Flash

SOUR by Wilson Koewing

June 2, 2021

To escape the midsummer heat, I ducked inside a bar specializing in sour beers on the fringes of Five Points in Denver. I ordered from the happy hour menu, drank sour pours then had my debit card declined.

“I tried it nine times,” the shaggy hair bartender said.

“Try it again.”

“Won’t go through.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

Another bartender, one of those effortlessly beautiful women who always seem marooned in restaurants, came over.

“Nice ink,” I said, noticing an eight ball on her wrist.

“Do you have another card?” she asked.

“I don’t,” I said. “Where do you play?

“Tarantulas.”

“Well, something has to give,” the shaggy hair bartender said, crossing his arms.

She leaned close, “If I cover this, can you Venmo me in a couple days?”

“Sure,” I said. “I could do that.”

She wrote her Venmo name on a ticket.

Outside, I smoked on the sidewalk under the late afternoon sun.

It wasn’t so much that I was poor, it was more that I didn’t work. My folks sent money sometimes and if they didn’t, I lived modest, rode couches and occasionally ate meals I wasn’t certain I could pay for.

Almost everyone who lived downtown were millennials, working for startups or dispensaries or in the service industry saving for ski bum winters. Either that or virus fired, so nobody cared if you were broke. The prevailing belief was we wouldn’t always be. If you could get in with the right people, asking if you could Venmo later was better than credit.

I went inside a liquor store up the street. I assumed I had some money on my card, just not enough for the tab.

The card ran.

I exited with a pint of tequila. A guy passed by, down on his luck, and asked for a smoke. I gave him one and offered the pint.

“Nah,” he said. “Gave up drinking.”

“What’s your story?”

“Man…”

“How many cigarettes for you to tell me your story?”

He clasped his hands behind his head and cut down an alley growing smaller and smaller as he went. I tucked the tequila in my pocket and headed toward downtown.

Denver was beautiful at dusk. The buildings appeared rusted in front of the sky.

When the sun slid behind the Rockies it bathed the front range in hard shadow creating, for about twenty minutes, a soft half-light that made the city feel quiet and surreal.

I passed through the tent town on Stout. I had friends who lived there. They weren’t bums but were considered as such. Really, they were burnt out on the bullshit.

Hundreds of tents lined the sidewalks. Trash tumbled by on a furnace breeze. I planned to check in but didn’t consider the time.

No one was around. Everybody was in the dinner line over at the mission.

I crossed Broadway to the 16th Street Mall. The only sign of life was businesspeople scurrying from office buildings.

I continued in the direction of the river looking for Cosmo. He sometimes got high at the confluence. Cosmo was a wild Russian who climbed cranes for Instagram posts. Finding him was dumb luck. His phone only worked when he had wi-fi.

I walked down Little Raven by the high-rise residential along the St. Vrain, crossed the pedestrian bridge into Lo-Hi, and spotted him on the rocks by the water.

“Fuck it,” he said as I approached. “If they don’t construct more buildings, I’m leaving.”

“Back to the Kremlin?” I asked, offering the tequila.

“Pacific Northwest,” he said. “Seattle is growing faster than Denver.”

“Rainy up there.”

“Good,” he said. “I’m sick of all this sunshine.”

“I like it,” I said. “Keeps my depression at bay.”

“Americans,” he laughed. “You think every day should be sunshine.”

As night fell, we got high and watched the windows of the buildings around downtown light up. Around ten, we entered the lobby of the Block 162 South tower. The guy at the desk was asleep. We climbed the stairs to the third floor and took the elevator to the 45th. Once you got a few floors up you could take the elevators without a key.

We accessed the roof through a door with an alarm that Cosmo disarmed with scotch tape. I peered over the ledge. The city took on a green haze. Quiet. The sway of the building was evident and that, coupled with the slow crawl of the cars below, created an Einstein on the bus effect, which is why I couldn’t jump on cranes.

Cosmo was unfazed.

“Be careful,” I said.

“If I lose my grip, I won’t feel a thing.”

He hung off the ledge, dropped onto a platform, sprinted and leapt onto the long arm of a crane where he dangled by one hand and took a selfie before pulling himself up, moving fast along the arm which led to an under construction building several hundred yards away. I lost sight of him along the way but knew he would make his way down through the building, fucking with whatever hapless security guard happened to be working. I wouldn’t see him again.

I smoked and stared west toward the front range which was visible because of light pollution from the city. From up there, the gradual climb of the peaks humbled, and if you stared long enough, the crisp black of the horizon started to push back.

I rode the elevator down and stepped outside. The return to witnessing life at normal scale always shocks the system. I walked over to Tarantula’s, which was only a few blocks away. The bartender from the sour house mentioned she played there. I figured since I asked it might be on her mind. Maybe we’d run into each other and shoot a game. If not, I’d play for beers, maybe win a few then call around for somewhere to crash.

