Fiction

LUMPS by Sean Littlefield Chumley

July 18, 2020

Unlike most people who live near restaurants, I never visit the fast-food place next to my house. Chunkee’s looks like any other corporate restaurant. The shellacked exterior, the vibrant sign a mile high announcing its presence like a lighthouse, the drive-thru menu with its voice-box speaker. I’ve never seen a Chunkee’s anywhere else, and I’ve never seen a commercial for one, and I don’t know what kind of food they serve other than fast. The sign doesn’t give much away. I watch it change every day, but the bottom always says NO BURGERS HERE!!!!!! From the window next to my TV I can see the long sticks the employees use to change the letters, but by the time I work up the energy to get up and look at the people doing it they’ve finished the job and have gone back inside. When I try to look through the windows to see what kind of person eats there, all I see is shiny glass with vague, shadowy shapes behind it and a line of cars waiting in the drive-thru.

Some days the sign says $5, and nothing else. Often it says COME GET THE BOX. I like when it says 3 FOR 12. It’s like a logic puzzle. Three of what? Twelve what? Presumably dollars are involved. Once—only once—the sign read LUMPS. The drive-thru line moved steadily that day. As soon as one driver rode off with their lumps another car would come to take its place at the end of the queue in perfect time, every time. I’d never seen it like that. I stayed inside all day watching the cars get their lumps. The shadow-puppet people inside the restaurant made it look so full, but I never saw anyone come or go. I came so close to going down there, to seeing what all the fuss was about, but I had a date to prepare for.

I’ve been seeing a pattern with the men I’ve dated lately. One beautiful date, a few days of texting after that, and then they vanish into the air. Ryan and I went for cupcakes and played video games demos in an electronics store that was going out of business. He wore a too-big sweater and tight jeans. He opened up to me about his past, his hopes for the future, where he sees his life going, and the poetic nuance of foosball. At the end of the date he parked in my driveway where we made out for a few minutes before he said, “Welp, here you go!” He pulled out of my driveway and into Chunkee’s.

Next was Alex. He looked like Vincent van Gogh, but with both ears, and he worked across the street from where I worked. After Alex came Jeffrey who had a piercing anywhere you could pinch a flap of skin together. Jeffrey preceded Mark, who came before Mitchell, Frank, another Alex, Drew, Joe, River, Ben and yet another Alex. All men who came and went at breakneck speed. It’s fun to imagine them stuck somewhere. I liked to think of them trapped in a man-sized jar with air-holes punched into the screwed-on lid. They could wrap themselves up in a chrysalis of their own design and emerge not as the boys they had so recently been, but as beautiful men with distinctive markings and impressive wingspans.

I could tell it was going to happen again. Justin and I went to a sushi restaurant where they deliver your maki on remote-controlled cars. We stopped for drinks at an alien-themed tiki bar on the way home. I asked if he wanted to come inside when I drove us back to my place.

“Yeah, I guess, if you mean we’ll do sex,” he said. I was stunned when he stayed the night, and so was he when he woke up the next morning.

“Oh, you’re still here,” he said. To me. In my bedroom.

I looked longingly at him, “Sure am!”

He shuffled out the door tucking his shirt into his unzipped pants.

“We’ll have to do this again sometime!” he said. “I’ll text you very soon. You can, and should, count on it!”

His car followed the same familiar route, but instead of going through the drive-thru he parked and went into Chunkee’s. As he opened the door a delicious smell filled my apartment. The sign read LUMPS. It was only the second time it had ever said that in the years I’d lived there. I drooled. My stomach gurgled. I threw on last night’s clothes and headed out the door. I walked past my car and set foot on the Chunkee’s parking lot, which was closer to the restaurant than I’d ever been before. I expected the door to expel me. Or, if not, that my hand would pass through it like air. But no, the door was real, and it opened, and a smell rich like gravy, but heavy with grease, delicious, seeped out and clung to me. It pulled me into the restaurant, which looked just as normal inside as it did outside. The same molded plastic booths you’d expect from any burger palace, the fountain drink machine, the yellow bucket with a mop sticking out.

While a lot of customers sat eating at tables, none stood in line and I walked straight up to the cashier, who I recognized as Ryan of the big sweater. His name tag was pinned to it, obscuring part of the alpine pattern. When we’d gone out he’d told me of the job he loved at a store in the mall that sold engraved chocolate family portraits. So I was surprised to see him in Chunkee’s, or at all. He, however seemed elated.

“So great to see you! I meant to text you back, but, you know.”

I didn’t know what to say! He blinked and his eyes turned big and black and segmented like a bug’s.

“What’ll it be today?”

“LUMPS,” I drooled.

