Flash

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.

MY MOTHER TOLD ME YOU COULD ONLY KNOW THAT ORANGES WERE GOOD IF THEY SMELLED LIKE FLORIDA by Megan M. Garwood

April 19, 2021

At the grocery store, I am buying whole milk and skim milk because I like to put whole milk in my coffee and I like to use skim milk in my Smacks. I am reaching for a gallon jug when I feel someone grab my butt with a heavy hand. I turn around to see a man with little expression pat my rear. I ask him what does he think he is doing and he smiles and tells me to have a nice day. I am scared but also complimented. I am in the cereal aisle now, and I think I deserve more than just Smacks. The boxes are colorful bounty and I am a robber on lookout. I see a toucan who is sledding into a bowl of colorful donuts. It must be Christmastime. I thought it was summer. I feel a hand on my breast. I look down and see bright pink nails, like claws, with airbrushed flamingos on them. She squeezes again and says, honk! honk! Her smile is big like one of those lawyers on late-night TV. I don’t understand, I say, but I don’t think she hears me and says, thanks for the feel. Normally, I would run away, but where would I go? I suppose that is a question I must answer. Instead, I turn to a familiar face that I haven’t seen in a while: Count Chocula, levitating white marshmallows with his mind. It really must be Christmas. Now I’m in aisle three. I promised myself I would not be in three, but I am here, looking at the chocolate bars. I pass the fancy ones because who needs to pretend to want coconut sugar. It is okay. It is for someone else: she’s probably wonderful, and she probably squeezes her own orange juice and maybe she pours it into little juice glasses for her family, but I am trying to make it to the checkout without dying. There are Santa Clauses filled with whipped peanut butter. I pause. There is a Santa filled with marshmallow. I wonder. There is an angel filled with toffee. I feel a hand again, this time on my upper thigh, like it is guiding me into a yoga pose. I look down. It belongs to a teenage boy, acne like volcanos erupting. Tongue out, he pants like a dog. I think this is illegal, and I worry about cameras. I ask him what he wants, and he barks at me and squeezes the soft flesh under my stretch pants and asks what it’s doing there. Now I am sad. I feel useless, and I politely ask him to remove his paw. I reach for the Santas with peanut butter, the Santa with marshmallow, and the thin angel filled with toffee, and I cry a little on the walk to the checkout. I forgot orange juice and I remember that I will never be someone who juices my own fruit or chooses the coconut sugar over the chemical, and I wonder how people do their makeup every day. I decide I am going to do it, I am going to juice an orange, and when I take an orange to my nose to smell for ripeness, I feel a pull at my hair, and a hand dig to the root to fill its fingers with my uncombed mane. I turn to see the hand belongs to the manager of the store, and he tells me that we can’t smell the fruit before we purchase it. I ask him how, then, does one know if the fruit is good without feeling it or smelling it. I tell him how my mother told me you could only know an orange was good after you smelled its navel and it smelled like Florida. His response is to pull my head back hard until I look up to the industrial beams and iron-looking light fixtures and see a little bird tweeting and it looks like it winked, but I cannot be sure because it is so far away, but I would bet on it. So I go over to the cold section, and I bend down to look at the juice selection and someone hooks their finger into my mouth and pulls at the corner until I snarl. I see it is a man in a suit with a nice gold watch and shiny leather shoes like a banker. His eyes are dreamy, and I think maybe I deserve this, so I cock my head, flutter my eyes, and lick his finger, but he says, gross; you’re too old! And I say, I’m sorry, I thought this was what you wanted. And he says nice try but that it was too late for me, and I agree. When I get to the checkout, I smile at the cashier and ask how her day was and she says, umm okay, and I say that’s great, then I say, guess what? I got fired today for being unlikable by upper management. The cashier says, cool, anarchy, and kind of raises her fist in the air. (more…)

DENOUEMENT by S.S. Mandani

April 14, 2021

“Sure, I’ve eaten cookies well into adulthood. Some days all I eat is one cookie. I break little bite-sized pieces off and revel in the ‘gasm that is sugar, butter, salt, flour, chocolate, pecans, jam, or what have you. I eat chocolate chip cookies, of course, but lace cookies are my current obsession. My taste buds ride a buttery, crispy wave, cresting into a smile. I have disliked certain cookies. Usually, though, I get over myself, and find a redeeming quality. Growing up, I hated those jam cookies served with chai. You know the ones? But one day the light hit a certain way. The jam sat glossy; a sphere in the middle. The soft white light of the clouds refracting off the glistening surface coaxed a bite from me. Through the shortbread, to the center, I kept at it until the whole tin was empty. What are they called again? Not jammie dodgers. Not cave cookies. Butter drop raspberry jam cookies, that’s it."

