Flash

THEY CAN LIVE WITHOUT FLIES by Michael Seymour Blake

March 14, 2022

She lay huddled and naked in bed, her skin a grayish black. Her brittle hair broke off at the slightest touch. I rested my head on her rigid body, hearing nothing. I inhaled—a dull, mossy smell. I called Dad.

He came over right away. He tapped Mom a few times, then knocked on her like he was knocking on a door. He placed his ear against her open lips.

“Get me a flashlight.”

I brought him one. He shined light into her mouth.

“What do you see?”

He grabbed a cigarette from the pack in his back pocket. He lit it and took a drag.

She stopped eating last month. Wouldn’t leave the bedroom. Dark, bark-like patches grew over her skin. I rubbed lotion on her arms and hands and it was like running my fingers across cement. I called the doctor.

“Give it some time. Things have a way of working themselves out.”

“We will have to bury her,” Dad said.

“Where?”

“Backyard.”

“What?”

“Backyard.”

“We’re going to bury Mom in the backyard?”

Thick amber tears oozed down Dad’s cheeks and landed in my hair. He lifted Mom from the bed and we went to the backyard. We found two shovels in the shed and plunged them into the earth and the sun was hot on our shoulders. I could feel the syrupy tears melting on my scalp. We worked in silence until the hole grew seven feet deep.

Dad placed Mom in the hole. I stood there watching with dirt in my shoes. A flower had sprouted from the blackness of her mouth, a little thing with dewy white petals surrounding a soft, yellow head.

“Ain’t that something,” Dad said.

Two nights ago, Mom had asked me to lay next to her. I stood in the doorway. I said, “You’re stronger than this,” which I really wanted to be true. ”I’ll bring you some tea, then I’m going out.”

Mom blinked like a lazy cat. I went out and walked around until I got tired.

I stared at the flower and thought about how I never brought Mom that tea. I expected to sink into the earth. I tried to think of someone to call. No one came to mind.

“Did Mom have any friends?” I asked.

Dad said, “I think so, a while ago.”

He seemed taller somehow. He lit another cigarette and rested on his shovel. His swollen knuckles looked like brown lichen. A thin golden film shimmered on his cheeks. He started to speak but a voice came from above.

“What happened?”

It was the next door neighbor leaning out her window.

“Mom died sometime during the night,” I said.

The neighbor looked at the sky and squinted. “What a sin.”

She closed the window.

Years ago, Dad gave me a Venus flytrap. A green so bright I thought it glowed. He told me to leave it near my window.

“Doesn’t it eat bugs?” Mom asked.

“Flies,” Dad said.

“What if there aren’t any flies?”

“They can live without flies.”

After two months, the plant shriveled up. I’d never seen its mouth close while it lived, and it hung open still in death. I touched its withered lobe with my pinky and the lobe cracked off.

Mom asked if I’d been watering it.

“Once a week,” I said.

She stuck her finger in the dusty soil and turned back to me, eyebrows raised.

I began to cry.

“Come here,” she said, arms open wide for a hug.

Dad found the plant in the garbage that night. “Guess it needed flies after all,” he said.

I climbed out of the hole while Dad knelt down to admire the flower, his massive frame like a smoking meteorite resting in an impact crater. I went inside and filled a kettle with water from the sink. I ran my fingers over the old apron Mom hung in the kitchen, but never wore. It belonged to her mother and the cotton felt soft and smelled like a home should smell. I grabbed a tea bag from the tin and tossed it in a mug. I watched Dad through the widow. He swatted at some gnats. I wanted to call out to him, but what would I say? “Hello Dad! I see you standing there in the backyard, swatting at gnats. Hello!”

The teapot whistled.

I grabbed a second tea bag and mug.

I returned to the backyard with the steaming mugs and found a tree where our hole had been. A thick green vine spiraled around its mammoth trunk. Those same white flowers grew from the vine. I did not see Dad. I walked to the front yard. His car was still in the driveway. I circled round it, expecting him to magically appear inside. I looked at Mom’s house with its stained eggshell siding and asphalt shingles. “Hello house,” I said. “I see you standing there.”

I went back and stood under the tree. A white flower fell into one of the mugs. I placed that mug down and sat in the shade and sipped tea.

After my last mouthful, I poured Dad’s tea in the dry dirt and watched the ground drink it up. It felt good to nourish something. The neighbor appeared at the window again. She regarded the tree from behind the glass, mouthed something, and was gone.

I looked back at the tree. It had doubled in size. Some white flowers were lying in a rapidly-rotting pile a few feet away. There was a faint smell of cigarettes and sulfur.

I sat there for a few hours as the festering pile of flowers grew. It felt like there was a heap of sopping towels inside my chest.

When it was dark I walked to the moonlit mound of organic rot and dug a tunnel into the middle where it was warm. The mustiness and dull smell of bad eggs comforted me. I think I slept for a long time. When I awoke, I opened my mouth. I tasted the decaying matter surrounding me and it was good. I feasted and went back to sleep.

My eyes opened. I climbed through what remained of the moldering heap until I felt the sun on my face. I stretched the translucent wings which had sprouted from my back. I groomed myself, licking the coarse hairs covering my arms and rubbing them over my bulbous body. I flapped my wings, a new and beautiful feeling. I rose up past the house. I rose until the house was the size of a heart below me. I passed through the clouds, higher and higher.

I reached the top of the tree, where the twisting green vine merged with the trunk to create vast open lobes surrounded with long green cilia. I circled above the glistening, red mouth. It looked vaguely like some strange and hungry organ. My bloated body, full with partially digested plant matter, made me feel like a giant, bristly grape. Scattered around the distant landscape were more of these strange growths. Some open, some closed.

I descended, landing on a sticky lobe. There was a throbbing power beneath my feet that could crush a house into dust. Trigger-hairs gently swayed in the wind. I knew how they worked—you touch one of these and the whole thing snaps shut faster than you could think. The hairs were scattered all around. A nursery of saplings. “Hello,” I said. “I see you.”

I reached out.

FACTS OF LIFE by Laetitia Keok

March 9, 2022

Male emperor penguins protect their eggs from the harsh Antarctic elements by balancing them on their feet.

