Flash

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.

COME HOME NOW by Danielle Chelosky

May 5, 2021

When apologizing to you for fucking up, I’d buy you flowers. The first ones were blue—not like the sky, but abrasive and ethereal like from a video game. I broke the stems so they would fit in my bag without peeking out, and the color dripped onto my palms and stained them for days. If it were red, it would have felt accusatory; this ultramarine was comforting, safe.

The risk for fucking up was lethal. Not for me, but for you.

I was seventeen. I fell in love fast, curled up against you while we watched movies. My mom spammed my phone one night with texts: There’s a tornado warning !!! Come home now !!! We laughed. Tornadoes never happen on Long Island. American Beauty played on the screen in front of us. We kissed while the storm raged, the wind vibrating the house, my phone buzzing.

You spent every night in my bed for months. When I unplugged yellow lights, I left the blue ones in. Then, as if by association, I’d reach my lips up to yours and climb on top of you. We fucked slow and carefully, as if the whole thing were fragile. I love being inside you, you’d say, so in love. We talked about getting married every day.

I checked your location. You checked mine. We were both dots on a map.

In the winter, we drove up to Syracuse. We dawdled around a DIY venue waiting for a band called Fiddlehead to play songs about grief. Rumors circulated that they were late because the frontman was a teacher and he got held late at school. You got nervous in crowds, but I held your hand. They went on and the sound quality was abominable in the best way. Static rang in our ears. You took photos with our shared disposable camera. In one, the band is drenched in a deep blue, almost underwater.

I am not anybody’s first, or second, or third, your poetry read, written years before. I am a residence put up for foreclosure, the weeds overgrown and the flowers dead.

We drove to Maine for another trip. After a show in Connecticut, we went to a hotel in Massachusetts. The air conditioner turned on and off throughout the night, waking both of us at 4 A.M., our consciousness syncing up. You wrote of the moment: “A kiss good night turned into passionate caresses until I found myself inside her half-asleep. We made love in a dazed narcoleptic dream. We then fell back asleep, this time fully naked, knotted in each other’s arms and legs.”

You worried you weren’t enough for me. You were often insecure, often implying that I was a slut.

According to News 12, there is about one tornado on Long Island every year. Where am I during these?

Another old poem of yours: Awoken by shrieks rippling into the dreading silence of 4am, I wipe the cold sweat from my forehead. The hazy vision from the night prior still remains. I think to myself how it reminds me of the steamy car windows that probably still reek of one too many stale beers and poor decisions. The rain still beats the gutters relentlessly and my headache pounds just as heavily.

You were a scorpio, a water sign. Sensitive, sentimental, intense.

I had the house to myself one night. You came over and we watched Pulp Fiction on my couch. I wanted to be Uma Thurman—mysterious, smoking cigarettes, bleeding out of my nose. We made cookies and popcorn, and then you fucked me on my translucent kitchen table because you could.

You kept getting sick. I didn’t know what that meant.

Maybe every time there was a tornado on Long Island, I was away with you. Maybe it was when we went to North Carolina. Or during our trip to West Virginia. Or amidst our Pittsburgh adventure. Or while we were at your aunt’s lake house in New Jersey.

We fought in the parking lot of a casino, but it was romantic. You hugged me every time I cried.

You were growing away from me. I checked your location. You were at a friend’s house. I thought you loved being inside me, then you weren’t even near me. When you were, I unplugged the yellow and blue lights at the same time, knowing you didn’t want your body in mine. I wished we weren’t separate entities. I wanted to be one with you. There was a gap between us, filled with static.

There is a website where people can predict tornadoes. The worst one to ever strike Long Island will be on July 9, 2141. I won’t be alive to watch it.

I checked your location. You were getting heroin. I had no choice but to go about my day. I went to Barnes and Noble because I needed books for class. I slid paperbacks into my bag and headed to the restrooms to sob and try calling you again. On the line, a woman told me: You look like a cartoon. Not in a bad way, I’m an artist.

You moved to Philadelphia for recovery. I drank gin in my room alone. The dot became a never-ending loading symbol.

One morning, I was sitting at a cafe reading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and getting ready to drive to you. It was two and a half hours away and the drive sometimes gave me panic attacks. I always went 90 on the Jersey Turnpike. When I started cleaning up to leave, you texted me asking if we could do the next day. I cried and cried and cried. I found out later that it was because you relapsed and were sick again.

I asked you if you could get me flowers. You never did.

