.

“Honestly, when I first met you, the very first thing I noticed was than you look exactly like [One Specific Porn Star]. Do you know her? You probably don’t. She’s—”

“I know.” I haven’t heard her name out loud since that girl at the juice bar. I haven’t thought about her much since then. I never had to.

“Oh god, you think I’m a pervert. You probably think I’m such a dirtbag.” He gets a sour look on his face and buries his head into my shoulder.

“I don’t. I know what I look like,” I say.

“You’re prettier than her.”

I am not.

“Thanks,” I say.

“I just want you to know you’re prettier than her. You’re beautiful, okay? But I’ve always been into her videos. I used to watch her a ton before we got together.”

“Do you still?” I ask. “I don’t mind if you do.” I mean this. I can’t enforce constant power over his thoughts and desires.

“Recently. Yeah. I have. I’ve been getting back into her a lot.”

“And sleeping with me just isn’t the same?” I ask.

His eyes widen and he shakes his head. “That’s not what I meant at all.” Even in his dopey kindness, I can hell he is lying to save my feelings.

“Then what did you mean?” I ask, and silence follows. “What were you thinking would happen when you brought this up to me?”

He shakes his head and hides his face, and I touch a hand to his shoulder. Try to comfort him in the wake of something that I’m guessing should probably hurt me.

“I don’t know,” he says. And now I am the one who is silent. I rise from bed, and he does not try to argue. I rifle through my bag for my laptop, straining on too many tabs and blinking low battery. Slowly, I find her, for the first time in years. Her face shines sweaty as she bounces on top of some man who doesn’t matter. I turn the volume up and follow her lead.

My boyfriend’s eyes are glued to her, and what’s more—my eyes are glued to her. In this moment, I feel like a little girl staring at the grown woman version of herself, and I wonder if it will always be this way. I tilt my head back and catch the mirror. He is still looking at the screen.

THE CONSTELLATIONS OF YOUR BEDROOM by Chris Vanjonack

February 1, 2021

After stumbling drunk into your bedroom, crawling onto your twin-sized mattress, and wrapping yourself in dirty bedsheets, you find that you are staring into oblivion. You can see the stars, the moon, and an airplane, each obscured only somewhat due to the haze of neon lights surrounding your apartment. The air is cold and you are so overwhelmed by your hour-old breakup on the dancefloor of a crowded dive bar that it takes you longer than it should to process what would otherwise be obvious:

Your ceiling is gone.

Still sad about your ex, you rack your brain for how this could have happened. Might this be some twisted act of vengeance by your former significant other—to literally take the roof off from over you? To expose you to the elements? To leave you cold?

After a moment of fevered rage, you realize that your newest ex probably hasn’t even deleted you on Facebook yet, much less orchestrated the removal of your bedroom ceiling.

You ask yourself: was your ceiling still here this afternoon, when you awoke at 1:35pm, already over a half-hour late to a lunch date with your ex’s family? Was it still here at 3:17pm, when you remembered that you had missed lunch entirely? What about 3:41pm, when you called to apologize, and—although you sensed a tone of resigned exasperation—managed to convince the lips you knew so well to surrender an, “I’ll be there,” on the subject of joining you and your buddies for a wild night of bar hopping? And what about when you left at 10:15pm, late again for no real reason other than that you were really into an episode of Ghost Hunters?

Of course it was. It was still here this evening, this afternoon, this morning, yesterday, the day before yesterday, the day before that, etc. etc. etc.

It’s funny: for such an ever-present figure in your life, you can remember very few specifics about your missing ceiling. In the three years you have lived in that bedroom, you have spent almost no time at all considering it. If you were to call the cops to report a missing ceiling, what might you even say about it? Could you speak to its exact dimensions? To its shade of gray? To the consistency of its paint job? To its history? To its character? To its hopes? Dreams? Regrets? Fears? To its belief in the unknown?

You could not; you never asked.

In the distance there is a strike of lightning, a crack of thunder, and a moment later, thick, powerful bursts of rain descend from above. The wet seeps through your blanket and to your bones. You shiver and try to curl up inside yourself.

