Flash

FULL OF HOLES by Luz Rosales

October 15, 2021

Kylie fingers Martina under the bleachers after school. Martina is warm, and moist, and slippery, and when she cums against Kylie’s palm, she moans so loudly that Kylie thinks everyone on campus must have heard. She hopes this is true. 

“I’m so proud of myself,” she says, and Martina laughs her scratchy laugh.

Martina doesn’t come to school the next day, doesn’t answer Kylie’s texts. The day after that, she’s found floating down a river in pieces.

***

Several of their classmates attend her funeral. They crowd together in the church, sniffling, and holding each other, and pretending to cry. None of them were friends with Martina. Some had been the very ones who bullied her and Kylie. They stalked them in the halls, pelted them with water balloons and milk cartons, hurled insults such as “dykes” and “lesbos.”

Kylie hates them all.

She sits near the back, sandwiched between her parents. Her father keeps his hand on her shoulder, though the effect is more suffocating than comforting. She feels like she’s breaking, splintering. The casket is closed. She can’t comprehend that her best friend’s body is in there, wants to demand that they open it so that everyone can see it isn’t Martina, it’s a doll, it’s an impostor.

They had been friends since the first grade, back when they were shy little girls who felt comfortable only around each other, and they grew into awkward teenagers together. They’d known each other for so long their identities had become intertwined. Kylie can’t imagine a Martina-less world, nor can she imagine a Martina-less Kylie. Who is she now? What is she supposed to do?

Martina’s mother, Ms. Aguilar, finds her after the service. She’s scowling, and Kylie is reminded of the last time she stayed at Martina’s house, how they hid under the blankets and tried to block out the sounds of her parents fighting.

“This is your fault,” her mother spits. “I wanted her to stop hanging out with you.”

“How is it my fault?” Kylie demands. It’s the fault of whoever killed her, they deserve to rot in Hell, except no one knows who did it. The medical examiner said it didn’t look like the work of a human, nor that of an animal.There were no wounds at all, no blood, it was as if her body unraveled spontaneously, as if she simply couldn’t stay in one piece anymore.

Within a few weeks Ms. Aguilar will be gone, moved to another city.

***

At night Kylie tries to hold onto everything she can remember about Martina: her voice, the smoothness of her skin, the texture of the scar on her arm, the way her tongue felt between her legs. She sucks on her fingers and pretends she can still taste Martina’s wetness, then rubs the part of her shoulder where Martina had given her a hickey once.

In the morning she finds a tiny, pinprick-sized hole on her shoulder. Her mother doesn’t see any hole, says she must be imagining it, but Kylie knows it’s real. She can’t stop thinking about the hole, can’t stop touching it, rubbing and rubbing until it’s wide enough for her to insert the tip of her finger. When she does the pain is so intense she almost screams, but there’s something satisfying about it.

Eventually a gray fluid starts leaking from the hole. 

Eventually, other holes appear.

***

Kylie comes to school covered in seeping black holes. Everyone stares at her. They’re shocked, disgusted, even enraged that she showed up like this and is forcing them all to see it.

In class, she does nothing but touch her holes. She leaves stains on the floor and on her desk.

The teacher asks her to leave. “You’re distracting the other students,” he says. He looks at her the way you’d look at a bug. She definitely feels less than human as she plods out of the room. Why is she so heavy all of a sudden? She can barely keep herself upright.

During nutrition she’s accosted by a group of girls who say they want to know more about her. They’ve never seen anything like that, they say, meaning her holes. She tells them to fuck off, but they grab her arms, and the next thing she knows they’re shoving their fingers into her, prying her open further. It hurts so bad. She screams and screams and thrashes and suddenly they let her go. Their mouths are wide open, they’re backing away from her. 

Kylie doesn’t know what they’re reacting to. She doesn’t care.

She turns around and runs.

***

She heads to Martina’s house, climbs in through the window. It’s not Martina’s house anymore, she knows, though a part of her still expects that she’ll come if she cries loud enough.

The walls are bare. There is no furniture, no remnants of the people who used to live here. Still she goes to what used to be Martina’s room and collapses.

Time goes by. It could be minutes, it could be hours. She spends it all on her side, lying in a puddle of her own filth. She’s mostly hole now. It’s almost peaceful. She could live like this, she thinks, as a giant hole, no longer a girl.

Right after she has this thought, her hand moves on its own, forming a fist. A few seconds later she’s clawing herself violently, she’s shaking, and crying, and bleeding, and she keeps saying, “Martina,” saying it like a prayer.

Then.

It stops.

Everything stops.

There is darkness and silence, a black void. This lasts only an instant. 

Once it’s over, she’s back in Martina’s bedroom. She feels different now, stronger but heavier. Slowly she stands and realizes something is attached to her shin.

She reaches down and touches it: there’s hair, and … is that a nose? Are those eyes?

“I…” 

That voice. It can’t be.

“Martina?” 

It is.

Martina is back, and she’s alive, and her head is a part of Kylie now, fused to her leg.

“Kylie,” Martina whispers.

Hearing her say her name brings tears to Kylie’s eyes. “What is it?” 

“I feel fantastic.”

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SPEECH CAPABLE by Elias Chen

October 14, 2021

Changliu and her sister were huddled over the kitchen counter. Between them lay an unopened bowl of instant ramen, shrink wrap intact, the container propped upright on a folded kitchen towel. Changliu and her sister looked directly into the smiling face of the man printed on the lid. The image was animate, blinking, shifting his shoulders, his lips parting now and again like he was about to speak but waiting for a cue. It was their idol, Xiao Tan.