You found someone else to love when I faded out of your life. Someone to spend nights in hotels with. Someone to post pictures of. Someone to replace me. Someone to relapse with—even better than me. I was someone you hid from; she got to see you down to your core, float with you in that staticky world you loved to escape to. Someone to save you, someone to bring you back from the dead, someone to wake you up from that nightmare that took the air out of your lungs. I was in another state when your heart stopped beating, and I didn’t find out until months later, like it never happened. I can’t hate her because she is why you’re still alive.

A loneliness flooded in that I had not felt in years. I thought: I am not anybody’s first, or second, or third.

I underlined in Bluets: “For to wish to forget how much you loved someone — and then, to actually forget — can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart.”

I have memories, but they are just images, ideas, fragments, poems, parts, pieces, and you are just a person, far away, a dot on a map I no longer have, a tornado swirling through a different city.

A VIEW FROM THE CITY by Elliot Alpern

May 3, 2021

I see the backs of your shoulders—there you are, right there—on a bench by the harbor, where it’s windy, and where there’s a nice clear view of the monster ambling toward the city.

“Hello,” I call out. You look each way, left and then right and then left again, but not behind, and so I jog lightly to your bench, take the seat beside you.

“Hello,” I say again, this time a bit breathlessly.

“Oh,” you say, “hey, I thought I heard your voice.”

You look the same. And that’s with some years, a different haircut, a sort of quiet glow that didn’t use to be there. But all of that’s garnish—you look exactly, exactly the same.

“It’s crazy,” I say, and then I look out at the water, so you can’t see yourself in my eyes. “They’re saying he’ll make landfall next month.”

“I heard that too! Yeah. I guess we’ll see. How’s your parents?”

“Fine.”

I think you do genuinely want to know how my parents are holding up, or at least my mom; I know you’d been close. Maybe closer than we were, me and you, maybe even me and Mom. But, I’m sure you understand—I can’t give you everything here.

“Good,” you say.

Maybe two, maybe three miles out into the ocean, the monster attracts a looney-tune halo of seagulls, and he walks slowly—no more than a few steps per day—but he does not rest. His is a beeline path, an inevitability by all accounts, straight for the busy heart of the city.

“I quit smoking weed,” I tell you, and immediately, I want to snatch the words back out of the air, stuff them right back down my stupid throat.

“That’s great,” you say with a smile, nodding, “that’s fantastic.”

“Did you—”

“I always hoped, you know. I just think that’s really, that’s just, great.”

“Right,” I say.

A helicopter buzzes out over the harbor, banking sharply out toward the big guy. There’s always so many on this side of the city, now—they like to keep tabs on him, I guess, or maybe they just don’t want him to get too lonely out there.

“Did you and, uh, Mark, did you guys figure out what you’re doing?” I ask. This is the hot new question of the summer. Do you know what you’re gonna do? And, do you? Does anyone?

“We’re leaving,” you say, only you say it with a weight, and an anchored rhythm, like you tried to say “I love him” and spoke the wrong language.

“Why?”

“Well we can’t stay,” you say, “obviously.” You look out at the monster in the harbor, and I look out at the monster in the harbor, and he keeps walking. He always keeps walking.

“And Mark says he’s not worried about finding something, even if it’s just running, you know, IT somewhere.”

“I’m sure.”

I am. Mark was nice the one time we met, and unfortunately rather sharp, and I remember most that he possessed a deep interest in curling. I couldn’t point you to the nearest rink.

“Do you think he’ll keep going?” I ask.

“Where?”

“Past the city. Through it, just, keep on walking. Right on through the heartlands.”

You sigh. I’m sure you tell yourself, this is why, right here, this is it. This is what you couldn’t take any longer.

“I don’t know,” you say. “Who knows. Maybe he’ll hang out on the beach.”

“Yeah. Anyway I hope it goes well,” I say. “Moving sucks. But, on to better things, which is always good.”

“Mhmm.”

You look like you want to say something else, and you do, you open your mouth to tell me, but the monster makes that sound—that annoying, lonely yelp, pitching up after a short while, like some stupid question, always the same one, over and over again. The monster so absolutely, impossibly immense, that we can hear it all these miles away, here in the city. All of us, we can all hear it getting louder, every day.

You and I could’ve left it there, on that note, in the unanswered silence.

But.

You can’t.

“And I’m due in the fall,” you say, eyes glittering. Which, of course, you didn’t have to tell me. I could have found it out on Instagram, or Facebook, like people normally do now, or through my mom, obviously, or I could have lived my whole life not knowing, could have died not knowing. Just fine.

