Flash

EILEEN GETS A LITTLE BIT DRUNK by Natalie Warther

January 13, 2021

My sons were watching a movie in the living room and I was upstairs, rummaging through their bathroom. I’m not really sure why, I almost never go in there, but there I was, and I’d had some wine, and we hadn’t left the house for twelve days, for Christ’s sake, so what else was I supposed to do? I looked in the drawers, looked in the shower, looked in the trash can, looked in the mirror and I looked old. I stuck my finger out like a cane, pointed it at the mirror, furrowed my eyebrows, and whispered at my reflection, “You pick up this hallway right this instant.” It was odd at first, seeing what my boys see. I thought about leaving, turning off the light, and joining them in the living room. But it felt a little bit good, mi petite performánce, so I tried, “You think I like being the bad guy?” And that felt a little bit more natural, so I kept going; I kept scolding that mirror.“That’s it, no phone for a week.”“Cut the shit, young man.”“You get your ass back up those stairs, NOW.” I was getting braver, the boys were in the living room, I was sure they were, so I gave my voice a slightly longer leash, “This is the last time I’m going to tell you to put that mother fucking phone down,” and “Hit your brother again and I’ll give you something to cry about,” and, yelling now, I mean, really pushing it, “You’ll drive me to suicide, Eileen!” Just how my mother used to say it. And then I turned the light off and left. But before I did, I used my oldest son’s toothbrush, because I missed him dearly, even though he was there, just down the stairs, watching a movie in the living room.

GIRL ON FIRE by Neal Suit

January 6, 2021

The first of the silvery sequins that grew and dangled from your skin appeared on your left shoulder, forming the shape of a crescent moon. I examined the sparkling protrusions rising near your collar bone, squinting as they glistened under the lamp.You booked an appointment with the dermatologist. They gave you a cream and told you to come back in a week if it hadn’t cleared up. They took pictures to show their colleagues and friends and the internet. They fawned over how you shined.Sequins sprouted on your arms, legs, neck, back, and forehead. Walking made you shimmer. The sequins not only reflected light but generated it, emitting an ethereal radiance. Your light seeped under our doors and billowed from our chimney, its slivers spilled out from our windows. People gathered to see the majestic illumination, took pictures and videos, posted them online and claimed you were a gift from God, a genius, an aspiration.Sequins soon covered your entire body, each of your movements a cacophony of glittering fire wheels, a dancing forest of whirring diamonds. I wore sunglasses everywhere I went, even when I showered or sought refuge in the garage. In the pitch black of midnight, our house remained alight. I covered you in a thick, wool blanket. The glare was still like shards of glass piercing my optic nerves. The blanket burst into orange flame, sputtered into black, and disintegrated into gritty, dark powder. You caught our bed on fire, the heat from your reflection incinerating the wood frame and synthetic fibers of the sheets. I could not hold or touch you for fear of being singed, my skin burned to blisters.Throngs assembled outside our house, hoping for a glimpse of you. When you left the house, crowds followed. Restaurants seated you at their best table without a reservation, a waiter standing by with a fire extinguisher in case your reflection combusted the table, the walls, the wine, the other customers. You were invited to red carpets, after parties, and award shows. Newspaper and television reporters called you a national treasure, a celestial being, a glimmering example of what can be achieved, what all young girls should strive to be. Fashion designers tried to sculpt dresses and gowns and jeans and blouses to simulate your luster, the marvel of your shine. All of them fell short of your grandeur and knew it.You worried that the only reason anyone liked you was for your sequin skin. You worried that the sequins would dull or fall away. You had nightmares that someone grew diamonds for skin, another ruby flesh, overpowering your shine, outdazzling you. Your brilliance grew. Your bright glow created a veil of blindness, even for you. Everyone stood back, averting their eyes, seeing only the blur of light, unable to get close for fear of burning their skin and eyes, being reduced to ash. The most they could hope to see is the remnant of phosphorescence from where you had been, the scorch marks on the concrete where you had stood, the remains of a dying star. All the while they muttered to each other, “Isn’t she beautiful? Isn’t she perfect?”