His sweater stirred. The knit pattern had a veiny look to it I’d never noticed before. He turned around to fetch my lumps and his sweater unfolded into a massive pair of wings. The air felt warm and moist. I looked for air holes drilled into the ceiling. He returned with the tray of food, two antennae wagging out of his forehead.

“Here you go. LUMPS!”

I took the tray to a table. The lumps resembled a deep-fried pillow, big and crispy on the plate. All around me I saw Justin and Jeffrey and a table full of Alexes. Mark and Mitchell and Frank and Joe. All these men who had vanished from my life, sitting around the restaurant in front of their lumps. They wiggled their antennas and flapped their wings at me, except Jeffrey, whose wings were too heavy with piercings.

I took a seat and joined them. Ben gave me a flirty wink with one of his segmented eyes. I lifted the lumps, inhaled its chewy scent, unrolled my proboscis and dug in.

WITHOUT YOU, I’M EVERYTHING by Felicity Fenton

July 17, 2020

They went away, left her for others. They called less. They texted less. Soon they were running into each other in the parking lot of the dump, rushing to get back to things. “You look great.” They didn’t mean it. “You seem great.” They didn’t mean it. “So great to see you.” They weren’t sure.

They boasted about busyness. Their kids, their houses, their husbands. She was busy felting socks for refugees. They were busy driving sports utility vehicles. She was busy searching for working pay phones so she could call her grandmother and tell her she had been places. They were busy applying lipgloss on southern California beach chairs. Their busy sweat stained tunics. Their busy slammed into parked hatchbacks. Their busy stubbed toes while shoving laundry into the mouth of a machine.

“Seems like you’ve been doing a lot!” they would say. “We like all of your pictures. You look skinny.” Their happiness was skinny. She would see them smiling for the camera from steering wheels and quickly close her browser window. She was bored by their contentedness, embarrassed by their stodge. Coffee franchises were responsible for their poor taste in music. Syrupy melodies. Always the same album, the same song. “Where did you get that jacket? I’ve been looking for something similar.” they would ask. She wouldn’t remember on purpose.

They were old. She wasn’t as old. But only by a few years. This was a point of contention among them. She still had a chance to escape the blow of societal ostracism. Men still called to her from construction sites. No one wanted to take their clothes off anymore. Not with the lights on. They had complained about losing out on orgasms to detached partners, so she taught each of them how to fuck couch arms via webcam.

Where had she moved from? Who were her relatives? How long did it take to brine pork chops? What was her first kiss like? They wanted answers.

She fled Brooklyn after being terrorized by a dead rock star. Her mother was related to a Tunisian farmer who married a Sicilian gypsy who died on a boat on the way to America. Her father was adopted by eco-warriors who lived on aloe vera and cashews. It took twelve hours to brine pork chops if you wanted them to taste good, but she was sure there were other cooks who could do it in less. Her first kiss was with her cousin, a piece of bubblegum, and a mirror. They were lovers for years.

What did she do for fun? She collected shades of red from the caskets of dead dictators. She took photos of strangers entering and exiting convenience stores. She pinched blackheads from the base of her nose.

She wrote Uncle Ho themed postcards to her aunt and never mailed them:

My pants won’t stay up. I bit my nails to nubs, again. My spine feels stacked in reverse. I walk backwards to keep up with my longing. Sorry to disappoint you. I'll try better next time.

Sadness was common. Mornings were the worst. Instead of turning off her alarm she would cover her head with a stack of pillows and shove her earplugs in further. She would roll from bed without using her arms or legs, thudding the cold tiles with her face.

They would come to her house and tell her about their trips to southern California beaches. How tan their arms were, how taut. “We talked about how lost you are.” they would say. “Maybe you should try accounting?” She would offer them tea, without milk or honey.

She wore baggy t-shirts while racing Olympian ghosts on treadmills. When she looked in the mirror she measured all parts. Her neck, her belly button, her thighs. Her role as human, daughter, beast. She lost to all measurements, then won them back later with a hit of weed.

When she ran out of money she suggested they fund her adventures to a disappearing island. There wouldn’t be status updates or pictures, but it would be real. It was her next big thing. There would be a book, a movie based on a book, and a book based on a book. She would float outside of herself. Nothing would penetrate her wet suit.

She returned unscathed, mostly shiny. No longer longing. Stronger in the hands. When they reached for her she sidestepped into another room, looking for a missing sock, a glass of water, a bobby pin. They were impressed without her having to do much of anything to impress them. Dust free corners said it all. The pork chops were succulent. She paid them back, plus interest, then demanded they remove their clothes.

