Fiction

IN THE TIME OF CLIMATE CHANGE (APOCALYPTIC VIEWFINDER #1) by Kathryn Kulpa

February 8, 2020

Flashing Obama

I was feeding the cats and Barack Obama was there, at my back door, standing on the deck. He wore aviator sunglasses and a blue chambray shirt and jeans. I wanted to let him in but I had to keep one hand on my belt loop because I didn’t have a belt and my pants kept slipping and how awful would it be if my pants fell down in front of Obama?

I had things I wanted to talk about with Obama. I wanted him to convince Joe Biden to drop out of the race. Joe Biden is not our man, I wanted to tell him. Although I sort of liked that cop-buddy movie thing they used to have going on.

Obama was like that one ex you don’t hate. The one you’d go back to, if you could. Only he’s dead or married or something, so you can’t.

But Heaven Knows

I was happy drunk, spinning in circles in my backyard. I wore a flouncy skirt with tiny broken bits of mirror sewn into every flounce, and when I whirled and twirled, they could see me on the moon.

Zombie Café

We were sitting in the zombie café.

No one would notice us as long as we pretended to be dead like them.

We ordered ice cream sundaes. We didn’t say a word when the waitress brought us Mexican soda instead. Tall green bottles of Sprite with paper straws.

The thing about zombies is they never complain about bad customer service.

Vomitorium

The world was covered in vomit. A sea of vomit, only a sea has a shore, a line where dry land begins, and this didn’t.

There were places you could go to get away. Tall, fortified buildings that somehow were still climate-controlled and had fresh air piped in. The people who could afford to live there met to discuss the state of the world. One man showed a diagram explaining how humans could be genetically modified to grow gills.

The adapted surface dwellers, he said, would thus be able to perform manual labor for those who lived in the towers.

I lost interest in what was said after that. Obviously nothing had changed.

Saddle Shoes

I opened my bedroom door and saddle shoes came dancing out from under my bed. They were doing a two-step. I was frightened but vindicated. I had always known my room was haunted.

Country Club

I was at a country club, being chased by a man in a golf cart. I kept running, looking for places to hide. I knew I couldn’t tell anyone he was chasing me, because he owned the club. I knew this had happened before.

I hid in the pool house. Inside I found a diary. It was open to a page that said:

Help me

No one will help me

He took me and tied me up and drowned me

I ran outside and jumped in the pool. Something was floating there, long hair waving like baby snakes.

Briefly

An old man singing into a 1920s Rudy Vallee megaphone:

Oh, she was young and per-ty

I was old and dir-ty

But I had lots of money

So she said she’d be my honey-bun tonight!

A Wing and a Prayer

He was flying, almost out of gas. Somewhere over Kansas, Oklahoma? Long flat plains, plowed fields. Somewhere that was not yet underwater.

He was flying under the radar. There was no radar. No instruments, no airport he could find. No sleep. Guided by stars.

The moon lit a white steeple and he saw a town, could even make out the shapes of people, gathering, pointing. He made a low pass, returned.

Then he saw something he hadn’t seen for a while. Lights. Sparks that flickered, then grew. Torches, lanterns, flashlights. Two rows of lights, a runway. A wide, empty street, and lights to guide his way. Calling him down.

As he came in for a landing he saw them looking up at him, holding their lights, waiting. Waiting for news, for hope. How long had it been since a stranger had come here? He had fallen out of the sky and they didn’t know if he was an angel or a demon.

The worst thing was, he didn’t know either.

Vampire Town

Everyone was a vampire now, or maybe not everyone—where would they get new victims? Whose blood would they suck?—but it felt like everyone. It felt like you’d be better off to cut your losses and find somewhere else to live. A place vampires hadn’t found, if there was such a place. I walked home from my vampire high school with its vampire teachers and vampire kids, the vampire football team kicking around something red and wet, the vampire cheerleaders leaping into the air, then hovering in a bat-winged pyramid.

They always had to show off, those vampire girls.

I was tired of fighting them for so long. I needed my mom to tell me to keep fighting, that it would all be worth it. I needed her to make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich cut into six triangles, exactly the same size.