When I tell you this, you lift me up and balance me on your feet. I am four and weigh nothing. You are a mountain of a man. With my tiny feet stacked atop your larger feet, you hold my hands and start taking wide, steady steps. We pass the balcony, and I feel the warmth of sunlight as it filters through the glass door to fall onto our bodies. Our shadows dance on the floor tiles like puppets. Then, I am flying. Past my mother’s old room that is now my aunt’s. Woosh. Past the cot that my baby sister is sleeping in. Woosh. And I am not afraid of falling—it doesn’t even cross my mind. We waddle across the living room, my cousins cheering softly in the background. Soon I am yelling directions, “停！转左！等！转右！” and we are zigzagging around the sofa and the stool and the bright red toy car that I have long outgrown, but that you’d fixed anyway. I keep my eyes on the floor—I am your guide, telling you to swerve to avoid the cracks in the floor, to turn at the right corners. When I look up, there is light everywhere—the room melts away and we are in Antarctica, inventing our own little penguin waltz. It is a long time before I am willing to walk on my own again, and I tell everyone this is how I learnt to do it: safe in your arms, fearless.

Only I am not fearless yet. I am six and it is my first day of primary school. You walk me to the gate, but I refuse to go in. I am afraid of the sickly cream-coloured walls and the pillars thicker than the width of both our bodies. But mostly I am afraid for you to leave. “Let’s walk for a bit more before I go in,” I say. “One more round, before you have to go.” You shake your head, but let me lead you to the zebra crossing and then back to the bus stop across the school compound. We circle the bush with the small white flowers once, then twice. You say “最后一次”, but we circle it another time. I cling onto your shirt sleeve. When you finally get me to step through the school gates, the walls and the pillars meld into a blur in my eyes. I am crying. I am reaching for your hand and grabbing air. I am begging for one more round, and always one more round.

Even as a child I knew to ask for more time.

There’s a line in Terese Marie Mailhot’s heart berries that says “Time seems measured by grief and anticipatory grief”.

The summer I spent chasing all 311 episodes of 《天下父母心》 with you was also the summer I realised you were not invincible. A light in the house had blown a fuse, and you were going to change it. I helped you get a ladder from the storeroom, and as I watched you climb it, I was terrified. I could not shake off an image of you falling. I imagined all the bones you could break, and all the hard edges that could break you. In my mind, I heard the dull crack of your spine, your neck, your hips. I let you get to the third rung, then made you get off. As I scaled the ladder in your place, you smiled and said, “Qi, see? Isn’t this easy? It’s good to learn now, I won’t be here forever to do it, you know.” I knew. I knew before you said it and it made me afraid.

At night, fifteen minutes into episode 201, you dozed off. As I watched the glow of the television tint your skin a ghostly purple, I traced the rise and fall of your chest and braced for the hitch in your breath, but there was none.

In so many ways, I have already grieved you.

In Parkinson's disease, certain nerve cells in the brain gradually break down or die. Early signs may be mild and go unnoticed.

At first, we do not notice the tremors. Then, they are all we see—you, earthquaking into yourself.

Here is how a body forgets itself: everything you can no longer bite into, the stiff of your feet, the hunch of your back, the tremble of your arms. You have always been quiet, but you no longer talk during meals because you’d choke if you did. You blink less. Your stride narrows.

Once, when I asked you how you’d lost half of your middle finger on your right hand, you told me you had been peeling an apple, when you’d accidentally sliced it off. I was fascinated. I thumbed the almost smooth ridge of skin that pulled itself over your remaining knuckle. “Did it make things frustrating?” I asked. “Like you suddenly couldn’t do so many things?” You ruffled my hair, chuckled, and said no, you’d just decided you didn’t need that finger.

But you will need your body, and you will not have it. It will no longer feel like yours. You will have trouble swallowing, talking, walking. You will need a wheelchair. I cannot imagine it, but you will grow unsteady. This time, there will be things you can no longer do.

There is no known cure for Parkinson’s. It is a disease that is chronic and worsens over time.

The day you are admitted, I see my mother cry for the first time in years. I learn we are all afraid—there is no such thing as fearless. She had woken me up in the morning before going to you. After she left, I sat in bed, and time swelled all around me. I had slept through it. You were in pain and I had slept through it. You were in pain and I should have felt it, somehow. Except I hadn’t. And I had slept through it all.

When I was younger, to correct my posture, my mother made me stand up straight against the kitchen wall. “Hold it for sixty seconds”, she would say. You laughed and counted the seconds with me.

Now, I count with you as you relearn your hands, finger first. One, thumb to index finger. Two, thumb to (half a) middle finger. Three, thumb to ring finger. Four, thumb to pinkie. I show you how to make a fist and unfurl it. Now, you memorise the motions to stand up safely, and I watch as it takes you multiple tries. I watch you learn to move sideways to navigate space, “like a crab”, you say. We waddle across the living room—I am your guide. I remind you to not look down, to take larger strides—“往前看，大步一点”. When I feel the ridges of the anti-slip mat in the bathroom dig into the soles of my feet, I know it must hurt for you, too, and learn you are a patient man.

Your body forgets, but mine remembers. I remember it all. Your feet, warm under mine. Your hands, always gentle. I remember that day, from years ago, when we walked eleven blocks and two traffic lights to pick my cousin up from kindergarten. I had slipped my hand into yours and thought, how I will miss you when you are gone.

BIRTHDAY PRESENTS by Gary Fincke

March 7, 2022

Sixth: Her Reborn Baby Doll

Her promised sister, it wasn’t, but her mother had selected the model featuring the optional beating heart and carried the gift-wrapped baby home bundled in a blanket as if sleet had begun to slant from a terrible sky. “What will you name her?” her mother said.

“Bernadine,” the girl whispered, knowing not to say Darla, as she felt the doll’s heart pulse against her body. As soon as she kissed its face, she packed away her other dolls like winter clothes. But one morning, only four months later, when she pressed her ear on Bernadine’s small chest, she heard silence. Her mother said, “Even these babies have a spring that can stick.” The girl placed her fingers upon Bernadine’s wrist, listening to its small, demanding quiet. She didn’t cry until her mother left the room.

Seventh: Chatty Cathy

First, perfectly timed, Cathy said, “Now you have a friend.” For a week, the girl loved pulling Cathy’s string to hear “I love you.” When her new school was lonely and scary, Cathy, as if she knew, told her, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Sometimes, though, the girl had to tug the string ten times to hear Cathy tell her what she needed to hear. Sometimes more. One evening she wouldn’t say, “I love you.” Instead, four times in a row, she said, “Take me with you.” The girl pulled harder, but Cathy kept whining. She pulled so hard that Cathy, at last, wouldn’t talk. Like she wasn’t her friend after all. Like she never would be again.