OFF COME THE MASKS by Mitchell Waldman

July 7, 2020

I'm driving down 104, out in the thinning herd of metal vehicles in pursuit of essentials, my mask on the seat beside me, right next to the miniature bottle of hand sanitizer and the pack of Marlboros, when I see him standing on the corner of 104 and Lake with his thin frame, long white beard, and the sign thrust up in the air "Prepare to Meet Your God!" I don’t know what comes over me, I slam on the brakes, the car behind almost smashing right into me, bleating its horn. I get out of the vehicle, and walk up to the figure, my heart pounding, fist clenched. I want to smash him in the face, get up close, closer, as I raise and cock my arm, ready to propel the clenched fist into his stupid face, when he looks right at me, a blankness, no expression in the eyes, like a zombie gone gone gone. The Gandhi on my shoulder whispers "Violence is not the answer," so I drop the arm, just stare at the man, his breath right on me now, his sign still held up high, high to the heavens. I turn and walk back to my metal vehicle, hearing the horns honking, seeing the face of an angry driver mouthing silent words, not sure if he's cursing me or the zombie. Across the intersection on the opposite corner stands a second specter with a sign which says "Jesus Is Coming Soon!" thrust high up in the air. I open the car door, sink back in my seat, stare at the mask on the passenger seat, my hands shaking on the wheel and sit, just sit there for a minute. Then I pull back out into the traffic herd, just another desperate human out on the hunt for essentials: meat, toilet paper, and a shred of the sanity I lost somewhere back when this all started.

SPREE by Meg Tuite

July 6, 2020

Mom has an entire fortress of pillows that she readjusts around her body.

“Barricading my skin against bedsores. Stay in one place for too long and you’ll have to order another ass from Walgreens.” Amber prescription bottles layer her bedside table. She marks the empties with a black X, doesn’t throw them away until a refill has been secured.

Rustling toes mow through bed sheets as Mom drags up another mini-vodka with her feet. The bottomless cascade of that clear liquid is her Niagara Falls. She is queen of the mini-island. Bottles are stashed away in pockets, beds, pillows, shoes, drawers, seat cushions. She buys tiny airplane-size bottles and layers the counter with them at the Walgreens every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

“I’m not a weekender,” she tells the clerk. “The Friday cattle who line up here are absurd, like accountants and flags.” No matter who’s behind the register, Mom is told that the larger bottles are much cheaper. She’s not an idiot. She loads up her empty purse with them, holds her hand up to her mouth as though it’s a secret and whispers to the clerk, “Hide the evidence. You get it, right?” Every time they laugh as though this is some kind of code that every customer, whether living in a cardboard box or a three-story house with kids doesn’t access.

“Elvirus, I’ve been calling you,” she says, as though I can’t hear the wheels of her guttural, somnolent chant, rutting over and over in my head.

“We’re going shopping. Light Mom a cigarette and get her a glass of ice for her vodka.” She doesn’t call me by my chosen name and speaks in third person after a few drinks. “Don’t forget her lemon, Elvine,” she thrums through a bloom of smoke.

By the time I get back with her glass, she’s dressed in one of her slinky 70s dresses.

This mimicry exhibits all the features of someone’s mom, but not mine. My mom only goes out for liquor. Her hair is combed. She isn’t wearing her shredding nylon nightgown, with coffee-splotched stains and cigarette holes anymore.

I stare in the mirror. I still look like her kid. My bangs are crooked and I wear stagnant knock-offs with shoulder pads, budding breasts polyp through Mom’s darts, pleated jean skirts and shiny pink, green and red blouses with moving motifs of lava lamp patterns, fringe and bell-bottoms from the pioneer days of Mom’s closet. I have a gift for reassembling the backwash material with scissors and safety pins.

“Do we need to lock the door?” Mom searches her purse for a key she doesn’t possess, as we walk out into infested air, thick with all the lives before it.

Mom and I slog through Harwood Avenue to catch a bus five blocks away. She wavers on a slight incline with her head and upper torso two steps ahead of the rest of her. She doesn’t drive anymore. I was eleven when I drove us home after Mom had one of her panic attacks, slammed over a curb into the yard of someone’s rummage sale. She didn’t hit anybody, but faces unhinged from the broken-down armoire, bicycles, toolsets, clothes, toys and astrology books they’d been rummaging through.

Mom’s hands were claws. Too much white hovered around the persecuted gray of her eyes. I had to unclench her fingers from the steering wheel and sit on top of her. When we got home, she shut the door to her room and didn’t come out for a few days. Dad whispered, ‘menopause’, but I knew this was no kind of pause.

We got off the bus in front of the "old bag" second-hand store.

“These clothes are married to a history you can feel. They didn’t come from cheap labor in China. Check the labels,” Mom says.

