Flash

THE STOAT by Nick Perilli

November 8, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUN IS MISSING by Kion You

November 7, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MOZZARELLA by Megan Navarro Conley

November 6, 2021

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

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

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

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

“It smells like shit.”

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

“It smells like something’s died.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAGNOLIA by Sarah Starr Murphy

November 1, 2021

The bumblebee swerves across the yard to a yellow daffodil. The bee clings to the flower’s face for an instant, then crawls on her abdomen into the cylinder of the corona, stretching her tongue towards the sweet nectar and flattening her last two legs behind like a puppy. She nuzzles in, wriggling. She backs out, clinging onto the rim with her four hind legs. Her front two legs wipe the pollen from her furry body. It falls in tiny but discernible chunks. She wipes her head a few more times, then buzzes off for the next flower.

The young boy runs through the grass, holding a plastic camel in one hand. He flops down on his stomach, weaves his camel through the grass. It’s in a standing pose, but its plastic legs are curved and uneven. The camel has one hump and a bridle. Its ears are back, fierce. The boy makes it charge through the tall strands of grass, right up to a dandelion heavy with blooms. He tips the camel’s face into the flower so that it can eat. The camel’s muzzle is yellow with pollen. The boy stands and runs away, galloping the camel in parabolas through the air.

The horse discovered that the gate to its paddock was unlocked. The woman had forgotten to latch it that morning. She had been in a hurry, currying his coat too roughly, her application of the hoof pick uneven. The horse had shifted and shivered his flanks, had snorted his discomfort. The woman had left, and he had followed her to the fence, grazed for a while. When he reached for a fresh piece of grass, the gate nudged open on his forelock. He wasted no time in stepping through. He smelled skunk cabbage trodden by deer in the adjacent vernal pool. The horse snorted, then trotted down the driveway.

The man was late for work. He poured his coffee from the single-serve coffee maker into a travel mug and set his house alarm. He locked the door, the deadbolt. He made a circuit from outside to ensure there were no open windows, no possible points of entry. He was a correctional officer; he could not be too careful. He walked to his small car, tried not to notice how it still smelled of last night’s takeout pizza. He rolled down the windows despite the cool air. The fact of his tardiness weighed down his foot on the pedal.

The bumblebee selects another daffodil, but this one has a short orange corona and she must cling to the rim with all six legs while she drinks. She gets drowsy on the nectar, rumbling from one flower to the next. She sees more bright yellow on the dark strip of driveway. Gluttony leads her there; she stretches her pollen-coated limbs.

The boy feels the bee land on his back, a thump on his vertebra, and he cranes his neck. He sees the bee with its big black eyes, its many stripes, and he shrieks. He abandons the camel on the driveway and runs, the bee clinging to his yellow t-shirt. His father, hearing the commotion, heads towards the door.

The horse reaches the road and hears a crash in the woods; the deer are returning to devour the orange-striped tulips in the woman’s garden. All the horse knows is danger. Adrenaline shoots down his long legs, rippling his chestnut coat. His hooves strike the pavement and he gallops, tearing down the street. Froth builds in his mouth. Sweat runs down his flanks. His hooves are together and apart, together and apart, the cacophony fierce and ancient. He sees something yellow up ahead.

The man reaches to adjust his radio, tired of the irritating jingle for the local dentist. He presses on the accelerator as the car climbs a small hill.

The father stands at the door and sees, improbably, a horse galloping from the left, a car speeding down the hill from the right. His heart ceases to beat and he cannot breathe to scream because he sees his son standing in the middle of the road, doing some kind of dance.

The boy sees the horse first. Its mane is flying, saliva is streaming from its mouth, and its hoofbeats shake the ground. He hears the engine next and turns to see a car crest the hill. The boy realizes that he is in the road. He will be in trouble. The boy feels the air stir as the car and horse fly towards him, and he pulls his arms in and wraps them around his body. He is perfectly still, and he closes his eyes.

The man sees the boy first: a spot of yellow. He curses and yanks the wheel to the right, driving straight through a barbed-wire fence. He sees the horse as he jerks across the bumpy field to a stop.

The horse is afraid of the yellow boy and the veering car, but all he knows is to run. He increases speed, hooves sparking, ribs heaving a fraction of an inch from the boy’s head as he thunders past.

