Flash

VIRGINS by K-Ming Chang

February 9, 2022

Sixth grade was the year I met Melanie. She’d transferred from private school, Catholic, and around her neck was a copper locket with the Virgin Mary’s portrait inside it. It was the first white person I’d ever seen, minus the wasian in our class who had freckles even in the crack of her ass. The first time Melanie showed me what was inside her locket, we were changing together in the concrete-walled locker room, right in front of the window spattered with flies that spanned the gym teacher’s office. Everyone knew those were the worst lockers to get, the ones in front of the window, because inside the office was our lesbian gym teacher with breath like bug spray and gray pubic hair at her temples. She never wore a bra under her gray T-shirt, and so her nipples pecked out at us like twin beaks, twitching as she chased us on the blacktop, blowing the whistle that meant run, bitch. While the lesbian gym teacher paced the length of the window, looking out at us, I was bent over, trying to cross my arms over my chest while simultaneously bucking off my teal terrycloth T-shirt. When I glanced beside me at Melanie, I saw that she could change from her pink baby-doll T-shirt into her gym shirt without undressing at all, and that she could do it with her shorts too, some kind of magic, the uniform descending over her like an eyelid, clean as the sky when it swaps its skin from morning to evening. Melanie saw me looking and said she’d teach me. It involved acrobatic choreography, yanking my original shirt out of the sleeve of my substitute, threading my head precisely. She was fleshy like a chicken breast, so I was impressed by the elegance of her undressing, and it was satisfying to be naked next to someone who wasn’t yet whittled into any shape. In comparison, I was a silver skewer, I was a preened wing, I had a few bones showing. Beside her, I glittered like the locket that swung from her neck when she bent, scabbing over her chest. When I asked her why Mary’s first name was Virgin, she said because Mary gave birth as one. That doesn’t make sense, I said, did they check to see it was really a baby and not just a really big shit? Melanie turned away from me, but I could still see the puckered purple line at the back of her neck where she carried the weight of that face.

I didn’t master Melanie’s undressing method for another three weeks, but our skin solidarity strengthened—sometimes she’d hold up her baby-doll shirt as a curtain so that the lesbian gym teacher wouldn’t see me through the window while I fumbled with my sleeves—and I discovered several things about Melanie: first, that she wore that mare-haired woman around her neck by choice, which confused me because the woman wasn’t even pretty or a celebrity; second, that she lived two streets away from me, in an apartment building where a husband-wife murder-suicide had occurred in the past year; and third, that she didn’t know we had three holes. This was evident one day in the locker room when I chose to change in a bathroom stall—I made fun of the girls who did that, the ones who still looked like wishbones, who had no fat buttered to their chests at all—because my tampon leaked and I didn’t want to flash the stain at our lesbian gym teacher, who might interpret it as a mating call, the way birds grow bright feathers on their breasts to attract females. When I left the bathroom and joined Melanie at the exit of the locker room, she asked why I’d changed on my own, and I said I’d gotten it, and Melanie said, oh, I haven’t gotten mine yet, I thought I did last year, but actually I just peed blood because my brother threw me at the TV, he was playing Call of Duty, so how do you know if it’s blood you’re peeing or the actual thing, and I said, you idiot, it doesn’t come out of that hole, and she said what hole, and I had to explain there were three—I held my fingers up to her nose and furled them down one at a time—the pee one, the poop one, and the period one. Melanie said oh, like the five holes, the five wounds Jesus bore, and I said no, three. Three holes. And only one of them likes to bleed, Melanie said, I wonder why. She said she thought everything came out of one hole, kind of like the spout of a soft serve machine, where sometimes it’s a vanilla swirl, sometimes it comes out chocolate, and sometime it’s a chocolate-and-vanilla braided swirl, and I said what the hell are you talking about. Melanie didn’t like when I said hell, and always chained her voice to mine: O, she added abruptly. You can’t say what the hello, I told her, because no one says that. Then we were separated on the blacktop, split up and lined up along rows of spray-painted numbers, 1-60—Melanie was in the tens because her last name was An, and I was in the thirties because my last name was Hsiao. I watched her as we did our stretches, our gym teacher up in front, fiddling with the whistle in her mouth like a nipple, strands of her spit suspended in the air when she pulled it away from her lips, a cobweb that stickied all our hands. I watched the fabric of Melanie’s black jersey shorts strain itself sheer as she bent over to touch her left toe, her underwear showing through—My Melody print—and I was embarrassed that for all her sorcery with sleeves in the locker room, I could see the dark sweat stain rivering the crack of her ass, flooding its bed. She bent over further, her fingertips skimming the blacktop, and for a second before she yanked it back up, the hem of her skirt scrolled all the way down to her chin and I saw that she wasn’t wearing a bra, that she had nipples small and pink, like the ceiling of pimples I plucked off my buttocks, flicking the skin into the toilet, her belly button an outie, its shadow hanging like a berry, and I reached forward to pluck it with my tongue before looking away, looking somewhere that could not implicate me or my teeth. Something wet released between my legs, hot as a finger seaming my skin, and I thought I’d pissed myself before remembering it was my week. I ran from my number thirty-one into the locker room bathroom, looking down at the jellied blood, so much of it. Then it was Melanie standing outside the stall and knocking with her knees, asking what had happened, and I told her to go into the teacher’s office and look in the lost-and-found for some shorts. I turned away from her voice and looked down into the toilet, dropping my underwear into it, the water turning that color of beef blood in the trenches of a Styrofoam tray. Melanie paused outside the door, and I said hurry, hurry, and she said, did you know this is punishment for Eve’s sin? And I said, oh my god, now is not the time for you to be a Christian. Get pants. But Melanie lingered outside the door, and finally I sighed and said come in, look at what you’ve done to me, look at what I’ll have to live with if you don’t help me. In the stall, she bent over the toilet and stared at the wad of my underwear, rafting up like an organ, pulsing and winged, and said I bet this is what an abortion looks like, don’t you think it’s sad, and I said no, just help me flush it. I pressed on the handle with my toe and watched as it slithered down before getting snagged, the toilet hacking it back up, butchered water splashing our ankles and veining the floor. Shit, I said, shit, and reached in to tug it out. No, don’t get rid of it, she said, catching my wrist. We panted, flinching at the water that would ring our socks with permanent stains, and she moved my wrist up to her lips, latched her mouth to the center of my palm, the tip of her tongue plunging a hole there, circling its rim before threading through me, and between my legs was the wet again, bloodless and bearing her face.

