Fiction

MAGNOLIA by Sarah Starr Murphy

November 1, 2021

The bumblebee swerves across the yard to a yellow daffodil. The bee clings to the flower’s face for an instant, then crawls on her abdomen into the cylinder of the corona, stretching her tongue towards the sweet nectar and flattening her last two legs behind like a puppy. She nuzzles in, wriggling. She backs out, clinging onto the rim with her four hind legs. Her front two legs wipe the pollen from her furry body. It falls in tiny but discernible chunks. She wipes her head a few more times, then buzzes off for the next flower.

The young boy runs through the grass, holding a plastic camel in one hand. He flops down on his stomach, weaves his camel through the grass. It’s in a standing pose, but its plastic legs are curved and uneven. The camel has one hump and a bridle. Its ears are back, fierce. The boy makes it charge through the tall strands of grass, right up to a dandelion heavy with blooms. He tips the camel’s face into the flower so that it can eat. The camel’s muzzle is yellow with pollen. The boy stands and runs away, galloping the camel in parabolas through the air.

The horse discovered that the gate to its paddock was unlocked. The woman had forgotten to latch it that morning. She had been in a hurry, currying his coat too roughly, her application of the hoof pick uneven. The horse had shifted and shivered his flanks, had snorted his discomfort. The woman had left, and he had followed her to the fence, grazed for a while. When he reached for a fresh piece of grass, the gate nudged open on his forelock. He wasted no time in stepping through. He smelled skunk cabbage trodden by deer in the adjacent vernal pool. The horse snorted, then trotted down the driveway.

The man was late for work. He poured his coffee from the single-serve coffee maker into a travel mug and set his house alarm. He locked the door, the deadbolt. He made a circuit from outside to ensure there were no open windows, no possible points of entry. He was a correctional officer; he could not be too careful. He walked to his small car, tried not to notice how it still smelled of last night’s takeout pizza. He rolled down the windows despite the cool air. The fact of his tardiness weighed down his foot on the pedal.

The bumblebee selects another daffodil, but this one has a short orange corona and she must cling to the rim with all six legs while she drinks. She gets drowsy on the nectar, rumbling from one flower to the next. She sees more bright yellow on the dark strip of driveway. Gluttony leads her there; she stretches her pollen-coated limbs.

The boy feels the bee land on his back, a thump on his vertebra, and he cranes his neck. He sees the bee with its big black eyes, its many stripes, and he shrieks. He abandons the camel on the driveway and runs, the bee clinging to his yellow t-shirt. His father, hearing the commotion, heads towards the door.

The horse reaches the road and hears a crash in the woods; the deer are returning to devour the orange-striped tulips in the woman’s garden. All the horse knows is danger. Adrenaline shoots down his long legs, rippling his chestnut coat. His hooves strike the pavement and he gallops, tearing down the street. Froth builds in his mouth. Sweat runs down his flanks. His hooves are together and apart, together and apart, the cacophony fierce and ancient. He sees something yellow up ahead.

The man reaches to adjust his radio, tired of the irritating jingle for the local dentist. He presses on the accelerator as the car climbs a small hill.

The father stands at the door and sees, improbably, a horse galloping from the left, a car speeding down the hill from the right. His heart ceases to beat and he cannot breathe to scream because he sees his son standing in the middle of the road, doing some kind of dance.

The boy sees the horse first. Its mane is flying, saliva is streaming from its mouth, and its hoofbeats shake the ground. He hears the engine next and turns to see a car crest the hill. The boy realizes that he is in the road. He will be in trouble. The boy feels the air stir as the car and horse fly towards him, and he pulls his arms in and wraps them around his body. He is perfectly still, and he closes his eyes.

The man sees the boy first: a spot of yellow. He curses and yanks the wheel to the right, driving straight through a barbed-wire fence. He sees the horse as he jerks across the bumpy field to a stop.

The horse is afraid of the yellow boy and the veering car, but all he knows is to run. He increases speed, hooves sparking, ribs heaving a fraction of an inch from the boy’s head as he thunders past.

The boy opens his eyes. He is alone in the road. He checks the back of his shirt. The bee is still there, and he feels a half-breath of panic, but before he can move, it lifts off and flies away. He wants his camel and tries to remember where he left it. Far away, he can hear men yelling.

The bee flies to the next yard, to a towering pink magnolia, queen of the neighborhood. The wind shifts. The man, the father, the boy, the bee, and even the slowing horse breathe in the magnolia’s musky perfume.

MALL MADNESS

October 31, 2021

Between 7th and 8th period, Becky tells us she can speak to the dead. She swears she can show us after school.

When she pulls the box from beneath her bed, we expect a ouija board. Instead, she produces Mall Madness, fun for ages eight to eighty. As she unfolds the board, it greets us. “Attention shoppers: There’s a clearance at the sunglasses boutique.”

The four of us gather cross-legged around the game, and Becky explains the rules. “Wait to ask your questions until it says your car lights are on and you must go to the parking lot, That’s our cue.”

“I guess this is better than getting locked in the Spirit Halloween,” S’tanael says, deflecting from his giddy exuberance.

That each of us has a dead person is well established. It was the impetus for (if not the substance of) our friendship. Each of us suspects with near-certainty that another of our number is The literal Devil. We suspect this bringer of death—the killer, if only indirectly, of someone we love—is the worst-kept secret at Cheverus Jesuit College Prep Elementary.

And none of us agrees about which of us it is.

We pick our players and color-coordinated credit cards. Somehow, without prompting, we all begin to chant in unison, and it feels more campfire kumbaya than anything spirit-led.

