Flash

BUD SMITH by Z.H. Gill

August 2, 2024

My brother Max told me about Bud Smith. The writer, not the baseball player, the one who’d pitched a no-hitter in his rookie year for the St. Louis Cards.For a brief time, I thought he was the baseball player, who’d pitched a no-hitter in his rookie year—on 9/3/01, eight days before fair Seth MacFarlane missed his plane at solemn Boston Logan—for the St. Louis Cards. But he was not him. Who else was he not? Bud Smith was not Indiana Jones*. He was not Jerry Springer, Bud Smith. He was not Josh Hartnett, nor Josh Hartnett’s character, Captain Danny Walker, from the film Pearl Harbor, which my parents brought me to on Christmas Day at CityWalk, in Universal City, CA—not so long before this other Bud pitched his no-no. (Do you think he saw Pearl Harbor in theaters, too? Bud Smith?)Back in the present, I couldn’t stop thinking about Bud Smith. The writer, Bud Smith. The author. Bud Smith. Bud. Smith. I looked up and ordered his novel on Amazon dot com, the book Teenager by Bud Smith. Bill Callahan—Smog himself!—had blurbed the book. He must have been thrilled about this, Bud Smith. I began talking to him in my sleep, Bud Smith. I asked him, Do you approve of me, Bud Smith? Back in New York City, Bud Smith’s apartment began to quake/shake. He stuck his head out the window and realized it was only his place quake/shaking, not the whole world, nor the city around him. He looked up at the ceiling, and he saw me, and I said, Bud Smith? Who’s asking? asked Bud Smith. I’m Z.H., I told Bud Smith. You’re a floating head, Z.H., said Bud Smith. Amazon dot com said your book’s coming tomorrow, I let Bud Smith know, Your book Teenager? Oh hey that’s nice to hear, Bud Smith replied. I’m sure I’ll like it, I declared to Bud Smith. Let me know if you do, Bud Smith said, Perhaps through more conventional means? My brother Max says you’re the nicest dude, I told Bud Smith. You know Max? He’s a lovely guy, said Bud Smith. If you’re ever in LA, could we have a catch, maybe? I wondered aloud, though I couldn’t hide my jittery excitement from Bud Smith. Catch? Can I think about it? requested Bud Smith.You know, I’m not the baseball player Bud Smith, he added, That young buck who pitched that no-hitter days before—I know, I acknowledged, Trust me, I know. And could you maybe send me a PDF of Work? It’s way out of print. Sure, kid, decided Bud Smith, Why not? I gave him my email, and then I said I’d check back in. Expect my floating head, Bud Smith, I said.I'll await it eagerly. Now if you don’t mind, I must get back to bed—and he turned to his side and fell asleep in an instant, Bud Smith. (Bud.)(Smith.) I did the same.__[*Later on, Bud Smith will tweet about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny being the 2nd best Indiana Jones movie. This will be the only time I disagree with Bud Smith. This will be, as far as I’m aware, the only time Bud Smith has ever been wrong.]

NINE by Matthew Feasley

August 1, 2024

A week before mom’s clinic burned to the ground, my older brother Sam brought home an octopus from the Greek grocery where he worked. After his shift, he had set the octopus on one of the shiny tables in the back and studied it beneath a wash of fluorescent lights. He looked at its hollow head, its body, and its missing eyes. Everything seemed ‘normal’ until he noticed its arms. Sam counted them again and again to be sure. Then he threaded the animal carefully into his backpack and hobbled out of the store to catch his bus.At home he staggered in a hurry toward the bathroom and I followed, certain something was up. I watched while he filled our tub and poured in the salt he’d retrieved from our pantry. He stirred the water with one hand and adjusted the hot and cold with the other, finally tasting a finger he’d dunked into the brine. Satisfied, he lowered the octopus gently into the water and it settled on the bottom. Sam rested his chin over the edge of the tub and waited. Later he slept there, snoring, both arms limp at his sides. I snuck away to the garage. I pulled Dad’s fishing net away from its hook, thinking I would fetch the limp creature from the tub, toss it into a trash bag and dump it into one of the neighbors’ cans. When Sam woke and it was no longer there, I would say he must have revived it. I would tell him that it probably escaped down the drain, that I had read this could happen with them sometimes, however unbelievable. But when I returned to the bathroom, Sam was no longer there. I stared at the octopus beneath the water before I heard a familiar sound behind me––it was Sam’s twisted foot as it dragged across the linoleum floor, followed by his good one coming down in its dull thump. Hissss...thump. Hissss...thump. The kitchen light sparked on overhead as I turned. Sam stood beneath it and rubbed both eyes clear with his large but frail hands. He gave an awful look, trying to figure why I held the garbage bag, dad’s net. Then without a word he shuffled slowly past me and up to our room.Sam slept through the morning and the next couple that followed. No one could wake him. The grocery owner called and our parents offered the excuse they had settled upon. “Well either way, he’s done here...and not sure we’ll hire another of them anytime soon.” He was still talking when dad hung up. A few days later, finally out of bed, Sam demanded to see it but dad told him he’d already buried it in the back. There was a mound of freshly turned soil in the garden but I wasn’t convinced he had. In any case, Sam drove a wooden stake through the ground there and painted the number ‘9’ onto a styrofoam plate he’d asked me to attach to it. Rain would wash the number gone only a few nights later as we slept. “A lot can come from messing with a wish or prayer or whatever you wanna call what your brother was doing with that thing,” mom told me in her car later that week. We were parked at her work, or what was left of it. Mom told dad she wanted to see it for herself and I asked to tag along. The metal parking signs were curled from the heat and letters that once spelled her name had bubbled and peeled away onto the asphalt. News trucks surrounded the blackened rubble while a large group waved signs and droned-on like insects. The news said someone had entered by smashing the front window with a large rock. Then there were kerosene-soaked rags stuffed into the open mouths of gasoline containers––eight in all. “Even if you meant well?” I asked.Mom rolled down her window. The swells of the opposing crowds filled her car as she lit the only cigarette I would ever see her smoke. The way she did it, I was sure it wasn’t her first. “Especially if you did.”