This shit never used to happen when the ceiling was here.

Pathetic, drunk, missing your ceiling and longing for warmth, you cannot help but whimper, “I’m sorry I never appreciated you,” your voice so weak that you barely hear it. “Please come back,” you say. “I’ll start taking note of you. I’ll say hello when I wake up. Goodnight, when I go to bed. I’ll stick glow-in-the-dark stars against your surface. When the lights go off you’ll look like the solar system.”

Another crash of thunder shakes your bed frame, and, impossibly, the rain comes down even harder. Your carpet is ruined. Your things are ruined. The night is long.

When you crawl out of your soaking bed the next morning, your ceiling is still absent. You take a hot shower and put on a damp t-shirt and go into town to purchase new bedsheets and a tarp. At the bus stop, you run into an old acquaintance. The exchange is pleasant but she looks distracted.

“My ceiling left last night,” she says, finally. “One minute it was there and then the next—poof—no more ceiling.”

“I thought I was the only one,” you say.

An old man sitting on the bench looks up from his paper. “Haven’t you heard?” he asks. “It’s happening everywhere.” His voice trails off as he scans his newspaper and coughs. “They’re calling it curious,” he says, “the scientists. They’re saying we didn’t love them enough.”

You resolve to start appreciating your floorboards. Once you get home you tell them what a great job they’re doing—how important they are to your sense of security.

“Thanks for being here,” you say. “Thanks for holding me up.”

The gesture of acknowledgment becomes a twice-daily ritual. You recite this gratitude every morning. Every night. Even when you’re exhausted. Even when you’re down, drunk and depressed. Even when the weather outside is so chaotic that the elements threaten to pummel and soak you until your skin is raw, until you are nothing but the sum of all your thank-yous.

JUNE by Rosella Birgy

January 29, 2021

The lady who owns the condo keeps a bonsai tree that she regularly forgets to water. She wears an ankle bracelet and her best friend is a nineteen-year-old boy who “works” maintenance for the complex in the summer in exchange for a living space that’s not with his parents. His father is a no feelings kind of guy and his mother hasn’t stopped taking Valium in the three years since his older brother died in a car crash and he doesn’t know if college “is for him,” the lady writes us in her letter of instructions for general upkeep of the condo.

“There’s a six-pack of beer in the fridge for him,” she says, “if he stops by. His name is Jack and he has a key but he’ll probably knock anyway.”

Somehow, these small facts do little to reaffirm the sense of grandeur which we may have wrongly assigned this first family vacation. My parents have no intention of cracking open a cold one with an underage kid in the way that a lonely, forty-some, Floridian woman apparently would.

My mother doesn’t feel great about the aforementioned young man having a key to our home for the next week so my dad calls up maintenance on the dial-up landline because cell service is routinely patchy. They send Jack over and he gets comfortable on the floral couch. Sand from his open-toed shoes leaks onto the floor—he is unapologetic.

“You understand we can’t give you the alcohol,” my dad says as Jack nonchalantly hands over his copy of our key.

“Yeah,” Jack says. “I feel ya.”

“You drink often?” My dad asks out of curiosity.

“I dunno,” Jack replies. “It’s not much fun without someone. I’d come over once in a while and have a drink with June. She’s a cool lady. You don’t meet a whole lot of folks like her. They get in your heart.” He thumps a fist to his chest like he’s making a heartbeat but it’s on the wrong side.

“Like a second mom,” my mother offers as if mothers are qualified by their ability to supply their kids with alcohol.

“No,” Jack says and nobody makes any more observations about the nature of the relationship.

My mother’s lips purse like a skinny pufferfish.

Immediately after Jack leaves, my parents each open a can of the beer. To my dismay, June’s fridge is empty except for the remaining four beer cans, a stick of margarine, and some equally unappealing tins of tuna fish. These, I feel, are representative of June and the condo’s personality.

It’s a strange little place. The view of the ocean is spectacular. A fat, cartoonish, clay statue man sits on the kitchen counter that is bizarre enough to make people lose their appetite. A glass mermaid perches on the back of the toilet. All the furniture is mismatched and the plastic covering on the couch makes it seem like this home is only temporary, not actually lived in. The plants—including the bonsai tree—wilt in the heat.