“Ready! Set! Shop!”

S’tanael’s buying everything. We start thinking: He’s the Devil. He’s killing it—the game—so maybe he could kill other stuff. Then again, Nate also seems to have maxed out one of his cards within minutes.

Downstairs, the movie Swamp Monsters rumbles. Becky’s stepdad’s doctor recommended he drink beer and watch Swamp Monsters on repeat if his back is ever gonna be up to truck driving again. It’s hard to concentrate on a question for our respective dead person with all the cinematic gurgling and roaring, not to mention that one of the group has just let one RIP.

“Eww, S’tanael!” Nate says and punches his shoulder.

“Smelt it, dealt it.” S’tanael shrugs.

We scream as the real source of the smell emerges from under the bed. Becky hisses at her ancient cat, Macavity, who hauls his scrawny body, his grey fur dull and matted, toward the game. Becky shoves the window sash aside, scoops up Macavity, and deposits him on the roof. She ignores his screech as she slams the window shut.

“That cat stinks of death,” S’tanael says.

“How would you know?” asks Nate, adjusting his glasses.

“Guys, quit it,” says Becky. “Get back to the game. You ready with your questions? I totally know what I’m gonna ask.”

Mall Madness finally makes the announcement we’ve all been waiting for. “Your car lights are on, and you must go to the parking lot.”

Perhaps today one of them will ask a question I want answered. “Which of you suppressed a smile when I ‘fell?’” “Which of you sat cotton-eyed at my funeral?” “Which of you is the Devil?”

Mall Madness won’t be ignored. “Attention all shoppers. Attention! Attention! Your car lights are on!”

The lights flicker. Becky gasps the way she gasped when my body hit the ground all those weeks ago.

That day, Becky needled me as I climbed the rotting tree in her backyard. “You can’t reach the top branch!” Despite her taunting, I found a knot in the trunk to place my foot. I felt certain it would hold me, and I wanted to rub it in her face when I grabbed that top branch. I put all my weight into it and slipped while reaching for the gnarled limb.

“Attention! What is your question?” Mall Madness insists. “Go to the parking lot. Attention. Your car lights are on. Ask me. Ask me. Your lights are on. Your lights are on.” Mall Madness gets stuck like scratched and skipping vinyl.

I remember the fall, the impact with the cold ground, the faces above me as I blinked my eyes for the last time.

Before anyone can give in to Mall Madness’s demands, a low yowl bleeds through the rickety window. Becky yanks it open, sticks her head out. "Macavity! Shut up!"

S’tanael reaches for Becky’s arm and says, “Get out of the way!”

Becky and McCavity slither back inside just as the window drops like a guillotine. Glass shatters everywhere. A small shard embeds itself in Becky’s forearm. In shock, she studies it but doesn’t attempt to pick it out.

“Where’s S’tanael?” asks Nate, voice quivering.

The whoosh of the October wind rushes in and fills the vacuum of silence. The creak of the last tree I ever climbed fills the room. Crack!

We stare wide-eyed, panting. Two cat ears rise from behind the discarded pizza box in the corner. Macavity’s eyes gleam. He witnessed it all that day, hidden in the fateful tree’s top branches, watching me fall to my death.

Thumping on the roof snatches our attention. Not the pitter-patter of an old cat’s paws, but the stomp-stomp-stomp of hellish hooves. A dark shape enters through the window. “Attention,” it growls.

The power fails. Becky whispers what we’re all thinking. “The Devil.”

“Yessss,” Macavity hisses, channeling the game. “There is a sale at S’tanael’s Soul Emporium.”

S’tanael staggers from a dark corner of the room. “Black Friday’s gonna be insane this year,” he says with a sneer. “And remember, Hell takes cash or credit. No layaways.”

TRAUMA SCOUTS OF AMERICA by Joe Kapitan

October 29, 2021

For the sisters of brothers Merit Badge: Hatchet Skills

Beth’s two fingertips laid there on the plywood floor of our fort in the woods. Her left middle and left index looked like two rubber fakes with the nails painted a loud orange, two made-in-Taiwan Halloween gags from Spencer’s Gifts in the mall, except that the pool of blood between her shaking, mangled left hand and the detached fingertips was growing fast, each beat of her pounding heart made visible by a fresh outflow from the stumps. The guilty hatchet was dropped next to the pool of blood, its blade painted crimson.

What came after is a broken-glass mosaic: Beth stumbling and sobbing, Mia death-gripping Beth’s wounded hand in hers, me carrying two bits of Beth’s in mine, Beth’s mom screaming, Beth screaming, the ambulance screaming.

Three weeks later, before the lake incident, she let us see her hand while her mom changed the dressings. The reattached fingers looked like they were taken from the corpse of a drowned man, bluish and bloated, joined to her by zippers of black thread. Tendons were permanently damaged, causing the fingertips to lean to one side.

No one was there to teach us how to split kindling the proper way. Our 1976-moms didn’t know how to hold a hatchet, didn’t even know where our dads kept them, on the bottom shelves of the workshops in the garages of our suburban colonials. Our 1976-dads and brothers didn’t think to show us, so we showed ourselves. What Beth’s merit badge taught us: don’t lay a log down on its side and try to split it. If you don’t hit it dead-center, the log rolls and the blade glances to the side and bites deep into your bracing hand. We learned that blood will never come out of plywood, and that soaking a fort in lawnmower gas makes it go up like a torch.