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE! by Rich Giptar

January 4, 2021

The first time I ever heard about Matthew, Mom was filming us on her Nikon D5300 and trying to get us to play this stupid game for her YouTube channel. The previous day she had filmed our reaction to her telling us we were getting a new brother or sister. We had been in a good mood then, ready to whoop and jump in the air and cover our mouths with our hands and run out the room. The bit she was filming that day was meant to be sequential, but Dad, a moron, had put our clothes from yesterday in the washing basket instead of spraying them with Febreze and folding them on top of the vasselier like he was supposed to. I had to wear this stinky, crumpled Ralph Lauren football shirt and Elise had to wear this stinky, crumpled Ralph Lauren pin-striped dress. My parents were very faithful to Ralph Lauren because it was where they got the idea to adopt from overseas in the first place, out of an article about a child model for Ralph Lauren, who had been adopted from India. The article was still on our corkboard. The title of the article was ‘SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE!’

Mom shoved a scratch-map towards us with the hand that wasn’t holding the camera and asked us to guess where our little sibling might be from by scratching out different countries. It was laborious. Elise scratched out the UK, and I scratched out Australia, and Elise scratched out Sweden until Mom got irritated. Dad pointed out a country that was the shape of an Airheads candy. Because it was a scratch map, it didn’t have any names on it.

I was editing with Adobe Premiere on Mom’s computer when she got back from the airport with Matthew. We were going to film the first time we met him, but it was easier if it wasn’t the real first time so we could plan it. Elise ran and opened the front door but something was wrong. My first thought was that he came from a people that was extremely tall, like the Dinka people of South Sudan, because he was taller than Mom. But it turned out that he was just old. It obviously wasn’t what Mom wanted, because toddlers got more clicks, but she had been teasing this for weeks and had a brand deal so in the end she just had to take whatever she could and move on.

‘Hi,’ said Matthew.

I thought he must be half Black, half Chinese because he wasn’t Black or Chinese. Unless he was…Muslim? Elise and I shook hands with Matthew and then he helped me edit a video of his gender reveal on Adobe Premiere. I was holding a large balloon filled with blue powder which Elise stabbed with craft scissors. When it popped the powder sprinkled over us like a Pokemon stun-spore animation.

Mom was disappointed because she had to scrap a lot of video ideas, like teaching Matthew English. The thing is, Matthew was actually really good at videos. He was spontaneous and could do cool stunts, like fifty cartwheels without getting out of breath. He said it was because he was raised in a mountainous atmosphere so the air down here went in really smooth and easy. Mom said, ‘I’m not trying to be David Dobrik.’

Matthew taught me a lot of useful things, the first two of which were how to clean your nose out in the sink and how to make your hand into a boat shape so you could eat without using cutlery. He also showed Elise and me how to play tigers and goats. First, you had to make a grid of thirty-two isosceles triangles. We made a huge grid in the yard out of rope and twenty Ralph Lauren promotional T-shirts. We needed one more tiger. Mom came out into the yard. ‘Be a tiger! We need a tiger!’ Elise yelled at her.

‘Or you could be a goat,’ I said.

‘What?’ said Mom. She looked angry.

In the end, Dad was a tiger.

Matthew got a job at the computer repair store so he could save up for community college. He actually had a lot of qualifications already, but they weren’t valid in America. He bought a car and sometimes brought Elise and me along on trips to the Asian supermarket to buy Lao Gan Ma and Bombay mix.

‘Timi haru kasta chau?’ the shopkeeper used to say to us.

‘Hami sanchai chum,’ we said back.

Dad used to be the one who was behind the camera, but after he started going on more weekend work trips, Mom made Matthew the camera man. He was also the donkey-man. One day we were hiking along the Bison trail and Matthew had to carry a colossal backpack with a million changes of clothes in it so Mom could take a lot of photos and eke them out over the next month on her Momstagram.

Mom found a boulder she want to take some photos with and asked us to climb on top. I could do it easily but Elise looked like a crazy squirrel trying to get up there in Keds, swinging this dumb Barbie-colored baguette bag prop. Mom rolled her eyes. It was funny ‘til it wasn’t because she ended up slipping and crunching her ankle. Matthew had to scoop up Elise and run with her back down the trail with the obese pack still bumping up and down on his back. Mom scooped up the baguette bag before she followed.