The boy opens his eyes. He is alone in the road. He checks the back of his shirt. The bee is still there, and he feels a half-breath of panic, but before he can move, it lifts off and flies away. He wants his camel and tries to remember where he left it. Far away, he can hear men yelling.

The bee flies to the next yard, to a towering pink magnolia, queen of the neighborhood. The wind shifts. The man, the father, the boy, the bee, and even the slowing horse breathe in the magnolia’s musky perfume.

MALL MADNESS

October 31, 2021

Between 7th and 8th period, Becky tells us she can speak to the dead. She swears she can show us after school.

When she pulls the box from beneath her bed, we expect a ouija board. Instead, she produces Mall Madness, fun for ages eight to eighty. As she unfolds the board, it greets us. “Attention shoppers: There’s a clearance at the sunglasses boutique.”

The four of us gather cross-legged around the game, and Becky explains the rules. “Wait to ask your questions until it says your car lights are on and you must go to the parking lot, That’s our cue.”

“I guess this is better than getting locked in the Spirit Halloween,” S’tanael says, deflecting from his giddy exuberance.

That each of us has a dead person is well established. It was the impetus for (if not the substance of) our friendship. Each of us suspects with near-certainty that another of our number is The literal Devil. We suspect this bringer of death—the killer, if only indirectly, of someone we love—is the worst-kept secret at Cheverus Jesuit College Prep Elementary.

And none of us agrees about which of us it is.

We pick our players and color-coordinated credit cards. Somehow, without prompting, we all begin to chant in unison, and it feels more campfire kumbaya than anything spirit-led.

“Ready! Set! Shop!”

S’tanael’s buying everything. We start thinking: He’s the Devil. He’s killing it—the game—so maybe he could kill other stuff. Then again, Nate also seems to have maxed out one of his cards within minutes.

Downstairs, the movie Swamp Monsters rumbles. Becky’s stepdad’s doctor recommended he drink beer and watch Swamp Monsters on repeat if his back is ever gonna be up to truck driving again. It’s hard to concentrate on a question for our respective dead person with all the cinematic gurgling and roaring, not to mention that one of the group has just let one RIP.

“Eww, S’tanael!” Nate says and punches his shoulder.

“Smelt it, dealt it.” S’tanael shrugs.

We scream as the real source of the smell emerges from under the bed. Becky hisses at her ancient cat, Macavity, who hauls his scrawny body, his grey fur dull and matted, toward the game. Becky shoves the window sash aside, scoops up Macavity, and deposits him on the roof. She ignores his screech as she slams the window shut.

“That cat stinks of death,” S’tanael says.

“How would you know?” asks Nate, adjusting his glasses.

“Guys, quit it,” says Becky. “Get back to the game. You ready with your questions? I totally know what I’m gonna ask.”

Mall Madness finally makes the announcement we’ve all been waiting for. “Your car lights are on, and you must go to the parking lot.”

Perhaps today one of them will ask a question I want answered. “Which of you suppressed a smile when I ‘fell?’” “Which of you sat cotton-eyed at my funeral?” “Which of you is the Devil?”

Mall Madness won’t be ignored. “Attention all shoppers. Attention! Attention! Your car lights are on!”

The lights flicker. Becky gasps the way she gasped when my body hit the ground all those weeks ago.

That day, Becky needled me as I climbed the rotting tree in her backyard. “You can’t reach the top branch!” Despite her taunting, I found a knot in the trunk to place my foot. I felt certain it would hold me, and I wanted to rub it in her face when I grabbed that top branch. I put all my weight into it and slipped while reaching for the gnarled limb.

“Attention! What is your question?” Mall Madness insists. “Go to the parking lot. Attention. Your car lights are on. Ask me. Ask me. Your lights are on. Your lights are on.” Mall Madness gets stuck like scratched and skipping vinyl.

I remember the fall, the impact with the cold ground, the faces above me as I blinked my eyes for the last time.

Before anyone can give in to Mall Madness’s demands, a low yowl bleeds through the rickety window. Becky yanks it open, sticks her head out. "Macavity! Shut up!"

S’tanael reaches for Becky’s arm and says, “Get out of the way!”

Becky and McCavity slither back inside just as the window drops like a guillotine. Glass shatters everywhere. A small shard embeds itself in Becky’s forearm. In shock, she studies it but doesn’t attempt to pick it out.