What was supposed to happen? After they opened the package, Xiao Tan was supposed to launch into a ninety-second monologue from the lid of the ramen bowl. Something along these generic cadences: thanks for buying, felicitations, please enjoy your meal. But most importantly, after that, you could talk to him freeform during the final thirty seconds. You’d ask questions and the tiny, animate Xiao Tan would respond, provided the answer wasn’t explicitly NSFW. In order to do this, to answer your questions, the print Xiao Tan was imbued with a bare-bones version of the living Xiao Tan’s personality. Even more crucial, this simulated personality held a selection of the person’s real memories. It knew what Xiao Tan knew.

Changliu held her phone over the packaged ramen. Several pop-up windows flashed on the screen, glowing windows superimposed over the live camera image of Xiao Tan on the lid. There were rapidly changing rows of letters, numbers, lines, and numerals. Changliu’s first task was to override Xiao Tan’s initial ninety-second dialogue, and then she’d ease the parameters of his Q&A script. All this made it possible for her sister to spend two entire minutes just asking him questions. 

Now here was a specific endeavor. Changliu, her sister, and hundreds of other sisters all around the country had bought every single ramen bowl in this particular batch just to do this exact procedure with every one of them. Citing production errors, the manufacturer had issued a recall, but between when the announcement was made and when supermarkets had begun to pull stock from the shelves, someone had figured out this hack. It was a miracle. In less than twelve hours, the sisters had mobilized, and they’d bought almost every unit of the defective batch before they were confiscated.

After consulting the experts among themselves, the sisters had collectively engineered the most straightforward way to jailbreak the ramen bowls in order to ask Xiao Tan their questions. The questioning would be done in pairs or in groups, with one sister responsible for jailbreaking the bowls and another sister responsible for asking the questions. The entire session would be recorded for later transcription and analysis.

The questions had been workshopped. Each group of sisters was responsible for asking a specific set of questions, so none of their efforts were redundant. The goal of this vast endeavor was a common, vital, sisterly interest. Changliu and her sisters were going to figure out whether their ship, a pairing of the male idol actors Xiao Tan / Gang Yinbo—They were going to figure out whether it was real.

“Are you ready?” her sister asked.

“Thirty seconds,” replied Changliu. 

Changliu tapped the screen of her phone. The shifting rows of letters and numbers began to cohere into legible sequences. They flickered once and then they stopped. On the lid of the bowl, Xiao Tan’s pupils froze in their sockets.

“Five seconds,” said Changliu. She, her sister, and Xiao Tan all blinked in unison, and then her sister tore the shrink wrap away from the bowl. She started asking their questions.

Were you in X place at Y time? Were all the actors housed on the same floor of the hotel when you shot Z drama? How often would you eat dinner with your co-star, Gang Yinbo? Did you become familiar with your co-star’s eating habits? How familiar were you with your co-star’s personal behaviors? Were you generally aware of how much he slept? When he went to bed? Did he prefer the room bright or dark? What was the first thing he did upon waking up?

Xiao Tan answered with the direct concision of a student getting quizzed out loud. But as he spoke, Changliu felt cold dismay settle in her stomach. His replies were single words or phrases, and while knowing the answers was good, the constellation of information they formed seemed almost incoherent. There were any number of reasons why Xiao Tan might know that Gang Yinbo ate one slice of whole grain toast and a hard-boiled egg every morning. When Xiao Tan professed not to know his co-star’s sleeping habits, Changliu remembered an interview where Xiao Tan had said their chaotic filming schedule meant that almost no one slept regular hours. It’d be incredible, delicious, and incendiary if he did know when, where, and how Gang Yinbo slept, but that he didn’t know meant very little. There was no conclusion to draw.

Changliu tried to imagine. Summer in Hengdian, where the drama was filmed, the air stifling and close, the heat of the season undissipated even long after midnight. The hotel’s air conditioning would stick clothes to damp skin, the sharp chill only getting worse between the lobby and the elevator.

“Comrade Gang,” Xiao Tan might say, slouching against the elevator’s chrome handrail, staring at Gang Yinbo with vaguely bloodshot eyes. “I know it’s already two, but we’re not filming until later tomorrow. You only have that interview around lunch, so how about coming to my room to look over the script now? We could practice our lines before bed.”

Changliu imagined Gang Yinbo leaning back, one hand raised to push the hair out of his eyes. She imagined him asking, brows lifted: “Are you sure?”

He’d rake his fingers through his hair. Xiao Tan would grin, and then—

Changliu realized the kitchen was silent. Her sister was looking at her, tense and slightly lost. She was done asking their assigned questions. Changliu glanced at the timer. There were twenty seconds left.

The animate Xiao Tan looked at them with pleasant expectation. Acutely aware of the effort they’d gone through, of the moments sliding past, a single question rushed out of Changliu’s mouth: “You—Do you love Gang Yinbo?”

For the first time, Xiao Tan smiled. Changliu’s scalp went numb, and sweat broke out on her temples.

“Of course I do,” Xiao Tan replied. “I also love Rei-brand Ramen! Remember, just add water, wait two minutes, and it’s ready to enjoy. Thanks for buying! I look forward to seeing you soon~”

With that, Xiao Tan settled back into print, the fine-grain twitches of his animation slowing down until he was an image on the lid. His mouth still curved with the trace of a smile.

Changliu and her sister looked at each other. Without speaking, her sister went over and turned on the kettle. She unsealed the ramen, and once the water was boiled, she poured it inside. They waited two minutes, just like Xiao Tan had said. Afterwards, sharing the same bowl, they ate together in deep, persistent silence.

Once they finished, Changliu indicated that if she wanted, her sister could drink the broth. Her sister raised the bowl to her lips. A trickle of soup leaked out of her mouth, dripping down to stain her collar with a vivid, orangey bloom.