Eighth: Wedding Day Midge

“Barbie’s friend, Midge Hadley, is getting married,” her mother said. The girl marched Midge down an aisle she made of a wide white ribbon. All of her old dolls sat on either side and stared like they were jealous. None of them had ever had a special day. The girl didn’t have any boy dolls, but she could imagine who would marry Midge, a boy who was taller and had the same smile, a boy who stood as straight as Midge with hair so much the same texture that he looked as if he might be her brother.

Ninth: Happy Family Midge

Happy Family Midge had such a fat belly that the girl barely recognized her. “Midge has been married a while,” her mother said. “She’s in the family way.”

The girl said nothing. She stared at Midge’s swollen plastic belly until her mother tapped it and said “Pull.” When the girl tugged, the belly lifted off in her hand and she found a baby curled in Midge’s plastic womb. “Now you can dress her,” her mother said. “See, there are things for your new sweetheart to wear.”

As the girl unwrapped those tiny clothes, her mother handed her a second box. “Now there’s a husband who won’t leave,” she said. “Now there will be two children because there’s an older brother named Ryan.”

Tenth: Her Breastfeeding Doll…

The package had one large-print sentence: “Because you shouldn’t have to wait until you have breasts before you start breastfeeding.” After the girl read it twice, she asked her mother to leave. “Of course,” her mother said, and the girl cuddled her child to her skinny chest. She examined herself in her mirror. She guided the small mouth to each nipple as if her breasts would bloom. At last, she lifted the flowered bra from the box and strapped it on. Two of those flowers would welcome that baby to suck, its mouth fitted perfectly as a lesson. She waited to sense her child’s hunger. There were fierce secrets that mothers knew. Lips and hands will want you. Tongues and teeth. She pressed her baby to a flower.

Eleventh: Her Look-Alike Doll

After her mother selected the photo most flattering to form the doll’s pliant face, the girl recognized her infant self. She gazed at that familiar baby, its small, resilient body. All night, as she slept with herself, she dreamt of shrinking. She asked to be photographed. She asked again, and among those faces, she looked for the one that would always best fit the body she was terrified to lose. One morning she crawled inside the closet where everything too small to wear was stored. She whimpered with her forgotten voice, stuffed two fingers into her mouth and sucked on those toys to keep from screaming.

AFTER NOT LEAVING THE HOUSE FOR THREE DAYS by Quinn Forlini

March 2, 2022

Anna’s mother convinces her to go for a walk. The weather’s getting warmer. Anna feels like she’s been living inside a tunnel, or an artery.

She’s thirteen. Last week she dyed her hair purple from a box at the drugstore and it’s ugly. She pulls her hair into a ponytail, feeling the roughness as it passes through her fingers from the cheap dye. Her mother tried to warn her, and that made her want it more.

Her mother reminds her for the seventh time that it’s a bit chilly out, so at the last second, Anna grabs her dad’s black hoodie from the hook in the front hall where it’s sat untouched for months and lets it bury her body. She’s glad she’s so lost in it, no hint of shape, just darkness. She digs her hands into the front pocket so they disappear.

She follows her mother down the driveway, shuffling her feet and looking at the ground. Her mom talks and she barely listens. She looks up at her mother’s dark sunglasses that are too big for her face and the sweatshirt she has tied around her waist. She examines her mother’s body as it moves against the crumpled knot of sleeves clustered at her belly. The empty arms swing against her thighs like an awkward gift bow. Her mother is slightly overweight, enough that it makes Anna wonder: Will that happen to me? She looks back at the ground, imagining her bleak future as her body becomes filled like a grocery bag a clerk is doing a bad job packing. Her mother talks on and on, her left hand gesturing for emphasis as if the words weren’t enough. Not that Anna’s listening. Not that she has any idea what her mom is saying.

She doesn’t know how long they’re going to walk. One strip of sidewalk becomes another, and she wishes she’d asked before they left, made it part of the bargain. She doesn’t want to ask now because she doesn’t want to sound like she’s complaining. She has an intense desire to complain all the time lately, and she’s fighting it as much as she can. That’s why she’s here, sullenly dragging herself along on this walk, even though all she wants to do is get lost in reality TV for hours and not talk to anyone. But she hates this desire almost as much as she desires it.

Anna knows there was a time when this walk would’ve felt easier, when talking to her mother would’ve been all she wanted. Now she speaks one word at a time only when she has to. She hates how hard everything has become, even things that used to seem simple, like putting on socks.

Her mother mentions that maybe they should start heading back because of the sky. Anna tunes back into her mother’s words, their familiar pattern of concern. She feels annoyance spring in her at how easily her mother becomes deterred, even though Anna didn’t want to go on this walk in the first place. She looks up at the sky and notices how quickly it’s shifting from blue to overcast. She finds herself pulled into it like a movie. She wishes she knew what her mother had been talking about all this time, but she can’t ask, or she’d have to admit she was ignoring her. Was it something about work? A friend? Her therapist? The sky feels like it’s folding in on itself. The grayness makes it feel closer. Anna’s warm, and it feels novel and miraculous that she can do something about this. She pulls the hoodie over her head, releases her body from it, and ties the bulky sleeves around her waist like her mother. They bob forward together, cumbersome with all this bulky fabric spilling around them.

At the crosswalk they stop and look both ways together, only her mother looks left first while she looks right, so they’re looking at each other, and they laugh because they almost bump noses. Then her mother looks the other way at the line of cars coming and Anna watches the back of her mother’s neck snap in place like a lioness, and she’s flooded with this feeling of knowing she can’t ever know how much her mother has done for her and would do for her, and what it felt like to be held by her for the first time, body to body and nothing else, and the feeling is disappearing, like the blue in the sky, like the morning, like this walk, and she wants to hold onto the feeling because it is angular in a way that makes life seem possible and even tolerable.

She feels this desperate need to cling to it, to the feeling, and she wants to hug her mother from the side, just a quick squeeze, as if that could make this all stand still, as if that could show her mother all that she wanted to show. It’s all she can do, and even though the feeling is already feeling like a dream she just woke up from that’s drifting back into an unknown place, she knows that, like a dream, it was intense and real when it was there and couldn’t be described with words but maybe with the colors red and grey or the touch of her mother’s skin. But before Anna can reach out her arms, her mother’s head snaps back and her mother’s body is launching off the curb and into the crosswalk as she says, Hurry up, let’s go, let’s cross the street while we still can.