We went to the ER and had to wait on this gross foamy line of chairs. Mom started sneaking the camera out and zooming in on Elise’s face and then zooming back out and then zooming in on her twisted ankle. After like an hour of waiting she said ‘Hell,’ and then grabbed Elise’s arm and tried to make her hop over to a ward and lie down in an empty bed for the clickbait. She was dragging Elise and Elise didn’t want to be dragged and was leaning the other way and they ended up crashing onto the floor. A lot of nurses came and stood in a disapproving circle around them like nuns. After that we stopped speaking to Mom and Mom stopped speaking to us. She posted a broken-heart emoji on Twitter and started taking Dad on expensive dates downtown.

For Matthew’s eighteenth birthday, we pooled our pocket money together and bought him a Canon EOS M6 Mark II. He also had some presents for us. They were adoption papers with our names freshly printed across them, and two airline tickets. We were finally going to be able to leave Trump’s America behind, and pick fresh golden raspberries off wild bushes. We were going back to Matthew’s homeland.

‘Your parents have agreed,’ he said, ‘and they’ll come and visit on vacations.’ We nodded happily. Mom and Dad were away in Guatemala. They were trying to find a new orphan there, a young one, with some modelling potential.

At the airport he bought us chicken nuggets and Capri Suns. Elise propped her ankle up across two chairs and rested her head back in Matthew’s lap. I leaned onto his other side. I felt content and languid, like a dog.

‘I love you, Matthew,’ I said.

He put his arm around me. ‘My name isn’t Matthew,’ he said.

ON THE STREET CORNER by Lina Lau

December 30, 2020

To see him again—tall, lean, crinkling eyes, thin lips tugged into a smile, always dry from working outside high up in the trees, a ‘tree doctor,’ he called himself—my stomach drops like it did when we first met at seventeen, him walking into the shoe store where I worked, later returning to ask me out, the first time picked up by a boy meeting my parents and we strolled the boardwalk in and out of circles of lamppost light, illuminating, fingers intertwined, his large hands enveloping, and now two decades later on the street corner in front of his parked work truck, white instead of black like the one he bought when we were together, so big he hoisted me up at the used car dealership, chuckling, the first truck I ever drove, perched and squinting out too-dark tinted windows, picking him up downtown at the end of his serving shift when his tip money was stolen out of his locker, a weekend job to save cash for our daydreamed trip to Belize, we catch up—his wife’s new hospital job, high daycare costs for his kids (I don’t reveal I know about his wife and kids from curious social media searches over the years), and my recent engagement (I keep the ring hidden under my gloves, he doesn’t ask)—then reminisce, his downcast embarrassment when his car ran out of gas on our third date, trekking the highway shoulder together carrying a red plastic gas can, the stocking I made for his first Christmas celebration, having renounced his mother’s religion just before we met, his name sewed in bold block white felt letters like the ones from my own childhood, eating soggy sandwiches under flat-bottom clouds in Saskatchewan during a cross-country drive, slurping warm chicken noodle soup on New Year’s Eve while he sprawled under a navy blanket on the couch sick with shingles, how I watched the X-Files through outstretched fingers covering my face curled beside him, always seeking his protection, stuck at the top of Blackcomb mountain, scared on a double-black diamond run in my stiff snowboard and boots, him holding me and coaxing me down, stripping mint-green paint from an old dresser, a thrift store find, sanding it bare and refinishing in hazelnut, something hearty and new, a dresser I still use, and now our belly laughter deep and full, talking over each other, words tumbling, so we don’t notice the crisp November air but shove hands deeper into pockets and step closer, my chattering teeth overlooked, work appointments ignored, my chest tightening as he removes his work helmet, tousling greying hair, and then a pause—his lowered voice asking, “Why did we break up again?”— and we remembered me leaning against the kitchen counter while he paced the grey speckled tiles, looking everywhere but at me, voice cracking, that after nearly nine years he didn’t want to settle down, he wasn’t ready, not in his mid-twenties, reasons now evaporated, and then for years, out-of-the-blue phone calls, dinners and concerts, pinkies linked, new boyfriends compared, each time wondering if this was it, hopeful, surprised at details he remembered about me that even I forgot, his memories a tether, getting tattoos, two colorful swallows on his chest facing each other, the crest of a blue wave on the inside of my left ankle, ebb and flow of tides, permanent reminders, and yet another night together, entangled and familiar, falling asleep as always with one leg draped over his, bodies warm and clinging together with sweat, hot breath in my neck, after he hosted a going away get-together before I moved away for grad school, grilling burgers for my friends, and I remember not our first kiss, but the one when I first knew, outside his sister’s apartment door, his back against the wall, me leaning in on tiptoes, him pulling me close, the weight of his clasped hands behind my back, the taste of cigarettes, and now we gaze at each other across a long silence, and when we hug goodbye, we each hold tight before letting go.

