Flash

CALCULUS by Calvin Westra

January 5, 2022

Last to first, his girlfriend dumped him, he did not get the job, his accent sailed out the window of my car, and he sneezed harder than I’d ever seen before.

It was an incredible sneeze, the kind that has you spitting and slobbering over the windshield, catching your breath, feeling like something knocked the wind out of you.

We watched as the accent flapped over the median, through oncoming traffic, and off among the tumbleweeds.

I said, “Is that what I think it is?”

And he said, “Yeah, that’s right. My accent.”

It was a horrible accent and I’d never before heard him speak without it. It was like he was trying to imitate some British politician or celebrity or it was like he was trying to imitate someone who imitated a British politician or celebrity.

If he got too excited it went all over the place. He’d be telling a joke and out of nowhere he was John Cleese on research chemicals.

But I had never heard him speak without it so I had kind of thought it was real.

We pulled to the shoulder and searched for the accent but it was a windy day and it was clearly not coming back.

“That accent is long gone, bro,” I said and he told me he couldn’t do the job interview without it.

I told him the airport Starbucks probably would not care if he didn’t have an accent. I told him he might even be better off without it.

I didn’t have to tell him how important getting this job was because, like me, he had been wiping his ass with old magazine pages for weeks. But I told him anyway and I reminded him that earning a paycheck would mean returning to the world of luxury, of on-demand toilet paper.

He had gotten up early that morning, before the sun had dragged itself out, and he had been slamming all of our vodka and referring to it as “morning vodka.”

He had also smoked the last of our weed, taking massive hits out of the ice cream maker he had fashioned into a bong.

On top of that, we had pooled all of our change and used it to buy almost a gallon of gas.

And here we were, on the side of the highway, considering turning back.

He somehow knew he wouldn’t get the job but I didn’t believe him so I drove him to the interview anyway.

He was right, he didn’t get the job. He swore to me his whole life was over now, without the accent.

Next his girlfriend dumped him.

She called him mid afternoon the next day and told him she wanted to take a break. The last few times she had been at our apartment she had complained about things like how we didn’t have toilet paper or that he smelled pretty bad and wouldn’t ever shower, even when she hinted at it politely. He smelled like old socks (her words), ground beef (my words), and weed (objective).

“It’s the accent,” he told me. His eyes were huge and wet and red. He stared a thousand miles into the future and explained to me that without the accent all he would ever be to people was his stutter, his GED, his greasy hair, his inability to read social nuances, and so on.

He told me that I could not fathom all the things he knew about Calculus, while I sat at the desk we shared, trying to fill out my own job applications.

Hand to God, brother, I know unfa-fa-fathomable things, is exactly what he said and how he said it.

He had this job application on the desk and it had little boxes for your education: where you went, the years you went there, your graduation date, and your major. In hard to read cursive he had written his high school major as Calculus.

In reality, he never finished high school. He had dropped out because “it was just fights and bullshit.” If you didn’t want to eat shit every day you got your GED and that’s what he did.

Since I had first moved in with him, he had spent every afternoon scaring up weed at the park.

It took him all day but he could show up with whatever change he found in the couch cushions and hustle people for stems and seeds, for residue, for whatever. He would huddle over park benches and playground equipment waiting for people to pass him by. As soon as someone neared him a disconnected sentence would shoot from his mouth and straight into the mind of the person.

He could say anything he wanted. He didn’t even know what he was saying. But words slipped past his crooked and broken teeth and fluttered on the breeze, gently rocking and waving through the air until they found the right angle to slip into some bystander’s brain.

And what do you know, sure enough, that person had come to the park specifically to buy whatever stems and bullshit he was trying to sell for ten dollars or they had crossed town specifically to sell him whatever random shit weed excess they might have in a baggy somewhere on their person, for whatever change he was offering.

People served him for whatever pennies and nickels he was holding in his outstretched hand. People bought whatever weed-adjacent garbage he was offering at whatever price he named. He could talk the sun into orbiting the earth, so long as he didn’t think about it too much.

Back at the apartment, we smoked whatever he had scavenged. His fingers always spilling out of his hoodie holding “one last roach” that formed from the dust in his pockets.

“You can’t even fathom all the things I know about Calculus,” he says. He holds accumulated quantities. We smoke the weed his patience buys.

First to last, he explains to me he needs to get his accent back and then he’ll get a job and then he’ll win over his now ex-girlfriend.

He calls her, briefly manic, to tell her how he is going to track the accent down, somehow inhale it back into his being. But she never returns the calls.

He turns depressive, withdraws, sits quietly with the ice cream maker in his lap, inhaling forever and then trying to talk to me about the accent with a lung and a half of smoke tumbling out as he does.

He draws imperceptible lines between how hard he sneezed and the way the hiring manager fixated on his GED. He stuttered too much, he admits, but only because he was nervous, only because he couldn’t stop thinking about his accent jerking around in the breeze like an abandoned bag, like a helium balloon wrestled free of a toddler’s grip.

He explains scientifically how all this bullshit is because of the accent or its absence and if I have questions, he says he isn’t explaining it well, the words just aren’t there. But there is truth, he promises me, to what he is saying.

It’s the accent’s fault or the mad winds that propelled its send off.

Those mad winds or the gods who sent them.

Those gods or maybe us, the bastards who named the gods. If he doesn’t think too hard while he explains, it makes a sense too perfect for me to even write.

HOT SAUCE GLOW by Jody Rae

January 3, 2022

Is it true we’ll spend the next nine months across worn-down Neapolitan-chocolate-brown carpet that we tell ourselves we’ll cover with a rug, but never do? The cinder block walls are painted dried vanilla ice cream on warm pavement. Like a wound that won’t heal, the thick drapes won’t close all the way and they bleed a strawberry sunset over Wide Open Spaces, an autumn-tinged campus and the regal-yet-defunct Boise train depot.

