Fiction

UNCLE CHARLIE’S BICYCLE by Rick White

December 17, 2019

Esther lived in corners. And behind the backs of armchairs. In the black and white shadows cast by the TV which Ma sat in front of all day. Saturday afternoons was wrestling—Ma’s favourite—and the other kids, the other ‘no-hoper-kids’ the ‘wargs of the state’ all gathered round to watch.‘That’s the Black Bomber,’ Ma would shout. ‘Sergeant Nitro. The Masked Intruder,’ she would shriek and holler from her sunken nicotine throne. Haloed in cigarette smoke—powder blue and sulfurous yellow.Esther was a mark, a low-carder; the perpetual victim of the rowdy, hyped up boys and their fighting ways. Clotheslines, DDT’s, backbreakers, German suplexes, powerslams and piledrivers—all meted out on thin mattresses and worn out sofas. ‘Roughhousing,’ Ma called it.To Esther, all the names of all the moves just sounded like fear, tasted metallic. Like the cat spatula, which Ma used to make scrambled egg on a Sunday and to fling pieces of shit out of the cat’s litter tray into the yard. Esther liked the cat though, his name was Arnold and, well, he’d curl up at the foot of Esther’s bed, on the rare nights when no one came. Arnold was her tag-team partner.When there was no wrestling on TV, and when Ma took to drinking—which was most days—Ma liked to pick two kids to fight in front of her. She’d make everyone gather round and chant FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! while the two chosen contestants duked it out. Ma knew which kids had a mean streak, and she knew which ones didn’t really want to fight. So she’d put them together. Said it was ‘character building’ for the weaker kids. Ma liked to be entertained, so you’d better look as though you were really trying and make it a good fight otherwise you’d be in even worse trouble. When Esther was picked, she made a big show of whirling her arms around to try to land a blow, but she rarely succeeded, and she was always pinned eventually. Esther had come to know only too well, that it’s damn near impossible to shift the weight of a teenage boy once he’s lying on top of you.‘Quit daydreaming and fetch Uncle Charlie’s Bicycle,’ said Ma one afternoon, and Esther flinched at the sound of Ma’s words—they all sounded like wrestling moves. ‘Then you get your ass to the store and get me a fifth of bourbon and a carton of smokes.’ Esther wasn’t sure what those things were.Uncle Charlie lived next door. He wasn’t Esther’s real Uncle any more than Ma was her real Ma. Uncle Charlie was a ‘Handy Man’, which sounded to Esther like a wrestling name. The Handy Man was one of the good guys, a ‘face’. The others were bad guys or ‘heels’ and she had names for them too; The Angry Principal, The Curtain Jerker, The Night-Time Visitor.Uncle Charlie was kind. He’d taken Esther to the drug store on the day Esther had seen the blood in her underwear. She’d found blood there before, but this time it was different, because it just appeared all on its own. Ma said it was Esther’s own fucking problem and if she was old enough to bleed, well then she could damn well fix it herself. Uncle Charlie knew what to ask for at the drugstore, and he told Esther to hide the box in her room for next time.The Handy Man was out back in his woodshed, and Esther walked across the yard to ask him for the bicycle.‘Sure you can borrow it any time, but first—come inside girl, I want to talk to you.’ Esther stood still, she didn’t know if she should go in to the woodshed with The Handy Man, even though she liked him.‘Well now don’t be afraid girl,’ said The Handy Man, ‘just come on in here.’ As always, Esther did as she was told. She stepped in to the woodshed, which was warm and smelt of sawdust and tobacco, just like Uncle Charlie.‘You love Jesus?’Esther nodded, like she knew she was supposed to, and this seemed to make Uncle Charlie happy. ‘Good. You like the wrestling on TV?’Esther shook her head from side to side, looked down at the wood shavings on the dusty floor.‘Me neither. It’s fake you know, all of it. It ain’t real, but you gotta admire the theatricality of it. You know that word, theatricality?’Esther thought she did, but she was just a dumb little girl, that’s what Ma said. So she stayed quiet.‘It means wrestling is all about timing. Timing, and winning the crowd. Me, I likes fishing. Fishing is about patience and perseverance. You run along now to the store or they’ll be a hiding waiting on you from Ma.’There was always a hiding waiting from someone, Esther thought. She started thinking about Jesus, and she heard The Baptist Preacher saying ‘Jesus Saves! Christ is your saviour!’ But Christ was no saviour for Esther. She thought about the wrestler on the canvas—face contorted in pain and suffering—trapped in a figure-four leg lock or a Boston Crab. All he had to do was submit. Just tap out and it’d all be over, the bell would ring and the fight would end. But Esther couldn’t even tap out. For her there was no bell and there was no saviour.Esther thought about the words Uncle Charlie had said to her as she rode the bicycle to the store, at first they didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.Patience and perseverance. Esther got the smokes and the liquor from the store, and when she got back to the house, she took the elbow-drops and the flying-knees and the stink-faces and the full-nelsons and she let Ma call her a dumb little whore when she found the box in her room.Winning the crowd. Esther smiled and told the Angry Principal that she’d just gone and blackened her own eye, that she was always so clumsy even though it was Ma who’d bounced her head repeatedly off the turnbuckle. She smiled at Ma through all of it, and she choked down Ma’s rancid cat-shit eggs on Sundays.Timing. She waited under bedsprings and kitchen tables, learned to play possum. Then one afternoon, when the boys were out in the yard and Ma was asleep in her armchair, Esther took her chance. She tiptoed out from the shadows and snuck up behind old Ma. The one wrestling move she had learned best was the sleeper hold, and she clamped it down on Ma’s neck before she even woke up, gripping on tight for all her life. Esther knew that wrestling was fake, but there was nothing fake about the way Ma’s legs kicked and spasmed as Esther held on to her neck. There was nothing more real than the way Ma gurgled and drooled as Esther crushed the breath right out of her jerking body. Ma scratched at Esther’s forearms, tearing away strips of red-raw flesh. But Esther didn’t feel the pain of it, for she’d learnt to feel nothing at all. Esther rolled back exhausted on to the canvas. She reached up from the mat and tagged her partner Arnold into the match, pulling herself up on the ropes. And to the roar of a thunderous crowd, the two victors left the arena as the bell finally rang, Esther the Shadow Girl and Arnold the Protector, riding away on Uncle Charlie’s bicycle. He did say she could borrow it any time, and she hoped he wouldn’t miss it too badly.

