Flash

(TEAR DOWN) THE OPRY by Carolynn Mireault

November 4, 2024

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.

LITTLE FLOWERS by Gillian O’Shaughnessy

October 25, 2024

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.

THE THING by Nick Ekkizogloy

October 24, 2024

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.

RETURNING MY MOM’S ROUTER WHEN SHE DIED by Ryan Riffenburgh

October 22, 2024

“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.

THE LAST MONKEY by Sarah Carriger

October 21, 2024

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.

WE LOVE KIMBERLY by Tam Eastley

October 18, 2024

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.

GREEKS by Caitlin Boston Ingham

October 15, 2024

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.

NAMING CONTESTS by Will Musgrove

October 8, 2024

The cashier, whose name tag reads Barbara, scans my items, a two-liter of Coke and a Milky Way, my usual. It became my usual once I discovered the total, $6.66. Barbara, wearing a faded Looney Tunes T-shirt, won’t say the amount out loud like she does with every other customer. Instead, she stares at me as if I’m summoning a sugar-powered demon. The number never fails to get a reaction, unlike the fact I’m dressed as a cell phone.I pay and grab my stuff off the counter, which is made difficult by the big white gloves velcroed to my hands. The bells tied to the gas station’s main door jingle as I exit. Outside, the sun hangs in the sky like a giant Fuck You. Sweating, I eat the Milky Way on my walk back to the store, arriving just before my boss, Hank. I’m able to get the contest sign from my rusted-out Buick and lug it to my corner before he flips on Cellular Dude’s lights.The sign advertises Cellular Dude’s mascot-naming contest. Motorists driving down Highway 71 are supposed to shout names for the store’s mascot, me, from their cars. At the end of the month, Hank, the Cellular Dude, will pick his favorite. There’s no prize, so most people don’t shout anything. A couple of days ago, a lady in a convertible called me a jackass, but most of the time I’m just an invisible dancing cell phone.It’s okay. I come from a lineage of unnamed people. I only know my dad by the numbers on his slaughterhouse work badge: 5156252. I only know my mom by the smell of the hot dogs she used to leave defrosting in the sink before leaving for her second-shift cleaning job. The light turns red. A row of cars starts to pile up. I wave the sign, do a little jig. People inside the cars avoid looking at me, but I look at them. I like to imagine I’m a part of their lives, of their commute, that I’m going where they’re going. My favorite is pretending I’m a planet the cars are orbiting, that they all know my name, but I don’t know theirs. The light turns green. The cars inch away. A Honda slows down next to me. The car behind it honks. The Honda’s driver’s-side window rolls down to reveal a middle-aged man sporting aviator sunglasses, which reflect my painted face, the blown-up pictures of apps taped to my chest.“You look like a Chip, maybe a Charles,” he shouts through cupped hands.Once he says it, he’s gone, down the highway and around the block. Chip? Charles? I wonder which one Hank will like better. A couple of hours pass, and I walk back to the gas station on my lunch break, craving another Milky Way and Coke. During the walk, I imagine what life would be like as a Chip or a Charles. I imagine “Chip Was Here” carved into a park picnic table, imagine parkgoers being able to perfectly picture me in their heads. I imagine a skyscraper office where Charles is drilled into my door like a landmark.Sitting in the gas station’s parking lot is the exact same model of Honda as before. I run a white glove across its hood, hoping it’ll uncover my new name. The entrance of the gas station opens, and out steps the middle-aged man.“Holy shit, it’s the cell phone,” he says, slapping me on the back. “Man, I bet that job sucks. I’m Jerry, by the way. You?”“Pete.”“Why not Pete then?” he says as if it’s obvious.I watch as Jerry gets into his car and backs out of the parking lot before I go inside. I gather my Milky Way and Coke. Barbara frowns as she sees me approaching the counter. She goes to scan my usual, but I throw in a pack of gum at the last second. She cocks her head, flashes me a look of confusion mixed with relief. She says my total out loud, but all I hear is, “Why not Pete then?”Kkkkriiissshhh. I yank off a glove. “Name’s Pete,” I say, extending Barbara a fleshy hand.

