Flash

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.

SWEET GIRL by Regina Caggiano

December 8, 2021

The difference between her and me is that only one of us is sweet. 

There may be other variables at work but none of them weigh nearly so much. I have learned this in a month and a half of living beside her blue bedroom. Case A: she is always walking around the house in ball-busting heels. Case B: when cooking for guests she is undaunted by expiration dates. What she wants and what she does are often in 1:1 ratio and she will always tell you the necessary truth, but no more. When we go out to neon bars she is not worried by the way her body escapes her. She is never concerned about untethering from the cord of herself while in line for the women’s bathroom. But in the morning she loves a woman who grinds coffee beans for a living and is bitter about it, and so there is always a fresh brew waiting for her on the stove. In the night I am sometimes taking home a boy with overlong hair. He spends one afternoon under the gun of our living room. She tells him that the way his hair hangs across his eyes has him looking like he is seven years old, he turns red and itchy in response to this. They are my words coming from her mouth.

To be sweet is to be willing to fall away.

She has poured herself into me in the nights beneath the skylight stars, we stay up suckling ethanol and vinegar on a sunbleached couch in the living room and together we find the root. Root: to be sweet is to be Mother. To have Mother so deep in your bones, you must’ve grown up with a good one, she says. We decide, always with a never-mother she had no chance at ever being anything but a taste that smarts the tongue.

Mother in the right way exists for me and no one else. Her body and her mouth are mine. I have seen the way I guzzle her wholly. I have seen the mirror of her marked on me, the way I once paid little mind to the exchange of things and the sake of balance. It is the cyclical nature of matter that you cannot take without losing. But being close to Mother and the creamy blanket of her arms is worth whatever infusions may take place at the site of skin contact while I am sleeping against her heart. 

To fall away is to be Mother.

(If) the doctrine of motherhood is self-effacement (then) the doctrine of loving a boy with child’s hair is supply and dependence. I will be his need-it-in-the-nighttime until he weeps no more, until he cannot sleep without a lock of me fingered between him. He refuses all haircuts and when he asks what must be changed and the answer is nothing, because, like all beings that emerge from you, he is perfect. Here is where it all comes together: a convergence between two moons.

To be Mother is to share a body.

Some women hold stars at the site of their never-home hearts. Some women circle each other as celestial bodies do, on a long long string with nothing in between. Sometimes their orbits are impenetrable. Two sad looking drunk girls are beholden to no one and may accomplish anything in the way of persuasion, and through this route hold the power to take over the world (given). 

(Hypothesis) she and I wear black boots at night but for him I will always be sweet. In the bedroom beside hers I crave and unfurl myself into his relief. I make whispers that he stretches into one dimension while he sleeps. I say, with all his infinite strength, he cleaves the universe in two when he turns over on the sheets. I make him fall in love this way, I knead the skin raw, he becomes new again. A boy in love is small and will fold easily against your heart. I hold him until our bodies are the same shape. We are both my creation.

THE HUMMING MAN by Rachel Laverdiere

December 6, 2021

I know better than risking the mall, the Salvation Army Santa’s bucket near the bus stop, but they’ve got a two-for-one on frozen pizzas at the E-Z-Mart, and I’ve been craving pepperoni all week.

Santa’s jingling coins follow me into the store, but I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams…blares overhead and soon enough I join the long line of paunchy, middle-aged men and wonder how many have a Christine who left when the ruts cratered.

I unzip my parka, press the frozen pizzas against my cheek and try to figure out what’s making the hum I’m thankful for because it distracts me from the sound that drove Christine away, the slot machines throbbing in my temple.

One day she went to her mother’s and never came back, claimed the rows of rolled quarters and dimes I hid in the sock drawer suffocated her, six of which, through the pocket of my sweats, I press into my thigh.

The man ahead of me unwinding his scarf, tugs the toque from his bald head, and the hum becomes a buzz.

He turns to me, points to his ear, says, “The buzzing bothering you? Just trying to relieve the tinnitus.”

My eyes must plead “yes” because he replaces the toque and the buzz fades to a hum, but then my slots go wild.