I FIRST MET ZAC SMITH IN A BARN by Giacomo Pope

December 17, 2019

I was 250 miles from the nearest streetlight, and my shoes were covered in horse shit. In the centre of the barn was this dude standing on the stacked hay. He was foaming at the mouth and shouting at overfed livestock.

Zac was watching these chickens try to kill each other and they were making all this noise, but over the top of it, you could still hear the poems crashing against cracked red paint.

The chickens were the stuntmen from Die Hard, and I was reaching into popcorn between my legs. I was sweating. The bigger chicken was digging its face into the other one (which now wasn’t moving or making a sound). The bigger chicken relentlessly pecking into fleshy feathers, and Zac was doing these little hops on the hay with a Cheshire grin.

It was all red and gore, and the hay was clumping up with chicken blood. The horses eating around it, drool and yellow teeth scraping the dirt for lines of hay.

I think about this day in the barn with Zac, and I think about how it wasn’t actually a barn, it was at a reading in Brooklyn, and how the cops were called and the bigger guy was dragged out the bar. The other dude melting into the floor with a face full of beer bottle. How fucked up it all was. How Zac and I couldn’t stop watching the grey mop pushing brown glass in puddles around the smaller guy while we waited for an Uber to take him to the hospital.

Okay I lied, we were never in a bar watching someone get murdered.

We were in this barn though, and the chicken was totally fucked. I held the chicken in my arms, my hands getting all sticky. I was feeling pretty anxious. Zac stepped down from the ladder in the middle of the barn and said he’d light up the BBQ.

I was feeling stressed out about how to pick out all the shards of glass from the meat, and the bar was closing up. The cops were asking us a bunch of dumb questions like “Did either of you know the stuntmen?”, “Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?” and “My favourite type of open-door building is a barn.”, which isn’t even a fucking question. Cops man, they’re dumb as hell.

The other writers had left the reading after the guy’s head had cracked open. They had taken all the horses, but we had both forgotten our boots anyway. Zac took a couple dozen copies of the books which were left behind the bar. We burnt them under the stars. The chicken was soft and fell apart in our mouths. I picked Zac’s teeth with hay, and we walked together to the subway. Our feet caked in the beer and blood from the floor, we dragged them through the muck to clean them up. At Zac’s stop, he turned around before the doors shut. The match caught against splintered beams. It was all so warm as the train screeched through the tunnels back home.

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REYKJAVIK by Jane Snyder

December 16, 2019

We took the kids on a tour of Iceland for winter break last year. It was Carrie’s first year of college, Tad’s third, and I wanted to do something as a family while we still could.

The sun didn’t rise the whole time we were there but everybody seemed to be having a good time. The kindergarten class leaving the National Museum as we were going in, for instance. The children had big bags of candy and were laughing so hard they couldn’t stand it. As soon as they’d start settling down one of them would say something that sounded to me like “Rootie Tootie” and they’d laugh more, harder.

“They came to see the Yule Lads,” Gurri, the tour guide said. She’d told us about the Yule Lads before. Icelandic Christmas trolls. Back in the day, they were real bastards, stole the bread from the mouths of widows and orphans. Now they put apples and little toys into children’s shoes. “The Yule Lads tell them stories and sing songs and then they all dance around the tree.”

“Roocha choocha,” a little girl in a pink snowsuit called out. “Toocha poocha.”

The children screamed with laughter, their teachers too.

The Yule Lads had left the building, Gurri told us when we said we wanted to see them, but she was sure we’d enjoy the museum and we should meet her in the gift shop in an hour. “Nobody ever needs more time.”

She took us to a downstairs room with props and costumes. “Here you can dress as authentic Vikings.”

The rest of our group, younger than my husband and me, but older than Tad and Carrie, fell to at once, grabbing wooden swords and their selfie sticks. “Thwack!” “Let us capture the maidens of this village, Leif, for they are a right comely lot.”

The kids would have loved it when they were little but they’re too self-conscious now. “Vikings rarely raped and pillaged,” Tad said primly. “They married local girls and raised crops.”

Carrie reminded us she’s an Art History major, saying, “It would behoove me to see as much of the museum as possible.” But there wasn’t a lot to see, nothing like the Louvre or the Met, other museums they’ve been to, and they quick-stepped through The Making of a Nation, the upstairs gallery’s permanent display.

A Viking drinking horn carved with pictures of Judith slaying Holofernes and Jacob slaying Absolam. A statue so old and beat up no one knew if it was Christ or Thor and another figure they knew was Christ, even though the cross was missing, because of the holes in the thickest part of his feet. The figure was crude in comparison to the marble crucifixes and pietas we’d seen in Italy on another trip but his face held our interest. Kind and bewildered as if he hadn’t seen it coming.

The display on the 19th century infant mortality rate was distressing. Almost half the babies born in Iceland then died before they were six months old, starved. Icelandic mothers didn’t breastfeed. No one knew why. In the rest of Europe, I read, everybody breastfed or got a wet nurse, and the infant mortality rate was much lower.

The part about dusa, a pap of chewed up meat and butter the babies in Iceland were given as a substitute for milk, disgusted Tad and Carrie.

I speculated the aversion to nursing might have come from the old idea that breast milk was the menses stored in pregnancy. In some cultures, I told them, menstrual blood is considered unclean.

“Would these be the same cultures that think water is wet?” the kids asked and went on, leaving me behind to be sad for the babies.

I read about a belief, “widespread in the 19th Century” that elves would steal a baby while its mother slept and replace it with an elf baby. Perhaps, it was thought, this was a way to make the mother less fond of the baby. When it sickened and died she would think it was the replacement baby and grieve less.

When I was having my children pediatricians told you breast was best; it’ll help you bond. But it seemed to me those mothers chewing scraps of food fine enough for their baby to swallow without choking, chewing to keep their baby alive, must have formed a bond too.

