Flash

JUMP by Neil McDonald

November 17, 2019

Arlene had felt like a criminal the first time.

You’re thirty-seven, she thought to herself.

Don’t remind me, she’d say in jest, whenever her age came up in conversation.

But here she was again, sneaking into the back yard in the dark. The first time she had done it on a whim, its strangeness a thrill in itself. It gave her a rush that was illicit, maybe? She wasn’t sure if that was the word. Now it was almost second nature, though she might still freeze a moment before beginning, not sure whether anyone could see her, wondering if there were any neighbours’ eyes out there peering from behind almost-closed blinds in some darkened bedroom nearby. Not to mention the joggers and the dog walkers, who would half-look as they passed the back fence, unable to help themselves. They never broke stride, though, not fully. They just went on their way and pretended they hadn’t seen a grown woman bouncing on a child’s trampoline in the dark.

At first, the jumping had been a release, a girlish fancy that became a form of what her friend Jackie called mindfulness, which was some kind of meditation she had heard about on Oprah. Initially, Arlene had felt this to be true, the night air and the silence of the neighbourhood punctured only by the sound of her feet meeting the trampoline with every gravitational descent, a sound akin to a mantra repeated over and over and over again. After a while her thoughts would become muffled as she rose and fell, the physical exertion coupled with the sensation of falling through the air barefoot, producing a kind of childish joy at being alive.

Lately, though, the feeling produced by jumping had started to change, curdling slowly from innocent release into a nightly compulsion that had replaced her sneaked cigarettes after the kids had gone to bed or, to be more accurate, after they had closed their doors for the night. Who knew when they actually went to bed.

Now she found herself unable to dissociate as she jumped, and instead her worries and regrets, her ‘tendency toward drama,’ as her husband Brad had put it during one typically orderly disagreement, were unmuffled and seemed to grow louder each night as she leapt. What does Breanne do after she closes her door at night, Arlene would wonder, her hair flipped upside down mid-descent. Is she on her phone with someone, some inappropriately older someone, or sending those pictures you hear about, or texting her friends the latest crime of embarrassment caused by her mother’s chronic misunderstanding.

Arlene worried about Breanne, it felt like 24/7, each day a torture of guessing her whereabouts or mood, unable to stop visualizing her 15-year-old daughter as the six-year-old girl who had made her a Christmas card that said ‘Merry Mama, Xmas’ on the front, in her earnest crayon scrawl.

And Jayson, that was another story. Her adorable, cheeky little Jay now a sullen 13-year-old from whose room came foul outbursts as he played that awful war video game online with who knows who. He had quit volleyball, diving, and band, all in the last year. He no longer wanted to do anything with Brad and her, and answered the playful queries of family members at Christmas and Easter with monosyllabic responses or vacant shrugs, trends that felt somewhere between normal pre-teen boy and future inmate.

Was it something she had done?

Bounce.

She had yelled at Jay so awfully that time when he was three.

Bounce.

And his face had crumpled, then straightened out into defiance, a sequence that had never left her mind and that seemed horrifying in retrospect, and that she had – bounce – watched for carefully ever since, fearful of any lasting damage to his personality she may have inflicted. Had it lain latent since?

Bounce.

And now curdled into mistrust and loathing, aided by a hormonal shift that tricked his better nature?

Bounce.

And why, on another topic, had Jackie stopped calling or stopping by? They used to get together for girls nights, drinks down at The Cruise Ship, where they’d talk and confide and roll their eyes when the university boys looked them over. Arlene had always considered herself a guarded person, not one to give herself away too easily. But she had been uncharacteristically disclosive with Jackie, lured in by her friend’s allusive gossip about the teachers at their kids’ school, and her frank assessment of the men of the neighbourhood, including Jackie’s own husband, Dean, whose online activities and struggles with personal hygiene had been both shocking and delicious to hear.

After a few glasses of wine and tales of this nature, Arlene had let slip some of her own previously unaired opinions about their mutual friends and neighbours, even, worst of all, about her own family, emboldened as she was by the alcohol and how Jackie leaned in when she knew something good was coming. Jackie, too, had been a flatterer, and Arlene was easily flattered, a weakness she now rued as she reviewed nightly the sentences she had spoken aloud to Jackie. And all because, what? Because Jackie had once said that Dean had once said that Brad was the most respected man in Woodlawn? Had he ever even said that, Arlene wondered now as she bounced. Had there ever been any truth to Jackie’s gossip and compliments, or was it all some elaborate long game to get to know the secrets of the quiet mum?