LOOK FOR A WHILE by Lamb

July 31, 2024

LILING, 66It is not wise to swim so soon after a meal, I know, but I have never experienced anything quite like the sensation of floating in a swimming pool with a full belly, which is—and I didn’t realize this until I lay here pushing my pale legs down into the water, watching them spring back up like ice—in essence, just another pool containing smaller bits of floating flesh. And all this occurring on the deck of a cruise ship floating in the Pacific, Earth’s largest body of water? Well. I may go again tomorrow after lunch.DAN, 37When I get to the pool there’s still some vomit on the surface. I was planning on draining the whole thing at port tomorrow, but Yuri said the guests are complaining, so I need to have it ready by five. Complaining. On a cruise.The lido deck is already closed for cleaning, so I throw Europe ’72 on the system while I search for the treatment protocol in the stack of loose manual sheets in the maintenance closet. When I asked the last guy how much chlorine solution to use for this kind of situation, he said to just blast it. “He’s Gone” comes on. I love this song. It reminds me of my father, the one I never knew but feel close to in this job, in any hard job, really. His image in my mind is always my age.Excuse me, says a small voice that hits me like a big one.A kid stands in the doorway with a bigass Shirley Temple. He’s shirtless and completely bald.I say, What’s going on, boss?Is the pool closed? he says. Kids do this—ask questions they already have answers to. I think it means they just want to talk. I’ve never been good with kids, but if the kid wants to talk, I can do that.Yeah, I say, should be good in a few hours.What’d he eat? he says.What? I say.The guy who ranched, he says.Oh, I say, I don’t know.Well, could you find out? he says.Sure, I say.The kid sucks down his soda as I attach the arm to the skimmer. I catch myself staring at his shiny head. In these situations, it’s best to just assume it’s cancer. “China Cat Sunflower” plays as we walk the pool’s edge to the deep end, where the juice is. I feel suddenly aware that I’m over thirty, working a summer job, listening to The Dead. I’m embarrassed. I don’t even like The Dead that much. I do, but not so much.I use the skimmer to push the water just behind the spill, directing it closer to the edge. Take a look, I say. He hands me his cup and gives me this look like, Don’t drink my friggen Shirley Temple. He lies with his belly on the sun-warmed tile, pulls himself forward till his head is just over the water. His face is solemn as he studies these remnants of a meal: a cream-streaked swirl, oily and orange, bits of unchewed chicken skin, translucent strings of celery spinning slowly outward.It’s beautiful, he says.It really is, I say.Like a galaxy, he says. BENJI, 11I’m taking a shower when Mom and David get back to our cabin. The bathroom door is shut, but I can hear them right on the other side, so I try to be quiet as I wash the shampoo out of my hair, drink some water from the shower head, dry off. I wish this was a tub. I asked David why they can’t have tubs instead, and he said they are too big for the bathrooms, and I said the shower is almost as long as the tub at home, and he said even a few inches longer would mean they couldn’t have as many passengers, and I asked what’s wrong with that, and he said it costs a lot of money to power a cruise ship like this one, to pay the staff, to feed everyone, and he asked if I liked the food and the entertainment and the clean facilities, and when I said I did, he said then I should be grateful that the showers are the size they are. I wish I didn’t ask. I’m quiet, but I’m mad. Well, not mad, just disappointed because David said he’d take me up to the pool after lunch, but that was two hours ago and now they’re fighting, Mom and David, so I probably won’t even get to swim on our last day. Which is today. Technically tomorrow is, but we get back to San Diego around noon, and Mom wants to go to two standup comedy shows in a row tomorrow morning. One of the comedians is a dwarf, David says, like a midget, but he’s got a big personality and he says the wildest stuff when he roasts the crowd. I can tell David wants to get roasted. I hope he does. Mom keeps saying they will be appropriate for me, the shows, but I don’t care if they’re appropriate. I just don’t want to spend my last hours at sea doing something I can do on land. I mean, I can swim on land, but not in a pool out on the open ocean. And I can’t go anywhere on the ship without one of them, not even the buffet, or the arcade, or Kidtopia, which is for five-year-olds. And Mom put our phones in the safe and said she wouldn’t tell us the combination, so we could be more in the moment, present, she kept saying, but somehow David got his phone because he said he had a work emergency, and when I asked him how he knew about the emergency before he checked his phone, he called me a smartass. I turn off the water and just sit on the hard floor of the shower waiting for them to calm down so I can come out and get dressed, but it’s a pretty bad one. The fight. I make a mohawk with my wet hair, then I shake it out, then I do it again, but it doesn’t hold for very long, so I smell all the soaps. I taste the one that smells like pineapple, but it tastes like original soap. I look under the sink for mouthwash, but I can’t find any, just some small bottles of body wash, bath salt … what do you even do with that? Like, to make it drugs … some toilet paper, and a black plastic case with a cutter inside. Like, a nice haircutter. It’s David’s, I think. I see some curly gray hairs caught in the little teeth on the blade. It’s 100% David’s. I wash the cutter in the sink till I can’t find any more of his hairs, don’t worry, I didn’t plug it in yet, I’m not stupid, then I wash the soap taste from my mouth, then I plug in the cutter to see if it works. When I turn it on it shakes my whole body, and my wiener tickles a little bit, and it feels kinda good, kinda weird. It struggles for a second like it’s choking on the water, the cutter, then it runs fast and smooth and vibrates even harder. Then I do something savage. I shave my whole head. I just go for it. My hair falls into the sink in big wet chunks. The thing sounds like it’s eating. Sometimes it stops working, but it’s not broken, you just have to clean out the hair that’s jammed in there and keep going. Mom cuts my hair in the tub at home, or she used to, and she told me that. She always said my hair was so hard to cut. She always said it’s coarse, and I always said just buzz it, and she always said I have no idea how much money people pay to get hair as blonde as mine, and it’s not right to just cut it all off. I finish a pretty good first pass on my head, but there are still a bunch of little strips of hair like when you think you’re done mowing the lawn and you look and see a bunch of little strips of uncut grass you didn’t see before. Even with the cutter buzzing in my ears and through my head, I still hear Mom crying to David. She’s hyperventilating too. David keeps saying, Seriously? Which is rude, and pisses me off, but forreal, I get it. Mom does this when she’s too lazy to make a good argument for why she’s right, or why Dad is delusional, or why David isn’t trying hard enough. It’s a lot. But I think she thinks she needs to do it. I do another pass, then I do one more until the cutter makes the same smooth sound all over my head. When I accidentally go at a different angle, it makes a different sound, because it’s cutting, and I realize that not all hair grows in the same direction, which makes sense, and which I already knew, but I guess I forgot. I turn off the cutter and run my hand over my head, and it’s giving velcro, I love it, and I sweep up all the hair I can with my hands and I throw it in the garbage can that doesn’t have a bag in it. There’s a bunch of shiny square wrappers in there, from condoms, and I wonder if David wears a condom when he sleeps. I look under the sink to see if there are any condoms to see what one would feel like on my wiener, but there’s not. I stand up and look in the mirror for a second, then I do something really savage. I go in Mom’s black zip-up bag sitting by the faucet and get her curvy razor and her mini can of shave gel. I pump some into my hands and rub them together till they’re foaming white, then I make my whole head creamy. Then I start to shave it. Only I’m very careful. I go over every part of my head very slow and I’m soft because my head is a weird shape in the back, like, it feels like there’s nothing between my skull and my hair. I cut myself when I’m curving it around my ear, and I touch where it stings with my fingers, and there’s hella blood, so I press the towel hard on it till it stops. I cut myself again where my hair meets my forehead, but no, there’s barely any blood this time. I double-check my work because it’s hard to see if you missed spots. You have to rub your fingers all over and if it’s not 100% smooth, like, if you feel any scratchy parts, you know you have to do it again, with the shaving cream and everything, just running the whole thing back from the beginning. It’s smooth, so I wash and dry the razor, then I put everything back. I look in the mirror. I look kinda weird, kinda sick. I didn’t know my ears were that big. Mom calls David an asshole really loud, then I hear the door slam, then it’s quiet, then I hear the TV turn on. I open the door. David’s on the bed choosing a show. I ask where’s my mom. He says she left. He doesn’t even look at me, so he doesn’t see my bald head. I ask if I can go swimming. He says to ask my mom and I say, Okay I will, thanks, David! but I’m lying. I put on my trunks and leave the cabin. I think I’ll stop by the bar and get a Shirley Temple before I hit the pool. Yeah, that’ll be good.

ON THE OFF CHANCE THERE ARE BONES IN THE SOUP by Emilee Prado

July 29, 2024

Last month, Robert Ladlo was accidentally promoted at work. He’d been standing in the empty head office, glancing around covetously when one of the new employees asked if he’d be taking over for the boss who was away exploring concerns about early onset dementia. Ladlo said yes. When everyone began treating Ladlo as if he were the new boss, it became true.Ladlo took this stroke of luck as divine right, a fated ascent. Over the next few weeks, he began to stir the pot just to see if anyone would stop him. Once, he spat his gum into the bushes in the courtyard even though a trash can was right beside him. He farted in the elevator, blamed it on a stranger, and everyone believed him. When he autographed a napkin and gave it to a barista, she blushed and said thanks. Ladlo began internalizing that if he acted with enough conviction, people wouldn’t question him or challenge his destiny.When the old boss returned to announce her official retirement, she assumed that higher-ups had Ladlo filling in. She left him with her blessing as he basked in the slotted sun that streamed through the blinds in his new permanent office.