I’m fourteen, don’t check labels. I rake through racks to find something normal that will fit me. Some lady with a skin-rippled overlip keeps threading silent eye-pong accusations in my direction as she folds sweaters and talks to the woman behind the counter. They have the exact same haircut. “A mutt is a mutt,” she says. “You don’t have any idea what you’re getting. You remember that guy who had the same mutt for like ten years and they find him mauled in his backyard. I mean, that’s the chance you take when you go to one of those shelters. With a pedigree, you can check out the parents of the litter and know what you’re bringing home.” The other lady looked bored like she’d heard this shit before. Overlip glanced over at me. “You can only take six items in the dressing room, honey. Six.” She held up six ringed fingers.

Mom was already in a dressing room. I could see the maxi dresses looped over the door. It was either nightgowns or slinky dresses and I loved when she dressed up even when she wasn’t going anywhere. That meant Mom was back in the world with us.

This place wasn’t an easy score. The women were checking my every move. “Here, honey, let me help you. What size are you? Six?” So much for a free one. Mom never helped. She wasn’t the Mom who talked with women. She could care less what transpired between us. Her universe placated one being. Mom bought me a pair of jeans and some sandals and said yes to all the dresses. After we got back on the bus walked the few blocks to get home, Mom unzipped the dress she was wearing and had two more on underneath. She ripped them off. “That feels much better. I was getting hot. Honey, can you get me a few lemons?”

“You stole those dresses?”

“No one else could have pulled these dresses off, Elvatross, let’s be definitive. I was saving the ladies a few hangers.”

UPHOLSTERY by Corey Farrenkopf

July 6, 2020

Silva left the tacks on the floor. Rick said to. Sweep up after, it saves time. The upholstery shop smelled of pulled cotton, dry foam, and whatever scent the furniture carried from its original home. Sometimes it was garlic, sometimes mothballs and wine. The plaid wingback chair propped before Silva held an odd copper aroma. He pried rusted staples from the armrest with a pronged screwdriver, tapping its steel end with a rubber mallet. Sometimes the metal was so old it turned to dust beneath Silva’s blows. Just leave them. I’ll cut them out later, Rick would say from behind the bench where he sewed throw pillows with a foot-pedaled Singer.

Occasionally, Rick would remove a nail gun hanging from the wall to tack wayward cloth in place, sometimes he’d go out back to smoke.

It was Silva’s first reliable job and he wanted to avoid doing anything wrong, hence the constant questioning of Rick, who’d been dissecting antique furniture for fifty years. Glen needed the money. His father passed away three years before and his mother’s bookkeeping business barely kept the lights on. Rick paid eighteen an hour, far beyond minimum wage, enough to save, keeping bank accounts stable.

Rick’s hands were notched and carved from stray nails and scissors, scars thick and winding over his knuckles. Rick knew Silva’s grandfather, decided nineteen was an ideal age for apprenticeship. Silva liked the work, liked the fact his boss let him listen to music while he peeled fabric off couches from the eighteen hundreds, ottomans riddled with cigarette burns. Strip the old skin, restitch the new, Rick said.

“They have me re-cover that one every five years,” Rick said, as Silva began to fold back the chair’s fabric. Unlike most of the furniture Silva worked on, there was a second layer beneath, not the typical mesh of cotton and foam. The material was badly stained, the copper smell swelling with removal.

“What the hell,” Silva said as the fabric fell away between nail taps.

“Just ignore it. Those people pay three times our rate to leave the base layer. Get the rest off and I’ll take it from there,” Rick said.

“But, I don’t…” Silva stammered.

The majority of the fabric lay curled over the chair’s arm like discarded skin. Beneath, the outline of a body had been pressed into the material, a dark brown fading to crimson around the edges. It looked like a man who’d been reduced to the contents of his veins, as if a body had bled out and dissolved into the cushions.

“You don’t what? You’re going to see weird stuff if you stick around. Objects that shouldn’t be stuck beneath seat cushions. Notes left in pockets that were never meant to be read. You’ll see,” Rick replied, the pedal of the Singer whirring, needle never faltering as he stitched the final raised seam.

“Someone literally died in this chair. We’re destroying evidence. Shouldn’t we call the cops?”

“If I was going to do that, I would have done so thirty years ago. And we’re preserving it if anything. Some cultures leave bodies of loved ones propped in their living rooms until the decay really sets in. I think of it as more of a remembrance, someone holding on to someone they miss.”

Silva fought down his revulsion, tugging loose another dozen nails, their tarnished points singing off the linoleum floor, allowing the second skin to slip to the ground. He needed to see the image in its entirety. The outline of a man’s body was unmistakable, down to the folds in his pants, the press of his fingers into the armrest. The silhouette almost looked burnt, seared into the seat.

“Now get the underside,” Rick said.

