Fiction

CHAMP by Anthony Sabourin

July 9, 2019

Most days I would sit in a big jacket in my stall in the dark of the parking garage and I would open the gate for people when they drove up in their cars. When they were gone and it was quiet again, my brain would be full of this image of a spaceship screaming towards Earth, burning up as it entered the atmosphere. I wanted to shed all of the pieces I no longer needed. To burn away until I was almost nothing. I don’t know, other times I’d just watch pornography but not jerk off. I appreciated everything. 

Today I sat in Greyhound bus in Ottawa; my big jacket with my cold face amongst the heaving bodies and stale air, and suddenly the bus moved and we were on our way to another place. It felt like I was in the middle of a period of great transformation. I had stolen five hundred dollars and two grams of hash from my roommate. I was going to Montreal. 

Outside of the terminal there was snow and cold, and the sidewalks were blue from rock salt. I breathed deeply and it felt sharp and good. I loved it. Matt was there to pick me up. He lived here now, and I had called him from the bus and sold him on old friendships and good times. We hugged and called each other shitheads and talked about how good it was to see each other and we didn’t acknowledge the distance between us. He looked clean shaven. 

I didn’t bring any luggage. I saw him notice this and begin to look worried so I gave him another great big hug before he could talk about it. He walked me through the crowd past buildings that were brown and jagged, avant-garde and ugly. That’s the art museum. This is the subway station. I didn’t trust it. The signs were in French. He handed me a weekend metro pass and we walked into one of the brown buildings and submerged. The whole ride, Matt was talking about his new city - he was effusive in his praise, using words like “history” and “culture” and “Leonard Cohen”. 

I remembered a night from when were in undergrad and the group of us took a bunch of mushrooms to watch the sunset from the Prince of Wales bridge. When the sun went down it looked like the sky above us was on fire. And we looked down and the water below us was on fire too. It felt like the end of days was coming, like this enormous hellfire was reaching out to embrace us and there was no escape. Matt looked at us and shouted out, “If we’re all gonna die then I want you to know that none of this has been worth it! None of it! You’re all pieces of shit!” 

He jumped into the water and he was fine. The sun that night continued to set and instead of armageddon it just got dark. It looked like he was doing well for himself now. 

He took me to his apartment and it was a long rectangle of open space and soft white light. There was an exposed brick wall and minimal furnishing. By the kitchen with the gas stove and the new fridge there were sliding glass doors that led to an outdoor seating area that was snowed in. Matt pointed out that in the upper left corner of the view you could see a small ‘+’ that was the cross on top of Mount Royal. The rest of it was blotted out by neighbouring apartments. He said that Montreal was the last affordable Great Canadian City and I said I had read that in a magazine, but I was lying. I was waiting to ask him about doing hot knives. There was a picture of him and his wife Lauren that was framed on the wall. It was from their wedding. They were holding each other happily and there were white flowers in the background. They had met in law school. She was hard-working and relentlessly cheerful in her disposition and so we hated each other. I asked Matt where she was and he told me she was working late. I asked Matt if he wanted to do hot knives. 

We had sunken into the couch with blank smiles on our faces and scorched knives in the sink when Matt remembered he made dinner reservations for us. We walked through the streets at night with faces red as our bloodshot eyes, in the kind of cold that makes everything crunch. The restaurant, when we got there, was burnished metal, big windows, and tasteful wooden accents, a chalkboard menu written in elegant cursive handwriting and no prices - it was unadorned by branding, which meant expensive. 

The people in the restaurant looked pleased and inert and they chortled away in their language. I didn’t know what anything was. Matt spoke casually to the waiter and a man came out from around the kitchen and made a show of presenting us with a bottle of red wine. He uncorked the wine and took Matt’s wine glass and poured a mouthful in and placed it in front of Matt. Matt picked up the glass by its stem and how he drank this wine was he swirled the glass around and brought it up to his nose and closed his eyes and inhaled through his nose. Then he opened his eyes and looked at the wine and brought it to his mouth and closed his eyes again and took a long slow sip. When he was done he nodded. 

Now this motherfucker came up to me with the wine and I was too high to be around all of these rich people. After he poured it I wondered if I could have the same experience as Matt, so I did what he did. I swirled it around and I brought it up to my nose and inhaled and then took a long slow slip. But to me it just smelled like wine and tasted like wine. I started to drink quickly.

When it was quiet again I asked Matt what I should order and he said poutine so that’s what I did. To be honest I wasn’t sure if I liked food anymore. I mostly ate breakfast wraps from the coffee place on the way to the parking garage, and if I got hungry again I would buy another coffee and if I was hungry again at home I would pick at the leftover shawarma platters my roommate would leave in the fridge. My mouth felt like it was always full of acid. My diet made getting high more efficient, and I was becoming gaunt but in a fashionable way. 

To say something, I told Matt that I was training for a marathon. I had been really into telling people that I was training for a marathon ever since I watched this video of a person in this spandex bodysuit undressing. It was this black room; all you could see was this person and their suit and it was like this tight blue androgynous cocoon. As the camera got closer you could see by their eyes that it was a woman. And then she started to unzip the suit and she took the head part of her suit off and this long blonde hair  flowed out of it. It made me think that we can all be anything we want. Two naked men walked into the frame of the video and then it was pornography. In the parking garage I thought that I would better myself by becoming a marathon runner, and I did research online and bought nike running shoes at full price and a grey sweatshirt that said “CHAMP” on it, with the quotation marks, in welcoming letters that arced like a rainbow across my chest. I told my roommate and my dad and my manager at the parking garage that I was training for a marathon. Everyone is so happy when you tell them you are running a marathon. Or not happy, but they act like they are impressed with you, and it’s nice. My stuff came in the mail and I tried to run once but it was stupid. There was nowhere to go.  Still, I started to wear the sweatshirt around to show that I was serious, and it became something to talk about with people. “It’s harder to train in the winter,” I said now, “but the key is to invest in good crampons.” I nodded to emphasize the importance of crampons. 

Matt told me it was inspiring that I was training for a marathon. 

We got lost in old memories. We talked about the time we did thanksgiving for our other roommates but we got too day drunk and fell asleep and almost burnt the apartment building down. It would have burned fast too - that apartment was littered with balled up Subway wrappers like so much kindling. Matt’s dad died when he was a kid and his mom never had much money so he worked at Subway for all of undergrad, and the smell became a part of him, it lingered on him like he was haunted. I remember I’d go to his Subway when it was quiet and I’d make logic puzzles out of convoluted sandwich orders to help him with his LSAT. He didn’t need the help anymore though - the waiter was coming with our food. 

I looked at my poutine and there was this strange grey meat on it. I asked what it was and Matt told me “Foie gras.” They make foie gras by sticking a feeding tube into a duck, and force feeding it until its liver is big and fatty. They do this for a hundred days, sticking the feeding tube into the duck and feeding it against its will, and then they kill it and take out its liver. I knew this because when I felt bad about watching too much pornography I would watch a video about factory farming. I was curious about the foie gras though. Maybe it was worth it. 

I took a bite and it made me sad. It was this smooth rich blankness, but it was just a texture. I wanted to eat a breakfast wrap. I sat picking fries and watching my food congeal into this brown-grey sludge. I looked at it and thought of soft splayed legs and sexual pumping and food tubes shoved into baby animals and rows of ducks in tiny cages. 

Matt, overtaken by hunger from the hash, was drinking wine and eating lobster pasta with an intense focus. After a long pause, Matt looked at me like he had something important to say, some big epiphany that he wanted to share with me. He told me there was something that had been on his mind a lot lately, and so he told me a story and it went like this:

THE BLUE SHIT STORY

Lauren’s law firm has this famous bake sale. It was this big charity thing to raise money for cystic fibrosis or diabetes, he couldn’t remember. The partners at the firm took it very seriously though, it raised a lot of money and made them all look like pillars of the community. Lauren was an excellent baker, and she wanted to impress the partners at the firm. She wanted to make something that was decadent, artful, and difficult to bake, so she made macaroons. They were perfect blue clouds that tasted of chocolate and raspberries. People at the bake sale loved the macaroons. They sold out, and therefore they were making a difference for the people with the cystic fibrosis or the diabetes. 

It took Lauren a day to realize what she had done. She used a lot of blue food colouring to make the macaroons the right colour, and now Lauren was in the bathroom, and she had just taken a shit, and it was blue. Matt ate some of the macaroons and his shit was blue too. All of these lawyers who had loved the macaroons were going to the bathroom and looking at their blue shit and they all knew why their shit was blue. All of these people who were supporting the people who had the cystic fibrosis or the diabetes were dropping these big blue hosses. Lauren was embarrassed. She wondered how she could go to work and practice law and also be the person that made everyone in the office shit blue. She was worried about getting a nickname like Blue Shit Lauren. Like she would be in courtroom and the judge would call up Blue Shit Lauren to present her closing arguments. But she went to work the next day and nobody ever talked about it. 

Matt said he thought life was like that blue shit. He said life was this strange and wonderful collective experience that nobody was talking about. 

