Flash

INCANDESCENCE by Evan Senie

August 12, 2020

We set the fire up in your backyard with only three logs, two on the bottom and one perpendicular across the top. I was quiet around you then, cautious. I’m afraid I still am, forever worried about possible endings. The fire burned for hours once it got started, but initially it was stop-and-go. We fed pages from the phonebook into the empty spaces, watched the flames cause each to curl inward, the ink running down in a purple wave until it burned itself out and was replaced. When the logs caught, it was just their edges, little strands of wood glowing, and I blew on them, softly, tried to protect them from the breeze. The sun wasn’t down yet but the air was cooling. When we were sure the fire would stay lit, that it wouldn’t go out when we turned our backs, we settled into lawn chairs next to each other. I wanted to kiss you but instead I opened the beer I’d taken from your refrigerator. I sipped at it, bitter and metallic and cool.

For a while the logs hummed and clicked in the evening air and the sun sank lower and there was hardly any smoke, only flames licking at the impending dusk. I said that the wood must be dry, cured in this Colorado air, but I was wrong, and soon they started hissing. The smoke came at us in waves and you leaned away but I didn’t, saw no getting around it and so leaned in, taking it into my lungs and my pores until my eyes were dry, until I could smell nothing but the wood burning in my childhood fireplace where I used to sit with my brother and read or watch television, and I thought about how I always wanted to be closer to the fire than he was, afraid he might get burned.

When the sun was gone but there was still enough light to see each other, you asked about him, or maybe I brought him up. I told you what he told me once, that he could only see one end to his life, that if not for me he’d already be gone. I think that’s true. I didn’t look at you while I spoke, instead staring into the fire and letting the smoke be a curtain around me, and for days afterward, in the steaming shower, I would smell it rising up off my hair.

In the darkness we left our chairs and settled again on the bricks around the fire, side by side, close enough to touch the burning logs. We stared with envy at the center, at its moving and changing glow that we could never touch for all that heat. I wanted to heal the fire, preserve it, because every change is a type of loss, but we stayed at the periphery, looked in from the outside. You pointed to a field of glowing crystals, and said that orange is a color only beautiful in its element, always transient and natural and I knew that you were right, that it was the destructive power of combustion that gave off such warmth, projected such beauty, that even the sunset is a type of elegy, and I recognized the ugliness and the desperation in asking for permanence.

I stared at the glowing crystals until finally whatever held this structure together succumbed to the pressures buried inside and the whole thing shifted. I didn’t know yet what was coming, the breakup and the reunion, standing with you in an oasis in the middle of a desert, crying on my bed, watching the sun set over the rocks on a beach in California, waking up next to you and wanting, for the first time, to be exactly where I was.

Together we remembered the beginning, when sparks ate words off the page, but it was long gone, so we settled for watching tiny fires that bubbled up through the ash, light in places we thought had already burned to nothing. We listened to the crackling and popping and huddled together until we were touching, knees, shoulders, almost hands, and despite our gaze the fire finally became only embers, and it was after that that I kissed you, for the first time, there in your kitchen, and I mourned the loss of everything that exists, the very nature of heat itself, even before it left my lips.

FOREIGNER by Rachel Laverdiere

August 10, 2020

When the cockroach and I lock eyes, I’m almost relieved. You’ve half convinced me that I’m neurotic. You say I imagine the scrutiny of the old ajumas at the outdoor markets, the side-eyed stares on the train to Kimje, the personalized attack by the orangutan at the Taegu Zoo. Yet, I’ve caught these glossy black orbs peering at me from above the window overlooking the hall. A hand’s-breadth from the closed classroom door. My only means of escape. I twist the pinching wedding bands your mother had made for me when we came back to Korea to exhibit our newborn son. She’d tried to convince me that her son and grandson belonged in this country, with her. It didn’t seem to matter where I belonged.

At last, I have proof that I’m being watched, but I hardly feel vindicated.

Your metred baritone penetrates the wall between our classrooms. The machine-gun clatter of children’s laughter and then a lull. Soon, the hall will fill with the youngest yuchiwon kids. If I don’t make my move now, I’ll have to wait for “Jake-teacher” to settle his next kindergarten class. I ease my chair away from the half-finished reports. I keep my eyes on the giant cockroach while I edge toward the door.

Once I make it into the hallway, your voice booms. I glance into the window, watch the kids smother you. Black ants on honey. When I rap at the windowpane, the furrow dividing your angular brow crosses concern with annoyance. I raise my eyebrows and mime helplessness. This cannot wait.