After supper that day, we got on the bus again to see the Northern Lights.

It had been a long day and Carrie put her head in my lap. “Wake me if it’s good.”

When we passed a cemetery outside of Reykjavik I let her sleep, while I looked out at the strings of colored lights draped over the stones. In winter, Gurri said, families liked to go walking in the dark so the churches decorate the cemeteries to make it nice for them. When I looked at the lights through the falling snow they changed from sharp points to blurred stains of soft color. The babies had been dead now for longer than they would have lived. Their flesh and unformed bones had dissolved long ago. I imagined the bits of color as something left of their sweetness though I knew the Christmas lights had nothing to do with the babies.

They’d been sick, fussy, hungry all their short lives. They did not become elves. They did not become the soul of color.

Behind me Tad was telling his dad the geyser we’d visited during the day reminded him of a pimple popping. “A really large pimple.”

Carrie’s long bright hair was splayed across my lap and I touched the end of a strand. It felt coarse and I remembered she’d complained that soaking in the Blue Lagoon had trashed her hair. “But my skin’s awesome,” she’d said, and held my hand to her cheek so I could feel how soft it was.

DCUQ ANGRUQ by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

December 14, 2019

A discussion in one of my classes, about metafiction, memory and torment, led me to bring up Chuck Jones’s classic cartoon, Duck Amuck. None of my students had heard of it, but that’s typical: they’re students. Still, before showing it in my next class I wanted to see the actual cartoon and not just rely on what I remembered when I first saw it as a kid. I mean who didn’t love the scene where Marvin the Martian takes Daffy aboard his flying saucer so that none of Bugs Bunny’s disintegrator blasts would ever singe his black feathers again?

But it’s in the nature of memory that details fuzz: without the cartoon in front of you, can you describe the expression upon Marvin’s golden face? Did Daffy weep one tear or two for his good fortune? I wanted to put Duck Amuck in front of my students, so that together we could see the thing itself, and untangle memory from reality.

So I tried looking for it online, first on YouTube, then Amazon, then Pirate Bay. I followed all the links my search engine grudgingly gave me, but no luck. Someone at Warner’s must have been very protective of their past, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I mean, it had Daffy traveling to Mars and finally meeting the true love of his life, Desdemona Duck, Queen of all Waterfowl. It was her love that at last broke Daffy from his endless cycle of disintegration/re-integration, of always returning not knowing anyone or anything, and to finally embrace certain death even if it was to be by erasure, the worst way to go out in a cartoon, and at last transcend annihilation to discover joy. It was like a recipe for enlightenment in ten minutes, thirteen seconds. It bothered me that one of the greatest cartoons of all time had been so thoroughly erased, and that no one seemed to notice.

I looked for and found seventeen Daffy Duck lovers subreddits. I got blocked on all of them.

Three thousand two hundred and fifty-one pages deep into my search I found a single pirated copy that cut off in the middle; it wobbled like someone had recorded it while drunk, holding their cellphone in front of a laptop on a speedboat. It was dubbed in Mongolian (I think?), and gave my computer a virus that required bitcoin to fix. There was an airplane in it. I don’t remember Duck Amuck ever having an airplane. Not unlike the original version, I felt like I too was being erased. I didn’t like how that felt.

Not long after that I got a call from my Chair. “I don’t know what you’ve been doing,” she said. “But knock it off.”

By this point all the ads on my browser were for Mongolian butcher shops and Viagra, and my phone kept buzzing with increasingly menacing texts from Deans and Provosts and People Who Choose to Remain Terrifyingly Anonymous. Don’t get me started on the exploding garbage trucks, or the near total absence of scenery. But the more I got the sense that someone was trying to keep me from the true Duck Amuck, the more I wanted to keep digging, because Daffy would do no less. Didn’t he fight off Bugs Bunny’s million instant Evil Martians with just a wooden practice sword to rescue his beloved Desdemona from the sewers? Surely I could save one cartoon from digital oblivion.

Finally, finally, finally, five thousand, three hundred and twenty-two pages deep into my search, I found a copy of Dcuq Angruq on a dodgy server somewhere in Southern Luxembourg. Despite the name, I knew what I had at last found. With total anticipation, I dropped the file into my video player.

My computer started whistling.

I kept waiting for the flying saucer moment where Daffy finally understands his place in the world; instead it was nothing like how I remembered it. All this version of Duck Amuck contained was just a bunch of grainy scenes where increasingly horrible things kept happening to Daffy, who had no idea why such horrible things were being done to him. No wonder it was so hard to find: it was the cartoon equivalent of a snuff film.

Smoke gushed out from every outlet of my computer, but I couldn’t stop watching.

When the cartoon sputtered to its end, there was no happy duck kissing, only Daffy writhing, crying, “Stop it, just stop it, please!”

Then the camera pulled back to reveal his tormenter to be Bugs Bunny, who was exactly the same as I remembered.

Looking up from the smoldering pile of feathers where a duck used to be, Bugs says, “Hugh, why are you watching me?”

“Have I been making you laugh?”

My name is Hugh.

The roof of my house is missing.

I see the falling shadow of an anvil approaching me. It moves wherever I move.

THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED by Sandra Arnold

December 13, 2019

We called him the Music Man because while he cleaned the headstones he liked singing along to the opera playing on his radio. Sometimes he threw his head back and let his voice soar to the sky, scattering the crows. His singing was so beautiful it softened the fears that lay hard in my heart. It brought Nettle close to tears and closer to remembering. Even Stuck Boy stopped his monologues long enough to listen. The three of us loved watching him at work though he rarely spoke to us except to tell us to bugger off if we got too close.

I’m not sure why the bad thing happened. Maybe he got sick of us hanging around him all the time. Admittedly, it would do anyone’s head in listening to Stuck Boy going on hour after hour about solving iodic evaluations. Nettle and I were used to it, but you could see that it really got on Music Man’s nerves. To be honest, it bothered me far more having to listen to the weirdos that frequented this place, but Music Man didn’t even look up from his cleaning when they drifted past.