“Where’s S’tanael?” asks Nate, voice quivering.

The whoosh of the October wind rushes in and fills the vacuum of silence. The creak of the last tree I ever climbed fills the room. Crack!

We stare wide-eyed, panting. Two cat ears rise from behind the discarded pizza box in the corner. Macavity’s eyes gleam. He witnessed it all that day, hidden in the fateful tree’s top branches, watching me fall to my death.

Thumping on the roof snatches our attention. Not the pitter-patter of an old cat’s paws, but the stomp-stomp-stomp of hellish hooves. A dark shape enters through the window. “Attention,” it growls.

The power fails. Becky whispers what we’re all thinking. “The Devil.”

“Yessss,” Macavity hisses, channeling the game. “There is a sale at S’tanael’s Soul Emporium.”

S’tanael staggers from a dark corner of the room. “Black Friday’s gonna be insane this year,” he says with a sneer. “And remember, Hell takes cash or credit. No layaways.”

TRAUMA SCOUTS OF AMERICA by Joe Kapitan

October 29, 2021

For the sisters of brothers Merit Badge: Hatchet Skills

Beth’s two fingertips laid there on the plywood floor of our fort in the woods. Her left middle and left index looked like two rubber fakes with the nails painted a loud orange, two made-in-Taiwan Halloween gags from Spencer’s Gifts in the mall, except that the pool of blood between her shaking, mangled left hand and the detached fingertips was growing fast, each beat of her pounding heart made visible by a fresh outflow from the stumps. The guilty hatchet was dropped next to the pool of blood, its blade painted crimson.

What came after is a broken-glass mosaic: Beth stumbling and sobbing, Mia death-gripping Beth’s wounded hand in hers, me carrying two bits of Beth’s in mine, Beth’s mom screaming, Beth screaming, the ambulance screaming.

Three weeks later, before the lake incident, she let us see her hand while her mom changed the dressings. The reattached fingers looked like they were taken from the corpse of a drowned man, bluish and bloated, joined to her by zippers of black thread. Tendons were permanently damaged, causing the fingertips to lean to one side.

No one was there to teach us how to split kindling the proper way. Our 1976-moms didn’t know how to hold a hatchet, didn’t even know where our dads kept them, on the bottom shelves of the workshops in the garages of our suburban colonials. Our 1976-dads and brothers didn’t think to show us, so we showed ourselves. What Beth’s merit badge taught us: don’t lay a log down on its side and try to split it. If you don’t hit it dead-center, the log rolls and the blade glances to the side and bites deep into your bracing hand. We learned that blood will never come out of plywood, and that soaking a fort in lawnmower gas makes it go up like a torch.

Beth wears her merit badge with pride. We still go out for drinks sometimes, the two of us, now that we’re older, and when she flips off someone using her damaged hand, usually an over-aggressive man, the middle finger drifts to the side, the “u” in her “Fuck You” falling over and looking more like a “Fuck Yoc”—an insult dipped in dialect; mostly understandable, enough to catch her meaning.

Merit Badge Status as of August 4, 1976

Merit Badges:	Hatchet Skills	CPR	Self-Defense
Beth	X	X
Mia		X
Natalie		X	X

The Trauma Scout Oath

On my honor, I pledge to do my will as I will—the rest is just a bunch of bullshit.

What’s Wrong with Mr. Dutton’s Secretary?

The previous summer, when it rained, my older brother and I opened the garage door and set up an office. My brother sat at a folding table in the back of the garage. He was Mr. Dutton, generic boss of a formless corporation. He told me to sit near the front of the garage. Your job is to help Mr. Dutton, he said. My name was Mr. Dutton’s Secretary, as if I were the thinnest of beings, or fabric, a lace curtain to be brushed aside.

All afternoon I watched the raindrops collide with the driveway. No one came to see Mr. Dutton.

Merit Badge: CPR

When Beth’s hand was healed over, enough that the lake water wouldn’t cause infection, we ran the test. It was late afternoon; the sun was packing it in, so we had the lake to ourselves. Mia looked scared, as if she might not go through with it. Beth and I were scared that we would.

We eased ourselves off the rickety wooden dock and into the murky water up to our chins. Our toes tunneled into the gray muck on the bottom. Mia was shivering. Remember, just to my limit, she said, no more. We nodded. She took a deep breath, slipped below the surface.