You brush off the children and line them up at the door. Soon, they screech toward the office to meet the piano teacher.

Rather than explain, which would likely lead you to dismiss the cockroach as another over-dramatization and judgement of Korea, I say, “Just come. Please.” You glance at your watch but follow.

Entering my classroom, I point out the intruder, still perched near the ceiling. You glance at your watch again, sigh and remove your polished shoe and climb atop a student desk. Thwack! As your shoe smacks the wall, the cockroach soars across the room and lands on my desk. You topple to the ground, your shoeless hand protecting your face.

I choke back my laughter but cannot conceal my grin as this tragedy becomes comedy.

“It’s a foreigner!” You spit the bitter words before you crush the cockroach between your shoe and my reports.

My smirk melts from my lips. Twisting my wedding bands, I ask, “But how can you tell?”

“Native cockroaches don’t fly.” You force your foot into its shoe and yank the shoelaces so hard I’m surprised they don’t snap. Your gaze hooks into mine, and you add, “Foreigners can’t be trusted to stay put.”

The heat of your words stings my cheeks. The door thuds behind you.

As I scrub cockroach remains from my reports, I picture the hefty white envelope at the bottom of my teaching bag. It’s stacked with enough won to pay back my student loans. Almost enough to get our son and I settled back in Canada. I set my teeth, determined to leave before I, too, am squashed.

WRITING PROMPTS AND CHANGING VIEWS by Sabrina Hicks

August 9, 2020

At a time when real life is crushed into an acronym, IRL, to accommodate social media, texts, curated accounts, all I crave is something real, someone to talk to, my father’s voice, my mother’s strength. Dani was annoyed that her father sent her a text asking how she was doing, as if the weight of their collective damage could be written with thumbs. Knowing he won’t answer your phone call, you text back fine not explaining how you got fired for taking too many days off, caring for a woman he once loved.

A strong memory of color. I’m driving to the hospital to visit my mother with Hey Jude playing on the radio so that when I enter the lobby of broken people my head is filled with begging: Jude, don’t be afraid, Jude, don’t let me down, Jude, take a sad song and make it better, and I think for a second I’ll let her into my heart so it can beat for two, like all those years before, but I don’t go to her. Instead, I pretend I’m there to see someone else. I say to the front desk, Maternity ward, please. My sister just gave birth. And somehow, I end up staring at babies fresh from the womb, bound in white hospital blankets, striped pink and blue and yellow, brushstrokes of blood and cream-colored mucus still streaked across their brow, and I wonder what it’s like to be that new, to open my eyes and see the world for the first time, to recognize my mother through static. I blink in the rich colors of life, until I’m kicked out and treated like a baby thief, like death visiting.

A time of anger or fear. She sits up, tubes scattered about, says, Dani, don’t be angry. But Dani cannot help herself. She vacillates between sympathy and disgust, looking at the slices across her mother’s veins, the dissection of life and death like the tree that fell on the roof of Dani’s childhood home, nearly missing her, her mother and father on one side, she on the other, and how her mother’s voice was a bridge cutting through wind and rain. Her friends console her, tell her she’s stronger than her mother, implying her mother is fragile and weak, not made for this world, but she doesn’t believe any of those words or explanations, only that some things cannot be explained, which is to say, everything human.

A ladybug crawls across your chest . . . Its wings, tucked underneath its brightly dotted shell, spill out, like her shirt you brought from home, coming through the zipper of her pants as you and the nurse get her dressed, before she is released from the hospital with a stack of papers on suicide prevention, group therapy, interventions, substance abuse hotlines, and bills to add to the bills you haven’t paid. She will not let you fuss over her anymore she says, but the shirt coming out of her front zipper is a bookmark you save for later when your eyes are heavy, humming Hey Jude, coming undone, the speckled night crawling across your chest.

A man asleep in a car. Make it funny! Make it scary! But all you see is a reckoning, a knife placed squarely in his chest and the taste of blood waking inside you. You write about the twist. You write about your father leaving you both, leaving you caretaker, littering your childhood with each curve of road. You rip it all up and write fantasy, a Lord of the Rings knockoff where you are the hero, your father is the villain, and your mother the damsel to be saved. But how do you save someone from themself? You forget about salvation, make the car drive off a cliff, a man asleep at the wheel, a daughter looking over the edge, a mother who becomes her own hero.

A time when you were desperate or diseased.

A time when you were grateful and knew love.

