Flash

STATIONS OF THE CROSS AS PERFORMED BY A 6TH GRADE CATHOLIC EDUCATION GROUP FOR A SMALL CONGREGATION ON THE THURSDAY BEFORE EASTER by Michael Harper

Jesus is condemned to deathMark is desperate to be crucified. He’s been acting especially pious this week. Smacking his cheeks to make them look ruddy and hallow. Doing push-ups before rehearsal. Crafting his body into a canvas for suffering. The other boys and Julie volunteered to be Roman soldiers. Cardboard swords clash dully. I should have tried out for Pilate. One scene then done. But my reputation isn’t good enough to condemn Jesus to death. I miss months of masses in a row. Crucify Him! rings out from the class. The trial seems rigged. I feel for Jesus even if Mark’s a giant prick. Jesus takes up his CrossThe soldiers get into it. They’re allowed to jostle and there is a moment when their roughhousing feels like it will overflow. Spill into actual violence. An overt shove. A tug on Mark’s thin toga. A rambunctious smack across his defenseless skin. The acting feels dangerous. A mask slipping to reveal a jagged scar. The congregation holds its collective breath. Most eyes get lost in the stained-glass kaleidoscopes that twist the morning light into prisms of color. It’s like the awkward reports on the nightly news. Global warming. Meth/opioid epidemic. We pray it will pass. Survive till the football scores. Jesus falls the first timeGolden chalices catch the light. The girls’ primary-colored cloaks flutter behind Mark’s staggers. They wail like raucous ghosts. Sometimes snorting into laughter.  Mark’s really dragging this out. Juicing his time in the spotlight. He falls. The sound booms in the quiet church. Ricocheting off the vaulted ceiling. I jump in my seat. The sound of violence feels dangerous in a place I’m only allowed to stand, sit, and kneel in. Where control is strictly enforced. Mark stays down. The soldiers push him. Tug at his arms. Red beads of wax slide down the eternal candle. The crucifix hovers. Watching. Waiting.Jesus meets his MotherCough. Cough. Stifled laugh. The crowd shifts in their seats as Vikki’s hand lingers on Mark’s face and then slide down the length of his partially exposed chest. The leader announces the station. The crowd responds: Have Mercy On Us! The words fill the nearly empty church. The chorus spreads like a flood through my upper body. Vikki and Mark don’t break eye contact. The public suffering activates something. The being watched by the audience makes their bodies tingle with desire. The leader pushes the narrative forward. Breaks the young lovers apart. We try to remember this is very serious.  Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus carry the crossThe procession approaches me. I’m pulled from the wooden pew and forced at cardboard sword point to pick up the back end of the cross. Its Styrofoam. Weighs less than the air. It’s more like a texture in my hands than a burden. In rehearsal I felt like a reluctant ally. An unlikely side hero in this story. But in front of the crowd, I turn into an accomplice. Another force pushing Jesus toward his inevitable ending. I strain my face. Flex my arms and shoulders into a garish struggle. Showing the crowd this is no picnic for me too. Veronica wipes the face of JesusRosita dabs at Mark’s face with a Dollar General wet wipe. Vikki stares daggers at her as she moistens his skin. Her touch is so tender. Light and humane. I don’t understand how someone could feel jealousy toward it. I forget my role. Find myself in a dream where hands as gentle as these press into me. Make the tiny electric sparkles under my skin flare and then settle. Feel my pores. I sense the tautness of my skin and how the pathways in my body connect like a waterway. HAVE MERCY ON US! Sucks me back into my performance. Jesus falls for the second timeMark really sells the fall. Spreading himself across the red carpet. Pulsating agony. I try not to look directly at him. The altar sneaks up on the procession. A green and gold cloth hangs off its skeletal frame. The site of the encroaching crucifixion. It’s like a tractor beam. What if we all just stopped? I could drop this cross. Walk out of the church. The soldiers could cast down their fake swords. Mark could put on a shirt. The crowd could go home. Why didn’t Jesus run? Is it a son’s responsibility to sacrifice his body for his family?  Jesus meets the women of JerusalemWails, wailing, wailed. The warble rises and falls. A flutter of reds, blues, yellows and greens heave with inconsequential grief. All we own is our pain. It is ours to cart around. To mold into a story of self-suffering. Mark draws a cross in the air before the girls and the hunger of their suffering intensifies. It’s unclear if he is blessing or forgiving them. If we are freed from our suffering would there be anything left? Life might become boring quick. Purpose is easier to create and easier to achieve when we’re pushing a boulder up a petrified hill. Jesus falls for the third timeWe get it. Mark’s suffering. His body heaves on the ground. His ribs push through his skin. I’m unsure of what to do with my hands. The faster he gets to his feet the faster the suffering continues. Stay down. I’m a shadow of this fallen figure. No longer a person but an outline of a body on the floor. An idea which I can fill my own body with. Should I have been Jesus? Instead of floating behind him, unsure of what to do. I could fill my soul with divine guidance. Let a higher purpose guide my life. Jesus is stripped of his garmentsMark’s skin looks translucent under the altar’s bright lights. His arms are slender. Veins run blue down his forearms. A complex root system spreading in the shallows of his body. It’s difficult imagining his body as temporary. As something separate from his eternal being. Flesh and bone and blood is the centerpiece of our sacrifice. The physicality, the realness of him makes the backs of my legs tingle. A horror spasm slithers down my legs. I shift my weight between feet. Time feels urgent. My skin becomes aware of a taught string stretching from this moment to a wooden coffin.       Jesus is nailed to the CrossThe soldiers’ faces hang heavy with purpose. Their movements precise. Mark is stretched open. His body splayed wide for the audience. The splotchy homemade cross is pitiful under the looming crucifix above him. His acting quaint next to Jesus’ carved suffering. A soldier holds his hammer and spike above Mark’s wrist, checks the lectern, and swings. A hollow ping rings from the sound system. I choke on my breath. The soldier moves to the other wrist. The next ping slips inside my body and ricochets around. He kneels with his tools. I close my eyes. Waiting for the final strike. Jesus dies on the crossDuring rehearsal we held ice cubes in our hands to simulate Jesus’ pain. I didn’t feel it then. The cold felt funny. The wet was simply wiped away. Watching Mark on the cross, I feel the sting of the ice in my palms. He’s stoic. Only wears the pain in his furrowed expression. His chest heaves. The final breaths become deeper, more exaggerated. And then silence. Or very shallow, near silence. Tiny signs of life escape him. A small sip of oxygen. A slight quiver through his finger. The church goes quiet. Holds its breath in solidarity. Prays in thanks. Jesus is taken down from the crossA limp body doesn’t cooperate. Feels like moving a mattress. Except its Mark. I remind myself that he’s still alive. We cover him with a white sheet. He becomes an outline under the thin layer of cloth. The shape of his body a ghostly terrain which dips and curves like a gentle mountain range. I imagine it’s a relief to no longer be looked at. I stare at the still form. The end of the pain. Relief spreads slowly from my fingers. Pushes up my arms like a tremble. Thank god it’s over. But now what? Where do we go?Jesus is laid in the tombApparently, we go to the basement. They just announced there’s Jell-O salad and Maid Rites. Mark doesn’t move. Everyone starts for the stairs. We walk past his body, quiet as a shiver. I pack away the performance inside myself. Breathe easier now it is over. No embarrassments. No impression at all. After eating I go upstairs. The sheet is empty. The lights are dark. Jesus stares down at me hard. I put the sheet over my head. A kid on Halloween. Breath deep into the fabric. Feel the memory of ice in my palms. Taste the air leaving my lungs.  
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FRACTURED by Lana Frankle

