Fiction

NIGHTHAWK by Zach VandeZande

May 21, 2019

There’s a yellowy light. It’s not fluorescent. This is not the IHOP. It’s the other one. The local diner. Yellowed sign, yellowed menus, yellow, yellowy light.

_________

Nothing that happens here is important. Important is elsewhere is the point of a place like this. This place is meant for in-between.

_________

She is at the hostess station looking lost. Looking like a customer who doesn’t know if she should seat herself. The post-bar rush is over. A last-call-at-2am town in a last-call-at-2am state. But: it’s later than all that. There seems to be no one in the restaurant at all. Bacon grease on everything. Pancakes in the very air.

_________

There are some things a body can do, and some things a body cannot do. Some things stand inside the scope, and then some things stand outside the scope, with their mocking smile and wave, with their cannot. The sum of these two types of things together is called a person.

_________

She has always been an IHOP person, if that’s a type of person to be.

_________

A man stands up from the one working video poker machine in the corner. This man has a great quality to his hands, prominent knuckles, a meaty rectangular strength to them. There is a tattoo in the webbing between thumb and forefinger—a small cross, hastily done. He wears a maroon polo shirt with a black collar. His hands look capable of doing things to other things, of being here and then here and then here and it helps or it hurts. He waves her along, leading her to a booth by the window. She will not look at his face. She looks at his transitive hands.

_________

Notably, the drunks have all gone home for the night.

_________

To look at a face is to have a face looked at is to invite comment. She is still beautiful, despite it. She still radiates youth, she still accidentally looks at people in a way that captures their complete attention, despite it. Some things do not change as easily as all that. To say that one thing is the essence of a person is to be naïve. She is in many ways naïve.

_________

She sits at a table. She says “Coffee,” she says, “Water with no ice.” In the blackness of the window she can see herself say these things. The yellow light overhead casts her reflection in dingy ghost shapes. The table lacquer is coming up at one corner, the booth she is sitting in has a slight tear in the seat back. There is damp and ache coming from her breasts. The man leaves her with a menu, which she ignores.

_________

A prison doesn’t require a key, after all. What it requires is belief in a key.

_________

The waiter brings water and disappears again around the corner. Behind her, somewhere, coffee futzes and sputters. He doesn’t bother telling her it’s brewing. She imagines him on the other side of the wall, playing video poker. On slow nights, a waiter might spend more at the video poker machine than he earns. She thinks he cannot help it. His nametag is peeling, his name rolling back into itself. That it were so easy to disappear, just a furl, a rolling in and away, gone.

_________

She finds him, suddenly, boring, wants to stop imagining him. He rubs a dollar against the corner of the video poker, making the money presentable, making it good enough to be accepted by the waiting mouth of the machine. She cannot see it, but this is what he does.

_________

Sitting there, she becomes aware of her breathing. She breathes manually, and then she panics that she won’t be able to stop breathing manually, that her body will never take over again. How long could she last? How long would it be before that responsibility too became crushing and she let herself collapse gasping to the floor? Could she make it through a cup of coffee, through a meal? Could she make it to daybreak?

_________

Never went in for the girl stuff, aside from being deliberate in her beauty. A breath. She thinks of herself as an angular person. A breath. She is all hard edges when she can help it. A breath. Doesn’t brook bullshit from anyone. Sees it as strength. A breath. Was not this for a time. A breath. And now. A breath.

_________

There’s an old joke, and it’s this: What’s the worst thing that can happen in a falling elevator? It stops. And what’s the best thing? It stops. Which isn’t funny, so maybe it’s not a joke. But it’s true.

_________

She tries to calm herself the way she was taught by her college roommate years ago: breathe out twice as long as you breathe in, count it out, name three things you love about being alive, realize that you are only your body, or realize that you are not just your body—she couldn’t remember which it was or if it was both—just ride the wave, live through this and then this and then this and guess what: now you’re living, present tense and actual. Now you’re now.

_________

It could be said fairly that every moment is life-changing, each insuck of air irrevocable. Thoughts like these are banal at every moment they aren’t.

_________

Three things she loves about being alive:

_________

The waiter reappears, passes her, returns with coffee. The presence of him forces her to be calm. She sits. She sips her coffee. It is surprisingly good. She expected something over-roasted, bile-sour, stale. Something that cried out for the little tub of cream in its basket on the table, sitting by the plastic tower of assorted jellies. There is a kind of betrayal in the robust flavor, in how good it feels to put the warmth into her body.

_________

From the video poker machine, bleeps and bloops move softly through the dining area.

_________

There is an absence of need in her that’s new, or worse, long-forgotten, the mark of an earlier version of herself pupating within her, ready to reemerge. She opens a tub of cream and dumps it in, then another. The coffee grays and whorls. It blooms. The way the black outside snugs up on the windows makes her feel as though she is attenuated to bigger truths lurking in the mundane. She wants things to be this still for her from now on.

_________

She might be connected to something new. A great heritage of loneliness. Nighthawk. That one Hemingway story she hated so much. Aaron made her read it in college, Aaron who got so upset when she didn’t care about all the nada, when she found it too cliché to be interesting. At the time she felt so sorry to hate the story. How often had she been sorry for her own opinion?

_________

She is not quite sure what it will be like, what she will do with so many empty hours, if it will ever feel as though this is what life is instead of feeling like, well, like what, exactly? Like she’s her own ghost, staying behind, carrying on.

_________

A body is still a vessel when it holds only itself. She learned this when the baby was born, and then somewhere she unlearned it, as the baby began to grow and occupy more space, kept finding more space to occupy than she knew was even there in her to occupy. It’s a thing she’d like to know again: how much space can fit in the vessel.

