Fiction

TENDERNESS by Anthony Sabourin

August 14, 2020

The Doomsayer is at work.

He takes a sip of black coffee from a styrofoam cup. He mumbles to himself and barks like a dog and screams into his elbow as one would muffle a cough. He takes another sip of coffee, gargling it and spitting it into the street; wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Across the street the train is stopping, and soon the morning rush will be streaming by on the stretch of street before him, walking in their harried steps, a tension in the inconvenience of being a person around other people, already impatient to hasten the day’s end before it’s begun. The Doomsayer adjusts his pants and trench coat, picks up his cardboard sign, and steps upon his milk crate. He shouts the words on his sign.

“The end is nigh!”

Faces look up to see.

“The world is almost over!”

***

The Doomsayer worked early and all day, taking lunch at 10 am and as many bathroom breaks as he could finagle out of the decrepit Subway across the street, where he was engaged in a bitter feud with the manager, a weaselly man named Laramie. He would be home in time for dinner with his wife, a sturdy and freckled woman who stunk from her work at the smelting plant, whom he loved completely.

It was a good life, and the Doomsayer found joy in his work. He was passionate about the end of the world, and while he was aware that his message was difficult to accept, for a long time he lived for even the most tacit acknowledgement of the words that he raggedly shouted to the idiot faces of the people who worked in glass and steel buildings. Even the most furtive of glances would satisfy him for weeks.

He remembered with great fondness one particular day when a car broke down in front of his preaching stoop. —his cracked yelps painting a picture of the end, of how the resolute corporate leaders of the past were long dead, and how their doughy and cow-eyed offspring could only lead us more swiftly to our certain doom; that unchecked plague had emaciated the horses and left the goats vomiting in the city’s neighboring fields, and how more and more these days the rain was actually just acid that left the asphalt smoking after a storm. He supplemented his arguments with credible first-hand analysis of various religious texts. And with the tow truck loaded and ready to leave, as the Doomsayer asked out of professional courtesy if this mother and her child would at least acknowledge if they, on the basis of the case the Doomsayer had presented to them, thought that the world would end, was it not true that their heads, as the truck jerked and pulled away, bobbed in a manner that was markedly similar to a nod? For so long this had been the highlight of the Doomsayer’s career, so much so that yearly his wife made him a rum cake to mark the anniversary of the occasion.

—after the black clouds of the chemical factory had intermingled with and covered the skyscrapers with soot, and all was darkness except for the fires from neighboring cities—that crowds began to form. Only now—as the syphilitic ramblings of the city’s mayor failed to placate them—that the crowds gathered to listen to the Doomsayer.

“Have we passed the point of no return?” he asked the crowd.

“Yes!” the crowd shouted back at him.

“Do the penguins now slide into the muddy ocean from the floes of our own garbage?”

“Surely!” they cried.

“What happened to all of the good animals? The noble giraffe? The whimsical flying squirrel?”

“All of the good animals are extinct!” the crowd said.

“And what of the new animals humankind discovers? Those weird fangy monstrosities they fish out of the bottom of the ocean? With their glowing eyes and spiked, skeletal bodies - what do we make of mother nature’s nightmares?”

“Only abominations remain!” the crowd cheered.

“No!” the crowd chanted in ecstasy.

“And what of our neighbors? Can we depend on the slack-jawed inbreds to the east and west of us for salvation in our hour of need?”

“Our neighbors can only be depended on for war and death!” the voices boomed.

“What have we done to our planet?” he would shout at their faces.

“We’ve wasted it!” the crowd would wail.

It was a true golden age.

Yet, after years of plying his trade in obscurity, the Doomsayer felt a sense of emptiness in his newfound success. The work came to him easily now, and he longed for the days when convincing people that the world was ending was a challenge. He had taken to rolling in the garbage in the alley by the Subway, thinking the rank juices dripping from his trench coat would make his message less sensible, but still, the crowds grew.

Only a seasoned observer would have been able to tell that his rheumy eyes were sad and not sick, his voice still full of fury but devoid of passion, his malaise not directed at the end of all things, but at himself and his lack of joy in this—his moment of triumph. The closest thing the Doomsayer had to such an observer was the dreaded Laramie, who mistook these changes as sure signs of the imminent death of his rival. Over a sandwich made for the Doomsayer with open contempt, they conversed:

“Is your death near?” the scoundrel Laramie asked him.

“Is yours?” he spat at his enemy.

“I am a picture of health,” Laramie said, and the Doomsayer did acknowledge to himself that Laramie’s long neck, bulbous head, and tiny limbs still wriggled about the vandalized sandwich counter with the ease of a younger man.

“But you—” Laramie continued. “Your new friends out there may not notice the change, but I have seen how your voice falters, how your eyes have turned splotchy, and your gestures uncertain. I have seen your skin grow pale and your body rebel with stink as it rots from the inside. I want you to know that I relish it!”

“If I appear ill,” the Doomsayer said, “it is no doubt from the stagnant meatballs and moldy cheese I ingest from this, the foulest of the Subways.” He took a bite of the sandwich and chewed it slowly. “But I want you to know, Laramie, that this food is the small dose of poison that grants me the immunity I need to endure your presence, and upon your demise I will lead your family to this failed enterprise to celebrate my ultimate victory.”

It would take another half hour of negotiations before the Doomsayer could use the bathroom.