The existence of a Neural Correlate of Consciousness that persists after the administration of anesthesia is such anathema to the established position taken by physicians of the modern age that publication of any supporting data has been effectively relegated to the annals of pseudoscience. This is despite the clear and alarming implications of not one but several studies attempting to chronicle the experience of the Fugue. As a man of science I at first balked, predictably: if overwhelming and conclusive evidence is rejected by the likes of Nature and Science than I as an individual bear no responsibility for its dissemination. However, I have since been prevailed upon: the public is not directly responsible for the systemic biases inherent in the academic standards that deceive them. If they are indeed active participants at all, it is indirectly. If their eyes have been blinded, and indeed even if it is through their own actions and mechanisms, it is not through any fault of their own. The public may be an agent in the dynamic, but assumptions have been made on the collective level that on the individual level are unwarranted: you, dear reader, may have done nothing wrong and still be subject to implications of the decisions of your peers. Perhaps this is not the case at all, and you will read this publication with a laugh and a sneer.  But if, upon finding it here, you feel naught but surprise and betrayal, know that this is for you. That the anesthetics touted and trumpeted as groundbreaking medical technology, come at a cost that is well hidden, but that I, active in their development, am suited to deconstruct. One thing I would like to make clear from the outset is that I fully appreciate the massive societal-level benefits imparted by the development of modern anesthetics: hundreds of thousands of life-saving surgical procedures are performed daily worldwide, and this scale of medical intervention improving the lives of millions of people would simply not be possible without them.  It is no overstatement to say that our human ability to self-repair our own physiology has been instrumental in allowing us to control the tide of our own evolution as a species.  I am thus fully aware of the implications of my own research into the persistence of consciousness into the anesthetized state.  It is only because I have seen with my own eyes and proven with incontrovertible data the agonizing states induced and never recalled consciously in fully anesthetized surgical patients that I took up the obligation of raising social awareness for this most sensitive issue of public interest.  Given this knowledge, it is still not imminently clear which is the most optimal course for setting policy or making individual decisions regarding surgical procedures – the vast majority of which, including technically “elective” procedures, are done for sound and necessary medical reasons and cannot be forgone without drastic health consequences up to and including death.  Some fairly straightforward implications, however, include ones for surgery done for purely aesthetic reasons, as well as implications on health decisions underscoring the importance of maintaining physical health through lifestyle to pre-empt the need for eventual surgery altogether.  The more interesting and difficult cases are ones in which surgery has already been medically advised, but would involve inducing extreme pain in a phi network that will not be able to communicate this either during or after the experience, but would fail to provide ongoing active consent were they able.Ultimately, the NCC in question has no means of exercising their legal rights, bodily autonomy [sic], or freedom of choice, and no recourse to protect or represent their own interests.  While this matter warrants legal and not just clinical expertise and consultation, there does seem to be a precedent for the protection of conscious entities not reliant on their integrated personhood – Cleever vs. the state of California and Scober vs. the State of Indiana can be here referred to, albeit the relevance of a criminal punishment in cases of insanity or incompetence may supersede the relevance of any protections relevant due to Markovian or causal independence.   Because these NCCs have no way of prosecuting such a case, protections would need to be implemented on their behalf – as is already done in cases of abortion and life support of comatose or vegetative individuals.  It is my firm belief that this direction should be explored by libertarian and other relevant ideological organizations and think tanks, and I will gladly offer my guidance for them to do so should they request it. 
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THE VARIANT by Lana Frankle