Beth wears her merit badge with pride. We still go out for drinks sometimes, the two of us, now that we’re older, and when she flips off someone using her damaged hand, usually an over-aggressive man, the middle finger drifts to the side, the “u” in her “Fuck You” falling over and looking more like a “Fuck Yoc”—an insult dipped in dialect; mostly understandable, enough to catch her meaning.

Merit Badge Status as of August 4, 1976

Merit Badges:	Hatchet Skills	CPR	Self-Defense
Beth	X	X
Mia		X
Natalie		X	X

The Trauma Scout Oath

On my honor, I pledge to do my will as I will—the rest is just a bunch of bullshit.

What’s Wrong with Mr. Dutton’s Secretary?

The previous summer, when it rained, my older brother and I opened the garage door and set up an office. My brother sat at a folding table in the back of the garage. He was Mr. Dutton, generic boss of a formless corporation. He told me to sit near the front of the garage. Your job is to help Mr. Dutton, he said. My name was Mr. Dutton’s Secretary, as if I were the thinnest of beings, or fabric, a lace curtain to be brushed aside.

All afternoon I watched the raindrops collide with the driveway. No one came to see Mr. Dutton.

Merit Badge: CPR

When Beth’s hand was healed over, enough that the lake water wouldn’t cause infection, we ran the test. It was late afternoon; the sun was packing it in, so we had the lake to ourselves. Mia looked scared, as if she might not go through with it. Beth and I were scared that we would.

We eased ourselves off the rickety wooden dock and into the murky water up to our chins. Our toes tunneled into the gray muck on the bottom. Mia was shivering. Remember, just to my limit, she said, no more. We nodded. She took a deep breath, slipped below the surface.

Beth and I each found a shoulder, putting our weight on it. For a minute or two everything was peaceful: the gurgle of the water in the reeds, birdsong. Then her spasms started. I stared at Beth, or through her, and we both pressed down harder. Mia’s flailing became wild, desperate, before suddenly calming again. Fear swept Beth’s face. We both grabbed Mia by an arm and hoisted her up. She coughed, gagged, her skin graying, her eyes bulging from her head. She was choking on water she’d inhaled, spitting cloudy mouthfuls at us. We couldn’t lift Mia’s dead weight onto the dock, so we hauled her to the shallows, through the reeds to the grassy shore. We laid Mia flat, her body still shuddering. I knelt next to her, putting my left hand beneath her neck, lifting to open her throat, just as the first aid handbook said to do, with my right hand placed on her forehead. Mia was expelling still, wheezing, and I couldn’t be sure if she was getting any breath in at all, so I bent over her with my lips sealed over hers, blowing what I could into her. She’s breathing, Nat, said Beth. Natalie, stop! But I couldn’t stop, not until Mia herself pushed me away. The dim light in her eyes was cold, departed, the look of someone deep at the bottom of a well who’d already decided not to climb out.

I wish I could remember how Mia looked before that day at the lake, right before she went under, before the best part of her never came up for air.

Origin Story

In the 70s, the Girl Scouts were the only game in town. Moms in heels led living-room campouts. They were uninspired, both the living rooms and the moms. They smelled docile, like ground beef and freshly laundered sheets and dreams pinched back and transplanted to the point that they didn’t take. Me, I wanted to cut my hair and nails short, to bind flat my budding tits so I could put on shoulder pads and plant some boy’s face in the stadium turf.

Each girl got a small green pocketknife. It’s handy for so many things, the moms said. Cutting thread, opening packages. Instead, I cut myself out of their picture. The knife I kept.

Merit Badge: Self-Defense

My step-uncle Jake was a doomsday survivalist, bunker-minded, his nightmares punctuated by mushroom clouds. His concrete safe room had a hatch built into his basement wall; a separate escape tunnel ended in a metal door set into the side of the ravine behind his house. The escape door had a hasp, but he didn’t keep it locked. The walls of the safe room were lined with shelves full of canned food, bottled water. There was a cot, a chair, a single light fixture.

He was the only man in my life who didn’t see me in pink-filtered light, so when he wanted to show me his bunker the first time, spur of the moment, I went, and when he touched me, I flinched, and when he played with himself in front of me, I didn’t leave. I have no idea why, but I didn’t. Instead, he moaned my name, Natalie, Natalie. I stared at the light in the ceiling glowing blue beneath its silver cage. Desperate insects threw themselves against it. It looked so pathetic, so incredibly small. It should have been so much bigger.

The second time he invited me down there, he planned it ahead of time, so I planned ahead too. Beth would sneak onto his property from the rear, up the ravine. I would go to the safe room with Uncle Jake at four. At five after four, Beth would enter through the escape tunnel, pocketknife at the ready. We figured the two of us could take him. It would have worked perfectly if it weren’t for the padlock.

I let him touch me at first so I could open the blade of my knife behind the small of my back unseen. His hands stroked the long seconds past. No Beth.

Fact: there is a particular paralysis caused by witnessing sudden violence that aids in self-defense. When a blade strikes an attacker’s face, such as a puncture or a slicing of the cheek near the eyes, the attacker will instinctively raise his hands to protect himself, presenting new targets to the defender’s blade.

Fact: blood does not permanently stain sealed concrete, but ragged scars stain faces. Scars can telegraph shame, and shame (to the shamed) is a billboard on a busy highway; it can lead a man to take his own life rather than see the looks on the faces of those passing by.

Fact: the singular goal of self-defense is survival. The losers never know they lost.