For a split second, I think you are giving me the cold shoulder when I come home from class and you are asleep with your eyes open and, yes, it is creepy. We never get enough sleep. Like a toxic love affair, we fight sleep and we crave it and we wrestle it and we yearn for it and we abandon it, and when we succumb to its gentle arms we never want to leave it again.

How many nights will we spend under this popcorn asbestos ceiling that we drove thumb tacks into to secure our twinkle lights, talking late and vowing to hold each other fiercely accountable for the lives we want? Powerless to the sparkle lurking between shadows, we will go astray, wander into intersections and stumble into gutters, eventually finding our way back to what we wanted all along.

Will we remember the wall-mounted phone with the spiral cord you deformed while twisting it around your fingers, drunk-dialing your crushes and defending your Scottish name in a rapidly fading Canadian accent. Grayg? Trayv?

There is a long line of boys outside our door for you, but before you go out on weekends, you leave sticky notes for yourself on the phone: Don’t Call [Current Crush]. And when you come home from the parties, you rip off the sticky note and crumple it in your hand while dialing.

Will you ever remember taking the trash out? There is a garbage shoot down the hall, and I think, seven floors high, what a ride. We are very bad at taking out the trash, but we’ll get much, much better.

You eat tacos from the top-down as opposed to coming in from the side. While earnestly and sincerely discussing angels and ghost theology, there is Jack in the Box hot sauce staining the corners of your mouth in an upward arc. While you speak, leaning close to my face, I think of the Joker. Years from now, I’ll learn about the Black Dahlia murder, and I’ll know exactly what a Glasgow smile looks like. Well, you are Scottish, after all. I’ll recognize the description of the image without needing to look it up online (don’t Google it). It’s Jack in the Box hot sauce without a napkin.

While I neatly arrange items on my desk like a still life painting, your desk displays unfolded laundered underwear, a case of diet coke, stray spiral notebooks and highlighters, Kraft Easy Mac dinners, and text books that never move all semester (they don’t need to). You wake before dawn to run stadiums with your soccer team, then come home to write a Women's Studies paper the night before it’s due. You’ll get an A.

We’ll tell each other a lot of things, but one thing I never tell you is that time I saw your crush at a party, cornered him on the beer-slick stairway, and threatened: “Heyyyyy, so good to see you, [Redacted]. Hey, listen if you ever Steal Her Sunshine I swear to god I’ll [redacted] and your mother will cry when she sees what I’ve done to you,” and his face went slack and, yes, it was creepy of me, but y’all hooked up anyway, and as far as I know he had zero power to steal your sunshine so, as far as I know, he remains intact to this day.

One night, religious visitors three doors down come in to stage what looks like an intervention for our friend in the next room. They speak quietly, kneeling on the Neapolitan chocolate carpet, while we strain to listen over our homework. You twist your hair between your fingers, sigh, and open a package of Oreos. “Should I do it?” you ask. I nod, not knowing what “it” might be, but knowing you should absolutely do whatever “it” is. You scrape Oreo cream onto your fingers and step into the other room where our friend is being held hostage by prayer warriors. With a straight face and steady voice, you hold out your hand and say to our friend, “Um. Josh stopped by to say hi, and wanted to give you this.”

I nearly pee myself. The prayer warriors think we’re on crack, that’s how hard we’re laughing. You fasten a bra over your eyes, blinding yourself, and hop like a cricket through the hallway, knocking the wall-mounted phone off the wall. “WE’RE NOT ON CRACK!” you yell. The prayer warriors leave soon after, tiptoeing past as we wheeze and writhe over the chocolate ice cream floor. Our friend comes over to our side and says, “You’re dead for that,” and snags an Oreo.

These will be the happiest nights of my first eighteen years of life — this pocket of acceptance I can come home to, in between classes and meals and study labs. You say you love my red Hurley hoodie, so I’ll ship it to you someday. I’ll sip hot cocoa in a navy waffle knit maxi-skirt, rolled low at my belly, and in that moment you’ll startle and say that I remind you of a beloved Aunt. I will wish for time travel again and again over the next decade, if only to go back to that dingy, cozy laugh haven.

At a toga party, we wear matching sheets covered in blue and gray stars over jeans and tshirts, and a stocky football player mistakes us for junior highers. “Fuck you! Fuck you!” you yell at the offensive lineman who will be accused of rape soon. I laugh hysterically because I can’t fathom becoming an adult, plus my mouth is filled with braces and my hair is braided. Let’s go, girls.

Spring break that year, you come home with me to Santa Cruz. My mom drives us all over, and we wind up in Carmel-by-the-Sea, where we shriek at $1500 tshirts and then pretend we already own one. At a drugstore, we wait in line to buy Advil or something when you sigh and ask me, “When does Daddy want the Jag back?”. I say five. It is 4:50. A smartly-dressed, gray-haired woman ushers us to the front of the line so we won’t get in trouble with our fake father. We quickly pay and race to the parking lot, ducking in our seats while yelling for my mom to “just drive” her Toyota Tercel like a getaway car. That night, we watch “Brokedown Palace”, and I, for shit and all glory, would one hundred percent sell myself out to release you from a Thai prison, no matter the charge or sentence. Later, my mom says, “She’s just so witty”. How does one become so witty?

This was your idea: We’re with Holly in the drive-thru line at a flagship JBX, remember that bullshit?. Boise is such a hot drive-thru market, we warrant a hipster analog Jack in the Box, I’m so sure. Yet here we are, waiting so long, creeping toward the speaker box like a car full of would-be “SAW” victims. “How many tacos? Hello? Hello!” You’re out cold, sound asleep, a serene smile plastered across your glowing face.