In the months since The Visitation there have been ceaseless efforts by the Department of Defense, including within my own division at DARPA, to develop strategies to either obliterate and neutralize the foreign Entities, or (in my own research lab) to counteract or mitigate the seemingly inevitable effects they have on human observers. Thus far, efforts to kill or immobilize these foreign agents have been largely unsuccessful, and this is due mostly to the lack of techniques for localizing and targeting them in ways that circumvent the need for soldiers or others to perceive them. The use of infrared goggles to attack in darkness at night did not prevent the known psychotogenic effects and suicidality in any significant way, and efforts to secure video-surveillance triggered munitions and drones has likewise been unsuccessful due to the lack of known distinguishing features that can be used to identify the targets from other warm bodies such as humans. After the third accidental death, of a toddler, with no confirmed hits on the Beings, the program for automated gunfire and drones to wipe them out was put on hold until better identifiers, whether visual or other, can be found. Our own techniques are less risky, and while they would not eliminate the threats, they show real promise in limiting the severity of reactions to them, which in normal cases range from debilitating to cataclysmic. So far over 15% of the population has succumbed, most of whom die too soon to be assessed or treated, and many of whom kill others before they go. The few we have been able to bring in for consultation are generally useless as they have been reduced to incoherence and frenetic oscillation of their mood, goals, and speech. Others still retreat inwards, becoming near-motionless, affectless, and catatonic. Analysis of brain tissue of those affected post-mortem offered another potential avenue of research, however it proved difficult to draw meaningful conclusions about any neurological effects as the timescale between the initial exposure and death is usually on the order of hours to days, generally too short to allow for clear atrophy, gliosis or synaptogenesis. Our findings based on this approach were therefore inconclusive, although they did allow us to rule out gross tissue damage such as cerebral infarction, ischemia, edema, or encephalopathy - bearing witness to the Beings does not appear to cause stroke, fluid build-up, or tissue swelling. Fortunately there remains one final and quite promising research opportunity left to pursue: a very small subset of people, somewhere between 0.1% and 0.5%, appear to be largely immune to the ill effects that beset those who look upon the Beings. So far we have only been able to examine one such individual, a thirteen-year-old girl. Two others are rumored to be under study by labs in Atlanta (CDC containment facility) and an old university in Tokyo, however, these reports remain unconfirmed, as currently all televised news media has been cut off and radio reports are intermittent and have limited geographical range. Some of these limitations in media and communication are inadvertent inevitabilities, while others are necessary enforced precautions to limit the spread of images containing the Beings. Electronic communications of any kind, as well as access to electronic databases, are theoretically still accessible to high-level government and military officials, which includes myself, as well as persons with some other very limited essential roles. However, maintaining an internet connection has itself been intermittent due to outages, electric grid failure, the near-impossibility of any maintenance of the system, and general chaos. This means that while we were able to run tests for many genetic markers on our subject, we have so far been completely unable to compare the results to those of other individuals with similar immunity, and analysis of the sequenced regions without such comparators could not suggest a pattern, as absent any polymorphisms or normal inter-individual differences, her genome appeared unremarkable. We do suspect that other similar cases can be found locally, however the obvious limitations on communication and safe mobility make any form of coordination or selection of potential subjects untenable for the time being. We are, however, grateful for the opportunity that has been presented us, and so far we have diligently made use of every means at our disposal to uncover what biological, neurological, psychological and/or soteriological defense mechanisms are at work, and how they might be co-opted or replicated in the general population, or at least in the servicemen responsible for deploying lethal force to rid our society of the Beings. Our primary base in Arlington has been out of commission since two weeks after the Visitation, the satellite research facility in Virginia Beach has connection to generator-powered electricity and well water, as well as stable architectural foundations and a primary lab space that is several feet underground, all of which makes for ideal research conditions given the larger global circumstances. It is equipped with a physical reference database consisting of decades of published scientific research across multiple disciplines, as well as cable internet, although this connection has so far only worked briefly and on two occasions, the latter of which was unsuccessful in connecting with any other labs or military bases. As mentioned previously, the facility is also limited in terms of the diagnostic instrumentation and other medical research equipment on hand. One of the newer DARPA employees, Major Chambers, an army psychiatrist recruited just a week prior to the Visitation and with no combat zone experience whatsoever, has adamantly insisted since we acquired our test subject that he can perform vital and informative assessments on her neurological and psychological functioning using verbal and cognitive tests alone. While I remained skeptical, his initial interview with the subject was the first time I had heard her speak openly about her witness of the Beings, and I reluctantly acknowledged that our options are currently narrow and granted him full license for any non-invasive tests he might want to run, provided there was negligible physical risk. Several days ago he presented me with some of the subject’s color pencil drawings of the Entities, of which she claims to have seen three. The drawings are quite skilled for a child of her age with no artistic training, but still rudimentary compared to what might have been accomplished by, say, a police sketch artist. It is also of course an open question how much of the drawings’ poor detail was due to an amateur’s lack of skill, and how much was due to the impossibility of conveying an incomprehensible horror whose visual presentation itself may not be standardized between different perceivers. The first of her drawings features a rotund gray thing with six long, spidery legs bent about halfway up. It features a ring-like raised ridge around the middle of its corpus, like Saturn. Its top is dotted with several protruding bumps, also gray, but darker. It has no discernable face. She calls this one Calye, though she would not say if it told her that name or if she gave the name to it herself. The second also has spindly insect-like legs, but an elongated, brown corpus. The subject mentioned that the color she used was “not quite right” but that she couldn’t find “what the real one would be”. It was ambiguous whether she meant that the color spectrum of the Beings was outside the spectrum of electromagnetic wavelengths typically visible to the human eye or simply that the 32 ct. Crayola colored pencil set provided her was insufficient. The last of the Entities she drew was perhaps the most intriguing, as rather than possessing legs it appeared to hover midair, and the lighter imprint of the coloration (which was sky blue with a touch of green) made it cloud-like. However, when asked if it did hover, or fly, the subject merely furrowed her brow in that way that children do when posed with a tough riddle, and answered, “I mean, sort of.” This being was also interesting because it was the only one which appeared to possess a face, or at least, several rounded circles resembling a single large, compound eye. When asked if she knew whether it was an eye, or if it ever seemed to look at her, or blink, however, the subject replied in the negative. There appears to be no harm or risk from viewing the drawings themselves, which speaks to the non-transferability of supernatural visual perceptual experiences and the inevitable loss of information at various points along the pipeline of basic sensation, integrated perception, cognitive and emotional processing, and repackaging for communication purposes using either the verbal or visual medium. Additionally, the colored pencil set she was given contained two missing colors (aqua green and light orange), one (violet red) which was broken into two pieces, as well as several others that were quite dull. Artistic tools are not, remember, a category of equipment necessarily kept on hand in either a secret military base or a secret research facility. Psychosocial interview and debriefing by the scientist about the Beings as well as any relevant background of the subject previously mentioned also proved at least partly fruitful as they revealed the following: -encounters with the Beings was somewhat disturbing or at least puzzling -when she saw the first one she found herself staring involuntarily, as one might a trainwreck, despite some slight discomfort akin to, but not exactly like, staring at the brightness of the sun. She also acknowledged, of her own initiative, that at least part of her fascination with these creatures stemmed not from the direct effect their forms had on her psyche, but from her prior knowledge that what she was witnessing were sights that had drove many others, including her own father and brother, into madness (immediate suicide and attempted attack on her mother with a knife, leading to a bystander shooting him, respectively). These reactions also provide further evidence against the origin of this type of relative immunity having any genetic component, barring the possibility of a de novo mutation, which the limited chromosomal regions on which we performed genetic sequencing fail to fully rule out. Medical history revealed no major medical conditions, disabilities, past surgeries or injuries, and psychiatric assessment ruled out any serious mental health conditions or history of trauma (prior to the death of her father and witnessing the death of her brother, which given the current societal circumstances are not outside the norm). Her beliefs regarding the supernatural prior to the Visitation, as well as her thoughts about or speculations on (or even knowledge of) the Beings were also probed. While she had not previously been religious or very superstitious (occasionally mixing up “potions” with friends or pretending to be witches, which all sounded relatively normal for her age) she did seem to have atypical attitudes to the Beings, including speculation, despite the trauma and devastation that had directly and indirectly affected her, that they carried a certain message that it was important to decode. When asked for further details on what this message was, however, she merely shrugged and said she didn’t know. “I think a lot more people are going to die, and I don’t think there’s anything you can do about it either, even though I know you’re trying.” is what she is recorded as having said, to which Chambers doing the interview replied, “You’re right, we are trying.” and nothing more. Various visual and cognitive tests were also performed by Chambers. While her vision was normal at 20/20 and she did not suffer from astigmatism or colorblindness, some tests of visual processing did render abnormal results including slower visual processing (less proficiency at detecting changes in rapidly switching images which showed added and then removed black dots on a white background, as well as movement of these dots to slightly different locations - an ingenious test designed for this purpose by Chambers himself, but based closely enough off of existing psychometric assessments to ensure the ability to form judgements and comparisons with the general population). While she was sometimes able to detect these changes, her accuracy was two standard deviations below the norm, despite her above-average intelligence. With a slower “frame rate” of changes to the layout and positioning of these dots, her accuracy improved significantly and was within normal range. When administered a Wechsler adult intelligence test rather than the Stanford-Binet children’s test (both tests have both children’s and adult versions) it was noted that her performance on Raven’s Matrix Reasoning was also well below two full standard deviations lower than average. Low performance on this test means her ability to predict the expected form of a symbol associated with several other previous symbols which together demonstrate a clear pattern with no a priori description was severely impaired. Her scores on picture arrangement and picture completion were also below normal, but only by one standard deviation. These tests assess for ability to make sense of discrete scenes that can be arranged into a coherent story, and ability to make sense of isolated images with missing features by adding these missing details. Lastly, her answers to the Rorschach inkblot test were highly irregular, not in a way suggesting psychological problems or trauma, but rather in interpretations of ambiguous imagery that take on highly specific, nuanced, and uncommon situations, events, and combinations of objects, such as two cardboard cutouts of South America being held in the cloven hooves of a ram standing on its hind legs. These answers were always given after a lengthy, deliberative pause, but with an air of complete certainty. Taken together, these results point to a general pattern of non-standard conceptual frameworks for visual input. Rather than seeing a few lines in the general shape of a chair as a chair with a missing line or two, for instance, the subject would see half of an oddly shaped horse or a chipped coffee cup with curves missing. Inability to predict the next abstract figure of a sequence, as in Raven’s Matrices, points to the formation of incorrect visual expectations and inability to recognize visual patterns. Trouble noticing changes in the patterns of dots on a screen points to lack of sequential organization in visual construction. Our working hypothesis is that the combination and interaction of these deficits decrease the subject’s ability to process the sheer horror of the Beings. It does this by interfering with the neural impulses of the brain regions responsible for object and scene level construction along the ascending pathways before they can reach the brain regions responsible for semantic-psychological level interpretations, existential terror, horror at the very nature of existence, and unfounded homicidal rage.changing dot patterns Raven’s test matrix picture arrangement test Rorschach test cards drawing completion test Our motivations for elucidating these mechanisms are twofold: to provide potential assessment tests available to the public to determine how likely it is that they are among the unsusceptible population (although we will proceed with this objective with extreme caution, if at all, as cognitive and psychological tests are unreliable, especially when self-administered, and any definitive causal relationship currently remains theoretical) and to use the information collected to attempt to induce a similar protection or immunity in previously vulnerable (normal) persons. Currently two different strategies to this end are already underway. The first involves the construction of a kind of physical distortion barrier, namely, protective lenses which can theoretically be manufactured, at least on small scales, for the use of select test populations, mainly the military troops tasked with elimination of the threat. The construction of these goggles will not be trivial and will require a complicated system of optic distortion combing artificial time delay/choppy or lagging video feed and certain image processing tools designed to compress or alter visual information in carefully specified ways, such as by inducing graininess, jitter, or watershed effects to split whole objects (such as the Entities) into collections of discrete parts. The use of this technique has not been tested and there is no way of guaranteeing it will work without testing it directly. However, existing strategies are virtually nonexistent and include trying to quickly look away or shut one’s eyes if a soldier hears the approach of, or glimpses, a Being, which is both ineffective (it generally does not prevent them witnessing it and all subsequent effects) but also almost completely prevents them from actually killing these Beings, which is the entire point of all their existing missions. The second strategy is less straightforward and involves psychological and therapeutic interventions, either as a prophylactic mechanism for those likely to encounter the Entities (again, mostly soldiers - civilians are often inadvertently exposed as well, but any targeted training of them remains unfeasible under current circumstances and they are advised to simply seek shelter and remain hidden and secluded) or to limit post-exposure effects. The therapeutic techniques involve visual training with the use of video feedback, in a setup similar to Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), as well as to existing video feedback military training. Another option which could be applied both prophylactically and in cases of catatonic or disturbed but contained/restrained persons recently exposed to the Beings is the use of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques to actively reprocess the trauma of exposure to the Beings in ways that are more aligned with the less harmful, chunked or distorted processing that our subject experiences naturally. One final cautionary note remains: while we have not been able to maintain steady contact with either the Atlanta lab or the Tokyo lab and do not know much of any information about subjects alleged to be similar, yet another similar subject has been rumored of in Mumbai, and this person (a man in his thirties with a wife and children) was said to be completely immune to the Entities, for several weeks, and became convinced that he was a deity whose duty it was to encounter and document them. He was said to have witnessed and photographed tens of such creatures as he sought them out intentionally, like a storm chaser. And then, it is rumored, he came across one and went mad, just as everyone else, and slaughtered his family. This tragic case (which onceagain, is unconfirmed by any reputable source, but was told to me by two people independently, both members of the US military) raises a concerning issue, namely, that even the type of immunity that we and others have documented may not be a complete immunity. It seems possible, and in fact very likely, that there exists at least one and possibly multiple variants of Being which still affect even the lucky few who resemble our subject. What to make of this information Chambers and I are unsure. His suggestion, which does seem plausible, is that there are alternative visual pathways that are utilized by alternative types of visual processing and scene construction, and that there are vulnerabilities that exist aside from the one that is currently known.
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(TEAR DOWN) THE OPRY by Carolynn Mireault