I spot the humming man near the Salvation Army Santa, get in line next to him and count change for the bus.

He smiles and says, “Money concerns, hey?”

I raise my eyebrows. “You can hear my sound?”

“Clanking coins. Sort of like a slot machine. Just like you’re picking up on my skeeter.” He points at his ear.

Tears sting the back of my nose—Christine thought I was crazy, the doctor said it was stress, but this stranger hears it too.

He leans towards me, pulls off the toque and says, “Go ahead. Take a closer look.”

A tiny mosquito is poised at the entrance to his ear. “Is it real?”

He chuckles .“Tattoo—she did a great job inking.”

Coins cascade like a waterfall.

He winks. “Best investment I’ve ever made. Not sure how it works, but this skeeter releases some of the noise from inside my head.” He hands me a business card, says, “Tell her Frank sent you for noise relief.” He puts his toque back on. “Far as I can figure, it’s people like us who hear noises in our heads who’s sensitive to the sounds in others’ heads. Right now, your coins are driving me mad!”

As the bus pulls up, he waves farewell, tosses his bus fare into Santa’s bucket and laughs when the slot machine strikes a jackpot.

On the bus, I doodle a stack of coins on the back of Jaina’s Tattoo Parlour. Instead of ignoring the ticking clock, I try to pinpoint the toque that muffles it.

THE TREES by Melissa Reddish

December 5, 2021

One of my crushes, a male professor with whom I work, is texting one of my other crushes, a second male professor with whom I work. The first one never speaks above a whisper and the second one has bushy eyebrows I’d like to grind between my molars. They are texting each other snide comments about my taste in fashion and music. At least, that is what I assume. Sometimes I imagine laying with each of them, but we keep our clothes on. Sometimes I imagine coating each of them in polystyrene to keep them from shedding their beauty like silk.

The first male professor has climbed to the top of a very tall tree. It is one of the ancient pine trees that has been cut down to make way for progress. He is scanning the horizon, his hand shielding his eyes. I wish he were scanning the horizon for me, but I’m standing at the base of the tree, chucking peanut shells at our feet, so there’s no chance of that. Once I have amassed enough peanut shells, I will step into my final form as the saggy, baggy elephant, and my disappearance will be complete.

Meanwhile, the second male professor, the lesser of my two crushes, has begun his final lecture to a hall full of ants. That’s what he calls the kids these days. Of course, they’re not really kids but women in their fifties who are waiting for the second male professor’s unparalleled knowledge of modernism to transform them. Some of them get a little antsy and clip a lock of his hair when he isn’t looking, which is often, because the second male professor rarely makes eye contact. One of them has gathered a jar of her own urine and is waiting for the full moon so she can do something witchy with it. Another has lined the classroom with funhouse mirrors so that no matter which way the second male professor looks, he will see her. All of them are vibrating to the second male professor’s solipsistic frequency. The frequency cannot be found on a radio, but if it could, it would be a twelve-minute guitar solo by Buckethead.

The second male professor has left the hall, even though there is still an hour left. I think about finishing the lecture for him. After all, it is on Virginia Woolf, and I am a bit of an expert, having once dreamt a sexy all-female version of The Waves back in grad school. Each line of dialogue was nothing but vocal fry. But the second I walk into the room, the women in their fifties hiss and wrap their ill-fitting cardigans around themselves. They have taken each silken thread of the second male professor’s narrative, the secret one that laments the male pattern baldness that runs in his family, and woven it into a chrysalis the size of a small mangrove.

Even though my salary is based on my accomplishments and not my hopes and dreams, I stay with the chrysalises. I feel a kind of tenderness to them, and by that, I mean the pull of a future both terrifying and tidal. It is the same feeling as watching a small child order the wrong flavor of ice cream, like mango. Nobody likes mango. I try to name the women in their fifties: there is Helen and Miriam and Peaches and Cushion. They don’t respond to these names, but they don’t seem to hate them, either. For once, nobody has mentioned the way my lips pucker inward or the way my laugh sounds like butt cheeks slapping together. I think maybe this is love. I think maybe I don’t need the crushes after all.