Is it true that I won’t laugh this hard for another eight years? Yes.

You always wanted to have two little girls. You have their names picked out. I always wanted to read a newspaper in my writer’s bungalow among mature trees, with eclectic throw pillows and a large hanging star lantern.

We are very good at manifesting.

THE DOGS WENT BACK ON ALL FOURS by Evelyn Winters

December 29, 2021

The man went out to get the mail. He opened the mailbox and looked inside. There were envelopes and a magazine. The magazine was Gourmet. It was a monthly for his wife, but his wife was dead. The periodical people probably didn’t know she died. If they do find out will they cancel her subscription? he wondered.

The night’s air was brisk and clear. Walking weather. The street was quiet.

He was one of those sad men you see walking around with their eyes on the pavement. Trudged in the rain. Trudged under the sun. Dragging his feet. But now that his wife was dead he held his head high constantly alert, on the lookout for her whereabouts. There were times he swore he saw her sitting in a tree or hang-gliding above in the open sky, but it always turned out to be various breeds of birds: ravens, owls, songbirds, woodpeckers, vultures.

The man had an urge to bring the magazine to his wife, even if she turned out to be a bird. He crossed the street, straight ahead to the sidewalk. The street lamps gave intermittent light. Enough for him to read a few sentences. It was a cooking magazine. His wife used to cook the most amazing meals: Boeuf Bourguignon, Bouillabaisse, Crêpes Suzette, and always with gobbles of red wine.

The man imagined the writer of the articles to be his wife. Every published word was hers. He read as he walked, sometimes sticking his hand out to pull a leaf off a tree or pluck a rose from a rose bush.

Around midnight the neighborhood dogs began to follow him. They were nice, but had that look, as if they could turn into something completely different than Dog, perhaps another species altogether. The dogs spread out from sidewalk to sidewalk.

While walking (now in the middle of the street) he thought about his wife’s flat feet. She liked to put her big feet in the air when making love. He’d hitch her ankles over his shoulders and go to work.

“This is your job,” she’d say. “Fulltime.”

“Could use some benefits,” he’d say. “A 401k.”

“You can have it all!” she’d say, “Direct deposit.”

For mysterious reasons this sort of banter made them climax at the same time, every time.

As a kid the man was known for breaking things: lamps, windows, mirrors. But also other stuff like woodstove pipes, globes, doorknobs, and once he broke a piano key. He kept that key in his underwear drawer. He never got around to telling his wife why he kept it.

The man broke off a branch of a maple tree and busted a mailbox.

“I haven’t broken anything in so long,” said the man. “Feels good.”

Every time a mailbox fell the dogs would yelp.

The man decided to take the On Ramp to the highway. There wasn’t much traffic, but every so often a car would slowly swerve back and forth behind the dogs until ambling off the exit in defeat. The man didn’t care about drivers, he was on a mission to find his dead wife.

“She’s probably swimming in a clear blue ocean,” he said. “She loved to swim.” Then he closed his eyes and pictured her big flippers kicking the water behind her.

The man began walking on all fours.

“When you’re as broken as me you can walk on all fours,” he said. “Mind as well.”

He looked behind him and noticed the dogs up on their hind legs. When the man stood the dogs went back on all fours as if to rebalance the universe.

***

Around two in the morning a woman his height, his build, his exact gait, came beside and matched him stride for stride. Her hair was short like his. She was thin, but wore a yellow sun dress. Her breasts were on the smaller side.

“There you are,” he said. She looked like his cousin, Rosina. “I haven’t seen you since Christmas at Noni’s!”

“You used to look under my dress,” she said.

“It was the point of the game.”

“Those days are long gone,” she said, flicking his earlobe.

“God,” he said. “It’s like looking into the mirror.”

“Should we switch places?” she asked. “Just to see what would happen.”

“I’m in favor. Anyway, it seems like the right time to take a turn.”

The highway veered left. He looked behind him. The dogs’ tongues were out, panting.

At mile marker fifteen they traded clothes. He stepped into her dress and had her tie the string in the back.

“I’ve always wanted help getting in and out of my clothes.”

“It gets old,” said Rosina. “Believe me.”

He admitted (to himself) that the dress felt alright, kinda good at first, but then a little too free? Actually, he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

After Rosina cinched up the leather belt and snapped the brass buckle she took EXIT 115 toward Lewisville.

“So long cuz,” she said. “Till next time.”

***

The man kept on, and at some point during the long journey became Female.

Also, and oddly, when she (the man) looked behind her the dogs had transformed into cats. Or perhaps the dogs gave up and some cats replaced the dogs? It’s impossible to know for sure, he thought.

The woman in the yellow sundress kept on, dead set on finding her wife.

She reached in her back pocket for the magazine but since she didn’t have a pocket she found only the soft curve of her ass. The magazine ended up being rolled up in her cleavage. She didn’t remember having breasts and certainly wouldn’t have thought to place a magazine there, but she pulled it out anyway wondering what else could be in this issue.

Music began to play upon opening the magazine. Big band music, Glen Miller style. When she closed the pages the music cut off.

When the music played the street lamps brightened and hummed as if they were getting turned on, sexually. When she closed it the street lamps grew dim and depressed as if they got their feelings hurt or their balls chopped off.

“Balls?” she said. “Penis and balls and all that man stuff. No thank you.”

She folded the magazine four ways and stuffed it in her panties.

She didn’t hate cats, but was surprised that cats were following her, since she always thought herself a dog person.

“My wife liked cats,” she said to the cats.

“Cats cats cats,” said the cats. But turns out they were little children in cat costumes.

***

Once they reached the end of the world the children giggled no more. She grabbed the chain link fence that served as the last obstacle and gazed out into the black abyss.

The children climbed the fence and leaped in shouting “Cats! Cats! Cats!”