By lying in the newly dug grave next to the one Music Man was working on I could enjoy his singing and the songs on his radio and tune out most of the complaints from the weirdos as they completed their circuit of the cemetery. Only a few of their grievances stuck to my ears like tattered cobwebs.

“I don’t know who my hands belong to anymore.”

“Why do they say he is ‘obligated’. It makes him sound like a rectangle.”

“A slatternly slut slithering in slime.”

“Avoid drawing attention to yourself.”

“Okay so I was drinking meths, but those two women had no right to refuse my entry into the cathedral. I said ‘How dare you judge me? Only one person can judge me and that’s not you.”

“Even the sky was struggling to hold up the clouds that day.”

Given everything we had to contend with, listening to Music Man singing along to his radio was an interlude of happiness for Stuck Boy, Nettle and me. Unfortunately, on this particular day, Nettle was going on even more than usual about the names on the headstone that Music Man was cleaning. She was always interested in watching him prise the grime out of the names he was working on even though he always ignored her questions. Eventually she would give up and move away to read other inscriptions. This time, however, she didn’t. Music Man heaved an exasperated sigh. He turned off his radio. I felt the molecules in the air shiver as I peered over the edge of the grave and saw Music Man toss his cleaning rag on the ground. He turned to stare directly at Nettle. He looked back at the headstone and jabbed a finger at the three names etched into the stone and then turned back to stare at each of us in turn. Stuck Boy immediately stopped spouting iodic evaluations. Nettle covered her face with her hands and began to cry. Music Man’s attitude felt like a punch to my gut. He of all people should have understood that there are some things you simply don’t rub in people’s faces. To get this point across I reached up, grabbed his ankle and dragged him into the grave. He lay there yelling blue murder while I climbed out and the three of us stood at the grave’s edge staring down at him. We told him we’d leave him there for a bit so he’d know how we felt and then we’d pull him out and forgive him.

After a couple of minutes four other workers in different parts of the cemetery heard Music Man’s shouts. They came charging over as if the devil himself was after them. Between sobs, Nettle tried to explain that it was an accident, that we didn’t mean to hurt him, that we just wanted to teach him a lesson. They ignored us and called an ambulance. The ambos ignored us too as they loaded Music Man onto a stretcher. We watched them carry him out the cemetery gate and into the ambulance. We watched the ambulance speed away down the road, siren blaring.

As the noise of the siren died away in the distance the crows settled back on the trees. Nettle cried louder and said she would really miss him. Stuck Boy gave her a hug then swiveled her around and pointed at the headstone. Music Man was kneeling there carrying on with his cleaning as if nothing had happened. Without looking at us he reached down to turn his radio on. Old habits die hard in some people, I suppose.

COVER by Benjamin Kessler

December 12, 2019

The father is accompanying the daughter to the mall. The daughter wants very much to get her ears pierced, and while the father thinks she is too young, he has consented. Though only after making the daughter pull weeds from between the spaces in the driveway concrete. The father doesn’t simply give the daughter everything she wants. He makes her earn it, and this makes him feel like a good parent. He enjoys very much feeling like a good parent, especially in front of the mother.

The daughter wants candy from one of the turnstile vending machines and the father gives her a quarter on the condition that she promises not to eat the candy all at once. The daughter says she won’t and runs off to the island where all of the machines sit, their scratched domes filled with stale sweets in muted primary colors.

The father sits on a concrete bench and watches as the daughter inspects each machine, stooping over and choosing carefully the candy she wants. The daughter insisted on wearing her favorite green jacket, even though it is permanently stained by grape juice and the mother has labeled it “home only.” But the father isn’t concerned. When he saw the daughter bound down the stairs and reach for it off the hook he gave her a sly wink, as if to say our little secret.

People mill in and out of stores. Teenagers laugh inside a photo booth. There’s so much to see. Another little girl in a green jacket runs laps around the candy machines. The father hasn’t had his driver's license back for very long and he’s excited to be out of the house. He wouldn’t tell the daughter this, but the father would have taken her to the mall regardless of whether or not she picked out the weeds to his specification. They may even go get fried chicken after, or see a movie. The father doesn’t have a job anymore. The father and the daughter could stay out all day long.

Being at home is just so difficult. It has become tremendously boring. The father feels as though he has read every book he owns, twice. Then there are of course the reminders: the now empty cabinet above the sink, the lowball glasses sealed away in the Goodwill box in the basement, the car with the busted front end sitting for months untouched in the garage. To get to the mall the father borrowed the mother’s car, though not without subject to that admonishing look she gave while handing him the keys. But everything is better now. Just look, the father says, holding his hand before him and spreading his fingers. No shakes.

The daughter has made her decision: chalky sour candy shaped like tropical fruit. She slides the quarter into the slot and turns the metal dial, the father watching, anticipating the sound of gear teeth in conversation. But there is instead another noise. A familiar sound, though not one the father has ever heard personally. He knows it only by reputation. The other mall shoppers must know it as well, because in an instant everyone is frenzied, running and screaming toward the array of double doors, overlarge glossy shopping bags swinging wildly from their hands.

But the father is smarter than them. Though he’s never been in this situation before he knows from evening news that the danger may well be waiting at the exits. So he launches himself toward the candy machines with speed he wasn’t aware he had, scoops the daughter up by the waist, and sprints into the nearest store. Once inside, soft music piping in over the speakers, he ferrets out a hiding space within a circular rack of blue jeans. He then pulls the denim closed like a curtain and holds the daughter close. They are safe, and the father again feels like a good parent. In the main hallway many are still in a panic, calling out. A fire alarm has been pulled and it wails.

The father tells the daughter that everything is going to be okay, then turns her around. But as he does so he discovers it is not the daughter. No, it is the other little girl with the other green jacket. She has fair skin and braided blonde pigtails. She looks nothing like the daughter, really, and to the father’s surprise his first thought isn’t for the daughter’s safety, but rather how the mother will react when she learns what has happened. She will assume the father had been drinking. How else could he make such a mistake? How else could he be so foolish and irresponsible?