_________

She trembled and slipped back into breathless panic. She thought I fucking told you. She thought Do not think about the Pollywog. She thought She didn’t cry when you set her car seat down on pavement, when you hurried away. She thought She stayed right asleep that scary way the Pollywog would sleep, scary baby too-deep sleep.

_________

The waiter comes back around to see if she’s ready. She apologizes. She forgot about the menu in front of her. He looks over his shoulder to the kitchen and says it’s fine. She is overly apologetic. He says it’s okay, but she persists in performing the act of apology, fingers squirming at the menu.

_________

In some ways she will always be in that two-bedroom apartment, man and baby and her as ghost. She does not want to know this, but she does.

_________

The waiter lingers. The waiter notices the quaver of her and wants to help. He asks her where she’s from and she says, “Here.” He puts two fingers on the table. He says, “No, I mean your peoples.” And she is looking at him, fierce, reddened eyes. He’s from somewhere too, by the look of him. “Guatemala,” she says, “Libya.” He whistles and says, “That’s some mix.” Her shoulders tighten. She does not want to talk to a waiter about anything, least of all this. That a person can reach adulthood without knowing this kind of small talk is terrible, sticking your finger in another person’s nose.

_________

She does not want to be hard angles right now, but she is with the waiter. She wants to be a not. She thinks she might unwrap her fork from its napkin and jab his fingers off the table. He stands there, not letting her be a not, forcing her to be a person in a context that came from somewhere. It’s horrible. He’s horrible.

_________

An in-between is a place like any other. Everybody lives in the present, all the time. Horrible.

_________

She was not always this woman. She learned to be another woman with Aaron. Aaron saw different because Aaron wanted her to love him, wanted that plain, and that came with a desire to bend the will of her to his, get her, the organism, a little closer to her, the idea in his mind. She’s not that idea, though. Not that she blames him. She did it, too, though not so much with Aaron. Aaron was Aaron, without consequence. She did it with the Pollywog. She did it until she realized she couldn’t.

_________

With Aaron she saw she could be not unhappy. Which is nothing at all like happy.

_________

Three things she loves about being alive:

_________

The waiter stands there expectant and she asks him for a cigarette. He says no. They’re there in his pocket. She could reach for them. She could take what she wanted. She looks up at him. He says city ordnance. He says. She holds out her open palm.

_________

It’s possible to feel weightless, freed, awful. It’s possible to feel everything you know, all at once.

_________

Cigarette in hand, to lips. The waiter nervous. Something electric in the scratch of the lighter, in him bringing the flame to her. The waiter’s hands. Used to trouble, probably. In trouble. She can make him feel a way about her, about himself. She need only reach across with her free hand. She need only grab the nametag and peel it free, and what comes after comes after.

_________

Her biggest regret is that she knows she could become anything at all and didn’t, still might.

_________

She tells him she wants to drink coffee for a while. She tells him he can say he didn’t notice the cigarette, if anyone asks. He nods and leaves her alone, disappears into the kitchen.

_________

Three things she loves about being alive:

_________

For the pieces of this to fit together, there must reasonably be some measure by which she would consider herself whole. She was capable of things, once. She could read a baby like a tarot card, every burp a star aligned. She could bear the wailing. She could give herself away, all the way. She could be unmade and still be made. Simple enough things.

_________

She takes a deep drag on the cigarette and her lungs fuzz out. Somewhere a baby wakes in the cold. Somewhere a baby. Somewhere a loss without language. Somewhere a light going on at the precinct, a savior arriving, not the wanted one. Somewhere a vessel being made unwhole.

_________

But who has ever been whole. It’s there in the word itself. Whole, hole. Cruelty, homonym.

_________

Three things she loves about being alive:

_________

That coffee goes cold. That dawn comes on. That a different now is on the way.

AJAR by Ankita Banerjee

May 19, 2019

He was at the counter flirting with a pixie cut. My eyes followed him the whole evening and I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I ordered my fifth gin and tonic, and when Sofie asked, “Why don’t you go talk to him?” I sniggered.

It started raining outside – the worst kind. He was now purring to the little black dress at the corner table. She was small, with a little hunch on her back. I went out for a cig and argued with the voice in my head.

“Perhaps it’s life coming to a full circle.”

“Or this is how I will again make a fool of myself if I stay any longer.”

“Perhaps he has changed.”

“He was sniffing the humpy’s hair like a wild bunny prepping up for a restroom quickie. So most likely, no.”

I took a deep drag on cigarette under the parking shade when the Apocalypse came.

He said, “So we meet again”. I said, “Shut up” and we kissed - through the cataclysm and until the end of the cervix of etcetera.

Later when we called an Uber and drove past the old town, the wisps of the night harked back to the old days when our world was lit with a thousand glowing worms. Back in the apartment we fucked, like old times - on the couch, against the door, in the tub, on the desk chair. When we craved food, I popped some corns.

It was the next best thing to cigarette after sex.

The sweat still turned the top of his ear bright pink. He still swirled his tongue clockwise inside the mouth like a broken down washing machine. I still felt clouds forming in my belly when he watched me getting off.

I knew him, he knew me, and at that point it was all that mattered.

When the rain softened outside he pulled up the blinds a little and carried me in front of the mirror. In the sodium lights from down the street he glistened like a gorgeous tornado and I melted in his clasp. He lifted my hair and whispered softly, “Are you real?” I think he asked that to the girl in the mirror, hence I said nothing. I wasn’t sure if I knew her.

For the brief moments we slept – on and off – I saw fragments of a dream that never reached its finish line. But he was there, making the same old grunting noises while asleep, and at that point it was all that mattered.

In the morning he left without kissing goodbye, just like old times. Later I found his note on my desk.

When Sofie asked, “Are you going to see him again?” I simply shrugged.

The following year I heard he had joined a cult. One day he just left home and hitchhiked down South to find faith, or drugs, or a secret subway to the heaven.