Instead of falling they hovered over the darkness and began to shrink: children to toddlers, toddlers to babies, babies to fetuses, until there was nothing at all. She knew, she just knew, those kids were her unborn children. She began to weep with the realization of the unfair life. Some of her tears dropped and ran down the front of her dress.

After calming herself, she reached into her panties and pulled out the magazine. She read the first recipe: two parts radio, a pinch of Canada, a dash of moon, and a drizzle of lug nuts.

“Oh, I remember that one,” said a pretty voice coming from the abyss. “Delicious.”

“I found you,” said the woman in a yellow dress.

“Remember how I used to put my feet on your shoulders.”

“I miss your big feet.”

“I can see that.”

She looked down and saw her manhood restored and pitching a tent inside the yellow dress. And then from the abyss, a hand reached through the fence and up his dress, grabbing hold. She began to work it back and forth like she did when they were young.

“There it is!” he said. He stretched over the fence and took hold of her left breast.

“You always liked the left one best!” she said.

“I love it all,” but when he went to reach further toward her sweet center (where she liked him to rub just so), he felt her hand grab his wrist.

“If you go there,” she warned, “you’ll never be able to go back.”

He thought about all the things he broke when he was young: eight ball, lawn mower, sky light, hat rack, white chalk, sun flower, and the piano key still stuck in his underwear drawer.

“Where will I go?” he said.

“You’ll see,” she said, and giggled.

GONE BABY GONE by Patricia Q. Bidar

December 27, 2021

Arthur and I are lucky. A client of mine on 110^th and Broadway—I clean houses—had a family thing and needed to leave the country for a few months. Arthur and I could stay.

It’s late morning. The door buzzer sounds and Arthur springs up. His old friend, Joey Chestnut. What we know so far is that Joey’s gotten clean, or at least a lot cleaner than the last time we saw him. He has a lady now. Maybe she’s a calming influence. Now Arthur and Joey are going on a fishing weekend. They’re traveling light because just yesterday Arthur’s Pacer was towed.

Aw, Jesus.

Aw, Jeez.

This is their Staten Island greeting. Shoulders are smacked. I say hey. Joey’s put on weight. This is good.

You want coffee? I say, and Joey says yes.

Where’s this woman you made up? Arthur asks, and Joey says she’s downstairs with her friend.

From the kitchenette I can look down and see. Sure enough, there are two women on the sidewalk in front of the stoop on the basketball court side, smoking. They’re both wearing fur-collared coats and platform shoes. Okay, so she’s real.

If it weren’t for my client needing to leave the country, I don’t know where we’d be, because of all the mess Arthur caused at our old building. The thing is, my client said, we've got to keep our noses down, avoid the other neighbors, and above all do not call the super for any reason.

So far, it has gone great. My client’s not a Richie. Part of her disability payment provides house cleaning. I don’t know where she gets the rest of her money. I mind my business. I have friends who get high with their clients. Eat with them. Not me.

—the best thing that ever happened to me, Joey is saying. You know where I was at after high school.

Arthur murmurs something supportive. And then Joey is saying he’s really gotten his shit together and all’s he brought for the whole weekend is chicken tranquilizers and a handle of Wild Turkey. It’ll be like the old days.

Now Joey is laughing—he actually pronounces the words hee hee hee—about our heavy door and our various locks. I guess he thinks this is our apartment.

Oh, this place is a regular Fort Knox, Arthur says. Self-important with his thick mustache and mutton chops. The river and Colombia are easy walking distance, he adds. St. John's too.

A real lord of the manor, I think but do not say.

Joey steps back into the hall, where he’s left his bag and the fishing rods. The door closes behind him with its heavy click. I’m always worried about locking myself out. We only have one key.

So, what do you think? I ask Arthur, and he says he thinks it’ll be okay.

What about those girls? They’d better not be coming with.

Nah, they’re just with Joey. They’re with Joey. Accompanied him here, is all. And I can hear now that the girls have come upstairs. Someone must’ve let them in. They’re talking fast and their voice bounce against the enameled walls. I can’t make anything out.

Arthur makes a big thing of taking my chin in his hand and tipping my face up to his for a kiss. He tries to hike my skirt up, but I’m wearing my quilted maxi and it’s a lot of fabric. I say Arthur’s gonna start pounding on the door and he says no he won’t. Arthur takes my chin and tips my face for a kiss. And then he’s hiking my skirt up. Oh, Arthur. The things he gets me to do. I step up onto the couch and sway strip-tease style, adding a dip to shuck my skirt and panties. Arthur throws them across the room. He’s kissing my tits and kissing my tits and it just lights me up; my whole body buzzes with want.

I say, Joey’s gonna start pounding and he says no he won’t and we’re kissing again. And I’m lying on the couch with my feet touching the floor when Arthur enters me with full urgency and oh. Oh. Then he’s finished, our bare chests, our rib cages, pressed together. I taste thesalt of his face. He pushes up, dips to kiss my neck saying thank you thank you thank you. I belong to this man. Oh, Arthur.

I wash the coffee cups and the pot, thinking about a job I have at three, a gay couple in the village. I switch on WNEW and it’s Patti Smith, a girl singer from New Jersey. If Arthur were here, he’d say turn that shit off.

That’s when I hear it: the next-door neighbor lady screaming: she’s been robbed. I run out to the hall and she’s there with her laundry from the basement machines, and she’s telling me she propped the door with a matchbook and down in the laundry all of ten minutes. And it hits me: I’m good and locked out barefoot in just my maxi skirt. Arthur’s gone baby gone, already hurtling on the sweltering A to Jesus knows where and the neighbor lady comes out with her baby which she left sleeping in his bassinet and she’s saying thank you thank you thank you.

