Flash

WOMAN OF STEEL by Valerie Hegarty

Yesterday in ceramics class Prof Woodstock did a demo of red glazes while telling us an old Chinese legend.  Once there was an emperor who demanded a red glazed pot.  The royal potter fired pot after pot, but could not get any of them to fire red.  So the emperor sentenced him to death.  The potter’s daughter was so upset she jumped in the fired kiln, and when they opened it all the pots were glazed red with her blood. Prof Woodstock said as a feminist she wasn’t thrilled with the story, but it showed the difficulty of producing a red glaze wasn’t just specific to dumb Americans.  I was sipping vodka from my water bottle and swooned a bit over the open kiln, my face flushed red from my buzz and the heat.  Prof Woodstock sent me home to sleep it off; she was cool like that, which was fine because my main focus in school was to make metal art.  Prof Steelhead told me making metal art was not recommended as it appeared I did not have the disposition to withstand working close to the fire for extended periods of time and lifting welded metal sculpture was challenging for even the most vigorous athletic builds. Prof  Steelhead made work similar in style to Richard Serra, and since Richard Serra was famous, no one cared about Steelhead’s art. It wasn’t shown in blue chip galleries in Chelsea, or at International Art Fairs like the Venice Biennale. Instead Steelhead’s rusted walls of steel littered meadows in Vermont, where cows were forced to walk the long way around these industrial barriers when looking for a lost calf.Of course I didn’t listen to Steelhead.  He should have gone West and bought a depressed town to reconstruct if he wanted to be a dictator like Heizer or Judd, but since he was slowly creaking out his tenure at a liberal Arts College in New England, no one listened to Steelhead.  Plus the college had the metal workshop outfitted with cranes and there were techs and other students to assist, so I don’t know why he was picking on me, aside from my slight build and nervous disposition.  Truthfully I was terrified of fire, but that was exactly why I wanted to make metal art to begin with—not to face my fears—but for the surges of Norepinephrine that coursed through my body when I thought I was on the precipice of death. I finished a twelve-pack of Bud cans before class, crushing the tin cans in my fist each time I polished one off just to psych myself up. Although it calmed my anxiety, I was now staggering when I walked. I told myself not to walk in front of Steelhead and to stay on the other side of the fire from him when the techs did the demo of the molten steel pour.  Ten of us arrived at class and Steelhead gave us shovels to dig out trenches as molds that would be filled with the molten steel during the demo.  I dug a hole the shape of my body, like the artist Ana Mendieta who performed in the landscape—lying naked on sand, against trees, in gardens, then covering herself with earth—but mine was a hole. No body. It was a hollow, like the voids in the lava post-Vesuvius.  Maybe it could be a memorial to Ana Mendieta, who was now without a body as her body broke and died when she was pushed out the window by her drunk lover, the artist Carl Andre. Without witnesses, he claimed it wasn’t him, and I know from drunken blackouts that maybe he did it and didn’t remember. Maybe it was psychic survival to keep that night dark.  Now I was feeling sad about Ana Mendieta. What a fucking way to die, drunk and fighting with your drunken lover, soon to be your murderer, whose work would still be going to Venice and Paris and every MOMA retrospective in every country around the world, while your body decayed and disappeared, leaving a void deep in the ground where you were buried.  It’s all very poetic except for the part where she was pushed.When I finished digging my body-shaped hole, I was dizzy from the exertion in the sun. I leaned on my shovel to prop me up.  Steelhead took my shovel out from under me and gave me an “I told you so” look and I glared at him, batting my eyelashes to confuse him.  My sweat smelled like barley and hops as it poured out under my armpits. I didn’t care if he smelled it, he was a drinker too; I could see it in his watery eyes in the morning class. He was blurred and hung over and pissed about Richard Serra.Steelhead told us all to stand back from our holes. Multiple techs in heavy Kevlar suits with helmets like they were headed to Mars picked up a trough that glowed fiery red with molten steel. They carried the trough to the holes and one by one filled the horse shoe shaped hole, the hole shaped like a pitchfork, the hole shaped like Carl Andre’s steel floor tiles. They carried the red molten metal to me, its liquid silver sloshing, and started to fill the hole shaped like my body. The heat from the molten steel overtook me. I was drunk and hot. If only I could sit down for a minute. I’ll just sit on my heels, I thought, and staggered backward. As I pitched forward, I tried to catch my balance. I could hear screaming as I fell into the  molten metal.I was at a party and it was late.  Someone was shooting up in the corner and nodding out with the needle still in his arm.  A couple was fighting about art and finances, and being a bad lover, and being a drunk, and you are a drunk, and the woman said she was leaving and leaving for good, and she was looking out the window shouting to her friend to wait, and the man ran to her. He was enraged. He almost had his hands on her, and I was right there, right in between them. I stuck out my foot.The man fell and hit his head on the iron baseboard heater. He was knocked unconscious.  Maybe he was dead.  The woman screamed. She checked his pulse.  “He’s dead!” she yelled, “Call an ambulance! He’s dead!”  You’re welcome, I thought.  I saw there was a fire in the kitchen sink, so I ran to put it out.  I turned on the water, but whiskey flowed out, accelerating the flames.  I grabbed a bottle of water and threw it on the growing fire, but it was vodka. Now the flames were consuming the cabinets and the stove. The utensil drawer dripped silver, the toaster melted, the refrigerator buckled in on itself.  I ran from the room, but I was drunk and lurching.  The man wasn’t dead. He was back on his feet and his face was so red it looked like he was going to pop.  He was coming for me.  “No! No! Get away from me!” I yelled as I ran out of the apartment, down the stairwell, into the street.  He was chasing me, he had one of his steel floor tiles in his hands raised over his head. He was going to pummel me with his metal art. He was gaining on me, and I was tired of running. I stopped and turned to him.  “Go ahead, kill me fast, I have a weak stomach for this type of thing,” and he raised the steel plate and crashed it down on my head.  There was the clanging boing of a gong. Two men were dragging me by my elbows up to a Chinese emperor sitting on his throne.  The emperor was drinking from a jug and I could smell the alcohol on his breath.  At his feet was a pile of ceramic shards from broken jugs.  My hands were tied behind my back and I was dragging my legs.   Next to the emperor was the biggest kiln I’d ever seen in my life, with a bonfire of stacked wood burning underneath.  Under the lid I could see rows of jugs waiting to be glazed and fired. “Get in if you want to save your father,” said the emperor, pointing behind me.  I turned around and my father was nodding his head.  “They will kill me if you don’t get in,” said my father, his eyes locking on mine.  “My blood will be on your hands,” he said.I nodded my head as if I understood, and the two men released my arms.  I stepped forward toward the kiln. “Save your motherfucking self!” I screamed as I ran out the door to the right of the kiln. I was running back and forth. I was in some inner courtyard and couldn’t find my way out.  The two men cornered me and one of them raised his double-edged sword, the edges glinting, and I stuck out my neck, “Fine, do it, it’s better than burning to death,” I said as I heard the swish of the sword cut the air in half.I was outside my childhood home and I heard my mother’s voice.  I thought my mother died two years ago of cancer, but she was in the kitchen calling my name. I ran to the kitchen. I couldn’t believe she was there, washing dessert spoons in the sink.  “Sweetie, you need to stop drinking. It’s killing you.  I love you and I don’t want you to die. I should have protected you more as kid.” She handed me a spoon and a bowl of ice cream. I fell into her skirt. It was my mother and I started to cry.  I was crying and the bowl of ice cream was melting and I was crying and melting and crying and melting and they were pulling me out of the body shaped hole.  I was still alive but all my clothes had burned off. My skin shone silver.  I had a coating of steel. I looked like the tin man’s wife.  Steelhead fell in love with me on the spot. He tried to hand me a can of beer to cool me off, but I deflected it with my wrist like Wonder Woman, and when the can touched my skin it instantly turned to liquid metal and poured into a puddle by my feet. Steelhead said we could make beautiful art together but I told him he was too old for me and I had a whole life to lead.  He wouldn’t be able to keep up and I couldn’t be with a drinker. It would be a risk to my newly sober self.  As I walked away the noon sun was so bright it glared off every side of my metal body. I heated up to the temperature of the sun itself. I was walking radiance. I could feel Steelhead’s watery eyes on me as I poured into the light.
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KNIVES by Sean Hayes