FIGHT VIDEOS 1-3 by Julian Castronovo

February 28, 2022

The babysitter Bunny put me in the basement and locked the door. It was an old basement, a cellar. There was a torn up floral sofa and a boiler and a window that looked out at the bottom of a hole. The hole was maybe four feet deep and was lined with pieces of wood that kept it from collapsing into itself. I walked over and looked up through it. The sky was dark yellow. I went and sat on the sofa and watched videos of fat people slapping each other hard in the face. Then I heard a loud car pull into the driveway. Bunny went to the front door and opened it for someone, a boy. They talked and laughed and moved around the house for a while. Then there was a thump directly above my head and I knew they were doing those things on the kitchen floor. I pictured Bunny on her back with her legs up by her head. I got on the floor and tried to lay in the same position perfectly beneath her. I listened to her breathing hard and whimpering. Outside a tornado siren started to scream but I felt safe and cold. I imagined the dark storm twisting across the plain and pulling the house from the foundation and ripping it into a million pieces. I imagined Bunny helicoptering limp and in blue panties through the sky and landing in a field three miles away. And once it was quiet I would climb the stairs and step cautiously out and walk through the wet rubble like an orphan. But then I imagined a different scenario. I would go up the stairs expecting ruin and waste but the door would open into a house I had never seen before, one belonging to some other people, some different family. The house would be perfectly intact, perfectly still and undisturbed. Maybe it has a beautiful smell, maybe it has a robot vacuum disc charging itself in a corner. But it doesn’t really matter if the strange house is nice or clean or fancy. It only matters that it isn’t mine.

II.

The first thing in the world was sadness.

For a long time it was the only thing. There was no division or firmament or earth and sky and so there was just sadness in all directions like a sea. Eventually, however, from it there rose little islands. They were covered in nice soft moss and there were animals upon them. The animals were stupid animals and they did not feel sadness. Instead they roamed around eating fruit and sleeping beneath the new sun you put there for them. The animals lived and multiplied and died many times over. But, in due course, there were certain among them born especially pale and grotesque. Such was the beginning of mankind. Each person emerged into this world weeping and weeping too was how they left it. They built houses from mud and straw and inside those houses they would sit in the twisting candlelight and whisper sadly of how the world seemed to grow larger with each day.

After many years, however, people grew ignorant of sadness. They invented love and war and fun little games. They became vapid and cruel and the entire course of human history proceeded thenceforth. Still there were, of course, occasionally individuals to whom the new diagrams of living seemed senseless and disturbing. Such unfortunate souls were regarded with pity and disgust and sometimes too they were beat to death with sticks for entertainment. But that was long ago. The events and happenings have since occurred at their somewhat irregular but expected rate. There were civilizations and great pieces of art; there were mysterious inventions and moments of strange coincidence; there were grand celebrations and those who danced high upon the crumbling parapets. And though there seemed at times a progression or “pattern” to these things, it is, we know, incorrect to assume them bound by any such logic. If one were to propose a picture in the non-abstract, say, of the general course of history, perhaps a more accurate view would be that of a child distractedly tying small loops and bows in a string. By this we mean to suggest only that things happen not because they must but simply because can, because they give one something to do, and that in this absence of some masterful “plan” perhaps what matters is simply that for each of us there is someone who, accidental and divine, ties us in knots.

For instance, once there was a girl who very much resembled you, Aiko, because she was long and slender and shiny like a wet dog. One day she was walking down Orchard street with a silk ribbon in her hair. The air was warm and the girl was texting lots of people with a sense of pleasant indifference. A boy, ugly and violently in love, walked along with her. Or, rather, he was walking slightly behind her, following with his eyes as the ribbon ahead disappeared and emerged like a delicate little lure in a river of heads.

Did the distance between them grow? Yes, see it now, ever widening. The boy began to feel a small sense of amorous panic because of this and he considered walking more quickly. The girl appeared not to notice the gap and indeed she seemed to have forgotten him altogether. As he continued to watch her move away he was struck by the sensation that everything around him had begun to rearrange itself as to better speak her absence. Had she, he was thus led to wonder, created the world like this especially for him? Indeed it was she who had created it. That much was clear. Who else, after all, could’ve made the islands rise as they did, could’ve made the candlelight dance so upon the sepulcher walls, could’ve made the angels whisper as they do? And if not for him then for whom? Yes, in his tiny pattering heart the boy knew it was he, sole beneficiary of this vast and unbroken field of sadness. And despite brief time he had shared in her company, he knew that it would be wrong or profane, even, to try to further collapse the distance between himself and his creator. All of this was making the boy feel hungover and alone and sort of floaty. Then he stopped walking and threw up a little blood in a patch of dirt and nobody stopped to look.

III.

There once was a totally unremarkable man who walked in the woods and with a stream of his piss bore a deep hole in a bank of snow. He thought about how some animal like a deer might come lick it up for salt and he felt sort of useful and happy. Then he zipped up his pants continued along a path until it became lost in a stand of spindly trees. The world seemed to him prematurely dark and his fingers were cold. He turned around, began to follow his tracks toward his car. His bootprints had been half-buried in new snow and so they were small and shallow, as if they’d been made by the feet of a child. The man was therefore struck by the impression that over his brief journey some important change had occurred in his being or that he was slightly older than he had been when, for example, he peed, which he was. He came out of the woods and crossed the parking area. He opened his car door, watched this action unfold in slow-motion from a displaced viewpoint that seemed to be “hovering slightly” above his head. Sitting in the driver’s seat, he turned on the heat and made and unmade his hands into fists. He looked at his phone. The phone showed its lock screen. The man fogged the glass with his breath and rubbed it with his sleeve. He tried to approximate his face with his face. This proved eventually successful, the phone opened with a cute clicky sound and immediately it displayed a picture of a young woman with really huge perky tits. The man blinked at the photo like a stupid idiot for several seconds and then remembered that he’d been looking at it when he’d last used his phone. He thumbed away from it and then he read a text from Mary Catherine, who he’d assumed to be napping but was evidently awake and wondering where he’d gone. He was on his way home, he wrote back, and, as he began to travel at what he felt to be a “furious” pace, the totally unremarkable man experienced a rush of clarity in anticipation of being near to her. Sure, there remained some sense of terror or horrible unease folded in him, but he knew, as sometimes one does, how the simple proximity of the person he loved would keep it balanced and tight, like, say, a little piece of origami.