A time when all the triggers buried in your chest did not require a key.

BLACK CANYON CITY by Chloe Lauter

August 6, 2020

It is October in Arizona and the desert is dark and merciless when we drive into Black Canyon City. Perhaps it would be safer to keep driving, perhaps it would be safer to drive all night, but your face is shadowy with fatigue. It’s only for the night, you say.

We see the rows of neat trailers as we turn off the highway, surrounded by dust-soaked single-family homes and dirt roads thin like sidewinder tracks. At the end of the main road, the night erupts into screaming fluorescence, the dollar store that is a drugstore and party décor and office supply store all rolled into one, and we are the only car in the parking lot.

You go first, you say.

I walk inside feeling dazzled by the smooth whoosh of the automatic doors and the sterile certainty of buzzing white light bouncing off the white pearlized floor. The store is stripped clean of the desert outside but still smells like wasteland. You follow me, rush up behind me, and my shriek of laughter ricochets off the bright bags of party balloons and skeins of wrapping paper left chalky and untouched. You’re so cute, you whisper in my ear. I buy a box of tampons. You buy a Red Bull. The clerk eyes us suspiciously.

I go to the bathroom, and you promise to wait outside. The bathroom lights flicker and hum like crickets at dusk. Above the sink is blank whitewashed wall. There is no mirror. Maybe there never was one.

We brush our teeth in the parking lot, spitting toothpaste out of the driver’s side door so the clerk won’t see us, and then drive in circles searching in the dark for a safe place to park for the night. We finally rest in the shelter of a tall fence. Crying carries up from the mobile homes on the other side for hours, but we are tired. We sleep curled up in the back of your van.

In the middle of the night, you jerk awake and, still half-dreaming, reach for the handgun hidden in the D pillar. Shh, I whisper, holding you, it’s okay. There is no one outside but coyotes, and they do not speak our language. No one will see us here.

In the morning, you stand coiled in the shade of the open passenger door and pour a bottle of water over your hands and your eyes. There is only one coffee shop in town, and when we walk inside, your arm around my shoulder, the unwelcome hits me like the smell of rot. A man in a leather vest and steel-toed boots hangs over the counter, and a shade of a woman stands in the corner holding a baby carrier, her face is hungry but not for food. We are the only real things in this place.

We take our coffees and emerge blinking into the sun. The air shimmering off the hood of the van smells like bitter almonds. We are the only people breathing for miles.

Don’t worry, you say, you’ll get used to it. I have.

AT THE ANIMAL LEVEL by L Mari Harris

August 3, 2020

I was not born with this rage.

I don’t remember when it first entered me. (Yes, you do.)

Nor do I remember when I first realized everything I saw was faintly veiled in red: the city streets, the faces of people I passed by every day, my reflection in the mirror as I brushed my teeth. (Are you sure about that?)

Now, I drape this red rage over me like a hooded cape made of velvet and ermine. If I tuck my head just right inside the hood, I cannot see the trim of white that once scampered along a winter’s day. Isn’t that the point—to hide from pain and suffering? Me, I mean. Others, too. How red is tied to beginning, middle, and end: my birth, my shoe in the middle of a street, people gathered at a shocked distance, hands clasped over mouths, those same mouths that the night before tore at a medium rare steak on their plates (a death, but not my own).

***

Here’s more red for you, born of pain (the rage came later): The corner of Washington & 17th, July, year of our Lord 1993. You are silky soft, lapin-eyed, still smelling of country-girl little bluestem, cornstalk buildings cleaving clouds when you tilt your tender little head and sniff these city smells, concrete seizing heat you feel through new city-girl shoes. Even the grackles and Blue Jays are softer here, trounced by the grinding of delivery trucks and SUVs. This city is too new. Too much. Too, too, too many people panting mad in the heat. Noses twitching like alley rats. This city is too hot in its fur. This day’s dawn, a fabrication, rubicund, but this moment still honeyed, still pure as a cottontail. Until a predator—say a coyote or a man—appears from downwind. Run in those new city-girl shoes as fast as you can. Until you trip, and a tempest rolls in, hovering, heavy, smelling of rot, of sweat, of bile. Kick and claw and bite, throw out all you have. You have tried. No one can accuse you of not trying. Later, after you clean yourself up, relief. It could have been so much worse, such a deeper red.

(Reader, did you see distance is still needed in the retelling, all these years later?)