After facing an afternoon of the cheering crowds, there was little relief for the Doomsayer among his own kind, for even at the Lazy Susan—where the drink special of a free rotisserie chicken with the purchase of a pilsner openly courted the castoffs of society—the company of his fellow harbingers, soapbox criers, suspected deities, and lesser prophets greeted him as a celebrity.

He drifted about in the whorl of voices with his pilsner and a drumstick—

Majestic tirade out there—buy you a drink you’ve earned it—the voice it’s his voice how he uses it he can—goes to show that hard work pays off in the—did you see the garbage he rolls in a stroke of genius—Kevin, I’m—it adds so much resonance you know he’s the garbage we’re the garbage we’ve wasted it—used to be humble too good to drink with the Kevins now—I think it’s his sign you need the right message—location is the key—no, I’m not Kevin I’m Carl you know, the conspiracy of dust that’s mine—all hard work that’s the key—The end!—It will never end it can’t—so proud of him I taught him the ropes and he—buy you a beer whatever you want —is nigh!—such persistence, it couldn’t have happened to a better guy he’s—

—running his fingers along the arches spine of Susan IV, the tavern cat about on her rounds—

It’s really him he comes here—yeah of course the end of the world—eat the rich that’s my thing I pass out pamphlets—where did you get that cloak it’s really thick—when he bellows it shakes the earth—they eat out the palm of his hand how articulate—the geese there are too many of them that’s my thing—K-E-V-I-N, I’m the second coming get you the right cloak—the end is nigh!—I found out they all huddle together close to the lake and I try to convince them to drown but the geese don’t ever—the end is nigh!—No I’m Carl the dust it—listen—you’re a Kevin I’m a Kevin—THE END IS NIGH!—oh every night this chant—THE END IS NIGH!—they never listen—THE END IS NIGH!—the rich you gotta eat them I hand out recipes—THE END!—dust building never stopping—IS!—the voice it’s—NIGH!—can’t hear you these chants—THE END IS NIGH!—the dust builds and it can’t - no listen –THE END IS NIGH!—it builds—THE END IS NIGH!—THE END IS NIGH!—THE END IS !

—looking out at still more expectant faces, the bedraggled and cloaked and rag-covered fellow cranks, he never knew what to tell them. He had nothing to say. He lifted up his beer to his fellow colleagues in a gesture of goodwill, chugged it down, and left to more cheering.

Outside he was accosted by one of the newer criers, a weathered boy who carried pamphlets of recipes for how to eat the rich, which he distributed to the university students downtown.

“Wait!” he said, grabbing the Doomsayer’s arm.

“Eat the rich! How is that going?”

“The University guards and their truncheons do not support cannibalism but I can still outrun them,” the boy said.

“Ah that’s good. You may want to use your pamphlets as padding, if they ever do catch you.”

"I appreciate the wisdom, sir. And, I apologize for grabbing you just now but please, do you have a moment to discuss the end? I feel like there must be something more to it. I have to know what is next.”

“Next?”

“Don’t pretend. These people, they look to you now because you knew, and because you knew, surely you must know what happens next. There must be something. Please, I beg of you— help me out here, I mean I’m just starting and even with just a nugget of your foresight I could build a whole new-”

“There is no next.”

“What?”

“The end is it. One day it will all be over with and done and that’s it. That’s the end of it all.”

The boy fell silent and his shoulders dropped into a slump. “Oh,” he said. The Doomsayer left him by the neon lights of the Lazy Susan, and walked home to his wife.

Home and seated for dinner, the Doomsayer realized it was the day of the cake. The Doomsayer had forgotten, but now here it was, his wife bringing it into the dining room and setting it out on the table. The rum cake is a glistening oversized donut shape from the bundt pan, with two candles representing the woman and her teenage child from that halcyon day years past.

He tried to make a happy face.

“What’s that, all of those things your face is doing?” his wife asked.

“I am just so moved by this gesture. The rum cake, I appreciate it so much I just.” The Doomsayer blew out the candles to keep from crying. He cut two pieces of rum cake and set them onto plates as listless smoke filled the room.

“Oh, so we will eat the cake in this very sad manner,” his wife said.

“No, I am happy, I love this delicious cake,” the Doomsayer said with a full mouth, chewing as his eyes began to water.

The Doomsayer’s eyes said that nothing was wrong, only this was unconvincing, because they were spilling tears, and suddenly he was breathing heavily and having a panic attack while still trying to eat the cake. His wife went into the kitchen to pour him a glass of water, and throughout the Doomsayer was trying to comport himself as though he were not having a panic attack, his body shaking as he swallowed cake between gasps of air, all of it becoming increasingly ridiculous. With his full mouth he sobbed “I no longer love what I do.”

His wife laid the water on the table and held him. She cooed into his ear: “Ah so what you love has turned into work, eh? Woe unto the prophet now that his obscure and cool new future is the common present. Shush, my idiot baby. You think I do not see this at the smelting plant? Some people stare at the glowing ore until it takes their minds away. You just need to take a vacation.”

“A vacation,” the Doomsayer said with wonder. The very concept seemed alien to the Doomsayer, but immediately his panic faced relaxed and his eyes brightened, and he again seemed at peace. They went back to eating their cake, which was very strong, and it led naturally to their lovemaking, their cries frightening the squirrels who had overtaken and were developing complex structures with the garbage they were collecting in the field beyond the Doomsayer’s home.

In the morning he purchased a plane ticket and packed his bag, soon finding himself on a propeller plane rocketing in its arc towards the Republic of Vronsk, a coastal city known for its decommissioned oil rigs, incomplete skyscrapers, and beautiful beaches, with sand as white as the Doomsayer’s knuckles as he experienced a screeching stop on the ramshackle landing strip of the Vronsk airport.