Whatever the case, she didn’t hear from Jackie now. Arlene thought she must have said something to offend Jackie, maybe some thoughtless, half-drunk comment at The Cruise Ship that carried deeper meaning than she’d intended. Who knew. They had drifted and it was over, and Arlene could only assume it was her fault. Sometimes they’d run into each other at the grocery store or at some neighbourhood thing, but it was like they had never even been friends, like they had meant nothing to each other. Jackie was, Arlene noticed, back to her old friends, the ones she had gossiped about, the ones who had once seemed part of Jackie’s past as the two of them looked forward to a lifetime of Cruise Ship nights, maybe even family vacations together. Now, clearly, that was not to be, though the two might half-heartedly resurrect the idea in passing, Arlene imagined, at some future Woodlawn Christmas party, for lack of anything else to talk about in the company of their husbands and the neighbours about whom they had once speculated so cavalierly.

Some nights, she would try to ignore these thoughts, gulp them down like some necessarily foul medicine, like the kind Brad had to drink before his colonoscopy. She would try to think of other things, like how she liked when people said ‘So long’ instead of goodbye, like in old movies. She also thought about how women don’t name their daughters after themselves. You never hear a woman say, ‘I’m Wendy Smith, Junior,” or whatever, she thought. Only guys do that.

Other nights, Arlene might take notice of her surroundings as she bounced, and wonder, for example, why she had never learned the names of the plants in her own yard, had never learned them and then taught them to her children, patiently explaining their provenance and import. What were those, anyway, over by the shed? Rhododendrons? No idea. What kind of trees, even, were these in her yard? Oak, maybe? Beech?

Sometimes, she just titled her head way back as she jumped, so it was perpendicular to the sky, almost so she felt like she might fall over completely, and tried not to think of anything.

***

Breanne stood at her bedroom window, as she did most nights, and watched her mother bouncing up and down, twisting this way and that under the moon. She never told her mother that she saw her or had seen her, or whatever the right way of saying that was. In her pettiest moments, she considered filming it on her phone and saving it for some kind of child-parent blackmail. However, even though the urge to use her phone to film something unusual was pretty much irresistible, she never did.

She just watched her mother bounce up and down on the trampoline and then finally stop and sit on the edge, Arlene’s shoulders moving a little. With the effort, or whatever.

OUR LADY ENTERS THE CITY [IN THREE ATTEMPTS] by Sarah Arantza Amador

November 15, 2019

1. The caravel moaned as it crept up the wide, drowsy river mouth, and it was met at the city limits by crowds of urchins, prostitutes, and thieves in the early dawn. The city’s soldiers dropped the corroded chain between the twin fortresses on either bank of the river, and the caravel continued its lumbering penetration of the city. The boat finally pulled into port just as the bursars were roused from their beds, brought jostling through the crowds to meet the returning fleet. Down the gangplank came the parade of the king’s bedraggled men, the king’s bags of raw gold dust, the king’s parrots and anemic flamingos, the head of a desiccated royal palm, and select nightshade varietals in moldy hemp sacks. And, finally, her: gift of the Holy Ghost, down the gangplank came she, locked in chains, more valuable than the contents of any war chest.

2. “Watch yourself--don’t get too fucking close to her,” hissed the noseless lieutenant to his men. They were exhausted, shuffling from bare broken foot to bare broken foot, avoiding their superior’s glare and watching impatiently from the deck as the caravel crept through the flotsam and garbage floating down the Guadalquivir. Dawn rose over the minarets in the center of the city, and they were spotted by ruffians camped along the riverbank. “Ring the bells! Ring the bells--by God, they’ve returned!” First it was one scabby boy, and then it was all of them, sniveling and crying. The men sobbed as they hurried down the gangplank and pushed into the crowd of jeering drunks and tavern cheats who met them in port. The lieutenant brought up the rear, his coconut-carved prosthesis sliding roughly over the gaping hole of his exposed nasal cavity. They unloaded the booty and the half-dead and wilted specimens. She was brought out last--as lively as ever--and they kept the chains taut on her, her jaws snapping in her beautiful face.