He spun a tumorous mass of spaghetti around the tines of his fork, and shoveled it into a wide open mouth. I thought it was a terrible fucking story, like of course Laura would make macaroons, and who even cared what happened to a bunch of lawyers, and now all I could feel was foie gras lingering in my mouth and maybe it was the wine or the hash or I don’t know, but I felt the saliva pooling and I looked at the floor and one moment it was fine and the next it was covered with so many chunks of grey mush, so much reddish bile, and I felt like I would never stop heaving. 

Outside of the restaurant, I was breathing out puffs of air while snow fell around me in fat flakes. Matt was still inside, smoothing things over and apologizing. 

There was a concert we went to in our final year of law school. It was a reunion show in a small club, some punk band Matt was into. When the lead singer came out he had this substitute teachers head attached to a substitute teacher’s body - kind of frumpy and washed out. It was shit - the band was too drunk to do anything, and after four songs the substitute teacher just set his guitar up by the amp to generate a wall of feedback, and he walked off the stage to leer at the young girls who were waiting by the bar. After the show Matt kept apologizing to us. I really enjoyed it though. I think it was the first time I understood getting old. 

Matt came outside and he looked at me, only now where before his face was flushed and happy, he just looked sad. He asked me if I needed help. 

I told him I did. I told him I needed the kind of help I used to give at Subway. I needed help to go to shitty rich restaurants to feast on suffering, and that I needed so much of his help to be so pretentious and empty.

And still he did not jettison and burn off and fly away. He told me that he was worried about me - that I looked sick, and that he was scared for me, and that he wanted to get me help if I needed it. He told me that he worked hard to get the life he had, and that it made him happy. 

I didn’t talk for a long time, but when I did I asked Matt if he thought that the average person could step into his life and do a better job with it. He asked what I was talking about. I took the five hundred dollars from my pocket and told him that it was my fee, and that I could free him. He looked at me one last time and left. 

I was relieved. My throat was burning from the vomit and there was so much more that I could be doing. I had always felt like a patient zero in search of a disease.  

*

Sometimes when I pictured the future, I saw myself as the King of this Great Pile of Garbage. I was seated on a mound of garbage bags, and it was so comfortable. People would come to me and seek my advice, and I would tell them to throw it all out. My garbage empire would grow and grow. Other times I could only picture blackened wood, embers fading into smoke. I was okay with that too. As for Montreal, it was alright. I walked by a costume store that was selling masks of babies and horses and dogs, and in the display window they were all perched on mannequins of male models. I walked by bars and saw young people who moved around as lithe and panicked as gazelles.

I had been drinking and was now great friends with these two punks. They both had shaved heads and leathery skin. They were older but spoke English. One of them had a head that was dented like a soup can. And the other one had a growth on the right side of his forehead, and that was how I could tell them apart. Otherwise it was a mess of patchwork denim and bad tattoos. I was buying us quarts of Fifty because I was rich. Quarts of Fifty were great because they came in these big bottles and were served with a tiny glass on the side, and you could poor from the big bottle into the tiny glass and feel like some kind of foreign dignitary. The guy with the dented head was telling us about how he got all of these dents. 

HOW I GOT ALL OF THESE DENTS

“So I’m waiting at the Bonaventure Metro, right?” he says. “And, wait, shit, you don’t know. The Bonaventure Metro is brick everything. Even the benches. With the heat from the trains it feels like you are trapped in this great furnace.” I nodded. “So I was there waiting for my train and I look across the tracks and I see this deer. It’s just standing there on the tracks opposite from me, and I look at the deer and the deer looks at me and then it goes back to grazing. And I look around me because there’s a fucking deer on the metro, and I am telling people, regardez, c’est un fucking deer but nobody is doing anything. Actually, they are looking at me like I’m the crazy one but I know what I see. And then I hear the rumble of the train coming, and I get really nervous because the deer is right there, yes? It’s still on the tracks and it’s not moving. It just looks up again and stares right at me, and now I can see the light from the train, and there is more noise and you can feel the rush of air, and I just walked right onto the tracks.”

“Bullshit you walked right onto the tracks,” I said.

“It’s what I did!” he said. “I walked onto the tracks and I reach out for the deer only it’s gone, it was like it had never been there at all, and now the only sound in my head is the sound of the train, and I look and the train hits me smack, right here!” - he smacks the middle of his forehead with his palm - “and that was it, that was all I could remember. I woke up later in a hospital, and my head was covered in bandages. I became very famous in Montreal for a time as the man who survived getting struck by a train. They let me shake Jean Béliveau’s hand.”

His friend, the other punk, laughed and said “You got those dents in a bar fight don’t be an idiot.” Then they were both laughing and I was laughing too. I felt comfortable with these old punks. 

I told them about how I had lost my job at the parking garage because one day I just left the gate open and went home because it didn’t matter. I talked about my roommate and how I was always stealing his food and how I owed him two months rent and had stolen all of his hash and money to come here, but that I’d left the rest of my hash at my friend’s apartment. I asked them where they bought drugs because it looked like they knew where to buy good drugs. They asked what I was into and I said that I pictured my body as this purification plant. I wanted to take in the world’s poison and process the chemicals and feel good or bad or powerful or ecstatic or tired or sick and leave only piss and shit smoke behind. 

The guy with the growth on his head never told us about why he had the growth on his head but we all agreed about the drugs, and so we left the bar together to go and buy them. 

We walked past portuguese chicken places and butcher shops  and rows of houses with walk up stairs. It was late and people were leaving bars and clubs, pushing past us in the streets with their jackets full of the feathers of dead baby geese. The punks talked about hockey riots and jaywalking tickets and how Montreal was a city built on old garbage dumps, nobody knew how many, they just paved over them and built schools and parks and houses. We walked down sidewalks narrowed like clogged arteries from snow. I was impressed by the state of disrepair I encountered. There was exposed piping and holes in the street. I wondered if my friends the old punks were going to kick the shit out of me and steal my money but I didn’t care. We walked for so long that all feeling left my body.

We stopped in front of a house. It had white siding that was yellowing at its edges and windows that were covered in garbage bags and tape. This was the place. They walked up to the door and knocked on it and it opened. I couldn’t see past them into the house. They held open the door and I walked towards them. I could only make out curdled wallpaper and a soft blue light inside of the house. I walked inside. It felt like a church to me.

*

I smoked something crystalline out of a foil packet and I didn’t feel like I was drowning in the undertow of euphoria, I didn’t get to watch my spirit hover over the Lachine canal while my body stumbled alongside watching, and I didn’t get to meet the lizard king of my third eye. I smoked it all up and sat there with my head of asbestos, and my ashed cigarette body, but this was normal. 

I looked over at the punks, who were passed out inside of their own heads like monks at peace with the world and I rifled through their pockets but found nothing except receipts and lint. I walked around the room kicking things over, knocking down lamps and picture frames and breaking glass. I punched at a wall but it didn’t make a hole like I wanted, it just really hurt my hand. I was bored of everything. 

I left the house and stepped into the midnight blue of the sky and the yellow of street lights. The quiet of the street was interrupted by the crack of a drum and the sound of trumpets, and I watched as a procession of revellers marching in a dance down the street, in the middle of the road. They were wearing strange masks and thrift store clothing - tattered plaid jackets or dirty leather; nobody was dressed alike but it still looked like they were in uniform. Their leader  was wearing a rubber face with cut-out eyes and I couldn’t place who it was supposed to be. He had a snare drum, and behind him there were women in animal masks with cut out mouths swaying and making cheerful noises with their trumpets. Behind them was a crowd of people - thirty or so men and women, all dancing behind them, shooting confetti into the sky. It was a cacophony of noise and jubilation. I watched as they came down the road, but when they got to where I was standing in front of the house everything stopped. There was no more marching or drums or sound, just confetti slowly tracing seesaw patterns in the air as it drifted down onto the street and a bunch of masks looking at me.

I said “English?” out loud and there was no answer. 

I said ““If we’re all gonna die then I want you to know that none of this has been worth it! None of it! You’re all pieces of shit!” and I dove into the snow on the sidewalk and writhed around in it and got snow down my neck and back but it was still quiet on the street. 

I got back up and looked at them and the grotesque shadows cast by their masks in the light of the street, and said “I don’t know what you want.” 

A child in a jester’s costume broke through the crowd and grabbed my hand and pulled me in. The people in their masks patted me on the back and shook my hand and wordlessly welcomed me into their ranks. Everything smelled like tobacco, but there was something sharp behind it, like vinegar. The drumming started again, the quick rat-tat-tat of the snare, and we were dancing through the streets again. 

We moved through the city past the fluorescent lights of Jean Coutu pharmacies and parks with trees that were collapsing under the snow. We passed under bridges and through neighbourhoods where houses were being demolished to make way for unfinished condos. When we passed people on the street they cheered us on. I thought of the mother I saw the day I left the gate up at my parking garage job, of her rusted green Corolla and car full of plastic bags and children pulling at her from the back seat and how it felt to leave the gate up. Of how it felt to see the spandex suit unzip in that movie, that moment of shedding your skin, and how I could never find it again afterwards; how some days I thought that I’d just dreamed it, but when I pictured it in my head it was so real. And we danced through the streets in the dark, and I felt a sense of belonging. More and more, people in the street applauded our marching. 