I consulted my list of “Untried Cookies.”

"I’d like to try a millionaire’s shortbread. In Scotland they just call it a millionaire. Nice to be able to eat a millionaire for $5.99 USD. Maybe I’ll poop money. That would solve everything. The credit card debt. The mortgage. The money owed to family, friends, friends of friends, anyone I could convince, really. The guy with the torn baseball hat and trench coat at the cardroom. Roy, I think his name was. I owed him a couple hundred bucks. And just like that, I owed everyone something. Even people I didn’t know at all. The internet’s a wild thing. Online applications for credit with the government stamp and all. Anyone that would help, really.”

The guy collecting my house and everything in it to pay my debts, or at least a portion of them, was listening good. His eyes in a crinkle, his mouth pursed in a pity smile. His face was empathetic. In the end, he just asked me, “Where do you want these?” And I said, “I get to keep them?” He nodded. I didn’t know if they were worthless or he felt bad. Maybe both.

In my recently vacated three bedroom, two bathroom house of 2,200 square feet, all I had left was me in front of a pantry filled from floor to ceiling with cookies from around the world. The places we had visited. Coyotas from a woman outside of a mezcaleria in Puebla. A box of empire biscuits from a quaint shop in Inverness. A case of authentic fig rolls from a street side hawker in an open-air bazaar in Cairo. Fortune cookies from Wo Hop in the Lower East Side. Macarons and macaroons from Ladurée in Madeleine, Paris. We had 'em all. Really we did. Well, it was just me. Zafira had gone. The kids were grown and gone. They were all perfectly fine. Everyone just had their own lives. And I had my cookies. Each with a memory from when life was golden and time was slow like honey.

So I took all the cookies and moved into the woods out back. There was a cabin no one knew about. Not even the collectors. It wasn’t listed on any papers. A place high up where I could keep an eye on the house that wasn’t mine anymore. I just wanted to know that someone would move in and act appropriately. Cherish it. Build a family, maybe. But they didn’t have to. They could just enjoy the house alone, too. Long as they maintained it. Two months later someone did and I moved further into the woods to another invisible cabin. I couldn’t see the house anymore. I just had a few cookies left. Eventually, I fed them to a rabbit. The rabbit was happy for a few days. Then I ate the rabbit, and I was happy. That rabbit taught me all about hunting and foraging and how to live in the woods. I became self-sufficient. A woodsman. I was officially off the grid and every night I cooked with fire. I didn’t have to explain myself and hardly ever talked aloud. I hummed songs from my childhood. I became the person I was supposed to be. And eventually the cookies, all of them, became a funny memory of a time when I owed everyone something and had a family.

One early morning there were flurries. Outside of my cabin door, sitting in a tuft of freshly laid snowfall, there was a blush box with a ribbon white as snow, as if it had been born from the ground itself, along with a note. The note was from my family and a few old friends. A happy intervention on paper. The words didn’t ask me to come back. They wished me well. I opened the box and those butter drop raspberry jam cookies fell out one by one, cinematically, onto the snow. The red jelly centers charmed me. I salvaged them before they got soggy, brushed the snow off, and put the blush box on the makeshift wood mantle above the fireplace.

Later that winter there was a severe snowstorm. The radio said there would be feet upon feet of snow. I surely didn’t have time to plan for dinner, but I did have the cookies. I sat on the tattered maroon leather armchair by the fireplace and savored each one, leaving all the centers until the very end. I stacked all of them up and held the jam jellies between my thumb and index finger, like I used to do as a kid. Forming a roll of lifesavers, I placed them in my mouth to enjoy, dreamt of a cup of chai, and leaned back to close my eyes for a long winter sleep.

THE MARRIAGE TEST by Bailey Bujnosek

April 12, 2021

In a long-forgotten society, there was a test people had to pass to get married. The test had one question. The question was multiple choice. If you were a woman, the question was: You have one plank of wood. Do you:

Affix it to the wall to support your husband’s golf trophies?
Burn it to provide warmth for you and your family?
Ask your husband what he wants to do with the wood?

