Flash

EULOGY by Dan Melling

November 22, 2021

Derek came in sad-faced because Alastair’d died, said, Alastair’s dead, but I’ve not worked in seven months because the pub’s been closed, so I said, Who’s Alastair? Derek’s face got sadder, said Big Alastair, with the jewelry and I remembered him. He was a dickhead. I said, Oh yeah, and got Shelly over to talk to Derek, but Shelly wouldn’t care either. Alastair was a dickhead who always wore two watches and two thick gold chains and a ring on each finger and whistled when he wanted a pint and one time slapped a girl’s arse as she walked past. The girl was young. First-job-out-of-school young and she was shaking after he did it. Only a joke, hen, he’d said, a wee skelp. Alastair was the colour of kidney failure. He went from yellow to green to purple to a reddish-brown in the space of one face. I used to think he looked like a bloated corpse from the Battle of the Somme. I used to picture him, urea-pigmented, bulging out of the mud and sludge and shell craters. I’d close my eyes and see him leering at me from the middle panel of an Otto Dix triptych. But Derek was sad and because we couldn’t serve beer indoors he went out into the beer garden and because it was May and snowing he was one of only three people out there and he drank and shivered and mourned. Derek was working hard on the pints, going two at a time, and I brought him two out and said, Some fucking day, ay? and Derek said I ken he was a dickhead but I’ve kenned him since school. I said, He wasn’t that bad, and Derek said, Nah, he was, and I could see in the way he wrinkled his brow, he was wondering where the sadness was coming from. I thought I could see him trying not to recognise the answer. How desperately he didn’t want to know that death is everywhere and that it’s always chomping its way towards us. It was like he didn’t want to know that even if death worked fairly, even if it moved sequentially, working through linear generations, he’d be getting right towards the top of its list and because he’s poor and because of where he was born and who he’s worked for there’s no way to postpone it. So Derek stayed confused and he drank his pints two at a time and then added a whiskey to each order. He shivered and watched his breath dissipate and pulled his sleeves up over his hands so that only enough finger was showing to bet on the horses on his phone and he probably remembered what Alastair was like in school and how different the uniforms were then and how different the area was and he probably remembered them being teenagers and fucking lasses and fighting lads and when they worked on the trains and when the trains got privatised and then he probably remembered retirement and all of the time they’d spent in this pub and all of its landlords and all the hundreds of people who’d had my job and the pints and pints and pints and he watched the snow falling and instantly melting while he mourned a dickhead.

JONAHS AND THE WHALES by Avra Margariti

November 20, 2021

You tell me your father Jonah was eaten by a whale when you were a boy. Right before your eyes, you say. One moment you were fishing together in your old boat; the next, the beast breached, snatching your father between shadow-thin teeth as if he were bait. You had to row yourself back to shore. Your spindly arms took weeks to regain sensation. Your heart never did. Is there a Jonah here? the delivery person asks as they hand me a loaded speargun wrapped in brown paper. Your name is also Jonah. The junior who will soon outlive the senior. Or so I thought before your online order arrived, the anniversary approached. When you lie next to me in bed, you paddle like a dog in its sleep. You recite lines from Moby Dick, the Hebrew Bible. I’m grateful I hid the speargun and its harpoon in the garden among my sweet peas. When you hold my hand at night, you clutch it tight like a weapon. I won’t let the whale take you, you vow in the morning, but you won’t look me in the eye. It’s not me you see. Over breakfast you play whale song recordings, try to decipher your father’s secret Morse Code, tap-tap-tapping against wet stomach lining. Revenge, you say. You need to get revenge on the whale, rescue your father from its giant gut. It’s been twenty years, you tell me, the milky white of your eyes bloodshot fever-red. His matches must have long since burned to nothing, the minnow-diet shrinking his proud skeleton. His fishing vest a chilled rag, waterlogged. You need to kill the whale, slice its belly open; you need to get him out. While we stroll through the park, a volunteer asks if we’ll sign a petition to end whaling. You knock the clipboard out of their hands. When I watch the Star Trek movie about humpback whales brought back from extinction, you kick the TV in: tinfoil screen, fishing line wires. Women want me, cetaceans fear me, the hat you never part with boasts above the brim. We haven’t touched each other in months. I wake up in the middle of the night to find our bed empty but your side still warm. The speargun gone from my patch of sweet peas, trampled into muddy confetti. Cheery music emanates from the open laptop, a sea-blue aquarium ad playing on repeat. I drive through town, retracing your steps. The aquarium’s chain link fence has been cut open. Security guards sleep slumped one against the other, tranquilizer darts flashing like lures from the side of their necks. In the whale exhibit, the light is blue and oscillating. The ground rumbles with distant bellows. I spot you on the feeding platform, precariously balanced while the stunted orca below breaks the water’s surface. The beast regards you, sluggish, old. Your speargun falls limp in the water. It sinks fast. Impassive, the whale returns to the bottom of its clear-glass prison. You prostrate yourself across the platform. My arms, you cry, I can’t feel my arms. You dissolve into lament: My father, I can’t find my father. I know, I tell you, and think of the broken TV, and the trampled sweet peas, and the nine-year-old boy who had to row his guilt home.