Vronsk was beautiful. The Doomsayer wandered around the city in a Hawaiian shirt and dollar store sandals, marveling at a sky that wasn’t grey-black. He fed beef jerky to the mongrel dogs, who began to follow him around.

He gazed up at an unfinished condo, whose main level was ransacked, and whose upper levels gave way from glass and concrete to upright metal beams that stabbed at nothing, razed manmade exclamation marks surprised that this was their end. As he walked up another block to see another interrupted building, he heard the familiar sound of a voice yelling in the street. Feeling the pangs of homesickness, he walked to the source of the shouting.

“It’s over!” the voice cried out. It was a Vronskian woman with a shaved head, wearing a metallic bouffant dress. She was gesturing to the great and unfinished skyscraper above her, which the Doomsayer had to admit was a nice touch. A crowd was forming.

“The sun shines weaker every day and the ocean rises ever more swiftly to swallow up Vronsk!” she shouted. “Our street dogs outnumber our children! And in their canniness they slip into our houses and lie in their beds!”

Voices murmured in agreement.

"Our leaders have been rendered fetus-like from inbreeding! Drought has crippled our farms and clouds of locusts rattle against our windows in the night! The word is ending!” she shouted. The Doomsayer found the material to be very strong, and he enjoyed being present in the throng of people who shouted in recognition.

“The world is ending!” he heard the woman say. All around the Doomsayer was a sense of good cheer. The woman basked in the jubilation for a moment, but she cut the crowd short. “It is ending! But is this enough?” she asked the crowd.

“No!” They shouted back.

“No!” the woman said. “For the end is not coming soon enough. We must act!” she preached. Members of the crowd raised their fists in the air.

“We must destroy!” she shouted. “We must waste! More garbage! More fires! The end is in our hands and we must never waver!” she screamed. “We must be resolute! The end is now!” The crowd was rapturous. The glass in the skyscraper was mirrored like the back of a bar, and reflected in that mirror the Doomsayer saw an old man in a Hawaiian shirt. He felt as though he were in a foreign church. The dogs followed him as he left the crowd.

The Doomsayer meandered beachward, stopping to buy postcards at a souvenir shop. On the back of a postcard featuring art depicting a more optimistic Vronsk, with the sun setting and playing off of completed skyscrapers, he wrote a series of threats addressed to Laramie. Then, on a postcard depicting a series of minerals native to Vronsk he addressed to his wife a poem of longing. He continued on, mailing the postcards and, at a corner store, buying a jug of brackish wine which was described to him as a local delicacy.

From the beach looking towards the ocean, the decommissioned oil rigs lounged in the distance like ugly mechanical swans. The Doomsayer laid on a towel in the sand with his dogs and an open package of beef jerky. He was sharing the jug of wine with a couple who had seated themselves next to him. They were honeymooning in Vronsk, which was very affordable, and they overlapped against each other like sunning seals, languid curves supine and happy. They reminded the Doomsayer of earlier days with his wife, and he radiated happiness and goodwill towards the loving couple, and refrained from mentioning the imminent end of all things.

They watched people in swimsuits splash in the waves; the new wife and husband periodically wading into the water, and as the jug emptied the afternoon passed in the lazy and relaxed way that beach days pass when the sun is out. Bony birds circled overhead, and shade from the palm trees retreated to the street.

A commotion arose in the water. From people-watching and the overheard snatches of conversation, it became clear that a woman playing in the waves had lost her wedding ring. She lay sobbing hunched over herself in the sand, and an improvised search party was formed, with bodies launching themselves headfirst into the surf, legs akimbo, looking in the sand underneath the waves for the lost ring. The newlywed couple next to the Doomsayer were recruited into the search, and the Doomsayer offered to stay behind to watch over their things. He threw beef jerky to the dogs and watched the futile pattern of the people in the waves, as over and over legs would appear out of the water, and would wriggle about in the air until submerging, and after a beat, like a magic trick, an apologetic face would emerge.

Suddenly a siren wailed from the beach, and a fissure of water erupted from one of the oil rigs in the distance. The Doomsayer watched as the rig furthest to the left began its collapse, metal sweeping into the water, the rig’s mast dipping at a dangerous angle and toppling into the adjacent rig. The shriek of metal-on-metal reverberated with the siren in the air. Waves grew larger and crashed to the shore and people retreated to the sand. The search was over.

Eventually the newlywed couple returned to the Doomsayer, where they admitted that the ring was likely lost for good. The Doomsayer stayed on the beach though, watching as the rigs toppled like slow motion dominoes into the greedy sea. The sound they made was mournful. The sun dipped below the horizon, disappearing into a blood-red wink.

Alone with the mongrel dogs on the beach, the Doomsayer turned around to face the street, and he noticed how the people were moving in the moonlight like pallbearers in search of a body. Everywhere there was garbage. He returned to the view of the lapping waves, and he found himself wading into the water, and his head disappeared into the sea.

The dogs watched the waves.

A pair of pale legs popped upright into the air, calm and balanced despite the waves.

The conspiracy of dust carried on unabated.

MOONRAKER by Robert Warf

August 13, 2020

GREENHOUSE

My father's hands are large and calloused with supple jointed thumbs.

I have my mother's hands. I'm a man. Not a man like my father. A man like my mother.

I'd tell you about my mother's hands, but I can only say so much for so long about a good thing.

But I'll tell you about my father.