3. They say that a holy light emanated from the caravel as it floated silently up the river--that it sailed like a beautiful angel, its white bosom rising softly over the water lapping at the bow. It appeared in the dawn as though trumpeting the sun’s arrival, and the people cried and cheered, the youngest and strongest walking out into the waters to meet her. They say that the city’s soldiers wept as they lowered the great chain. They placed their hands over their faces and washed their fronts with their tears at the sight of her. When the sailors put down the gangplank and disembarked with the king’s prizes, the last feet to grace the boards were those from which the light shone. The Lady’s brilliance stunned the crowd, the scales along her naked body dazzling them all as they shimmered and pierced their eyes like the cleanest ice, Blessed Mother. Never before had the people beheld such pulchritude, such grace, such magnificent terror.

GHOST by Alexandra M. Matthews

November 12, 2019

I rode the roller coasters again today.

I called out sick from work, ate a small breakfast. I pulled my hair back in a tight braid so it wouldn’t whip me in the face on sharp turns.

The park was empty. As long as I didn’t faint or vomit, there was no limit on how many times I could ride the same roller coaster. I nodded to the attendants and they sent me around once more.

My grandfather used to say that roller coasters jumble the insides, cause nose bleeds. Enough scrambling and a person would come off the ride different.

I sat in the front row on every ride. From high up, the other attractions looked like the colorful, oversized toys of a child.

###

I’ve always thought of myself as an interpreter of blood signs, because women understand how blood behaves outside the body. If it appears in our underwear, we analyze. We need a tampon. We’re spotting. We may have cervical cancer. We are not pregnant, we may be pregnant, we are no longer pregnant. It can evoke elation, relief, devastation, ambivalence, or no emotion at all. It depends on the bleeder.

I was eighteen weeks pregnant on the day I found the blood.

It could never survive, the doctors said. I sobbed.

After the hospital, I put my stained underwear in the washing machine by itself on delicate cycle.

###

As I was leaving the amusement park, a teenage girl in one of the ticket booths called out to me. For thrill seekers like me, she said, it would be much cheaper to find people online to join me and get the group rate.

I thanked her for the suggestion without explaining that I preferred to ride the roller coasters by myself. I needed to be alone during that first, terrifying drop. I needed to feel weightless.

The first time I went in my grandfather’s basement was after he died. I was eight. I made it most of the way down the stairs before I got spooked. I’d seen his empty tool wall, where he had painted the outlines of his entire collection in white: saws, hammers, wrenches, pliers, screwdrivers, levels, utility knives. I was afraid the tools had become ghosts. At any moment, they could soar through the dark basement to attack.

###

When he retired, my grandfather converted the space into a workshop, where he repaired vintage Italian bicycles to sell at antique shows. No one was allowed down there, not even my grandmother. There were small parts that we might knock off the table and lose, paint we might spill that was difficult to replace.

###

In his final weeks, my grandfather refused all visitors. My parents lied. They told me it was unsafe for me to be around him. It was as if he had disappeared. No one could bring themselves to say that what drove my grandfather to isolation was shame.

###

I realize now he wasn’t protecting the bicycles. He could drop a tire valve cover on the floor, his hands too stiff to get a firm grip, without being seen. His arms could shake from the tremors, struggling to position the seat on its post, and no one would offer to do it for him. Alone, he was the only witness to his body’s betrayal.

GLOVES by R.S. Powers

November 11, 2019

He had a dream, he says, about the rest of their lives on another planet rich with tech indistinguishable from magic. On his back, he holds his hands toward the ceiling, the cusp of dawn filling their disheveled bedroom, and describes jazz hands-ing away the deep gulf of scar tissue rippling down her body’s left side, from scalp to ankle, where the asphalt carried away almost everything. He was wearing these iridescent gloves that could remodel skin like wet clay. They could afford them because their parents (in the dream) were dead and left them money.

He rolls back over. You were so happy, he says into his pillow.

You need to get ready for school, she says. Your kids need you.

Her fitful sleep, which medically requires both shoulders to be flat on their broken mattress, has been the same since she woke in the E.R. with no broken bones or ligaments. Since four a.m. she’d been tracking a fresh galaxy of stains slowly spreading on the sallow stucco above. She’d have to call the landlord again about the druggie upstairs neighbors’ cracked tub before the rusty water started pooling and the pregnant ceiling shape came back, ready to burst.

I can’t go to work, he says. I should quit. I should be with you all day.