***

Robert Ladlo brought his rise to autogenic glory home with him and began frequently boasting about his success to his husband, João. But Ladlo’s office-related-pot-stirring soon reached their home too. João’s expression slid from pride down through dubiousness and landed somewhere near disgust when he chatted with Edna, a mutual friend who was also now one of Ladlo’s subordinates.One evening, the couple idled on their apartment’s balcony, listening to thunder murmur in the distance. João sat unusually far from Ladlo, and eventually, he set down the copy of A História Trágica do Doutor Fausto. He turned to regard his husband.“Berto,” said João. “I don’t know how else you’ll listen unless I just say it, all of it, right out. First, I am so proud of your hard work. Second. Second, amor, you’re being—and I think a few people would agree with me on this—a big fat jerk. You never used to be like this. What happened?”Ladlo blinked. He crossed his arms over his chest. “I am not a jerk.”“I see your new aura. And I’ve talked with our friend, Edna. You have been stirring the pot, no? And for what purpose—to show that you can?”Ladlo doubled down. “You have to take what you want in this life. You of all people know that. You picked up, left your home country, put yourself through university here, and took. That’s how you conjured success.”“No, that is where you are wrong. Taking is not the same thing as creating. I built my architecture firm—well, metaphorically. We work from a rented space. Oh, you know what I mean—I created something that wasn’t there before, and I’m still indebted to everyone who helped me get here. Plus, I once experienced this too, this ego. After I designed the national aviary and I got to be a bit of a star at the opening gala, I got—well—a big head and all puffed up. And what I’m sensing around you now is a noxious poison cloud, Berto. I can barely come close. Soon, I worry, it will poison you and its effect will be permanent.”Ladlo’s expression collapsed. “Do you really see me that way? As a contaminant?”“Wait here,” said João. He stood and kissed Ladlo on the forehead, coughed, and went inside.When João returned, he handed Ladlo a wriggling fish. It looked to be a salmon in its spawning phase, but instead of being powered by life, Ladlo saw a 9-volt battery inside its mouth. Ladlo raised an eyebrow at his husband.“You have to take it to the address printed on the tail. It’s a different experience for everyone, so I cannot say what you should expect, but they’ll tell you what to do.”“The Warehouse of Contentment,” Ladlo read from the tail. “I take it there and they will cure me of being a big fat jerk and dispel this noxious cloud I have around me?”“I hope so, amor.”

***

Ladlo’s GPS indicated that the Warehouse of Contentment was that enormous building in the distance, but on the road in front of him was a gate and security booth that prevented him from entering. He slowed the car and pulled up to the window.It slid open.“Good evening, I’m The Fisherman. How can I assist you?”“Fisherperson, you mean,” said Ladlo.“I haven’t gotten the okay to change my job title yet, but I’m thinking something like Reelcaster, Lineleader, Luredangler, or maybe Chumchucker? Anyway, what can I do you for? Do you have a fish with you?”The spawning phase salmon lay wriggling on the passenger seat. Ladlo handed it over.The Fisherman said she’d be right back.Ladlo saw the back door of the booth open. The Fisherman emerged. She held Ladlo’s fish in one hand and steered a kick-pedal scooter with the other, heading in the direction of the warehouse.Fifteen minutes later, she returned in the same manner, except instead of holding the fish, she held a small cardboard box.“Your bosses should look into a more efficient mode of transportation. A golf cart, or a conveyor belt even,” said Ladlo after the Fisherman returned to the window.“That’s why it’s called fishing, not catching.”“What?”The Fisherman didn’t respond. Instead, she opened the box and pulled out a handheld mirror. It was the cheap plastic-backed kind that could be bought at a dollar store. She handed it to Ladlo.Ladlo took the mirror, looked it over, looked at his reflection, looked it over again. Ladlo asked if it was a magic mirror. The Fisherman laughed, called Ladlo silly, and said that magic doesn’t exist.“How is this going to fix my problem?” said Ladlo. “And don’t you even want to hear my circumstances?”“We got them from the fish.”“It was my husband’s fish.”“But you brought it here.”“I—”“I’m sorry, there is a car waiting behind you. And remember, I’m just The Fisherman, I don’t have any answers to give you.”Not knowing what else to do, Ladlo pulled forward until the lane U-turned toward the exit, which led him back to the road.At home, Ladlo showed the mirror to João who looked it over and had no advice to offer other than that Ladlo should carry it with him and wait and see.

***

Later in the workweek, Ladlo was washing his hands when he caught his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He shook the water from his hands and pulled the handheld mirror from his satchel. He held it near the large mirror until he could see himself from several angles. Then he understood how he could unstir the pot.What he was lacking was self-awareness.Ladlo tested his theory when the shorter of the two Tonys came into his office. Ladlo held out the mirror to where he could catch his own expression with a sideways glance. After Ladlo explained what he was doing, Short Tony got on with his question. Ladlo noticed that the mirror was reflecting a beam of sunlight down onto Tony’s papers, so he adjusted the beam away. How self-aware of him. And when Ladlo saw that his face was growing harsh and critical in response to Short Tony saying something less than competent, Ladlo knew to change his expression.Then it hit him: this sort of awareness was too limited. He could see the front of Short Tony’s face, and with the mirror, he could glimpse his own profile, but he could not see Tony’s profile. Surely there would be micro-expressions he was missing. This made him worry he was limiting his access to observation and thus thwarting his capacity for total self-awareness. After work, Ladlo went and bought three more cheap plastic mirrors. They came in neon colors.

***

As he navigated his day-to-day life with two mirrors in each hand, Ladlo understandably ran into some difficulties with doors, utensils, and gestures—and, well—most daily activities. But worse was the continued lack of angles; there were points of view that were still hidden from him.Determined that self-awareness would be his, Ladlo bought dozens of colorful mirrors and he linked them together using duct tape and wire until what he held became wing-like. Mirrors atop mirrors, all angled in slightly different directions, branching from his two arms and curving toward the front so they enveloped whomever Ladlo was talking to.When Ladlo met with the head of another department, and several times he bonked and jostled the poor woman with his spread and reflective plastic feathers, he decided to re-work the self-awareness thing again. She was irritated with him; he could see it from a dozen angles. Ladlo also saw that his own face was not apologetic, that is until he and his reflections adjusted their expressions. Still, the whole thing was a nuisance because he had to constantly set down one of the wings to use a pen and he couldn’t use them at all while typing. This caused him both blind spots and exasperation.Ladlo went into the storage unit below his apartment and found the boxes they had been storing for João’s nephew. From one of the boxes labeled Sports Stuff, Ladlo pulled out a pair of American football shoulder pads. He attached his colorful mirrors to the skeletal plastic. He was so busy sitting on the concrete outside the storage unit, using more tape and wire and other supports, and adjusting the angles of the mirrors, and being so totally focused on being one hundred percent self-aware that it got very late. He finally set the wings aside until morning and went to join his husband in bed, but João was already asleep.

***

Ladlo arrived at work wearing his new wings and as he rode the elevator, he appreciated the metaphor of rising to new heights—perhaps to ultra-cognizance, maybe even enlightenment. He thought that this just might be the peak of self-awareness. He did a tap dance glide out of the elevator and that’s when he was caught. His right wing hadn’t cleared the elevator when the door closed. Some sort of mechanical sensor was completely un-self-aware and utterly unengaged at the exact moment he needed it to sense him.The elevator began to descend, hailed by someone below and Ladlo let out little yelps of panic. He face-planted with a whump, but then the elevator stopped. His wing was wedged between the inner roof of the elevator and his floor’s floor. Ladlo could neither stand nor wriggle out of the shoulder pads, so he remained there on his belly on the ground.The intern had seen all this from his desk and was holding out his phone, presumably recording. Soon all of Ladlo’s subordinates gathered and stood looking down at Ladlo.Ladlo could see every one of their faces in his bent left wing and after he finished yelling and swearing at those faces, he began to cry.Ladlo saw his former friend Edna make a phone call, but still, no one moved to help him.He lay there for a long time and then a sob caught in his throat as he heard the stairwell door bang open behind him. It was his husband. In his wing, two dozen Joãos appeared, each of them holding a toolbox. In his head, Ladlo fought hard to find the right words as all of the Joãos began to pry him free.