Changliu’s sister slammed the bowl onto the table. She coughed twice, eyes watering, and yelled, “Surely this life is cursed! What the hell did he mean?”

“I know,” said Changliu. “I know.”

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Monologue of a pirate ship that doesn’t have a figurehead, or maybe it did, long ago, but it’s hard to tell now because its bow is encrusted with these ossified clam shells and barnacles, which, during a storm, scuttle about and open up and scream, as though they had mouths. by Jiaqi Kang

October 13, 2021

I only ever wanted to know how it felt to have the wind beneath your feet, eager to hoist you up to where you needed to be, hands outstretched, palms faced upwards and fingers laced together, inviting. As a sapling I watched children do that, paid special attention to the one at the bottom who was always getting a faceful of leg, ass, and hand as his friends used him to clamber over the wall. I was friends with the wall. My roots were entwined with the bricks at its foundation. We’d come up around the same time, the wall erected where before there was only common. When the time came for me to leave, it was difficult for them to cut me down. Like the wall was holding on to me, trying to keep me there. They had to smash some of the stone to tear me out, and dig their heels into the mud and pull and pull. 

Afterwards, they stripped my bark and made me smooth. Made me bend and curve the way they wanted. The wall stayed put and did its job, which was to enclose, and forgot me. Part of me became the holster for a sail, and when the wind blew across the water and filled my puffed-out cheeks I learned that nothing is as good as you think it’ll be when you’re lying on your back on a common that no longer exists while your mother rubs your belly in comforting circles. I learned that you can miss stomachaches, and the sky when it’s placid, and children who snap your branches and tuck their garbage into the crooks of your trunk. I learned that you can be seasick. 

The sea was so wide, the first time. The sky was empty. I crossed them and crossed them and didn’t leave so much as a mark. The water held no imprint. It took me years to realise that the waves lapping against me wanted nothing from me, and had nothing to say to me either.

My captain sings to me when he thinks only I can hear. My captain shares his rum with me and sometimes falls out of his bed so I can feel his skin. My captain saw my run-down husk and replaced each and every one of my planks, some himself, some by others under his orders. When I first met my captain he was only a child. He reminded me of myself at that age: supple, wicked, with conniving thoughts. I watched him shed his skirts and cut his hair. I watched him kill his masters with a cleaver he pocketed from the kitchens. I was there when he lost his leg and I gave him a part of me to use as peg, and it was like how he used to run a finger across the coarse grain of my body to see if I’d splinter him; that hiss of pain and prick of blood always such a thrill, as though in that moment he understood me. The splinters always pushed themselves out some days later but when he received the peg, it was mine for him to keep. His.

My name is Shen. It means deep. It means God. It means aunt. It means that I live in the gap beneath your bed and only come out to call you down to mealtimes. No, it doesn’t. My kidnappers only thought it would be an easy name to use for when they needed me to wade into the water on their behalf. Sometimes, I drop my anchor into the sands in the dark and wonder if I’ll fall in love with whatever I find next. There was a particular ripple that passed through me once and made me wonder whether that’s what it feels like, when it happens—as though something has moved through you, has made use of you in that moment as some kind of transit or vessel, and now all you want to do is to follow it wherever it goes so that it may use you again. I think it was made of sound, the ripple, though I don’t know what it sounds like. 

Here’s what I do know: I know that aunts are meant to look like dads, all square faces and round eyes, lips clicking around pistachio shells. I know the sound of my captain’s footsteps, the drag of him across the floor. I know that the color purple exists, though I have never seen it. I know that the common is gone. I know that my captain’s parrot did not die of an accident, that the first mate poisoned it, that he will use the same poison to kill my captain. I know that I will not let them throw my captain’s body into the ocean after they kill him. I will not even let them touch his body, which only I have felt, his breasts tucked between his chest and the straw mattress when he sleeps, his scarred and mottled arms, the snail that lives in his hair, he sound of his snoring. I would sooner sink myself and every soul that has carved a space for itself inside my brig than let my captain’s crew dispose of him like some aging widow too old to sweep an alehouse floor. 

They think because I am an aged, creaking thing, because I am ugly and damp, that I cannot fight back. What they don’t know is that my captain loves me for what he sees of me. I’d always hoped I’d die by fire, but if I am to drown, for my captain, I’d be glad, I’d be honored, I wouldn’t cry. Let the breeze take the pieces of me to some faraway shore, with enough wood to start anew.

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MISSIONS by Ali Raz

October 12, 2021

Mission 1

 

We weren’t in any particularly good place, just a parking lot without any cars. Part of the lot had been flooded and now resembled a pond. It was only a matter of time until A, high on soda, stripped out of his clothes and plunged in. The others encouraged him with maniacal hoots of laughter. I ducked over to untie my shoelaces, squeezed a tube of explosives from inside of one, and proceeded to attach it to the underside of A’s Toyota.

I waited for two hours to be out of sight before I dialed The Number from a phone booth. Two hours beforehand, A had started his car and burned to a crisp. 

 “It’s done,” I said into the payphone. This was difficult; the most difficult part of the whole operation. Each of us were questioned by the police, but nothing came of it. Of course it didn’t. They were incompetent fools. 

***

Surveillance structures in Looptown (not a name; a homonym) are designed with sightlines in mind. This sounds obvious when thus stated, yet one would be surprised by how commonly it is overlooked—in other cities. The whole of Looptown is the work of a single architect. This has given the township a coherence of design rare in modern cities. Looptown is distinctive in other senses, too, being the brainchild of bureaucrats who gathered in parliament one afternoon and decided en masse that a new city was necessary. The king was pleased. Preparations began forthwith. An engineering competition was launched—anyway, not to go on. The point is, there was a point in Looptown’s emergence. Unlike the mass of historical cities, it was not formed through the step-wise action of historical time. It burst upon the planet all at once, complete and fully formed, much like Mr. Bean’s fall from the sky (for the careful observer, that show—and no other—has predicted the future in other ways, too).