But my house felt empty. When I called my mom she didn’t answer right away, and then she came out of her bedroom with a man who was not my father (I knew this, because my father was dead). She tried to introduce him, her vampire boyfriend, but I wasn’t going to go there. I wasn’t going to make nice with my new vampire stepfather.

How could you betray Dad like that? I asked.

Her face was weary and she looked way past me, an adult kind of tiredness I hadn’t reached yet and didn’t want to know.

FAIR NIGHT NUMBER ONE by Tom Weller

February 2, 2020

Scrap Boys have each other. Scrap Boy 1, Scrap Boy 2, Scrap Boy 3, three prepubescent bodies lean and sharp as barbed wire, three backyard haircuts, three thunder-clap voices, three tornado spirits joined like the three chambers of a rattler’s heart. And tonight the Scrap Boys have the fair. Tonight they have snow cones and onion rings and rides that spin the Scrap Boys around and around and around and around until they can’t tell up from down. Tonight they have rock songs banging out of rickety speakers rattling their ribs. Tonight the Scrap Boys breathe humid night air full of promises of big winnings shouted by the bulldog-faced men running the milk can toss and the shooting range. Tonight they walk together, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, bare chested and loud through the swirling crowd. Tonight the Scrap Boys watch mothers pull their toddlers closer when the Scrap Boys walk by.

Tonight the skinny blonde girls from school eat cotton candy, pink clouds of sugar filling their hands, their mouths, sticky and sweet. They travel the midway in a pack, five of them, their hair sparkling under the lights that flash from the Gravitron. They speak in high twittery syllables, voices like birdsong, call each other slut and bitch and laugh and laugh and laugh, but when the Scrap Boys call out to the skinny blonde girls from school, the girls don’t call back. The girls look at the Scrap Boys, look past the Scrap Boys, look through the Scrap Boys. Under the gaze of the skinny blonde girls, the Scrap Boys become ghosts.

Tonight the ghost Scrap Boys haunt the fair studying girls with an astronomer’s zeal, keep a tally of all the different girl bodies spinning through the universe of the midway, each new body an epiphany, each new body worthy of further study, if only there was time for that, if only there were not so many other bodies demanding attention, if only it was possible. The tall bodies, the short bodies, the brown bodies, the white bodies, the hard bodies, the thick bodies, they all spark a longing in the ghost Scrap Boys, a heat like an electrical fire crackling where their blood used to be.

I TOLD HIM I WOULD by Steve Chang

February 1, 2020

Before his accident, he’d called to ask if I’d go drinking with him. I told him, No, not tonight. I’d started writing again.

Wow, he said. That’s cool!

I guess, I said.

We both listened a little longer on the phone.

I would tell myself—in the months to come—that besides the lateness of the call, I’d had no reason to suspect anything might be wrong. I would tell myself that he’d always been fine, alone. I would tell myself all kinds of things before I could, finally, imagine us talking.

Alright then, he said, getting ready to go. Write something good and tell everyone you’re my friend.

BABES by Ian Anderson

January 31, 2020

She wants to know how it works.

It’s easy, he tells her. You create a profile on the Babes app, upload a couple pictures of your baby, fill out the profile, and then people can start Holding. Thirty dollars for the first hour; five dollars for each additional fifteen minutes.

They’re pushing their toddlers in the swings next to each other. She only knows him from the playground, but he’s always seemed like a good dad. Engaged. Attentive. The worst thing she can say about him is that he has a mustache. It surprises her to learn that he rents out his child.

It’s safe?

It’s safer than taxis, he says.

She never knew taxis were a barometer for safety. Can you be there while the person is Holding?

It’s frowned upon. He did it the first couple of times, but it seemed pointless, a waste of time. The app has the Holder’s personal information, so they wouldn’t get far if they did something; and besides, it was a good time to run errands, read a book, take a nap.

She asks what people did with his baby when he stayed.

One guy wanted to use the baby to pick up women. One woman was meeting an ex she feared was trying to rekindle their relationship. Then there was the woman who just wanted to hold his child. She swayed back and forth. She sniffed the child’s head. She cried in awful, wet sobs that reminded him of cooked spaghetti. He was embarrassed to be there. That’s when he decided: No more sticking around.