PURGATORY by Amy DeBellis

July 11, 2024

Julia starts noticing David when he kills the fish in their bio classroom. The class finds it on the floor when they come in, stranded in a too-shallow puddle of water, tiny mouth open in a last desperate gasp. Like everyone else, David wears an expression of puzzled sorrow, his pale eyes wide with sympathy, but nobody besides Julia notices the spots of water on his sleeves. The thin trapdoor of his smile, flickering in and out of existence.So Julia starts noticing other things, too. She registers the curve of his lips, the cupid’s bow as pronounced as those of the girls in Renaissance paintings. She wonders what it might taste like. Rust or moss, maybe, blooming in dark secret places where no one looks.One evening she sees him walking into the field behind their houses. The slim rifle, straight path into the woods, and then a shot. Venison on the neighbors’ table for dinner. He sees her seeing him. On the path between their properties, into the narrow space between their bodies, he says, “I can teach you, if you want.”It’s that sliver of a pause, that hesitation before if you want, that decides her. Because for a second, before he thought to add those words, he didn’t even consider that she might not want it. And in that second she was ready for anything. She wants to live in that second. She wants to pull that second over her like a cloak and walk so far in it that she can’t find her way back home. ___ The next day, in the forest, David stands very close to her. He has to, in order to show her how to hold and load the rifle. There’s a metallic odor seeping from his skin, as though he’s chewed up a bunch of rounds, gritted them to dust between his teeth, digested them and turned them into sweat.“Man, you’ve never even held a gun before,” he says in wonder. “What planet did you come from?”“Some sheltered girl planet, I guess,” Julia replies, and then feels like an idiot.But he doesn’t seem to mind the distinction she’s drawn between the two of them. “Make sure you’ve got it pointed away from your head. That’s the first thing you need to learn.” He’s grinning, his teeth small and chipped in the crescent moon of his smile. He teaches her the anatomy of the rifle, demonstrating with his rough woodblock hands: “This is the action. This is the safety. This is the trigger…” He makes her recite every part until she’s got it memorized as well as the topography of her own skin. Only then will he let her hold it. He says: “Only ever point the rifle at things you are willing to destroy.”She nods seriously. She thinks of aiming it at every tree on her property, at her house, at her mother’s car. Into the open cavern of her own skull. ___ When he lets her start shooting, he stands next to her, as though he can guide her shots just by his presence. She misses and misses until finally she doesn’t. It’s a rabbit, small and delicate when it was making its way across the grass, but when she picks the body up it’s ugly, heavy, waterlogged with death. Nothingness spreads through her. It’s after her first kill that she learns what David tastes like. Not rust, or moss, or even metal. He tastes like what you might find at the bottom of a pond. Like something that was once green but slowly turning liquid, falling apart to rot. She doesn’t hate it. There’s none of that artificial bubblegum flavor she’s tasted on other boys, no chemical chapstick taste, no spearmint mouthwash. It’s realer than life. As real as death. It draws her in, makes her reach out for more, and he pulls away too soon—smiling, knowing. He teaches her how to bring down deer. They’re fast and shy, but a single buck can feed a family for months. Their slim bodies, so elegant in life, lose all their grace at the moment of the bullet’s impact, and what was once a whole animal splinters into a collection of fractures: spasms, synapses blindly firing, intricate circuitry torn apart. Every kill earns her a kiss. The loamy warmth, the taste of decay, is addictive. The nothingness spreads through her like poison or wine. They go to the forest more and more. They take turns, passing the rifle back and forth between them: a deer for Julia, a fox for David. Julia’s mother doesn’t notice her absence because she doesn’t notice anything anymore. Except the TV, and her cans of beer, and cigarettes that she smokes with fingers that grow increasingly thin and whittled down, like brittle sticks of wood. David doesn’t talk about his family, but she knows that he knows about hers. He pulls her close as they hunt frogs in the ponds, not wasting bullets but crouching low to the ground and trapping them in coffee cans, listening to the frantic thump of their bodies, the sound like wet beating hearts. “Should we name them?” he asks. “What’s the point? We’re killing them anyway.”She can tell he’s not fooled by her casual tone. A twinge of disdain crosses his face. “You mean, you could never kill anything with a name.” ___ In the evening the fields turn leaden gray like the skin of her parents. Like her mother with her fingers that will soon be the same size as her cigarettes. Like her father dying sunk full of morphine, painkiller rushing silver through his veins, hospital walls closing in around him like an artificial womb. They stop by the edge of the forest. The wheat is as tall as it will ever be. David is by her side, the cool pale of his eyes reflecting the sky. There aren’t any deer here, just a neighbor’s cat, not even thirty feet away. “See her?” Julia asks. She is the one holding the rifle.“Yes.”The cat doesn’t notice them. Her name is Luna, Julia remembers. Luna or Lulu, something like that. Her tabby pattern blends in with her surroundings, melts her into them like a stripe of paint blurring into a stone-colored background. She slinks through the wheat thinking herself unseen. “Lulu,” David whispers, soft as a thought. Soon she will disappear into the woods. Only a few more steps until she’s in; only a few more seconds left for Julia to make a shot. “Your turn,” David says.The feeling of her own heart beating is what makes her raise the rifle to her shoulder. She aims, stares down the barrel. She thinks about how they both have hearts, her and David, her and Lulu, her and all the things she’s killed. How everything with a heart is fair game. The trigger like a bone under her finger, and then the crack, the nothingness blossoming outward from a central point.The two of them stand motionless in the algal gloom, in the murky raucous dark. David smiles. And although it’s ostensibly an expression of openness, of transparency and warmth, something about it makes her think of a trap twisting shut.