On their first night alone together, Anne Cowan has gas, and is the type of modern woman to announce this mid-noir, center candlelight, right as Robert is pushing aside their T-bones. Tonight they’re Clean Plate Rangers, having tested each other’s manners—wrong knife, tines up, napkins on the table—but zilch, he’s certain, could have girded him for this.“What would you like me to do about that?”“Nothing, I guess,” she says, “unless you have something. Do you have anything? Phazyme?”They’re at the El Dorado Bed & Breakfast halfway between Carthage and Sedalia. This alone required some finagling, a detailed fabrication about a meeting Robert had in the area, and even still, it had to be on Anne’s terms. A hotel, for instance, was out of the question, but she’d supposed it’d be all right if it were a B&B, and all right so long as he made steak dinner in the bulking onsite oven, and if they discussed their future over wine, and agreed, if things felt natural, it would be all right to spend the night together, in each other’s arms.“No, I don’t.”The room is cramped with enormous tan furniture that can’t come apart nor be lifted, has been here forever, and will stay just as long. A mismatched bedroom set is mixed in with the couch and dining area, so they are as much in the chamber of coition as they are in the kitchen. A ceiling fan is fast over them and turned as bright as it can go, lighting the dumplings of skin beneath her sockets and the start of a unibrow. Her brown velvet dress matches the throw pillows, and soon, she could be between them, if things go all right.“Can you go down and ask?”“Down?”“Yeah,” she says. “The front desk might have some.”It’s a frivolous mission already, made more fabulous still considering that Robert does have Phazyme tucked in the side pocket of his messenger bag, where he keeps his wallet and pictures of Susan and the boys. He fusses for a moment, deciding whether to put back on his shoes, which require a production to tie, and he’s already gotten comfortable. Plus, El Dorado is carpeted all the way down, thick blue to every baseboard and over each stair. He opens the door to leave.“No shoes?”“I’ll just be fast,” he says.“Do you have a key?”“You’ll be here, won’t you?”“In case I’m indisposed when you get back.”He goes to the dresser where he’s placed the key and holds it up to her before sliding it into a front pocket, then leaves. To his right, a single mother and her children are trying to get into Room 4, but struggling with the key. The little daughter in blush overalls looks at him with credulous misery, and being the generous man he is, Robert walks over to help.“Let me get this for you, ma’am.”“It’s not ‘ma’am,’ it’s ‘miss,’” says the boy, who’s older than the girl, and wearing a too-large hat.“Quiet, James,” she says. Then, “Thank you,” to Robert.The boy’s got on his stinkface, and when the door comes open, pushes his sister in first then throws a big, green purse at her. The mother is too tired for patience or gratitude, nods at Robert and shuts him out. Through three inches of original oak, he can hear the squeals of the girl at the cruelty of brotherhood and the crash and bang of flung objects.He takes to the stairs, which threaten a spill when his socks slip on the carpeting. It feels as though there are infinite other carpets beneath it, filled with lint and accidents, dead with beetles and dust mites. At the bottom, beside a tower of ice-blue luggage, a mastiff puppy sleeps on a bath towel beside a dish of water. There isn’t much of a lobby—just a desk in the hallway—and no one is manning the counter. There’s no bell to ring, and once one minute passes, Robert considers going back upstairs and telling Anne he checked, he asked, and she’s out of luck. But without the Phazyme, she might not be all right, may not want to move forward or finish the wine, and he’s not sure when his next chance will be to see her overnight. Keeping waiting, he stares at a poorly composed still life of a gray bagel on a checkered blanket beside a tub of Kraft cream cheese, (two times the size of the bagel), and a plate of anchovies. It is signed Kojak. As Robert’s hope is failing, he hears the desk clerk’s voice in the next room: “I’ll be with you in a minute!”When the next minute passes and she still isn’t with him, and what felt like a miracle begins to act like something he’s dreamt, Robert follows the voice into the next room—the dining room—to find she had not been talking to him at all, but rather three supermodels sitting with their forearms on the tablecloth, and whispering to each other around an ewer of carnations. All three look up at the same time, and beam in a way that the room fills with daylight, then dims again to the glare of exposed lamp bulbs and extraordinary silence.“Hello,” he says. “Have you seen the clerk?”“Nice socks,” says the one with the blond bob.“Come sit,” says another.“Guys,” the third whispers, “what are you doing?”“What?” asks the first. “He could be here for the convention.”“What convention?” he asks, then again, “Have you seen her? Has she been in here?”“Come on,” the second one says again, patting the chair beside her.Robert goes to it and sits there, putting a napkin quickly over his lap, where he fears at the slightest suggestion, blood will flow and all life and comfort will be destroyed.“I only have a minute,” he says. “I need to ask the clerk something.”“Are you here to see Dr. Eadburg?”The one beside him slides her wine past the carnations. He takes a drink and gives it back. Behind them, a fireplace with a grand, white mantel is lined with porcelain lambs and foals. There is a patriotic urn on the end with a newspaper clipping framed above it. An orange map of Missouri is glassed-in above a peacock chair in the corner.“Never heard of him,” he says.The three look at each other and take a sip as if making a pact.“Okay,” the first one says. “We’ll tell you.”“That’s all right. I don’t mind.”“It’s important that you know,” says the second. “You’ll find out anyway. Dr. Eadburg is a prophet of God.”“Is that right?”“And we’re his wives,” says the third, “or we will be, in Heaven. He selected us three out of everybody in the world.”“I wonder why,” says Robert. “So, the prophet is right here in El Dorado?”“He’s at El Dorado.”“What do you mean ‘at’?”“He’s being wrongfully held at the correctional facility,” says the second, “for one hundred and seventy years.”“Oh, I see,” says Robert. “So, he’s a rapist and murderer?”“How could you say that?” asks the third. “Dr. Eadburg’s mind is God’s mind. His body is God’s body. His schmunt is God’s schmunt. He writes to us. He writes about the snake of Heaven. He loves us, and even if you hate him, he loves you, too. Even you. He’s your prophet. Even you.”“His schmunt is whose what?”“All his outcomes are blessings.”“Him in jail?” Robert asks.The second one laughs with anger. “You don’t know what you’re saying,” in singsong. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know who you’re talking about or who you’re talking to.”“We’ll finally meet tomorrow,” says the first.“You’re going to the jail?”“It’s the circumstances,” she says. “We can’t change the circumstances but we don’t have to accept them.”“Can’t he change the circumstances if he’s so God?”“You have such a rude way of talking,” says the third one. “No wonder you’re here alone.”The front desk clerk comes in from the kitchen, which, with its doors open, smells up the room with dust and bullion. Though perhaps not Eadburg’s cuppa, she’s nothing to laugh at in an empire waist top, crocheted at the neckline, where her clavicle fades under fat. She’s semi-blond, too, and would be blonder if she bathed, as her hair is parted down the middle and combed into two slick flaps on the sides of her head, shining dark. Her forehead sparkles with grease. She holds reheated frittatas and blackberry scones.“This is all we had,” she says. “I hope it’s enough.”Behind her shoulder, another still life is hung. On a red, one-dimensional table lacking the proper parallelograms, two ugly fruits are painted—perhaps mangos—crooked and parted, and appear as a doublet of pelletal breasts. Kojak tried using coffee to stain the background, causing the paper to ripple and scrunch.“What’s in the eggs?” the second one asks.“Rabbit and leeks.”They stick up their chins.“You think that’s gross, sweetheart?” Robert asks. “Wait until you see the prophet’s ding-dong.”The first one spits her wine on the tablecloth, tries to stand, but is too frail, appears to have something wrong with her hip, and lands back in her seat with a yelp.“Can I get you something, Mr. Dunn?” the clerk asks.“Phazyme?”All three brides go sage with nausea.“Right away.”