The women in their fifties have no natural enemies except time and a general malaise that sets in around the eyes and hips. I can’t protect them against either, but I can spray each chrysalis with a fine mist and rub it clean. Each one is as shiny as an oil spill.

Days pass. Weeks. The carapaces are beautifully structured things, the outside a smooth poly-cotton blend. By contrast, I seem to be diminishing. Every day my skin sags and I keep losing chunks of my foundation. If only my crushes could see me now, I think as I cough up phlegm the color of interrupted sex. Sometimes I try to climb atop a chrysalis so it can cocoon me in its amniotic comforts, but the chrysalises are too busy to notice me. Always the bridesmaid, I chuckle as I wipe away my own viscous trail.

Soon, men in blue jumpsuits begin to wheel the desks away. I try to find my authoritative teacher voice. Excuse me, but class is still in session. One man grunts, a second one shrugs. A third hands me a paper the shape of a tombstone as he wheels the entire teacher station out the door.

We are deeply apologetic

for the unfortunate role

the institution has played.

Deepest condolences go

out to the families affected.

No refunds will be provided

at this time. –Admin

After the men leave, nothing is left but a patch of dry grass, the chrysalises, and me. A better woman would leave since I’m definitely not getting paid anymore. Of course, I haven’t gotten paid for years since the money has been deposited directly in an offshore account and the remainder rounded up for charity.

Perhaps at this point, you are expecting a beautiful transformation, a metaphor that will gather the latent power of Mother Earth in one final burst of florescent magnificence. But all that happens is I gather the chrysalises, which have begun to rot, into the hollow of an old oak tree. Here, in this fungal gloom, I can finally let my hair down. The women in their fifties (who are breaking down into the most delicious slurry) tell me it reminds them of their youth. I shouldn’t change a thing.

ACTIVE SHOOTER TRAINING by Jason Peck

December 3, 2021

We’ve attended such lessons before, briefings that point us to hiding places and escape routes, drills that teach us quick action and suspicion toward our coworkers. But this seminar is different. This is the best workplace shooter training this company has ever had. People who attended the first sessions this morning still recall them with awe on their coffee and smoke breaks.

Life-changing, they say. An eye-opener, they say. But mostly—very good.

We can already see their transformations. They walk straighter, talk bolder. Evelyn in accounting says she will hear the training again. Roberta from legal holds her calls in preparation. And Max from IT—a joker, typically—remains unusually silent. When it comes to Max and such matters….well, we must be sensitive. He knows firsthand of survival, and his past haunts him.

It’s not something I talk about, Max says, his head down. (He actually talks often of how little he likes to talk, but we remain polite).

Your life will be changed, Evelyn tells him.

Max nods. He very much wants his life to be changed.

The conference room is full for the final session. The speaker is not from the Marines or a SEAL like last year’s speaker. More than one of us finds his potbelly and unkempt moustache disappointing. But he is commanding and serious, even when making a joke. (You know how you prevent laugh lines? he asks. Don’t laugh.) We know he means business by the way he holds attention like a center of gravity, by the alertness in his eyes and the tension to his stance.

The speaker taps his microphone once, twice.

Surely you know about this shooting, the speaker says. In his right hand, he clicks a mouse that changes the image on his projector screen. We nod our heads—of course, we recognize this particular shooting. He clicks again to another shooting; this one we identify from the shopping mall where it occurred. This next one too, by its near-iconic Pulitzer photo. And so on with the next. And the one after that. Roberta wishes for a comforting hand on her shoulder. Max’s eyes dart toward the exits. Evelyn notes that the slides this afternoon show different shootings than the training this morning.

He keeps us on our toes, she whispers with approval.

There is only one person who can stop a workplace shooting, the speaker says. (His voice, a measured baritone, defies his unassuming figure.) The police are too slow to help you, he says. Security is incapable. And yet you would rely on those people, would you not? Even with the gunman upon you, you would assume the best, wouldn’t you?

Max laughs once, loudly enough that our eyes turn to him. The instructor raises an eyebrow and addresses Max directly.

