Fiction

DEAD FLOWERS by Rasmenia Massoud

November 1, 2019

We didn't know how to talk to Troy's new girl. Then again, we didn't know how to talk to the last one, either. Sunny, giggling girls flocked around him, their shiny polished nails drawn to his brown arms and the thick blond waves of hair that touched his shoulders.

Things were that way. People came and went. Stuck together like it was life and death in one moment, an almost forgotten odd character in a funny anecdote the next.

To a girl who'd had a few and met Troy for the first time, it might've seemed as if he'd been forged by some golden god of hair metal, but Brad and I laughed and watched him cut the sleeves and collars off his concert t-shirts so they'd show off his arms and chest hair, combing his fingers through his mane to make it perfect. Accidental sexiness is a carefully crafted look.

Troy's previous girl peed on Brad's couch. For days, Brad threatened to find another roommate, and criticized Troy for going out with a girl who couldn't handle her booze and let it go all over the leather couch. There was no sense in pointing out the couch was vinyl, or that the blanket she and Troy were curled up in soaked up most of her drunken pee.

"We're not buying any more booze for minors." Brad turned to me. "Except you, Justine. You're housebroken."

I smiled, feeling validated because back then, flattery and belittling other women often looked the same.

We laughed off Brad's ranting, and Troy found a new girl. She rolled around on the living room floor in her cut-off shorts, showing the three of us her ass cheeks while we sat on a tattered sleeping bag that now served as a sofa cover. A movie played in the VHS, but we were watching Troy's girl, who refused a chair, preferring to lay on the floor, sitting up now and then to smear more lotion onto her legs.

"I like lotion," she said, giggling as she squirted another gob into her hand. I wondered how long she could keep rubbing the stuff on her skin before gummy gobs began balling up on her fingers.

Brad and I looked at one another, stifling laughter, and took our beers outside. Maybe she'd pee on the couch. Maybe she'd leave a greasy lotion smear in the middle of the living room. Maybe she'd be gone and replaced in a week. None of it mattered because by the same time the following year, Brad had a new roommate. Troy chopped off his wavy heavy metal hair and joined the Navy. The 25-year-old stripper Brad was fucking behind my back would be nursing their kid on the vinyl pee couch as I became a memory, sweating through the graveyard shift in a plastics factory, still a year away from being able to buy my own booze.

We drank and smoked outside on the wooden steps leading up to the trailer door. Brad peeked inside and snorted. He shook his head, squinting his blue eyes, pushing his shaggy brown hair from his face. That shaggy brown hair was just a few years from falling out completely. "That chick, what's her name? Annie? Amy? What the fuck is the deal with the lotion?"

I shrug. "You know how it is with Troy's girlfriends. It's always something." Brad offers to buy me my own barrel of lotion. Leaning on each other, we laugh until tears blur our already doubled vision. We laugh because of the weirdness Troy always brought around, and because we thought he was the fool, and we were so smart. Like we knew something he didn't. Like we knew anything about what was real, or how to make anything last.

I try to stand and realize how drunk I am. Brad gets to his feet, teeters a bit, then staggers across the dirt road to a dried up sunflower, dying from the summer heat. He reels as he yanks and pulls at it until it's free from the Earth and returns to me, holding out his prize. Behind him, in the distance, the first glimpse of sunrise appears, warning that another night is coming to an end.

"What is this?" I'm swaying, gripping his arm for balance.

"My gift to you," he says, "To immortalize this moment."

"And what's so special about this moment?"

"Nothing. We're here," he says. "That's all."

He shrugs, stumbles again, and pulls me tighter to him, crispy dead flower fragments falling around us.

THAT GIRL by Kathryn McMahon

October 30, 2019

If you’re going to listen to this story, you better really listen because that’s what it’s about: listening. You better scoot closer in case you miss something, in case a log pops, in case the wind picks up, because it’s bad luck to re-tell it, any part. The girl in this story will see to that.

She could be almost anyone. She isn’t beautiful, or maybe she is, or maybe it doesn’t matter. She’s been watching you, waiting to meet you. To get close. To listen to what you have to say as she bites her lip or runs her tongue across sharp, needle teeth that she files herself. Some say she wears red because she likes red-on-red, and while new blood dries brown, she likes that, too. Blood is easily lost against black, and this girl has nothing to hide.

The best way to know her is by the bats she keeps in her hair. She wears it up in a messy bun and petite, fuzzy bodies droop down and around, as if she were Medusa but with more cunning and a detachable wrath. Of course, they aren’t always nesting. These bats? She sends them out to hunt while she wanders neighborhoods, stealing secret spare keys and loosening bike chains. Letting you know she’s around. And that’s on one of her good days. Heaven forbid you catch her on a bad day. Or she catches you. Are you listening?

