Flash

THE WASP by Tyler Engström

July 8, 2021

I look out the kitchen window and wonder why the flowers won’t grow. I can’t even remember what I planted, what sort of beauty I’m disappointed in not receiving. I’ve given them plenty of water. Was it too much water? I don’t know. I’ve never known. What life does water make, anyway?

Anyway, a wasp comes up to the window and lands on what would be my nose, if not for the window. I lovingly watch his little hands scrape against each other. Adorable! “You look like a fly,” I tell him, “like all the little flies that crowd every rotting meal.”

I tap gently on the window and say, “Little wasp, I love you!” and the wasp zips off. I lose sight of him and miss him already. Has anyone ever kept a wasp as their own? I would’ve been the first. How about an equal? There’s potential there. I think about all the things we could’ve been together and hear a pop against the window. The wasp is back, but this time as a lifeless little Rorschach test exploded against the window. The kind you only ever see on your windshield driving Highway 9 in the middle of July, but I wasn’t going anywhere just now.

If you love something, you’re supposed to let it go, and if it comes back, it’s yours forever. It’s something that doesn’t have to be true to feel good, so what remains of the wasp was my responsibility now. I owe him that much.

I step outside and pick the pieces off the grass. His head, thorax, other parts I’m sure I learned the names of in school, but some things are so easy to forget. Most things are like that, I guess. I wash everything that was once inside of the wasp off the window and place the wet tissue and his little body in the bin. “Back to the earth where you came from,” I say. I throw a handful of dirt in the bin with him for good measure. He was a very good wasp, as wasps go. We had a great time, once.

My neighbor notices my funeral procession and walks over. The down trip must be palpable from across the street, I figure. He asks what I’m doing. “Well,” I say, “I’m tending to the garden and doing what mother nature never had the guts to do, no pun intended. Do you think the wasp would be offended by that? God, I hope not.” He stares through me and I can tell I’ve shared more than I care to. There are no shadows on the ground and the air is damp. His eyes are so glassy, and he looks like he’d been crying. “What’s this about a wasp?” he asks. “The one in the compost, and never mind about that, anyway.”

He starts telling me about my flowers, “They need water,” he says. But what does he know about it? What does he know about the life water gives? What does he know about smashing your head through the glass pane of the world?

BIG DINKY ENERGY by Josh Sherman

July 5, 2021

You really need to figure out how to stop drinking so much. You could ask your doctor to refer a therapist or join some 12-step program. But you’ve got a better idea. It’ll just have to wait until the weekend, when you aren’t busy writing marketing copy for real-estate developers.

***

‘The Mulberry Estates are a charming collection of spacious single-family homes in leafy Elgin County.’

‘Set to rise in Toronto’s vibrant Entertainment District, the Foxtrot is a luxurious 45-storey condo tower by the award-winning Mango Development Corporation.’

These are the sentences you’re paid to write eight hours a day, Monday to Friday, from an office downtown.

You wish AI would hurry up and make your job redundant.

***

Saturday morning you’ve got a raging headache. You don’t even throw up when hungover anymore. It’s like your body has tapped out from the constant abuse, or maybe it’s just your natural state now.

Though you’re resolved to stick to your plan no matter how shitty you feel, you’re also nervous and pace your apartment for an indeterminate length of time. A small part of you wants to back out while you still can.

***

It’s so bright out as you walk across a bridge to your destination. You want to capture the brightness — put it in a package like a light bulb so you can use it later. Someone has spray painted RUTHLESS LOWLIFE on a cement barrier. Seeing the graffiti tag, which is all over your neighbourhood, brings you joy. You consider RUTHLESS LOWLIFE to be your favourite street artist. You think of RUTHLESS LOWLIFE as a kind of light bulb.

***

Automatic doors usher you into Canadian Tire. You haven’t been in a hardware store in a long time — probably not since you were a little kid, when your mom made you wear that colourful leash thing so you wouldn’t wander away and get abducted. Recently, while helping your mom move, you found the leash in a box in the crawlspace of her old place. You wanted her boyfriend to take a picture of you two tethered at the wrists once again, but neither he nor your mom were willing to participate for some reason.

Weird.

***

It doesn’t take long for you to get your bearings. There’s a comforting logic to the store’s layout, and you sense intuitively where the aisle you’re looking for is located. Just in case, you’ve rehearsed a backstory for what you’re about to do.

And then you see it, what you came here for: the dinky-car display.

***

Suddenly you’re eight years old again.

You’ve never had alcohol.

Your organs are pink and healthy.

You wake up early to watch cartoons.

Your main concern is your Hot Wheels collection.

You are safe and secure on your leash.

If you could just recapture something of that lost time, even at 1:64 scale, you might find a way out of your predicament. These die-cast toy cars haven’t changed in decades. Something of your childhood remains static, sealed in plastic, and perfect.

So you flip through the packages, picking out a couple models: an ’85 Honda City Turbo, a ’68 Mazda Cosmo Sport, a Nissan Silvia.

You’re already making plans for an Instagram account to post pictures of your toy-car collection. You’ll create it when you get home. The username will be @bigdinkyenergy.

***

You stand in line feeling like you did the first time you bought condoms. You hope the cashier is an old person, someone whose judgment you don’t give a fuck about.

Instead, you end up with a hot 20-something ringing through and bagging your items. You feel totally castrated.