CATFISHING by Bridge Lower

July 4, 2024

Catfishing happens at night and the bait smells like blood and cheese. We fished for what felt like hours in a cloud of mosquitoes, and we only caught one fish. We pulled it to the floor of the boat, and I couldn’t believe it actually looked like a cat. It fought hard, flailing wildly. The man called it a beastly motherfucker, his foul language thrilling my sister Ellen and me. “You know catfish got tastebuds all over their bodies?” he said. “They’re just swimmin’ tongues. You lick one and he’s lickin’ you right back.”“Gross!” we screamed. “Why would you lick a catfish?” He laughed. “Knowin’ that, why wouldn’t you?”When the fish finally succumbed, we laid it in a cooler full of ice, its glassy eyes cold and detached. The man promised us fried catfish sandwiches the next day, which I’d never had and didn’t know I wanted until right then. To eat this very fish would be primitive in a way for which, at age ten, I didn’t possess words or experience. Every fish I’d ever eaten had come from a blue Styrofoam tray, wrapped in layers of plastic that encased a dozen different smells, all of them factory and none of them sea.We slept in the car, something I don’t think was planned because there was only one blanket. The man made do with a thick canvas coat, putting the driver's seat down as far as it would go and resting his hat over his face. Ellen and I curled up in the backseat and held hands all night, the way otters do to keep from floating apart. She couldn’t sleep so I whispered to her everything I knew about dogs, making friends, black holes, puberty, Christmas, Egyptian mummies, different types of candy, and kissing.In the morning, we sat up and saw two deer, a mother and a baby. The man told us to be still, don’t make a sound. The pair walked past the rear window, their soft dappled fur nearly brushing the glass. On the way home, the man dropped us at a Wendy’s and said he was going to find a payphone. “Let’s get your mom on the line,” he said. I was happy to have a break from the car. The smell of the catfish was beginning to leak in from the trunk. Even on ice it was starting to spoil. He handed me a twenty-dollar bill. “That’s ten each,” he said. “More than enough, but don’t spend it all.” Wendy’s had recently launched a ninety-nine cent menu. We ordered modestly, just a burger and small fries each, and a Frosty to share. We didn’t want to get into more trouble. Then we went outside and looked for the man, for his car, and found neither. We stayed there for hours, spending the rest of the money. First, Ellen was thirsty, so I bought her a soda. Then she was hungry, so I bought her some chicken nuggets. Then she was scared, so I bought us both another Frosty. On our table grew a mountain of sweating yellow cups, cardboard boxes, and greasy wrappers. We somehow knew not to draw attention to ourselves, sitting out of view of the employees and moving tables every half hour. Each time I ordered more food, I told the cashier, “My mom said to buy this”, but the employees didn’t care. They weren’t thinking about us at all. We quietly sang Bruce Springsteen songs, avoiding eye contact during “I’m On Fire.” Hey little girl is your daddy home, did he go and leave you all alone mmmm-hmmm.“Darlington County” felt better, full of references to things like union connections and World Trade Centers, things we didn’t understand but flew off our tongues with less self-awareness. I told Ellen the man was coming back, of course he was, he probably had trouble finding a phone. She gulped and nodded. I looked out the wide windows to see if there was somewhere else to go, but everything outside held much more uncertainty than the Wendy’s booth. There, in the plastic refuge, we were safe.I told Ellen that Dave Thomas was a real person and he named Wendy’s for his daughter, also real. I wasn’t sure if she really looked like the grinning, freckled girl who stared up at us from our pile of trash. She was almost certainly never left behind at a Wendy’s, or anywhere for that matter. She was loved. I told Ellen everything I knew about leprechauns, monkeys, Garbage Pail Kids, dreams, Hawaii, Helen Keller, bras, weddings, and secret diaries with locks and tiny keys. We spoke about the doe and the fawn we’d seen when we woke up that morning, walking past the car, oblivious to our presence. We named them after ourselves.We ran out of things to talk about and began to eat whatever was left, picking at the smooth edge of a hamburger bun, the skin of a baked potato. Ellen ran her tongue around the inside of a fry box and I was jealous I’d never thought to do that.Then she whimpered. Our eyes met; her mouth twisted terribly. She had an accident – too much stress, too much grease. I took her into the bathroom, which smelled of lemon disinfectant and urine, and in the stall, I helped her remove her shoes, socks, and pants. We threw her underwear into the trash and buried them. The stink of feces persisted, filling the tight space. Ellen cried hot tears while I wiped her legs with wet paper towels oozing with electric blue soap that rubbed her skin until it stung. I removed my own shoes, socks, and pants and gave my underwear to her. I was fine without them, but she would not be. She needed them to feel safe, a thin shield against the world. It was getting dark when the man came back. I watched his wiry frame move across the parking lot, silhouetted against an astonishing pink and purple sunset. He walked with purpose until we locked eyes through the glass, and then he hesitated. I suppose there are things in life that feel right in the moment but will grate at your being over time, leaving you porous. You become a sieve, unable to hold anything for any amount of time without remembering the awful things you did. Maybe he came back because he didn’t want to be a sieve for the rest of his life and leaving two young girls at a Wendy’s will do that to you. He saw us through that window and knew he was nothing but fucked. Many years later, I entered this Wendy’s into Mapquest and found it was over two hundred miles from home. To get to the catfishing lake, we had gone up and over the Rocky Mountains, passing several ski resorts. On the drive, in each direction, when we approached Hot Sulphur Springs, the car filled with the stench of rotten eggs, and both times, Ellen opened her eyes and asked who farted. We’d laughed on the way there, but no one laughed on the way back. The man raged as he drove, telling us how our mom had tricked him, said she had an emergency and could he take us for a night. He said she begged and cried, and having no kids of his own, he didn’t know what to do with children, didn’t know how much attention we required. He said he’d do anything for her, move mountains, drain the widest river. He kept referring to her little rendezvous, which I made a note to look up later, but I couldn’t find it in the dictionary because it’s not spelled how it sounds. Over and over, he said he should have known. He never stopped talking, comparing her to all sorts of animals: snake, dog, cow, pig. He used other words too: bitch, whore, liar. He called her a fucking slut and then apologized for swearing. I dozed off with Ellen’s head in my lap and woke to see a roadside sign with reflective white letters that said Denver 87 miles. Ellen snored loudly, the seatbelt tight under her chin. The man was still talking circles, though quieter, hissing to himself. It was darkest night by the time we got home. Our unwashed hair absorbed the smell of oil and the char of beef hung on our coats. He dropped us at the end of our cul-de-sac, told us to go up to our own house and ring the bell. We climbed from his car, bedraggled and drowsy, and before we slammed the door, his last words came floating out.“I didn’t touch you. I didn’t touch neither of you. You be sure to let her know. I ain’t going down for something I didn’t do.”I woke up in my own bedroom, the cheap blinds no match for the bright Colorado sun. I rolled over and faced my sister, searching for the night in her hot morning breath.

SUCKLE, SWALLOW by em x. liu

July 3, 2024

In my mouth, your name is silt and sweet freshwater, like the stream that bounded you and yours into that space the rest of the village didn’t dare cross. Yong’en—Yong—En—Yongen. 永 for forever and 恩 for a kindness. It must have meant my kindness; you have never been kind to me, my Yongen. When we were girls you would organize the other kids so that as soon as my attention flagged, they would peel away from me–your long hair and shrill laughter flickering on the wind at the front of the pack. It was a shock every time, a reminder of my own freakishness. Proof of your own belonging. We understood each other in this way, marginal from each other. At the end of the day, we were the two who would sling our patchy knapsacks over our shoulders and trudge the long way down a longer dirt road back to the nothing and nowhere place we came from. You would kick every stray scrap of metal you found, just to see how far it could skitter. Yongen, have you ever loved me as I love you? I love you. I love you like I love the solid handle of an axe in my hands, the surety of its useful violence. I love you the way I love the chick we raised into meat, enough to slit your throat myself. I know now that your mother hired me not because of my inherent talent—although I have learned quickly what is expected of me—but for my unique ability to shoulder a necessary cruelty. Yours, and then later, mine. *We all wondered about the pigs your family kept, away from the rest of the animals. The day your grandmother died, some upperclassman asshole paid off the funeral home to tell him if anyone showed up. And, of course, no one did. What supposedly were her ashes were interred in the community shrine and we dutifully visited every Zhongyuan with our fragrant joss and tacky paper bills that came in stacks, plasticked together straight from the city. We mourned. I stopped trimming the ragged edges of my hair in solidarity with you, close enough to be considered a familiar person by now. Your mother spoke idly about her at dinner, each of us drinking the rich, steaming pork bone broth that fed us that winter. When we got in a childish spat–a pillow fight–we spilled your grandmother’s hair all over the ground. Still speckled pepper and not entirely grey. When your mother hurried into the room, sewing kit in hand and sterner than she’d ever been, I finally understood the peculiarities of your family. Your spirits were stubborn, sticky. Leave anything of the body unused and the soul would never rest, doomed to wander the earth, unaware. Your mother startled at night, when you were too deep in sleep to notice and I was in the kitchen, sharpening her tools. She clutched at my sleeve often, paranoid that she had not done enough, that something of her mother was left behind, her essence congealed in a leftover morsel of her body like meat fibres stuck between her teeth. To leave anything behind was anathema to her–unfilial, ungrateful. She would have eaten clay had it been baked with her mother’s leftover blood, gobbled it down like soup tofu, its dark red delicacy. * I abruptly remembered the first time I had stepped foot on your family’s land—your mother was teaching you how best to butcher: she had your small hand encompassed in hers, fingers wrapped around a wicked blade. One cut, Yongen, she said, and you twisted your face inelegantly, like you were about to cry. But you didn’t flinch when you made the fatal slash. Your mother took the now-dead animal from your hands and drained its thick, dark blood from the clean cut you made so well. That night, we tossed the sweet chicken meat with mala spices, peppercorn and fresh onion; we fried the skin and licked crispy fat off our lips. When we picked the bones clean, we tossed them back into the already steaming broth, meant to last the week. You could never handle your spice, so I carefully scraped all that gritty red off your food, poured just enough soy sauce over to salt it well, and you ate what I fed you. Your mother offered me a job and a place to stay the next day. It was my job to scrub the bleeding basin clean—not a drop left over, she said, and I instinctively knew she meant it literally. I rubbed the little plastic tub until my fingertips hurt and wrinkled, rinsed it out half a dozen times so the water ran out clean and clear as a spring when I was done, and your mother gave me a chicken bone still bursting with marinated flavour to suckle on as reward. Afterward, she told me to chew hard until the pieces splintered under my molars. Swallow. *How did we end up here, Yongen? The branch, splitting you open. The dirt road with its skid marks like regret. I’d fallen beside you, but I was intact, miraculously. Your soft mouth, open in a scream. *“Did your mother make you eat after lao lao’s funeral?” I asked you, my teeth against your skin. You opened your mouth and moaned, low and long. “Don’t make me say it,” you panted, grasping onto my arm. “That’s so fucked up.” “What about Xiao Lu? When he drowned in the river that year?” Your cousin, pearly eyed and dimple-cheeked. Fat rolls still on his chubby arms. It was a strange year. All our crops flooded too, that fatal river overflowing with fresh rain, but our table was plentiful that spring. We feasted. 五花肉 bubbled in wine and dark soy, a rust coloured marinate that swallowed the gritty pieces of rock sugar greedily. A broth so thick and freshsweet it warmed me up inside out for the whole evening.“Don’t,” you said again, but I could see it in your eyes. Saliva flecked your lips. I wondered if you were thinking of that abundance again. Or if you were only scared. *You blinked, one fat tear rolling over your cheek. “You’ll take care of me?” you asked. “After?” I imagined your mother dutifully stuffing her own mother’s hair in that pillow. I imagined myself winding your long hair into braids, bundling branches with it, ready to burn. Carefully, I rubbed my way up your spine. You watched me with wide eyes, your lips parted. Through the blotchy red and your pinked eyes, I thought there was the beginning of some flush suffusing your face. I had left your hair half cleansed; some of it fell across your lips and left behind easy strings of crimson, your own blood streaking your mouth. My fingers found what I was looking for. The branch was thick, twisted, its surface ribbed where it pushed its way into you. The edges of you around it all soft. Skin taut. Slippery with more fluid. I leaned into you and you pulled me in close, your other hand winding in the waist of my shirt. “Please,” you told me, and for the first time, it wasn’t some form of denial, so I hugged you tender and started working you open. I fucked you before I ever kissed you, Yongen. The branch primed you for it, introduced the notion of being open to your body, at once so soft and yet so unyielding, but I was the one who pulled you apart. You clung to me as I eased the tip of my finger into you, crooked so I could find the right angle. Your lips moved soundlessly, your eyes fluttering shut. I slipped in one, then two, rocking slow enough to ease you into it. Your skin was stubborn. Even with the ragged edge, you tore so slowly. “Trust me,” I said, even marred and terrified, you answered me automatically with a soft sound, a nod. I would be grateful to you, Yongen. I would leave no trace behind.