I'll tell you something.

MOONSHADOW

Oil rig at sea. Drillers drilling. Sweat. Dripping sweat. The moon overhead. Men work under lamplight. Roughnecks with rough hands. Hands of a father. Smoldering filter in dirty fingers. Dirty fingers of my father's dirty work. A flare dropped down a well. A spark from machinery. Not by my father's hands.

They told us father didn't feel a thing when it went up.

Not a thing.

He just went, but not up.

MARSHLAND

Daddy, I've done a lot of acid. I see burning plains. Fire skirting along the horizon, flirting with you, but I can't put it out daddy, I can't put it out.

He holds my hand. Mother’s in another state. Father's woman in the other room. I am with father. Hand in hand.

Son. At some point you've got to come down. My father said this to me and I did this for him. I did this for him, and when I asked him to come down he never did.

MACHINERY

I’ll tell you something else. Something I need to say.

I’ll tell you what I saw when I went up.

I saw you.

We spoke. So here I am talking to you father. You left me with mother and I love mother, but I want to love you. You left me with mother's hands and I don't understand why you left. I don’t understand where you left me, but I want to understand. I want to because I need to.

Let me see you father.

MUSHROOM

When I see you, we sit out along the plains with a bottle of red wine and a cowboy steak we eat with our hands. You smoke a Rothman's how mother told me you smoked Rothman's. You hand me one and we smoke and watch the plains. There's no sea here. There's nothing. We're safe. I tell you this when you panic. I hold your hand then. You ask where we are and I see the sweat on your forehead and I see the veins in your eyes and I know, you need to know. You must.

Where are we?

You don't know father. You aren't meant to.

SCARAB by Jihoon Park

August 11, 2020

I see a scarab beetle on the sidewalk on my walk home from the bar. Instead of stepping on it, I scoop it up with the Yellow Pages on the driveway and place it on the ficus tree next to the garage door.

I’m very nice when I’m drunk. I fall into bed next to Janine. She is awake but she does not want to talk to me. She probably wants me to shower and get the whisky smell off, but I still have some dignity left. I am my own man and tonight I want to sleep in my jacket and jeans.

In the morning, I see Janine smile for the first time since our son died. She has made pancakes. A stack of three pancakes for her, and a stack of three pancakes for the scarab beetle.

“I see you brought the bug in,” I say.

“Sorry there’s only one pancake left,” Janine says. “Scabby was starving. Maybe you can wake up earlier next time.”

So she’s given it a name. That’s fine. My childhood dog’s name was Scrappy, and I wonder if Janine is playing a trick on me. Do those names even sound alike? I try not to think about it.

My hangover gets worse on the drive to work and so I pull over on the freeway to throw up the single pancake I ate. I gargle with the mouthwash I keep in the glove compartment.

Janine spends more and more time with Scabby, who grows bigger every day. She takes it to the play structures in the park. She takes it to the mall and looks at the stuffed animals in the Build-A-Bear Workshop.

One day I come home to find them watching Wheel of Fortune. Scabby is now the size of a large Doberman. “Can you get groceries tonight?” she says, patting Scabby’s little armored head. “Scabby ate all the frozen chicken. I left a list.”

I decide to have a few drinks at Ralph’s Tavern before grocery shopping. At Ralph’s, I run into Hector. He has just sued his employer after spraining his ankle getting off a forklift, so we celebrate. After last call, we smoke two joints inside his van. We drive out to the soccer field and skid out donuts in the parking lot, like in the old days.

I come back home past 2:00 AM. Janine is waiting for me at the dining table reading The Metamorphosis.

“Did you at least get the groceries?” she asks without looking up.

“Forgot.”

We start to argue. Janine wants me to stop drinking, to be a better role model for Scabby. We start arguing, but Janine stops. She doesn’t want to wake Scabby in his room.

“His room?” I ask.

Janine tiptoes down the hall and opens Dave’s room, the room we never go into since he died. Scabby is asleep in Dave’s bed. I begin yelling. I hate seeing that thing in my son’s bed. I throw the desk lamp and shatter the window. I pick up Dave’s old hockey stick and bash down the closet mirror. I topple over Dave’s drawers. Janine grabs Scabby, cradles him in her arms and yells that she is staying at her friend what’s-her-face's for the night.

My feet are bloody from stepping on broken glass, so I wrap them up with gauze. I make three Long Islands in the kitchen and gulp them down. My hands shake. My feet hurt too much to sleep so I go and get groceries.

Janine does not come back for a while. I sweep up the glass in Dave’s room and fix up his drawer with some old two-by-fours in the garage. I straighten out his trophies. I want the room to look nice.

I try removing the bloodstains in the carpet with shampoo, but it doesn't work. I search Google and it tells me to use ammonia instead. The internet warns me not to mix ammonia with bleach, since the fumes will kill me.

I invite Hector to crash on the couch for a few nights. He brings over four bottles of Johnnie Walker, which he bought with his settlement money. We drink and smoke and watch reruns of Cheers.

Janine comes back with Scabby after a month. Scabby is all grown up now and much taller than me. He is dressed in a nice three-piece suit. Janine says she is back to collect her things, and that Scabby will take care of her from now on. He has found a nice job at that legal firm with the nighttime television commercials, Johnson & Perkins or something like that.

I beg her to stay. She hands me a business card. One of her old college friends is an addiction counselor and has agreed to see me pro-bono. I get angry. I don’t need anyone’s charity. I rip the card into tiny little pieces and toss them down on the doormat.