It’s a shame no one remembers what she was called before the dying undid her. She became someone who things had happened to. Bad things, of course, because no one talks much about the good that goes on, and people talked all about the bad. They blamed her for it. Like she was a tiny black hole sucking bad toward her, not a girl in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not just a girl being a girl.

When she was dead, still a girl because that’s all the time she was dealt, she came back. People were talking about what had happened to her so much so that she got sick of it. Just sick of it. She collected herself, all her broken bits and moldy pieces, and crawled right out of her grave and decided to make everyone talk about the things she actually did. The things she could control. And what does she do with that voice of hers, the one that was squashed, beaten-down, ignored? If you hear your name and turn to find no one there, that’s her. She’s coming for you. Readying your story in her mouth.

Her bats don’t only swoop after mosquitoes and moths. They’re searching for lies, for willful misunderstandings. They don’t drink blood—much. She’s no vampire queen. Though, if they’re a little thirsty, because it’s a warm night and they’ve been out hunting awhile, their delicate toes will land on your collar and they’ll creep toward your neck with eager, clicking fangs.

Are your ears perked for that brush of velvet? For that electric chirp of sonar?

When they get really hungry, when it’s one big whopper stinking up the night breeze, something awful about this girl or some other, about a woman, about women; when they hear She was asking for it. Her skirt was tootighttooshorttoo—. When they hear She’s lucky he paid her any attention. She should dress more like a girl. When they hear She shouldn’t have had that much to drink. What did she expect? The bats recognize their quarry.

They’re not only looking for that boy at the party, not only for that man in the car. She’s sent them for the storytellers, the owners of those lies. For their tongues or, rather, something past them. To the bats, those lying tongues licking chapped lips look extra tender and wet and juicy. Pure temptation. All they need is a point of darkness deep in those throats, tiny black holes sucking them in, and oh, how they want to be sucked in. To catch your lies and stuff them back down your throat. They see that hollow behind your teeth and pop through, one after the other. Because the girl? She wants in, too.

Once they’re inside, don’t try to scream. Your tongue will feel like a mechanical bull trying to kick free. But these cowgirls are going to win. The fingers at the ends of their wings hook on like a stranger on your car door. A few quick rips and their toes whisper past your taste buds to the meat underneath. They chew and chew. It is so soft, your tongue. They eat their fill, first one, then another, shredding their way down your throat, making a cave of your body like you did to the truth about that woman, that girl. Making you into a welcome mat for one such girl who will find you on the ground, right, right, like that, half-drowned in your own blood, sagging out of life.

The bats snap open your ribs one-by-one, a sound not unlike logs crackling on the fire. They’re stronger than they look, like that girl.

She puts her hand on your shoulder. Her fingers graze your arm, almost forgiving you. Almost. But there’s a hole where your sternum should be, and she reaches in, up through your throat, and since you’re useless and forgot how to tell the truth, she puppets your jaw for you. Cradles it. She’s deep inside you, firm and gentle. But that’s a lie. She’s not gentle at all. A bat folded where your tongue should be twitches at her touch. With a nudge or two, it flies free, carrying the truth. Now, lie still. Hush.

THE HORSES, THE HORSES by John Torrance (Megan Pillow)

October 30, 2019

All in all, it’s a good place to stop for the night. There’s little work to be done and a beauty of a view: a tranquil lake at the bottom of a grassy hill, lush and electric green beneath the early evening sun. No other cattle to crowd them. After they put up tents, perhaps a bit of play to shake off the day’s ride: a tune on Morton’s banjo. Then grass for the cattle and grub for the men: canned beans, or maybe a rabbit that’s a touch too slow, something that makes the belly full without turning it. They’d learned that lesson with the prairie dogs near Jackson Hole.

While Amos and Morton unsaddle the horses and shoo the cattle, Jack is staring at something. Amos shakes his head. Still distracted. Watching the animals. Amos watches the grassland, which looks like his palm when he touched it to the barn that time and drew it away, wet and green and dripping great dots of color onto the bleached ground, leaving a half dozen lines trailing dull across the wood like a boy had run his hand there instead of a man. The memory of those fingermarks makes him shiver. They’re still on the side of that barn in Cheyenne, as if the ghost of him is running its fingers along the wall.

By the time all the tents are up, it’s dusk, and the three of them are worked out. No time for music. Clouds are gathering: big, dark, and they bring a chill. No wind. Just a slow, sneaking cold, like an icehouse door left open too long. Amos winds the rope that tethers the (quiet, quiet) horses to the makeshift hitching post till there’s no more play. Morton spoons beans onto tin plates. Amos makes a face but takes one, hands another to Jack. But Jack isn’t paying a lick of attention. His face is drawn, dull. He’s staring at the horses (are they staring back?). Where Jack’s looking, there’s nothing but horses. He’s been restless the past few nights, woken Amos with his whispering. Mornings, he’s always sitting by the dying fire, his eyes bruised, a blanket around him.