***

That night, she sits in bed. An episode of Fixer Upper she’s seen ten times before streams on Hulu. Her husband snores obnoxiously. He had been out earlier for his fantasy football draft and came back smelling of cigars and whiskey. He was a little drunk. It’s only 9 PM. There was a time in her life when she would have still been getting ready to go out on a Saturday night, but this is her life now. She wouldn’t change anything about it, but she does get bored. Maybe that’s why she downloads Babes. Maybe it’s curiosity, like the times she considers—but not really considers—creating a fake Match.com profile. There’s so much to modern life she’s missed, can’t even comprehend, because she wasn’t born ten years later. The app finishes downloading. She signs up with a fake name as a Holder. There are reviews of babies. She reads them:

Tyler—A plump Hold. Laughed a lot. (five stars)

Zara—Good Hold, would recommend. Pooped tho. Knocks her down a star for me. (three stars)

Jordan—Baby didn’t look like picture. (one star)

She sees a baby with impossibly round cheeks, a swirl of strawberry hair, and fat little hands grasping a fat little foot. She knows this baby. It is her baby. Her stomach feels like it’s being sucked down a drain. The urge to check on her child commands her to the nursery. It’s ridiculous, she knows; of course the baby is there, but she still feels cool relief when she sees her child balled into sleep. In the dark of the nursery, she sits in the rocking chair; the glow of the phone illuminates her face in cold light. She reads her baby’s profile. There is a short bio. It has no mention of her, the mother. She cycles through emotions like she’s scrolling through Instagram posts: anger, betrayal, confusion, anger again, and again, and again. She looks up how to report someone on the app but can’t find anything.

Who would do something like this? What was their endgame? She can’t figure it out. She thumbs the button below her child’s picture that reads “Schedule a Hold.” The only times available are Sunday afternoons. Like a new show on Netflix, it comes to her all at once.

They call them Daddy Days. Every week her husband takes their little one on special trips. To the zoo. To the art museum. To see the latest Pixar movie in IMAX. Or so he’s told her.

Her head is spinning. Her body is electric. She’s so mad she could cry. She looks again at her baby and imagines all the strange arms that have cradled the child, all the little whispers that have filled their perfect cup ears, all the credit card transactions. What did these Holdings pay for? She wonders. Suddenly, everything in the house looks cheap and vicious.

***

His stupid face is scrunched against the pillow. It reminds her of of an empty latex Halloween mask. She tries to wake him with a shove of the shoulder, but he’s dead to the world like a bricked phone. In an irrational world, she decides, you have to hold your anger like a knife to the throat. It’s the only thing the world will understand. She slaps her husband across his sleep-creased face.

It works.

Her husband is more confused than hurt. He holds his cheek like he has a toothache. He asks her what’s going on.

She shows him her phone, their child’s face cut awkwardly into a circle below the Babes logo. Her husband says nothing. If this were a cartoon, a piano would fall out of the sky in this moment, land on his head, and he would walk around the room, his body springing up and down like an accordion. But this isn’t a cartoon. This is real life, and it gets more bizarre by the second.

There are questions she wants to ask: How many times has he rented out their child to strangers? Did he at least stay to make sure everything was okay? Why couldn’t he just be cheating on her? Before tonight, that was the worst thing she could imagine him doing, but what could be worse than this? If there’s an app for everything, she thinks, where are the apps you actually need? Where can she download the app that will help her navigate a moment like this, when her life is cracking like the screen of a dropped phone? In the end, she decides, there’s only one question to ask. It’s the only one that matters right now. Why?

He swings his feet over the side of the bed. He runs a hand through his thinning hair, rubs his neck like the answers are somewhere back there and just needs retrieving. He talks of the price of Postmates, the rate hike for Netflix, the downturn in the market, and the new Disney+ service. Surely, they’ll need to subscribe to Disney+. She can’t understand any of this. He says he wants to be a provider. He talks about a husband’s purpose, a father’s purpose, a man’s purpose. He wants his family to know a life of Hulu with no commercials.

That’s fucked, she tells him. She leaves the room and enters the nursery. She picks up her sleeping child. The baby opens their eyes for a moment, as if to make sure of whom is holding them. She whispers to her child that everything is going to be okay. She wants to believe it. Her husband is in the doorway. He asks her what she’s doing.

She tells him that they’re leaving.

Where does she plans to go at an hour like this, he wants to know.