THE SOUND OF VIOLENCE by Ryan Norman

May 26, 2021

Usually the orchard was all light, sunburn cooled by a welcome breeze, but not that day. Fog crept up from the river and swallowed every tree in its path, whetting its appetite for the too short grass that cut like blades, soaking the cicadas’ song. I sat on a cold cinder block and watched my boyfriend wash his car, questioning why he would shine it on such a gloomy day, but daring not to say it aloud. His phone rang and I looked at myself in the shiny apple red door. Winked. Shot some finger guns. Fell to the floor.“What are you doing? I have to go do something. Stay here,” he ordered.“I want to come. Where are you going? How long will you be gone?”“A deer’s trapped in a fence in the upper orchard. I have to kill it, or it’ll make a big hole in the fence, or break its neck.”“I’m coming.”

I didn’t know deer screamed until that day. I watched in awe, my eyes wet, standing at a distance from this huge creature, all muscle, as it screamed into the damp air. Thrashing wildly against an almost invisible wire fence, its antlers trapped, entangled with imminent death until finally all went quiet. I touched my forehead and pulled away sticky droplets on my fingertips. That welcome breeze returned, and my heart sank. I had never witnessed death, and never imagined I would. He told me the deer would be skinned, the meat eaten. Nothing would go to waste. But I sat in silence as the truck hurtled past trees into the thick of fog, uncomfortably aware that in the open bed lay a blood-soaked deer, jiggling stiffly with every pebble on the road. I imagined the process of preparing the deer for consumption, sliding a sharp knife between the skin and muscle. I knew some details. The indignity of it all. Hanging it by its hind feet to drain the blood, eyes wide open like black holes. But hadn’t I done the same?

Descending the stairs in a southern New York lab, wearing clothes on top of clothes to keep out the formaldehyde—a sticky stench—entering a room with two dead bodies given to science. We were assigned a cadaver, a trick of the language to distance ourselves from the fact that we would be cutting into dead people with scalpels. Uncovering secrets. Naming muscles, veins, arteries. Draping white cloth for dignity. Digging into intercostal muscles with no breath sounds. A smell that hasn’t left me. And when the draping slipped, an image that hasn’t left me either. All that muscle. Exposed on a stainless-steel table. So much gray. Could I really judge my farmer boyfriend for killing a deer when I cut into a human?

He had been offended by that lab as much as I was saddened by killing a trapped deer. He had told me to stay. Wasn’t it my own fault? But life carried on. Sadness blurred. Judgment faded. We went about our usual things, no hang ups. Trivia on Wednesdays, sunsets on the roof, cider on the porch watching the train rush by. Until we drunkenly ran through the woods one night, searching for a waterfall. We set up camp in a small clearing on the property of the orchard. A tent built for one. We stopped to eat over fire, a hunk of meat thrown onto a cast iron skillet. He fed me a small piece and it was nothing I recognized. I asked him what it was, and he asked, “Remember that deer?” And it tasted of pain and fear. It tasted of violence. I spat it out.

The moon guided us to water, as she is wont to do, and the rushing sound plummeting past wet, slick stone drowned our voices. We left our clothes on the dirt embankment and swam in silver flecked streams, our bodies glowing green underwater and star white on top. I watched him there, standing in a warrior’s pose on an outcropping of rocks among the frothy water, drunk on apples, and admired every inch of his marble-carved body. Maybe I was drunk on apples, too. Everything began to wobble, so we went back to his tent. He laid down, just another naked body in the summer night, his skin still cold from the green river. The moon cast his skin gray as he laid there on a slab of earth, no modesty, just the thin floor of his tent. I covered his face with my palm, his breath heavy, fog caught in my lifeline, obscuring love, and lust; my tongue a scalpel plunging deep into him. I wondered at his muscles quaking with each scream, stealing the silence of the night until I was full.

REWIND by Amy Wang

May 24, 2021

This is before the bed at my new apartment feels especially wide and I wake up crying over things I barely remember; before the two years during which every night I hear the tell-tale groaning of a broken stairway as it is about to collapse under the weight of ashes and a leaping fire in the second after I fall asleep; this is before I have to start going to therapy in order to keep from crying every time I pass the cafe where you used to buy me peppermint lattes, before I begin reminding myself that it is my fault, my words that manifested into fire and brimstone and inferno and consumed everything I had once loved. This is before they show me your body, or what’s left of it, before they tell me that you were trapped under a fallen beam, your spine melting into the burgundy corduroy of our sofa cushions as your eyelashes turned into dust. This is before I wait on the sidewalk, cold despite the heat of the flames that still roar above my head, waiting, waiting for you to appear, for your head to pop out from the doorway; this is before the moment that I realize that you weren’t going to, before the moment I knew that you couldn’t. This is before the roof collapses and buries you under it, before that first fire and before the final one; this is before I stumble down a rickety flight of steps as soon as the alarm sounds, at the first sign of smoke, before too many first-hand experiences acclimate me to the dangers of heat.