CREEP by Julia Meinwald

October 7, 2024

Arriving home from work, Mina noticed a man crawling along her building’s perimeter. He was close to the wall, his bare shoulders almost touching the dirty brick exterior, and wore only a pair of plain white underwear. He had a grim, determined look on his face, which was clean but partially covered by a coarse, unruly beard. He was very thin. The man looked down at the ground as he crawled. Mina watched him, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, for a number of minutes. Only after he’d crept out of sight did she dash in the front door. Generally, Mina tried not to look at the shabby bus stop on the corner of her apartment complex, the uneven patch of sidewalk, the building’s faded blue awning announcing its name: The Warwick Arms. It was a grand name for a run-down place. The lock on her apartment’s door frequently broke in one of two contradictory ways, either sticking such that she couldn’t get in, or refusing to lock on her way out. The paint on her walls flaked and chipped, and one of the three elevators was always broken. If she arrived home at the same time as a neighbor, she had to converse for too many minutes about the weather, the time of day, being tired, before the heavy doors finally opened to ferry her up to the fourteenth floor. (Everyone knows that it’s really the thirteenth floor in disguise.) Mina didn’t know the names of her neighbors, and would likely not recognize any of them outside the context of her building. When she left for work the next morning, the man was still at it. His knees were now dirty and scabbed. His pace had not slowed or quickened. Could this be performance art? Or some eccentric fundraiser, with donors pledging dollars for each lap around the building? His expression was so serious, though. Mina had read a study once, about cats with injured brains. The injuries were located in a spot that affected the animals’ sense of navigation: they could only turn in one direction. Left unattended, they would walk in endless circles.

***

Every Saturday, Mina babysat her niece Anna, a chaotic blonde spring of sticky energy. She told her sister Lydia to meet her at the park for the dropoff, not wanting the young girl to see the crawling man. Anna held Mina’s hand as they walked towards the playground, though she argued that four is old enough that she didn’t need to. The girl would stop along the way to pick up discarded fast food boxes, seltzer cans, once a (thankfully empty) blood collection tube like the kind you’d see in a hospital. Mina was disturbed by the trash in the park, wondered whose job it was to collect it. She didn’t see any real harm in it though, and Anna regarded each treasure with respectful attention before Mina gingerly pried it from her hands. At the playground, a dead rat was lying at the foot of the swingset. Anna jetted towards it, picked it up, and cradled it in her arms. “Honey, put that down, please,” Mina said, trying not to sound afraid.“She let me pet her.” “Actually, I think it might be dead,” Mina said, hoping she wasn’t introducing the concept of mortality for the first time.“No she’s not,” said Anna. Looking closer, Mina realized her niece was right. The rat’s abdomen was rising and falling in a ragged arrhythmia. Its eyes gazed blankly upward, as if asking for mercy. “We don’t know if it’s sick though,” said Mina. The image of the rat rousing itself in a final death-twitch to bite Anna flashed through her mind, and she grabbed the creature by its tail and flung it out of Anna’s hands. It landed with a soft thump a few feet away. “We’re going to wash our hands,” she said, dragging Anna towards the grimy public park bathroom. “Now.”Shaken, Mina walked a jittery lap around the park once Lydia had picked up Anna. With each step she said to herself, I’m fine, I’m fine, but she couldn’t quite dismiss the expression she remembered on the crawling man’s face, the sound of the rat’s wheezing breath. She had the unsettled feeling of being infected by some undefined threat. The sun set, and Mina walked home. She would make rice and melted cheese for dinner. She would watch last night’s episode of The Bachelor. It was just another day.