BUNNY: A TRIPTYCH by Yasmina Din Madden

February 23, 2022

The rabbits come in dozens it seems. Nothing one minute, invasion the next. They crouch in the grass like tiny statues, gray fur flecked with white. Cottontails. Leaf-ears at attention. Waiting. Kits, short for kittens, now called bunnies, as if kitten is not cute enough for the tiniest of these rabbits. Bunny, diminutive of the Scottish bun, a nickname for a pet rabbit. Also, slang for a young, attractive woman. She’s a real bunny. A male rabbit is a buck, a female a doe. Before mating, the buck chases the doe until she turns and boxes at him with her front paws. They crouch and stare at each other. Face off until one or the other leaps into the air. Leap, leap, leap, come together.

No matter how long I sit on the back porch watching, I’ve never seen any of the rabbits mate. Yet there are so many of them, dotting my yard like some kind of Disney movie. Bunnies hop through the grass, nibble and twitch, go still as stone when birds dive bomb the shrubs. My child, who is too sensitive, who moves worms off the sidewalk and carries stink bugs outside, tells me that a doe can produce up to ten litters a year, with up to twelve bunnies in each litter. Sometimes the mother eats her litter if she is too stressed and fearful of predators, or she just eats the runt because it’s going to die anyway. My daughter tells me all of this matter-of-factly, like a little old woman familiar with the cycle of life, rather than the ten-year-old that she is. A phantom elbow or foot punches me from within, the ghost of an ache low in my abdomen.

Giving birth can be painless and it can be full of pain. It can be easy or difficult or anywhere in between. You can give birth in a sterilized hospital room or in a kiddie pool in a living room to the dulcet voice of your doula or midwife. You can give birth in the back of a car, on a bathroom floor, in a field, in an elevator, on the side of the road, in a mall, a forest, a library, an airplane, at prom, or in a Walmart parking lot. The list goes on and on and on. While giving birth you may say or hear the following: birth plan, epidural, fuck, breech, Pitocin, I don’t want this, breathe, I’m sorry, push, no, in distress, crowning, don’t touch me. You may not hear or say any of these things. But at the end you will have a baby or you won’t, and what you feel will depend on which.

EVIDENCE IN SUPPORT OF MY CAPACITY by Barbara Lock

February 21, 2022

One time I punched a wall that I thought was made of plasterboard but was in fact concrete. Either way, I would have broken my hand. The side of my fist near my pinky crunched up and my girlfriend told me I was a lunatic. Stop it, stop it, she said. Then she covered her face with a shroud, which irritated me to no end.
I wore a white wool sweater in the style of Irish fishermen last year which placed me fifteen years too far in the past, or possibly the future. It’s hard to know. My appearance was very similar to what you see now, which is to say approximately young, though male. I kept my pace steady and would have gotten there in time if I hadn’t fished around in my bag for something to drop.
There are bridges being constructed and deconstructed all the time. I can tell you about Tappan Zee, Sakonnet, Charles, just off the top of my head. The things we think of as static are not just rarely so, but never so.
I am thinking now of a girl in a nightgown with a ruffled hem. She plays in a driveway next to a house lined by lilacs that make the house, for exactly nine days, the most sweet-smelling place in the universe. After that, it smells like Tang and kitty litter.
A woman I once knew used to dislocate her own shoulder to scam drugs from hospitals. One time she roared up to the ambulance bay in an old Town Car, popped her shoulder out, cursed and screamed until they came with a stretcher. What a story she spun for the doctors! Said that she served in the military in Spain, worked the pile after nine-eleven, took care of orphans, the like. The psychiatrist declared her incurable and she was discharged with a parking ticket.
Four bas-relief carved stone ropes flank the bay window of the brownstone where I used to live. The segmented ropes look like worms, or perhaps a certain type of plant, though I couldn’t tell you which one. I’ve had a difficult time recalling plants along with birds, brand names, varieties of cheese. The spiral of the detail runs clockwise up. At the top of the windows, the stone rope gathers into a swirl above a central rosette. The rosette is not a window, but it’s made of glass or some other translucent material and the morning sun lights the face of the rosette such that it radiates like a beacon into the park.
Sometimes I jump from one time and place to another with insufficient preparation. Indeed, this is the rule. The key to enjoying yourself in this situation is to avoid judgment. I can’t be all things to all people, I tell myself. There is a sadness that never goes away. The man knew this, and he followed me, sat beside me, put his arm around me. I’m not who you think I am, I said to the man.
A tree looks like a fistful of dripping wounds.
The flash from the man’s digital camera blew onto my face and collected my skin in a sort of vacuum. I wasn’t removed from the sidewalk. I was still there, and as I expanded and looked out at the little mirrored triangles spreading across the park, up over the moraine boulder and the sycamore trees, the man pulled his camera from his face so I could see his eyes. When he blinked, a thin translucent membrane spread across his corneas, making his irises appear briefly blue, though they were not.
I am remembering the time that my mother threw a party and afterwards I wondered who was in love with her. Someone was in love with her, one of the guests, or perhaps two or three. A situation of passion suspended in the air as a sort of mist, something I could see, but I didn’t know how to pin it down. Situations like this one are happening to me all the time, contemporaneously with each other. It is difficult to know where to land. I still must eat and drink. Basic bodily functions must be exercised.
In the park across the street, shards of a mirror arranged themselves into the shape of a flower, then a bell, then a fountain. The shapes hung over the sky above the playground where toddlers and 6 year-olds hid behind skinny metal poles, covered their eyes with their hands. You must be hungry, said the man. He rubbed his hands on my back. I could eat, I said. The man moved to grab my wrist, but then I was gone.

STICK FIGURES by Sara Solberg

February 18, 2022

In an eastern New Mexico desert, amid a forest of mesquite and bluestem grass, overlooking nothing but miles upon miles of iron-pressed, sunbaked earth, sits the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP for short). On the surface, it looks like any other government base: a simple grid of unremarkable squat buildings, the tan color of which bleeds into the surrounding arid landscape. But step into one of the elevators that spend their days bobbing up and down WIPP’s vertical mine shafts, ferrying hard-hatted workers between ground level and the ancient salt bed 2,150 feet below, and it’s a different story.

One of the few deep geological repositories in the world, WIPP’s raison d'être is to store the radioactive waste produced by the US’s nuclear reactors. While the facility is only licensed for 10,000 years, the barrels of waste that get buried there will be harmful to humans much longer than that—250,000 years, to be exact. But with its rising popularity as a cleaner, more reliable, more land-efficient alternative to other forms of energy like fossil fuels and solar, both nuclear power and the often lethal byproducts that come with it seem here to stay.