THE COPY by Lana Frankle

July 1, 2024

Delusion of control has long been a fascinating yet unnerving symptom of schizophrenia and other psychoses, as well as derealization and depersonalization disorders. While some antipsychotics do show promise in treating this symptom, treatment resistance is common and can be stymying, and no therapy specific to it exists. The inventive paradigm described here will be a game-changer for people with this condition. The inspiration for our intervention comes from the famous, decades-old experiments by Benjamin Libet, who observed using electrophysiological techniques that the neural impulse that generates motor actions occurs several hundred milliseconds prior to the action, and more importantly, a few hundred milliseconds prior to one's own awareness of the intention to move. This occurs in stark contrast to the commonsense and foundational notions of individual agency and free will. The explanation proposed at the time and largely accepted since is that efference copies generated by the motor cortex lead to a retrodicted sense of ownership, known henceforth as antedating. In a small subset of psychiatric patients, this efference copy appears to be absent (confirmed using EEG data, see figure 1) leading to a lack of felt ownership of one's actions. This explanatory gap then often sadly leads to fabricated explanations and delusions, such as that one's actions are being controlled by a third party, be it a demon, machine, alien entity or mad scientist. Fortunately due to the simplicity of the mechanism at work, rectifying the feeling which serves as the initial trigger for such thoughts becomes fairly straightforward. While Libet himself did not anticipate such an application of his work, or even make the connection between his observed data and psychotic experience, in more recent decades, researchers and clinicians have pioneered the use of non-invasive ways to use electromagnetic waves not only to measure but also to induce or suppress human neural activity. One such method, gaining in popularity as a treatment for medication-resistant depression, is transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). This technique uses electrodes attached to the scalp to administer magnetic pulses to various brain regions, most commonly the left frontal cortex. Its effectiveness has had a huge impact within the field and on patients' lives, financial cost of the treatments notwithstanding. The mechanism behind this treatment, that of activating or suppressing any superficial brain area, gives it enormous and broad potential, potential which has largely gone under-utilized. In addition to its use in research studies focusing on decision-making, it has also been applied to the treatment of depression and other disorders. This study marks the first of its kind using tDCS to treat delusion of control, by simulating the missing efference copy. As a pilot study we used only one patient, with the intention of following up with a larger study using a sample test group. Our reasons for this are technical but also include some difficulty in recruitment for a therapy this novel and ambitious, despite its total safety. Persons with severe psychiatric disorders are a category for which many legal and logistical protections exist within experimental research, even when the research concerns topics of interest to that group specifically. Furthermore, psychotic patients who are not wards of the state or under the care of other legal guardians who act as medical representatives for them (and most of them are not) may be apprehensive to engage in an experimental study this different from existing approved treatments. This hesitancy, far from paranoia, can be understood empathically as a reaction to systematic marginalization and dismissiveness in a world that is perhaps already seen as confusing and hostile through the lens of disorganized perception and cognition. However, it is lamentable that the potential benefits of our treatment are difficult for this population to realize even when explained clearly, as our attempt to help mitigate the differences in processing and ease the fluency with which they interact with the world and with others is most definitely an admirable goal. Our hope is that with the positive data from this pilot study we will gain traction in recruiting volunteers, and that any further studies will cement the benefits of this therapy as well as the complete lack of ill effects. The participant, a 28-year-old Asian male diagnosed with schizophrenia four years previously and on antipsychotic medication, had recurrent, near-constant delusions of control. He acted as his own control by completing some routine physical tasks both with and without applied magnetic stimulation, and completing a semi structured interview before and after the tDCS. The physical tasks were given by instructions: bend your arm at the elbow, open and close your hand five times, pick up a ball and throw it at a target. The interview contained standard assessment criteria for positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia, although the particular focus of our lab centered on the questions concerning the symptom of interest. "Do you ever feel as though someone else, or something else, is controlling your actions for you?" In the first interview, the patient answered "Yes, most of the time." and then went on to give an elaborate description of aliens from Venus beaming electric rays into his arms and legs. We asked him if he felt this way during the tasks he'd just completed, and he answered in the affirmative. We then applied the electrodes to target the motor cortex and re-issued the same set of instructions. The patient complied, his face still blank and affectless, but beneath that mask, mild surprise. We removed the electrodes and sat him down in a different room, where we'd done the first interview, and asked him the same set of questions. His answers were the same, uncannily so, the same wording, as though he had it memorized. But the shifting tone in his voice, which parts lilted and how, made it different enough from the first time so as not to be strange. Then we got back to "Do you ever feel as though someone else, or something else, is controlling your actions for you?” The patient paused, almost furrowed his brow a little. "Did you feel like this during the last set of tasks?" I prodded. "No," he said. "I guess I didn't." The exit interview he gave subsequently provided ample assurance of the safety and comfort of the procedure. While repeat administration over multiple sessions would likely be necessary in order to have a lasting effect, observing whether this can occur is one of our future directions for this research. With adequate insurance coverage, these sessions could be made accessible and affordable for anyone who can be convinced of the benefits. The success of this therapy is no trivial accomplishment applying merely to the treatment of a miscellaneous fringe symptom, as ultimately the core of our very humanity stems from our subjective experience of acting as free agents in the world, capable of making deliberate choices when interacting with our surroundings. When we are cruelly robbed of this liberty by the malfunctioning of our brains, we are reduced to the status of mere automatons living a flattened and colorless existence. In restoring the sense of agency to these lost souls, physicians are doing no less than reigniting the spark of purpose, and reinvigorating the animus that has dulled. The current that flows from the electrodes placed in the wearable cap can thus fundamentally restore the ghost in the machine.