Y by Thomas Thatcher

February 7, 2022

I picked up the BB gun. I carried it to the road over my shoulder. Then eventually I pointed it at an oncoming car. The driver didn’t see me. He was driving slowly and he didn’t see me with the BB gun. He was about to hear Tsshh Krr. Copper-coated premium BB’s. I thought it might have cracked the windshield but it hit and skipped off the windshield. Boom and the smoke of the incense, which came with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God out of the angel's hand (Rev.8:4)

We needed bread and I didn’t have any bread. When I get some I’ll get us our own apartment. I went to the road because I was having trouble telling Yardane all of the truth. I was saying some of it but not all. So I pulled the trigger. The driver slammed his brakes. I jumped and made off like a coyote. Yardane closed the screen door, reluctantly. The driver and the car kept going. I stepped over branches and made my way back up the driveway. Dogs are barking. We all felt better. Love made perfect.

Yardane walks into Penn Station. She passes by a guy in uniform with his buddies in uniforms and they all have guns. Yardane doesn’t care. She just doesn’t want me to have a gun. She calls me when she finds her seat and talks delicately. I’m excited and I’m sitting on the front steps zooming in and out of the line that means “train tracks” on the maps application.

They have now compassed us in our steps: they have set their eyes bowing down to the earth; (Psalm17:11) So I looked down the driveway and saw all of its dirt and rocks. I ate the blackberries I had in my hand. I think, fuck I’m doing better. She sounds like herself. She sounds sweet. What an awesome combination; Yardane and blackberries.

I’ll cook lentil soup for us tonight. She will put her arms around me, then her leg around my leg, when I’m washing the bowls and spoons. We are so good. I went into the bathroom, put my head under the faucet, and swallowed an oxy. I went into my grandmother's guest room and looked around for a place to crawl into. I’ll leave in a couple of hours and pick up Yardane at the Providence Amtrak Station.

I’m curled up. I think about her and I in a city. I’ll buy a dirt-bike and we’ll fuck the city up. I saw the city and I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. (Rev.21:22-23) We are in the black Ford pick-up truck and we’re leaving the Providence Amtrak Station.

I say, “We’re going to Cape Cod. D’you want watch me hit 90,”

She is holding my leg. She is sitting in the middle seat next to me. I tell her to take the wheel and she says she hates taking the wheel. I kiss her forehead and she takes the wheel.

Vincent called me 2 times so I called him back. We made a plan to go to an NA meeting and then get food at Friendly’s. I tell him Yardane and I will pick him and his girlfriend up in an hour. The dog is barking. I thought about yelling but quietly said her name to myself.

Watermelons and kiwi’s are the same, possibly. I’m holding a small watermelon-kiwi. I bite into it and I feel the skin get stuck in between my teeth and I don’t care that much. This one is nice, it's sweet and drips on my shirt. Walking with Yardane up the handicap ramp is tiring. I think about her and I both looking at the handicap ramp when we got here and feeling retarded.

I found two seats in the back and pulled her wrist so we looked attached at the hip. We entered and exited the room 2 times before I found our spots. She said very softly, “Remedial NA” and I knew she meant her and I needed extra help. She made me laugh over the moment of silence for those still suffering. We are suffering. We are suffering and playing with debris. I stop thinking about where I’ll be when everyone who has not received the mark goes high, higher and I listen. Someone is sharing. I’m giving them my attention but Yardane is sitting next to me. I’m ready, I think. It might happen soon. Are you ready. Is Yardane ready. Yes, yes.