Not to prostitute their child, she tells him as she walks past; but the truth is, she doesn't know what she’s doing. She’s making it up one step at a time.

He follows them down the stairs. She puts on shoes and picks up the diaper bag. He asks her what she thinks she’s doing when she posts pictures of their child on Facebook. He tells her that she does it for the Likes; she does it for the comments; to rack up the notifications. He asks her if she actually thinks she’s above it all, that she’s better than anyone. He tells her not to kid herself. At least he’s providing something for the family and not his ego.

She doesn’t close the front door as she leaves. She doesn’t look back to see if her husband is watching. She holds her baby so close that she thinks she’ll never let go. The sky is clear, and the moon hangs low and full. She can see the road ahead of her in all its details. There’s an all-night diner a mile away. It seems as good a destination as any. She’ll carry her baby all the way. And when she gets there, she’ll...well, she doesn’t know what she’ll do. She doesn't know what comes next.

FILLING THE GOYA ROOM by Beth Gilstrap

January 30, 2020

One wouldn’t think my hands would sweat the way they do walking adjacent to you, with your khakis, too short and wrinkled, but here we are. Since day two of the retreat, your various states of beard have complicated my hair and makeup routine, my mind equally untidy. By day eight, we wander through the Carnegie Museum. Stand for photos under moose. Stare at fossils. Lives preserved in amber. Hooves dug from ice. Hulking jawbones. Wings cast in plaster and reassembled with unknowable screws and fishing line, hanging above our heads. We are long married to other people. My elbow grazes yours. I move toward the Goya room filled with his later drawings. The syphilis drawings. Where his smudgy grays mash the faces of those he loved. Where bodies are distorted and grotesque. Where she props him up, mouth agape, and the sword lay below, having killed her own bright star.

HAPPINESS by Matthew Licht

January 29, 2020

My father wasn’t a traveling salesman, just a guy who never seemed to be where he was.

A look crossed his face if someone came into the room where he was thinking or dreaming or scheming or whatever he was pretending to do, or spoke to him directly when he was present but lost. The look said who are you, what are you doing here, what do you want from me?Everything was fine. We lived in an acceptable house where hot meals were a regular feature. Then one day Pop came home with a monkey.The baby hadn’t begun to walk or talk yet.The monkey could walk erect. He had no tail, therefore was an ape, a primate, a chimpanzee. The chimp and Pop held hands like they’d known each other a while. Pop was in one of his gray suits, the chimp had on short pants. I watched them come up the block and then the driveway. Pop fumbled the keys and held the door.He never shouted, Honey I’m home from the factory, lab or air base or wherever I pretend to work. But then, we never dropped what we’d been doing to greet him.Pop and chimp headed for the kitchen. The chimp got a banana. Pop, a beer. The rest of us stood in the doorway.Mama unfroze first. She put the baby in his high chair and made dinner. Pop was a better cook, but he usually eschewed domestic chores.Pop crunched the can and saw us staring. At him, not the chimp. He might’ve brought the beast home to distract our attention. The plan hadn’t worked. It dawned that some explanation was called for.We settled for an introduction. “This is Happy. He will uh, live with us now.”Mama broke the silence. “Is he OK with another banana for dinner, or should I have the kids set another place at table?”Pop had to think. “Set another place, I guess.”Dinner was awkward, but Happy liked tuna noodle casserole. He ate with a spoon, without much mess or fuss.When my sister reached for the fruit salad—didn’t make sense to ask an ape to pass it along—Happy snapped at her hand with unbelievable speed and viciousness. A smell spread, like she’d wet herself.“Better watch out,” Pop said. “Happy’s not like the monkeys on TV or at the circus.”