The doorway to the shop pulled at Silva’s naval, the urge to flee tugging at his insides. His face had grown warm, sweat clawing at his armpits.

“I can’t. This is messed up. I need a couple hours of sick time or...” Silva said.

“No, you don’t. It will take ten minutes, then it’s over. I’ll do the rest and you won’t see this chair again for another five years. You’ll forget. The money’s good. A little unease is worth it.”

Silva’s best friend Chuck made nine-fifty stocking shelves at the local market. His girlfriend, Beth, pulled in just over eleven cleaning bathrooms at the hotel on 6A. Most of the older adults in his life were barely making above twenty, and they’d been at their jobs for decades. Eighteen was unheard of for starting pay. Rick promised he’d earn more than 50K when he graduated from apprentice, nearly fifteen grand more than his mother made a year.

Opportunity was rare. Silva couldn’t let it wither.

“Ten minutes isn’t much,” he said, sweeping a cluster of tacks from the base of the chair, clearing a spot where he could kneel to get at the layer of underlining draped beneath the seat. “I can do ten minutes.”

DOG TRACING by Mike Andrelczyk

July 5, 2020

I just remembered a maintenance man I used to work with who said he liked to get drunk and trace his dog on big sheets of paper and his garden was lined with pieces of broken hotel sinks. I just remembered this. Out of nowhere. When things come into your mind from out of nowhere it’s like looking at the outline of a dog on a piece of paper. The dog is gone, but its shape is there. This is a memory.

Imagine one of those shitty video dissolving effects now.

….

…. OK.

I was standing in the sun outside of the parking garage. There was a square of sunlight on the ground and I was standing in the center of it. I was avoiding doing any work for a few minutes and I was standing in the center of a square of sunlight. This was a good thing to do while avoiding loading luggage onto bellman carts and wheeling it around the hotel and unloading it.

Javier came out of the parking garage with a box of empties. The sunlight hit the bottles and it looked like Javier was carrying a box of light to the dumpster. This was good too. Throwing light into the dumpster.

“I’ll get it dude,” I said and lifted up the lid to the dumpster. “Dump ’em baby.”

Javier smiled. “I’m doing these bottles one at a time.”

He took out an empty bottle of Barcardi rum and threw it into the mouth of the dumpster. There was a great smashing sound. The great smash. The sound was like the sun smashing to pieces.

Javier selected another bottle from the box. A green bottle. He handed it to me. Like a suave gentleman extending an offer of a cigarette. Would you care for a smash, my friend?

I accepted. “Smashing,” I said in an English accent. I looped the bottle end over end and it shattered at the bottom of the empty dumpster. Terrific. Success.

Javier smiled at me. Success. Javier didn’t talk much. He was from Brazil. He had distant family that still lived in the jungle he told me once. He seemed to have a lot of girlfriends too.

“Hey, what the fuck are y’all doin!?” It was Jesse. The maintenance man. Maintaining. He was yelling at us in a pretend way like we were suddenly caught mid-smash and in big trouble. Jesse seemed to always appear out of nowhere. Especially when I was throwing stuff in the dumpster. He was like a fly. Attracted to trash and refuse.

“Jesse, what the fuck. You’re interrupting a perfectly good smashing session,” I said.

Javier the Gentleman simply extended an empty Grey Goose bottle to Jesse. A peace offering. An invitation to share in the destruction.

Jesse inspected the bottle. He really looked at it lovingly. The man simply loved trash.

“Jesse, throw the bottle in the dumpster dude,” I said. “Have a nice smash man. Take a smash break. Be a smash bro.” (I am an idiot.)

“I ain’t ‘bout to. Ima take this home,” he said.

We were obviously stupid rubes for smashing perfectly good liquor bottles. Jesse knew the secret. Never throw anything away. Don’t abandon your trash. It’s only trash if you let it be trash. Never refuse. He told me once that he would take the broken porcelain sinks and toilets home from the hotel and smash them up until he had pebble-sized pieces and he would use those for his Russian wife’s Japanese-style zen rock garden.

He was the maintenance man. He knew all the secrets of the hotel. The ins as well as the outs. He was maintaining the order of things.

I said the last thing out loud. About maintaining the order.

“Huh?” Jesse looked at me cockeyed. “See, what I like to do is buy some Jacquin’s then I fill up these bottles and there ya go. Ya got Grey Goose. Don’t nobody know the difference.”

I laughed. “What? Damn Jesse, you’re a genius.”

He smiled. Because he knew he was a genius.

“Sheet,” he said. “See what I like to do is have a few drinks then I get my dog on the floor.”

In the few seconds before Jesse continued my mind was filled with horrific visions of drunken bestiality. Then Jesse hit us with the tenderness.