YOUR WIFE’S GYM FRIEND IS DRUNK by Kyle Seibel

June 24, 2024

Your wife’s gym friend is drunk. Not outrageously drunk, but too drunk to drive. According to her, he went to a work happy hour thing that morphed into a dinner thing which became a cocktails thing and now he is stranded somewhere in the city. There are no Ubers apparently or the wait is too long, so he calls your wife and asks for a ride, that is, of course, if it’s alright with you.“I don’t understand,” you say. “He’s getting kicked out of the bar?”She’s standing near the door with car keys in her hand. “No, just drunk. I said that already.” “You’re really going downtown now?” She taps her phone. “It’s not that late.” You turn off the TV and say you’ll come too. Your wife drops her keys and they crash on the tiles. “Perfect,” she says, picking them up.

It’s just after Christmas last year that your wife declares war on her gunt. When you ask her what a gunt is, she lifts up her shirt and pulls down her pants and points to the crepey pouch of tissue on her lower stomach. Say goodbye, she says, grabbing and shaking it. To her credit, she follows through. Your wife wins the war against her gunt. She wins the war and just keeps going.And at first, there’s no issue. Not really. The gym is her space, her time. You’re happy for her, even. You have your places too. Your own gym, for example. Your office friends, you’re close with them. You know intimate things about each other. Brad from account services tried to kill himself in college, for example, and Sue Ann the media planner recently had plastic surgery on her vagina. But they know you as well, know when something’s off. It is Brad, in fact, who brings it up first. Comes over for a beer one night and asks where your wife is.“At the gym,” you say.“Didn’t she go this morning?” Brad says. “Didn’t you mention that?”“That was a class,” you say. “Boot camp or something. This is free weights. Or yoga, I forget.”“Does she do that a lot, go to the gym twice a day?”“Well,” you say. “She usually goes three times.” Brad takes a long drink of beer, wipes his mouth, looks away, and says jesus.

Your wife’s gym friend is wearing an untucked black shirt with the top three buttons undone. He is sitting in the passenger seat and giving you directions to his condo. Your wife follows behind, driving his car, which is some kind of SUV off-road type thing. It’s got a big stovepipe situation coming out of the hood, which he says comes in handy more often than you might think.He talks about work. He asks you what you do. When you tell him, he makes a face and says, “Damn dude!” Looking over, you notice your wife’s gym friend must shave his chest. You can tell because he has stubble. It distracts you for some reason. You roll a yellow light and pull over on the next block to wait for your wife to catch up.“Ah, just keep driving,” your wife’s gym friend says. “She knows where she’s going.”

You’d be more concerned if there was more to be concerned about. There’s a thing called trust, you tell Brad and Sue Ann. I trust her, you say. Ten years, you remind them. That’s a long time. But they don’t look convinced. They think it’s weird, all the time at the gym. And it’s not their fault, they just don’t know, don’t understand the extent of the situation. You’re not one of these shithead husbands. You do the dishes, your own cooking. You’re not ignorant or moody. You’re an adult, goddamnit. It’s how you’ve always been. Virtually nothing has changed since the day you were married. Hell, you wore your tux last Halloween and went as James Bond. You tell them you’re exactly the same person you were on your wedding day. The microwave in the breakroom bleats in bursts of three.“So, okay,” Sue Ann says. “Maybe that’s the problem.”

“How does she know where you live?” you ask your wife’s gym friend. You are still pulled over, waiting for the light to change and your wife to join you.“Hmm?” he says.You swallow and repeat the question. Behind you, your wife flashes her brights.“Oh, she’s taken me home from the gym before,” he says.“What?” you say.“Sometimes I jog there,” he says. “Double exercise, you know.”“Right,” you say, putting the car into gear. “Double exercise.”

It’ll take you three weeks to look at your wife’s phone and when you do, you’ll see her gym friend’s penis in the folder for recently deleted photos. You’ll be shocked by its color, its fluorescent redness. You’ll think, did he use a filter? Does he have high blood pressure? Is there something else medical going on here? You’ll look down at your own crotch. So normal looking, so boring. How can you compete with a day-glo dick? You can’t, you think. You can’t, of course.You’ll throw the phone against the wall. You’ll think, I should throw the phone against the wall. Then you’ll realize you already did that. You’ll pick it up and throw it against the wall again. A buzzer will go off in your ears. Your wife will come into the kitchen. She’ll be screaming at you, that was the buzzing. She’ll follow you out to your car, sawing like a cicada. You’ll leave the house and go to Brad’s and against Brad’s advice, you’ll return home a few hours later. For five days, your wife will refuse to go to the gym. She’ll lie in bed sobbing, begging for you to talk to her.On the sixth day, she’ll move in with her gym friend, into the condo where you dropped him off that night. Over the next couple months, she’ll intermittently try to get back together. She’ll text you baby names and call late at night. Your lawyer will advise you to not pick up. Your lawyer will also advise you to not prevent her access to the house, so when she asks to pick up some stuff, you’ll say that it’s fine, just don’t bring her gym friend. He’ll come along anyway.Your wife or whatever she is at this point, will run off upstairs to collect her things and leave you in the kitchen with him.He’ll say that none of this is her fault and that he understands how you’re feeling. He’ll say that neither of them meant for this to happen, but that it’s against nature to deny true love. He’ll say that in a couple years, we’ll laugh about this. You’ll tell him quietly that you’re going to punch him in the face. He’ll do this shitty laugh scoffing thing and shake his head and say he’s trying to have a mature conversation and so that’ll be when you punch him in the face. He’ll fall down, out of surprise mostly, and without thinking, you’ll kick him as hard as you can in the back, the spot where the kidneys are. You’ll do this a great number of times. He’ll writhe around on the ground. You’ll step on his head a little and grind his face against the kitchen floor. Something religious will fill your chest when you hear his nose crunch under your foot. Your wife will hear the yelling and come running and see the blood on the white tile and faint, but when she comes to, she will be looking at you in a whole new way, and it will disturb you, it will turn your stomach, because you’ll realize that somewhere in all this violence, the seeds of your eventual reconciliation have been planted.

You keep the car running as your wife walks her gym friend to his door. Driving him home was your good deed for the day, you reason. There’s really no point in overthinking things. Tomorrow’s Thursday. You can take Friday off. There’s nothing wrong that can’t be fixed by a long weekend. Your wife gets back in the car, turns the heat up full blast, says something you can’t hear. You ask her to repeat it. She says never mind.

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The girls were odd. by Katie Antonsson