Later on we drove past a gate. It looked old. 4 of us sat in the big pick-up truck and it was quiet. Vincent’s girl needed a ride home so she was with us too. Vincent made some light-hearted jokes about her in front of her and then they kissed and she got out of the backseat and disappeared. I knew what was going on when we passed the gate and parked in this abandoned parking lot in a weird part of town. She had told us on the ride there that her new tent was nice and, if her stuff wasn’t all around, sleeps 4 people.

Vincent asked me if I was serious about getting into bull-riding. I told him yes I was. I asked him if he wanted a small tin of chewing tobacco I bought. I said the taste isn’t all bad. I said, “it’s actually minty,” I was staring at the woods in the headlights. And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I … saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband (Rev.21:1-2).

Tornado warning. The truck will be gone. Tornado. It’ll get shot up to a black storm in the sky. My dirt bike will be gone too. The tornado is moving north-west, south-west, west, south, and north. Not the usual winds but powerful winds. It’s the end of Eastern Massachusetts. But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only (Matt.24:36). I called my mom to tell her.

It’s finally going to be real. The life after this life. The life with Yardane after this life with Yardane. She will feel my emotions really hard in the after-life. For the first time she will have no doubts at all about how real everything is. I’ll be found, my body devastated and not resembling me, against a rock, maintaining the stoic face that I was never able to make in my time alive. For wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together (Matt.24:28) Darkness, clouds, and more wind.

That night Yardane stepped over me and I grabbed her leg. I love her legs. I called her a doll and kissed her thigh. I lit another cigarette and handed it to her. Sitting on the front steps with Yardane makes my faith stronger. Everything is going to be alright in a couple of seconds. I heard it too. She heard a bang. You possibly heard it. And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind (Rev.6:13).

And she picked up pieces of space and pieces of the moon. We picked up metal sharp objects and pointed them at each other, giggling. A meteor hit an airplane above us. We smile together. The town is going to be under water, maybe. There’s a small barn made for chickens that we crawl into and there she kissed my arm. She’s almost asleep. Her small body made a Z shape and then it made a G shape.

I can reach and touch her toes. I can touch her knees underneath white cloth. A frock that we agreed on was modest. I clad myself in XL black gym shorts and an XXL green T-shirt. She likes when my clothes are sometimes falling off like a shepherd who holds his robe up while herding. The pebbles on our driveway. Her leather shoes on the pebbles. There was something (Maybe a ribbon tied on her ponytail, or the pattern of her stockings) that reminded me of Sunday school.

FIFTY-FIVE AND OLDER by Christopher Notarnicola

February 4, 2022

I’m about to be sick on the front porch. Granddad is at the back, beating his cane against the screen door to scare the Muscovy ducks. The neighbors understand—nobody wants duck mess on the walkway. We’ve split a buttered bagel and yesterday’s half pot. He’s probably finishing breakfast while my first bite slips from my tongue in a string of saliva, landing like egg yolk in the flowerbed. I gag. The neighbors have a hard time with my prolonged presence, though no one seems to have heard my heaving. Drum and bass in the front drive after midnight, and in come the questions via landline. Granddad could tell them nothing they would readily understand—the loss of a wife can only excuse so much noise. Two ducks have made their way around front, three puffy ducklings in tow. The adults are black and white with red growths around the eyes and bills. The little ones are yellow with brown over top, stumbling along, chittering through their perfect beaks. I find it hard to understand how a creature can bear such mutation. Granddad has stopped with his cane. And I am surprised to see that a butterfly casts a shadow. The coffee has gone lukewarm again, which seems to be better, and the sip goes down. More ducklings round the flowerbed, intrigued by my aborted breakfast. A gag sends them off. The older ducks are past the mailbox, crossing the neighbor’s front walk, leading the brood. The neighbor’s door opens a crack, and slivers of gold reach for the lawn. My stomach flips, pulling me to the mulch. The coffee comes up with a burn. Bile sinks in the shade of a peace lily. Out back, Granddad has started with his cane again.

ALERT by Caelyn Cobb

February 2, 2022

We all regret downloading that crime reporting app. “I’ve learned that I’m always a few blocks from some guy swinging a chain,” our friend says at dinner. For us, it’s gunshots or fires. Gunshots reported, four hundred feet. One mile. Six hundred yards. People on the app give these alerts thousands of likes. That’s what you get, someone comments. “Probably just fireworks,” I say. Those distances don’t feel that close. One mile might as well be a different universe. They have a different congresswoman and everything.

When we’re getting ready for bed the app says there’s a fire at Food Universe. Their lemons are always moldy and they don’t even have goat cheese. Burn, motherfucker! the commenters cheer. A few weeks ago the worst pizzeria in the neighborhood burned down at three in the morning. That time everyone on the app was devastated. Where will I get my pizza now? Literally anywhere else, we both agreed. Now the pizzeria is almost done rebuilding. We walked by and the door was open: white tiles accented with green, all the chrome new and shining.