Awards Ceremony

To me, this last merit badge has no single look. At times it arrives like debilitating claustrophobia or love in another woman’s arms or shrill screams in the deep crotch of night or a forgotten gravestone or a corner office on the eighth floor with two walls made of glass.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and no longer recognize myself; I see Mia’s haunted eyes staring out of my dark sockets, Beth’s warped fingers reaching. Sometimes I go into work early just to watch the pedestrians streaming across the sidewalks below me like tiny cells pulsing through the arteries of pavement, splitting off and disappearing, bleeding into doorways and alleys, soaking into the floorboards of the city.

Sometimes it rains all afternoon, and I watch it from my desk, and no one comes to see me.

FOUR STORIES by Joe Aguilar

October 27, 2021

Face Tattoo

I get a tattoo of my face over my face. Now my face looks even more like my face. It’s my face twice over. My wife asks me if I’m in a good mood because today I look brighter than ever. I tell her yes. It’s true. I’m true. My truest face.

The Man with the Tiger’s Head Who Answers Phones

I have a human body and a tiger’s head. People stare at me on the train. I avoid their eyes. I answer phones at the company that makes weapons. Nobody sees me over the phone. My voice is deep and splendid like a purr. I sleep very deeply. In the dream I run through a jungle. The trees are on fire. Somebody’s screaming.

Night Meat

In the cabin we eat meat for nourishment.
Chad leaves to look for more meat. Where is Chad?
Vlad goes to look for Chad. Where are Vlad and Chad?
We are hungry enough to lock the doors. Tad and I knock on Brad’s door. Poor dead Brad!
I wander the woods full of nourishment. The moon tracks me like an eye.

The End of the World

I am out for my morning run when I see the mushroom cloud blossoming over the skyscrapers. Then I hear the explosion and am knocked to my hands and knees. The air smells sweet like ozone. A car alarm is going off. The end is near. I run into a gas station. A microwave beeps. The cashier has hung himself with a red licorice rope. A hotdog turns behind glass. It starts to rain.

CHASE by Frankie McMillan

October 25, 2021

Mr Whippy here and there, up the street, down the street, swerving his pink and cream van to avoid a dog, Mr Whippy his face emperor white, hunched over the wheel wondering what dogs want with Mr Whippy.

Mr Whippy glancing in the rear vision mirror, kids still chasing him on bikes, their heads ducked under the handlebars, a mother jogging with a baby on her hip, ice cream, ice cream but Mr Whippy is wrecked, days leaning out his window, handing out cones with the perfect pointy top, pulling on levers, eyes squinting in the bright sun. his ears ringing.

Mr Whippy turning off his ice cream shaped speakers because Green Sleeves isn’t what he wants to hear right now. He turns into a leafy suburb, checks in the mirror again, sighs with relief. Mr Whippy parks under a tree, eases himself into the back of the van, pours sacks of skim milk into the machine, fondly pats the metal side, re stocks cones, wipes the sticky window sill, tugs on his ear again.

Mrs Whippy shining a torch down his ear canal, slush in his ear she laughs, a cul de sac of sprinkles and Mr Whippy, tired though he is clamps a pale hand on her thigh. Mrs Whippy wriggles loose. Mr Whippy rises.

Out the bedroom door, down the hall, out into the night. Mrs Whippy runs smooth and light as a girl and Mr Whippy follows, his legs pumping, dogs barking, the whole street cheering him on.

MR. DUBECKI’S SECRET MENU by Kyle Seibel

October 22, 2021

Mr. Dubecki is the first person I tell about the people humping in the men’s restroom because he is the franchise owner slash store manager for one thing, but also because he’s the only other person here after Greg went home sick and Rocky’s brother picked him up early and the new girl who’s training on the window would only get in the way, so she got cut and Mr. Dubecki said he’d come by to help me close.

Near the end of the shift I go to clean the facilities and what I find is that it’s a four-legs-under-the-stall kind of situation, which I relay back to Mr. Dubecki, who rubs his face like this is the last thing he needs, people humping in the bathroom, oh perfect. I don’t think this is the only Taco Bell he owns, but I can see from his face that this was the Taco Bell Mr. Dubecki had hoped people would never hump in.

I follow him into the bathroom and you can basically tell from the noises that it’s two guys and they’re not hiding it, not even close. We’re both standing outside the stall and I’m waiting for Mr. Dubecki to lay down the law but he doesn’t. The panting and grunting is coming from the stall but when I look at Mr. Dubecki his face is far away. I nudge him and he clears his throat real loud but that does not stop the humping. Mr. Dubecki knocks on the stall door. Hello, Mr. Dubecki says. The humping stops.

What do you want, a voice says.

Mr. Dubecki sputters without sound, like his mind is grasping for a response that makes sense and cannot find one. I jump in and say, We want you to stop humping in this Taco Bell.

This seems to put the world back together for Mr. Dubecki. He follows up by saying, Yes, please leave this Taco Bell. We allow them a moment of silence to consider our demands.

Fine, okay, whatever, says the voice.

We wait outside while they reorder themselves and Mr. Dubecki holds the door open for them. They’re two pretty regular looking guys. Mr. Dubecki asks them to please not come back to this Taco Bell.

After we close up, when Mr. Dubecki is locking the doors, he says, Thank you for that back there, and nods in the direction of the bathrooms and I tell him, No problem. He says, You’re okay, you know that? When you started, I was eh, not so sure about you. Thought you’d be here through the summer and then go back to school. But hey, you stuck around and I’m happy, really. You’re one of the good ones. He says it like I’ve cleared some bar with him on a personal level and what comes next is going to be a whole new thing between us.