As I scanned the faces in the crowd, I saw one that I recognized as my own. The face was my own dumb face, but it the cheeks were fuller, the eyes a bit brighter. The man looked like me but different - he was put together, a nice peacoat and an expensive haircut, but he was less interesting somehow. I broke off from the people in their masks and I approached this man and he said “Avez-vous besoin d'aide?” and I took whatever money was left in my pockets and thrust it into his hands and hurried back to the revellers, who again clapped their arms around my back and welcomed me with open arms as we moved down Rue de la montage past rows of old houses and construction sites and garages, galleries and glass buildings reflecting nothing but the cold.  We continued to march until we approached the mouth of a tunnel. The man with the drum walked up to each of us and shook our hands and when he got to me he took of his mask and I understood. And he went back to the mouth of the tunnel and started drumming again and he led us inside, and soon there was only a perfect darkness. I reached out with my hand and felt for the person in front of me, and I found them and we walked together, and another hand reached for my back and we all walked like that in the dark, linked to each other. We followed the echoing sounds of the drums, and the story of the tunnel was this: as I kept on walking through the fertile, fetid darkness, I told myself I didn’t feel any different, but I didn’t know anymore if this was true. 

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SEVEN DROPS OF SALT WATER by Ariel Kusby

July 8, 2019

First, she thought he was a man. Then, she thought he was a seal. But if you’ve ever seen the way a sea mammal disappears, becomes dark water, you’ll understand why she never thought he was a warm body but a bit of ocean contained for a while. When a slick being emerges fully formed from a void you want to grab hold of it. You want to ask it what it’s seen. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re any different, that the deep is darker than your own blood. The body is full of stories. Your blood will always let them in.

Her story begins with rough water. A year of sleeper waves that claimed beachcombers, obscured by pulses of marine layer. They say she was born on a night like this. That she rushed out of her mother’s body in a giant wave and after that, they couldn’t keep her away from water. She learned to swim before she could walk, and before she could swim, her father took her into the swells in a plastic pink floatie, far beyond the break.

By the time she was twenty, no one could navigate a red-flag day like she could. They say she would have made a great lifeguard, better than the stoner boys who patrolled the beaches for extra cash, but there was something about her that was too odd. She rarely made eye contact. She walked the beach by herself and swam at night. The neighbors judged her father for letting her go alone but he believed he had taught her well. 

Imagine her: lonely, filled with adrenaline, ecstatic in her held breath as her body curved below fifteen-foot swells. Silver turbulence, sea spirits rising up from the drop-off. How deep could her legs have propelled her? How powerful can a body ever be? 

Mornings she’d work for her father, a fisherman. She’d slice each catch and gut it, smearing blood along her arms no matter how careful she was, then wash it off before school, where she studied folklore.

Do you think she did it intentionally? During all of her sea-walks and secret sadness wrapped up inside her like invasive kelp, did she cry seven tears to tempt fate? Or did they just come, unaware of what they would bring?

Before this, she’d dated a few young men she’d met in class. They couldn’t swim, were afraid of water, but inevitably she’d end up in the shallows with them, holding their bodies like a reluctant mother, telling them to kick, to breathe, to cup their hands and move. 

Then, one day he appeared like a washed-up flower from a funeral boat. Dark and surprising. Swimming in the shallows where moments before, there had been no movement. 

The first thing she loved was the way his body moved. With soft intention, a moonpull. Then, his voice, friendly like he already knew her. Like a shell knows how to whisper intimately into an eardrum. 

She had never seen him before. He greeted her, walking up the shore to his belongings. A black canvas bag she hadn’t noticed. He was new in town and wanted her to show him around.

Picture her walking with him, amazed that she could talk with him more easily than with anyone she’d ever met before. He seemed lonely too, hungry to talk about books and folklore with someone who shared the same esoteric interests. 

Some say they saw the two eating together, and then they left town and walked back to the beach, where they disappeared beneath a pier. They lingered there for hours between the barnacle-crusted pilings. Imagine his silken hands on hers, his lips tracing her collarbone. Imagine her suddenly wet on top of the sand, wet like a wave spilling over him. Salt concentrated in their mouths, surprising heat overriding the damp cold. His energy like a wave sloshing into a coastal cave, rippling all the way into its back corners. A phosphorescent red tide of wild hormones and tenderness and the idea that they’d finally found something really good. Imagine him cumming on her belly, semen shimming in the moonlight like a silver snake. 

After that they were never seen apart, swam together everyday. He kept up with her even when the swells grew into monsters with enough power to kill. He taught her a trick for holding her breath.

Some say what eventually happened between them was the result of great passion. Or of getting what she asked for. When a human and a sea creature love each other too much, it will always lead to destruction. Some say it was her cruel heart, a sealhunter. Others believe he transformed in more ways than one. He was many seals and many men, and mapped the bodies of young women to find deep spaces he could glide into and haunt.

She found it in the black bag in his closet, where she was looking for a lost pair of underwear. It’s glint from the overhead light caught her eye, and she pulled it out, repulsed and terrified. It was a sealskin with the cleanest slits, like a wetsuit, ready to be stepped into and zipped up. Was it fresh? Why did it look so immaculate, almost freshly laundered? She didn’t know what to think, but she knew he had a secret. 

And then she remembered the passage from her book about sea legends: “Selkies, or seal people are shapeshifters. They can be summoned by seven tears shed into the sea. Selkies often seduce humans on land, only to quickly leave them again for the ocean. The only way they will stay on land is if their lover hides their seal coat. Then, they will be locked in human form.” 

She couldn’t leave it but she couldn’t hide it, so she did hide it because being alone felt unbearable. She buried it in the dirt in a public park far away from the water.

She considered confronting him, but was it worth it? She was finally happy for the first time in her life. So, he had a secret. She spent her days cutting the hearts out of fish. Who was she to make assumptions? 

She hid her knowledge like an anemone bloated with water, sucked up inside of herself. Truth is, she was never good at hiding anything. A toxic feeling congealed. In her body, muck built up. 

He became moody and withdrawn. When he came over to her house, he touched her with rough hands and foggy eyes. She asked him what was wrong. What did he need from her? He threw a plate against the wall behind her head. Nothing. She ran out of the house all the way to the water and dove in, dropping tear after tear into each indifferent surge. He ran after her, crying too. I’m sorry, he said. How can you ever forgive me. I would never hurt you. And then he held her, warmer and softer than the water did. 

So they stayed together. And every week this pattern repeated. Often they would be body-surfing, tethered by their intensity, and then: a comment he didn’t like. A wrong question. And they were like two sharks turned against each other. 

Below the surface, who could know what ultimately happened between them? Some say he would take her underwater and breathe into her mouth and it was a sort of high for her, breathing half-air, her blood a roiling boil molten in cold water. 

How could she have known he’d find it? That he’d end up in that park with another woman he’d secretly been seeing the whole time? The myths never mentioned that a selkie would be able to smell their own skin and step back into it. 

Like that, he dissolved. They say she went to the ocean every day, and that eventually he did approach her, transformed again from a fish to a man. She asked what it was like down there. Surprisingly warm, sublimely bright, he said. If you want to come with me, I’ll take you. Then they’d fuck in the water, so desperate for it that the awkwardness didn’t matter. Salt water inside her, semen dispersing like pale squid ink. Then he’d melt back down into the darkness, and all night she’d ruminate about joining him.

They say there were months more of late-night conversations, of wet trysts that ended in fighting, and then an evening when he grabbed her and pulled her underwater against her will. Fading light, tightening muscles. Love sucked up by the instinct for air. Or perhaps not love, but something else. She fought her way back to the surface and knew. She liked it better up there, away from him. Even if that meant facing a different type of void.

Not long after this, she moved away from town. Some say to the mountains, where she lives beside a river, and has never come back to the ocean again. They still love to talk about it. They call her the sea spinster, or the water witch. No man would want her now, the women say. She was soiled by a figment of the imagination, a dark archetype. 

Imagine her now living amongst the trees, bathing in the river filled with pinkly glittering trout. The deep feeling of the body: something dark swimming, rising up and holding her. Perhaps it breaches and disappears, only to breach again, different every time. 

Truth is, she isn’t close to water. She knows what it must have felt like for our ancestors when they crawled out of the ocean, fins flailing in the dirt for a chance at something better. Was it for a good reason? If you’ve never known anything but slipperiness, you want something to hold onto. Imagine her now, having made it for herself. Imagine her warm and dry.

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PHARM BOY by Chris Milam

June 30, 2019

At the grocery, I was debating which would pair better with a chicken sandwich when I saw a ponytailed head wedged inside the refrigerated glass doors inspecting a carton of eggs.

“Hello there, do you have a preference in pickles?”

“Excuse me?”

“Pickles.” I held both jars in front of me. “Bread and butter or dill?”

“I don’t eat them. Sorry.” The smack of flip flips on linoleum trailed her into the next aisle.

I accidentally bumped into her again minutes later. I didn't need her to be anyone specific, not Rachel, not my mother, or the bored college girl who worked at the gas station I went to every night for energy drinks. She didn't have to inhabit their skin, take on their personality, mimic their cadence. I only wanted her to help me make a proper decision. Just play along. Fill a hole. “Should I go with rye or whole wheat?”