“You know what my father would have called that?” you asked. I did, but I didn’t say it. Some things shouldn’t be said, even if it was someone else who said them.

A siren wails. A woman who lives across from the grocery store posts a video. We expect smoke, black and billowing, red-orange lights flashing, but it’s nothing. Y’all are fuckin dumbasses, a commenter says. Fuck you, someone else replies. Laugh emoji. Thumbs up. Some people aren’t laughing. Some people have darker things to say. The siren is still going, farther away—who knows to where. Someone on the app will figure it out. Someone on the app is probably there already.

The local paper tweets that a woman set herself on fire. She was trying to get bedbugs out of her car. “Can you even get bedbugs in your car?” you want to know. They could be anywhere, I remind you. When we had them in that first apartment I would see them in the hallway. If only someone would set fire to that place. Sometimes fire is the only option. Your grandma told us that’s what they did back in the forties: big bonfires of their beds and chairs and clothes, right on the sidewalk. Someone on the app is probably filming that burning car right now, getting thousands of fire emoji reactions. 366 yards away, the woman is probably already in the ambulance, a paramedic rubbing silver into her wounds, pushing medication to keep her calm.

Another siren. My phone buzzes. I turn it to silent and roll onto my side to sleep. You’re still sitting up, awake, the bright white square of your phone lighting up the hollows of your face, vigilant.

HALF-SISTERS by Kristen M. Ploetz

January 26, 2022

red + blue

Her birthstone is amethyst and she has his blue eyes. At the fair, he buys her a purple balloon; when it slips from her grip, he buys her another and ties it to her wrist, winks as he promises, this one will always stay. When he reads to her at night he points to the lupine in Miss Rumphius and tells her about the importance of family. On sunny days he holds her hand as they meander through rocky tide pools where they look for the purple arms of sea stars under shimmering water. She steps barefoot on an urchin and he wipes away her tears. When she is eight, he walks her from house to house on Halloween, a wizard dressed in purple and gold who still believes in magic and forever. A week later, in the wake of a November hurricane that gives birth to a lilac sky, he tells her he’s leaving and not coming back. Her veins purple with sorrow, her breath uneven and shallow as she waits and waits for things to go back to the way they were. Each night she dots lavender oil on her temples and wrists to coax slumber, to quiet the heartpound in her ears. Her mother buys her an orchid for the south-facing sill in her room and still tucks grape BubbleYum in her lunches, but everything remains irrevocable and broken.

Years pass. She finally musters the nerve to visit on Christmas. Over runny pie and under the heavyweight safety of her hoodie she discovers devotion doesn’t come with a lifetime guarantee. She texts her mother from the bathroom: can u pick me up? total waste of time, wipes her eyes on her sleeve as she strides past the table.

He drives her to her first year at the university, an offer her mother forces her to accept because he has the truck and she can’t get the day off. They ride in silence except when he nods toward the hills and says, That’s where the grapes grow. It is the last time she’ll ever be within arm’s reach, confirms the magic of him withered on the vine too long ago. She tacks her course schedule to the cork board above her desk and sets a cup of pencils under the box store lamp, drops a sharpener in the top drawer. Her lavender bunny with the missing ear and folded belly leans against her pillow just like it has since she was a toddler. She vows to sketch out her own life from this new beginning, to study only beautiful things. In art class she discovers violet is a spectral color with its own wavelength, that purple is similar to the eye but a fundamental difference exists—just like him before and after. She is seduced by Claude’s violettomania and Vincent’s ear, doesn’t think either of them were mad but bruised somewhere deep inside like her. She draws on the warm backs of friends, plants iris and crocus between valleys of scapulae, and soon drops out to apprentice and hone her craft where a neon tube hangs in the dirty bay of a street level window, the periwinkle argon glow of Tattoo City a beacon for those who seek something that lasts. Her first client pays her in tears and a fistful of tens, bares her shoulder and talks about how heliotrope is a flower of devotion, once the permissible color of half-mourning after weeks of wearing black, talks about how she buried her sister five weeks ago. Dots of blood trail the needle. She thinks of the urchin that pierced the sole of her foot that one summer. Her attention breaks when the woman says, Do you have any sisters? She draws pale purple ink into her needle and thinks about how November is drawing near, how it will soon be time to buy another orchid for her window sill.

yellow + blue

Her birthstone is emerald and she has his blue eyes. On her first birthday, he ties a green balloon to the back of her high chair, watches it shrink and pucker over a few days before he tucks the cool flap of latex into a memory box at the back of the closet. He doesn’t want to forget this time. He reads her The Wizard of Oz, points to the Emerald City and alludes to the importance of home; her eyes are heavy with sleep when his lies of omission come easy. On sunny days, he holds her hand along the rocky tide pools where they look for sea lettuce under the shimmering water, where he guides her to pockets of soft sand and smooth, algae-coated stone so her flesh remains unbroken. He shields his eyes from the glare bouncing off the water, averts his gaze from a purple constellation of sea stars. On Halloween night he walks her from house to house; she is Tinkerbell and waves her wand as she says, I love you, Daddy, effortlessly beguiling him with her captive magic.