***

I will reframe my rage, tuck it between the pages of a book, bury it under a pillow, wrap it in a blanket, in another round of drinks. If depression is rage turned inward, what, then, do I call the simmering of avoidance? Is this why we’re attracted to fairy tales—because we understand what red signifies? —A forest, a copse of trees, a house with a plume of smoke drifting up from the chimney, an open door where more red is waiting to eat us up?

***

Let’s look at what is red:

Passion. Power. Hunger. Fear. Pain. Shame. Anger.

Life Force (see: above).

STOP.

I now see I forgot Love, but I’m not sure where it belongs.

***

For this one I will remain in first person. (I must own this one as my own doing.)

A July weekend, year of my Lord 2000 (what is it with July?—I have concluded it’s red heat, red fireworks, a hand on a boiling pot not watched). A pleasant man sits next to me. We introduce ourselves, talk of books and art, knock back a few shots with barbaric yawps that make the bartender laugh. Here’s red again, a warm flush head to toe (see: Passion, Hunger). A red truck I jump into (STOP). The bartender’s name is Leo. I’m sure red-truck guy told me his name, too, but all I see is Red Means GO. We drive deep into the forest, up the mountainside. I know this terrain well. We pull off onto a dirt service road I’ve passed many times but have never wandered down. It descends steeply, stops abruptly at a stream. My first thought is How beautiful. My second thought is Bears live here. The third thought doesn’t come until the next morning, after I’ve popped my sixth ibuprofen and prayed over the toilet. It doesn’t matter that red-truck guy was a lovely man. It doesn’t matter that I enjoyed this small moment of my life. What matters is the heat I feel rising in my veins (see: Shame, Anger). I’m smarter than this, knowing to always keep myself out of a scent trail.

And yet.

Days later, one of the local station’s lead stories—video shot in the dappled afternoon light of a patch of tall grass near a stream. Two deputies stand over a blanketed lump, bones of what appears to have once been a foot peeking out. In the background I see a boulder with a peace sign spray painted in blue on it.

I had leaned on that boulder to slip my boots back on.

(How do you wrap your head around this?) If you ever figure it out, let me know.

***

I hate to use the word “lucky” to describe how incredibly stupid I still feel for cornering myself with a strange man on a deserted mountain road, but lucky I am (putting the onus on my shoulders yet again).

Why do my actions matter? Because we have made it so. And I hate that about this world.

***

Some say rage can only be absolved by forgiveness. My reply is this—I doubt they’ve ever truly experienced rage, then.

Forgiveness is a shade of yellow I've never allowed to color my walls.

SELF-LOATHING WALKS THE TOWN by Amy L. Freeman

August 1, 2020

Despite the early morning’s scorching heat, Self-Loathing strides down the street in Anytown, USA, slapping mosquitoes from his neck. He reaches his first house, the leaves of its magnificent oak tree motionless in the heavy air. With a quick sidelong glance to ensure no one is watching, Self-Loathing shimmies up the tree and leans forward to peek into a second-story window.

Wearing just boxer shorts, fourteen-year-old Richie is leaning over his bed, scrubbing at his sheets with a damp green hand-towel. He’s using his other fist to pound his thigh as he tries to also scrub away the image of the new boy's lazy smile while he swings his lacrosse stick back and forth, a metronome. Self-Loathing decides he doesn’t need to intervene further, today. He smiles and drops lightly to the ground, then circles around to the back of the house.

Self-Loathing looks through the window at Richie’s father sitting at an old wooden desk, a spinning bamboo ceiling fan rustling the pages of a yellow legal pad. Every few moments, he reaches toward a Bible, flicks through pages, then returns to writing. Standing on tiptoes, Self-Loathing sends a gentle breath toward the Bible, fluttering its pages until it lands open on Leviticus 18:22. Richie’s father peers at the page, taps his pen against his teeth, and nods.

He resumes writing. The Bible tells us, “You shall not lie with a man as with a woman; it is an abomination.” His pen flies across the page. The sins of the flesh can bring down even the most righteous person. He knows that all too well.

He’ll have Sunday’s sermon ready. He always does. And after last week’s little round of hooky, he’d better see Richie scrubbed clean and sitting in the front pew.

Self-Loathing has a spring in his step as he heads to his next house. Sixteen-year-old Dillon’s room is on the ground floor in the back, and she never closes her drapes. Self-Loathing only has to hide behind a tool shed to watch her.

Even though she hasn’t even brushed her teeth, Dillon’s on her iPad. Self-Loathing’s eagle eyes can see that she’s surfing a wellness website, bookmarking pages touting the benefits of burpees and lean protein. Self-Loathing frowns. This won’t do.