THREE FLASH STORIES by Michael Haller

November 19, 2021

WORK

I answer a phone for the company. I sit behind a desk in a room and answer the telephone when it rings. When the telephone is not ringing I sit in my chair and wait for the phone to ring. When the phone rings I pick up the handset and listen to the voice on the other end, and when the voice is finished saying what it has to say I hang up and try not to think. Then the phone rings and I answer it.

My boss tells me I am doing a splendid job, but I think he is saying this to keep me from thinking that maybe I am not doing a splendid job and that I am, in fact, wasting the company’s money. But because the company has never shown signs of a money shortage, I do not believe it is possible to waste something that cannot be depleted. Therefore my boss is telling the truth. He is an honest man.

At 5:00 the phone stops ringing and it is time to go home. I do not know whether the company turns off the phone so no more calls can get through, or if the callers automatically stop calling every day at 5:00 and then resume calling at 8:00 the next morning.

At 5:00 I leave and go home to my house where there is a phone in the bedroom. This phone rings occasionally, no, seldom, when I am with it. When I do get a call, the voice on the other end often sounds familiar, but I cannot match the voice to a face or a person. I listen, though, and sometimes speak to the voice.

One day I made a tape recording of my voice and brought it to a nearby phone booth. I dialed my home, set the mouthpiece next to the tape recorder, rushed home, and answered my phone in time to hear my voice on the other end speaking to me. It was a limited conversation but one that I have cherished because I knew who was talking to me. I would like to meet this person from the phone booth, but because of time constraints we will be unable to get together.

THE TOURNAMENT

It was after the billiards tournament I had won. We were standing around the table talking; I was talking about the last shot I made. Hands recently removed from nearby pockets were grabbing my right one and shaking it in congratulations. One of the hands felt like a tongue. There were camera flashes and questions from a reporter. I had won. Then the men took me by the arms and laid me on the pool table, splayed like an X. Two pock-faced men unbuttoned my shirt. A heavyset man wearing tinted glasses took a penknife out of his pocket and stuck it into my chest just above the left nipple. While holding the knife in place with his right index finger, he removed a handkerchief from his pants with his left hand and blew his nose. He then made an incision in my chest that cut in a rising half arc to my right nipple, around and down to a spot midway between sternum and navel, then straight down to my beltline. He rolled back the flap of skin, in the same way one might open a tin of sardines. He sloshed his hands in the opening, then tugged on something that gave with a snap. It slipped out of his hands and made the sound a cow liver would make if it were dropped on the ground. Then they put the skin back in place, stitched me, picked up my fallen organ, and left. A minute later one of the men returned and read me a note: “In order to facilitate recuperation the patient must remain supine for seven days. If the patient attempts to ambulate before the seventh day, it is possible he or she will agitate the part of the body that is healing and tear loose the stitching.”

DOMESTIC

I live in the fear that someone will assassinate me. I will walk out of my house one morning to get my newspaper, and when I turn to wave to my next-door neighbor (who is also getting his paper) a gunman in a passing car will open fire with a machine gun. I will do a writhing death dance in my front yard, similar to the one Warren Beatty performed at the end of Bonnie & Clyde, blood spewing from my wounds like geysers.