One Christmas—the one when she gets the parakeet she names Limey Lime—a teenage girl comes for dessert wearing an oversized hoodie in a clearance rack shade of purple. Her mother is silent when she sets down the festive green plates runny with apple filling and whipped cream, “Holly Jolly Christmas” bleating from the living room stereo. There is something familiar about the girl, something in her frowning profile. After two bites of pie, the girl spends a long time in the bathroom. Her father throws his napkin on his chair and knocks on the bathroom door, comes back a few minutes later with his lips pressed into a thin, angry line. The girl emerges while the plates are being cleared and a horn beeps out front. The girl doesn’t say goodbye, doesn’t ever come back.

He shows her the world, gives her every spare moment: quetzals of Guatemala and grassy Irish coasts and malachite beads being strung onto necklaces by Kenyan women and the undulating green of the Northern Lights, every summer endless and carefree in that verdant filter of childhood. Hears about her first kiss near the back nine of the country club, helps heal the heartbreak with a week of mint chip double scoops he picks up on the way home from work. When he drops her off at college, he slides the edge of an American Express under the heirloom Emeralite lamp she plucked from his home office, says he’ll text her later that day. She studies botany, presses her cheeks against woodland mosses during field studies, mounts ferns onto large pages in the university herbarium late into the night, talks for hours with her father when he calls every Sunday. With a loan he never actually wants her to pay back, she opens a small flower shop in a trendy pocket of Knoxville, watches him hang the palm frond wallpaper and dig holes for young gingkos in the sidewalk planter and paint the potting bench Kermit green. Friday nights on her veranda she sips absinthe cocktails with friends in their own private l’heure verte where she tells them—every time—This was Van Gogh’s green muse before they talk about the virtue of being loved by so many, how it comes so easy. The business blooms and she can’t believe her luck at selling succulents and air plants to the Instagram masses, has a four-leaf clover etched onto her hip as Ink Street hums with a green krypton glow outside the picture window. She watches the needle drag across her skin and rests her hand above her still-taut belly as she watches, imagines the day her blue-eyed child will bounce on her father’s knee, wonders whatever happened to that girl that one Christmas, if she is happier now, happy like her.

THREE SELECTIONS FROM MORE ANIMIST BABBLE (A WIP) by Bram Riddlebarger

January 24, 2022

The Hornworm and the Green Tomato

The hornworm had eaten the better part of the upper reaches of the tomato plant.

The green tomato was petrified. It was already late in the season and now this.

“YOU BETTER NOT EAT ME,” screamed the green tomato as the hornworm cast glances its way.

“I’m so fucking horny,” said the hornworm. Its rear horn rigid.

“I’ll BE RED IN A FEW DAYS,” negotiated/bargained/pleaded the green tomato with a faint blush.

“You’ll be red-y now,” leered the worm. It ashed a cigarette as tobacco worms did. The cherry burned.

The hornworm bit deeply. The sexual juices of the green tomato grew into flight.

Fern

“Nobody loves me,” said the fern.

The water of the pond reflected a gray sky.

“I hate this fucking job,” said the fern.

The wind blew across the cubicle of the earth.

“There’s no future,” said the fern. “No hope for a better life.”

The western fires had all died.

But they would return.

“It’s cold out here. I’m freezing to death!” said the fern.

The sun set on the ridgeline.

“Even Job was better off than me,” said the fern. Its fronds covered its face.

The fern swayed as the cold settled in from on high.

“Boy, you sure are a sensitive fella aren’t you?” asked the sedge grasses grown brown and brittle. “What kinda fern are you anyway?”

The fern’s nose cleared with the change in season.

“A sensitive fern,” said the fern.

The sedge fashioned a casket for the fern.

The first frost set in.

The Bumblebee and the Stink Bug

for Graham

The bumblebee sat exhausted on the large green leaf of a delicata squash plant overtaking the beans. The bumblebee was covered head to toe in orange pollen. It had been up since 4am. It barely slept at all.

“Fucking shit,” the bumblebee cursed. It combed the pollen to fly.

A stink bug watched from the next row of beans.

“God, I’d murder someone to be carefree,” said the bumblebee taking longer than the regulated 15 minute break.

“That’s not pollen, baby,” said the stink bug. “It’s just my sexual juices.”