Beth and I each found a shoulder, putting our weight on it. For a minute or two everything was peaceful: the gurgle of the water in the reeds, birdsong. Then her spasms started. I stared at Beth, or through her, and we both pressed down harder. Mia’s flailing became wild, desperate, before suddenly calming again. Fear swept Beth’s face. We both grabbed Mia by an arm and hoisted her up. She coughed, gagged, her skin graying, her eyes bulging from her head. She was choking on water she’d inhaled, spitting cloudy mouthfuls at us. We couldn’t lift Mia’s dead weight onto the dock, so we hauled her to the shallows, through the reeds to the grassy shore. We laid Mia flat, her body still shuddering. I knelt next to her, putting my left hand beneath her neck, lifting to open her throat, just as the first aid handbook said to do, with my right hand placed on her forehead. Mia was expelling still, wheezing, and I couldn’t be sure if she was getting any breath in at all, so I bent over her with my lips sealed over hers, blowing what I could into her. She’s breathing, Nat, said Beth. Natalie, stop! But I couldn’t stop, not until Mia herself pushed me away. The dim light in her eyes was cold, departed, the look of someone deep at the bottom of a well who’d already decided not to climb out.

I wish I could remember how Mia looked before that day at the lake, right before she went under, before the best part of her never came up for air.

Origin Story

In the 70s, the Girl Scouts were the only game in town. Moms in heels led living-room campouts. They were uninspired, both the living rooms and the moms. They smelled docile, like ground beef and freshly laundered sheets and dreams pinched back and transplanted to the point that they didn’t take. Me, I wanted to cut my hair and nails short, to bind flat my budding tits so I could put on shoulder pads and plant some boy’s face in the stadium turf.

Each girl got a small green pocketknife. It’s handy for so many things, the moms said. Cutting thread, opening packages. Instead, I cut myself out of their picture. The knife I kept.

Merit Badge: Self-Defense

My step-uncle Jake was a doomsday survivalist, bunker-minded, his nightmares punctuated by mushroom clouds. His concrete safe room had a hatch built into his basement wall; a separate escape tunnel ended in a metal door set into the side of the ravine behind his house. The escape door had a hasp, but he didn’t keep it locked. The walls of the safe room were lined with shelves full of canned food, bottled water. There was a cot, a chair, a single light fixture.

He was the only man in my life who didn’t see me in pink-filtered light, so when he wanted to show me his bunker the first time, spur of the moment, I went, and when he touched me, I flinched, and when he played with himself in front of me, I didn’t leave. I have no idea why, but I didn’t. Instead, he moaned my name, Natalie, Natalie. I stared at the light in the ceiling glowing blue beneath its silver cage. Desperate insects threw themselves against it. It looked so pathetic, so incredibly small. It should have been so much bigger.

The second time he invited me down there, he planned it ahead of time, so I planned ahead too. Beth would sneak onto his property from the rear, up the ravine. I would go to the safe room with Uncle Jake at four. At five after four, Beth would enter through the escape tunnel, pocketknife at the ready. We figured the two of us could take him. It would have worked perfectly if it weren’t for the padlock.

I let him touch me at first so I could open the blade of my knife behind the small of my back unseen. His hands stroked the long seconds past. No Beth.

Fact: there is a particular paralysis caused by witnessing sudden violence that aids in self-defense. When a blade strikes an attacker’s face, such as a puncture or a slicing of the cheek near the eyes, the attacker will instinctively raise his hands to protect himself, presenting new targets to the defender’s blade.

Fact: blood does not permanently stain sealed concrete, but ragged scars stain faces. Scars can telegraph shame, and shame (to the shamed) is a billboard on a busy highway; it can lead a man to take his own life rather than see the looks on the faces of those passing by.

Fact: the singular goal of self-defense is survival. The losers never know they lost.

Awards Ceremony

To me, this last merit badge has no single look. At times it arrives like debilitating claustrophobia or love in another woman’s arms or shrill screams in the deep crotch of night or a forgotten gravestone or a corner office on the eighth floor with two walls made of glass.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and no longer recognize myself; I see Mia’s haunted eyes staring out of my dark sockets, Beth’s warped fingers reaching. Sometimes I go into work early just to watch the pedestrians streaming across the sidewalks below me like tiny cells pulsing through the arteries of pavement, splitting off and disappearing, bleeding into doorways and alleys, soaking into the floorboards of the city.