She knows this is the end, that he will never forgive himself. After five years together it was his scooter, his hard right turn down the steep hill by the chemical plant after happy hour for their anniversary, his abusive ex’s helmet that clapped the curb and saved her life. Without a scratch on him, he passed out before he could call 9-1-1. Tell me more, she says.

What? he says, half-back asleep and soaring through burning skies on the other world.

About the gloves, she says. Tell me what it feels like to use them.

DURING THE YEAR OF RAPID WEIGHT LOSS, I BECOME UNCHARACTERISTICALLY EXHIBITIONISTIC by Amy Kiger-Williams

November 10, 2019

I’d like you to really look at me. You will see less of me that you would have seen before, but now I will let you look longer. This is where the inherent irony lies. As a consequence, you’ll see more of me than you ever would have before.

Undressing in front of a stranger is a vulnerable thing. Your scars, your roundness, your concavity: everything that was never up for discussion before is now fair game.

Bikini tops, wife beaters, hip huggers: these are all I wear anymore. The tighter, the better. Less is more.

Still, there is a comfort in the hiding. An oversized hoodie is a homebaked apple pie. It’s a pile of mashed potatoes with gravy, a bowl of Rocky Road, a buttered roll.

When you look at me, ignore the things I don’t want you to see, which is really everything.

When I shed a layer, I became someone else.

And it’s easier to be someone else, even though there’s the maintenance! It’s unrelenting, staying where I am. I’m so hungry all the time for parts of the person I used to be.

When you turn out the light, this is when I will undress. I will imagine the scars, the roundness, the concavity, both mine and your own, and the darkness will envelop us, a hoodie, a pie, potatoes, ice cream, a buttered roll.

LENA by Divya Iyer

November 8, 2019

I want this to be honest in a way that makes empires shake. I need to text Lena back, and if I do text Lena back with the right words, the ones that hum and whimper and shake and do not cajole (under any circumstances), I know what I would say. The crux of it is that, no, I wasn’t crucified and, yeah, I can’t tell sparkling water from holy water. I would tell Lena about the way loneliness grew inside me, a big sprawling thing, reaching inside for empty spaces, seeping in like ink on blotting paper, like all the lights of a city going out during a power-cut. I wanted to give Lena the proof of it, the bits that said: look, I was here and I suffered and I nearly drowned but I made it out and, sure, it’s got to mean something, in the sense that I dug myself out of debris, metaphorically.

It blows my mind that people in high school thought I was straight. They still treat me like a straight girl sometimes. I’m not flamboyant in an interesting enough way. Nobody from my high school era would say that I queer up a room just by entering it. Their loss; it’s astonishing, what they’re missing. I sometimes want to sing it out loud. Look at me, like a peacock dancing in the rain, I am pretty and proud. But look at this—it’s another part of me, a beautiful one, blown out of glass but tough like calluses and diamonds. What I mean is, I came out, and it didn’t change anything, not really. What a strange thing. Trust isn’t enough to renovate a building, I suppose. Some things are damned to stay the same, no matter what you give them.

People in High School could be a whole novella. It would be almost slapstick in its tragedy. Central to this is the idea that there is a girl called Divya Iyer, and she is nobody’s first choice for anything. Nobody’s second choice either, or third. There isn’t a girl called Divya Iyer anymore; she’s of the past and the past only. We’re in the next chapter here, but there is a weight to it, a sort of damned glory to how I learned to love myself, first out of spite, and second, because being your own support system does call for some love. Sometimes the reason people are nice is not because they care about you; they’re nice because that’s how they are with everyone. And they’ll string you along for rides and not listen when you talk and when you split the bill with them over lunch they won’t tell you that you’ve got broccoli between your teeth because they’ll be too busy thinking of how to come up with an excuse so that they don’t have to meet you next week.

It’s reasonable to wonder where this suspicion is coming from. It’s all in my head, but it’s still electric, like veins and lines and wires it’s a current, coursing through, all charged up. I was a flashing sign, a cry for help through a boombox. I was an open book nobody bothered to read, and, now, I am the punchline for every joke. The worst part is that there’s a girl everyone calls my best friend, and I spend too long not correcting them. There’s a girl everyone calls my best friend, everyone but me, and she’s complicit in this.