This is before I make you sleep on the couch, before I shut the door of our bedroom without even giving you a blanket. This is before the argument that even led to that fire in the first place. This is before I get sick of the way you laugh, before you burn the edges of the painting my mom had given me for my twenty-sixth birthday and I scream at you for doing it. This is before the coiled heat of irritability begins lacing itself every weekday night, before we lose our ability to have conversations without our words melting into the barrel of a gun primed to explode.

This is before you lose your job and we downsize to a shitty apartment two hours away from the house you used to say we would raise our kids in. This is before our two year anniversary, during which you light the entire cake on fire courtesy of cooking oil, because you “thought it was undercooked.” This is before you get diagnosed as a clinical pyromaniac and before I have to go through every room of our house, flipping over sofa cushions in case lighters are hiding underneath. This is before I realize that you have a problem falling in love with things that hurt you, and judging from how long I’ve stayed, so do I. This is before I wake up to find the quilt smoking around me, to your thumb flicking a lighter as your fingers hover gently over flame. This is before we move in together, and my father tells me that you will never make me happy because you have never known stability and I tell him to fuck off. This is before I have to take over making dinner because all too often what you make is burnt black, because you forget to turn off the stove while you’re busy staring at the flames. This is before I ask you why you smoke so much, and you tell me that it’s because you crave warmth.

This is before all of that. It is summer, and the groves of orange trees that we always drove by whenever we went on road trips are laden with ripe fruit. The air is filled with citrus and lies thickly and still and syrupy over the two of us. The sun is always golden and red and dying; the sky is always flame-pink; every oxygen atom in the space around us is perfectly seared salmon. You have yet to break your leg at the construction site where you work, and on Sunday afternoons, you still flip over the chain-link fence, filling your pockets with mandarins and handing them off to the kids that live on our street. On Wednesday afternoons, we go driving in your old Toyota, windows down, heat warnings and fire danger signs wavering in strips of silver, summer mirages slipping over the horizon and through our fingertips as you rewind the CD in the stereo. We are comfortable still, the two of us, caught in the divot between the awkwardness of learning to love and the exhaustion of forgetting how to. I lean in for a kiss, and when our lips touch, your skin is so hot it feels like fire. I think, to myself, that I would give anything, anything to stay in this moment. You are lovely, next to me. Your smile is incandescent.

A DAUGHTER NEEDS A NAME LIKE AN AMULET by Sara Comito

May 20, 2021

She wakes up laughing at her dream that she is a chest of drawers with a single knob in the middle. She wakes to find her belly button has popped like a Butterball turkey thermometer. She dreams she is eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She wakes and makes a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She drinks from the milk carton and guzzles down half its contents. She dreams she is a milk carton. She wakes to find her nightgown is wet with her first milk. Mmmmmm she breathes. It smells delicious. She dreams she is weighing grapefruits in her palm at the supermarket while making sure the other customers aren't looking. She wakes to find her breasts painfully engorged. She takes a long, hot shower. She dreams her boyfriend is drinking at the bar. She wakes to find he has not come home. She calls the bar. The bartender who knows both of them says, Ummm, nope, haven't seen him. She gets up and sits on the couch, falling into a slumber. She dreams she is leaning against a vibrating washing machine. She wakes to find the cat purring, curled up on her belly. She starts upstairs and notices snowy boot prints on the carpet. The boyfriend is open-mouthed and snoring on the bed. She returns to the couch. She dreams she is eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She writes “milk” on the shopping list on the fridge. That evening she dozes on the couch, book falling closed on her belly. The telephone startles her awake. She had just had her tests that day and all is well, but the midwife tells her to come outside to watch the northern lights. The midwife has brought a pot of soup. She dreams she is a moon with an elliptical orbit. When she is at her closest point to her huge planet, she is squeezed so she might burst. She wakes to find she is having Braxton Hicks contractions. She feels her belly and is surprised at how strong and tight it is. This makes her smile. She dreams she is a tree being chopped down. She wakes to her boyfriend beating on the door. She has locked him out. It will be a long night. She dreams she is a tree whose roots gently surround a squirrel sleeping in a hollow. Roots penetrate the earth and even come out of places they're not supposed to, like her branches and leaves. She sees the veins of the leaves, pumping red, illuminated from behind by the sun. She wakes to a loud pop she can both feel and hear. The contractions leave her breathless. She stumbles to the phone and has to stop halfway there. She calls the midwife, just down the street. The midwife says, Shit, it's sounds like you're transitioning already. She drops the receiver and lurches to the bathroom. Her bowels empty spasmodically while she vomits soup into the sink. The midwife uses her own key and runs up the stairs to find her on the floor of the bathroom. A second set of heavy footsteps up the stairs – the doula. Oh, thank god. She delivers after four hours from precipitous start to precipitous finish. The baby is fine, better than fine. Perfect. A girl, which she did not dream but somehow knew. The snowy villas are lit up in ambulance red while green aurora dances overhead. On the gurney down the stairs she is being pulled from her body the way the baby was. All she sees is red. She thinks about primary colors. The midwife's voice somewhere up above calls her back, You have a lot of work to do here, young lady. Don't you dare leave us. She feels the way she does when she's trying to ignore an alarm clock. At last her sense of obligation brings her back. It is snowing. Each snowflake shimmers pink. The most beautiful thing she's ever seen. In the emergency room, a doctor reaches in and pulls out the placenta, turning her inside out. She hears fabric ripping, the kind of thunder that sounds like the sky is zipping apart. You've lost most of your blood, the doctor tells her. The midwife holds her hand. She dreams about holding a bowl of red Jello. She can't steady her hands so it will stop wobbling. She wakes up kneading her belly. So empty, so loose. A haunted house. This is the one thing they don't tell you about, she says to nobody. The baby is warming in a compartment near the bed. The companion chair is empty. A nurse walks by and notices she's awake, approaches the bedside. She smiles. Good morning. Are you ready to hold your baby?