I try to imagine June here—somehow coaxing a meal out of the tins of tuna or lovingly dusting the furniture. I try to picture her watering an assortment of dead things. I can’t, as much as I try.

II.

June pours her can of beer into a glass because she has done this since she was fourteen and it makes her feel more mature—like a real woman. She ogles the foam as it deflates in the way that all cheap beer does. She has turned all the water in the fridge to beer, like a convenience store Jesus. She sits on the couch and her skin sticks to the plastic covering. She traces the floral pattern with her finger. Her own sweat disgusts her.

June thinks about the nice man from Pittsburgh with a job and a cookie-cutter house in a city with all four seasons and how he asked her to marry him. He would’ve made her mother very happy. June knew that the sun would give her premature wrinkles. No one between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-five deserved to live on a beach. You had to earn it at some point, which June never had considered herself to. A summer away—or longer if she felt particularly ambitious—would be penance.

June thinks about her birthday (in June, of course) and tries to remember how old she is. She thinks about the young maintenance boy and how much he deserves the beach and the heat and the sun and everything good under it and she does not.

She knows that she must leave. She takes an inventory of everything that matters to her and begins to write instructions for summer renters with a lease on bronzed bodies and saltwater pools.

~~Water the plants~~

Even she does not water the plants. She has never been nurturing towards anything that can’t hold up their side of a conversation. She starts again.

DUNHUANG, IN THE SUMMER by Jiaqi Kang

January 28, 2021

is beige and washed with soft, settled dust. It nests between sand dunes, two-tone hills that whistle and whisper at dusk, the breeze bringing mysterious dreams to those who sleep under its soupy night sky. My guests, pilgrims whose cotton shifts are streaked with the brown patterns of their journeys, spend the last of their silver on a bed and a meal in my inn. They are tired, worn, and bone-thin, but there is that momentary sense of relief in their eyes when they clap an ugly coin into my palm. I lead them to their cots and my husband ladles precious wine into their bowls; twice a year, he makes hard candies out of the sugar grains that have stuck to the bottoms of jars, and I hand them to the pilgrims’ children. “Ah—” I tease, holding the candy just out of reach. “Say, ‘Thank you, Mister Innkeeper!’” The parents smile as the toddlers’ fingers work to unwrap the treats. Inside the wrapping paper, my husband makes an inscription: a character from a sutra, painstakingly calligraphic and minuscule—just big enough to cast a spell. I don’t believe in these words anymore, but he does, and I adore him for his insistence on sewing whole sheets of sutras into our winter clothes so that they sometimes swish and crinkle when I do the morning chores.

Not that we need winter clothes here in the desert, but even after twelve winters—a full zodiac cycle—we haven’t shaken that habit of renewing ourselves for the start of each year. In the weeks before the spring festival, we sew them for each other, then exchange them over a rare feast of pork buns. It would shock our younger selves, the effort we put into every stitch and our miserly use of the cloth, but now that we’re poor, we pay more attention. In recent years, I have become worried that our annual gift-giving lacks fairness, that he has ruined his eyes copying our sutras by candlelight. I have offered to write my own, but he says it wouldn’t work—heathen that I am. It has taken me some time, but this summer, I have prepared an extra gift for him: his own sword.

When we’d left the world, he pretended not to mind leaving it behind—, he threw it nonchalantly into the Yangtze and didn’t look back. In that moment, I’d thought of that idiom, ke-zhou-qiu-jian, about the fool from the Warring States era who, instead of diving to retrieve his drowning sword, carved a mark onto the edge of the boat and said, This is where the sword fell. When we reach shore, I shall dive from here. They don’t say what happened to him afterwards. For what was a wuxia without his weapon? A martial artist without his art; a fool; a wastrel; an innkeeper, a cook—someone without a name hiding somewhere far off doing ordinary things that would never be told of over campfires across the jianghu. I’d thought of selling the sword, but my husband hadn’t wanted to draw attention with such a famous weapon.