I do not understand why anyone would want to assassinate me.

I am not a politician, and to remove any suspicion about my involvement in politics I have stopped voting. Nor am I a religious figure. I have closed the church’s doors to myself and have stopped thinking about God. Politicians and preachers are the usual targets of the assassin’s bullet, and by removing myself from the sphere of the hunted I think I will be safe.

Yet I wake at night and see shadows moving in the dark, hear feet shifting in the carpet...windows conspiring against me.

I will hire bodyguards to protect me at all times and I will wear a bulletproof suit. The protection will cost money but if it saves my life it will be worth it.

GOTTERDAMMERUNG by Howie Good

November 18, 2021

Welcome to the Age of Autonomous Machines, where the brown bears of Kamchatka are cold, ragged, and hungry, and under perpetual ban, and rivers brim with jizz and blood, and fish have the twisted mouths of stroke victims, where saints travel incognito on New York City subways and God speaks to them in a gravelly two-packs-a-day voice, where a peeling billboard declares it’s time to look ahead to the past, when the public gallows stood silhouetted at dusk against a sky of faded red plush.

Blinking like a sick mole against the harsh white light of the desert, the last of the angels steps out of his winged chariot onto the hot tarmac. Little girls in braids present him with bouquets. Jeers erupt somewhere among the hundreds of people solemnly watching the ceremonies from behind a security fence. The plainclothesmen mixing with the crowd pepper-spray everyone within range. On the tarmac, meanwhile, a military band strikes up a brassy tune that has long been a favorite of dictators around the world. Birds hum along.

I fall asleep to music, wake up to the barking of Soviet space dogs. We are apparently closer than I realized to the border of a bygone era. “Better call a repairman,” I whisper to my wife, who is standing on tiptoes, peering over my shoulder. By the time the repairman arrives, it is four in the afternoon and the sky has a long, black crack running down the middle. As he unpacks his tools, he volunteers that he has a titanium plate in his head. I nod numbly. Death, when it finally comes, will have his phlegmy eyes.

THE FLIGHT PATH by Megan Peck Shub

November 17, 2021

The morning my friend passed away—not a euphemism here, for passing is just what she did, through her protracted process, a slow shifting from life to whatever it is that is not life—some engineers launched a rocket at the Cape.

I’d flown down from New York at 4 AM, but I arrived too close to the end for me to cut in, so I stayed at my parents’ house, waiting for the call.

That night, in someone’s backyard, my other friends and I, we stood there, conscious of our collective remaining behind. It was one of those suburban Florida backyards, one in a long, identical row, the ground half dirt/half Saint Augustine grass, primly fenced off from the neighbors. Some of us were drinking vodka, yes. I didn’t partake in the cigarettes because I’d quit, and I figured my friend—since she died of cancer, and here it feels better to say died—wouldn’t want me to smoke. It is not logical to do things for the dead, but we do them anyway, because what we’re doing is actually for ourselves, obviously.

That part of town sits in an airport flight path; when I think of it, I think of watching the bellies of low-flying aircraft, their landing gear reaching out like talons.

One of my friends looked up at the sky.

“She had the best seat in the house for the rocket launch,” this living friend said, her finger stuck toward the sky; some wet-eyed laughter all around the group. A nice thought, but I could not agree. The truth is that I didn’t think it was the truth.

Years ago, when I was 24, I worked at Newark airport with a middle-aged colleague who—unbeknownst to him, absorbed as he was in our rigmarole, in our planes, in the pallid mounting of his days—taught me a lot about pain. The context is gone, but one day he asked me, “Have you lost a friend yet?”

Yet. Yet. What a tag it was—yet. There are words that sound like their meaning. Crash. Bang. This felt like that. Yet: something brutal, inevitable.

I remembered his words, standing in that backyard, looking up at the roving dots, what I imagined were satellites, slung around and around and around our orbit by gravity. The memory played as if released by a needle sliding into a record’s wax groove. “Hit it,” I could hear my friend say, snapping her fingers. This part was imaginary, of course.

The next day I flew back to New York. Every time I leave Florida, I feel like it’s spitting me out, like I’m some kind of flayed pit, hurtling.