***

Upstairs, Anne has found Robert’s Phazyme as well as the photos of his kids, and is standing by the bed, leaning on the frame, flicking through them. She isn’t mad, but wants to meet them, thinks they’re “adorable,” that they remind her of her nephews in Salt Lake whose mother was in the hospital all the time with valve disease. Robert says yes, okay, that she can meet them, but first, he needs to know she’s serious, that she’s starting to fall in love, and he lays her bare-ass on the Bargello quilt, has sex with her in an ill way that requires little motion or participation on the woman end, and doesn’t think about Susan or the boys, who are all over the state tonight at sleepovers and other forms of suffering. Gall-slow and knocking, it is the same act as usual—all the culture sucked out of it, all the pageantry—with just the noise of slapping testicles on perineum in a beating extraction.
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LITTLE FLOWERS by Gillian O’Shaughnessy

In the dry years, my teeth begin to fall from my mouth. Not in a clatter, but softly. I collect them in the blue enamel pot we used to keep for tea leaves, bury them beneath the kitchen window, scrape furrows in the dirt with my fingernails. When the weather breaks, perhaps they’ll sprout. Perhaps they’ll grow. Mother doubts it. She says it might never rain again. Sometimes she tells me stories of when water fell freely from the sky, when pools and puddles collected in the street for anyone to see, when flowers bloomed in pinks and butter-yellow clouds, when parks were lined with sweeping trees, when lush green grass frilled the roadsides. I try to recall, but the pictures are faded and grey.We bathe in sand, eat beans from tins with rough oatmeal biscuits soaked in the sauce. The Government trucks in water to town for drinking, and milk to the school for the children. It comes in trays once a month. Row after row of small bottles with golden foil lids that glint like jewels in the sun. I love the feel of the glass, heavy and cool against the skin of my palm. I save my share of milk for Mother, who rightly demands it. She gave her teeth to the dry and her bones are brittle, she’s a tumble weed that whispers through the streets in the desert dusk. No matter what I do, the milk always spoils in the heat before I get home. Mother doesn’t mind. She waits for me in her chair on the veranda, blinking. Brown dust cakes her dress and settles deep in the folds of her face. She tilts her head like a hungry baby bird, and I spoon yellow curds into the puckered crevice of her mouth. She clutches my hand, flicks her dry tongue over her lips, seeking every last speck. When we’re done, she closes her eyes and coos.The University sends a doctor to our class to check our bones. A dentist to look at our teeth for his studies. We gather beforehand to watch the clouds of red dirt billow on the horizon as they approach. We grin gap-tooth when they alight in their fresh white coats. I line up with the others, allow the doctor to run probing hands up and down my spine. I reach to touch my toes. I squat. When the dentist asks, I open wide. He doesn’t like what he sees in my smile. The teeth I have left jut crooked, this way and that, wooden fence posts battered in a flinted wind. He says if I hope to save any, I need fillings and braces and both in a hurry. I laugh. It’s as likely I’ll sail a clipper ship down the cracked creek bed.When the last of my teeth come loose, I clamp my jaw together to try to hold them in a little longer, savour the click, click, click as they meet. My gums itch and ache, they feel the loss already. The skin of my lips and my cheeks is soft and sinking. Mother comforts me as I cry, catches my tears with her fingertip, sucks at each one like it’s spun sugar candy. She takes my face in her hands, kisses my mouth and counsels my surrender. She reaches in with her tiny clawing fingers, wobbles each tooth gently, ready to tug them all free. I ask her to wait until they fall on their own, but she refuses. She tells me it won’t hurt. Like pulling little flowers, from a bed of soft, damp soil
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THE THING by Nick Ekkizogloy