DELICIOUS by James Cato

December 21, 2020

Like most Saturday mornings, I’m alone cleaning the streets. The morning sun hurries through the cloudless sky, already buttering me with sweat, though Las Vegas sleeps. I slog around with trash pincers and make peace with the place through solitude.

Before, I worked afternoons and wore my baseball cap with the army patch. People asked questions. Where was I deployed? What’s it like being a woman in war? Did I ever shoot someone? War stories drew people in. They tried to stare through the ugly by looking at me.

I’m picking up after a parade; I can tell by the debris. Streamers stick to the sidewalk like snakeskin. Buzzards hunch atop asphalt burgers and chicken bones, sharing sticky leftovers with lizards and scorpions. I call it desert-dessert. Delicious. They help me clean.

When I wore my hat, some people would blame me, yell at me. Others would thank me. Nobody knew any better. I came from a small town, the only way out spelled A-R-M-Y. At eighteen I copied the boys and picked up my M16 with dreams of returning to a big city. I guess it worked—Vegas, baby.

I pause, my sack heavy with trampled food, fancy pants, a sparkly shoe, ragdoll condoms, a brunette wig, and Everclear in a grenade bottle. A creepy plastic bag crinkles in the center of the road, juddering in the heat mirages, weighed down by a shrouded cylinder. I drift toward it like a hooked fish.

I was asked if I got flashbacks. People heard of IEDs disguised as garbage, but they hadn’t heard of daisy-rigging. That’s when one decoy IED, planted somewhere obvious, is linked to another, hidden. You never have a clue. To those asking, I just said: It gets easier.

My jeans swish against the steel under them, long jeans because my legs don’t get hot anymore. A vulture beats her wings to defend her breakfast. I promise her I’m not interested. A scorpion scuttles by, tail up. I give my pincers a few clicks in solidarity. A spiky lizard pauses in my shadow. He can only go a few minutes exposed without cooking alive, so I rest, offering my shade. I eye the heat weeping from that ominous bag.

Some people were curious; some were killing the cat. The latter quizzed me on my childhood. Where I grew up, we'd placed dime bets on lizard-scorpion fights in jelly jars. “So you’re a tomboy,” the people replied. No. I always chose the lizard, and I always lost. The scorpion was daisy-rigged too; it distracted the reptile with mean claws then stuck them with the flagpole stinger. One girl chided, “If you hadn’t trapped them together, lizards and scorpions would never fight.” I agreed with her.

Nowadays I rarely see anything but downed drunks and desert-dessert out here. Even when I do, my head is naked to burn, no more army hat. Still, there’s that familiar horror. It’s everywhere in Vegas—bodily fluids, confetti, meat, clothes, sun, photos, torn food, glasses, vomit, tamped dunes, smoke, torn packaging, friends, sere vegetation, shattered porcelain. Remains of a night gone wrong. The striking indifference of the desert.

A few men with chapped lips liked my figure, and I stared at their legs. They looked at my shirt sticking to my chest or at my hair curling in the heat and made sly intimations, but I just stared at their legs. Stared as if there were nothing else, no man, just calves sliced like porpoises through a propeller, toes pointed like fairy shoes, two dogs with eager snouts. They gave up eventually. Probably after telling me they had the world’s longest tongue.

This bag on the center line has a prim little knot to cloak its contents. I reach down and work it free, hand shaking. Inside, glowing in the sun, is a full angel cake in plastic armor. I smile at it for a full minute before I bring it to the curb. Yes, an untouched angel cake, forgotten, a gift from fate with no strings attached. I join in desert-dessert with the vultures—delicious. Like remains of a night gone right.

THE COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPIST WANTS A DIVORCE BUT DOES NOT WANT TO BE THE ONE TO ASK by Jo Withers

December 18, 2020

Ten months before she wants things to end, she buys two figures sculpted in soapstone, one male and one female. She positions them on the bedroom windowsill, where they will be the first thing seen each morning, the last thing seen each night. Every day she moves the figures a fraction apart. Every day she turns the male slightly into shadow, every day she moves the female closer to the light.