“I got her trained so she just lay on these sheets of paper. And then I trace her. I make silhouettes and then I decorate my walls with all the pictures of my dogs. Been doing it for years. First was Delly. She was a good girl. Then was New Delly. Then Dolly. Now Jasmine. All labs. They’re my sweethearts and I love ’em,” Jesse paused. A moment of silence for his dogs. “Thanks for the bottle motherfucker.” He punched Javier in the ribs, but not hard. Javier only smiled.

Jesse walked off. Cradling his bottle like a baby. A baby bottle. A jewel. He moved towards the elevator shaft and disappeared into the stairwell. A silhouette is the shape of a ghost.

Some silence occurred then. Not much, but a little. Enough for it to be called a silence.

Javier looked at me.

“He draw his dogs?”

“Haha. Shit. He traces ’em. Outlines.” I mimed outlining a dog on the ground. I made the shape of a dog. I briefly imagined like that would be all you had to do to make a dog – just make the shape of a dog and it existed. In a way it was true.

Javier smiled. “Traces dogs,” he said. “Jesse.” But the way he said it sounded like Yessy.

Javier handed me another empty bottle. I smashed it. The bottle became hundreds of tiny pebbled-sized pieces. An empty bottle is just a future zen garden.

We finished the smashing. I still had more than an hour to go. This was a shitty shift. Not much action. I’d be lucky to make three dollars in tips.

$$$

I got lucky and carried some bags for a rich asshole guy and his girlfriend. Some rich people were truly cheap. But this guy wanted to show off and he gave me $10. It may have been accidental. He pulled out the bill and we both looked at it and then he handed it to me.

$$$

I stopped at the Food Lion on my way home. I always thought “Food Dog” in my mind because once I drove Javier home and he pointed to the sign and asked if I minded stopping at the Food Dog. The lion on the sign looked like a dog I guess. I mean it was basically like the shape of a dog pretty much. I bought some fried chicken for grandma.

Then I stopped at R&R and bought a fifth of Grey Goose.

I took a small drink as I drove home. The window down. The warm evening air rushing through. I heard a dog barking in the distance. The air made the shape of the dog’s barks. The sound of the dog barking became part of the air. A dog in the sky. Yes, I thought, a dog in the sky.

I decided I would take the bottle to the beach that night and drink it in the dark. I would drink from the bottle until it was empty and I could see in the dark.

AFTER SWITCHING ANTIDEPRESSANTS, THE NIGHT STRETCHES by Matthew Mastricova

July 2, 2020

After switching antidepressants, the night stretches over his body as he lies next to you in bed, thinking about dying again, even though he would never tell you that. He would never tell you that for months it has been creeping out his mouth—his death, his parents’ deaths, his students’ deaths, the death (or non-death) that comes in the after death. When he is lucky, he can find an anchor: a pair of your socks balled hidden under the table or a can of apricot La Croix chilled for days. Leftovers of a from-scratch meal you cooked that he packed for a lunch he may or may not remember to bring. A reminder that you still live here—you still live. In bed he stretches across your body like a hand over a mandolin. His body a compass seeking your warmth, your pulse, your promise that when he wakes up your body will still be singing there with predawn light.

He will watch the night, the next three nights, pass over your body. He will tell you this, his pledge to try again another pill, only after he realizes that watching you, too, is just another way to die. But tonight is still early, or late, enough for him to promise that he will get better, drinking the clotted darkness between you till there is only your body, the sun.

THE TODDLERS ARE PLAYING AIRPORT AGAIN by Tucker Leighty-Phillips

July 1, 2020

They’ve partitioned everything: the slide is the runway, the jungle gym is the terminal, covered in tiny travelers; anything with mulch is part of the operations area. Nobody flies. Nobody ever wants to be pilot. The toddlers love every aspect of the airport except for flight. Tickle always wants to be the rampie, loading freight onto planes with his sandbox bucket. Dasha is the lav agent, as she’s the best at keeping the plane’s bathrooms within regulation. Everyone wants to be Bill Boyer, Jr, CEO. They fight over his stock options until they shove one another and you have to step in and separate them, saying Lacy, you were Bill Boyer Jr. last time, why don’t we let Steve this time? One child reluctantly plays pilot and discusses weather conditions and itinerary changes with a dawdling crew chief, a snotty kid with both shoe strings loose-a-goose. This is most of their game, quiet discussions, loading and unloading bags into mouths of slides. This is the fourth time I’ve been routed through Tampa this week, pilot child groans while the other begins the aircraft’s push back, preparing for takeoff. They bicker over operating the tow motor. When you say, don’t you kids want to fly, just once, don’t you want to fly, they say that’s what everyone thinks on day one, you just come in and fly, no problem, like it’s a breeze, you just fly, but we’ve got an overnighter on a non-movement area and ATC is backed up to Glasgow and I haven’t had a single fruit snack today so forgive me if I’m a little on edge, Mr. Sky Cap, and you step back, remind yourself it’s just their game, babble with the other parents, and think of some great taxi propelling you through the sky, vaulting into the blue-and-white, traversing the mighty somewhere else.