“Whoa,” I say. “Congratulations—that’s amazing, I, uh, I’m sure. That’ll be wonderful.”

A pause, the only time I remember wanting that monster to ask its dumb fucking question again, but it won’t, and so we have to sit in this quiet, and the breeze. Since I can’t possibly say more about that.

Another helicopter buzzes past, this time inbound, a long fat day of monster-watching, I’m sure. There used to be birds in this park, quite a lot of them, but I don’t think they like the down-wash.

“I’m gonna have to get going,” you say eventually. “Do you want to walk back, grab coffee on the way? Do you have anywhere to be?”

“Nah, you go ahead,” I say. “Tell Mark I said hi. And, you know, hope the move is smooth. Hire movers.”

“Oh we will,” you say. “Be well!”

I’ll be well. She’ll be well. I don’t particularly think we’ll see each other again, and that’s alright. And she’ll have a nice full family at Christmas, now, and that’s alright. And the monster is going to walk right over this city, asking its question to bleeding ears, and I don’t think I have an answer for him, really, I don’t think anyone will. And that’s just alright by me.

LIZARD BLOOD by Alisha Wexler

April 28, 2021

Tuesday I wake up damp with a clenched jaw. Dirty towels on the ground reeking of mildew. Why do people record their dreams? Dreams are trout in bare hands—let them slip free! Mine are so generic anyway. I pluck out my teeth one-by-one like daisy petals. He loves me, I say with blood pouring down my hand, he loves me not. I move on. I weasel out of New York lease. I get out of bed. I go into the bathroom. I put on the clammy moist bikini hanging over the shower rod. I lay by the kidney-shaped pool in the backyard.

I’m still in Arizona—the McMansion in the Sonoran Desert. It’s the house I grew up in that my dead mother left to me. I’ve been here a month. By now, I should have renovated the house. I should have listed it on the market. But for who to buy? The houses in the neighborhood are still boarded up and owned by banks. Occupied by squatters. No one’s moving in. I should have signed the deed over to my stepdad, Neil. But I’ve done nothing except lay by the pool.

My friend in New York texts me: WHAT is even in the Southwest suburbs?

I reply: Pools.

This pool is where I had my first kiss. It’s where the Mormon girls in my neighborhood baptized me by holding my head underwater until I felt the walls of my lungs vacuum seal together.

I lay across slabs of sandstone, basking in the sun. Lizards join me: geckos and horny-toads.

When my dead boyfriend was alive, he called me reptilian—an ongoing joke that I hated. He first mentioned it when he saw how freakishly long my tongue was, then in passive aggressive jest about my short attention span. Sometimes he mentioned it when he heard my croaky morning voice, and once when he noticed the yellowish green of my eyes. Mostly, he said it when I was cold. I resented this. Being called ectothermic—associated with cold-bloodedness.

In the Sonoran Desert, the children are playing in the cul-de-sac and the teenagers are overdosing on Fentanyl. I take a deep breath of air polluted with endocrine disruptors. Yesterday I parked behind the drug store and watched a malnourished coyote lap up roadkill. Today I see the sun glittering like chrome sparks off the pool’s little wakes. Everyday, I get up and drive twenty minutes to the nearest Starbucks just to hear someone tell me “good morning” and remind me I exist.

***

Wednesday I wake up, put on the damp bikini, lay by the pool.

At noon, Neil comes over to check the chlorine levels, filters, and pumps. He circles the perimeter, skimming out leaves and drowned moths. “The Little Guy is broken,” he tells me. The Little Guy is what he calls the suction scooter that scours the pool like a bottom-feeder.

The older he gets, the deeper his voice becomes. I now hear the Oklahoma drawl he suppressed for years. Though, he’s not “old” per se. He’s only sixteen years older than me. I run the numbers in my head. Married my mother when he was 24, she was 47, I was 8. Oddly, the older he gets, the younger he looks. Maybe it’s the relief of my nutcase mother being in the ground, maybe it’s his even tan, or just the glow of new sobriety. He’s got those angular lower abs that gesture toward his dick. Had he always had those? I can’t believe my mom made me call him Daddy.

I dog-paddle to the narrow part of the kidney and rest my elbows on the lip of the pool, letting water dribble out of my mouth.

“Neil,” I say, “the jackrabbits are committing suicide.”

“I don’t blame them.”

“I’ve run over several on the road underneath the arroyo. They hop out into the middle and just sit there. I swerve, they leap in the same direction. Splat!”