ON THE SUGGESTION OF ROADKILL WALKS by Evan James Sheldon

May 19, 2021

I hear an odd sound and go out front to investigate only to find my mother holding a vulture on a leash with a harness like people buy for tiny yippee dogs. There’s snow on the ground and on the pine trees by the house and I can see where they’ve been by the tracks. She’s been walking the vulture through the neighborhood.

And now she’s walking it back and forth out front and it hops and waddles, occasionally flapping once or twice. It’s large enough that I bet if it really wanted to fly away my mother wouldn’t be able to hold it. Maybe she knows that too, and knowing the vulture could leave whenever it chooses but continues to stay, offers her a kind of comfort.

Hey Mom. What do you have there?

Oh isn’t he beautiful? They’re really such elegant creatures. And clean too. Everyone has misguided notions about them just because of what they eat. She cocks her head to the side and then, as if speaking mostly to herself she says, But eating carrion is a kind of cleaning too isn’t it? She looks at me, eyes bright. You’ll never guess how I got him.

A pickup truck passes our house, the driver oblivious to my mother, to the vulture, and I wonder how many odd occurrences I’ve missed just because I was on my way somewhere and too preoccupied to look around. Maybe the world is filled with women who have been recently abandoned by their priggish husbands strutting around with giant birds on leashes and I’ve never noticed. Maybe there’s strange things happening all the time, just out of sight, just beyond my focus. An odd feeling sweeps over me, something akin to loneliness.

Mom. Why don’t you come inside? Warm up a bit?

A compact SUV pulls into the driveway a few houses down and two women in dark dresses get out carrying pyrex casserole dishes covered in tin foil. One of the women shifts the dish to one arm and opens the rear driver’s side door, offers a hand to a kid—maybe five or six years old—wearing a dark suit and snow boots. He’s holding a mylar balloon that says Sorry for Your Loss. When he doesn’t take the woman’s hand and jumps down on his own, she joins the other woman inside.

The boy is looking our way and his eyes grow wide as he realizes what my mother is doing. Children always see more than adults and more than we give them credit for. The vulture flaps once, twice hard, but my mom pulls it back to the ground. I know the bird is probably attracted to the shine of the balloon but I can’t help but think it’s going after the child. It’s beak and talons are meant for tearing flesh and a terrible image flashes through my mind

My mother hasn’t noticed anything.

Did you know, she tells me, that in areas suspected of containing natural gas people will walk them like this, like I am, because they’re so good at sniffing it out. Amazing. Aren’t you amazing? Yes you are.

The boy takes a few steps toward us like he’s deciding whether to come over. I move to the edge of our lawn, in between the boy and the bird, in case I need to intercept.

Mom, I say with my eyes still on the boy, you know that’s probably because they’re used to sniffing the gas escaping from decomposing bodies, right? Why don’t you take a stroll and see if anything has gotten hit? Maybe you can use that bird to clean up like you said? Or go inside? We can go through some of that stuff you wanted to donate.

The boy moves closer. He’s only one yard away now, just an icy patch of mostly dead grass away from the vulture. I don’t want to have to run at him or yell and scare him, particularly after what I’m guessing has been a terrible day for him. But I will.