KILLING PLANTS by Aaron Kreuter

June 30, 2020

It was during Fletcher's third week at the new job that he noticed Colleen's plant didn't look so hot. The plant's big green leaves were sagging, nearly touching the desk. Nobody had asked him to take care of the plant during his ten-month contract, filling in for Colleen while she was on mat leave, but the plant was obviously thirsty. Fletcher filled up his coffee mug with water and poured it into the off-white pot, the soil quickly sucking it up. Just to be safe, he tipped in a second mugful; this time, a half-inch of water remained sitting on top of the dirt. More than enough. It already seemed perkier.

When he came back after the long weekend—Saturday night spent worrying about the plant, whose health Fletcher had convinced himself would determine if he was hired on full time upon Colleen's return—the plant was dead. It was unmistakable: the leaves were brown and crispy, there wasn't a speck of green, not a hint of life. Fletcher panicked. A dead plant in the office did not scream collegiality. He had to get rid of it. But he couldn't just throw it out in the office garbage—it was Colleen's plant! The janitor would for sure notice.

He stuffed the plant into his knapsack, the leaves crunching, and took the stairs to the floor below, where he deposited it in the washroom garbage under the paper towel dispenser. Washing his hands, the peaked garbage lid still swinging on its hinges, a toilet flushed. Fletcher froze, looked up at the stall he had assumed was empty in the mirror. The door creaked open, and out came Brenda. “Fletch, how ya doing?! We were all really impressed with how you handled last week’s scheduling snafu.” She was rigorously washing her hands. At least six-five, shaved head, white shirt with a short black tie, Brenda was Fletcher's boss.

Fletcher stood there, dumbfounded. Did she know what he had done? “You seem to be fitting in great. Keep it up!” Brenda smacked Fletcher on the back—hard—and vacated the bathroom.

Back at his desk, Fletcher couldn't focus. There was a lot of work to do, unending work, but for the rest of the day Fletcher barely got through what normally would take him half an hour.

The plant's absence grew in his mind like a pimple. Every night he worried that the following morning he'd be called into the board room, and Brenda and Brenda's bosses—and even, sometimes, Colleen herself, a month-old baby latched onto her breast—would be sitting there. “Fletcher, we need to talk.” “Fletcher, we know what you did.” “Fletcher... you're fired.” A week after he threw the plant out he went back to the washroom to see if it was still in the garbage. It wasn't. He told himself it didn't matter, everything was okay, it was just a plant, right?

But no matter what he did, he couldn't shake that fucking plant. He booked an appointment at his therapist, whom he hadn't seen in years. The therapist had grown his hair out, was drinking coffee from a large travel mug. The office reeked like greasy farts. Fletcher wasn't perturbed; he unloaded on his therapist about the plant, the dread, the guilt, the dreams of getting fired. “How much longer can this go on?” he said to the therapist, who took a long, loud sip before launching into techniques to deal with intrusive thoughts.

Afterwards, Fletcher felt better, but that night the dream was back: the board room, the higher-ups, their knowledge of what he did to Colleen's plant. Fletcher back in his office, packing up his scant belongings.

So went the days, the weeks, the months. Some nights, worry for the plant would fester into more generalized worries, blisters of hot searing guilt. Fletcher as a bad roommate at nineteen. Fletcher running out of his pills three weeks after society collapsed. Fletcher, a young boy, laughing when he accidentally closed the elevator door on an old man, the geezer flailing his arms and legs as the soft doors hit him repeatedly. So went the days, weeks, months, the plant by now no more than dust salting a seagull's breakfast at some suburban landfill.

Finally, Colleen's mat leave was over, and Fletcher was interviewed for a permanent position. The interview with Brenda was light, chatty. A breeze. Still, he couldn't help feeling that any moment now, the ax would fall.

The day he was offered the job, in Colleen's office with Colleen and Brenda, Fletcher told them what happened with the plant, and they all had a good laugh. “Why didn't you just buy a new plant if you were so worried?” said Brenda, slapping her knee. “That plant was here when I got my promotion,” Colleen said, “it wasn't even mine!” She was laughing so hard Fletcher watched milk stains blossom under her blouse.