And what has happened? Nothing so sinister. What the father, and everyone else, don’t know is that the sound, like a director’s clapboard inciting a hectic scene, was simply a sandwich board falling onto its face.

The father stares at the little girl who is not the daughter. The little girl is about to speak but the father puts a single finger to his lips. The father thinks about the daughter. He wonders if, in another store, in some makeshift shelter-in place much like his own, another father is staring at the daughter. The father takes out his cell phone, thinks about calling the mother, telling her that he is okay. And the daughter, she will ask? Fine, the father will respond, because he doesn’t know she isn’t.

THE PUDDLE BOYS AT NIGHT by Hadiyyah Kuma

December 11, 2019

Though dripping a little, the puddle boys are no longer melting. It is late nighttime. They don’t have to sleep because there is nowhere they have to be for now. They hope they never have to sleep again, but of course this is idealistic. The puddle boys know this too, but it is nice to ignore, it is nice to be fully conscious and in love. Crossing the street is the best excuse for holding hands. Cars echo away from them; some move through and splash people’s face. Everyone forgives them. The puddle boys' backs become green then red. Their hair moves with the wind, so moved, it sheds a tear.

The puddle boys drip into a cookie dough shop and practice spelling each other’s names.

“Devonte.”

“Rehan.”

“De-von-tay,” blows Rehan.

“Ray-han,” giggles Devonte.

The puddle boys tingle as their spirits align and their skins connect. They pass breath between each other. Devonte is excited about mint-chocolate cookie dough and he peruses the menu for a price. Rehan waits patiently behind him with a strawberry sharpie. As Devonte orders for the both of them, Rehan sneaks the marker under Devonte’s shirt and writes, “sanctuary.” Devonte ripples and shimmers.

The server says the cookie dough will take a few minutes; there was not enough mint left, and she has to get some more from storage.

“Can I hold the bags under your eyes?”

Devonte considers this and sees a horse outside, muddling through the street with a police officer on his back. “I could never draw a horse.”

“I never cared for horses very much. I like seashells.” Rehan knows that to be an artist one does not have to know how to draw horses. He reminds Devonte of his beach painting, of the way the seashells seemed to be sharp, yet malleable. How it seemed like a prize just to kiss the hand of the artist who made the world look soft again.

Devonte describes the feeling of being artistically inadequate as building a house with smaller bricks than everyone else, but the house has to be even bigger than every other builder. “It’s okay if you don’t understand what I’m saying.”

Rehan sits on the floor because he understands perfectly. The tiles are a jade-blue and white checkered pattern. They’re not innovative, but their simplicity gives the puddle boys a place for standing water. Delicate in their way, the puddle boys hug the grooves of the floor and change the subject. They are masters at subject-changing. They tell each other all kinds of things about shoe sizes and pony rides and simulated car rides at their respective local malls. There is always something new to talk to about. Water accumulates behind Rehan’s nose each time Devonte says the word, “probably.”

The puddle boys talk big, and soon they are shouting but not at each other, as the woman who entered the cookie dough shop would like. She has a son, he is young and smiles at the puddle boys. The woman’s thumb is ready on the record button of her phone. There is no drama to see. The puddle boys shout different animals’ names, but it’s not a spectacle; it’s two boys shouting about animals. Rehan touches Devonte’s laugh and there is no obstacle. Rehan likes donkeys and Devonte likes cows. These are their favourite animals.

From the outside the store glows white, and an accountant in his office across the street sips his coffee, rubs his eyes, checks his phone for missed calls and finds none. There is a text message that reads: have you eaten today behta? He texts, yes Ma, and puts the phone out of sight. He sees two boys yelling without making a sound. It’s not a dream. He would like to watch them forever but knows this will always be impossible.

Rehan has Devonte’s dark circles in his palms as he licks the cookie dough. A park bench at night becomes a test site of resilience because it’s not clear or dirty; it’s just somewhere to spread and spill. The puddle boys are even darker than before, their calves resting on each other like no simile can describe. It takes forever for a streetlight to come on, but it does. “Your tongue is my fire,” exclaims Rehan.

Devonte chews slowly, watching a man pee behind a tree. “I’m so glad I’m not that tree,” says Devonte. “I’m so glad I’m not that man,” says Rehan, “Alhamdulillah.” “Thank you, Jesus,” says Devonte. The puddle boys unlearn all the rules and discuss how trees can grow both up and down, but also side to side. They can break through and out of the earth, but they can extend as far as they want to go. It is hard to see the trees in this light. The puddle boys’ eyes are glinting, illuminated the worn skin around their cuticles.

Devonte sucks in the air to feel the mint aftertaste cool his mouth. “You can give them back now.”

Rehan places his palms on Devonte’s eyes and returns to him the dark circles.

The streets flex upward and back down again as Devonte and Rehan flood them. Love is big, and there are not a lot of places to hide it. An avenue opens into an alleyway, and the puddle boys crouch behind a crate of onions. They breath droplets and exhaust are the friction in each other’s collarbones. The world’s heat is turning thick and orange. It is not a good sign.

Devonte notices something behind Rehan’s hair. It is a carving made by a key or sharp fingernail. It reads, “Baby Boy and Baby Girl for life babyyyyyyy.” The many Ys lump in Devonte’s throat because he has too many wordless questions. “I wish I could last a day,” he says.

Rehan agrees. “I wish I could own a body.”

“It’s not the same as having,” says Devonte. “I’d build a city of Lego for you.”

“Build me legs and arms too, so that I have the strength to build you a better one.”

A tall man arrives. He smells like Vicks medicine, and he sweats out violence and cuss words. He mumbles, “goddamn” and “motherfucker of Jesus.” Tightening the grip beneath his shoes, he lifts the crate of onions onto his right shoulder and carries it away as if it were light.

“I don’t like men who say ‘goddamn’,” says Rehan.

“I don’t like men who make heavy things look light,” says Devonte.

“You are the best.”

“No, I feel myself giving up.”

The cement is a lighter shade. The avenue closes again, and there is nowhere to be but in the bright. Car windshields flash fire into everyone’s eyes. A cellphone reflects the light, piercing Rehan’s chest. He wobbles but is still breathing. “I feel myself giving up.” Devonte holds him by the waist. It is not easy to keep going when the dawn is so violent.