There was an extra room for when Mama and Pop’s friends came. Visits called for wild parties. How all those people knew each other, where they’d met and what they had in common remained a mystery. Mama and Pop were awfully quiet after a party, and avoided each other even more than usual.Happy didn’t move into the guest room. Instead, Pop rigged a pen in the garage, with a mound of old clothes for him to sleep on, including Mama’s collection of past-date panties.The chimp went to bed and woke up when we did. I thought he’d eventually come to school with us. My sister and I invented stories to explain our brother, the chimp. Pop worked at the circus, or the zoo. He was an African explorer. The ape’s parents died in a Big Top fire, or were crushed by elephants. So we had to take him in.Pop said Happy would not attend school. “He already knows everything he needs to know.”Once I stared, to learn what went on inside the head of a creature who knew everything he needed to know. Happy’s eyes were deep pupils without centers that said, maybe I look slightly like you but we’re not the same. I know things about life and nature that you’ll never understand. Maybe I can’t express myself with words, but if I grabbed you by the ankles I could rip you in half.The hairy mirror-image dissolved and charged. Pop restrained Happy, barely. “Uh, better not stare at him like that, it’s a sign of aggression.”The only other time I’d seen animal aggression was out on the playground. Big Mary held me down and said she was going to suck out my eyeballs. But she didn’t. She kissed me on the mouth like grown-ups in movies and said, “Oh yeah baby now we’re boyfriend and girlfriend forever.”One day Mama needed help to carry a couple of sacks up to the attic. “What does Pop do for a living?” I asked.She was caught off guard. “Well, you know, he works in an office.”“Yeah but what kind of office?”“One that’s full of desks and chairs and telephones.” She didn’t know what Pop did all day either, or didn’t want to tell.“So where’s this office where he works?”“Oh, you know, downtown. Where all the other offices and skyscrapers are.”“Do I have to work in an office too when I grow up?” In a gray suit, I’d bring home a crow or a goat to meet Big Mary and our kids.

Mama settled the sack she’d dragged up in a corner attic where, strangely, there were no spiderwebs. She didn’t hear, or had no answer.“Did you ever work in an office, Mama?”She took my sack and settled it against the other one. They sat there, tied up at the top like hobo sausages passed out in a drunk tank. The sunset reflected on her face as she considered their placement.“Before I met your father,” she said, “I went to college to learn architecture. I wanted to build houses, you know, for people to live in.” She made it sound like an impossible dream. “Then I met your father at a cocktail party and then we had you.”Babies were born from cocktails when the party was over and foiled career dreams. Mama labored in a house she hadn’t built. Pop worked in an office no one had ever seen, and then a chimpanzee appeared.The neighbors were curious that an anthropoid ape dwelt in our garage. It was odd enough Mama and Pop didn’t own an automobile. Pop rode his bicycle to the train station and back. Occasionally he brought Happy with him to work. The chimp sat on the handlebars, but never did handstands or juggled bananas or anything circus-worthy. His muzzle was a headlight, his teeth chattered for unlucky flying insects.Maybe Happy worked in the city too. He shook a cup for a mustachioed organ-grinder, or did pin-up pictures for banana company calendars, or was the “before” model in ads for depilatory creams. Pop was the chimp’s handler/agent.Mr. Munger, our next-door neighbor, asked me to help rake leaves. He’d just lit the dead foliage pyre when Pop pedaled back from the station with the chimp. “Your father does things his own way, that’s for sure,” he said.My sister and I spied on the Mungers through their living room window that night. We were supposed to be at the McLaughlin sisters’ Halloween party, but Mama had made our costumes. My sister was a gypsy-ish witch. I was the devil in a cut-off, cast-off business suit. We didn’t want to mingle with kids in store-bought disguises.We figured the Mungers must have their own version of Happy. This turned out not to be the case. The Mungers consumed uncomplicated cocktails. They spoke to each other while they ate their non-human flesh stew. They cleaned up in the she washes, he dries manner and retired to their living room to read. She cracked a novel. He rattled the newspaper, then dropped it for Life magazine.

