Flash

OTTERS AT THE ZOO by Christopher Allen

September 13, 2021

My imaginary son is learning about otters in imaginary third grade. He has to write a report. I think he’s a bit young for reports, but his imaginary teacher, Mrs. Florida, thinks otherwise. Two hundred words. Due Monday.

So I plan a trip to the imaginary zoo though my imaginary son says the fastest way to learn about otters is the Internet. He spends all his internet time reading about sea otters. He’s an official member of the Otter Appreciation Society.

Did you know, he says, that otters can talk? He whistles, growls, says he’s learning Otterish, says he doesn’t have time for a zoo when he’s got 42,689 search results to get through for “All Things Otter.”

But the fresh air, I say. The snake house. Churros.

Nah, he says.

There’ll be imaginary sea otters, I say. Real ones.

He’s already in the car.

My imaginary son is just big enough to sit in the front without his imaginary car seat. He buckles up, smiles like that click is the most adult thing in the world. And maybe it is. He asks how far the imaginary zoo is, and I say it’s seven carrot sticks and that tuna fish sandwich in his imaginary backpack. He tucks into the sandwich.

My imaginary son’s obsession with sea otters is nothing new. Ever since he hatched from my thigh he’s been a little otter fellow. I allow it. A boy needs a hobby. I collected stamps.

Did you know, he munches, that ninety percent of sea otters live on the coast of Alaska?

I didn’t, I say, and he says, We live in Delaware.

A shame, I say. Where do the other ten percent live?

Did you know, he says, they store food in their armpits?

That’s gross, I say.

Super gross, he says like super gross is the best thing ever.

The imaginary zoo is hopping today. It’s the birth of Wen, the imaginary panda. It’s been all over the news. We’re waiting to enter the imaginary panda pavilion when I spot the churros cart. I’m starving, and we’ve been waiting in the queue for what seems like a million carrot sticks, so I tell my imaginary son to hold our place while I grab us churros. I return with the most aromatic imaginary confection to the same queue, the same panda pavilion, but no imaginary son.

Have you seen a kid? Have you seen a kid? I say to the parents in the queue.

This is a zoo, someone says. It’s an ocean of kids.

He’s eight, I say, looks like a miniature me. Like this, I say, and squish my cheeks up into my imaginary son’s goofy face.

You left your kid? someone says, For churros?

I run up and down the queue—Have you seen my kid?—getting only judgmental glares for taking my eyes off him for four seconds, but then I hear him beyond a cobblestone path. He’s jumping up and down squealing Otterish on a platform made for kids so they can traumatize the sea otters below.

He settles when he sees me, knows I’m not the kind of dad who’d haul off or why I oughta. He knows I’m just grateful for every moment he decides to stay. Did you know, he says, that otter mothers leave their babies floating on the water when they look for food? He takes a churro from the bag, and it may be the cinnamon and sugar dusting the air between us, but I feel a breeze of something real, something unfamiliar like, I don’t know, but that’s just it, isn’t it? I don’t know.

Why is that? I ask.

Their fur’s too thick, he says. They can’t swim under water. But they float great. He smiles and throws an imaginary fish to the otters below.

ALT TEXT FOR A CANDID AUDIENCE PHOTO by Taylor Alexandra Duffy

September 8, 2021

With thanks to Dr. Zaneta M. Thayer, biological anthropologist

EXPERIENCERS by Emily Costa

September 6, 2021

Your girlfriend believes that at some point during the last year or so her father has been abducted by aliens and replaced with a human-like shell. She believes visits still happen, routinely and systematically, that they must pull him up there with that classic tractor beam, or else he meets them somewhere in the woods, and they do tests and probe him and check on his progress. Progress with what, you wonder, but she’s still talking. She says they return him dead-eyed. She’s got it all laid out. She keeps a little journal by her bed to jot down the nights, to keep track of his behavior. She says on Mondays and Thursdays he leaves in the middle of the night. The front light’s on motion detector and shines into her window. She hears his tires crunch driveway gravel. Then, he’s there again at cereal time, normal.

She’s telling you this because she trusts you, she says, finally she trusts you.

You wonder if this means you can move on from spending the night in her bed just making out, from jerking off in your room when you get home. You hate that you think that, especially considering what you’re doing now: driving down route 63 with her, tailing her dad’s BMW, trying to find what she’s calling an “entry point.” Your crappy Toyota is having some issue with acceleration—it’s stuttering, slow—but you need to maintain distance anyway. Your girlfriend is biting the sides of her fingernails. She is messing with the radio. She is telling you hang back and speed up.