Hey, I call to the boy, that bird isn’t so friendly. Can you stay back a bit?

Instead of listening to me, he steps closer.

I’m so focused on the boy that I don’t realize my mother is staring at me.

You don’t have to manage me, be so delicate. I know you want to protect me from this. To help me shoulder what he did and all that he ruined, but you know he left you too. I’m doing my best. And it will get better.

The boy chooses that moment to let go of the balloon. The vulture flaps once, twice, and again my mother pulls him back down, but this time he doesn’t stop. I run and grab the leash and the bird drags us both forward, our boots slipping on the ice, but it doesn’t get away. The boy cackles and runs off. I guess he knew what would happen the whole time.

We hold on together until the balloon disappears and turns to a bright shiny dot over the snow-crusted trees. The vulture settles.

PINCH FORWARD MOTION OF TUMBLING by Angelo Maneage

May 17, 2021

Now we are walking down the riverbank and we still hear a dryer. I am confused by this. My mom says you should never get wet clothes but there is a garage sale by the riverbank where they are cheap. My mom says do not buy the clothes because they will be wet. I hadn’t even bought anything yet before she told me that they will be better if they are already dry. There were barely any things to buy. My mom kept saying go on buy them then she ran the dryer and looked at me.

Standing idle near my mom she said can you do this three times. It was funny because she needs an assistant and I had told her this and it was funny now because now I was her assistant after I had told her.

There was a dryer by the riverbank. I heard it talking to my mother. I looked over my right shoulder and saw her looking at me when I was buying clothes. I heard the dryer. She put her hand on her forehead and began to laugh. I looked over my left shoulder and saw a wall.

It was hard to get the dryer home without it electrocuting us on account of it was raining acid too. And that hurt you could tell from our cries. My clothes were dry though. I kept looking over my shoulder seeing my mom in front of me. I was walking backwards because I thought it would be safer but I kept hearing the dryer and got afraid so I turned around while we walked forward.

Through the riverbank there is a swamp right after it. It was a riverbank but they had no money or river. I was helping I thought when I bought anything. But it was wet and full of poison. Whenever I asked my mom what it was she would say something that was not a joke but sounded like a joke and we did not laugh.

I was afraid that after the amount of times we’d been electrocuted and burnt by the rain on our way home that we would not have bandages then be afraid to plug the dryer in to use. We didn’t really need a dryer but we were sick of our clothes crystalizing. Besides none of us were able to touch our head to our heel anyway.

My father I have dreams about. My mother tells me not to but you can. I had a dream about watching a father. I had dry clothes and my mother had bandages like me. We were rolling around asking for fathers and we were helped by one who had a pager on his hip. It started to rain but we’d already washed our clothes.

My mom with the dryer over her shoulder starts to yell at me for being tired. We all sit down a few trees from our house to rest. It is not too warm. It is raining but it doesn’t burn anymore. The dryer has a person in it that we did not see before.

I check all the coat pockets like the man of the house though I do not deal with bills or finances. I will put all of the found money into a black jar next to the stove. We will turn the stove on and forget about the jar. An open can of beans is there which is funny because it is next to money and it smells. We will forget the stove is on or off and check it several times.

We have to make a fire to stay warm because it is colder than my mom thought when she made me get us two more jackets with harmonicas in the pockets. My mom me and the dryer all sat by the fire with harmonicas.

There are only a few more trees left to burn down but we are in the northeast so it is more difficult to stay on fire. We want dry clothes. My mom looked at me over my shoulder and shook her head when I held up a rain jacket. It was wet. I did not know what was okay because I once saw an umbrella with holes in it and showed her and she laughed but now she was not laughing.

I heard a dryer when I listened for one. I wondered how far into the river we had to have gone. I wondered how many dryers were at the bank. My mom was looking at me when I told her I will just drink a little bit of the creek water when she told me that it was swamp water then said do what you want. I drank just a little bit of the creek water from the bank and had diarrhea. She told me that she did not feel good either and laughed and that we were getting pneumonias and we were. I’d gotten excited because the pneumonias were always so beautiful by this river though I was never interested in flowers.

There is a dryer we are using to burn things now because it gets too hot. I keep hearing my mom laugh at it and then it slams.

My mom told me to hang up the clothes. I bought the rug she bought once. We did not need the rug but I knew she liked it and she was so happy. We hung it during a holiday. It covered the whole part of the outside it was near. We would beat it and dust would come out of it. One day after we had it for a while I threw it on the ground. It was way bigger than I thought.

I am dreaming of my grandfather in the basement. I am thinking of a river.

There is a dryer in the background. I can hear it. Something like a claw and metal. I am in an onyx river. I do not know what onyx is. I am thinking of a river. I am thinking of my mother.