You know from other records that the question and answer choices were different for men. You also know that there was a correct answer that, if circled, would allow the test-taker to get married. However, since no answer key or specific records of the test survive, you are left to hypothesize the answer.

The marriage test was discovered fifty years ago. No one’s taken as much of an interest in it as you. You dream about the test. You can’t hear the alphabet without thinking of A, B, and C, golf, fire, deferment.Your husband does not care for the history of marriage law. You try to engage him during dinner by passing him a handwritten version of the test and he almost chokes on his shrimp scampi, laughing. You frown, your face the color of the shrimp on your plate. Upon noticing this, he calms himself and skims the paper.“Who would have thought they had golf back then?” he says with a smile.You explain that this is a loose translation of a sport closer to croquet than golf.“Why don’t they just translate it as croquet?”You’ve wondered this yourself, though you don’t admit it. You shrug. Say, “Maybe they thought it would be more understandable because it’s more popular.”Get no response, not even a hmm. Return to your food.

He, the man you married, wakes you up in the middle of the night. You feel uncertain of your shape. You are both veiled by darkness. How do you know you’re not changing, disfiguring?“C’mon,” your husband says, and his voice is like snow falling. “What’s the right answer?”“To what?”You roll over. Press your palms against your ribs. Nothing suddenly sharp or absent. You’re still whole, full of caged organs.“You know what,” he says.“There isn’t one we know of.”“You’re kidding.”You pull your hands out from under your shirt and breathe. You tell him you’re not kidding. Wait for the next question, the one you hoped he’d ask at dinner. What do you think the correct answer is? He snores like waves against rocks. It is worse than silence.

Your research into the marriage test hasn’t won you any grants or awards. You can’t yet call yourself doctor. You tell yourself you aren’t in it for those reasons, but seeing Dr. Jeff dance around the library celebrating his second grant of the month isn’t a joyride. You wish you could chuck him out of the archives room. He sweats on all the rare books.You mention this, the sweating, to the librarian one day. She gives you a stare like your fly is down. You hope she will not tell Jeff.Jeff’s area of study is marital fashion. His numerous grants of late are due to his writings on corsetry. He’s working on a book about how all wedding dresses are metaphorical or literal shackles and bonds. You know this because he has run his grant proposals by you numerous times. He claims you have a good ear for arrogance and aren’t afraid to call him out on it. You have yet to find a nice way of explaining how hard it is to sound arrogant when you’re begging people for money.

If you would’ve had to take the marriage test, would you have failed? This question haunts the back of your throat. You blurt it out to the cashier at the grocery store.The cashier says if he had to take the test, he wouldn’t care if he passed or failed. He is scanning the third bag of shrimp when you realize you didn’t grab anything else. On the way home, you pick up cheesesteak sandwiches.“I’m sure you’d pass,” your husband says that night, when you voice the question to him. “You’d figure out the right answer.” He does not say what he thinks the right answer is.The cheesesteak is a bloated sponge in your hand. Too much cheese. You choke and your husband watches you give yourself the Heimlich maneuver over the back of your chair. He tells you you’re very brave for saving yourself.You think if he took the test, he’d fail, and you think of a singledom full of cats and baths, of soap operas and saving yourself from all kinds of pitiful near-death experiences. But, you think, he would not take the test. He would just get married. Jeff, too. They’d simply be unable to comprehend why anyone had the power to control their lives like that.

One boiling day in the archives, Jeff theorizes that the correct answer is C. His justification is that deferment to a husband is probably what was expected, “back in those days.” “Only it wasn’t like that in all cultures,” you say. “Maybe it’s B because a wife should check her husband’s wants against the family’s needs.”“But what if you take the test in the summer?” Jeff asks. “Then there’s no point in a fire for warmth.” He’s sweating more than usual. His nose is soggy like a dog’s. You lean over your half of the textbook between you to protect its pages.“It’s symbolic,” you say. “You’re not letting the husband have the wood.”“What if you choose C knowing your husband will burn the wood?”You don’t know. To change the subject, you point at a picture on his side of the page. The picture shows a woman in a dress made of canary feathers, popular in the weddings of a now-extinct tribe.“That’s pretty,” you say.Jeff says the feathers were plucked from live birds, says the dress had to be stitched by the bride’s father, says if the feathers weren’t the right shade of yellow it was grounds for canceling the ceremony. You’re jealous of his answers. You pine for a textbook on the marriage test. Maybe when you pass out from heat exhaustion, you’ll dream one up.