Sometimes it rains all afternoon, and I watch it from my desk, and no one comes to see me.

THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT by David Luntz

October 20, 2021

The weight of light can be measured by my Uncle Kev’s death. But before that, some memories: it’s family dinner and Uncle Kev’s explaining how the bread mashed in his ex-boxer’s sixty-year-old fist represents Pangea and the glass of red wine in his fingers the Tethys Sea. He’s telling us about the earth’s history, Wegener’s theory of continental drift, orogeny, extinct volcanoes, dragonflies in amber, and trilobites. Mom and dad tune him out. So do I. I get enough of that kind of shit at school. But Uncle Kev doesn’t care. He’s relentless, a natural fighter, and won’t stop until he’s educated me properly. Most of his instructing takes place in his car when he’s driving me somewhere. There’s no escaping him there.

When he talks about light, his eyes gleam like wet pebbles. He always smells nice, like Old Spice aftershave. He waves his hands a lot. They’re hairy and tufted, like a coconut. His polished nails blur cyan in the air. One time, he tells me about how light actually dies as it hits our eyes, and says, “Isn’t that beautiful, I mean that light must die so we can see?” I wish I’d really been listening to him, at what he was really trying to tell me, but I thought then that he was just plugging some lame religious metaphor: light is just like Jesus, always sacrificing and always giving, existing in some sublime state of eternal crucifixion and resurrection. And I reply: Maybe light would rather not die. Maybe light doesn’t give a shit about our sight.

It’s the only time I remember him giving me a grieved look. But this was before, and now we’re driving down Route One and Uncle Kev blurts out, “Kinch,” which is what he calls me after reading Ulysses, “Answer me this: How’s the spirit supposed to fecking survive when it’s got to look at this shite every fooking day?” nodding at the strip malls and billboards, a question whose unanswered weight each passing season presses down on me like ten thousand leaves, maybe more, because soon afterward come his limp wrists floating like pale petals in a pink scurf that won't come out of the tiles. And because he still burns and reaches me like light from a dead star, it makes no sense to say he no longer exists, especially when I see him as a child, basking on kilned rocks after swimming in the cold water of Keeley Bay, telling me how much he loves it there, the sunbaked scent of stranded kelp, the wisps of tickling seaweed, and the way light rushes into spaces he never knew about inside him, promising that it will always be there and never leave him. And I wonder too, sometimes, if what he did was his way of giving back the gift, so light could see things it couldn’t otherwise see, and whether somewhere, perhaps not so far off, he still skips up to some sunny attic where he unpacks his sewing machine and stitches a dress from old curtains, hoping that when he hits the streets that night with his new lipstick and pumps, he might get lucky.

(For my uncle who took my education upon himself, since he trusted no school to do it.)

ON BUILDING A NEST by Stella Lei

October 16, 2021

My mother’s house always looked halfway to collapse. She had paid copious amounts of money to build it this way—its perpetually slouching walls, its staircases that jerked into corners before snarling to the next floor. This was because she preferred things that existed between one state and another. Her philosophy was as follows: you cannot determine something’s worth before it is finished, and most everything finished is bad—corrupted by greed, or rust, or the general incompetence of its maker. And so the house lurched across a river like a lopsided Fallingwater, its unending rush lulling her to the edge of sleep. When she awoke, she stood in the middle of one of her precarious staircases, fingers to her lips, surveying the distance between her body and the floor.

As a child, I bumped into buckled walls and tripped over uneven floorboards. Cuts rusted down my legs in slashes of bronze, and my mother wiped them clean, warning me to be careful with the currency of my blood.

“You see this?” She held up the towel, stained through and sour with disinfectant, “You let all this go. Gone. Wasted.” She believed blood was metal metabolized. Gold lining our veins. “That’s why it tastes like pennies,” she said, and I swiped my finger across the wound, bringing it to my lips to check.

Our ancestors thought drinking gold—untarnishable light—could instill them with youth. Their organs would never rust into disuse, polished instead with health. What they didn’t know, my mother said, was that we were born with gold bottled in our veins. She smoothed a Band-Aid across my knee. “So the real secret to youth is to avoid bleeding. To seam your skin and keep the gold inside.”