Eight months before she wants things to end, she redecorates, weaving bad memories throughout the apartment like mold. She scents the inside of their pillows with crumpled pine leaves to remind him of the skiing holiday where she flirted endlessly with the waiter. She covers the coffee table in the lounge room with black and white art magazines, like the ones in the waiting room at couple’s counselling. She displays erotic prints on the lounge room walls: a ballerina who looks just like her, wrapped around a dancer who looks just like his best friend.

Six months before she wants things to end, she conceals a thin wire through the lining of the sofa, from her side onto his. Every time he says something romantic, she pulls the wire a little at her end so it scratches the back of his neck, thin and pointed like a needle. ‘I missed you today,’ scratch, ‘I like your hair like that,’ scratch, ‘I love you,’ scratch.

Four months before she wants things to end, she talks to him after he falls asleep. She slips the curtain back and lets the moon inside, licking the walls like patterns on a zoetrope. She watches his eyelids dance as he grows restless, smiles as his peace of mind strains. She leans closer, feeds his subconscious with hatred. She whispers names of her past lovers, intertwines them with the names of poisonous plants and sexual positions. She tells him what she liked, what she doesn’t like with him.

Two months before she wants things to end, she chooses a symbol to mark the culmination point. She decides on a cross. She bombards him with this image at the conclusion of everything. When they finish eating, she places her knife and fork in a cross on her plate. When the T.V. show ends, she crosses her legs. When the day is over, she marks a thick black cross on the kitchen calendar. When they finish having sex, she strokes a cross against his back with her fingertips.

One month before she wants things to end, she begins to highlight words in newspapers, magazine articles, cereal boxes, instruction booklets. Words like ‘terminate’, ‘dispose’, ‘detach’.

On the day she wants things to end, she knocks the soapstone man to the floor, leaves it lying face down under the bed. She whispers belladonna and the name of her first lover over and over as he sleeps. She circles every spiteful, affecting negative that she can find—‘separate’ on the laundry powder, ‘divide’ on the cake mixture, ‘dissolve’ on the salt. She leaves him a note, ‘See you tonight’ followed by ten thick black kisses. Cross, cross, cross, cross, cross, cross, cross, cross, cross, cross.

When she returns from work, the house is still. She smiles at the inertia as she moves from room to room. His marks are already fading, no footprints on the sofa, no ring stains on the coffee table. His clothes have been cleared from the wardrobe; his accessories have been taken from the drawers. As she wanders through the kitchen, she ignores the water filter blinking ‘empty’, pretends she doesn’t notice the microwave label urging ‘Do not dissemble parts’. In the bedroom, evening turns the cream walls sepia, on the windowsill the soapstone woman absorbs the last light and warmth from the fading sun.

THE ROT OF THAT by Darina Sikmashvili

December 17, 2020

City women bucked when you tried to do a nice thing. To carry this or that, to open a door. To offer guidance in a terrain they weren't used to. Danny remembered telling one young woman with a gristly attitude that she shouldn't get too flustered about the noises at night. Houses out here make noise; nature is a talker. She was there to buy firewood. He was trying to do her a favor. But the girl just raked her tongue ring across her teeth and looked the other way. Danny wanted to reach into that mouth with his fingers and yank the ring right out. But he took her money, tossed the wood into the trunk of her car, and watched her get the fuck off his property.

This woman wasn’t like that. The feat to mask a certain softness immediately endeared her to him. She reminded him a little of his Josephine is why. He liked the way she studied her surroundings, his property. The way she offered, in earnest, to help wheel the wheelbarrow across the rain-silken earth. Hesitant, she asked: was the wood dry? He assured her, he wanted to. Dry as bone. It'll catch quick. Come see for yourself. Come closer. Close.

But she would not.

Josephine liked it, he thought, even under all her lecturing. Liked how ridiculous Danny found it when she'd go calling up specialists for the house’s little things. How by the time some jackass quoted her a price like he was going to drive her around in a limousine while the pipes got replaced, Danny would return with the parts to do the work himself.

This was early, when he was courting. Trying to teach this city mouse in an ugly, old, inherited house how to lean back and relax. What needed mending? She need only show him.

“Daniel,” she'd whisper.

“Danny,” he'd correct.

He rose with the sun. His hands, eager and aching to meddle, to fix. But fixing’s not what partners are for. She called him that. Partner. Like they were fixing to rob a bank.