He’d long ago hacked into her Wi-Fi, installing a nifty little program that lets him feed ads and other content of his choosing to her screen. He taps a few buttons, then folds his arms and stands back, waiting.

It’s only minutes, really, before he sees her poke a finger into her soft belly. She swipes at the screen again. Then she pinches a roll of her flesh between her thumb and pointer. Self-loathing sends her a few more images. Dillon abruptly shoves her iPad aside, stands, and walks out of the room.

When she returns, she’s cradling something wrapped in a navy towel. She shoves a chair under her doorknob and goes to her bathroom to pour a glass of water. Then she unfurls the towel, tears open the loaf of white bread, and starts to stuff slices into her mouth, guzzling water to force the food down her throat.

Self-Loathing debates sticking around to hear her puking, but he’s already running late on his rounds. Another day.

A woman pushing a stroller is on the sidewalk, maybe fifty feet away, coming toward him. She’s cooing into the stroller. Babies are tricky because they can’t yet absorb what he offers.

The mothers are another story; so easy to plant those seeds. “I’ve read that not all beautiful chubby babies grow up to be fat kids.” Or, “I wouldn’t worry about the size of her ears. Most babies’ proportions even out over time.” He’s been at this long enough to witness the mothers transplant those seedlings into their children.

The baby gurgles, a pure, joyous sound. Something about the laughter’s timbre jars loose a distant childhood memory, one Self-Loathing can’t quite bring into focus.

When was the last time he felt pure joy?

Easier to remember its opposite. Like on the school playground, when the bullies came for him. Or at the dinners, when his mother stayed silent while his father shamed him. Or the dates he never went on, the job interviews he flubbed, and the endless nights alone.

The woman blows kisses at the baby. Self-Loathing straightens and walks toward her. He scans her face, body, and demeanor, weighing her split ends, baby-weight, and acne scars. He splays his hands wide as if he means no harm.

“Morning! Can I have a peek at your baby?”

LIKE HUMMINGBIRDS by Shome Dasgupta

July 31, 2020

Like when we sat on the sun and watched the world simmer in our heads, brother—remember that time? And how you were so furious and the words from your mouth smoldered, drifting towards every star, making sure there was no void. The pain. The pain you felt became ashes in my own body, and I’m so sorry, brother. I was helpless. And as much as I felt your pain, there was nothing I could do to take it away from you. Your skull vibrated as the smoke left through every pore of your body, and I just wanted to hold you, even if it meant I’d burn, but you wouldn’t let. You knew. You recognized, despite all that was happening, that you loved me and didn’t want to hurt me. Remember in that brief gleam of light, before you or I left, how the sun diminished and we floated in space no longer knowing if the world existed or cared if it did or not, and we hovered around like the hummingbirds in our backyard, trying not to bump into stars. We had so much fun and for that endless second you found peace as you took my hand and guided me around, much like you did in life. You loved those hummingbirds.

Brother, I fucked up so much, I’m so sorry.

And like before it all happened, when you were there we would be on our hands and knees, crawling in the ditch, pretending to be raccoons because there were no more raccoons left to feed. They went away just like you or me. But when we were playing, I cut my leg and cried so loud. You picked me up to take me home but I flailed so much we tumbled over, and the world was before us as we were on our backs. My pain went away as we tried to count all the birds in the sky.

And brother, I don’t know—I don’t know if I had the chance to do it all over again if I would change any of it. Including all the times I fucked up and all the times you had to pull on my arm while I was sinking. I don’t know if I would change it all up because look at who we became—I honestly think our parents would be so proud of us. How we made it through even though we weren’t meant to—I know who we are now, but if I could go back and change all the ways I needed to change, I don’t know who we would become.

You’d be so proud of me now, brother. I’m sorry. I’m glad you no longer feel any pain. I feel it every now and then but then it all goes away when it’s just us, floating around in space, drifting this way and that, toward every star, and every now and then a hummingbird appears, glowing and holy, fluttering its wings to let us know that we’re here. How you loved those hummingbirds, brother, I will never forget, even with closed eyes, I will never forget.

And this might be the last time we can speak—I don’t know if you can hear me—I’m not sure how all of this goes, but I love you, brother. Thanks for always being there.