***

Of all of Looptown’s many noteworthy architectural features, none is more immediately striking than the design of its surveillance structures: police station, prison, courthouse, post office, grocery store, and bank. Observed from aerial view, Looptown is a cube. Each structure is situated in a way that allows it complete and unobstructed sightlines over each of the cube’s six faces. The task was impossible—which is exactly why I had been given it; I, and not my dear eliminated A, had been the intended eliminee. In executing the mission, I had evaded my own death, switching it out with A’s. Would it matter? I hoped that it would not. Which is why, filled with hope, I made the circuitous trek out of the police station and walked with my back to their expanding glass wall, always aware of the 100 eyes upon my back, until the moment I occupied the vertex where the domain of the police station ends and the post office begins. It wasn’t a blind spot. It was an interference zone. Policemen and postal workers dried out their eyes in staring contests as I, meanwhile, picked up the receiver and dialed The Infernal Number.

 

Mission 2

Men have no regard for each other.

For example:

In Wes Craven’s B-movie extravaganza The Hills Have Eyes, two families have a stand-off. One is a normal family. One is a cannibal family. The Normals bust a tire and run out of gas in the middle of an endless desert. Soft sand and dry heat form mountains of grit that run a ring around the horizon. These hills have iron in them. The iron scuppers the radio reception, meaning they’re good and truly stuck. Really cooked—as both families know. Have known, each independent of the other, from the moment they stopped at a gas station and encountered a strange old man, saw a bloody handprint on a door, listened to warnings they’d no mind of heeding. Each of the six holds this knowledge within themselves while maintaining a false exterior for the others. They each of them front. Which is why, as families do, they will each of them rot, burn, and lose their minds, sustain bullet wounds and be stabbed to death, in a single night lose everything that they hold dear. The seventh, a baby named Catherine, meanwhile, had no idea any of this was happening, or that she lived with such utter fools.

***

The film doesn’t end. It only stops running. The last frame is of Doug Wood, the golden boy. Unable to pull the wool over his eyes any more, Doug plunges a knife into the cannibal father the way one plunges a clogged toilet bowl. Beneath him, out of frame, the father cannibal experiences ecstatic death. It’s hard growing up in a desert. It’s hard living with animals like an animal. It’s hard being ugly, maimed, malformed. It’s hard to be spurned, scorned, denied, expunged. It’s hard to eat baby Catherine, but it’s easier than the alternative, which is to starve.

Mission 3

Iron has magnetic properties.QQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQA3333 and it will, and it will lead me to the true North.

“Melissa,” I said to the spider, who turned in her web and wagged her face at me. “Do you think it would be wise or unwise for someone—not myself, of course—but someone else, to respond to radio messages not intended for them?”

The coffee pot pinged and I poured a large cup. I drank it in the living room with Melissa.

The telephone rang around noon: six hours too late. “You’re too late,” I intoned into the phone. Behind me, Melissa started up her mezzo-soprano scales and I cupped a hand over the mouthpiece to keep my interlocutor from overhearing. “It’s already over.”

Hardly had I said this when a fist pounded on the front door. Melissa’s voice broke on a note. I curled a hand over the pistol in my waistband and moved softly towards the door. The silhouette was a woman’s. I tucked myself flat against the wall and asked the stranger what she wanted.

She told me she needed to make a phone call. Her car had broken down—looking out the kitchen window later, I’d indeed see a Beetle with smoke rising from the hood—and she needed a mechanic. A breathless moment passed. Then I slipped the pistol back into my pants, yanked aside the chain, and welcomed the stranger into my house. Highly irregular behavior from a serviceman, but I had had queasy dreams the night before. Queasy dreams, whenever I have them, make me act queasy until the feeling goes away.

“Would you like some coffee?” I asked her when she had made the call. “Cereal? A sandwich?”

The woman politely declined each of these. She said I was very kind, but she had to be going. At the door she paused, perhaps pitied me, turned to kiss me a little on the lips. Her tongue had darted into my mouth before I had time to react, and then she was gone.

“Wow,” I said aloud, and spat out the pellet she had deposited against the inside of my cheek. When I’d unrolled the tight little paper tube and dried it out, I saw that there was an address on it. The address was my own.

***

“Melissa,” I asked Melissa. “Do you think I ought to take a shower or a bath?”

So I stood under warm flowing water and moved a loofah around me, trying to get clean. Melissa had picked my outfit for the day. She’d gone all out. Lime-green suit, bowler hat, stovepipe socks and brogues. The last time I’d worn all that I’d been getting married.

Which was fitting.

I hid the bomb in the cake. This was easy. A ten-layered wedding cake, to arrive intact at an event, has to be assembled on the premises. A team of bakers ferry the individual layers to the venue in a trademark iced truck and, when the time is right, carefully and with bated breath, stand each layer atop the other. Frosting and icing are added along with decorative bits and bobs. 

I hung around the bakers and snatched a moment when their attention was diverted to slide the pipe bomb into the side of the vanilla cake. I covered the point of insertion with icing and, with my work having been accomplished, wandered further into the party. I was enjoying canapes and champagne in a far corner of the garden when the bride and groom cut into the wedding cake and sprayed blood and marzipan all over the place.

“It’s done,” I said into the payphone, and hung up. Then I was on the ground and vomiting, really heaving, my whole gut was in my mouth. The shadow of the man who had poisoned—of course, poisoned!—the precise canape that was served to me fell over the ground, and then I blacked out.