Neither of us knew that observation of events possibly influences them. Spooked, we thought everyone else in the world was normal and we were freaks.We ran wild-eyed to the McLaughlin sisters’ Day of the Dead shindig. Rhythm n’ blues blew from the parental hi-fi. Low lights shone on adolescent gropes in progress.“Boo!”“Yah!”The devil and one of his faithful witches burst in as though possessed, and scared the crap out of everyone. But we were only dancing. We shooped and shimmied, then suggested that the Munger Mansion was ripe for a toilet-papering, the Munger chariot for a windshield-egging. We whooshed out into the night like a swarm of rabid bats and laid waste. The Mungers never knew why.Being normal has a price.Happy developed gray fur on his back around the same time I needed a first shave. Pop presented me with the instruments and a deodorant stick. “You already know what happens between men and women, right? Must’ve heard talk in the gym, or on the corner, seen some magazines.”“Get a boner and stick it where she pees?"“OK you already know more about it than I do.”“But where did Happy come from, Pop? Did you and Mama...”“Everyone’s responsible for their own happiness,” he said. “You have to make your own decisions and take your lumps, if lumps are in order. But the rewards can be great, if you guess right, and...that’s all I’m going to say.”He was as good as his word.Pop took Happy to the city with him the next day.That evening, the chimp was dressed in cotton pyjamas silk-screened to look like a tuxedo. “Ooooh,” my sister said. “Happy’s gonna get married.”Pop said, quietly, “Happy grows old faster than we do. We should be ready for when his time comes. Mentally, I mean.”My sister looked my way. Our thought-balloons merged. Oh we’re ready. Any old time. It was hard to tell what our human baby brother thought.Any attempt to delve into Happy’s mental state was met with snarls. Pop, if he was around, would yell, “Leave him alone.”

Happy stared at flies, and at mosquitoes after sundown. He picked insects out of his airspace with blinding speed, deadly accuracy.When approached slowly, hindquarters foremost, Happy gave great neck-rubs and back-scratches. He tolerated grooming sessions with me, relished them with my sister. He’d give her the sniff test first.You probably shouldn’t do that, Pop said.Happy drew a rare paternal reproach when the ape approached my sister with a hot pink banana- shaped love-offering. Pop grabbed him by the waistband and collar, brought him to the garage. No one said, bad. No one said, wrong.Mama said, well he never tried to get fresh with me. It was hard to tell if she was surprised or miffed. Or if she was talking about Happy or Pop.Aunt Floydine phoned the week before school let out to see if my sister and could spend the summer with her in Las Vegas. Mama thought it was a good idea. “But no casinos, please,” she said. “They’re both still children, really.”Casinos were the last thing on Aunt Floydine’s mind. Games of chance, or any other kind of fun and games, weren’t her idea of a productive vacation. Gardening was more like it.Dressed like a movie star, Aunt Floydine dealt us a spade, a hoe and a rake. She swept a satin-gloved hand across the swath of desert that stretched to the horizon and was her backyard. She asked how long we thought it’d take to turn that scrubby desolation into a cactus garden.“Gonna take a long time,” I said, and my sister nodded.Aunt Floydine was an imaginative cook. She knocked up sundown cocktails with adolescent- appropriate doses of rum. She subscribed to magazines devoted to how gardens, houses and people ought to look. She wanted to create paradise on the outskirts of a cowtown that had become an amusement park.As our departure date loomed, Aunt Floydine inspected her new garden and was pleased. She drove us to the Strip in her convertible Cadillac and bought us new clothes. We knew they’d be ludicrous back home, but we got to be movie star ranch-hands for an afternoon.At the airport, she handed over the big bills.“Cash stays out of sight,” she said. “Keep it stashed it for a rainy day.”Rainy days seemed impossible around Aunt Floydine. We wanted to stay in the desert and be her garden-slaves forever, but such indentured happiness wasn’t in the cards.

There was a surprise at the airport on the other side. Pop was wearing an unusual hat. Unusual for him, I mean. Mama had on gangster-lady sunglasses. Our brother had evolved to the point where he could toddle around in his Oshkosh overalls.

No chimp.

Neither of us asked, "Where’s Happy?"

On the train home, Pop said Happy had had an accident when he chased one of the McLaughlin sisters. It was unclear whether Happy met his doom on a passing auto’s grille, or at the hands of shotgun- toting Papa McLaughlin. Didn’t matter. We’d missed Happy’s burial in a corner of the backyard.

Pop never brought home a replacement ape.

When I was left for college, he accompanied me to the bus depot. The others stayed home to watch a Tarzan movie on TV.

Pop shook my hand on the platform. “Be your own man,” he said. “Be strong. Be happy.”

GOD AT 60 by Bill Merklee

January 27, 2020

We started as marginal Catholics, going though the motions. Now I was having dinner with Kenny, the only one of us who’d stuck with it. Father Postlewaite to his parish. It’d been too long.

“Andre still an atheist?” he said.

“Yup. In Oregon. Found himself a nice godless girl.”