Think of buildings covered in poison ivy; the ivy the only thing holding the bricks together, holding them up. Think of me, sawed open. Think of her hands on my shoulder for a brief moment as she shares the funniest story she can think of which isn’t even a story about her; it’s a story about how I spent the day after my eighteenth birthday with a hangover headache pounding like a construction site in my head. I look at her each time she does this and I think I resent you. She tells my stories like they’re hers, so I don’t tell her the important things, not really. I give her slivers of it. Div Lite, you could say. Let her think she knows me. Let her hold shadows in her hands.

I know she tells everyone my secrets. I know what she told her other best friend, who I can’t ever feel comfortable around, not now that I know what I know. Fun party stories. When your life isn’t marginalized you can always milk the cow of someone who struggles to get out of bed, even. You can say, look – this is adventure. Maybe it is. But it isn’t yours.

What do you know, I think as I look at her. I loved you once, I think. I was in love with you, once. It feels like such a waste, such loss. I had so much to give, and you didn’t respect even the minimality of who I was as a person.

High school was a mess; a mess of dissociation and possible broken home related abuse that I would only learn to call by its name years later, in college, thinking clinical and detached and shakily, god, she should never have put her hands on me like that, she should’ve gone to jail for what she did to me, she should be there still. I wish I could show Lena the kaleidoscope lens of it. I am a mess, chaotic and a disaster. People have left me behind all the time, I would say. I stand through it all, and so can you. So will you.

I think of Lena’s poetry about softness and blueness. Lena’s writing, tender until it’s vicious, tender until the fangs of hurt sneak in from the undersides of it. I think, Lena, if you can do it, so can I. I think, Lena, you are not alone. I have been neglected by people who called themselves my friends, too. Girls have broken my heart, more often than I could ever have guessed. I know what it feels like, to love with a heart big and doglike, beating with the excess of it. We’re syrup sweet and not everyone deserves it. Not everyone is ready for the infinite momentum of love that we wield. Lena. We feel too much. We love too much. We hurt too much. It’s not a bad thing. It will never be a bad thing.

I don’t believe you’re depressed, she’d said to me that day out on the games field. I’d simmered with frustration, with anger. My suicide could be on your hands, I’d thought. I’d shrugged my way through it. I’m still here. And at 4 in the afternoon, the sky is all pastel and blue. I play my softest playlist. I curl in on myself, I look out of the car window. I think of my mental health, of my genderqueer bisexual boy experiences. I think of all the people who lost the privilege of knowing me, and I smile to myself.

Call it bingo. Call it jackpot. Call it “being in a better place.” I built myself a mansion out of the rubble. There are so many people who aren’t invited to the housewarming party. That’s just how it is, sometimes.

VIEWS LIKE WHITE ELEPHANTS by Frank Jackson

November 4, 2019

The couple found a spot on a beach with no one in front of them. Sunset was an hour away. She pulled out her phone and scanned the view. He grabbed a couple of beers, opened his own and started chugging.

“Hey Babe, how’s it looking?”“Oh my God, it’s going to be perfect.”“A gorgeous sunset post at the end of summer. I can feel it — this one’s gonna blow up for me.”“Well I was going to post it on my feed.”“Well we can’t both post the same picture at the same location. People will know we’re together.”“Well you’ve made it perfectly clear how you feel about that.”

A beached whale emerged on the shore. People hurried over to try to help the whale and the lifeguard ran to call a specialist from the zoo. The whale appeared to be in distress. One of its flippers was bent and barely moving. It let out a series of noises trying to communicate something in earnest.

“I just don’t think my followers will be cool with us dating so soon after me and Tracy. She has over 12,000 followers, and trust me you do not want to piss them off.”“I’m sorry I just thought the picture from dinner at the restaurant last night was so perfect and beautiful and would have obviously gotten 5 digit likes and my page is just in a rut right now and I wish you hadn’t made me delete it.”“If you want to post it just go ahead and post it, do whatever you want.”“Oh really, you’d be fine with that?”“I’m just saying maybe wait a while, let this whole thing with me and Tracy blow over.”“It’s too late anyway, I’m not going to post something today from yesterday."“Christ, who would even know? Who would even care?”

A second beached whale washed up on shore. People went and took the buckets their children were using to make sandcastles and were now running back and forth splashing buckets of ocean water trying to keep the whales wet until help could arrive. A couple of the bravest ones were attempting to push and slide the whales across the sand and back in the water but weren’t making much progress.