Sofie smirked. “Who knew he could find a different obsession?” I took a long chug of my beer and pushed down the lump in my throat.

I wondered how he is managing in the cold. He had always been a beach guy after all. I wondered if he has shaved his head now. I wondered if we could find each other across the room ever again.

When I wake up in the middle of the day, feeling like a spurned ashtray, I go back to his note over and over again.

“Until next time”, it said.

But how long is one exasecond anyway?

GOOD BOY by Kailash Srinivasan

May 17, 2019

It was a mistake trusting your parents will come back to get you. It was a mistake turning your back to them, clapping idiot-like at the spinning top that lit up red in the dark. They left for Bombay, leaving you behind in Delhi with your grandma, your paati.

Its summer—the city is a furnace, everything is melting. Your paati slips in the bathroom and fractures both her legs. With weights, pulleys, her legs hang in the air, like the hands of a clock: 2.10 p.m. Her loose, burnt-brown flesh hangs loose from her thighs.

In brown shorts and a white t-shirt with stripes, you have your music notebook in your clammy hand, revealing wet phantom finger-prints around its spine when you change hands. A Donald Duck label in the front has your details:

Name: Sethumohan;

Class: III;

Age: 8 yrs old.

She wants to pee. You slide the aluminium dish between her legs, her thigh-flesh jiggles. You wait for her bladder to empty. When she grunts, you carefully pull it out with both your hands, carry it to the door. You hold your breath and drain the dish, watching the piss form black globules on the dry earth.

She hands you her metal ruler, which you bury deep between her cast and her skin and scratch her calf, her ankle, and with your nails between her toes that wiggle. You follow her instructions: left, no, no, right, up, up, down...ah!

“Okay, leave. You’re late,” she says. “Leave the door open.”

You hesitate.

“Run,” she barks and you’re out the door.

“Look everyone, Sethu finally decided to show up to class.” Arun, your vocal teacher, tells the rest of the students, stretching the vowels in your name like a chewing gum. He moves his limp wrists and motions for you to sit next to him. You sing for a bit. Then he asks, as always, for the other students to leave. The house is empty. You know what this means. But still, you try. You get up to follow them. You can’t go yet he tells you. He smiles, his hand is on your thigh. You walk to his bedroom.

Arun turns off the lights and pulls close the curtains, bolts the door. The sudden withdrawal of light, gives the room the cold, dark look of night.

“Let’s begin,” he says. He means the game. He calls it, ‘Adventures of the Night Explorer’: the goal is to identify different parts of each other’s bodies by touching. You know the drill, you know where everything is on his body; however, pretense is a big part of the game.

It’s your turn first so you feel your way in the darkness. Your tiny hands land on his mouth.

“Your lips.”

“Correct. My turn,” says Arun.

You lay still on the bed, trying your best to not make a sound. Arun places his sticky, fleshy palm on your stomach.

“Your bum.”

“No, my tummy,” you say, in a condescending tone. He likes it.

“Your stomach?” Arun says and lifts your shirt. He tickles you until you beg him to stop. You have to laugh, you have to enjoy it. Else, he gets mad.

“My turn.” Your eyes have adjusted to the light and you’re able to see clearly, but you continue to pretend like you have a secret. You also reach for his stomach but to make it more believable, you pretend to think.

“You give up?” he says.

“It’s your— .”

Before you can answer, Arun pulls your hand and slips it into his pyjamas, whose strings are already loose.

It swells in your hand until it’s a Popsicle. You know what it is, not by its official name yet, by what your grandma calls it: Choochoo. You have held yours many times, moving it like a hose to see how far up the wall your pee can go. You know it’s wrong, it’s something you aren’t supposed to be doing. If you tell your grandma, she won’t believe you. You could tell your parents, though your letter will end up like the rest, somewhere under a pile of old newspapers? You know they don’t read them. You know this because once they were visiting and you sat next to your dad, smiling shyly, giddy with excitement, and then blinked at your mum. Surely, they must have got you the latest Superman comic book. But the morning bled into noon and noon melted into night and a whole week went by. They hadn’t, and you never asked.

Arun wants you to move your hand up and down. How many times does he need to teach you? He makes these little sounds, takes these short breaths, before finally your fingers are wet like you’d just dipped them in a bottle of glue.

“You still haven’t guessed. You lose”

“Choochoo,” you say. It’s a game and you still want to win.

“Is that what you call yours?” Arun chuckles. “Let’s see if you have one.”

When you’re leaving he says, “See you tomorrow.” He expects you to bob your head, so you bob your head.

Grandma wants to know about your class, what you learned.

“Sing me something,” she says. You say you have to wash your hands first.

“Good boy,” she calls you. She says you should always wash your hands when you come home from outside. “Wash your feet, too.”

GNOSTIC BAPTISTE by Gregg Williard

May 16, 2019

“I found him.”

“Him who?”

“Gnostic Baptiste!”

“The spam tag?”

“It’s not just a tag! I wasn’t even running a simple traceroute function before I get a local postal address. So I go there…”

“Wait a second. I need a beer for this.” Alex and I had worked together for 3 years out of the Attorney General’s Office, doing tech consulting for an anti-spam task force. Alex was one of the best systems designers I knew, parlaying hacker-honed skills into the legit and the lucrative. But the thankless and poorly- paid search for spammers had become his holy grail. I thought I’d seen him at his most weirdly obsessive, but this was different. I popped two beers and handed him one, but he just put it on the table and kept pacing.

“You’re saying there’s a person named Gnostic Baptiste?”

He stopped and his eyes got too bright. “A…’person’?”

He finally fell onto the couch and rubbed his hands through his hair.