He’d been right, as always: when, some years ago, I began to discreetly ask about the sword, it was too easy to track it down to some middle-class collector in the capital city with the audacity to admit visitors in exchange for an entry fee. The hard part was stealing it. I debated whether to reveal myself to one of our old friends, an imperial general, perhaps, who might remember what I did for him in the war, or instead to venture out on my own with some plausible cover story. In the end, it was one of the rare merchants at the inn who helped me secure the services of a rogue wuxia who could travel to the capital and back, no questions asked. All it took was a tumble in the hay with the merchant, under the watery eyes of our one wizened donkey. And money, of course; money all the time, the entirety of my secret savings as well as one of the two gold bars we hid under the kitchen floorboards, which my husband does not often check and which I will blame on a thieving pilgrim when he does find out.

Would a thief only steal half our gold? I must continue to work on the story, but it is hard to focus when all I can think of is the smile that will bloom on my husband’s face when I present him with the sword next week, the kind of pure and joyous smile that even he is unable to suppress, maybe even a smile with teeth! Or else I worry about the naked blade’s condition after having traveled such a distance—I could not afford the scabbard, which remains at the collector’s. I think we could go retrieve it together. We’ll shut the inn for a month or two, go on vacation for the first time; a kind of honeymoon. We could detour through Jiangnan, spy on those we left behind: our shifu, our sworn brothers and sisters who by now will have taken on disciples of their own, the teahouses where we eavesdropped on local gossip, and my husband’s grandfather, though perhaps he has died. Would it be too painful? I suppose that question is too far into the future, considering that we cannot afford to shut the inn. Business slows in the summer for reasons I still haven’t fully comprehended. Some days, there are so few guests that I am able to leave our hired girl in charge and accompany my husband to the market.

In town, we are careful not to walk too closely together. Everyone on the Silk Road has a secret, and people in Dunhuang don’t mind these things, but it also means that any tanned, forgettable face could be masking violence. The assumption, I think, is that we are brothers, and technically we are—brothers-in-arms, fellow disciples under one shifu. I don’t mind: it reminds me of our youth, when there was always this invisible hurricane that raged in the space between our bodies and into which we would throw everything we weren’t allowed to say or feel. Sometimes I miss those days, not because we were wealthy, but because of the back-and-forth of our dance, how precarious it all was, how miraculous, how heartbreaking. Everything was so new that I’d sometimes forget we were fighting a civil war; even in the midst of a battle, when across the melee in the corner of my eye I could watch him slash and parry, I’d felt so attuned to him, as though we were the only ones there, as though my hands weren’t full of someone else’s blood. I miss that, too, but I don’t tell my husband that I do: he’d made me promise, that day on the Yangtze, that we’d leave it all behind. I think he prefers Dunhuang, our inn, the lazy fog of sunlight, the spices and curiosities brought in from the West, the foreign languages that he practices with the street sellers. The callouses on his hands have faded; instead, he has little cuts here and there from the cleaver brought down too fast or too hard.

Today, a week before the wuxia arrives in Dunhuang with the gift, the sunset sends rays of glimmering pink clouds across the sky, and my husband stops by a Persian carpet-seller to feel the soft weave on the tapestries. I am admiring the way that his face, bathed in golden light, seems to be chiseled from the sand dunes that surround and cradle us when I am hit with a nauseating premonition and stumble a little. I steady myself against the merchant’s camel, which wavers its head, as if aware of my distress. It has suddenly occurred to me that my husband may not want his sword back at all, that I have made a terrible mistake; I have overreached, overstepped, overwhelmingly overstated—it is over. I imagine him trying and failing to hide his profound disappointment, turning his back to me as he rolls up his sleeves to knead more dough, the rise and fall of his silent shoulders. My husband is gripping my arm now, saying something with his low voice that I can’t make out—all I hear is the rush of blood in my ears and the fuzziness in my mouth. I am frozen, like that night on the battlefield so many years ago, an agony I’d forgotten. He leads me away from the crowd, into a quieter alley, and I start to calm down a little, I think. He leans against the wall next to me as my breathing slows. After some time, I shuffle closer, lean my head against his shoulder, touch his hand. He lets me.