APEX PREDATORS by Nicole VanderLinden

July 30, 2020

Jessa hears a bear. Only it’s not a bear. It’s the wind nudging against the nylon of our tent, but my new wife has never camped on a grassy bald in the Smoky Mountains. So when she elbows me, whispers, is that a snout? where the fabric pushes in against her sleeping bag, I say, probably. I say, you didn’t bring in a candy bar, did you? She knows this story, that tent walls aren’t really walls and that a bear can slice right through them, drag you away for a bit of chocolate.

Next to me, I feel her go still so as not to provoke the bear-that-isn’t-there. She steadies her breathing, in and out, and soon she’s as calm as a corpse, also afraid and very alive.

I’ve told her other things, some true and mostly not. Bears smell fear, I say. You’re not bleeding, are you? Imagine, I tell her, if our tent was invisible, what we’d look like to them—other animals, too. Lonely pink babies under the cold Tennessee sky.

We don’t pass many thru-hikers, and the ones we do have trail names: Rock-n-Roll, Jumpy Cat. Men whose necks have furred and, once, an old woman with two filthy Pomeranians. Bear snacks, I whisper. We share tortillas and pouches of peanut butter. We muse on the weather, what it might become—I predict lightning and gusts that will blow over trees. When we ask for the hikers’ real names, they laugh and say, those names don’t count out here.

See? I say to her later. We sit alone on a fallen yellow birch. I breathe in the musk of her unwashed clothes—fires put out and canvas grown damp—her botanical smells long gone and scrubbed clean. In a nearby tree, a rat snake catches an errant ray of sun. Your name doesn’t count out here.

She carries a green backpack. She likes to blend in, and she packs it each morning, the sleeping bag then the tent poles then the bear canister then the snacks, in order of what she most wants to keep dry. I’m an apex predator, she says, big with her backpack. Maybe that’s my name, she says, and I say, you sure about that?

And then, on the last day, we do see a bear.

It’s foraging along the French Broad River. It’s midday, and the river’s swollen with rain; the rush of it leaves me dizzy. The bear. She shrinks into that green backpack, rigid as the hills. The bear, the bear. For a moment I think we’ve conjured it. It’s a few yards away and can smell us, I know, the memory of cooked meat still clinging to our hair, whiskey on our breath. Somewhere, a dead branch cracks to the ground.

The bear sniffs and then huffs, its mouth a cave. Her fingers curl around my fingers, and I feel her pulse, or maybe it’s mine, a heartbeat between our hands. We are small and we are nobody. But then the bear turns away and ambles on, no reason why or why not.

He’ll be back for you, I say, though she knows this isn’t true. We’re spending the night in Hot Springs, in a cabin, in a place where bears can’t go, and she will be Jessa once more.

Next year, we’ll visit the sea. We’ll rent a kayak, and it will be her turn to lay me low, to make me forget my name.

Shark, she’ll whisper from behind as we paddle into the blue, our boat like a toy bobbing in the swells. I see a fin, she’ll say, over there, on the horizon. I’ll get the shiver; my nerves will bloom. That means he’s hunting, she’ll say.

PLEASE FORGIVE ME, MIDNIGHT ANGEL by Timothy Boudreau

July 30, 2020

That morning Cristina’s husband Charley brings her breakfast from the Diner, gray hair tufting from under his ball cap as he hands her the bag with an egg and cheese sandwich.

“Why aren’t you coming again?” she asks as she unwraps it.

“Off to provide another goddamn eight hours of superior customer service,” he says. That's been his life: jobs with name tags and aprons, jobs where the dickhead customer’s always right.

“Make sure you eat before you leave,” he goes on. “Give my best to her family.”

“Not sure who’s even left.”

“Wasn’t for staffing issues, I’d be there.” He hands her napkins from his jacket pocket.

“With everything she went through, I guess it all makes sense.” Cristina’s sigh holds him beside the door. “I’d just like to see her again, you know?”

He kisses her forehead. “See you tonight Babe.”

Cristina bites the sandwich, tastes her breath, rinses her mouth with OJ. “Holy fuck Sammi,” she says.

Sammi: freckles and tomato hair, her curls like spaghetti tinsel. “Speckled Sammi,” the mean girls called her. All curves and softness, like a pillow, but when she hugged you, she meant it, she squeezed. Back then it was Cristina and Sammi, hip to hip through the halls of Daleborough High. Nicotine hair and Newports tucked in their jean jackets.

Cristina brings her phone outside where they have reception. The tire swing in the neighbor’s yard is like the one they rode at Sammi’s while they waited for the bus: overjoyed, legs splayed, after wine coolers for breakfast; their moms absent, September sky like a musty blanket.