I look over my right shoulder. My mom is holding a lead dryer over her shoulder and she is laughing with it. It is spitting fire. I am picking up all the fire that is on the ground while the dryer is making noise. I have burns on my index finger and thumb because I am not really doing anything with the fire. She is seeing me and trying to help move the fire and now we both have burns on our index fingers and thumbs.

We are a few trees from our house when I can see the patterns. It is cold though it is warm right here. We are all together. This garden patch is where we slept.

CAMPARI SODA ISN’T AN AMPHIBIAN by Vi Khi Nao

May 13, 2021

In real life, the girl on the toilet is named KAY. Another girl, Vada, walks in and silently holds a gun to Kay’s head. Without making any demands. She turns to Kay and automatically offers one key to her. Vada takes a look at the key and contemplates whether to kill her or not. Vada pulls the trigger and Kay drops to the ground. She turns to the bathroom door and realizes that there is a key already in the lock. Vada walks towards the bar after exiting the bathroom. And, turns to the bartender and says, “My sex drive is an amphibian. It can go a very long time on water. Or stroll leisurely on land. I wish you could see the radiation beneath your eyelids.” The bartender turns to her and says, “Campari soda isn’t an amphibian, but it will make you drunk enough to feel like you are floating down the Mississippi.”

Vada twirls her fingers in her air and says, “Two of those please.”

The bartender responds, “I am sorry we ran out of Campari.”

“Why did you suggest it then?”

“Because Campari and amphibian share so many vowels and consonants and I wouldn’t want to deprive you of such linguistic liquor.”

“You don’t speak like a bartender.’

“What do I speak like?”

“Like an English teacher.”

“Close.”

“What is it then?”

“I play scrabble competitively.”

“For money?”

“For the education of my ego.”

“Tell me: would you prefer a key or a bullet?”

“Neither.”

“But if you had to choose.”

“A bullet.”

“Right.”

“Truman Capote wrote a book called In Cold Blood. An amphibian is a cold-blooded, ectothermic vertebrate. A bullet is a cold-blooded metal. Do you think if I make you a Bloody Mary – it would be cold-blooded enough?”

“May I have a highball?”

“That is how it ought to be served. However, we just ran out of tomato juice and dill pickle spear.”

“Are you playing with me?”

“One coming right up.”

In real life, the bartender is a bullfighter. He looks like Manolete. His face takes the shape of a thin pentagon. And, his chest hair grows massively, spilling over his clean white shirt and his bow tie, and it extends into the wall like English ivies, invading and gatecrashing into the brick walls and scaling up the old apartment complexes near the bar above the Greek restaurant. He was a bullfighter by day and a scrabble player in the afternoon and in the evening, he bartends.

“Your chest hair is a health hazard.”

“A fire hazard.”

“Has it killed anyone?”

“You mean has it strangled cats, dogs, and homeless folks?”

“I don’t mean it like that.”

“It just clogs up toilet bowls. It snakes into the bottom of the sewage system and whenever I stroll home, I drag home a city worth of tampons and wedding rings. I look like an eschatological version of a Christmas tree.”

“Does your chest hair get in the way of your—”

“You mean—bullfighting.”

“You’re a bullfighter too?”

“Yes, it makes me more of a complex beast. I get full respect from the bull.”

“Doesn’t it get in the way of your speed?”

“My chest hair?”

“What else?”

“It doesn’t. It makes me focus more. This jungle here.” The bartender waves his fingers agilely across his chest and continues, “My footwork must be flawless. It has made me more of a nimble, lithe, dexterous being. Because I always had to compensate for my chest hair—I had to be always on top of my game.”

“It seems like a very tiring life.”

“Hardly, I am clever, you see.”

“How?”

“My infraclavicular virtue makes me so much smarter than men who don’t have any hair. I make better decisions. It’s easier for me to win scrabble games. And, postmenopausal species are so much more attracted to me – especially when I wear a V-neck sweater. And, I could tell that you just killed someone in the bathroom with a bullet.”

“How did you know? You could see through walls?”

“My chest hair has been wet, not like a water wet – which is when the toilet bowl overflows, but wet as in thick – like blood is thicker than water thick – and so I knew the edges of my hair has been feeding secrets about you back to me. You see, I am clever. And, I wouldn’t be clever without the extraordinary circumference of my chest hair. A virtue! Now, the cops will be arriving soon because my chest hair just dialed the police station from meters away using my cellphone. So, while we wait for them to arrive, may I make you a Campari soda?”

“I thought you ran out?”

“My chest hair, again, just strolled to a liquor store a few blocks from here and purchased a couple of bottles for me.”

“It even paid for it using your credit card?”

“How did you know?”