“It’s all your fault, I should have crushed you when I had the chance.” I leap at Scabby and throw punches, trying to bust his jaw or mandible or whatever you call it, but his exoskeleton protects him. I expect him to fight back, to rip me apart with his 100-times-stronger-relative-to-his-body-weight strength, but he just waits until I tire myself out. I collapse on the front steps of the house.

“I’m sorry,” says Janine, staring down at me. She grabs hold of Scabby, who opens up his back to reveal his glistening, golden wings. I watch them fly away, Scabby’s wings booming like a helicopter, until they disappear as a little dot in the blue sky.

WRITING PROMPTS AND CHANGING VIEWS by Sabrina Hicks

August 9, 2020

At a time when real life is crushed into an acronym, IRL, to accommodate social media, texts, curated accounts, all I crave is something real, someone to talk to, my father’s voice, my mother’s strength. Dani was annoyed that her father sent her a text asking how she was doing, as if the weight of their collective damage could be written with thumbs. Knowing he won’t answer your phone call, you text back fine not explaining how you got fired for taking too many days off, caring for a woman he once loved.

A strong memory of color. I’m driving to the hospital to visit my mother with Hey Jude playing on the radio so that when I enter the lobby of broken people my head is filled with begging: Jude, don’t be afraid, Jude, don’t let me down, Jude, take a sad song and make it better, and I think for a second I’ll let her into my heart so it can beat for two, like all those years before, but I don’t go to her. Instead, I pretend I’m there to see someone else. I say to the front desk, Maternity ward, please. My sister just gave birth. And somehow, I end up staring at babies fresh from the womb, bound in white hospital blankets, striped pink and blue and yellow, brushstrokes of blood and cream-colored mucus still streaked across their brow, and I wonder what it’s like to be that new, to open my eyes and see the world for the first time, to recognize my mother through static. I blink in the rich colors of life, until I’m kicked out and treated like a baby thief, like death visiting.

A time of anger or fear. She sits up, tubes scattered about, says, Dani, don’t be angry. But Dani cannot help herself. She vacillates between sympathy and disgust, looking at the slices across her mother’s veins, the dissection of life and death like the tree that fell on the roof of Dani’s childhood home, nearly missing her, her mother and father on one side, she on the other, and how her mother’s voice was a bridge cutting through wind and rain. Her friends console her, tell her she’s stronger than her mother, implying her mother is fragile and weak, not made for this world, but she doesn’t believe any of those words or explanations, only that some things cannot be explained, which is to say, everything human.

A ladybug crawls across your chest . . . Its wings, tucked underneath its brightly dotted shell, spill out, like her shirt you brought from home, coming through the zipper of her pants as you and the nurse get her dressed, before she is released from the hospital with a stack of papers on suicide prevention, group therapy, interventions, substance abuse hotlines, and bills to add to the bills you haven’t paid. She will not let you fuss over her anymore she says, but the shirt coming out of her front zipper is a bookmark you save for later when your eyes are heavy, humming Hey Jude, coming undone, the speckled night crawling across your chest.

A man asleep in a car. Make it funny! Make it scary! But all you see is a reckoning, a knife placed squarely in his chest and the taste of blood waking inside you. You write about the twist. You write about your father leaving you both, leaving you caretaker, littering your childhood with each curve of road. You rip it all up and write fantasy, a Lord of the Rings knockoff where you are the hero, your father is the villain, and your mother the damsel to be saved. But how do you save someone from themself? You forget about salvation, make the car drive off a cliff, a man asleep at the wheel, a daughter looking over the edge, a mother who becomes her own hero.

A time when you were desperate or diseased.

A time when you were grateful and knew love.

A time when all the triggers buried in your chest did not require a key.

VISION QUEST by Joe Cary

August 8, 2020

Nestled in his sleeping bag, Randy had fallen asleep alone under the desert stars, but here is stirred by a slithering along his naked thigh and a rattle under his armpit. Half asleep, he imagines he’s dreaming, but a Stone Age part of him wrings his spine and cascades adrenaline. The rattlesnake brushes Randy’s ankle and traces halfway up his ribs, so smooth and cold he wouldn’t have placed it but for the harrowing sound. A collision of fear and logic keeps him rabbit-still. The slick, thick thing slides across the old bruise left by Phil’s wingtips and curls around Randy’s heel, then brushes the arch of his foot. It tickles, goddamn it, and his foot jerks. A radio-static rattle as the diamondback roils against the bag.

“No please God no,” Randy whispers.

He spies his iPhone ten feet away, beside a saguaro, and pictures his F-150 at the trailhead.

Maybe it’ll leave on its own.

He sniffles the cold snot in his nostrils, senses the chill in his earlobes too, and it hits him: his bag is the warmest spot around. The snake isn’t leaving. Warm panic simmers in his chest and he laughs morosely. “Exactly what you want.”

Slowly, he brings his hands to his collarbones. The bottom of the bag, yellow in the moonlight, undulates and swells as the thing settles around Randy’s feet and lays its weight across his ankles. A quieter rattle, like the trill of cicadas.

It’s not here to bite me.

Randy thinks of his phone and the text messages on it. And the opinions and lives that would be forever changed if those messages were found. How he’d flung his phone from this spot after Phil’s last text at 10:16 p.m.: U ARENT WORTH THE WAIT. If only it were closer now. Phil would know what to do, he’d handle this.