The sun becomes hotter and people pour into the street. Devonte and Rehan are smaller than they’ve ever been. They share memories of the night so as not to lose its darkness. They subject change to the red lights into green lights and green lights into yellow and then back again, and there are cows, but they are all sick and no milk can be obtained from them. The city is thirsty, and so it becomes careless. The puddle boys grow angry, but never at each other because they have hope and that deflects rays, sometimes. They start to yell again, but no one hears them. They try to laugh, but it is difficult with disappearing chests. There is another police horse, and the puddle boys hide under a car to avoid his hammering hoofs. Weight like that is definitive destruction. The streets flex downward and there is no stopping them.

“There is nowhere to hold you anymore.” The puddle boys’ backs are missing. All that’s left is the beginning of a name.

PICTURES by Andrew C. Miller

December 10, 2019

Lauren watched her father saw through the apple pie with a butter knife.

“Want a piece?” He scooped out a chunk, slid it into a cereal bowl. “Got eggs if you’d rather, but no bacon.” He poured coffee into a brown mug, dribbling on the counter. Lauren shook her head, glanced at the half open door to the canning room.

During Christmas they agreed that mother would be more comfortable on the first floor. So they converted the canning room into a bedroom and carried down her things—loose fitting clothes, toiletries, framed pictures of the family and relatives, watercolors from the community college art classes. Her father rolled in an oxygen tank, dragged in a small dresser from the garage. Lauren scooped up a handful of math and logic puzzles from the front closet.

Her father didn’t bother to set sponge up the coffee. He set his bowl and mug on the table, sat down hard.

Lauren frowned. Without her mother in the kitchen, the house didn’t feel like theirs anymore. It was as though someone else had moved in, rearranged the furniture, changed the lights, didn’t bother to pick up.

“Where’re the hospice people?”

“Got them on the phone yesterday. Seemed real nice.”

He set the spoon down, slid a tattered shoebox to the center of the table.

“They haven’t been here yet?”

He shook his head. “Now your Mother—"

Lauren’s eyes narrowed. “You just talked to them?” She opened and closed her fists. “Mom’s in pain, losing weight...”

“Got your Mother on a special diet. Florence—from the church—told us about it.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

He swept his arm overhead. “She didn’t want other women in her kitchen.”

“So, nothing’s been set up?”

He explained that they wanted to give the diet a chance. And, she was starting breathing exercises. They read about them in a health magazine that came in the mail. He jabbed the pie with his spoon.

“What about the pain?”

“All this addiction scares her.” He held up a spoonful, mostly crust. “Have a cup of coffee.”

“You were supposed to get hospice started.”

She walked to the counter, picked up the coffee pot. At Christmas she had downloaded the hospice information, stuck their telephone number on the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a rabbit.

He looked up. “There’s no cream.”

“No matter.” She poured a cup, leaned back against the sink. His shoulders seemed more hunched; his face thinner than she remembered. She wanted to yell, what’s going on here? Instead she asked, “Why’d you call?”

She was almost asleep when he called, asked her to come home. She got up at four, drove the 200 miles in under three hours.

He slid the bowl to one side, flipped open the shoebox.

“It’s the pictures.”

He pulled out a fat envelope, legal-sized, rumpled and stained. He slid out a handful of pictures, began to snap them on the table like he was dealing cards.

“We couldn’t figure out these people.” He glanced at the door to the canning room, then back at Lauren. “It was at the reunion right after your 16th birthday.”

Pictures. A long line of pictures.

At Christmas they had talked on and on about hospice. On their first visit, Lauren would come back home to meet them. They’d discuss everything. As a family. Pain management. Comfort food. Her mother’s wishes. Lauren had told her parents about Dr. Kaminsky, one of her university profs that had just died. Dr. Kaminsky’s wife had said the hospice people were a blessing. A blessing to have them in their home while he weakened, when he passed.

She stared at the pictures, didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she touched one.

“This is Cousin Freda’s daughter. She lives in Arizona.”

LIFE, AS OF NOW by Kamil Ahsan

December 9, 2019

The courtship practices of Shalimar Gardens spiked on Pakistan Day. His breath is raggedy. The trees brush the air with heart-shaped leaves, a reminder that the world is passing him by without noticing him sink—the cars that move too fast, the motorcycles that almost run him over, the people, oh all the people, so many people, everywhere everywhere everywhere…

It’s nightfall. He’s never been to the Shalimar Gardens. He never needed to. Fate grabbed him by the collar and shook him before he had a chance to know what he expected. All around him is noise, very ordinary noise. He thought he would feel exhilarated, pained but born anew, terrified. But he only feels the dirt kicked onto his knee by a motorcycle. A man and a woman and two children, one carried by the woman, stop by the side of the road. The din is sliced through by the man’s gravelly voice, as his hands pull on his wife’s dupatta. The older child says she wants to ride in front of him, and there’s a flash of repugnance across the man’s face—even he can see it, from a distance—and it lands as a blow across the child’s cheek. Before he can register his shock, the child disappears, a ballast between her father and mother. The motorcycle speeds into the crowd: the thing holding bodies together. A collective brain containing all these bodies that move like a wave, bursting through the bottleneck’s seams in the traffic. When many things squirm through small openings, it is the smallest of those things that gets bruised.

He feels his face peeling, crackling. A stray dog scampers to his right. He doesn’t really notice it. That is, the part of him that notices the dog is not conscious of the dog. Nor does he really notice that the dog is more careful with the traffic than himself.

At the signal, a family in the car closest to him is squabbling. He goes closer without realizing. A little girl looks at him imperiously and rolls up her window. There must be a shadow, he feels, working independently of him. If a passerby—say, the little girl—took a picture of him, what would it show? A vacant vessel of bone and sinew? A roving shadow stealing away round the corner? If someone was interested by the photograph, would they fail to see beyond this general part of the city, or would they see him—a being that did not coincide with a self?