What’s wrong? Amos always says.

The horses, says Jack. The horses.

Amos elbows Jack. He takes the plate without taking his eyes off the horses.

Boy’s got a case of the creeps. Just one more night (there’s nothing to be afraid of), we deliver the cattle, and we can all go home.

The cold is all around them before the beans are gone, needling its way inside their clothing so quick that they all turn in. There’s no more light to work by anyway. The roiling clouds have blotted out the moon, the stars. It’s so dark they couldn’t see a pack of wolves hunting them down the hillside. Best to bury under the blankets and sleep till morning. Amos pulls back his tent flap. Jack is standing at the mouth of his own. His eyes are like the gleam of water at the bottom of a well. Likely Jack is getting no sleep at all.

Amos hasn’t been asleep long when a sound wakes him. Quiet, then again: hooves pawing the dirt, playing at something. He clicks his lamp on, lifts the tent flap. The horses are loose from their hitch, standing in a line, their necks close as a clutch of flowers. All of the cattle are gone. He clicks the light off now. He’s tired. His head makes shit up. These are good horses. They won’t (hurt us) disappear. Cattle are probably just over the hillside. He clicks the lamp on again, looks out. Midnight, a horse he’s had since he was a colt, turns his head towards him. His eyes shine like dimes. Out of the dark, Jack is whispering.

The horses. The horses.

I need sleep, thinks Amos. He clicks the light off and hopes for sleep, closes his eyes.

Then, again: hooves. Closer. He clicks the lamp on, lifts the flap. The horses are a few feet away now. Steam rises from their noses like smoke from distant fires. Then the lamp begins to die and he is suddenly terrified. The light flares. Amos can see the rise of Midnight’s chest, the dull constellation of scars spanning his ribs where Amos uses the crop, digs in his spurs.

Good boy, he whispers.

Midnight watches him with gleaming eyes.

Amos’s lamp sputters out. The darkness terrifies him. Anything could be out there. Nothing makes sense in the dark.

The, the sound of hooves again. Closer. Closer.

The horses, whispers Jack. The horses.

Amos presses the switch and the lamp sputters on for a moment and off, and he’s in the dark again all alone, his chest heaving, and light again, then none and he’s struggling, working the switch but the light’s down to nothing again, and he’s desperate no more playing with these fucking animals but the lamp cuts off again and it makes a scream swell in his throat and Jack is whispering again and again the horses the horses again and again maybe this is a dream maybe maybe maybe I am that green-palmed ghost haunting the side of the barn in Cheyenne and maybe I’m still that dull good boy but then the lamp clicks on, and his breath shudders in his throat like a light.

Hooves paw the ground just outside his tent now.

The damp from Midnight’s nostrils wet the flap like breath against a windowpane.

The lamp goes out again.

Amos can hear the click of the bit, like bone, between Midnight’s teeth.

Maybe I’m not here at all I’m not here I’m not but in another field somewhere. Maybe I’m in a parlor yes or at a hotel bar blacking out from drink the dredges of. Maybe I’m walking across the bathroom of room 237 to join a woman in a great green tub. Maybe there’s no escape all this is fake the work is for nothing and no play was a better plan but makes a mistake. Maybe maybe Jack was right maybe maybe I’m stuck in a snowdrift slowly freezing maybe I’m not shining but maybe I’m a dull boy maybe I’m alone in some haunted hotel maybe just writing a novel about this. Maybe -

the lamp clicks on and he sees it then oh God and the horse takes the shape of something, something, something and then oh then it blacks out the sky what is it dear God -

the words were here all along.

Maybe this is the end.

Or maybe

(all my words in the world won’t work to save me and this is the end of time and no nothing will change it you can’t do a thing the play is dead it’s the end I think it makes me terrified of what’s coming but only Jack knows he knows it’s the end times, isn’t it? I am a dull dead boy now)

it is the beginning of something new.

Maybe all all it is work and no play no play and no play the beginning the beginning makes Jack of something of something a dull boy new something new.

Maybe all all it is is work and no play no play and just no play the beginning the beginning makes Jack of something of something a dull boy new something new.

Maybe

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

THIS SKIN YOU CALL YOUR OWN by Chloe N. Clark

October 29, 2019

He told me he didn’t believe in witches. We were on the floor of my apartment, half undressed while he used one hand to unbutton my jeans, when he said it. Out of nowhere.

“I don’t believe in witches, you know,” he said. He began kissing down my neck, hand slipping beneath my jeans.

“What do you mean?” I asked. My own hand slid down his stomach. He let out a short exhale of air.