***

Phones were ringing off the hook. One phone would be answered, and another would start ringing and mixed up in it all were the murmurs of male voices. Low and officious—that is how the men sounded, as consciousness slowly returned to me. I couldn’t see the men, and this is how I knew there was a hood over my head. There was no feeling in my hands and feet. My butt was hurting on a hard metal chair. Leather straps kept me pressed to it.

“He’s awake.”

“Light him up.”

A set of floodlights blazed on in my face and the hood was yanked off by a wire. I know that I screamed because there was the taste of blood in my throat; I’d bitten down on my tongue in the shock of the lights. There was a gibbering sound like turkeys at play.

“We have you. F__ Gott__, you are under arrest!” A voice spoke into a mic. I know that he was using a mic because there was a lot of feedback. Especially when he raised his voice and got all excited, and the mic exploded in a chainsaw of artifacts. Someone got him a new one.

He read me out my list of crimes. Everything I’d ever done, and some things that I hadn’t. While they had me, they must have thought, might as well pin some loose ends on me. It was policework, plain and simple. I didn’t hold any grudges on that account.

“Who sold me out?” I asked, when the recitation had ended and my cop captors asked if I’d any questions. A universal tittering went up.

“It was Melissa,” the man boomed into the mic.

Melissa, Melissa, Melissa, the others echoed. 

Melissa

Melissa

Melissa

Someone threw the switch and the straps fell off from around me. Immediately, I teetered, lost balance, fell thirty feet into an ice bath of piranhas. 

Melissa

Melissa

Melissa

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NOSEBLEED WEATHER by Marilyn Hope

October 11, 2021

Twelve-year-old Tibby Wallace takes the winter with him when he dies, but it's an act of rage. Summer scrapes through the valley overnight. Pollens convulse, lakes flood. Hundreds of snowshoe hares wear their December-whites in the sudden verdure; easy prey for owls, foxes, Mazzie Mako's feral cats. Soft, torn bodies everywhere. Tibby evokes eight-foot-tall stalks of hogweed from every ribcage, furious and toxic to the touch. But it's the yarrow that spells murder to me and Cricket.

"Never seen anything natural grow in such straight lines," Cricket says, studying the row of rusty blossoms that slit across the town limits like papercuts. "Earth don't plant in processions."

"Speaking of processions," I say, nodding to the single-lane road. Mrs. Wallace is driving back from the cemetery in far-off Stanton in her battered station wagon, heading the autocade at a crawl. Everyone's still got their winter tires on. Wallace rolls down her window, melting snow clinging to the tulle veil of her fascinator: she must've stood graveside for a very long time.

"What's all this?" Wallace asks. "Hemlock?"

"Yarrows," says Cricket. "Also known as 'soldier's woundworts' or 'sanguinaries.'"

"All right, Policegirl Posy. What they mean?"

"Mean he's angry." Cricket's thick black hair hangs heavy with sweat and rain. Tibby has been tantruming short storms and grueling sun in turn across the 5.80 square miles of our town all day. "Mean there's something else he wants us to see."

"Always got to have the final word, my boy," says Wallace. She and Tibby lived in a small house full of fatigue. They were hard-eyed but shy, both of them better hiders than seekers. Mrs. Wallace's hands are all knuckle as she tightens them around the steering wheel, so hard that the old leather cracks. "We following through or not?"

Cricket and I get back into the squad car and hit the siren. We're in haphazard plainclothes for today's mercurial weather. I’m wearing a denim romper and snow boots. Cricket’s in a sage-colored button-down, men's trousers, and a disposable rain poncho. Badges on ball chains circle our necks.

"Seen this before," Cricket tells me, dodging hogweed as we drive. "My neighbor's daughter in Cheongsando went missing one spring. Found the body surrounded by endangered musk deer, the kind that live in the boreal forest, right there in the island green. They died so quickly. Fangs everywhere, like punctuation marks. But for a spell, they brought the taiga with them. Jezo spruce and bog rosemary and fireweed—"

"You know your plants," I say, startled.

"I know everything that's got a place," says Cricket. "And I know a pointed finger when I see one. That girl laid dahurian larch all around the house of the man who killed her. I didn't have the seniority to convict him then, but I've got the numbers and the shadows to back me here. Not that I think Tibby'll have left much for us to fingerprint. If this sun is any indication."

Sweat slips down our temples. Cricket pokes the AC vents open.

"Hell-hot," she says.

By the time we reach the house at the end of the yarrow, tiny red petals have swallowed the doctor entirely—a woman's silhouette tethered to the ground by a net of stems. Cricket and I draw closer on our tiptoes, seesawing as we try not to step on the flowers’ open faces. So many and so close, the copper clusters of florets smell full and peppery, like someone's cooking. Spindly white spider lilies canopy her expression, rising from her eyes and nostrils and mouth, as if in censorship.

Cricket presses one hand to the doctor's wrist for a pulse, then pulls it back with her middle finger raised toward the ceiling.

"Oh, boss, don't pout," I say. "Let the boy have his revenge."

"And what pretty revenge it is," says Cricket, sullen. "Just wish the achillea came with answers."

But it doesn't. Tibby had been back in the phlebotomy chair the last afternoon we spoke. I asked what they were testing for this time, and he replied in that voice of his, dry as dust: “Toxins. The really-hard-to-find ones.” 

He liked us—Cricket's terse concern and thin mouth, my cheerful banter, the silly things I could do with my eyebrows. The way we believed him when he said someone was poisoning him. “I wanted to do what you two do”, he said, the doctor tapping gently at his inner elbow. “I wanted to keep listening after everyone else gives up.”