LAST-DITCH EFFORT: A FAMILY DRAMA TOLD IN NINE CHAPTERS by Torrey Kurtzner

December 22, 2021

Flip a Coin

Christmas morning, 1999.

My mother and father were seated on a couch in our living room. Neither seemed to acknowledge the other’s presence. Instead, they both stared lifelessly at a nearby wall. Holiday festivities be damned; it was just another day in matrimonial hell for my folks.

My father awkwardly turned to face my mother.

“Merry Christmas,” he said begrudgingly, holding out an envelope. “It’s an Applebee’s gift card.”

My mother glanced at the envelope and sighed.

“I don’t think I love you anymore,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Yes. You’re not surprised, are you?”

“No, not at all,” he assured her. “It’s just that… I never loved you, and I always thought you felt the same way about me.”

Relieved, my mother smiled.

“I do feel the same way!” she said.

“Well, why didn’t you say that?”

“I thought it would be insensitive.”

They both cackled like hyenas. In twelve years of marriage, this was the happiest they’d ever been.

“This is great!” my father exclaimed. “I’m gonna get packing; I can be out of your hair in forty-five minutes!”

Overjoyed, he bounced off the couch like a loose spring.

“Hold up,” my mother called after him. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“What, the house?” he said, his voice fading in the distance. “Keep it; it’s yours!”

My mother cleared her throat and motioned her eyes towards our Christmas tree, where I sat in a state of shock. Amid all the excitement, my parents must have forgotten that I, their six-year-old son and only child, was just inches away from them.

Upon looking me in the eyes, my father’s mood shifted from happy idiot to irritated scumbag. He turned back to face my mother, who was also visually bothered by their current predicament.

“Should we flip a coin?” he asked earnestly.

Growing Pains

As an adolescent, I would bounce back and forth between my mother and father. Despite not wanting anything to do with me, they randomly felt inclined to be parental in the most stereotypical ways possible.

“Do better in school,” my mother once told me while I was in the fifth grade.

“Why do you care about my grades?”

“I’m your mother,” she replied indifferently. “I’m supposed to care.”

Meanwhile, in a bizarre attempt to develop our non-existing relationship, my father would randomly visit me at school. I’ll never forget the day he dropped by my junior high school and pulled me out of math class.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

My father was holding two baseball mitts.

“I figured we should play catch.”

“Why?”

My father shrugged.

“Because I’m your father, and you’re my son.”

“Look,” I sighed. “I don’t get out of here until three o’clock.”

My father glanced at his wristwatch. His brow furrowed.

“That’s not gonna work for me.”

Ditto, pops. Ditto.

A Voice of Reason

Even after they amicably separated, my parents remained cold towards me simply because I existed. At six years old, I felt like a hindrance to their happiness. To get over this guilt, I wholeheartedly embraced the concept of detachment.

In my early twenties, I would meet a girl while attending college. Although I cared about this girl, I had a hard time expressing my feelings to her. Thankfully, she was sympathetic when I explained my unconventional upbringing.

“Christ!” she yelled. “That’s fucked up.”

I nodded my head in agreement.

“Yeah, it’s crazy. I don’t mean to be distant, but that’s just how I deal with things.”

“Have you ever considered therapy?”

I shrugged.

“I think it would help you rediscover your emotions,” she said. “If not for yourself, do it for our relationship.”

Her arm wrapped around my shoulder was all it took for me to agree.

Texts from the Big Chair

“Do you ever talk to your parents?” my therapist asked.

“We text.”

“Care to share these exchanges with me?”

I pulled out my phone and complied.

Mom

How R you?

Fine. Hbu?

Mom

I’m good. Thanks 4 asking.

“Is that it?” my therapist asked.

I nodded.

“I see…” he scribbled some text onto his notepad. “What about your father?”

Dad

Ever see Death Race?

Dad

Jason Statham flick.

I don’t think so.

Dad

It was amazing.

“...And?” my therapist asked, practically on the edge of his seat.

“Oh, I thought that was an organic stopping point for the conversation,” I said, straight-faced.

“Okay,” my therapist sighed, leaning backward in his chair. “I’m giving you an assignment. I want you to have meaningful, face-to-face conversations with your mother and father.”

“What should we talk about?”

“That’s entirely up to you. What are some things you’ve always wanted to ask them?”

Tough Conversations

Per my therapist’s request, I visited my parents during a three-day weekend. I dropped by my mother’s house first. Seated inside her kitchen, she puffed on a cigarette while we talked.

“Why did you and Dad get married?”

“It was customary at the time. I blame The Game of Life.”

I couldn’t tell if she was being metaphorical or simply referencing the popular board game. I didn’t bother asking; I had a much more consequential question on my mind.

“Mom… was I a mistake?”

My mother scoffed.

“Don’t be dense,” she told me through a thick cloud of secondhand smoke.

I asked my father the same question when visiting him later that evening. We stood outside his garage, basking in the moonlight.

“You weren’t an accident,” he said matter of factly. “You were a last-ditch effort to save our marriage.”

I took a moment to ponder my father’s words. Imagine being brought into this world to salvage a doomed marriage. Then, imagine growing up with the knowledge that you failed miserably. The psychological ramifications of coming to that realization would drive anyone insane.

For the first time since I was six, I felt pain inside my heart. But rather than free this pain, I pushed it down into the pit of my stomach.

“Guess I didn’t pay off, huh?” I uttered under my breath.

My father laughed while gazing into the black abyss of the night sky.

“No, son. You did not.”

Hammer Time

“Have I ever told you about the dream where I kill my parents with a hammer?”

My therapist nearly spat coffee across his desk. After a few seconds of coughing, he managed to recollect himself. I continued monotonously.

“I bash their brains in with a hammer, and the whole time, I’m waiting for them to say something, anything. But they just take it and die.”