“…I find the place. An abandoned warehouse by the yards. Not a computer in sight. No phones. No jacks. No Wi-Fi. Nothing. Zip. Except this fat kid in a swivel chair. When I get close he stands up and says, ‘I am Gnostic Baptiste. Spread the word.”

I reached out to pat him on the arm. He shrank back. “Don’t touch me! I’m infected!”

“Infected?”

He sprang off the couch and bent over, clutching his crotch. “Here. Look.” He booted his computer and tapped the keys. “You see?” The screen showed a word document. Alex was typing out a solid block of spam:

BIGGER AND THICKER WITH GNOSTIC BAPTISTE!

GIGANTIC ORGAN COCK FROM GNOSTIC BAPTISTE!

BOOST HER WET HAPPY WITH VIAGRA PENIS PATCH

FOR ULTRA HARD PENILE SEXUAL WITH 100 MG

X 10 PILLS PRICE CHEAPER MASSIVE COCK WITH

75% OFF ROLEX, MORADO GUCCI VACHERON

WATCHES WITH EXTRA LONG COCK FOR HER

PLEASURE FROM MR. GNOSTIC BAPTISTE!

“I don’t get it.”

“Shit, Rob! Look at the keys I’m hitting!” He slowed down so I could see:

t-h-e q-u-i-c-k b-r-o-w-n f-o-x j-u-m-p-e-d o-v-e-r t-h-e

“Wow. Something with the keyboard?”

“It’s not the keys!” He went to my desktop. The same thing happened. We tried the four other computers in my apartment.

They only showed spam.

“Effing weird. We’ll run diagnostics. Entangled zombie shit. “

He grabbed between his legs and crawled into a corner, rocking and whispering to himself. I went to him but he waved me away and staggered back to his feet, bent over and clutching his crotch again. “Gotta’ show you.” He undid his belt and pulled down his jeans and tattered underwear. A hot, yeasty smell filled the room. His penis heaved out of his pants, drooping low from his pubic hair to coil around his leg all the way to his ankle. Even limp it was thick and solid enough to hold a dozen or more silver wristwatches along its impossible length. We both stared, breathless, as it unwound and thudded to the floor. Despite the weight of the watches, it reared up five feet into the air and stayed there, swaying. The glans was round and fat as a grapefruit, like an orchid starved for heat. Alex finally looked at me and I could see the same thought behind his eyes: and he’s not even hard. He went rigid reciting a spam rant in whispers.

“’…massive cock growth for ultra-hard and thick penile enlargement with 75% off all Rolex, Gucci, Vacheron Viagra watches from Mr. Gnostic Baptiste…”

“Alex…!”

“You understand now, Rob? I’m the tangled zombie. I’m fucking spam.” He hefted his cock in both hands and swung it against his leg. After cursing through several floppy misses the weighted organ wrapped itself tightly back around his thigh and down to his shoe. He tugged his jeans up over the pulsing coil and limped to the door.

“Where are you going?”

“I gotta’ find him.”

“Wait.”

“Don’t touch me, Rob! You’ll spend every cent you’ve got on shit watches or Viagra or West African gold ingots or horny Russian mail-order brides or pictures of teen girls having sex with horses or…”

I blocked the door. “You bought the Ultra Viagra, or some shit, and took it?”

As if in answer his penis pressed, then strained against the side of his jeans. “So, what if I did? It was that or be sucked in. I told you—I’m fucking spam! You have no conception of what it feels like! To actually fuck spam! “

His erection was so stiff now that Alex could no longer bend his leg. The denim swelled. The seams popped in low, hectoring snicks. The glans wiggled and squeezed out the bottom of his jeans, white and loamy as dough. The material gave way with a shrieking rent, and his penis sprang across the room. I felt like I’d been hit by a bus. When I came to the door was on one hinge and Alex was gone.

Who, or what, was Gnostic Baptiste? I never saw any trace of him, or of Alex, either. But I know that the moment I get back online again they’ll both be there, selling watches, Nigerian gold ingots, low cost Viagra or Russian teen brides. And waiting for me. And whatever it was that Alex was powerless to resist – the promise of sex beyond any sex he’d ever known, the fucking of spam incarnate with a penis of freaks – will be popping up or dancing across or seeping into every move I make online. The only sanctuary is in silence, and cunning; an electronic chastity that will leave me alone under GPS dumb stars. Now when I walk through L.A.N. parties and Wi-Fi fields I can almost feel a tingling along the back of my hands and up and down my spine. And sometimes it even makes me hard.

LEPIDOPTERA by Shelby Colburn

May 15, 2019

She told me she caught a moth in her throat. We sat in a roadhouse munching on fried pickles as snow fell past the window. She reached into her mouth with a finger and pulled her right cheek to the side like a hooked fish. I leaned closer to her face and peered down her mouth. There it was, a grey moth lodged in the opening of her throat. Its small wings fluttered behind her uvula and tonsils. She popped her finger away, closing the opening to the moth’s new home.

“It chose me,” Priv said as she attempted to clear her throat, “I felt it one day and there it was.”

She took her hand from under mine and picked up her glass of seltzer. She sipped a few gulps while I watched as the condensation formed moisture against the edges of her chipping maroon nail polish.

“I feel it against my neck if I press hard enough,” she said, “And it won’t tell me why it chose me,” Priv put down her drink and folded her arms against her chest, “It speaks to me. Tells me what it wants.”

I popped a pickle in my mouth letting the juice trail down my chin. Priv sucked a glob of ranch off her fingers. I wondered if the moth would spit the dressing down into the cavern of saliva and mucus. What if Priv displeased it—would it stretch out and choke the air from her trachea? My sadness formed a lump in my own throat.

Priv smiled and swallowed another pickle.

***

When the last traces of snow melted into the earth, I saw the effects of the insect spooning itself against Priv’s pharynx.

I was reading a book when I looked over and saw Priv staring at her lamp.