There was nothing we could say to that, his resignation, our failure. I watched the test tubes fill one after the other, his tiny veins bulging with blood. Almost beautiful. 

“Like branches,” I said.

“Like roots,” Tibby replied.

Outside, Mrs. Wallace honks her horn twice. She and the funeral cortege are pulling up to see the damage. I can address the grief in her expression—there are enough ways to say "I'm sorry" and "I know you loved him"—but I can think of no acceptable reply to the fury and shame that twist her mouth when she sees where the flowers are leading her.

Cricket and I walk to the front porch and stand shoulder-to-shoulder, shivering. Now that we've found the body, Tibby has released the weather again, fast as a snap of the fingers. Not far beyond the final car, it's beginning to snow, winter creeping up on the mourners like a slow, slender needle.

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TELOGEN EFFLUVIUM by Brooke Middlebrook

September 29, 2021

Is when your hair falls out from stress. Your hair’s heading for the exits but the name rolls off the tongue. 

Perhaps it’s because I take scalding showers, or I eat too much Annie’s Macaroni & Cheese. Sure, it’s organic, but nothing good for you comes as a powder. The best part is the bunny tail you press to open the box.

External forces cause follicles to enter a sleep cycle. Hair loss, when inherited, is called alopecia. The old nature vs. nurture question, like we’re not all tired of that debate. 

Someone I know is laying in an ICU bed tethered with oxygen, someone not quite family or friend but another vector that relates us to each other beyond these simple terms. Our lives act on each other’s in ways not easily catalogued, the forces underneath similar enough, moving in generally the same direction, but sometimes, like now, shearing against each other, and underneath my concern for this person is a selfish wish to know in which direction my arrow will point now. I don’t know how this works; I failed physics. 

Like hair, I go through phases. Sometimes I don’t listen to song lyrics, or I mishear them, and then many years pass and at the exact right moment I come to understand. Two decades after the song is released, while separating egg whites from yolks over the kitchen sink, I realize that her placenta falls to the floor. 

Thirty-eight and eleven-twelfths years of age doesn’t seem like a good enough fulcrum from which the rest of my life slides down, hairless. 

I failed physics because I spent the class wetting cotton balls and throwing them at the ceiling when the teacher’s back was turned. One might call it my rebellious phase. 

Someone was telling me there are seventeen-year cicadas about to emerge from the ground. I misheard and thought they said seventy, as if any length of time living in the dark is not an achievement.

One afternoon in my college dorm, I was alone in the girls’ bathroom, washing my hair in the last shower of the row. I heard a drunk boy enter and shuffle towards the sound of water, his can frisking along the tile. Then there was silence, until he tore my curtain open, and I was certain this is it, this is how it happens, in flip flops. But he stood there looking, and laughed. I must have misheard that particular lyric. 

At least once a day my elbow is tickled by what I’m sure is a bug but is only a fallen hair, stuck to the fabric of my sleeve. 

I was on a 6 train headed uptown at a time in my life when much was in flux, and the book I was reading asked, How much uncertainty are you willing to tolerate? and in that exact moment the question was comforting, like a warm bowl of noodles. 

At the nymph stage, young cicadas survive all those years underground by sipping root sap.

One night at a bar in Emmetsburg, Iowa, I was picking songs on the jukebox when a cellophane-wrapped chicken ’n cheese sandwich fell on my head. There could be no arc or trajectory, it simply dropped from the smooth ceiling. I have since lived my life secure in that moment’s reality and impossibility. 

But how do cicadas know it’s time to tunnel up to air in synchrony? Some phases begin without us realizing, not until later recognizing the border behind us, not until the nymphs are molting and walking on soft legs.

My friend Frank, a pediatric geneticist, was called to testify in the trial of a mother accused of poisoning her child with salt. The defense claimed Frank’s assessment failed to identify some rare metabolic disorder as the cause of her child’s ill health. I asked him what it was like to be part of such a sensational trial, a case of nature vs. (disordered) nurture. Can you believe it? he said. They made me sound like I was bad at my job. 

In physics, forces were always moving towards or away from each other with those arrows, confident, announcing their direction. I failed because I saw little use in naming forces if they could be canceled out. 

Losses can still tickle quite a long time after the fact.

Distinctions matter. All those cotton balls hanging over my head, bunny tails, speech bubbles containing the words, ‘I don’t know’. The slope I climbed up was fragile; the slope I’m rolling down is always changing. So many things have roots.

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HOW TO PRONOUNCE BON IVER by Holden Tyler Wright

September 27, 2021

The day after New Year’s, my neighbor—who strummed his guitar at 2 in the morning singing tone-deaf Beatles covers—asked me for a ride. My other neighbor, Isaac, kept the TV on 24/7, just loud enough to be heard in the corner I pressed my bed into, peppering my nights with laugh tracks. Beyond him, Ruth stayed up knitting. I knew this because she made me an endearingly hideous hat and a too-short scarf. We were all insomniacs. I was the only student among us, and saw my living situation as a stepping stone into something greater. I wondered how the other three got locked into crappy efficiency apartments in their middle age. “We look out for each other, here,” Ruth had told me with a wink, watching me pull on her lopsided beanie.

So, I gave my neighbor the ride. I couldn’t tell you his name, because he’d never told me, and at that point I was embarrassed to ask. “I got to pick up my car from the shop,” he deadpanned to the passenger window. “I ran someone over. That’s how I wrecked it. She died. The other guy was okay though.” 

I had no appropriate response. “That’s terrible,” I managed, “any way you slice it.”