“How does this dream make you feel?” my therapist asked.

I shrugged.

“Indifferent, I guess. Dreams are weird, right?”

My therapist looked me in the eyes with equal parts bewilderment and frustration. After several minutes of silence, he spoke up.

“Are you familiar with antidepressants?”

Uncomfortably Numb

My therapist was confident that antidepressants would help me relax and open up. If anything, they made me more withdrawn, like a comatose vegetable on life support.

“Why can’t you just open up to me?” my girlfriend tearfully asked.

“I’m trying,” I responded, albeit forty seconds later.

Shortly after this conversation, she would dump me. I couldn’t blame her.

Tougher Conversations

Several years passed. I would graduate college and move back home to be closer to my folks, who were both dying from different forms of cancer. Since I was no longer dating my girlfriend from college, I decided to ditch my therapist and his antidepressants. He was surprisingly grateful.

I tried to have one last meaningful conversation with each of my parents before they died.

“Mom, did you ever love me?”

My mother rolled her eyes.

“I’m your mother,” she replied indifferently. “I’m supposed to love you.”

“But what if I wasn’t your son? What if I was a stranger?”

“Well, that’s a weird fucking question,” she answered sarcastically. “I don’t love strangers. I tolerate them.”

In her final moments, my mother inadvertently summarized our relationship perfectly.

Regarding my father, our final conversation was a bit more eventful.

“I once dreamed about killing you and Mom with a hammer,” I confessed.

My father’s face lit up like a Christmas tree. I hadn’t seen him this excited since the day he and my mother announced their mutual disdain for each other.

“I think Jason Statham kills someone with a hammer in Death Race!” he exclaimed. “I’ve got the DVD on my dresser. Could you put it on for me?”

“Sure,” I said, slightly taken aback.

We proceeded to watch the film together. I don’t believe Jason Statham’s character ever used a hammer to kill anyone. Regardless, my father was grinning from ear to ear the entire time. I couldn’t tell if he was happy because I was there with him or because of the movie. I assumed it was the latter.

Death and Rebirth

My parents would die just days apart from each other. At the cemetery, my ex-girlfriend consoled me by their gravesites.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“You’re not gonna like it.”

“It’s okay,” she replied softly.

I shrugged my shoulders nonchalantly.

“I don’t feel a damn thing.”

I turned to face my ex-girlfriend. I could tell she knew I was lying. After a few moments, she nodded for me to keep searching for the right words. I sighed and continued.

“I feel… disappointed. I used to have fantasies about this day when I was a kid, shortly after they separated. I thought, ‘This will be the day that I’m finally free from their bullshit.’ I’ll be happy and relieved. Free of guilt. A different person.”

Despondent, I glanced down at my parent’s tombstones.

“But I don’t feel any of those things.”

Suddenly, a lump formed in my throat as hot tears began to roll down my cheeks. It was the first time I had expressed anything aside from apathy since the age of six.

“Dammit,” I sobbed. “Those bastards really did a number on me, huh?”

My ex-girlfriend wrapped her arm around my shoulder and held me as I wept.

TELL ME YOU’RE A HOT MESS WITHOUT TELLING ME YOU’RE A HOT MESS by D.E. Hardy

December 21, 2021

I should have known it was a bad time to have a friend over. I was 15. My parents were divorcing, the house divided into a his/hers venn diagram, the kitchen being the overlapping space.

I should have foregone the offer of a snack, and led my friend straight to my room that was squarely situated on the her-side of the floorplan. Better, I could have suggested my friend and I walk to her house where we could have eaten whatever we wanted. Even in before-times, my family rarely had anything good in the fridge.

I should have shut the fridge door when I saw our side of the fridge contained a half-eaten jar of pickles and a deflated bag of bread with two end pieces in it, while my dad’s side was fully stocked with grapes and mozzarella sticks, a pack of cinnamon buns and half a pie.

I should have lied and told my friend she could help herself, that there were no sides of the fridge, I should have pretended there would be no consequences for taking my dad’s food, that there wouldn’t be a scene, that he wouldn’t penalize my mom by deducting the cost of whatever my friend might take—some juice, a glass of milk—from my mom’s next support payment, that she wouldn’t yell at me for being selfish, for making things harder than they already were.

But I didn’t have any of that kind of sense, and so I just stood there, confused, in front of the fridge that hung open like a cracked rib cage, watching my friend’s expression evolve, her eyes widening then darkening, as she realized I thought my family was normal, how in watching her reaction, I was only now learning it wasn’t.

THE DOCKMASTER MUST NEVER SEE THIS by Claire Hopple

December 17, 2021

Gretchen starts with ditching her cell phone. She connects a landline and absconds with an old friend’s answering machine.

She receives a message from a wrong number telling her to meet at a houseboat by the river tomorrow at nine. The voice doesn’t specify whether that’s A.M. or P.M. She plays the message over and over, repulsed.

The following day, she settles on a bench beside the river. There’s only one boat. It’s docked directly in view of the casino. It’s not a houseboat. Not at all. Regardless, this must be the place.

Hampered by the stranger’s lack of specificity and not yet emboldened enough to track down her hunch, she decides that he meant nine at night, not nine in the morning like it is right now.

Gretchen doesn’t go home. She continues to sit on the bench. She stares at a patch of dormant grass and tries not to think very deeply about its symbolism.

A breeze kicks up from the water. She puts her fingers on her neck to warm them, which feels like being mean and nice to herself at the same time. Maybe she is canceling herself out.

There’s a doughnut cart over by the playground. She stands down from her station for reinforcements and fraternizes with the pigeons by feeding them crumbs.

Finally, it’s time. Gretchen enters what is meant to be the living room, bringing a wake of her own.

“The dockmaster must never see this,” a man says from the ground.