“Just picking these up for my nephew,” you say.

“He really… loves Japanese cars,” you add.

The cashier avoids eye contact when she hands you the bag.

***

As you walk back over the bridge on your way home, there’s a City of Toronto truck pulled up to the curb. Someone in a City of Toronto uniform is power-washing RUTHLESS LOWLIFE off the cement barrier. You just wish some things wouldn’t change, and you’re reminded of the versatility of grief, of all its variants.

Then you notice something else. The bag you’re carrying is so much lighter than what you lug home every day from the liquor store around the corner. And you think maybe you’re more excited to open its contents, too.

SERPENT WITH FIREWORK by Harris Lahti

July 4, 2021

The sunburnt man climbs the steep bank of the lake, dragging a large plastic cooler packed with the last beers of his life. And then? Redemption. Stone-cold sobriety. Through his speed shades, the remains of the abandoned luxury resort rise in nuclear yellow—the shattered windows and graffitied cabins, the crooked doors and cracked tennis courts, the moist volleyball sand where he first slid against his wife and jizzed his teenaged blue jeans. Boy, it sure is nice to discover everything where he left it.

Or not exactly.

From the shallow end of the pool, three skateboarders stare up at him—at his yellow Polo and high-visibility boardshorts, his wraparound reflective sunglasses—hoping against hope the irradiated yuppie doesn’t intend to kick them out. The weekend boating crowd, they know, love nothing more than to report any ruckus that wasn’t of their own making. Especially on the Fourth of July! And so the moment hangs. And hang there—the skateboarders not wanting to rub him the wrong way, lest this lobster call the cops and prematurely end their session—until, with a sudden dart of his tongue, the sunburnt man shaves the foam from his blistered upper lip and declares to them:

“It’s cool, yo!” he slurs. “I used to skate!” All the time back in the day, this sunburnt man and his friends used to lug a generator back here, a sump pump. Gasoline. Fucking mops and towels to soak up the grime. Nets to catch the bullfrogs, snakes, and salamanders living in the sludge. They’d skate this pool until there was nothing left but a crater. “Utter destruction!” he says.

The skateboards stare throughout his summary, blinking back a code that anyone with a dry slab of brain could decipher to mean: Yeah, fuck-o, that’s exactly what we’re doing, just look around, where’s the crater? the utter destruction? the pool’s right here, bro until, apropos of nothing, the sunburnt man cuts off to make a shotgun reloading sound with his mouth, “Kirch-kirch,” and slides another beer from the cooler into his neon yellow koozie. From which, he swigs deeply, damn near polishing off the twenty-seventh beer in a single draught.

Or was it his twenty-eighth? His twenty-ninth, perhaps?

He continues to teeter there at the edge of the pool for some time, his sunglasses flashing sharp blades of sun, as all but one of the skateboarders resume their session—the one with the walking cast on his leg who’s setup on the stairs of the shallow end grilling hamburgers. “Ayo, chief,” this grill master says. “Happy fourth. You want a burger?” All morning, he’d been grilling them, breathing coal and meat smoke out of his toolbox-sized barbeque while watching his friends enjoy the emptied pool as the skin inside his walking cast popping and aching like beaded burger fat. “Medium? Medium-rare?”

“With a pulse,” this sunburnt man responds before draining off his maybe twenty-seventh/eighth/ninth beer with conviction. His throat bobs and knuckles as the beer flows into his purplish neck. However, on this day, unlike others, no shame accompanies this chugging. Instead, a sense of achievement, self-betterment, as if each cracked beer tab opens another door in his mind. After passing through all thirty of them, a new life will begin. A life in which, he’ll return home, apologize. Listen. Just listen. Take the garbage out, load the laundry, then mow the lawn while his wife watches him out the kitchen window, her heart thawing with love.

The grill master proffers the bloody burger. “You want this or what?”

The sunburnt man peers down through the metallic glasses: “I didn’t order that.”

To which the grill master gives a half-hearted grumble and tosses the burger onto the paper plates, adding to the other gray and shriveled patties his buddies refused throughout the morning, to this greasy leaning tower that has grown into a metaphor for his life—because, once upon a time, not even a year ago, this grill master would’ve found solace in a well-cooked burger, would’ve enjoyed a day spent simply watching his buddies skate. But his string of recent injuries has been too long, too suffering, and at the ripe old age of twenty-five, this master of char and broil has taken a hard look at his life: the future he’s stepped into is old and hurting. Just like this radioactive drunk, he thinks. This boozed up kook who won’t stop word salading at me like I could give a fuck: What do I care about his good old days? His wife? The way they used to roll around over in the volleyball court? How her red hair used to spark in the sun? How she’d moan like Medusa when they fucked?

“You’d understand if you saw her,” the sunburnt man tells him. “Matter fact,” he says, fishing a large cell phone from his cargo pocket.

The grill master glances at his friends, trying to transmit a call for help, a refocusing of social responsibility. But their skateboarding only continues, as if it was now up to the grill master, and him alone, to run interference with this drunkard, to sacrifice himself for their opportunity to slash at the pool coping with their skateboard’s metal trucks. To carve over the light fixture in the deep end with a poetry he felt he’d never again be able to write. Then: this spit sucking sound. “What the fuck?”