When we caught what I can only refer to as the “thing,” I was fishing the outflow of the Micalgi Dam with my soon-to-be-pregnant wife Tonya who was mainly hauling in fingerling catfish and red-eared sunfish but whose cheeks were blushed from all the Chablis we’d been drinking.  We were fishing with cut up hot dogs, a trick I learned from my uncle, an ichthyologist, which is a fancy name for a fish scientist.  Man, what I wouldn’t give for him to have been there when I pulled in the “thing.”  He was dead by then, having been poisoned by something over the years, perhaps from overexposure to the mercury that pooled in the guts of the fish he worked on, it’s hard to say.  So, this creature comes in and it looks like a caterpillar if the caterpillar was nine pounds and pink and gelatinous as a huge earthworm with flute holes along its side in the style of a woodwind instrument or an ocarina.  I landed it on the rocks, and it started oozing and undulating, staring up at us in amazement with two oil-black eyes the size of half dollars.  Tonya looked at me and I looked at Tonya, and we both looked down to the thing.  It had a round suck hole framed with rows of small translucent teeth, and it was working it open and closed horribly, joking to itself in a sound I can only describe as a squishy bleat.  The fishhook was stuck through the side of the grotesque mouth and red blood leaked out in spurts, like it would on a human, suggesting that, at the very least, inside the thing was a beating heart.   When it first appeared out of the water, Tonya was all, “No fucking way Wayne, no fucking way! Cut the line,” but something about it was mesmerizing.  I stood dumbfounded and Tonya’s calls trailed off as we both stood before it and watched. “Strange things live behind dams,” prophesized my uncle so long ago.  He’d been the clean-up man, the scientist to come in after some idiot dumped a bunch of car batteries into the river or when a fertilizer plant was found to be dumping forever chemicals into a waterway.  Fisheries restoration was always a growth market.  So, we’re looking at this thing, this mutant, this monster, and Tonya turns her head.  “Did you hear that?” she whispered.  “It said something.”  Tonya and I were drunk but not that drunk.  Squish, squish.  Bleat, bleat. Then I heard it.  The bleating, the thrumming sound, the squishing, the bleating again, and then it spoke as blue-bird clear as the Montana sky.  “MA-MA.”  Ho-Lee-SHIT! “Kill it!” Tonya yelled, the blinking lights alongside the dam casting her face red. I picked up a boulder and held it over my head.  I held it there for a minute.  The thing spoke again and bleated and squished, and I got caught in its black-eyed gaze and felt my elbows wobble from the weight of the rock.  “Do it!” she yelled. I slammed the rock down across the thing’s make-believe face, and we hauled ass out of there.  The next day, after a fitful night’s rest and a lot more wine, I poured through my uncle’s books. I found something in a chapter called, Outflow Oddities, a freshwater lamprey. But it didn’t look the same.  The lamprey looked more like a shark, but it had the flute holes on its side and the mouth with ringed teeth, a potential fish cousin.  I wrote the whole thing off as a pollution-induced freak show and we went on with our lives.  

***

Later, years later, after Tonya and I’d failed to bring six pregnancies to completion, we’d resigned ourselves to fishing together and loving one another.  The doctors had a few theories on why we couldn’t have kids, a few newfangled options to try, but at our age we decided to let it be and to focus on ourselves.We fished a lot, and I never forgot the “thing.”  Sometimes I hoped we could catch another one to talk to, perhaps to keep and study.  Tonya never made mention of it again, but I knew it haunted her in the way she reacted each time she caught a big fish.  We didn’t talk about the encounter with the “thing” like we’d probably should, and we grew older, into people who only fished, only drank beer and wine every night, only worried and fought in tiny drunk outbursts about our legacy as a family.  

***

One day, when the water was roiling behind the dam, frothy with milky bubbles and mud, and when the red light stopped blinking and stayed lit, Tonya hooked into something.  The reel unspooled in a frantic whine, emptying her line nearly to the bare arbor knot.  The dam was opening.  A siren sounded.  She kept fighting the fish.  The few others fishing the outflow packed it up.“Ya’ll should leave, now,” hollered a dam worker standing on a catwalk alongside the spillway.  One guy waited to see what Tonya pulled in.  We all held our breath.Then, in a great magnanimous leap, a rainbow trout broke the water and flashed its scintillating sides like a model before runway flashbulbs.  A real hog.  A moment later, Tonya had brought the fish to hand, held it close for a minute and cried softly.  It was a beautiful thing, too unnecessarily beautiful.  “What are we going to do?” I said, referring to keeping it or tossing it back.  She released the fish slowly, holding onto its tail for a few seconds as the thing ran water back through its gills, wobbling back and forth, playfully.  “Keep fishing,” she said, wiping her tears away. She finally let go, but just before its form totally disappeared, when all its colors smudged into the singular gray of river rock, the waters from the dam released in a thunderous display of the power of nature.  
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RETURNING MY MOM’S ROUTER WHEN SHE DIED by Ryan Riffenburgh

“Do you know for a fact that the store will take it back? I don't want to walk around the mall with a router.” My sister nods. We sit on the floor of an empty room, my sister across from me with her back to the wall. I watch the dust swirl around the last lamp in the room like cicadas in the summer. We pick from the trash; working out what holds meaning using a perverted equation of sentimentality vs. space in our respective apartments. I lean towards the smaller objects: a passport photo to cleanse the image of her skeletonized body in hospice, restoring color to her face. Tactile things like clothing that I can run my hands across like braille. Nestled on top of my pile sits the router, its multicolored cables spilling out. I take the router and head for the door, scooping the cables in a bunch. I sit the thing on the passenger seat and turn down the road. The AT&T store is not far from the apartment but I dread the walk through the mall among the empty stores and stale air. I park close to the store, working off childhood memory alone, and find a spot in the dark garage.  There are way fewer cars than I remember ever being here; like catacombs, the cars are sporadic every five to ten spaces. It makes sense; it’s a Wednesday afternoon. Middle schoolers, who migrate in from across the street, are on spring break. There’s something unnerving about the emptiness and the sounds of tires on the road blocks away. I wrap the router in my hands, feeling finality cloak the situation. It’s weird to me that you never own it; it’s just given to you to borrow. Holding the router, I push open the door to the mall, its cables begging to slip from my hands and fall along my legs. It wants to drag against the floor and walk along the tile next to me. The router and I slowly pass each store. I keep a cool pace that mimics the child in front of me. He’s tugging on his father’s sleeve, mesmerized by all that's surrounding him. He’s walking so slow to download everything he sees, to lock picture into memory. Just a pair of glossy eyes facing skyward. His obtaining and my releasing seem so distant, yet there’s a symbiosis in how we’re both moving and observing. Mutually pulling on something that soothes us. I come around the corner to the store. The router doesn’t beg for me to turn around. It’s almost comfortable being back here. It doesn't throw its cables around anymore; it just sits there next to me on the cold wood chair facing the iPhones, calm, waiting for the man with glasses to help. I watch the overhead light diffuse into the matte black of its sidings and bounce off the shiny front parts. Folding my legs, we wait together. “I need to return this router to you guys. It’s not mine. I—it's for my mom.” The man looks at me then the router, piecing together what's going on. “So we can’t actually take back the router in the store. You’re going to have to go to UPS. Just give them this account number,” he says as he grabs a Post-It note, hastily scribbling numbers. He’s almost sympathetic as he looks at me with gentle eyes. It’s uncomfortable, even agitating. The surrealness of the man pinning me down begins to deconstruct walls of denial I've so carefully built through paperwork, cleaning, and phone calls. I leave the store in a rushed attempt to contain any security I’ve formed for myself.All the empty walkways and escalators stare back with the icy cold of metal. I’m confused and faint from the lack of food and sleep I’ve missed in the past weeks. My jaw is slammed into its other half, crunching with anxiety. All I want is to finish; I want to return the router and be alone again. There's a fog around the whole place. What permeates the skylights is a translation of the gray marine layer outside. I brush the router's thin brown hair out of its eyes as we walk. I cradle her in the Panda Express line and apologize. Last time we were together when she was still cognizant I was high on pills from the night before. We had breakfast that day and all I can remember was being so comfortable, my new humor making the smile lines that ridge her cheeks grow. She even texted me that morning saying how good it was to see me, punctuating her thankfulness with emojis. I can't stop apologizing to her for this as I sit across from her at the food court table. I can’t escape her last memory of me being a direct consequence of drug use. A moment blanched of real love, the last visual she’ll be buried with. The curtains closing on a sad act of my derangement—all the worse, one she believed in, one she responded to with outstretched arms.  At Panda Express, I think maybe if I plug her in somewhere around here then her lights will blink in sequence, shaping constellations in an otherwise blank sky. Instead, I gather the cables in my arms and head outside.It’s in the front seat on the way to the UPS store. I buckle her in so she doesn’t fly through the windshield and break into a million tiny pieces if I crash. The speakers play something I won’t remember later. Memory screens back images without sound sometimes; as if you’ve lost the right to deserve your complete past. I will only deserve a small allocation of these moments, portioned out thin enough to still want. More than this would be gluttonous, less would be hollow. The UPS man is similar to the AT&T man except I love this one like family. I can’t figure out why, but his voice is soft and the afternoon sun drapes across him through the window like a thin sheet. I gently place the router in his arms. A little too gently. He holds her as she leaves my fingers, hands me a receipt, and explains it will all be taken care of. I step outside into the rest. 
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THE LAST MONKEY by Sarah Carriger