Your husband stages an intervention after the fifth shrimp dinner of the week.“Why are you so out of it lately?” he says. He doesn’t realize that:

You’re actually as ‘into it’ as you’ve ever been, which is to say you never cared much for shaking up dinner and just got careless this week.
Because being out of it is equivalent to finally finding something you’re truly passionate about, even if no one else is, even if it never amounts to anything, because you care. You care so much.
Ask your husband what he thinks.

You choose C.“You’re blaming me now? What did I do?”You repeat yourself: “What do you think?”Your husband sleeps on the couch. Neither of you clears your plates from the table or washes the dishes. In the morning the fetid smell greets you like a slap.Your husband is gone. He left a note: Going to my brother’s for a few days.

You take a dry erase marker and on the fridge you write out the marriage test. Swap out golf for croquet. Run your hands through your hair. Pace. Wonder what Jeff has won today. Tell yourself not to care, but care anyways. Someone knocks on the door. It’s your landlord looking for the rent check. He follows you into the kitchen, reads the refrigerator while you scurry to the bedroom and find the check in your husband’s sock drawer.“What’s with the piece of wood?” he asks, pointing towards the question on the fridge. You fumble something about lumber being a useful resource.“Still don’t get it,” he says. You hand him the check. When he leaves, you wipe the test off the fridge with your sleeve.

Your husband comes back unshaven, closer than ever to a wild animal. He holds a plank of wood in his hand. Drops it on the kitchen floor with a dull thud.Your husband does not play golf or croquet. It is hotter today than it has ever been in your life. You know deferring to him again is useless. This is your choice.You pick up the plank of wood and drop it in the kitchen trash. You ask him if he will cook dinner for the both of you. He says yes.

VALUATION by Kayleigh Shoen

April 9, 2021

My mom used to say if you don’t own anything worth stealing, you never need to lock your doors. In our neighborhood, the breeze at night could travel the entire length of the street in and out through the screen doors of unlocked houses. It was that kind of place.

There were three thefts that summer before the police would even file a report. They kept saying it was probably a misunderstanding; what thief leaves cash to cover the object they stole? And if anything, the amount left was probably too much: $50 for the Zeiglers’ oinking cookie jar, $25 for the Sweeneys’ moth-eaten throw, $13 for an ashtray one of the Thompson kids stole from a diner on vacation.

But as the thefts continued into the fall, the items became more personal. Beth Smyk found an envelope with $7 in exchange for her hairbrush, still full of hair. Cal Washington got $9 for his lucky socks. Greg Tsu reported a stolen baseball cap to the police. But then a week later he found the cap in his trunk and realized his wedding album was gone.

The most distressing thefts were the unidentified ones. Some victims spent months searching their homes, and memories, for the missing item whose value matched the money in the envelope. Figures like $3, $15, and $42 took on new mysterious significance to the neighbors we watched through their windows opening cupboards, pulling out drawers, perplexed.

Even after all that my parents never locked our doors. It had only been a year since my sister succumbed to cancer, and maybe they thought this larger loss exempted them from petty theft. They didn’t seem to believe that the crimes that affected our neighbors could touch them, too.

Meanwhile, new signs were cropping up on the neighbors’ lawns, advertising their new “securely monitored” status. One day the Kimballs brought home a dog with sharp ears and a metal collar. The Johnsons sold their house to an older couple who built a wood slat fence and kept behind it. The neighborhood was becoming a different kind of place.

I never told my parents about the envelope I found in our front hallway. I still remember the feel of the morning sun on my neck as I weighed the stack of bills in my hand, both too heavy and too light. I thought about all the cheap, priceless objects that still cluttered my sister’s bedroom down the hall. Without counting it, I put the cash back in the envelope and buried it in the trash.

BUSINESSMAN by Jim Windolf

April 8, 2021

My father told me, when I was fourteen, that business was a language anyone could learn. I never got fluent. So there I stood, a thirty-six-year-old man with not much in the bank, at the side of a hole in the ground as they lowered the coffin that contained his body.

He had run a small empire in our New Jersey town. His main business was an insurance agency. There was also a travel bureau, a movie theater, and a restaurant. Of all his businesses, I probably liked the travel bureau best.