COURT MANDATED THERAPY by Sage Tyrtle

January 19, 2022

Bill is not having flashbacks to Vietnam. Even though the shiny-haired psychiatrist says there's no doubt at all, even though the list of symptoms looks like his autobiography. Bill sits on the burnt orange couch. He looks at the palm frond wallpaper. He says in his most even tone, "No, I believe you're mistaken," and he's being careful because if the psychiatrist decides that he's a danger to himself or others then he could end up a Thorazine zombie like Harry Alessi up at the sanitarium. Bill clears his throat and makes himself look into the psychiatrist's eyes. Makes himself say, "But let's explore it further."

Bill is not having flashbacks to Vietnam. Yesterday, when Bill was kneeling on the floor at the local Goodwill, keening, he wasn't hearing gunfire. He couldn't feel socks that had been wet for so long they were disintegrating. His hands weren't dripping in blood. Bill didn't feel the horror the psychiatrist is telling him he felt, and avoiding places that remind him of the war won't help. When Bill was on the floor, shaking his head in response to the Goodwill manager who was pleading with him to leave, he was holding a Holly Hobby doll.

Bill is not having flashbacks to Vietnam. Yesterday, curled into a ball on the floor in the Goodwill, he was also in 1971, he was also back at the house in Munroe Falls. He was ripping his draft notice into a hundred pieces and flushing those pieces down the toilet. He was stuffing clothes into a duffel bag. He was emptying the Green Giant Frozen Peas box of his mother's pin money with a muttered apology. He was walking backwards on the highway, sticking out his thumb, muttering, "North, just north," to the drivers. He was thinking of his Canadian wife who bounced out of bed at 5 AM, who made up silly songs whenever she saw a bumblebee, who never existed. The tiny apartment they never shared in Montreal and their imaginary little girl named Judy. Who pointed at the picture in the book he was reading and said, "I am Sylvester and you are the Magic Pebble, okay?" He is mourning his nineteen-year-old self, his gentleness in the years before he reported for duty, Sir.

Bill is not having flashbacks to Vietnam. But he nods and nods and tries to remember how to grin in a way that is convincing. He shakes the psychiatrist's hand and promises to fill that prescription, doctor, and when he makes it outside he sits on a park bench where a pigeon flies over and looks up at him with bright eyes. He rips the prescription into a hundred pieces. He lets the wind take them.

‘BLUE BANJO: THE HIRAM SADLER STORY’ DELETED INTERVIEWS by Bodie Fox

January 17, 2022

HAZEL COX (Hiram’s first wife): I was pregnant with our first the night he played the Russian Roulette. We was in a dive bar after a show in Lubbock, Texas—I’ll never forget the place, neither, ’cause it had a sawdust floor and the piano played itself. He was drunk, of course. Except for that first year we knew each other—from the day he walked into my music store to the night of our wedding—he always had something to sip on, whether it was a bottle of rye or a bit of sippin’ cream.

He lost. But, in a way, he won. He survived. The bullet was only a .22. It went under his skin, ricocheted off his temple, bounced up and around his skull, and tore out behind his right ear.

HANK SADLER (Hiram’s oldest son): Yeah, Pa fought in the World War, the second one, even survived the Battle of the Bulge with nothing more than frostbite in his picking hand, which the docs had to cut out. They took his pointer and bird fingers. Still got em, though. Shoot, ask him about it next time y’all bunch head out to his house. Keeps ‘em up there on the mantle in a TOPS Sweet Snuff tin, all blackened and wrapped in frayed tissue. Likes to take ‘em down anytime he got company over.

“SWEET TOOTH” (convenience store clerk in town where Hiram resides): I coulda done told youins how the ole boy got the Cancer in his throat. After all the business up at the Ryman, after they’d done blackballed him over the lawnmower, he stayed in town more and he drove down here every day for two packs of Winstons. Rain, snow, sleet, hail, he’s here. About twice a week, when I’m just about to leave for home to take my supper, he comes back in, stands on them tiles—those two sticky ones there—and gets him anotheren.

PARSON LYMON (preacher at Hiram’s church home): It’s always a good Sunday to see Hiram strut through those back doors, under the brick arch. Although, he’s late every single Sunday. I can’t recall a time he ever arrived before the hymn that leads into my sermon. We tried to work it out to where he could play backup banjo to the piano sometimes, something to encourage him to come early, but it never worked out.

HARRIET SADLER (Hiram’s eighth daughter): It’s not like he was around anyways, but, yeah, Mom—that’s Erin Massey, his third, dead now—left him. He came in roaring drunk one night and threw turtle stew at me for smarting off, something about how fat he’d got. Luckily he missed, and it splattered on the dresser that Mom kept in the dining room. What they had left, which isn’t much, was over after that.

PARSON LYMON: Rambling man as he was, he always seemed to stay married. I officiated all seven of his weddings, but I think Hiram only counted six. He had one annulled on the grounds of incapacity. However, that argument could probably be made for all his marriages, except the one with Hazel; I know without a doubt that he was sober for the year before they tied the knot.

HUNTER SADLER (Hiram’s fifth son): If I ever wanted to see him, had to go to his shows.