“Like everyone told me you were a witch before we hooked up,” he said. I could hear the excitement behind his words, the thought of being with a witch edging against his desire to make him seem different from all the others who wanted me, talked about me.

I didn’t speak for a moment, tracing my fingers against the skin of his stomach before moving my hand lower on his body. He was warm, and I could smell the faint ache of sweat on him.

“They said watch out for her,” he continued. “They said you’d want something from me. That you’d only like it if you could get something from me.”

I applied a little more pressure with my fingers. He pulled in his breath. His own hand slowing. I wondered how much I could make him want me. There’s a pleasure in being wanted. Though nothing near to the pleasure of what I want from them—that slow unspool of darkness. I shifted away from him and began to kiss every inch of his skin. My tongue on his skin. I could taste his sweat. It was salty at first and then it was the coffee he’d drunk at work—sharp, slightly over-extracted espresso, that hint of latex. I went lower down his body, past his stomach, his back arching slightly. There was a memory in him, that he didn’t even know he’d kept, of earlier in the day, he’d been watching a woman across the street talking to her child. The woman was crouched so that she and the child were at the same height. Her coat was bright red, a dark blue scarf, and he’d remembered his mother once scolding him at a park. She’d stood above him, never deigning to be at his level. He didn’t remember her words. I ran my hands up his thighs, pushing the memory out of his body. I knew he’d never know it was gone. I wanted him thinking of only one thing. He needed to only be here in this moment, this pleasure. The dark should be the furthest from his mind. That’s how I’ve always liked it. I needed to be able to take what he wasn’t watching, a magician who keeps your eye on the wrong card.

He said my name. I used my tongue, my lips. He lost his words. I, on the other hand, had a thousand languages at my disposal. I’d learned how to shape my tongue so many ways, knew how to use it to make others speak to me. I moved my tongue, shaped my lips, made his body yell to me.

He had this recurring nightmare that he woke up on an island in the middle of nowhere. There was no one else there. He wandered around and around, calling out the names of everyone he’d ever known. No one answered. And then someone did. Some voice called out from beneath the sand. It begged him to run. Run away. So he tried. He’d run to the water’s edge and try to get in it, to swim away, but he couldn’t. The water would be glass or boiling hot or freezing, freezing cold. But he’d try, he’d keep trying, as the voice kept screaming for him to run and he’d know something was coming for him. Something that he’d never want to know.

This I liked. I held it closer to myself, letting it slip into my skin, run its darkness into my blood. It felt so good flooding my body, down to the tips of my toes.

He was so close to release. His whole body thrummed with it. And then he said, “Wait.”

I stopped.

He said, “I didn’t believe them.”

And I knew what he meant, how much he thought everyone was telling lies about me but that he’d hoped they weren’t but didn’t want to give in to believing. Men like him loved witches, loved that hint of danger. I knew how much he’d wanted me. I could feel it on him—it came off of him like a bit of extra warmth, standing too close to the fire on too cold of days.

I moved again, long enough to say, “Shhh.”

He nodded. There was sweat pooled in the hollow of his throat, it glistened. In that light, he was more than beautiful.

Of course, everyone was, when I’m there with them, when I’m pulling the darkness from their bodies. They look so filled with light if only for a moment.

I used my tongue, shaped my lips around him. I spoke a thousand words he wouldn’t hear, just my tongue tracing the letters, rolling the syllables.

The words let everything he’d ever been scared of into my body. It filled me up so quick. Everyone carried so many tiny fears. They cascaded into me, every part of me was so filled with him. There was so much power in knowing every darkest corner, every monster under the bed.

And then his body went still, only his fast breathing, heart pounding to show he was still there.

I lay beside him. Everything ached in that pleasurable way, like after running a marathon. Time spent well. Sometimes, often if I was honest, I wondered what it was like for them. If afterwards, they went out knowing what I’d taken. If they felt lighter or if it didn’t feel like anything at all. To go into the world, unafraid, must feel like something.

“What are you?” he asked, smiling.

“I’m a witch,” I said. But he didn’t believe me. They never believed in witches really.

A SPECTRE LURKS AT THE PUTT-PUTT ON RIVERSIDE by Keef

October 29, 2019

The ghost in our town haunts the putt-putt golf course with the big Peter Pan statue out front. The haunting is the only semi-interesting thing about the course, and even the ghost is dull. Kyle from AP Biology works the concessions, wearing a paper hat and staring at his phone. Hot dogs are only a dollar, but you get what you pay for. All the holes are pretty busted, and there’s always a parade of sad single dads tromping around the place with their kids, trying to make up for neglect and inattention and assumptions that they’d always have what they love.