Always a musky fear when Josephine climbed on top. She rode him and looked up, or worse, inward. He burned holes into her eyelids trying to will her out of a private celebration and back into bed with him. He felt not like her husband then but some thrill dispensary. A utility. He’d let her work herself until he swelled with wrath. Then he'd fake boredom, pluck her off, and turn her on her stomach. He’d grind to find her tool parts, isolate them, but it would come to naught. Softened by adulation, always.

Josephine left him in the winter, in the middle of the night. The inherited house was his if he wanted it. He chopped what he could into wood to sell. He chopped the trees. He torched every last living thing on that plot of land but mother nature sneered. Spring came. Shrub returned lush and grass soothed scalded earth.

But what of the rot of loneliness? What of that?

THE COUCH ATE MY MOTHER by Julia Breitkreutz

December 11, 2020

The couch unhinges its gray jaws and my mother’s unresisting body sinks into the wide gap between the soft cushions. When I first notice that the couch is eating my mother, the slight folding of her pelvis into the gray polyester fabric is so subtle of a shift that I would have easily glanced over if not for the noise—thick and wet—like leaving the YMCA as a kid. With a beach towel wrapped around my small frame, I remember how my orange Crocs quickly filled with a thin puddle of water that had dripped off my body. The sound of my skin and the chlorine water coming together in the confined space made me laugh as I walked with my mother—hand in hand—across the hot pavement towards our van. A squelching sound.

The couch’s black, slimy tongue has revealed itself and is wrapping around my mother’s thin, unshaven calves. It releases this thick gray goo across her wasted body, like the glistening trails slugs leave behind on our driveway. I grab and pull my mother’s arm—we all do—but the action only seems to increase the rate at which the couch devours her.

There are the pills—yellow and white and some pink—that Doctor Gordon tells us we must give her three times a day. Dr. Gordon has a thick belly upon which he folds his wide hands when we tell him that the pills aren’t working, that our mother is still being eaten. He is already scribbling a prescription for more pills as we speak.

I wonder what color they will be this time. What shape.

I hold my mother’s head up and away from the floral-patterned pillow and notice the indentation her head has made in the fabric. I press the glass to her thin, chapping lips. As the orange juice drains from the glass, I find myself wondering exactly how long it takes for the colorful pills to exert their power after dissolving within a body.

Soon all that is left of my mother’s body is her head and neck. We take turns spoon-feeding her vanilla yogurt mixed in with strawberries for breakfast and warmed-up beef stew for dinner. I fill up a red bowl with warm water and massage shampoo into her hair, cupping the water in my hand and rinsing away the suds as she sinks a little deeper, the end of her chin now hidden.

There is a moment in which I think I notice a flicker in her eye. For an instant, I convince myself that she is actually looking at me as if she suddenly remembers that I am her daughter and she is my mother. Just as quickly as it is there, it disappears and the couch makes a slurping noise, taking a few centimeters more of her into that space which we cannot reach.

ROLLING by H. A. Eugene

December 9, 2020

The day came when he didn’t know what else he could possibly do, so he climbed up a great hill and lied down on top of it. And then he started rolling.

He accelerated, faster and faster, and after a few exhilarating bangs and bumps, found himself, once again, at the bottom. But he didn’t stop there. He kept on rolling—through the woods and into town. Eventually he rolled into the city, underneath the highway that bisected its sprawling map, past the train tracks, and beyond the outlet stores that marked the suburb’s edge.

Rolling, rolling, rolling.

Until houses changed to warehouses, and warehouses changed to land with unshaven grass and ravenous trees that crawled over rocks and monopolized the dirt; until that dirt turned to rock, and that rock, a chalk-like substance that ended at a cliff whose edge dropped into a churning, interminable darkness.

The sea.

And with no regard for what lay ahead, he plunged right off that edge—and splashed directly into the foaming brine. But this didn’t stop his motion, no. Instead, he continued rolling—underwater. On the sea floor, over massive dead reefs, and beyond the Continental Shelf, then down into the Mariana Trench, where water flows beneath the water.

And even in this lightless submarine plain of great pressure and gurning silence, he kept on rolling.

Rolling, rolling, rolling.

By this point, it was as if motion had become a type of stillness, and stillness, motion; a convolution of senses, all but ignored by his ceaselessly spinning purview.

Like those numerous wrecks—missing machines, long since abandoned and so time-worn, they appeared ancient.