I was gonna be a salesman. I took an elevator up to the third floor and followed signs taped to the walls with directional arrows and Trajectory Marketing Demo printed on them. They led to an office with an open door. There were guys with hair gelled, cut, buzzed, or combed into all different shapes wearing oversized suits and ties, the kind that’d only been worn to funerals. My hair was shaggy again and I was wearing my beat-up Christmas slippers, Nike sweatpants, and my Arc’teryx fleece riddled with cigarette burns like I was some weird spotted animal. I just wanted to make Dad and my stepmom Paula proud since I got put on academic suspension from college for the semester and was back living at home. That was why I found and circled an ad in the paper for a demonstration with Trajectory Marketing at 7PM Wednesday. It said I could make a grand a week. If I made a grand a week I wouldn’t have to steal or borrow money from Dad ever again.So I was at the office building in SoNo. I didn’t get high before because I wanted to do right. Be good. Get a job. Turn my life around. I walked to a table. There were two dozen boxes of donuts from Dunk’s. I chose a double chocolate frosted donut, took a seat, and ate the donut. The windows of the office looked out onto The Sound. The sunset was Pepto Bismal pink and DayQuil orange. A beautiful omen. I swear to God the Gladiator soundtrack was playing softly from somewhere. Donuts, over-the-counter omen sunsets, the prospect of fortune. Sometimes life spoils us.The guy in charge had a chinstrap that looked like it was holding his hair on his head. Chinstrap Man told everyone to take a seat. We sat down and got quiet. He pushed a button on the stereo on his desk. The Gladiator soundtrack stopped playing softly in the background, confirming that it really was playing. Chinstrap Man smiled. He shook a set of keys in front of us once we all sat down and he smiled some more.“Do you know what these are?” Chinstrap Man asked us.“Keys?” someone said.“Not just any keys.” Chinstrap Man jingled them around like we were a bunch of babies fascinated by them. “Keys, to an M3.”I couldn’t tell what kind of keys they were. They were definitely keys though.“They could be yours,” he told to us. “If you hustle the way I hustle, you can have keys to an M3 too.”Some of the guys sitting around smiled and whispered to each other, excited about the possibility of M3s.“What do you fellas know about knives?” Chinstrap Man asked us.“They cut stuff,” someone said.“Not all knives cut stuff with surgical precision though.” Chinstrap Man clasped his hands together.The kid next to me was picking his nose. He picked it and smiled when he was supposed to smile while Chinstrap Man said things we were supposed to smile at. I smiled at the things we were supposed to smile at too, but also watched the guy picking his nose until Chinstrap Man took a cutting board out from under a tableclothed table. He dumped a bunch of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies on the table. He took out a knife block full of knives and a Stop & Shop bag full of fruits and vegetables.“What do you know about SliceWorks knives?” he asked us.“They’re the best around,” someone said.“Ding, ding, ding. What’s your name, young man?” Chinstrap Man asked him.“Michael,” the guy said.“Michael, you’re a smart man.” Chinstrap Man threw Michael a quarter. Then he threw Michael a penny and motioned for him to go up there.“Take these scissors and cut that penny in half. Put the quarter in your pocket. Consider it a down payment on that M3 you’re gonna be driving.” Chinstrap Man handed Michael a pair of scissors from the knife block.Michael smiled a nervous smile while he was trying to do it, but the scissors cut the penny right in half. Did that shit for him. Michael even said it. “They did that shit for me.”Chinstrap Man high-fived Michael. Some people clapped. I clapped a little too. I watched the dude picking his nose again until he finally got what he was digging for. He tasted it and it must’ve not tasted the way it was supposed to taste because he made a frown and pushed the booger onto the back of the seat in front of him. At that point, I figured it might be okay to be high in the Trajectory Marketing demo. I walked to the bathroom, took the green time-release coating off the OC 80 so all the time was mine, crushed the bone white pill and a little piece of a Xanax bar up on the toilet paper dispenser, snorted it, and walked back into the demo. It was the last 80 I was gonna do. It was always the last 80. All of them. The first. Second. Hundredth. However many. They were all the last. In the twelve step meetings I quit going to, they say one is too many and a thousand is never enough and they say addiction is a progressive disease. It eats me up inside to know they might know me better than I know myself.I sat back down in the demo and I smiled. Everything was gonna be alright. Chinstrap Man was telling us how we’d be selling knives to family and friends on commission. No hourly rate. I pictured myself in Aunt Deb’s apartment in Cornwall, sitting at her dining room table with the knife block on display and a pile of change I’d cut to smithereens while she chain-smoked Marlboro Lights and ashed into a carnival glass ashtray filled with hundreds of butts and she’d tell me in her cigarette-carved voice I didn’t need to do any of that sales pitch bullshit and she’d buy whatever her dear nephew was selling.I thought about all the Oxys I’d be doing in my M3. The last Oxys. I picked at this scab that had once been a pimple long ago, but had scabbed over a few times. I picked at it and smiled and chuckled when everyone smiled and chuckled at Chinstrap Man even though I wasn’t listening to a word he was saying anymore. Chinstrap Man hit play on a stereo. The song by “Bodies” by Drowning Pool started. The lead singer screamed and heavy metal guitars screeched. Chinstrap Man sliced tomatoes, celery stalks, and heads of lettuce with incredible speed. Debris flew everywhere. The chain from his chain wallet swung back and forth against his dress slacks as he chopped. People cheered. I smiled and laughed, enjoying it like everyone else. I must’ve nodded because when I came to, Chinstrap Man was standing in front of me with a meat cleaver in his hand. Drowning Pool had been turned down so it was only playing lightly. Everyone was turned around staring at me.“Are we boring you?” Chinstrap Man said to me. “Buddy, your face is bleeding.”He held the shiny meat cleaver up to my face so I could see myself. I was bleeding a long thin streak of blood from my forehead down to my chin from the opened scab. I also had chocolate frosting on the corners of my mouth.“Why don’t you go get cleaned up and catch us at the next demo in April?” He gave me a little pat on the shoulder and left his hand there with a tightening grip like he was ready to escort me out if needed.Everyone stared at me. The guy who had been picking his nose was back to picking his nose while staring at me too. I got up and walked to the door. Chinstrap Man restarted the Drowning Pool song as I walked out.On the drive home, I pretended I was Chinstrap Man. I morphed into him like it was The Matrix. His chinstrap became mine. Dad’s Subaru Forrester became a BMW M3 with a forest of New Car Scent Little Trees dangling from the rearview. Standard turned to stick. I suddenly knew how to drive stick. The chain from my chain wallet rested on the driver’s seat. I hit a hundred on a straightaway on I-95 until the steering wheel shook and I remembered I was in the Forrester. I took my hands off the wheel, outstretching my arms like I was Jesus on the cross. In April, I would rise from the dead. In April, I’d turn my life around. In April, I’d call Mom and  my stepdad Pat who kicked me out of their house senior year of high school and I’d tell them I had a business proposition for them and crunch across their shell driveway with the knife block cradled in my arms. In April, I’d show them my M3, my chinstrap, my chain wallet full of cash. In April, I’d show them the surgical precision of the blades. The ease at which I could cut up a big old pile of change.
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FLORIDA MAN by Bridget Adams