The sunburnt man nudges him: “Lookit.” And for a split-second dream-moment? this crazy-eyed red-headed woman? she bobs in the grill master’s lap? a fiery mop of hair? right there on the stairs? in the shallow end of the pool? where he’s been all morning? sucking him? giving him the first head he’s gotten in months? a whole year? Only his dick is redder, more curving.

“The only picture I have of her,” the sunburnt man says before slipping his cell phone back into his pocket and opening the lid of the cooler and starting to fish for his maybe twenty-ninth/thirtieth beer—fishing, fishing, fishing—for that maybe final one—the key with which he will crack the final door that lead into his new and sober future, where after completing the lawn, he’ll enter the kitchen to discover his wife overflowing with a pent up a sexuality that says please fuck me, right here on the laminate counter, you sweet animal, I’ve missed you so much—except, no, this final beer, nah-uh, there isn’t a final one. Apparently, he drank that one, already stepped into that future life. Without realization or ceremony. And instead, he comes up with a damp firework: a big red cake he must’ve purchased earlier at the Exxon along with the thirty pack to celebrate this moment. The start of his new life that’ll play from here forth into eternity like a prime-time family comedy. And so, to mark this occasion, he flicks his Bic lighter and holds flame to fuse. He ignites a spark that travels hissing toward the firework’s center clenched in his scorched hand. He cocks his arm and sends the cake flying.

The skateboarders stop to gawk at the pool’s deep end as the grey braids of smoke diffuse up into the thick pines, into the shadows the branches hold down, waiting for an explosion that doesn’t come. Refuses to. (Perhaps, this firework, too, has failed to thrive? the grill master wonders.) But then: explosion! A heat. An unleashed wrath shoots upward and launches off the pool’s curving walls into the pines, where a large bird startles high up in the branches. With a flap of enormous wings, its shadow frees itself, soars over them, a vulture, a hawk, no, a bald eagle—majestic and full of glory—up, up, up into the patches of blue skies above, shrieking its rage, piercing at their eardrums, so loudly that even the sunburnt man stops to watch the thing flap and shrink into nothingness. Into memory.

And in the blast’s wake? Aside from the tattered box and ruined pool slick with charcoal, confetti, and myriad destruction that’d surely bite into the steady roll of any skateboard wheels? There’s something else: this rope: this rattling sound: this glitching movement in the pool that makes no sense: a missing puzzle piece of movement where there should’ve been none: a reptile that must’ve fallen from the eagle’s mouth as it raged against the blast: a snake with a rattle, a diamond-shaped head: red eyes staring back.

“Seriously, what the what?” The skateboarders exchange glances, shrug. Repeat this process again. What do you do in a situation like this? Bash the rattler with a rock? Coax it out with a stick? There were no obvious answers. No other actions to take than to turn toward the sunburnt man with murder in their eyes, as if he’d conjured the snake on purpose. And this drunk dayglo dickhead, you know what he does?

Laughs—because for him, right now, the universe aligns. Its cosmic beer sign arrows blink the fated way: First through the thirty pack, then the firework, and now this rattlesnake, another set of doors inside the other set of doors inside his mind through which he must walk. After capturing the serpent, he’ll skin the thing and gift the hide to his wife as a totem reminder of how far he sunk without her love.

(If it doesn’t make sense to you, I can’t explain his logic.)

The grill master tries to stop him. The two other skateboarders try to stop him. But the sunburnt man moves too quickly toward the rattler, who only continues to amplify and sustain its warning clatter. “Kirch-kirch, kirch-kirch, kirch-krich,” the sunburnt man responds, hoping to confuse the animal—because, boy, this rattle snake is a stupid one. The sunburnt man realizes this right away. Easily distractable. Lacks the reflexes that I possess, he thinks.

Even the sizzle of the grill master’s grill falls silent as if to watch the sunburnt fool close in on the rattler, like he’s done so a thousand times, making it hard not to wonder: Was this sunburnt donkey a snake handler, a reptile wrangler, a herpetologist of some kind? Of course not. Maybe, though?

Drunk as he is, the sunburnt man senses his audience’s captivation and this makes him make the mistake he so often made in the past—his other signature—the one where he says, “Just one more beer,” and attempts to amplify heaven. He lurches. He grabs. Then, before he’s even aware of his success, he’s twirling the rattler by its tail before his belly like a lasso.

“Kirch, kirch, kirch,” he says, repeatedly. The skateboarders say nothing. Just stand in awe. Gawking at the beautiful way this crimson kook gyroscopes the rattle snake, the way this hologram of death blurs before his toasted body. The grill master can’t blink. He can’t breathe. On account of the adrenaline now coursing through his blood, flooding him with a feeling he associates with his own good old days. Remember?

The sunburnt man does, remembers everything. His idealized life moves before him, inside the action of the snake, caged there like rare diamond in a wedding ring. Each time the snake passes, his smile cracks wider, his lip oozes blood.

Meanwhile, the sunlight that snaps off his metallic sunglasses causes the skateboarders to squint, to shield their eyes, not wanting to miss what happens next, as the rattler’s fangs continue to snap and miss him, snap and miss him, until, okay, maybe they haven’t. Maybe the fangs have connected after all.

It takes a moment, but the sunburnt man feels this venom pooling, too, as an energy, and within this accumulation he senses a fissure, the sudden formation of another door. A final door. One whose edges are flooded with heavenly light. One door at the end of the thirty pack and snake that he hadn’t anticipated or imagined. An emergency exit of sorts. And it’s in this moment, with this realization, that the scene’s energy swells too taut. Too impossible. It needs somewhere to go, too. Anywhere. And so, with no other options left, the energy plunges itself into his burnt body, burrowing behind the venom toward the sunburnt man’s over-cooked heart.