Randy pushes up gently against the bag, exposing his chest to cooler air. A breeze washes the sharp scent of desert sage over his face. He inhales, but then he blinks at something in his eye and his nose tingles; he rubs it and pinches the septum, but blurts a sneeze that quakes his body. The snake writhes and its rattle screams like a whirring fly reel as it lashes Randy’s ankle; Randy pisses himself.

“Please. We’re good.”

A klaxon ringtone blares. Randy cranes to the flashing amber light and knows it’s Phil, and wonders what he has to say for himself. It sounds five, six times in succession and he knows Phil’s drunk again. He’ll think Randy is ignoring him. He’ll get spiteful. Dangerous. A snake without the courtesy of a warning.

But at least Phil is awake.

“Hey Siri.”

No reply.

“Hey Siri!”

“Hey! Fucking Siri!” The snake coils around his right ankle and constricts in pulses like a blood pressure sleeve.

“Oh, that’s your name? Hey Fucking Siri, get outta my bag.” He squeezes his face; this was to be time away from Phil––self-reflection under infinite stars––not a nightmare. Another klaxon and Randy grinds his head into the ground, convulsing at the futility. The rattle sounds like a strong shower.

“Fine, Phil, come,” he says to the sky. “Arroyo trailhead. Two miles east. You can shove me. Kick me. Just. Please hurry.”

A pocket of air billows in his gut and Randy wonders if gas would faze the snake, pictures it flouncing up his chest and tearing across his face, returning to bite him only after the air clears. He’s getting squirrelly and he knows it.

His left foot tingles. It’s falling asleep. Far off, a coyote howls, and Randy senses something, like an ancestral echo: he’s the one who needs to leave. Before both feet go numb. Tick, tock, he’s on his own with this. Alone. He’ll take his time, he decides, the patience of a glacier. The rattle buzzes like his Cannondale’s rear hub, as if the snake agrees.

One tooth at a time he carefully unzips the bag to his hips and digs his elbows in and slowly—slowly—raises his torso. He eases his left foot back, knee bent, and grounds his heel for stability. Pain lances across his instep as his foot awakens. The snake remains coiled around his right ankle. He bends that knee slightly and flexes his foot back and forth repeatedly, rhythmically. When his calf begins to quiver he pleads, “Hey Siri, let me out, and you keep my bag. Promise.”

“You’ll need to unlock your iPhone first,” says the other Siri.

At that, the diamondback uncoils and threads into the spot where Randy’s left foot had been. Randy rises to his palms and cranks out, elbow buckling, wrist searing. He scrambles clear and, stiff and numb, pulls on his Levi’s and boots. Then he lumbers to his phone and uses its flashlight to find a rock, saucepan sized. He grabs it to bludgeon the snake, but a klaxon startles him.

“Go to bed, Phil!”

Rock in one hand, he thumbs to the last text: U better be DEAD.

Randy drops the phone.

The sleeping bag is silent, placid. Randy holds the rock over his phone and considers its cost. The hassle of replacing it. Adjusting the rock’s position, he contemplates upgrading to a better camera and boyfriend and, hell, a new phone number, sloughing it all...and lets go of the rock, not a deliberate action but a refusal to hold on, willful neglect or careless disregard as lawyer Phil might argue. The phone crunches. Randy grunts and jumps on the rock and the phone crack-cracks. Bending, he scoops the scraps and shards and the phone itself—battered and bent, screen crazed—and slips it all into his pocket.

He turns around. “Hey Siri, enjoy the bag.” Then he puts one foot ahead of the other for the two miles back to his pickup and blinks a smile each time the phone scraps rattle in his pocket.

JUST OUTSIDE THE TUNNEL OF LOVE by Francine Witte

August 7, 2020

And Benny Jones telling me about Darlene. In other words, he pulled me through to unlove me.

Something about how love is a crispy pepper one minute, but then it goes wilty and soft. I told him I’m not a goddam pepper and get to the goddam point.

Problem is, I gave Benny Jones my heart too fast. My heart is a bristle I keep in my pocket and I can never wait to give it away.

Benny Jones sat in the boat in the Tunnel of Love, all squirm and tangle of words. Friends, he was saying, and didn’t mean to.

Then he pointed to a pin’s worth of light right there in front of us. “That’s the future,” he said. “It gets bigger and brighter the closer we get. All beautiful and warm.” I told Benny to shut the hell up. If we’re not a thing, we’re not a thing, but don’t go making a movie out of it.

When we did get outside the Tunnel of Love, into the future Benny Jones had promised would be warm and bright, I didn’t see anything. I didn’t feel anything. Just thought back to that summer at my grandma’s house, when her old dog, Punch, got a fever and she was going to shoot him. How I stroked Punch’s tan fur, telling him, it’s okay boy, when I knew damn well it wasn’t. My heart wriggling around in my pocket even then with no damn place for it to go.

BLACK CANYON CITY by Chloe Lauter

August 6, 2020

It is October in Arizona and the desert is dark and merciless when we drive into Black Canyon City. Perhaps it would be safer to keep driving, perhaps it would be safer to drive all night, but your face is shadowy with fatigue. It’s only for the night, you say.

We see the rows of neat trailers as we turn off the highway, surrounded by dust-soaked single-family homes and dirt roads thin like sidewinder tracks. At the end of the main road, the night erupts into screaming fluorescence, the dollar store that is a drugstore and party décor and office supply store all rolled into one, and we are the only car in the parking lot.

You go first, you say.