He stops blinking away the blood from a gash on his forehead.

“You’re still alive? I wasn’t sure,” Gretchen says.

“Tell it to the buoys.”

According to the vinyl beside him, he wasn't the only victim. A mangled ball python lies on torn cushions.

“Can it be cured?” he asks, gesturing to the snake but not moving very much.

She wasn’t sure if by “cured” he meant made into meat or healed. She doesn’t answer.

There are so many ways to make it clear that a visitor doesn’t belong, she thinks, and one of them is not using customary specifics when requesting said visitor in the first place, even if the message was intended for someone else. She could have arrived before it was too late. Still, she almost wishes she could decipher the architecture of helpfulness.

He looks like one giant and triumphant recessive gene lying there on the floor like that. He probably studies escape routes of public buildings.

The man keeps shouting at her, “I keep shouting at you!”

But then he reaches a more suitable volume. He volunteers that he used to be a tightrope walker.

“How did you do it?” Gretchen asks.

“I could tell you, but it’s much more interesting to learn how you do it,” he says.

His small table holds what looks like a framed portrait of a slice of rhubarb pie.

“I used to think I wanted to be inconspicuous about my work. Like the daytime moon. Now I know I’ve always yearned to be caught. I can tell you’re the same way. And yet you’ve failed me,” he says, trying to get up.

Failing people. This is the sort of thing she can do.

“I know what you’re getting at,” she says.

The man seems to already know about her. She does want to be reprimanded, but the only people who notice her are the people who don’t seem to mind.

“Look, there’s a horde of angry civilians peering in the portholes and murmuring at us right now.”

There isn’t.

“Do you want...a bandaid?” she manages. “Or an MRI?” she tries again.

A woman joins them below deck and sets down her purse. Her name tag says: LUCKY.

“That student government your son is involved with, it’s really just a puppet regime,” Lucky says.

She sits down on the flayed cushions, right on top of the snake carcass, and unties her shoes.

MEN WHO CAN’T HUNT by James Cato

December 15, 2021

Who but Leatra would sashay onto my lopsided porch late for a 6 PM appointment, her pink top with ribbons tied tight across the front. I didn’t correct her when she called me a masseuse but felt the beginnings of dislike before she lay naked with a towel slack at her hips on the table. Resisting the urge to yank her platinum braid, I ran grapeseed oil on her back in a drizzling loop.

Who but Leatra would tighten at the mention of my brother Ely. I told her how this therapy studio had been his bedroom before he vanished, before we slid posters in windshield wipers, before he was no longer considered missing. We had found and buried something. But he was not found. My body moved with my hands over her bony landmarks. The lingering spoor of Ely clung in this room on hot days like today with no AC and damp towels and blackout curtains.

Ely had been hellishly fixed on Leatra back in high school. She’d knocked him flat on his ass—in one long scroller text she stated he could not be with her, ever, he was unfit, too passive, too cockeyed, too short; he should get the notion permanently scrubbed out of his brain. I’ve often wondered if her cruel words helped punt him down his dark path. Even a big sister beer-run failed to console him. I wanted this patient of mine to make amends.

And who but Leatra would change the subject as I cleaved her spine with my hands in blades, her sweating shoulders soft as tomatoes in the oven. She described how she dated Ammon, Benny B, and Lela on and off and sometimes all at once, because, and this went unsaid, Leatra Feridun needed the affection of not one but three of the most attractive people in town. I chewed ice while I rubbed and she complained about its glacial creak against my teeth. I was attracted to her. I understood Ely’s sickness for her unflinching demands.

And she had talent as an open ear. I kneaded her trapezius which puts most patients in a trance yet she listened thoughtfully to my theory about how skin-walkers in the woods had taken Ely when he walked into the trees with dad’s gun, how once he’d disappeared box turtles started bobbling through my yard with smiley faces and stars drawn in mud on their carapaces. Even in pre-colonial times, stories of shapeshifting skin-walkers had haunted these hills and it was crazier to doubt centuries of indigenous accounts than to believe them.

I wondered: what would Ely think of Leatra undressed here in his old bedroom, speculating about his fate? I shared how the graffiti on the wildlife wasn’t the only sign of Ely’s spirit while pulling her shoulders away from each other, believing her honey skin could disguise ill will as well as any deer skull beast screaming for help in the night. Ely’s online profiles also persisted as if linked to his soul. His cell phone gathered dust and voicemails of garbled wind. I even drove by roadkill mutilated, skinned and headless.

“That’s just the men who can’t hunt,” she butted in. “They drive around and steal the antlers and hides and heads and mount them in their garages. Ammon told me. He’s a real hunter; I know because he invites me sometimes to come along and watch. I don’t mind deer or the killing of deer, but I never go.”

Just like Leatra Feridun, I thought, to not mind a thing and also not mind the killing of that thing. But there was excitement in her voice. Because maybe my brother Ely who never hurt an animal in his life really did stroll into the woods with a gun and had his essence eaten. Maybe he’d actually convinced his monster to feast on rumble strip corpses rather than stalking live victims. I noticed skin crumpled under Leatra’s ear, a scar from a bottle thrown by real hunter Ammon, gossip the whole town had heard but tuned out. I liked her more than when she first walked in. It was important to her to believe, even a little, with me.

When she left she took a fistful of mints from the bowl and I waved her croupy truck down the slithering road until it was eaten by trees in the dusk. Her face gave nothing away except a tilt toward the forest. Mosquito larvae flexed in the birdbath as if celebrating with me. I swept a flashlight across the creek-rippling reeds on the edge of the yard. The beam caught the eyes of a standing animal and I held the contact for a few seconds. Then I clicked it off, leaving the night darker than ever.