He says, I have two questions for you. I say, Okay. And he says my first question is this: how would you like to make five hundred dollars and my second question is this: do you believe that stealing something back that was yours first, yours to begin with, that someone stole from you, do you believe that has both a legal and moral justification?

I think about it for a second and then say yes to both.

There are some things, Mr. Dubecki explains, some things in the basement of his house that belonged to him and there had been a situation where now he wasn’t allowed back there so much on the order of the future ex-Mrs. Dubecki who was being pretty unreasonable, truth be told. And what he needed, what he really needed, was someone who could keep their cool, just like I did back in the bathroom, just a guy who calls a ball a ball and a strike a strike. Someone who can find a few boxes of stuff the future ex-Mrs. Dubecki would never miss. He says that she hasn’t even been in the basement for a year. Do it during the daytime when she’d be at work and the kid would be at school. There’s a fake rock with a key in it and he says he can draw me a map, so easy. Five hundred bucks. Mr. Dubecki says that he sure could use five hundred bucks, the divorce and all, but this stuff I’m going to get, it means that much to him.

I think about it for a second and then say, Okay, Mr. Dubecki, and he smiles and says, Please call me George, and I say, Okay, George, and we make a plan for the coming Tuesday.

On Tuesday I find the key in the fake stone just like Mr. Dubecki said and when I open the door into the house everything is covered with buttery light from the big windows and it’s all over the white carpet and all over the white furniture.

I find the basement no problem, find the shelves no problem, find the three boxes no problem. They’re pretty heavy so I’m taking them one at a time. I’m on my first trip to the car when I hear a small voice from above say, Hello?

It’s the kid. Mr. Dubecki’s son. He’s standing at the top of the stairs. I say, Hello, and he says, Hello, and I say, I’m one of your dad’s special friends. He says, Okay, and I say, I came to get some of his things, and he says, My mom will be back later, and I say, Okay, and he says, Okay.

He looks like a little Mr. Dubecki. Same moon face and turned-up nose. He sits on the top of the stairs and watches me go back and forth. Supervising.

This is my last one, I say, nodding at the box I’m holding, and the kid says, Okay.

I ask him what grade he’s in and he says third. He asks me what grade I’m in and I say I’m sort of in college. He asks me what that means and I say, Well, I’m supposed to be in college.

Kind of like how you’re supposed to be in school, I say, and he says, Yeah but I got sent home. My mom had to come get me.

Some kind of fight, I say and he shakes his head.

He asks if I’ve ever heard of a game called Charlie Charlie and I say no and he asks me if I want to play, and I say, Does it take very long, and he smiles and runs off and comes back with two pencils and a piece of paper.

We go to the kitchen and he draws a cross in the center of the paper, making four boxes. In the top two boxes he writes YES and then NO and then on the bottom two boxes he writes NO and then YES so that each quadrant contains a word and is reflected diagonally across from the other. He lays one pencil down along the horizontal line and the other one he balances on top except this one is along the vertical line and he asks me what I want to know.

What do you mean, I say.

You ask Charlie what you want to know, he says. Any question, yes or no.

Who’s Charlie, I ask and he says that Charlie is a demon or something and so I think about it for a second and then say, Will I be rich one day?

The kid nods and grabs my hands to make a circle around the piece of paper. He closes his eyes and says, Charlie Charlie, come out to play. We’ve asked our question, now what do you say? We wait a few seconds and sure enough the pencil on top, the one balancing, starts to wobble and then swivels to point at both NOs.

Well shit, I say to the kid, and he asks me if I want to know the trick.

He says you do it with your nose. Just blow with your nose really lightly and it’s enough to move the pencil but not enough for anyone to notice.

Not bad, I tell him. Why’d you get sent home?

The kid looks away. He says, I asked Charlie if everyone was going to die and then I made Charlie say yes we all would. He looks back at me. Some kids started crying, he says.

Jesus, I say.

But it’s true, he says.

I guess, I say. And then, Don’t tell your mom I was here.

Don’t tell my dad I got in trouble.

We shake on it and I give him a little punch on the shoulder. I tell him, You’re okay, you know that, and he shrugs like he doesn’t really believe me and it’s at that moment when the future ex-Mrs. Dubecki walks in the front door with a few bags of groceries to see a strange man in her kitchen who is touching her son.

Hello, I say, and she says, What the fuck is happening, who the fuck are you, get the fuck away from him, what the fuck, what the fuck, I’m calling the police right now, you sick bastard.

The kid says, Mom, stop, he’s one of dad’s special friends, and I say whoa a whole bunch of times in a row while I try to think of what to tell her.

George, I say, stepping back from the kid. George sent me to get some of his things. The basement, the boxes in the basement. The key in the rock. Then I saw the kid. Jesus, please don’t call the police.

The future ex-Mrs. Dubecki looks at me, looks at her phone, looks at the oranges that rolled out of the grocery bag she dropped when she saw me, bends down to pick them up, starts crying, slumps over, and then kind of rolls to prop herself up against the white couch. The kid goes over to her and says I’m sorry and then I say I’m sorry. And because it would be weird if she didn’t, the future ex-Mrs. Dubecki says, I’m sorry. Then we all do it again. Each one of us says sorry again and then I decide to pick up the oranges which breaks the spell.

I put the groceries on the kitchen counter. Mrs. Dubecki watches me. She’s standing up now, assessing me. You’re pretty young, she says, and I say, I guess so, and she suppresses a sob while saying, Are you happy. I don’t know what to say, so I say, I guess so, and she blubbers, Together, with George, you’re happy together at least?