“Don’t swerve. Jackrabbits seek thrill. They play chicken. You just go straight at ‘em and they’ll jump out of the way.”

I think about games of chicken. Two fighters racing toward each other only to surrender at the exact same time, pull out in the exact same direction, collide anyway. Two cowards who die without dignity.

That night I wrote a letter to my dead boyfriend.

Are you one of those people who see animal instincts as omens or warnings? You know, how in apocalypse/natural disaster movies the first sign of things taking a turn for the worst is always strange animal behavior? I’m one of those people.

This is why I left Arizona years ago. There were animals—animals everywhere. I’d walk out my front door and see roadrunners darting down the sidewalk. I saw coyotes sniffing through the garbage. Late at night, I’d pull into the driveway, headlights beaming onto cottontail families as they scurried out of the lawns. Their habitats: the sage, saguaros, and brier, were being torn out and scorched to the ground to lay down concrete. New roads paved. The foundation to build bigger but weaker houses; ugly houses with confused architectural styles. This isn’t to say that the animals “sensed” an economic crash, but it was a sign (more literal than symbolic) that something was about to change.

I wish you could smell my skin now: coconut and chlorine. Maybe I don’t shower enough. I am so tired and sun-drunk and regular drunk. I drank a lot of tequila. I ate a lot of Xanax. Perhaps I’ll see you in Hell very soon.

Until we meet again,

***

Thursday I wake up, put on the damp bikini, lay by the pool.

Another friend texts me: Damn the desert’s a VIBE

I reply hell yaaa and swat a wasp away from my thigh.

U working on anything out there?

No. Just vibing.

When the sun sets I drive to Starbucks and take the road under the arroyo. A jackrabbit is there, as always. I charge straight at it, as Neil advised. It doesn’t jump away. My heart swishes around my chest like a squid in a small net when I feel the crunch under my tire.

At night, Neil calls to tell me that my yard is infested with scorpions. It’s nice of him to help out as much as he does, I think, considering he’s a gold digger who didn’t get the inheritance he married for. I feel an odd responsibility to take care of my dead mom’s cowboy gigolo widower. I’ll give him money, but I’ll never give him this piece of shit house.

I go outside with a blacklight. He was right. I see scorpions glowing fluorescent blue—too many to count—they’re crawling on the ground and wriggling up the walls. People who don’t believe that there is pure horror in this world have never done this: gone into the desert night with a blacklight.

***

Friday I wake up, put on the damp bikini, lay by the pool.

The least serene day of the week: band practice. A death metal band plays in a garage up the street. There are guttural shrieks and heavy base. Boys squealing like injured pigs—various patterns of the words:

GUT

FUCK

CUM

SLUT

CUNT

PUNCH

It ends with them repeating:

INSIDIOUS

I roll over onto my stomach and untie my bikini. A lizard is back. He doesn’t flinch. He holds his head regally high toward the sun.

I jump into the pool and hold my breath. I wonder if I can stay down long enough to feel the walls of my lungs kiss like they did the time I was baptized.

I imagined New York, slinking into bed when my boyfriend’s body was still warm. I swung my leg over his leg, braided my knee under his knee, my ankle over his ankle. He said he felt the night’s chill soaked into my skin. His was burning feverishly. We lied there entwined, regulating each other’s body temperatures. Morphing into one another. Yin and yang. The next night an ambulance flashed lights over our unmade bed. Ripples of blanket and sheets looked like the waves of a red hot sea.

I emerge from the water’s surface and gasp. I climb out of the pool and offer myself to the sun. I turn toward it. I indulge in it. It warms my lizard blood, and when the wasps come buzzing, I’ll shoot my lizard tongue twice as far as my height and eat them. Later today, I’ll find a way to numb my lizard brain. And when I no longer like my lizard tail, I will chop it off and it will grow right back.

THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER by Gabrielle McAree

April 22, 2021

Dad has the emotional range of a runt-sized peanut. He hates the internet, roundabouts, tap water, trash collection, anyone called “Jerry.” He doesn’t trust directions and believes the government is listening in on his conversations. Dad grows a four-inch beard as an act of defiance, because it looks nothing like his driver’s license picture, and swears off technology. His collection of gray hair disappoints him, so he buys an electric blue Camaro.

***

When Dad turns 63, I pick up a cake from the store. Half chocolate, half vanilla to curb his untreated bipolar disorder. I remember to be vigilant, but Dad counts each wax candle with the tenacity of a bored mathematician.

“You’re not good with numbers, Darby,” he says.