Your girlfriend’s mom is at home, zonked on Valium. You’d left your own father similarly zonked, head back, on the couch. Something in his nightly regimen knocks him out but you’re not sure which pill. You make a mental note to ask the doctor. Maybe you could even ask the nurse at treatment while he dozes and you’re stuck in the sticky chair next to him, flipping through a book, unable to focus on the words. Maybe it’s the disease itself. But you try not to think about that, and your girlfriend is saying are you listening? and you are and you aren’t.

Because the thing is you know where her dad goes. It’s easy to infer, even though you’ve only met the guy once. The way he smiles, the over-cheer in his voice. Like he’s making up for something. But your girlfriend doesn’t see it. Or, she doesn’t want to see it. And you can’t just come out and tell her the warm thing her father’s enveloped in isn’t some human-sized test-tube filled with space goo. So you’re just waiting for the thing to happen. And it’ll happen tonight: you’ll follow the father all the way to the other woman’s house. There will be no object in the sky, no abduction, no jump in the clock. Just a split-level with its porch light on. The door will open. You’ll both catch a glimpse of her as she pulls him inside. Your girlfriend will look at you in a way you’ll never forget, and you won’t be sure how to make your face look, how to mirror surprise.

But before that, you’re driving, and you know, and she doesn’t, and you can’t tell her, and it’s all hanging there in the air, and you start to wonder if you’re a bad person—your most frequent thought—because you want the thing to happen already, to get it over with, to end up on the other side of it, but you don’t want to say the words. You can barely even think them.

“I’M TELLING YOU YOU’RE GONNA LOVE IT” by Eros Livieratos

September 1, 2021

“I’m telling you, you’re gonna love it.”“There is absolutely no way I’m going to like it.” “Come on, it won’t be that bad.”“It sounds awful.”“So?”

James was always trying to get me to do shit. The first time I ate glass, they were there, egging me on. They posted a clip of it on their story while I was picking at my gums. I remember them saying,

“If Lucas Abela¹ can do it, why can’t you?”

So, I swallowed some. We kept on hanging out. What else would I do? Their suggestions kept getting a little riskier, a bit more reckless. When they convinced me to try robbing a grave, I declined. I wasn’t into it. My ma would hate me for it. So, James said,

“You’ll never be an R.L. Stine² character.”

And for whatever reason, that really did it. I dug up a grave, but it turns out, they lock some coffins so all I took were the ghosts.

I haven’t been sleeping right. I thought this thing with James wasn’t going to work out. Their hot pink leather pants and infected stick-n-pokes couldn’t be in my life any longer. I was going to break it off. I thought maybe I’d text them and this would all be settled. They were already at my door.

“Have you tried salvia³ before?”

“No. No James, I’m done. I’m tired. I kind of just want to get a job.”

James looked at me for a moment. They looked me up and down, they lingered on the down. Their red-heart earring dangled like a pendulum. Their eyes intent, staring into my hips for what felt like an eternity.

“No. Nope. I don’t think we should keep hanging out. I don’t think we’re good for each other—”

James’ lips moved up and down, slowly, mocking me. They patted their bald head and rubbed their flat stomach and began screeching. Howling.

“Do you remember that time Hanatarash⁴ bulldozed that club?”

“No. What? I wasn’t alive. Wasn’t that in the 80s?”

“What if I told you, I could get us a bulldozer?” Their green eyes lit up with what my ma would call, “the devil’s passion.” I know this, it isn’t going to happen again.

“James, I’m done. I haven’t slept in months. I think I need to get exorcised?”

“Jen, you will never ever be a moderately well-known but still largely obscure harsh-noise artist if you don’t do this. Like, nobody will like you.” I finally heard it. The teeth still left in their mouth clicked with each syllable and everything was clarity. I wasn’t going to fall for it.

“Where would you even work, anyway? Nobody’s hiring.” James’ shoulders dropped. It felt like I was talking to someone else. They weren’t interested in trying to bulldoze a basement gig anymore.

“I don’t know, I really don’t want to but like rent’s coming up and—”

“What?”

“I was just going to start delivering packages, like just for a few weeks or something”

“I still have this bag of salvia.”

“I really don’t—”

“I’m telling you, you’re gonna love it.”

“There is absolutely no way I’m going to like it.”

Lucas Abela is an Australian harsh noise musician known for creating and playing an instrument comprised of glass and contact microphones. The instrument is played by mouth and by hand.
That guy who wrote Goosebumps.
A mistake.
Japanese harsh noise band from the 80s that pioneered the genre and received notoriety from being banned from several countries after bulldozing a club as one of their performances.