He took me there now and then on summer mornings when I was six or seven. The place had a smell of paper and perfume. I would sit on a swivel chair at an unoccupied desk, tapping at a computer keyboard, watching the green letters jump across the dark screen, while my dad spent time in an interior office going over things with the mustached man who was the travel bureau’s president. A pair of sisters who worked there would put their faces close to mine. They also gave me candy from their desks, sour balls and Mary Janes, and they teased me about my curly hair, saying it was wasted on a boy.

After college, with the idea of eventually moving up in my father’s organization, I went to work in the warehouse that supplied his various businesses. But it turned out I was only ever good—unusually good, that is—at two things, sports and sex, and I have ended up making my small living at both.

I fell into sex work nearly ten years ago, during a cruise-ship vacation I took with my parents, my sister, and our baby brother, who had just finished high school.

It was the first time we had gone on an extended family trip as adults. I couldn’t shake the feeling we were trying to re-create our vacations of years earlier, although we must have been aware we had lost the old everyday mix of conflict and ease that animates families when they are young. So instead of playing hide-and-seek in a churchyard near a shingled seaside rental, or finding ourselves in the silence of nature as night fell and the blood thrummed in our veins, my siblings and I would put ourselves through three-hour dinners, sometimes at the captain’s table—meals that started with cocktails and crystal dishes filled with puckered olives and radish slices flavored with olive oil and flaked salt.

The ship was pushing through the northern Atlantic at one in the morning when I looked up from a craps table and into the eyes of a woman who must have been twenty or twenty-five years older than me. I was the last member of my family in the little casino, and she might have assumed I was alone in the world. I wasn’t surprised when I ended up in her cabin for what remained of the night, but it did catch me off guard, in the morning, when she lifted her head and aimed a glance at a stack of bills on the black coffee table. I took the cash as if I had done it before, and by the end of the next cruise, which I had booked solo, I found I had made more than I had spent.

After three years at sea, I knew the major ports and hated my morning reflection. When I heard about a job opening at my old school, I decided to apply.

***

My father, still firm, with a senator’s handsomeness, died of a mysterious illness in his seventy-third year, a week after undergoing hip surgery in October 2019. Six months later, while under quarantine aboard a small ship in the Mediterranean, I couldn’t help wondering if he had contracted an early case of Covid-19.

The memorial service took place on a crisp morning, with sharply outlined clouds parading across a marine blue sky. I didn’t see anyone crying at the grave site. He had been too large a presence for that. We felt like a mountain had been blown off the earth. The next day I went back to the high school where I had been employed six years — the same school where I had set records, since broken, as a member of the cross-country, basketball, and baseball teams.

The 7:45 a.m. faculty meeting was the usual mix of administrative talk and rank gossip about troublesome students and their parents. I got nods of concern from colleagues between the P.E. classes I ran. At 3:15 I drove the rowdy cross-country boys in an Econoline van to South Mountain Reservation for another practice. I felt like an orphan, now that I had no father, but I also felt the same.

The routine that had kept me in line since I had left the ships remained in force until the Monday morning when I got an email from the principal inviting me to see her in her office. We had not spoken in the weeks since the death of my father, and the first thing she said was, “I was so sorry to hear about your loss.”

I knew something else was up when her grave expression didn’t fade as we arranged ourselves in the deep leather chairs. She took a large smartphone from a blazer pocket and held it to my face. I saw screen shots of certain text messages between me and the mother of a boy on the cross-country team.

“I think this is a private thing,” I said.

“I'm not so sure about that. We received a batch of similar texts and emails going back roughly to the start of your employment.”

I wondered how my correspondence with the moms had ended up in a single file. I tried to figure out who would have sent it to my boss, and why.

“How would you like to do this?” the principal said.

“Do what?”

“I can accept your resignation. Or the school can terminate your contract.”

***

When I was a teenager, sort of as a joke, I started calling my mother “Ma.” She said she hated it and gave me light punches to the shoulder whenever I used that word. I stuck with it, though, and I think it helped set our relationship apart from the ones she had with my siblings. And so when, more than a month after Dad’s death, I told her I had lost my job and was going away, she insisted on seeing me off. I’m not so sure she would have done the same for my brother or my sister.

“I wonder if I’ll ever see you again,” she said.

“Don’t be dramatic, Ma.”