THE EARTHWORM by Jennifer Ritenour

December 11, 2021

Earthworm unfurls from an egg. No siblings. Only this one worm of two sexes. E wiggles in fluid and then presses herms face against the soft wall of the cocoon. A beat comes from the other side. Aware of hermself, E is now alive. E thrusts and pushes until the wall tears. Darkness, slick cool mud. The cocoon is now deflated behind herm. The lub dub, lub dub, lub dub is the pulse of Mother Earth and also the beat of herms five hearts.

Earthworm slides through the dirt. Stomach pangs. E opens herms mouth. Soil flows in and through herm. Pebbles and stones grind the rot, dead leaves, old fruit, animal bones and fungus deep beneath the trees’ roots. Out comes the castings. Earthworm feels the life sprout somewhere above herm.

E falls asleep and dreams of an Earthworm, just like herm, and there is a flash of light when they touch.

Earthworm wakes and notices a ring has formed. Inside the cocoon are nine empty eggs.

The other Earthworm, from the dream, slides up beside herm. They touch, skin to skin, and release their fluids. Their ten hearts pump in a rhythmic sway, lub dub lub dub lub dub. A shared warmth, a swirl of light, a ring.

Can it be this way, like it is right now, forever? Earthworm thinks.

I will see you again, The Other thinks, in the glow.

The Other slips away.

As Earthworm pushes forward, the eggs inside herms ring bump against each other erupting herms incubating children into giggles.

A knowing, an instinct, a flash. Earthworm could have done this with hermself. An exact copy. If E couldn’t find The Other to share the warmth, to make the light ring, then E could have given herms own fluid to herms own eggs and be born again.

But for now, herms children are not clones and they aren’t alone. They will hatch, be curious about the lub dub, the sparks of light and rushes of warmth. They will eat rocks and dead plants and help the grass grow. They will meet An Other and share fluids and leave each other or share the warmth only with themselves.

The cocoon detaches from herms body. Slides right off herm and nestles in the dirt. Earthworm rises up. There is no time left.

The breakthrough of this surface is cold and harsh. Rain droplets pelt on herms delicate skin, but the crisp air and dead moss call herm to eat. Opening herms mouth, E never tasted such mulch without the dirt and the rocks to grind it and E became fuller than ever before.

The shush of rain stops. Warmth breaks from above and beams on herms body. E stretches hermself up into the air where there is no mud or dirt. E has a strange feeling of having done this all before.

Earthworm, with herms tiny eyeless face, stares into the Sun, mouth open, and absorbs all the light, the glow.

ON THE TOILET MAKING UNWINNABLE DEALS WITH GOD by Garth Miró

December 9, 2021

“I’ll be right there!” I called out to my girlfriend.

I’d just stuck my cooking-oil-lubed arm halfway up my asshole when her friends arrived for lunch. Someone’s birthday. Heard them out there, smiling, kissing one another. There was clinking and keys and hellos and I was supremely fucked.

When you smoke a lot of heroin you get really constipated. When you get really constipated you sometimes get impacted. Then you’re an animal.

I was sweating. I jammed my arm up further, and really, it was probably only my hand, but I heard something rip. No. There was no turning back. I’d quit heroin, that’s what I told my girlfriend, so I needed to finish and get out there and host this thing without shit and blood all over myself. Hello! Yes, welcome. Oh this? On my shoulder? No, I think it’s a leaf or something. No! Don’t touch it! Couldn’t have some such slip-up happen. Needed to finish ass-spelunking and clean up. So I could serve them little foods on little comfortable plates. I didn’t know how I’d endure such a truce because I hated food right now, what it’d done to me, and it didn’t deserve plates. It wasn’t my fault that I’d used again. It was the food. I’d been in here for thirty minutes, digging out what seemed like endless buckets of super dense onyx stones, scooping and slopping them down the toilet. Why! I made my hand into a tiny shovel. It smelled ten times worse than normal. This shit that wasn’t quite shit yet.

I heard a knock on the bathroom door, a light tap.

“Seriously,” my girlfriend whispered. “Come out. What are you even doing? Better not be what I think. We talked. It’s rude. I’ll open some wine, but you need to be nice and come out.”

“Everything’s fine! Everything’s fine!” I said, probably much too loud and maniacally happy. A bad performance and I was woozy.

I was getting very weak. It takes a lot out of you: the position of hovering with your legs spread wide open, hunched just right above the toilet. Impacted bowels were rotten vicious bitches. It was so bloody. It was war.

This was becoming an unpardonable lifestyle. This sneaking. Everything behind bathroom doors. The hateful putrid secrets just behind where people smiled and clinked, and it was a pit, my life. Out there were normal people, shine spilling out their heads. And maybe I belonged in here with the shit.

“What’s he doing?” I heard someone say.

“Oh, you know, when he’s….” My girlfriend said something I couldn’t quite pick up, but I could tell she was doing that thing with her hair she did when nervous.

I sucked in some air. This was it. I was going to have to dig my way out the trenches. I swore to God I’d never smoke heroin again. I made all the unwinnable deals. I’d be good. If He just let me get out of this without ripping myself in two. All this blood. Was I going to be OK? God? I promised it was no more cigarettes or buying contraptions off TV, kitchen gadgets I never used, that were cheap, that required great human suffering to produce. I’d take my Suboxone and shut up. I’d tuck in my shirt. Go straight. Be good to Michelle. She put up with so much. All my drugs. The tinfoil everywhere. The tinfoil with slick black tears that slid down past all my hells. The hell I had as a kid, being touched. The hair on his arms like the hair on my arms now, up my ass, up my ass also then. I was an animal eating myself, or pulling myself out my own uterus, giving birth to myself. That’s what it felt like.

My girlfriend knocked again, harder, louder. “What the fuck, hurry up! What the fuck is going on?”

“I think I have a problem,” I said.