“The lights are magnificent,” she told me, “They look like life and death.”

I asked her what that meant, but she reached up and lifted the shade from the LED.

“I see pixels and swirls of purples and pinks. Oranges are mating with yellows to create greens. There is black behind every surface mixed with scarlet.”

I reached over and turned off the light. Priv blinked her eyes and turned her head back to me. Her pupils were dilated enough to leave no white.

“Return them to me,” she said.

I pulled the string down, and she reached her hand towards the burning bulb.

***

When I saw her the next day, Priv was sitting on a stool slumped over her kitchen island. Bags hung below her eyes and the paint from her nails had been chewed off.

She was whispering and placing her index finger in her mouth. I watched as she chewed the tip of the nail with small nibbles. “Your fur scratches my throat,” she said quietly while tipping her head back. She hocked, but smiled as she rested her chin against the grain of the island.

I leaned down beside her and tilted my head to meet her blank gaze. She turned her neck slightly towards me, her pupils still large in her eyes. I asked her if she wanted to try and get rid of it. She chomped down hard on her nail and tore a crescent from her finger. With a gulp she sent it back to her throat.

“Why?” she said, “Jealous?”

A glint of spit dripped from her bottom lip.

***

When bulbs began to bloom, I watched as bandages replaced her fingers. Priv munched her nails down to the lunula. Her shirts and sweaters grew damp with drool while she sucked and nibbled at the edges of her sleeves.

“I don’t want to do that,” she whispered to herself one day, taking her sleeve away from her mouth. I stood back from her and she began laughing, “I don’t want to drink the flowers.”

I asked her what that meant, but Priv told me not to worry about it. “Moth things,” she said while sticking her sweater over her tongue.

I tried taking the sleeve out of Priv’s mouth, but she pushed me away.

I didn’t want to smother her, so I let her be.

***

Two days later I found Priv examining her garden, her hands digging into the dirt to tear up her credenzas’ roots. I watched as she plucked the flowers from her garden and tilted the head of the plant to her lips, her tongue soaking up the morning dew that rested on the surface of the florets. She crushed the flower in her hands, looking up at me with a yellow-green moustache; her smirk tainted with a clear syrup falling down her chin.

***

In mid spring, when her garden was strewn with the corpses of tulips, hydrangeas, and camellias; Priv began to tear and gnaw her clothing. She plucked with her teeth the cotton and polyester blends that scooped around her neck. Lint caught between her incisors, so she flossed with loose strings from the leftovers of her rags.

“I can’t eat anything else,” she said, her eyes circled with faint black rims, “Nectar and lint…”

She walked over to her sink and ripped the curtains hanging over the window above. She tore at the sewn chickens and apples, ripping the cloth into samples that she could plop into her mouth. She swallowed and I could hear a buzzing form in her throat.

“I always hated mom’s curtains,” she said chewing. She clicked her tongue in her mouth, her eyes beginning to squint with thought. “I wonder what sweat tastes like?” she said turning to me, her teeth holding a brown Welcome sign in the gaps of her gums.

***

When the humidity of July drenched our bodies with salt, Priv began to lick her arms and hands, wiping the drops of moisture from her forehead. When she tried to lick me, I pushed her back, telling the moth to stop it.

“It’s not the moth anymore,” she said, her voice wild. She climbed up her stairs and left me alone by the entrance of her porch. The light hanging over her door frame had scratch marks.

***

That night I sat in my bed and felt the fan blowing warm summer air on my body. I was unable to fall asleep as the muggy heat held me down on my sheets.

As I scrolled through my feeds, Priv’s face popped up in front of me. I answered her call.

“I need more,” she said, her voice sounding desperate and dry.

I buried my face in my pillow, my sweat seeping into the synthetic fibers.

“Can’t you do anything for me?” she said, her voice booming in my room.

I didn’t answer her.

“You never cared.” She hung up.

***

“I need more,” a voice said coming from my window. I opened my eyes and twisted my head from my pillow. I saw Priv’s blue glare gleam as a car passed on the street below. My window fan lulled beside her.

As I wiped dried tears from the corners of my eyes, I heard Priv whispering to herself:

“I need something I haven’t tasted before.”

She opened her mouth, releasing a red string. It floated above her head in the current from the fan.

She inched closer to me, eyeing the sweat that was forming under my hairline. She lunged at me, pinning me down against the fabric of my sheets. Before I could scramble away, she locked my arms down with her knees and opened her mouth.

“Just a bite,” she said while licking the side of my face, her breath smelling of nectar and Nike. I tried struggling beneath her, but she engulfed me. All I felt was the strange sensation of wings batting against my consumed skin.

***

When I came to, green scales clutched the caves and crooks of my epidermis, and I was struggling to breathe in a suspended world of metamorphosis. I could hear Priv’s voice shake the cavern around me: Just pretend to like it.

I looked down at my body and saw that my limbs were forming branches of black with spikes of hair. How long have I been down here? I thought, disbelief running through my mind. I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t alive. What was I?

My eyesight was beginning to merge into millions of diamonds, and I felt my head sprout two antennae. My blonde hair fell from my scalp into the abyss below, followed by crumbs of tonsil stone. I brought my fingers to my disillusioned eyes and saw my red blood had turned yellow.

I looked around. I was twisted and snarled within a golden-brown cocoon just dangling below the rounded hood of Priv’s uvula.

I’m not ready to swallow you, her voice echoed around me. She laughed, swinging my cocoon back and forth. You tasted so good. I had to save you for later.

***

My fingers were beginning to form as one when I heard a voice in my ear begin to speak to me.

It’s almost over, it whispered. It didn’t come from Priv’s throat—the sound was too clear against the ringing of my ears. But the soft cadence of the voice died against the shuffling and scratching my cocoon made. As I searched for the sound, I found my diamond eyes locate the red reflection of gems hiding behind the scars of forgotten wisdom teeth.