LEE SHARR (former friend of Hiram’s) After that whole mess with the lawnmower on the Ryman stage, he was bored and sitting around with me in the carport most days, chain smoking Winstons, taking pulls off my rye. That’s when I suggested we should make Brunswick stew, give us something to keep busy. That’s the shit that he later jarred, labeled and sold as “Brunswick Blue.” Stole my recipe, the bastard.

HAZEL COX: He won’t admit it to you, but there wouldn’t be no Hiram Sadler without me. Sure, he was good, but he was in a bad place when we met. After they cut off his picking fingers, he about drank himself to death and it didn’t stop until the day he came into my music store, where I showed him a left-handed banjo, the one he bought, the one that made him who he was, the one with the blued head on it. He won’t tell you that I was the one who taught him to play again, play left-handed. He never even told them kids how it happened. Told ‘em that he taught himself to play over again. Bet he said the same thing to y’all folks.

CLAIRE SADLER (Hiram’s second daughter): All of us kids seemed to get different Hirams. A few, like Hank and maybe Steff, say that he was good to them, and I think he tried with me, at least when I was young, but I wish he hadn’t.

There was this one time: my school had a Career Day and I’d begged and begged him to come. I mean, what kid wouldn’t? He was Hiram Sadler, the living Bluegrass legend. When it was my turn, he wasn’t there and I did all I could to not cry in front of everyone.

He was two hours late, but he came, smelling like rye. Mrs. Dubbie only let him talk because she felt bad for me. Didn’t bring no banjo. Didn’t bring no finger picks. Came dressed in his old fatigues and passed around his TOPS Sweet Snuff tin for all the kids to see.

MOVEMENT STUDY by Amelia C. Winter

January 14, 2022

The only way they had was their nakedness. This and this alone delivered them through the many corridors of their pursuit: their innumerable stations of falling over and springing upright.

Their eyes, their pupils, were open, bright, darting: brilliantly black-on-white. They were silent—mutists—but too antic for the soliloquy over the straitjacket. They were turned out of the asylums as quick as they were caught, hopped then over hedges and fences, scattering the hills.

The realm of objects at all times tried to court them; its advances went unrequited. (That is what a prop is, said Marx: a thing that tries to dominate you and fails.) They were slippery as fish, and in time they were common as pigeons, though they never scavenged or roosted or even seemed to perch, and certainly they did not breed.

Some were captured on motion picture cameras—but very few, and only by desperate pursuit. Stories were fitted to this footage at great cost. The dramatic scenes were done by costumed doppelgangers, all of whom later sat abed and drank, copiously—copiously.

When I say that they were naked, I mean that they were clothed, relentlessly and essentially clothed, even the tops of their heads covered with an inalienable hat.

When I say that they were naked, I mean that some of those who saw them also studied them, wrote of them, but one would then be found giving suck to a piglet or taking a wife in legal ceremony and the arguments would fall apart. Even the poems of praise were outdated in weeks.

When I do say that they were naked, I mean that they lacked the impression of weight and volume; one could chase them up, reach out and palpate their necks and yet feel no surer of them as things of real duration.

But their real duration was discovered at last when they vanished. They came all at once, and they went all at once. It seemed they were to be nobody’s sport.

And then:

A man ran for a train and caught it.

A man came into a secret and never told it.

A man kissed another man on the mouth and got the hell slapped out of him. (He never lost his hat.)

A man drove to the detention centre and detonated his bomb, then fled across a heat camera that tracked him. The heat camera tracked him live to a bog into which he waded out, in which he submerged himself, until his signature died. He was never caught. On the shore, by a tree, he left a ratty tramp’s coat.

These were tributes.

Myself: I have spoken to nobody friendly in months. I eat tuna-on-toast in my little brown garret and attempt to write. I spend my evenings laid up in bed, cold-calling people by voice-over-IP, trying to sell them insurance.

When I go running—always by night—I imagine that I’m Eadweard Muybridge, of chronophotography fame, having just killed my wife’s lover. Muybridge was acquitted for that in 1875, but I live in a different time.

When I think, as I run, of my wife’s dead lover—of my finger depressing the gun’s trigger, the bullet piercing his heart, of how he staggered backward into his bookshelf and conducted all his books, knick-knacks, and tchotchkes down onto the floor, on top of him—I know I’ll need to spend my life on the run—running in place against a black background—each minute movement an exquisitely-lit anatomy—a stationary plate of black-and-white impressions.

This, too, I tell myself, is a variety of escape. Just narrowly.

GREAT BLOOD by Zee Carlstrom

January 12, 2022

Every day, during his half-hour lunch break, Horace Median Dahl strolls along the ornamental concrete pathway that cuts through the center of Grace Hill Cemetery. During this restive walk, he eats his usual brown-bag lunch: a snack-sized sack of Doritos and a chicken and cheddar sandwich with BBQ sauce, the way his mama always makes it.