“And Coyne?”

“Still waiting for Armageddon.” Kenny grinned without looking at me, eased back in his chair.

“Remember that comparative religion class? All those speakers trying to explain their faith before the bell rang?”

“The Baptist preacher in the powder blue suit? Right out of central casting.”

“They’d never get away with that now.”

“And Malathi the exchange student telling us about Hinduism. She planted a seed,” I said.

“Ah, the corrupting influence of public education.”

“Well, she was cute. Even so, back then I thought the rabbi and the priest made the most sense.”

“Thank you for that. So why Zen then?”

“No dogma. Only took me thirty years to find it.” I held my cup with both hands, elbows on the table. “Listen, I’m sorry about all the Jesus jokes. Most of them, anyway.”

“You’re forgiven, my son. I’m sorry I didn't come to your jukai ceremony.”

“No worries. You know, with these knees I meditate in a chair now. Most times I nod off.”

“It was important to you.”

“You thought I was going to Hell.”

“Oh, you’re still going to Hell. But I should have been there.”

The server who’d come to top off our coffees eyed us like she expected a brawl. Kenny and I burst out laughing. Back in the day he’d passed silent judgement when I told him about the abortion I’d paid for. And again about my vasectomy. It had gotten between us. What a relief to finally just say what we’re thinking.

By the time we got our coats I’d forgotten how I got there. It was dark and misting in the parking lot.

“So how do I get back to the highway?”

“No GPS on your phone?”

“I don’t even text. Phones are for talking. And calling 911.”

“Follow me then, old man.”

The wipers beat a slow rhythm like a grandfather clock. I followed Kenny until the blurred halos of his tail lights blended with so many others, all of us going home.

IMAGINE WHAT MY BODY WOULD SOUND LIKE by Hannah Grieco

January 26, 2020

Twenty-year-old me had biceps. Back from a year away, rock climbing and waiting tables, fucking women for the first time. I walked differently. Strutting in my baggy cargo pants, flirting with those baby butch Oberlin girls. A new me.

In the college library lounge, short-haired, smooth-skinned girlfriends ran their fingertips up my sculpted arms and I ignited.

***

This morning I wake to my daughter’s nightmare whimpers. Tucked under my armpit, bone-thin, her ribs pressing into my side. Always burning up, she wears only underwear in the house. No blankets except her lovey, clutched to her cheek in sleep.

4 AM. The bedroom door opens.

“Where’s dad?” my son asks.

“Sleeping in the basement.”

He slides in under the quilt and settles next to me.

“Shh,” I warn him.

“Shh,” he says and falls asleep with my hair across his face.

***

Twenty-year-old me control-alt-deleted with a boyfriend who assigned us monogamy but then cheated on me with woman after woman. Insisted it was all in my head. That my suspicions were borderline pathetic and indicative of deeply-rooted trust issues. We couldn’t be together if I accused him of eye-fucking every woman he met.

“You’re not a lesbian,” he said.

“Maybe I am,” I said.

“You’re not.” Then fucked me face down on his bed. It was that kind of sex. The kind where someone barely even notices your body, sex so dry your skin tears, where you end up on antibiotics for a UTI. The kind of sex where he sees you ripping and keeps fucking you.

***

I wake again, this time to bright sunlight. It’s late, too late, and I know we’ve missed the bus.

“Sorry to wake you,” my husband says. He’s sitting at the foot of the bed.

“Rough night,” I say and sit up, stand up, shake the blood into my feet.

He comes over and hugs me, squeezes my soft arms.

“I’ll see you after work.”

***

Twenty-year-old me wanted babies. Tiny hands to curl around my neck and drool down my chin, fingers pulling my hair. Babies to fill me up since everything else was a piece of gravel tossed into the ocean. Not even a ripple. I thought about babies as I changed majors, considered moving to New York, danced between Susannah and Kate to the club mix of Bjork’s Hyperballad at that fake rave, the boys from Case Western watching as I took off my shirt and pulled off Kate’s, too. Susannah blushing as I put the E under her tongue and kissed the tip of her nose. Maybe a ripple.

Imagine what my body would sound likeSlamming against those rocks.