I THINK ABOUT YOUR COCK DURING TIMES OF CRISIS by Lexi Kent-Monning

July 2, 2021

The first thing I thought of during the coup was your cock. I think of it when I need comfort, and what I wanted to remember was the first time it saved me. We were on your bed, a Friday afternoon, both skipping work. I’d been bent over in the shower, but you know I faint easily so you moved us out of the hot water. Our just shampooed hair made dark blotches and streaks on your grey sheets, while stars encroached on my vision and echoes rolled through my ears, the two telltale symptoms I’m about to pass out. Instead of the stars and echoes, I focused on your cock like my life depended on it, and the deeper I plunged it into my throat, the more I kept the fainting at bay. Your cock brought me back to full consciousness, so now when I don’t have my faculties or when my faculties are too present, when I need a jolt or a numbing, it returns me. When I have to wake up in a few hours but haven’t gotten a whisper of sleep, your cock comes faster than sheep into my head and soothes me. When I almost drive off the road and need to stay awake for a few more miles, remembering the taste of the first lick of the head puts me on cruise control until I pull into the garage. When I’m on my knees about to retch into a toilet, I think about swallowing you down, and my stomach immediately stops churning. So when guns and Confederate flags filled the screens again, the first thing I thought of was your cock, and how it’s never been used for violence. When crises arise, I think of your cock and I know how to stay alive.

LOW GAS AND A LION IN THE BACKSEAT by Hannah Gregory

July 1, 2021

My hand lives in her belly. That belly has a tumor the size of a banjo. I like to think my hand keeps her company, playing a soothing song on her tumor banjo whenever she cries in pain. I use my one hand to play my non-tumor banjo for her, my actual banjo, like hum-di-bum-hum-di-dee-hum-di-bum-hum-di-dee. No chords because, hello, one hand over here. My girlfriend Tracy is always yelling at me for getting a lion, but Theory: Is it really about the banjo? Tracy refuses to help me with the chords so she just hears me singing in Open G all day. I tell her that every townie who’s been trapped in the town where they grew up deserves to play banjo for a lion they love. Checkmate. Conclusion: Tracy hates banjos.

My lion breathes heavy these days, breathing the breaths of like… really hard breathing. Tracy doesn’t think I’m a biologist, but what about that online course I took? Checkmate. Theory: Tracy is jealous. She says to stop spending all of my money on that lion. Tracy has had to pick me up because my car ran out of gas. More than once. I spend all of my tips from the bar on the lion’s treatments and we barely make rent. Last night, I did donuts in the high school parking lot until my Low Fuel light popped up, blasting Earl Scruggs with the lion in the backseat as a treat in her final days. Tracy says I’m going to have to start paying for my own AAA if I don’t get rid of that lion. Conclusion: Tracy is jealous. She gives me the silent treatment like she knows how to use it, but there’s a button behind her ear. When I press it eight times, she stops giving me the silent treatment. “Stahp. Staaaaaaahp. Quit it. Please. Okay. Stop now. Ha ha. Okay. Ha ha. You really know how to get on my nerves.” It always goes like that and then we make sweet, salty townie love.

I would cry if this car could run on tears and anxiety instead of gasoline. Theory: If my palm sweats the whole way to the vet’s office, I’ll be able to make it there before my tank runs out of gas. My lion can’t get comfortable in the backseat because of the banjo in her belly. Her brain refuses to quit even though her body is trying to kill her. If I run out of gas, I’ll need to put a sign on the window that says: Careful! Lion in the backseat! She bites but be nice to her. She’s dying! I pass by a gas station, but keep driving because I know where I can get gas two cents cheaper. Conclusion: The car coasts into the vet’s parking lot and it shuts off before I can park. Conclusion: Tracy misjudges my thrift.

My body quakes ugly tears and I rest my head on my lion’s. She licks the tears off my face and she has that smile, that desire to keep living, to keep sleeping, to keep waking up, to keep eating her favorite dinner of fresh carcasses and sweaty hands, to keep listening to my one-handed banjo while I sing her a sweet song about love and heartache.

I sit with her until the vet comes out. We all walk inside together and I walk out alone.

Theory: My heart’s going to fall out and never make its way back home. My lion’s name was Bette, by the way. She was young. Only about five years old. I hum Bette’s favorite song until Tracy comes and picks me up. We leave my car stranded in the vet’s parking lot. Conclusion: I’m going to cry until I die.

HAUNTING by Edee James

June 30, 2021

A ghost is a boy who always comes back to you.

We were kissing in his car, which he’d initially parked by the side of the road so we could volley insults at each other responsibly. With his breath sweet and warm on my neck, and his tongue darting in and out of my ear, it was easy to momentarily forget why we were fighting.

It was about another girl.

I grew up learning that a man will stray. You shouldn’t kill yourself just because your man is a community penis, my aunt said. All I had to do was pray he didn’t gift me something incurable. My position in his heart was solid if he had a string of female names on his phone, but it was ‘code red’ if he was focusing on one specific girl.

There was one specific girl.