She doesn’t like to swallow, it said raising its voice, She wants to absorb us. The moth’s proboscis did not move with the words that formed in my head—we were connected by the tissue that held us above Priv’s throat.

What can I give her?

Everything I couldn’t.

***

You think changing will help her? Priv’s throat said undulating. It didn’t help you.

The moth crawled into the red glow that shown from Priv’s cheeks, the outside world just out of reach behind flesh and veins. The moth’s white fur clashed with large red eyes, its hair coaxed in bits of lint and sap. Its left side was torn with bite marks forming over ripped trunks of leftover legs and torn aileron. Yellow blood splashed up against the thorax.

She tried eating me but she liked the taste too much.

Priv laughed again.

The moth climbed over my cocoon and began nibbling the seams that kept me suspended.

Make the decision, its voice called to me as its front leg stepped on my ridged home.

My surroundings vibrated with my every shake.

I didn’t want to leave her. It said while snipping away at the branches that held me up above the gaping esophagus. Even when I turned, she didn’t release me.

The green scales of the cocoon tightened their grip on me with every utterance. They snarled at me and dug into my furry skin.

Do what I should have done.

Priv’s jaw began to move, clipping the moth against her back molar with a large clush. Her throat motioned in repeating rows that drew back pieces of the moth.

I’m done with you, Priv said.

With one last slash, the moth tore open my cocoon and looked at me with its red eyes. It opened its mouth and screamed at me.

Priv’s mouth opened and a bright light filtered in past her gums. As her tongue bashed the moth down into her body below, I leapt forward. Two orange and black wings opened from my shoulder blades.

I flapped out of Priv’s mouth. She chomped at me with a lunge, but I soared out the gap between my fan and window. Her ethereal cries echoed below me.

TO CUT A WIDE SWATH by Therese White

May 14, 2019

I smell ammonia. Old people. We visit Great Aunt Alma for no reason. It’s Sunday, reason enough. Her room: a single cell, a single window. The bed backs into a corner. Her white bedspread, a canvas. Little blocks, cut from her underwear, lay stacked: pastel patches. Her arthritic finger points to them. Her mouth opens; no words exit. Tan knee-highs choke her calves. Her strap slips off her shoulder. Her feet are firmly planted in sturdy, black loafers.

My grandparents are not surprised; they are blasé.

I stand mute, wondering what language Alma is forgetting: French or English. My plain face stares kindly, as I remember a recent verb conjugation in Madame Lessard’s class: couper...tu coupes...she cuts.

My grandmother wrests away Alma’s scissors. Arms outstretched, Alma breathes in quickly, cups my 14-year-old face, whispering, “Magnifique,” and I blink.

THE HEART OF MORALITY by Austin Ross

May 13, 2019

Daddy’s monster is back. That slightly musky scent of sawgrass wafts in across the Everglades as he slides a single bullet into the revolver. This is what I remember, all these years later. This incident with the revolver is familiar to me, a nightly ritual to cap off our evenings of foil-wrapped TV dinners and, for him, nearly a third of a bottle of whiskey. I have learned by now to keep silent during the ritual.

As he examines the revolver in his hands, polishes the silver of the barrel with his sleeve, I think: he isn’t such a bad Daddy. His monster is one that only I can see. He still takes me for bike rides, sometimes, through St. Mary’s Park after school, still holds my hand as we sit in the church pew in our Sunday best. The monster inside him has slowly eaten away at what makes him Daddy. It reminds me of the alligators that I can occasionally hear through my bedroom window during the long summer nights. I can forgive Daddy for what he’s become, I think—if only because it is sadness, and not anger, that made him this way.

Tonight feels different to me, though. We are both sweaty from the oppressive Everglade heat. He has stripped to a pair of pants and an undershirt. I am still in my dress, my feet hot from wearing the shoes and socks of my school uniform. My legs dangle from the chair. I wish I was taller, older. Daddy looks at me and sips from the whiskey bottle. He spins the chamber of the revolver, clicks it shut, presses the tip of the barrel to his temple. He looks me in the eye, smiles sadly, and pulls the trigger. Click. No bullet this time. My heart is beating so fast I think it might burst, but I don’t cry. Crying makes it worse.

This is our ritual—Daddy will now press the tip of the barrel to my head, pull the trigger, and afterwards we will watch I Love Lucy, neither of us speaking in the quiet, desperate aftermath. Which of us did he want to die more? The girl with her mother’s eyes, or the widowed father? I don’t know.

Daddy slowly exhales, and I am brought back to this moment, now. Tonight is different: he slides the revolver across the table, removes his hand slowly. He looks at me, his eyes curious, like a wild animal’s, as though to ask: what are you going to do?

“Go ahead,” he says. The sound is deafening in the silence. “Pick it up.”

The revolver gleams on the kitchen table. I stare at it, my heart beating faster with each second.

“This is the heart of morality,” Daddy says, tapping the kitchen table with his finger. “A loaded gun.”

I look Daddy in the eye, carefully examine him. His face is expressionless as he watches me carefully, and I wonder: if I pick it up, will it make things worse?

I sense Daddy’s monster behind his eyes. It had come to live with us after Momma died—slumped over the kitchen table one day, her own monster—bowel cancer—having devoured her quickly and unexpectedly. Over the years, Daddy had learned to chain the monster up. When others saw him, it was manageable and tame. But I know it’s neither of those things. It will destroy him if he lets it.

I pick up the revolver, feel the weight of it in my hands, the authority it brings. I open the chamber, see the single bullet resting inside. Tears are streaming down my cheeks. I can sense Daddy’s immense sorrow. As the tears well and my vision blurs, Daddy shimmers and splits into two.