For years, I was careful not to bleed. I tiptoed around corners and walls. Climbed the stairs while gripping the banister, unpainted wood strangled in my fist. I weaned my legs off running, teaching them to slide slowly across the floor’s hardwood swells.

My mother said the world was a pipe bomb, people just fuses ready to light. When she was young, her father exploded in her face—fists clenched to grenades—and left her blue as the sea. That was why I was forbidden from going out alone, my flash-paper bones too easily expended into smoke. And so I stayed home, insulated from flames and men, replacing school with the encyclopedias lining the office shelves.

I worked my way through the books in alphabetical order, repeating each word to myself, sculpting my breath against the sound. A for aviation. B for beak. C for critical period: the period of time in which young animals are most likely to acquire learned behavior; when imprinting occurs.

The period of time in which a baby bird’s song crystallizes like rust on steel, its voice molding to that of its parents. The period beyond which the bird can no longer learn to sing, its notes fracturing like a face in warped glass.

I was twelve when the bleeding started. It woke me in a pool of sour warmth, wet against my legs, sticky in my joints. I shouted for my mother, certain my tissues were dissolving, my organs churning to pulp. She scowled as she changed the sheets and soaked them in cold water, but told me I wasn’t dying. What had happened, she said, was I became too close to fully formed—transitioning into a woman who could eventually smoke, and drink, and leave her behind. The solution was to regress to my halfway point. To freeze my body in time so gold would lie snugly in my veins, youth unable to escape.

That evening, when I asked about dinner, she told me if I went long enough without food, I could shrink my stomach into a fist. Exorcise the years from my body, leave only purity. Bone. Calcium scaffolding my shins like pillars of salt. How I could reverse my flesh within myself, surviving off nothing but smooth planes of skin.

From then on, she fed me only feathers so my years could take flight and leave me clean. She boiled them soft and piled them on my plate in quivering puffs of down.

“The body follows a clock of its own,” she said, “You just have to wind it in reverse. Close the hourglass’s waist. Look at each bird through its mouth.”

When I told her I didn’t know what she meant, that all the birds I’d seen were mouthless, roasted in the oven or strewn across my plate in ragged plumes, she pointed out the window and said “Those birds, there. See how each note matures in their throat before they sing it? That’s where it all starts. The throat.”

I flipped through the T encyclopedia until I got to throat. Esophagus. Trachea. Larynx. I traced my finger down the diagrams and taught the page to swallow. Air digested into air.

In the bathroom, I opened my mouth in the mirror and peered inside. My throat was a cavern of darkness rippled with heat—something pulsing and alive. I clawed my fingers in to see if I could retrieve the half-formed notes in my vocal cords, cup their soft vibration in my palms. I retched into the sink, but my stomach had hardened to a pit, too empty to expel anything but breath. Feathers clotted against my teeth.

The bleeding eventually stopped, my uterus rewound into a state that didn’t know time, years resorbed into my body. When I looked in the mirror, my collarbones were arrowheads grafted to skin.

In place of blood, cold permeated through me like a haunting on loop. I wrapped myself in sweaters and coats—molted in reverse—and stood with my mother at the staircase’s head. We held hands and peered down the house’s narrow throat, too scared to fly.

My mother’s New Year’s gift to me was a music box, gilded gold, a lark perched on its crown. An heirloom passed down by her mother by her mother by hers, carried through generations like our coarse hair and heat-shriveled eyes. She wrapped my hands in her own and showed me how to wind it up. How to coax a bird to sing. We cranked the key as far as it would go, the lark shuddering in the anticipation of dance. I tightened my fingers around the knob as it pushed against my palm, fighting to unspool its song—to fly free. The notes stuttered out, slow, splintered into shards.

FULL OF HOLES by Luz Rosales

October 15, 2021

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

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

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

***

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

Kylie hates them all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Eventually a gray fluid starts leaking from the hole.

Eventually, other holes appear.

***

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

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

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

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

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

She turns around and runs.

***

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

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

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

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

Then.

It stops.

Everything stops.

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

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

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

“I…”

That voice. It can’t be.

“Martina?”

It is.

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

“Kylie,” Martina whispers.

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

“I feel fantastic.”

SPEECH CAPABLE by Elias Chen

October 14, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you ready?” her sister asked.

“Thirty seconds,” replied Changliu.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I know,” said Changliu. “I know.”