“How much longer do we have to wait for the sunset?”“Siri, what time will the sun set today?”

“The sunset today will be in 14 minutes.”

He opened up another beer, finished it with three giant gulps and opened up another one.

“This is boring.”“We can leave as soon as I get my picture.”“Oh. So you’re going to post it.”“Yes I’m going to post it.”“Fine, I guess I won’t be posting one then.”“I’m sorry but I’m not the bad guy here.”

She took the beer from his hand and finished it.

“Look, Babe, time is going to fly. In a month or two or three after we make it public everything will be so perfect. I mean who knows, I could see one day us making a joint account together, raising it from scratch, growing it together, something we can share.”“Really?”“Yeah.”“I mean, you really mean it?”“Babe.”

They kissed.

“I love you.”“I think we would create an amazing YouTube channel together.”

By the time the marine specialists arrived it was too late. The whales had given out to dehydration. Many of the people, especially the children, took it hard.

A HOME by Sasha Tandlich

November 3, 2019

Don’t look at me. Don’t look at me! She covers her face. There’s nobody there but the cat. The cat yells, jumps at something. See, it’s not just the cat. There are also the ants crawling in a line, stampeding through the too-big crack under the front door. She leans forward. Creak. The chair moves with her, rocking forward as rocking chairs do. This chair didn’t always live here. No. She didn’t always live here, either. There was the house with the porch. The house with the porch and the rocking chair being pushed forward and back by the wind. She wasn’t in the chair then. Not then in that house. When she was in that house, she buzzed around inside, carrying the children here and there, the way the ants are handling those crumbs that are a little too heavy but they won’t dare drop. There aren’t as many crumbs as there should be. The house is dirty, yes, but food is required to make crumbs. To get food there is the cooking of the food. To get the cooking of the food there is the shopping at the grocery store. To get the shopping at the grocery store there is the driving of the car, the leaving of the house, the standing out of the chair, the…

In the other house, there was the view. The waves of green cornfields where the kids would get lost and call for her, frantic. She didn’t always take time to look at that view. There were vegetables to pickle, lunches to pack, a husband with needs she had signed up to meet. That husband lives in the photographs now. Sometimes his ghost talks to her, but she asks him politely to shut up. She is already haunted; she doesn’t need a single more ghost. She sits close to the TV when the people start jumping off the Titanic. She has an old VHS player and she only ever plays the second tape. She can’t go backwards, to that time of richness and hope. She pictures the waves are made not of ice, but of corn, that they land in a place of comfort. She hums along when the band comes back for one more song.

She’s started scratching the faces off of her pictures. She takes her keys to them as she makes her way to the toilet once, maybe twice a day. There is no other use for the keys. She doesn’t lock the door. Nobody is coming, and the ants don’t need a key. They don’t need a welcome mat, either, but she leaves hers out there. Maybe one day the mail man will come up to her door and feel that he is welcome and drop off that piece of mail that got lost years ago. She waits for it. Surely, there is news for her. She’s not sure who the letter is from, just that it holds the key to something. Key—there’s a key again! It has to mean something, but nothing means anything anymore, and now she feels her sock slipping. It’s a prim thing, with a lace trim. She has dainty little feet to pull it off. Her husband loved holding her feet in his hands, rubbing them when she had a hard day which was always. She wears her socks and shoes inside in case he comes by with a good proposition and whisks her away. So far, all her ghost husband has brought up are stories from the past and the past is pointless because it is past. You can’t unsink the Titanic, and you can’t make your children forget the cat piss smell stuck to these rotting floorboards.

Some of the ants might be termites. The ones making their way up the wall with wings they never use. “You’re not using your full potential” is something people used to say to her often. Now they say, “Get the fuck out of the house, Mother. If you choose to live like this we give up.” She doesn’t blame them. She gave up once, too.

Sometimes she mistakes the painting on the wall for the TV. She watches it, and she’s not surprised by its lack of movement because everything in the painting moves exactly as much as everything on the TV. She doesn’t remember buying this painting, hanging it up. It’s there the same way the bad art is up at the Holiday Inn before she ever even arrives. It has a history without her, just as she has a history without this house. Is it even a house? It might be a townhouse, or an apartment, or maybe she lives on a ship. She can’t recall what it looks like because all she can recall is being inside. That other house she remembers only in flashes, like the flashes of light when the cat comes in and out. She doesn’t feed the cat, and she’s not sure if that’s why someone put in the cat door. It’s possible the door was already there and that’s how she acquired the cat. The cat doesn’t seem to care for her either way, but sometimes when she’s so still the chair doesn’t rock a single bit, it will jump into her lap and purr. She doesn’t pet the cat. She covers her face to hide it away.