Storage is one thing. What happens to that storage after we’re gone is another matter entirely.

…

A few months before my mom died, I asked her for a favor.

“I just want Dad to have something he can keep going back to,” I said, feet folded up onto the recliner in Mom’s office nook while I watched her work at her desk. I spent a lot of time like this in those days, trailing behind her around the house like I used to when I was little, desperate to soak in her presence while I still could. “You know. For different occasions and stuff.”

Outside the window her desk faced, a cardinal swooped back and forth across the bronzed orange trees lining the border of our yard.

Her bare brow furrowed beneath the rim of her fleece cap. “Write him cards?” The cancer had spread to Mom’s throat by then, and her voice was rough, her words sounding as though they’d been scoured raw with a steel dish scrubber before being set free.

I rocked back and forth, springs creaking as the chair bobbed in time with my rhythm. “Yeah. And on the envelopes you can put things like ‘open this on our anniversary,’ or ‘open this when you’re having a bad day’ or something. Like on Pinterest.”

Mom, ever allergic to technology, didn’t know what Pinterest was.

“Like a letters to your future self kind of thing. But for Dad.” Trying to prepare for the future was another thing I did a lot of in those days. But how can a person prepare for something that can only be understood in hindsight?

When I looked outside again, the cardinal was gone.

…

In 1981, the US Department of Energy commissioned a multitalented team of experts (physicists, engineers, environmental scientists, political scientists, sociologists, archeologists and behavioral psychologists, to name a few) in anticipation of the Yucca Mountain geological repository that was to be built. Though plans were ultimately scrapped in favor of the repository in New Mexico, the team—christened the Human Interference Task Force—became founding members in the emerging field of nuclear semiotics. The sole purpose of this field is to answer one thing: How do we stop generations 10,000+ years into the future from unearthing radioactive waste?

Similar to WIPP, it’s a deceptively simple question on the surface that gains immediate complexity with a little digging. Creating a warning message that will be understood by people 10,000 years out is the bare minimum goal of nuclear semioticians. Ideally, such a message would not only last a couple hundred thousand years in addition to that, but could also be deciphered instantaneously—an unmistakable Turn Back Now; Do Not Pass Go; Do Not Collect $200 that can be understood by any person in any context. But 10,000 years is already double the length of recorded human history. 250,000 years is almost as long as Homo sapiens have existed.

To come up with a clear message that will not only survive in meaning, but in material form—something that will resist the decay of time, that won’t wither like a plant carcass in the searing New Mexican heat, eroded by nature or chipped away by human hands—is almost incogitable.

…

I stopped by Target to find some cards that looked worthy of being the message bearers to my future, widowed dad from his future, deceased wife. The fluorescent lights reflected off the white shelves and white tiles and white ceiling, and it felt like I was the dead one, ascended to a heaven that resembled the gift section of a department store. The Hallmark dogs with their halos and wings only solidified the mirage.

I stood in front of the blank, boxed cards for several minutes, trying to choose from an assortment simultaneously too meager and too diverse. What, I wondered, was the appropriate design for a situation like mine? Colorful circles, bumping up against one another in random patterns like marbles tossed across a floor? Shadows of birds balanced on a wire, twittering quarter and eighth notes that trailed in a wispy string above their heads? The tidy, monochromatic lineup of trees, each a different shade of blue? What design most strongly said, I’m sorry I died? What most said, I was thinking of you then, even if I can’t be there with you now?

I ended up buying two boxes of flower prints: the first a diverse bouquet, the second a wreath of roses and daisies, in the center of which perched a green and yellow, vaguely bohemian sparrow. Its one visible eye, just a small black dot on its turned away face, stared into the distance, perhaps contemplating the wrapping paper a few feet away, or maybe its own two-dimensional existence, frozen on paper until it was either destroyed or disintegrated with age.

Mom loved flowers—loved the wild bouquets I’d sometimes pick for her, loved getting dirt under her fingernails pulling weeds from the garden. Mom loved birds, going as far as to get a few birdwatching guide books so she’d be able to identify the species that tended to hover around the backyard feeders. She loved life.

The cards weren’t enough. They were never going to be enough. But they were better than nothing at all.

…

Numerous solutions to the nuclear semiotics riddle have been proposed since the 1980s, each with their own unique shortcomings. Perhaps the most commonly suggested warning is a simple written message—Rosetta Stones whose multilingual inscriptions can be updated every handful of decades for indefinite millennia. Languages, though, are as alive as the people who use them, ever-changing as they age. It’s only taken six centuries for the English used in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to become unreadable to modern English speakers. Given the infinite unknowns that await humanity, it’s an act of pure faith to believe a message written today will still be translatable 10,000 years out.

Some have suggested using pictograms; Carl Sagan famously insisted the most effective message would be a simple skull and crossbones. But symbols, like language, are ever-evolving. Before it became an omen of death during the Golden Age of Piracy, the skull and crossbones was used by the Knights Templar as a symbol of the Christian rebirth. Today, it’s inseparable from children’s Halloween costumes and Disney movies featuring Johnny Depp.

The next logical step after individual pictograms is a series of them. A narrative. A comic strip depicting a person dying after they’re exposed to the radioactive waste buried below. Stories and stick figures, after all, are two of the few universals that have existed as long as humans have been around. But even then, there’s no guarantee future humans will interpret a comic strip in left to right sequence. Read right to left, it becomes a resurrection story.

Other solutions have included everything from folktales to atomic priesthoods to bioluminescent cats that will glow when they’re within a certain distance of a repository.

And others still have said it’s all a lost cause. Humans have always had a compulsion to excavate. To know. To remember our forgotten histories. Surely, any warning message we leave is just as likely to be seen as an invitation. Why waste our own finite time on earth trying to protect some distant perhaps?

…

Mom bought a small, hinged box from Hobby Lobby to put the cards in—one that resembled a pirate’s treasure chest, complete with an arched top and fake iron plating. It sat in my room for weeks after her funeral, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag to shield it from dust, shoved to the far corner beneath my bed.

As I promised her I’d do, I gave it to my dad once things settled down and the reality of our new lives had started to take shape. There was nothing I could think to say in response to his tears or shaking hands when he reached out to take it—no comforting Hallmark platitudes, no way to boil down the immensity of our loss into something comprehensible.

That’s the paradox of such situations: finding a way to communicate the incommunicable.

I left my parent’s bedroom in silence, quietly closing the door behind me.