This was three years ago. I still hear her ringing laughter, clear as ever, perhaps even clearer than before she left—and here it feels most apt to say she left. I feel her shrugging, somewhere, maybe in my own shoulders, when, from time to time, I smoke a cigarette.

For Jessey

YOU’RE INVITED TO MY MENOPAUSE BALL by Susan Hatters Friedman

November 14, 2021

The Debut Ball for Invisibility

The family of _____________ (enter name of menopausal woman here) __

request the honour of your company at the Menopause Ball, in honour of her 51st birthday, to celebrate the “next phase” of her life.

You attended her Debutante Ball when she was “coming out” to be pursued. Now, in Grandest Blue-Blood Tradition of the Magnificent Menopause Balls of yore—for the next rite of passage, she is “going back in.”

Help ___________ celebrate this glorious time in her life, when she no longer needs birth control, Tampax, or responses to cat-calls. Join us as we fondly bid farewell to her: endogenous estrogen production, waistline, vaginal moisture, memory, stable mood, body temperature control, restful nights, and hair (except for witchy black chin hairs).

Let’s bid adieu to her marriageable years and debut her ceremonial cloak to symbolise her invisibility! The invisibility cloak will render her invisible to men on the street, men at the grocery store when she needs something from a high shelf—and let’s face it—men in the bedroom. However, she will be valued for her wisdom… if anyone can figure out where exactly she is.

The Soirée will take place on: Friday the 13th at Five Thirty P.M. (Biological clocks are ticking!)

Location: Shangri-La Hotel Grand Ballroom

Attire: Formal. The guest of honour will wear a white gown (with no worries, the one positive!)

____________ will be presented by two gentlemen, as is traditional for debut. Her escorts will be her husband _______ and Fireman Nathan (a.k.a. Mr. July in the Firefighter calendar—in case she experiences any hot flashes during the event).

N.B. In order to best represent the climacteric, the ballroom’s thermostat will be going all over the place. If the guest-of-honour asks, “Is it hot in here,” please reply that it “must just be you” in the grandest party game tradition.

The choreographed Climacteric Dance Finale will go all night—to symbolize difficulty sleeping.

With Music Including: “Hot Hot Hot” by the Cure

“The Heat is On” by Glenn Frey

“Ice-Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice

“The Heat of the Moment” by Asia

“Hot Blooded” by Foreigner

and “Some Like it Hot” followed by “I’ve Seen Better Days (and the Bottom Drops Out)…” by Citizen King

All the crème de la crème will be there. The glamourous few presiding over the event, chosen by Le Distinguished Committee, will include those actresses in their 50s who can somehow still play women in their 30s: Jennifer Aniston, Nicole Kidman, and Robin Wright.

With man-splaining speeches expected from ________________(the guy from work who shares tips for menopause from when his mom went through it).

Valet parking tickets will be validated by ______at the entrance. (Sometimes the guest of honour wishes she herself were a parking ticket.)

Gift bags upon departure will include fancy-fans, tweezers, vaginal jelly, hair dye, and eggshell calcium tablets (for the rest of your life).

R.S.V.P.:

M___________________________

___ happily accepts

___ will be there in spirit

___ will be there in spirit, and realises that they will probably never again notice the newly-invisible guest of honour

TANKERS by Mackenzie Moore

November 11, 2021

I thought my grief would come out like my mother dumps out her purse.

If you’ve ever seen that woman turn over her tote bag, it’s like the Niagara of tidbits. You need a poncho just to block the crumbs. Everything comes spilling out into a big old pile: Armani lipstick that costs more than my phone bill; floss picks, Altoids, crinkled napkins with phone numbers of networking colleagues; one wooden “eco spork” used, but wiped clean on one of the aforementioned crinkled napkins.

It’s an absolute mess but my god what a sight to see.

That’s not what happened. I did not dump. I did not turn out my pockets. I partitioned — sectioning off the sadness like an oil tanker. I remember learning in grade school about how those massive ships don’t sink when they hit ice — they just seal off the flooded compartment, and re-distribute the weight. Capitalism and Midwest values have a way of encouraging one to cordon off the wound and deal with it later, in the privacy of loneliness.