“It was raining,” he excused himself. “I didn’t see them. Nobody’s pressing charges or anything.” He aimed a finger across the street. “Can we stop at CVS first? My stomach’s been hurting. Doctor’s don’t know why.”

I waited in the car listening to Bon Iver while my neighbor got his prescription. It was a gray day, the streets still glossy from an earlier shower. 

Bon Iver reminded me of my sister’s shitty ex-boyfriend, who scoffed at my mispronunciation: Bawn Eye-vur. The boyfriend played basketball but was too short to make the local community college team and became assistant manager instead. When my sister brought Muggsy—as he called himself—home, he talked sports with my father, complimented my mother’s cooking, distributed animal crackers to the kids, ran thin fingers through his coiffed blonde hair. Muggsy was white and Mormon, like us, which made him “safe” in my parents’ eyes. Though by the time they broke up, it was clear to each of us that he was anything but safe.

“It’s French,” Muggsy explained, unveiling his dentist’s-son teeth. “Bon hiver. It means ‘good winter.’” Now I say it wrong on purpose.

The sign at the car garage said, “Closed Weekends,” but my neighbor summoned someone by rattling the door. The guy wore basketball shorts and a scowl fierce enough to fend off the cold. After some conversation, my neighbor got back into the car. “They don’t have it here,” he told me. “I’m gonna have to figure this out.” He closed his eyes, sighed as if this were the thing that might do him in. Down the street stood a billboard for a funeral home that featured a leering young woman draped in white fur and holding a lap dog. “Happy Holidays!” it read.

My neighbor didn’t buckle up on the drive home, and every thirty seconds my car chimed a wordless warning. Each iteration felt louder and longer than the last.

He cleaned his glasses and nodded at the car stereo. “This Peter Gabriel?” he asked. 

“Bon Iver,” I told him.

I worried my neighbor might interpret the alarm as a serious problem, a precursor to the hood suddenly jackknifing open or the tires going ragged. Worse, he might think something was wrong with me for ignoring the noise. If my neighbor met another person who listened to Bon Iver, he might think I was an idiot for mispronouncing their name. Maybe he blamed me for the racket my car was making. Maybe he gripped his armrest, afraid I might go slicing through a red light and into oncoming traffic.

The alarm sounded again and again. Each slick intersection held its watery double. I didn’t know how to tell my neighbor it was his fault. 

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ALBTRAUM by Corey Miller

September 22, 2021

I coax Mother’s wheelchair through Newark terminal to our United gate. I pray she knows where she is—where she is going.

I can’t understand her anymore; sensing death she no longer speaks in English. She dreams of her hometown, Essen, Germany. Unaccustomed mother tongue, I download Duolingo on my iPhone to learn Deutsche. To decipher her code.

Returning Mother to her homeland, I use all of my sick days from work, expecting to catch a bug at some point throughout the year. I’ve never traveled outside of America. My passport on the verge of expiring.

Mother’s lips are as tight as a treasure chest when it’s time for her medicine. The airport terminal eyes us foreign. Vacationers ready for a good time, not to witness the end of the line. I force her to consume healing capsules. The army of tablets are protection, so she won’t panic in public, believing she teleported there.

Duolingo is good at teaching single words and building up to sentences.

Good day. Guten Tag. Goodbye. Auf Wiedersehen.

I am a man. Ich bin ein Mann.

I am a strong man. Ich bin ein stark Mann.

Meine Mutter hasn’t been back to Deutschland since she was twenty, arriving in America with unborn me. She recalls stories of riding her Westphalian horse through the town center as a Mädchen.  She raised me by herself in America. She would always talk about how much of the world she experienced growing up, how much of the world I missed by tending her needs.

On the plane, meine Mutter doesn’t speak—she screams. Her body is a guitar string, wound tight and vibrating. The other passengers all look the same to me as I pan between them, restraining my final family member. The crew is bilingual. They say Mother cries of foals and mares. They watch me force the pills down her throat like I want her to throw up. An inflight map depicts a plane surrounded by water.

Growing up, Mother would tell me I was gifted when the other boys called me names at baseball practice. She would tell me I was strong and I’d accomplish greatness. What if that’s a mantra mothers are required to preach? A page from The Mother’s Playbook. I didn’t have time for friends when my mother required all of my love. Now I cook softer foods, my opinion of makeup turned into application, I accompany her up and down each step.

My mind is a freezer thawing. Memories sitting in ice trays, warming back into water and evaporating. Did meine Mutter dye these thoughts different colors? Grün, blau, und rot cubes containing the times we cantered the horses bareback through open fields of clover. Bits of purple memories kicked into my backside, the shape of a horseshoe.

We fly into Dusseldorf because the airport in Essen is classified as a minor unscheduled facility. “Essen” in Deutsche means “to eat.” A town made of food, I think. A whole gingerbread village where everyone can be a cookie-cutter friend. The little I know isn’t enough to save me here.

Pushing her wheelchair across cobblestones through the treeless Altstadt to the train station is like pushing against a wall. The resistance ist stark. Ich bin stark.

In Deutschland, you count starting with your thumb as if everything is A-OK. Four is spelled “vier” but is pronounced “fear.” Ich bin ein stark Mann.

Mutter peers at statues, mouth agape. I learn of a German word that doesn’t translate into English well: Gemütlichkeit. It’s a feeling of warmth usually associated with having close friends present.

The city smells like it’s been here since the start of time. Aromatic honey and barley overflow from the shops and the peddlers manage raw food with their bare hands. “Hell” means “bright.” The sun is hell, berating my doubt and casting shadows of those who stand tall.

I hesitate translating the train system. Lists and screens and platforms — I don’t want to go the wrong way.

The stories she told me always ended with how her Westphalian died of colic. Pferde can’t vomit because their esophagus contains muscles shoving in one direction, the inability to vomit can tangle their insides.