The cruise ships circle the island like sharks. Full of wealthy refugees. We watch from the rooftop of the five-star resort where we’ve chosen to spend the end of our money and the end of the world. Loquats from the branch that overhangs our balcony and the limited room service menu provide sustenance but little pleasure. I choke down the yuca, the bitter greens, the thin soups that taste of dirt or chemicals. The kitchen staff pretend not to speak English when I ask about ingredients. I dream of meat—sweet breads, foie gras, suckling pig, rack of lamb, steaks so rare they’re blue. My husband says it’s because I’m iron deficient. “I’m a carnivore,” I say, baring my teeth.He snorts. “You couldn’t say boo to a goose.” My husband doesn’t like me to walk in the garden—says it’s not safe for a woman alone—but I’ve begun to sneak out when he’s asleep. The guard, Enrique, patrols the perimeter with a machine gun. Children beg for food by the fence. I often catch him dropping loquats from the pocket of his fatigues into the small hands that protrude. Sometimes we share a black-market Marlboro under the star-studded sky. The cruise ships drift past. Floating palaces. “Let them eat Twinkies,” I say to Enrique, who gives me a quizzical smile. There used to be monkeys, he tells me. Small, brown monkeys who lived in the loquat trees. But they started falling. He mimes something plummeting from a great height.It upset the guests, he says, so they had to move the rest. “Move where?” I say. “Move,” he says, slicing his hand across his jugular. He was able to save one. He will show me if I come back the next night with more money. I agree, and he disappears into the blue-black shadows as a cruise ship blocks out the moon. The next night my husband stays up reading The Wealth of Nations, and apparently it’s a knee-slapper. He keeps chuckling every few pages, which grates on my nerves. I sulk on the balcony and scan for the glow of Enrique’s cigarette. Finally, a soft thunk as the book slides to the carpet and my husband’s purring snore. I find Enrique playing patience at one of the garden tables meant for moonlit drinks. He makes me wait while he finishes his hand. He’s become somewhat fickle since we’ve grown closer. Finally, he looks up. Into his open palm I drop three Franklin Mint silver dollars from my husband’s Discovery of America set. I know I’ll be in trouble when he finds them gone, but I find I no longer care. Enrique bites down on a coin and grins. I clutch his waist as we jounce through the night on his gleaming Schwinn. After a lifetime, a cluster of shacks. Enrique stops without warning, and I spill onto the gravel. “Shh!” he says. But helps me up. My blood shines like black beads in the moonlight. We slink around corners and past candle-lit windows. No dogs to give us away. A child shrieks like it’s being skinned alive.He guides me to his hovel and pushes me inside. I’m afraid I’ve made a terrible mistake. But he only lights a candle and points to a dark corner, fenced off to form a cage. He rubs his fingers together. Mine for the right price.At first I don’t see anything, but then in the depths something stirs. I creep closer. “There, There,” I say, holding out my hand. The monkey moves into the light. Its face open like a pansy. “There, there,” I say, as I reach in to wring its neck.
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WE LOVE KIMBERLY by Tam Eastley

Kimberly keeps her cowboy hat in the trunk of her car for emergencies. Emergencies like a last-minute invite to a rodeo, or line dancing at Ranchman’s.Other items in her car include: stickers from the local radio station, an old Cosmo magazine, bear spray, and a dinner knife. She doesn’t know about the dinner knife though. It slipped under the seat after she helped set up her nephew’s birthday picnic in the park two years ago. Like most things in Kimberly’s car though, the knife doesn’t have anything to do with this story.Her car is also home to dozens of lighters that she’s stolen from various people over the years. But Kimberly’s vice isn’t smoking; she’s barely a social smoker. To tell you the truth, she goes out less than she lets on. No, Kimberly’s vice is biting her fingernails. She bites them down to the nub and chews the flesh around her cuticles. Her fingertips bleed and ache. They’re sensitive to the touch. Cosmo tells her that it’s important to identify her nail-biting triggers. Her underlying issues. But when Kimberly sits idle in her car and thinks about it, really thinks about it, her mind goes blank and her fingers find their way to her mouth. Is life an issue, she asks. The very act of being? And you’d think we’d give her some sort of answer, but we don’t.A few weeks ago, Kimberly went to a hypnotist. She heard him advertising on that same local radio station where she got all her stickers, and he boasted about the ability to cure anything with just one session. She made an appointment right then and there at the 14th Street traffic light that always takes forever to turn. Later, she’ll realize it was like her nubby fingers dialed the number on their own, seemingly taking matters into their own hands. Like swarm intelligence or those clouds of birds she sees on Instagram, their tiny bodies morphing into dramatic drops of ink in the sky.The hypnotist was strange, as hypnotists are, but he didn’t wear a cape or anything and he didn’t make her squawk like a chicken. He had her lie back on a lounge chair and count down from ten. Then she sort of… drifted. She woke up seventeen minutes later. “Do you want to bite your nails?” the hypnotist asked.And to Kimberly’s surprise, she didn’t. Not even when she stared at herself in the elevator mirror, sat in traffic, or waited at the drive-through.And you’d think we’d be proud of Kimberly, and we are in a way, because we love Kimberly. But unfortunately, something else will now have room to grow, and that’s not quite the ending we wanted for her.Kimberly keeps her cowboy hat in the trunk of her car for emergencies, and yesterday, she put it on. But there are no last-minute invites to bars with mechanical bulls looming. No. Our dear Kimberly is on the run. And if she’s going to be on the run, she’s bringing her cowboy hat with her.Kimberly’s nails are long now. They’re red and pointed and they have a mind of their own. They tap against countertops and demand respect. They flash stolen credit cards and hypnotize—yes, hypnotize—with their otherworldly glow. She can’t stop them. Her nails are opposing magnets to her mouth. But when she thinks about it, really thinks about it, she realizes she doesn’t even want to trim them, let alone bite them, these precious nails. They’re sharp enough to be weapons.Kimberly races down the highway. Confident she’s not being followed, she pulls over on the side of the road. She flicks the metal wheel of one of her backseat lighters, chucks it into the car, and walks away. Her nails sparkle and glitter with the obliteration of her previous life. When the bear spray explodes she doesn’t think of the knife from her nephew’s birthday party, because, if you remember, she doesn’t even know it’s there.Kimberly hitches a ride one town over. She ponders the majesty of her nails as she slices the neck of her unsuspecting driver, as she digs his grave by the light of the moon. They’re just so powerful, she gushes as she drives away in his car, turns on the radio, and searches for a new station. And because we love Kimberly, even after all this, we find her something good.
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GREEKS by Caitlin Boston Ingham