I redistributed by lying on the knotty wooden floor of my apartment most nights, letting the sadness settle — like waiting for the foam to burn off a beer poured too quickly. In the quiet darkness, I let the cataclysmic waves wash over me. Once the sloshing stopped, I stood up.

Sometimes the system failed, and things came leaking out. I could make you a map of all the unfortunate corners of New York where my grief boiled over: the “stamps only” line at the Cooper Union post office; under the ancient hand dryers of 721 Broadway; the Staten Island ferry as it docked in Battery Park; crumbling corners of my ex’s Astoria apartment.

The blindsiding waves eventually grew less frequent. I stopped grieving on a daily basis. Or at least, I made it less obvious, especially to myself. But even so, the ghost of something, much to be desired, still lingers. Perhaps it’s just the ache for a specific feeling — one of turning yourself completely inside out. Of dumping out the dusty corners and making sure the light hits them, at least to acknowledge they exist.

THE STOAT by Nick Perilli

November 8, 2021

We don’t know where the hole in the basement of our house goes, only that it’s far deeper than it looks. Our pet stoat made it last year before disappearing into it. She was always digging—into our wood floors, our garden, our couches, and pantries—but this hole was her masterpiece. The white fur on her belly darkened with dirt over time. Since the day we brought the stoat home, she didn’t pay us any mind; she only had time for digging. She escaped from her cage whenever we weren’t looking, and we admit we rarely looked.

Whatever the stoat was digging for, she must have found it, as we haven’t seen the thing since. Our youngest daughter of three, Aly, sat at the hole in the basement for days while she was home from school with the flu. She, most of all, wanted to follow the stoat wherever it went. To find the better place it had surely gone.

Charles from across the street watched her while she was sick and we were at work. He didn’t have anything else to do but sit in his bedroom on his phone, taking photos of neighbors from the window. Whether it was out of boredom or malice, he encouraged our youngest to search for the stoat.

“Take my phone,” he said, knowing it was at 3 percent. “You can use it as a flashlight.”

At the dinner table that night, we noticed scrapes along Aly’s elbows and some dirt she forgot to wipe away along her neck.

“What happened?” one of us—the angrier one—asked. “Did Charles do this to you?”

Aly hesitated, exploring her options to respond behind her darting eyes, then burst into small tears as she told us that she climbed into the hole in the basement. “And I found her!” she said. “I met the stoat somewhere near the end. I saw an odd light from another place peeking in behind her. She was very still, and her fur had turned all dark.”

She thought the stoat was dead until it shook its head and began cleaning its face with its front paws. It plopped onto its one side, then the other, scrambling like a furred snake. When Aly reached for the stoat, it bit her.

“You’re late,” it said, “but I knew you would follow me.” The stoat’s whiskers twitched. “I’m here to tell you to go right back.”

“What’s there?” Aly asked, looking beyond the stoat. She tried to get closer, but the stoat stood in her way, baring teeth again.

“False wonder and warped danger,” the stoat said. “Dreams of people like Charles up there for children like you.” The stoat barked at her, low and strong like a hungry dog with powerful jaws. It bit Aly again on as many fingers as it could get in its mouth before she pulled away. “It’s not what you need—it’s not what I needed either, I guess, and now I’m caught between these spaces unsure of what to do.”

It barked louder—more guttural, more rabid. Aly backed away.

“I suppose I’ll just stay right here,” the stoat said. “To stop you, your small children, and your children’s small children from ever getting by me. From ever falling victim to predatory wonder. I am prey, but you shouldn’t be.” The stoat snapped its jaws at Aly one more time.

Aly scrambled out of the hole. Charles grabbed her by the arms, begging her to tell him what she saw down there. The false wonder. The warped danger. He had a look in his eye. Aly leaned into him and bit him hard on the neck until he left. Aly said he tasted like pennies—red on her teeth—then pushed the rest of her dinner away. Her older sisters ate it happily.

We called Charles, but he didn’t answer. We still saw the shadow of him in his window across the street taking his pictures, so we knew he was home. In time, the shadow faded.

Over the next three days, we found Aly standing at the top of the basement stairs at three in the morning. She tried and failed to go down the hole a few more times, until she hit a growth spurt and forgot that it was even there. In a decade or two, her children tried. Long after we died and left the house to Aly, her children’s children attempted, then their children—and so on. All of them were bitten and turned away by the same soot-furred stoat.