We board the train with assistance from the conductor; he lowers a bridge to mind the gap and wheel aboard. The towns come and go, divided by farmland large enough to home a cow for each resident. Shelter is necessary for livestock, but I wonder if, like humans, there’s such thing as too much. I ask Mother if she knows where she is. “Wo sind wir?” She smiles as she collapses out of her wheelchair, crumbling onto the floor. The doors slide open, the conductor announces Essen, next stop Bochum. I see banners hung in the station that I cannot read, yet, it feels like the vertebrae in my spine have realigned. Pictures of horses jumping obstacles and pulling plows for Equitana, one of the largest horse festivals. Meine Mutter smiles, not looking outside. She locks eyes with me and I can see the years she’s bartered for this final moment of clarity — for the pair of us.

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THE CROW CAME ONE MORNING AND WHAT’S LEFT TO WONDER? by Derek Maine

September 15, 2021

He takes his shoes off by the door. A solemn peek in the hotel mirror suggests pleated pants, starched shirt, taut tie, he’s running out of matching letters to describe his appearance which is always, and only, just that. To himself he appears as an apparition. Do others see him, he wonders often. The meetings today went well. He sold himself. Passed himself off as one of them. Someone they could trust. Someone they could have a beer with. At a baseball game. A hot dog too. He is not that someone. He hasn’t had a beer in some very long time. A hot dog would upset his stomach, surely. He calls his home. No one answers. Everything is being created or dying and he obsesses over which. The crow circled above his house this morning, before he left for his work trip, and that is another thing he has been considering. He steps forward toward the television then steps back. The room looks like all the other rooms. Describing it would kill it, surely. Has he used surely twice? He has. He wishes he hadn’t but it’s too late to change it, he sighs. Someone else is in the room, came in with him. It’s him the other way. There are always two, wherever he goes. He is an unwilling participant in an argument for argument’s sake which has raged on within him for 39 years. Whenever he picks up a new trick, or learns a new phrase, the other way does too. It bores him. He wishes there was another way, but he only contains enough energy to wish. He seeks nothing, he has done no serious investigation.  He avoids the television, walking further into the room, not wanting to stir up an anger. He pulls the curtain to reveal a view of the highway. What a stupid way to live, he says to no one. The phone rings. He picks it up and says something like, “hello.” It is not 1979, in case you were wondering. It is a year, but not that one. His wife is on the other end of the line. He can hear his children screaming in the background. They love him. They miss him. They say goodbye and he hangs up the phone. He wonders who they love. He considers who they miss. It is not him. It is their projection of him. He is too many things at once to miss. He is too many things at once to love, he thinks. He is listless, the other way suggests he could be lifeless, if he’d like. He doesn’t want to be listless or lifeless. His co-pay is too rich for any other state of being. He distrusts professionals of all varieties, preferring amateurs or, better yet, people and things to happen with no explanation whatsoever. Plus, what books have the therapists read? It only ever shows you, on the websites, which insurance they accept. It never digs into their relationship to literature, being the only thing that matters to him. Since he mentioned websites, he can delete the part about it not being 1979. He doesn’t want to. It is a nod to an earlier work. He is conscious of building an oeuvre, even if he still has to look up the word every time to spell it correctly. It’s the “e” after the “o” that always trips him up. His wife sends him a text. She is privy to his rhythms. Suggests he use the hotel treadmill to stave off the thing that doesn’t have to come. He’s missing cigarettes. He’s not missing beer, but he’s always missing cigarettes. He does not want to exercise. He does not know what, or how, to be. It disheartens him. It unsettles him. He will do nothing to improve his prospects of knowing, or being, or being any other way. It is the only way he knows. He is not going to leave the hotel room. He is not going to change clothes or shower or turn on the television or open his computer to write or go outside for a walk or eat any food or think about anything other than how he is feeling, which is an absence, and occurs to him to be the only thing happening in the entire world at the moment. He masturbates when it is time to masturbate. He takes a Tylenol PM when it is time to take a Tylenol PM. He lay on top of the sheets, naked, unable to sleep. He takes a second Tylenol PM when it is time to take a second Tylenol PM. The couple next door is having sex. Or the person next door is watching pornography, whatever the case may be. His wife is jealous of his work trips, his time away from home, his peace away from the kids. But she does not have to be him, he thinks. He does, he’s sure of it. He is in pain at how brief life is. And how poor of a showing he’s made thus far. His oeuvre is weak and wildly inconsistent. He would like to be different, but he does not know how. He wonders what he would write about if he could write anything at all, writing being all he’d like to do, though he’s never examined why, and he’s terribly aware that if he were to, he might find something else to dislike about himself, and so he does nothing. He tries to conjure an image but comes away, as usual, with nothing but formlessness. He is unable to imagine a red dot. Or tap into any visual. It is all, instead, a constant flow of language. He has a business degree and a loneliness he’s immediately thrust onto everyone he’s ever been intimate with, and an immediate regret. He’s lost the plot, control of the narrative, not a natural editor, too fat around the belly, bags under the eyes – the Tylenol PM never works, wondering what the crow wants with him, if anything, probably nothing, he’s made babies and has a life insurance policy and isn’t sure there’s much else left for him to do. He pulls into his driveway. It is the next day now, if that makes any kind of difference. His wife kisses him softly on the lips, she’s headed out to a yoga class. The kids are out playing with friends. He takes his shoes off by the door. A solemn peek in the bedroom mirror suggests pleated pants, starched shirt, taut tie, he’s running out of matching letters to describe his appearance which is always, and only, just that. To himself he appears as an apparition. Do others see him, he wonders often.

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