THE MAN SITTING ON MY COUCH HAS OBTAINED HIS ALLIGATOR HARVEST PERMITYes, it’s true! We haven’t fucked yet but soon you’ll be crouched in the greased dark of a velvet panhandle midnight, your rifle pointed squarely in the center of an alligator’s long flat head, between the ridges of its eyes. The animal’s body looks like a topographic map, bone-hard hills and valleys laid over with skin too tough for bullets at anything but close range. “Alligators are really hard to kill,” you say, and I want to give the curve of your ear one long lick as you turn your face from mine. We might need this to stay metaphorical. Someone could get hurt. But look at your baby face. There’s something else there, soft, like a creamy reptilian underbelly, sweetly speckled. It’s alligators all the way down, isn’t it? So, it’s too easy but I’ll say it anyway—this is an old story, the oldest, and maybe I’ve run out of ways to describe it with something lighter than brute force: Pull out my insides, stuff me, hang me up on your wall. I’ll be your prize carcass. MY FIRST PAINTING!I seduced you the first time with an erotic cartoon of Fred Flintstone and I’m not ready to stop. An Epstein documentary played soft and low on the TV, and I used red crayon on an envelope from the hospital. Fred’s penis was deformed because I’m not a very good artist. You didn’t mind. Here, now, acrylics have been splashed, washed out with water, the blue of the sky and the sea erratic and changing as I ran out of paint on my brush. I say this is you and me and you look hard and say, “I see it! I see us!” And you do. Two tiny flecks of paint, dark spots in the vast, uneven ocean. What you can’t see is us touching each other under the water in the painting, like we did in real life. A storm was coming in from the east that day, fat slate clouds on a mission, steady and sure. CHANCEL LAMPWe are on Floor Bed, which is all of the pillows on the couch dragged to the floor so we can really stretch out, roll around, get lazy for hours. On Floor Bed, we do everything—we make each other laugh there, we fuck there, we wipe taco innards from each other’s lips there. “Thank you for letting me be myself,” you say. No one has ever said a sentence like that to me in my life–trimeter, lilting—is it dactylic, even, in gratitude? I think about the light at church that couldn’t go out and how I am in love with you and I don’t need to tell you. I’m lit up whether anyone can see it or not.  OKAY, BUT—BUT,I do tell you I love you. You say it back. Nothing like this has ever happened to me. I’m way too old for this! It’s always been: what else do you call having a lot of sex and struggling with the ugly little tumor your personalities make together and going out to dinner most nights? But I didn’t know the tenderness I could feel like a toothache when I watch you do ordinary things, like imperfectly wrap the perfect, longed-for gift or run your fingers through your hair as you introduce your mother or crouch down in the weeds and spray something illegal to fry the roaches, thick as thumbs, that pool at the stone base of my apartment—and how long are we happy? By which I mean: how long are we walking through the pines with sunlight on our shoulders, how long are we frying potatoes in olive oil and rosemary and putting on mud masks from the same tub before bed, how long are we knotted together at the knees and reading books in that little apartment, Spanish Moss blowing greenly and slick against the window? NOT LONG ENOUGHWe sit crying on a park bench. A woman stops in front of us. She has short white hair and complex lines of embroidery run around the collar of her electric blue tunic. A cross, starkly bodiless, hangs heavy and wooden between her breasts. She tells us to open our hands. Dumb and obedient in our suffering, we do, and she throws her fist back, then pitches it forward, over and over. “I’m throwing blessings,” she says. My heart is yelping like a kicked dog! HOW IS THE PIECE OF MY HEART?Is she in your pocket, is she in your wallet, do you leave her on a shelf when you go out? Do you forget about her? Do you bury her out back under the magnolia tree? When you open the fridge and she’s back again, drinking your Topo Chico, are you mad? Do you throw her in the trash with the matching mugs you bought us? When you can’t get rid of her, do you take her out to breakfast? Do you put little black sunglasses and a little black beanie on her because it’s sunny but cold? Do you hold her hand and watch the wood storks crowd at the lakeshore? Do you blow raspberries above her belly button? Do you nap together? When she has bad dreams do you put her head in your lap? Do you cry for the first time in years, curled against her, while she rubs your back? Do you pick her up and put her on the counter and kiss her? Do you tell her you’re afraid and you don’t know what you’re doing? Does she know that the future is a black hole and it will swallow you? When you reach for your gun in the night, do you point it at her? Do you tell her you’re leaving—to New York, to West Africa, to Ukraine? When you fuck other women do you crush her beneath your bodies because she won’t shut the fuck up? And do you think you’ll ever give her back?  MEAT/HEADA hemiplegic migraine lays me down in the early hours of the afternoon, insistent and urgent as you once were. Close the blinds. I want to see you naked. You always spoke like the desire almost hurt and there is hurt in me now and numbness spreads through the fingers of my left hand making them useless, one by one. At the very end of us you slept on the bed against the window and bullets of rain grayed the palms through the glass. You breathed steady and I made tea and read. If I try to read now the oil slick of pain above my eye will become a house fire. When it was time to go to the party, I woke you and you started, your body coiled and dewy with hangover sweat. And now the numbness reaches my wrist, and no frantic shaking brings the feeling back. I understood you then and I understand you now—the way that history acted on us, the shock of a fist to the gut—and anyway you are elsewhere and transformed, all meat. But there were days when the sun came in through the blinds and made us golden, when we made love after the protest, when we thought we might change the world because we were changing each other. So what if now I’m alone and half of me can’t feel a thing and the other half is delirious, effulgent, with pain? I can blind myself with a pillow, raise my hands, throw the sheet off and expose a breast. I can say the price is fair. AND LIKE GOD, I’LL FORGIVE YOU TOOI go for walks. A man with a red beard makes me laugh and takes me on bike rides through the forest. We weave down the trail, now in shadow, now in light. The sun sets on the long drive to the airport and I marvel at the stretch of wildflowers—yellow, blue, purple—carpeting the median strip. I say little prayers at night and two gifts you’ve never seen—a hanging wooden heron and a voluptuous philodendron—watch over me in my bed, the bed that you’re not in. Red snapper blackens in a pan and the sound of a distant saxophone, played poorly, haltingly, drifts into my kitchen. I read. I write. I work. I make plans. I get things I’ve always wanted. And maybe I’ve seen you for the very last time, your back in a black cotton t-shirt moving farther and farther away into the haze of a wet north Florida winter until you could have been anyone. Or maybe one day when the azaleas again blaze hot pink outside my front door, you’ll knock. And like God I’ll say: Come on in, prodigal, lover boy, mercenary, imp. Sit down. What a long road you took. Let me take off your boots. You talk. I’ll listen.
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YOU WORK IN THE WORST DINER IN EXISTENCE THAT’S ALWAYS OPEN FOR BUSINESS by Avitus B. Carle