SUN IS MISSING by Kion You

November 7, 2021

The Korean rice weevil is a felicitous insect, bent on one simple task: scaling my bedroom walls. Tonight I see three but sometimes there are as many as ten. The thrill must be similar to that of free solo climbing, but when the weevil falls it gets back up and tries again—the hard-shelled advantage.

After dinner I lie in bed, which is a mat on the ground. One weevil wordlessly falls onto my blanket. It lands on its back and its legs flail like a pit of eels. After gathering itself, the weevil plants its left anterior leg onto the blanket and uses it as a fulcrum, spinning its body counterclockwise in an attempt to pop itself back up. After exhaustive study (entire days in bed) I have concluded that this exercise is successful fifty percent of the time.

I sweep my room and round up a decadent gray pile of cuticle flakes, pubic hairs, dried boogers, and chip crumbs. I scrape bug corpses from cobwebs in corners: weevils, flies, moths, spiders, mosquitos, and one black fuzzy caterpillar. While sifting detritus onto paper towels, another weevil falls, one that has climbed only to the point where the linoleum flooring meets the wallpaper (approximately one inch off the ground). I flip this one back onto its feet, anticipating a stronger performance in its next go-round.

A nightly ritual: spraying mosquito repellent onto every shelf, behind every drawer, even out the window. I lay in wait for a lone mosquito to venture out into the open, hacking its last, but nothing happens. Both weevils are still spinning on their backs. As I insert my earplugs and turn off the light I know the mosquitos will soon be buzzing around my head, talking in tinnitus.

I take out my earplugs to make sure the screeching is real, and my phone says it is 3:30AM. There are three courses of action: try to go back to sleep and hide my limbs under my blanket, reach for the insect spray by my bed and spray blindly around my face, or get up, turn on the light, and clap the motherfuckers to death. After turning on the light I see three of them on the wall just above my head and I smack all of them, one-two-three, letting their blood— my blood—smear the wall. I'm too sleepy to clean up, and when I turn off the light, the darkness pulsates with haloes for a second.

The path back to sleep will be impossible because I am now aware of the background noise my body has worked so hard to block out. I wear earplugs because my grandmother is dying in the next room and I do not want to hear it. Every night she sings, all throaty and guttural, two syllables which flutter up and down. 아퍼, 아퍼, 아퍼, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts. Right now she is singing a variation on the theme: 너무 아퍼, it hurts so much, 죽고 싶어, I want to die. In dire combination: 아퍼, 아퍼, 너무 아퍼, 죽고 싶어.

If Google Translate is correct, my grandmother's esophageal tube has enlarged to the point where acid refluxes up her body whenever she lies down. She has a few devices lodged there to little effect. She also has a hip problem from falling off her roof twenty years ago. Her husband drank himself to death and her sons abandoned her for America. This once amazed me, the accumulation of suffering packed into one body, which is why I decided to move back to Korea and live with her. Now, however, she is just my grandmother.

My grandmother's stream of piss sounds healthy, and I hear her leave the house to wander the neighborhood. She never closes her bedroom or bathroom doors but always slams the front door. This week I have woken up to her chopping vegetables, barging into my room to pick out my dirty laundry, and watching TV with the volume maxed out. With their death knells, she and the mosquitos are formidable.

But I'm not sure if she's actually dying. During my first month, I didn't sleep because I was terrified that at any moment she might keel over and breathe her last, but I've come to realize that a dying person doesn't have this much fight in them.

My aunt says that me coming to Korea has been a "present" for my grandmother, but my Korean is so bad that while she regales me at mealtimes I just nod and clear off my bowl of rice. In the vocabulary of pain, however, she speaks simply and succinctly—I feel like I'm being ripped in half. Have you ever rubbed pepper flakes into a wound?

I'm wide awake and heave a sigh. Per usual, I open Instagram and let the blue light ruin me. It is afternoon in New York and pictures are being posted. In the yard, I hear my grandmother cursing a family of feral cats. The cats took up residence a few weeks ago—a mother and three orange newborns—but my grandmother waged war after they began pooping in our yard. She has thrown unopened cans of beer. She curses them as she would her children. I hear each thump of her cane, the cats' claws gristling the asphalt.