TECHNO SHOW by Lucy Zhou

August 31, 2021

In a post-Covid world, we joke, the first thing we’ll do is go to a techno show. Yeah, like the kind in someone’s basement that smells of bathwater or underneath a freeway pass for better acoustics—remember that last show we went to? Where we had to slink ungracefully through a doggy door in the fence and squish through ferns that tickled our palms before we came across the path, illuminated by Carla’s bright-pink hair. There will be a Halloween-store fog machine, a drumline of clanging pots and pans, and those little umbrellas in everyone’s red Solo cup. Most people are just huffing down straight gin. Your ex’s new girlfriend is the one DJing, and you suddenly feel very petty and small, even though this is the ex who inhaled paint thinner and said your calves were horsey when he was high. But still—you look around for his signature shaved head and are relieved that he’s not here. And if he is, you couldn’t care less. So yeah, at this techno show, everyone is wearing a slick black mask in some intersection between goth and UX designer. In the bright darkness, we k-hole as if we aren’t terrified of being near stranger bodies, wrapped in tender-damp heat, after almost two years of only talking to low-res avatars on a screen. We suddenly have nothing to say. No one brings up how Jay would have been the first one shuffling up a storm, except his parents took him off the ventilator a month ago. None of us could go to the family-only funeral. Or how Tony has to sit down for most of the set after getting sick in the first wave. But we sit down with him in the middle of the dance floor, watch the crowd bob nervously and grow old. We leave after an hour. On the way home, Carla drives because she’s doing some alcohol detox, and we mouth off about how the music was whack, no, the people, no, it was the general vibe and like, what the heck was up with those little umbrellas? It’s all very predictable, you know, this idea of an after, as easy as getting used to a ghost. And Jay laughs at this like a donkey in heat from the backseat, as if to remind us that he’s still here, still kicking. By the time we turn back to make sure, he’s already gone.

SECOND HONEYMOON by Michael Czyzniejewski

August 30, 2021

I met my wife on our honeymoons, the ones we were taking with other people. Both of us went parasailing when our newlywed spouses were too afraid. A storm came in just as we lifted into the air and we were caught in its path. Our lines got detached, sending us parasailing into the horizon. We woke up on a deserted island.

Two months later, firmly in love, we were found by crab photographers. Coincidentally, our spouses back home fell in love, too, assuming we were dead. At the press conference after our rescue, the four of us laughed about how things work out. Soon we were all divorced and remarried to the right people, no hard feelings.

On the island, I’d heard so much about my soon-to-be in-laws. They lived in Minneapolis but didn’t wear sweaters. They were lapsed Lutherans, they line-danced, and they played competitive Jenga. They ran an apiary.

My parents had been dentists in Toledo. They were both dead: parasailing accident on their twenty-fifth anniversary vacation—not from a storm, but by flying straight into a bridge. Miami renamed the bridge after them. It has a toll—it leads to an island where flamingos are bred—but they gave me an ID card, said I could cross for free. I was eight. I still have never been to Florida.

My new wife, Barbi, took me to see her parents after our wedding. I was allergic to bee stings and afraid to go. Barbi described their suits, the kind beekeepers wear in cartoons. She’d worked with bees her entire life and had only been stung once, on the tip of her right nipple. She swore it made her sting-proof: Bees were her chicken pox. We’d been through a lot together, I figured, agreeing to go. If I died from asphyxiation I knew she’d genuinely feel horrible.

Barbi’s mom looked exactly like Barbi, twenty years older, more of a big sister than a mom. Maybe she was future Barbi, sent back in time to pose as her own mother. She also didn’t care for me—she was a staunch fan of Barbi’s original husband, Santino, the guy now married to my original wife, Sue Ellen. Santino reminded Barbi’s mom of a boy she’d dated in high school, a boy who died visiting her at midnight, climbing the trellis to her bedroom, falling and impaling himself on the lawn sprinkler. Naturally, Santino had to be this old beau reincarnated, in love with Barbi, her genetic doppelganger. Barbi’s mom asked how our flight was. Barbi said it felt long. Her mom replied, “Santino knew the value of first class.” She looked my way. “You, sir, are no Santino.”

Barbi’s dad came in from beekeeping. He was still wearing the outfit, including the hat, a pith helmet with black netting veiling his face. He took off his glove to shake my hand, churning it like butter. He told me he loved me, leaning in to kiss me, pushing his net into my mouth. He removed his headgear. He looked exactly like me. If Barbi was the genetic copy of her mom, I was that for her dad. Helmet off, he leaned in for that kiss. “I love you,” he said. “Son.”

Barbi’s mom had readied pot roast with potatoes and carrots. It tasted sweet, like candied pot roast. “You can really taste the honey,” Barbi said. I coughed, as allergic to honey as I was to bee stings. By the time I hit the floor, my hands swelled to twice their size. Just before my eyes shut, I saw Barbi’s dad straddling me, the epinephrine injector from my pocket in his fist. A pinhead of air seeped into my lungs. I fell unconscious.