“What is wrong with you? I don’t give a fuck what you eat. Leave me alone.” Smack, smack, smack around the corner. In her basket was a loaf of pumpernickel. Was hoping she would’ve steered me in that exotic direction.

Bent and back home, Rachel clung to air and fabric. The apartment, post-evacuation, was nothing more than a gigantic Rachel fingerprint. I had met her at an NA meeting. She was on step 12; I was on step burned all bridges. Connection erupted seamlessly after that; delirium jabbed us both in the addicted heart. We found a quaint loft, painted the walls champagne, rented a leather couch, did some volunteer work. Went to church. We were all about spackling cracks.

When I relapsed, when my whole existence was lapsed, our love bottomed out. I pawned her jewelry, mocked her metamorphosis, and prowled the streets. The last thing she said to me: “Do you want to stay high and live low or stay with me and live with hope?” She bolted instead, I stayed and free-fell, landing in the arms of shadow. If not for a mother’s unconditional enabling and charitable pocketbook, I’d probably be living in the woods behind the supermarket.

A week later and I’m stuck again. "Horseradish sauce or mayonnaise, which one do you like?"

Her blonde friend in dark denim eyeballed me for a tick. “I’d need some burn, go with the horseradish.” She peeked at my cart. “And you can't go wrong with dill chips, so crunchy and sour."

We headed to the parking lot, sat in my car. “You wanna listen to rock, alternative, or hip hop?”

Lily flicked a veiny hand. “Let’s skip the nonsense. She had me text you for a reason. How many you got?”

“Hold on. Tell me something, a morsel of information. Is she still dating her sponsor? Is she happy?”

“Yes and maybe. But she’s falling, said you had the remedy.”

“She has my number, could've just called me.” I handed her six pills. “Tell her no charge. And ask her if I should move on or not. Will you do that for me?”

“You know what happened the last time you had her number. Your phone voice is a bit emotional. And yes, I’ll ask her. Gotta roll, take care.”

“Wait, does she still cut her sandwiches in half, diagonally?”

“I don’t know. I’ll find out when I drop these off.”

“Thanks.” And with that she jogged to her Mazda and blasted away from the storm surge.

Later, at a meeting, I spotted her boyfriend. Lewis was slurping coffee from a styrofoam cup. Black v-neck, grey slacks, dollar store tortoiseshell readers, silver rope bracelet, same chameleon smile; repulsive to me, an aphrodisiac to recovering, vulnerable women.

I assaulted his personal space, jaw to jaw. His coconut shampoo was intoxicating. “Do you love her or are you just using her? And a little bird told me that Rachel is popping again. Nice work, being her sponsor and all.”

“I’m not doing this tonight. You should just focus on step one and let me worry about her. Okay, Jason?”

He looked at me the way a father might when his golden boy wets the bed: a slurry of indignation, detachment, and empathy. “Yeah, better watch her close, friend. She knows I’m around.”

We admitted we were powerless…

Eat some cotton, man, climb that stairway and find enlightenment. Step 13? Walk away, sprawl on the couch, and kiss God flush on the mouth.

She’ll come back to me. Opiate love is true and eternal.

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RAW MEAT by Jo Varnish

June 27, 2019

She was eighty when being eighty meant being eighty. It meant grey hair and dark colored calf length skirts, tights and rounded toed court shoes. It meant a green felted coat and patent leather black purse shaped like the queen’s, with a shiny silver clasp that snapped shut. It meant that purse held, at a minimum: a checkbook, a hairbrush, rouge, a lipstick, tissues (a pack, unused, and at least one folded, used), a pair of spectacles and a variety of pens.  It meant she walked slowly, tutted at ill mannered children and grew African violets in mismatched pots along her living room window ledge. It meant furniture and decor as old as she was, and a dark, cold house with wallpaper and parquet wooden floors and no central heating.  

She looked after a little girl before school for extra money. She'd seen a note towards the end of the summer asking for help, written neatly on an index card and tacked up on a noticeboard in the post office. The little girl, six years old, would be dropped off by her mother (who then went to her job of all things, as if her job weren’t to look after the child!) and the old lady would watch her for half an hour and then walk her to the school, which was just a few minutes away, even at the old lady’s slow pace.

Watching her for half an hour sounded easy enough.  But this was not a child who was content to sit and listen to the radio or read her book.  While she certainly always had at least one book in her school bag (they weren’t the classics they should have been, but what could one expect from these modern schools?), when the old lady would suggest she take one out and read during their time together, the little girl was direct in her response: “I don’t want to read, I want to talk to you.”

The autumn sun faded to the gloom of winter, and still the little girl wanted to talk.  The old lady had exhausted her knowledge of cats and flowers and and castles and insects, and exhausted herself by having to endure the same conversations over and over (honestly, were all little children so tiresome?) and thus she was relieved when the little girl rolled up her sleeve and pointed to her wrist.  

“Look, I’ve got a mole, like a big freckle.”

The old lady knew what to do about that. She opened her fridge and took out a tray of sirloin steak, an indulgence despite its sale price.  It was for her supper of beef and vegetable stew, for this was when being eighty meant cooking a sensible meal every single evening, even if widowed, as she was.  She cut a chunk from the middle of the steak, avoiding the marbled fat as much as possible.

“Hold out your hand and I’ll get rid of that nasty mole for you.”

The little girl looked unsure.  She squeezed her eyes shut and offered her hand out towards the old lady, who turned it, exposing the offending mole. She gripped the chunk of bovine muscle and rubbed it over the mole, rubbed and rubbed and rubbed. The little girl said it felt sore and she squealed when the old lady didn’t stop.  She rubbed it until the fibers of the steak were stretched and split by the dry friction, until the skin was red and blotched and coated in a fine film, dappled with tiny grains of raw meat.  

The little girl frowned and pushed her tongue in the side of her cheek, her eyes threatening tears.  The old lady pulled her across the kitchen and rinsed her wrist over the teacup and saucer in the sink, oily, beefy water swirling in the cup.  She patted the little girl’s wrist and hand dry with a stiff white tea towel, and they both peered at where the mole had been.  And where the mole still was, surrounded by dark pink mottled skin.

It’s possible that being eighty meant she’d mixed up her remedies, as the little girl began to sway and as she swayed, she started to fade until she had completely disappeared, mole and all.  

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PIERCED by Charles Duffie

June 26, 2019

Each evening, I remove the band-aid, pinch the tweezers’ silver teeth, and draw the splinter from my thumb. I faithfully clean the small wound. By morning my private stigmata will be partially healed. The body is a determined machine.

The sliver of pine is only half an inch long and thin as a needle, but against my brown palm it glows like a cosmic shard. I dip a cotton ball in peroxide, touch the splinter, disinfectant cold as river water, then place the baptized thorn in the hollow of a contact lens case and click the lid. The click always makes me flinch.

I was walking to the bus for more firewood. Maybe half mile down the trail.

That’s when you first heard the shots?

Can you turn off the lights?

What?

The cruiser lights. The flashing, it’s… I think I’m going to be sick again.

Of course. Sorry. Hold on.

Father God…

So you were half a mile away when you heard the shots?

I didn’t know what it was. It didn’t sound like gunfire.

A lot of people say that. A lot of people say it sounds like—

Shake my head, one quick jerk to return from the synaptic detour of memory.

Light an incense cone so my hotel room will smell like the forest. Fill the diffuser so the air will feel damp as that night two months ago. Turn on the sound machine so crickets and frogs will surround me again. Tap the desktop planetarium projector so the ceiling over my bed fills with stars. Then I kneel on a carpet countless feet have flattened into soft concrete and I pray.

“Father God. Set me free. See how I resurrect my pain. See how I fuel my dreams. I can’t let go. Forgive me for surviving. I hate myself for still being alive.”

When the words taste like salt, I sputter “Amen” and squeeze into bed.

Michael, would you say a few words?