LIKE NIGHTSHADE AND PERIODONTOLOGY by Rebekah Bergman

May 12, 2021

She scheduled all her overdue appointments for the same week. She went to the doctor, the dentist, and the gynecologist. She came back with three minor diagnoses and referrals for two other specialists.It was right around this time that all science started feeling like pseudoscience, modern medicine especially. It began with the nightshade.She could no longer sleep through the night for the itching. A rash that looked like raspberry jam had formed on the back of her neck. The allergist told her to stop eating nightshade. She was unsure if she had been eating nightshade.What was nightshade? It sounded like witchcraft. She began to question what food she put into her body, and what her body did with it.Two weeks later, her wisdom teeth were impacted. The pain in her gums was a fact she held onto. Still, she could not fully fathom that her body had grown these appendages—wisdom teeth. They were only mentioned when they failed.She became, slowly, sicker. As she did, she became more of a skeptic. She questioned what her body held inside it. And what it didn't. What it was capable of. And what it wasn’t.She had never seen, for instance, that she had such a thing as a brain or a heart.Some days she could convince herself that her own sense of self was a kind of delusion, like nightshade or periodontology. Had she always been like this?A memory of a chilly day in childhood. Sitting beside her father on a picnic blanket in the backyard. Him, reading her a book and sipping his coffee. Everything around them cozy, golden. She’d felt so loved, so hopefully curious in a world full of wonder.

When you die, she said, interrupting her father mid-sentence, can I cut your body open and look inside?

HYDROGEN AND HELIUM by Peter Krumbach

May 10, 2021

I misspell people’s faces. Cup them in my palms, kiss some, give a playful tug on the jowls of others. Good evening. Never better. Burghers of landfills and oak-lined boardrooms, white-collar criminals and donors of kidneys. Calculated together, they equal a mean designed to obscure the edges. I apologize, parties do this to me. The low ceiling track lights, the shag underfoot, the heads bobbing like olives in brine. I could have sworn it was Frank. Dressed as Biff. I bend to greet the elders collapsed in mid-century chairs. Boredom, meet urgency. I bend to your aunt Wilma, who turns out to be your stepfather’s 94-year-old cousin Lou. Forgive me. To regard the room is to learn constellations. The ochre in the white of certain eyes. I’m not the only one bending. Notice Larry–or is it Barry–how he bows to smell the toothpick-pierced prosciutto rolls. Do I need air? Out on the deck, two PhDs and an Anglican dean lighting a blunt. Why did the universe start off with hydrogen and helium? The PhDs chuckle. Way too young for their degrees. The dean holds his breath, then exhales fine haze. Pardon my bladder. On the bathroom mirror, someone wrote N = R × f_p × n_e × f_l × f_i × f_c × L in coral rouge. Stepping out, I hear someone suggest a duel by the pool. A reenactment of Pushkin versus d’Anthès. A thousand dreams that never were. For you, I play Pushkin. It works. I come to supine, you kneeling in the grass, hand on my head. I point at the leaves. Red, white, red, white, the ambulance strobe-lights salsa with the trees.

FROG CIGARETTES by Brendan Gillen

May 6, 2021

Two at a time, take the steps ’til I’m out of breath. Mom doesn’t know. Attic stiff with heat. Cobwebs like lightning. Know I’m after something important, just haven’t found it yet. Up here there’s a tool chest by the mannequin. Been around long as I’ve been sneaking up. Since I was seven maybe. The years feel like gym class. Around and around and leave me dizzy. The dust is thick and my eyes itch.

Not supposed to be up here because it’s where Dad used to come and hide. Maybe Mom thinks part of him is still up here and that I’ll find it. Plus, it’s dangerous. Least that’s what she thinks. Ladder is rotted, creaky, and there are nails and stuff. I even found a dead frog one time, buried it in the backyard with my baseball cards.

All kinds of junk. Typewriter with keys like busted teeth, switch knife with a comb for a blade, empty birdcage from when Nell and Coffee were alive. Mom keeps saying she’s going to clear it all out, sell some of it, but she never does, just sits and reads magazines and drinks her iced tea. Who’d want to buy this crap, anyway? Besides, I’d never let her.

There are splinters. Got one underneath my thumb skin once two years ago. Hurt real bad and I tried to fish it out with a pin from an old sewing kit, but I only jammed it in more and made it bleed. I didn’t tell Mom until a week later because my thumb started looking like a grape. She took me to Doctor Aimes who used little pliers to take it out and drain the pus. I only cried a little, I swear.

Mom took me for ice cream after and then she spanked me at home in the kitchen with the metal spatula. Almost hurt as much as the splinter, but I didn’t cry because I knew what to expect by then. Mom would start off hitting pretty hard, but by the fifth or sixth whack, her heart wasn’t in it anymore and I could tell she just wanted to go back to the magazines and iced tea. When she hits me now, she looks a little scared like she thinks one day I might start to hit back.