At sixty-seven, she was still a good driver, able to zip her Audi from lane to lane of traffic-clotted Route 3 and sneak between the rival buses, trucks, and cars on the helix that led to the mouths of the Lincoln Tunnel. Just as I had done as a child on drives to Manhattan, I kept an eye out, as we pushed through the rightmost of the three Lincoln Tunnel tubes, for the painted tiles marking the border between New Jersey and New York.

“I don’t understand how a person loses their job and then goes on a cruise. What will you do for money?”

“I’ll be all right.”

“I don’t understand where you got this wanderlust.”

“Maybe you and Dad shouldn’t have taken me on the cruise that time. Or maybe it was the travel bureau. I always liked it there.”

“I would think you’d want to do something a little more useful.”

“I’ll be useful.”

She found a metered spot on West Forty-Second Street between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, and we walked under a gray sky toward the Hudson. I used my left hand to steer the boxy rolling suitcase that trailed me and my right to carry the soft hanging bag that contained the three suits I had bought online, not to mention the tux I'd worn on formal nights during my earlier years at sea.

“Got your passport?”

“Got it.”

“Can I wave to you from shore? Like people did in the old days?”

“You might have to wait for me to go through the safety thing, with everybody sitting in an auditorium, wearing life preservers.”

“I’d forgotten about that.”

Near the spot where the U.S.S. Intrepid was docked, we waited for the white walking man to show up on the sign before crossing the West Side Highway.

We turned right. Now coming into our view, partly obscured by a concrete structure, was the ocean liner and the great ropes that held it to the city. It seemed strange to me that no else was walking toward it.

“What’s the first stop?”

“Bar Harbor. Then Greenland.”

“How long till you make St. Petersburg?”

“About three weeks.”

“Will there be Russians on board?”

“Let’s hope.”

She gave me a light punch on the shoulder, the way she used to, which somehow made me want to cry, and she said, “I really don’t see how you can afford this kind of thing.” I didn’t reply but imagined myself saying, “I’m what they used to call a gigolo,” and I pictured her bursting out in laughter, and I heard her laughter die as her eyes took on a sudden look of clarity, and I saw myself moving closer to her, saying, “It’s just business, Ma. I’m a businessman, too.”

Our farewell hug lasted a few seconds longer than I had expected. I believed she was sending me a telepathic message to tell me that she knew, that she understood, that she thought my way of life was not ideal, but that it was all right, given my particular skills and weaknesses, traits unsuited to running a business but sufficient for getting a person through the days more or less unharmed.

“If you can wait here, I’ll wave from the deck."

“I’d like that.”

"It won’t be like the old days, when everybody waved handkerchiefs as the ship pulled away, but it’ll be close enough.”

"That's O.K."

It turned out I was the last passenger to sign in and step through security. A crew member told me I would have to go through the safety session with the other stragglers. I nodded and moved on to the gangplank.

The horn sounded, and from the top deck I saw my mother, thirty or forty feet below, holding her hands to her ears. I leaned over the rail and waved as the ship started to move, and she waved back with a wild hand. I remembered something, the white handkerchief in my jacket pocket, and I waved it with an old-time flourish, and I saw her laughing in a way that seemed to say she loved me, even if I didn't measure up.

THAT WAS THE YEAR WE by Eric Scot Tryon

April 7, 2021

That was the year we went to Colombia to visit her parents. Her mom had just had surgery on her hand and couldn’t cook, so we spent a month eating empanadas from the little market on the corner, the one with the blind dog that always lay across the open door. Perfect golden-brown crescents, we devoured them on the small white plastic table outside with a cold beer or we ate them as we walked around the town square. She would tell me the history of the church or about the protests that happened there when she was a kid.

That was also the year she got pregnant. We loved to think it happened on that trip, maybe one of the nights we were away in Anapoima. One of the nights we walked to the tiny bar atop the hill. The bar that was just six poles, an aluminum roof and a large ice cooler. Walls and windows and doors are not always necessary. Yes, maybe it happened one of the nights we got drunk there and chatted to the locals until the darkest hour of the night. She, already talking in cursive, would translate their stories back to me, and we all laughed as if speaking the same language. One of the nights we stumbled back to the tiny four-room hotel with paper thin drapes that blew into the room like ghosts.