Today, however, Horace strays from the ornamental concrete path and tosses his mama’s lunch into the garbage. Unencumbered by tradition, he strides down a weedy gravel walkway that takes him into a dark corner of the cemetery, devouring a tilapia salad sandwich and a can of ranch-flavored Pringles he purchased from a deli.

He does this, makes these changes, because other things in his life need to change—bigger things than chips or lunchtime walking routes—and Horace believes he can start small and work his way large, hoping decisions are like atomic particles, minuscule molecules that, when combined, create universal shifts. The kinds of shifts that move a thirty-seven-year-old warehouse manager out of his mama’s spare bedroom and into the warm embraces of greater hopes and truer lovers, lovers of a sexual variety, with fascinating private organs and lips that taste, he imagines, nothing like BBQ sauce.

The gravel path crunches beneath his Asics, a comforting sound as he meanders past the crumbling graves, far older and poorer than the grand monuments lining the central pathway. Beneath the yellowing oaks and orangish maples, he pops his Pringles’ top and inhales the new-can smell. Intoxicating and vaguely alluring.

High on ranch-flavored dust and the potentiality of his future, Horace strolls toward a statue—a fat angel with a wreath of dead flowers on its head. Chuckling, he stops and observes the angel, which seems to stare into the place where Horace keeps his secrets. Then, he hears a lustful voice behind him.

“Hey there, big fella.”

Startled, Horace wheels toward the voice. There, on the other side of the path, he finds a middle-aged woman wearing a red-white-and-blue bikini. She’s seated on a gravestone with her arms resting on her knees, her head cocked, and her lips set with a curious smile.

“I assume you’re here cuz of my Craigslist advertisement,” the woman continues. “And if not, then I’m wonderin’ if you’d like to be my baby’s daddy.”

Horace nearly drops his chips but holds fast to the can. He studies the woman. She is not particularly attractive, but still out of the league he has come to accept as his own. Flesh bunches around the edges of her patriotic bikini, and her nose is the size and shape of a parrot’s. And yet, regardless of these and other shortcomings, Horace is drawn to the woman’s countless folds and ripples, and the question of fatherhood echoes in the meager vaults of his masculine mind.

The woman sighs. “Judgin’ by your obvious surprise, I’m gonna take it you haven’t read my Craigslist post. If that’s the deal, please lemme explain—”

She does explain, and Horace listens, nodding and smiling while the woman makes jokes about her father’s death, his kooky last request, his alarming insistence that she preserve their ancient bloodline, their ancestral greatness, the Knights Templar and the Freemasons, Benjamin Franklin and Joan of Arc. She says her first name is Guinevere, her last name is Magdalene, and her father specifically requested she breed a heroic descendant on his grave, taking as her mate an average stranger with poor eyesight and questionable prospects.

“I know it all sounds a little nutty,” Guinevere continues. “But your glasses are pretty thick, and your shirt’s too large, so I’m assumin’ you meet my daddy’s requirements.”

Horace stress-chews a mouthful of Pringles and swallows with difficulty. “I do.”

“Super.” Guinevere smiles—warm yellow teeth—and unties the strings binding her bikini bottom. With a flick of her wrist, she exposes herself.

Mortified, Horace averts his gaze, turning back to the fat angel with the dead flowers on its head.

“Oh my God,” he mutters. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”

“Relax.” The woman lays back on the grave and stares at the sky. “You got this.”

Horace shifts on his feet. He looks up and down the gravel path. Surely, there are hidden cameras in the bushes. Surely, this is not happening to him in real life. But then, it must be. He’s never had a dream before, not even during the day, and this is all too imperfect for fantasy. Too impossible.

“What are you waitin’ for?” murmurs Guinevere. “I’m offerin’ you everything.”

“I’m coming,” Horace whispers, stumbling forward, unzipping his khakis with his non-Pringles hand and wondering what mama would think if she knew he threw away her sandwich, her chips, her kindness.

“There ya go,” Guinevere coos as Horace climbs onto her body. “It’s only weird if we think about it.”

Horace clears his throat and avoids his thoughts. He drops the Pringles can into the grass. He does his best. Long seconds pass, and he tries to breathe through his nose, sparing Guinevere his fish-tinged breath. He moves like the men he’s seen in the videos. He moves like a man worthy of responsibility. He moves like a hero with a future, a house of his own, a life worth living. He grunts and struggles, and Guinevere sniffs and coughs.

“This don’t mean nothin’,” she mutters. “This ain’t for you or me.”

“I know,” Horace gasps, willing his body to cooperate, envisioning his eventual child. A genius, perhaps. A titan of industry. An eminent world leader who will forget his father entirely the way Horace has long tried to forget his own.

“Oh God,” Horace hisses. “Oh God, help us all.”

“Why you cryin’?” Guinevere asks, tenderly, but it’s too late. Lunch break is over. The Pringles are finished. Horace can already feel himself deflating, the great urge dying, the chance passing like time.