The boy said it was either me or her whenever he was ready for marriage. The fight wasn’t about the fact that he had options. It was because he wouldn’t spell out my position in his list of eligible women. I told him to go and fix his limp dick, and he told me they were selling oils for my receding hairline. Then we were giggling and kissing, mouths and hands everywhere, stray moans escaping throats, goosebumps like we’d been submerged in ice. An army van screeched to a stop in front of us, tires spraying gravel and sand. Three soldiers leaped out with guns slung over their shoulders to buy roasted corn from a roadside seller. It was then I lost control of my bladder.

There was a pool of urine on my seat when the boy dropped me off.

We didn’t talk about me peeing myself. We didn’t talk about the fact that it wasn’t really about the soldiers--my dad was in the army, so I was quite familiar with officers. We didn’t talk at all.

It was about their guns.

The boy dropped me off without a word. We had been on and off for five years. It was clear we were off again. Inside my house, I stepped out of my soiled skirt and flung my bra and wig against the wall. I shivered under the spray of cold water in the shower, but it was alright because it helped dilute my warm tears.

Right then, I knew two things:

1. The boy and I, currently off, would be on again in about a year2. He was never going to marry me

I knew.

I have always known things. My cousin calls me before he bets on football games. My friend won lots of money after I blurted out winning numbers. When I was younger, my mother took me to a prophet because she couldn’t understand it all. A girl working in my mom’s beauty salon noticed how I always turned up right before my mom started eating lunch on her break. No one believed the girl, so she decided to set a trap for me. She bought ice cream and said my mom couldn’t eat it until a certain time. I appeared as my mother swallowed the first scoop.

A ghost is a dearly departed soul who doesn’t know how to return home.

I was drying plates in the kitchen the first time I saw the ghost. It was running up and down, restive. I told it to stop, then wondered if my insomnia was finally catching up with me. The next day it was back, a figure in white floating around the periphery of my vision. Annoyed, I told it I wasn’t responsible for its death.

I was there the day the ghost died. I had swept his skull fragments into a dustpan with my hands after the kidnappers emptied a clip into his head and spilled his brain. He had come to cut my uncle’s hair at home but stuck around because he wanted to help me clean the house. He owned a barbershop in town, and my uncle was one of his VIP clients. That Sunday, he finished his job and got paid, but he insisted on dusting the furniture before leaving. I pried the cleaning rag out of his grip after the police came and took my statement and his body. An officer scribbled something indecipherable as I recounted the event:

a. I was frying plantains when the kidnappers cameb. They took everyone to my uncle’s bedroomc. They asked us all to lie facedownd. They asked for a pen and a piece of papere. One of them asked if I was the maid, and I said yes because of the way his greedy eyes X-rayed my bodyf. They wrote down the number we had to call to pay the ransomg. They killed the barber on their way out because he recognized someone in the gangh. No, they didn't wear masksi. They kidnapped my uncle

I told my aunt about the restless ghost, and she looked at me funny and asked me how I knew. Apparently, some prophet had told her the same thing. We brought people to pray and bless the house.

A ghost is the first love you will never forget.

The boy came back. He glossed over the urine incident now that a year had passed, telling me how I had squirted and almost ruined his car just because of a little kiss on the neck. He suggested therapy when I told him about the dead barber and the kidnappers and the guns.

The boy and I started sexting back and forth until we had chapters of erotica. I’d wake up to the wicked things he was planning to do to me, and I’d reply, threatening something even more delicious. We threatened each other with ice cubes and whips, fire and handcuffs, lace and blindfold. Yet I knew that everything we wrote and did would only help his sex life when he married his specific girl. I was only helping him build a library.

THE FUCK’S A TUFFET? by Jonathan Cardew

June 25, 2021

Little Miss Muffet took another hit from her Juul. It was Friday, which meant English class all afternoon. Instead of walking towards the Arts building, though, Muffet detoured into the woods so she could do a little pipe before Hawthorne.

When she sat down on a grassy embankment, a spider descended from a nearby tree--a ten-foot wide spider, big enough to hop and skip over a bus.

She tried to light her pipe, but the spider freaked out and hissed at the flame.

“Oh, just piss off,” she said to the spider, and it promptly did.

Once she was high, it crawled back.

“Are you eating fire?” asked the spider, sheepishly, motioning to the pipe with one hairy leg.

“Go away,” said Muffet.

“I just want to sit with you on that tuffet,” said the spider. “Seems like a perfect spot.”

Miss Muffet enjoyed smoking so much—getting high was her new normal, filling herself with fumes was her new way.

“A tuffet?”

She laughed. She coughed out smoke.

Spiders were not her new way.

…

When she arrived at school, things were baffling.

Two freshmen rushed up to her and flapped their traps about Mr. Karman making out with one of the seniors and getting caught by the principal.

Miss Muffet took a surreptitious draw from her Juul, eating the vape so that it leaked out of her nose.

“Ewww, gross,” she said, but she wasn’t really grossed out; Mr. Karman had a tush like two boiled eggs joined in holy matrimony.

“In the Biology room,” said one of the freshmen, with an exaggerated wink.

Little Miss Muffet thought about the spider.

She mouthed the word, “tuffet.”

Tuffet.

Tuff-it.

She entered the school via the Sciences wing.

…

It was dark in the Biology room, except for the hydroponic lights in one corner.

Little Miss Muffet peered through the little glass window and could just about make out the hunched figure of Mr. Karman at his desk.