Her hands tremble as she makes the call.

“Yes, one PM,” Mr. Herman says. “Light refreshments after. The information’s on the website.”

“Will there be a viewing? Can you tell me that?”

“There will not. The family chose cremation.”

While Cristina pulls on her best blouse and jeans, slicks back her hair, Pandora plays Quarterflash, Heart, The Pretenders. She arranges her nips on the bureau, hums along, punches the air to punctuate the choruses. Imagines Sammi’s ashes crossing the country in a jet, limo transporting the urn from Logan with a police escort. Blue lights, music blasting.

Music was Sammi’s wine cooler buzz, pink fog fizz. They rode with “Shadows of the Night” on the radio, Sammi’s voice cracking at the top of her range, stubby arms waving as if commanding a back seat band; Cristina, the better drunk driver, behind the wheel. “Midnight angel, won’t you say you will?” All night Sammi was thinking of Matty Cryans, her cheeks red, forehead glistening, everything in her mind with a heart scrawled across it, “Sammi loves Matty.”

Matty was skinny, long eyelashes over moist blue eyes. Gawky, shy, thick shag of blond.

“He's my number-two pencil," Sammi told everyone, “long and straight. Girls think he's dumb because he’s quiet, but he’s always observing. He saves his thoughts for nighttime and brings them home to me.”

Were they twenty-three when it started? One Friday Cristina invited Matty over for supper, while Sammi worked a double and Charley was away. When Cristina pulled him onto the bed Matty’s wet eyes filled with questions, but he hardened as soon as she unzipped him.

“But what about Sammi?” he said, as she mouthed his dick. “What about Sammi?” as she climbed on top, settled onto him, “But Sammi,” wincing first until she bounced, bounced, and shoot made sure he came inside before she fell off (he was crying now) and went to wash his mess out of her.

Cristina’s jacket smells like cigarettes, its inside pockets packed with nips. While she waits for the taxi she slips into her neighbor’s garden and breaks off four lilies, wraps them in tissue.

The taxi drops her at the corner of Crawford and Elm, next to the building where Sammi lived after everything blew up. Cristina slides the lilies in her pocket, pats her hair, remembers visiting before Sammi ditched them all and moved out West.

“Just listen Sammi,” Cristina told her.In the doorway Sammi blew cigarette smoke in Cristina’s face, her fist on her hip. “Why.”

“We need to talk.”

“Matty’s not here anymore.” She turned, flipped the butt off Cristina’s shoulder. “Leave me alone you greasy bitch.”

In the back row at Herman’s Funeral Home Cristina looks at the program, Sammi Cryans, 1967-2018, with a Psalm printed inside.

There’s a lectern, flowers and two big pictures up front: Sammi in lopsided pigtails, riding a tricycle; forty-something Sammi with some guy beside a Christmas tree, flannel shirt, curls chopped, pupils pinned, high as fuck.

After the hometown bridges have been neglected, burned, bombed, what’s left are aunties, a lonely cousin, a drunk former friend in the back corner. Three speakers: the pastor; Aunt Ellen, trembling; a former coworker. Stories about kid Sammi gobbling graham crackers; smoke breaks at her old job.

Finally Cristina can’t stand anymore. She stumbles out, lilies in her fist, past a lady in a hairnet beside the door crying into a napkin.

She walks outside, head swimming. She already knows how it’ll end. Read The Lord is my shepherd, hallowed art thy name. Claim it was Sammi’s favorite scripture, as if she fucking had a favorite. Talk about her “troubles,” say something about God’s wisdom; describe a peaceful rest, free of pain. No mention of tire swings or Matty Cryans or her fierce, ragged heart.

How long has it taken her to walk home? Her face is flushed, jacket loose, thistle sticking to her jeans after she plunges through the brush into the driveway to find Charley standing outside with his phone, ball cap pulled low.

“It was a mistake,” she says, “the whole day was a farce,” she says, “it’s not fair, we’re too young,” shivering as Charley wraps his arm around her and Sammi’s lilies and helps her inside.

“FIND THE PATTERNS”: A Review of Chloe N. Clark’s Collective Gravities by James McAdams

July 28, 2020

To lift one particularly apposite description of a character in “Like the Desert Dark,” Chloe N. Clark “likes thinking about 'ifs.’” Collective Gravities, her third collection (The Science of Unvanishing Objects, Finishing Line Press; Your Strange Fortune, Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), posits a world replete with paranormality. Like a symphony, these stories repeatedly touch upon the same subjects, explored, revealed, and experienced from a diverse variety of narrative perspectives. We can represent the frequency and range of this symphonic collection numerically.