He’s joking, but my face turns the color of ripe tomatoes. When I forget a candle, everyone laughs at my dereliction, my stupidity. “I studied theatre,” I object, my voice two sizes too small. But my claim is futile; my siblings have PhDs attached to their names. I don’t.

***

I screw my eyes shut as Dad slams cabinets and drawers, looking for his checkbook, his car keys, his wallet, his readers. We search behind potted plants, between freezer meat, amidst his collection of coffee mugs, below the kitchen sink. His things are nowhere and everywhere, scattered around the house like an expert game of Where’s Waldo.

“I’d lose my head if it wasn’t attached,” he says. His self-hate is camouflaged by Dad Humor, the color of sunshine and imported silk. It is impossible not to love him.

Dad finds his checkbook in his coat pocket. His keys in the cupholder. His wallet in the washer. His readers in the pantry next to the peanut shells. Everyone laughs the same choked, plaintive laugh, but we actively fail Dad as he sinks into an amnesiac-sponsored abyss.

Dad is a renowned surgeon. He’s been saving lives for thirty-plus years—one appendectomy at a time—but he forgets his cellphone on the charger and can’t remember to take the dogs out. Their hoarse barks cut through glass. Why can’t I remember? Dad asks, gluing his leathery hands to his eye sockets, rubbing his skin an unforgiving red. He gives the dogs extra treats to counterpose his laxness. All is forgiven.

I bury myself in books I don’t understand.

“Why can’t Dad remember?” I ask a cashier clerk, the expired tub of animal crackers, oblivion. Surely, there is an answer.

“There’s an answer for everything,” Dad says. “It’s good you’re pretty, Darby.”

I read and read and read.

***

I go local for college and save Dad money by commuting. On Sundays, we sit in matching gray, leather chairs by the fireplace. Dad tells me about his sister, Jenny, who joined the Peace Corps and changed her name to Loki; his favorite dog, Hamish; how he regrets: not joining the Army; not competing in triathlons; not taking Sami Gates to his senior prom.

“Getting old sucks,” he says. “Your regrets look like a grocery list. Cheat age if you can, Darby.” But he doesn’t tell me how.

Dad takes a party platter of vitamins—collagen, crocin, retinol, magnesium—and drinks a glass of red wine before bed, toasting to the vestige of his youth.

I look at myself in the mirror for traces of him and keep the water running so he can’t hear me cry. I am older every day and can’t afford to feel better about my relation to mortality. I don’t have money for distractions.

***

My sister sends her wedding invitation in the mail. She’s marrying a guy from medical school, Mark Something. Mark Something believes Dad has early-onset Alzheimer’s. I’m not asked to be in the wedding party, but my other sister, the dentist, is maid of honor. My brothers, groomsmen. Dad asks why I don’t have a career. He says, “Maybe if you had a career, you’d be in your sister’s wedding.”

Dad pays the wedding tab with his American Express Black Card, but forgets his suit at home, so I drive back in rush-hour traffic to retrieve it. He can’t walk down the aisle in his Notre Dame jersey and orange board shorts.

Dad’s collection of ex-wives sit in the last pew, in chronological order. Throughout the service, he turns around to look at them, the physical representations of his life, decade after decade, each a nod to his impermanence. Gloria, Dakota, Macie, Rebecca, Lorraine. They agree Dad is a good man, he just couldn’t remember things they wanted him to remember. They all signed prenups, so Dad keeps his cabin in the woods, his 13 acres, his Camaro.

***

When I’m nine, I learn that everything dies. Humans, insects, rats, nature, inanimate objects. At first, I don’t accept this. I cry into Dad’s lap, staining his favorite corduroys. He strokes my hair while lecturing me on biology, science, The Lion King. We’re at my sister’s softball practice. Dad lets me sob, hysterically, without shushing me.

He says, “Forever is boring, Darby. Imagine paying taxes forever.”

***

At 66, Dad is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Mark gloats. My siblings strategize at the kitchen table without me. Dad gets a catheter two months later. He wants to drink Irish whiskey and sleep. I listen to his stories. I am all his children, his wives, his friends. I cover him in thick blankets and empty his urine. When Dad dies, he leaves me the electric blue Camaro, the log cabin, everything. My siblings hire an attorney. A letter arrives, postmarked before Dad’s death. It reads: Darby, you were always my favorite.

The next morning, I lose my keys.

HOW THE WIND DOES BLOW AND BLOW by Kevin Grauke

April 21, 2021

If you’re smart, don’t ever let Claudette Aarons catch you reading anything, not even a magazine, because if she does, she’ll for sure say, “You know what you should be reading instead of that, don’t you? You should be reading Dorothy Scarborough’s The Wind.”