Well, I think he’s doing okay. It’s not like we work together all that much, I say. The future ex-Mrs. Dubecki’s face changes. She puts her hands on her hips and she asks me how I know George and I tell her Taco Bell, and she says, Oh, Jesus, I thought you were his—I don’t know what they call it—boyfriend, I guess.

Oh, I say.

You didn’t know, she says.

No, I say.

Well, she says. Neither did I for a long time.

The kid runs off upstairs. We put the groceries away together, she and I. After, she walks me to the door. I’m not evil, she says. I’m getting my mind around it. Good days and bad days. I mean, there’s a version of myself that’s happy for him and I’m going to be that woman. Really.

I tell her I think that’s a good way to think about it and she asks me if he’s doing okay and I think of Mr. Dubecki’s face in the bathroom, far away.

Ask Charlie, I say.

I’m closing that night at Taco Bell and Mr. Dubecki comes by to get the boxes from me. He counts out five one-hundred-dollar bills. He asks me if I had any issues and I say, Not really.

Mr. Dubecki is putting the last box in his car when he stops and asks me if I want to see inside the boxes and I say, Okay. We’re standing around the trunk of his Camry in the Taco Bell parking and what’s inside the boxes is yearbooks and photos and letters and book reports and birthday cards and school newspaper articles and Christmas lists and dental x-rays and baseball cards and bronze baby shoes and souvenir mugs and swim meet ribbons and playbills and bible camp postcards and wrestling trophies and license plates and standardized test scores and watercolor paintings and Mr. Dubecki takes out each item, gives a one-word description, then passes it to me and I look at it and then put it back in the box. It feels like church. We do it for all three boxes and when we’re done, Mr. Dubecki steps back to take it all in.

Well, he says finally and grabs a box and starts walking toward the dumpster. C’mon, he says to me, and I grab a box and follow him. I ask him if he wants to maybe just keep the photos and he stares at me. Especially not the photos, he says. We throw it all away.

The purge fills Mr. Dubecki with nervous energy and he bounces alongside me as I walk back towards the Taco Bell to finish my shift. He puts his hand on the door before I can open it.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret, he tells me, and I say, Okay.

His mouth is pressed into a hard line and his eyes are narrowed to make two deep creases in his forehead. There’s something called the enchirito, he says. It’s not on any menu, but I can teach you how to make one for your shift meal, if you want. It’s basically a smothered burrito if you’ve ever had one of those, but it’s really, really good. I keep asking corporate to put it on the menu, but they always ignore me. Truth is, they’re not ready for everyone to experience the enchirito.

Mr. Dubecki’s face goes far away. Maybe they’re right, he says. He opens the door for me and we go back to the kitchen and he starts gathering the ingredients. Mr. Dubecki’s skin is shiny under the fluorescent lights. He looks brand new, fresh out of the packaging.

Okay, he says, tying an apron on. What I’m about to show you is extremely sensitive information.

I watch him run around and I write down the recipe. I tell him his secrets are safe with me.

LUCID FIRE by Cletus Crow

October 21, 2021

I'm dreaming that our bed is engulfed in flames, but in the waking world either your body lies draped across my torso, or I have a fever, or we forgot to turn the oven off, or someone dropped a burning corpse between us, or we have too many sheets, or I can see the future, or our bed really is engulfed in flames, or God came back when we were sleeping, or global warming works faster than they say, or a Republican tweeted, or there was a gas leak, or the neighbors can tell we aren't just friends, or I'm in the Fantastic Four, or a burglar enjoys a Marlboro, or your ex finally did it, or the thermometer broke, or meteorites collided, or war was declared. When I wake up, you're clinging to me like damp hair. I scan the ceiling for burns.

THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT by David Luntz

October 20, 2021

The weight of light can be measured by my Uncle Kev’s death. But before that, some memories: it’s family dinner and Uncle Kev’s explaining how the bread mashed in his ex-boxer’s sixty-year-old fist represents Pangea and the glass of red wine in his fingers the Tethys Sea. He’s telling us about the earth’s history, Wegener’s theory of continental drift, orogeny, extinct volcanoes, dragonflies in amber, and trilobites. Mom and dad tune him out. So do I. I get enough of that kind of shit at school. But Uncle Kev doesn’t care. He’s relentless, a natural fighter, and won’t stop until he’s educated me properly. Most of his instructing takes place in his car when he’s driving me somewhere. There’s no escaping him there.

When he talks about light, his eyes gleam like wet pebbles. He always smells nice, like Old Spice aftershave. He waves his hands a lot. They’re hairy and tufted, like a coconut. His polished nails blur cyan in the air. One time, he tells me about how light actually dies as it hits our eyes, and says, “Isn’t that beautiful, I mean that light must die so we can see?” I wish I’d really been listening to him, at what he was really trying to tell me, but I thought then that he was just plugging some lame religious metaphor: light is just like Jesus, always sacrificing and always giving, existing in some sublime state of eternal crucifixion and resurrection. And I reply: Maybe light would rather not die. Maybe light doesn’t give a shit about our sight.