I woke up in Barbi’s bedroom. Barbi leapt to my side when she saw me stir, kissing me up and down, crying from joy that I was alive. After she calmed herself, she asked why I’d eaten that pot roast if I was allergic to honey. I replied that I’d never had pot roast with honey. She laughed, asked where I’d grown up, Mars?!

Her dad stuck his head in. I thanked him for saving my life. He told me he loved me. Barbi’s mom, from the hallway, told him to ask if I wanted more pot roast. Her dad laughed like it was the funniest joke he’d ever heard. He came in and kissed Barbi on the lips then kissed me again, this time on the forehead.

“Feel better, Champ,” he said.

Barbi shut the door when Dad departed. She came toward me, unbuttoning her blouse, mounting my abdomen. I told her I didn’t think this was the time. I still couldn’t breathe right. That’s what makes it so appealing, she said, everything that made her happy all in one place: her parents, her bedroom, me. As she undid my belt, she shared a funny thought: “What if I got pregnant right here, our first night together with my folks?” I laughed like it was the funniest joke I’d ever heard.

Afterward, Barbi asleep, I got up to use the bathroom. I walked past her parents’ room. Her dad was sitting on the bed. I only caught a glimpse, but I would have sworn he was masturbating.

I stepped into the bathroom just as Barbi’s mom was coming out. It was dark, pitch. Before I could say anything, she put her arms around my neck, whispered, Are you ready for me? and attached her mouth to mine, prying open my lips. I tried to stop her, but she pushed me against the wall, forcing her tongue past my teeth, her thigh into my crotch. I pictured the horror that was on its way, her finding out it was me, not Barbi’s dad. Or maybe she knew already. She kissed me deeper and I tasted sweetness on her tongue, something from her palate, perhaps from between her teeth.

My heart raced, my throat closed, my eyes shut, replacing one type of darkness with another.

BEAN HEADS by Mila Jaroniec

August 26, 2021

In the little free library was a hand-sewn chapbook with poems from all the poets who had read at Bean Heads. The open mic was every Friday and gray men would shuffle in to crinkle coffee-stained pages at the microphone. It was an Event. There were gasps and snaps and silence. I didn’t understand it. Here I was, fifteen years old and crafting big papers about The Count of Monte Cristo, and someone had written this:

Amoral Amnesty

A parliament of stalking butlers

Deafening silence over the telephone

The Pope flows like running water

Calligraphy makes the Queen go blind.

The poets must be on to something though because even now, after all my university degrees and formal trainings, this is still the only poem I know by heart.

The only other girl at Bean Heads was a barista. I envied her job, if only for the fact that she got to smell coffee and look at people instead of smell steramine and look at their food remains. She asked me the Cambridge equivalent of What do you want to be when you grow up? which was, What are you gonna do when you get out of here? Cambridge, New York was a tiny town that maybe after a couple beers could pass for a bootleg Stars Hollow, but I was too underage and nervous to make friends so after work I’d go straight back to my godfather’s place to listen to Lacuna Coil and smoke Ecstasy herbal cigarettes and write down my dreams. I made boxes of mac & cheese and took them upstairs to eat alone.

I told the barista I didn’t know what I was going to do but I wanted to write. She asked if I’d ever heard of NYLON Magazine. I hadn’t. She said it was her favorite and the next day she brought in a copy.

Growing up in Stow, Ohio, all the magazines for sale at the Discount Drug Mart in the early 2000s were different versions of the same thing. Glamour and Cosmo and Vogue, tailored to caricatures of women it seemed a lot of work to learn how to be. Down a step, Seventeen magazine showed smiling girls who had solid friendships and butterfly clips, whose problems had to do with what extracurriculars to give up because they were president of too many. I wonder how my life would’ve been different if I’d known about Rookie then, but if you’re always validated, there’s nothing left to push against.

NYLON was beyond this. No diet tips, no harrowing sex advice, no recommendations for jaw placement during a blow job. There were record recommendations and reviews of actual books. Young fashion designers who made nonsensical clothes worn by stoned-looking models and hand-drawn products on the beauty page. Chartreuse lipstick, three pairs of socks on a pair of untoned calves stuffed inside fuschia jelly platforms, unbrushed hair and absurdly short bangs. Fashion that made you go What the fuck? No $2000 trench coats that were fucking beige. And there was something else: the Private Icon.

Each month the Private Icon centered a heroine or set of heroines from a cult film, with a description of what made them iconic plus a recommended list of clothes and products with which to emulate their style. Alabama from True Romance. Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger. Winona and Angelina, the OG fucked up gal pals in Girl, Interrupted. According to NYLON, canonization was not only possible, it was accessible by formula. Instead of becoming Your Best Self, as the other magazines instructed you to do, you could play characters. If you were having a hard time becoming somebody on your own, you could assemble the conflux of elements that had made somebody else unforgettable. If you wanted, you could buy the exact shade of lipstick worn by Penny Lane.