Don’t ask her how come, because she’ll tell you how come for an hour. And don’t lie and say you’ve already read it, because then she’ll expect you to discuss it forevermore. And don’t ignore her, either, because she’ll just take that the same as if you’d asked her how come. Your best bet is to simply cross the street as soon as you see her coming.

Nobody in town, not even Claudette’s own daughter, has ever bothered to read it—mostly out of pure orneriness, probably. Regardless, everyone still knows its story backwards and forwards, since that’s all she’ll fill your ear with whenever the wind happens to kick up, which is pretty much every day that ends with a ‘y.’ Yes, the wind does blow and blow here in Yonder, and it blows because there’s not a goddamn thing big enough to ever slow it down—not any buildings taller than a telephone pole, not any trees that qualify to be called as such, not anything. It’s good for the windmills drawing up water from the aquifer for the stock tanks, and it’s good for the wind farms that’ve turned the land north of 20 into some strange Martian landscape, but it’s not good for much else. In the summer, it huffs and puffs oven-hot up from Mexico (or Old Mexico, as Boyd Pinkston, who probably remembers Pancho Villa, still calls it), and in the winter it screams icebox-cold down from the North Pole. No matter the season, by the end of the day your skin is liable to feel rasped raw. And at night, while you’re waiting for sleep and dreams to come, it just keeps on whistling its lonesome blues beneath your door until the sun finally comes up, usually to roast you alive before you’ve poured your second cup of coffee.

As bad as the wind can be, though, it’s never as bad as Claudette’s favorite book would have you believe. Written in 1925 and set in the 1880s, it tells the story of a young woman named Letty, who was forced to move from the green fields of Virginia to a ranch just west of Sweetwater.

“Can you believe that?” Claudette says, all bug-eyed. “Of all the places that Dorothy Scarborough could’ve moved Letty to! Just west of Sweetwater! Letty even mentions Yonder a few times!”

Some folks say that Claudette’s been like this—just as crazy as a bullbat when it comes to the wind—ever since she was a little girl. Other folks say it’s only been since a tornado south of Archer City flung her fiancé’s truck into a Dairy Queen like so much trash. But even that was a long time ago.

“They made a silent movie based on it, you know,” Claudette will continue. “It was one of the last MGM made. Lillian Gish played Letty. Can you believe that? Lillian Gish!” Everybody except maybe Boyd Pinkston has to pretend to understand why this is a big deal. “They filmed it in the Mojave Desert, though, not here,” Claudette grumbles. “Those Hollywood pinkos couldn’t handle the real thing.”

Letty is eventually driven so insane by the wind, Claudette explains, that she kills a man and then commits suicide by running straight into a dust storm.

“What’d she do, suffocate?” asked Vance Wickersham once. “That seems like a bit of a stretch, don’t you think? She’d’ve really had to work at doing that, seems like. There’s lots easier ways.”

“But it makes sense how that other part could happen,” Claudette shot back. “The killing part, I mean. Because, I swear, sometimes the wind just makes you want to mow everyone down with both barrels.”

Though most folks smile and nod their heads when she talks like this, nobody knows what the hell she means exactly. Sure, when the wind makes the traffic light down on the square rock and creak on its wire late at night, it does have a way of making you feel like a lost and lonely soul, especially if it’s long after everybody else has gone home to bed and you’re standing there all by yourself, but that’s nothing that a few beers can’t usually fix. Regardless, everyone with a lick of sense knows to steer clear of Claudette whenever a dust storm or a blue norther is fixing to howl and churn into town, because it’s a known fact that, thanks to her Daddy, who raised her like a boy since he was cursed with five daughters and no sons, she may be even more of a deadeye shot than Zell Wylie, and that’s saying something. Zell, after all, once shattered a bottle of Pearl with a shot fired from two hundred yards. Kid Gillespie hadn’t even been expecting it. He’d just happened to been drinking in the gravel lot of the domino parlor when Zell decided to take aim at it for no particular reason. Had Claudette been there, she probably would’ve taken the shot from fifty yards further away, seeing as how she’s never been one to shy away from a challenge—and plugged it, too—just as long as Kid held his hand steady, but now he’s got Parkinson’s tremors so bad that he can’t even play 42 anymore, not without scattering dominoes every which way. These days, all he does is stand around and watch, usually with his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his jeans to keep them flapping about like broken-winged doves.