My daughter-in-law Susie bought me a voucher for an adult educational course at the local evening school. Susie had studied herbalism there last year. She suggested I try it too. Susie had been married to my son for six years, but I struggled to connect with her. She wore pigtails in her hair and never smiled with teeth. She discussed her reproductive system with a near-pornographic reverence. I did not want to study herbalism. I didn’t want to learn to make wildflower seed-balls or my own callus balm with essential oils. What I wanted from Susie was a lesson on the subject of my own son, Jon, who was impenetrable to me. Silent, large, permanently bored, Jon had arrived on the earth like that: a baby IT manager.I selected the course in Greek Mythology on Wednesday nights from 6-8pm. The teacher had dyed black hair and a chain that linked his belt to his wallet. Athena was the best starting point when looking at Greek Mythology, he told us. Zeus had swallowed Athena’s mother whole because he didn’t want kids. But then Athena popped right out of Zeus’s forehead, wearing a helmet and holding a sword. When I told the group that I related to this experience of parenting, they laughed more than I had expected them to.  That weekend, I saw Susie on the street, carrying a bundle of wild-weeds in her arms. She seemed baffled as to why I hadn’t selected the herbalism course. I grinned, perhaps baring my teeth a little too much. “What are the nettles for?” I asked.She looked at them and sighed. “They promote healthy ovulation.”Her pigtails had little wooden cubes on each hairband. Were these ornaments a representation of my son’s taste? Every time I saw Susie, it was all I could do: scrutinise her for signs that pointed to my son’s character.“Some people say that ovulation is a lot like religion,” I offered. “Best not overthought.”Susie didn’t have anything to say to that.Driving home from work, I thought about Athena’s mother. She had crafted Athena’s helmet and armour right inside Zeus’s stomach; the hammering sound gave him a headache. It must have felt gratifying, I thought, passing down something to one’s child. I’d never experienced anything like that. I remembered picking up Jon once from a week-long school trip to Wales. All the other kids were homesick and crying, desperate to come home. But Jon stood there among the weeping children, gormless, unaffected by their tears. His teacher told me that he’d gone around double-lacing every single child’s pair of shoes on the bus ride home. Some students had tried to kick him off, others had patted his back like a little donkey. I was stunned. I couldn’t even remember if I’d taught him to knot his own laces yet.In another evening session, we were asked to go into breakout groups of two to discuss Circe. Circe was an enchantress known for her knowledge of potions and herbs. She could transform her enemies into animals—mostly squealing pigs.The teacher asked us to choose partners for breakout sessions. Looking around, I realised I didn’t know anyone’s name. As I watched my classmates buddy up with each other, it dawned on me that many of them were not here to learn about myths.After a while, I noticed a man sitting alone in the corner. He was fidgety and had blackheads on his nose. Thinking he was shy, I approached and asked if he wanted to link up with me. It was maybe a poor choice of words. As soon as I said this, the man leered, raising his eyebrow.“You know,” he said, smirking, “according to the Greeks, the world started when the earth fucked the sky.” Then he winked. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to hit on me.I bumped into Susie in the same place I had the time before. Our routines were clearly in sync. This time, she was heaving a grocery bag on her hip. “What’s in there?” I asked her, trying to sound kind and approachable. I hoped maybe she’d invite me to dinner at her and Jon’s house.“Night ointment,” she said. “Homemade. For Jon. Lavender oil base and roughage from pink corn skin. I’ve been working on it for several weeks.”I thought of her in bed with Jon, rubbing the ointment all over his enormous back. His face against the pillow, expressionless, still.“And it helps him sleep?” I asked.Susie shrugged. “That’s the hope.”I hesitated. “Well, can I try some?”Susie smiled cautiously. “Really?” She seemed reluctantly pleased.“Oh, please! I’m a terrible sleeper,” I lied, laughing too loudly. “Like mother, like son.”  We learnt about Icarus in class that week. It was one of the few stories I’d remembered. The father who creates a pair of wax wings for his son who then flies too high in the sky and comes crashing down. A story about ego. The teacher described Icarus flying with a lot of gusto, emphasizing the joy of escape and the temptation of the sun. I shut my eyes and tried to picture Jon flying high like that. I tried to picture him in a state of bliss.In the car after class, I sat in the driver’s seat for several minutes. I looked down and noticed the large bottle of Susie’s potion on the passenger’s seat. I’d tossed it there after seeing her. Brushing the hair from my face, I pulled off the lid and smeared it all over my forearms. It smelt like a first aid kit. The liquid stung my skin, which I assumed was purposeful. The pain felt vaguely correct somehow.Trying to breathe evenly, my arms lathered up, I took out my phone to text Jon. Tell Susie thank you so much for the lovely ointment. She’s a witch! In a good way 🙂I waited for a few minutes. He didn’t text back.  The sores didn’t appear immediately, but when they started to come through, they were red, pea-sized lumps, almost geometrically abundant, like a raging breed of honeycomb. I couldn’t figure out whether bandaging them up would make them worse, so I wrapped up one and left the other bare.By the time the next class came around, Jon still hadn’t responded to my text about Susie’s lotion. I assumed he was ignoring me, as he usually did. I thought about texting him with a picture, typing, Look what your wife did to me, but decided against it.In class, I felt tearful, aggrieved. I kept catching other members of the group staring at my blistered arms, the looks of concern and disgust on their faces. The wounds seemed like burns. I thought about what had happened with Susie. I had not flown too close to the sun, I don’t think. I had barely gotten a peek through the clouds. Whilst the teacher was introducing us to Theseus and the Minotaur, my phone buzzed in my pocket. Jon had texted me back. The message was a picture. I leaned over and opened it. He’d sent me a photograph of his arms, irritated and bumpy, just like mine. They looked as if they had been dipped into a bucket of mild acid. He texted, Do you think this is normal? Susie made it. I can’t stop scratching. I put my phone back into my pocket. The teacher was telling us how the story ended with King Aegeus throwing himself into the sea when he wrongly presumed that his son Theseus was dead. I pictured the Aegean Ocean, riotous turquoise, limestone soft enough to sleep on. I imagined floating in the warm sea, the water buttery on my skin. I pulled out my phone again to look at the picture from Jon. I hoped that nobody would notice how much I was smiling.
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