The cold facts are that in this moment, on this day, on the 23rd of March in Lahore, he has been stripped of all the currency into which he was born. He has no wallet, he has no belt, he has no shoes, he has no cell phone. His shirt pocket is ripped, partially baring his chest. His jeans are shredded at the buttocks, and he holds the fabric together, even as he approaches a restaurant where he thinks maybe he can ask to make a phone call. He stands at the foot of the steps and hesitates. Behind him, there’s a man stabbing through brambles on the sidewalk and onto the small lawn. Ahead of him, people sit inside a glass window on restaurant tables, happy; or at least, ordinary. If this army of the living lives because it has the dignity of the soul, he is dead—or at best, a suggestion of a self.

And the fear and the panic and the pleasure and the longing and the confusion, the absence of all knowledge of an encounter that has happened to him and to him alone, the apprehension, the chance, just the smallest, the smallest of chances that this man who follows him and hides in the darkness can get close enough and grab his arms, thus exposing his bare buttocks mottled with violence that had to have been accidental—"It had to be! It must have been!"—along with the guilt; but then, all of that could just be a consequence of him remaining stationary in a cacophony of lights here, somewhere on Mall Road, the night alive with the smell of foods, each competing with the other, and so he moves as if with this swirling tide up the steps and begins to cry, not for an innocence he’s suddenly lost, but because what if this is relief, or ecstasy, or growth? Despite whatever he failed to feel, and despite his utter lack of innocence, his anxious limbs, prehensile arms and legs pushed. And he ran. And that gave him the forward momentum to speak the minimum number of words for a waiter to lend him his cell phone—until he realized it wasn’t a good idea to call anyone, and then there he was. A trickle of blood pooled over a left thigh, a fulsome pain.

He dials a number. It rings three times.

“Who is this?” Sara asks.

“Listen—I’m in trouble,” he says, and he begins to weep so loudly it orients the nature of the phone call so as to demarcate the ordinary from the extraordinary.

“Umair…What happened? No, fuck that, where are you? What’s going on?”

“I fucked up. I fucked up, I don’t know, I’m at Salt & Pepper, the one on Mall Road. I’m in trouble, I’ve—” He trails off. His eyes drop to the floor and float.

“Have you been running?” she says. She sounds bewildered and as if she’s trying to hide it. But that is not true. She is feigning surprise. It is not a complete surprise.

“Yes. No. Not running…no, maybe you don’t need to come,” he says before a crippling pain travels straight up his legs. He doubles over.

“Where’s your phone?” Sara asks.

“…lost it. Wallet too. Should I take a rickshaw and pay when I’m home? Tell me what to do. I can’t go home.”

He retches, once, twice, and on the third, a wet honk from the pit of a spectral wound empties his stomach.

“Okay, get it out, okay. Okay, stop. Listen. Say yes or no: I shouldn’t call Saad or Raza, right? I can call, um… oh, fuck, well, Zehra’s closer, I can call her. No, wait I’ll come myself. Yes or no? Should I come?”

His feet are bleeding. He barely notices. Two waiters look at him nervously. They whisper to each other.

“Umair! Okay, I’m coming to get you. Umair, just stay where you are, okay?” she says. She’s yelling.

He tries to pull himself together. “No, it’s fine,” he says. But it was like squeezing a pair of trousers five sizes too small; he was maybe a little closer but still too far.

Her voice cut a single chord, flawlessly. Without dropping a note. “Umair, stay right where you fucking are! Come on, stay on the phone, keep talking.”

“I need to give the phone back,” he says.

“Oh. Fuck. Okay, give it back, sit tight.”

“Yes, please.” he says.

“Acha, leaving now,” she says.

“You have to come in,” he says.

“What, why?! OK, I’ll come in but stay put, not even to the bathroom.” Sara’s voice rises in irritation, and it makes him feel as if it is she who grasps the urgency of the situation, not him—and then there’s a relief to that, an impatience that is soothing. Maybe he has overreacted. Maybe there is nothing to any of this. Maybe he is a child as she is a child and they behave like children and things are melodramatic and urgent because they desperately want their lives to be melodramatic and urgent, for perhaps in their world there is a high premium on trauma, a bigger story, a sadder story, a taboo story, a few little white lies stitched into a story that sounds not better but much worse than it is, because fifteen sleeping pills make a teenage socialite more interesting than seven sleeping pills, because three jilted ex-girlfriends are better than one, because two bottles of Absolut in one evening will always be better than one.

This is not one of those stories, even if it retains some of the same elemental capacity for exaggeration. This is the story that would not get told.

He sidles into a booth, taps his feet on a damp tiled floor, a dub dub dub that takes some of the rhythm away from the pain. His eyes droop over the ketchup packets strewn across the table, along with small pieces of chicken, charred bits of food, empty soda bottles. Nobody in Lahore ever cleans up after themselves. Just how it is. Outside the door to Salt & Pepper, there is a soft patter of footsteps. The man sees Umair through it, into a mannequin across the pane of a storefront into it. Or so Umair believes.

The ride to her house in the back of a silver Corolla is quiet. She looks at him and wonders if he’ll ever tell her the whole truth. He avoids looking at her. He thinks she must be thinking he was creating a drama. He is a boy. He could have gotten a rickshaw.

But then she holds his hand, and it is for him an ultimate act of kindness that she looks away from him, though it is for her the natural order of things; an inexorability. The form of something she'd intuited would happen had happened. He dozes off. She wakes him when they get to her house. His breath catches from old cries he was trying to subdue. Like hiccups.

They go inside. He stands in the dark foyer next to a console and a giant round mirror. Sara orders the driver to go. She looks at him standing with his back to her, at the foot of the stairs, shorn of all the willful unrest and commotion that makes Umair himself. She closes the front door behind her.

He’s safe. He’s let go of his torn jeans. The door latch clicks shut. He turns to face her. And although the story will only be told in splinters and things will run their course and nothing will be asked or prevented from happening again, in a knotty shudder of a moment, all of a sudden, Sara’s heart begins to break in ways she does not understand. It will be the barometer she will use for heartbreak for years to come.