***

To her relief, there was no sign of the crawling man outside her apartment. Perhaps he was just on the far side of the building. Perhaps he had crawled away. She was alone in the elevator, which trundled her up to her floor without fanfare. Pushing into her apartment, Mina felt suddenly tired. She let her bag drop to the floor, and turned the corner to find the crawling man circumnavigating her kitchen. She froze in the doorway. He continued his slow circle, knees dragging against the off-white tile floor, eyes down. When he reached her feet, he lifted his head slowly. His watery blue eyes met hers.“I mean you no harm,” he said in a soft, choked voice. An ant crawled out of his beard and across his face. He did not brush it away, but instead resumed his own slithering around the edge of the room. Mina backed out of the doorway. She sat gingerly on her living room couch, unsure what to do. She could hear the shuffling sound of the man in the next room. Eventually, she tiptoed to the hallway and retrieved her phone from her purse. She brought it back to the couch and dialed 9-1-1. “There’s someone in my house,” she whispered to the operator. After she hung up, she sat quietly, waiting for the police to arrive. She breathed a stuttering breath. The man crawled. She breathed. The man crawled. She breathed. The man crawled.

FIVE OF THE WAYS I WISH I WAS MORE LIKE MOISSANITE by Patrick Eades

October 2, 2024

People often ask me what my spirit animal is. I'm not sure why I am asked so frequently. Maybe they are unsure if I am still human. Or maybe it is the clear spirits mixed with bile I have used to decorate their terrazzo floors that confuses them, and they are not sure whether to use lion strength metho or if bumblebee spray-and-wipe will be enough. In any case, I tell them I don't have a spirit animal, but if I could choose a spirit mineral, it would be Moissanite. Moissanite is somewhat of an unknown in the spirit world, but it’s one hell of a mineral. Moissanite is the second hardest mineral on earth, behind only diamonds. So hard it is almost impossible to chip anything off an old block of Moissanite. More the pity for me, who has been carved straight from my guilt-ridden Catholic of a mother. Guilt strips me slowly, or sometimes in great chunks. Nothing eats away at Moissanite. Not even alcohol. Eight gin and squashes on a Tuesday night doesn’t even leave a blemish.Moissanite—unlike my former self—does not contain any soul, or at least none yet discovered by the technology we have available to us as amateur mineral enthusiasts. This is a good thing. Souls are weak. They break at the drop of a baby. Moissanite—unlike diamonds—is conflict free. Like a dim-witted alien without a spaceship licence, it hitched a ride on a meteor and crashed to the earth’s surface. It can also be grown in a lab, where synthetics can be manipulated for greater strength and resilience.Perhaps Moissanite is conflict-free because it is incapable of blame. Even if it was able to remember which set of hands strapped —could you really call it strapped?—that baby bicycle seat, or who it was that panicked when a magpie beak perforated their eardrum and haywired their vestibular system—completely understandable—it would not be able to allocate blame in a fair and balanced manner. It wouldn’t even try. Credit to Moissanite where credit is due, I do believe it would be able to sit through grief counselling sessions without chain-smoking three joints in the alley outside prior. Conversely, it would not have the thumb dexterity to secretly record the most salient points made by Sally the grief therapist to later use as ammunition in a war in which both combatants are already buried in trenches.And perhaps most importantly—unlike any animal I have met or seen in David Attenborough documentaries, and unlike any of the spirits hiding in my pantry, or in the shaving cabinet, or underneath my bed—Moissanite is not transformational. It is what it is.It does not have the ability to harden at the sight of a familiar face—now seen only once a year—as it trudges towards a crooked slab of marble lodged in grass. It cannot soften, as it watches this face leak upon withered yellow daisies. And it cannot re-harden, as it sees the face turn, swallow the apology on the tip of its tongue, stand, and walk away once more. Moissanite originates from the stars, a twinkle in the sky. On cloudless nights, I stand outside and gaze up at all my unmet wishes. If I wait here long enough, perhaps one day she will fall again. This time I will catch her.