It’s never silent inside. The TV is always on. When the power goes out, which it does sometimes, there’s still the sound of the ghosts, the wings of the moths fluttering inside the closets. There was a different kind of noise in the other house. Laughter, yes, screams, of course, but also that low constant hum of desperation, of a need to get out. It called to her in the droning of the Frigidaire inherited from her mother-in-law. Get out get out get out. Mostly, she stayed. Then one day she didn’t.

When she gets out of the chair, for her trip once or twice to the toilet, her back never straightens out. It retains the same bent shape. That is her body type now. Bent as a spoon. Creak. The chair keeps rocking and the cat jumps in for a ride. She passes the wall of faceless photos. It looks like a horror movie, but it’s not, because no one is coming after her. On the TV, a body sinks into the water and another exclaims in a voice so quiet it might as well not exist. She wonders if she would sound like that, were she to speak. She never spoke then either. Her children cannot recall the sound of her voice. They remember the cornfields, though, and they are filled with a sense of comfort. That’s all she ever wanted.

ON LOCATION by Corey Miller

November 2, 2019

Actor Wanted

I’m sitting on the 22” x 14” x 9” life I just purchased, about to board in Blueberry Maine. Stickers of “Fragile” and “Contents Known To Cause Cancer In The State Of California,” label what’s left of me: clothes, a deck of cards, spare change, and my photo album.

Every American has been to the Salty Dog Café and wears this damn shirt you bought me to blend in. The train brings an oily coal in the air. My mind returns to working the factory. I can see the machine press opening then crushing, waiting for me to stick my head in. I’ve got nothing left here so I’m coming for you. I drag my life aboard, planning to use the cards to make money for stamps. I no longer have a return address.

Supporting Character in a Dark Comedy

Boston has history like a marriage. Signed documents humans fuck up. I’m Robert Smith with The Cure, dancing in circles over the sea. The ocean looks as clear as gin on the rocks with spruce trees as straws – just like heaven.

I saw you on TV once, in the background. Some sitcom; you were drinking beer and touching his arm. Were you directed to?

The woman across the aisle orders a cocktail from the cart and tightens her lips in an unsolicited smile. She’s given one of those baby bottles of liquor. It’s hardly a gulp and she only adds half the vial as if the chemistry is off and might explode. I turn to the window to see what state I’m in now.

Previous Experience Not Needed

Kentucky smells like limestone and horse shit. I see the rickhouses along the tracks, like prisons for bourbon barrels. If we stopped I would help them escape, scratch the oak until splinters inject the sweetness into my bloodstream. The devil’s cut for my angel’s share.

My parents used to throw parties all the time when I was a child. They would pass out all around the house. There was always someone in my bed so I’d clean up to make them happy. The glasses were half full, I didn’t want to dump it all down the drain.

Worn-Out Male 30-40

We rattle through Misery. I close my eyes from the other passengers. I smell of horseradish, pungent and stinging. The passengers haven’t seen the films that reel on the back of my eyelids. That’s us, you say. That’s me pursuing my acting dream and that’s you finally getting to see the world. You’re the American in Paris. If I could dance like Gene Kelly, I’d spin out of this dream sequence.

It’s getting hotter the further southwest we go. Filming on location and these costume changes have me working up a sweat. The woman across the aisle buys another cocktail today. I stare at the half gulp not added and want to cough for her attention.

The cart comes back around and she throws out the ounce of liquor remaining. I follow the garbage bag until it’s left unattended and dig through it. In my hands the bottle seems to grow. It’s now the size of a guitar. I slide my fingers down the strings over the frets. I want to return home and stop exploring this foreign world. I’m not sure if this is the former character or the upcoming role I want to play. Surrendering to a drop of liquid, it fixes me—my little pickup.

Must Be Willing To Change Appearance

I write down a monologue to audition for you. I sing it out loud, born to play the part. The passengers mumble the back-up vocals. The scene has ended for my character.