In the corner where the slanted roof meets the floor, there’s a TV with a hole punched through it. I’m glad it doesn’t work. TV makes people stop talking to each other. Like when Dad was still around, he and Mom would leave me the dishes in the sink and then go watch Wheel of Fortune and pretend they didn’t hate each other’s guts.

Once I even asked Mom did she hate Dad’s guts and all she said was, “Of course, but he hates mine too, so we’re even.”

Then I asked her did she hate my guts, and she smiled and said, “Not yet.”

I find a rumpled pack of cigarettes I can’t believe I never saw before in an old shoebox behind the busted TV. The pack is green and I open it up. There’s two left and one of ‘em is pretty squished. I take that one out and smell it. Smells different than when you smoke it. This was the kind Dad used to like. Or probably he still likes them, I don’t know.

I think about eating the cigarette, just something about it, but instead I tear it open and all the brown leaves sprinkle on the floor. But then I get nervous because what if another frog comes up and eats the leaves and he dies too? I make the leaves into a neat little pile and lick my fingers so the leaves stick to my fingers and I put them in my mouth. It’s gross and tastes like spoiled dirt, but I swallow it down so at least the frogs will be safe.

I go over to the mannequin and sit on the floor and pull my knees up and think about how I wish it wasn’t the first day of summer break. Summer just means trying to find things to do that aren’t the two of us pretending like Mom isn’t still sad about Dad being gone. I hate school but at least it’s something to do. That’s why I like when Mom goes out for more iced tea so I can come up here. I’ve never shown this place to anyone.

There’s a girl I like in my grade, her name is Katie Wray. She wears braids and doesn’t know I like her. It’s better that way because if I told her and she doesn’t like me back it would all be ruined. I think about bringing her up here someday. I’d tell her to watch her head for the slanting roof and be careful touching the beams because of splinters. I’d tell her I got one in my thumb a few years back and that it hurt pretty bad, but no way I’d tell her about the crying or getting spanked.

I think she’d like it up here. Who wouldn’t? I know she likes books because she’s always raising her hand to read in Mr. Foley’s class. I like hearing her read. She’s got a voice that would be nice to listen to on the phone. There are some books up here I could show her. There’s one about gardening, and a real beat up one called Find Your True Calling, and one about the birds of the Southeast. I set aside the bird one because it seems like the kind of thing Katie would like.

I stand up and stoop so I don’t bang my head. My gut gurgles and lurches to the left.

Uh oh.

I burp and taste old dirt and my stomach feels like going over a dip in the car. If I hurl up here, Mom will find out and I’ll never get to come back up again. I get a lot of spit in my mouth like when Mom makes hamburgers, except I’ve never been less hungry in my whole life and the thought of burgers makes me burp again. I pick up the bird book and take it with me and make my way backwards down the ladder.

There’s a bubble in my head and I run downstairs and through the kitchen and out into the backyard just in time because I bend over and spew right there in the grass near the birdfeeder. My eyes burn and my nose runs. I breathe and breathe until my stomach finally stops being pissed.

I sit there in the grass and start to cry because this day is nothing and summer only just started and I got spew on my t-shirt. Mom will see it when she does the wash so I think about chucking it, but then she’ll notice it’s gone because it’s the Braves one I wear all the time and if I tell her I traded it to Jasper Nicks down the street, she’ll either smack me for lying or smack me for trading away a good shirt. I feel like a dummy for crying, and that only makes me cry more.

I see something move in the grass by my shoe. It moves again and the grass sort of twitches and I see what it is. A frog.

“Hey buddy,” I say real soft and it hops closer to my foot. I want to hold it, so I move really, really slowly and carefully and don’t even dry my face. I lean over so carefully and the frog doesn’t move. He lets me pick him right up in my palm. His eyes slide around like he’s not so sure about this and his throat is moving real fast, so I say, “Hey, it’s okay, I got you.”

He’s heavier than I thought, the weight of a baseball maybe, and he feels a little like the way an orange out the fridge feels. I really want to pet him with my other hand, but I’m afraid to scare him, so instead I think about how I’m going to tell Katie about him when school starts up again in August. It’s a long way away, but I’ll remember. I’ll tell her the frog liked being in my hand because he trusted me.

There’s the pop and crunch of gravel, the sound of Mom turning into the driveway. I’ll tell her about my t-shirt because I don’t care anymore and she’ll get the spatula anyway, but for now I lower my hand and before I even get to the ground, the frog knows what to do and hops off into the grass. I lose him for a second, but then he hops again and again and off into the summer, like he’s telling me something as big as love, Thank you, thank you, thank you.