It looked like he was bent over his grading, but surely he was staring down into the chasm of his bad choices.

Little Miss Muffet knocked on the window—rat-a-tat-tat.

No response.

She tried again, but figured she might as well just open the door.

The room was eerily quiet—never was it quiet during class time since Mr. Karman operated on a ‘do what you will’ kind of vibe.

She walked toward him.

He looked up from his chasm.

“Muffet…” he said. “Don’t you have class now?”

“Free period,” she lied, sitting down on one of the student seats.

“Oh,” he said, letting out a sigh.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Karman, but I had a question…”

“Now's not a great time for questions,” he said.

Little Miss Muffet leant back in the seat so it groaned, getting out her Juul device and giving it a quick pull.

She guessed Mr. Karman wouldn’t notice, let alone care.

“Now’s not a great time for anything.”

Mr. Karman looked sexy in the wan light, like a figure from an oil painting, all anguish and doom, haggard.

…

When the bell rang, Little Miss Muffet was already deep in the woods again.

Hawthorne could wait until Wednesday.

Hawthorne and his scarlet letter could go screw themselves, 1600s style.

“You’re back,” said the spider, who was in the same general vicinity as before.

The spider was one of those fat spiders with tiny legs. Pointless. Dragging its hairy-ass belly across the ground when it moved.

A sorry, sorry sight.

“I’m back,” said Little Miss Muffet, using her fingers to simulate quote marks.

She took her place on the small, grassy hill and got out her pipe again.

“Can I?” said the spider, pointing to the same spot as before.

“Can you what?”

It blinked its dozen eyes.

“Sit down beside you,” it said. “On that tuffet.”

Little Miss Muffet sighed, channeling Mr. Karman.

“Look,” she said. “It’s a free country.”

She pushed a nub of weed into the pipe end and lit it, drawing a perfect crackle.

“Can I ask you a question?”

RUSSIAN ADVICE by Joshua Hebburn

June 23, 2021

The only tenderable advice Mom had given him was if a woman threatens to throw a plate at your head, she might, but if she takes her shoes off first, she's going to kill you. Mom said she learned this while reading Turgenev. In college.

He started taking magnesium supplements for better sleep. His therapist recommended it when he mentioned his disturbances in his sleep and insomnia. He Googled magnesium. He learned that magnesium burns especially hot, and that bad people—child pornographers, hackers, drug cartel accountants—used magnesium-based flip-switch ignition setups to melt their hard drives full of illegal information when the men in heavy gear and gas masks stormed in. He learned about nutritional magnesium. He went to Target. His dreams became vivid from the magnesium. The dead and the lost things in his life returned to him in everyday settings, and the famous people—politicians and actors and actresses—all articulated together into nonsense. The people were speaking out of character, sometimes in a language that was almost decipherable. The settings flowed into the wrong next one. They committed unconjoined, sometimes tender, sometimes disgusting acts. These would be disturbing. This isn’t speaking of the objects and other nouns. That is if they weren't, as memories, faint, thin, and rapidly fading. But maybe they wouldn't: they don't wake him up in their progress. He thinks of these as his magnesium dreams. He has magnesium dreams almost every night now. He didn’t dream this much before, either. He likes it even if it makes him feel bad.

The other advice Mom gave was—for instance, only eat cake after thirty if you’re not married, women like plump guys but don't keep them—it was stuff that made only surface sense, made too complete a feeling, was calculated to imply a kind of person, it was like a magazine ad.

He thought of the way she would turn her hand palm up when she talked. She curled her index finger in towards the palm. It alarmed him that he couldn’t think of the hand beyond the gesture. In his mind’s eye it was a smudge, like the limb of one of the figures in the background of a painting, exactly what came into his mind when he thought generically of a “woman’s palm,” or “woman’s index finger.” He could look at his own hand and observe the fold of flesh in the groin between his thumb and his pointer. He wished he could see a picture of the same place on her hand, or, if he could only consult a reference to jar his memory into particulars. He imaged some library that contained volumes of photographs of human hands, human wrists, human arms, and all of the other parts, photographs made in hard light and printed in large format on thick, smooth art book paper. It would be forgotten, the form of any human hand, her hand was going to be forgotten, and even his own hand as it was now because it would be another hand in the future, a hand with different creases.

Nobody's home. He went to her room and applied her makeup from the crowded table. He does it in the same way you might invert your shirt and go bongos on your belly, or sing a song loudly and badly, inserting cusses and slurs, or the way you pretend to be Jim Carrey in The Mask. Hummanahummana! Because you can. First a metallic dusting. Then an outline with a wet black pen. An oyster colored, oyster cool cream on the hands that smells like lavender, and salt. The satisfying twist of the plastic gold tube to raise the ruby worn down by Mom's lips. I'm a glamorita, a glamourpuss. I look divine.

He was occasioned for all of this. He thought while he sat beside his second wife, who he knew he didn't love recently, or maybe never. His hands were folded into his hands. The pew was hard. Everyone wears black. The pastor said the pastor's scripture of love, God, and death. The light passed through the stained glass windows and it filled the enormous room with color.

He thinks of Mom smacking the bottom of the bear shaped bottle of pure clover honey, then looking at Dad at the kitchen table, and moving her hand to the hollowed bear rump, patting and laughing. Later, she would throw something at Dad, and for a reason. He couldn't remember if she was wearing shoes, she often did or didn't inside the house. How did she feel?