I study the farthest landscape I’ve ever reached. It’s all turquoise and dirt. Now that’s the real us. Why can’t we become a new person whenever we want? A lonely factory worker struggling with disease one day, a hero ready to change the next. A snake willing to shed its skin.

I rent a car and start down a new path. What’s a Ford Fusion fusing together? Probably two things that don’t fit naturally. The vehicle stops in Arizona to see what’s so grand. I yell out to hear someone comfort me. This could be my home with the hills struggling upwards then hitting rock bottom.

Traffic in Los Angeles is a standstill. My first shower in days washes away the old me. I put on a suit to get into character. I’ve rehearsed this a hundred times. Just stick to the script.

I see you on set, my eyes a camera out of focus. I hear your voice, the dreams I had during fights I slept through. This pilot looks promising, like it could run for seasons.

DEAD FLOWERS by Rasmenia Massoud

November 1, 2019

We didn't know how to talk to Troy's new girl. Then again, we didn't know how to talk to the last one, either. Sunny, giggling girls flocked around him, their shiny polished nails drawn to his brown arms and the thick blond waves of hair that touched his shoulders.

Things were that way. People came and went. Stuck together like it was life and death in one moment, an almost forgotten odd character in a funny anecdote the next.

To a girl who'd had a few and met Troy for the first time, it might've seemed as if he'd been forged by some golden god of hair metal, but Brad and I laughed and watched him cut the sleeves and collars off his concert t-shirts so they'd show off his arms and chest hair, combing his fingers through his mane to make it perfect. Accidental sexiness is a carefully crafted look.

Troy's previous girl peed on Brad's couch. For days, Brad threatened to find another roommate, and criticized Troy for going out with a girl who couldn't handle her booze and let it go all over the leather couch. There was no sense in pointing out the couch was vinyl, or that the blanket she and Troy were curled up in soaked up most of her drunken pee.

"We're not buying any more booze for minors." Brad turned to me. "Except you, Justine. You're housebroken."

I smiled, feeling validated because back then, flattery and belittling other women often looked the same.

We laughed off Brad's ranting, and Troy found a new girl. She rolled around on the living room floor in her cut-off shorts, showing the three of us her ass cheeks while we sat on a tattered sleeping bag that now served as a sofa cover. A movie played in the VHS, but we were watching Troy's girl, who refused a chair, preferring to lay on the floor, sitting up now and then to smear more lotion onto her legs.

"I like lotion," she said, giggling as she squirted another gob into her hand. I wondered how long she could keep rubbing the stuff on her skin before gummy gobs began balling up on her fingers.

Brad and I looked at one another, stifling laughter, and took our beers outside. Maybe she'd pee on the couch. Maybe she'd leave a greasy lotion smear in the middle of the living room. Maybe she'd be gone and replaced in a week. None of it mattered because by the same time the following year, Brad had a new roommate. Troy chopped off his wavy heavy metal hair and joined the Navy. The 25-year-old stripper Brad was fucking behind my back would be nursing their kid on the vinyl pee couch as I became a memory, sweating through the graveyard shift in a plastics factory, still a year away from being able to buy my own booze.

We drank and smoked outside on the wooden steps leading up to the trailer door. Brad peeked inside and snorted. He shook his head, squinting his blue eyes, pushing his shaggy brown hair from his face. That shaggy brown hair was just a few years from falling out completely. "That chick, what's her name? Annie? Amy? What the fuck is the deal with the lotion?"

I shrug. "You know how it is with Troy's girlfriends. It's always something." Brad offers to buy me my own barrel of lotion. Leaning on each other, we laugh until tears blur our already doubled vision. We laugh because of the weirdness Troy always brought around, and because we thought he was the fool, and we were so smart. Like we knew something he didn't. Like we knew anything about what was real, or how to make anything last.

I try to stand and realize how drunk I am. Brad gets to his feet, teeters a bit, then staggers across the dirt road to a dried up sunflower, dying from the summer heat. He reels as he yanks and pulls at it until it's free from the Earth and returns to me, holding out his prize. Behind him, in the distance, the first glimpse of sunrise appears, warning that another night is coming to an end.

"What is this?" I'm swaying, gripping his arm for balance.

"My gift to you," he says, "To immortalize this moment."

"And what's so special about this moment?"

"Nothing. We're here," he says. "That's all."

He shrugs, stumbles again, and pulls me tighter to him, crispy dead flower fragments falling around us.