Thank you, pastor. I don’t know how to do this. I wish I had died that night. That must offend you. But it’s how I feel. I wish my spirit was looking down with Nala and your sons and daughters. All of us together. Looking down on someone else standing here, someone with better words. I was going to ask Nala to marry me. I was going to attend nine high school graduations. Now I walk around with this hole in my chest, this this this hatred so constant I wear it like my own skin—

Shake my head to collapse the memory bridges. Lying on my back, tucked hotel sheets holding me down, I listen to the crickets and frogs, watch the stars, breathe the damp air, summon the dream, repeating “forest” over and over, clucking my tongue like wet gunshots. Eyes stutter. There’s the glow. I hear the voices. The trees part like curtains…

NINE HIGH SCHOOL KIDS CROUCH AROUND THE CAMPFIRE STACKING S’MORES OUT OF BROKEN GRAHAM CRACKERS CHOCOLATE CHUNKS BLACKENED MARSHMALLOWS / NALA LEADS THEM IN SONG STRUMMING “WE ARE ONE IN THE SPIRIT WE ARE ONE IN THE LORD” THE SAFEST PLACE IN THE WORLD GOD’S OWN CATHEDRAL / TWO MEN DRIFT OUT OF THE DARK LIKE FOG DRESSED IN WHITE CAMO PANTS JACKETS HOODS / THE SHOTS SOUND LIKE HANDS CLAPPING LIKE PLATES HITTING A TILE FLOOR LIKE HOLES PUNCHED THROUGH A GUITAR’S BUZZING CHEST / I CRAWL BETWEEN FACES NIGHT SHRILL FROGS CHANTING INSECTS CRYING BILE IN MY THROAT BRAIN FERAL HEART COLLAPSED LIKE A BLACK HOLE LEAVING NOTHING NOTHING BUT THE SOFT MARBLE OF THEIR WRISTS / I SEE NALA’S BODY SINKING INTO PINE NEEDLES THE DECADES OF SENSATIONS SHE WILL NEVER HAVE CONCENTRATING NOW IN THESE LAST MOMENTS / SHE FEELS ANIMALS BREATHING IN THE SHADOWS AND SEES THE SOULS OF LOVED ONES LONG PASSED TEARS PULSE OUT OF HER EYES AND STEAM IN THE COLD AIR / THE STARS DESCEND BEYOND THE NIGHT-BIRDS AND CRICKETS AND FROGS SHE DETECTS THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES BUT DOESN’T WANT TO LEAVE THIS IS HOME THIS HUMAN PLACE PLEASE SHE SAYS / I HEAR RUNNING AND TURN TO SEE MYSELF STUMBLE INTO THE CLEARING—

I wake, as I do every night, like someone brought back from drowning. The dream is so physical. It’s still shouting through me like a freight train rushing past an open window. I chew three orange Motrin tablets and lean against the wallpaper.  

You plan to do this full time?

I’ve taken a sabbatical from the university.

And what do you hope to accomplish?

I’m joining families from Columbine and Las Vegas, Sandy Hook and Orlando, Virginia Tech and Aurora and Parkland. There’s hundreds of us now. We’ll march on foot from California to D.C., adding marchers and gaining support as we go. We’re spending every cent we have to feed and house the caravan. We hope to inspire pilgrimages from all directions. We want to be five million strong by the time we hit Washington. But we won’t pray with politicians. We won’t debate NRA spokesmodels. We’re going to make demands. Because we deny the American alchemy that transforms victims into accomplices. We reject the lie that the only way to stop mass shootings is to amass more weapons. We claim the right of—

Shake my head. Stare into the flat dark until dawn separates the curtain from the wall.

I scrape a match, hold a needle to the flame, reopen the wound in my thumb. The pain is quick, sharp, like an animal biting my flesh from the inside.

We’re in New Mexico this morning. Speaking at two colleges, gathering signatures for an amendment to ban assault weapons on a county-by-county basis, hoping to grow like grass under the feet of Washington’s lobbyists. This is my public penance. No one notices the band-aid on my thumb.

I was too late that night. By the time I got back to the campfire, everyone was gone. But it’s not too late to stop the next tragedy. That’s why we’re here today. Because the Pine Mountain shooters were two 15-year-old boys who attended the same high school as their victims. Because other shooters are arming themselves right now. Because a mass shooting is defined as four or more dead or wounded and by that definition Pine Mountain was number 71. Because in the two months since, there have been 42 more mass shootings in America. Because last year there were over 300 and because there were over 300 the year before that and because—

Another shake of the head.

Pop open the contact lens case. Steadying the tweezers, I push the splinter back into my thumb. In that snap of pain, I see what only I saw, what only I know. I wasn’t walking back to the bus. I was sitting on the opposite edge of the campfire. I see the two men in white, the black Xs of rifle straps over their chests like their hearts have been crossed out. I see Nala lunge to pull a high school girl down. I see my own view turn and run, ducking low, fingers scrambling in the dirt, stumbling down the narrow path, down into the huge night as hands clap and plates shatter and holes punch, my vision flashing like strobe lights, choke of blood in the back of my throat, running faster, wilder, until my right hand, as if the better part of me, slams against a rough pine, another, another, dragging on me like an anchor until I stop, sobbing under that swath of stars and like a man waking from a dream turn and run back to the fire. I won’t find the splinter until two days later.

Running saved my life. I would have died too, cut down in seconds. I know that. But what I know can’t save me. I was god to those kids. And it’s not just me. Everywhere I go I see gods running, abandoning our children and grandchildren to the shooters, to poverty and sickness and dystopian tidal waves stacking on the horizon. Maybe we’re all broken. I don’t know how else to understand it. All driven by hungers we can’t sate, fears we can’t control, guilt we hide in our bodies. Maybe we’re all walking around pierced, our wounds the engine of the world.

You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead—

Shake.

My name is Michael Washington and I’m a survivor of the 71st—

Shake.

Two students who survived Parkland have committed suicide. What’s your—

Shake.

Nala stares up at me, waiting. I lean back so she can see the stars—

Knock on the door. A voice calls from the other side, asking if I’m ready.

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AT NIGHT by Craig Rodgers

June 25, 2019

The clock reads 2:04.  The bedroom door is closed.  He stares. He closes his eyes.

He opens his eyes.  The clock reads 2:09.  The bedroom door is open.  He closes his eyes. He opens them.  He stands and reaches out and he closes the door.  He gets back into bed. The clock reads 2:11. He closes his eyes.  

He opens his eyes.  The clock reads 2:36.  The bedroom door is open.  He stands and pads his slow way through blue dark to a bathroom at hall’s end.  He urinates with eyes closed. He returns to the bedroom, one hand shutting the door behind him.  He closes his eyes.

He opens his eyes.  The clock reads 2:43.  The bedroom door is open.  He stares. Brow furrows. He leans and reaches and without getting up he pushes closed the door.  He stares another moment. He closes his eyes.

He opens his eyes.  The bedroom door is open.  He sits up in bed, throws legs over the side.  His feet touch cold floor. He stares. He pushes the door closed.  He waits. The clock reads 2:49. The clock reads 2:50. The bedroom door is closed.  He curls his form back into bed. He stares. The clock reads 2:53. His eyes fall closed.  

He opens his eyes.  The bedroom door is open.  The clock reads 2:59. He stares.  He stares. The clock reads 3:01. He pushes closed the door.  He stares. The clock reads 3:05. The clock reads 3:08. He stares.  The bedroom door is closed. He stares. The clock reads 3:15. He stares.  The clock reads 3:30. The bedroom door is closed. He stares. He stares.

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THE BALLAD OF BOBBLEHEAD LERN by Anthony Sabourin

June 24, 2019
ILern Dobronski woke up to find that his head had grown gigantic overnight. He could feel the weight of it. As he touched it with his hands, surprised fingers prodding the growth, he panicked. He had to almost fully extend his arms in order to feel the hair on top of his head. It was like one of those cheap rubber toys that soaked in water and doubled or tripled in size, except it wasn’t a toy, it was Lern’s head. He scrambled towards his bathroom to get to a mirror, hyperventilating with big-headed panic.He used to look at his reflection in that mirror, pushing his hair back and inspecting his hairline, wondering if it was receding. He’d really study it, worrying over imperceptible changes, afraid of one day waking up bald. He looked in the mirror now and saw his oversized head, which had grown in proportion to itself but not his body, and thought, I didn’t know I had to worry about this too. He decided that he should go to the hospital, but tiny humiliations kept getting in the way. He went to put on a shirt but nothing would fit over his big head. He had to resort to this wrinkled oxford button-down, his one dress shirt, stained red with tomato sauce. While scrounging around for change for the bus, he kept bumping into things in his apartment that he had never before considered. The new geometry of his head made ducking under desks and tables very difficult. He started crying as he ate his cereal, realizing that he would have to go out in public to get to the hospital. The weight of his head threw him off-balance as he tossed back the last sip of his morning coffee. He decided to cover up his head before going outside. This was how Lern ended up riding the bus with his head in a pillow case. He had cut eye and mouth holes into the pillow case for the occasion, and people gave Lern a wide berth.On the bus he imagined good news. A doctor saying this happens all of the time, just a routine case of head gigantism. He would poke Lern’s head with a needle and air would rush out in a big fart, his head deflating to its normal size. Or the doctor would talk about twenty-four hour giant syndrome and give Lern a fast-acting pill so that his body would grow in size to match his head. For a day he would be able to pick up cars over his head, juggle his enemies, or open any jar in the world. This is great, Lern thought. Some jars are super hard to open.He entered the hospital and was directed to the emergency room. He could hear the room go silent, nurses looking up at him wide-eyed, a guy with a skate sticking out of his head looked at Lern with an expression of deep concern, but overall Lern was optimistic about his potential diagnosis. This optimism was unfounded.Dr. Paschek was an old woman with an unworried face. She took measurements of the diameter of Lern’s head and subjected him to x-rays. Many other doctors gathered around to look at the x-rays. “We don’t know what this is,” they said about Lern’s head. “Yeah, it looks okay in there though,” said a doctor with a clipboard. “Is it because I’ve been eating too much sodium?” Lern asked, trying to be helpful.“No probably not.”“Oh.” Lern paused. He was sitting on a hospital bed holding the weight of his head in his hands, wearing a crinkly paper robe. He felt dumb. “Hey, if my head is so big, does that mean I’m smarter?”“Lord no,” Dr. Paschek said, answering very quickly. Man, Lern thought, that was a really immediate answer. “Hey,” she said, “We could try running you through our Big Metal Machine.” The other doctors started murmuring in positive tones about the Big Metal Machine. They strapped him into the Big Metal Machine and spun it around a few times but it did not yield further answers. Eight hours later they were ready to send Lern home. “Yeah, it’s fine,” Dr. Paschek was saying. “Will I ever get better?” Lern asked.“Who’s to say what’s better?” the doctor said, making air quotes with her fingers as she said the word ‘better’.“I mean some of us have regular heads though,” Lern said. “Is there any medicine you can give me?”The doctor narrowed her eyes into an expression that looked thoughtful and reached into the pocket of her white doctor coat and handed Lern a plastic baggy full of thick gelatinous multicoloured blobs.“What are these?” Lern asked.“Oh, these are jujubes. They are a tasty snack, except for the black ones. Eat them as a special treat.”“That’s it?”“Oh, and this pamphlet of neck exercises. You should do neck exercises.”Lern took the pamphlet and left for home.The journey home did not go well. Lern lost his pillow case in the hospital, and sitting on the bus he felt exposed. People loved staring at a giant head. It was like seeing a normal-sized head, but way bigger. He could feel the attention of everyone on the bus, and could no longer entertain himself with notions of his head being shrunk by modern pharmaceuticals. Instead he was thinking about the carnival. Elephant shit and popcorn and gape-mouthed plastic horses with wild eyes spinning in circles. He was specifically thinking about the freaks at the carnival - the mutants, the bearded ladies, strong-men, cyclopses, the chicken-head-eating geeks, and of course the big-headed Lern Dobronski’s. He’d have to ride in a convoy of trucks with de-constructed and rusty carnival rides from city to podunk city. They’d arrive in a new town and he’d have to set up his own cage; have to endure the gawking of strangers before returning to the temporary reprieve of the companionship of his new freak friends. But maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe society would be accepting of his new deformity. He looked around at the people on the bus and saw a young family with a sleeping infant, an elderly couple holding hands, two teenagers tagging their seat with permanent marker, two more awkwardly trying to kiss, groups of university students and coworkers, an old man reading a book - why couldn’t Lern fit in amongst all of this mundane life? Lern sat back and felt at peace. Then a kid with wiry red hair and freckles pointed at Lern and shouted out “Bobblehead!” The bus erupted with the sounds of laughter.It was at this moment that Lern decided to commit suicide.