I walk inside feeling dazzled by the smooth whoosh of the automatic doors and the sterile certainty of buzzing white light bouncing off the white pearlized floor. The store is stripped clean of the desert outside but still smells like wasteland. You follow me, rush up behind me, and my shriek of laughter ricochets off the bright bags of party balloons and skeins of wrapping paper left chalky and untouched. You’re so cute, you whisper in my ear. I buy a box of tampons. You buy a Red Bull. The clerk eyes us suspiciously.

I go to the bathroom, and you promise to wait outside. The bathroom lights flicker and hum like crickets at dusk. Above the sink is blank whitewashed wall. There is no mirror. Maybe there never was one.

We brush our teeth in the parking lot, spitting toothpaste out of the driver’s side door so the clerk won’t see us, and then drive in circles searching in the dark for a safe place to park for the night. We finally rest in the shelter of a tall fence. Crying carries up from the mobile homes on the other side for hours, but we are tired. We sleep curled up in the back of your van.

In the middle of the night, you jerk awake and, still half-dreaming, reach for the handgun hidden in the D pillar. Shh, I whisper, holding you, it’s okay. There is no one outside but coyotes, and they do not speak our language. No one will see us here.

In the morning, you stand coiled in the shade of the open passenger door and pour a bottle of water over your hands and your eyes. There is only one coffee shop in town, and when we walk inside, your arm around my shoulder, the unwelcome hits me like the smell of rot. A man in a leather vest and steel-toed boots hangs over the counter, and a shade of a woman stands in the corner holding a baby carrier, her face is hungry but not for food. We are the only real things in this place.

We take our coffees and emerge blinking into the sun. The air shimmering off the hood of the van smells like bitter almonds. We are the only people breathing for miles.

Don’t worry, you say, you’ll get used to it. I have.

SELF-LOATHING WALKS THE TOWN by Amy L. Freeman

August 1, 2020

Despite the early morning’s scorching heat, Self-Loathing strides down the street in Anytown, USA, slapping mosquitoes from his neck. He reaches his first house, the leaves of its magnificent oak tree motionless in the heavy air. With a quick sidelong glance to ensure no one is watching, Self-Loathing shimmies up the tree and leans forward to peek into a second-story window.

Wearing just boxer shorts, fourteen-year-old Richie is leaning over his bed, scrubbing at his sheets with a damp green hand-towel. He’s using his other fist to pound his thigh as he tries to also scrub away the image of the new boy's lazy smile while he swings his lacrosse stick back and forth, a metronome. Self-Loathing decides he doesn’t need to intervene further, today. He smiles and drops lightly to the ground, then circles around to the back of the house.

Self-Loathing looks through the window at Richie’s father sitting at an old wooden desk, a spinning bamboo ceiling fan rustling the pages of a yellow legal pad. Every few moments, he reaches toward a Bible, flicks through pages, then returns to writing. Standing on tiptoes, Self-Loathing sends a gentle breath toward the Bible, fluttering its pages until it lands open on Leviticus 18:22. Richie’s father peers at the page, taps his pen against his teeth, and nods.

He resumes writing. The Bible tells us, “You shall not lie with a man as with a woman; it is an abomination.” His pen flies across the page. The sins of the flesh can bring down even the most righteous person. He knows that all too well.

He’ll have Sunday’s sermon ready. He always does. And after last week’s little round of hooky, he’d better see Richie scrubbed clean and sitting in the front pew.

Self-Loathing has a spring in his step as he heads to his next house. Sixteen-year-old Dillon’s room is on the ground floor in the back, and she never closes her drapes. Self-Loathing only has to hide behind a tool shed to watch her.

Even though she hasn’t even brushed her teeth, Dillon’s on her iPad. Self-Loathing’s eagle eyes can see that she’s surfing a wellness website, bookmarking pages touting the benefits of burpees and lean protein. Self-Loathing frowns. This won’t do.

He’d long ago hacked into her Wi-Fi, installing a nifty little program that lets him feed ads and other content of his choosing to her screen. He taps a few buttons, then folds his arms and stands back, waiting.

It’s only minutes, really, before he sees her poke a finger into her soft belly. She swipes at the screen again. Then she pinches a roll of her flesh between her thumb and pointer. Self-loathing sends her a few more images. Dillon abruptly shoves her iPad aside, stands, and walks out of the room.

When she returns, she’s cradling something wrapped in a navy towel. She shoves a chair under her doorknob and goes to her bathroom to pour a glass of water. Then she unfurls the towel, tears open the loaf of white bread, and starts to stuff slices into her mouth, guzzling water to force the food down her throat.

Self-Loathing debates sticking around to hear her puking, but he’s already running late on his rounds. Another day.

A woman pushing a stroller is on the sidewalk, maybe fifty feet away, coming toward him. She’s cooing into the stroller. Babies are tricky because they can’t yet absorb what he offers.

The mothers are another story; so easy to plant those seeds. “I’ve read that not all beautiful chubby babies grow up to be fat kids.” Or, “I wouldn’t worry about the size of her ears. Most babies’ proportions even out over time.” He’s been at this long enough to witness the mothers transplant those seedlings into their children.

The baby gurgles, a pure, joyous sound. Something about the laughter’s timbre jars loose a distant childhood memory, one Self-Loathing can’t quite bring into focus.

When was the last time he felt pure joy?

Easier to remember its opposite. Like on the school playground, when the bullies came for him. Or at the dinners, when his mother stayed silent while his father shamed him. Or the dates he never went on, the job interviews he flubbed, and the endless nights alone.

The woman blows kisses at the baby. Self-Loathing straightens and walks toward her. He scans her face, body, and demeanor, weighing her split ends, baby-weight, and acne scars. He splays his hands wide as if he means no harm.