Todd wanted to see the ghost and I wanted to take him on a date, so we headed down there on Friday after sunset. He drove us in his mom's minivan. I warned him beforehand that the ghost wasn't very cool; it was just a ghost. It wasn't scary and it wasn't some gothic spook in a shroud whispering cautionary tales about the mistakes it made in life or whatever.

"It's just a guy," I said. "You sometimes have to wait for it to move if it's in the way."

But Todd still wanted to see it.

It took us a while to pick out putters that weren't too bent-up from douchebags bashing them against the statues. I bought us a couple hotdogs. Kyle said "Gentlemen," and gave us the nod and only charged us half price. We still got what we paid for.

"These hot dogs are so bad," I said. "You sure this is what you want? A lame ghost and lousy hotdogs? It's not too late to let me take you to IHOP."

"You're just scared," he said. "Of the ghost. Or maybe just the, you know, the eerie vision of the sad dads. Under the phantasmagoric light of the, uh, gibbous moon."

Sometimes Todd is the funniest person in the world, so I kissed him.

He’s also really cute, especially when he's concentrating on putting. His tongue sticks out between his teeth, and if I say something to break his concentration, his shoulders slump and he throws his head back and rolls his eyes and makes an exasperated noise, which is adorable, and I shouldn’t do that but it’s so hard to resist.

The seventh hole is a bull rearing up, but one of the front legs broke a long time ago, so now it's sort of kneeling. I was trying to chip the ball up and bounce it off the bull's nose to make Todd laugh, which is hard when all you have is a putter. All the hair on the back of my neck went up. The chill started on the soles of my feet, like someone massaging them with seaweed.

"Wow," said Todd. "You feel that?"

"Yeah," I said. The icy feeling slid up the back of my calves and circled up and around my inner thighs, settling in the middle of my torso. "I should've brought my hoodie."

"Look," he said, and pointed.

The ghost hovered on the brick pathway between Todd and the eighth hole. It was wearing a polo and khakis, which faded and became transparent above what probably would've been a pair of Sperrys. It had a dad-bod paunch, a pancake ass, and no head. Its clothes and skin were the dirty white of the moon in an old mirror.

"Jeez, gross," I said.

The cold clenched in my center, in my belly-brain, which Mr. Jamison from AP Bio calls the "enteric nervous system." It runs from the throat to the anus and has more neurons than the spine. It's what clenches when I cry, warms when I laugh, and turns to warm goo when I look into Todd's eyes in his basement. When I saw the ghost, frozen fingers slithered around it and caressed my xiphoid process into an icicle.

I shivered. "It's a lot spookier than I remembered."

Todd put his arm around me, which made me feel a little better.

The ghost slowly reached a diaphanous hand into its pocket and withdrew a phantom phone, which it held up in front of where its face would've been. Wind whistled over its open windpipe, low and hollow, like a freight train far away in the night.

"God damn," I said.

The ghost lowered the phone. The visible muscles in its neck stretched as it turned in our direction. It wheezed and produced a deep rumbling sound, the suppurating beginnings of what might have been a yell if its vocal cords had still been in place.

"Excuse me," said a sad dad behind us. "If you're not going to putt, can we play through?"

"There's a ghost," I said, and pointed at the ghost.

"Yeah, I know," he said. "Can we play through or what?"

I picked up my ball and stepped back. He and his kids bustled through, putted, and moved past the ghost to the eighth hole.

I held Todd close to me and we watched the ghost lift the phone once again and meander down the pathway. At one point it was looking at its phone, not paying attention, and its invisible feet caught on an uneven brick. It pitched forward, did a little two-step, caught itself, and kept shuffling. The icy fingers caressed my heart.

THE ROSE by Joshua Hebburn

October 28, 2019

Driving back after the funeral, he stopped at a Target to get Starbucks and take a piss. He'd stayed overnight at a motel, and he left the motel early in the morning to make it back east by driving all day.

Driving that morning he thought of the black and white picture of a Joshua tree in the room. It was the only thing not reusable in the motel; it was the sort of picture somebody would take in an intermediate photography class, not something tastelessly good the owners would get in a bulk purchase of decor.

There was something too amateur—too ambitious but clumsy—about the composition of this picture of a Joshua tree, and the overexposure of the image—and there was the starkness of that, it was the wrong tone for a motel. It made your eye stop, and in a motel you shouldn't seem to have had eyes.

He'd drove—drove not really seeing anything but the spiky black silhouette of that Joshua tree, and the grainy white of the blown-out desert behind it—and the gray of the highway, the tires below the bumpers, and the loss of time they represented.

The Target was empty this early in the morning. The aisles were pristine, walls of familiar merchandise waiting brightly in fluorescent light. The store seemed eager—except for a yawning cashier. It was stunning after the monotony of the drive and his thoughts.