II

Lern had to figure out how to tie a knot. Then he had to figure out where to hang it. He was worried about the weight of his head being too great. He could picture the noose giving way, and then he’d just be a guy who jumped from a chair to the floor with a piece of rope around his neck. Once he was satisfied with the rope situation, he moved on to writing his suicide note. He would start to write, “I love you all,” and then he would stop and crumple up the note and start again. Something about the note felt more real than the rope. All told it was two in the morning and Lern was still writing when his suicide attempt was interrupted by the physicists.  They opened the door to his apartment and found Lern sitting at a desk with a noose in his arms, looking over a stack of papers. Lern looked up from his desk and saw three thin bald men in lab coats. They looked like variations on the same person. Lern said “I’m busy right now.”“You must stop,” said the first physicist. “Please, listen to us,” said the second physicist.“We are physicists,” said the third physicist. They all had the same voice. Lern hated the physicists.“Ugh, how did you guys even get in here?” Lern said. “The universe is this big hologram so doors don’t really exist,” said the first physicist.“If you can understand the math it’s actually pretty trivial to travel without boundaries through this plane of reality,” said the second physicist.“You left your door unlocked too,” said the third physicist. “But we have pressing matters to discuss with you, regarding your new giant head.” Lern made fists with his hands around the noose. “What, can you guys fix it?”“Hahaha, oh, of course not,” said the first physicist. “No we can’t and we wouldn’t want to.” “Lern,” said the second physicist, “We intercepted hospital readings from the Big Metal Machine, and we believe that your head now houses a potential space-time singularity.” “A what?” Lern said.“A singularity,” said the third physicist. “You know? The start of the Big Bang? The inside of a black hole?”“Singularities,” said the first physicist, “Could be really good or really bad.”“We’ve done all of the calculations and we still don’t know,” said the second physicist. “This is so exciting!”“I mean, we know everything,” said the third physicist, “So having a new unknown is really great. The inside of your head could house the secret to the infinite!”Lern could picture the physicists looking at his head and seeing nothing but a giant italicized x of a math equation. He tried to remember high school physics but all he could picture was the smell of weed and the cover to Dark Side of the Moon. “What do you narcs even want?” he said. “To run tests, of course,” said the first physicist. “Yes, and to activate the singularity,” said the second physicist.“We have to know what happens,” said the third physicist.Lern crumpled up his note and threw the rope on the floor. He stood up and told the physicists “GET OUT OF HERE YOU BUMS! NOBODY UNDERSTANDS WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT ANYWAY. HOLOGRAMS?? SINGUWHATEVERS?? YOU’RE JUST A BUNCH OF FAKE MATH PHILOSOPHERS!”The physicists stood quiet and dumbfounded at the entrance of Lern’s apartment. Their faces reflected a look of hurt, but also defiance. It didn’t look like they were leaving so Lern kept on shouting “OUT! GET OUT YOU GODDAMN QUANTUM NOBODIES!”A neighbour’s voice came muffled through the wall: “Is everything okay in there?”“NO HAL, I GOT PHYSICISTS IN MY APARTMENT.”“Those cockroaches,” said the neighbour through the wall. “Stay right there, I’m getting my shotgun.”The physicists hurried to leave, dodging a shoe thrown by Lern as they left. Word had spread quickly throughout the apartment building, and they were heckled and pelted with fruits and vegetables as they ran through the street.Lern looked out his window at a particular flying zucchini and felt ashamed that moments earlier he had been trying to end his life. He took his noose and walked to his floor’s garbage chute. He placed the rope inside and closed the chute. The sound of the rope clattering down the chute was pleasing to Lern. That night he dreamt of the cosmos. IIIIn the morning Lern woke up and did not go to work. It was hard to go to work when your head was gigantic and your couch was comfortable. There was so much he was not ready to do. He didn’t want to tell his mom or his dad, or any of his three sisters. He ate cereal until it turned soggy and watched TV until there was nothing but infomercials. Eventually he forced himself to go for a walk outside. Walking through his building’s hallways, with their oatmeal coloured walls and ticking fluorescent lights, felt like leaving the comfort of hibernation. The street outside was covered with smeared produce. He looked up at the sun and it felt like a spotlight. He knew where he wanted to go, and took deserted side streets to get to a small, nondescript rectangle of sand nestled amongst a busy road and a heavily polluted stretch of river. It was his favourite beach.It was early afternoon when Lern arrived, and everyone on the sparsely populated beach turned and looked at him. Lern tried to ignore this and found a solitary spot of sand where he could sit alone. He sheepishly took off his shoes and socks, rolled up his pants, and sat cross-legged, looking out at the water and people. Eventually they looked away. Lern felt hot but not from the sun. More people arrived at the beach as the day stretched on, and Lern continued to sit in the sand, getting used to the activity, getting used to the glares of people, and getting sunburnt.  He noticed two teenage girls approaching, one with her face obscured by sunglasses and another forcefully chewing gum. They were talking and looking at their phones. They stopped short of Lern and snapped open a towel and Lern could feel the air. He winced and felt his eyes water. He didn’t want the company, but the two girls sat next to him. “Hey wow, you look like a big red baby,” said the girl with the gum.“Lisa, Jesus you can’t just fucking say that,” said the girl with the sunglasses.“Ugh, why? Hey dude, what happened to your head?”Lern rubbed his eyes and said “I woke up like this yesterday,” “No way.”“Yeah it just happened. The doctor’s don’t know why and some physicists said maybe there’s a thing in my head. I hate physicists, who can understand them.”“Man, physicists gets on my nerves,” Lisa said. “Like if you are so good at physics why don’t you just do straight math. Hey, do you want sunscreen for your big red baby head? I’m Lisa by the way.” Lisa held out the sunscreen. Lern reached out a hand.“I’m Lern.”“I’m Deborah,” said Deborah. “Hi Deborah,” said Lern.“Well Lern, we are going to eat sandwiches and listen to music in your general area so I hope that’s cool. Don’t worry about your head, Deborah has a peanut-shaped one and we all still like her.”“Lisa that is big talk for someone with an outie bellybutton.”“Ahh! Ahh! How can you even see that with your lazy eye?!”It didn’t look to Lern like Deborah had a lazy eye, and Lern continued to listen to Lisa and Deborah pick apart real and imagined imperfections until they both burst into laughter. Lern laughed too, in spite of himself, his whole head lolling back and forth. “You are the first people I’ve talked to all day,” he told them.  Lern decided to stay at the beach. Lisa took Deborah’s phone and put on a song that sounded to Lern like a colourful and apocalyptic future. The girls broke out sandwiches but decided they weren’t hungry, so they fed them to gathering seagulls, in willful ignorance of the ‘DO NOT FEED THE BIRDS’ signs posted nearby. A seagull grabbed a piece of sandwich bigger than its head and choked it down in big gulps. It turned towards the rolling tide and started screeching. A second gull landed, stood beside the first one, and started screeching too. It made sense to Lern. He thanked the girls for the sunscreen and left as the birds continued to shriek by the incoming waves of brown water and garbage.As Lern was walking home, he caught the glint of an alto saxophone in a shop window, dying sunlight reflecting off of polished brass, and he bought it on sight. The neck strap didn’t fit, and the cashier tried to talk him out of it, but Lern couldn’t be helped. He smiled the whole walk home. In his apartment Lern took the saxophone out of its case. He set up the reed and mouthpiece, attaching them together with the ligature, which took a couple of tries to get right. When it was done he attached it to the neck of the saxophone, and attached the neck to the body. He said “What am I going to do with a saxophone?” out loud to the empty room. He set it on the chair across from his at the kitchen table and looked at it while he ate spaghetti. He laughed at himself. The saxophone made the rest of his apartment look dull.Now that there was nothing else to do but play the saxophone, Lern found that he could not. He thought of blowing into the saxophone with all of his strength, red-faced, neck muscles bulging, and no sound coming out. He pictured the saxophone falling apart in his arms. The failure felt too big to imagine. He sighed, did his neck exercises, and fell asleep in his bed while the saxophone sat in the kitchen. In his dream, Lern was a big red baby, floating lost through empty space. Suddenly, he was engulfed in a bright light— Lern’s eyes snapped open and, still in his boxers, he grabbed the saxophone and left for the roof of the apartment building. Lern ducked his head under the door and was met with open air and the quiet of a sleeping city. He wedged the door open and set foot on the gravel surface of the roof. He looked out towards the grey brutalism of the new government buildings, then past them towards the gothic revival style of older government buildings, which were in turn surrounded by modest downtown skyscrapers. He held the saxophone steady and placed his hands over the keys. He took a deep breath. He felt ready.He blew into the instrument and no sound came out. The calm of the city was indifferent. Then Lern remembered embouchure, the way the guy at the music store said you needed to shape your mouth to direct the tunnel of air from your lungs to the saxophone. He tried again, resting his upper teeth on the mouthpiece while the reed rested on his bottom lip, which was curled over his lower teeth. He took another deep breath and closed his eyes. He felt his swollen head spinning in the pressure of the Big Metal Machine. A crowd of people leering at him and chanting bobblehead. A crumpled note next to a thick knot. He blew into the saxophone and felt the instrument vibrate, heard a noise disturb the air.IVAs his fingers started moving with unknown purpose along the keys, a huge, immense sound emptied itself out of Lern. Screeching, mournful wailing - geese squeaking at the earth as they fell like bowling pins out of the sky; dive-bombing in straight lines out of immense grey clouds.As Lern continued to play, his body powering a deep thrum of squawking bellows, he saw the white light of his dream; he saw infinity, a nothingness beyond comprehension. Out of that void came a sensation like the colour red, and out of that sensation Lern could see the red expand into the solid brick walls of a tiny bar, vibrating to the music of a group of thrashing punks. He saw a man with his oversized head bobbing at the back of the club, singing along with the refrain of a song that goes: You will always, be a loser! You will always, be a loser!The man with the big head collides into a tall woman with striking black hair - spilt drinks and future laundry. They make eye contact as the singer continues: Aaand that’s Okay! They find themselves singing along, and they start to laugh. They eat pizza slices in the cold November air after the show. Lern’s whole body shifted with the saxophone, as he continued to burst forth with sound and vision. He saw the inky blackness of stars spit out of a black hole. He saw dark hair flowing out the window of a rented camper van driving through the desert. The man with the large head lies in the back of the van. They set up camp and eat hotdogs that split and curl over themselves in the heat of an open fire. They sit by copper gorges of earth cut down by water that doesn’t exist anymore, watch the sky dance and the sun set over the dessert. Stars swirling like water circling a drain around the density of a blue giant.A jubilant cacophony ripped through the air above the street and Lern saw everything at once: a gurney ripping through hospital hallways. The milky way in an expanding whorl. A hand gripping his. The woman with the dark hair screaming as she gives birth. Crowning. A cold dead sun suddenly flaring. The woman with the dark hair holding new life - an infant crying as she learns to breathe. Planets spat back into orbit. A tiny life swathed in cotton. More and more in a torrent Lern can’t control - hands and feet clambering over his head as the child treats her father as an obstacle course. Living in the basement of an old box home given to veterans after the war. First steps and first words. The weary feeling of parenting, stealing sleep by the glow of televisions, in front of open books, the comforting feeling of that head of dark hair fitting like a puzzle piece in the crook of Lern’s neck. A wealth of seasons - rain, heat, autumn leaves and white snow. Planets circled a vibrant sun. Pencil marks along the edge of a wall as an infant ran screaming, the marks creeping upwards as she turns into a three year old. These marks twinned by another child. Colouring crayons and a tiny blue dress. Soccer balls and dance shoes. A calm and even universe. The man with the big head and his saxophone settled into an exuberant groove but there is still more.Faster and faster - images that Lern can’t make sense of - stars losing sense of themselves and turning into primordial clouds, boxes of pamphlets, city council signs with giant heads on them, hand shaking, so many strange faces, so many loved ones, sleek black caskets and dead parents, new nieces, new nephews, new cousins, clouds shedding atoms, and a frantic tone on the saxophone now. And more and too much; dark hair turning grey beautifully, gracefully; a house of textbooks, dumb boys, okay ones, scratched cars and university tours, canoes like matchsticks in a great river, atoms falling apart, subatomic particles freezing, a cold beyond imagining. An elegiac saxophone slows as Lern sees the end – a cabin, a still lake, grandchildren by a gnarled willow tree - and stops playing, a wetness on his face drying in the warm glow of morning.VAn old man with a giant head drifts slowly away from the laughter in the cabin. A young voice calls for him so he waves a hand. In the darkness, the man walks along a dirt path from the cabin to a great undisturbed lake. He finds comfort in the stillness, the stars, the vast geography. He sits at the base of a tall, gnarled tree and takes a last look at the cabin, its happy sounds and warm glow. The man closes his eyes and rests.When his head splits open, the stunning light of the infinite bursts out.
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THE PITS by Christopher X. Ryan