I wish I could live in New York and write for NYLON, the barista said.

And that was that, and then we went back to being dishwasher and barista, not going out after work and not saying much more to each other, and sooner or later the summer ended and I took my under-the-table money and went home, along with the copy of NYLON and the chapbook with “Amoral Amnesty” in it. Eventually I moved to New York and replaced the Ecstasy cigarettes with menthols and the mac & cheese with salads. I kept eating in my room alone.

The magazines came every month to my Alphabet City apartment. I had a Victoria’s Secret Angel for a downstairs neighbor and got my nails done next to Justin Vivian Bond. I tried interesting things with scarves and lipstick and bought an ugly pair of Miu Miu sandals at the Buffalo Exchange down the street. They were so ugly not one single person liked them on Instagram. And they fell apart on my way to buy a raw activated coconut something—you had to eat like an It Girl, which was something like the Private Icon in real time and involved a lot of raw organics punctuated by the occasional craving for a Big Mac and fries—after which I dumped the sandals in a trashcan on Avenue B and walked the rest of the way to Rawvolution barefoot, really living.

And then: I did end up writing for NYLON. I emailed an editor on the suggestion of my girlfriend and got a freelance gig writing beauty articles. Well sooner or later I would be hired to write features, I thought, and go on assignments, and the world would open up. I felt justified in having subscribed to NYLON, stacking the magazines up in a pile along the wall for lack of a bookshelf, knowing I could write anything in there better than the people they hired. None of that happened. A handful of my pieces were published online. They weren’t hiring staff writers anymore, they said, on account of the budget. I started a series called “Beauty and the Book” that made It Girls out of indie novel heroines. The series died after one installment. Nothing I did ever made it to print.

And so: the closest I came to being an It Girl was walking home from Hell’s Kitchen in the rain at 3:30 in the morning wearing Jeffrey Campbell Litas when they were still cool and a see-through Skingraft dress with a leather harness and no bra, finally skinny from Adderall and out of my mind on cocaine, posing for invisible cameras in the empty glow streets of Times Square. A show for no audience. That time, and the time a Teen Vogue editor tried on my Balmain coat and tweeted, I am tweeting from inside a Balmain coat, or the time I went to The Standard at the High Line with a pretty girl who convinced me we were pretty enough to get in upstairs sans guest list, and was right, and we left our dates downstairs playing pool even though I suspected there was no guest list, and was right, and had $18 vodka gimlets across from Rosie Huntington-Whitely. That’s my life in magazine copy.

And you were right about New York. It is expensive. NYLON still owes me a hundred and fifty dollars and they stopped answering my emails.

OGOPOGO LIVES by Sheldon Birnie

August 25, 2021

It was Canada Day by the big lake and everyone was right fucked up.

After the fireworks show on the beach wrapped up, the crowd took to the streets. Things were getting messy. Drunk girls held on to each other, hiking miniskirts up around hips to piss off the wharf into the black waters below, howling. One fell in, came up splashing, laughing. Muscle dummies squared off in the road, blocking traffic, letting the blood out of each other. Strip clubs up and down the lakeshore were packed, dancers raking in the money hand over fist. A police helicopter circled above, spotlight illuminating scenes of depravity that would make Bosch blush.

Kevin and his buddies were right in the middle of it. Floating on waves of psilocybin and pilsner, they drifted from a backyard barbecue and booze up just south of the highway over to the beach to take in the beautiful explosions, then stumbled aimlessly along among the throng as it poured back through downtown. One buddy disappeared into a dance club, one popped into the peelers, another just drifted off, mumbling at trees and trying to open locked cars he thought might be his, until Kevin was alone again, swaying slightly in front of a street punk busking for change.

“We’re gonna be rich,” the big boy in patched pants and a sleeveless jacket sang, voice gravelly as the arid valley soil all around. The battered guitar he strummed upside down had the words “Mr Awesome” scrawled in Sharpie along the body. “Because the Ogopogo lives.”

“Fuckin eh,” Kevin mumbled, tossing the dude a buck before shuffling off, away from the echoing horns and sirens and drunken hollering towards a park by the water. The song’s expression of hope buoys him onward.

Squirrels chase each other up around and over the branches of an American elm. Crouched on a mattress in an alley, a man leans away from a dry handy to vomit on the hot concrete. Further up, among the aging bungalows, a couple are full on fucking on the hood of a beige Toyota Corolla.