Fletcher went back to his desk. An enormous weight had been lifted. He was free of the plant. He had a good government job with good government benefits and a good government pension. He started working with that rare elation that comes, what, three, four times in a life, if you're lucky. As usual, He had a backlog, but he was so buoyant he didn't care. The work would get done. The cargo would be concentrated in central, confined centers. The cargo would be packed onto trains and delivered to the processing plant. The cargo would be processed. It always was.

Fletcher looked around his office, a smile on his face.

Maybe he'd buy himself a plant.

TIME TRAVELING ANTIQUE DEALER by Travis Dahlke

June 29, 2020

The owner of Beachman's eBay store had it bad for my best friend Gedaliah. I didn't trust him because his eyeballs were made three times smaller by his glasses and it was rumored he kept a time machine in his stockroom used for poaching antiques. The eBay thing was just a front and a former ketchup plant kept the whole operation mostly hidden from public view. Gedaliah paid nine hundred dollars for her walnut pembroke table but the bureau that Beachman sold me was a reproduction with drilled-in wormholes. Gedaliah's table reeked of tea bags close up. The nails piecing it together were oily when you cupped your hand underneath. Its edges had barely softened.

“Come back with me for the set. Please. You'll learn to love him,” she told me in the car outside his shop. Gedaliah's first husband was cut down from lead paint and her second was eaten by a piano. For the in-between times there was me. For her third husband we had parked between great vats of crystallized ketchup and a yard sign that said Fast Cash 4 UR Stash.

“Five minutes. My chaperone days are through,” I told her.

Small talk burbled up easily in between Beachman and Gedaliah. No problem doing that with no customers. I couldn't handle the flirting and so I excused myself down a path carved through sewing machines and mirror glass framed by cherubs. Their wings were more like parrot wings. I followed an extension cord to where it lead under a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. SERIOUSLY, DON'T COME IN. Most likely a stunt to keep the time machine rumors moist. I considered throwing a pineapple shaped cookie jar to the ground until Gedaliah told me that we were all meeting at the Mystic Steak Loft for brandies.

We waited in the bar for hours. “Don't do this,” I told her.

“Oh stop. You don't see it?”

“See what?”

“He knows me. And he's so handsome. His face narrows in a familiar way like one of those gray movie actors,” she said finishing our third bowl of olives.

When Beachman finally showed up, draping his trench coat on a stool, I was drunk and I told him he was full of shit.

“It's not a perfect machine,” Beachman claimed. “It can only return eighty-three years.”

“So invest in stocks,” I said.

He looked right at my best friend, collected her tiny hands in his and said, “I'm drawn to what is rare.”

Familiarity is easily confused with love you shithead, but under the table Gedaliah was already exploring his shin with her foot which meant soon I'd be alone.

Throughout their engagement Gedaliah wrote me emails. At first they were joyous and typeset with magenta. She'd describe which TV programs they watched together or how skillfully Beachman could apply nail polish to her little toe without getting any on the cuticle. He often returned from his excursions with special gifts. An engagement ring stolen from a major Vegemite proprietor or a toy rocking horse with its sales tag still intact, just like the one she had when she was five.

And then her emails turned black. She wrote how Beachman had become short tempered. Money was getting tight. Young couples no longer desired real woodwork for which to decorate their homes with. Young couples aren't even buying homes. His antique poaching also came with side effects like nightmares and weight gain. He started skipping the spaghetti dinners Gedaliah cooked and spent every night on an elliptical in their basement. No more TV programs. It seemed as though, she wrote, that Beachman was tired of her.

Gedaliah became stricken by cramps that began as glass in her stomach before working their way up to her memory. In a final email she had come to realize that she knew Beachman from somewhere else. A man that cleaned her parent's house or a faceless flannel coat splitting up bread for ducks at her teenage hangout. Always watching. Mashing toxic paint chips into powder. Familiar cramps are easily confused with love.

A year after her emails turned white, Beachman's eBay store went up in flames. They found a body. They found several other bodies which might've been manikins. The cologne from ancient baseball cards, dinnerware melded into velvet paintings of Garth Brooks, brass sows, and rugs embedded with hair. Windsor-style armchairs, Pandora beads, postcards, VHS tapes, real pearl, fake pearl, young adult novels about teachers who were really aliens, bronze babies bred from tropical fowl, ottomans, wood paneled digital alarm clocks, luggage, electric guitars, bureaus with forbidden love letters still stashed within their hidden compartments, samurai swords, Christmas ornaments, Penthouses and coin collections all unified in the afterlife. Gedaliah had soaked them from inside. She entered with a jar of nail polish remover and escaped through the time machine before it too was destroyed.

Now behind the ketchup plant is only emptiness. I think they won't do anything with the space. In Gedaliah's first email she had said through Comic Sans, “it all tastes exactly like sweet lint.” I think of her now living among the heirlooms where they are all brand new.