June 23, 2019

It was all over the news. Skull fragments got discovered on Jimmy Wallace’s land during a septic dig. Just a few chips turned up, no bigger than the tokens Jimmy dishes out at the carousel he runs, but rumors cantered across town faster than you could say ex-wife.

The cops quashed the rumors though, saying it was probably a native skull, an archaeological or anthropological thing. They cordoned off Jimmy’s property with yellow tape and erected floodlights and stood with their thumbs hooked in their belts and their feet splayed like sentries at the portal to some savage place in our distant past.

If true they were native skull bits, it would be a ginormous relief to me and Carl Clancy. He and I had in fact interred a body back there, a kid we’d killed by accident one time when were high as banners. Carl was at the wheel—ka-thump—kid on a kick-scooter went under us. You wouldn’t expect the jeep to lurch and list on such a tiny body, but that soft skin and rich blood nearly diverted our trajectory into the oak at the bend of Rattlecan Corner. It happened the night of the fireworks and traffic vehicular and bodily was heavy, so we tarped up the boy and stuck him temporarily in the vast expanse of dirt between Jimmy’s garage and the marsh, a soft place with decades of old leaves and centuries of bent nails and eons of broken-up roots. Six months later, after the hubbub of the boy’s disappearance died down, we dragged the body to the cliffs and tossed it into the sea for the birds and fishes to particularize. Whether we spilled some head parts I don’t know but it seems like a true possibility if I get to pondering it. That was three years back.

Now, after two days of drinking and furious puking of the sort that makes your brow feel like it’s been substituting for a rock sledge, I slink down to the carousel where Jimmy works and strike up a friendly chat to get the lay of the land, almost literally.

Despite the notion that unsettled souls are haunting his land, he’s doing fine, distracted by business. The carousel downright hops all summer on account of the horses having real hair and being the oldest in the country. Look in them horses’ eyes and you’ll see gems and figurines and such but the carousel animals don’t bounce, just whirl in a lazy circle. Catch that brass ring though, you get a free ride. People love it, being simpletons and lovers of glimmering novelty, and Jimmy makes a killing running the place for some overseas consortium. Also, they’s got lots of arcade games in the annex.

“Now they’re thinkin’ there’s a whole village deep down,” Jimmy says, rocking on the heels of his ugly but comfortable looking shoes while jiggling the two pounds of change he keeps in his pockets. I don’t full-on hate the guy, but there’s something about him that makes me wonder if he ever got laid in his life. He’s that tense and under-socialized.

“A village, you say.”

He snorts his wet, god-awful snort, indicating he thinks something idiotic just been said. “Either a horde of natives got kill’t or someone’s been a-dumpin’ bodies there for years.”

“Huh—that’s—a thing to contemplate about.”

“Yup.”

“Yup.”

“Indeed.”

After that I hit the paddles on Galaxy War but don’t even come close to beating Fred Sutton’s high score, then head over to the construction site where Carl Clancy gets paid to clean up wayward nails and Tyvek sheets and the other shit the carpenters chuck off the roofs. Soon as Carl sees me coming though, he gets twitchy and his eyeballs do that shaky thing.