“Do it,” they both say as the monster grows. The lights above us flicker as their black tendrils stretch across the table towards me.

I slide the chamber closed again and pick one of the Daddy’s, squeeze the trigger, and in the explosion of sound, something leaves the room, some massive presence, and I wipe my eyes clear and see Daddy crouched on the floor, crying but unharmed, and I run to him, apologizing, but all he does is say I’m sorry over and over and over as he hugs me tightly. In the distance, I can just hear the rumbling growl of an alligator, or perhaps a monster, retreating to the swamps.

SOMETHING WRONG WITH MY LIFE by Meeah Williams

April 26, 2019

I could sense it coming like a mule senses thunder.I had his cock in my mouth and I was trying to keep my neck from being too traumatized when he bucked his hips in short hard thrusts. It was like being a passenger in a car whose driver proceeded down the street by slamming on the brakes every three seconds. I'm getting whiplash just thinking about it. I watched people on the sidewalk stop, stare, and the expressions on their faces said "What the hell is that all about?"I leaned out the window and threw confetti at the parade-goers lining the pavement, smiling like a prom queen, my teeth gnashing together. What I mean is that I smiled like a porn star, a cock thrust balls-deep in my ass."It's okay, ok-k-k-k-kkay," I cry, throwing more confetti, which is actually colored rice, crying, my mascara running, thinking "isn't this over yet?"Thinking, when the birds swallow this rice it's gonna bloat up in their little bellies and they'll explode and die. This bed is like a raft in the middle of the ocean and I'm looking for an island, a tanker, a helicopter, anything to wave my arms at. You're in the helicopter, hovering, but all you're doing is watching. Yes, I'm talking to YOU, the watcher, the reader, whoever. YOU!When you cum--or get bored--you hit the off button. It's even worse when you hit "pause," and there I am, eyes shut, mouth black-ovaled, looking like I'm in pain, the thick shiny thing half in and half out of me, almost human-looking, human plumbing, clogged, and I'm waiting, waiting waiting either for the thrust or the withdrawal and getting neither. Just that clogged plumbing with no flow..."Fuck you!" we both shout, you and I. No, I'm not going through all that again. We're going mad with thirst anyway. It can't be long now. I'm going to test my luck in the choppy water, whatever that means. I'm going to commit myself to the waves.Hello Ocean!"Certain death," he ventures a guess. But he's already commandeered the machete, don't think I don't know it. He's figuring he'll clobber me on the head, cut open some part of me, drink my blood. He's bearded now, maniacal, looking like a two-legged Ahab."Thar she blows," he says and with his pirate telescope points up to the sky which looks like the aftermath of a flash photograph--a flash photograph of nothing—or everything.I slip into the water, where the sharks are slouching about in their leather jackets, cigarettes dangling from their louche lips, posing with self-conscious nonchalance in a way they're well aware shows off their new tattoos to best advantage.Oh the sharks aren't as bad as reported. Fake news, you see. I meet one with a Brooklyn accent and a history of trumped-up mayhem. But he's ready to turn a new clam shell, so he says. I can be a trusting soul, when I'm desperate enough. I jump on the back of his jet-ski and wheeeeeee...We're bouncing over the waves now. My hair flowing out behind me like a banner that says "Welcome home, Johnny!" There's a desert island with your name on it somewhere. But it's not on any map and you have to put your name on it yourself."Who's Johnny?" I yell into the shark's non-existent ear. He doesn't answer. His body is thick, smooth, one big chunk of remorseless muscle built by a lifetime of endless swimming and fed by murdered mermaids. He smells like Brut, not fishy at all. He's got about 300 teeth in that mouth of his. Sure they can reduce me to a bloody hash within seconds. But, wow, when he's in the mood, you should see him smile.

LET ME SHOW YOU WHERE YOU’LL BE SITTING by Jeffrey Yamaguchi

April 25, 2019

We walk through a corridor, then down a flight of steps. Elevator doors open to receive us as if they had been waiting. We get in and my guide, a woman in perfect business attire, pushes the only button. The doors close. There is no sound. I can’t tell if we are moving up or down, and then I realize I can’t tell if we are moving at all. Suddenly there is a slight lift, and then feathery fall, of the woman’s hair above her eyes, which are staring right through me.

*****

There is a painting on the wall. Two large swaths of dark storm cloudiness on a moonless night, surrounded by a multitude of colors – the blue of the bluest sky, the red of a lollipop savored with impossible patience, the purple of a bruise that came by way of invitation. I stopped noticing the painting until someone new began work in our area. She mentioned the richness of the pools of darkness – unnerving, but also inviting. I looked at the painting again and saw not two streaks of starless black surrounded by colors, but now, just countless blotches of a deep and unforgiving darkness. Was I misremembering? Or was someone fucking with me?

I turned away and made a point of not looking at the painting ever again. So I saw it every day, countless times. The darkness continued to grow.

*****

The phone rings. I answer it immediately. I want to show how present I am, how assertive I am about getting things done. I say hello and hear a familiar old man’s voice on the other side of the line.

“Is Mr. Neal available?”

I explain that he no longer works here and hasn’t for some time, as I have done many times before.

“But that’s impossible. I just spoke to him yesterday. It is imperative that I speak to him at once.”

I know how this conversation will continue. So I tell the old man that I will deliver his message to Mr. Neal as soon as possible.

“Thank you, sir. I look forward to hearing from him shortly. Please do tell him it is urgent.” I hang up. A few minutes later, the phone rings. I answer it immediately.

*****

Everyone else has left. The echoes of a vacuum from the other side of the office fill the air. I look outside at all those empty offices in the looming tombstone landscape. Just a few lights on in a scattering of windows here and there. One by one, as I continue to reach beyond my own reflection into the swamp dark murkiness of night, the lights go out. Eventually, I am holding my gaze on the very last light which is rising and falling, as if it is lost at sea, not because it is moving, but because my breathing has become more labored and anxious. With absolutely no fanfare whatsoever, the last light is extinguished.