The road crosses a stream dried up in the summer heat. Little more than a ditch, really, full of trash and brambly weeds and emanating a foul stank. How many such streams, sometime and former means of shunting moisture down the valley towards the big sink, had been paved right over or rerouted beneath concrete? Fuck only knows. But Kevin follows the one he’s stumbled across west until he hits beach access.

Blessedly, nobody’s fucking here. Visibly, at least. Dogs barking, Kevin flips his rotting kicks off, letting the grimy sand squelch dryly between his toes. He sits down where the black water laps the shore, shoves his feet into the cool wet void with a deep sigh. That’s the ticket.

Sounds of the city drift up the lake. The chopper, sirens, odd car alarm blaring, and drone of ceaseless traffic become background chatter, white noise.

“We’re gonna be rich,” Kevin hums, sipping warm soda and rum, wide eyes staring out at stars rippling off the water. “Because the Ogopogo lives.”

The lake is deep.

The lake is long.

The lake is wide.

Must be plenty of places for a big bastard fish or whatever to frolic or lay about down there. How long he stares, sitting there, Kevin doesn’t know or care to find out. He’s content, watching the interplay of light and dark, wondering if a prehistoric beast from the deep will emerge before his eyes or not. Isn’t counting on it. Isn’t disappointed when it fails to appear. Knows, if he were Ogopogo, he sure as shit wouldn’t be showing his face on Canada Day. No way José. Save that for the solstice. Or the equinox. A full moon, or maybe the new? Some pagan holiday, anyway, as ordained by the stars or the moon or whatever calendar the pagans planned their parties by. The alignment of the planets, perhaps?

Kevin wonders if Ogie ever gets lonely, cruising the depths of this primeval waterway? Is there a mate it has longed for, over the ages, who was lost, cut off in some upper channel, when the glacial flood waters receded? Does it pine, lowing in an age-old subsonic language, beneath the waves, for its long-lost lover?

There’s no way they’ll ever be reunited, Kevin knows. But does Ogie? Has it accepted eternal solitude, or does it hold out, hopelessly, for a miracle? Ten thousand years is a long time to pine. How does a monster as ancient as Ogie measure the passing of epochs?

Such solitude has Kevin feeling blue. Where has his love gone? Over the hills and far, far away by now. Of that he is sure. She told him that much, at least, when she left weeks earlier. What drove that love from him? Something akin to a change in climate, personal if not meteorological. Way it goes, he knows. The way it goes.

Would she return? She’d told Kevin not to hold his breath. So he won’t.

Kevin takes a long pull of warm drink, smacks his lips and gets back up to his feet. The sounds of the city have diminished, but not disappeared. Hours remain before the sun pokes above the valley to the east, though the sky is beginning to lighten.

To the north, a small mountain looms. A provincial or regional park of some sort—he’s never really been clear—with dusty trails snaking up to its peak. Kevin’s climbed it before, sober as a judge, and high as a kite, and most everywhere in between. From the top, eyes can see far and wide before the lake swings out of sight behind the hills in either direction.

Whistling the beggar punk’s tune, Kevin figures he may as well climb. See what he can see. Should Ogie or something of similar lost mythology pass by in the early light before dawn, could he spot it from up here? If not up here, then where?

He is off. Up, up, whistling away.