When he went into the bathroom, a light on a motion sensor turned on. There was a pleasant artificial cherry smell. It was all gray slate, white porcelain, straight lines. It was easy.

He did what he came to do.

Going to wash his hands, and in the mirror he noticed the boots in the little stall. He'd assumed he had been alone pissing because of the motion sensing light—that was wrong.

The boots were cowboy boots. They had dark bluejeans tucked into them. The jeans were stiff tubes, almost hollow seeming. The man's legs must be thin.

The feet were planted far apart, as if the person in the stall were bracing for one to give the devil. But the jeans weren't down.

Embroidered on the side of the boot closest to him, which was almost under the gap of the little stall, was a rose.

It was the kind of rose you would imagine tattooed on the bicep or chest of a biker or sailor.

The bathroom was new, even the grout on the floor by the boot was clean and white. The boot with the rose also appeared to be new. The red threading of the rose shone like silk. The leather had not yet crinkled or cracked. The leather wasn’t dusty or soiled. The point of the boot was sharp.

The figure was still and quiet in the stall. The sound of the ventilation system filled the room.

He looked away from the stall, the boots, the mirror. He rinsed his hands in the automatic faucet and wiped them on his slacks. He pulled open the door and went out.

The episode of the man in the stall was one of the small strange occurrences that we overlook, and then forget, in the course of a life.

We have all had something like a man staring into the window of our house from the street in the middle of the night—something like being in the fog on a beach in the morning and coming upon a rotten seaweed-entangled heap that gives us a feeling—had something like a lost object turning up after a few days in a place we knew we didn't leave it.

He went and got a venti iced coffee. He added whole milk and three paper sachets of sugar. He was in for a very long drive.

He listened for bootsteps behind him as he made his way through the empty store to his car. He heard only ice shifting against plastic and ice.

Years later, looking through all the stuff he had to sort through a few weeks after the next funeral, he turned a page, and there were the boots. They were on his Dad. His Dad had an armful of Mom. They were by the bulk of a redwood. They were young.

He put the album down, he got into his car, he turned the key. He idled in the driveway. He noticed he was covered in a sweat gone cold.

I PROMISE I WON’T SCREAM by Jan Stinchcomb

October 28, 2019

They say you did it.

Please tell us how it went down, otherwise we will never be able to stop parking in front of your house on Hibiscus Way. The woman who lives there now glares at us from the driveway. She got the place for a good price because of what happened, but by then most of us were gone, sent away in our parents’ last attempt to save us from the bad scene.

We have returned, as all children do, because we have nowhere else to go.

The sunlight in our hometown knocks us out. It follows us everywhere, even in our dreams. We feel safest here, but only because we know the depth of our secrets. It’s like trusting our feet will touch the bottom of the pool at the rec center.

Once we park here, we can’t leave. Sometimes we tell stories of the blood you spilled, and sometimes we sit and wait in brittle silence. Sometimes you are good enough to appear.

Look––someone’s in the window! There she is! That’s her face!

Now we’re all screaming.

Even the woman in the driveway is whirling around, trying to see what we’re screaming about. Christine puts her foot on the pedal and we fly away. Before we get to the first stop sign, our screams have turned into wild laughter, scattered tears.

We should have stayed, I say in a voice so small no one hears me.

Later on, while I’m lying awake in bed, I can see your face floating above me until the sun rises. Your furious face. Your center part. Your brown hair is so long it hangs down and tickles the tip of my nose.

You haven’t changed a bit.

A hammer and a gun. Blood all over the master bedroom, the carpet saturated. You burned the bodies at China Camp. We go out there now to smoke a joint in that same spot where you thought fire could hide your crimes. You wanted a fairy tale, didn’t you, a world without parents? No more rules, no screaming fights, just their money and their house. We feel for you, especially when they blame you for your green eyes and witchy ways, or when they say you manipulated your boyfriend into committing murder. He’s stuck in prison, they tell us, but they forget you were only sixteen, an abused adoptee.

We remember you, the saddest girl in school. You made us feel like we had no problems. Pills. Shoplifting. Pregnancies. Hidden bruises. Dreams we were afraid to speak. None of that compares to your misfortune, your curse, a mother-daughter tale of fiery rage that devours itself.

I go to the cemetery by myself and sit in front of your parents’ grave. It is the anniversary of the murder and I am all alone.

My parents would be so angry if they knew where I was.

I see you coming from afar. You’re wearing the same blue jeans and peasant shirt you wore in high school. Platform shoes. You carry a suede fringe purse with a long shoulder strap. It is you. It must be you. It is as if no time has passed.

Now we can talk about everything. Finally. I have so many questions for you.

But I panic as you get closer and then I bolt. I run on trembling legs past the crypts of respectable families whose daughters don’t do drugs or fornicate with older men. At the cemetery gates I turn, gasping, to look back at you.