LIES ABOUT THE WORST WAY TO DIE by Dawson Kiser

April 24, 2019

There are a lot of shitty ways to die. A quick Google search of the worst ways to die will lead you down a not so wonderful rabbit hole of people drowning, burning, being eaten by animals, even falling in volcanoes. Not that I’m an expert on dying, but I’m walking into the hospital right now for my third year of chemotherapy and I’d argue this must be on the top 10 shittiest ways to die. Burning? That sounds horrific but from my limited research I found out you black out within 20 to 30 seconds. Your worst 30 seconds alive. This has been my worst 3 years alive. Slowly being eaten away by the ravenous monster inside my single lung. My left lung was cut out during my first year. Empty promises of a quick fix. “The tumor is only in your left lung,” they said. “We think you’re in remission,” they said. That month spent in remission ended with me face down in the busy Chicago intersection. Blood flowing from my nose and mouth. Shit and piss down my leg. A crowd of people. Some taking pictures with their phones. Others rushing to my aid but hesitating when their noses reached the stench. Took a half an hour for the ambulance to come. Now they say, “there’s cancerous cell growth around your right lung.” As if they have to specify which lung it is.

The other cancer patients look at me with dreadful eyes. One young woman, who is still very much pretty, is looking at me wondering, “will I look like that in a few years?” Sorry, you probably will. You will probably throw up, shit, and piss more than you thought was humanly possible. You will have no appetite and will shrivel up more with each day that passes, leaving you looking like a stray dog living in a dumpster in a back alley. In your worst moments, you will compare yourself to Jesus Christ as you sweat blood down your jagged face. I pass her and say, “you’ll be alright.” and use all my strength to give her an encouraging smile and a pat on her (soon to be bony) back.

I’m running a little late so most of the good beds and chairs have been taken. I sit down in an old wooden chair with a penny thin cushion that allows the hard seat to grate on my fucked tailbone. The same nurse as always goes around and draws the curtains. This way you can’t see the other poor bastards turn into zombies. Not that this does much. The noises people make can be just as bad as seeing them turn into the living dead. The first year I tried to sleep through the “therapy” but the visceral nightmarish imagery that flooded my dreams made it unbearable. Now I bring a stack of mindless magazines to read. I tried novels but I’d get bored too easily.

I have managed to get comfortable with the needles and tubes in me. At first, you feel like the patient in the game Operation. It’s been about an hour. Family members of patients are starting to visit now. The support by family and friends in the early stages make you feel like you’re a celebrity. Your brother’s daughter’s girl scout troop sells cookies to raise money for your surgeries. Your mom’s church holds a healing service. Your best friend from high school that you haven’t talked to in years, except for the occasional Facebook message, stops by your house with a casserole and hallmark card. Your siblings and parents come to every chemo session. You get used to their company. But after a year or so the hype around your death begins to fade and less people visit. I haven’t had a visitation in a full year. Not that I care. I can’t even speak during the sessions anymore.

A few curtain rows down I hear sobbing. A young voice. A kid voice. A little girl whimpers, “mommy it hurts,” again and again. Her mother’s voice can be heard trying to comfort her dying daughter. “I know baby, I know. The medicine will help baby,” she says. That’s what we all hope. In my three years of chemo I’ve never shared a session with a kid. I’m focusing on my magazine trying to distract myself from the poor child. Brad Pitt in trouble again. The new Marvel movie broke another box office record. Nameless actress had a nip slip on the red carpet. These are the things that occupy your mind in these circumstances. Mindless pop culture magazines spreading gossip like you’re back in high school. Don’t pretend you don’t like it. You live for it.

My reading is interrupted by the sound of the little girl screaming. I hear the man closest to me ask a nurse for earplugs. I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t want a pair as well. You’d want them too.

“Mommy I can’t,” she screams. “Yes, you can Claire,” her mother says with a trembling voice. She has a name. Claire. I feel the devil in my chest clawing at my heart. A name solidifies. It completes. It makes someone’s suffering tangible. A little girl isn’t dying of cancer. A little girl named Claire is dying of cancer.

I unplug all the needles and tubes inside of me. The monitor begins beeping in a fast-steady gallop. The nurse rushes to my assistance. “What are you doing? Where are you going? Are you alright?” she says. I extend my skinny-ass legs until they reach the floor. Using the chair as support I push myself up. I head down the room ignoring the nurse’s plea to sit back down. I shuffle my feet like a toddler learning to walk. All 70 pounds of me walking past all the other patients towards the sound of Claire’s cries. I turn to face her laying in her uncomfortable piss-soaked hospital bed. Her mother stands surprised to see anyone who isn’t the nurse. I fall to my knees next to Claire’s bed. I reach out both of my hands. One towards Claire and one towards her mother. Claire takes my hand and her mother hesitates a little before doing the same. “You’ve got this Claire,” I say, “you’re gonna kick cancers ass.”

I know the pain won’t stop but Claire’s cries and screams did. Another hour has passed and I’m still kneeling next to her bedside with her mother and their hands in mine. The only thing to be heard is the rhythmic beep of her monitor.

She’s asleep now. Her face soft and smooth. Soon she will be frail. Her skin will drape over her twig-like bones and her muscles will shrink. Her half circle eyes will take up most of her face and the skin around them will begin to darken. Her hair will be gone, and she will cover it up with a Mickey Mouse bandanna. She’ll want to throw punches at God, but her hands will be too weak to be made into fists. But for now, I’ll sit here in silence and comfort both her and her mother. There’s a lot of shitty ways to die but I’ll lie and tell them that cancer isn’t one of them.