And with the gunman directly above you, you would sit there immobile, wouldn’t you? The instructor asks. You, with no clue how to react. Even with a gun in your face, you would sit there like a coward and accept your fate?

Max raises his hand in objection. Then he coughs and lowers it.

No more police, the instructor says to gasps. No more security guards. From here on, only one person can save you.

He gathers his breath and points and Roberta swears that he points at her, and Max swears he points at him, but Evelyn, who attended earlier, smiles because of course he points to us all.

You, the speaker says. You are the only person who can stop your shooter.

He enunciates the word with gravity like a revelation. Perhaps it is. Roberta’s heart swells with sudden responsibility. Max brings his hand to his stomach, where a new sensation begins stirring.

Your shoe can be used as a weapon, the speaker continues. The human eyes are weak points. Throw your shoes at his eyes. He sees someone in management drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup, nods his approval (the instructor himself drinks coffee). Your coffee too can be thrown at the gunman’s eyes, the instructor says. Once something has been thrown at his eyes, he can be distracted. Once distracted, he can be subdued. But fight only when you cannot flee. This is most important.

He walks to Roberta and kneels to face her, armed with his authority.

You are walking toward the elevator, he says. A man enters the front door with a gun. What action do you take?

I will throw my shoe at him, Roberta says. But hesitation makes it sound like a question instead.

No, the instructor says. He points his finger at her head, cocks it with his other hand. Bang, you are dead, he says. You have the opportunity to flee, thus fighting back is the invalid response.

This stings Roberta. The speaker approaches Evelyn.

You are by the printer, he says. Not more than ten feet away, the perpetrator opens fire. What do you do?

I don’t know. Evelyn says with a wink. (She knows the answer, but plays along) I will grab my coffee and throw it at him? And then subdue him? She grabs her cane, hoists it overhead like a weapon.

No, the instructor says. Bang, you are dead. In this scenario, the nearest secured room is fifty feet away, a dash of mere seconds. You could run and barricade yourself, rather than fight.

The instructor stands again, and some force everyone can sense brings him to Max at the far corner of the room. Maybe it’s because of their earlier confrontation, maybe he senses the way Max avoids his gaze, fleeing from challenge. Maybe our host can look into his individual audience and see something in need of resolution. The instructor kneels to face Max, and we know nothing can stop this collision, this moment of truth.

You are working at your desk, the instructor says to Max. A man starts shooting. Two cubicles over, perhaps—in the moment you cannot be sure. Soon he will reach you.

I should have thrown my shoe, Max says, almost to himself. I should have thrown my coffee. All those years ago, I did not act. I accepted my fate.

It’s OK, Evelyn says. Her hand rests on his shoulder, comforting him.

No it is not OK, the instructor barks, without pity. That was then. This is now. In crisis, you have no time to decide.

Max finally looks up from his lap and faces the instructor with a resolve we have never seen. He gulps and draws himself to his full height, the true leader now, and we know we will soon witness the measure of a man.

What do you do? The instructor repeats.

This time, I will fight this shooter, Max says.

The instructor points his finger to Max’s head, slaps the bottom with his other hand as though reloading an automatic. But that finger rocks back and forth, unsteady. Max takes a breath.

I will throw my shoe, Max says. I will throw my coffee.

Your final answer? The instructor asks.

I will no longer be frightened, Max says. My stapler could stun him. The loose pages of my reports would distract him. He takes a deep breath. I swear I will find something I can throw.

The instructor nods, and his hand slowly turns to a thumbs-up.

Correct, the instructor says. Unlike these other two people, you could not run. With no choice, your attack is therefore valid. You live.

The host will continue speaking. He will play more videos. Many more things can be thrown at the gunman—did we know the chemicals of a fire extinguisher can blind? That a loud noise can distract? Our lives hinge on details we never imagined. Those who fail today’s tests will understand why they would die, those who pass will grasp their survival. Through him, we will learn structure out of chaos, the predictable patterns of a gunman’s mind, the natural progression of a crisis. The host clicks his mouse and another image flashes, and we wait for his words to flow again.