Like a duel, he supposed, you make a commitment and do it out of some idea that you will feel some way after you've gone through. They say, go through with it. You go to the dentist. You go to the funeral. You snort cocaine. You divorce a wife. You say Jesus Christ.

BACCHUS AT LARGE by Avee Chaudhuri

June 21, 2021

For six straight days we drank bourbon with delighted urgency: men, women, and children above the age of twelve. The preacher was horrified of course. The Mayor betrayed no emotions. He simply knew what must be done to save the town. Twelve-year-olds were dancing in the streets and exposing themselves to livestock and wild animals. Many of the women had embraced the ancient, sapphic ways under this new regimen. The men were livid but the Mayor kept the peace. “It’s the whiskey, fellas. That’s all,” he said, knowing he was a liar. The Mayor was a man of the world and had been educated in France, then had practiced law and medicine and silversmithing in Brazil before an intense hankering for peaches brought him back to Texas.

For six straight days we drank, and Providence smiled briefly because on the seventh day we were assured that Addison himself, the dread distiller, would ride in from Kentucky and burn everything in sight, and then in the smoldering wreckage he would murder Jason Faulkner with his bare hands. Faulkner had worked at the distillery in Shively, and stolen from Addison about one hundred cases of whiskey, simply because he could. Then he came down to Texas on a wagon loaded with whiskey and books and seed packets for some land and privacy. He was a horticulturalist by trade and set himself up in consultation, in a house off the main square. The whiskey was stored in his basement.

Faulkner was a womanizer too and something of an exhibitionist. He slept with Molly Ibsen under a canopy of blue azaleas in the public gardens, and that’s what set the whole thing off. Molly came home that afternoon without her usual despondent look and her husband was immediately suspicious. He followed her the next day and saw her screwing Faulkner in all these poses facing earthward. He was incensed, then aroused, then briefly conciliatory, and then even more pissed off. Intending to stab Faulkner in the eyes and groin, Tom Ibsen broke into his house through the basement, where he noticed the many cases of whiskey, all stamped with the famous Addison logo: a horse trampling a Delaware Indian. He decided not to kill Faulkner that night, and as it happened Faulkner wasn’t even at home. He was with the preacher’s wife high above town on the roof of the Hotel Sam Houston.

The next day, Tom Ibsen wrote to Addison describing what he had seen in Faulkner’s basement. In a week he received a reply that Addison was on his way to murder Jason Faulkner and destroy the town which had harbored him. Only Ibsen’s home would be spared. Ibsen was so goddamn petty that the news from Addison struck him as fair and equitable. Ibsen drank a toast to himself and fell asleep at his desk. When trying to rouse her husband for dinner, Molly Ibsen saw the letter from Addison and took it to Faulkner. She was inconsolable.

“Calm yourself, Molly,” said Faulkner. Faulkner told the Mayor a little of what transpired and asked him to hold a town meeting and the Mayor agreed because things had been far too peaceful and civil and he was getting fucking bored with it all and restless. Once in Okinawa, a man he had disgraced with his fists had told him that every crisis is an opportunity. But for so long there had been no crisis here on account of fair weather and steady trade.

“Send forth the crier,” the Mayor said dramatically. Then he did a bump of cocaine.

The town gathered and Faulkner addressed the citizens:

“Friends, lovers and enemies. You know me as Jason Faulkner. That is indeed my name on the census but I have been known by many names over many lifetimes: Bacchus, Hanuman, Reynard the Fox.”

“What the fuck is your point!” someone shouted.

“Goddammit,” Faulkner continued, “I am the god of wine and mischief. A terrible disaster awaits. I stole one hundred cases of whiskey from Brody Addison and he will think you all complicit and burn the town. Unless we drink all the whiskey.”

“Seems to me,” said Colonel Bright, “that we oughta dump that whiskey in the river and that you oughta move along.”

“And waste the wisdom of Solomon, the secret pleasure of Agamemnon?” Faulkner said. “We can drink it together in the spirit of fellowship. We can show that evil goddamn maniac that revelry will always triumph over murder and arrogance.”

Faulkner repeated the claim that he was a living god and this upset quite a few people, particularly the preacher.

“You’re simply a man. You fucked my wife and she didn’t come home smelling like ambrosia. In fact, she reeked of horse shit,” the preacher complained.

The townspeople prevailed on their mayor to say something:

Why the hell not, said the Mayor. This is the time for spectacle and revelation. Atrocities in the Belgian Congo, the telephone, the phonograph, a transatlantic cable. They’ve discovered the lost city of Troy and canals on Mars. In about one hundred years, the millennium will be upon us and the world will surely end. The sea will swallow Texas, and we may or may not survive in the coming ether as unlimbered gnats. For so long, the Mayor sighed, all we’ve really known how to do together is kill, so why shouldn’t the king of satyrs appear in these woods and tell us otherwise.

“Fuck it, I’m in. Faulkner, put me down for a case,” said the Mayor.