Where the brown leather stools and chairs suction to the patrons’ skin until they bruise. Where the tables wobble and the menus are always sticky and the food listed changes every day. The bar is slanted and the floor dips and your uniform remains the same except for the endless supply of toothpicks you carry in the pockets of your apron. Where you are the only employee. Where food cooks itself. Where you can gaze at a new apocalypse just outside the window every time the bell that hangs over the door sings a brand-new carol and a new customer arrives.

***

A man asks for an eyeball in his large glass of gasoline served with a bendy straw. A foot with clipped toenails dipped in ketchup to go. He’s a zombie and you’re a zombie well versed in the language of snarl. Your hand falls off while pouring a bag of teeth into the coffee grinder and you watch it spin and change into liquid. You return to the man with your steaming liquid hand mixed with the teeth of strangers and snarl that all you have left are shoes. But your jaw falls off and lands in his lap and he takes it, replacing his own.

***

A mother and her two children grab a booth by the window while the ocean consumes the world. Their lips are purple, their skin withered, and they drool mini-puddles when they talk. One child, a girl, tries to detach the menu from her cheek. The other, a boy, rocks the table until the salt spills and dissolves in the water around them. Their eyes turn red, your eyes turn red, and both you and the girl clench your hands into fists. You rub your eyes and she rubs her eyes and you both suck your teeth. You think clutz. The girl says clutz and you laugh because she sounds like you.

***

The man asks for green Jello — no whipped cream — and a single french fry with ketchup. But you’re a mannequin. You are both mannequins and cannot move, which doesn’t matter, since all you have are peaches. You ask the man if he likes mushrooms because that’s what the cloud blooming behind him reminds you of. You don’t hear his answer. He’s suckling two ketchup packets. The cloud, you say, again and again, and watch his jaw melt into his lap. You feel the heat of all his words as they hit you and throw you like the depleted packets flicked from his thumb.

***

The mother asks if you will watch her children. Her daughter has bat wings, feathers instead of hair, and teeth like a shark. Her son’s eyes blink sideways. He has green scales and a tail that curls around your waist. He picks you up and brings you to their table. You’re needed as a guest, a witness for the wedding, at the special request of a toothpick pulled from your pocket. She wears a ketchup packet for a veil and is marrying a butter knife. The girl plucks blue feathers from her scalp and showers them over the bride as she hops down the aisle. You remove a few toothpicks from your pocket and place them on both sides in the audience. After the couple kisses, the children devour them all. They screech and howl, shatter the window between you and the apocalypse, and invite you to go hunting with them.

***

The man is a teenager covered in boils who asks for the cure but you only have a bowl filled with Imodium. You push the bowl closer to him and notice your hand, soft, but your fingernails are chipped. Your reflection displays your teenage self, listening to a young man talk about football. How he loves the sport, but math is his passion, and you reach and touch his hand. The boils that burst beneath your fingers remind you of the poppers you threw with...who? You weren’t alone then, you aren’t alone now, and recognize the surprised look on the young man’s face. He pulls away, knocks the bowl of Imodium over, and you watch them spill into his lap.

***

The boy is a robot who detaches his jaw and places it on the table. The girl, who is a floating orb made up of the sequence for Pi levitates a toothpick between her brother’s metal teeth. She clicks about humans; how helpless they would be without them. But instead of “humans” you hear “mothers” and “if she ever wonders about me.”

***

The man is back to being a man and asks if you at least have pancakes that look like Darth Vader and ketchup he can use as a lightsaber? And you tell him no, you don’t, because the microwave and oven and stove and dishwasher all quit to rule the world but you provide him two packets of ketchup.

***

The girl picks her nose and pulls a clone of herself out and she tells you, on her planet, children rule. She keeps picking and pulling clones of herself until the diner is filled with clones. You search for her brother. Didn’t you promise their mother you would keep an eye on them? You search for him amongst the girls but all you find is a toothpick sinking into a perfectly swirled pit of ketchup.

***

Are you ready to go? The man asks, holding the door open. All the humans have left, except the two of you, boarding a ship to the moon. You tell him not yet, that you’re waiting for someone. She’s not coming, and you know you’ve heard this before. You look for the children, reach into your pocket, feel your palm fill with pinprick kisses of toothpicks. Are you ready to go? And you still aren’t sure until he removes the ketchup packets from his pockets.She never comes back, you hear him say, and you can’t remember ever seeing her leave.
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CONGRATULATIONS by Graeme Bezanson