Nobody is there. Not a soul.

You lived the teenage fantasy: you killed your parents.

When you disappeared from school, we thought you’d run away with your boyfriend, and then someone said they saw you at the market.

The market! We were disappointed, honestly. It was so ordinary. Why in the world would you be at the market? We would have thought you’d turn the house into a sex palace and drift away on a cloud of pot smoke.

We had no way of knowing murderers get hungry.

This town loves the dirt. They say you got off easy and went on to a life of petty crime. You go by many aliases. You’re an addict. A whore. A man who never lived here published a book about the murders; an artist did your portrait in graphite and ink. Despite all these attempts to fix you in place, you have disappeared.

A new theory emerges. That hammer. Your mother. It couldn’t have been your boyfriend, they say, it had to be you. All you. It was too violent, too personal. Your mother’s blood on your white hands. We’re going to drive by your house once more. We want you to walk through time and open the front door. We really need you to come out and talk to us.

Please. I won’t run away this time. I promise I won’t scream.

THE BABY by Jamy Bond

October 28, 2019

One morning, she told me the story of how her friend’s baby died in a car accident.

“They were stopped at a red light. Someone came up from behind and slammed into them. My friend thought immediately of her baby in the back seat, but when she turned around to reach for it, she saw the baby’s head pop off, its arms and legs break, its chest cave in.”

All I could think about at school that day was the baby. Its head popping off. We were supposed to practice writing our letters, but every time I came to the lower case i—with its slender body and bubbly, round head—I thought of the baby, its head ripping away from its neck, flying up into the air. Did it hit the roof of the car, I wondered, or roll onto the floor? Did it cry?

“How was school?” she asked when I got home.

“I keep thinking about the baby.”

“My friend’s baby? Oh, what a tragedy. To think of a baby crushed to death! What an awful thing. Honey, let me sit down for a minute. Put your arms around me. That poor, poor baby.”

I dreamed about the baby. It wasn’t a baby in my dream, but a little girl like me, and I could see her from her mother’s perspective in the front seat: her eyes bugging out just as her head explodes. Blood spouting from her open neck, spraying the seats and windows in bright red.

The next day at school, I kept hearing a baby’s cry. I heard it in the clang of metal lockers, in the slam of heavy classroom doors, in the screams of children on the playground. While I stood at the craft table cutting Valentine hearts out of pink construction paper, my hands started to shake and I broke out in a sweat.

“What’s wrong, do you have a fever?” Ms. Albert said.

“No,” I told her. “I can’t stop thinking about the baby.”

“What baby?”

“The baby my mother told me about. The one in the car accident. The baby whose head popped off. The baby that was crushed to death.”

“Come here,” Ms. Albert said and led me down the hall to the nurse’s office.

I told the nurse about the baby, the dream, my shaking hands.

She called my mother.

I could hear the nurse’s voice go from puzzled to concerned to, finally, empathetic.

“Yes, they do tend to exaggerate. Even make stuff up.”

She hung up the phone.

“Time to return to class, my dear,” she said and pulled me down the hall.

Back in the classroom, it was story time. I lay down on a soft rug and listened to a story about cats.

“What’s wrong with you?” my mother said when I walked into the house. “I never said that.”

“What?”

“I told you her baby died in a car accident. I never said anything about its head popping off or its arms and legs. That’s ridiculous. How embarrassing! You have a very vivid imagination.”

She sent me to my room to wait for dinner, so I played with the Baby Alive doll I’d gotten for Christmas. There were batteries at the small of her back, beneath her pink, lacy onesie, that made her mouth open and close. She came with food and diapers. Her food was a packet of cherry powder that you mixed with water until it turned into goo. I loved feeding her that goo on a tiny pink spoon with a butterfly handle. Soon after she swallowed it, a creamy pink slime would appear in her diaper.

I had used all of the food and diapers on Christmas day, and my mother refused to buy more because it was messy. So for now, I just pretended to feed my baby, scooping air into her pulsing mouth with that tiny spoon.

“Eat up,” I said, “you must be hungry,” and I imagined her emaciated and starving, skin draping from her baby bones.

(IT’S NOT LIKE CLAIRE DIDN’T BRING IT ON HERSELF) by Jennifer Fliss

October 27, 2019

The indigo sky informed all of them that it would soon be time. That the children as clowns and superheroes and princesses would be stuffed full of Reese’s and candy corn and rolling in their little beds positively asphyxiated with the sugar. The teenagers were dressed in threadbare tie dye t-shirts, fringed leather vests. Claire wore bellbottoms and a crop top. She had been about to pull on a long-sleeved shirt. (Ben said don’t.)