Not to be outdone, Colonel Bright demanded two cases of whiskey, and soon everyone was clamoring to help hide the evidence of Faulkner’s crimes. Thirty or forty good men and women had come forward and the Mayor issued an emergency order that the children could drink. We started drinking in a concerted fashion. Musicians played day and night in the main square. The drunk children started using cocaine in vast quantities in order to stay awake so they could keep drinking. Old blood feuds were resolved and outstanding gambling debts were forgiven. Tom Ibsen even tried to reconcile with his wife, but by then, in her state of sublime drunkenness, Molly decided she didn’t need Tom or Jason or carnal knowledge of any man or woman. She wanted to be a gunfighter. The Mayor, seated beneath a statue of General Sam Houston, watched it all and thought to himself: somewhere, that old Samurai bastard is smiling upon us.

Late on the sixth day we smashed up and burned all the empty bottles and crates from the Addison Distillery. The Mayor and his valets performed Pagliacci, a rough English translation that had us in tears. The point is it sobered us up. The musicians disbanded. The brothel, which in those six days had served as a hospital for victims of alcohol poisoning, was redecorated in its usual satin and silk finery, in its traditional arabesque. It was business as usual when Addison rolled up. The peach farmers were in the main square arguing with the monocled peach commissioner, threatening to form a co-operative. In the middle of it all, the Mayor wore his finest sable coat and twirled his walking stick, saying, “Gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen!”

Addison was gaunt and high-legged.

“Where is he? Where is Faulkner?” Addison asked.

“Faulkner, we know no Faulkner,” said the Mayor. “we know a Bacchus, Bismarck, Hanuman, Cleopatra, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, and good old George Washington Gomez.” The Mayor kept going for minutes, fueled as he was by cocaine and insolence.

“Enough!” Addison shouted. Then he brandished his pistol.

“Hey there, Addison!” Faulkner cried from his front porch.

The two men met in the center of the main square.

“You are a thief. Where is my whiskey?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve ridden all this way for no reason.”

“The day after you left, I discovered one hundred cases of my whiskey missing. I have a letter from a man named Ibsen claiming to have seen one hundred cases of my whiskey in your cellar.”

“That man Ibsen is a congenital liar. There is no whiskey here,” said Faulkner.

Addison sighed and smiled wistfully, sensing Faulkner had outsmarted him in some way, and then he shot him right in the gut and then once more in the right temple. Faulkner’s blood crested in the wind, splattering among the peaches.

“I am a Colonel of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. I will ride freely,” said Addison.

We buried Faulkner later that day in a shallow grave, and the Mayor spoke a eulogy in a variety of modern and ancient languages. Whenever Faulkner is ready, whenever the horn blows or the raven circles the mountain, what little we have laid on top of him, mere twigs and branches, and some handfuls of dirt, may be easily traversed.

UNFINISHED by David Osgood

June 17, 2021

My wife brushes her teeth in the shower and doesn’t spit, so the toothpaste foams around her mouth and drips down her chin onto her breasts. It reminds me of the two people I fear the most: my mother and my dentist. Tonya oversleeps again. She is starting to look like her mother. I burn my wife’s sprouted grains toast because I hate her new Vegan diet. She doesn’t notice because it is covered with half-ripe avocado. I crisp up a whole package of uncured maple bacon to give her something to complain about.

Tonya yells at her mom like a teenager, though she is only twelve. I cannot imagine what the house will be like when I leave and she doesn’t have an audience. She and I lock rolled eyes. It’s the only thing we have in common that keeps us from falling apart.

On the way to school, Tonya mentions drugs. I tell her I smoked pot in college, but that’s about it. I try to remember what it was like when I was her age. I feel bad for Tonya, having a mentally vacant dad and an emotionally unstable mom. No wonder she is doing drugs already. I picture Drew Barrymore doing a line of cocaine off a Tiger Beat magazine with Jonathan Taylor Thomas on the cover. Maybe I just wasn’t as cool as the other kids, sweaty palms and counting down from ten to muster up the courage to kiss my girlfriend. She broke up with me and the other kids called me a prude. I entered high school with the enormous false sense of confidence that I would sleep with every girl in my class. When that didn’t happen, I drank to feel something, then drank not to feel anything, then just drank.

Tonya opens her car door before I come to a complete stop. She runs up to a group of girls and hugs them all at the same time, showing off what looks like a tattoo on her backside. I drive away thinking I should be upset or disappointed or concerned in some way. I wave begrudgingly at an over-caffeinated school mom tipping her oversized coffee cup to my obvious right of way like she is performing a humanitarian feat. I fantasize about her tailing me home where we drink mimosas and cheat.

I locate the piece of oversized luggage we used to take on family vacations and pull it down from the closet shelf; I find a tampon, a trial-size body lotion, and a foldable toothbrush in the bottom of it. I pack up everything I can fit into it, sit on top of the full suitcase, and get lost in a ceiling stain.

Tonya and her mother come home, furious I missed their calls and voicemails and texts. They stomp up the stairs like walking temper tantrums, following the noises to the bedroom. I look down at them from the attic through a large hole in the ceiling where the stain used to be. “I cut a stain out,” I manage to utter. “I’ll replace it.” They look up at me as if to confirm my suspicions that the father-daughter dance was not, in fact, cancelled this year.

My wife makes curry for dinner and Tonya stays at the table for the entire meal. She asks if we are getting a divorce and I tell her no I just hate my life and she says join the club and we smile like a familiar pain masking a deeper one. She looks high but I don’t say anything. My wife doesn’t talk to me for the rest of the night, even when I am unpacking the enormous suitcase and cleaning plaster off the bedroom floor. I pretend to sleep while she cries; she sleeps and I get up to pay bills in the dark.