After work I met Alexa because we were trying out the idea that we could be just friends. Together we walked to Barnes & Noble where they were having an event for Dan Dashiell, author of a celebrated sad novel about a dying husband who spends the last month of his life teaching his wife how to cook the family’s favorite meals. Every chapter is a different dish and life lesson. Alexa knew Dan from the internet and I think they read together once, before he became a successful young novelist. Also I believe he was at one point fucking Yvonne. After a store employee introduced him he read an excerpt from the book, an early chapter dealing with regret and spinach lasagna. Afterwards people lined up and Dan sat and signed books for them. I went to look at magazines while Alexa hovered around waiting to say hi.Upstairs I found a couple of literary journals I’d recently been rejected from and read their lists of contributors. In one I only recognized a few bigger-deal poets but the second had like ten people I know, including a popular new Irish poet who had recently read at K Bar. I remember a bunch of highly-emotional poems involving a lot of muck and root vegetables. I flipped to his page and read the fragment “plough nigh / upon aching furrow” and closed the magazine and put it back in the wrong place and tried to leave my body for five heartbeats.Alexa and Dan were chatting when I got back downstairs. Dan and I shook hands and he kind of leaned in and half-patted, half-hugged my shoulder even though I couldn’t remember us ever being friends. I told him congrats on the book.“And how’s your writing life going?” he asked me. I told him I was chipping away. He sighed in a way that I think was meant to convey affinity or professional understanding and then steered the conversation to his book tour, so for a while we all compared notes on the people he’d met along the way. Alexa told a good anecdote about the organizer of a longstanding Seattle reading series involving a Top Gun-themed party and a bag of angel dust. I tried to think of quotes from Top Gun while Dan listened intently and laughed. Eventually a bookstore lady stepped in and started to kind of politely corral Dan towards the back of the store.“Let me know whenever you have a reading,” Dan said to Alexa. “I really want to hear your new stuff.” Alexa made a mock-shy, flirtatious expression. “You too,” Dan added, swiveling part-way towards me as he was swept away by the bookstore lady. “Love all that stuff you do. So great. So great.”I had three good poems and maybe two hundred starts of things, dumb ideas, abandoned drafts. God keep me from ever completing anything says Moby Dick but I’m pretty sure that’s meant to cover stuff that’s already pretty much finished. E.g. Moby Dick is like six hundred pages, not five lines and a working title.At home after the platonic bookstore outing I opened a file where I’d started collecting physical descriptions from profiles of dead writers: Ted Hughes has a huge face; Simone de Beauvoir is clear-eyed and rosy-complected; Borges’ features are vague, as if partially erased. Adrian was online and I messaged him to say I was considering rebranding from poet to “text-based artist.” “Ok,” said Adrian and I waited for him to write more but he didn’t. I added some line breaks to the dead writers document then clicked away and read a NY Times article about a recent outbreak of violence in Central Africa. The phrase “crucible of war” popped into my head, somewhat melodramatically, I felt. I searched online for “crucible of war” but couldn’t find a satisfying answer for why the phrase seemed so ancient and indestructible. I cycled back to see if Adrian had written anything then scanned through my chat contacts where recently people I didn’t know had started appearing, maybe via a technical glitch or some runaway algorithm. I recognized the name of a successful early-career artist and briefly considered messaging her about her recent show in which everything had been extremely black. Instead I opened a new document on my laptop and wrote “The worst thing about being the darkness must be knowing there’s no darkness coming,” which, for the time being, seemed good and sad and true. I stared at the page and wrote “Black” then deleted it and wrote “Black” again, then closed Word completely. On my laptop I put on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which there’s a C plot involving Riker falling asleep at Data’s poetry reading. Midway through the episode Data asks Geordi for feedback on his poems and Geordi, whose first impulse is to spare the android’s non-existent feelings, ends up advising Data to focus more on what he wants to say with his art, and less on how he says it, which struck me as good advice for an android and very bad advice for everyone else.I put on the end of a Knicks game and idly scrolled through old pictures while drinking a poly-vegetable juice for I guess dinner. My phone ran out of battery just as the Knicks surrendered and emptied their bench. Mourning doves strafed each other outside in the darkening space between buildings. I sat very still and, while everything grew deep blue and gelatinous, thought about an iron plough tearing through the deep black earth.
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LEGATO TONGUE by Timothy Boudreau

In the mid-eighties most Prescott High band members cheat on the terminology test, since Mr. Madison can’t see past the front row. Brass and woodwinds retreat toward the percussion section, sit with answer keys on their music stands. Percussionist Colin Andrews sits alone, no cheat sheet, scores a 96%.All three percussionists, Colin, Danny Gabriel, and Liz Reynolds, live in Perch Hollow Trailer Park. Colin gets it: growing up on the poor side of town naturally makes them want to pound the shit out of something.Liz lets all the neighborhood boys practice on her in her father’s shed; they learn tricks they’ll use later when they’re out with their real girlfriends—at Lavio’s for pizza, the Prescott Theatre for Ghostbusters. Liz is tall, with broad shoulders, narrow hips. She stands behind the bass drum with a mallet in each hand, thrashes both sides like it deserves it, like it used to be her friend.   The percussion section chills while Mr. Madison rehearses the clarinets.“Why didn’t you cheat on the terminology thing?” Liz says.“I just like to know them.”Colin doesn’t mention his favorite, legato tongue: the subtlest of articulations, a connecting pulse on a wind.“You keep staring at the flute section. You have a thing for Keri, maybe? Missy?”“No.” Colin imagines the sweetness of Missy Lavender’s voice, her flute’s soft trilling. “I don’t have a thing for anyone.”Colin’s the oldest sibling, the first to go through puberty. Bad breath, smelly armpits, straggly chin whiskers, barbed wire crotch hair that’s constantly itching: of course he has a thing for the flute girls; he has more things than he can tally. But Missy is his primary. Across the band room he admires the flicker of her fingers, imagines the warmth of her breath, the moistness of her dabbing, darling tongue.   “Believe me, I have nothing to hide.”Liz is alone, singing “Open Arms” in the band cloak closet when Colin goes in to find a marching band jacket. She laughs, tells him all the jackets are too big for him, he looks like a scarecrow.Behind school at lunch she lights a cigarette. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she says, watching Denny Carpenter walk past with Missy, who’s wearing Denny’s football jersey.Liz exhales while Denny and Missy sprint across the street through the drizzle, says “fuck” again, as if she’s telling it to the rain.Colin nods, shifts away from the smoke, understands. Of course Liz has things, for Denny, for whoever: her mom left them, her dad is the neighborhood asshole. Everyone hears him yelling at the dog, yelling at Liz to quit thrashing her drum set, the rattle of slammed doors, the shatter of plates as he screams at her to keep those boys in the shed, don’t bring them inside, it’s nasty.   Liz and Colin are sitting on the grass behind her father’s shed.“So you want this or not?” Liz says.“Yeah, sure.”Liz gives him a beer. “You’ve done it before?”“I’ve done a couple things.”“You have a few beers, it'll be fine.” She sips. “I'll show you my tits.”Halfway through his second beer Colin’s head is swirling. “Where’d you get your drum set?” His tongue feels thick. “I hear you playing sometimes.”Liz touches his leg and Colin’s heart jumps. “Mind if I have another beer?”On a mattress in the shed, between broken lawnmowers, Liz shows him her breasts, but they’re not like the ones in Playboy. They’re damp, patchily red with a couple large moles, wispy hairs around the nipples.“Just let me take care of this.”She kisses his forehead, nose, chin, belly, with each leaves a splash of spit with her tongue—then goes down, uses her whole mouth to caress and envelop him, as if his penis is the most precious thing on earth. She gets him into a rubber, eases herself onto him. He’s taking deep breaths, trying not to panic.“That’s it, follow me.”She grunts with him as he climaxes, eyes closed.“Just be quiet about this, okay?” she says after, reaching for a cigarette while Colin tugs up his underwear, bangs his forehead on a lawnmower. “Nobody needs to know.”   From your percussion section admirer, reads the note Colin slips into Missy’s locker, with a drawing of a flute and a snare drum.The kids pass it around at lunch the next day, laugh uproariously. “What a douchebag.”Two days later in band class, Colin’s sitting near the trumpet section, laughing when they laugh, pretending he's part of it. They’re loud, everyone can hear them. Liz keeps her head down as she walks past.“I hear Miss Austin found Liz and Bonkers Benny going at it in the janitor’s closet,” someone says. “She was sitting on a slop bucket, fucking wolfing up his dick.”Liz sits in the back corner, reaches for her Walkman. Colin tries not to remember her tongue twisting between his lips, her breath mingling with his when they kissed: sour cigarettes, the slanted sweetness of warm beer.Liz stays in the corner, doesn’t play at all, bobs her head to her Walkman. No one takes over her bass part, but Mr. Madison doesn’t say anything.   That weekend, while his parents are away, Colin drinks three of his mom’s wine coolers, walks to Liz’s trailer in his marching band uniform, and knocks on the door. Her dad opens the door, stands in the doorway: tank top, red-rimmed eyes.“Is Liz home?”“Why the hell are you wearing that?”Colin sways, steadies himself. “Tell her it’s Colin Andrews, from down the street.”Her dad disappears; after a minute he comes back with a wicked grin. “She says she never heard of you.”What can Colin say? His stomach’s roiling, the world’s sliding to the left, soon he’ll need to throw up. He lowers his eyes; his band pants swish as he turns and walks away.“Get the fuck outta here!” Liz’s dad calls after him.
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TAKE HEART by Sean Craypo