“Who else been a-dumpin’ there?” I ask.

“I mean, fuck. Years back my grandpa and Josiah Pundt used to rob the natives of they’s liquor and car parts and sometimes it got ugly.”

“Who else?”

Now Carl is all but dancing but not the kind that’d make a gal jiggly and wet. “Shit, man. Your dad. My dad.”

I rub my jaw. “I suppose that’s a good thing. They call it possible deniability or something like that.”

“It’s just—”

“What?”

His eyeballs take to quivering again, flitting back and forth like a hummingbird on fermented nectar. “Only problem is—”

“Spit it out before I yank it out, Carl.”

“Garrett Simms is on the case.”

At that name my skin prickles. There’s only one person on Earth I hate more than God himself and that’s Garrett Simms. “What in the hell for? He’s just a regular ol’ street pig.”

“Naw, he got up-moted to detective. It was in the newspaper and everything.”

“Goddamn it, Carl.”

“Ain’t my fault.”

“We got to do something about this.”

“Such as what?”

“We got to mess up the dig zone. You still got them deer skulls?”

The next day I call in sick and park my van a short ways from Jimmy’s house and sit there drinking joe after joe until my balls are sore to the touch. I take frequent pisses into a jug but I don’t sleep none and my eyes don’t droop and I watch the pits like it’s my dharma. All the while my mind drifts tither and yon and I think of the times Garrett Simms pulled down my pants in the locker room or pinned me down so kids could slap my calves with wet rags and of course when he full-on grabbed my cock in the group showers.

Around noon a team comes in to sweep at Jimmy’s dirt with toothbrushes and blowers. Sure enough the devil Simms himself pulls up in an unmarked car. It’s nothing fancy but his suit looks tailored. He’s still fit and handsome but you put a turd in a shiny pouch, it’s still fecal and liable to smear everything it touches. He and the other pigs have gridded out the dirt and cordoned it off with yellow tape but them forensic types have only dug a foot deep, or so my binoculars tell me.

News reporters hover. A hearse appears but no one gets in or out and then it leaves.

Garrett and the other cops stand there chatting until evening and Jimmy brings them cold ones. He’s an authority sycophant. A termite with skin. You ever seen what a tire does to a human skull? They’s eyes leap out as if trying to see who just done this. Man, what’d I’d pay to get Jimmy and Garrett laying crown-to-crown in the road.

When dark plummets for good and Jimmy’s acreage goes still for the night, I slide out the back door of the van and wander over and stand at the rim of the pits a good while, thinking about the blacktop that led me to such a moment and the options that could steer me away from it. Then I notice the cooler’s still there, half-filled with ice, and a few of Jimmy’s brewskis are bobbing in it like overboard sailors. His home brew is probably the best in town and after all the coffee I’ve been swilling I get a hankering for something smooth. So I have one, then a second. It doesn’t take long before the happies set in and my limbs start to float. Because my gut is empty things go sideways on the third. The bottle slips from my hand and the pit starts to shift, sliding here and there until it’s all around me and I feel like I’m last in line to receive communion and the whole congregation is staring at me. A second later the air goes cold with a sharp rush of wind. A shovel or something of its ilk ker-klonks me on the brainpan and instantly my knees puss out. My body goes snaky in response and down I go, right into the dig pits.

Things invert a moment. Sound changes, like I’m at the bottom of the swimming hole. My head lolls around of its own accord and when my vision returns I see stars above me, only they’re all spinny, going round and round like the lights above the carousel. Then I see the horses up in the sky. I see myself too but I’m not alone—the kid we killed is on the horse ahead of me and we’re both reaching for the brass ring. He misses it and I feel bad, so I miss it on purpose too and we both lose out on the free ride.   

My head bobs in the other direction and I see a figure slinking about in the pits. They’s got on a bandanna and a clever hat so his identity is lost to me. He comes closer, bearing down on me like an ugly angel, jabbing at the soil with the shovel, and each time the blade hits a rock all I can think is that the sparks look like fireflies.

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THE CALL WAS COMING FROM INSIDE THE COCKROACH by Maggie Dove

June 21, 2019

“It’s just a Palmetto Bug. I’ll put it outside.”

This could be a more daunting task than relocating, say, a daddy long legs or a lost lizard that found its way into the house. When the humidity is just right in Florida, somewhere around the 90% mark, the Palmetto Bug doesn’t just run away from you. The Palmetto Bug defiantly takes flight, rocketing directly into your face, making even the least squeamish of native Floridians scream in horror as the fwip-fwip-fwip of their wings flutter at all five of your senses.

The Palmetto Bug is a shiny, brown, beastly creature that can grow to over two inches in length, with spindly black antennae that are just as long. Palmetto Bugs are so large that you can hear them chewing something crunchy from the other room like your Uncle Lou going at a tin of peanut brittle, as I unfortunately found out the hard and crunchy way when I interrupted one eating a crouton that had fallen onto the kitchen floor one night.

“It’s just a Palmetto Bug. I’ll put it outside.”

You could smash the Palmetto Bug with a shoe or a newspaper, but they were so large it seemed mean, like you were killing a peer, and if you didn’t angle your smashing instrument just right, it could go Pulp Fiction on you and spray its Dr. Pepper-colored guts four feet across your wall and you’d have to summon Harvey Keitel to come out for the clean-up. It was easier to just put them outside.

Besides, it wasn’t like they were those smaller but more ominous German cockroaches we had in our house, where when you saw one then it meant there were a million more hiding behind your walls. Any time we bug-bombed the house, it was like walking into a German cockroach apocalypse when we returned four hours later; thousands of their small bodies legs-up on the floor, the masses so dense that you had to sweep them out the door like you were cleaning up after an old-timey ticker tape parade.

They would recover their ranks and repopulate the house within a month.

The Palmetto Bug, unlike the armies of German cockroaches, was most often a solo traveler in your Florida home; an unwelcome, weird friend who stopped by unannounced. He wasn’t a symptom of a bigger problem, he was a self-contained local nightmare that you shuffled out the door with a piece of junk mail. Anyone’s mother would (incorrectly) tell you that they didn’t even want to be in the house to begin with; that they lived in the palmettos, hence the name “Palmetto Bug”. They weren’t roaches for Pete’s sake. They were outdoor bugs, like beetles or moths!

Tourists were always eager to tell you about these gigantic, fearsome creatures they found crawling up their Florida motel room walls, and we native Floridians would wave them off with:

“It’s just a Palmetto Bug. We put them outside.”

The only people who were unimpressed were tourists visiting from New York, who bragged that Palmetto Bugs had nothing on New York City cockroaches almost as fiercely as they argued their title of Best Slice or Best Bagel.

In my thirties, on my first trip to New York, I saw a Palmetto Bug crawling up a wall in Times Square. I pointed at it and said, “Hey! You guys have Palmetto Bugs here, too! Maybe I brought him up here on vacation!”

My New Yorker friend stared at me.

I found out that day that the real, scientific term for the Palmetto Bug is the "American Cockroach".

I found out that day that the real, scientific term for the legendary New York cockroach is the "American Cockroach".

They were the same goddamned bug.

And New Yorkers still said theirs were superior.

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BONE RATE by Kristen M. Ploetz

June 20, 2019

The marble lobby smells like old paper and spiders have taken residence in the dark corners of the tooth dentil trim. From behind a framed pane of cheap glass, ten wanted men stare at Naenie. Eight of them are smiling. She glances long enough to know some are dangerous, but all of them are broken.

Of the three windows, the middle is open for business. As Naenie waits her turn, she watches the woman in a red coat. With a gloved hand, the woman slides a small white box toward the clerk and drops three coins into his palm. Naenie cannot hear what the clerk asks before the woman nods. When she turns to leave, Naenie sees the missing eye.

The clerk waves Naenie forward. Inside her coat pocket, her left hand is in a loose fist. Her right hand signs the alphabet over and over at her side.

“Sending first-class?” he asks.

Naenie does not respond.

The wood counter is dipped in the center. A century of hands and wrists have worn it down. Over the shallow bowl, Naenie opens her fist. Six tiny bones fall from her palm. Malleus, incus, and stapes from her right ear, the other three from her left. She scratches at the stitches behind her ears, tucks the hospital bracelet back under the cuff of her silk blouse.

He leans closer to Naenie, mouths the words with precision. “Bone rate?”

She nods.

He pinches the bones one by one and puts them on the scale. Tick tick tick tick tick tick against stainless steel. For Naenie, they fall in silence.

Total weight: 1/1000th of an ounce. She pulls a wrinkled dollar from her pocket and sets it on the scale next to the bones.

With a sable paintbrush he slides them into a small metal tube the size of his finger, pushes a black rubber stopper into the top. From a desk drawer near his knee, he pulls out a padded envelope. Stamped in block letters on the front: FRAGILE-OSSICLES.

“Where to?” He says the words slowly, his black pen suspended above the envelope. He doesn’t break his stare as he waits for her answer.

Naenie slips him a folded square of paper and whispers, “This address please.” She signs no more with her right hand low behind the counter so the clerk cannot see, twists the ends of the stitches behind her left ear as he writes the name of her father.

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