SPLENDOR IN THE CORN by Kate Jayroe

August 24, 2021

I am such a hot, sad wraith. Open-mouthed, I sob in the park on quarantine walks. I listen to ‘Til Tuesday. I ramble as far as possible from every other person there. Fuck the Frisbee golfers. I’m processing the three most harrowing break ups of my life. I’d been with none of the people involved, save myself. One is the man I’d been sleeping with. A hot, aging punk with a scarred nipple from self-piercing as a teen in his parents’ kitchen. I liked to squeeze the scar tissue in bed between two digits, other hand busy down below. It ended because he does not fall in love. A sort of policy. It ended because he called me “Carolyn” on Friday the 13th, his own swollen digits inside me. It ended because I cried watching him sleep, knowing it was a mistake to have let it last as long as it had. Another, a best gal pal whom I called “wife” for years. Wifed me as well. A mutual She/They connection. You know. Nowadays. We slept together or not all over town and the world. Drank together. Gymed together. Bathed together. Ate salads with fried chicken. Ate ass and watched the Criterion Channel. Snorted ketamine. It ended because I began sleeping with the punk and she began sleeping with his best friend, a surfing therapist who named his dog after himself and brought crab dip to potluck type gatherings. The third: a kindly Midwesterner who did basically nothing. Once a year, he traveled across state lines for an annual event where I likewise was present and had crossed state lines in preparation. He sits crisscross applesauce all the other days in a cornfield, until his wife calls him home for supper. He sighs, looks around one last time. Then he gets up, dusts off his khakis, and crosses the threshold to a warm hearth. Some would call him spiritually touched. A holy man of modern times who cares not for wages or liquor. He leaves his marriage bed cold. But the cornfield! Warm with his breath. His tight, little buttocks. In a hungry vision in the park, the angel Gabriel tells me to go to the cornfield via tractor and seduce the man within. Gabriel says: Do not be afraid of the Frisbee golfers. In general, they are socially distancing at a proficient level. Intercourse among the corn is how you heal. Ride a John Deere for your journey. Enjoy the slow sights of a cursed nation. Nothing runs like a Deere. I understand you two have sporadically dry humped for several years while both attending an annual event which holds sentimental value in terms of content and locale. If you bag the final one, they’ll all be done. Mark my words. Gabriel’s haircut looks a lot like Aimee Mann’s haircut in the “Voices Carry” music video. The angel dissipates into a cruel, clear sky. Publicly visible menstrual blood dots my grey yoga pants. A consecrated mark upon my miserable flesh. I see Kansas. I see cows. I see COVID, dancing in the very air. Salome, before the silver platter. I see outdoor church services with The Word of God booming all around, nourishing the grass and torturing bees. I hear the tractor’s slow death as I approach Ohio’s edge. I ask Gabriel to help me make my country mission. The tractor goes kaput at the outskirts of my silken destination. Each ear has such girth. Morning dew smooched each tip. All these blooming cobs are tall sex incarnate and I feel something dropping deep in the deepest goddamned pit of me. Immersed in a labyrinthine patina of gold and green, I don’t know where to go. How long may I live off corn? Grilled. Creamed. Pops. Pop Secret. It has been hours or half of one. I lie down and nap, under the dumb watch of a caftan-wearing scarecrow. I awaken! The heat of the day. Shall I perish in this maze of desire? I’ve all but left hope, when I hear a rustle. A school of greasy teens emerge. I call out: Youths! Please help. I’m looking for the man who does nothing. It’s paramount we rut among the corn. They laugh in demon song. Good luck with that, says the one in front. You’re not far. Keep along this path. We see him each week and bring offerings. He wants nothing of our joy. The youths did not lead me astray. I shortly see khaki out the corner of my eye. His eyes, mouth closed. He breathes in the way we are instructed to breathe for optimal health. He is surrounded by offerings of the youths. Brazzers DVDs, Wild Turkey 101, whippets, fidget spinners, pop sockets, magnum condoms, greeting cards, wild flowers, a cheeseburger. Gingerly, I mimic his sitting and face him. Slow as a cat, he opens his eyes. He bares teeth. Well! He says. Well, well. Well. I stroke his face. He sucks my pinky. We nuzzle as old horses might. I kiss his lips. He gently puts a hand up. You’re great, he says. I can’t. This isn’t across state lines. Corn won’t allow it. Besides, you know there’s someone I love very much in a nearby warm home. You’ve made me ill with unresolved desire! I’m shouting. The angel Gabriel brought me here! We must rut! Please, give me your spirit. At least a 69. Here, he says. He slides a Brazzers DVD my way. An ear of this stuff is bigger than me anyways. If you’d like, I can sit here with my eyes closed while you bring yourself to climax. I think there’s a portable DVD player, nearby. Gabriel will understand. I cum so hard, I see Gabriel’s smile. My heartbreak rushes out of me. Silken waterfall. What now? I ask. We sit here, he says. Then, we go home. Corn, for dinner.

THE MASTIFF by Max Halper

August 23, 2021

“My life is over,” I said in the dark my first night inside.

A full minute passed. “Shut the fuck up,” said my cellmate.

A month later I hanged myself. I did it from the bunk with my undershirt. There was no pain. My cellmate slept through it. When he woke up I was so dead I seemed more a facet of the cell than an occupant. He looked at me and nodded, as if my body imparted some keen insight. He determined I had managed to escape, had bored a tunnel through the only wall in the prison they could not reinforce. Now I scrambled toward freedom, through darkness on hands and knees, driven by desperate hope, spying a glint of light, quickening—only it wasn’t light, but a trick of the eye, and the darkness twisted onward. My cellmate relocated my commissary to his side of the cell, and then sat on his bunk and waited for the doors to open for roll call.

The way time worked inside was tricky: it smeared, pooled. Coagulated. Time curdled in prison. Then again, it was possible that time worked like this on the outside too. My cellmate could not remember. Sometimes he counted in his head, to try and stabilize the time, to ground it. He counted slowly. If he stopped counting, or ran out of numbers, the time would disfigure. He counted then, there on his bunk, waiting for the doors, my body hardening beside him.