It’s the only time I remember him giving me a grieved look. But this was before, and now we’re driving down Route One and Uncle Kev blurts out, “Kinch,” which is what he calls me after reading Ulysses, “Answer me this: How’s the spirit supposed to fecking survive when it’s got to look at this shite every fooking day?” nodding at the strip malls and billboards, a question whose unanswered weight each passing season presses down on me like ten thousand leaves, maybe more, because soon afterward come his limp wrists floating like pale petals in a pink scurf that won't come out of the tiles. And because he still burns and reaches me like light from a dead star, it makes no sense to say he no longer exists, especially when I see him as a child, basking on kilned rocks after swimming in the cold water of Keeley Bay, telling me how much he loves it there, the sunbaked scent of stranded kelp, the wisps of tickling seaweed, and the way light rushes into spaces he never knew about inside him, promising that it will always be there and never leave him. And I wonder too, sometimes, if what he did was his way of giving back the gift, so light could see things it couldn’t otherwise see, and whether somewhere, perhaps not so far off, he still skips up to some sunny attic where he unpacks his sewing machine and stitches a dress from old curtains, hoping that when he hits the streets that night with his new lipstick and pumps, he might get lucky.

(For my uncle who took my education upon himself, since he trusted no school to do it.)

ON BUILDING A NEST by Stella Lei

October 16, 2021

My mother’s house always looked halfway to collapse. She had paid copious amounts of money to build it this way—its perpetually slouching walls, its staircases that jerked into corners before snarling to the next floor. This was because she preferred things that existed between one state and another. Her philosophy was as follows: you cannot determine something’s worth before it is finished, and most everything finished is bad—corrupted by greed, or rust, or the general incompetence of its maker. And so the house lurched across a river like a lopsided Fallingwater, its unending rush lulling her to the edge of sleep. When she awoke, she stood in the middle of one of her precarious staircases, fingers to her lips, surveying the distance between her body and the floor.

As a child, I bumped into buckled walls and tripped over uneven floorboards. Cuts rusted down my legs in slashes of bronze, and my mother wiped them clean, warning me to be careful with the currency of my blood.

“You see this?” She held up the towel, stained through and sour with disinfectant, “You let all this go. Gone. Wasted.” She believed blood was metal metabolized. Gold lining our veins. “That’s why it tastes like pennies,” she said, and I swiped my finger across the wound, bringing it to my lips to check.

Our ancestors thought drinking gold—untarnishable light—could instill them with youth. Their organs would never rust into disuse, polished instead with health. What they didn’t know, my mother said, was that we were born with gold bottled in our veins. She smoothed a Band-Aid across my knee. “So the real secret to youth is to avoid bleeding. To seam your skin and keep the gold inside.”

For years, I was careful not to bleed. I tiptoed around corners and walls. Climbed the stairs while gripping the banister, unpainted wood strangled in my fist. I weaned my legs off running, teaching them to slide slowly across the floor’s hardwood swells.

My mother said the world was a pipe bomb, people just fuses ready to light. When she was young, her father exploded in her face—fists clenched to grenades—and left her blue as the sea. That was why I was forbidden from going out alone, my flash-paper bones too easily expended into smoke. And so I stayed home, insulated from flames and men, replacing school with the encyclopedias lining the office shelves.

I worked my way through the books in alphabetical order, repeating each word to myself, sculpting my breath against the sound. A for aviation. B for beak. C for critical period: the period of time in which young animals are most likely to acquire learned behavior; when imprinting occurs.

The period of time in which a baby bird’s song crystallizes like rust on steel, its voice molding to that of its parents. The period beyond which the bird can no longer learn to sing, its notes fracturing like a face in warped glass.

I was twelve when the bleeding started. It woke me in a pool of sour warmth, wet against my legs, sticky in my joints. I shouted for my mother, certain my tissues were dissolving, my organs churning to pulp. She scowled as she changed the sheets and soaked them in cold water, but told me I wasn’t dying. What had happened, she said, was I became too close to fully formed—transitioning into a woman who could eventually smoke, and drink, and leave her behind. The solution was to regress to my halfway point. To freeze my body in time so gold would lie snugly in my veins, youth unable to escape.

That evening, when I asked about dinner, she told me if I went long enough without food, I could shrink my stomach into a fist. Exorcise the years from my body, leave only purity. Bone. Calcium scaffolding my shins like pillars of salt. How I could reverse my flesh within myself, surviving off nothing but smooth planes of skin.

From then on, she fed me only feathers so my years could take flight and leave me clean. She boiled them soft and piled them on my plate in quivering puffs of down.

“The body follows a clock of its own,” she said, “You just have to wind it in reverse. Close the hourglass’s waist. Look at each bird through its mouth.”

When I told her I didn’t know what she meant, that all the birds I’d seen were mouthless, roasted in the oven or strewn across my plate in ragged plumes, she pointed out the window and said “Those birds, there. See how each note matures in their throat before they sing it? That’s where it all starts. The throat.”

I flipped through the T encyclopedia until I got to throat. Esophagus. Trachea. Larynx. I traced my finger down the diagrams and taught the page to swallow. Air digested into air.

In the bathroom, I opened my mouth in the mirror and peered inside. My throat was a cavern of darkness rippled with heat—something pulsing and alive. I clawed my fingers in to see if I could retrieve the half-formed notes in my vocal cords, cup their soft vibration in my palms. I retched into the sink, but my stomach had hardened to a pit, too empty to expel anything but breath. Feathers clotted against my teeth.

The bleeding eventually stopped, my uterus rewound into a state that didn’t know time, years resorbed into my body. When I looked in the mirror, my collarbones were arrowheads grafted to skin.

In place of blood, cold permeated through me like a haunting on loop. I wrapped myself in sweaters and coats—molted in reverse—and stood with my mother at the staircase’s head. We held hands and peered down the house’s narrow throat, too scared to fly.