The human heart on the street wasn’t mine. It came from the crumpled body thirty feet away. Another thirty feet behind the body was a pair of boots, which may or may not have had feet in them. Just behind the boots was the sedan. The bumper was barely dented from where it had struck the man.A severed vein sticking out of the heart looked big enough to stick my thumb into. Black skid marks streaked the fat on the lower part, as if someone had plucked out the heart and skipped it like a stone across the street. A few flecks of goo dotted the concrete around it and there was a smear where it slid to a stop. Somehow the heart had sailed all that distance and stayed intact.We hadn’t slept at all that night. There’d been one medical call after another, and fire watch from three to five A.M. (Fire watch is one of the cruelest assignments an engine can get. We sat around making sure a fire that other crews had put out didn’t rekindle). After that, the heart called me here.“Mantis,” said a voice.It startled me. “What?” I looked up. “This mess isn’t going to sweep up itself. Get the kitty litter.” The voice came from behind me. My driver, Jimmy.I got the absorbent from the fire engine and dumped it on the pools and streams of car juice. “How did it stay in one piece? I can make out the vena cava,” Jimmy said as he started spreading out the absorbent with a push broom brush-side up so the absorbent could be ground into the street with the flat wooden bar. I picked up the other broom. I wished every person who’d ever written a song about a broken heart could see this. A heart doesn’t break. Everything around it mangles and disintegrates until the heart lies alone on starless asphalt.“The heart is one tough muscle,” I said.“I want to take it and put it in a jar. Do you think anyone would notice?” Jimmy said.“The owner might want it back,” I said.“I doubt it.” Jimmy flipped his broom and used the bristle side to push the used absorbent into a pile. I got the shovel and industrial trash bag.“How did it get out?” I said when I got back.“I don’t know. I tried to check. But it’s like the guy is missing half his bones. He’s just a pile of meat.” Jimmy grabbed the trash bag and I started shoveling the absorbent into it.“You’re not really going to take it, are you?” I asked.It was gross. It wasn’t his. Someone would notice it missing. The saint of lost hearts would come for us both.“I’ve got to.”“No, you don’t got to.” Sometimes it could be hard to know if Jimmy said something because he believed it or because he was worming me. Not this time; I could tell he wanted it by the way he didn’t pause to enjoy my outrage. I wasn’t going to let him have the heart. “How badass would that be,” he said as he tied up the bag.I put the shovel and brooms back on the engine and then came back to Jimmy, who stood by the heart.“It would make the best conversation piece. Maybe I could put it in a lava lamp. I’m gonna get a bag.”“You can’t take the heart.”“Why not?”“Because it’s wrong.” Because it wasn’t his. Because it had done its part.“It’s not like he needs it. I’ll be putting it to good use. Reduce, re-use, recycle.” He made for the engine. Everything was cleaned up and we were ready to go but he didn’t pull the chock blocks from the tires. Instead, he opened a compartment.I had one last moment to listen to what the heart had to tell me. Maybe it would tell me what to do, tell me how to save it. As I waited for instruction, I started to become one with the wrecked car, the deflated body, the grief of those who knew him, the sorrow of the person who’d struck the man and tore his heart from his chest. The heart had grown and I’d stepped inside it.The sound of two paramedics and a cop talking pulled me from this vision. Jimmy took a bag from the engine and came towards me. “Y’all aren’t going to believe this,” I shouted to the paramedics as I waved them over. The cop and the paramedics were standing by the body. They looked at me but didn’t move. If Jimmy could have shot lasers out of his eyes, he would have torched me right there. He walked faster. If he could get to the heart before they did, he knew I wouldn’t proactively rat him out. “It’s the dude’s heart!” I shouted. That got their attention. They trotted over, arriving just after Jimmy did. There was no way for Jimmy to get it now and I was sure that no one else was going to trap it in a lava lamp. There wasn’t anything more I could do for it. Although it would remain free a little longer, the heart would soon be incinerated. Back to ash. After a lifetime of service, that seemed a better fate. Dawn came and sunlight fell on the heart for the first time.
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AN ELEGY FOR COACH by Ravi Mangla