“Morning! Can I have a peek at your baby?”

LIKE HUMMINGBIRDS by Shome Dasgupta

July 31, 2020

Like when we sat on the sun and watched the world simmer in our heads, brother—remember that time? And how you were so furious and the words from your mouth smoldered, drifting towards every star, making sure there was no void. The pain. The pain you felt became ashes in my own body, and I’m so sorry, brother. I was helpless. And as much as I felt your pain, there was nothing I could do to take it away from you. Your skull vibrated as the smoke left through every pore of your body, and I just wanted to hold you, even if it meant I’d burn, but you wouldn’t let. You knew. You recognized, despite all that was happening, that you loved me and didn’t want to hurt me. Remember in that brief gleam of light, before you or I left, how the sun diminished and we floated in space no longer knowing if the world existed or cared if it did or not, and we hovered around like the hummingbirds in our backyard, trying not to bump into stars. We had so much fun and for that endless second you found peace as you took my hand and guided me around, much like you did in life. You loved those hummingbirds.

Brother, I fucked up so much, I’m so sorry.

And like before it all happened, when you were there we would be on our hands and knees, crawling in the ditch, pretending to be raccoons because there were no more raccoons left to feed. They went away just like you or me. But when we were playing, I cut my leg and cried so loud. You picked me up to take me home but I flailed so much we tumbled over, and the world was before us as we were on our backs. My pain went away as we tried to count all the birds in the sky.

And brother, I don’t know—I don’t know if I had the chance to do it all over again if I would change any of it. Including all the times I fucked up and all the times you had to pull on my arm while I was sinking. I don’t know if I would change it all up because look at who we became—I honestly think our parents would be so proud of us. How we made it through even though we weren’t meant to—I know who we are now, but if I could go back and change all the ways I needed to change, I don’t know who we would become.

You’d be so proud of me now, brother. I’m sorry. I’m glad you no longer feel any pain. I feel it every now and then but then it all goes away when it’s just us, floating around in space, drifting this way and that, toward every star, and every now and then a hummingbird appears, glowing and holy, fluttering its wings to let us know that we’re here. How you loved those hummingbirds, brother, I will never forget, even with closed eyes, I will never forget.

And this might be the last time we can speak—I don’t know if you can hear me—I’m not sure how all of this goes, but I love you, brother. Thanks for always being there.

APEX PREDATORS by Nicole VanderLinden

July 30, 2020

Jessa hears a bear. Only it’s not a bear. It’s the wind nudging against the nylon of our tent, but my new wife has never camped on a grassy bald in the Smoky Mountains. So when she elbows me, whispers, is that a snout? where the fabric pushes in against her sleeping bag, I say, probably. I say, you didn’t bring in a candy bar, did you? She knows this story, that tent walls aren’t really walls and that a bear can slice right through them, drag you away for a bit of chocolate.

Next to me, I feel her go still so as not to provoke the bear-that-isn’t-there. She steadies her breathing, in and out, and soon she’s as calm as a corpse, also afraid and very alive.

I’ve told her other things, some true and mostly not. Bears smell fear, I say. You’re not bleeding, are you? Imagine, I tell her, if our tent was invisible, what we’d look like to them—other animals, too. Lonely pink babies under the cold Tennessee sky.

We don’t pass many thru-hikers, and the ones we do have trail names: Rock-n-Roll, Jumpy Cat. Men whose necks have furred and, once, an old woman with two filthy Pomeranians. Bear snacks, I whisper. We share tortillas and pouches of peanut butter. We muse on the weather, what it might become—I predict lightning and gusts that will blow over trees. When we ask for the hikers’ real names, they laugh and say, those names don’t count out here.

See? I say to her later. We sit alone on a fallen yellow birch. I breathe in the musk of her unwashed clothes—fires put out and canvas grown damp—her botanical smells long gone and scrubbed clean. In a nearby tree, a rat snake catches an errant ray of sun. Your name doesn’t count out here.

She carries a green backpack. She likes to blend in, and she packs it each morning, the sleeping bag then the tent poles then the bear canister then the snacks, in order of what she most wants to keep dry. I’m an apex predator, she says, big with her backpack. Maybe that’s my name, she says, and I say, you sure about that?

And then, on the last day, we do see a bear.

It’s foraging along the French Broad River. It’s midday, and the river’s swollen with rain; the rush of it leaves me dizzy. The bear. She shrinks into that green backpack, rigid as the hills. The bear, the bear. For a moment I think we’ve conjured it. It’s a few yards away and can smell us, I know, the memory of cooked meat still clinging to our hair, whiskey on our breath. Somewhere, a dead branch cracks to the ground.

The bear sniffs and then huffs, its mouth a cave. Her fingers curl around my fingers, and I feel her pulse, or maybe it’s mine, a heartbeat between our hands. We are small and we are nobody. But then the bear turns away and ambles on, no reason why or why not.

He’ll be back for you, I say, though she knows this isn’t true. We’re spending the night in Hot Springs, in a cabin, in a place where bears can’t go, and she will be Jessa once more.

Next year, we’ll visit the sea. We’ll rent a kayak, and it will be her turn to lay me low, to make me forget my name.

Shark, she’ll whisper from behind as we paddle into the blue, our boat like a toy bobbing in the swells. I see a fin, she’ll say, over there, on the horizon. I’ll get the shiver; my nerves will bloom. That means he’s hunting, she’ll say.