My mother’s New Year’s gift to me was a music box, gilded gold, a lark perched on its crown. An heirloom passed down by her mother by her mother by hers, carried through generations like our coarse hair and heat-shriveled eyes. She wrapped my hands in her own and showed me how to wind it up. How to coax a bird to sing. We cranked the key as far as it would go, the lark shuddering in the anticipation of dance. I tightened my fingers around the knob as it pushed against my palm, fighting to unspool its song—to fly free. The notes stuttered out, slow, splintered into shards.

FULL OF HOLES by Luz Rosales

October 15, 2021

Kylie fingers Martina under the bleachers after school. Martina is warm, and moist, and slippery, and when she cums against Kylie’s palm, she moans so loudly that Kylie thinks everyone on campus must have heard. She hopes this is true.

“I’m so proud of myself,” she says, and Martina laughs her scratchy laugh.

Martina doesn’t come to school the next day, doesn’t answer Kylie’s texts. The day after that, she’s found floating down a river in pieces.

***

Several of their classmates attend her funeral. They crowd together in the church, sniffling, and holding each other, and pretending to cry. None of them were friends with Martina. Some had been the very ones who bullied her and Kylie. They stalked them in the halls, pelted them with water balloons and milk cartons, hurled insults such as “dykes” and “lesbos.”

Kylie hates them all.

She sits near the back, sandwiched between her parents. Her father keeps his hand on her shoulder, though the effect is more suffocating than comforting. She feels like she’s breaking, splintering. The casket is closed. She can’t comprehend that her best friend’s body is in there, wants to demand that they open it so that everyone can see it isn’t Martina, it’s a doll, it’s an impostor.

They had been friends since the first grade, back when they were shy little girls who felt comfortable only around each other, and they grew into awkward teenagers together. They’d known each other for so long their identities had become intertwined. Kylie can’t imagine a Martina-less world, nor can she imagine a Martina-less Kylie. Who is she now? What is she supposed to do?

Martina’s mother, Ms. Aguilar, finds her after the service. She’s scowling, and Kylie is reminded of the last time she stayed at Martina’s house, how they hid under the blankets and tried to block out the sounds of her parents fighting.

“This is your fault,” her mother spits. “I wanted her to stop hanging out with you.”

“How is it my fault?” Kylie demands. It’s the fault of whoever killed her, they deserve to rot in Hell, except no one knows who did it. The medical examiner said it didn’t look like the work of a human, nor that of an animal.There were no wounds at all, no blood, it was as if her body unraveled spontaneously, as if she simply couldn’t stay in one piece anymore.

Within a few weeks Ms. Aguilar will be gone, moved to another city.

***

At night Kylie tries to hold onto everything she can remember about Martina: her voice, the smoothness of her skin, the texture of the scar on her arm, the way her tongue felt between her legs. She sucks on her fingers and pretends she can still taste Martina’s wetness, then rubs the part of her shoulder where Martina had given her a hickey once.

In the morning she finds a tiny, pinprick-sized hole on her shoulder. Her mother doesn’t see any hole, says she must be imagining it, but Kylie knows it’s real. She can’t stop thinking about the hole, can’t stop touching it, rubbing and rubbing until it’s wide enough for her to insert the tip of her finger. When she does the pain is so intense she almost screams, but there’s something satisfying about it.

Eventually a gray fluid starts leaking from the hole.

Eventually, other holes appear.

***

Kylie comes to school covered in seeping black holes. Everyone stares at her. They’re shocked, disgusted, even enraged that she showed up like this and is forcing them all to see it.

In class, she does nothing but touch her holes. She leaves stains on the floor and on her desk.

The teacher asks her to leave. “You’re distracting the other students,” he says. He looks at her the way you’d look at a bug. She definitely feels less than human as she plods out of the room. Why is she so heavy all of a sudden? She can barely keep herself upright.

During nutrition she’s accosted by a group of girls who say they want to know more about her. They’ve never seen anything like that, they say, meaning her holes. She tells them to fuck off, but they grab her arms, and the next thing she knows they’re shoving their fingers into her, prying her open further. It hurts so bad. She screams and screams and thrashes and suddenly they let her go. Their mouths are wide open, they’re backing away from her.

Kylie doesn’t know what they’re reacting to. She doesn’t care.

She turns around and runs.

***

She heads to Martina’s house, climbs in through the window. It’s not Martina’s house anymore, she knows, though a part of her still expects that she’ll come if she cries loud enough.

The walls are bare. There is no furniture, no remnants of the people who used to live here. Still she goes to what used to be Martina’s room and collapses.

Time goes by. It could be minutes, it could be hours. She spends it all on her side, lying in a puddle of her own filth. She’s mostly hole now. It’s almost peaceful. She could live like this, she thinks, as a giant hole, no longer a girl.

Right after she has this thought, her hand moves on its own, forming a fist. A few seconds later she’s clawing herself violently, she’s shaking, and crying, and bleeding, and she keeps saying, “Martina,” saying it like a prayer.

Then.

It stops.

Everything stops.

There is darkness and silence, a black void. This lasts only an instant.

Once it’s over, she’s back in Martina’s bedroom. She feels different now, stronger but heavier. Slowly she stands and realizes something is attached to her shin.

She reaches down and touches it: there’s hair, and … is that a nose? Are those eyes?

“I…”

That voice. It can’t be.

“Martina?”

It is.

Martina is back, and she’s alive, and her head is a part of Kylie now, fused to her leg.

“Kylie,” Martina whispers.

Hearing her say her name brings tears to Kylie’s eyes. “What is it?”

“I feel fantastic.”