MOLD ON THE CEILING by Katherine Tweedle

December 9, 2019

Sophie had never thought twice about the décor in her mind palace. That was, until her counselor barged into her secret space and perched in her favorite armchair.

One moment, the women sat in an office tinted a chi-centering blue; the next, the room had transformed into a dim sitting room. Sophie blanched, her private life now public. Dr. Erwin seemed unabashed, if not actually bored, continuing to pull on a fountain soda the size of a prize pumpkin.

The room was Yin and Yang: clutter and cleanliness; one half as immaculate as a museum, the other half, a virtual kaleidoscope of crap. A thick, musty smell crawled through the air.

Dr. Erwin’s eyes roved over their new surroundings and settled on a shaggy patch of mold inching across the ceiling. She spoke in a lazy drawl, the straw wedged between her lips. “I like what you’ve done with the place.”

Sophie flinched at the quip. “Could we maybe—? Go back to your office?”

“You don’t like how I work?” The counselor’s tired eyes froze her.

A flush rose up Sophie’s neck as her eyes slid from the pristine gallery on one wall to the other half of the room. Crowding around them lay piles of books like fallen avalanches, crumbling cardboard boxes of corroded spectacles, and ragged grocery bags bulging with splinters of previously-fine china.

“Do you collect anything, Doctor?” Sophie asked, plumping a pillow beside her. A puff of dust exploded in her face.

“Everyone’s got junk.”

“I don’t know about junk. Lots of hobbies, maybe.” Sophie swept her arms wide, elbowing a stack of magazines that flapped to the floor.

Dr. Erwin waved a dismissive hand. “Baggage is normal,” she finally said. Then she pulled a face, her cheeks bulging, and Sophie realized with revulsion the woman was trying to smile.

Sophie reflexively perused the wall around them for the expected credential frames, but of course, if they’d been in Dr. Erwin’s office, she couldn’t see them now.

“Your room’s really something.” Dr. Erwin slid the straw from her drink and pointed it at the musty patch overhead. “Why do you figure that’s here?”

Sophie frowned at the intrusive straw, but quickly recovered. “Beautiful plasterwork, isn’t it?”

Dr. Erwin’s caterpillar eyebrows rose. “Is the plasterwork under the mold?”

“Mold? Oh that’s just—that’s been here forever. How about this?” Sophie scurried over to remove a glass box from the gleaming mantel and drew up a chair next to the counselor. The gold inlay gleamed when she lifted the lid.

“Naughty Box?” the counselor asked, reading the inscription.

“Yes. It has...reminders.”

“For?”

Sophie paused. “Anyone ever insult you?” she said. She didn’t wait for an answer. “Everyone’s flawed. Even those people.” Sophie reached in, lifting a pink note from the well-thumbed stack inside. “This one’s Marjorie,” she said, waggling the note in the air, “who seems to find other people more interesting lately.” Sophie flipped the paper onto the coffee table.

“Charles,” she said, extracting another note. “My cat passed away this year. I was devastated. Folks offer condolences, right? Not Charles. He didn’t care.” Sophie flicked through the pile and tugged another slip.

Dr. Erwin interrupted. “I assume you drew up some contract with him about friendship etiquette?”

Sophie snapped the lid shut. She rose to replace the box, taking care to ensure it was centered.

“Did you confront these people?”

“I’d be wasting my time.” Sophie returned to the couch and stretched out. Her foot nudged a box beneath the coffee table. She stiffened, looking like she’d just swallowed an ice cube.

Dr. Erwin leaned forward and squinted. “What’s that?”

Sophie shrugged. “That’s nothing. Not very pretty.”

Dr. Erwin’s eyes met Sophie’s, a controlled softness in her gaze. “Neither is mine.” The counselor’s exhaustion was radiating. It was a little sad; Sophie felt it too.

Sophie reluctantly lifted the box. It was glass like the first, but the panels were foggy with dust, the fastenings dark with rust.

“I keep throwing this nasty thing out, but it keeps coming back.”

“That’s your Oopsie Box?”

Sophie blinked away the juvenile term.

Inside the box lay a stack of crisp yellow notes like citations.

“These show up a lot,” Sophie said in a low voice. Her eyes scanned the first. “Sometimes I leave my shopping cart in the lot.” She flicked her shoulders as if shrugging off a fly.

“You feel some type of way about it?”

“Not really,” Sophie said, and that was that. “Mary. Once, I—this was just after my cat died—intimated to a coworker that Mary’d been withdrawn lately because of her husband’s affair. Apparently there were others in the breakroom, and by day’s end, those idiots spread it to everyone on the fourth floor.” Sophie rolled her eyes into her hairline. “It was...traumatizing.”

“I know what you mean,” Dr. Erwin said. Her eyes went vacant, as if she’d left her whole body sitting there, empty, to run some errand.

“I meant difficult for Mary. She was betrayed by everyone.”

Dr. Erwin took a disinterested pull from her soda. “Next?”

Sophie stared at this new note as if seeing it for the first time. Her face fell. “My sister’s blind in one eye.”

“How’d it happen?”

“You know the thing that always happens to kids who play with sticks?”

They sat in silence a while.

Finally, Sophie blurted: “She’s forgiven me, of course.” She squeezed the papers back in the decrepit box and stuffed it under the table.

Something shifted in the room, like a breeze, and they both looked up to see the mold above them grow. Sophie scowled.

“That’s no normal fungus,” Dr. Erwin said.

Sophie snapped her head back down to face her. “What isn’t?”

Dr. Erwin’s caterpillars climbed up her forehead.

“I don’t know what that is,” Sophie insisted.

“Then I’ll tell you; you don’t wanna let it sit.”

Sophie set her jaw. “Just leave it.”

Dr. Erwin tapped the plastic lid of her cup. “You want warm fuzzy feelings, or help?”

Without a word, Sophie rose. She crossed the room and opened the door, temporarily forgetting which way to turn the knob.

“I’m glad you came,” Dr. Erwin called.

Sophie pivoted. Her eyes lingered on the mold looming heavy and low. The flesh on her face hung limp as if it too were tired now. She nodded and crossed the threshold.

In the room she left behind, the mold on the ceiling flickered.