We shook on it.If we won the final game of the season, Coach would run fifty laps around the gym. Some time around the eighth lap he collapsed and died.Some of us cried. Others stood in monastic silence. McClusky threw up in the Gatorade cooler. Coach’s death was relayed on the morning announcements after news that the cafeteria was out of waffle fries. This was not, we believed, the memorial Coach would have wanted. He loved waffle fries.We felt an obligation then, a hefty responsibility, to give Coach the send-off he would have wanted. After all, Coach made us who we are. He taught us you could beat a breathalyzer by swallowing a roll full of quarters. That any bowel troubles could be remedied with an egg cream in the morning. And that laws proscribing gambling on youth sports were antiquated and in need of legislative reform.Baumiller proposed planting a ficus tree. Coach was partial to the natural world. He often referred to the forest as earth’s dampest of pleasures. Many of us knew him to steal away to the woods after a particularly stinging loss. Once, after going missing for three days, a jogger found him at the forest’s edge, naked and covered in sheep’s blood.There were rumors that Coach had children of his own. Connelly, who worked at the mall food court, once saw what looked like Coach with a child in tow berating a Smoothie King employee. But for all practical purposes, we were his children, and we wouldn’t let his memory perish in the crucible of time. Coach wasn’t perfect, but he was our coach.Chakravarti said we should set a dove loose in the gym rafters. But where does one even acquire a dove? Someone suggested wrangling a pigeon from the parking lot, but we felt that a pigeon lacked commensurate gravitas.We were drinking our egg creams when Roskowick proposed burning an effigy. No objections were raised.Shapiro nicked a set of Coach’s clothes from his office. Ramirez found a mesh bag of half-deflated volleyballs. We filled Coach’s trademark polo and khakis to a generous girth. In the cold light of dawn, we propped his body against the visitor’s goal post.Markelson took out his clarinet and played a beautiful rendition of a Brahms sonata. Stuart-Byrd read a sestina by the English poet W. H. Auden.We tried to hang his beloved orange whistle from his shoulders, finally losing patience and stuffing it in his shirt pocket.Roskowick doused the effigy with rubbing alcohol from the team manager’s first aid kit, then set it alight.We watched the flames consume his body, smoke filling the air. It spread to the rest of the field: a great orange blaze that turned seedling to ash.Markelson quietly uncoupled his clarinet and packed it in its case.The flames rose, swallowing the equipment shed and bleachers, lapping at the painted scoreboard with our school crest.When we heard the sirens behind us, the voices calling our names, we didn’t turn our heads. We didn’t run or flee. We knew we’d done nothing wrong.
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A HOLE TO DIE IN by Sarah Butler

The Yucca Valley had plenty of pool cleaners, but none as good as him. Jeb started cleaning pools because he didn’t want to sell meth like his cousins Rob, Kyle, Tyler, and Clay. He liked the roteness of skimming the surface of the water with his net, the reading of pH strips, and the satisfaction of a job well done. He’d cleaned some of the most beautiful pools in the desert – he even did the one at Sinatra’s house once. But what he really wanted to do was own a vintage cowboy boot store. He was born and raised in the sand. He knew there was demand from city-slicking Angelenos who came to bake in the sun and dip in his pristine pools. Jeb’s dad had skin like leather. He’d raised Jeb in several different RV parks across the valley – Apache Mobile Park was the one they lived in the longest. Jeb suspected this was because his father was always something of a ladies man, and the girls had been prettiest at Apache.  The year Jeb was set to graduate from high school there had been at least three “desert tens” who lived there with emotionally absent or physically abusive boyfriends. This was also the year that the prettiest of them all, Winnie Lynn, helped Jeb realize his dream of small business ownership. She was tattoo artist and unofficial babysitter to the park’s families. She was 19 and loved being her own boss. “If I worked in some gay-ass office, I’d have to cover all my tats, dye my hair brown, use an ashtray… I’d be miserable! And for what? $11.50 an hour? Please.”She held a Michelob Ultra and a menthol in her decorated hands, which were illuminated by the small campfire Jeb had taken to building between their neighboring trailers on Thursday nights. When she saw the fire, she’d come out and chill with him before her boyfriend – this asshole Kyle – came to pick her up and take her away for the weekend. This week, he was running particularly late. So they kept talking.“You could do it too, Jeb,” she’d said. “Why give anyone the right to tell you what to do? Let them tell you how much you're worth? Fuckin’... yeah, right. It’s your time! It’s your life! It’s the most valuable thing you got. You’re so much better than that.” She meant better than his father, who was always getting fired from one hard labor gig or another for showing up drunk or fucking the boss’ girlfriend. She took another swig and stared into the flames.“Thanks, Winn,” he’d finally said, distracted by the shadow her plump upper lip cast below her perfect little nose. “I love you.”She took his virginity on one of the dilapidated lawn chairs by the park pool shortly thereafter. To this day, nothing got him harder than the smell of chlorine and Camels.Winnie moved to LA to do tattoos on TV and Jeb stayed with his father at Apache, in a trailer of his own. Inspired by recent events, De-Luxe Pool Maintenance was born.At night he would ride his black with lime green dirt bike out to where he wanted to put the store, between Oasis Dentistry and the Eagle Club on route 60, cutting across wide swaths of desert, past the nice houses that multiplied every year. He never got too close. He was just trying to stay sober. Going fast helped with that. 

***

Valerie went to the hot tub every night while Liam talked shop, doing lines or smoking Js with Micheal, Mike, and Wesley. On these desert trips, she preferred a glass of vino and the company of her own womanly thoughts to talking to the boys all in a group. It was just the 5 of them, for miles. The guys had no wives or serious girlfriends, probably on account of their emotional immaturity and erectile dysfunction from the Adderall dependency that had originally bonded them at Berkeley. Their group had met while ironically attending a Communist Society meeting to find bisexual young women with unnaturally colored hair – something Liam had playfully admitted to Valerie while describing his “best bros”  on their second date. Sometimes the other men brought OnlyFans models they were dating, or baristas they were toying with, but never anything real. Being the only constant feminine presence had felt unsafe in an exciting way, but after Liam proposed, that changed. It was fun to be the hot girlfriend. She could be gone tomorrow. She could be a house mother to all the boys, maybe even get in a drunken flirt here and there.. She was embarrassed and bored as the hot fiancé. Judging by the number of times Liam had accidentally knocked her up premaritally, she’d probably be pregnant soon after the wedding, and then all this really had to stop. In the intoxicating heat of the tub, she willed her stream of consciousness to slow to a dribble and sipped her wine. It would be dark soon. She surveyed her beige legs floating passively, waving against the jets. Her phone dinged.  Liam had texted her from inside. “b-storming again tonight before investor meeting tomo, wanna hit the slopes with us?”“All good babe plz don’t go too crazy tho lol. Don’t u leave for Vegas lowkey early?”“So fucking annoying fucking cocksucking loser” she whispered into the water. It didn’t matter that their little fraternity were the majority stakeholders and founders of Bossi, the third-most utilized AI-powered KPI measuring application on the market or whatever. She was a beautiful mermaid with long black hair that floated like she was on an album cover in the clear, steamy water that held every inch of her body. And so no, she wasn’t going to get fucked up with her husband-to-be and his boys. Every time they did coke, Wesley did a Jamaican accent for the rest of the night. She could be pregnant, for fucks sake. She looked up to the stars and searched for constellations. The wine and heat made her dizzy, possibly hallucinatory, and she was seeing ones she hadn’t before. She heard a dirtbike in the distance and got the sudden urge to show her tits to whoever was driving it.