And those ruins—so eroded, they appeared constructed by time and chance, and not by people.

And those bizarre entities—yes, there were creatures down there! But as organisms go, they were barely alive, in the sense that he understood ‘alive’ to be. And the exact shapes of their oblique bodies—to say nothing of how they lived at all, this far down—would never be known by him. Because—like the wrecks, the ruins, and every other mystery that whirled by—they appeared only as colorful slivers of light, beheld for barely a stroboscopic moment; far too quick to ever be properly defined, or explained. Because he was rolling.

Rolling, rolling, rolling.

And he kept on rolling, even when the waters became still, and the air rejoined the surface, where birds made feasts of dead things in the briny surf.

Mind you, by this point, he, himself, was dead; though that hardly mattered. His lack of life did nothing to stop his rolling; though eventually, his body did fall apart, smallest bits, first. Fingernails, then fingers. Then hands. Then arms. And those biggest chunks of him dissolved into bone and mush; then sand, until that sand broke up into the smallest possible units of matter; mindless doo-dads that kept on and on and on; compelled by heat and cold, to a state of endless, un-feeling motion.

Rolling, rolling, rolling.

AT THE POLICE STATION, WITH SKETCH ARTIST by Alana Mohamed

December 4, 2020

The most startling thing about him was the realization that he must have been beautiful when he was younger. I like to look into people’s faces and imagine them other ways: older, younger, dying, terrified, on the brink of extreme cruelty. This man did not look capable of cruelty, though it was dark out and difficult to tell. He seemed like a good man who had grown up and seen life turn in on itself and now he was in a hard way, with such a striking face and such deep lines.It was a foggy Tuesday and I was exhausted from a hike through four supermarkets to find limes. It was unusual of me to be out so late at night and to stare so brazenly at a man. I’m embarrassed about it now.He carried stress in his brow, I remember. It furrowed when I didn’t immediately comply. I couldn’t hear him at first. He was a frantic whisperer and I was at a loss to make him stop. He got close enough to reach for my bag, a vintage store relic I bought to be interesting, and I finally understood. I imagined his whole face smoothing out at the sight of hungry children or a pregnant wife, and I decided to give him everything. I shoved my bag in his hands along with: my wallet, $73 in cash, and two credit cards I never use; the keys to my apartment; a small can of pepper spray; three overnight pads I carried “just in case;” a water bottle with no water; half a package of Tums; the three limes I had finally claimed. “For gimlets,” I explained when he looked up.“Funny lady,” he whispered. He thought I was joking. I liked that.He didn’t like it when I took off my blouse. Instead, with alarm: “Look funny lady, I don’t want any trouble.” I told him I wasn’t trying to give him any trouble, just the clothes off my back. “That always spells trouble,” he said, shaking his head. It’s true, I carry some baggage from past relationships, but he didn’t have to assume it was like that.I said, “You’re being very rude and I didn’t take you for a rude guy.”His eyes widened—they had been narrowed the whole time and I’d assumed he had a natural Clint Eastwood squint, but when he looked at me, years melted off his face. I could see that underneath he was like a Disney Prince, handsome and prone to severe errors in judgment. “I don’t think you’re a rude guy,” I amended quickly.“I’m not a rude guy, I’m a stranger trying to rob you,” he reminded me gently. He stood there with my purse, I with my shirt off. “I just wanted to give you something. This is a very nice blouse.” It was white silk with puffed sleeves, my mother’s from her secretary days. I thought it would suit his color, or maybe he’d enjoy it brushing against his skin the way I had as a child.The creased brow deepened. “I don’t want you to give me anything, I need to take something from you,” he said. I couldn’t imagine caring about the difference between the two.“I thought what you needed was help,” I told him.“I think you need help.” He said, reaching out with his hands. I looked at his peeling fingers and thought, “Yes, I do.” I opened my arms wide, he hooked the purse strap on my outstretched hand.“No, no, I insist,” I tried to return the stinging rejection, but he was already backing away. I shrugged my top on intending to follow him. When I looked up he was gone and I was lost in the fog. I keep failing to recall his face, though I can’t stop thinking about it: old and wrinkled, young and wide-eyed at the same time. Instead, I can only see it buried in the puffed sleeve of my mother’s favorite blouse, a phantom that will not shake loose. Surely this is some kind of crime.