Four years later he was released. They excavated his property from storage and led him out through door after door. The doors locked shut behind him. It was late November. The sky was the same gray as the prison’s interior. A van pulled up to take him to the bus. He climbed into the passenger seat and the van drove down a road he remembered only vaguely, as if from a dream. In the side-view mirror, the edges and angles of the prison distilled into points and counterpoints. The gray sky crashed over it all and the road buckled. A car whooshed past in the opposite direction, full of people.

“Something happened,” the ticket agent said. “Down in the city. No buses that way.”

My cellmate shook his head. “I’ll just take whatever’s going south.”

“No buses south,” she said. “You’re going to have to wait.”

My cellmate stood aside. A television mounted to the wall ran ads for cars and drugs. A woman on a bench near the bathrooms gawped into her phone. A pair of children chased one another along the perimeter of the terminal, their sneakers squealing on the concrete floor. A teenaged boy leaned across the counter at the convenience kiosk and whispered to the teenaged girl tending the register. A man in a suit slept on a bench beneath the television, surrounded by suitcases. My cellmate tried to determine what each of them was in for.

An hour later the ticket agent announced that all buses were cancelled indefinitely. My cellmate went to the door of the terminal and waited for a guard to release it. It doesn’t work like that here, he reminded himself. It was cold enough to snow; the sky whorled off into tangled sheets of gray. A bus driver stood beside a concrete pillar, smoking. “Which way is south?” my cellmate asked.

The bus driver jerked his head.

My cellmate walked off without anyone’s permission. Something akin to homesickness gathered at the base of his skull.

He walked along the shoulder. The road essed through a corridor of rufous trees. Acorns skittered around his feet. He had a dream while still inside that he walked along the shoulder of a country road in late autumn. He didn’t know where he was going, or where he’d been. He just walked, my cellmate, then he woke up in his cell. He remembered this dream only now, and felt suddenly unbalanced, as if the whole thing had listed to the side. He counted in his head; when he ran out of numbers, he told himself, his eyes would open, and he would be back inside.

No trains running southbound. No trains running at all. It was too late to keep walking. My cellmate had the $160 he’d gone in with plus the $150 in gate money they’d handed him on his way out. He got a room at a motel by the station. The room had two twin beds. He sat on one, then the other. He watched the door. The room sloped endlessly in all directions. His shadow spiraled along his arms. That night he dreamed he crawled through a tunnel toward a guttering light. The tunnel emptied into his cell. He lay on his bunk and fell asleep and woke up in the motel. It was still dark. He parted the curtains. A light on the solitary telephone pole by the road revealed a veil of languid snowflakes. There were no cars in the motel lot. He drank from the faucet, pocketed a bar of soap from the shower. He waited at the door.

He walked south along the train tracks. Snow gathered in his hair and across his shoulders. Daylight stole uncertainly around the crests of the trees; sometimes it seemed to retreat, and grow darker.

White sky, blue air, purple trees. My cellmate could not feel his toes. One-thousand-nine. One-thousand-ten. A silence of geese scored through the falling snow. Ahead, the train tracks disappeared into the mouth of a tunnel at the base of a speckled mountain. One-thousand-eleven. My cellmate took long steps. His breath bled through the cracks in his lips. The mountain was affixed at its distance. One-thousand-twelve. He curled his arms around himself. One-thousand-thirteen. One-thousand-fourteen. The snow flitted. The mountain maintained its size and shape.

It was impossible to determine for how long he walked through the tunnel. A full minute. Twelve years. It was pitch-black. He felt along the cold, rough wall. He counted, but the distance between each number—One-thousand-four-hundred-twenty-four, one-thousand-four-hundred-twenty-five—was immeasurable. The tunnel twisted onward. Years ago there was a blackout in the prison. It lasted days. The inmates were not allowed candles, and the staff refused to part with their precious supply of flashlights. There was disconcertion. One of the inmates, Gideon, a cop-killer, suggested they all tell stories to pass the time. Most of them grumbled off to their cells. The few remaining gathered in the dark dayroom. Gideon asked who wanted to go first, but no one volunteered.

A dog trailed him along the train tracks. When he stopped, the dog stopped, expressionless in the uneasy snow.

The shops, restaurants, and single motel in Wallkill were closed. He slept in the stairwell of a stout brick building off the main street. A man came down the stairs, paused and looked at him, then left into the dark morning. My cellmate continued south soon after. The clouds broke apart, and the sky behind was pale. The train tracks ran along a ridge overlooking the highway and the river. Cars traveled only northbound. Further along the traffic hardened, until the whole thing came to a standstill. Where the river crooked sharply east, two jets screamed suddenly from the north, scored through the sky so low my cellmate ducked, and thundered off toward the horizon. Later, he beheld a swarm of helicopters affixed high overhead, black specks biding their distance. He felt assailable below.