Subjects (admittedly subjective):	# Stories these subjects occur in:
astronauts/paranormal investigation	6
undiagnosed illness/epidemics	6
near-death/no-death phenomena	4
mental illness	4
floods	5
magic/card tricks	4
jumping off bridges	5
dreams	7
ecological disaster	4
The horrors of online dating	1 (!)

There’s something oddly soothing about this thematic accretion. As you read further into the collection, you continually confront these motifs, creating a limpid “repetition with a difference” feeling. It’s subtle, but it works. It’s like wading into a pool, stepping slowly, freezing at first, and then once you're immersed in it, the swimming is captivating and you forget for a second what it was like to be back on the shore, dry.

For example, the collection is bookended by two pieces about astronauts convening at a memorial for a deceased member of their operation team (“Balancing Beams,” and “Between the Axis and the Stars,” respectively). Both memorials stress the significance of remembering and storytelling as a way to deal with death. The second story foregoes an actual traditional memorial, instead placing the characters in a room with the grieving Mom of their friend, where they simply tell stories about the deceased. “Between the Axis and the Stars” (and the collection as a whole) ends here, in a country field in Iowa:

“After, I walked outside to find Peter. He was sitting in the grass, staring up at the night sky.

'We don’t have stars like this in Boston.'

I sat down beside him, laughing. 'You’ve literally been to the stars, why do you need to see them from so far away?'

'I can see them all at once like this. Find the patterns.'”

My two favorite stories, both concerning the power of referentless words, are quiet pieces of flash, published initially in Noble/Glass Quarterly and Bartleby Snopes (R.I.P.!!). In “This is the Color of Your Eyes in the Dark,” the narrator, informed of the sudden death of a girl she was briefly friends with in middle school, remembers:

“When we went to Mindy’s house, we always took long walks in the trees behind her house instead of going inside. She’d tell me the names of each tree. Not like the scientific names, but the names she’d given them. I asked her why she named them and she answered me, as if it was the silliest question in the world, ‘don’t you like to say the names of your friends’? Her favorite was a pine that had been struck by lightning. An arc of scarring went down one side of it. She would put her hand against the mark and just hold it there, eyes closed, as if she was trying to heal it.”

Meanwhile, in “Topographical Cartography,” a woman’s boyfriend begins to suffer from a vague, ill-defined disease (see above) whose symptoms are the appearance of an X-axis along his back, and then the appearance along the axis of “words and symbols. Under each dash: ‘sugar,’ ‘Oak,’ ‘fine,’ a picture of an eclipse, more and more words without context.” Then, after he dies, the narrator awakens to find a similar pattern of words and symbols on her back, only this time as a Y-axis. This is a numinous description of love. I mean if I know anything about love from watching TV: one person’s X fitting into another person’s Y.

Paranormality probably isn’t a good description of Collective Gravities, since it sounds like X-Files fanfiction. Magical realism doesn’t work, because the stories here are too realistic, too detailed (in a good way); neither does surrealism work, since the plots and narratives are tightly controlled and cogent. If we wanted to coin a term for the “slanted truth” nature of this collection, that term could be pulled from the collection’s first story. The narrator describes a painting hanging on the wall. “The colors were slightly off,” she writes, “leaves a blue-green and bark a red-brown that wouldn’t exist in nature.” The characters discuss what’s wrong with the painter, suggesting she’s color blind among other things. Ultimately, they determine the word for it, and for Collective Gravities, is “Almreal...almost real, not quite, not surreal.”

Furthermore, it works organically, meaning it doesn’t feel like marketing agenda or strategic little phrased inserted in pre-publication to make the collection seem “whole” or “novel-like,” like those collections marketed as “inter-linked short stories” with the same character(s) or place. Those are mostly bullshit excuses to make something look like a novel.

Possibly Irrelevant Addendum I Couldn’t Fit Into the Review: Two cool facts I learned while researching Chloe Clark and word west press. 1) Chloe, part of the editorial triumvirate of Cotton Xenomorph with Tea and Hanna, has designed a class on the literature of space. Enrollment is open, check it out here. 2) word west press, in recognition of Chloe’s affection for space, actually bought her a star. That’s awesome. Great work Chloe and word west press!

Pick up a copy of Chloe Clark's Collective Gravities here!