…

Many people mistakenly assume WIPP is located where it is because it’s remote. As survivors of disasters like Fukushima can attest, after all, living in the vicinity of radioactive material isn’t an enviable position. In actuality though, the facility owes its placement to one thing, and one thing only: the 2,000 feet of continuous salt below.

The remnant of a sea that evaporated 250 million years ago, the salt bed is an ideal burial ground for nuclear waste for multiple reasons. It’s accessible. It’s malleable, and therefore easy to mine. It’s geologically stable, and impermeable by water.

But above all else, salt is capable of healing. Eventually, 75 years or so after WIPP’s mine is filled to capacity and closed off, left to sit for time immemorial—either remembered or forgotten, as all things are—the salt will collapse around the barrels of waste. It will collapse, and then it will begin to stitch itself together, fractures and fissures filling over the course of a few decades until the barrels have been wholly encapsulated, the surface sealed once more.

I wonder what scars will remain.

CAROUSEL BAR / DOWN IN HOLY CROSS by Autumn Holladay

February 14, 2022

Carousel Bar

I miss 99-cent margaritas served at the old strip from 6:00 a.m. to noon. I’d sit and sip and watch the sex workers rest on slot machine stools after their shift. Most tourists weren’t around at that hour—just the cleaners and the junkies and the loners, and I thought they were my kind of people. The bartender invited me to shower with her after her shift. I believed there was no better way to spend my last day in Vegas.

Her name was Holly. She wore a leather corset and when she took it off, tattoos took its place. I wore a pencil skirt and a silky blouse and when she took them off, my skin was bare. I was 21. I think she was 40. All we did was bathe. She told me she missed her daughter. I asked what happened to her. She pretended not to hear and washed my hair.

Dear guy from Boston, remember when you took me to dinner at the Bellagio because you wanted to fuck me at the Circus Circus? You said Hunter S. Thompson was your favorite writer. But the room was mine and I didn’t invite you in.

I was more interested in the old people blowing their retirement and the people getting married upstairs and the whole place reeking of cigarettes and Lysol and where the fuck was the carousel bar?

I saw you on the news. I thought being an anchorman suited you: you loved to talk and I loved to turn you off. Click. What was your line then? I have a girlfriend but don’t worry, you leaned in, I’m a bad boyfriend. It seemed like a line a boy inherits from his father.

I have a friend who worked at the Circus Circus. Her name is Megan. She was there when I was there, but I didn’t know her then. Megan has stories about dusty brothels and sandstorms and pole dancers and 3:00 a.m. cigarettes and missing her dad. She can’t tell them anymore though. Megan lost her head. She was hit by a car walking home one day. The car didn’t stop.

Megan isn’t dead. I am with her now as she looks out the hospital window.

“Megan,” I say, “do you remember the carousel bar? How people came from all over to see it and sometimes it was there and sometimes it was gone and sometimes they swore they sat at it even when it was closed?”

She smiles and her head doesn't nod and her head doesn't shake and today we can pretend.

Down in Holy Cross

There is only one sunset in New Orleans. To get to it, you drive down Robertson to cross over the canal by Poland. And maybe you laugh because the street before the bridge is Kentucky and the one after is Tennessee. But before you discover this, you’re stuck on the ramp, waiting for the bridge to come down.

You wait, your car slanted up on the ramp as you watch the bridge rise up and up and hear the ship’s horn calling below. If this was your first time, maybe you’d feel impatient. Sometimes it takes twenty minutes for that bridge to come down. But you’re thankful you have a car. You think of all the people who died trying to cross here, either on foot or bike. Then you laugh because the people in the van in front of you get out and start dancing, their music blasting, and it all seems so ridiculous. The horn blows again. The ship makes it through. The bridge lowers. The people rush back into their car. You go up and up then down, but not too fast because you have to make a right at the first light. And you do.

You drive slowly. There are a lot of potholes and kids running around. When you reach the motherload of potholes, the one larger than the street itself, you let the car sink in and out and make another right. It’s funny driving in New Orleans. All of the bumps and stops make it feel like you're riding in a carriage. You go on and on down the road, all slow and careful, until you see a big green hill that leads to the levee.

You continue down Sister Street and you see the ramp for the St. Claude Bridge, but you are crossing underneath it. The road narrows quite a bit and you go real slow this time because it's dark under there and you never know who’s waiting.

Maybe you think of the time last May when you rushed to roll up your windows. A swarm of termites waited for you. There are no termites now. You make it through and up ahead is a big yellow school bus that has sat there since you moved down and probably will always be there. You laugh about the first time you saw it. You were supposed to meet her here and thought her friends were living in it, but really she wanted you to meet her at the house just behind it.

A turn on Burgundy and you’re almost there. You drive up to the gravel patch, by the old baseball field, and think of the time it was just a hole, spitting out water until it flooded the entire street. The Great Burgundy River you waded through. Broken branches and garbage rubbed against your thighs as you waded to the gray double shotgun on your right. You park your car on the sidewalk because it is the safest place to park, but you don’t get out just yet. You sit and stare at the house.

Its ugly gray steps that lead to the torn-up, mustard chair on the porch. And you just stare at it. This is where it all started and ended. You don’t think that, but feel it. You try not to think about it at all. But it comes anyway. Her body. The couch. Cold. Alone. Gone. Never again.

You get out of the car, but you don’t go to the door. You don’t know the people who live there anymore.

Instead, you turn back down the street and walk slowly by the house on the corner because you’ve always admired their garden and today their amaryllis is in bloom. It is a delight to see the bright orange flower pop out from the evergreens. Then you're at the wooden fence and the German Shepherd that always barks, barks, and you go on and cross the street to the parking lot.

Needles and weeds are scattered along the pavement. You follow the little pathway under the live oak tree and you’re in front of the old Holy Cross School. You don’t go inside. You've been inside before. Instead you walk around it through the field along Deslonde Street. The grass is tall, but not too tall, yet. And you go on, slowly, because there are holes mixed in and then you are at the bottom of the levee and you walk up it amongst the yellow flowers and then when you look up again, there is the Mississippi.

There is a swing set on the tower of the levee marker now. Two boys stand there with a long walking stick and point out across the water. They drop their stick and start swinging and you walk past them to the purple rock and sit.