But that was also the year she got unpregnant. That’s what we decided to call it. She lay in bed for weeks, often FaceTiming her mom, longing to be back in a place where she had childhood stories, back in a place where the soil and the trees and the drunk locals with missing teeth all spoke her native tongue. I didn’t always feel welcome during those calls and that was fine. Some things shouldn’t be translated. Instead I spent those days on YouTube, in the kitchen, flour dotting my forehead, watching videos on how to make empanadas. Perfect golden-brown crescents. The kind that crisp when you bite into them, a little bit of heaven wafting out with the steam.

HOW TO TELL A SCARY STORY by Sara Hills

April 5, 2021

Start with setting

Think about someplace you know. A lonely walk to school, the back alleyways downtown, the dark crevices under the high school bleachers, a house from your childhood. Remember the sodium-yellow haze over the empty parking lot that time in college when a rugby player refused to get out of your car, and decide, instead, to catch the reader off-guard. Think about places that should be more comforting and familiar—a clean ribbon of asphalt under a cloudless sky, the upstairs bathroom at a family Christmas party, a sleepover at your best friend’s house, a city bus.

Add in the sounds—the cheering crowd, the seventeenth rendition of Jingle Bells pounded on the piano by your niece, a sharp inhale through a cigarette, a coffined silence, the steady drip from a leaky tap; the smells—pine toilet cleaner, car exhaust, whiskey and vomit, buttered popcorn—know you’ll come back to these details later and wonder which ones are worth telling.

Choose a protagonist

Pick someone likable, sympathetic; or not. A small girl whose yellow sundress tickles the tops of her knees, a teenager in ripped jeans on her way home late from school. Make her 32, a spinster, a mother. Make her thin as a mint Girl Scout cookie. Make her fat with thighs that rub together under her skirt. Give her glasses or a briefcase, let her clothes inform the time period—a chunky bow in her hair says 1983, a Holly Hobby lunchbox says 1979, a flannel shirt and ripped jeans says grunge, 1992. Make her proud or shy, make her a cookie-baking grandmother of four, or a boy with gapped teeth and a hole in his heart. A widower with three children at home. Make them hungry, unsuspecting, naive. Make them a little bit like you. Make them kind to kittens and afraid of breaking the rules. Or not.

Craft a villain

Surprise the reader; make them nonthreatening, approachable. Make them a teacher with a drawer full of snacks, a benevolent uncle, the older brother of your best friend. Remember drunk teenage boys in dark houses, fathers addicted to pills, neighbors with a new game to play. Pluck them out of thin air. Give them a uniform—a police officer, a postman, a soldier, a doctor, a nurse. Think about the possibility of female villains. Controlling mothers who can reduce a child to the size of a tick with one glance, ready to pop you if they hear one more distasteful word. Angry teachers who make you call them ‘Miss’ and send you to sit in the hallway for being helpful. Decide it could be any one of them.

Choose a weapon

Start with what you know. Remember your mother’s pinched face and her open palm, your brother’s fists, your dad’s loaded pistol in the bedside table. Remember the boy who chased you home from school with a big stick, how fast you ran. Think legendary weapons—Thor with his mighty hammer, Medusa’s eyes, Midas’s touch—and wonder about touch as a weapon. Remember all the times your blood felt like it had stopped, clotted to stone, how your legs didn’t move—couldn’t. Think of celebrities’ accusers, think of girls in alleyways behind dumpsters, think of machetes and acid and knife attacks and bombs, and think how easy it would be to go quickly. Think of an unexpected weapon, the thing most villains have in common. Write ‘penis.’

Employ rising action. Quicken the pace.

Let your mind rest on the crocheted doll on the back of the toilet, her plastic smile, the exploded lunchbox with the blue thermos rolling into the bushes, the white-and-pink globs of bubble gum pressed under the bleachers, the empty beer cans, chocolate wrappers, the posters of boy bands on the walls. Recall the smells, you always do, the sound of laughter, disparaging remarks. Try not to cry.

The denouement

After, let your protagonist live. Fasten the memory like a tiny shadow tucked inside a heart, a womb, until it gnaws its way out. Let them tell no one what happened, or let them tell everyone. Have them whisper it to their diary, their best friend, their mother. Try to remember how the shards of words can catch in a throat; seeing yourself reflected in your mother’s eyes when you told her—how distorted you felt, how dirty, how broken—and make your protagonist look away. Crimson their skin with shame until it feels bruised. Let them pray for help, for forgiveness, for death, for justice that never ever comes.

Let no one believe them.

Let it happen again.