June 17, 2024

The girls were odd. They didn’t make friends, we realized too late, they collected people. A cab driver who barely spoke English, a barista with a middling art career and infected lip piercing, the neighborhood dog-walker-cum-psychedelics-dealer. We decorated their lives, and we wanted to. We were ravenous to. Every text message, every invitation to the graveyard or the beach, we simply couldn’t say no. Their magnetism was a thing to behold, a gift to feel.They ate little, like birds, claiming assorted food allergies none of us had heard of and none of us questioned. They went to a loosely qualified doctor who tapped their temples and told them their guts were full of parasites. They believed they were witches, and given the power they had over us, none of us was eager to dispute this.We loved their ardent devotion to each other, and wondered how any of us could be so lucky as to populate their orbit. They dropped tabs on our tongues like fairy godmothers and we thought we were blessed. Their friendship was fast—none of us knew the propulsion was drugs, not truth. None of us knew it hit hard and quietly like an acid trip then faded out with sullen indifference.So when they disappeared, separately and then together, the hole they left behind was so ragged none of us could stop purging long enough to breathe. And realize.“The thing is,” a friend says to me while he changes lanes on the 101, “there are friends, right. And then there are the people you do drugs with.”I reject this notion, soundly, a week after Anastasia disappears and an hour before Antonia does. It isn’t hard to know where they’ll be on a Sunday afternoon, and I just want to believe them. All the same, I can’t seem to stop crying.A therapist—I can’t remember which one of the five I see—asked me what was worth fighting for, what was so brilliant about Anastasia that I couldn’t stop fixating. The answer seemed obvious: everything was brilliant about her; she shone like Saturn itself on the night of the new moon; she floated through this life, ethereal and untouchable, and for a while she’d bothered to look me in the eye. I wanted to devour her whole, become her. But when I opened my mouth to spill this soliloquy, all that dribbled out was, “Oh, my god. I don’t know.”I’d touched the fabric of the universe for a good seven months, and her sudden absence felt like a rebuke, like a rejection of my being. Our souls had tangled that afternoon in the freezing water of the Kern River. I’d dropped to my knees in the current, splashing up to my neck, and let out a primal scream so deep and vibrational I felt all the errors of my life simply exit my body. And she was right beside me, crying, smiling, pointing to a blue jay and saying it was the soul of my grandfather watching me. I’d never felt so loved in my life.“Were you not on five scant grams of shrooms?” my friend interrupts, blaring his horn at a mountain lion attempting to cross the freeway.I hobbled out of the water after a brave thirty seconds. She stayed in for twenty minutes, claiming she’d done so much work on her nervous system the cold actually felt good. I felt properly chastened for not doing enough work on my nervous system for the cold to actually feel good.I never knew, and still don’t, why I was collected. Me, a soft housing department inspector who’d been called to investigate a burst pipe in their apartment that burbled out red water like Kool-Aid. When I arrived, they’d piled everything on top of everything else. They were huddled together atop an armchair atop the couch atop the bed, limbs tangled, bright eyes fixed on me. There was a good eight inches of acid red water devouring their floor. Two ducks had flown in through an open window, dipping their beaks and coating their feathers in vermillion. They said they regretted calling me because they loved the ducks.As the last drop of liquid drained, and as I scrawled my illegible signature to the final report, they clambered down from their tower and asked if I wanted to be their friend. Creatures of this magnitude had never approached me—I had cystic acne and scoliosis—and yet here they were, looking me deep in the eye and handing me a piece of lilac paper with one phone number on it along with a half-gram mushroom. The floor and lower eight inches of their apartment were freshly red. It never faded, not as long as I knew them. They’d point to the low water mark at parties and say it was the water that sent me, Brayden, to them. It was A Sign from The Universe to Conjoin Our Paths, as in all of our Past Lives.I couldn’t shut up about them. Not then, not now.“Of that,” my friend says, nearly missing the exit to the canyons, “I am well aware.”They shared a purple cell phone so you never knew which of them was responding to your text. I was saved in their contacts as Moonbeam☽, and this made me feel special. They used a lot of ☆sparkles☆ and rarely my name. Sometimes Antonia would tell me to meet her at the graveyard after dark, to hop the fence and skirt the guards. I did it three times, tearing my pants at the crotch and not saying a word about the blood seeping through the knees. She’d dance under the full moon, a diaphanous dressing gown she’d stolen from a set she’d worked on (the only time I ever heard her mention a job) billowing around her in dramatic fashion. This was when she confessed to her kleptomania, in small sighs as she caught her delicate breath. She stole once a day, every day, from big box stores. Mostly supplements and probiotics. She had a lifetime cache of them in her closet. She admitted this with such resigned pride it seemed ridiculous that everyone wasn’t stealing. In total and over time, I stole $927 worth of goods from the mega–hardware store. Just $23 shy of grand larceny. It did, I have to admit, feel incredible.Life with them was outrageously beautiful. I simply mattered more, in this life, under their attention. We all felt this way, though I doubt any of us would have the nerve to admit it. They seemed to access a current of existence that none of us had known existed, and they pulled us into its flow. The rules as we’d known them seemed arbitrary and small; their world was a kind of floating, a soft ease. They called me, a man truly ugly as sin, the most beautiful being they’d ever seen, stroking my craggy cheeks. It seemed that after thirty-two years of thin, pale light, I might finally see color.And then Anastasia stopped speaking to me. She wouldn’t look me in the eye at parties and shrugged away from my hand on her shoulder. She’d gaze indifferently at the wall as I left their apartment, whispering wistfully that she loved me in a child’s mocking tone. When I asked her what was wrong, she’d sigh, “Nothing, Moonbeam. Nothing.” Their texts were increasingly Antonia-coded, and nobody believed my sweating panic, until Anastasia said she’d enjoyed the relationship we’d had in the past and simply disappeared. The sinking in my stomach and the hole in my heart were surprising, even to me. I was so hollowed out I called off work for two days to sit on my couch in abject silence. By Wednesday, I stood in a wrecked apartment downtown and let the upstairs pipes rain electric blue water on my head, soak my clipboard. By Thursday, I stood in a room made of mold and breathed spores with indifference, watching them grow across the clipboard. By Friday, I stood outside the girls’ apartment and looked through the window, my big greasy nose smashed against the glass. Half of the red stain was scrubbed away, as if the apartment were sawed in two. I was sawed in two. Antonia glided out of the bedroom and watched me through the glass, taking pity on me long enough to walk me to the park and let me cry on her shoulder while she fed me dekopon oranges in the dappled light. Anastasia merely went through her phases, she assured me with a honeyed tongue, just as the moon does. And I believed her. She slipped me half a tab of acid and we, too, went to the moon. Her laugh fluttered like crystal and her freckles sparkled. She promised I would always be her moonbeam. And I believed her.I still do.“Fuck, $15?” my friend cries, coming to a shrieking stop at the parking lot gate. He reverses and rams into the car behind us, which honks pitifully, and cranks forward again to find a street spot in front of someone’s second home. I start to cry again as we walk toward the secret stairs, blubbering behind my sunglasses. I showed them this beach. They took my hands, one on each side, as we walked down this road, waving at people out in their front yards tending to their succulents. A woman gave Anastasia a cutting that she popped in water and called Brayden once it grew roots long enough to live. Antonia plucked limes from trees so ripe mounds of exploded citrus blanketed the ground. We listened to the ocean, floated in the waves, and cried about our mothers. It was the best day of my life, I’m sorry to say.My friend and I descend the sand-coated stairs. There’s one huddle of figures on the beach, spread across striped blankets, that seems to breathe and expand. There are five in total, and the glittering shapes of Anastasia and Antonia render beautifully with every step, their laughs bounding across the walls of the cliffside. I know that sound in my marrow, the validation of it, that for the first time in my life anyone found me funny. As we approach, the laughter wanes and the companions defamiliarize. Where I’d assumed the cab driver and the infected barista and the dog-walker-cum-psychedelics-dealer I’d come to know and nearly love, instead: a convenience store owner who couldn’t speak at all, a bartender with an eyepatch, a feral-cat herder with a joint dangling from his lip. They look at me in expectation. The girls don't look at me at all.I attempt to say their names, but all that comes out is a pathetic squeak.“Hi,” my friend says breathlessly, his eyes affixed to the girls. A familiar wonder is on his syllable, and as I turn to cast him a glance, I suddenly disintegrate into the sand beneath his feet.They turn to him, lock their pinkies together. “What’s your name?” Antonia asks, so coolly taking the joint from the cat herder. She impossibly exhales a perfect ring of smoke into which my friend says his name. The girls turn to each other and giggle. “Who are you?”He is speechless for a moment, reduced to a stuttering moron, eyes glazed. “I’m a claims adjuster with plaque psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis.”Anastasia beams, tossing her hair back into the sun, and asks, “Do you want to be our friend?” All he can do is nod, his jaw slack, bewitched. All I can do is stare up at him in horror, reduced to millions of aghast granules. The betrayal! The nerve. Anastasia jumps up, setting her manicured feet right on top of me, and takes his hand. Something feels familiar about the sand around me. It smells like old car, like espresso, like dog hair. Antonia takes one last toke and pops the joint into the eyepatched bartender’s mouth, slipping her hand into my friend’s other sweaty palm, her fingers laced through the crust of his plaques.“You have beautiful hands,” Antonia gasps, examining the red flakes across his knuckles. She kisses them one by one with childish glee. “Well, come on, Moonbeam,” Anastasia says, pulling their human chain to the water. His laugh booms across the sand, shivering every one of my grains, as he follows them into the sea.