Seagulls fly across the gray and violet sky and ducks swim below. You watch the seagulls land on the water, chasing the ducks out of their fishing spot. You see the boats go by, creating waves across the water, and wonder how the birds manage to fight the current. Then you watch the sun sink below the towers of the CBD where it glows an orange halo around the old Naval base at the End of the World. It is hard to see with the light glittering across the waves, but you keep your eyes open and wonder about the gray sky with the big orange crack running through it.

This is the only sunset in New Orleans.

Before it gets too dark, you get up to walk along the levee. You walk because you know it is there and right now you want to see it, and there it is— the little rock with the words “Be Brave” spray painted black across it. And when you look up again, all that is left are the city lights.

A RIOT OF THE HUMAN HEART by Jillian Luft

February 11, 2022

Boston is burning itself over a baseball game. Outside of Fenway, the local evening news zooms in on a few torched sedans. Undercarriages in flames like hibachi grills. White boy ruddy faces rejoicing. Game 4 of the 2003 ACLS. A Red Sox victory.

I care about baseball because I love you. I want to wake you up to celebrate Johnny Damon and Pedro Martinez and all those other shaggy-haired rascals hellbent on breaking the curse. Once you view the game highlights, I want you to bang me against the TV, so my bare ass kisses static. I want you to tell me it’s all okay, that it’s only the oysters like you said—no, slurred—before you passed out with puke on your tongue.

Boston ties with the Yankees for the series. So, they revel and pelt the pavements with their empties. Some brawl in bars while others lay waste to their beloved hometown with spray paint and gasoline and alcohol-impaired decision-making. At first, I don't understand why their response to winning is as if they’d lost. Then I think about all the times I lucked out when I thought myself doomed. Hope, victory, delusion—whatever you want to call it— can feel like you’ve managed to cage death. Like you have to edge closer and reach through those bars to truly know what you’re up against. Like you can only make sense of your good fortune by testing it.

I watch you in your clammy, fucked-up sleep. You’ve been this way for hours. Still and corpse-like. You don’t stir, but you sweat. God, do you sweat. You’ve got that after-vomit sheen, skin the color of a dead tooth. You’re still wearing your good clothes but we’re not going anywhere.

In my new lacy underthings, I slump against the bed frame. I glimpse my wan face in the mirror and behold a pouty, bare-breasted child. I contemplate the ways my skin folds when I cry, the way my eyes retreat into my babyfat cheeks but leave wet traces. The way I look when I’m alone: pathetic but honest.

The celebration-cum-riot continues. Drunken, gap-toothed bros too close to the camera. Mouths like clogged drains. I wonder if I could spy the mayhem outside our hotel window, but I’ve no idea where Fenway is. I’ve seen so little of this city since we arrived this morning. Just a raw bar kiosk in Quincy Market, the inside of a Victoria’s Secret, a basement Mexican restaurant in Faneuil Hall, and a shitload of Dunkin’ Donuts. If I didn’t know about Paul Revere and the cobblestones, I’d think there’s no rich history here. Except for sports, of course.

The truth is I don’t need history. I’m happy to be lulled—no, fooled— by the present, the way our bodies find ways to collide from moment to moment, the way your hands and mouth and dick quiet my fears, make me forget about everything else but us.

It feels like grief when you’re lost to me like this. I worry you’ll wake up and forget—no, remember—what we’ve done. You’ll see it differently and then you won’t see me at all.

You blame the oysters, but I ate them too. It’s not bad seafood and it’s more than the booze or the drugs—though they certainly play their part. It’s that you haven’t seen your boys in months now, that you are reminded of your youngest when we landed at Logan because it’s his namesake. It’s the foggy realization that even in these clandestine and anonymous spaces where no one knows our sordid origin story, the odds of this working out don’t change. Wherever we go, there we are—totally tragic and out of control. The havoc our passion creates is literally making you sick, but you’ll never admit it.

This trip is intended as an escape. A respite from the harsh demands of your wife’s lawyer, the real repercussions of our workplace romance, the tenuous nature of our cohabitation. Sober truths await us in Florida, bitter and anti-climactic like the Ecstasy comedown we recently shared at your best friend’s wedding.

I hoped for an evening of memorable romance, some sort of affirmation that the hardship, the wild impulses, the inevitable hurt, the inadvertent destruction, the sheer and total dysfunction of it all is worth it. I hoped, at the very least, you’d take me to Cheer’s.

But I refuse to wallow. This is our vacation, goddammit. We’re in Boston and we’re in love. I grab the stationery off the nightstand, uncap the pen with my teeth. I lay on my stomach like a homesick camper, my head resting at your feet. While I stare at your stubbly mask of a face, I pen you a love letter. You’re my destiny and I find a dozen eloquent—no, florid and insincere ways— to tell you so. I write about everything but tonight except to say that when you’re sleeping you look pure, except to say I know forever and it’s you.

Eventually you wake up and reach for me, chapped lips forming excuses. I silence you with my girlish grin, gift you the notepad with mute anticipation. When you read my words, you cry just enough to seem genuine. Your voice is sturdy and weighted with promises far too heavy to keep. You say I love you like it’s an instant replay. You chant my many pet names until I nearly forget who I am. This is the way I like it best: to be lost in your perception of me; to place faith in mutual fantasy; to root for us, the underdogs, whose love will win out if they continue to ignore the rest.

When we return to Florida, your wife finds my letter in your glove compartment. I thought you’d be more discreet, more appreciative of this private—no, performative—testimony. She rips it to shreds; makes you promise I’m gone. And you do but then you don’t. Until you do.

I realize now what I’ve lost, you say. You tell me I need to find another place to live, another person to love. And I wonder who’s really lost what when I whisper, okay, while clenching a throw pillow that probably once belonged to her. And that night, as I thrash and wail in our big white bed, lost in all that I’m losing, calling out to you on the couch, pleading for you to come and hold me, the back of you sighing my name with pity and indifference, I still think I can turn this around. I’ve done it before. Like that night in Boston. I can assure us that what we have is kismet, record-breaking chemistry, a riot of the human heart that can’t be contained. I refuse to let all the rapture—no, destruction—be for nothing.

Everything hinges on Game 7 of the ACLS: a trip to the World Series, the reversal of a curse, a city’s restored belief in themselves. Part of me—no, nearly all of me—thinks you’ll come back if the Red Sox pull this off. At Yankee Stadium, a tired yet determined Martinez remains on the mound long after he should. His manager checks in with him but decides not to pull him out. And when Wakefield closes in the 11th inning and Aaron Boone nails a home run, it’s not the result of some sinister voodoo. If the fans were honest with themselves, they’d admit it was the way the game was played.