Doris’s house was not what you’d expect. A rambler, off-white brick and something that was not brick but just as ugly. The numbers, 10220, hung off nails and threatened to drop and then who would find her then?

It had been raining all week. Moisture clung to the blades of grass and ghost-fingered branches clasped above their heads, as if in prayer. Here the leaves and the apples had fallen early.

Above them, hundreds of crows sang their murderous song. Two blocks away, Eve Lake. If it were summer they would hear the warble of frogs and have their skin lanced by mosquitoes. Late night picnickers would be enjoying the ever sun. Today they could feel the future phantom of winter. Claire chewed her lips and picked at her fingernails.

Doris lived with her grandson Jake. Jake flicked his retainer in and out on his tongue and wore a leather duster that he said had been his father’s. (His grandmother told him this lie because he wouldn’t wear a jacket otherwise.)

“I don’t know if I really want to do this,” Claire said.

The crows fell silent. Across from Doris’s house, an automated eight-foot witch cackled. Marcus started humming and Ben added a low growly beatbox. The trio had been stand outs in The One Notes, the school a capella group. Claire added a high note.

“Shut up,” Ben said.

Every year, a senior is selected as lead. (Everyone said Jake was coming out of his shell and weren’t they all so glad about that!?)

A gust of wind unfurled off the lake. A shrill bird.

“The fuck was that?” Ben said.

“An owl, what do you think?” Marcus said and slung the burlap bag over his shoulder. (It was not an owl.) The bag was already heavy. They shuffled along the driveway toward the house.

Shiny wrapped candy waited in a bowl under the stuttering porch light. A shower was running and there was singing. (Jake was an excellent singer, but most people didn’t know that.)

Ben’s father had started The One Notes thirty years earlier.

At the front door, Marcus reached for a candy bar but Ben slapped his arm back.

“Dude, they’re Hundred Grands. We hit the Halloween lottery,” Marcus said.

Claire wheezed and tried to control her breath, as if you could do such a thing, control the thing that keeps you alive. She thought about the kiss she and Ben shared earlier that day. Under the bleachers at lunch, stealing a smoke, like always. But when she said fuck, it’s cold, Ben leaned over, locked his lips on hers, and exhaled the nicotine directly into her throat. She sputtered and he put one hand up her shirt in an instant, the other still held onto his burning cigarette. When she finally got enough air to cough, he pushed her back. Slut. He laughed and Claire was unsure what had changed. The soft parts of her mouth still burned.

They had wandered back to the cafeteria and he said he was looking forward to the auditions for the lead that afternoon.

That evening, on the dark side of the sun on Halloween by a lake, the teenagers stood with a bulky burlap bag at their feet.

“Do it,” Ben said. Marcus rang the doorbell and they fled toward the lake.

No one came to the door. Claire was alone. She didn’t see where Ben and Marcus had gone but she had a straight view of Doris’s door. She thought she saw movement. Her breath grew tight. She heard the creak of the door.

It was Jake, hair wet, slicked back, towel at his waist. Bare chest like snow in the night. He looked up and down the street (don’t they always?) and only after a moment registered the bag. He nudged it.

Doris appeared over his shoulder. “What is it Jakey?”

“A bag.”

“Should we open it?” She didn’t make a move to do so. “Is this from one of your friends?” (No.)

“You should’ve told them to come in,” Doris said and went back into the house. She always wished Jake brought friends home. Jake stood for a long while. Remembering a time before all this. A time when he didn’t wear the not-previously-his father’s coat. (Yes, he knew.)

Jake undid the knot. Pulled at it to open the top. As he did, it frayed as if time moved forward. The bag released an over-ripe peach smell and he pulled back the edges to reveal a tangle of long damp hair.

It was Claire. Claire in a bag and her blond brown wet hair and a red candy bar wrapper in her grip. Her eyes were closed.

Claire was always so kind to him, saying bless you when he sneezed, smiling close-mouthed at him in the hall. Once she offered to get him a ditto from the teacher so he didn’t have to get up from his desk.

Was she breathing? He opened the bag, laying her legs and arms beside her body gently. Her limbs still pliant; no rigor mortis, at least. She was topless and he covered her breasts with the burlap.

Over the lake, the crows took off, hundreds of black smears in the sky. Two figures were running. Then the crows dove. Down, down, pulling at the hair of one figure, then the other, and then all Jake could see was one dark mass and he brought Claire inside.

The house was hot. His grandmother always had the heat on at 85, her collection of salt and pepper shakers covered on every surface. Stifling. He felt trapped, but wouldn’t ever leave.

Claire’s chest rose though her eyes remained closed.

We all are. (Trapped, that is.)

CATOPTROMANCY by A.V. Greene

October 27, 2019

In the instant before Molly turns the light back on, your friends all forget how deep puberty’s teeth have sunk.