At dawn, my grandmother falls into an intense fit of snoring. The pearling sky makes visible three mosquitos pinned against my wall. They are half-flattened and half-protruding, perfect for a glass case or a crucifixion scene. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

MOZZARELLA by Megan Navarro Conley

November 6, 2021

After they drown and bloat with water, white people look like mozzarella cheese. Not the shredded kind in resealable bags, but the smooth spherical cheese in the little wet bags near the deli counter. Sometimes I buy this cheese from Trader Joe’s because plucking it off the refrigerated shelf makes me feel fancy. I like to turn it over in my hands, cup it in my palm while waiting in line.

I learn this fact about white people and cheese while standing in a river. I am nineteen, and I still think I’m going to be a doctor. The director of my honors program tells us that we need leadership positions if we want to apply to med school, so I am standing in this river wearing a neon green hat that shouts Volunteer Team Leader. Behind me, on the shore, are ten other college kids looking to fill lines on their resumes. It’s 9am, and we are all cold and tired and hungover, but because I am the team leader, the park ranger hands me rubber pants and boots to wade into the water.

It rained the night before, but the tree lying halfway across the river clearly fell a long time ago. It’s caught litter in its branches, a matted solid clump of chip bags, soda cans, plastic bags, anything unnaturally dyed and saturated that immediately draws the eye. My friend stands on top of the tree, dry and holding open a garbage bag.

I’ve picked up most of it. At the top of the ravine, I can feel the park ranger staring at me while the other students pick around the shore, poking into bushes, around tree roots. I am wondering if his job is always this cushy, when my friend pinches her nose.

“It smells like shit.”

“Really? I have a bad sense of smell.”

“It smells like something’s died.”

I try sweeping the leaves downriver, fishing through the grey-brown muck. I think I’m almost done with this area, ready to wade out of the water and step out of these rubber boots which will stand up even when I’m not in them.

“There’s this big thing against the tree,” I say, and my friend crouches down above me to get a better look.

Not that we can see anything in particular, but I can feel the weight of it, pressing both my hands against its squishy mass, it’s at least half the length of the tree trunk. I start thinking out loud about what it could be: “I think it’s a waterlogged pillow. It’s so squishy and heavy because it’s all weighed down, but this is definitely cloth.” My fingers search for the edges of it, manage to grip parts of the fabric, and this is when I begin to pull.

My friend slaps her hand over her mouth, and I hear someone else scramble up the ravine, shouting to the park ranger.

“It’s just a mannequin,” I tell my friend, but she begins laughing and shaking her head, on hands and knees as she crawls along the tree trunk.

I am still pulling on it, using all my weight to try to dislodge it from the tree, but it only rocks back and forth in the water, cresting small waves against my waist. I can hear the park ranger speaking into static, the other volunteers buzzing with excitement, but I keep standing in the river, and I keep pulling, and even now, I don’t know why I did this. Maybe because I am nineteen, and I want to be a leader, and I want to be a lot of things that, deep down, I know I am not. Maybe I keep pulling because I don’t want to accept what it is, because if I have to accept what it is, then I have to accept what I am, and I have to accept that I am holding someone, I am holding an unfortunate someone the same way I refuse to be held. If I have to accept what is in front of me, I have to accept all the rest too, and I can’t do that because I am weak, so I keep pulling. If I keep pulling, this will be something else, this will be happening to somebody else, and I need that to be true, even if it’s wrong, even if it’s disgusting and horrible to think this way. If I can make myself into what I am not, then this isn’t allowed to be someone’s body, and I will keep pulling until it isn’t.

Years later, I’m going to learn what the word dissociating means. I will think that the word is too soft to mean what it does, this violent expulsion from the body to protect the mind from further harm.

It turns over in the water, suddenly, revealing a smooth, creamy surface. I press a fingertip into it, the way you press a sunburn to see the lightbulb left behind, but all I leave behind is an indent, deep enough to fill with water. I pull again, and then his arm pops free—a doughy wrist, a ballooned hand. Looking back on it now, I should’ve held it right there in the water, until the police arrived.