***

Two kids at school, another on his computer finishing his homeschool classes. I wash the dishes. I prep the slow cooker. I fold the laundry. I ask my mother to keep an eye on my son so I can go to the store. I call the pediatrician. I pump up the flat back tire on the bike by the shed. I take the garbage cans back down behind the house. I sort the mail. I run a bath. I feed the fish.

Will my eyesBe closed or open?

LAST WORDS by Jayne Martin

January 25, 2020

There’s usually two of us, but it’s Christmas Eve and I got nowhere to be. Anyway, she’s just a little bit of a thing, barely 90 pounds from the looks of her. I can roll her onto the gurney.

The Super found her after complaints about the smell. I don’t smell nothing no more. Fucking freezing in here.

“No rent. No heat,” he said.

Asshole should be charged with murder. But who’s gonna complain?

Place is neat as a pin. Something my mom used to always say. Neat as a pin. Still don’t know what that means. Mom would have been about her age if the cancer hadn’t gotten her.

Not much in the fridge. Lettuce, brown and wilting. One of those single-serve cups of ice cream in the freezer. Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia. I find a spoon.

“I was a Deadhead,” she says. “Followed them everywhere.”

I dip the spoon into the ice cream, raise it to my lips. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Oh heaven’s no. No reason for it to go to waste,” she says. “Sorry to inconvenience you on Christmas Eve. I thought I’d be found before this.”

People who say those that have passed are “dead and gone” don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.

“Where’s your family?” I ask.

“Why, they’re all around. Just waiting. Don’t you see them?”

The room swells with Christmas music as children sing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and dance around a brightly-lit tree. Grownups sip eggnog by a mantel hung with stockings with the names Charlie, Susie, and Mary.

And there in the middle of the room, she stands, looking vibrantly alive, her arms outstretched toward me. “You’re welcome to join us.”

It's not the first time I was made such an offer, and I can’t say I'm not tempted. I toss the empty ice cream container into the garbage and walk over to the lifeless form on the floor.

“I’ll take good care of you,” I say and gently place the sheet over her unseeing clear blue eyes.

ABOUT DINNER by Veronica Klash

January 24, 2020

You know what it means to have dinner. The meal that satiates before slumber. After the sky is drained of fire and flooded with ink. But what does it mean to have dinner with a man? To sit across from each other at that Thai place that just opened. To look at the menu and not see the words because his hand grazed yours and euphoria dripped from the base of your neck down your spine and he smells like mint and spice and something else that you can’t describe and you rush your inhale so you can breathe him again. If he was on the menu, you’d order him twice, one to eat now and the second to take home to be consumed by the glow of the naked bulb that lights your kitchen. But what does it mean to have dinner with a man and his parents? To fold and refold the napkin on your lap as his mother examines you with narrowed eyes from across the table. You’re smiling and talking about the roses in your garden, but you swear she can see the time you cheated on the spelling quiz in third grade. And if his mother advances an inch forward in her chair she’ll spot the time you let your friend shoplift the Popsicle Pink lipstick even though you knew it was wrong but they were going through something and you wanted to see them smile. Then he squeezes your hand. Your heart remembers its purpose and oxygen reaches your limbs again. But what does it mean to have dinner with a man in silence? To watch as the butter sauce on the fish turns from creamy to congealed. To listen as the clock you picked out during the honeymoon you planned for months chimes undisturbed from the next room. The song is a call and you answer. You push your chair back, stride over to him, hold his face in your hands, whisper I’m sorry, and crush your lips onto his. He pulls you to his lap, folds your bodies into one, and answers I’m sorry too. The boulder in your stomach is reduced to flint, igniting a shivering spark. But what does it mean to have dinner with a man after the kids are gone? To sit around a table too big, in a room too full of emptiness, alone together. To laugh at how silly you both feel now that there’s less laundry to do, less food to cook, and more time. More time than you ever expected. He says he knows how you can spend that time and winks. Euphoria drips from the base of your neck down your spine. You say you’re sure you have no idea what he means, and you smile. But what does it mean to have dinner with a man who’s not there? To look down at your plate and not recognize what you see. To look up and pretend he’s still there. Holding on to memories like they’re the last gasp for air before drowning. Dinner is your favorite, because it satiates before slumber, and when you close your eyes you’re back at that Thai place. It just opened. You know what it means to have dinner.