***

“Nice boots,” said a man’s voice behind her.She turned from her place in the checkout line to face a young man – he couldn’t have been older than 30 – holding a six-pack of double zero Heinekens. He had thick eyebrows, sun-damaged skin, and a buzzcut that made his nose look extra pointy. “Oh! Thanks,” Valerie said, looking down and planting the toe of her old leather cowboy boots into the tile, extending her leg and twisting it ever so slightly to show off the custom embroidery. “They were my moms. Her feet got too big when she was pregnant with me. I guess I wanted them for myself even then,” she said with a polite laugh. The severity of his features had caused her to overshare. He smiled.“Jeb,” he said, using his free hand to point his thumb at his chest. Like a monkey. Jesus Christ. You’re a goddamn moron, he thought.“Layla,” Valerie lied, for no reason other than vanity.“Pretty,” Jeb said.“Next!” the clerk demanded. Valerie dutifully unloaded her cart full of chicken breast, white wine, and bagged Cesar salad. She felt the man’s eyes on her backside as she bent over into the cart to retrieve her items for scanning. He knew that she felt him looking, his pupils boring a hole into the ass off her denim cutoffs, but he refused to avert his gaze. Her burning face twisted into a smile. He liked how her earrings moved with her center of gravity. He liked making her nervous.“Have a goodun’,” the clerk sighed, waving Jeb up the queue. He paid for his six-pack with a ten dollar bill, watching Valerie wrangle her plastic bags of booze and raw meat. “Want a hand with those?” 

***

Pretty blonde women and men in distressed jeans lauded Valley Boots for their “Silverlake cowboy aesthetic”, which brought more entitled clients, which brought more psychological pain. Jeb still rode his dirtbike late at night, even though Valerie was pregnant and she wanted him to hold her, and tell her she was as beautiful as the day they met. Her boots – her mother’s boots – didn’t fit anymore. She kept them behind the counter and denied their sale to women who were younger and smaller than her as a way of taking back her power.Valerie was better with the clients at Valley Boots. They were obnoxious like her dead fiancé. He, Michael, Mike, and Wesley had been drunk driving the Cybertruck back to California from Vegas, which would’ve been fine had they not been struck by a regular, drunker truck driver. She treated everyone that walked through the beaded curtain off route 60 with kindness, mostly out of guilt. Had Jeb not brought her to orgasm on the ledge of the hot tub that day, would God have willed Liam to live? Would he have been pulled from the twisted aluminum, battered, but still as beautiful as he was? The paramedics said the metal had turned molten in the resulting fire, their melted skin had to be carefully separated from the seats and their caskets welded shut, for their mothers’ sakes. One month later, Jeb’s father got drunk and drowned in the Apache pool. Jeb had just cleaned it, too. 
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FRUIT AND FRACTIONS by Taleen V.

On the table apricots blush, sliced to their stony seeds. A faded bowl of walnut brains sits untouched and long wet spears of cucumber sweat beside them. Goods grown right here in Fresno, just like you. The professor picks you up by the waist and sets you next to the spread.His beard is silver spangled and his brows touch. He resembles your uncle Varouj who plays the piano at Christmastime, except this man doesn’t smile as much. Until his grab, it had not crossed your mind to be afraid.“You can always trust Armenians, they’re family,” your mom once promised. “But Turks and Azeris, you must never speak to. They cut your great grandfather in half. In. Half.” That was third grade.The man rips free the hard pit and holds a piece of apricot in his fingers, where hair sprouts above the knuckle. “The mother tree is from Hayastan,” he tells you, so you’re aware it is special. His wife, who is tutoring you in pre-algebra so you can earn a scholarship to a private high school, so you can get into an elite American university, so you can break the barrier into sky-high economic mobility, is supposed to be home. She ran out when she got a call that her son broke his leg on the parallel bars. Her husband, the history professor, stepped in and said he could tutor you instead—how hard could pre-algebra be? First though, he insists, we must nourish the stomach before we can nourish the mind. He sounded so fobby with his accent that you dismissed him.“Eat,” he demands, and pushes the orange pink flesh into your mouth. You expect summer sweet, but the apricot is sour and tough and you feel like a fool, knowing you’ll never be able to swallow it. When his finger broaches your lips, fingernail scraping your tongue, you are thankful there is no extra taste but the apricot. Perhaps a light salting. Your eyes fix upon a thickly framed painting of Khor Virap Monastery, the peaks of Medz Masis and Pokr Masis looming above the lone cloister. You remember seeing the real thing two years ago on that charity religious trip to Armenia. Wandering the fruit market, your mother bought carton after carton with a moneyed hunger, collecting fragrant raspberries from a pail, larval mulberries in black and beige, and a pound of the treasured golden orbs. This is what a real apricot tastes like, she said, mouth full, eyes half closed. You weren’t sure what to make of the foreign fruit. Flavorful, sure, but so soft your mind feared rot. Picked too close to the beginning of death. Americans were terrified of letting anything spoil and you’ve grown accustomed to eating produce before its prime.That afternoon in Yerevan, you and your mother gorged yourselves in the art-less hotel room save for the window giving you a full view of biblical Mount Ararat. You had washed the fruits with tap water, so the following day you developed a fever and vomited every sweet thing you’d eaten. Your mother screamed at you for wasting her hard earned cash.Paused, awaiting your reaction, the man stares past his finger into your split mouth. He seems to be giving you a choice. You are too ugly to have been kissed before. You are, honestly, equal parts frightened and flattered. With your tongue, you roll his sandpapery digit to your teeth and chew to test, like a puppy. He appears delighted. Last month, your class watched The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, and you forgot most of it except the little boy who was stretched apart on the bed, then the clink of Talaat Pasha’s belt unbuckling. A traitorous part of your heart always wondered if the horrors of the genocide were exaggerated, but today you realize, they weren’t. Few believed them, none will believe you. His finger swims against your budding wisdom teeth, expectant, moving toward an answer. The apricot mush sags in your cheeks.You vaguely wonder if your great-grandfather died quick enough not to feel anything. He did not have the option to run away and pretend to forget. This man who moments ago squeezed his hands into your nonexistent hips and lifted you up, his ancestors were also tortured or killed or escaped. Every Armenian has a similar sad story. Even when you are betrayed, you are lucky.Your eyes wander again to the eternally icy caps of Ararat. Miss Froonjian’s Tuesday pop quiz may have revealed you do not understand fractions, but now you feel you have received new insight.Fruit is meant to be picked at, taken apart: halved, quartered, devoured. You reassure yourself, that’s the only way a new seed can grow. Still, like the math problems on paper, you cannot solve this one.
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